Amour-Fou♥Net

Hmm… Yeah I guess the reason I haven’t blogged in awhile is because nothing interesting has been going on.

OH WAIT EXCEPT FOR THE PART ABOUT ME GRADUATING FROM COLLEGE!!!

Ahem.

So yeah, in the past month or so, I’ve been beyond busy doing some of the following things:

1. Finishing up my last classes ever
2. Taking my last exams ever
3. Writing my last papers ever
4. Playing my last v– Just kidding. I’ll never stop playing video games.
5. Writing my last Spec article ever, also known as my senior column
6. Moving out of my dorm for the last time ever

And then, finally, after 4 years (22 years?) of waiting, I actually graduated! I passed all my classes, walked the stage, donned the cap and gown (below), and it was/is official!!!

The pic is of me and one of my best friends, Amanda, at Commencement. It was pouring rain–hence the raincoat you can see peaking out from under my “gown.” And the apple cores? Well one of the cool and/or annoying things about Columbia (depending on how you look at it) is the school’s trademark gigantic Core Curriculum. So you know. Symbolically holding actual cores. It used to be a tradition, but then people started throwing non-eaten apples at the ceremony and hurting people. Oops.

So now I’m back at home–actually I’m kind of homeless at the moment, because Tom and I haven’t found a place to live in the fall yet, but for the moment I’m living at my family home until Tom and I leave the country in June. To go on our epically awesome vacation to (in case you’ve forgotten!) South Africa, Vietnam (switched from Thailand), Hong Kong, China, and Japan. So excited.

All I have to do now is play a ridiculous number of video games (more on that soon, obviously) and get our visas together. The latter of which is actually stressing me out a great deal more than I expected. Poop.

But yeah. In case you can’t tell, I’m so so thrilled to be free and finished with school. Now if only I had a job…

Something you may not know about me (or you may, depending on who you are… hi dad!) is that when I was 16 or so, I was incredibly pretentious. I went through a phase during which I was obsessed with Surrealism and fancied myself a kindred spirit with the nearly-century-old movement.

There was a reason for this that is less pretentious and more earnest: I’ve always had extremely vivid, memorable dreams for my entire life, and at the time when I found Surrealism–specifically the work of André Breton (my domain is actually named after a book by him, incidentally…)–I was pretty much living half in real life and half in my dreams for various reasons. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I discovered a group of people (or at least one person) who believed that dreams were just as significant and waking life!

So this morning I happen to be at home in Philadelphia, and I was looking through some of my old stuff, and I found this old notebook that I used to carry around when I was sixteen and write in whenever inspiration struck. I had totally forgotten about this until now, but I now remember it well. And it is RIDICULOUSLY PRETENTIOUS. For the most part. The context: I was taking art classes over the summer while working at a cheese shop.

Here are some pictures of the notebook:

Here are some of the best, most delightfully pretentious excerpts:

The discovery is that (well, a number of things but first and foremost that) I cannot bring myself to be an artist. These people are not really people and they stand for what? I am a person and I mostly stand for love. To the extent that I stand for dreams + Surrealism (in its truest sense) it is to the extent that I stand for love. To the extent that I love, I love love. To the extent that I am in love, I am in love with love. To the extent that I live and/or breathe, I live and/or breathe love. To the extent that I ______, I ______ love. Artists love themselves and their pencils.

Art class is full of rules. It’s a throwback to the 1800s, but gleaning the most convenient bits from modernism. You’d think by now someone would have realized that “composition” as is dictated by books like Learn to Draw and so on is no significant. “GOOD”=accurate. Is it so strange that I bore myself to death as a draftsman? It is with a disbelieving and disgusted eye (shocked; appalled) that I view myself in this position. I am an “art student.” Undesirable term, that.

But all signs point to psychic life existing outside of time and space.

 
So basically I was a pretentious asshole when I was sixteen. No surprises there–isn’t everyone kind of a pretentious asshole in their teens? The funny thing is that I also found a history study guide from the same period that I made with a friend. It has a slightly different angle on life…

• •RADICAL REPUBLICANS
• •Critics of slavery (HARDCORE)
• •S&M and titty bars

 
Ooooooh high school. Sometimes I miss it. More posts to come! Sorry I’ve been so sporadic…