Crisis On Infinite Earths!!

Today I started off as a sloth. My body melted to fit the shape of the couch as the lights shut off behind my eyes. I was switching between an Australian soap opera and a hurling match on the television. Little did I know that the course of my day would be altered dramatically with the arrival of the next tv program!! A cooking show. Now not only was I a sloth, but a hungry one. My grumbling gut energized my bones and I peeled myself off the couch. If I was going to get a bite to eat, I should take a walk while I was at it. Why not bring my sketchbook too. I walked along the coast road and ended up at Monks. There I had a delightful lunch of seafood chowder (It was advertised as award winning. After having devoured it completely, I couldn't help but agree with them), brown bread, salad, and a steaming cup of irish coffee. It was everything I had hoped it would be and more.

I was sketching and feeling inspired after walking further along the coast. Suddenly I realized that I really felt like practicing the banjo. So I scampered home. The following video shows the fruits of my labor. These are the two songs I've managed to learn by heart. I still can't play them as smoothly as I'd like and they are very simple, but I am happy with them. Please don't laugh :/ Now I am relaxing and reading Crisis On Infinite Earths! I'm not a huge DC or Marvel fan, but it looked interesting and so far it most certainly is proving to be.

Pictures from walk climb/ new work

Hot Iron

The Burren causes me to reflect on a camp, Brethren Woods, that I worked at two summers ago. I was the Craft Lady/Counselor. Being the Craft Lady was good fun, but being a counselor brought in the most rewards. When I say rewards I mean emotional growth, because some of those kids would chew you up and spit you out. It was all worth it. Being a child's guide through a week long adventure in the outdoors, camping out under the stars and cooking over an open fire (and actually being able to start the fire), it really struck something within me. Thus I decided to climb the mountain behind school today. The weather was perfect and the opportunity was calling. I made it up about halfway before coming face to face with the wild goat herds that inhabit the higher reaches of the Burren. We regarded each other silently before moving on. I will admit that images of being skewered and then head-butted down the mountain side to meet my wild-goat-induced-death did flash across my mind. Aside from the labor of climbing uphill, the goat encounter was the only thing to really get my heart pumping.

I realized that it is a damned good thing that Ireland has no poisonous snakes (or much of a snake population at all really). If there were snakes, the rocks of the Burren would hold a treachery that extends beyond the possibility of falling and breaking a bone. All this snake thinking brings me right back to Brethren Woods. The Shenandoah Valley is home to the timber rattlesnake. Go hiking in the woods and you have a very good chance of running into one. I have had this pleasure a couple of times. I have also come across black bears, which is admittedly more frightening than a rattlesnake. Thankfully, though, the first time it was just a cub (mother absent) who quickly ran away when he saw us. The second was a full grown bear but he was further down from the road and just kept on his way, we wisely didn't do anything to draw its attention. When I think about it there was a third time as well. I was driving along and by chance I looked out into one of the fields by the road. There was this lone tiny cub working his way across the field. The sight made me feel very sad, but I am digressing.

At camp there were plenty of rattlers. If we were to see one, we had to very calmly pick up our radio and say "There is a 'hot iron' at Maple Ridge/Cedar Cove/etc." We could never actually say snake because the radios are loud and the children would hear. Panic would quickly ensue. If it was a non-poisonous snake you would call it a 'cold iron'. However, the fact that no one has been bitten in the 52 year history of that camp, despite all of the rattlers you come across truly baffles me. I am amazed. I almost stepped on one when I was a camper there. Its long body stretched over the entire width of the trail. I know I was not the only camper turned employee to come across one. No one has ever been bitten. Excuse me while my brain boggles.

BTW: Rattlesnake when cooked properly is very tasty. We cooked one up when I was working there. A tad rubbery, though.

Pictures: One of the older groups I counseled, My co-worker eating food, Me eating food.

The Consequences of Sound

Zonks

As far as places go, I have found that Ireland is very easy to adjust to. I wake up in this house, I walk along the Burren Way, I go to a school that has it's own castle, and I get to spend all day seeing where my creativity will go. Despite the uniqueness of the situation I am experiencing, there are moments where the question really hits me. Why am I here? Why am I sitting in an Irish living room, watching a movie about a precocious 10 year old boy trapped in a Japanese POW camp? At the moment he's dancing atop a derelict building as Allied forces bomb the bejeezus out of the nearby Japanese bunkers. His friend just died :(

Commercial break, the credit-crunch-brand-piggy bank is distributing lower prices on his magic flying Euro. I particularly like the No Nonsense Car Insurance commercial that involves zombie coverage. If I owned a car I would want zombie coverage. Dear God I hope I'd never actually need it, but it would be nice to have.

I've enjoyed the commercials in Ireland so far, but back to the question at hand. I didn't come here for the commercials. I knew that coming here would mean leaving the people I'm comfortable with. They are people I've known for years and with whom I have overcome that awkward dance of being an acquaintance. I think that is the biggest challenge I'm facing here. When I spent two weeks in Japan, it was the over all culture shock that really got me down. I detest nori, the humidity came from the depths of hell itself, but at least having the language barrier allowed us to embrace being awkward and we were able to bumble about happily. When I'm faced with peers who speak the same language, that come from the same country, the pressure is on. I tend to over think things to the extent that something zonks behind my eyeballs and an acrid smoke puffs out of my ears. This dreadful over thinking causes my words to get trapped somewhere between my brain and vocal cords. My solution to this is to remain quiet. I stay quiet and I go off and do my own thing, but this leaves too many things unsaid and too many chances untouched.

(I'm watching a cop drama now. This detective has a weird lip/tongue twitch that he does occasionally. That, sir, is very distracting.)

I'm trying to approach this introverted habit in my art work. If I crack it open and dissect it, perhaps I can break myself of it. This reminds me of a performance piece I put together last semester. I wrote down everything I wished I could have said onto strips of paper. I then sat with a male friend, side by side. I faced the audience while he had his back turned. I then proceeded to put all the strips into my mouth and held them there. One by one I pulled the strips out and handed them to my friend for him to read aloud. My face, my words, but his voice. Despite physically extracting the words from my body, I was still unable to utter them myself and this reinforced the idea that I found such behavior to be a personal taboo.

Hmmmm. A movie called Taboo just came on... I'm beginning to worry that it's a horror movie :(

Black Coffee/ Home Alone/ The Package

This tune has been dancing in my head all day:

I think that worked. Maybe it did. Either way this little song kept me smiling as I worked today. If it didn't work, here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8EB-hUUzsE

I love Cowboy Bebop. In particular I love Ed. Adorable. If you don't know Cowboy Bebop (look it up!), Ed is the girl in the song that keeps refusing to have some coffee.

On to the next order of business! I am home alone. I wasn't really looking forward to it. I didn't like the idea of being in this house all alone. However, when I woke up all alone this morning, I realized that having the place to myself is rather liberating. For example, right now I am blasting music, airing a nice bottle of red wine, preparing to cook some lamb with potatoes & asparagus before settling into a night of Monty Python wonderfulness. Lovely.

I received a package today! The package contained all of my Monty Python movies, more snack food/food related items than I could have possible expected in my wildest dreams, and a pair of frog slippers. The frog slippers went on my feet as soon as I got through the door. My thirst for random and plushy footwear cannot be quenched.

Mr. A

Above is some of the work I've made so far this semester. I'll let it be known now that I am no photographer. Please forgive any blurriness or over all poor picture quality that may occur.

As you can probably see, my Nacho Libre-esque character appears regularly in my work. Sometimes he has a mustache, other times he is clean shaven (although you could never really tell with his face all hidden behind that mask and such) but he is always fat, hairy, and humorous. I've taken to calling him Mr. Arrogance. You can call him Mr. A for short. I do.

My professor was really pushing me to figure out what he was. When I first got here all I knew was that I was obsessed with drawing him. As in I couldn't stop. Every time I picked up a pen/pencil, he is what emerged. I have a sketchbook full of him back home. He first appeared when I was pissed off during a class critique. It had been a very dull day and my professor at the time was obnoxious. As more overly aggressive opinions spewed forth from her thin, chapped lips, Mr. A wrestled himself onto the page of my sketchbook. Armed with fiery wings and a halo, he threw his arms up to the sky and screamed "Fools! All of you!" Thus his name. He is my arrogance. He is my alter-ego. A little nugget of a voice in the back of my head wonders if it is healthy to use him as a mask, but I'm ignoring it. As of right now, my fat hairy mask is keeping me inspired.

Am I just too damn lazy?

How do I start this?

I would blame my Mom. Yes. It is her fault, her fault entirely that now whenever I go to my trusty little MacBook I start looking at blogs. It began when she started blogging about Three Angel Missions Haiti, and through that I started reading others. It was then that the egg was planted. It sprouted and grew into a nagging thought that would follow me throughout the day.

"Hey, maybe I should give this blog crap a try."

So now I have. Feels pretty good so far, so I'm retracting my "blog crap" statement. Actually while I'm backtracking, I take back what I said about my trusty macbook... she failed me terribly. She crashed the night before I left to go study abroad in Ireland. Thank goodness Galway has a place that services macs.

That reminds me. I'm in Ireland. Have been for about two months and will remain here until April. I have quested out into the countryside to study Art at the Burren College of Art. I have found that cows, rain, wooly sweaters, Guinness, mossy rocks, abandoned houses, crusty old Irish men, crinkly soft old Irish women, swans, farm dogs, stone walls, Robert, Bulmers Hard Apple Cider, church bells, scandalous priests, banjos, pubs, and a tasty tasty bowl of traditional lamb Irish stew all serve as great fodder for the creative juices. I will post up some of the my work and discuss the Mr. A phenomenon in a separate entry. Otherwise I'll just keep rambling.