|
| I know you will all probably groan and say, "Here we go again..." when you hear this, but hey. It's my life. I can do what I want. I have a new blog. And it's wonderful. This means that while this blog is not dead, I may be letting it hibernate for awhile. Any of you who still consider yourselves my faithful followers and still hang on to my every witty word, may trundle over and check out the new posts. www.whimsicalfaery.blogspot.com Thank you, wonderful readers, thank you. | | |
| I have always enjoyed Groundhog Day. It is somehow delightfully ironic and quaint, kind of like a salt and vinegar potato chip. Just a regular boring potato chip…but it’s got that zing that makes your tastebuds sit up straighter. Groundhog Day pokes the tastebuds of my brain. However, as I was driving to work this morning, meditating on the greater meaning of Groundhog Day, I was suddenly attacked by a case of paranoia and suspicion. There are some things that just don’t add up. Let’s start with a bit of background. It is said that on February 2, the groundhog emerges from his burrow and looks around. If he can see his shadow on the ground, it means six more weeks of winter. If he doesn’t see his shadow, it means spring will come early. The most famous of these groundhogs is Punxsutawney Phil, who resides (oddly enough) in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Allow me to point out a few potential problems. First of all, what makes Pennsylvania the center of weather determination. I live in Ohio, where winter is just as crummy, and it has been cloudy all morning. Does the groundhog have to be in PA for it to be accurate? Second, how does the overgrown hairball know when February 2nd is? Is it a simple matter of a professional groundhog taking pride in his work and considering this an honorable duty, and therefore setting a groundhog alarm clock? Or maybe it is a natural occurrence, where somewhere deep in the genetic code of the groundhog, is a strand of DNA marked “wake master up on February 2nd.” Or, (and I think this is far more likely) what we have is one shifty-looking character who gets up at four in the morning, sneaks past the media to ol’ Punxsutawney Phil’s burrow, and pokes him with a stick until he wakes up. Then he cleverly blocks Phil from leaving the burrow by putting his stick in front of the entrance and leaning on it casually and nonchalantly, as if to say, “Hey dudes…just me…hanging out with my main man Punx. What? Who’s Punx? Oh, that’s what I call him. We’re tight like that.” Then, as the fanfare plays, and people await the event with the misty veil of tears in their eyes, he just deftly grabs his stick, gives it a few nonchalant twirls, and disappears into the throng. Punxie then does what any self-respecting mammal should do when rudely awakened by a poking stick. He rushes out and looks for someone to bite. Blinded by the flash of a million cameras and deafened by thousands of shrill children informing their parents that they HAVE to go to the bathroom now, and NO, they CAN’T wait, Punxie just looks around disdainfully and crawls back to his burrow for a hot toddy and a good nap. Or maybe we’ve been looking at this the wrong way from the beginning. Maybe the groundhog DOESN’T predict the weather. Maybe he CAUSES it. Groundhogs are mystical things, people. I could easily see them being part of a hateful secret cult of snow-mongerers. Whatever the case is…it doesn’t seem to matter. The National Climatic Data Center only gives groundhogs a 39% accuracy rating anyway. Which is pretty sad, considering that they have a 50-50 chance of being right. Hoorah for Groundhog Day! And here’s to sipping hot toddies with my main man Punxie. | | |
| I came across an interesting thought the other day. Granted, it was in a trite, melodramatic bit of Star Trek fan-fiction, but days after I had finished the book, this thought came back and surprised me with its insight. In the book, a woman sat in front of a painting every day, and claimed that every time she did, she saw something new in it, and learned something new about herself. Her friend could not understand this one iota. To him it was just a chaotic jumble of colors swirled around. Completely meaningless. And to be honest, that’s often how I’ve felt as well. Modern art has never grabbed me. Whether it was in music, painting, sculpting…I dismissed it all as the works of people too undisciplined to compose something that actually resembled….well, pretty much anything. If you’ve ever tried to write a song, you know it’s not just throwing a bunch of notes down wherever you feel like. The melody has to go somewhere. And usually, it has to come back again, or you begin to feel like the song isn’t going anywhere at all, just meandering on forever. You have to know what notes to put with others for each particular type of harmony. It doesn’t arrive by chance. If you’ve ever tried to draw a portrait, you know that you can’t just sit down and draw a bunch of lines and have it come out looking like the person you’re drawing. (Maybe some people can, and blessings on their talent and genius, but most of us can’t.) You have to pay careful attention to proportions, shading, and perspective. And yet, when modern art has crossed my path, it seems that the artist did just that. They closed their eyes and threw their brushes at the canvas. Then they closed their eyes again and drew out a slip of paper from their bag of random words and emotions, and called it the “title” of this “masterpiece.” Maybe that’s what they do. I don’t know. And to be honest, it really doesn’t matter. Whatever their methods, and whatever their motivations, what has changed is the way I view a piece, and the way it impacts me. I think modern art really does teach us about ourselves. Wow. What a hokey, relativistic, swamis-on-mountains, trancey, in-touch-with-nature-and-our-inner-selves thing to say. But hear me out. This should all make sense by the end. Let’s use an example. I did a google search for modern art and then clicked on “images.” I pulled up a painting that is basically a bunch of fairly muted colors swirled in wavy, curly stripes. And I looked at it. All at once, I noticed one particular black stripe that goes from the top to the bottom of the painting like a path. To me it looks like a bottomless chasm. Beside it is a white stripe that follows the same curves. The white stripe starts out really wide at the top, and then gets so narrow that it almost disappears into the black before widening again on its way to the bottom. As I looked at it, I was suddenly reminded of a couple verses from the Bible. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” “The way is straight and narrow, and few there be that find it.” And I thought of the part in Pilgrim’s Progress where they are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, and there are pits on both sides that lead straight to Hell. That idea, of walking along a narrow path, knowing that any wrong move could send me over the edge scares me. It’s an analogy that can be applied to so many things. Christians can apply it to their spiritual journey through life towards eternity. Bullied kids might feel like that path is their self-esteem, with those pits being full of people jeering at them, trying to trip them, and anything to get them to fall off. Someone struggling to make ends meet might see those pits full of their financial responsibilities. For me, the path is my purpose in life. The things God wants me to accomplish. And the things in that pit are my faults. My selfishness, procrastination, lack of discipline, pride, insecurity…all of those things have their long sticky fingers curled around my ankles. I am always peeling them off again. They are unrelenting. Sometimes I find myself crawling on my hands and knees because they’ve pulled me down so far. Sometimes I stop completely, sitting cross-legged on the path, the only strength I have left devoted to not falling off completely. This is all from two swirls. There are a lot more swirls for everyone else to choose from. Now, what if it really had been a painting of a narrow path with chasms on each side? To me, that would be powerful, but I wouldn’t have had to come up with it myself. It wouldn’t have anymore “swirls” for someone else to make into their own totally different picture. I’m not trying to say that it’s better than realism, not by any means. But I feel like I would have missed out on something if I would never have seen this painting and would never have put that extra effort into seeing something in it. Maybe I have an overactive imagination. Maybe I really am into that trancey, in-touch-with-my-inner-self stuff. Regardless of that, I have this mental picture to pull up in my mind to remind me to keep peeling those sticky fingers off. And the next time I’m at a museum, and I pass some mangled mass of wires sitting on a pedestal, I might actually stop and look at it, instead of blowing past on my way to the collection of Andrew Wyeth.  http://www.milesmodernart.com/modern-art-41108-24x48 | | |
| Do you ever get that way? You feel full of deep nebulous thoughts, and you really really want to write something thought-provoking, but everything is so foggy, you just can't get seem to capture anything...
See? Right between the last paragraph and this one was a five minute pause.
Maybe I shouldn't be trying to blog.
On second thought...
I love analogies. I love painting word pictures. I love explaining normal, everyday things in twisted weird ways that make everyone go, "Whoa! I never thought of it like that."
I have used analogies to describe white chocolate (like a knock-off Rolex you buy in NYC), denominational differences (like a snowman between two snow forts), heroism (in many dimensions a la Lord of the Rings), winter (like a pimple on the face of my life), politics (like a dog fight in your neighbor's yard), fairies (like the square root of a negative number), etc. etc.
Okay. There will be three parts to my post then. And yay! Some of them are interactive! (Woot! Interactive posts.)
First, I decided to come up with a special analogy, just for this post.
Saying to your hairdresser, "Surprise me," is like giving a three-year-old a bucket of paint and saying "Here honey, why don't YOU do the redecorating?"
The second part is "Finish This Analogy." I've come up with this great analogy that has all sorts of twisted potential. Your job is to come up with the person, place, thing, concept, etc., that I am describing.
________________ is like a woman who goes shopping, fully intending to buy a blender. But while she's at the store, she sees this man dressed up in a chipmunk costume telling her to buy three gallons of chocolate sauce. And she's so surprised that goes home with a lot of chocolate sauce.
And lastly, I come up with my best stuff when someone says "Annie, how would you explain ___________" So in order to perpetuate the strangeness, please submit requests for YOUR confusing things to be explained.
That definitely was not pensive or deep. Maybe thought-provoking. Incidentally, when people say "thought-provoking" I get this mental picture of a manatee sleeping by its stone pool in a zoo. And then some rude little boy comes along and starts poking it with his light saber. And every time the boy does it, the manatee twitches.
Okay. I'll stop now.
| | |
| Well, I'm back, but sorry about your luck. The important picture-laden post will not be forthcoming until I have the aforementioned pictures for ladening purposes. Stay tuned for the "Many Crazy Things Annie Did in Costa Rica and Nicaragua" or MCTADCRN, for short. | | |
|
