Reason not to go into politics

At the grad "exercises"(their term) last night it was suggested one pursuit was to go into politics.
I submit this picture of Sen D. Stabenow of Michigan as one very good reason to avoid it.
Do you really want your picture, looking like this, to be on the internet or anywhere else?

End of high school - yeah! Congratulations AREA!

So, this is it.

No more high school rules about
- how you can dress (= no spaghetti straps, but of course nobody enforced it),
- how to make up gym class (= hand in a media article on health, doesn't matter if you read it),
- no more crazy snow days (they rarely exist in college, you are simply supposed to be in class)
- strict grading (in college the teachers themselves set the policy, ok, it can be even more crazy...)
- no more hall passes or nurse passes (= go to college class unless you are throwing up)
- no more football games or senior prank days (time for more sophistication or real sports...)

This is it.  End of kid years.  Now it is the real thing.  18 and with a driver's license, no money, but a summer job!  Shape your life, get in the wheel barrow (if you like), and do what you think is important, not what some senior speech girl or guy that goes to Princeton think is important.  It is up to you now (with some help from us).  We think you are amazing.

I think you will struggle with keeping things organized, but that is OK.   I think you will make wonderful things that touch people deeply.  I think you will do great, important things that make the world a better place, and I am not talking about money, creating a new Facebook, or being a new Steve Jobs.  Whatever you do, follow the path that keeps you interested and happy with you.  I love that you care about others, especially in this world.  More teenagers should be like you.

Congratulations, 12 years of regular school is over, and now you get to do what you love (well, mostly...).  Actual, unprotected life is scary, amazing, fun, worrisome, and just how life is.  You can handle it, I know it! Du ar underbar.  Love, Mom/Mamma

What life is really about, but it is easy to forget this...

Excerpt from a great commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College; source: Wall Street Journal

”If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the ”rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."

Is art is about empty space?

rather empty bulletin board for the sculpture department - depressing I think, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

Depressingly few job openings, exhibitions and other opportunities posted on the board at the Sculpture department at MECA (Maine College of Art). Too bad. Or maybe the bulletin board master is on vacation?