These are old archived entries from my journal, Ornamental Illness. I have eliminated all graphics (except those in context of an entry) to save on my bandwidth usage.


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Friday, August 1, 2003

I just don't know about this comments thing.

Gratuitious entry just for the sake of testing whether Greymatter indeed removes the comment link when old entry is scrolled off.

Posted by Ann on 08/01/03@08:06 AM CST ..::Link::..

Thursday, July 31, 2003

Bush Stinks

Aaargh. Listening to NPR and this woman who has three kids (and a fourth on the way!) is just so THRILLED with getting $1200 from Shrubby's tax cut.

Now I don't know this woman's economic status, but you know there is such a thing as birth control if you are so strapped for cash. And I'd just like to know why a couple making $100,000 a year who has two kids is any more entitled to $800 than a couple (without kids) making less than $40,000 a year, or a single male without any dependents making $20,000 a year. Or a family with two kids who are under the poverty level who didn't pay taxes. Riddle me that, Space Cowboy.

Posted by Ann on 07/31/03@01:40 PM CST ..::Link::..

Clarification

I realize that my last entry became dangerously close to one thing that I absolutely hate about "blogs"...fugitive links to ironic pop kitsch nostalgia items. Once I ran into a blog that was comprised of just that:

Mittens for your grandfather clock

Aromatherapy sessions for your dog etc. etc.

You know, ha ha. Funny. Like The Onion. Ha ha. Humour with no future and no soul. Yes, I admit
I H A T E T H A T.

However, because it was about Pink Floyd, I feel justified in its inclusion. Not just any Russian Nesting Doll collection would get a mention here, nosiree, bob. Not just any pop kitsch nostalgia item on eBay gets a link from yours truly.

So not to worry, I have not backslided on my ethics. I'm not going to start posting links for playing card decks with 52 accused child molester priests, or bobble-headed Kobe Bryant dolls. (Oh god, I can see the google searches coming on that one).

No, I will not be assimilated.

Anyway, C'est Ne Pas Une Blogue.

Posted by Ann on 07/31/03@11:59 AM CST ..::Link::..

Oh god this is sick

Pink Floyd Russian Nesting Dolls (link will expire on August 2nd or so). Is this twisted or what? They don't even look like them! (Especially Nick...and Rick...I mean...what the...f????) Laughing my ass off while shaking my head. OK, so I can SORT of see the resemblence in a VERY caricatured way with Roger, and yes, I can see David looking like he did in some pics around the late 70s, but...WTF?

Posted by Ann on 07/31/03@11:23 AM CST ..::Link::..

Aesthetic Crisis

OK, Here's the dilemma...Go back to a certain time in your life that's significant because that's when you started a specific artistic direction that you are still pursuing today. But look at the other stuff in your life at that time. CRAP. All Crap. The people you knew were crap. You were working with people who were crap. People made you feel like crap. You would even like to say the music you were listening to was crap, except, YOU WEREN'T LISTENING TO ANY DAMN MUSIC, so that in itself is CRAP. Therefore, does it then go to prove that the artistic direction you pursued, indeed, is crap too? Are these things separable or are they connected? Go back further in your life. Your friends were good. You had a couple fun jobs. No one made you feel like crap, except for maybe a short time, but you were able to escape from that era. The music, although not what you are listening to now, was not necessarily crap, it was redeeming, and you were listening to some good stuff too. Hell, at least you were listening to music. But your artistic vision was not what you are doing today.

I'm just having a hard time with this. I'm at an aesthetic crisis.

Because I made the decision with my artistic direction when I was under the influence of CRAP, does that make my artistic direction CRAP?

In a way, I don't think so, because my artistic direction has seen several changes in my personal life, bad things like financial stress, personal hardship, and good things like discovering new music, and remained intact nonetheless. Therefore, it can withstand stress and remain durable, unlike the previous artistic direction that really only existed during good times (with a slight interruption/bump in 1985), but FELL APART during the hard times (1989-90). Therefore, my latter direction has integrity, by that logic, right?

The thing is, how do I take my Seinfeldian "art about nothing" and make it about something? How can that be achieved with non-representative abstracts? Oxymoron.

I just don't want to be making ONLY pretty pictures, you know?

Posted by Ann on 07/31/03@09:28 AM CST ..::Link::..

Wednesday, July 30, 2003

Too many planes falling out of the sky dreams

just like when I was younger. This can't be good.

Posted by Ann on 07/30/03@04:14 PM CST ..::Link::..

Another Crashing Aircraft DREAM

We had all these animals in a cage...newts, lizards, rats, it was quite hideous, actually. Some were emaciated. I was trying to feed them mealworms. It was disastrous.

There was a large aircraft in the sky that was in the shape of something, like a flat pontoon or something, I can't recall exactly. It was having a hard time taking off because another aircraft was ahead of it, so it tried circling around a few times, but it was having problems maneuvering, tipping a lot, and then finally it crashed. I didn't know where it crashed, but all of a sudden I was downtown (Madison) and looked out a window of a building and realized that the aircraft had crashed onto the steeple of some church that was very high. It's hard to describe, but it was as if the steeple was on top of a buiding. There were all these people walking around it, looking at the disaster. Ironically, there wasn't much fire or anything, just a small fire inside the crunched steeple. There were a bunch of schoolkids, like kids in Catholic School uniforms, milling about. I was hoping no one was killed. Very odd dream.

Posted by Ann on 07/30/03@09:09 AM CST ..::Link::..

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

It was just a bad dream

Seriously, when I heard of this on the radio in the morning, I was half asleep and I really thought I was dreaming it up it was so absurd.

The whole Futures Market for Terrorism was just a joke, right? I mean, the Pentagon wasn't SERIOUS about this, were they? It's like some absurdist futuristic comedy. Unbelievable. Reminds me a bit of:

"Hey bartender over here
Two more shots and two more beers
Sir, turn up the TV sound
The war has started on the ground
Just love those laser guided bombs
They're really great for righting wrongs
You hit the target and win the game
From bars 3,000 miles away"
-from 'The Bravery of Being out of Range' by Roger Waters

Posted by Ann on 07/29/03@06:49 PM CST ..::Link::..

Strange...

You know, when you're drunk with friends and you're showing them things on the internet, you're apt to add the oddest things to your bookmarks, like...Theodore Roosevelt on Film.

I have no clue why, but it was there this morning when I looked at my bookmarks.

Posted by Ann on 07/29/03@02:25 PM CST ..::Link::..

Monday, July 28, 2003

New Guess

Pink Floyd. 3rd Translation. Japanese.

Being your, something suitable ones of the vibration that it is
obtained is dangerous. Your calmness it continues? and the reader of
the valley of walking of the iron of the steel iron iron - with to the
submissive road, it is good, it is.

(I just thought it was really funny, is all.)

Posted by Ann on 07/28/03@03:12 PM CST ..::Link::..

DREAM - Paralyzed

I suffered a stroke and had some disability with the right side of my body, namely signing my name. I could do other things, but signing my name was extremely difficult. I discovered this when we had to sign a bunch of papers for the house refinancing, and my signature was quite large and didn't look like my real signature at all. I told the woman who was going through the signing with us that I couldn't sign my name because of my stroke, and she, unsympathetically, said "try anyway." I felt like I was using my left hand. Then Stan and I were out late at night and were getting together with Lamya and Russ to go out to eat or something. For some odd reason, I had a large painting in my car that I was able to carry just fine, even though my ride side was disabled. Weird.

Stan and I had a whole bunch of frogs (IRL we kept two of the chorus frogs we raised from tadpoles, but released the other 9) but they were more like mice. They were colored like mice, black, white, grey, brown. I lifted up the cover to their cage and it fell on them and I worried I damaged one.

Posted by Ann on 07/28/03@09:16 AM CST ..::Link::..
By Ann @ 20:55 AM CST:08:20:03 ..::Link::..