Tag Archives: education

the art of… art

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the creative process is interesting as i find many things in life.

sitting, pondering, doing, erasing, doing over, trying, retrying. scrapping it and starting all over.

writing, painting, sculpting, creation of any kind.

for myself i’ve tried many types.

pottery making is fun even if messy. getting the right speed of the wheel, the right pressure on the clay outside and inside. big, small, tall, squat. plate, bowl, cup. glazed, unglazed. if you mess up, chuck it (gently) back into the pile of clay and start over. i signed up for a single 2-3 hour class and made four different things. i like three of the four only because i messed up on the fourth and ran out of time before i could fix it.

painting/drawing i seem to suck at. in middle school the teacher told me that i had a lot of imagination but no talent. that’s the only reason i got a ‘d’ instead of an ‘f’ i think. maybe i should try a lesson. every so often i tried and pencil sketch something usually something right in front of my like my hand. some of the doodles aren’t that bad. but it isn’t something i can reproduce easily.

writing, somewhat rhetorically obvious, is what i enjoy. even in high school i enjoyed it. unfortunately i was told often i shouldn’t be wasting my time on it by teachers, family and friends. i even tried to submit a piece to a writing contest. the way i remember it, i spent quite a lot of countless nights awake working on it. i then gave it to my ap english teacher to review and submit. one day i asked if she had heard anything. again unfortunately she never got around to looking at it. i don’t remember an apology or anything. i still don’t think she even liked me since i was never as good as my sibs had been. i do remember the feeling of being crushed and i did give it up for a while. i took some classes in college but it wasn’t the same.

so now i’m making another run just a little differently this time and maybe i will even take another chance in the future at something a little longer than a blog.

to anyone that creates, keep it up. don’t let them tell you it’s not good enough. let your heart and head decide. beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

-Santa’s Fallen Angel

 

In the end the turkey still loses

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Why the following has latched onto my brain I don’t know, but I feel like this is leading to some great epiphany or a great madness. Either could be a fun ride.

Stuffing. Such a simple word. Yet it can mean three different things.

The act, the food, the stuff in objects.

Here we go. I am stuffing the stuffing into the turkey. I am stuffing the stuffing into the cushion.

Language is so interesting sometimes when I actually pay attention to it as I use it but really when I hear or read it from someone else. I have a facebook friend that chooses to write in what seems like a foreign twisted version of the english language. The thing is I can actually understand what she writes, mostly. Even though I had never seen those letters combined in such a way, they mostly made sense. I’m perplexed. I don’t know why I’m perplexed but I am.

Isn’t that somewhat how language works?

You start making your own sounds and hearing from others and you watch people talking and you watch those lip movements. You then start to mimic these. You get feedback and repetition. Then the dreaded alphabet. We have it lucky. If my random knowledge holds, I think the Chinese language has about 10,000 characters. Right? We have 26 to use to make words. 10,000! I think my brain just had a seizure. I can’t imagine someone knowing all of the characters AND the words they make up. But I’m sure they need to know more than 26 characters.

It’s still interesting that the English/American language (I don’t say footpath) is still considered a complicated language. I do get it. I read (present tense) things from people who live here that can’t use basic language skills. Like college level people who are still working on writing a complete sentence and paragraph. Not to say I don’t make mistakes when I write. I do. I also take liberties with the language. I don’t always write complete sentences.

If you get a chance to talk to someone who wasn’t born here or had a very proper education you can immediately tell the difference. The spelling and grammar are usually spot on. Unfortunately maybe because we don’t write so good it can seem mechanical and too precise. Like the way most real-life animated creatures are obviously fake and we’re ok with that but those animated creatures that are getting closer to acting/looking like humans just creep us out. They are on the edge but just not good enough yet. We can still spot the difference.

Getting back…

After the alphabet, we work on combining them into things we call words. C. A. T. = ?

It’s ok if you missed that one. Everyone needs a goal to strive for. But it’s not just how you put those letters together. It’s the other words around it that can give it meaning and how to pronounce it. I have read (red) it. I will read (reed) it. Then there are the words that sound alike. I will right the problems when I write about rites. This is a quintuple doozy since right and write and rite sound alike and right can be to correct, the direction, and a claim. You read the sentence and if you know of the rules you can understand what it means. It’s the rules and the corollaries to the rules and the exceptions to the rules and the exceptions to the exceptions (I made this last one up), that confuse the crap out of people who trying to figure out the language. A perverse reason I wish we could read and write american better as a country.

As this year progresses ponder on the nature of the word and be thankful at thanksgiving that we can communicate. And as I said, in the end the turkey still loses, unless it’s tofurkey.

Yeah I know, I stretched at the end to bring it back to the title. I can’t say it deviated from the intent since this one grew as I put thought to electron.

Hoping for a more educated world.

-Santa’s Fallen Angel