Day: January 19, 2006

Crankypantsing

It’s Random Thursday!

Shelly

And now, some random randomness:

  • Our vending machine candy bars have gone up to 75¢.
  • I backed into a Hostess delivery truck this morning, when I stopped to get my morning caffeinated beverage. No harm, no foul, as far as both the driver and I were concerned, but damn, how on earth did I not see something that ginormous? My defense is that the truck was white, and it blended in with the huge billboard at the Pepsi plant across the street. All I have to say is, hallelujah for rear-mounted spare tires. They’re bouncy
  • Finally, after much swearing and nerve shredding, I have achieved W-2ness. My PIN still wasn’t working, even after having it reset on Tuesday. I tried it again yesterday. Nada. So, I called again this morning, and today’s customer service representative, who was condescending as all hell (yes, I know what a freaking PIN is, and what SSN stands for), did manage to sort out the problem. Whatever on earth the problem was. She wasn’t saying anything except that “You aren’t entering it correctly.” “It” and “correctly” were never defined. But, whatever. If she wants to try to make me feel like some sort of jackass, that’s fine, as long as she says the proper incantation on her end. Which she did, apparently, because I was finally able to access my W-2s. Praise be!
  • I finished 8-9 pages of journalling from Soul Mapping yesterday. One observation: I started out with a regular gel pen, and by the time I was finished with the first page, my hand was aching. I’m sure part of it was due to the fact that I don’t do all that much writing by hand, at least not large amounts of it at once. I switched to a dip pen and India ink, because I was in a mood for brown ink and couldn’t find a brown pen. After switching, my hand stopped hurting. The pain must have been mostly due to the pen, or how I was gripping it. Apparently, the dip pen I was using is Just Right. I’ll have to keep that in mind.
  • Another writing issue, related to pens, is that I tend to write so fast that my hand can’t really keep up. The result is a cramped, thoroughly illegible hash of chicken scratches. It’s not pretty. I think the dip pen made me slow down enough that I was able to gain better control over the micro-movements of my hand. And, of course, slower means less stress on the hand and more legible handwriting, which are both pluses.
  • There is a rock in my shoe and it’s annoying the shit out of me. Not enough to actually do something about it, mind you, but still.
Art

Strange Associations

Shelly

I was recently reminded of someone I went to college with. He was a fellow art student, studying drawing. I was only in one class with him–a disappointing watercolor class[1]–so I really didn’t have a good idea of what sort of work he did. His watercolors were nice, but pretty mundane. I recall lots of still lifes and landscapes. Certainly not anything to get granny’s knickers in a twist.

Imagine my surprise when, on viewing his senior show, I was confronted with dozens and dozens of large-format, carefully rendered self-portraits of him–nude, mind you–with all manner of fantastical equines. Male equines. Very obviously male equines. The drawings themselves were in Prismacolor, and had a distinctly Precious Moments Meets Black Light Velvet Painting feel about them. The horses, unicorns (yes, unicorns), and centaurs (yes, those, too) were all of the large-, liquid-eyed variety, with exaggerated Arab heads and delicate feet.

Can you just imagine it? A room chock-a-block with homoerotic bestial fantasy art? Don’t you think, at some point, someone would have taken this poor kid aside and told him, “Dude, your kink is not okay”? Hard as it is to believe, I have to assume that this guy was actually graduated. The thought that such work would earn him a degree in fine art is more than a little mind-boggling.

As a funny aside, the reason I even saw his senior show is that it was held at the University Museum of Art, where I worked, and I happened to be on duty that weekend. Weekends at the MoA were when folks from the local community stopped by. Old folks from the local community. Old folks who were really not amused by the My Little Porny Exhibition. We got more complaints about that show than any other, including Sylvia Sleigh’s nudes, which made the local patrons all sorts of pearl-clutchy and cranky.

So, anyway, now, whenever I see fantasy art that involves equines, I think of My Little Porny Boy. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, when someone on Paint-L mentioned centaurs, I started giggling uncontrollably.

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[1] I think I’ve vented my spleen about the unsatisfactoriness of that class in the past.