What's going on with me?
I draw good…and stuff.
The thing with E is all good. We didn’t even need to have a big ole talk the next day. I think he was just freaked out from his horrible workday. He’s actually had major negative incidents happen on each of his last four shifts, so it’s been sort of a cumulative effect. Stupid famous busy restaurant.
I just got out of my Illustration History class, where I got my re-submitted first assignment back graded. Here is what the cover sheet said, verbatem:
First piece D
Re-submitted piece A-
Total Grade B+
ShaZAM! An A- on my second version, which is as high as I could possibly have hoped for. Also, how hilarious is it that I am an Illustration major and my first project EVER received a D? I am choosing to see the humor in that. For instance, for the rest of my life, if I am ever called upon to give a motivational lecture or to talk about my own work (like, 40 years from now or something), I can always say that I received a D on my very first illustration.
After getting out of class, I was so giddy from my three-grade increase that I drove to the gourmet market and bought some nice things for dinner. This is what I mean when I say nice things:
– 1 overpriced cobb salad
– 1 fancy European-brand yogurt (muesli flavored)
– 1 bottle diet Dr. Pepper
– 1 pack clove cigarettes
Re: the cloves, this is my line of thought. On very rare occasions I like to smoke - usually when I am out drinking or when working on a drawing late at night, to pep me up a little. So for those situations I keep a pack in the fridge, because I literally stretch one pack out for about three months and I once heard that cigarettes stay fresh(er) if you refrigerate or freeze them.
But I have a total anti-smoking-inside thing, because seriously, is there anything worse than a home that smells like your favorite bar? So I go out on the front porch to smoke. BUT, winter has, you know, finally reached us down here in sunny Georgia. Hence, the cloves! I can smoke them indoors and my apartment will just smell better.
Right? Or it’ll smell like a group of high school goth kids - we’ll see.
Now I am home watching Beauty and the Geek, because I do not have cable and of the four stations I can get, CW is by far the least-snowy. So my tv choices are fairly narrow. Reruns of South Park and Different World, you get the picture. However the finale of Top Chef is on later, and that DEFINITELY warrants a trip over to E’s freezing cold (but be-cabled) apartment.
Have a good night, you guys!
1.29.2007
New Wheels
Thanks for your kind words about my horrible and sad drawing, guys. One good thing, which I think I forgot to mention in my last post, is that the professor allows us to redo each project once and resubmit it. So, I redid it this week and hopefully now will get, like, a C. As opposed to the F– that I suspect the original would have scored.
Also, I got a new bike! I went to a pawn shop for this one as well. I think I pretty much got the best Rebound Bike possible. The old one was a black kids’ Huffy with a “Good Vibrations” sticker down each side. The new one is a navy Huffy with a “Savannah Cruisin’ ” sticker. Good follow-up, eh?
I had a crazy last week and weekend, homework and job-wise. Unbelievably, we are in the fourth week of classes now, and each term is only ten weeks long. This has really been the hardest term for me as of yet, workload-wise, but is also speeding by wildly, so…yay.
Over the weekend, E and I celebrated our seven-month anniversary by going out for a huge dinner and then seeing Children of Men, which we both liked but not as much as we anticipated. I mean, I had read one review literally calling it “the movie of the millenium,” so I have to admit that my expectations were perhaps unattainably high. Without giving away key parts of it, I will say that we both were wanting it to be more sci-fi/explanatory and less war/action/battle sequences than it was. The scenery looked amazing though, like the last half of The Pianist or something.
It was a nice night out together, Saturday was, but THEN, last night, things got sort of hairy. E got off work and stopped by around 8, and we had this huge downer debriefing about his crappy workday, and then he was upset because whenever he complains about work, I get all critical about the way he handles things, and then I was upset because he is so miserable in his managerial position and always talks about getting a job or internship in which he can actually use his history degree, but never actually makes a move to do so, and blah blah.
I mean, we really never fight, and even this was not a fight in that there were no raised voices at all (we are both meek little mice). It sounds odd, but I’m glad to finally have a disagreement because I had been starting to think that we were in an unnaturally placid relationship.
HOWEVER, at the end of the conversation, oh my god. I told him that it was nice to see him, if even for just a few minutes, and I was sorry to kick him out, but that I had to do some homework. And he got all tense and suddenly said that he didn’t know exactly what our relationship is, because he’s not sure how much I feel for him, and he was really looking forward to seeing me but I always seemed sort of meh about spending time with him. And I was shocked and said, basically, “Are you really wanting to talk about THIS BIG HUGE THING now? I can’t talk about all this right now; I have homework; so we will see each other tomorrow night.” And he was fine with that and left, and everything was amiable.
Now, see this post, in which I said that the word love hadn’t been used yet, and maybe this is Rules-y of me, but I am DAMN SURE not going to be the first one to say it. So if he is confused about my feelings for him, well, I could say the same thing.
I guess tonight he is going to come over and tell me that his biological clock is TICKING LIKE THIS, and where are we going? But hello! I am the old one. I should get to use that line.
I think I will. Movie lines always break the ice, yes?
1.19.2007
The saddest drawing in the world
There is no worse feeling (in art school anyway) than throwing your work up for a class critique and knowing INSTANTLY that your piece is the worst one out of everybody’s.
I have just come from such a critique.
I’m in three classes – Drawing 3, Life Drawing (which is a fancy name for drawing naked people), and Survey of Illustration. The two drawing courses are going very well and I’m really excited about my projects so far.
However, the survey class is my first class in my illustration major, and it was listed as a lecture, with no actual art projects due and no studio prerequisite classes, but in practice the professor is requiring actual paintings. I’ve been a little nervous about this since the first day, because I am the only person in the class who doesn’t know anyone else, ie. who hasn’t taken any illustration classes yet.
SO, tonight was the night of our first project critique. I created a drawing that was possibly the ugliest thing I, or anyone else in the history of everything, have ever created, but I had misunderstood the instructions and thought that this was sort of the point. We were illustrating creation myths from primitive cultures, and I thought that the EXECUTION, not just the subject, of the project, was supposed to be primitive as well.
Um, NO.
I threw my drawing up on the wall and immediately knew it was the worst. Thank god my name was called sort of early on, so that I could get the ass-reaming out of the way early. After class I was on my way out and the professor very nicely stopped me and told me that I would be fine for the rest of the class; I should just resubmit the drawing with the new instructions. I asked whether it was okay that this is my first class within the major and she assured me that it was, and that I would be fine. Very nice of her.
Then I hurried to my car, tore the drawing up into a thousand pieces so I’d never have to look at its ugliness ever again, left the car to throw the pieces away into the nearest trash can, returned to my car, shut the door, and screamed repeatedly as loudly as I could, until I felt better about being humiliated in front of twelve strangers.
Then I returned home, ordered a ginormous pizza from Papa Johns, and poured myself a ginormous glass of very cheap shiraz.
This will be the rest of my evening. This, and planning out how I am going to redo the drawing.
1.10.2007
Savannah, why do you hate me when I love you so?? ARGH.
Helen was lovely! We had such a nice time. It was a little rainy on our one full day there, but it wasn’t too cold and we spent it wandering around the Bavarian market part of town, spending all the money we didn’t have. The best part was the German grocery store, where we bought cookies and chocolates (E) and fancy spices in pretty little jars that can be reused as flower vases eventually (me).
We also bought a CLASSIC pair of his n’ hers cooking aprons – in the form of lederhosen and a little German dress. (Possible Halloween costume this year?) To go with this, I insisted we buy a small cookbook of German food, because otherwise it just seemed sad. We at least have to pretend that we’re going to be cooking real meals in our ridiculously awesome new aprons.
AND, we ate really well. One night we hit up the fancy German restaurant for weiner schnitzel and bratwurst, and one morning we had streudel and funnel cake.
When the weather got nice, we hiked around a lake in the nearby state park, and saw a famous waterfall. I would have had PHOTOS of all this, had my three month old hp camera actually worked. Grr grr grrr. It worked on New Year’s Eve! And then, as soon as we pulled into Helen, it of course decides to be broken. It turns on and then immediately gets an angry snowy screen and turns itself off. So now I need to make a trip out to Best Buy and exchange it.
But here are some photos I pulled off of travel sites:
Also, we stayed in a little cabin in the woods just outside of town, and it had a nice big tv and a hot tub for nighttime fun. On Friday night I made E watch two episodes of What Not to Wear, and I think we both learned a lot.
Electric pink-and-green leggings = Bad.
So, we came back to Savannah on Saturday. On Sunday I was running errands to get ready for classes, which started back up Monday. At the end of the night E and I arrived home from a last evening relaxing at our favorite coffee place. I opened the front door to my building, turned the corner, and saw, at the end of the hallway, right outside my apartment door, that my bike was gone.
My bike. My stupid rusty cheap awesome ADORABLE pawn shop bike. Was stolen.
FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE RIGHT NOW.
So in conclusion: Savannah! Why do you not want me here? Why do you try so hard to alienate me and pick apart my meager little spirit, bit by bit? First my tire got slashed, then I got kicked out of the grad program at school, then my car got hit-and-run, and now my little Huffy bike gets stolen.
I am waiting for the locusts.