Art Appreciation

In art appreciation right now, we are learning about the various media of design. Everything from drawing to sculpture. So far we've gone over printmaking and drawing. Drawing is one that pretty much everyone already knows. I know a lot of these different media anyway, because I took art in high school and we used a lot of these media. Some of the types of drawing we learned about were chalk, charcoal, and brush and ink. I already knew a good bit about chalk and charcoal drawings, however I did not know much about brush and ink. Brush and ink is a more eastern way drawing. Not to many western artist use it because it is so complex and it does not allow you to erase. Eastern artists on the other hand love this form of drawing. It's as easy for them as drawing with a pencil is for us. The reason for this being that brush and ink was how eastern cultures use to write everything.
Yesterday we learned about a new type of media called printmaking. I did not know much about this media because I had only ever done a woodcut print. It turned out that there are four other types of printmaking than this that I had never heard of. Woodcut or linocut are pretty simple, you cut out the pieces you don't want to show up in the artwork and leave the rest to transfer the ink. Once you get done carving, all you have to do is roll ink over the top and then press and pull a piece of paper on it. I did not know however that if you wanted different colors, you had to make a different matrix for each color. I also didn't know artist would cut an X through the matrix so no other prints could be made.

The Color of Hunger

All emotions have a color associated with them. Red is the color of passion and anger. If you are angry, people say that you are seeing red. I guess red became associated with anger because people's faces turn red when they are angry. Green is the color of envy or the color of sickness. Green is the color of money, so an association between money and wants go hand in hand. Same thing goes for sickness. Whenever you are sick you look a little green or pale, therefore the color green has been associated with sickness. Yellow is the color of cowards. I'm not sure how this association came about. You have the term "yellow belly", but I'm not sure of its origins. Blue is the color of sadness. Not sure how blue came to be associated with sadness either, but I do know that a lot of songs use blue to describe sadness. However, there is not a color for hunger. Some might not consider hunger an emotion, but I do. When you are hungry, it is pretty much all you can think about, right? Hunger is also something you feel, therefore it is a feeling. But what is the color for hunger? It can't be in the green family because green is sickness, and when you are sick, you do not want to eat. It could, however, be in the blue family. When people are depressed, they tend to eat a lot. This situation is where the phrase "eating your feelings" came about. Girls eat ice cream and comfort foods after a bad breakup, supposedly. Don't blame me for that stereotype, blame Hollywood. Therefore, I think the color of hunger should be like a purple or violet color. With purple or violet, you get the cool feeling of the blues, it is not completely blue.

Halloween

I have two most memorable experiences from Halloween: chasing kids with a chainsaw and making a kid cry, but not on purpose. Each year at my school, we would put on a haunted house for our Fall Festival. In my junior and senior year, my class put on the haunted house. Both years I got to chase kids around with a chainsaw. In my junior year, we did a Saw kind of theme, in which a friend of mine laid tied up to a table and I would hide behind a curtain. After the kids would enter the room, my friend, Ian, would start talking to the kids trying to make them leave. Then I would pop out with the chainsaw roaring and act like I was chopping Ian up. Ian was a pretty good actor. He made it seem pretty realistic. However, don't get the wrong idea. I didn't chase around kids with a dangerous chainsaw; the chain had been taken off. The next year we did the haunted house in the gym and were able to have a lot more space. Unfortunately, we didn't really have a theme that year. It was more of just popping out at kids and trying to make them cry, which was fun without a doubt.
My next memory comes from when I was little and still went Trick or Treating. I was about ten years old and I got a costume that had one of the bleeding masks on it. Well maybe the bleeding part wasn't such a good idea. I walked up to a door to get some candy and a small child saw me. He couldn't have been more than four years old. He started balling. I bent over, with the mask still on, to try and comfort him and to tell him it wasn't real, but maybe I should have taken the mask off. I finally took the mask off and showed him I was just like him. He stopped crying and ran along with his mom. I'm sure he was fine afterward. It's a little funny looking back at it now.

Point of view of a freshly scrubbed floor

I actually run a scrub machine at my job. Every night I close at a grocery store, I have to dust mop the entire store and run a scrub machine. What goes through my head as I'm doing it is "if stock crew messes this up in the morning, I'm going to be pissed." Allow me to explain something to you: a bagger at any store is at the bottom of the food chain. If anything goes wrong that a bagger could have possibly played a role in, the bagger is held responsible automatically. It doesn't matter if he/she did it or not. They are held accountable. For instance: say I was bagging a lady's groceries and her eggs get broken. It does not matter if the eggs were broken because the cashier slung them down the ramp, the bagger is automatically assumed to have broken them, because they are the last person to handle them. While I'm talking about my job, here is another thing that I find annoying: whenever I talk to a customer, do you know what the first thing out of their mouth is? Are you in school? "No mam, I plan on bagging groceries the rest of my life!" That is the most condescending remark I have ever heard. Just because I am bagging groceries at a grocery store does not mean I don't have ambitions. The next thing the customer does is even worse. They act astonished that I'm in school. "Oh really! That is so good. Keep up the good work!" I loathe it with a passion.
Anyways, one thing would go through the mind of a freshly scrubbed floor: please don't let anybody mess me up. The floor knows its going to get stepped on, but it does not want to have anything spilled on it. So the next time you are in a grocery store, please don't mess up my floor. Do it for the floor's sake.

Why a teacher would change careers

It takes a unique individual to become a teacher. A teacher must be strong willed, first of all. Teachers have to put up with so much stuff, not just from their boss, but from their students as well. Kids are the cruelest individuals on the planet Earth. Kids show no mercy. If you are fat, they're going to call you fat. If you look funny, you can count on them letting you know. Teachers have to put up with this on a daily basis. Yeah you could say that parents do the same thing all the time; however, say a teacher teaches 25 students a day for eight hours. That would equal out to 200 hours a day at eight hours per kid. Then when they leave work, chances are they have to go home to their own kids. All the spitballs, fart jokes, and rude comments are enough to make the average person quit. I know when I was in grade school, we were horrible to our teachers. We'd go to class with the fart machines you can buy at Spencer's and hide them somewhere in the classroom. The someone would have the remote and just keep pressing the button throughout the class period. We made numerous teachers cry and want to quit. As a matter of fact we made some teachers quit, honestly. I would not want to put up with a teenager like I was. Not only do they put up with a lot of crap, teachers don't make that much money. So they get tortured on a daily basis for horrible pay. Some people might consider that to be the definition of insanity.

Something to do when there is no power

Whenever a hurricane rolls through Alabama, the power at my house always goes out. During our last major hurricane, me and my brother went to the Dollar Tree and bought a bunch of puzzles. I use to love those puzzles when I was younger. And the fact that my brother actually let me do them with him helped as well. Me and my brother did not really hang out much at that time. However, we hang out a good bit now. We would sit in the living room on the floor, in front of the window so we could see what we were doing. I'm actually not that good at puzzles. As a matter of fact, I'm horrible at them. Everyone says you are suppose to start with the border and then work towards the middle, but that doesn't work for me. I just end up having to look at every single piece. I don't know how my brother does it; he's able to just look at two pieces and see that they are going to fit together. I, on the other hand, have to try each side of the puzzle piece and each possible combination before I can rule a fit out. I guess this is why puzzles are so good for me to do when the power is out; they take me a long time to do. However, when they are finished you feel an overwhelming feeling of self-accomplishment.

Meet Joe Blog

The article is basically about how blogs are becoming more powerful in America. Blogs are not censored by anyone except maybe the site you post on, but you are able to create a completely independent blog as well. Therefore censorship is not an issue. Blogs are capable of saying the things that news stations and newspaper are either afraid to say or are simply not interested in saying. The article gives one example of this involving a US Senator. The Senator made a relatively hateful remark at a party, and the news mainstream ignored it completely. Blogs took on the issue instead and eventually the topic did reach mainstream news about four days later. As a result the Senator was forced out of his chair. Blogs are able to keep on writing about something until someone pays attention, unlike news stations who have to move onto the next big story the next day. The article goes on to say that blogs are biased unlike other media streams who are neutral. Because of this bias, the blogs are a lot more fun to read. The blogs are opinions shared by its readers.
The article suggests that blogs could replace mainstream media all together eventually, because they have a growing number of readers. With numbers grow well beyond the 100,000 thousand mark, it is hard to imagine how this could not happen. However, there is a downside. With people constantly reading biased material that is not concerned with the other side of the argument, their views and opinions can never be changed.
The article ends with a suggestion that blogs could even help a candidate into the White House. You think it would be possible after nom de blog Atrios earned a total of $25,000 for Senator John Kerry's campaign.

Vacation

By far my most incredible vacation was to Destin, Florida. Me and a few of my friends stayed in the most luxurious condo i have ever seen. My friend's boss is a spinal surgeon and he owned a half million dollar condo on the beach in San Destin. He let me and my friends stay there for free. The only thing we had to pay for was food. I love San Destin. It is so clean and people are pretty nice there. On the way there, we passed over the longest bridge i have ever been on. It was the Midbay Bridge and it leads into San Destin. When we got to the condo, i spent almost all of my time standing on the balcony because we were on like the 15th floor and you could see virtually everything. The ocean looked magnificent from up there. It didn't look all nasty and dirty from up there like it does when you are standing on the beach. The sand was as white as can be also. It wasn't that disgusting brown color you get when you go to Gulf Shores. If i could retire somewhere it would be there. The people there are pretty cool as well, or at the tourists that come there are. My friends and I met four girls on the beach one night while we were just out walking around and they were pretty cool. They were as nice as they could have possibly been. If we had tried to talk to some random girls in Montgomery they probably would have freaked out. When that week in San Destin was over, I didn't want to leave. But oh well.

Please don't squeeze the.....

Please don't squeeze the ranch. When I was in the ninth grade, a rather funny situation occured involving a bottle of Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing. It was lunch time and my fellow classmates and myself were eating in Ms. D's room. First allow me to give you some background information on Ms. D. She is a rather clean individual who can't stand a mess. You could say she is OCD. She won't even leave her food uncovered when she walks across the room. Anyways, we were having pizza for lunch that day and some people like ranch on their pizza for some odd reason. I understand why people like ranch on their pizza. Ranch is not ketchup; it does not go with everything. Anyway, so we had a bottle of ranch in the classroom. We'll everyone was passing it around and putting a little on their pizza. Finally the bottle gets to Louis. Louis goes to shake the bottle up to get it to come out better and as he starts to squeeze and shake the bottle, ranch flies everywhere. All you see is a stream of dressing shot across the room. There was ranch on the wall, on the white board, on the desks, on the floor, and anywhere else you could think of. Oh by the way Ms. D was out of the classroom at this point. She walks back in to find ranch everywhere and she lost it. She went off on Louis. She shut the door and gave Louis "a very up close and personal" talking to. Lets just say he didn't leave a drop of ranch anywhere in the classroom. That is why is say pleas don't squeeze the ranch. And make sure the top in on something good before you go and shake it up. If not things will only end badly for you and those around you.

8 good reason to sleep in

1) You have swine flu. If you have swine flu u shouldn't go anywhere so might as well stay in bed. You shouldn't run the risk of infecting someone else. That's why swine flu is becoming a pandemic, because people aren't staying in bed.
2) Morning is the worst time to start the day. When people wake up they are cranky. They're cranky because they want to be back in bed asleep. We can kill two birds with one stone here. Go back to sleep then you won't be cranky and by the time you wake up everyone will have had their coffee and it'll be a beautiful day.
3) Breakfast foods aren't that good. If you ask someone what their favorite meal is, they aren't going to say breakfast. They are going to say lunch or dinner. If you think about it, breakfast for dinner even tastes better than breakfast for breakfast. Look at hotpockets. The ones for lunch are so much better than breakfast. Would you rather have a pizza one or a sausage and cheese?
4) When the sun first comes up it is in just the right position where your sun visor in your car can't block it. Wait a couple more hours for the sun to get directly above. It would cut down on accidents in the morning because people could see better.
5) Too many senior citizens are awake at this time. Senior citizens are grumpy individuals. They think cause they are old that they can get away with anything. If you'd wait til 12 to wake up, they'd be taking their naps.
6) Nothing good is on TV besides the news, and that comes on at noon too. When you wake up, you don't want the first thing you see to be a talk show: you want cartoons. When do cartoons come on? Later in the day, that's when.
7) Miss rush hour. No one likes being stuck in a.m. traffic. Sleep in an extra hour or two and you'll miss that traffic completely.
8) It is colder in the morning. It is always colder in the morning than the rest of the day. This could cause you to put on the wrong clothes and have you messed up for the rest of the day. It could be sixty in the morning and then go up to ninety by the end of the day.

Advice

A friend of mine named MK came over to my house one time along with some other people. She wanted to see all the artwork my brother and I had in our rooms so i took her back to show her. She loved our rooms. She said it was like a museum of art because my brother also had sculptures everywhere. But that's beside the point. She noticed a piece of paper hanging on my wall that was my to do list. She read it and wanted to add something. She wrote on it "Smile Joel". I said to her why do I need to smile; it's not that important. She added to it "it is important Joel" with one of those smilie faces that girls like to draw. She is the type of girl with a "bubbly attitude" if you know what I mean. She's the type of person that is always positive and can find the good in anything. There's nothing wrong with that. You should always think on the bright side. Don't be that pestamistic person who always sees the glass half empty instead of half full. I know that's a cheesy saying but there is some truth in it. If you go through life looking at everything as a bad thing then your life is going to suck, figuratively speaking of course. You have to have expectations in your life, so might as well make them positive ones. However, there is a down side to this. By always having positive expectations, you set yourself up to be disappointed in life. But that is just a part of life. Disappointment comes along with experiences. Smiling is in important I suppose. If you don't smile, you go through your life pissed off all the time. So I guess she's right. I still have that piece of paper on my wall, even though anytime a new girlfriend of mine sees it they ask who she is. But oh well. That piece of paper serves as a reminder. It is a reminder to live your life not just going through the motions, but having fun. I encourage people, better yet challenge people to find the good in all situations and go throughout life with a smile on your face because that is something no one can take away from you.

Is this art

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/upload/2007/06/art1.jpg

I want you to check out this link. This link is to an artwork. The artwork consists of three huge blank canvases. My question to you is Is this art?
They say art is in the beholder. Everyone has an opinion and they are welcome to it because this is America and we have freedom of speech.
You are able to use some terms from my art appreciation class on this piece. One such term would be balance. This artwork is completely balanced because there is nothing there.
I just can't imagine that this is art. However this do evoke a reaction in people, which is what most artist try to do. So maybe that is what the true definition of art is. Something that causes you to feel something. Doesn't matter what it is as long as you feel something.

Injury

It was my tenth grade year and I was playing varsity basketball at my school. I had been playing basketball since the seventh grade at Taylor Road Academy. Well that is except the year I had my knee surgery and that plays a roll in this story. In the eighth grade I had knee surgery on my right knee. Years of basketball and running hard had worn down the bone in my right knee to the point where a piece had broken off and was hanging on by a thread. When I went to the orthopedic surgeon, he told me I would need knee surgery and I would probably be on crutches for a couple of weeks. Well as my luck would have it, this did not happen. I was not on crutches for a couple of weeks or even a few weeks. I was on crutches, hopping around for three months. That's a long time to be on crutches. While on crutches I could not put any pressure on my right leg or else I'd run the chance of breaking that piece of bone off. So three months went by and I finally got to walk again. However, when I went to take that first step, it felt as though I had forgotten how to walk. I know that is hard to believe. How can someone forget how to walk? Well I had for the most part. I took that first step and almost fell over. It felt like someone had stabbed a thousand needles into my right foot.
My right leg had wasted away during that time and the doctor did not assign me to any physical therapy what so ever.
Finally I got most of the strength back in my right leg and played basketball the following year. The next year I went to play varsity and that is when the injury happened.
During practice we were running a scrimmage game. I was run not attention and ran right into a fellow teammate named Keldrick. Now Keldrick is a rather big man. He's about 5' 10" and 200 plus in weight. It was like hitting a brick wall and my knee buckled. I went straight to the ground in agony. My knee had popped out of place. Lying there on the floor, squirming in pain, I thought to myself well this ain't good. The coach walked over to me and examined my leg. He wasn't very helpful at this moment. His exact words were, "Ehh I can see it." I thought to myself thanks coach you're being real helpful right now.
I finally got up and limped my way over to the bleachers. A friend of mine's mom took me to get an x-ray of that knee and I was told I had torn all the ligaments on the left side of my knee that connected the kneecap to the rest of the leg. I thought oh great this is gonna be good.
So here we go again, another long period on crutches.

School Experience

I remember my brother and our friend Jared blowing up a VCR in the middle of the classroom. Okay so the story starts out with it being after school and we are all in after school care. I'm in like the third grade and my brother is in the sixth. My brother and I have always taken things apart just to see what they look like on the inside. I don't know what made us do it exactly but we were curious. One time we even dragged a pinball machine into a tree, then took it apart. And afterward we pushed it out of the tree. Good bang. But anyway, we were all sitting in the third grade classroom and my brother and Jared are taking apart this VCR. They took all the parts out and crushed some of them. But I guess they were still curious so they tried to reassemble the thing. Then they had another bright idea. The decided "Hey lets plug it back up and see what it looks like when it is working." Oh yeah let me tell you, that was the best idea ever. Well that is if you like fireworks, it really was a "bright" idea. Of course as you would suspect the VCR caught on fire and left burn marks on the floor. However I do not remember how they put it out. That part is a little fuzzy. I imagine they took it outside. But the funny thing is that our teacher was a college student and she had no idea what to do.

An Unforgetable Dream

Have you ever had a dream that occurs over and over again? Well I have. By far my most memorable dream is one that I have had about three times. This quite disturbing dream takes place in some car. I have no idea who's car it is because it is a car I have never seen before. But anyways, I'm sitting there in this old beat down car in the passenger seat. I can hear the radio playing some old country song, and I hate oldies when it comes to country music. So, the next thing I do is try to flip channels to find another station. As I'm sitting there fumbling through radio stations, I notice something beating on the car window. I look outside, but there's nothing there. I go back to fumbling through stations until I the noise again. Again I lean over to the window and look outside, and come to find nothing there. I turn my attention back to the radio. The noise occurs again and its getting loud. It is as if someone is beating on the side of the car. Finally, I see something moving across the ground. I try to open the car door to see what it is exactly but the door will not open. Then something starts climbing through the window, and I finally realize what I'm looking at; it is those troll dolls. You know the one's with the crazy outrageous hair that you use to play with when you where a kid. Hundreds of them start pouring through the window. They start attacking me. Pulling my hair and hitting. I guess they were out to get some natural hair of their own. I honestly do not know what it was they were trying to do. I start wrestling around with them, trying to get to the controls for the window. I can't seem to roll down the window. Then all of the sudden I awake and the dream is over. I promise this is a real dream. I couldn't make something like this up.

Could I quit my job today?

If I were to quit my job today, I would have a whole lot more time to do what I want to do. However, the downside to this would be that I would not have any money to do what I want to do. I like having money as well. Without money I'd be force to lay around the house all day doing nothing. Honestly, thats not the type of person I am. My mom tells me I have to be on the road twenty-four seven and its true. I have to go places. I can not stand being at the house bored. If I were to quit my job, I wouldn't have the money to drive anywhere because I would not be able to afford the gas. I hate asking my parents for money. That's another reason i could not quit my job, because I like having a sense of independence about myself. Whenever my mom offers me money now, I always try to turn it down. Unfortunately though, she always insist and I end up with the money anyway. But here are the top ten things I could not do if I quit my job:
1) Take my girl friend out
2) Go fishing (no money for supplies...bait)
3) Go to friend's houses (need money for gas)
4) Go kayaking
5) Buy new clothes (I can't where the ones I have forever)
6)Go to the Rave
7) Buy food when I'm hungry and not at home
8) Buy new Cd's
9) Buy or rent movies
10) Take on any new hobbies

The Need For Twitter????

The newest craze in technology is Twitter. What is Twitter?? I don't think people who use it even know what it is. I do know that famous people; a.k.a. actors, athletes, superstars, use it to "inform" their fans of what they are doing. But why do people even want to know when and actor or actress is sitting in their living room eating ice cream? I could understand if they were informing people about an upcoming appearance in public or about a concert that is coming up; but I do not see the need for anything else. Also myspace and facebook already have similar devices on their networking systems, so there is really no need for twitter. I have seen recently on TV where you can order a pizza or get a "tweet" from Domino's about deals. However, if you are already on the internet, it is much simpler to go to their website. I guess what I'm trying to get around to saying is that I do not understand why someone would feel the need to inform everyone and their brother of what they are doing at every minute of every day. I do not think I have ever sat down in front of the TV recently without viewing something that has to do with Twitter. I have even heard about Twitter on the radio. I hope someone could answer this for me.

I will never

1. Go to China
2. Ride in a car my friend Mike is Driving
3. Let my brother do what comes after the words "Hey watch this!"
4. Go noodling for catfish. (I like having two arms)\
5. Let my friends talk me in to getting caught in the current of the river...again.
6. Allow mike to drive my car.
7. Do crack.
8. Do meth.
9. Bungee jump.
10. Murder another human being.
11. Be drafted into a war. (I will go to Canada if I have to)
12. Join a nudest colony. (Usually filled with old people)
13. Be on TV other than the news.
14. Have eight kids like John and Kate. (That's just insane)
15. Eat something that might have been on Fear Factor.
16. Wrestle a crocodile. (Alligator maybe)
17. Swim with stingrays. (Just look at what happened to Steve Irwen)
18. Buy a rat for a pet.
19. Watch another reality show that comes on Vh1 about someone trying to find "love".
20. Live in Oklahoma.
21. Allow any of my girlfriends to go to Paris without me. (After seeing Taken)
22. Try to walk down the beach drunk in Destin again. (Last time I got chased by a cop)
23. Become an alcoholic.