my greatest achievement

Yep. This is it.

Toothbrushes.

I am working on a project for my sculpture class - I'll talk more about that when I've done more work on it. For now, I had to de-bristle sixteen toothbrushes, and I ended up having some fun with the bristles. So, here is a ball of approximately 16,000 toothbrush bristles:

Something I hope to one day soon revise.

it wasn’t the first time I saw you,
the first time I looked,
really looked.
it was like
skidding on black ice,
but not skidding,
only the fear of skidding.
or like tiptoeing
over the cracks
in a sidewalk,
or walking barefoot
over tangled branches.
the first time I looked,
really looked,
it was like
getting lost without a map,
but not staying lost,
just the fear of staying lost,
only,
I really was lost.

Paper tree

For my sculpture class, I attempted to create a tree entirely out of paper. I had wanted to work with a fairly realistic scale, rather than making something miniature, and the sculpture ended up somewhere in between.





I began the tree by taking cereal boxes from the recycling shed and rolling them into cylinders. I stuffed the cylinders with newspaper, and attached them to form the skeleton of the tree. I then tore newspaper into strips, twisted them, and wrapped them around the skeleton. This created an interesting texture, which I then paper-mâchéd over with brown paper bags.

The tree did not turn out exactly how I had wanted it to. I think that trying to use such a large scale inhibited my ability to pay attention to smaller details. In any case, I'm satisfied with it. It also has a pretty convincing shadow.



Once it's a little warmer and more of the snow has melted, I'm going to bring it into the woods and lay it down amongst some dead trees. It does sort of look like a dead tree. I'm going to take pictures of it there, and then leave it to decay.

Knitting With Paper

I'm taking a sculpture class this semester, and our first assignment is to build something entirely out of paper. Currently, I'm working on creating a small tree made primarily out of newspaper and brown paper bags. It's nowhere near finished, but I'll post photos when it is. Before I began the tree, however, my first idea was to experiment with knitting:



To do this, I tore newspaper into long, thin strips and braided them together to make a cord, which I then knitted. It was somewhat tedious, but the result looked pretty cool.

This is going to be a good year. I know it.

7.24.08

You cried like nothing I’d ever seen before
Salt crusted around your irritated tear ducts
I watched your vision blur,
but the prismatic blue spheres behind your swollen eyelids
could not project your own fish eyed view over mine
You were born with confused and shifted organs, an anomaly
I walked forwards as you stumbled backwards over your own confused feet
You swallowed your thoughts and let them sink into your stomach
I left my brain in my head and my heart in my chest
and captured pointed syllables in a net
In my make-believe world,
you were an infant without your favorite toy
In your make-believe world,
there were no infants and the sky was tinted red

When your organs grew tired of tripping over themselves
and aligned to heal the scrapes and bruises,
we danced behind blue velvet
On your toes you were blissful
But parting curtains pursed your lips together and glued them shut
And your limbs grew sore and once again forgot their worth

Reclined in polished wood and nails you glowed, artificial
In yesterday’s skin you were a bruised vegetable
Poised carefully on silk you became ripe,
painted over like icing on a wedding cake
Like never before, you were surrounded by flowers
to capture the salt dripping onto your chest,
this time not your own
This last time the waterfalls were not your own

I held my breath and tried to grasp the air between my fingertips
The wind could not be caught and pushed back into you
Continuous air expelled from living mouths,
travelled in and out and in and out of living lungs
Your make-believe world was a candle that had flickered and gone out
In my make-believe world I was tired,
gasping for breaths through empty space once inhabited
The air tasted impossibly different

Berghuis v. Thompkins

Today the Supreme Court ruled that a criminal suspect must specifically invoke the right against self-incrimination in order to be legally protected by the 5th Amendment.

This means that if you are in a sticky situation with a member of law enforcement, you can't just stay silent and expect to have any rights. You need to actually state out loud your intention to remain silent. How ironic.

Just another technicality to allow police officers to more effectively arrest people who don't understand the law and the extent of their own rights.

Guerilla Knitting

Some days are just bad days from the start. Everything is all wrong and the world seems plain and ugly.

On these days, I knit.

And then I attach my knitting to inanimate objects in public places so that maybe, just maybe,

someone else having a terrible day will have something to smile about.

Here are some things that I have knitted around campus:

This is a lamp post that is more than half covered in knitting.

This is a bike shed with a little bit of knitting on it.

This is another lamp post.

Gopher-ing around.

I took this photo of a gopher:

It's not the best quality, but I'm very proud of it. I spent a long time getting acquainted with that gopher in order to take this picture.