Thursday, May 15, 2008

Come on!!!

Photobucket
This picture was enough to get me through my Bioengineering class today. Here's what happened:

Today was about Biomechanics, and we spent a lot of time talking about joints. I have this thing about joints, especially joint injuries. If you ever want to send shudders down my spine, just mention the word... I don't even want to type it... dislocation. Anyway, actually please don't do that, I'd appreciate it. Any way, my teacher put a big diagram of the knee joint along with its ligaments up on the board. Then he proceeded to explain exactly what happens when you tear your ACL and I just about lost it.

I couldn't even look up, and even listening to him talking about it made me shudder. So I told myself, "I really need to become distracted!!!" so I just started drawing. I ended up with this guy. first, it was just the guy, but my teacher was still talking about tearing ligaments (he now had a graph of stress vs. deformation of the ligament, which, for a simple curve on an x y plane, disturbed me more than any other graph has). So I continued to draw.

I gave him the hat first, and then the balloon, and then the ice cream cone, and then the ice cream on his face. Then i pondered him. I hadn't meant for him to have so much stuff when I drew his mouth and eyebrows. But for some reason it made a lot of sense. I think I might have subconsciously drew a representation of one of my firmest beliefs, that stuff doesn't make you happy. I also have a related theory about stuff as a heuristic for happiness. Maybe I'll write about that sometime.

that's where the speech bubble came from.

I don't know what my deal is with joint injuries. The pictures weren't graphic or disturbing at all to any of the other 165 people in my class.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

weightlessness and oatmeal

My bowl of oatmeal definitely experienced several distinct moments of nothing less than levitation this morning when it jumped off the counter, into my left hand, where it displaced the spoon that was there (which, itself, flew into my right hand but did not remain, although I really want to say that it did) and before I could secure it in my grip, leaped back to the countertop unharmed.

I'm trying a new thing today. This morning on my way to school in my car, I said to myself out loud, "I'm going to do my best today!"

I'll get back to you on how that worked out for me.