Artful things

Last night, I was cleaning out my dropbox and realized I never posted the two Jesus postcards I bought two years ago at St Paul's in London, two of the founding members of my collection. For shame!

Also below the cut - an ad for an exhibition on now at the Met. It's about time I kick off goal number 84, and I absolutely adore simple sketch drawings like this. Something about them seems more... personal, more individual... closer to the artist, and therefore more remarkable that they have survived through the centuries. I suppose they're the visual arts equivalent of acoustic songs. Anyway, I'm going to be in New York in less than a month for Spring Break (Daily Show should be completed then, too!) and I am really excited about loading up my ipod with quiet music and going to go absorb the pretty :)



These are apparently part of a larger series called "The Way: The Truth: The Life," by Sergei Chepik, and were completed in 2005. They are the second and third pieces, "The Public Ministry" and "The Crucifixion," respectively. I love how forlorn they are, especially when compared with the rest of the St Paul's decor, which is much brighter and more traditionally "wondrous." (For reference, see #6 and #8 on this post.) It's good to be reminded by these darker works that St Paul's is one of the largest public mausoleums in the world, in addition to a place of worship.

And! Here's the exhibition's ad:

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A Nervous Romance

Oy. I forgot to dropbox the Iceman article files, so I'll have to make the pdf tomorrow. In the meantime, an update of a different sort: I watched Annie Hall on Saturday night, the second of the twenty-five greatest movies of all time ever I have viewed since starting this whole shebang. I loved it. The story was adorable without being fuzzy, the script was hilarious, and the little extra bits Woody Allen threw in, like the animated scene and the subtitled "yes we're talking but we should be fucking" scene, just made it an excellent piece of film work. I also loved how it is obviously one of Jerry Seinfeld's favorite movies, or Larry David's, or both.

Oh! On Friday last week, I donated $25 on Donors Choose to a fourth grade class that needs posterboard and markers to make maps of the US and the world. As you may recall, I am a huge fan of coloring maps in order to internalize geography, and there was some special corporate matching thing going on in honor of President's Day... it was timely. I'm now 10% done with the Donors Choose goal!

I like quantifiable progress. I should actually figure out how many stitches are required when knitting a sweater... if I were to estimate, I'd say I'm about 73% done at this point. Progress has ground to a near-halt because I'm at the cap of the right sleeve, and I knit it in the round so I'm not entirely sure how to close it off since it needs to taper up. Ugh. I'll get there.
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101 is a lot to remember...

So, oops, I totally forgot that one of my actual goals (#9) was to knit a sweater. For some reason, in my head it got folded into #40, Create an entire outfit by hand. This is actually really beneficial that I just remembered, because it means I am on the verge of completing another goal just as one got shot down. Yep, that's right, it's the end of January, and you know what that means, folks - the Foreign Service finally emailed and of course it was a no, because I just graduated and I really don't know anything about anything yet and.

It's still disappointing. It's the only thing that I very clearly know that I want to do as a career, that I can see myself doing for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years. Insofar as I can see myself doing any one thing for approximately the same amount of time I've been a self-aware human being, anyway.

But anyway so as I mentioned in yesterday's post, I'm looking at grad school options, and my top two choices are this program at Columbia, a Masters in International Affairs with a concentration in Social Policy, and this program at NYU, which gives an MA in International Relations and Journalism. I have yet to discern the distinct merits of being a "Master of Field X" versus being a "Master of Arts of Field X," so that is my next task. It looks like they both start accepting applications in August - which for some reason reminds me that I need to sign up IMMEDIATELY for the GRE. Okay, that is my real next task. Stream of consciousness what?

tl;dr: Foreign Service = not this year. Grad school = life plan for 2011. Goal #9 = remembered, almost completed.

Next up: St Paul's Patrick's, Habitat, SPT x2.
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ENID: It’s probably the slang.

Still busy busy busy. Last weekend I swung swingset #4, a picture of which should hopefully be uploaded shortly. So too will last week's SPT, after my friend whose camera such a picture should be on uploads them to Facebook. The past two weeks, my drabble has turned into the inkling of a Something, and it's up to about 400 words now. (That doesn't sound too impressive, but keep in mind that a drabble is only supposed to be 100 words and an attempt at a semi-self-contained short story to keep your creative juices going.) It's using the same character as the last Oversized Serious drabble I wrote over a month ago, which I will post tomorrow or Friday, and then after a suitable period of introspective judgment, I'll post this current one, too.

I also began knitting a grocery bag, although I have three sweater patterns that I really want to get to work on. I just needed something a bit more simple to get back into it. I unfortunately did not buy a watercolor journal last week as I said I was going to, because Michael's ended up being on a different (and much further away) street than I thought and I was in a rush to meet a friend for his going away party. I could have bought it by now at Walmart, but I'd prefer not to feed the giant - and, it turns out, there's one even closer than where I was going to go that is legitimately local, Southern Paint and Supply. They supply Actual! watercolor tubes, so I can use something other than a dinky little Crayola tray. Not that I'm knocking my mad elementary school art skillz or anything, but... yeah. I want rich colors, ergo, real paint.

In terms of wine connoisseurship, yesterday I got a call from my mom asking me which I'd prefer to drink with Thanksgiving dinner. When I replied, "Oh, um, well, like, pinot grigio, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon. I can bring my own," she asked, "What brand is that?" Long story short, I popped a quarter mile down the road to the grocery store to help her find something to drink that isn't white zinfandel or blackberry Manischewitz. We got a pinot noir and a beaujolais, and I also picked up two bottles of Spanish wine I had over the weekend for my own nefarious purposes. Mission successful. Sorta.

That's about it. I forgot to keep all the links for articles last week, so below are the four I found most memorable.

"Lunch with M." is purportedly the first-ever meeting between a journalist and a Michelin restaurant "inspector." It really isn't an interview, because the inspector cannot divulge any identifying details - even her parents aren't supposed to know her real occupation, lest they boast to their friends; the New Yorker reporter just sits down with the head of the Michelin guides and a woman who would just like to be called "M." For all that he's not allowed to tell us about their conversation, it is a surprisingly comprehensive exposé of the Michelin organization as a whole and the incredible shroud Kevlar vest of secrecy they've built up to protect it.

As we all know, the shuttle fleet is retiring next year and the new Orion capsules aren't due to come online until the middle of the next decade. At least. "Is this the end for human space flight?" Inquiring minds want to know, so the science editor of The Daily Mail (seriously?) and a science journalist in residence at some college in Canada argue about it. The former says, yes, we're done with space, because no president will take the Kennedyesque step of committing resources to something that may or may not pan out three administrations down the road. The latter says, no-well-maybe; humans are creatures of conquering exploring and inquiring stock, and we really really WANT to see what's out in space. All I have to say about it is this.

"Four ways to feed the world" provides NS readers with a very simple plan for feeding the extra 3 billion or so people who will be on the Earth in the next 15 years, in addition to the 17% of those already here who are chronically starving. It's simple, really; grow more high-yielding crops on the same amount of farmland with less water, and build more roads to move the harvest around. Genius. Why has no one thought of this before??? This is the sort of quality reporting that drew me to NS in the first place.

I don't even know what this is but the best way I can think to describe it is "forcibly stripping the porn out of the porno script" (pun fully intended). It made me giggle, anyway, if mostly in a WTF-am-I-reading way.
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Apocalypse Never

This weekend, after a few months of trying to get various members of my family to watch it with me, I decided to finally suck it up and get Apocalypse Now over with. It was going along swimmingly until I got about an hour and a half in, to the part where they accidentally-on-purpose kill all the Vietnamese civilians on the sampan and find out it was all because of a puppy. It was at that point I realized there was still more than an hour and a half left, and I didn't really want to see if they kill the puppy, and that really, 90 minutes is the length of a crappy movie and I was therefore allowed to feel like I'd had the complete Apocalypse Now experience. I am therefore declaring the classic movie goal, number 86, to be IN PROGRESS. Go me.
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Drumroll, please...

I guess it's finally time to declare goal 42, Learn how to program a website, officially underway. First, I tweaked the code for this blog in the weeks before launching it. Then, I completely modified a different template for my friend Chelsea's blog. And now, I am proud to present, for your bookmarking pleasure, the official Swingsets and Cathedrals favicon! Apparently, that is the term the internet, with its seemingly infinite ability to portmanteau, has thought up to label the little icon next to the web address up in the address bar there, and on your bookmark toolbar. Look! See! Isn't it adorable? It was actually surprisingly easy to add to the blog; much more difficult was the actual making of it in Paint.

Anyway, time to hit up at least a thousand grains of rice's worth of capitals before bed. Bamako, Mali! Antananarivo, Madagascar! Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia! Conakry, Guinea!
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A Secret

While I am fairly confident that I could label a map of Africa with all the correct country names, I was really bad about learning their capitals. Same for the islands of the South Pacific, and, to a lesser extent, those of the Caribbean, but in every region, I knew at least the major ones. I have been playing Free Rice for the last 45 minutes or so trying to remedy this, and earned 4030 grains of rice and developed a few mnemonics for remembering which capital goes with which country - at least when the names of the capital are provided and I don't have to recall them straight from memory. I'm hoping that by doing this every day for the next week, at least 2500 grains, I'll be able to reinforce the names even more. Just to confirm my basic geography skills, I'll also sprinkle in some of the "Countries on the map" game, too.

I also realized I should probably get a (re)start on Rosetta Stone Spanish, so my goal for this week is to try and do at least half an hour of it every morning before work. I find that scheduling things to do before work instead of before bed makes me much more apt to do them - partially because it gives me a nice excuse to delay heading over to the office, and partially because I'd just rather go to sleep at night. I'm also trying hard not to overschedule myself, but it's very difficult. Forty hours a week at work is a lot of time, something I know shouldn't be a huge surprise to me, nor something that I let get in the way of me doing what I want to do. Especially when the real reason is TV. Anyway, that's my plan for this week. I'll keep you posted on how that actually goes.
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$1, Bob, $1.

Today I donated my first dollar towards my breast cancer charity goal. Technically it wasn't by doing a sanctioned Walk for the Cure (in fact, I didn't even walk at all except from the car into the restaurant and back), but it's still going to cancer research. I decided to get lunch today at Firehouse Subs and they had a donation box set out for the American Cancer Society. Since I cashed my first full-time paycheck (ever!) yesterday, and proceeded to buy myself two bottles of celebratory wine to commence the wine connoisseur goal, number 53, it seemed like a good idea to also give something back.

I've tried to do this sort of thing periodically from time to time; after a big shopping splurge in New York, I'd keep change in my pocket to give to a homeless person. Most memorably, I gave all the change in my wallet (except for enough quarters for emergency bus fare) to a homeless man in Portland after buying a $2 truffle.

In other, mid-week news, I've commenced goal #93, Learn to identify ten things under the hood of a car and how to tell when they break, thanks to a Facebook quiz to that effect. I got 40% right, but the only one I knew for sure was that a muffler is on the exhaust pipe. Anyways now that I have a car, I'm sure at some point someone will be able to help me identify things that can go horribly, horribly wrong under there, and I'll never want to drive again...

I just went downstairs to get the mail and! I'm glad I hadn't hit post yet. The Economist came! Hooray! I'm reading through "The world this week" right now (in between tasks, of course!), which certainly won't be posted as one of the three articles, never fear. It looks like there's a lot of juicy stuff about Obama and health care, British foreign policy, and, of course, the cover story, "Wall Street: One year on, what's changed?" I am so very, very, very excited to finally have a subscription!
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Top 50 Movies of All Time Ever

(that I've never before seen.)

Here's the list of Great, Classic Movies I came up with based on the IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and the AFI 100 Years/100 Movies lists. If you would like to argue that something should not be on this list, feel free to! If you think I've made an egregious error leaving something out, you should also feel free to recommend a film, with the caveat that it may have been left off because I've seen it already. As I watch these movies, I will make posts about them, but I will come back to this post and create links on the list to those posts, turning them blue a la goal completion on The Master List.

1. Godfather
2. Citizen Cain
3. Casablanca
4. Raging Bull
5. Singin’ in the Rain
6. Gone with the Wind
7. Lawrence of Arabia
8. Schindler’s List
9. The Wizard of Oz
10. City Lights
11. 2001: A Space Odyssey
12. All About Eve
13. Seven Samurai
14. The Graduate
15. On the Waterfront
16. Chinatown
17. Grapes of Wrath
18. High Noon
19. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
20. Apocalypse Now
21. The Maltese Falcon
22. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
23. Annie Hall
24. The Best Years of Our Lives
25. Dr. Strangelove
26. King Kong
27. Bonnie and Clyde
28. The Philadelphia Story
29. A Streetcar Named Desire
30. North by Northwest
31. Rocky
32. Taxi Driver
33. Schindler’s List
34. The African Queen
35. All the President’s Men
36. The Terminator
37. Fargo
38. Rosemary’s Baby
39. The Wages of Fear
40. Fanny and Alexander
41. Sunday’s Children
42. Yojimbo
43. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
44. The Usual Suspects
45. Forrest Gump
46. Pan’s Labyrinth
47. Hotel Rwanda
48. Requiem for a Dream
49/50. Alien(s)
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Educational Goals

2. Score ≥167 on the LSAT.
12. Rosetta Stone: Spanish
13. Rosetta Stone: Arabic
31. Take an oral history.
33. Learn to be good at chess.
39. Learn to build my own desktop. Do so.
41. Learn the constellations. And how to tell the damn planets apart from the stars on a consistent basis.
42. Learn how to program a website.
43. Learn the Kiddish, the Kaddish, and the prayer for breaking bread.
45. Learn to snorkel.
53. Learn to tell the difference between wines.
84. Go to ten special exhibitions at museums.
86. Watch 25 of the Greatest Movies of All Time Ever that I've never before seen.
89. Keep detailed accounting data for one month.
93. Learn to identify at least ten things under the hood of a car and how you can tell when they break.
95. Write a full page with my right hand.

Details

Note - you can keep up with my progress on all Educational goals by clicking the "Educational" tag. Very few in this category will have specialized tags; those will be noted below.

2. Score ≥167 on the LSAT.

I'm not actually certain that I want to go to law school; in fact, I'm moving more and more in the direction away from it. However, one never can be too sure, and it's better to do standardized tests sooner rather than later after college. And here's a little secret about me: I actually just love taking standardized tests. I think 167 is a realistic goal, but one that I think is high enough that I will still feel compelled to study beforehand. I really just want to know my score, so I could see where I could go if I actually wanted to learn the law.

12. Rosetta Stone: Spanish

I took four years of Spanish in high school, and while I was never particularly good at it, I was certainly not particularly bad at it, either. Or:
Yo tome cuatro años de español en la escuela secondaría, y (though) yo no (past progressive of ser?) muy bueno con lo, ni yo (again with ser) muy mal, tampoco. So, I will complete the second and third levels of Rosetta Stone in order to regain and learn new vocabulary and grammatical fluency, and, after completing the course, testing myself by reading a Spanish-language novel that I purchased a few years ago.

Complete through: Level 2, Unit 1, Lesson 3

13. Rosetta Stone: Arabic

If you've already read the entire master list, then you're aware that joining the Foreign Service is on it. The reasons for that will be more fully explained in the Sundries - Part 1 post, but it is a major contributing factor to me wanting to learn Arabic. English, Spanish, and Arabic are three of the most spoken languages on the planet, and between them, they cover just about every country whose American embassy I would love to work in. And written Arabic is probably the most beautiful script I've ever seen, and I really want to be able to understand it and produce it myself, at least rudimentarily. This goal will be finished after I complete all three levels of Rosetta Stone's Arabic program and I have read an Arabic-language newspaper front to back.

31. Take an oral history.

My paternal great-grandparents were all immigrants who came to America sometime between 1900 and 1920 from Eastern Europe. I know that my grandmother's family came from a tiny village in Poland, because one of my uncles researched and visited it a few years ago and there's a photo album of the trip on her shelf. My grandfather's family... I don't even really know. I have heard variously that we were expelled Russian Jews, Ukrainian, Latvian, and Polish. Suffice it to say that both sets of great-grandparents did a very good job of assimilating themselves and their children to American culture, and my father and his brothers seem not to have thought much about where the family came from in their youth, apart from the vague notion of "over there." At least, that's my impression as a member of the third generation born here.

So, my goal is to sit down with my grandmother, whom, conveniently enough, I will be living just upstairs from through the winter, and, once and for all, find out who we Leonard-Moverman-Abramsons are and just where exactly it is that we came from.

33. Learn to be good at chess.

I know the rules of chess. I understand which way the pieces are supposed to move and that the queen is always supposed to start on her own color and all the technical stuff like that. I just have no eye for the strategy of it. I can't see five moves ahead for myself, let alone the other guy (who always seems to know what I'm going to do anyway). It's like I have a giant neon sign flashing above my head proclaiming my epically noob status. My goal is to practice until I get to the point where, even if I can't beat my dad at chess, I can at least give a decent show of trying.

39. Learn to build my own desktop. Do so.

I am pretty good at computers, at least from the software end. I can diagnose problems with my own computer; perform basic maintenance myself, and can convince it that it has extra CD-ROM drives for my own non-nefarious purposes. What I do not know is what goes on inside: how the drives and cards and cords fit together to make the magic happen. I only have a basic understanding of what most of the things in there are even called.

My laptop is also getting on in. It will be three around Thanksgiving, which is practically ancient in technology years. It had its mid-life crisis last September, and, luckily, since the warranty was still good, Sony sent a technician TO MY HOUSE to replace the motherboard and a lot of little things for free. It was awesome. But still, the poor little thing barely has enough hard drive memory anymore, and its non-video card pitches fits every few weeks (and here I am, not running anything strenuous on it so as not to piss it off more). It's time for something new. It's time for something powerful and amenable to staying in one place, and it's time for me to learn how to do it. Ergo, desktop. Lots of space to mess around in, lots of interchangeable, fully-customizable parts; lots, lots cheaper. I hope to get this project started sooner rather than later, obviously, and if anyone knows of any particularly rad resources about building one's own computer, I would be eternally grateful if you could point me in their direction.

41. Learn the constellations. And how to tell the damn planets apart from the stars on a consistent basis.

I already know the Big and Little Dippers; Orion; and sometimes, if I'm really lucky, I can pick out Sirius. I used to be able to find Venus, if it was around. I want to know more. I will consider this goal complete after I've learned 15 constellations and basic facts about them, and memorized when which planets are within our view and how I can identify them with the naked eye (when possible).

42. Learn how to program a website.

I know basic html, and in the last week, I've picked up a bit of CSS tweaking this blog's template to my personal taste. It's been a lot of fun, and it's a lot harder than I thought. I will consider this goal complete after I have completely scripted this blog myself, from scratch.

43. Learn the Kiddish, the Kaddish, and the prayer for breaking bread.

I'm a really bad Jew. In that I'm not actually Jewish at all, but half my family is by heritage, and we all eat pork and forget when it's time to celebrate Hanukkah. Bacon is tasty. Anyway, this isn't about being more religious so much as just learning something that can connect me to that part of me. When my grandfather died two years ago, I felt completely inadequate because I couldn't say the Kaddish for him, even though I watch Angels in America every three months and I really should have picked it up by now. So now I'm going to. End of story.

45. Learn to snorkel.

Properly, this goal in its complete form is "Learn to snorkel without getting water down the tube and in my goggles," but that doesn't look very elegant. I've really only been snorkeling once, on a cruise my family took when I was in high school that stopped in Key West. It was beautiful in the reef, and I would really love to go back and do it again, sans the salt water in my mouth and eyes. I'll probably practice in a pool, and if I really just can't make it down to a beach in the summertime, then that will be sufficient fulfillment of this goal. Ideally, though, a real world test will mark the end of it.

53. Learn to tell the difference between wines.

This, too, deserves a little clarification. I know that a Pinot Grigio is different from a Sauvignon Blanc and both are completely different from a Riesling. I like reds, now, too, but the only one I think I could semi-reliably identify in a blind taste test is Shiraz. So, this goal has two sub-goals: the first, to branch out and try new types and regions of wine, and the second, to keep a record of the wines I drink and identify their distinguishing characteristics. I will consider this goal complete after I successfully identify nine out of ten wines in a blind taste test.

84. Go to ten special exhibitions at museums.

Unless they're free, I very rarely go to special exhibitions. And while I love the permanent collections of the museums I "frequent," I really am missing out when I neglect to see the new and different pieces and perspectives offered by special exhibits. Therefore, I plan to see ten different paid exhibits in the next 1001 days to which I would not otherwise have gone. An example: when I was in London a few years ago, the Tate Modern was doing a Kandinsky retrospective. They could have charged £20 for it, and I still would have gone and spent all day in it. Such an exhibit would not count towards this goal. This project is about discovery, after all.

Exhibitions visited: 1

86. Watch 25 of the Greatest Movies of All Time Ever that I've never before seen.

I have never seen Casablanca. I think I fell asleep during the Wizard of Oz. I definitely fell asleep during all three Godfathers. I'm in the process of compiling a list that draws from the IMDB's Top 250, Rotten Tomatoes' Top 100, and AFI's 100 Years, 100 Movies lists, in order to make a list of about fifty movies, of which I will have to watch at least 25 by May 25, 2012, so that I can actually contribute to conversations people have about these epically famous films. Posts relating to this goal will be tagged "Movies."

Movies Consumed: 1

89. Keep detailed accounting data for one month.

I did this when I first lived in London, in order to keep track of how badly the exchange rate was screwing me over, and, though it got to be very tedious towards the end, it was extremely helpful in that I knew exactly where my money was going, in what forms I was spending it, and, most importantly, knowing that I would have to account for something after I got home really helped me cut back on truly ridiculous impulse spending. Let me be clear: by "detailed accounting data," I don't just mean writing down the amount of each receipt and keeping a running total. I mean EVERY. SINGLE. ITEM. gets logged. It's effective, and I think it's time for a refresher course in curbing impromptu purchases.

93. Learn to identify at least ten things under the hood of a car and how you can tell when they break.

Enough said.

Car parts learned: .2

95. Write a full page with my right hand.

I was beginning to think that all my goals were leaning more towards being Epic and Serious Projects, so the the last ten or so are lighthearted, so that I remember to schedule time for out-and-out silliness. So: because I am left-handed and, when I have tried to write with my right hand, it has been a garbled mess, I would like to improve my opposite-handwriting. After this goal is complete, I will post a scan of the finished page, whatever it is.

Again, any suggestions on ways I can better meet these goals, or improve upon them, will be greatly welcome.


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