I have come to the carefully considered conclusion that I do not want to graduate. Which sucks, because I'm not going to have a say in the matter in less than two weeks.

I already know I'll be coming back for graduate school, but I don't want to have to leave and come back at all. I just want to stay here, because for once, I'm actually happy and the thought of going "home" to Terabil makes me want to crawl under the covers and never come out.

It seems like just when I have things going well, when I seem to be doing things right-- I'm in a city I like, doing well in my art and my classes, surrounded by people I care about-- I'm just expected to drop it all and "start a life in the real world."

You know what? Fuck the "real world." I like the world I'm already in.

I keep getting asked what I'll be doing after graduation and frankly, I wish the hell I knew. I've had so much work this quarter I haven't been able to do more than a cursory job search, and while there are a lot of things I'd want to do, I've seen my roommate doing enough job searches and cover letters to know how few of those jobs would probably want me.

What I do know is that I would rather have my fingernails ripped out with pliers than spend any significant amount of time in Terabil. Unfortunately my mom would rather I stayed at home while I looked for a job, which might take months. My grandmother has also offered to let me live with her while I look for jobs in her city, which to me sounds like a much more palatable option, but my mom insists that there won't be enough space for both of us (notwithstanding the fact that I've been living in an 18x12 dorm room with another person for the past four years, so I think I can deal with a house), and besides, there's this newspaper internship they found a classified ad for in the paper, and I can live at home! for free!

"Free" is a subjective term. If there's anything I've learned, it's that living with my family has its own very special costs.

Labels: family, school

Written for my portrait class. The assignment is a double self-portrait, one of our "outer self" and one of our "inner self" or the self that we don't show to others, and we were to write a paper about what's "behind the mask."

I swear, one of these days I'll write something that's not crossposted from a class assignment...

What is behind my "mask" of public persona? What is my "inner self" which I don't allow most people, if anyone at all, to see? What do I hide from public view?

Frankly, just about everything.

I have met people with Asperger's syndrome who are more socially apt than I am. I can't take more than an hour at parties because I get exhausted and drained doing nothing more than sitting, drinking soda, and trying to make awkward small talk with people; in fact, people who are now my close friends have told me that they thought I hated them when they first met me-- I'm that bad at basic social situations. I like books more than people because books didn't make fun of me all through middle school. When I take personality quizzes, I rarely score anywhere below the top percentile on introversion, and I don't even have to jimmy the results. They simply don't make them much more introverted than I am.

What that means is that generally speaking, I present a fairly blank mask to the world. It's not so much that I control or suppress my emotions or thoughts as that I never quite learned to display them in the first place. Often this comes across as cold or disdainful to people who don't know me (or who haven't been warned by people that know me); I get asked a lot if something is "wrong" or if I'm "okay" when I'm just staring off into space, which I suppose means that my "neutral" expression often gets read as anger or sadness, or at the very least off-putting. All it really means is that it's extremely hard for me to physically interact with people I don't know well. I generally don't have a problem expressing abstract opinions or information, probably because of time spent in high school debate, and I have very little trouble being expressive in writing or artwork, but ask me about myself to my face and I won't have a damn clue what to tell you.

Most of my feelings, thoughts, and desires are going to totally fly under the radar of someone who's just "reading" my public persona, because that's about as informative as a blank check is to someone's bank balance. Growing up as a Southern evangelical Christian, I was subjected to enough well-meaning youth-group leaders whose entire profession was attempting to befriend me in order to convert me that I have a basic distrust of interpersonal relationships. I basically believe that to tell people what you want, or what affects you, is to give them a license to punish or manipulate you by withholding or obstructing your desires or using your triggers against you, so I tend to avoid revealing myself to people until I've established that they're not going to try to mess with my head. Most of the time, my "mask" is calculated, consciously or unconsciously, to attract as little attention and give away as little information as possible.

However, I'm a fantastically terrible actor. It's not in my nature to invent another persona to hide behind. I lie by omission, not commission. When I was part of the drama team in high school (ironically, I have a bizarre number of friends who are actors and performers) I worked behind the stage, running the lights. My costume was black clothing and a headset. Pretending to be another person is just as, if not more, draining in the long run as telling the truth about yourself; either way, you're telling a story, whether it's your own or someone else's. It's simpler to wear a blank mask than full Kabuki makeup.

So what is it that's "behind the mask?" Feeling. Passion. Desire and fear. Thought and belief, spirituality and sexuality, anger and joy. Anything that I perceive as potential vulnerability gets edited out of my public mask. It's all concealed by a blank facade like a stained-glass window behind a plaster coating, because the congregation is afraid of people throwing rocks through the glass.

Is it necessarily a bad thing? I would guess that most people find it incomprehensible, or at least a little sad, that I find it that difficult to open up to other people. Sometimes I wish it were easier to get along with strangers in everyday life. It's definitely hell on my love life, since it means I can flirt about as well as a brick.

It conflicts strangely with being an artist, since my artworks and stories are all based on outworkings of personal issues and conflicts, but I'll theorize that my creativity is a natural reaction to it and an outlet for all the mental/emotional turmoil that gets bottled up as a matter of standard operating procedure. I don't find my artwork personally threatening because the artwork is removed from myself and thus becomes universalized. Instead of it being about just my problems and fears, it becomes about anyone who feels that fear or struggles with that problem. It invokes compassion, not derision, because as an artist I can make someone feel what I'm feeling as well.

Art might not replace the mask, but it can provide a look through the same eyeholes.

Labels: art, school

From my Art & Spirituality journal. I would include the name of the play, but since it's a local production, it'd be too easy to Google it and find out where I live. Hurray for paranoia!

They aren't much alike, on the surface. Pan's Labyrinth is a story juxtaposing a child's journeys in a supernatural fairy world with the rebel resistance to Fascist Spain. [Local Play] is an exploration of mental illness and creativity on the personal scale. One involves a relatively benevolent faun, the other a malevolent reptile demon.

They both, however, nearly made me cry in the theatre.

I was once a child who invented fantasy worlds to live in when the reality around me was too dark and too big to deal with. I was once a teenager who made bargains with my internal demons because I thought they constituted my creative powers. The tightrope between reality as it is and reality as I lived it is one I have balanced on before.

In my lived experience of spirituality, I have lately been separating the truths and the falsehoods from the systems I was given wholesale as a child, comparing and contrasting it with my own experiences and my own discoveries. Sometimes I don't know if I cling to certain beliefs because I believe them true on my own terms or because I fear the consequences of proving them false. Sometimes I still come home to an empty house and think I'm the only one who hasn't been raptured because I wasn't a Real Christian. I wonder if I might have to be the only one who can see the truth, like Ofelia as the sole believer in fairies and [Protagonist] as the only one who can see the lizards, and whether something exists independent of anyone's belief in it other than my own.

To a large degree, as an artist, I still negotiate the balances inherent in trying to make my own visions into a reality to be experienced by others, and the difficulties of the process of unraveling the fabric of my own reality in order to study the threads of which it is woven. I deal with my own experience of mental illness in order to help friends who are dealing with some of the same issues, separating the real from the illusory and the true from the false, and discovering the ways in which something real may be false and something dreamed can be the truth in the end.

Labels: religion, school

From my Art & Spirituality journal.

Perhaps as a result of my previous art history elective, Women in Art (which I loved and adored, in part because I savored the chance to make all my feminist wonkery useful for something other than pissing off my parents), one question kept nagging at me throughout the quarter:

"Where are the women?"

I saw more female nudes than female artists. I counted two women that we studied throughout the entire quarter-- Georgia O'Keefe and Frida Kahlo. These two tend to be the standard artists to use when the occasion calls for "[insert girl painter here]," so it's not quite that I quibble with their inclusion per se, but that they were the only ones. Given that the twentieth century was a time of unprecedented accessibility for female artists, there should have been far more than just two female artists to analyze.

Where was Hannah Koch and the spirituality of Dada? Romaine Brooks' somber exploration of solitude and sexuality? Eva Hesse's tactile minimalism? It bothered me in particular that Sonia Delaunay was excluded from the book's discussion of her husband Robert's work, considering that hers was similar in outlook as well as incorporating collage and fiber elements and using abstraction in a manner predating even Kandinsky's.

It bothers me, as a woman and an artist, that art history can apparently blithely exclude an entire gender's perceptions of spiritual and artistic experience without noticing anything missing.

Labels: art, school

From my Art & Spirituality journal. I can't remember the names of the music in question.

I have a curious relationship with noise. Growing up as the second of five children, I have come to hold a certain sort of distrust of total silence. The absence of sound generally makes me feel on edge and somewhat paranoid, perhaps because I feel like my siblings or parents are plotting some evil distraction or onerous chore to spring on me at any moment. Silence is the prelude to something extremely obnoxious. Partly as a result, I can't deal with total quiet; it's necessary for music or the fan to be on for me to feel comfortable enough to focus on either working or sleeping. Whenever I return to [Terabil] from [Avalon], the first night always weirds me out because I can't hear the bizarrely comforting night soundscape of sirens and dehumidifier rattling that I'm used to.

However, I could no more "mjavascript:void(0)editate" to either the "noise music" or the Balinese ritual than I could work or sleep to the soothing sound of jackhammers. The Balinese participation game reminded me all too familiarly of family car trips which would devolve into verbal sparring matches until my father demanded to know if we'd like him to turn the car around or I put my headphones on, whichever came first. The second didn't bother me at first, until the whining drill noise came on. There's nothing less soothing than being reminded of dental surgery, particularly to someone with such a bad gag reflex that she had to take Valium to get her braces taken off without barfing on the orthodontic personnel.

Apparently pure noise simply has too many negative associations for me to ever feel up to contemplating it on the level of meditation. I don't think a mantra consisting of "make it stop! make it stop!" is very spiritual at all.

Labels: school

From my Art & Spirituality journal.

My senior project is centered around a girl's simultaneous experience of lycanthropy and adolescence. To this end I've had to do a lot of research into werewolf myths, which involves watching and reading a lot of horror movies and books. (My life is so hard.)

Among other things, one of the major themes I'd like to explore is the relationship between the mind and the body, particularly the division between the intellectual and the sexual. One of the major themes of most werewolf myths is a sense of mind-body dualism, particularly a Gnostic / Manichean duality in which the body represents and constitutes the base, animalistic material nature. In this paradigm, the body, as seen in the "beast" form of the wolf-man, must be subdued if possible, and destroyed if necessary, as an impediment to the essential goodness of the human. To be good is to be disassociated from the physical.

Typically, this kind of "matter is evil" philosophy tends to be fairly misogynistic, since women are supposed to be more rooted to their physical bodies than men. Women are generally tied to their reproductive systems, their menstrual cycles and their pregnancies, in a way that men are not. Women therefore tend to be equated with "The Physical," symbolically, and therefore with Evil. In many ways, for women to be considered fully human, they have to overcome their femaleness. You can interpret werewolf myths, in that sense, as The Intellectual Man overcoming or being overcome (and destroyed) by his lunarly-controlled Physical Woman Side.

In particular, a lot of Western spiritual systems tend to portray sexuality as the enemy of spirituality, especially the more intellectual or systematic the religion tends to be. I learned that lesson early as an evangelical teenager, where my job as a girl was to be the gatekeeper of sexuality. I, as a Good Christian Girl, was supposed to focus on allowing or disallowing boys access to my body based on whether he said the Magic Words (something along the lines of "Will You Marry Me?") Sexuality was something to be channeled into Approved Modes of Expression, which were mainly limited to monogamous heterosexual marriage. The idea that I might want something different, or anything at all, on my own terms, particularly not the idea that I might not want boys at all, was never presented as an option. Since I, as a female person, represented sexuality, it was all the more my burden to overcome it to be considered truly pure and spiritual.

This, not to put too blunt a point on it, is pure bullshit.

To this end, much of the story is meant to question this duality of Mind Is Good, Body Is Bad. The heroine fails at all the obvious solutions-- she can't simply deny the reality of her wolf self, she can't control or subdue her wolf self without damage to her whole self, and she can't entirely throw herself over to being totally wolfy without doing injury to her human self as well. She, as a werewolf, is neither entirely human nor entirely wolf, and living as one or the other therefore makes no sense. The solution, for her, is not to try to compartmentalize and hierarchalize the components of her nature, but to integrate them into a working whole. The body and the mind, the right brain and the left brain, the sexual and the spiritual, are not enemies, nor are they even necessarily separate parts of a larger whole, but different lenses through which to view the world and different modes in which to act.

Labels: art, religion, school

From my Art & Spirituality journal. The meditation in question had us imagine ourselves with a tail which dug deep into the center of the earth, where we released our "negative energy." Then we howled like wolves. Yeah.

I think I got the point of the meditation, but my ingrained sense of parody prevents me from seriously contemplating my imaginary tail drilling into Mother Earth to release my "negative energy."

I, personally, have always wanted a tail, if for no other reason than to have an extra hand to do things like open and close doors and hit light switches when my actual hands are full. (I've also always wanted to be telekinetic so I can turn off the lights when I'm in bed rather than having to get up to do so. Also, if I had wings, I wouldn't have to wait for the crosswalk. Sometimes I'm too practical for my own good.) When asked to imagine that I have a tail, I can think of many, many more interesting things to do with a tail-- ooh, is it pointy so I can use it as a weapon? Can I write or draw with it? Can I use it to tap people on the shoulder and then pretend I didn't do it so they keep looking around for who tapped them and meanwhile I look perfectly innocent because both of my hands are in my pockets and I'm too far away?-- than dig a hole in the ground with it. As well, being an imperturbably visual thinker, I have to first imagine what this tail looks like-- fuzzy and swishy like a husky's tail? long and stripey like a lemur tail? can it have spikes like a dinosaur?-- and by the time I'm done working out the particulars of My Psychic Tail, I'm already distracted from the point of the meditation.

This is why I couldn't ever be Buddhist. I need no outside distractions because I'm so perfectly capable of being one for myself.

I also have to admit that I relexively scorn ideas having to do with spiritual "vibrations" or "energies" or other psychic emanations. Perhaps as a result of having depression for so long, I don't really think ideas like "negative energy" are very useful, at least for me, inasmuch as they tend to give concrete existence to something that's not really real in the strictest metaphysical sense. Spirituality, for my purposes, needs to be rooted in the practical and the lived for it to be relevant. I've never felt any negative energy that I could treat as something apart from my own human energy, such as it is, and I don't think treating my own energy as something to be dumped into the lap of the cosmos for God/Nature/[insert deity and/or force of universe here as desired] to deal with is very useful, no more than offloading my own feelings and problems onto other people was helpful to anyone, least of all myself.

Also, wolf howling? Less freeing, more embarrassing for the introverts among us. I also feel sorry for the poor confused dogs who thought they were going to get to go to a party.

That said, I did like being outside for once. I wish I could have smelled the frankincense better, but apparently the smell genes I got were the defective ones. I blame my father.

Labels: religion, school

From my Art & Spirituality journal.

A perhaps telling amount of my artwork has dealt with themes of escape, confinement, and freedom, realized or thwarted. I tend to use flying metaphors, particularly women with wings, to describe "flight" as both a literal and metaphorical concept. What would we learn if we were not confined to earth or the quotidian?

My favorite story I've now written three times, twice as a comic and once as a prose story. The last version, a four-page painted comic, is probably the closest to the "definitive version" as it's ever going to get, and it tends to be fairly popular. It involves a girl named Faith (both comic versions are wordless, but she acquired a name in the prose version) who, unhappy with her boring and static life, gets wings tattooed on her back and drives out to the mountains to jump off a cliff. The last page shows her wings of ink transforming into real ones, allowing her to fly into the distance.

My Fiction professor insisted on seeing this as a suicide metaphor, and in many ways, it can be, what with my protagonist jumping off a cliff and all. But the main idea behind it is the idea of escape from the quotidian, in this case through a leap of faith.

One of my dilemmas of faith is having a space to retreat to in order to clear my head, when I find church overbearing and stifling and home intrusive and busy. My bedroom at home used to be my space, but when I left for college, my family moved and I now share a room with my older sister, so I'm not allowed to decorate it-- and beige walls and floral fabric aren't exactly conducive to spiritual experience for me. My freshman year, I had a habit of walking down to [X] Street at midnight and sitting on the pier to think. I stopped doing that when someone pointed out that small, defenseless-looking women might not find it in the interests of their safety to walk around at night downtown.

Nowadays my occasional spiritual ritual is to make myself a cup of green tea, sit on the staircase outside my top-floor dorm room, and warm my hands on the cup while I ponder the mysteries of life, the universe, and the busy intersection I can see from my sitting place. It's a good place to people-watch while being remote enough so that I'm not bothered. Sometimes I pray to myself, but most of the time I just sit and think.

Labels: art, religion, school

From my Art & Spirituality journal.

I was born in [a different Southern city], but raised in [Terabil], a town which would like to think of itself as a city but is really a suburb that metastasized enough to strangle the city it grew around. Given its position in the Bible Belt, it's not entirely surprising that I was raised as a conservative evangelical Presbyterian.

My childhood was generally unexceptional in a very middle-class WASP sort of way. I have four siblings, one older and three younger, and as we all grew up it was increasingly clear that I was going to be characterized as the black sheep (or, well, the rainbow sheep in my case). We were all smart, and encouraged to get good grades, but I was the one who really liked to Question Things. Just as an indication, my older sister works at a banking corporation and is applying to law school, and my younger college-age brother is going to med school like my father. And I'm at art school majoring in comics. Not exactly the respectable, comfortable option.

My major difficulty with the insular spiritual mindset I was raised with began, not surprisingly, at puberty. Throughout twelve or thirteen years of Sunday School, I was taught to memorize verses and recite catechisms and obey teachers, and this began to clash with my increasing insistence on analyzing verses and questioning catechisms and beginning to wonder where, precisely, my teachers derived their incontrovertible spiritual authority from if we were all, as we were taught, part of the priesthood of believers. I noticed where certain assumptions conflicted with each other or didn't seem to apply to my life, or in the case of admonitions to boys not to lust after attractive girls, applied to me when they probably weren't intended to.

The older I got, the less orthodox I became, especially when I got internet access and could look up any theological or spiritual topic which interested me. I went through a short atheist phase, but eventually came back to theism; a bit of a halfhearted Wiccan phase lasted until the pervasive fluffybunny syncretism got on my nerves. I still have a soft spot in my heart for Taoism, but the lack of, well, Jesus made it ultimately unworkable for me. Sometimes you can't leave behind everything.

Nowadays I identify somewhere around Quaker Christianity, which has a strong emphasis on individual connection to God and the essential primacy of conscience over doctrine or tradition, as well as honesty, integrity, and equality, which jibes well with my sense of what religion should be about-- one's relationship to God as best expressed in one's treatment of other people, who like oneself are made in the image of God.

Labels: religion, school

From my Art & Spirituality journal. The meditation is as described in Art & Fluffybunny Cosmic Lightballs.

The meditation on the universe bothered me, partly because I couldn't resist the characterization of it as cheesy New Ageyness. Feeling the earth rotating under your feet and whirling through the universe? If gravity and your inner ear are doing their job right, you shouldn't feel this at all.

As well, I don't think I'd really realized how much I distrusted organized worship until I was put in that situation. I really disliked closing my eyes because to me, removing my sight is removing the main way I relate to the world, and it puts me in a very psychologically vulnerable position. When someone tells me to close my eyes, my first reaction is to think that they're trying to put something over on me. It's not something I'll do for someone I don't already know and trust.

The idea of being graded on how open I was willing to be about my spirituality recalled way too strongly the idea of "brokenness" I grew up with, where the more "spiritually helpless" you were, the more you boasted of your (nonspecific, naturally) weakness and pathetic humanity, the more virtuous you seemed. Here are people demanding that I make myself vulnerable before them and trust them when I have no assurance that they're not going to hurt me if I do, when I have been hurt before by those I did trust that manipulated my emotions and beliefs to their predetermined purposes? Man, I don't think so.

It bothers me that my initial reaction to anything spiritual is so violently allergic, but I don't feel like there's much I can do about it at the moment.

Labels: art, religion, school

I actually had a really good day today.

I know. I was shocked too. That's the nice thing about being a pessimist-- the only surprises you get are pleasant ones. Particularly the better you get at anticipating the worst, which is in itself a sort of creative exercise. Pessimism is a paradoxical win-win situation-- either good stuff happens, or you get the satisfaction of being right all along.

Painting class was nice. Not only did I get a lot of work done, which nearly brings me to a finish on my still life (I had to stop early so I'd have something to do while logging out-of-class work hours) I asked the prof for a final check and he looked at my painting for a minute, and then asked "So, what's your major again?"

"Sequential art."*

"Are you a painting minor?"

"Nope. I'm a drawing minor, though." (Which is pretty similar, since "drawing" is more about the technical qualities of art than draftsmanship per se. I've done paintings for projects in drawing classes, particularly my color drawing class.)

"Have you considered a minor in painting?"

"Well, it's too late to do anything about it since I graduate next quarter, but hey. I've thought about grad school in painting, though."

"Yeah, you could do that."

So yay, that was my ego boost for the day. ^_____^

My other happy moment was, after missing Iris walking to class about four classes in a row on my way to art history (which sucked because that had been the high point of my art history class days), I caught up with her today. So that just put me in a better mood altogether.

And the BEST part is that it's nearly one in the morning and the other shoe never dropped. ... Well, I found out that my art history journal was due today, but since I'm pretty confident in my ability to pull a B in that class anyway, it wasn't a huge shoe-drop, as these things go.

So! Yes. Now I must needs return to my finals schedule, which involves finishing two oil paintings (one of which I, um, kind of haven't started yet) and my art history journal (subtitle: The Great Bullshitting Extravaganza) by Monday and my illustration class final (which involves dragons!) by next Thursday.)

I will not be sleeping much this weekend, but since I'm an insomniac who works best between the hours of 12 and 5 a.m. anyway, this probably works in my favor.

* Yes, I'm majoring in comics. And it's awesome.

Labels: art, school

[+] Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. (I had midterms.)

[+] I'm trying very hard not to think about the fact that I'm GRADUATING IN FIVE MONTHS AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M GOING TO DO HOLY SHIT SNOOZE BUTTON! SNOOZE BUTTON ON LIFE!

I know that I definitely don't want to go back to live in Terabil, because Terabil is the sort of place that eats your soul and makes it impossible to leave. It's like the Sarlacc Pit of employment opportunities-- you can make just enough to make it there, and even live well there since it's relatively cheap as far as cost-of-living goes, but the opportunities for advancement even for a normal non-creative job are few and far between. And I did not just spend four years in art school to be a cubicle monkey.

Not to mention the fact that I would rather chew off my right arm than be forced to live within supervisory distance of my immediate family.

[+] I know that at some point I want to come back for my MFA, but I don't yet know in what. I'm seriously considering coming back to get it in painting instead of sequential art because I'm completely in love with my basic painting class right now.

[+] Iris and I are still dating, but not seriously. She isn't looking for a serious relationship, and while I wouldn't turn one down I don't have the time or energy to work on developing one, but we make time to hang out on weekends and I usually see her on my walk to my art history class. It's sort of a relief not to have to think about OMG Are We A Couple Now sorts of things and just enjoying her company. And, you know, the earlobe nibbling and random kisses and whatnot are a rather nice bonus too. Mmm, earlobes.

[cheesy moment] I was over at her dorm last Saturday after helping out on Hans' senior project film shoot (my role was Anonymous Office Lackey Windexing the Plastic Plants in the Background) and when I had to go walk home we kissed goodnight. About six times. She almost didn't let me leave. Heehee. [/cheese]

[+] Helga dumped Hans the day before his birthday back in December. On Valentine's day, of all days, he officially started a New And Improved relationship with the heretoforth named Heather, whom he has been acquainted with for years and who only recently he started getting to know in earnest because of a shared interest in Japanese monster movies and the fact that she's in my art history class and is also my next-door neighbor, so she hung out around me a lot, and anyone who hangs around me a lot eventually ends up hanging around Hans a lot too.

They are a very well-matched couple, and I'm happy for them both because they're both my friends, but if they don't stop making out in front of me I'm going to start carrying a bucket of cold water around when I'm with them. I am violently allergic to PDA, particularly the kind that produces wet smacking noises. Eurgh.

[+] I (sort of) cleaned my room today. Go me!

Labels: art, love/sex, school

If you do not like the swears, you may prefer to skip this post.

Fuckin' hell. I read the professor reviews for Spirituality & Art, but no one mentioned that this teacher is OFF HER ROCKER. (Okay, one said she was "cuckoo." I thought that meant "mildly absentminded in an endearing way," not "why is this woman allowed out unsupervised?")

I signed up for the class thinking it was going to be a class on how artists' spirituality and religious beliefs influenced their work and certain movements. I didn't expect to have to give the teacher an account of my own "spiritual journey" for a journal grade and spend an entire first class not even MENTIONING religion until one student asked if we were allowed to talk about God. Most of what she was talking about was Happy Shiny New-Agey "feeling your connection with the cosmos" crap. This is the ultimate "I'm spiritual but not religious" class, and it's beginning to annoy me after one session.

I have to admit that a major part of my annoyance right now is the journal assignment. I generally find class journals not just useless, but distracting, because while I'm spending time "reflecting on lessons," which means coming up with a page or so of bullshit about how Russian Suprematism touches my soul, or addressing journal topics like "who are my hero/ines?" and "where am I on my spiritual journey?", neither of which I feel like talking about to a TOTAL STRANGER, I could be doing something productive like, you know, working on the research paper she also assigned us.

This journal isn't just that, but it's almost like an entire class notebook. Except it's not, because our class notes (which, well, note-taking isn't my strength or my style) are supposed to be kept separate from them. The contents of this journal are to include:

Title page, contents page, syllabus, glossary, index, and that sort of thing¹
Homework assignments
Study skills tips ²
Reading Notes ³
Research notes ⁴
Class notes, numbered and dated.⁵
Special things that you copy from your class notes, like inspirational words, new and useful concepts, creative developments on topics handled in the class ⁶
Journal topics ⁷

1. This is supposed to be an actual book-type journal. The last time I had to do this was back in Fiction Writing, where it actually made a lick of sense. In an art history course this is pointless. Not to mention the fact that I usually cut up my syllabus to post the class schedule on my wall.

2. Like what?

"Don't fall asleep during the class meditations. This is considered Bad Form."

"Listen in class. If you're lucky, she'll say something that's objectively provable, like 'Kandinsky was raised Russian Orthodox.' Chances are slim that she'll actually discuss how this impacted his art, or that he was also interested in Theosophy, or, you know, what Theosophy was at the time and ths symbology and methods it uses, or basically any of the things I took the class expecting to learn about. No, this is all about YOUR Spiritual Development as an Artist."

3. Which I don't take, because I have this thing called reading comprehension where I actually remember what I read.

4. Dude, I don't think she really wants me to cram my illegible scribbled outlines and random phrases, scraps of paper with noted-down call numbers, and highlighted photocopies in my Happy Shiny Spiritual Travel Diary.

5. Let's talk about the last time a teacher wanted to see my nice, organized class notes. No, really. Let's.

I took Bible class in high school, and Mr. Trunk did notebook checks where he expected to see all of our class notes. Our notes were graded according to neatness and content, and if we didn't write down every golden word he put on the overhead, we were penalized. We were also supposed to collect all our old quizzes and tests to use as study guides. All this was to make sure we had something to study for the tests and final exam.

I did none of this. And I did it blatantly. When Mr. Trunk asked why I wasn't taking notes in class, I would tell him quite clearly it was because I never used them. My notes consisted of noted-down dates and names with very little else. Whatever quizzes survived to the end of the class were the ones I happened to find folded in my textbook. Naturally my notebook grade was something like a D, and yet I still made a decent B in the class-- because I scored well on all the tests, even without obsessively taking notes and hoarding quizzes.

The lesson I learned from this is to do what works for me, not what I'm told should work for me. Which is why I hate Notebook Checks, which is essentially what this assignment is.

6. WTF does this even mean?

7. The journal topics are pretty boilerplate things, like "who are your heroes/heroines?" "what are your current spiritual practices?" "what's your spiritual background?" We also have daily class "meditations" we're supposed to reflect on.

This bothers me a lot, partly because it's so New Agey in tone (the first class' meditation was all about feeling the earth rotating under your feet and whirling through the universe, which, frankly, if gravity and your inner ear are doing their job right, you shouldn't feel this in any physical sense) and partly because my extreme distaste for the Church right now is spilling over into any kind of organized group spiritual activity. I don't think she'd like it if my reflections on the class meditations consisted of what a nice nap I had that day.

I knew from reading class reviews that the meditation thing was a regular feature, and as long as it stayed nonsectarian I was fairly game, but I reacted with a distrust that was surprising even to me the moment she told us to close our eyes. To me, removing my sight is removing the main way I relate to the world, and it puts me in a very psychologically vulnerable position. When someone tells me to close my eyes, my first reaction is to think that they're trying to put something over on me. It's not something I'll do for someone I don't already know and trust.

I don't think I'd really realized how much I distrusted organized worship until I was put in that situation. The idea of being graded on how open I was willing to be about my spirituality recalled way too strongly the idea of "brokenness" I grew up with, where the more "spiritually helpless" you were, the more you boasted of your (nonspecific, normally) weakness and pathetic humanity, the more virtuous you seemed. Here are these people demanding that I make myself vulnerable before them and trust them when I have no assurance that they're not going to hurt me if I do, when I have been hurt before by those I did trust that manipulated my emotions and beliefs to their predetermined purposes? Man, I don't think so.

I'm honestly afraid that this class is going to put a really bad connotation to any kind of spiritual activity to me, and it's going to exacerbate my natural skepticism and distrust of group worship/meditation and turn me into a raging atheist, or at least a fairly pissed-off agnostic. It bothers me that my initial reaction to anything spiritual is so violently allergic, but I don't feel like there's much I can do about it where I am at the moment.

Labels: art, religion, school

[+] Eugene at Paradoxy linked this personality test thingy, whereupon I found out that I am a Reserved Inventor. w00t.

[+] According to my pencilling professor, I need to work on my drawing skills. According to my painting professor, Professor #1's out of his mind and I need to show him the stuff I did for painting class. Who should I believe, I wonder?

Frankly it probably has a lot to do with the way the projects for each class worked. For the pencilling class it was all pencil and ink work with pretty straightforward project mandates. Do this, this way, in two weeks. With the painting projects I felt like I had more creative agency; I was working with paint and color and mixed media and all sorts of new and interesting things, and my technical skill wasn't as important as my ability to get the story across. I enjoyed the projects more because I was more interested in them, and thus, they tended not to suck as much as the boilerplate just-meet-the-critera-dammit stuff I turned in for pencilling.

[+] Spring quarter classes start tomorrow. Oddly, this is the second quarter I've been at AIUA that I've had all female teachers. Given that I'm majoring in a department with only one female teacher, it's sort of impressive.

[+] I have made a promise to myself that I will NOT crush madly on one of my classmates. I mostly expect to break this within two weeks, maximum, because it's sort of a stupid promise to make anyway. After all, if I had any control in the matter it wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

[+] I talked about my meds with my shrink at my last appointment, and told him about a growing suspicion I had that they were flattening my creative drive.

Lexapro (and SSRIs in general) have a really short half-life; it doesn't remain in your system for more than about twenty-six hours or so. I'd noticed before that if I accidentally missed a dose, I would crash into a sobby depressed puddle approximately a day and a half later.

I'd also noticed over the past quarter that I did my best work after about one a.m. through about eight in the morning. I pulled seven allnighters because I couldn't get the work done any other time, and then just slept during the day between classes. If I tried working during the day, I just couldn't find the motivation to get the creative work done. This is relevant because I also take my pill at night, usually before I sleep, so I don't have to deal with it making me nauseous. So in other words, one a.m. was just about when the Lexapro was beginning to fade from my system.

Based on just my knowledge of my own mental states, I'd figured that Lexapro does, in fact, cushion my depressive lows, but on the flip side it also damps my natural highs. It had an overall numbing effect, which was probably helpful during that initial re-coming-out shit with my parents but isn't quite so beneficial in the long run.

My guess, then, is that the Lexapro was interfering with all the complex motivations and emotions that go into my creative state. I need to be able to feel my own emotions to be able to work effectively.

So the compromise now is that I'm on a half dose of the Lexapro for a trial run, to see if the effect is ameliorated, and if it seems to be lingering on, perhaps a switch to yet another antidepressant. I'd thought about Wellbutrin, since I know a couple of creative-type friends that have had decent experiences with it, but since I also have a particular insomniac disorder and one of bupropion's main side effects is insomnia, that might have to be defaulted. The doctor suggested Effexor or Cymbalta as possible replacements; I still need to do my research on those.

So far, on just a few day's lowered dose, I've noticed a greater variation in my moods. Granted, it's not necessarily the best time to measure the effect since I'm also on my period at the moment, so chemicals are swirling about madly at any rate. I have been drawing more lately, and feeling more creative, but I think it's too early to tell whether it's wishful thinking or not.

Labels: art, medication, school

Thanks to finals week(s), my natural nocturnal tendencies, and what I suspect is the growing inefficacy of Lexapro, I've discovered that I do my best artwork between one and eight a.m.

Seriously. It's almost tomorrow already and I'm not near sleepy. Given that I went to bed at nine-thirty a.m. yesterday and slept until five p.m., that's probably not terribly surprising.

I pulled two all-nighters on one of my final projects, but it's done now and it completely kicks ass. Since I finished my art history report before then, now I have only one final to go. Unfortunately, it's the final for the teacher who told me during midterm (well, more like end-of-quarter) conferences "You're very bright, but it's not coming out in your work. Have you considered being just a writer?"

Which is a backhanded compliment, at least, since one thing most comic artists can't do is write, but STILL. I didn't just spend three years in art school to be told I should've just been an English major. Besides the fact that I'm very picky about how I want my stories drawn (which is to say by myself, dammit), the probability of breaking into the comic writing business is about equivalent to the odds of spontaneously combusting.

Gah.

At any rate, I haven't been posting much (okay, AT ALL) lately, partly due to a nasty depressive episode and partly due to school and whatnot. I'm hoping to post a bit during spring break. Of course, for that to happen, I'd have to finish my damn final...

Which is IMPECCABLY written and paced, even if it's not going to have breathtakingly accurate perspective shots.

Labels: art, school

On Facebook recently, someone I went to high school with (I'll call him Friedrich) messaged me wondering about my profile. He wanted to know if my "interested in: women" was a joke or actuality.

I know it probably should be obvious, but I was actually somewhat surprised to find out that I was not the only queer that went to Eastchester.

Eastchester is your prototypical WASP-y private academy. I can count on one hand the number of students that weren't white when I was there, and religious diversity only extended to Protestant denomination. The vast majority of the families were upper-middle-class (if not downright filthy-rich) conservative white evangelicals.

I was notable among the student body (which was tiny; my graduating class was thirty-seven people) for being an outspoken liberal. I was recruited for the debate team because I'd developed a well-earned reputation for being argumentative and articulate. My Bible teachers tended to regard me with a mix of amusement and exasperation. Most of my classmates tended to think that "love the sinner, hate the sin" was downright progressive, and there I was unapologetically identifying myself as a feminist and a non-Republican. Frankly, I'd be surprised if there were never rumors about a deeper meaning to my love of comfortable shoes.

It actually wasn't that difficult to maintain a "straight facade." The student body being as small as it was, there actually wasn't much dating on-campus; I was never questioned about my lack of boyfriends because hardly any girls did have one. I wasn't visibly butch, since for a long time I maintained long hair. Mostly, though, there was an underlying assumption of default heterosexuality that no one bothered to question. The idea that one of their classmates might be gay simply never occured to them for the most part because homosexuality was something that occurred Out There, not In Here where it's Normal. As long as you didn't raise the question yourself, no one would think to ask it.

In some ways I guess I fell for the same thinking, because before I told any of my friends I felt horribly alone and isolated. Nobody else seemed to be asking the same questions about their sexuality that I was. For most girls, it seemed to be a question of which boy and how far to go. For me, it was who I wanted and why, and if I would ever find a chance to go anywhere at all. I assumed my classmates were all essentially straight.

Friedrich apparently thought that he too was "the only one who escaped the gender-unfriendly brainwashing of the [...] fire and brimstone empire," as he put it. He made the point that both of us were seen as "discontents," which is pretty accurate, though in his case it was for being publically atheist.

I have to wonder if being gay in high school, for us, was a reason for the discontent. When you find yourself questioning the most basic tenets upon which your educational society operates, like "girls go with boys, full stop," there's precious little stopping you from questioning secondary concerns like whether chapel attendance should be mandatory, or whether the Creationism Vs. Evolution class is composed of pure bullshit.

I wonder, then, who else was simply trying to blend in as hard as they could. Whoever did it was pretty convincing since I never gaydared anyone positively, though I had my guesses. I knew of a couple of bisexual (to some extent; both are currently dating men) girls, but no one else. Friedrich says he had "more than suspicions" but no solid evidence, though given the environment I'd be more surprised if there were any. I can't say I'd be totally shocked to go to a class reunion to see at least one other person bringing a same-sex spouse, but I'd probably be surprised to find out which one.

Labels: home, school, Teh Gay

Going back to Terabil for winter break is a bit like an excruciatingly long dental appointment. I go only because I know it's necessary, and then I retreat to my Happy Place until it's over and I can go home.

Granted, going back doesn't jam sharp metal tools into my gums, nor does going to the dentist last six weeks, but the general experience is about the same.

It's finals here, since AIUA is on the quarter system, and then we're all out for winter break until January. I'm (supposed to be) finishing up all my classes and final projects at the moment, but I've been so tired all the time, regardless of how much sleep I'm getting, that it's hard to work. At first I thought it was caffeine deprivation, but I've been drinking green tea today and I'm still as lethargic as ever. That leads me to think it's more a dread of leaving Avalon, like my subconscious thinks "Hey, maybe if I don't finish my finals, they won't let me go!"

I wish.

I'm considering taking a summer quarter this year so I don't have to endure summer in Terabil, but I'd have to find and pay for an apartment if I did that.

Seriously, I doubt it's mentally healthy to have to steel myself against potential psychic violence every time I go back to my hometown. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but when every moment my mom can catch me alone is a potential moment to battle against Teh Gay, or when Sunday morning means I get to hear "I do wish you'd find a church in Avalon-- it's so important to be around fellow Christians!" for the hundredth time, it gets old real fast.

Church is another dental appointment experience. Frankly, I enjoy not being around "fellow" "Christians" all the time, given that usually that means simply all the other WASP families that congregate in the same social arenas every Sunday or so. They're not my "fellows" and quite a few of them aren't necessarily very Christian either, unless by "Christian" you simply mean "conservative Republican who bleats the right things." It's not particularly spiritually beneficial to me to sit around a bunch of people who have the effect of making me cynical and withdrawn every Sunday. I could have a better worship experience at a bar-- at least drunk people are willing to admit their problems.

Paradoxically, if my mom really wanted me to go to church, the best way she could do it is to stop bugging me to go. She apparently believes that if she just keeps after me long enough I'll cave and do what she wants, and as long as I'll be reinforcing that belief, I refuse to give in. I'll go back to church because I want to go back to church, because I believe it will be of spiritual value to me, not because I want my mom to shut up about me going back to church.

Much less the fact that if I did pick a church down here, it would have to be a mom-approved church of the conservative Protestant non-gay-friendly variety. Call me crazy but I don't think going to the local Unitarian Universalist church would qualify.

Labels: home, religion, school