welcome to art nerds united.

happy 2005, everyone.  this year was the hardest year ever, and the ending is bittersweet.  at times my life feels insane, an entanglement of emotions and obligations.  boredom sets in, and i wish for more than a studio apartment, a part time job, and a thesis to write.  but my mom helps me keep my head on straight, as does my best friend (Isabelle).  Thank god for them.  They also know that unrequited love is hard (sometimes it feels so rotten), and I don’t  care what Mama Cass said, it’s not a pleasure to be sad… although that is a good song ("Fools rush in, so here i am, awfully glad to be unhappy…*).

So although I’ve technically hit an all-time low, it really is an encouragement (in cognito) to take things one day at a time.  It’s a healthy realization that things don’t always go the way you thought they would.  But I’m starting to think they never do.  That’s all right.  A most desirable trait is flexibility, and the ability to see what’s right in front of you.

I’m thankful for the New Year, and this year I really understand its meaning.  I always thought that its potential for ‘renewal’ was a hoax and a bit artificial; but having been through what I have this year, I know now that this is a chance to reflect on what has happened since one year ago, meditate on our mistakes and triumphs - often the former is exaggerated and the latter are disguised - and try to make conscious changes in our lives.  ‘New Years Resolutions’ may seem pointless if you don’t feel that anything needs to be changed (or if you happen to try the same resolution as most people and as you have in years past - quit smoking, lose weight, exercise) but if you give yourself the chance to really reflect on even one major event that has happened in the last year (a death, a failure, any change - whatever size), then from these meditations you can really learn something about yourself and realize that it is within your purview to change your own situation or yourself - although I must admit, both take more than a year to do.

So the New Year is a celebration of everything we can possibly know, because it is a celebration of ourselves - constantly changing, learning, and experiencing what life brings our way.  Bring it on!!  Yippee!  HAPPY NEW YEAR!

so i return - but perhaps not with good news.  over the past weeks i have considered the following: (1) writing fiction. (2) moving to Texas - early. (3) going to library science school and becoming an archivist. (4) subsequently giving up my thesis. (5) adopting a cat, curbing lonliness. (6) becoming a journalist. … and so on.  the list continues.  my thesis is starting to feel like a burden once again, and i’m tempted to scrap this third topic and start again.  but how many times can i start again?  i’ve already done it once, or maybe two or three times, with no result other than that i embark on an exciting new subject that i can fully expect will begin to weigh on me when i realize that it is too massive for me to treat in a thirty page paper.

so my current inability to handle this project at times makes me feel like a mega-wimp.  so many other people accomplished where i failed.  yes, my thought train goes here sometimes… maybe too much… however, i realize that this fact opens new possibilities to me.  my desire to become a being of constantly accumulating knowledge, more of a generalist, branching out from art and institutional studies, to literature and travel writing, history and modern languages.  I have always had widely divergent interestes - as a child, i loved science, literature, and history… anyway, sometimes i imagine myself as an archivist or a book dealer, one that holes herself up in a small storefront overflowing with books, or protector of some realm of knowledge that would become my own world.  sometimes i have a truley nineteenth-century disposition.  and a romantic soul.

regarding my thesis, however, it’s not that i don’t enjoy the research.  i really love to accumulate perspectives to a situation, in this case turn of the century Chicago, and to really feel that i know something.  reading the history of Chicago has, as I had hoped, given me new reasons to brood over the contemporary public and cultural spaces here.  i have made several trips down town, to different museums this month.  i love watching people there.   i love following groups of people around who seem to be talking about the architecture of the place or trying to learn or find meaning in one of our museums.  i am very curious about the educational process that takes place (whether or not successfully) in museums, although i tire of the conversations currently taking place in museum studies: about info-tainment, ‘disnification’ of knowledge, aesthetic/ethnographic subjectification, private patronage, etc. etc.  Most of what I read about museums is either dire - pessimistic, cynical - or (dare i say it) boring.

But still, my favorite place is the Field here in Chicago.  it is truly a museum of museums.  each exhibit is SO different, each telling of a different approach to the cultures they represent.  one of the strangest juxtapositions i saw there was the exhibit on africa, which situates you in small communities in differing countries there - and it is a very interesting attempt to give a midwestern american such as myself an idea of a very different contemporary culture.  you "meet" a family, and through likenesses and videos you learn about their familial structure, rituals, way of life, et cetera.  another part of the exhibit shows how africans who live in the desert can stand the heat.  anyway, so you spend about half an hour here, and suddenly you step onto a slave boat.  it’s very dramatic, and a bit archaic, to go from contemporary africa to post colonial america.  i still don’t know what to make of it - it’s not the ’slave trade’ exhibit i disagree with, but the manner in which it was transitioned directly and abruptly from a genuine attempt to exhibit african culture in a non-objectifying way.  compare this to ‘exhibits of africans’ at worlds fairs in the 19th century if you know anything about that.  but i wonder what an exhibit of the contemporary american would look like.