I'm currently going through all my shit. Though it hurts me, I'm gonna hafta throw my seal away. Alas.


The best art project I've ever done.

Is this gauche? I hope not. Our bathroom has become the most vibrant part of our house. I promise to maintain bathroom graffiti as a way of life from now on.

What an eventful last few days. (This post will most likely become a superficial list; I apologize.)

-Thursday my friend gave birth to a beautiful girl.
That evening my roommate and I drove a large budget truck, which was filled with all of her things, down to Atlanta and hung out with her folks. We then went downtown and checked in at the hospital. We talked with our friend and looked at the her baby. So tiny! Cute cute cute. We then met up with a couple of our high school friends in Midtown. When we noticed how late it was getting, we drove back to Athens, returned the truck, and went downtown. After celebrating a friend's birthday party for a couple of hours, we crashed.

-Friday my roommates and I threw our last party together.
I got up early, went to work, and finished several projects. JD picked me up (he did a lot of driving this weekend, and I really appreciate him), and we began to get stuff together. Balloons, streamers, alcohol, Depression-era blues, twine, dirty clothes, newspapers, rags, and cardboard boxes--we constructed the finest crack den/shanty town the world has seen.

-Saturday our friends got married.
We got up early, still under the weather from the night. Washed and dressed in our finest, we drove to Atlanta and celebrated our friends' marriage. The ceremony and reception were beautiful. Quite wonderful. After the wedding, we realized Herbie Hancock was giving a free show in Piedmont Park. We walked through the crowded park, ate carnival food, and watched a great show under the stars.

-Sunday JD and I putzed around.
After sleeping in, we walked to brunch. Then we made a quick trip to the museum, where we saw the Annie Leibovitz exhibit and a traveling show from the Louvre. We drove home, and I cleaned up the house. I love mopping.

A birth, moving out, a birthday, a party, a marriage, music, art, eating, drinking, mopping--this weekend had it all. I am tired but glad.

Trout (for reference) with very large package from New York.

Uuuuuhhhhghghghghghghghghhhhhhh . . .

I'll be totally cool. Just gotta breath and work. Make it fun.

I think I might spend some time in Atlanta next week after the party and the wedding.

Alright, I'm bored now

Bark/Sneeze

Pandas are loud. And cute:


Another weekend has passed. Nothing too exciting happened: bridal shower, cleaning, and sleeping in. My roommates and I have decided to throw an end-of-the-term party. The theme is the Great Depression. Our invitation: "Party at Hooverville: Great Depression--Great Fun."

We've also spread out bathroom graffiti to the walls. Expect pictures of crude drawings.

Cleaning and Cards

Something remarkable happened today:

They may seem like two ordinary fileboxes, filled with colorful folders, well-ordered labels, and various documents. Until today, however, they were simply a fantasy.

For the last few years, I have slowly accumulated a pile of notebooks, photos, bills, letters, and general crap, all of which I have pushed from one corner to another. Perhaps the realization that I will have to move all this shit across country--not just across town--helped motivate me. Perhaps this newly-reclaimed free time is unleashing a new zeal for organization. Either way, I am quite relieved and looking forward to recycling all this rubbish:



Wow, this post is kind of boring; it's about files. I'll finish with a quote I took from a photocopied selection about political power and tactics in Saul Alinsky's _Rules for Radicals_: "Power has always derived from two main sources, money and people. Lacking money, the Have-Nots must build power from their own flesh and blood. A mass movement expresses itself with mass tactics. Against the finesse and sophistication of the status quo, the Have-Nots have always had to club their way. In early Renaissance Italy the playing cards showed swords for the nobility (the word spade is a corruption of the Italian word for sword), chalices (which became hearts) for the clergy, diamonds for the merchants, and clubs as the symbol of the peasants." I don't know nothin' bout them politics, but the card tidbit is interesting.

Couldn't sleep at all last night. I eventually got out of bed and watched Watership Down on YouTube. Psychic rabbits are awesome.

My parents are returning to Tacoma today, after a week-long visit for graduation. I really enjoyed having them, and I am glad we worked on my loans for this summer (shit, y'all, New York's spensive). I'll just be indebted to everyone forever, but at least I won't be in rural Georgia another year.

I think I'm going to learn more about the color field painters.

Sure, my boyfriend makes fun of me for liking seemingly incoherent blobs of color, but I can't help it. Plus I need something to distract me from work, cleaning, packing, assignments, and all that.

All six of us are currently cleaning out the house for our party on Saturday. This means, unfortunately, that we are throwing away all of our prized bathroom mags, filled with irreverent graffiti. Here are some of my favorites. Please excuse the poor scan quality.


This is from our favorite issue of Vogue, which included a special on rainjackets, one of which looks exactly like the Abu Ghrab prison torture. Judge for yourself.

The lift-out quote: "An anorak is a way of adding an unexpectedly fizzy jolt to an otherwise prosaic outfit." Haley added the noose for emphasis.

Finally, our favorite magazine, Life & Style:
Oh, and here is an interesting (and completely unrelated) fact. I was downtown with my professor, his wife, and a couple classmates. He told me that the little old woman who says "Hush" in the book Goodnight Moon is Gertrude Stein. I never knew.

Wow, I wish I had such dedication:

http://www.c71123.com/daily_photo/

And links to other "obsessive photo projects":

http://www.c71123.com/daily_photo/links.php

A dream from 9 May 1980:

"I am involved in some kind of race or chase. There are 3 teams and we are trying to get to Japan first and we have bicycles . . . The event starts out somewhere in the desert (I guess Palmdale)and the other two teams have a definite advantage because they have the money to take jet planes there . . . They both take off and are on their way to Japan--a friend tells me of a way to get over . . . I take apart my bicycle and put all the different parts in packages, then I put my body inside some kind of tractor tire that was being shipped to Japan. It was kind of scary at first, I was being rolled around a whole lot, but I got used to it . . . I arrive in Japan and Tokyo is one huge shopping center with lots of people with cameras . . . They seemed like tourists in their own towns. I get picked up by my teammate, who is Woody Allen and his son, who is a nice, bright, funny kid . . . Slowly we arrange the bicycle parts aright again and head for the finish line . . . We find out that the other teams have not gotten there yet. We are happy and don't care if we win, but glad that the race will be a close one."

A diary entry from 18 May 2006:

"In my hotel room, watching Italian MTV. Today was a long stretch of walking, which is refreshing compared with yesterday, a day of little movement across broad expanses of space and time. After checking my bag in Heathrow, I sat in the international departures wing of the airport for two hours, waiting for a gate to be assigned to my flight. I spent this time boy-watching, for the most part. When I got on the plane, I was ready for it all to be done. After a long (it seemed so) flight, a long train ride, and a long walk through the hectic streets of Rome, I finally reached the hotel and collapsed. The watchman brought me to my room, turned on the tv, turned the channel to the soccer game, and said, "Finale!" Fell asleep immediately, a sleep of death that left me confused when I woke up at 6AM. Figured out how to call home and did so. Had breakfast with il professore and then headed out. Early in the morning, I visited the Trevi Fountain, la Piazza di Populo, la Villa Borghese, the Spanish steps, the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, and the park surrounding the Domus Aurea. At a spinach calzone and took a three hour nap at the hotel. The Katies then knocked upon my door, and we took another long walk. Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, and the Villa Borghese. As the sun set we came upon the temple to Aesclepius in the Villa. Gorgeous. We then walked home in the dark, ate a pita at a nearby restaurant. Sat in my room, watched TV, wrote. Great day. Hot Chip's "Over and Over" and Fabri Fibra's "Applausi per Fibra" play repeatedly on the tv as I fall asleep."

I'm a lazy documenter. I dislike photos and diaries; they ruin the moment for me. Looking back on my experiences, though, I wish I had more evidence. Perhaps I can begin to strike a balance between living in the moment and keeping a record for the future.

In true Miles fashion, I procrastinated on the very last paper of my undergraduate career. Surely I would pull through for this one, make a final valiant effort to work ahead of time. No way. Wrote two pages last night, ten today. Turned it in thirty minutes late. Oddly, there is no guilt whatsoever. I honor my priorities, which do not include seventeenth century royalist poets. Dommage.

Alright, I'm off to get some late lunch and finish some work, which includes installing a new scanner for my office. Excited!

Word I learned today:

Puncheon:
I. Name of various pointed or piercing instruments.
1. A short piercing weapon; a dagger.
2. a. A pointed tool for piercing; a bodkin.
b. A marble-worker's tool, ? a mason's pointed chisel. Now rare.
c. A graving tool, a burin
3. An instrument for punching or stamping figures, letters, etc. on plate or other material; also, for making dies for coining and matrices for casting type
4. A short upright piece of timber in a wooden framing which serves to stiffen one or more long timbers or to support or transmit a load; a supporting post; a post supporting the roof in a coal-mine; formerly also a door-post.

Also:
A large cask for liquids, fish, etc.; spec. one of a definite capacity, varying for different liquids and commodities.

As a liquid measure it varied from 72 (beer) to 120 (whisky) gallons.
Thanks, OED. Another word I'll never use.

Cool and weird, ceird:

Today was luxurious: sleeping in, lunch at home, easy project at work, margaritas, art show, and more.

I even learned something at work:

"Qoppa is an obsolete letter of the Greek alphabet and has a numeric value of 90. It has been attested in early Aeolic and Boeotian scripts, while the sound [kʷ] is attested in the Linear B syllabary. Greek dropped the sound, a labial-velar plosive, it presented in the post-Mycenaean era, and the letter survived for a few more centuries in certain dialects before becoming altogether extinct by pre-Classical times. There are two very different glyphs for qoppa: "archaic Qoppa" (Ϙ ϙ) used to write words and "Numeric Qoppa" (Ϟ ϟ) used in modern Greek legal documentation.

Qoppa was originally borrowed from the Phoenicians, who had /q/ (a voiceless uvular adoptedplosive) in their language. It was later imported into the Etruscan alphabet, and through this eventually into the Latin alphabet, in its current form Q. It was also into the early Cyrillic alphabet, as koppa (Ҁ, ҁ)." This is from wikipedia. I consult it far too much.

Had never even heard of that letter before today.

I did a very foolish thing today.

Thinking that my last final was at 8AM, I woke up very early (for me), studied, biked to campus, and ran into class. It wasn't my class. It was a different class. I had gotten the time for my final wrong. By seven hours. Once again this proves what a little sleep deprivation will do to me.

Finally finished my final for Avant Garde Theory. Here it is, a Surrealist collage of every doodle I've drawn in the last couple of years. Please go here to download pdf.

http://philos.myweb.uga.edu/Collage.pdf