annnnnnd I'm alive!!!
wow, i don't even know how to start this post. any of you who have actually been reading my journal for the past couple of years can probably guess at which part of my little annual "cycle" I'm currently at right now, haha.
but uh, damn. what was once a rollercoaster is now pretty much one of those sine waves which progressively keeps growing in intensity, while still maintaining the same period. and yes that was the quite possibly the nerdiest metaphor i've ever made, but it's pretty accurate if you think about it.
HHAHAHAAHAH wow a terrible quote just popped in my head in reference to the sine wave - robert smithson, on his work - "there's no temporal climax, just a entropic system of undifferentiated infinity".
I certainly hope my life doesn't dissolve into an undifferentiated infinity.
OK, ENOUGH AMBIGUITIES. I apologize. I just woke up after a delicious normal-length sleep in my bed, quite possibly the first in the past few weeks, and after my little affair with Mlle. Nuit-Blanche which has been off-and-on since November, I'm ready to leave that bitch and become a normal human being. for two weeks.
ok ok, structure nick, structure. no one wants to hear your hazy streams-of-consciousness drivel.
Chapitre 1: My six-week-long heart attack
I guess there's not an enormous amount to really say about this period, except that it truly felt like a prolonged heart attack. and by prolonged, i mean spanning the course of 6 weeks. it was just constant deadline missing, living in constant fear, constant anxiety, constant stress, constant work and constant breakdowns. and booooy did i break-it-down like james brown (rip brotha!). little sleep was had in this period, especially in the past couple of weeks, in which i've been averaging at about 3-4 hours a night, every night. i think the worst part though, was just that it felt like i was constantly failing, OVER and OVER again for six weeks. like EVERY single new project/paper/exam was an opportunity for me to screw up and feel worse about myself, until I just boiled down to this emotionally haywire and physically fucked up excuse for a human being.
Chapitre 2: My Christmas with Merleau-Ponty and Eva Hesse
Finals technically ended and I technically was back in LA on the 21st of december, but of course super-punctual me had a late minimalism take-home exam to finish! Oh, only a couple hundred pages of dense minimalist theory/phenomenology/structural linguistics and 8 artists to cram into 16 pages. no pants, no problem! (lmao ok that expression doesn't fit here at all, but for some reason i was itching to type it out).
I mean, granted, it was FANTASTIC to be home and it definitely helped me a lot to have real food and whatnot. I was still kind of in heart attack mode though, since the paper was getting later and later, and I still hadn't contacted my prof. i was pulling red bull-fueled all-nighters for days straight in my own home, which was pretty bizarre.
But, damn, what a great paper. lol. With 21 blood-stained pages, I finished yesterday, and I learned so fucking much.
This class was fantastic... I think that after having such a classical education in high school (and which continued with columbia's core, obviously), there's always been this gap in my knowledge in terms of how we got to where we are today... and consequently i've always felt as if my generation were just so removed from all that i've ever learned about. it's such an amazing feeling to start to bridge that gap, and start to understand my own generation's place in the grand scheme of things. god, we have SUCH an incredible heritage from the postwar thinkers and artists.
thank you donald judd, robert morris, dan flavin, richard serra, robert smithson, dan graham, sol lewitt and eva hesse. you bastards were the bane of my existence for the past 2 weeks, but i love you.
Chapitre 3: Ballet rendition of Edward Scissorhands with the Katz family
So after finishing my paper, I had my first ever outing in about... oh god i don't even want to think about it. haha... But yeah, Sophie called up and invited me to go to "edward scissorhands the musical" with her family... ahahaha, best idea ever. as a whole, it was a bit lacking and hella cheesy, but it was nice to have a little "christmas moment" since I had missed it with my minimalism paper, lol.
but yeah, man, her family is the greatest. I always feel so inadequate going over to her house, lmao. her parents have fantastic taste, and they're all so intelligent and cool in the most with-my-eyes-closed manner possible. seriously, if i had to imagine in my head what i'd want my home/family to be like, it'd look a lot like the katz family. lol, not to embarrass you at all, sophie...
last night also made me realize how shitty my french is right now. oh my GOD. it's so sad that after 10 years in a french school, passing the bac and everything, it can all spiral down after three years.
Chapitre 4: Apologies and Beach brunches
My adhd is setting in and i want to finish this entry, so with that, i want to apologize to everyone who called me and whom i'd ignored over the past week. it was a horribly stressful time, and i pretty much shut everyone out.
alright, now time for a beach brunch with sophie at pt dume! woohoo.
but uh, damn. what was once a rollercoaster is now pretty much one of those sine waves which progressively keeps growing in intensity, while still maintaining the same period. and yes that was the quite possibly the nerdiest metaphor i've ever made, but it's pretty accurate if you think about it.
HHAHAHAAHAH wow a terrible quote just popped in my head in reference to the sine wave - robert smithson, on his work - "there's no temporal climax, just a entropic system of undifferentiated infinity".
I certainly hope my life doesn't dissolve into an undifferentiated infinity.
OK, ENOUGH AMBIGUITIES. I apologize. I just woke up after a delicious normal-length sleep in my bed, quite possibly the first in the past few weeks, and after my little affair with Mlle. Nuit-Blanche which has been off-and-on since November, I'm ready to leave that bitch and become a normal human being. for two weeks.
ok ok, structure nick, structure. no one wants to hear your hazy streams-of-consciousness drivel.
Chapitre 1: My six-week-long heart attack
I guess there's not an enormous amount to really say about this period, except that it truly felt like a prolonged heart attack. and by prolonged, i mean spanning the course of 6 weeks. it was just constant deadline missing, living in constant fear, constant anxiety, constant stress, constant work and constant breakdowns. and booooy did i break-it-down like james brown (rip brotha!). little sleep was had in this period, especially in the past couple of weeks, in which i've been averaging at about 3-4 hours a night, every night. i think the worst part though, was just that it felt like i was constantly failing, OVER and OVER again for six weeks. like EVERY single new project/paper/exam was an opportunity for me to screw up and feel worse about myself, until I just boiled down to this emotionally haywire and physically fucked up excuse for a human being.
Chapitre 2: My Christmas with Merleau-Ponty and Eva Hesse
Finals technically ended and I technically was back in LA on the 21st of december, but of course super-punctual me had a late minimalism take-home exam to finish! Oh, only a couple hundred pages of dense minimalist theory/phenomenology/structural linguistics and 8 artists to cram into 16 pages. no pants, no problem! (lmao ok that expression doesn't fit here at all, but for some reason i was itching to type it out).
I mean, granted, it was FANTASTIC to be home and it definitely helped me a lot to have real food and whatnot. I was still kind of in heart attack mode though, since the paper was getting later and later, and I still hadn't contacted my prof. i was pulling red bull-fueled all-nighters for days straight in my own home, which was pretty bizarre.
But, damn, what a great paper. lol. With 21 blood-stained pages, I finished yesterday, and I learned so fucking much.
This class was fantastic... I think that after having such a classical education in high school (and which continued with columbia's core, obviously), there's always been this gap in my knowledge in terms of how we got to where we are today... and consequently i've always felt as if my generation were just so removed from all that i've ever learned about. it's such an amazing feeling to start to bridge that gap, and start to understand my own generation's place in the grand scheme of things. god, we have SUCH an incredible heritage from the postwar thinkers and artists.
thank you donald judd, robert morris, dan flavin, richard serra, robert smithson, dan graham, sol lewitt and eva hesse. you bastards were the bane of my existence for the past 2 weeks, but i love you.
Chapitre 3: Ballet rendition of Edward Scissorhands with the Katz family
So after finishing my paper, I had my first ever outing in about... oh god i don't even want to think about it. haha... But yeah, Sophie called up and invited me to go to "edward scissorhands the musical" with her family... ahahaha, best idea ever. as a whole, it was a bit lacking and hella cheesy, but it was nice to have a little "christmas moment" since I had missed it with my minimalism paper, lol.
but yeah, man, her family is the greatest. I always feel so inadequate going over to her house, lmao. her parents have fantastic taste, and they're all so intelligent and cool in the most with-my-eyes-closed manner possible. seriously, if i had to imagine in my head what i'd want my home/family to be like, it'd look a lot like the katz family. lol, not to embarrass you at all, sophie...
last night also made me realize how shitty my french is right now. oh my GOD. it's so sad that after 10 years in a french school, passing the bac and everything, it can all spiral down after three years.
Chapitre 4: Apologies and Beach brunches
My adhd is setting in and i want to finish this entry, so with that, i want to apologize to everyone who called me and whom i'd ignored over the past week. it was a horribly stressful time, and i pretty much shut everyone out.
alright, now time for a beach brunch with sophie at pt dume! woohoo.