Remnants

           My bike whizzed along the hot pavement, its tires crunching rocks and spitting them out behind me like tiny meteorites. The sun had finally submitted to the clouds that had rolled in, leaving me with a breeze that was as cool, calm, and collected as an Abercrombie & Fitch store’s atmosphere. Except thankfully, the outside smelled much less terrible and much more like dirt and honeysuckle. I prefer dirt and honeysuckle over the migraine-inducing stench of an A&F store any day.

            I biked on past the familiar trees, turn-offs, and corroding metals that littered the old highway. I had biked this road hundreds of times due to the low traffic and rolling slopes and remembered a variety of landmarks that described the locals: a butterfly banner that whipped in the wind and whispered, “welcome,” a house with a tin roof that shined copper and nickel, a rusty '48 Ford with one broken light, and a rocking horse that sat on the porch of a fenced-in home. 

            I heard a rumble of thunder. It was faint and far away, but I was arrogant and confident enough in my biking abilities that I figured I could out-bike any storm if necessary. Screw Tornado Chasers, I was the Tornado Runner Away-er. Let it be known that I did not realize I could not out-bike any storm if said storm was coming from the direction of my home. Naturally, I thought it was going to always be behind me. Naturally, I was an idiot.

            Suddenly, a vertical strike of lightning branched down from the sky and struck the ground in a nearby neighborhood. I totally flipped and made a verbal screech. A car coming from the opposite direction had its windshield wipers on, indicating rainfall. The lightning strike was followed by a boom that shook the ground. There were flashes of lightning that lit up the sky, flickering on and off like the lights in a room.

            As soon as the cars had passed, I made a U-turn and headed for the hills (aka my parents' home). I was about three miles from home at this point, but it was no use: the thunder continued to boom and crash like Zeus had started a rock band, intense lightning show included. Honestly, Zeus? This was not the time. 



            The lightning went sideways and flashed even quicker now; Zeus must have hired a hoard of Pikachus to help with the light show. I turned off at a nearby town and rolled my bike under an arched alcove. There was a fire station in my view. Under its awning, sitting casually in rocking chairs, there were a few men sipping some beers, laughing, and pointing at the skies. I checked my phone and my dad was already on his way to rescue me from the freaky-leaky skies. Just as he pulled up in his rumbling Diesel truck, the sky broke open and soaked us both.



            Cheers to Daddy Hval for rescuing me in the midst of an immense downpour... he's the real MVP.

Post-Op Patience

______Well kids, I survived my septoplasty surgery that took place a week and a half ago (which hopefully explains my missing presence on all of your blogs). I've been taking it easy propped up in bed for the past week, alternating hot and cold liquids down my windpipe, feeling accomplished when I can eat a diced up banana in under half an hour, and getting physically drained and utterly sleepy after eating. I was basically an infant. An infant with sick bruises under her eyes and a penchant for mushy peas.

______Seriously. Food has been a trial and so has keeping my eyes open. You think surgery inside your nose wouldn't affect your chewing, but nope! Your mouth sure does move your nostrils around quite a bite. 

______The past ten days have been annoyingly exhausting even though I've been doing little to nothing. I'm finally getting to the point where I can eat slightly less mushy things (aka food that isn't baby food or frozen yogurt) and get up and move around the house. I thought the first couple of days post-op would be paradise streaming Netflix and drawing whilst propped up in bed, but all I wanted to do was sit upright with my eyes closed since I was so tired all the time. There wasn't really any pain--the worst of it was The Sore Throat That Thy Demon Lord Satan Cast Upon Me that wouldn't go away for eight days. But I know being able to breathe through both my nostrils will be so so worth it in the end! I can already feel the effects of it.

______That all being said, I want to apologize for being so inactive on my blog and with commenting and keeping up with you guys' lives; I am definitely back on that starting...

______...

______...

______...NOW!

______P.S. That is Gunner, and he was my snuggle buddy while I was in bed. Quite a handsome lad, I must say.

I-I-I-I'm Stayin' Alive

______I promise you all I haven't fallen off the face of the earth like a gob of queso falls from a tortilla chip, just as I promise I haven't been taken hostage by a vicious band of time traveling bards. I have merely remained hidden these past few months. Unbeknownst to you, I've been observing everything from behind a very suspicious looking bush. I waddle around on concrete shaking my plastic leaves obnoxiously so everybody knows I'm not a real bush rooted to the earth, but I still inhabit the bush because pretending to be a bush makes you laugh at yourself for hours.

______And you guys know how I love poking fun at myself; that way, you guys can't do it. Because I know you would. BIG JERKS. I bet you all flick ladybugs for fun.

______Besides, if I was taken hostage by time traveling bards, I'd probably join them in their fifteenth century shenanegins. I've always wanted to sharpen my lute skills, become infected with the incurable plague, and be discriminated against since I'm a woman. At heart, I always knew I was a peasant wench.



______My final semester as an undergraduate was the busiest of all with 18 hours of classes and a part-time illustration job. It was a persevering trial where I was included in three shows (one which was an exhibition in a space an undergraduate has never shown before), received a handsome $15,000 fellowship that will allow me to pursue my textile-based art for another year or so (holy potbelly pigs on a plane, batman!), tried to understand my own art and practice through the longest artist statement I've ever written, exchanged names with a range of vibrant people, and performed all those other daily mundane tasks that sap precious minutes away, like exercising and remembering to eat.



______I'm in no way complaining because being busy is my jam and biscuits, yo.

______It was a nice, productive sort of drowning… like drowning in chocolate milk, and everything around you is so tasty you can't complain. And sometimes opportunistic marshmallows float by and other times obstacles present themselves, like wasps that are still alive are veering toward you on their backs, barely a threat but still terrifying and always looming. And your professors are wearing floaties or lounging on inner tubes and pull you up when your arms need a rest and you need a pep talk, but soon after you willingly dump yourself back in to the chocolate milk. You know you've gotta swim hard since they're always watching.

______Always watching. They could be in a plastic bush watching you slurp down that tea in the art quad. Shake shake. What's that? Oh shit, it's your professor wearing a bush! GET BACK TO WORK, PEASANT STUDENT.

______And then, just like that, graduation smacks you in the face like a drunk guy's sweaty manboob in a mosh pit. And now I've finally begun working on art with the money I've received from the Windgate Fellowship. Basically with that, I was given 15k to better my textile craft-based work, which I've put aside for delicious pricy fabrics and embellishments, two sewing workshops, and renting a studio space.

______So... that's where I've been. I'll be back and frequent as ever on here! Thanks for sticking with me, you guys. You're cooler than cool. You're ice cold. Aw-right-aw-right-aw-right-aw-right.

______Here's to the next year! (I say as I clink my apple juice-filled wine glass to my laptop screen)

Baby's First Mosh Pit

______I went to my first real concert last Thursday night, you guys. Perhaps you've heard of AFI, short for A Fire Inside, also known as a metaphor for my middle school existence: composed of angst, sorrow, and studs, they owned the stage that night and the audience before them. I would have never expected them to come to a place near me, but lo and behold, they did. So I managed to get a dear friend of mine to abide me and we did jam like the jammiest of fruit concentrates. As we sang and  to all the familiar AFI tunes, the horrors of middle school flooding back into our thoughts, he suddenly asked, "You want to go up?" I wasn't sure what he meant, and then it clicked.

______Crowd-surfing.

______Nodding then subsequently putting on a mask of urbane swag, I shout-asked a random fellow to my friend's right, "Can you help me up?"

______And within an instant, I was floating above a sea of undulating hands, unable to control the direction or velocity at which I was being transported. I was a helpless turtle on its back being guided solely by the black-clad human beings below me. My hands were scrunched in toward my core and flailing ever so slightly, and my mouth was most definitely producing screaming noises. I was just being so hardcore in that moment, you guys. Such. A. Punk.

______Take me to your leader, I thought, and as if the shaking bodies below me heard such thoughts, my being was slowly transported toward the stage, and closer, and closer... I saw a strobing blue light,  heads furnished with mowhawks, ears gaged with chrome, the lead singer's combat boots, and even gazed up for a short second to meet eyes with him for a bloody 1/60th of a second. The best 0.01666666 seconds of my life, naturally.

______I did the math for that fraction. Don't check it.

______Suddenly, my shoulders dropped and my body slanted at an angle toward the ground. As soon as I knew it, I was half-cradled, half-flopped in the muscly arms of a security guy who skillfully slipped me upright and onto my feet. It was plausible he had done this many times before.

______"You okay?" he asked with a half-laugh. I nodded, but apologized immediately for being in the empty lane between stage and crowd, and waddled back toward the chanting swarm of black-clad human beings with my tail between my legs. As quickly as possible, I integrated myself seamlessly into the dark blob of thrashing organic matter. Don't you just adore how I refer to people as thrashing organic matter? I do.



______When the moshing began, I did not know it had. I had always presumed that moshing was nothing more than highly intensified fist-pumping and jumping, much more energetic than the usual kinetic motion that reverberates through concert-goers' bodies. What happened was that all of a sudden, I realized that these turdbuckets next to me were shoving each other. Like, chill you guys. This is AFI. We are a chill folk: act like it.

______OH.
______But then.
______But then.

______But then, a sweaty man with a ginger beard and a rubbery belly smacked into me. His momentum propelled me into one of the three long-haired Gothic Fabio-bros that had been swaying peacefully alongside my friend and I the entire concert. From there, Gothic Fabio One propelled me into Gothic Fabio Two with a hearty shove of both hands. I felt absolutely betrayed since we were all bros signing along and smiling and stabbing the air with our hands just a moment ago. Now, the brotherhood had been ruthlessly torn apart, like a piece of bread unable to be mended, and so tossing all logic aside, I shoved Gothic Fabio One back at his other two clones. They seemed unfazed and continued to shoulder into whoever they could.



______From there, I dashed away from the mad mosh-y merriment, dodging the wild Spartans about me like a football star and using my arms to bounce from one human to the next. I was a pinball in a game of flashing lights and shifting obstacles, and the floor was my beer-and-sweat-drenched battlefield. Taking care not to slip, I took refuge behind a chill couple in their mid-thirties who were surveying the situation with eyes saturated with wisdom and amusement.

______I was so not being hardcore in that moment, you guys.

______But it was no matter, because the evening was rad nonetheless, and I zipped back to the center of the floor when the moshing ceased. The presence of the lead singer (and love of my life), Davey Havok, gave off the presence that he presented in his videos, interviews, and tunes, but he performed above and beyond what I thought. He did all his jumps, hair flips, and sassy Davey-gestures were just the way I imagined in the flesh, if not better. I did fangirl. Hashtag no shame.

______What was your first concert experience like, if you had one? If not, what's your favorite steamed vegetable?

The Obscurity of Things

______I've always been peculiarly drawn to the abandonment of places and spaces, very similar to the way some boys are attracted to the tantalizing headwear that is a fedora. The way nature smites a space into one composed of peeling wallpaper, tattered furniture, and creaky floorboards is alluring in the sense you've caught something in a moment from which it will only further decompose.

______Some may think the old outhouse I stumbled upon was unpleasant as the texture of mayonnaise on watermelon (mmm yeah, pretend you can feel that one in your mouth), but I've gotta disagree and say it was weirdly compelling, bro. Why, inside was a plethora of eccentric items that would cause any peasant to squeal with delight: a generic baseball trophy, a 1984 road atlas of the United States, a few empty jugs of motor oil, and most curiously, a ladder.

______A ladder in an outhouse? I mean, sure man, maybe there comes a time once in a blue men when you've just gotta take a dump from atop a ladder to make it all performative and stuff. I'm sure someone out there wants to invent the turd-taking Olympics. Hint hint: it's me. The bigger the splash, the higher your score. There's a definite relation between doo-doo size, velocity, and splash circumference. There's a potential topic for your senior thesis. Get at it.

______So now that we've covered bowel movements and their prospective future role in sport competitions, along with some creepy-looking pictures of me, let's talk about this weird object trailing behind me that just so happens to look intestinal. There is consistency to my blog post topics, random as they may seem.

______This aggregation of segmented strands is actually for a performance piece that I'll have to work with next week for my advanced drawing concepts class, and the forms are based loosely off the gestural, biological forms I work with in my paintings and lithographs. I'm sort of pumped and sort of nervous for the actual presentation, but conclusively I'm ready to go for it. SO READY. Each individual strand is plump with plastic wrap or fabric, and some even have jingle bells in the nodules that produce a delightful wind-chime-esque sound when I move.

______Carry on and be merry, my friends!

Quit With Hue Bad Self

______The past week or so has been absolutely surreal. I've been moving through the world like I've been voyaging on some kind of magical art school vacay, absorbing everything around me like an ever-expanding, ever-hungry, ever-spongey sponge. A sponge with legs. Or maybe a psuedofoot, like snails. My days consist of scribbling away in sketchbooks, hacking away at sheets of fabric, painting away in the studio, and ruminating upon art ideas via nighttime bike rides where I listen to David Bowie albums on repeat. Everything seems a little more certain this year, a little more intensely saturated, a little deeper and more apparent.

______I haven't had much time to properly blog due to taking more hours than I'm used to top of my part-time illustration job. I mean, I've totally been having to stick "eat lunch" on daily to-do lists. But you know, I feel like I'm living and breathing art so I can't complain, not at all!

______I know most of you have seen these photos, either via the Instagrams or the Facebooks, but to explain them, they're based a thought about how the palpability of light can transform a subject either through lending them some emotion or appear to put them through a literal transformation. I'm taking is a freelance Honors Photography class that I'm really excited about since I haven't lately been using my camera but for blog photos and documenting art. Here's to more creative thinking!

 

______And before you think, "Oh no, there could be a booby or a body part that half the human population has and knows about in there!" I must say 1) dude, chill, everyone has them nips and 2) I zoomed in everywhere. No nips for you. The free spirited nakedness does not bother me personally, but I do occasionally think about the wellbeing of others. Either way, let us embrace the body. It's been hard for me to do, as I'm sure you all know from my less-than-lovely history of eating problems, but you've gotta start somewhere.

Fairy Circle

______Hello, my precious and darling citizens! It feels as if I've been gone for decades; alas, I have apparently only been missing for half a fortnight!

______I've been bustling with activity this past week, and thus my days have blended into nights and back into days again. I've even been (gasp) staying up past my bedtime of ten o' clock. Yeah, when my bedtime is interrupted, shit gets real. I've practically been living in the art buildings on campus. There's even a couch nested against a vending machine on the third floor in case I ever feel the need to have a one-man slumber party. Let's hope that never becomes a conclusion to my pitiful artist lifestyle.

The Heat of Summer

______It's neat how when you visit the same place during different seasons, you're able to sniff out new things.  In autumn, there are warmer colors to the trees, a crisp scent in the air, and little to no flora; in the heat of the summer, trees are bearded with moss and crusted with lichen in subdued shades of mint and cream, and the flowers that have survived have brittle linings on their petals.  There's something lovely about a bright rose that's wilting slightly from the heat opposed to one completely in tact.

______I know that macro nature pictures can be so horribly cliché, but it's no wonder--nature is so pretty up close, especially when the same species of flower has variations in gradients and petal shapes, or when lichen can clutch its frail little hands around a tree in patterns more diverse than sandwich combinations.  Even when it's dying, decaying, or otherwise wasting away, it still seems so alive.



______I took these awhile ago when I was on little journey to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. I went there last summer, too, and did my best to find some new things to snap.  It was the middle of the day and I perspired more than an old man in a sauna full of attractive young ladies, but I think it resulted in a few decent photos, some bright with life and others a bit more solemn!



______Do you guys have any places you like to frequently visit, whether it be for picture-taking, day-dreaming about Fabio and his swooshy golden locks, or hiding away from the world for a moment's respite?

Reflection

______At times, life can be an immense burden.

______Just when you think,"Ah, at long last, I am home in my dorm and able to go pants-less for the night!", you simultaneously realize you have forgotten your iPhone in the Photography room, most likely on the glass table where you usually set it down while you're slaving away in the darkroom, splashing yourself with chemicals occasionally and having a bit of a nostalgic dance party with your colleagues, one kindled by the 90s Pop Hits Pandora station.  None of you knew each other as children, but the music made it seem otherwise.  You left your phone on the table because as you waited for your prints to wash, you were deep into A Game of Thrones.



 ______After you left your prints to dry, you walked out the door reading the book, your mind focused on remembering the households and the characters and their relationships. There were so many names to remember, but you had a good hang on them, and that made you feel somewhat successful.



______It is the first day of summer break, and this is the last time you will have to return to that room.  You are forced to trudge a whole six minutes back to retrieve your electronic device that is so vital to your daily existence.  It's there (thankfully).  A girl looks up from her binder and cocks her head at you like you're some criminal scurrying out of there with something that isn't yours.  She has never reacted well to your presence, and you've never been sure why.  You never liked her cropped pants, the ones with the white stripes snaking down the sides like day-old toothpaste.



______And once you're out of the room, you skip down the first two stairs, walk down the rest, and are happy that your phone was there, and happy that you are on your way back.  The walk there wasn't long.  The walk back would be shorter.  You decide to stop by the world's largest Starbucks on campus to order something warm to drink on the way because it has gotten cooler.  It is wedged perfectly between the photography room and your living space, and they know you by name there because you order the same thing each time--a Venti Passion tea, piping hot, unsweetened.




______Sometimes, they will draw a heart on the "i" in your name, or maybe rush a smiley face, or say, "The usual?" and it makes you feel a little bit classy, a little bit known, a little bit like you belong somewhere.    Two of them even know you by name.  One knows that your last name is Norwegian.  There is a certain pause at this moment, one that makes you forget how you forgot your phone in the first place.  You're enjoying this little detour, but you won't admit it.  You won't admit how convenient things are for you, and how much you like being able to feel like there's kind of place you belong, at least in the nooks and crannies where there are less people who are more important.  You are not in the mass, and probably never will be, but that is okay.



______You walk back to your conveniently located dorm on campus.  The sun is setting and casting orange light against the buildings, and blue shadows are opposite to them like ghosts with outstretched arms, and there is the smell of spiced flowers in the air.  Things are greener, warmer now.  There are no flowers sprouting eagerly from their buds, no set name for this day that should make it feel any different than the others, but there is the right feeling, the one that seems as if everything has awoken from its hibernation, and is now full of vigor and an honest brightness.  And it is rather serene, the scene which nature has so kindly painted.



______And that is when you realize that life isn't really such an immense burden, and you wonder why you could have ever imagined such a thing in the first place.  It is the first day of summer break, and you are leaving your pleasant burdens behind.

Spring 2013, Photography I, 35mm film