Kara and I created this short stop-motion film over Fall Break, taking successive photos of the blackboard in the common room. Dewey played and recorded the score for us during finals week, and I put it all together. Introducing (drum roll, please)… The Perfectly Standard Adventures of Asgrim, Ainar, and Aldrich, now on YouTube.
Merry Christmas, and — to be all nondenominational — Happy Holidays!
I’ve been busy this holiday season. Mostly I hid in the back room crocheting a scarf for my brother and watching The Office, coming out occasionally for sustenance and familial obligations. Really, though, I had a lot of fun: the family Christmas party, visiting my Aunt Annie in her art-filled apartment, catching up with Leslie and ST over dinner, watching Kal Ho Naa Ho with Michelle and Merri Ann, seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls with Kim at the Seattle Science Center, playing White Elephant and dress-up with old friends at Katherine’s house, and opening gifts and enjoying the traditions films and foods at home with my parents, Max, Aunt Sandy, and Grammy.
The holidays so rarely feel magical anymore, but I was more okay with that this year. For one thing, the gifts were smaller and less overpowering. I had a good time picking out and creating gifts, and I felt less pressured to get something perfect — it was more for fun and the idea of the thing. Many years I have ended up with a huge pile of presents at my feet, half of which I didn’t really want, feeling sort of sickened at the whole thing. Not this year, though! I feel that I can appreciate each gift more, and hence enjoy Christmas more, without huge emotional and financial investments. I already have gift and project ideas for next year (when I hopefully won’t be as sick and crabby).
All the festive decorations draw my mind to my own house — well, the house I will build some day in the future. I got my dad to drag out his books on architecture and construction, which I may have to “borrow” like I did his copies of A Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language. I also have to get him to teach me some of what he’s learned about investment and finances; call me crazy, but I’m already thinking about how to practically create this thing. Bamboo flooring… window seats… shoji screens… radiant floor heating… solar panels… fruit trees… *sigh*
My holiday spirit (and the end of finals) is making me feel all warm and fuzzy! And so, wishing to share this with everyone I care about – plus the few strangers who wander in from the cold to discover my website – I’ve created a special holiday treat: a twelve-part daily comic called, simply enough, 12 Days.
Happy holidays, everyone!
I can’t wait for the semester to be over, for finals to end, for papers to be written. We have been analyzing everything to the point where it becomes devoid of meaning. I have to work hard to keep from being sucked into a completely relativistic world where it’s pointless to try to understand anything. Classes, though amusing, have become sophist arenas of rhetoric and rhetorical questions. There is rich beauty and deep meaning in the world, but academia keeps trying to bleach it white. I am full of wonder and poetry! I want to grasp the universe! I want to run in the rain and dance in the snow; I want to draw, crochet, create. Pedantic academic discourse just leaves my soul feeling empty and my mind feeling flat.
It was weird to go out into town the other day and see Christmas advertising. There has not been much in the way of holiday paraphernalia at Reed, and yet I feel more in the spirit of the season than I’ve felt in years. It may have to do with the crisp air, the baking, the feeling of family I get when I’m around my friends… Gifts seem completely unimportant, though I have a great desire to create something festive to share with others — I have several ideas, just wait and see. Perhaps the normal inundation of decorations, music, and materialism drowned my enthusiasm in years past. Popular culture constructs an ideal for how the holidays are supposed to be experienced, but it ends up feeling oppressive. In the absence of all the usual trimmings, however, I’m finding all the warm and comfortable feelings that the season is supposed to inspire — even that little touch of magic.
In short, the semester has gone well, but academia is moving further into the periphery of my focus in life. Other things mean much more to me now, bringing me joy and commanding my curiosity. I don’t yet know how to define this new realm, but I keep wanting to just call it “life.”