Morning Glory

When I came back to Bard I felt a bit misplaced. It’s a familiar feeling though.
I went to Will’s moderation show, for music: drumming'. He passed! He dropped a drum stick and suavely picked up another one without missing a beat. It was a variety of jazzy music.
I had a chamber singing concert, Beethoven Mass in C; it was on a Wednesday, but people still came. 

'when I entered the building some guy said hello to me in a way that I didn't expect on campus, nor knew what to do with

One day I started out eating dinner alone (peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, it was a bad day for kline) and accidentally (and awkwardly) ended up at the “Russian table”. Some good things out of it;

1) I watched Mercury Rising with a girl who took Russian 300 this semester. We had an assignment for our child abnormal class to analyze a character by the DSM. We have quite a few mutual friends, so it's funny that this is how we met.

2) This guy I don’t know but who’s funny says hi to me now (he’s from the Czech Republic, he wasn’t at the table, but he was Andres’s roommate last year). Sometimes greetings can be nice.

3) I get e-mails about Russian/Russia related stuff form the Russian professor Oleg Minin. For example I went to a talk called “Social Vulnerability and the Psychologist in Russia's Vice of Modernization” before the Beethoven concert. Despite the topic, it wasn’t a very good talk, but maybe at one point there will be a good one.

Friday is when it felt that finals had started.

A semester of watching the Smolny (St. Petersburg) exchange students from afar led to nothing, and I became sharply aware of this fact that morning. I wandered past Stargon for a break, my thoughts were flickering a bit. I think that area is usually a bog, but the ground had frozen enough to walk on it. Later, when I left the library for dinner, I met Mark while he was tripping on LSA.

“everything is new, everything is a decision” I’m not entirely sure as to how the mechanisms behind LSA differ from LSD, though I do know there’s a natural source for it: Morning Glory seeds.

(sorry to those of you who expected sexual content?)

Finals is when everything seems to happen. Maybe it's the urgency of time running out, or maybe it's because all the social events happen then, or perhaps because everyone is working so hard, and so everyone is functioning on 'high', pushing themselves in every way. But it always happens.

Thanksgiving 2012

I have a lot of writing backlogged, so I guess I’ll go with chronology.

Jack drove me and a boy from Nepal I had never met before home for Thanksgiving on Tuesday night. The boy thought language was the root of all social ills (as in; the origin of language, the fact that language exists). The next day Mama and I spent cooking. The feast day was spent with Inka&co. We played mafia before dessert.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about. When my parents came to the US, they didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving much (if at all).  The reason Thanksgiving was popularized in the U.S. has very little to do with any origin story everyone is told in school. Rather the point was to have an origin story to bring people together; people from all over the world. It works. 

Like any other year, I went over to Eloosha’s house. There was the Evening of Creativity (творческий вечер), that went until one or two in the morning. After that, ten of us (the university students, that’s what they call our generation) went to hang out with some other people our age in another house. We sang.

It’s interesting, from an anthropological perspective, how we act. Everyone sings, that’s true across all ages. But the students, when together, cease to have the concept of personal space. This isn’t just my friends. It’s other people who grew up in the USA but have Russian roots. I have no way of explaining this; it’s not a Russian thing or an American thing, and it happens very quickly.  

We played laser tag. It was my first time, and I think part of what made it wonderful was that everyone went, ages ten to fifty, more or less. At some point, I asked the generation below us what they though of us. Everyone is very opinionated, but I'm not sure the adults realized that they are not the only ones, and decided not to fall into that trap. But Anya and Etya said that they think we are just really cool, so score.
Before I left, Myron and I realized that Kirill didn’t know what coke and mentos could do together, and decided to right this wrong.
 

Light and Darko

The junior studio majors had an art crit today that lasted from 5pm-9pm. This piece is significantly weaker, but unlike the other piece I put up, I am not intending on working on it anymore, so you are stuck with it for illustration. I think its 29''*44'', oil on canvas.

On the way back I talked to the freshman I met on the train to NYC a while ago, for the first time since. It had been a subtle weight on me; that I had been so stressed after coming back that I wouldn't registered that we had passed each other until it was too late to say hi, and thus inadvertently ignored him. Though, I'm not sure if our conversation relived me of that weight. 

Friday I went to an African dance performance Adrienne was in, and then we all went to Diwali. It was fun: it's amazing what a combination of spicy food and dancing can do to me in terms of improving my mood.
Saturday I went to the Junior dance show with Amanda and then we re-wached Donnie Darko.  The first time I had watched it, I was at Max M's house, and I came home amped up on Dr. Pepper and spent half the night writing down how I believed the world worked.

Studio Arts Major

2:20 AM-- (a great time to write)
just finished hanging my work for my moderation board tomorrow-today. All that work does sum up: it takes up three walls, much more than it does all rolled up, one piece inside the other inside another.
my feet: the balls of my feet, the heal, and less so (oddly) the arch, cried with every step I took on my walk back to my room. As I passed Robins, someone was having sex (she was an "oh God"-er)
Last night I had a dream that I was walking and turned around and there was an old man behind me and he took this as an invitation and I kept running from him and was afraid he was going to rape me. I woke up around six am because I'm anxious about tomorrow. Life, Death, and everything in between.

11:20 PM--(a great time to write, not in a sarcastic way)
I woke up at 7am and then went to eat around nine. One of the girls sitting next to me said "I don't eat carbs. Well, I do, but only good carbs, like, organic" and I just had to leave. Jeff (my painting prof) looked at my work and said "you're going to do great" because I was clearly anxious.
The board consisted of my adviser Laura Battle, Kristen Lucas, and Ken Buhler. They asked a lot of questions. Why do I like painting. What do I see in my work. Why. Why. How. Why. What. Why. Where?
It was scary.  I got some good things out of it, mostly from Ken Buhler.
Positive: I was able to carry things I learned in one class over to other classes (i.e. drawing to painting) and said "I can congratulate you on that"
Negative: Just how confused I felt and how confused I am about what to do next, what I want, and that I want to do everything.
Mixed: "I see talent and I see skill but I don't see what you want to do next"
"you wrote in your paper, almost apologetically, that you do not do more of the conceptual stuff, and you don't have to be apologetic about it"
Useful: "Some people feel for their senior project they have to do something totally different than what they did before. And you don't have to do that"
And they talked about working slow versus working fast. And what classes to possibly take.
Laura came up to me after and said "we are looking at that course list"

I knew I was in the green when Laura said "second semester of junior year is great. You don't have to worry about moderation, and you don't have to worry about senior project- well, you're moderating late but"

So I moderated! I'm officially studying both psychology and studio art.

Jeff asked me how I was going to reward myself. I said "I'm going to sleep" and he responded "I'm a firm believer in gifts"

Titanium White

Things that make me unhappy right now:

1. That I am out of white oil paint and white acrylic
2. That my moderation board is so soon
3. The state of my room
4. That I keep waking up at 7am
5. That I am behind on reading for my psych and history courses
6. That I am not certain which part of psychology I am interested in
7. That I always get better grades in non-psych courses
8. That my feet hurt from standing in the studio so much
9. That my hands get raw from washing brushes
10. I’m hungry

Things that make me happy right now:

1. That a girl in my drawing class lent me some white oil paint
2. That I will get my phone, which I left at Carnegie, back soon, through the mail
3. My self-portrait is going well, and my drawing professor looked at it and liked it
4. That despite the time I’ve been spending at the studio, I made a new friend
5. That my brother called me last night
6. That I got a few letters in the mail in the past week
7. That Hannah, Kalena, and I made a cake
8. That Kalena and I watched Lost in Translation
9. People I’m not really close with but who I am friends with coming up to me and saying that my work in the moderation show looks really good; that specific group because they are not obligated to tell me, or remember, or care.
10. The prospect of dinner with Lauren, Alana, Adrienne and Cat

The Vote! so far.

The results are coming in! This is what I've been keeping track of, mostly because this is where my vote counted. Plus electoral count. It's 163:163 now.
Manor Hall is filled with people and food (cookies and chips and ice-cream) and Walter Mead and a projector screen which has been flickering between different news sites.

Sandy

I don't really believe in fate, but I ended up choosing this article to write an essay, and I'm going to pretend I'm being told to go to Germany and study schizophrenia. Probably not Dusseldorf though. And it doesn't have to be schizophrenia (though it is incredibly interesting). That sounds like a pretty good future- no?
Maybe it doesn't even have to be Germany. The countries I've been to are: USA, Canada, Mexico (Cozumel though, it was super touristy so it doesn't really count) Israel (but not since I was eight and half) Germany, and Russia.
There are other countries out there.

Bard barely got hit by Sandy. That is, Sandy didn't hit us at all, all the while two hours away havoc was brought down on Manhattan, as well as areas not two hours away, but much closer (and further) away.

Our electricity didn't even go out. It was the first time classes were uniformally canceled, because everyone was worried, but hurricane Irene last year made a much bigger impact on campus (we had to re-build half of the chapel) than this, and even earlier this year the rain fell harder and we lost power.

One of my friends went down to Boston until NYU gets running water and electricity back.
I hope that everything will soon be well in places that were hit harder than Bard.