Art is relative

These are various photos I've taken over the years that I'm particularly proud of. They're not amazing but They're significant to me.

I like the way the only clear thing in the picture is Andrea smiling. Just a friend but a beautiful one.





My sister named this picture "Persephone" and I quite like that name.





I kind of feel like this photo explains my entire relationship with Fae. It's all blurry and distinguishing what's actually there and what isn't is almost impossible.








Allison was so amazing and beautiful and trying to capture that in a photograph was almost impossible. This was the closest I ever came.
I still miss her but I wish her all the happiness the world could possibly offer.


If you haven't seen the movie Cashback you totally should.

It's all about the dots.

My reflection and life philosophy.
Fair warning: I abandoned grammar some hours ago and am now going for broke.


I honestly loved this class. I know I dropped off the face of the earth halfway through and was kinda craptastic about regular upkeep but I still loved this class and I loved the chance to really examine something I see as on the rise and important- blogs in the context of activism.

I see the human spirit as having so much potential. My entire life philosophy is based on the painting "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat. This idea doesn't make a lot of sense until you know what the painting is made of . The painting is made up of tiny individual dots of paint, millions of them. There isn't a single brushstroke on the canvas.

My theory is that life is a canvas and each of us is a blank dot. As we live our lives we fill our dots up. We can either have our dots be beautiful and contribute to the end result being beautiful or we can contribute to the painting being ugly. What will your dot look like? What can we do to make the dots around us more beautiful? What can we do to make the whole painting more beautiful?

I also feel that each act in our lives is a dot within our dots. Our lives add up to those things we accomplished and those lives we touched and those people we loved and were loved by. All of these things are part of the picture.

It's hard to create change more than a few dots beyond yourself but with blogging and the internet we are starting to reach a point where entire portions of the picture are able to shift quickly to being more beautiful, more loving, more accepting. The ideas and changes and words move quickly across the globe.

In this class I enjoyed reading as people grew and changed and became more comfortable with themselves as bloggers. I'm excited to see where everyone goes from here. The potential is just mind blowing.

I want to thank everyone for being supportive and amazing and really building a blogging community. It rocked and I hope everyone continues their blogs because I'll keep reading them...




PS: I apologize if "the dots" analogy got long winded and weird and incomprehensible. I'll try to explain it more clearly at a later date.

You guys rock!!

Susan Boyle, the average person, and media cynicism: A blog response

I find it mildly amusing that I'm responding to a blog post from a blog in our class.
Liz posted on her blog, Women with Pants, about YouTube sensation Susan Boyle and her famous Britan's Got Talent audition.

I was planning on commenting directly on her blog but as I was writing it began to get out of hand and I decided to give my response it's own post over here on my blog.


I know we all enjoy the schadenfreude of watching Simon Cowell rip a less than amazing contestant but Piers Morgan can be just as horrible if not worse than Simon. I think that she should be so admired for having such courage and resolve in the face of such ugly cynicism.

Auditions are brutal no matter who you are and the fact that we enjoy the public humiliation of those who aren't wildy successful is somewhat sickening. I've worked in theatre and everyone willing to stand up on the stage and audition is braver than me. I have done some acting in high school but I never had the courage to audition for anything.

I genuinely wish the media would leave her alone in some ways. She strikes me as a particularly simple and practical woman. It drives me nuts that the media is pulling in every direction and wants more from her. They want the next level of awesome or awful. I dread that with so much exposure to the media people will start feeling more comfortable lobbing harsh criticism and outright insult at her.

What is it about our society that we require more and more?

What is it about us that we like The Starry Night better if someone takes a print, punches holes in the sky portion of the painting, and then backlights it so it's like a carnival! (I have seen it but I couldn't find it on the internet)
WTF?!

Why are we not content to just enjoy that people are generally remarkable whether we expect them to be or not and why are we only happy when they are remarkable in very specific ways?



I find it somewhat ironic that she chose to sing "I Dreamed a Dream". To be honest, it was the strongest I've ever heard it sung.