Viva la vie boheme

Thought of the day (via Unicornology):

You’re a unique individual. However, your troubles are universal. Flights are delayed, pets pass away, and people get dumped. (Ugh those things suck so hard; thinking about them makes me teary.) Life is not fair, you know this, and everybody feels it. That being said, rest assured that your personal pain is no more painful than that of the person next door. We’re all in this together. We’ll help each other when we can and we’ll suck it up when we have to. We’re equals, peers, lucky enough to be part of a community.
Today remind yourself: I’m special, but I don’t expect special treatment.

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Follow up to dying seafood on Market Street ie. Aquarium of Death

According to the comments, bat rays are probably in season and are sometimes sold as food. Which doesn't explain randomly abandoning them on a major city sidewalk to the bemusement and confusion of the masses, but hey, at least it's an explanation right?

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Just reminiscing on one of my very favorite classes back in college because I was talking to GreyGander about watercoloring. I took it during my lightest semester-I was only taking three classes mostly because I didn't get into the Psych 101 class that I actually didn't have an interest in after a while. So I ended up taking a 9am Italian 4 class, a 12pm Architectural History lecture and a 7pm Drawing course. Yeah, I took a lot of naps. Many of my days started with waking up and stumbling to Italian with my strict dictator of a Milanese TA and then going back to the dorm and alternating between surfing the web and going back to bed. At night, though, the witching hours were taken up by my drawing class. Full of mostly seniors trying to fufill their last sketching/art requirement; I was one of only two sophmores in the class and wrote a haiku for our last assignment which was telling our professor what grade we deserved.

We did a lot of nude model drawing and random pieces imitating art styles of Picasso, Seurat, Monet, Mondrian etc. It was a fun class, late at night, scribbling on huge pieces of paper with my beret wearing professor bouncing around the room, playing us jazz and showing us the weird portraits Freud's (Lucien I think) grandson painted. I would come home-tired but meditative, coated in charcoal, oil pastels and ink. Short of smoking Galuoises, it was as close to bohemian that I would ever get, or ever want to get. But we pretty much got to use whatever media we wanted and pretty much got to draw whatever subjects we wanted, outside of class. It was an insular environment, dark outside, light, bright and nude inside. Since none of them knew me, they didn't really know what to expect and I was left to my own devices. In a way, it was a real first taste of actual artistic freedom. Apart from the petty social clubs that ran rampant through my '01 graduates-the people I had taken class with since freshman year- I found that I enjoyed art and artists. They were more interesting, more experienced, more open minded.

Even today, I love hanging out with singers and actors who are either way older or way younger than myself. But generally, I can't stand other actors who are my age. I wonder why that is. Lack of competition? Lack of perceived agist prejudices? I ran into one of the leads from 'Rocky' at Ms/Mr Bird's show in Berkeley over the weekend; and it was like we agreed not to recognize or acknowledge each other. Now, she could be just as shy as me or not remember me, but I did try to catch her eye to say hi and she wouldn't even look up. I've actually met her twice; once at callbacks and once during the table read. I mean, I'm not going to hold it against her, but dude, remember just because you think you're hot shit today doesn't mean you won't be cold diarrhea tomorrow. Just to make it relevant, we're the same age; except she's a Virgo.

I'm just saying.

Watch a video of my other art professor, C. Sullivan give a watercolor technique demo. It's the technique I still use to this day. Esp. putting the wash of yellow down first to get a more vibrant final painting.