July 11th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Housekeeping
Hey bitches! You may have noticed that I cleaned up my layout quite a bit. It’ll change over the next few days once I figure out what I want the header image to be, but I’m already happy with the way things are turning out right now. I also learned some things about WordPress that make my life a lot easier, like that you can have themes based on other themes so that one serves as a template.
My parents bought our cats a new “cat tree” recently, so Igby’s been all over it. I saw an unsuccessful attempt by him to jump from the bottom to the top yesterday. He almost seemed embarrassed when he fell down because he immediately walked in the other direction, but I know that assigning him with a human emotion is relatively foolish. I take too many pictures of him.
Working at UCLA has been good, especially since I only need to go in once or twice a week. It still requires a lot of work at home though. I finished laying out a lesson plan, but I have another one to complete soon as well as two cover designs. I’m just happy that I have another thing to put on my resume. In addition, I’ve been learning far more things about using InDesign than I did when I worked on EyeCandy. (Primarily because I only dealt with a two-page spread in EyeCandy as opposed to a fifty-page booklet.) I impressed my boss the other day with my ability to quickly convert the National Center for History in the Schools logo into a vector object. Nerdery pays off, sometimes.
I’m seeing my friend Elizabeth tomorrow afternoon and then Troy (exboyfriend) in the evening. It’ll be comforting to feel like less of a recluse. There have been things happening in my life lately that haven’t been very conducive to making me feel like a rational human being, at least in terms of intransigence. I don’t know. I never know.
Anyway, I’ve been listening to M.I.A.’s latest album sporadically over the last two days, but not because I think it sounds good. I’m actually really creeped out by it. I talked to my friend James about it and we agreed that “overstimulation” was a good term to assign to 2010. There’s definitely a lot self-parody in MAYA (yeah I’m not even going to bother with the punctuation) that extends beyond the kitschy album art, in that she’s singing about things a lot of musicians loftily push aside. The tracks are an electronic clusterfuck of memes with lyrics that praise the internet, Twitter, texting, and whatever other mediums we as a society have willingly plugged into. I’m still not sure what to make of “Born Free” (and its ginger genocide music video)–I still can’t listen to it without being constantly aware of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” looped in the background–but I thought this blog post on Lady Gaga brought up a lot of interesting points about the inherent hypocrisy of preaching individuality to the masses. To me, the most striking similarity between Lady Gaga and M.I.A. is that they’re both accused of being “edgy” for the sake of creating buzz for themselves, of putting on some crazy front so that we can talk about them all the time, even if it’s just to say that they’re insane. Lady Gaga, however, has a career that very obviously mimics Madonna’s. Inverted crosses and melodramatic performances will probably soon lose their novelty (again). M.I.A., on the other hand, seems to embody all that weird [seemingly omnipresent] self-referencing shit that I sift through when I’m browsing the internet, and sings about detachment as a result of our twinkling gadgets. Which is precisely what leaves me so horrified.
June 8th, 2010 at 10:18 am
Ich freu sich auf Sommer
Mmm so I’m pretty happy right now. I got my hardest final exam (German) out of the way yesterday at 8AM. I have two more tomorrow, but I’m not terribly worried as American television history is a subject I’m really familiar with and I’m allowed to accompany myself with two cheat sheets during my art history final exam (whaaat!). Notwithstanding, it’s clear to me that I set a ridiculous goal. Posting every day doesn’t make sense during finals week. Aha. Summer break is here in three days though! Seven-hour road trips aren’t fun but seeing my cat and eating ramen is. I’m planning to make an effort to see my friends in Los Angeles and do ‘Los Angeles things’ like go to overpriced cafes and eavesdrop on screenwriters. But I’m also looking forward to eventually coming back here… Santa Cruz feels more like home at this point. I dunnnnno. I just hope I can keep myself busybusybusy.
May 29th, 2010 at 10:51 am
The Future
May 11th, 2010 at 12:46 am
My favorite cat is the ocelot
I saw a wooly bear caterpillar tonight! I passed it before I realized what it was (it was dark), so I took a few steps backwards to kneel down and pet it. My fuzzy friend halted and I [somewhat embarrassingly] stood back up quickly as a car drove by. (In retrospect, I probably should have moved the caterpillar onto the grass, but I suppose I needn’t worry too much since the sidewalk was deserted. I just have a fairly nightmarish memory of stepping on one accidentally when I was about five or six and seeing its blood squirt across the pavement.) It was nice to see some other indication of my being outside, to share a footpath with an relatively humble organism, since I was walking back from the press center where I spent a few hours staring at a computer screen. (Nevermind that I’ve returned to this computer screen to write about how much I love the outdoors…)
Other things I did today:
- Not burn my hand! That was yesterday, and it was a steam burn :(
- Reactivate my Facebook account. I went 48 hours without it. I could have gone longer, but waiting for people to show up at the press center left me with hardly anything else to do. (Opening Tumblr can be intimidating in public spaces–I follow a lot of people who like to post gross [fascinating] shit.)
- Make this animation:
I found out that Photoshop CS4 has a handy “timeline” feature in their animation palette that saves a lot of time in regards to creating frames if you’re just moving an object. But uh, yeah, I should probably stop messing with Mini Mike and scan more of my drawings. - Talk a lot in my History of Television discussion section. My TA seemed impressed and said, “Kelsey you will get an A” in his pretty Lebanese accent. Unfortunately, I got an 89% on the midterm he handed back later.
- Stay up too late if I’m serious about going to class at 8AM tomorrow morning.
Goooodnight.
April 14th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
All you know about me is what I’ve sold you
Lynn let me borrow her Wacom tablet today! :) I haven’t drawn on the computer in forever so I was surprised to find that I could get back into it pretty easily.
March 25th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
Inhibited
I’m indirectly writing you all letters every time I publish something. Frustrating, abstruse self-censorship plays a large part in my posts. I could fulminate against your voyeurism, but that’s cliché and a character trait I thrive on inasmuch as it makes breaking the fourth wall possible. I am posing prose.
March 20th, 2010 at 8:49 pm
There’s a buzz in my backside
Hey man, I know that I know shit about music. I know that I like ‘experimental post-rock.’ I know that I stood three feet away from Jamie Stewart last night. I know that I felt his sweat, that I saw his pores, and that the fangirl next to me was creaming her pants at the mere thought of being in my place, despite the fact that the dude closes his eyes the entire time just like my morbidly shy German professor. I know that Xiu Xiu probably played way too fucking loud for a venue of that size, that I’m still deaf from the show, and that this paragraph should end soon before my insides turn into artificially scented ‘feminine hygiene product.’ I GOT CHILLS. THEY’RE ELECTRIFYING.
Stuffing myself in the back of a pickup truck and then getting a ride to campus from a (separate) saintly fellow led to a gathering of chemically altered states at an apartment occupied by new and old friends. I am glad to know them. It was comforting to get the jitters again and to reject my previous belief in utter unfeeling. Curmudgeonliness isn’t hip. Misanthropy is something I will inevitably return to, but I’m hoping these words will make their rounds again, that I’ll look at this memory in its less-than-transient glory (thanks, WordPress), and I’ll have some fondness for previous social successes. Feelings are funny things.
This morning was accompanied by (now familiar) wobbliness and apprehension but I resolved the latter by joining ‘old folks.’ BART, Shanghai in the 30s, food of the Vietnamese *and* Indian varieties, man. I’d like to see El Norte through the eyes of juvenile confreres, but I’m not entirely worried about that right now.
December 21st, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Igby
My favorite model.
December 5th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Die Blumen (UCSC Arboretum)
View the rest of the set on Flickr.