Kick, Flip, Twist

But good luck to everyone for however long you stay in school. Good luck on your exam/presentations. And goodnight. It's time to log out...wow this feels weird. Leaving is hard.

So here we are. End of the first year. Yaaaayy. We did it. Now we are pretty much officially sophomore a and can look down on the freshman in the fall. But like let's just take a minute to rant on how stressed we are now. No matter what level in school you're in, as soon as the end is near every teacher tells you to finish a month's work of work in like 2 weeks. It's just like you know I have other classes right? They don't care. You know I like to live a normal teen/adult life? Do it some other time. It's nice to have dinner on time isn't it? Nope, eat instant noodles behind Word. On top of project 3, I have to keep designing a magazine for the Rolling Stones, A logo for a tea company, a package for the company, a book based on a quote, and I have to build a 3D clock...that actually works! Oops, forgot I also have to glue all my projects to boards for one of my classes. I just can't even handle waking up knowing I have to go to class and be told about something else to do. Like that clock is enough. I'm sure everyone knows how putting things together always go wrong. Nothing fits, it won't hold right, and you're stuck on the floor trying to figure out how to make it work. But I mean let's be optimistic, it's almost over. We're at the point when we can almost spend every day catching up on sleep we spent to do projects. We can go to work without a bag to study at the register or during break. Soon we can just give up, relax, most of you can go home, and just be naked alone in your house with food and Netflix. Like what's better than that?! If you haven't been nude in you're house, you're missing out. Obviously until summer when you can be outside until like 10 pm. They say the first year is the worst. So if it is, then we can all relax since nothing will beat us down more than this. Stay strong, smoke the weed we all know you have, hug your friends if you're leaving, hug them just because it's psychologically helpful, and let's stand up to the load these adults have been crushing us with for the last 3 months!

Commenting on blogs is so much better than having to write the usual long posts. Even though you get to pick your own topic, having to drag it out for so long makes it hard. Especially without going into a whole new subject. Commenting makes us more of a class. We get feedback and learn if there's someone else that feel the same we do even though they don't post it at that time. And it makes us look good when we actually have like and reblogs in the little thunder bolt section. There's nothing really new to learn about tumblr because the features don't really change. Once you have it for a month or two it's just like all social media. The only things that change are what you see posted. And sometimes you may find that people post the same thing over and over. Then there's nothing new.

For my final project, I want to convince people to embrace the different ways or experiences people share. No two people are the same, but isn't that why the world is so advanced and unique now? We should all want to be different, or "weird" as some say. I have friends that people wouldn't talk to a second time because of the way they act. It's those reasons that I choose them to be around me. It gives life so much unpredictability. Everything is full of color and fun. They make you feel like a kid that's never grown up. Have you ever had someone tell you their alphabet or numbers have individual colors? Sometimes they can see colors from curtains sounds? Isn't that a huge double-take moment?! What do those things even mean? How is it possible? Synesthesia is what makes it possible and most likely the "weirdest" thing around. No, it's not a disease. You can't catch it. It doesn't make you any less human than anyone next to you. In fact, I think it makes you better. Such a new view on life to share. Who cares that the tree is green. I want to talk about why the word "ice" tastes like cheese. I want to know why people associate such a thing as a disease. Why are these people ridiculed because they're just telling us what they feel? Don't you have friends that are different? If not, don't you think you're the "different" friend in the group? My argument boils down ultimately to opinion. It uses the biological results of synesthetes having the same brain functions as average people to argue that they're just like us. There are many people, mostly kids, that tease their classmates because the don't understand it. I bet there are also adults that do it too. It slightly touches on how the world defines "weird," "different," and etc. when the truth is, nobody is the same. There's no such thing as "normal." My project will use the average essay layout, with pictures added in to help understand the medical terms I may run into, or just to break up all the boring text. I'm not using too many of the specific terms because I want children, elementary to middle school age, to understand this. They're the ones that are the most judgmental of their peers. Older people with be somewhat a secondary audience. In the previous project, I had to do a lot of groundbreaking research. I had only know the definition of "synesthesia." Now I know the range of rates that a synesthetic person is among non-synesthetes. I got just a glance at how their senses actually connect inside the brain and what forces the effect to actually happen. I even found that there are several types of synesthesia, and people with it normally have multiple types. Can you imagine not one, but multiple senses connecting in your head?! I still need to go deeper on how average brain senses worked compared to these. I have to know the difference in how they perform not just mental tasks, but according to how it contributes to a person's actions. Scholastically, I'm not contributing much. The work on what this is and does is done and far beyond me. My aim is to add why it's not a problem to the world as some people see it to be or wonder if it is. This is how I want my second project to work. I really want to make people feel it. My most recent design project placed us in the shoes of a synesthete to make a piece. It was scary because I had never heard of such a thing and didn't know how to go at it. Eventually, I understood it. It was amazing. The world took a new shape to me. I want everyone to feel it and know it's really awesome

Our final project seems to be the heaviest one. Since I've already gathered quite a bit of information on the topic, I'm going to continue using synesthesia. This time not to explain why it would be fun to have. This next project will focus on explaining to people that see it as some disease. People have been ridiculed and misunderstood all because of something they're born with that differs from the average experience. But is that enough to actual call someone sick or weird? To label a bodily process a infection or disease? No, it's not by far. Nobody can choose what they have. Being born isn't some walk out of a convenience store to the doctor shopping for genes. We have what he get and we learn to live with it. Others around us receive differently, but we learn to live alongside them. Sometimes we get people that are further off than others, but they still deserve to be understood and walked alongside of. My next project work towards making us feel this "disease" as if we truly have it. Im not too confident it will work. It's almost impossible to make people feel what's not there. But I can try so why not? Most likely, it'll all be done on some long essay that nobody wants to read, but I'll add pictures so we don't get bored. Maybe I'll try to use the "series of blog posts" when I figure how that works. It'll break up my research to make it less boring all at once into some kind of sequel of information. That sounds cooler already. Meeting people that are weird brings the real fun into life. The unpredictability, nothing sounding stupid, people that make you feel comfortable for being the you when you're alone. We all do weird stuff, maybe even things that'll make someone look at you like you're insane. But we all need and have someone that makes it alright. And synesthetic people need that "someone" too. If you're brave comment or make a post of something you think/do that's not normal. You'd be surprised at how many others think it's cool or do the same.

Robert Booth's "The Scrutiny of Objects" was my favorite exhibit of all the ones we seen. At first it seemed like a colorless bunch of sculptures. Come to find out, he just used tens of thousands of pieces of tape to cover everything. But why? What was he trying to gain by unifying everything? Would've it been better to highlight one thing with a different tape or "cover"? Was they're something else besides tape that works better? The story of dementia seemed to be the dominant explanation of his work. But let's take the boat for example. The boat had holes all over it. Some say is was the effects of losing your memories. But who cares about losing some. You forget things all the time. So if you lose something, can't you just replace it? Maybe you forget the time you rode a bike. That "hole" can be replaced with the time you ate a one pound cheeseburger. So why are the holes there? It slightly portrays that he or people have a limited amount of memories, when in fact, memories are quite endless. The same can applied to the lawn mower piece. So either we were wrong about it being dementia or Booth didn't accurately sculpt the disease. Maybe we have the right idea of dementia, but the wrong concept of the holes and grass. We'll never know. The sculpture of the ball, footprints, and can was another personal favorite. I liked how the string reached out from the wall to the can. It attached the ball to objects not connected to the wall. Unfortunately once again, I didn't like the interpretation we came up with. The idea was that the footsteps were bookmarks as to were Booth had been. They stretched all over the black mat. He even placed them in an unpredictable pattern. They're just there. But why? As you live life, you take countless numbers of footsteps. Walking to your kitchen can be anywhere from 5 steps to 30 steps. So what does this say in comparison to life? Can you define where you've gone inside of such a small sculpture? Or any sculpture to be exact. I don't believe that's what the footsteps are for. But I can't think of what they would be that relates to his ball, string, and can. Art is just a mess. I don't really care to know why people do what they do. It's brainpower and time I'd rather spend on something else. Plot twist, I'm an art major. Figure out a concept behind that.