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2007-03-06 @ 11:51 p.m. |
snurf. snurffffffffffff. Oh damn, it appears that the one time I left my house in practically a month (Charlemagne's birthday party), I have picked up some random germ and now have the beginnings of a cold. And I never get sick. EVER! Its one of the few perks of being a germ-a-phobe/recluse. I never get close enough to other humans to actually contract illnesses and if I do I usually have moist towelettes to clean up any possible germ interaction. But I guess I was kind of freewheeling it on Sunday. Playing Pictionary with toddlers. Sharing food off of the same plates and forks as strangers. See witty, that's why being a recluse is best. No germs. No sniffles. No life. Oh wait, I wasn't supposed to actually say that last thing out loud. I've actually been having a fairly action filled week for me. Party-Sunday. And then I went to my first water color art class at the YMCA yesterday. We've been having absolutely terrible weather the last couple of days. Blizzard-like conditions. Frigid temperatures, as in "The Today Show" actually broadcast live from our downtown area this morning because we were so frickin' cold. I was excited about the water color class starting because it had been postponed from last week because the teacher was ill and goddess knows I could use a little more art in my life. I mean my drawing class is great, but I do get bored and I am always open to learn a new medium, especially anything involving painting. I love to paint, but after my asshat psycho neighbor started harassing me last summer, I stopped painting out on my porch. Why? Because everytime I set up my easel and paints, he'd walk by, see me working and then immediately run and get his clippers and start randomly clipping the bushes directly under my porch. It happened like 3 times in a row in 2 weeks, so I finally just gave up and never painted again. So I started the class Monday night and guess what? Go ahead guess! It was in the middle of the worst blizzard ever. It looked the snow version of Hell when I looked out around 6:15. Snow was flying in every direction and it was so intense, I couldn't even see the apartment building 40 feet across the courtyard. Plus the wind-chill was about 25 degrees below zero. I did call the YMCA to make sure the class wasn't canceled and it wasn't. So I went out to my car and had to scrape like 3 inches of ice off the windshield while I was warming it up. The wind was so cold it felt like I was getting pelted with 9 million needles. I had just watched the news before I left and there had been a 26 car pile up on the Parkway. YAY! So I finally carved my car out of the ice and started driving towards the YMCA, which thankfully is only one mile away, but holy fuck-a-doodle, it was like that scene in "The Shining." I literally could not see more than a foot in front of my car since there aren't many street lights in my neighborhood. Fortunately I am more confident driving my Subaru than I ever was driving any of my other crap cars since it really seems to handle the snow well, but I was still nervous once I hit the main street where there was a lot of commuters coming home. Fortunately I just had to deal with that for a second before I turned into the Towne Centre parking lot which was really just a vast tundra of blowing snow. The watercolor class was all women as I figured it would be. The teacher was a little stuffy, as in, I'm a Water Color Painter and I've written a book, and here are some postcards of my work and I'm totally awesome so listen to me very closely because everything I say is like the Holy Grail of water color painting because by the way did I mention you can buy my book on Amazon.com? Okay, we get it. You're totally awesome. And sure, her work was very nice. She even paints pictures on Hallmark cards...just try not to be so insufferable, mmm'kay? I guess I was just thinking of the fun-loving guy I took the acrylic painting class from last winter. He was just so funny and zany and open to anything you suggested and didn't take himself so seriously. To me that is what art is all about. Being able to express yourself and not being so haughty about it. So she had us write down two things on a piece of paper. I guess because they were so important. 1) Paint on wet paper - Play exercise. 2) Value chart - dry paper. Yup. We had to cut down an entire tree, just to write those two things down. And then she went on and on about how expensive paper was and how the YMCA's budget had been cut and people taking classes had been walking off with art supplies so they now had to be very frugal. Blah, blah, blah. Who cares. We were over an hour into the class before we even got to touch a paint brush. And this was only a two hour class! Bah! And then I got yelled at for leaving a paint brush in the jar of water, with a detailed explanation of how it destroys the bristles and rusts the metal widget that holds the bristles to the wood and how the water will eventually disintegrate the wooden handle if left in the water. blah de blah blah blah.... And I'm thinking, holy cow(!!) this is probably all detailed in her book on Amazon.com ...Paint brush destruction: Chapter 39. And here I'm getting all this information TOTALLY FREE!! WHEEE!!!!! We did finally get to do a little painting. Strips of colors from light to dark, which I failed miserably at. And then we did the Play Exercise. As I was doing mine I thought it looked pretty good, but then when I got it home I thought it kinda looked like I had somehow painted the inside of Keith Richards brain.  I then had another art class at the "Y" tonight. Painting on silk. Fortunately it was with a different teacher and fortunately there was no blizzard tonight, but man, it was so frooking cold. We not only broke a record for the coldest temperature on this day, we also broke the record for the coldest low temperature which was a balmy zero degrees. I really had no idea what Painting on Silk was, but it sounded interesting and since I still have funding for art classes, I want to take advantage of as many classes as I can. This class is only two sessions long unfortunately, but it seems like its going to be really cool. I guess its a lot like batik. You lightly draw a picture on a piece of stretched out silk with a pencil. And then you lightly trace over it with this glue-like substance out of a tube. You then let it dry...which is what we did this week. And then next week we will wash it out and apply paint which will make our traced lines show up as white. While most of the other women were drawing flowers, I drew an Arabian castle with a huge smiling sun overhead. You knew I had to be different, right? I was originally going to draw some sunflowers since those are my favorites, but hey, why be like everyone else. There was one fly in the ointment tonight, however. I had one of those extremely annoying women you get in almost every art class. The one who feels the need to announce about every four and a half minutes how terrible they are at art. How bad they are at drawing. How totally inept they are with a pencil. And then I wonder, well then why are you here? Why are you taking an art class that requires drawing? And why do you keep drawing attention to yourself by announcing your supposed inadequacies? I hate when people do this. Absolutely hate it. So I usually tell them everyone has some kind of art talent. And then try and help them figure out what theirs is. Like this woman said her butterfly wasn't symmetrical and I said no butterfly is perfectly symmetrical and that is the beauty of nature. She kinda glared at me as if, how dare you interrupt my self-bashing. Its the only attention I get. She later commented on how some of her circles looked like sperm. So I finally just left her alone, although listening to her say how crappy she was, was kind of interrupting my flow of creativity. Older Entries |
Lyrics by Lennon/McCartney. All angst copyright by awittykitty |
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