Birthday Thoughts

Last year, I posted a video of myself essentially trapped in the world that is cyberspace.

This year, I'm officially going to give my decision that I've been sitting on for the last week or so. My mind and energy already made that clear these past few days given the lack of productivity.

So, yeah, I'm not graduating this semester. The more people I talk to, the more it is clear that I need more time. What I think about the department, my teacher, my self doesn't matter at this point. Objectively, I haven't met the level of standards for the class in order to graduate. My paper is nothing but examples after examples with no real correlation to the work. The work is starting to appear forced and tries too hard to tell the viewer where it is I want them to go, almost to the point of insulting their intelligence. Outside my own mind, I'm a wreck physically, staring at notes trying to figure them out only to ultimately leave in silent frustration.

With a month left in the semester, I'm going to start asking questions like hell. What kind of paperwork do I have to do to get this over with? What happens to the money I paid to participate in the walk this semester? Will I be able to keep my studio space over the summer or move out? Can I still get financial aid even though I'm way past the deadline to turn it in? Do I have to go through the entire process of thesis again since I'm essentially retaking the class? After all the paperwork is filled, do I still have to show up for class since I'm technically not withdrawing?

"Thorough" may be brought to OCD levels once stop asking questions to the people that can answer them.

A feel-good closer for those who know the relationship I have with my family: Since the mid-term letter and my ever-present stress of panic and confusion, my family has started to get a better understanding of what it is I'm doing. They come from the school of thought that making art is easy and that anything can be art with time and care. To see someone like me be told "Sorry, you're stuff is weak, and we think you need more time" is quite the wake-up call to what I've been saying for a while to anything that thinks art is easy. So while I was off looking for books to beef up my paper's cited resources and artists as examples of tactics and aesthetics accepted by art history, they were off trying to figure out how to best help me. This was mostly through conversation about my day and trying to understand what it was that Terry or Lauren or Kristi or Amanda was telling me when I asked them for help. Most recently, my mother made me aware of a show in Washington DC featuring anime and manga which apparently features an animation done by Takashi Muramaki, the first animation I've heard of from him. With so much stress and depression looming over my head to the point where they see my video game behavior more as a cry for help than a time-waster, it was suggested that a kind of vacation would be good for me. Though, I would have to do some homework into finding out what other exhibits or museums there are in the DC area we could go to that fall in the time frame of this show. But then again, what vacation doesn't involve some kind of homework like that?

To the outside observer, it may appear that I've become hard boiled and do not appreciate the attempts they are making to understand what it is I want to do and why being told that what I am doing isn't up to par is making me more panicked than a claustrophobic trapped in a stuck elevator. And, yes, I could do better in showing my appreciation for what they are doing for me rather than storming off more upset than I was before the conversation started because of the failure of trying to suppress socially unacceptable reactions. But when I'm about to go to sleep at night and as I'm fighting with Skippy for space on the bed to actually sleep on, the thought comes wandering with a casual stroll. And I end up finally seeing what everyone else has been saying about my parents. They really are good people, and I'm lucky to have them. My only regret is that it took me a quarter of a century to realize this.