Self-portrait

Sometime last September I started doing a photo self-portrait project with two friends of mine, one of whom was moving to Newcastle to study abroad for two semesters. At the beginning of the project I was all gung-ho, like, "Sweet! It's gonna be so awesome to see how I change every day! And how I've changed from the beginning to the end when it's done! And what a feeling of accomplishment! I'M SO IN."

By approximately Day 50 (let's not lie, what I really mean is Day 10) the novelty had worn off and it had started to get tedious. It was less, "YES GONNA SET UP THE CAMERA AND TAKE A GREAT PICTURE OF MYSELF AND IT'S GONNA BE FAB!" and more "Dear God, I swear if I have to look at my own fucking face one more time I'm going to maim myself just so I'll have some variety in what I have to look at." And then! Around this same time, we began to spend the entire first half of spring semester in my drawing class DRAWING self-portraits!

Drawing myself was so much worse than photographing myself, and if I thought I was tired of looking at myself during the photo project, it was nothing compared to the hours upon hours I spent starting at one picture of myself in order to translate it to charcoal. I really couldn't stand to do both the portraits for drawing class and the photo portraits, and the drawing class ones weren't exactly optional. I dropped out of the photo project around Day 150, I think, and even though I didn't get that feeling of accomplishment from seeing it all the way through, it was a much better feeling to be able to look in a mirror without sobbing because oh my God, the face, it is a thing of my repetitive nightmares.

Where am I going with all of this? Well! After spending the first half of the semester working on self-portraits, my drawing teacher decided it would be so! cool! to have our final project be -- can you guess? I bet you can! -- self-portraits! Thankfully for me, we are allowed to use any medium for the final project, which means much more setting up of tripods and adjusting of shutter speeds and much less sitting alone in a fifth-floor art studio in the middle of downtown Atlanta at ten o'clock on a Saturday night and sobbing uncontrollably because I have spent two hours drawing one eye twenty times in a row and you have got to be kidding me, THAT STILL ISN'T THE RIGHT SHAPE.

So, long story short(er), I am taking a picture of myself every day for a month. This project has actually been easier and more enjoyable so far, though, because 1) if I don't do it, I kind of fail art class, so you know, that's good motivation right there, and 2) I'm taking every picture at the same time every day -- 9PM -- and having a set time to stop and click a picture, no matter what I'm doing, makes it a lot easier to remember. Plus I think it adds more interest to the project. Also, I can post the pictures here, so everyone who reads this (aka my mama) will be able to see what I'm doing every day at 9PM!

3.26.2007 3.27.2007 3.28.2007

Welcome to my eblo!

I was going to jump on the blog bandwagon some time ago, but was stopped by the fact that I couldn't think of a decent URL name. Not that the one I currently possess (aka my first and middle name) is very creative, but I have to give my mama snaps for giving me a good name, and I like to flaunt it like a street-corner prostitute flaunts the goods, if you know what I mean. I also like to write run-on sentences containing an unnecessarily large number of commas.

I'd like to take a moment to say that I really hate the word "blog." Whoever originally coined that term to describe an internet phenomenon that became so massive is probably wishing he had come up with something that didn't sound like another way to describe throw-up. I know, I know, it's short for "weblog," but couldn't there have been another way to shorten that? How about "eblo"? Sure, it looks a little nonsensical, but it sounds like it could possibly be the name of something related to fairies, or elves maybe, instead of that sound you make when you have a big wad of phlegm lodged in the back of your throat and seriously guys, you can't get it out.

Actually, I think from now on that I will refer to this as my "eblo." People won't know what I'm talking about at first, and they may recoil when I say enthusiastically, "Hey guys, wanna see my eblo?!" because they think that maybe I'm using a cute euphemism for a body part I normally keep in my pants, but eventually? It could catch on and replace its distasteful predecessor. You never know.

Normally, when I'm at work, the longest breaks I take are to scoot down the road to get lunch. But! Today someone was here working on computers and needed the use of mine for about half an hour (our computers are always fucked up) so I went down the road to Target because the warm weather has made me lust after warm-weather dresses. And! A few dresses I tried on several months ago were on clearance, so I bought them all, because seriously? I am going to live in dresses this summer, and I wish I lived somewhere warm enough to wear them year-round. They're really the perfect thing to wear because they're so cool in hot weather, and most of all, they're so EASY, and the six-year-old in me that isn't particularly fond of wearing clothes in the first place is enamored of easy.

To illustrate: getting dressed in anything else is a multi-step process. I'm like, ooh this skirt is really cute, I want to wear this skirt, but I have no shirt to match, now I have to find one, dammit. Or I want to wear this really nice shirt but the only pair of jeans that doesn't give me love handles is dirty, and not the kind of dirty that would allow me to pull them out of the hamper and re-wear them, but the kind of dirty where I accidentally spilled a plate of spaghetti on them earlier in the week. But dresses! You put one on, and you're done! Just like that! I defy you to show me another piece of clothing so magical.

oh hay!

hahahaha lol i have a blog!

how ridiculous is this?