I'm totally a college student.

I experimented with making Ramen today. I had some celery laying around and was in the mood for something quick yet delicious, so I was like, "what the heck?" I then dug through my food cupboard and found a can of chicken, kinda like a can of tuna only it was chicken. So, I put some water in a pan and cut up two stalks of celery, and then threw the chicken in there and the flavoring packet too. (The flavor was roast beef, and I figured I wanted some of that flavor to ooze into my celery so I better cook it together, you know?) Anyway, I dug around some more and found a few beef granules, like bullion cubes mushed up. So I threw some of that in too. Add the noodles, boil it for a bit, and tadaa! Food! I definitely like the celery, but I probably didn't need two stalks, and the flavor is pretty good but maybe some garlic would make it even better. Oh well, there you go. Proof that I'm a college student. :)

Sonnet

So, I have this online poem class I'm taking right now where once I week I have to write two poems and send them in. It's pretty easy and kind of fun, since I've never seriously wrote any poems before and the atmosphere is so relaxed I can just plop down whatever I want and not have to worry about it. This week I had to write a sonnet for one of my poems, and I actually think mine is pretty sweet so I'm going to share it. (If you need a brush up on what a sonnet is, it is a 14 line poem with an iambic pentameter meter. That is, an unstressed-stressed pattern, and there needs to be five of those in each line. Confused? Yeah, me too!)

So, anyway, here you go!

Trans Fat

What is the use of a mere onion ring,

Dripping with oil and full of gross fat?

Who in the world would eat such a thing?

Taste and shape not even fit for a cat!

And yet sometimes when I order some fries,

I peek inside and what do my eyes see?

Amid the sticks of potatoes it lies,

A round deep fried product of greesery!

"What is this monstrosity?" I exclaim!

With a finger and thumb I fish it out.

"An onion ring?" I say with clear disdain!

Looking at it my mouth forms to a pout.

But after a moment I plop it in,

"It's not that bad," I say with a small grin.

I seem to like silly poems, hehe. :D

Also, I had a project due for my drawing class this last Tuesday and of course I didn't start until the day before. I was feeling a bit crappy just in general about life, (I feel a lot better now, it was a weird funk) and so I just used that to pump out a big charcoal mess. My favorite is the little dude in the upper right:

Otherwise, I'm thinking for my final painting project I might get a little ambitious and try to pump out a short little animation... I dunno though, that's a lot of work. Corey has inspired me though and I'm always trying to work up the motivation to make an actual hand-drawn animation, so maybe this is my chance!? We'll see....

Why do deer move around in the morning? Why!?

Deer hunting is pretty much the lazy man's connection to being awesome. All you do is sit around for hours and hope a big meaty deer comes waltzing past. Deer, surprisingly, are amazingly quiet. I always assumed I'd be able to hear a deer coming a mile away, but they are very sneaky animals and very rarely do their feet make any noise. So, you have to keep your eyes open and look for movement. (Which of course makes everything look like a deer whenever it moves, and then you know you're getting way too excited.) But, if you do see one and are able to sneak your gun up to it without it noticing you (in addition to being silent they have great hearing, so you can't make any noise or they'll hear it and run like a bitch), there is pretty much no way you can miss. Compared to duck hunting it's basically cake, if you can sit still that is. But it occured to me today that there is one freaky thing about deer hunting that completely blows duck hunting out of the water.

Walking out to your stand.

Because deer move around the most when it is just getting light out, you want to be sitting in your stand ideally at least a half-hour before it gets light. Yeah, you know what that means; you gotta get up early and walk through the woods. In the dark. Did you know there are wolves and bears up in northern Minnesota? Of course you do. But it really doesn't seem like that big of a deal... until you need to walk blindly through the trees in complete darkness. Suddenly, a place that is usually peaceful becomes a full of hungry, rabid predators. All you have is one measly flashlight, and it bounces off all this brush and trees you didn't even notice in the daylight. It feels like you're boxed in! Boxed in, and only able to see a few feet in front of you, with the possibility of anything creeping around to your sides or behind you or anything. And when you're tramping out there, hoping you're not lost, and you hear those wolves start howling... I'm pretty sure I lose a few pounds in sweat everytime.

Then, of course, are those times you get lost. You have markers, gashes, broken twigs, shiny little tacks, everything, and still you get lost. So you sit there in darkness with your one little flashlight, shining it all over the place trying to look for that one shiny tack that'll lead you farther into the mess of trees around you. It sucks! Today I had to sit for a while on a big rock because I took a right when I was supposed to take a left. I was following my trail and then I started following another path and then I was in a clearing and there was no where to go! And then I was like, "Uhm, where did I come from?" so I poked around and realized I had no idea. Luckily I eventually figured it out once I calmed down and just sat, but still, getting lost in the woods at 4:30am is not how I like to start my day. Luckily, there were no wolves howling this morning. :)

And, of course it was worth it!

I'm actually feeling quite good today.

Do you ever feel like the stuff you care about is something that no one else really understands? I mean, really. No one cares to see it, or look for it, or even think that it's worth caring about. They're more interested in making what you're interested in into something that they already like, or persuading you to move away from it, or trying to tell you that its dumb and obviously not as important as what they care about. I mean, shit, I do that all the time so just typing it out makes me feel a bit hypocritical. But at the same time, there are days when I just feel weary and wish I had more little "Sara-groupies" to keep me inspired and wanting to pursue the things I like. In general, I'm just lazy and devolve into this strange fleshy doormat that agrees with profs and peers and whoever about how my stuff sucks. And hey, sometimes they have great points and great insights so I love that. But other times I think, "can't you just try to like this? I like it. There are things in there that I know are worth liking." I think the fault in all this comes in my timid nature. I am not always the best in articulating what I think, and honestly it makes me nervous. So I devolve to this safe place, this comfort zone, where I don't try to explain what I was going for in a piece of artwork or whatever creative vision I may be working towards. I just agree with what people say and don't try to fight it... why would they care about something when I'm not showing them why they should care?

Hmm, this reminds me of how I go about stating opinions. Very similar really. Arguing for an opinion is way more difficult though, for me anyway. Though I'd venture to say my sense of right and wrong is persuasive, my logical explanations of said rights and wrongs leave me feeling very dissatisfied. Most of the time if I get to the point of explaining what is on my mind, what people mirror back to me is not what I was trying to say, and other times I just get poked in the logical holes I created for myself. Our world is such a logical place, and I know that all people have strong logical sides if only they'd let them out. I strangle mine and kill it with fear, and so it struggles and gimps along and leaves me with exactly what I try so hard to avoid: rejection. How ironic!

It occurs to me that maybe people don't preform as well as they wish they did not because they can't, but because they stop themselves. They have all these abilities but they are hard to those things, they fear rejection and failure and so they try to "toughen" themselves in order to avoid the unavoidable. Life, I think, is important because of rejection and failure. And if you think about it, rejection and failure are not bad things. They're sort of like getting a cold. No one likes getting stuffed up and sick, but the reason your body is doing that is to save you from death. Not that rejection and failure is that extreme, but I think they serve a similar purpose. They're uncomfortable and unwanted, but they are not bad things. And maybe, in an ideal world, they would not be quite so uncomfortable and unwanted. Maybe they're so feared because we try to harden ourselves to them, to stop them from happening. Maybe colds wouldn't be so bad either, if we just opened ourselves to them and allowed our bodies to fully and completely fight whatever is making us ill.

Or, maybe not. :)