Saggy baggy elephants and tree huggers

First thing's first: I have finally fixed my internet. More or less anyway. I still believe it's time for a change of companies, but it's not so urgent now.

Now, onward and upward. Yesterday I walked into a tree. I'm not even kidding. What's important about this act of stupidity? Well, for once in my life, I just laughed. Yes, I was a smidge embarrassed, as anyone who walks into a large and unmoving object should be (particularly when they do it on a busy city street). But all I could do was laugh. And for me, someone who worries far too much what other people think, that letting go is an occasion worth celebrating. Here's hoping my collision jarred loose some creative thoughts.

It's had me thinking a lot about how ridiculous nearly everything is. It's inescapable, in fact. And it's far better if you can just laugh your way through it or maybe find the beauty in the ridiculousness. It will, I think, make life fuller. It's that, or just spend your whole life feeling red-faced. Which leads me to my self-portrait of the day:


I'm calling it Saggy Baggy Self Portrait. When I was a kid and my socks would fall down, my mom would say I had saggy baggy elephant socks. Now I'm an adult, and things haven't changed a bit.





Some new endeavors for this week. Thanks to my typography teacher, I'll be spending hours staring at InDesign. The assignment? Take this quote:

"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something besides oneself is real." ~Iris Murdock

And express it using typography. We are free to mess with its size and placement on the page, but we must use only one family of typefaces and no color is allowed. (There goes my cliche idea of putting "love" in red.)

My seminar in literature and writing has also charged us with a creative task. A writing assignment based on either Hemingway or William Carlos Williams. I haven't had enough time to decide which I'll be doing, but I'm definitely ruminating on one idea in particular. Both of these writers use plain language, and yet they achieve a crisp, evocative, emotional effect. Their subjects are, on the whole, not extraordinary, fanciful things, and yet they are made, perhaps, more beautiful than the most exotic of subjects. As my professor said, "For Williams, it is sufficient to write a poem in which you are just taking note of something."