"Valentine's Day is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap."
This past week, disaster seems to be the operative word, and its been tiring, though not so much for me as for those most closely affected by the main one, which was a Carbon Monoxide infestation in Mt. Royal 1502. This is the row house Jenn and Erin live in, as well as Jack, Neil, Juliana, TJ, and Alex. It seems that if Erin's mother didn't buy that CO detector, things might have turned out pretty horrible. As it is everyone is physically ok, it seems, and I hope soon the emotional aspect will heal too. It was kind of a nightmare. But its not really my story to write. I just hope very much that all will be well.
As for myself, I think I have poisoned myself with all that oil paint beyond repair. I get titanium white in cuts. That’s bad. Its been on my crazy hypochondriac’s brain for the whole past week, after I was painting in Fox and my wound from the night before rubbed against my paint rag and came away covered with blue-gray. The sad thing was that it was an ugly color. It would have been better if it was transcendent. Oh well.
Today, walking back to the Commons, I saw a seagull swoop down into the middle of the street, only a meter or two away, to snatch at a large crumb of bread and fly away. It disappeared over the buildings, and the people behind me, watching it, made squawking noises as though to make fun. And the way the cars are going over the bridge right now look like the ebb and flow of water. Those things have nothing to do with one another, really, but I am finding it difficult to keep this space coherent when no one single observation I want to put down necessarily evenly flows into the other. So I am going to have to let the convention of continuity and logical progression go for now.
And speaking of that, I started my tutoring work study at the Brown Memorial Church this Wednesday, and had my first tutoring session, as a substitute, yesterday morning, with, actually, an pretty bright and motivated kid, who read through everything and when I asked him if he wanted to go on kept on nodding. I didn't realize that the time limit was really that short, so I thought there would be a chance to cover more ground, but it ended while I thought we were barely half way through. And I had to ask the kid, "what does the bell mean?" when it rang. He was nice about it, and I guess he understood that it was my first day. And when he left, he waved, which was nice too. I am nervous about getting my own "student" next week; as it is, I've been a bit spoiled on this first. I find it interesting that all the elementary, and I guess middle, school students have to wear that light yellow uniform around here. If you watch the kids play at the Mount Royal school, the "playground"(Two condemned trees, concrete, gravel and benches )of which is right opposite the Commons(we have a whole heap of trees, a basketball hoop, and lots of grass to play on), the bright yellow, especially on sunnier days,(and only when its warm enough for them to be out there in the first place), makes quite a strange and lovely contrast with the gray rock underneath. The elderly man who was tutoring a girl in the same room as me talked to me for a while, after the kids went away and he was putting on his red jacket. He's a professor of Biochemistry at Hopkins, but since he doesn't do anymore lab work he spends the free time tutoring there. I think in general the whole program is quite a noble and valiant effort. And everyone I've met there so far seems quite nice. Unfortunately, I've only heard most of their names once, which means that, except for a few exceptions, I've forgotten them. The church and the surrounding area, a block away from the Myerhoff, our dining hall, I guess make up one of those pockets of charm for which Baltimore gets the nickname "Charm City." The walls in the stairwell leading up to the tutoring place are painted with a long dark blue mural of happy sea creatures. I bet it was by MICA students and such, for the Community Arts Partnership, or maybe not.
Speaking of which, I went into Annapolis on Sunday, because apparently taking the train to DC on weekends is MUCH more expensive, since you have to take the Amtrak, as the MARC only operates on weekdays. This makes my grand idea of a large DC trip a good deal more costly, but we'll have to see about all that...maybe something can be arranged somehow. But in any case, since my project was to get as far away as possible within three hours and take (quality) pictures along the way, and since the time was already ticking when I found out about the train, I had to make a quick decision and bolt for the Lightrail. Of course, the bolting did me no good, since I still had to wait for about an hour at Patapsco station for an hour till the bus to Annapolis came, and by the time I was there, I had only fifteen minutes on my clock to take pictures, but I pulled off one or two decent ones in that time, which was enough. Anyways, the way this relates to that Community Arts Partnership business to which the "speaking of which" above refers to is that in front of me, not long after I exited the bus, there was a man, a woman, and a dog between them, and since I was trying to take candid and compositionally interesting shots of people along the way (which is, by the way, apparently really hard and scary), I wanted to capture them. Well, I didn't do that well in that respect, though their backs figure in quite prominently into one of my (accidentally) best shots. Anyway, once I passed them, the man says to me "Nice camera" and I say "Yeah, but unfortunately its not mine" and he says "Can I have it" and I say "Sorry, its my school's" and then after a few more words he asks whether I go to St. Johns (which at one point long ago I was actually interested in, seeing that their entire curriculum is based on reading lots of classic books that everyone always has the intention to check into, but rarely does) and I tell him that no, I am from Baltimore. So he says, much to my surprise "Oh. MICA?" You see, this was a huge thing, because usually nobody outside the art world knows what MICA is if you go one meter off campus. Well, apparently he did the CAP thing there, and he started naming all these names of people in different departments and stuff, hoping I would know them. But, of course, me being a freshman, I didn't. And, I guess he ended up being part of the art world in any case, so it wasn't that big of a coincidence. So I guess I rambled on a lot for no reason. But in any case, Annapolis after dark and out of the most touristy season can get very creepy, especially when you forget the spot of the bus stop at first, and miss the bus and have to kill another hour and a half there. Incidentally, the stop happens to be next to a pretty interesting graveyard. I hadn't noticed that before. But in any case, I wandered the suddenly almost empty streets, walked into one of those New Age shops, and listened to a conversation in temporary light. I ate at a nearby subway, and then realized how aimless I was. I went out of my room that morning wearing my wide brimmed black hat, assuming that it would make me look less like a terrorist, since terrorists ought not wear pretentious things like that(Andy later told me that I looked like the Hebrew Hammer), and in the evening I felt like a strange and alone figure in an odd place, sitting on bench by the streetlight, eating a subway sandwich in a paint-smeared coat and that scarf and hat, watching a street that was completely empty, but for the occasional cars of the two lovers strolling, or the people inside the restaurants. To get to the bus stop, I passed a tall stone cross set between lanes, in the circle where the church is. I think now, maybe the windows were lit. I don't know.
(Sometimes I think that both Baltimore and Annapolis, somewhere in them, must play secret host to some sort of deep, dark, antediluvian, eldritch, monstrous Lovecraftian horror; I thought I heard Cthulhu himself breathing out of the Metro tunnels once, oh, and speaking of that, someone drew Cthulhu in different versions on the walls and mirrors of the Fox building bathroom, in a pretty sickly, bathroom color. If you read Call of Cthulhu, or even Pickman's Model, that makes sense, since apparently the Great Old One seems to like to influence the minds of "aesthetes", and MICA would be a natural place to do that, being an art school and all. Plus, Baltimore itself seems like a good location, crime ridden, old, and, most importantly, close to the water. There are certainly Poe related horrors here somewhere, I bet you. I saw him on my three-hour trip, towards the beginning, leaning forward on his armchair. He was all in gleaming black, and I took a picture.)
When my bus finally came, the bus driver didn't stop at the sign, but kept on beeping his horn at me from across the street, where he stood at a red light. It took me a while to realize that he wanted me to cross and get on right away. When I showed him my ticket he just nodded with this really serious look on his face, and floored it. And I guess it was a little surreal for a while, even after a few other passengers got on: a slightly bowlegged man wearing NY Yankee clothes and reading the sports section, a large nervous guy with filled up pockets, an old man that just wouldn't stop smiling broadly like a child. I didn't take any sneaky pictures of them. I guess I was getting guilty and plus my flash card was full. I looked out the window at the strip mall writing in neon, and at my reflection. I thought that maybe in that hat I looked mysterious or something, but the chances are I just looked silly. Anyways, I have taken to wearing the hat regularly now, hoping the mystery will grow on me if I wear it long enough. I caught the last Lightrail train back, so I was lucky. On the train, a man who wore an MTA jacket in bright colors and was lanky, with white hair and a mustache, had an animated, on his part, conversation with two young girls with a bike about pretty trails, and about the one that ran through Annapolis, and about his son who used to go to the Naval Academy but then transferred, and about his plans to travel after he retired on a route starting somewhere in Alaska, I guess, and going down to somewhere beautiful in a ferry. Then he got off, then the girls got off, then and I got off.
And what was the point of any of that?
I ramble so much, ramble like a madman, I ramble when I'm talking and ramble, in the physical sense, when I'm walking, completely aimless. I could ramble a lot more right now, probably because I honestly have nothing better to do, but I will stop.
As for myself, I think I have poisoned myself with all that oil paint beyond repair. I get titanium white in cuts. That’s bad. Its been on my crazy hypochondriac’s brain for the whole past week, after I was painting in Fox and my wound from the night before rubbed against my paint rag and came away covered with blue-gray. The sad thing was that it was an ugly color. It would have been better if it was transcendent. Oh well.
Today, walking back to the Commons, I saw a seagull swoop down into the middle of the street, only a meter or two away, to snatch at a large crumb of bread and fly away. It disappeared over the buildings, and the people behind me, watching it, made squawking noises as though to make fun. And the way the cars are going over the bridge right now look like the ebb and flow of water. Those things have nothing to do with one another, really, but I am finding it difficult to keep this space coherent when no one single observation I want to put down necessarily evenly flows into the other. So I am going to have to let the convention of continuity and logical progression go for now.
And speaking of that, I started my tutoring work study at the Brown Memorial Church this Wednesday, and had my first tutoring session, as a substitute, yesterday morning, with, actually, an pretty bright and motivated kid, who read through everything and when I asked him if he wanted to go on kept on nodding. I didn't realize that the time limit was really that short, so I thought there would be a chance to cover more ground, but it ended while I thought we were barely half way through. And I had to ask the kid, "what does the bell mean?" when it rang. He was nice about it, and I guess he understood that it was my first day. And when he left, he waved, which was nice too. I am nervous about getting my own "student" next week; as it is, I've been a bit spoiled on this first. I find it interesting that all the elementary, and I guess middle, school students have to wear that light yellow uniform around here. If you watch the kids play at the Mount Royal school, the "playground"(Two condemned trees, concrete, gravel and benches )of which is right opposite the Commons(we have a whole heap of trees, a basketball hoop, and lots of grass to play on), the bright yellow, especially on sunnier days,(and only when its warm enough for them to be out there in the first place), makes quite a strange and lovely contrast with the gray rock underneath. The elderly man who was tutoring a girl in the same room as me talked to me for a while, after the kids went away and he was putting on his red jacket. He's a professor of Biochemistry at Hopkins, but since he doesn't do anymore lab work he spends the free time tutoring there. I think in general the whole program is quite a noble and valiant effort. And everyone I've met there so far seems quite nice. Unfortunately, I've only heard most of their names once, which means that, except for a few exceptions, I've forgotten them. The church and the surrounding area, a block away from the Myerhoff, our dining hall, I guess make up one of those pockets of charm for which Baltimore gets the nickname "Charm City." The walls in the stairwell leading up to the tutoring place are painted with a long dark blue mural of happy sea creatures. I bet it was by MICA students and such, for the Community Arts Partnership, or maybe not.
Speaking of which, I went into Annapolis on Sunday, because apparently taking the train to DC on weekends is MUCH more expensive, since you have to take the Amtrak, as the MARC only operates on weekdays. This makes my grand idea of a large DC trip a good deal more costly, but we'll have to see about all that...maybe something can be arranged somehow. But in any case, since my project was to get as far away as possible within three hours and take (quality) pictures along the way, and since the time was already ticking when I found out about the train, I had to make a quick decision and bolt for the Lightrail. Of course, the bolting did me no good, since I still had to wait for about an hour at Patapsco station for an hour till the bus to Annapolis came, and by the time I was there, I had only fifteen minutes on my clock to take pictures, but I pulled off one or two decent ones in that time, which was enough. Anyways, the way this relates to that Community Arts Partnership business to which the "speaking of which" above refers to is that in front of me, not long after I exited the bus, there was a man, a woman, and a dog between them, and since I was trying to take candid and compositionally interesting shots of people along the way (which is, by the way, apparently really hard and scary), I wanted to capture them. Well, I didn't do that well in that respect, though their backs figure in quite prominently into one of my (accidentally) best shots. Anyway, once I passed them, the man says to me "Nice camera" and I say "Yeah, but unfortunately its not mine" and he says "Can I have it" and I say "Sorry, its my school's" and then after a few more words he asks whether I go to St. Johns (which at one point long ago I was actually interested in, seeing that their entire curriculum is based on reading lots of classic books that everyone always has the intention to check into, but rarely does) and I tell him that no, I am from Baltimore. So he says, much to my surprise "Oh. MICA?" You see, this was a huge thing, because usually nobody outside the art world knows what MICA is if you go one meter off campus. Well, apparently he did the CAP thing there, and he started naming all these names of people in different departments and stuff, hoping I would know them. But, of course, me being a freshman, I didn't. And, I guess he ended up being part of the art world in any case, so it wasn't that big of a coincidence. So I guess I rambled on a lot for no reason. But in any case, Annapolis after dark and out of the most touristy season can get very creepy, especially when you forget the spot of the bus stop at first, and miss the bus and have to kill another hour and a half there. Incidentally, the stop happens to be next to a pretty interesting graveyard. I hadn't noticed that before. But in any case, I wandered the suddenly almost empty streets, walked into one of those New Age shops, and listened to a conversation in temporary light. I ate at a nearby subway, and then realized how aimless I was. I went out of my room that morning wearing my wide brimmed black hat, assuming that it would make me look less like a terrorist, since terrorists ought not wear pretentious things like that(Andy later told me that I looked like the Hebrew Hammer), and in the evening I felt like a strange and alone figure in an odd place, sitting on bench by the streetlight, eating a subway sandwich in a paint-smeared coat and that scarf and hat, watching a street that was completely empty, but for the occasional cars of the two lovers strolling, or the people inside the restaurants. To get to the bus stop, I passed a tall stone cross set between lanes, in the circle where the church is. I think now, maybe the windows were lit. I don't know.
(Sometimes I think that both Baltimore and Annapolis, somewhere in them, must play secret host to some sort of deep, dark, antediluvian, eldritch, monstrous Lovecraftian horror; I thought I heard Cthulhu himself breathing out of the Metro tunnels once, oh, and speaking of that, someone drew Cthulhu in different versions on the walls and mirrors of the Fox building bathroom, in a pretty sickly, bathroom color. If you read Call of Cthulhu, or even Pickman's Model, that makes sense, since apparently the Great Old One seems to like to influence the minds of "aesthetes", and MICA would be a natural place to do that, being an art school and all. Plus, Baltimore itself seems like a good location, crime ridden, old, and, most importantly, close to the water. There are certainly Poe related horrors here somewhere, I bet you. I saw him on my three-hour trip, towards the beginning, leaning forward on his armchair. He was all in gleaming black, and I took a picture.)
When my bus finally came, the bus driver didn't stop at the sign, but kept on beeping his horn at me from across the street, where he stood at a red light. It took me a while to realize that he wanted me to cross and get on right away. When I showed him my ticket he just nodded with this really serious look on his face, and floored it. And I guess it was a little surreal for a while, even after a few other passengers got on: a slightly bowlegged man wearing NY Yankee clothes and reading the sports section, a large nervous guy with filled up pockets, an old man that just wouldn't stop smiling broadly like a child. I didn't take any sneaky pictures of them. I guess I was getting guilty and plus my flash card was full. I looked out the window at the strip mall writing in neon, and at my reflection. I thought that maybe in that hat I looked mysterious or something, but the chances are I just looked silly. Anyways, I have taken to wearing the hat regularly now, hoping the mystery will grow on me if I wear it long enough. I caught the last Lightrail train back, so I was lucky. On the train, a man who wore an MTA jacket in bright colors and was lanky, with white hair and a mustache, had an animated, on his part, conversation with two young girls with a bike about pretty trails, and about the one that ran through Annapolis, and about his son who used to go to the Naval Academy but then transferred, and about his plans to travel after he retired on a route starting somewhere in Alaska, I guess, and going down to somewhere beautiful in a ferry. Then he got off, then the girls got off, then and I got off.
And what was the point of any of that?
I ramble so much, ramble like a madman, I ramble when I'm talking and ramble, in the physical sense, when I'm walking, completely aimless. I could ramble a lot more right now, probably because I honestly have nothing better to do, but I will stop.