woostering

So, imagine you were me yesterday and had a horrid headache. It was the kind you wake up with, starts to go away, and comes back around dinnertime with a vengeance. However, after taking some tylenol (seeing as the aspirin earlier didn't do much good) and drinking about three glasses of water and my dad had done this wonderful massage-y thing to my scalp I was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for the headache to go away. I could tell it was. I was sitting clamly, focusing on my breathing because anything else would make it owrse and not better. And, since this process is kind of like meditation, my mind decided to narrate what it was noticing. I found the results somewhat fascinating.

I noticed that my glass of water, my glasses, and the tylenol bottle were all in this nice diagonal line. It's what artists refer to as an alignment, and that's what I called it because I had taken drawing first semester and learned all about them. The line from these three things then met up with one of the candleholders in the advent wreath. I couldn't tell whether or not it lined up with the corner of a stack of paper, because my glasses were off and I wasn't up to really trying to draw lines just yet. My head still hurt a bit.

I followed the alignment back and forth a while, appreciated how my glasses made a nice square shape because the part that goes over the  ears wasn't folded in. The diagonal line cut through the square not perfectly centered, but basically from the left lense to the right tip on the other side. Then I focused on the stack of paper which may or may not line up with this, and it bothered me because I'm an artistic person and my head hurt. It didn't really look like it lined up from where I was sitting, with my head in my hands, but I wasn't aout to move. Then I looked more closely (rather, as closely as I could at the moment) at the papers. They weren't stacked straight and one of the corners was bent, so I figured depending on where you were one of those corners would line up with something else on the table. I didn't try to imagine it, but I theorized that if I moved, maybe stood up and looked over the table, the corner that was bothering me might line up.

And then, because this kind of lucid thinking always comes with a revelation, I had a revelation. Alignments in real life are completely arbitrary. (No duh, you say. They're imaginary lines in the first place. Remeber I had a nasty headache at the time, okay?) An alignment could cease to exist in real life if I moved and look at the room from a different perspective. Movement removes alignments and reveals new ones. Alignments only really exist in pictures, because you can't change perspective in a picture. Sure, you could imagine quite clearly how things might look, but it'd be a completely different picture, and the alignments that held it together before would be gone.

By this point my headache was clearing and my need for semi-meditative breathing was much less, which meant that my train of thought was going to switch back to normal soon. For some reason I made a brief detour and thought a bit about the shape of out vision. I believe it's an oval. I've actually wondered about it before, because we see things within that oval of our vision but we so often put boxes around things that, by necessity, cut off part of that oval. I'm sure there's something art and psychology can or have pulled out of that.

Anyway, my final tohugh on alignments was that I much prefer and notice diagonal alignments, like the edge of the christmas tree on our fridge. Horizontal and vertical lines, and even things that are diagonal because of perspective that would be straight if you looked at them head-on don't interest me as much. I use them, and I suppose I like things that have them, but I'm drawn to lines that inherently aren't straight.

Then my headache was gone, and this bit of madness ended. I should finish cleaning my room. I should eat dinner soon too.

Friends are wonderful things. Even if some of them are lame (or forgetful or things) sometimes, so are we all and they can be forgiven. I luffs them a lot, and it's important to actually SEE people you luff over the summer. And my friend who moved to Nevada a few years ago is visiting soon and staying at my house, so this is good. Friends make you feel better. Conversation and contact can do a lot.

The fourth was also, surprisingly, good. I was all excited with the kind of excitement a nine-year-old gets from watching fireworks. It was oddly uplifting. My house has a wonderful nice deck, so we went up there to watch the show, because we can see about four major school and park fireworks displays as well as anyone in the neighborhood who got stuff. On a slightly different note, the economy can't be that bad because our neighbors had some pretty nice stuff, and a lot of it. It was pretty... A rather delightful night. Which is nice because for the last few years it had been somewhat depressing.

Otherwise my summer has been relatively uneventful and unproductive. I got some good drawing done but that was mostly toward the beginning in teh 'Out of school w00t' rush. I've touched photoshop twice. I finally finished the first chapter of something I started fixing halfway through the school year. Um... I have been writing some of the time. And I have been reading A LOT. I reading, like, four books right now. I still can't find it in me to keep picking up Agincourt, though. Maybe I'm just not in the mood.

And I had a headache two days ago and again today that DOES NOT WANT to go away, which makes doing much of anything hard. Ugh. I hate headaches. It's not bad enough to turn me into a mindless drone but enough to make actually DOING something out of the question. And for once I'm fairly sure it's not because I'm dehydrated. *just wants it to stop* I already took a nap today and I don't want to take another because getting too much sleep does wierd things to me and may actually make it worse.

But really that is all. I feel somewhat pitiful.