Him: When in San Diego, when you take the top down and insist it won’t rain, you’ll probably be right.

At 11:30 as I was about to go to bed, I saw a giant column of sparks a couple of streets over and ventured out to investigate.

The big house on the corner of First and Clement was burning. Radford’s a party school, and this is the fratty area of town, so many of the spectators had beer and seemed to be enjoying the drama. Others were simply amazed. You could feel the heat from a block away.

From the construction fabric ringing the property and the fact that nobody in the talkative crowd seemed to know who lived there, I got the impression the house was vacant. The reek of gasoline hinted at arson, which is a shame. I love old houses and I hate to see them go.

My instincts, honed through photography class beat-downs, kicked in and I took about 150 pictures. Here are a few of my favorites on flickr. You have to click through to the original size to really see the colors.

A. paint them
B. apply to hair in streaks
C. squeeze into pasta
D. make lemonade
E. hurl them in a rage

It was the fourth of July, and a red, white, and blue cake seemed essential.

 

 

Julia had already challenged us with her rainbow cake, and after a brainstorming session we came up with our own strategy for creating multicolored cakes. It is simple and fun!!

Multicolored cake recipe:

1. Select a white cake recipe. I prefer an easy one, because I am lazy.
2. Mix together the ingredients.
3. Separate the cake batter into different bowls for each color. Add food color to each bowl.
4. Pour different colors of batter into bundt cake pan.
5. Swirl together with rubber spatula. Do not swirl too much, or the colors will mix together and become muddy.
6. Bake normally and frost as desired.

Today me and Cathy (CATHY AND I- GRAMMAR GASP!) went to the art building for old times’ sake. Aided by the mysterious fact that someone installed the deadbolt backwards so you could turn the lock from outside, we ventured in and discovered this déclassé and unacceptable furniture arrangement.

Look at the grainy cell phone shot of this and despair:

So we added up our collective MFA abilities and made the lobby the “peak of chic”.

There’s a lot going on here, all of it good.

I love when people paint their 4X4 with Cammo, and I love when they stencil on their cars.

I did the same thing with my tiger car back in the day:

Compare the beauty:

And just a cherry on top, the Jeep driver left the keys in the ignition (at the liquor store-ha!) A ballsy move if ever I saw one. I do not have the level of trust to do this, even in small town America where I live.

I am writing this post because I have never read an article or blog that says you should go to grad school. Most say you should save your time and money. I went to grad school and I stand by my decision. Why I chose to get a MFA:

Not to teach

You have to be realistic about college teaching as a career move. College teaching has bad pay, intense competition, and extremely strict experience requirements. For teaching K-12, a master’s in education is cheaper and more practical.

(I actually love teaching, but it is not my current career goal. I am considering it as a second career in 10 to 20 years.)

To get beyond employment plateau

I worked design jobs and was at a competitive disadvantage because my degree was in another field. The diploma itself didn’t matter as much as the fact that I didn’t have the institutional knowledge and depth of experience I needed. Everyone else got that in art school, so I decided to do that too.

Also, I work at a university. Almost all the people with big jobs at my place of employment have an advanced degree.

True interest in the subject matter

I truly love the subject and wanted to increase my knowledge of it.

Affordability

A cheap state school with a competitive MFA program was 15 miles from my house in a rural area of Virginia. This made school convenient and attainable. A big-name school in a city was completely out of the question since I would have had to pay back $150K in student loans.

(My MFA is in 2D visual art. My concentration is in painting and drawing. I took electives in commercial art, graphic design, and photography. I had a great experience and I am extremely happy with my decision to attend this program.)

I can’t even describe how tired I am of these. Sim City has always had them all the way back to 1995. This is not a new idea and it just gets more and more annoying.

Example: Picnik, the Flickr online image editor. Status message as it is s…l…o…w…l…y loading the interface over my terabyte connection here at work:

Applying sunscreen…

I think there’s another one along the lines of:

Unwrapping sandwiches…

I get it. The application is called Picnik, so all the status messages have to be picnic themed in order to have an integrated design based on this stupid application name. Right? WRONG!

This is not a clever design. It is annoying, and it sucks.

What is wrong with

Loading…

?

NOTHING! Loading is perfect! It gives you information and doesn’t make you feel like all these highly paid professionals think of you as a 3rd grader who is entertained by this crap.

I’m such a hater, but whatever.

Last week, following a night of tormented dreams, all of Julia’s fish suddenly died just before the slew of celebrity deaths. Sort of a grim prognostication. RIP, fish.

And in tribute to Michael Jackson, who although crazy was unquestionably a genius, I created Sparkleflask:

Benjamin Kunkel poses the question: Is my life richer with high speed internet? His answer: No. He is too brilliant and elite to concern himself with online content, which he considers to be inferior to practically everything ever published. Which suggests he hasn’t read much trashy fiction. And which is ironic since his diatribe against online content is found… online.

My life is infinitely richer with ubiquitous wireless internet. I do a lot of work on the computer- and I always have- and it’s nice to be in touch with people online. I like being on the computer. And just for the record, I like lots of other things too.

He writes:

“The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online”

His article is certainly a case in point.

As Julia puts it via text message:

shit like this is why i can’t finish grad school

I think that people who complain about how the internet and texting is destroying the written word are missing the forest for the trees. Yes, it is undeniable that texting doesn’t happen in Oxford English, but neither does practically anything else, and IT NEVER HAS. Idiosyncratic grammar is commonplace. The golden age of literacy is now.

How is this POSSIBLY GOOD?

Great, my battery needs replacing. I can’t WAIT to pry my computer apart or send it back to Apple for 2 weeks.

This isn’t “innovation”- this is “ham-fisted”!

This is what I would like– Apple, Microsoft, Zeus– whoever is listening:

Scenario: You are connected to your external hard drive. (Your computer, not you personally.) You need to leave RIGHT NOW but the drive is busy. You try to eject it, you get an error message saying something along the lines of “This drive is busy. Close applications and try again.” So you wrack your brains, wondering what file on the external you were using with what application. You guess wrong. You try again and again but no dice, you just can’t eject the drive, and then in frustration yank the cord out of the machine and leave, bellowing in rage and now late.

Powers That Be: Why don’t you PROMPT ME to quit applications that are using files on the external so I don’t have to TRY TO FIGURE IT OUT. You could say: “iTunes is using files on [your external.] Would you like to: Save and close; Force quit iTunes without save; Cancel.” So easy and graceful.

My music is already on an external hard drive and I got a new laptop. Here is how I got my new Mac working with my existing library located on my external. (I’m putting the instructions here since every time I change machines I wonder how I got it to work last time, and the articles online just send me in circles.)

If your library is on an external hard drive already:

Here’s how you make the old library work with the new laptop:

On your external, navigate to iTunes Music. Inside that directory find iTunes. Copy iTunes back onto your local machine at: user:Music/iTunes/iTunes Music (yes, the finished result will be iTunes/iTunes Music/iTunes)

Launch iTunes while holding down the Option key. This will cause iTunes to prompt you to select an iTunes library. Navigate to your external and select the iTunes Music directory.

iTunes should now work properly. But iTunes can be temperamental and it may give you a file-not-found error for each track (looks like an exclamation point.) If this happens:

Troubleshooting steps:

1. Relaunch iTunes.

If that does not work:

1. Go to iTunes>Preferences>Advanced. Change the music library location to your external.
2. Select “Keep iTunes Music Folder organized”. Select “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library”
3. Click OK.
4. Go to Library>Consolidate Library. Click OK.

If this does not fix the problem:

1. On local hard drive, go to: user:Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/iTunes
2. Open iTunes Library.xml with a text editor
3. Change the below string to the correct path:

Music Folderfile://localhost/Volumes/[Your External Hard Drive]/iTunes%20Music/

4. Relaunch iTunes.

3. If this does not fix the problem either, just copy all the music files off your external hard drive into the local iTunes Music folder, relaunch iTunes and start over with all the music locally. It’s annoying but ultimately faster and less frustrating than fighting with iTunes.

I had a bottle of awful wine* and decided to make sangria.

Sangria Recipe — translated from the Spanish by a legitimate Spanish major:

Take 1 bottle of putrid red wine (chilled)
Juice of 1/2 orange
1/2 orange (cut into small pieces)
1 apple (cut into small pieces)
1 20 oz bottle of lemon-lime soda
Several shots orange liqueur (Triple Sec, Cointreau, or whatever)

Combine all ingredients in an attractive pitcher. Serve over ice with umbrella straws at a sunny sidewalk cafe. I mean, drink out of the skulls of your enemies.

*Trader Joe’s 2 Buck Chuck. Whoa! It is bad.

Sometimes I get tired of all the doctored photography in the world and I want to put the camera on a weird brown setting and then be too lazy to correct the red-eye.

Like so:

But then sometimes I switch it up and fix the image.