Uggie. Short Update...

I've made it home, free from the icky big bad hospital!!!! wow. what a horrible week.

I'm on even stronger pain pills, so thank goodness for spell check - I just wanted to write a small blog to say I'm alive. The big fall that broke my foot also turned itself into blood clots that traveled into my lungs, who quite plainly, did not want them taking residence there. My left lung began hurting really badly, and of course after having a collapsed lung a few years ago (totally spontaneous btw, so they've no idea why it ever happened anyway), I freaked out thinking surely it happened again due to the fall. After x-rays and Cat-scans and blood tests galore, it proved that both lungs had blood clots in them. So yeah, heh I really did myself in. So now I'm on a bunch of blood thinners, quite a new experience for me. I'm becoming forcibly friends with needles, as I have a shot due in my tummy once a day, and tons of blood tests that will continue on in the future, taking these meds up to a year from now :(

I finally just got in a real "shower" if you can call it that, and tomorrow I go in for blood tests. I hope I can return to school this week, but honestly and unfortunately it's up to the doctor I see on Monday who will decide my fate for the next bit of time. I hope I can get back in the swing of things soon, because I'm feeling very anxious and really really sorry I ever fell considering the circumstances that have occurred. Anyway need to go lay back down. Curse you blood clots!!

ps: thank you all who helped in making or signed the box card, it was awesome and did in fact cheer me up, quite a lil piece of art in itself :D

Oh, and for anyone who would like to see the purple cast o glory, here it is.

WAAAAAAGHHHH! Purple casts, and curbs, and broken feet oh my! Let's play 50 Questions, and then I'll ramble on about last class.

1) What if my bones became bonded with Adamantium like Wolverine? ANSWER: Ahem, then I would not have broken my foot after class on Monday, and be writing these questions with a purple cast on my leg/foot :P There I answered it already.
2) What if we drank coffee at night to help fall asleep?
3) What if we had more than two sets of teeth, that is you'd constantly get new teeth growing in if you lost one like a shark?
4) What if people all thought vegetables were "candy", and disliked candy thinking they were like lima beans or something? sorry to anyone who likes lima beans.
5) What if we all drove cars backwards while standing on our heads, using our hands on the pedals?
6) What if laughing meant you were angry and yelling meant you were amused?
7) What if no meant yes and yes meant no!
8) What if 2 + 3 + 40 - 23 / 9 by the power of a billion was worth solving?
9) What if the moon were really made of cheese?
10) What if history never got recorded or documented?
11) What if the internet never came to exist?
12) What if we got rid of money?
13) What if we didn't sleep on beds, or didn't sleep at ALL!?
14) What if wounds never healed?
15) What if we were immortal?
16) What if pain medication was never invented?
17) What if stairs were never invented?
18) What if all things invented never came to fruition?!
19) What if we lived on the stars in the sky and the planets were the stars?
20) What if life really WAS fair?
21) What if our brains just entirely stopped thinking about anything rational?
22) What if rational was irrational, and irrational was the rational?
23) What if we all just said what came to mind without a "filter"?
24) What if we didn't sweat?
25) What if we didn't hold our friends close, and our enemies even closer?
26) What if you could not scratch an itch to make it go away?
27) What if cigarettes never existed?
28) What if you could eat anything you wanted and never gain weight?
29) What if we ran out of water and it never rained?
30) What if hardly trying was putting in effort, and trying really hard was effortless?
31) What if our normal days were a holiday, and holidays were just our normal days?
32) What if every day was Halloween for that matter?
33) What if we never had a calendar to mark the days, and there was no Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or even Sunday?
34) What if cold was hot and burned, or hot was cold and icy? What if you felt both at the same time? What if you never felt hot or cold, or there was no such thing?
35) What if we all reincarnated as a hair brush?
36) What if we all reincarnated as a cat?
37) What if animals could speak our type of English, and we spoke with mews or howls or little sounds instead? What if they could actually understand us?
38) What if we were not considered "the top dogs" aka: head honchos of the nature world, and animals ruled the world with us at the bottom of the chain?
39) What if we had never cut down all those rainforests, or killed so many animals that we even have extinct animals, or what if we never even had to worry about animals going extinct!?
40) What if unicorns, dragons, faeries, and other such "imaginary" creatures did exist or could exist even now?
41) What if pigs really COULD fly?
42) What if birds couldn't fly and slopped around in the mud to keep cool?
43) What if you had the hiccups forever? What if rubbing your earlobes, eating peanut butter, drinking water in little sips, or being scared didn't rid you of them?
44) What if all the questions in the world could simultaneously be answered? What if those answers were 100% truth? What if all the world ran on was those little Magic 8 balls to help predict the future, and we put all the psychics out of business?
45) What if no one remembered you?
46) What if only people remembered the bad, the embarassing, or the goofy things about you?
47) What if you could live as any animal you wanted for one day, and would you do it?
48) What if I had never gotten out of bed on Monday, what if I was going to break something no matter what I did that day?
49) What if I told you I wish we could ask even more questions because now I'm on a roll?
50) What if not one question here that I wrote mattered? What if I leave a random comment on everyone's blogs?
51) What if everyone actually read each others blogs, gave input, feedback, at least constructive criticism (without being either stuck up or picky unless it was constructively! :P)

Okay so. Here's the part where I say something important about our last class. I am going to maybe practice writing another novel sized blog, since it's apparent no one reads this thing. First, I guess I'm feeling a bit invisible in this class. When I have something to say, someone is already talking or has said it. Or, I'm not even remembered as one of the people who didn't talk and needs to. Currently, all I do is mostly listen in class, which is funny because normally I'm very much talkative otherwise. So that's where my viewpoint is coming from on the projects. As far as the "time" projects go, we all saw time differently. Used it differently to create those projects. Just because people in this class aren't inspired or don't like it doesn't mean it's bad. I'm not sure I'd say anyone wasted their time on their project just because people didn't all speak up at once about it after it being presented. Some of us ironically need time to process it even. Overall, perhaps it's because everyone isn't on the same wavelength.

I have accepted that it's okay if something I created didn't inspire anyone, even if it's been every single project thus far. I am still figuring out what it IS about this class. Maybe I'm just drawing on my observations, and feeling a bit frustrated. I'm sure I will figure it out better when I'm not dopey on pain pills too. Anyway lesson of the day was: curbs + walking + being tired = bad juju. I can even tweak that into a whole lesson of how time for me worked. I fell so fast I barely had time to process it. It was not the comical slo-mo fall. Waiting at the doctor's office felt like ten million ages...8 weeks using crutches/having cast is going to feel like forever. :( Hard lesson about time I guess. Oh, and there's a first time for everything. /end ramble!
There is no spoon.

Here it is! Time project.

I think I finally got it squared away. I'm mostly happy with the result. The music was from here, I recorded the crunching chompy noise myself, and got the cuckoo clock effect from this place. All were free use. There, now that I covered me tail on all that, please enjoy. :)
(here is the direct link if you wanna see it even bigger)

If you are at all curious of the ingredients used to make the numbers, here they are as follows:
1 - Raisins
2 - Pumpkin Seeds
3 - Pretzel
4 - Panda Puff Peanut Butter cereal
5 - Apricots
6 - Pasta
7 - Cinnamon Raisin Bread
8 - Trader Joe cookies
9 - Celery
10 - String Cheese + Grape Tomato
11 - Baby Carrots
12 - Skittles
NOTE: No guarantee that use of these ingredients will result in same end product ROFL ROFL!!! kidding.

There's a time...

(don't mind me, just working out my ideas hehe)
Time:
Trepidacious
Initiative
Multi-tasking
Ends and yet Endless

Time can be past, present, future.

Slow, fast, blurred, forgotten, memorable, fleeting, boring, exciting...

I thought a good deal about quotes involving time. I have no idea why, but I really love to read quotes by people, for example Oscar Wilde. I kept trying really hard to find witty neat quotes, but then one stuck out to me for a quite nerdy but good natured reason: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." - Gandalf from LOTR. There, that sums it up.

I even tried listening to songs that were inspired by the topic of time to help rev my brain for ideas...I ran across one by Paul van Dyk called Time of Our Lives I think? Not my usual style, however I really dig the song because of the meaningful lyrics.

So what am I going to do with the time given to me to do this project about time? haha.

Eating mashed potatoes. Idea enters brain, hey, time is consumable
just like food is. I even made a number 3 a la mashed potato sculpture, then I ate it muwahah.
No matter how good or bad it was, when it's gone, it's gone!
Something that tastes really good, you wish you had more
of. If it's really bad, you can't wait to be done with it or slide it under
the rug or feed it to the dog, and what not. lol. Just like time. Or at least in my scatter-brained head I made the comparison.

Leads me to idea of doing an After Effects animation of clock...I'm actually in a class right now to learn the program better. So in essence, this will make great use of my time no matter what. I'm not afraid to totally bomb this...okay I lied, I am a bit nervous. LOL Anyway, I'm going to use various foods as the #'s, and then animate the hands with music/sound effect of chomping. The clock in itself will be "the beast" per se consuming the time. Nothing really long, will probably be amusing. I'm not an expert on After Effects yet, but I'm going to give it a good try! Be gentle, and wish me luck. :) Will post up later tonight I hope!!

FAVORITE EGG THINGIE:
Well, admittedly I'm a sucker for things that get a laugh out of me. I enjoyed watching the kid-like animation/video story that we saw in class last week. Although I really love stories in general, that one stuck out to me. :)

The Art of Camoflauge *hides*

Grasping the giant, potential-to-break-wrists Seeing Sideways book, I simply placed it in my lap, with my hands on a chunk of pages and flipped it open, hoping for something inspiring...muttering all the while to myself "no whammies, no whammies, please NO whammmiess!"

I was pleasantly surprised! I opened up to page 264 entitled: Camouflage. *insert magical epiphany music playing* AWESOME. So here's my thoughts on it.

There is a rather large black and white picture on most of the two pages. It took me a second to realize what it was a picture of...a dalmation dog blended into the background...of outside in a back yard? Is he in a lake? On a street? I think that's the whole point here. It really made my imagination jump around from one guess to the next. There was a quote my eyes were drawn to which said: "I spilt spot remover on my dog and he disappeared" - Jack Benny. This is very true of the picture, because at first glance you do not see the dog, you see spots and splotches and what not. The dog was truly hidden yet...but was he really? :) Very thought provoking indeed!

"Camouflage operates by either making the conspicuous inconspicuous or the inconspicuous conspicuous." (try saying that 10 times fast lol) It goes on to mention how the objective of camouflage is to mislead, and not conceal. There are different types of camouflage too, such as counter shading - a gazelle for instance. It's markings help it appear flat and entirely disappear in favorable lighting. Then there's disruptive patterns - like a tiger, who can easily blend in with taller grass. Also, there is confrontational markings - such as brightly colored, but poisonous Great Barrier Reef fish, flaunting them around saying "Hey don't eat me, unless you've a death wish! RAWR n such!" All these work in a delicate balance to mislead...and I began thinking, what are some things that we, as humans, do as a part of camouflaging aka: misleading?

Our clothes, like certain colors or patterns, might for example mimic a leopard (ahem, certain styles or eras more than others of course), or we might talk a certain way "No honey, you don't look fat in that" to help mislead but the tone it's said in does not entirely conceal our thoughts. What about plastic surgery in order to look younger? Doesn't that mislead...Another thing to think about with this picture is negative (white) space vs. the black. The splotches actually help your eyes move around the picture in order to see the Dalmatian dog. This is based on it's design, and how our eyes perceive something, I guess I'm recalling some things from my Design Principles class perhaps even, and boy is that a whole nother can o worms!

This article was an interesting read, and it really got my thoughts going about relating to it! Plus, now that I've typed camouflage about a dozen times I surely will not forget there is a "u" after camo. LOL. I'll leave you with this quote: "Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal." - Russell Lynes