Collections and Recollections

Worst Websites: A Review

2009-09-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

For one of my design classes, I had to find 3 really bad websites and write an analysis on them.

Enjoy?

{Best Clips}
I don't know how Senior Scribe Publications can get off with using the word "best" in any context on this site. Clearly the creator of the site either has never looked at Best Clips online, or he or she is permanently stationed 12 feet away from the screen. 24 pt. is not conducive to anything more than three or four words on a browser. And what kind of English-interested blogger misspells "arrangements" and puts line breaks in such dastardly locations?

The colors are very natural. Natural, that is, if you are used to seeing bloody leprechauns rolling around on eggshells on a bright, sunny day. Baby blue, St. Patty's green, Maroon, and eggshell white? That just doesn't happen, people.

What really gets me is the quote at the bottom, (there is more scrolling going on at this site than at the Library of Alexandria):
"It's Our Choice!
Each of us was born with two ends:
One to sit on and the other to think with.
Success or failure in life depends on which we use the most—
heads we win, tails we lose!"

Senior Scribe Pub, your tail is showing.

{Dancing Baby—Burning Pixel Productions}

Ron K Lussier. Apparently, this man brought us the dancing baby animation, one of the earliest internet phenomena. The website is a travesty. “High quality graphics, animation and multimedia production for the digital world”? I am skeptic.

Upon further examination of the content:

Frowny face because his MIDI music won’t play. A tough blow.
“Vector Graphics: I had done some experiments with a web technology called ‘Scalable Vector Graphics’ a few years ago”

I am beginning to suspect that this website is slightly out of tune with the rest of what we people like to refer to as “the present.”

I can’t decide which aspect is the most depressing. The layout? (Grid systems are a foreign enigma to Mr. Lussier.) The obnoxious number and placement of ads? The fact that the flash on the site is a loop of less than 2 seconds? The four or five different grays that do not match? (that is something you have to just see for yourself.)

Lussier even mentions Opera! On his SUPER AWESOME FLASH! and “VECTOR” PAGE!

Tears are beginning to form in my eyes. The pixels aren’t the only thing burning.

{ChildCare Action Project}

Here it is, the obligatory unbearable Christian website.

As you may already suspect, it is covered in pixellated images created, as far as I can tell, in MS Paint (Windows 1.0). The colors are retina-scarring red, chartreuse, cyan, robin’s egg blue, and royal blue, with a hint of tan and wolf gray. Half of these colors are brilliantly displayed in a flash film reel banner.

No, you did not transport back in time. It is still 2009, Michael Jackson is dead. He is not cruising the Caribbean with Macaulay Culkin.

And then there’s the buttons.

No, whatever you do, do not scroll to the bottom. You will find some very terrifying things down there. One, you will realize that the webmaster has been online at least once in the last year to renew the copyright date (though not much else). But at the very end of the abyss, to your horror, you will find not only a flash animation of a spinning gilded cross, but two more links. Yes, those are links to the “top rated” Christian websites. If you have heart problems, are susceptible to liver problems, or do not want to spend the rest of your life crying yourself to sleep, do not visit those sites, and especially do not visit any of the sites featured. Nothing is safe; nothing is sacred.

We're Engaged!

2009-04-16T14:33:00.000-07:00

Thomas Willard and I are getting married! I am so excited to be engaged to my best friend!

When Girls Watch Scary Movies (poem)

2009-02-05T22:30:00.000-08:00

We aren’t as afraid as you think we are,
clinging onto your shirtsleeves as we peer
over your shoulder, eyes squeezed, jaws tightened
as a group of oblivious teenagers fumble around in the dark.
We pretend that the monster or unshaven criminal
might suddenly jump from the screen, that
we are the prey and you, our defender. But while you set yourself
in marble, seemingly unfazed, we are closing our eyes, picturing
a full moon on a clear summer evening, werewolves
replaced by Romeo, Saint George slaying for a princess and honor,
Indy with a whip blazing in hand, Tom Hanks on the top
of the Empire State Building.

You see us not looking and pull us in closer to console us from
this thunderous nightmare, but now rain is splashing
onto our eyelashes, and we are soaked
in Austen’s old England, riding on the backs
of gentlemen’s horses, while a far off voice is assuring us
none of it is real.

Eulogy in Yellow (Revision)

2009-02-05T22:20:00.000-08:00

At eighteen I stand in an Irish abbey
crumbled by centuries of forgetfulness,
believing in monks whose cadences
rose like sacrificial smoke.
And in Monasterboice, high crosses project
heavenward. People gape like infant birds
as though the sky will feed them.
But I walk through the stone forest of the cemetery,
reading letters engraved for those who are gone.

A daffodil illuminated by grey marble, brighter
than the sun swaddled in clouds. Two names
written on its headstone—
Mark, Luke. I stop to scan their story:
One lived August to June, it says,
his brother was born an angel.

I wonder if their hair was red, if Mark ever
walked or called for mother. These boys
would have quarreled had they lived,
pelted rocks at neighborhood sheep,
fought over toys, forgotten their chores,
caught a fever from swimming in spring.
But now they are quietly sharing this plot,
this stone, this flower. Luke is five years dead.

The grass is thick over the grave,
tourist-pressed. School uniforms are
flooding into the cemetery, but the accents
are muted by this yellow-petaled trumpet
placed by ghost or mother,
playing an Irish lullaby.

I Thought Not of Insignificance

2009-02-05T22:14:00.000-08:00

[revision of "Resisting Inertia"]

Broke from my summer reading
to lay out on the lawn which drew me
from the air conditioning and couch. Now
I am on my back, terrain:
a plateau of skin, hair, and 100 percent cotton.

But when I look behind the clouds
to the universe invisible, I suddenly remember
that the earth is hurling through space
at 67,000 miles an hour, is turning on its axis at a thousand miles
each hour, and I sink my fingers into the grass,
lodge myself into the dirt, straining to feel the rotation.

And then I, twenty years old, wonder if each of us
is always dizzy from all that spinning,
and if feelings of nausea
are epiphanies in disguise.

Photos: Up North (Vol 3)

2008-12-19T15:05:00.000-08:00

Photos: Up North (Vol 2)

2008-12-19T15:03:00.001-08:00

Photos: Up North (Vol 1)

2008-12-19T15:00:00.000-08:00

Photos: The Twin Cities Volume II

2008-12-19T14:55:00.000-08:00

Some photos from around the cities... (including a smug tortoise)

Photos: Sonshine Music Festival

2008-12-19T14:49:00.000-08:00

These are some photos from the Sonshine Music Festival this summer in Willmar, MN. I am really only including the hilarious/creepy/weird random person in a bunny suit and an out of focus photo of David Crowder Band, because I like it. I am also throwing in a photo of a stoplight.

Photos: More Minnesota Summer

2008-12-19T14:06:00.000-08:00

So, I have a lot of photos to post. Right now, I am just going to add 30. Yes, only thirty. More will probably come when I am more conscious and have more time :)

These are from my summer, when I got to spend time with my family.

Hmmmmm

2008-11-24T21:54:00.000-08:00

So, I realize I haven't posted in a while. It's been pretty crazy the last few weeks! I went to Virginia to visit my sweetheart and go to the Marine Corps Birthday Ball with him two weekends ago, and then last weekend I was trying to figure out where I would live next semester and how I could possibly graduate on time keeping writing and graphic design. I'm still working those out. But God is good, so I will try not to stress out about things.

Anyway, this week is Thanksgiving, so I might have time to post the last couple months' worth of photos. Although it isn't terribly likely. I have to proofread a 200+ page book, draw five portraits, paint a cubist painting, and possibly read a theology book before next week! Aaaaaaaaaaaah.

So, if I am still living by next week, and my brain hasn't shriveled up, then some photos should be posted. At least eventually!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Diversion (Short Story)

2008-11-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

Helen James was at the Hill County Post Office in Danielsburg, attempting to simultaneously wait in line and occupy her mind with something, anything, other than the Preamble of the United States Constitution, which was painted on the wall in slanting letters. She had read it twenty-seven times since her arrival and was sure it would plague her for days. In a week, she would be sitting in the corner of her library at Peasley Elementary, reading Wayside Stories to third graders before recess and wondering how to establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility among Mr. Jeffreys’ class.

But for now, she was still in line at the post office, the only one for fifteen or twenty miles, depending on how you traveled. Helen knew of one man, Eugene Thompson, who had parasailed off Mount Lincoln on an exceptionally windy day, attempting to take aerial photographs of the new roundabout he had designed in South Bluffs. He found himself on the roof of JJ’s Hardware Store in Kittleston, right next door to the post office. The distance, he later calculated, was twenty-three and a half kilometers—14.6 miles. (Eugene had boycotted the English system of measurement. The reason, Helen suspected, was that he considered it some sort of prejudice against people with small feet.)

Helen James had no parasail, and on this Tuesday, October twenty-ninth, the wind was almost as lifeless as Helen’s hair, which looked fallow under the artificial lighting. The line was not terribly long, but the man at the head was paying for a package that cost $14.78, and he was determined to pay with change he had brought in a Viva Las Vegas piggy bank. Behind him was a frizzy-haired, very large woman wearing neon scrubs. Next, the wife of Danielsburg’s dentist. Then Helen, clutching a stuffed catalogue envelope. She had been occupying the last three minutes trying to figure out the print on the scrubs of the woman second in line. They might have been states, no longer united, but splattered across the fabric, discombobulated and wondering what on earth they were doing on the backside of a plump veterinarian. Or perhaps they were domestic animals.

The man at the head of the line was attempting to exhume two last pennies, apologetically mumbling to the women something about overseas shipping prices. The clerk at the desk, her hand propping up her face, was not forgiving. She looked up at the clock on the opposite wall, counted the people in line with a slight head nod, and seemed to inwardly groan.

Helen herself would not have minded being overseas. She would be at Oxford, touching the wooden shelves, feeling the weight of Chaucer in her hand: For hym was levere have at his beddes heed / Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed, / of Aristotle and his philosophie / Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie.

But then, Helen’s glimpse of Mrs. Dentist flipping her hair steered her imagination in an entirely different direction. She had been thrust onto unknown beach, the sand clinging to her indecently. There was Mrs. Dentist. She was in a red bikini with matching stilettos, reclining on a towel. The woman, Helen observed, was quite literally a pair of legs with bosoms. And she was unreasonably tan for this time of year.

“Next.”

Helen was still in the post office, relieved to see that Mrs. Dentist was clothed (for the most part). The veterinarian had advanced to the counter, and the man with the bank strode to the exit, wearing a victorious grin. Yes, your thriftiness, premature baldness, and billowy trousers make you irresistibly attractive, Helen thought. Why wish for Ricky Ricardo when we can have Fred?

***

Helen had a Ricky Ricardo once. He was a healthy-looking Cuban physicist named Ramón Oswardo, and they had fallen in love in grad school when she directed him to a juicy novel about Alhazen's intromission theory of light. Ramón believed in creation, thinking man was too stupid to invent love by himself. He would say that he was thankful for holes in the ozone layer, teasing Helen that she had fallen from heaven through one of them.

“Look at that break in the clouds! That must be one of them!” he would say, pointing at the sky when they were walking together.

But Ramón did not believe in procreation. It had been five years since Helen had woken up to Ramón standing in the doorway of the bathroom, extending a soggy pink pill.

“This is no pencil eraser,” he said.

“No. It isn’t.” She was sure she had seen it go down the drain.

“I dropped one of my contacts in the sink,” he said. “I pulled up the stopper and found this.”

She wound the sheet around her wrist.

“What is this supposed to mean?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just wanted—”

“We both know what you wanted. But I thought we agreed that what I wanted was the best for us.”

“You didn’t know what you wanted,” she whispered. Hair fell in front of her eyes.

He flung the pill into the trash. He walked back into the bathroom, turned on the water, rinsed his hands. Helen heard him over the spraying water. “I know I what I didn’t want. What I don’t want.” He turned off the water. “You lied.”

By now she was sitting on the edge of the bed, cold from the morning air but sitting up straight. “It didn’t have to affect you! You could have left. I wouldn’t have made you stay.”

He came out, holding a towel in his hands. “That is where you are wrong, Helen. I couldn’t have left.” The towel dropped to the floor. “But I can now.”

***

Helen remembered the months that had followed. The house half emptied, her sister coming to visit, their watching movies in the mornings with the blinds pulled down, buying cheesecake in bulk, rearranging the furniture, rescuing a street cat and naming him Marc Antony, beginning her report, which she now held completed in her hands.

She looked down at her envelope, tracing “Teacher Librarian Journal Submissions” with her thumb. She was rounding off the “J,” when Mrs. Dentist stepped to the front. Initially amazed that the dentist’s wife could balance herself on two legs shaped like backwards parentheses, Helen realized that the woman’s proportions were each rebelling against gravity. If she were a poker hand, she’d be two pair, she mused.

Helen remembered when she taught her younger sister, Mary, how to play cards. Helen was twelve and had just returned home from a spring break probability camp. They hid behind two lilac bushes, breathing in the pastel fragrance. Helen even grabbed her marbles to bet with. She felt dangerous and brilliant, and Mary was ingenuously cooperative, like when they played Joan of Arc in the back yard. Helen would shove her hair into her dad’s baseball cap to make her hair look short, and she would charge against Mary, rhetorically, because Helen had made her Bishop Cauchon. The game would culminate in the young Helen wrapping herself around a birch tree, crying, “Martin! Hold the cross up before my eyes, so I may see it until I die!” Once, before the family moved to Nevada, Helen’s parents had to usher potential buyers away from the backyard, where a blonde, Pennsylvanian Joan of Arc was leading the French in a siege of Orleans, about to be shot by a stray arrow.

***

Mrs. Dentist had finished. Helen stepped up to the counter and handed the clerk her envelope, picturing her essay within, snug and eager to be read—“Giddy Philosophers Readily Supplying Learning May Teach a Lad Hence: Using Mnemonic Devises to Teach the Dewey Decimal Classification to Students.” She had spent the last few years trying to make the system understandable to her students. The subject had evolved from an idea scribbled on a library slip to a desire, a passion. The paper quickly consumed her free time. Marc Antony even began to notice, avoiding Helen when she was in paper mode—desk lamp on, computer out, rug covered in papers—for fear that he may be swatted out of the room. Though his reflexes were average for a cat, he realized instinctively that the librarian species is especially territorial when preying over manuscripts.

For the first time, Helen questioned what she would do now that the paper was being submitted. Her concern had been to enlighten her students: If only they could see the beauty, the magnificent order, the wonder of classification! Now her paper might be submitted. Her work in creating a library revival could be finished.

The clerk was completely unaware that under her twelve-dollar manicure sat the glory of the woman on the other side of the counter, who dreamed of children being engaged in library utopias. Helen was looking at the lady’s bangles, which were silver and teal and clinked as she punched buttons on the scale.

“Parcel Post?”

“Priority.”

“Eight twenty-four.”

Helen surrendered a ten.

The clerk slapped a blue and white label on Helen’s envelope, tossed it into a bin which was grey, not “gray,” and called over Helen’s shoulder.

“Next.”

Her paper would now have to stand its own. She could very well be the librarian who founded discovery among elementary students. Now she would just have to wait for the praise to come to her, and remain humbly working in the meantime.

She remembered to unlock her P.O. box on the way out, realizing she could have checked it before getting in line. Helen was brilliant, but not very smart. She pulled out her keys, found the one with the rubber purple slip cover (Purple, post office), and opened box 1903, greeted by a company of envelopes.

Leaning against the wall of tiny silver doors, she flipped through her mail and sorted it by size. Movie rental—The Secret Garden—in the back, a host of bills and pleas for subscriptions, and an unexpected letter from Mary.

She started outside, gently ripping the fold to unearth her letter. The envelope gaped as if taking a breath, and Helen drew out a glossy card.

MERRY CHRISTMAS! was splayed across the top. It was not yet November. There was a photo of Mary and her husband Stan standing in front of a fireplace covered with tinsel and embroidered stockings. One stocking was for Max, their Pomeranian. Stan was wearing a pair of antlers. Love, Stan, Mary, and Max, it said.

Helen spotted a note on the back. It was in Mary’s handwriting.

“How’s your job going? Is that kid still around, that boy that stole magazines to make collages?”

Helen found a Reader’s Digest last week that was missing all of the noses from each picture, human and otherwise. “Honestly, Jelly,”—Helen hated that nickname, but preferred it to the original, Helly Jelly—“you have worked at that elementary school for what, six years? Don’t you want to move up? Work at a university or something? Meet a hunky professor who likes long walks on the beach and computer sciences? Ciao, M”

Helen smiled and began to skim the body of the letter.

The pages were sown with pictures of Mary and her husband, Stan, on their vacation to Europe. They loved the “je nay see qua” of Paris, as Mary put it, and were disappointed they couldn’t find a decent taco place in Madrid. There was a photo of Stan standing next to a royal guard at Buckingham Palace, puckering up and popping his foot, as though he and the guard were lovers.

“We have exciting news!”—This caught Helen’s attention.

“Mary is pregnant!”

Helen staggered, spilling out the door, but she caught herself on a railing outside the post office. She wasn’t particularly surprised, since Mary and Stan had been married for four years and had dated through college. To find out this way, in a general letter to everyone.

Mary is pregnant. Helen felt a throbbing hollowness coming the crux of her body. She was like a pear that had been peeled and cored.

Helen pictured her yoga-smitten sister looking nine months pregnant, craving foods she had sworn off. She imagined Runaway Bunny and Everyone Poops set out on a coffee table, next to the Harper’s Weekly. But the coffee table she envisioned was not the iron and glass monstrosity that was sitting in the living room of Mary and Stan’s condo. Instead, it was a dark table of substance and oak, and it had clawed feet. It was similar to the one that Helen had in her house.
She read on.

“And guess what? We’re having TWINS!”

Helen was no longer holding the letter with both hands. Her arms dropped, and she looked up at the sun, no longer a runny egg yolk in the toast of the sky. A breeze picked up, rattling the letter at Helen’s side. She lifted the letter, and, watching clouds on the horizon, folded it into thirds. The clouds were preparing for delivery. Helen tore the letter in half. Then she ripped it again, and again. She let go and watched the liberation of the pieces. The wind carried them upwards, dispersing them through the town of Danielsburg. Later, a little boy who liked to make collages would come outside and find a picture of a man wearing antlers stuck to his mailbox.

Helen reached into her handbag and dug out her keys. She inserted a cyan key into the door of a green Taurus. Raindrops began to splatter on her windshield. The sky turned an orangey purple, and thunder echoed the sound of the ignition. She pulled out of the Hill County Post Office parking lot, and as she switched on her windshield wipers, she watched the lightning prod Mount Lincoln in the distance. Perhaps she might like to try parasailing.

Resisting Inertia

2008-11-01T11:51:00.001-07:00

My novel is on the table—the grass
too seductive. Rinsed by Minnesota sunlight, I am terrain:
a plateau of skin, hair, 100 percent cotton,
looking behind the clouds and remembering Earth is
hurling through space at 67,000 miles an hour and sink
my fingers into the grass, lodge myself in the dirt
to feel the rotation and wonder if each of us is always dizzy
from all that spinning, if vertigo is a type of epiphany.

The June air is hot breath on my cheeks. I want to accelerate,
be pancaked against the grass in a carnival of blurred horizon, sky melting
into suburbia, then slow down and go flying into an oak tree.
I could take the world off cruise control
if I knew it wouldn’t kill us.

Eulogy in Yellow

2008-11-01T11:50:00.001-07:00

At eighteen I stand in an Irish abbey
crumbled by centuries of forgetfulness,
believing in monks whose cadences
rose like sacrificial smoke.
And in Monasterboice, high crosses project
heavenward. People gape like infant birds
as though the sky will feed them.
But I walk through the stone forest of the cemetery,
reading letters engraved for those who are gone.

I see a daffodil illuminated by grey marble, brighter
than the sun swaddled in clouds. Two names
are written on the daffodil’s headstone—
Mark, Luke. I stop to scan their story:
One lived August to June, it says,
his brother was born an angel.

I wonder if their hair was red, if Mark ever
walked or called for mother. These boys
would have quarreled had they lived,
fought over toys and forgotten their chores,
broken their arms climbing on rocks and
gotten a fever from swimming in spring.
But now they are quietly sharing this plot, this stone,
this flower. Luke is five years dead.

The grass is thick over the grave,
tourist-pressed. School uniforms are
flooding into the cemetery, but the accents
are muted by this yellow-petaled trumpet
placed by ghost or mother,
playing an Irish lullaby.

World Traveller (a poem)

2008-10-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

I can’t sleep on the overnight flight from Atlanta to Manchester.
I see a river shining like a silver thread, and then,
there, the pink suede of the Irish Sea as we sink below the clouds.

In England there are times when I am breathless,
seeing shades of green I’d never seen before, and
standing in ruins of an abbey, visualizing monks striding
down sunlit corridors, their cadences rising to the open air
like sacrificial smoke.

We sample the local cuisine, such as black pudding,
which has no particular taste and looks as though the chef
took a cookie cutter to a hot slab of asphalt.

We familiarize ourselves with European appliances:
televisions and radiators with suspicious knobs
and dials, a sadistic shower-head
that levitates from the wall, a cobra
striking with hard-water venom.

We go on tours of castles and cathedrals, gaping
at architecture, climbing on it when we can, pretending
we are lords and ladies of the court.
And we are in another time, in another world, grounded
because gravity is stronger than our daydreams.

And then gravity has its way, pulling us deeper into the
culture, I see it not so groggily, I wake up and smell
the feet, sweat, geriatric body odor,
cigarettes in a pub in Ulster, and I have to look around
to make sure I’m not sitting by a rugby-playing,
shoeless eighty-year-old come in for a drink,
perhaps asking our waitress for a light
and seeing where that takes him.

A few days later, just hours before dawn,
I am serenaded, woken by a drunken woman
staggering home outside my hotel window.

I come home after ten days of traveling, of culture,
of memories stuffed into a black hard-bound journal.
Yet the people back home don’t see I’m more cultured
but stand there, blinking at me
because, due to a sudden attack of jet lag,
I have transmuted into an invertebrate
and am lying on the floor, as much a puddle
as a world traveler.

Jane (a poem)

2008-10-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

I think it’s Leukemia,
says the professor.
She is explicating a story
we read for class.
My heart knocks against sternum,
claustrophobic
as I think of Tom’s mother.

Eight years ago, a hospital in Washington,
two teenage boys at her bedside,
holding clay dioramas Sam made:
white blood cells attacking the Leukemia,
who has a mustache.

I recognize her in the pitch
of the voices of her sons, of her husband—
the softening of their voices
as they talk of their mother,
his wife.

Grief hangs like a wet sweatshirt.
I am grieving,
inhaling it like second-hand smoke.

How can you grieve for someone you’ve never met?
Why does my heart rattle its ribcage
whenever I hear her name? Or
think of her family without her.
How can I miss someone I had never known?

The discussion has finished. I consider denouement
as I leave the classroom, wondering if it is possible
when grieving for the unknown.

Woa, theology.

2008-09-24T16:33:00.000-07:00

So, today was interestingly cool, theological-wise.

In chapel, the speaker was talking about waiting on the Lord, which was basically the spiritual theme of this past summer. (This fall, the theme is intentionality. Being intentional in my devotionals, in prayer, in relationships.)
One thing specifically caught my attention. She talked about when you do something out of your own strength and do not wait for the Lord, you will create an Ishmael. That really spoke to me, especially because I read the story of Abraham and Ishmael earlier this week (Gen 16). Of course, sometimes God is silent, and we can't just do nothing with our lives, waiting for Jesus to come back like some did in the New Testament. If we spend time with God, we will get to know Him better. When we know Him better, we can make decisions follow His will to the best of our ability.
Sample scripture on waiting: Psalm 27:14, 33:20, 38:15, 40:1, 130:5; Isaiah 8:17, 28:6, 30:18, 64:4; Lamentations 3:24; Hosea 12:6; Micah 7:7; Romans 8:25

The second insight came from my writing workshop class. We were talking about the mystery of God and the Holy Spirit. How evangelical Christianity is steeped in modernity, and because of it, they almost throw out anything that isn't utilitarian or anything they don't understand. That some of them worship Father, Son, and Holy Scripture, forgetting the mystery and wonder that is God in the Holy Spirit. We also talked about how Paul's words are studied much more than the words of Jesus, because Jesus is God and He isn't as easy to understand as Pragmatic Paul. I love the letters in the New Testament because they are so practical. But we cannot place the words of a man over the words of our Lord, and we certainly cannot worship the words of our Lord over our Lord Himself.

It was all very interesting, and it made me think. I like that.

I'd be interested in what you think on the subject(s).

-C

P.S. I will post more photos soon. I turned one in, so I might wait until I get that back. Also, I am not posting any of my final projects, the real ones (poetry and fiction pieces) until after I revise them and turn them in. In a few weeks, they will be up.

Old Stuff: Holiness for Dummies

2008-09-20T22:31:00.000-07:00

I made this parody for a class in 2006. It is Leviticus, done as a parody of the "For Dummies" books. Most of the text is mine, added in the same style as the Dummies books. If you click on the images, they should get bigger so you can read them. Feel free to use them, just don't sell them off as your own. I spent a lot of time on these book covers! :)

A new addiction (Darkroom #1)

2008-09-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

Well...This was basically terrifying. You know, the whole taking your film out of the cartridge and loading it up onto a reel in total darkness, then developing the film, then making prints. And at the same time, it was really exciting! Here are the four prints I made today, the last one being my favorite (it holds a special place in my heart. Perhaps you can guess why). Enjoy! More to come later. I have found a new addiction :D

Hill County Post Office (free write)

2008-09-19T13:40:00.001-07:00

Free Write for Adv. Writers' Workshop. Prompt is in bold:

The Hill County post office in Danielsburg was the only one for a radius of fifteen to twenty miles, depending on how you traveled. One man, Eugene Thompson, had parasailed off Mt. Lincoln on an exceptionally windy day, and though he was attempting to take aerial photographs of the new roundabout he had designed in South Bluffs, he found himself on the roof of JJ's hardware store in Kittleston, right next door to the Kittleston Post Office. The distance, he later calculated, was twenty-three and a half kilometers (14.6 miles). Eugene boycotted the English system of measurement, citing a prejudice against people with small feet.

Helen James had no parasail, and on this Tuesday, December second, the wind was almost as lifeless as Helen's hair. The line was not terribly long, but the man at the head was paying for a package that cost $14.78, and he was determined to pay for it with change he had brought in a Viva Las Vegas piggy bank. Behind him was a very large woman wearing neon scrubs, followed by the wife of Danielsburg's dentist, followed by Helen. She had been occupying the last three minutes trying to figure out the print on the scrubs of the woman second in line. They seemed to be either states, no longer United, but splattered across the fabric, or they were domestic animals. The man was still trying to fish out two pennies. As he worked his fingers into the bank, his elbow cranked up and down, as though he were pumping oil out of the ground. He was apologetically mumbling to the women something about oversea shipping prices. The clerk at the desk, her hand propping up her face, was not forgiving. She looked up at the clock on the opposite wall, counted the people in line with a slight head nod, and inwardly groaned, I want to send everyone overseas!

Photos: September 2008

2008-09-17T20:38:00.000-07:00

The last three are digital photos from our class outing. (Hopefully) film prints to come.

Photos: The Twin Cities

2008-09-17T20:12:00.000-07:00

Photos: Minnesota July

2008-09-17T20:03:00.000-07:00

Photos: Minnesota Treasures

2008-09-17T19:50:00.000-07:00

Old Photos: Mexico

2008-09-17T19:43:00.000-07:00

Old Photos: Holiday in Ireland and the UK

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Old Photos: Graphics

2008-09-17T19:21:00.000-07:00

Old Photos: Colorado

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Let the Photos Roll

2008-09-17T19:09:00.000-07:00

So, I figured I would get out a few of my old photos and such now, and then I can upload others as I take them. I will try to do them a couple at a time so that they can be separated in a semi-organized way. So, to start off, here are some miscellaneous photos:

Pleasure Reading (free write)

2008-09-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

When I am a teenager I discover the true meaning of pleasure reading: reading books that have no philosophical depth and whose sole purpose is to entertain. But I will get to that later.
I was silently reading at the age of four, reading eighth grade level books in fourth grade. Unabridged Shakespeare in fifth, acting out Midsummer Night’s Dream with my mother’s old horse figures on the floor of my bedroom. Lysander was a bay, front right leg forever extended.
It seems strange to me now, thinking about how much I loved reading and the depth to which it was done. Now, when the only books I can read are text books or feminist landscape of the mind, or nonfiction. And when I read in my own time, I chose pleasure reading.
I think of what it would have been like if that zeal for reading had never been squelched by the assigned reading that came in middle school. Perhaps now I would be a fan of Jane Austen, falling in love with Mr. Bingley because Mr. Darcy was too vainglorious. But I have only seen the movies.
It is, in fact, movies which reintroduce me to reading. I had never even heard of The Lord of the Rings before a friend of mine wanted to rent it on Pay-Per-View when we were at a hotel in Denver for a Destination Imagination competition. By the next Christmas break, I had read the entire trilogy. I read it twice more in two years.
The escape I got from reading Tolkien’s trilogy was not sufficient, however, to get me through the school year, especially since I only had the time to read all three books in the summer times. Thus I discover true pleasure reading: the Georgia Nicolson series.
I am lying on the floor of my bedroom, which is unusually cleared of enough clutter for me to spread out comfortably, reading a book excerpt in a teen magazine. Magazines I did not particularly consider reading material. Though my grandmother bought me subscriptions hoping I would one day fit into the homecoming court rather than my crowd of misfit artist friends, I usually used Seventeen as a medium for brightly colored collages—ones which satirized any remote idea of “fashion.” This particular magazine, however, had a two page excerpt from Louise Rennison’s second Georgia book, the title of which was scandalously intriguing. It was incredibly hilarious, and I spotted British slang immediately, wondering what “snogging” was but figuring it out easily enough.
Soon every time my family traveled an hour to Grand Junction, Colorado to go shopping, we would go to the Barnes and Noble, and my mother would buy me the most recent book, happy to be spoiling me, especially because that with which she was spoiling me seemed to be feminine. I would read as we ate the cheesy butter bread at Red Lobster, read under the cabin light as we drove through the canyon home, and finish it before bed.

Beauty (free write)

2008-09-17T18:02:00.000-07:00

I remember my mother telling me that her grandmother always got up at least an hour before her husband to put on her makeup. My great grandfather had never seen his wife without a painted face.
The memory crossed my mind as I was looking through my grandfather’s photographs that had belonged to his mother.
She was a dancer, she and my great grandfather. She danced well into her seventies. And here, in my hand, was a photograph of her in a dark green jumpsuit-like dancing outfit with white trim and bellbottoms. Did I mention she also danced into the 1970s?
Her black hair was pulled back into a large, thick bun–her hair must have been quite long–and it was held up with a white ribbon. She had too much eye makeup on, but she posed like a model: knee popped, chin up and to the side, hand resting on hip, looking away from the camera, and lifting a white platform heel just slightly off the orange shag carpet. The colors, style were hideous, yet she held herself in a way that was dignified. Beautiful, in a bizarre sort of way only possible in that decade. She could have been an actress, if she could act.

Last summer I visited her in her nursing home. She’d probably still be dancing, if it weren’t for the Alzheimer’s, or the stroke. Now everything is beautiful. Perhaps she has forgotten beauty magazines, the seventies, movie stars and television. When we sat together next to the home’s aviary, she commented on how beautiful the birds were. She rediscovered their beauty every couple of minutes. Though I sat next to her, she kept forgetting I was there, and talked with my grandparents about me in such a way. “Caitlin? That’s a pretty name.”
After we talked for some time, my grandfather began pushing her back to her room. As she rolled past me, she looked back at her great grandchild and said, “Isn’t she beautiful?”
I wasn’t wearing any makeup.

This Time of Year (free write)

2008-09-17T18:00:00.000-07:00

(an unfinished free write from one of my classes)

“This time of the year is always difficult for me,” I heard as I was counting leaves on a tree overhead, my back cushioned in the grassy hillside. I rolled over onto my side and looked at him, propping up my head for fear it would fall over. It had been a long week of studying and deadlines.
“Finals week?”
“No.” He meant springtime. For some unfortunate reason, coincidence or otherwise, his major heartbreaks always occurred during this season.

I always loved springtime for all the new life it would bring. My birthday is in April, and almost every year when I was between the ages of ten and fourteen, I would get to go to the Denver Zoo to see all the baby animals, wasting—as my mother would call it—all of the exposures in my disposable cameras. Photos needed to have people in them, that either I or she knew, to be considered successful. My mother was livid when she would bring home doubles of prints of giraffes.

For him, on the other hand, spring was not a time of life and beginnings, but rather of death and losses. His mother. His father’s broken engagement. His girlfriend’s perfidy.

I will never forget what he said once while we were eating lunch in the sunlight under blossom trees.
“It’s spring! Love is in the air! Or pollen.” He shrugged and took a bite of his sandwich. “Something.”

Eleven months later, after he told me he loved me, he pointed out the irony that it was April. Given his history of springtime experiences, to begin something during that time of year seemed uncharacteristic.

Li-Young Lee (free write)

2008-09-17T17:57:00.000-07:00

(This poem is modeled after Lee's “The Weight of Sweetness.” Read it. He's an amazing poet.)

No loyal acquaintance, this muse of inspiration.

Skill, talent, motivation, purpose: inspiration
is greater than these gifts.

Hear a brush caress
the canvas and flatten its bristles until
it lifts.
Grasp the brush, try a hue, life
and beauty so light and soft
at your fingertips.
And then comes an old impression:

A paint-dipped
toothbrush mists, splashing
the paper and the girl.
She sputters, tickled,
and her father wipes from her nose
one pink droplet
sitting like a freckle.

The young girl clutches a handful of brushes
her father has bought
for her.
Now she paints
like her father, who is painting a waterscape.
See the look on the girl’s face
as her father adds
more and more layers, while her own strokes
stagger, and her shapes don’t look right, as she tries
her way at
impressionism.

Oh, Joy.

2008-09-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

So, I figure it's about time I start a blog. One other than anything on Facebook or Myspace.

I don't particularly know what I will post on here, especially since I have 2-3 ongoing journals as well as 2ish online bloggy things. I don't really have a vision for this. Perhaps my poetry or fiction or nonfiction will pop up here and there. Perhaps some artwork. I guess we will just have to see. In the meantime, I suppose I can just sit back, relax, and watch Braveheart, since I have never seen it before and it came in on Netflix...

Cherrio,

Caitlin