Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Life In Current Form

Life has changed a lot since summer it seems. I now live in a new place, a nice one with nice folk. The only bummer about the place so far is the noisy neighbors who have children that just yell and scream at each other for no reason sometimes as early as 5:30 in the morning. Which is quite annoying with the thinness of the wall between my bed's headboard and the kids room. They really might as well be in my room and jumping on my bed while they're at it. I may not have it as bad as my roomate Reed though who often has to sleep through their DVD menu stopping and starting throughout the night. The only other complaints I have of the place is the great lack of windows. We only have one window for all of the living space, and then one for each bedroom. The bathroom doesn't even have a window. And the one window we have is covered by a patio, so there really is never any natural light in the place. And it has a lack of close parking for friends to come over, but really other than that, you can't beat it.
It has been nice to have people always around. My old living situation was practically by myself, so if I ever wanted people around, I had to go somewhere. Now if I want to be alone, I can either go in my room and sit through the screaming neighbor kids, or go somewhere else. But luckily I haven't really had any desire for alone time, so I have quite liked having the fun people always around.
Much of my time as of late has gone into the making of our future coffee table. I have really enjoyed getting back into the creative process of making something useful. Though I must admit not too much creativity was involved as all I really am doing is sanding and oiling a giant block of wood. Plus I stole the idea for the creation of it from a magazine, but mine will be different and better. I guess I just love doing anything with wood. I really have come to think that I have to find a way to make that what I do. Finishing wood and making ugly wood look and feel amazing really is one of my favorite things in the world to do. Once I got started I just couldn't wait to keep working on it till I could see the final outcome. I pretty much lost all desire to do anything else when working on it, and I'm almost done. Just have to wax it and finish the little legs for it.
School this semester is likely to be the most busy semester of college I have yet experienced. I am taking more units than I ever have, and they are almost all upper division classes full of lots of reading and plenty of papers, and plenty of class presentations and speeches. I am also taking a class called book arts which should be fun, but really stretch my creative abilities as I have to write and construct my very own creative cool looking books. I don't think I have ever done anything close to that before in my life. It should be fun though, and hopefully I will make a cool book or two. I never knew how creative books could actually be until taking this class. I never really contemplated how much creativity and craftiness can go into the cover and type of paper and everything. Last night I made paper in the class which was actually quite fun. I never imagined it to be so easy, and also was quite surprised how it works. I got a little carried away in the creative part of the paper making and started throwing in all sorts of things into the paper to make it look cool. Things like bark, leaves, and other little spices and such to add color and texture. Now I have 7 fairly useless pieces of paper as they are full of little bumps and ridges and leaves that make writing on it not too easy, nor easily readable. But hey, its cool looking paper. I kind of want to make a little hobby of paper making now, but it does require the purchasing of certain devices and tools that I don't currently have, but didn't seem too expensive.
So life is pretty busy as of late, and seems it will be for the next year or so, but it seems to be full of good stuff for the most part.
God bless us, every one

1 comment:

abby christensen said...

i'm glad to hear that you're table is turning out well. i think sometime in the near future in sculpture we will start working with wood and i'm pretty excited. also, i'm jealous of your paper making. i've been wanting to try it for a while but haven't had a chance. and hey, if you really need something to do with some useless paper, you could send a letter to a lonely college student in chicago...