clickmom

Apr 17, 2015

I volunteered to go first in showing the prints I brought for our gallery show. I figured I should get it out of the way early. I'm so glad I did. They had a few comments on my print quality, but said it was close enough as is. (I knew the printing was fine. I can print) pretty much they asked me the questions that I need to consider for my space. It was painless. Except for one moment when I was describing how the focal distance from one panel of the triptych changed subtly as you move across the images and my current advisor said it wasn't noticeable and my old advisor said he had noticed what I was describing. I think I'm going to approach my current advisor and let him know that I sense his frustration with me and that I want things to be good between us. He isn't the touchy feely type, so it'll probably shock him and I imagine he will say there is nothing to talk about and then think about it later on and not be so automatically frustrated with me. Let's at least hope that is how it goes. Truthfully, the expectation vibe I'm getting from the advisors that I will fail is as annoying the crap out of me. I can't wait to get that diploma in my big fat hands and turn around and prove them wrong.

They started off the day by asking us which one of us would like to teach after graduation. I suspected it was a trick question so I did not raise my hand. I was the only one! Then they made everyone except me get up and give a 5 minute talk on their philosophy of teaching. Bwah ha ha ha.

Apr 16, 2015

Not taking two red eye flights in three days is currently on the top of my list of things I do not advise people to do. In the end I have made it to Berlin safe and sound. Let the games begin

I always feel much better about my situation when my classmates tell me that they are nervous and feeling unprepared as much as I am feeling nervous and unprepared. I still wish I felt confident and ready to conquer the world. I'm just going to pretend and shock everyone. I especially want to shock the advisors. I feel as if they are lacking confidence in me and I want them to walk out being impressed. Not that their opinion is going to make or break me, I am freaking proud of the work I have produced for this program. I just want to stick my tongue out and say nah nah nah nah nah in my imagination while smiling at them.

Do I really want to grow up? I'm not so sure.

120 days

Last night I made a different edit of my work, and I am really happy with it.  It's getting closer with every revision.  One decision I have been struggling with is wether or not to include some photos of dead animals I took.  I want them in, because it makes it more personal to me, but I am still conflicted over it. One photo in particular is one that I took back in February of a squirrel that is draped over the skinny branches of a sapling as if it were dropped from the sky.  It is frozen, and has crystals on it's fur, and a frozen droplet of blood hanging from it's nose and even scarier, a squished or even deboned head.  I wasn't able to get that close, so you have to enjoy this squirrel from a little distance, but still, there is something about this photo that is so wrong that it is delicious.  I thought it might be too disturbing, as in so disturbing it's distracting, to other people.

I was in the dog park with sweet pea this morning when I turned a corner and found a woman calling out for her dog, who had disappeared.  I told her I hadn't seen her dog on my trail, and asked if I could help her out.  She said that it had happened before and if she stayed put the dog would return.  Then I made a comment on the day and the woman asked me if I had seen the dead squirrel.  Now, surely squirrels meet unfortunate ends every day in this park, but I instantly knew this woman was talking about my dead tree squirrel, my photograph and I could feel the glint forming in my eye when I told her that not only had I seen it I had also taken a photo of it. Our connection was immediate.  She was talking about the very same squirrel, and we shared our mutual love for the dog park, and she confessed to writing poetry about the park and was thinking of publishing some.  I confessed to worshipping the park through photography and told her I would definitely be publishing a photo book this summer!  We discussed the spots that we both think are special (totally in sync) and it was just the most exciting connection I've made in a long time. Luckily I had photographed my book last night, so I shot her a text of my page with the squirrel on it.  I asked my advisor what he thought about adding poetry to my book, and he said he knew nothing about poetry, but I should bring some to Berlin if I want it in my book.  I'll text her later and see if she is game.  This is way too freaky for mere coincidence.  Freaky!!

I wish winter would leave already.

Duh

Don't get worried about me or anything, but at times like these I so wish I was the pill popping type of person because I am pretty sure there is a pill that would slice the freakout right off of me.  Yeah, I said freakout.  I am totally freaking out.  I reworked my book edit and taped it all together and realized immediately that it is about 30 percent too long.  I'm so cranky.

I'll figure it out on the plane to Berlin.

Or when I get there.

I feel like this trip to Berlin I'm just gonna be cranky and not want to do stuff.  I definitely don't want to walk around until my feet are blistered and swollen and I have to buy some birkenstocks that are too big, but I am for sure bringing those gigantic birkenstocks with me and some really thick socks too because nothing else is more comfortable than that.  What I really want to bring are my hiking boots, since I have exclusively dressed in some sort of hiking boot since January I am having trouble wrapping my head around anything else.  Also, my hiking boots are super comfortable.  If I could be invisible I'd just spend the two weeks in hiking boots, pajamas and a down comforter.  I wish I was invisible.  Grad school ruined Berlin for me.  (Not really, I'd totally go back on my own)

Since I don't have a family sized bathtub and no one loves me enough to install a hot tub, I think I will call it a night and go take a scalding hot shower and hit the hay.

Did I mention the dentist fiasco of yesterday?  It was a bad one folks, and it involved me getting gas for two straight hours during which I kept asking the nurse to NOT turn it up anymore, but since they were hurting me they kept turning it up, like that was going to make a difference, and in the end I came very close to puking in the dentist chair and was dizzy/nauseated for hours afterwards. I'm so over having teeth too.  If there was a pill for that I'd just take it and they could all be magically replaced by cold unfeeling implants.  At least the implants don't hurt or smell like dirty turtle cages.  Yes, I can smell my own tooth decay.  Gotta love having the smell sense of a wolf.  Or not.

Did I mention cranky?

Approximately 4:30 this afternoon:

Evan: What's for dinner tonight?

Me: Beef stroganoff.  I'm using filet mignon.

Evan: Yum!  Are you feeling guilty about something?

Me: Duh.

122 days left

The printing frenzy continues here, how I long to be a more organized person!  Yesterday I used the town library conference room and spread out all of my photos on every table top, counter and window ledge in an attempt to organize it all into some kind of sequence that creates little vignettes of the stories I tell myself happened there.  I am coming to realize that I might teeter on the edge of kooky.  Or the rest of you are dull dull dull.  In any case, I feel like the light at the end of the printing tunnel is visible, which is good because I am totally running out of time.

Did I ever tell you about the strange woman who saw me photographing and told me she had already taken photos and couldn't wait to get home and view them on her computer and when I said I loved the colors after the rain she said YEAH and that she thought it was the colors of a psych ward (while smiling, fond memories?) and I said I thought it was soothing and would paint my home these colors and now I'm afraid she is going to follow me out of the park and chop me up into little pieces, which she will scatter around the park at dusk so that when it gets dark and the nightly carnage begins all of the animals will devour the evidence before the kids are even allowed to file a missing person's report.  If I go missing, I'm not rogue (I love my bed too much for that) just check out the park regulars- she'll be obvious.

I learned something new and it came around at such a convenient time that I can't help but think it is a book naming gift from beyond.  Thanks guardian angel!  (Hey guardian angel, about those lottery tickets...) There is a word for the scent of rain, it is petrichor.  I like the ring of scent of rain, petrichor sounds like a dinosaur name, (at least the way I am thinking it is pronounced) which is unfortunate because I am looking for catchy names for the BOOK OF INCREDIBLE IMAGES I'll be self publishing next summer as a requirement for graduating my ADVANCED DEGREE IN TAKING PRETTY PICTURES program.  Wow, I think I may have opened myself up for google searches with that last statement, so I went back and changed it around and that is why it might be confusing.  Reread if you care. And just for the record if the powers that be ever thought I thought of my work as a book of pretty pictures they'd turn red right before their heads exploded because the whole ordeal is very conceptual.  So, from now on you should know that my photos are not pretty (even though they are, I can't help myself) they are deep and profound and spiritual and reflect my inner emotional state when in the woods without my dearly departed dead dog, bear bait.  Okay?  Got it? 

The end is near!  The end is near! 

125 days to go

I feel icky and I really want to take a bath in my old stepford bathtub.  I got that bathtub when I was pregnant with Josh and thinking I'd have a water birth (I did) I opted for the biggest freaking bathtub I could find.  This bathtub, was so luxurious that when the kids were little, and they wanted baby Josh to get into the tub with them, I could pile all three of them and me too into it (because someone had to hold baby Josh)

I think the best thing about that humongous (we had to buy a second water heater to fill it) bathtub was that I could lie in it and not touch the sides.  

In my new town house there is long thin bathtub and it isn't comfortable. First, it is too long, so I slide down even if my legs are straight and second it is too thin so my arms touch the cold sides of it.  Also, if I need to add more scalding hot water to the tub because I've been in it for long enough for the three cups of water surrounding my body to cool off there his no where for me to put my legs so they don't get burned from the new water addition.  This leaves me to conclude that I am going to have to buy a hot tub.  It's only logical. I long for a hot tub (especially at the lake) and I even know the perfect spot for it.

The pressure of my next session is really beginning to hit home.  At any given moment I could pretty much puke.  Which is unfortunate and unnecessary and I'm thinking not the way it should be.  Even my friend who is leagues ahead of the rest of us, having completed her photography and working on her sequencing, is having anxiety attacks.  I am shaking my head in disbelief.  I recall going to Y@le and hearing the grad student talk about how burned out he was and how he wasn't going to pick up a camera for the entire summer after finishing and I thought to myself that it shouldn't be that way!  I thought he should leave energized and brimming with ideas!  I was naive back then.  I hadn't been through this process where the objective is to bring us to our knees and begging for mercy.  

Like I said, I am feeling icky.

I've commandeered the dining room and have been printing like a mad woman. But I'm not sure why since I really have the best of my work already printed out. It's just easier to tell what is better if I can hold it rather than see it not he computer screen.  I also reserved the tremendous library conference room for Monday and am going to use that table to lay out all of my work and try to figure out another sequence that doesn't look just like the first sequence in which the work was deemed to all look alike.  That kind of makes me annoyed and I am tempted here to refer to the people who said my work all looking the same as mother fuckers.  I don't think they looked hard enough, mother fuckers.

Icky.

I really hate three day weekends because I can get so much accomplished when no one is around but not when the world's laziest family is all lounging close by with an unwatched television blabbering in the background.  BTW, there is something about the completely artificial way that sports announcers speak which makes me want to pull the skin off of their faces. Anything to make them stop.  I can't believe women want in on that field.  It's the downfall of humanity.  A tragedy in the making.

Icky. Icky. 

128

128 days until graduation, but who is counting?  Me and Mitzy!  That's who! Shout out to Mitzy, who is still hanging in here with me and did not abandon my blog for Facebook like my other two readers!  (As if I am open and honest on Facebook! hahahah)  That would be crazy.  I mean on Facebook, the people who read my stuff are people who actually know/knew me now and in the past (hello high school reunion) and I'm not going to let them see my insecure whiny side!  On Facebook I'm funny and confident, not binge eating my way to an MFA that in all likelihood won't pay for itself because all we have heard since day one in this program is that we are never going to make any money at all publishing photobooks.  On Facebook life is glorious and wonderful.  Truth be told is that once I realized the program director was stalking us on Facebook I pretty much decided to lay low.  Like a worm.  Below ground, for the most part.  I don't talk about school on Facebook. 

I sat down and took a good hard look at the photos I have taken since that last workshop when the program director gave me some technical advice and I am just about giddy with delight.  It was just what I needed to shake things up a bit and now I feel like I can really sit down and thrill to all of the great images I have captured and work them into some kind of an edit that will hopefully take a viewer on a spiritual journey of the woods!  Simple right?  Come viewers, find your holy in the woods with me!  Also, buy my book.

I gotta get a gallery behind me. That's what I know.

I am in the fortunate position of having a local school friend who is pretty much done with shooting her book and onto the next stage and thankfully I can follow in her systematic well planned out footsteps and go into the process with some research/groundwork already relayed to me by someone with amazing organizational skills!  Just knowing this woman makes me feel better about myself, as if I don't live in this purely emotional/everything I do is because of feelings and not logic/place and pretend that I know something about the stuff she is telling me about and it is all so damned exciting!  

As long as come back from our next session having been declared by the powers that be finished with shooting and ready to enter the magical world of book publishing/gallery showing.  Because if I come back from the next session with the advice to keep shooting my panic mode will be in full red flag alert and I can predict a slow boring stay in the loony bin after my total nervous breakdown. but I'm not going to think like that.  I'm good!  I'm good! 

 

PS In the dog park today I had a good laugh with some other dog owners about sweet pea's chow chow/retriever/german shepherd DNA results.  Validation is like heroin to me. Can not get enough.  If I were a heroin addict, I mean.  In real life validation is like chocolate to me, because when push comes to shove I can actually imagine selling a kidney for a guaranteed life time supply.