Vickilicious

We have so, so many things to talk about, like so much you're going to be sick of me and my thoughts and photos and life events before I even finish posting them, and I will get to them really soon, or at least as soon as I make some time, which I promise I seriously will try to do soon(ish).

But I made this video of going down a water slide in Iceland, and it's so full of glee and swooshing and water-sliding that, well, you really should just forgive my ongoing reticence and watch it:

(link)

Wheeeeee, right??

See you soon.

You may want to grab a snack and a beverage, as I've been thinking a lot and I don't promise to be concise.

First, I have an inner ear infection. It's not fun. It ruined my plans for this weekend, and it's given me horrible vertigo with accompanying nausea. I recently bought a supply of Dramamine and Bonine and those wrist pressure bracelets to avoid seasickness while whale-watching in Iceland, and I've really seriously considered tapping into all of the above.

(I thought about Photoshopping my face over Kim Novak's, but yeah, that's a lot of work, so let's pretend that I did and it was awesome and you got a nice little chuckle out of that.)

Did you know, by the way, that allegedly associated symptoms of labyrinthitis (which hey, what up Bowie-type disease name) include rather intense anxiety and depression? Doesn't that sound made up? It seems so wholly fictitious that I started really pondering the mechanism, along with the whole concept of derealization (which happens more than I'd care to admit) until I became completely panicky and dizzy.

I've had really bad bronchitis three or four times in the past year, and it wasn't until the last bout that I read that one of the clinical symptoms is malaise. It sounds so obvious, like of course you feel out of sorts, you're sick... and yet, that uneasy sense of trepidation is usually the only thing that first tips me off that I'm in for something gross. In spite of being sick as frequently as I've been this year (what is UP with that??), I'm still not really used to it, and I don't listen to my body the way I should. If I feel sick or nauseous or upset or depersonalized, I always assume it's psychological until my body is actually producing an excess of something and freaking out. I think a lot about the perceived sense of health and the way that, still after all these years of clinical descriptors and specificity, we lack a lot of the language to truly describe sensations of illness. This overlap of symptom and sensation, the way we feel what we are experiencing, seems to carry a lot of the truth of what it is to be alive, and I think there is a lot to understand in the complexity beyond "this feels good / this feels bad." My body knows, at least, and I'd like to pay more attention to that.

Last week I went to a concert with my very dear friend John. Actually first we went to dinner at Via Della Pace, which may be my new favorite Italian restaurant in the city.

We both had lobster ravioli in pink vodka sauce with red caviar, and oh, it was delicious.

I love John intensely - he is a tremendous friend from undergrad, with whom I have wonderfully long conversations for hours on end with nowhere near the frequency I would like. We share a lot of interests, especially to do with philosophy and spirituality, and we talk in depth about the universe and beliefs and all the stuff you're sort of afraid to talk about in mixed company. I didn't realize how much I needed a night with John until I was in the middle of it, and I kept thinking how lucky I was to have that time together.

The band we saw is one of my favorite post-rock groups, called This Will Destroy You. They are phenomenally talented, and the atmosphere at the Mercury Lounge was just spot-on for really getting lost in the music. Their set opened with maybe 20-30 minutes of broody, evocative improvisation, and the collective build of energy was just amazing. John is really highly empathic but says it takes quite a lot to genuinely affect him. By the end of the first - I hesitate to call it a song, should I say movement of music? - I could see he was completely immersed in it, and I was thrilled that he dug these guys as much as I did.

After the absolutely mesmerizing show (which flew by, since we were all literally captivated with our mouths open in awe), John and I got cake at a place down the street, where we stayed for a pretty good long time talking about every little thing in the universe and, one of my favorite topics, the nature of the universe itself.

On the train ride home, I kept thinking how incredible it is that we so quickly fell back into that level of intimacy in discourse after close to a year apart and a handful of "we really should get together" emails and Facebook messages. I felt truly, profoundly lucky to have that kind of connection, and I realize that I have that with a lot of my friends, a group that includes all these unbelievably beautiful, brilliant, fascinating people. When I went off to college the first time, they were the type of people I hoped beyond hope existed in the world, the kinds I dreamnt about writing letters to and sharing wine with in some little restaurant on a rainy night in New York. And there I was, living that dream, remembering all the other things I'd dreamnt for myself as well.

I don't necessarily regret the events of my life between when I graduated from Trinity and the present, but I do sometimes wonder if I actually chose them, or if I kind of let them happen to me. When I was 21, I moved to Brooklyn and got completely lost in every sense. I had a few different jobs and no money, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time wallowing over heartbreak, both with men and ruined friendships. I started dating my ex-boyfriend on the tails of an abysmally dysfunctional relationship, which I never really processed, and I spent a lot of our four-year relationship in a daze between grad school, depression, baffling fights I still don't understand, and clutter in every sense of the word. Periodically I would ask myself "Is this really what I mean to be doing?" and I would kind of sigh because I'd gotten myself in too deep and felt trapped in a lot of destructive and unhappy patterns. I felt myself giving up on dreams and believing really awful cynical things, settling for what felt in the moment like happiness when I see now it was more like comfort.

I have to chide myself for bad historiography here, as it is anachronistically revisionist in tone, and I hate when people disparage their past because, as I said, I don't regret it, and most of it I remember fondly.

I just find myself in the present looking around and wondering again if this is what I meant to choose.

There are some people in my life who I love in unspeakably profound ways, for whom words like "friend" and "love" sound profane in their shallowness and lack of specificity. It seems like these are the people I should be spending my time talking with and being with, caring for, and learning from.

I very foolishly pushed people away in the beginning of grad school, pulling that old reality-show chestnut, "I'm not here to make friends," because I thought that was what a serious student would do and I was tired of feeling like an academic joke. I recognize how stupid that was, since really, what else AM I here to do?? I learn so much from my friends and acquaintances, and in general from people whose company challenges me, yet I was denying myself that experience with lame excuses about money or time or needing to go home and fight with my boyfriend about the dishes for the thousandth time. Also fear and shyness and that sense that I was already too late all the time for anything that mattered to me.

I understand now the debilitating effects of anxiety and internalizing negative ideas about oneself, and I like to think I've gotten a hell of a lot more comfortable in my own skin. I used to be afraid to talk to people and constantly ashamed of myself, and now I just say what I think and ask people for their thoughts. I like myself a lot more, and hell, it's about time - I'm pushing 30.

So I look at my life and what I'm doing with it, and I recognize a very real opportunity to make it whatever I desire in the next little bit here. I get to choose where I live, what my apartment will be like, the friends I spend the most time with and the ones I let recede a little into fond memory, the men I love or give up on, the new people I let in and get to know better, what classes I take, what jobs I work, and really, what my life will become. I'm nearly overwhelmed with the excitement.

I felt the staggering astonishment of really doing anything I want the other day when I was painting, starting with a fresh canvas (which I haven't done in a while) and just having at it. I have a newsketchbook, and it fits really perfectly in my current purse without getting jostled around, which has lead to a wonderful amount of compulsive drawing while listening to music on trains or wherever I may be. I started trying to make a painting from one of my sketches, and pretty quickly I reminded myself of why this rarely occurs successfully in a one-to-one depiction, since the figure-ground relationship of painting and drawing is inherently different. Further, in drawings, I can just accept dramatic strokes of ink for what they are, and I don't ask them to be something more, whereas in oil paint, in color, I feel like I need toarticulate, to make clearer the nature of something which is categorically different than a drawing.

"Eff it," I said with much greater vulgarity, "it doesn't want to be my drawing," and I went at the canvas in such a delightfully free, open-ended kind of way. I told my hands to do whatever they wanted, I grabbed at color impulsively and let the forms tell me what they wanted to be. I hope you'll pardon the trite cliche, but it was truly exhilarating, and I felt freer than I've felt in a painfully long time.

Once I'd blocked out what this painting is pretty much going to be and even came up with a jokey little title that I rather love, I was all high on art-making and self-being. I asked my dad what he thought, expecting one of his typically supportive replies, and he looked a little concerned and said, "Isn't it a lot like the one you just did?" He was referring to the painting I finished around St. Patrick's Day, which is now hanging in my parents' bedroom. At first I got kind of pissy because no, it's obviously nothing like that painting! The only thing they have in common is a predominance of blue! But eventually I calmed down and sorted out that he wasn't saying anything judgmental in this observation, just noticing the very clear similarities.

The other thing, I thought much later, is that sometimes when I have all the possibilities in the world in front of me, and I can choose whatever I want, my dream is not really that different from my reality, save for the way I got there.

I might not change that much about myself or my life, since I still make most decisions by following my heart. The difference is, I'm actually making these decisions now, and owning them, and I'm approaching them from a place of optimism, open-endedness, and sublime freedom. Makes a big difference, I think.

Did you ever have really good news, and you're going around telling all your friends and acquaintances and anyone who will listen, and they're all happy for you, and then you run into like, one of your closest and best friends and you off-handedly refer to your good news and they're all "WTF?! You never told me about that!" and you feel kind of like a terrible friend?

So hey blog, I have great news!

I've been working my ass off the past few months to finish writing my art history master's thesis, and then I launched into a massive series of major edits and revisiting my sources and fixing all my citations and rewriting significant sections, and well, it's been a LOT of work beyond what had already been a monumental task.

Because I don't have a desk in my room here, and because I needed to work with about twenty eight books and seventeen stacks of paper at a time, I've been spread out at the dining room table, along with a rather alarming amount of Twizzlers and cookies, in what my family has been calling (sometimes through clenched teeth) "Thesis Central."

So last Friday, after another week of phone calls with my advisor and working on minor edits, we were discussing the conclusions, and abruptly she said, "So that's it. Congratulations, you're ready to publish now." I did a handful of double-takes, followed by trying really hard not to shriek as she continued to talk about some future possibilities in the field and ideas she has for me (which I'll get into later).

After we hung up the phone, with the reality that I have just a few more steps to finish two master's degrees, I was kind of floored. I still haven't really processed what it all means and feels - it may actually be too enormous for my current (exhausted) emotional faculties to handle all at once.

I have, however, been celebrating up, down, and all over the place. I feel like I have a lot of social life to catch up on (why do I want to say "upon?"), and I recognize that I've been leaving a lot of stuff in shambles while I focus all my energies on just finishing the damn thesis. But now it is (basically) done, and my God, what a tremendous feeling.

With this, dear blog, I'm going to try to be less of an absentee friend and more of a, how shall we say,person, again. It may take me a bit to get back into the swing of posting regularly, and I can't promise it won't all be cat photos for a while, but hey, I wrote a master's thesis (!!!!!!!). I can handle some blog posts.

I've developed this tendency lately to assume omniscience on the part of the internet and my friends and family. Alternately, I forget that the internet is not one entirely continuous repository of information that distributes whatever I type in the status boxes of Facebook or Twitter to anyone who might be interested (yet).

So, while I first wrote that title in jest, because I've been accused lately of name-droppy tendencies with Iceland, it occurs to me that I very well might not have mentioned here that, hey, I AM GOING TO ICELAND!!!!!

My mom has been wanting to travel to Iceland since she was a little girl. She wrote every possible school assignment she could on Iceland or geysers, she drew pictures of puffins, she studied the country's history and legends, and has always been both fascinated by and remarkably knowledgeable about it. When she and I were thinking out loud about places we might like to travel, she threw out Iceland, and I was immediately intrigued. The more we researched, the more ridiculously excited I became about it, and this winter we booked our trip for the peak of the season, June 21st through July 2nd! (I feel like that sentence should end with about thirty exclamation points, but I'm trying to keep it together.)

Ironically, once our trip was paid in full and we were committed to going, our buddy Eyjafjallajökull had to start making trouble for the whole world (check out some pretty stunning time-lapse footage). We've had a running joke for years now that the type of adventure travel we enjoy is not sitting on a guide bus looking out the window at the country going by, but it's also not riding bicycles up the side of active volcanoes. This shared preference, by the way, is just one of the many thousands of reasons why my mom is such an awesome travel companion. We agree that it's important to actually experience a country's culture and heritage, but we also want to get out in it and explore. When the big E started erupting, I did double-check our itinerary to see if we were, in fact, bicycling up its side (we're not), but so far we're only scheduled to visit it and a nearby glacier, seismic activity pending.

Among other things, we'll be doing a lot of hiking, checking out horses and a puffin rookery, whale-watching, looking at infinite glacial rivers and waterfalls, taking a dip in hot springs, visiting the gigantic Geysir for which all other geysers are named, walking on glaciers, and going glacial river-rafting (!!!!!!!). Right now the glacial river-rafting is probably the activity for which I am most excited, but I know that once I get there I'm going to be blown away by the wildly different natural beauty.

It goes without saying my shutter finger is already twitching with excitement. As an added bonus, the time when we're there is during the Midnight Sun, when there is nearly continuous daylight (more info on climate). While I'm happy to tote my SLR most places, I learned in Costa Rica that there is no way to protect it on certain hikes and of course rafting. I started researching an underwater housing for the little pocket camera I bought last summer (Nikon Coolpix S630), but they were so expensive that I realized I could as easily just buy a new waterproof, shock-proof camera, which had 14 megapixels instead of 12.

Hello, dollface.

I researched a bunch of waterproof/underwater cameras and went with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS2, which dominated the alternatives in light sensitivity and exposure options. I was also considering theCanon Powershot D10 because I genuinely love Canon cameras. I was seriously tempted by the Canon last summer as well, but it just didn't match the Lumix for things that really mattered to me. I also felt like its design was a little clunky, whereas the Lumix is slick and streamlined.

In addition to bringing it to Iceland, I'm also planning to bring this camera with me sailing and kayaking (which is why it's important that it take nice photos out of the water too) because I see so many amazing things out on the river, but of course I am not going to bring my SLR in my little frog fleet.*

* The sailboat being named Kermit and my kayak called La piccola rana, Italian for "the little frog" because it's so cute and green and allows me to be sort of amphibious.

Fortunately, because I've traveled in various climates and circumstances in the past few years, I have most of the stuff I'll need already, like a great waterproof hiking backpack with water bottle holders on the sides and the most amazingly wonderful pair of insulated, waterproof leather hiking boots I could have imagined. My last trip to Italy in November (which doesn't sound like it should be cold, but we were working outdoors on a freezing site and it rained a lot) taught me the wonder of silk base layers for warmth without bulk, and I've experimented a lot with layering systems (with varying degrees of success) to know what works for me. Heck, I've even figured out how to style my hair so it stays out of my face all day but looks (more or less) presentable in photos.

I guess what I'm saying is I feel really, fantastically prepared, which is an exceptionally rare thing for me. Instead of fretting or experiencing vast expanses of anxiety, I just feel excitement and dizzy anticipation. Now let's just hope that volcano doesn't get any bad ideas...

I think that apart from a few big, irreversible life decisions (whether or not to marry, and to whom, whether or not to have children, how many, etc.), it's hard to see yourself in the process of choosing who you are going to become. We rarely have the distance or perspective to be able to wrap our heads around what the implications of seemingly small day-to-day decisions add up to be, nor to grasp what it really means to be a person who buys organic produce or supports the arts.

Periodically, I find myself at crossroads where I am keenly aware that I am making a decision that will probably impact the rest of my life. I get into a slow motion she-moves-like-they-do kind of detachment and really think hard about who I want to be, what my life will look like if I go for A, B, or the as yet great unknown. A friend of mine is going through the same type of thing right now, and she and I spent a good deal of time sketching out what we imagine our lives could be in the next few years.

Life being what it is, any time I've found myself at similar crossroads, I never could have imagined what was coming down the path at me, or the drastic difference between what I planned for and what I lived. There are so many variables of chance, circumstances, the fickle nature of human emotions... you just never know who you are going to be, when, and what life will throw at you in that moment. (Am I full of cliched truisms today, or what??)

I've thought about the things I've never regretted, and it's a pretty small list:

- Traveling
- Buying books
- Going to concerts, the opera, plays, etc.
- Starting new paintings
- Falling in love

(The temptation to buy a new book, pack my sketching supplies, leave the country and fall in love during intermission for an opera is extraordinary.)

I guess the thing I have to keep reminding myself is that even if I choose one path over another, or I tell myself what I'm going to feel, I ultimately have no control over the universe outside of what I do in it. The fact that I could meet my soul mate on the train tomorrow morning is equally exhilarating and terrifying. The possibility that I've already met him and missed my chance weighs pretty heavy on my heart. Maybe I go to one school and become a pioneer in my field. Maybe I go to another and decide to give it up and work in industry developing cleaning products. Maybe I live in New York again and have all the experiences I've been meaning to. Maybe it's just like the last time, or worse.

All I can really choose is whether I'm open to these possibilities or not, and whether I make my choices from a place of fear and insecurity or hope and boldness. I guess for now, I choose the latter. Saying yes to everything, and letting the universe sort out who I become.

Two days after my last post, my grandmother died. It was really upsetting and hard for all of us - and continues to be - and I've been at a bit of a loss for what to say or think about it all.

I think I was repressing my feelings, channeling them all into over-the-top stress about my thesis. As long as I was sitting at the dining room table frantically typing and editing all day and night, I felt like I could stave off how sad I was about it. I think my dad has been going through it the same way, and when I see his face crumple and his shoulders go soft whenever a new sympathy card arrives, I understand the reluctance to accept that this has really happened. Maybe, collectively, we've been thinking that if we just don't talk about it and act like it isn't our reality, we could escape the sorrow and hurt caused by losing someone so special and dear to us.

But that's not really the way the heart works, or the brain, and whenever I find myself with some time to think, like during a sad song at a concert, a little trickle of emotion would open the floodgates. You find yourself crying in public more than once, and you start to wonder if there isn't maybe something you need to spend a little more time dealing with.

Last week I was driving to Brooklyn for a stressful meeting, and I guess I hadn't really made that drive since my gram had the stroke. I wasn't at all prepared for the way my heart and brain lit up with hurt and overflowed with the reality that my gram was gone. I talked about this phenomenon with a friend a little last summer when my aunt died, and he agreed that things always hit him hardest when he's alone in the car. I turned into one of those gulping, sobbing messes you see in movies (and always wonder - wouldn't it be safer to pull over?) and cried nearly the whole drive from New Jersey. At first it was with that devastating realization that I'd never get to talk with my gram again or hear her voice. Then I fell apart when I realized she'd never touch my hand the way she does, and I'd never get to hug her and smell her nice gram smell, which I adore because she bathed with lavender soap. I'd never get to hear her voice, her boisterous laugh, or to have access to her marvelous thoughts and insights into things.

I think it hit my mother this week on May 10th, which is both my parents' wedding anniversary and the frost date for this region. My parents were planting flowers, and my mom had a gardening question. Of course, her first instinct was to call my gram and ask her, because as much as her short-term memory was affected by Alzheimer's, she knew gardening better than anyone. Suddenly, I think my mom recognized, she'd never get to call her again, and that while she might get her question answered by a book or the internet, she'd never get it the way my grandmother knew things, out of the habit of nurturing and doing things her whole life.

We've all been quietly, privately eulogizing my gram with this type of memory, talking about her intellectual curiosity and appreciation for music and the opera, or about how charming it was that when she moved to Hawaii she promised her feet she'd never put them in shoes again, and she wore flip-flops damn near every day of the rest of her life. I got all teary writing the acknowledgments to my thesis, which I dedicated to my gram because some of my earliest memories of her were when she'd stop in the middle of the street to look at a type of bromeliad she'd never seen before, and no matter what kind of hurry everyone else was in, or if they snipped "oh it's just some decorative thing in a planter, let's go," she would insist on staying and having her look because she positively needed to know what it was. That observation of life, and the tenacity to follow one's instincts about what's actually important in the grand scheme of things, are just two of the many things I genuinely admired about my gram, and I hope, every day, that I have some of that in me.

I can hear her voice, when some aspect of the world charmed her, saying "Oh aren't you cute," or "Look at you, you lovely thing!" and touching flowers with the tenderness of a lover. I think of her so literally stopping to smell the roses, and gasping "My GOD, what a heavenly scent!" and that sense of urgency and freaking-out about deadlines and drafts and sources and oh-no-oh-no rushing that I've been feeling immediately dissipates, as utterly absurd by comparison.

I've come to this realization many times before in the course of my graduate degrees, but it's important to remember that while I'm focusing all my time and energy on school, I'm still alive, in the world, and even if I have a lot of work to do, this is still my only chance at that. That day crying in the car might have been a lot of things, but it was also sunny, with a gentle breeze, and that night I saw an amazing opera. I'm really going to make an effort to pay more attention to that type of joy, the way my gram did, and stop taking everything else so damn seriously. I mean really, is anything more important than living and loving?

My Grandma Wanda is 87 years old and has had a handful of health problems in the past few years, so I've been trying to make the most of any time I've had with her. I've also been trying to prepare myself for the reality that we don't have forever together.

On Thursday I learned that she had a stroke and was in the hospital. Friday, she had a second, hemorrhagic stroke, and they didn't expect her to survive. As of now, she is unconscious, but breathing on her own, and they don't yet know the extent of the damage, if she will survive, and what quality of life she may have if she does.

I've been a mess, trying to think through what to even pray for, and I realize it's not up to me. All I can ask for is what's best for her, and that she have peace. I know she knows how much we all love her and have cherished having her in our lives.

I've tried not to yammer on incessantly about what's involved in pursuing two master's degrees, as I don't imagine this topic is of much interest to people who aren't in the process of doing it, and they of course already know what special kind of hell this can be. I also use the (highly faulty) logic that if I have time to write about writing, I have time to do the writing, so instead I focus on valuable, time-sensitive topics like shoes and makeup and food. Or my cat. Or how I worry about being alone my whole life, or whatever I do blather on about most (I tune in and out).

But this is a major part of my life, and currently it is the thing that occupies literally every day. It is, and I'm not exaggerating this, constantly on my mind, and nearly every other facet of my existence gets measured against my thesis. This is only a small part of why I'm so, SO ready to be done with it.

I got an invitation to a symposium where selected other students from my department would present their completed master's dissertations, and for God knows what reason, this time I really paid attention to the titles and topics. Probably because I don't like myself very much and needed to add another item to the voluminous Thesis Insecurities and Anxieties list.

I had a professor once who referred to this style of titling as Academic Hypercolonics. I'm sure you can come up with some kind of an example, but the general format goes:

Cheeky Clever Title: A Mind-bogglingly complex analysis overwrought with buzzwords and terms you have to look up, requiring multiple readings to even discern the general topic.

Bonus points if it includes verbing a noun, rethinking a paradigm, identifying cultural shifts, or deals with something that by its very nature sounds obnoxiously obscure yet effortlessly sanctimonious.

Nine times out of ten (honestly, it's way way more), I read the titles of art history and theory papers, and I have an immediate "OMG, who the F caaaares?!?!" response. I am hopelessly impatient, and I get tremendously annoyed by things that seem tedious (how did I even get into a master's program in the first place?). It seems to me that those devoting their research to the exhaustive examination of cultural minutiae are even more predisposed than your average academic to the rigorously abstruse.

I know that I've written about this before, but there was a time when I was reading theory and criticism articles for an MFA class, and they were so dense and overwrought with appropriated philosophical vocabulary (often misused) and agonizingly unclear language that I reverted to looking up every other word with a dictionary and diagramming out really, precisely, what they were saying. Big shock, most writing about art does not actually say anything. It dances around in a lot of specialized tautology and self-referential terminology to achieve, essentially, a vague characterization of an artwork's theorized cultural impact. Or, avoiding any hard aesthetic judgments or qualifications, achieves criticism which is merely descriptive at best. Art criticism is, of course, its own animal, and I understand the need for this type of cagey, noncommittal writing (kind of). But art history? Really??

The way I understand the history of art is probably different from most because I have always looked at art as a painter and a person captivated by visual stimuli. If it's beautiful, or sexy, or makes me feel something visceral, I'm probably going to like it. If it's disgusting and ugly and weird, but intriguing, I'm going to spend time looking at it and also enjoy the experience. I'm not so upfront about what I think is "good" or "bad" (or in MFA terms "successful" or not) because I recognize that is all subjective, but I still have an instinctive, immediate response. I'm either interested or not, and so my definition of "bad" art is that which just falls flat and doesn't interest me. Wholly subjective and unscientific, and I'm okay with that. If it leaves me cold, I don't like it.

I also subscribe to the belief that throughout time, most people's system of aesthetics veers closer to mine than current art theory and criticism would have you believe. I trust my senses more than conceptual conceits, and I feel like if I have to read multiple tomes of smug, intellectually problematic and self-important theory (rife with hypocrisy) to say "Okay... I think I get it...." then it's not really my style of art. (I would argue it may not even BE art, so much as a masturbatory intellectual exercise, but that's another can of worms.)

So what matters when studying art history? Looking through an historical lens, we have the benefit of already knowing a work's impact from the time of its creation to present (more or less). We cannot, of course, predict what will become important to future generations (Botticelli was largely dismissed as a middling also-ran for centuries), nor can we guarantee that the art we value most now will even exist, if the materials are not handled in a future-minded way (hello, art conservation science!). We can, however, look at the background of a work's creation (patronage and commissions, predominant sociopolitical/religious etc ideology, reference images and sources, documentation of contracts, specifications about materials, working methods and techniques, and so on) as well as the immediate cultural climate in which it was received. In this way, looking at a painting now, and reading how people felt about it when it was made, we can tap into what it was like to live then, to think and feel in the artist's time, and to know a little more about being human as a consequence.

These connections are probably what draws me most to art history. Political history can tell you what happened, but the art and literature and music tell you how it felt. Voices carry over time and give you another version of existence, in other times and places and with different beliefs. This cultural material is, in many many ways, the literal stuff that connects people over time and unites humanity. (Obviously it's tremendously important to me.)

Good historical art, to me, is different from interesting contemporary art, but I use similar criteria to evaluate it. What I want to see, when looking at the piece, is how the artist felt when making it. How they used the materials, and to what effect. What it was to be alive in that time, place, and circumstances, and how they treated their subject in relation to that. As I said, this is because I look at art as a painter, and I know how most of it is made (or I work to find out). Painting is a tool to try to understand the universe, like math or language or botany, and I want to see that inquiry and exploration mapped out in the work. The "art" of being an artist really happens mainly in their head, and the "stuff" of art, I think, exists almost as a secondary entity to keep track of what they were doing. It's like having access to a scientist's notes on an experiment.

I have a silly and emotional connection to art, an historical camaraderie and tenderness that makes me weep when I see an anonymous painter's brushstrokes on a bird in Pompeii. I think things like "He really had fun painting this," and I get all mushy and overwhelmed. I'm really okay with that, and I've come to terms with the fact that I probably don't belong in art history as a field because I am just plain not interested in the overwrought intellectual arguments (often done faultily anyway) - it seems to me if that were the approach I wanted to take, I should study pure philosophy, but not call it art history.

I look at my thesis and I worry that it's trite and stupid and that anyone who is not really interested in flowers and Italian Renaissance painting and herbal medicine and Venice could have that same "OMG who caaaaaares?!" response that I have to other people's topics. I also get paranoid that it's all made up and has no factual basis beyond my own desire to see something that's not there (oh the falterings of confidence are fantastic on this one), but I keep transporting myself back to the first time I saw these paintings, when I noticed these adorable little rows of recognizable and identifiable flowers, and I thought "Hmm, what are they doing there??"

I've thought almost as much about the process of thesis writing as I have thought about my actual thesis. I talk with other students in my program, about their projects and their research strategies, and sometimes I feel like I'm doing something completely wrong. One friend, a pure art theorist writing on a contemporary conceptual artist, started by deciding he wanted to write on this artist, looked at all the artist's work, read everything that's been written about it, and synthesized an argument from there. I'm not gonna lie, that approach holds little interest for me, and I'm really happy that I started with an original observation and back-tracked through a whole pile of different influencing factors. I matched my research method to the Renaissance approach to ideas, and even if it's been scatter-shot and wobbling along in a bizarrely non-linear way, it feels right, and true to the work. I haven't been trying to retroactively apply my own ideas about art onto something anachronistically... I think it's more a thing of trying to tease out what is already in the work, what mattered to the artist and patrons, and what was in the air.

But knowing what's in the art isn't all of it. A scientist friend sent me a brilliant paper from this lab known for its extraordinary volume and quality of publications, on writing a paper. Among many marvelous insights, it had an unforgettable passage about what a scientific paper is, which seems applicable to any type of academic research (bear with me on this):

Realize that your objective in research is to formulate and test hypotheses, to draw conclusions from these tests, and to teach these conclusions to others. Your objective is not to "collect data".

As a corollary in art history, I would offer that it's also important not to start with a system of assumptions and manipulate your research to "support" editorial claims. There is a middle path where you can look through research objectively and sensitively, to learn as much as you can, and then say, okay, I think this is what this all adds up to. Then there has to be that "so what?" moment, where you unpack what that means to anyone else and explain why that is interesting for humanity.

I might be completely wrong about all of my methods and ideas, but after years of this research, inconceivable exhaustion and frustration, I think I've got some things to say. I hope they're interesting.

What I meant to say, before I got all starry-eyed about food and tirade-y about running, is that I really want to get my thesis finished so that I can get on with my life.

I've been in grad school entirely too long, and it's really time to move forward (to another degree, heh). It's not being in school that's a problem, it's the way I put the rest of my existence on hold and dismiss things, sliding them down the priority scale to "I don't have time for that," when really, I should MAKE time for the things that matter to me.

I keep thinking through how to do things differently, how to stop the incessant worrisome chatter in my mind that strips the joy out of experiences, that nagging sensation at the base of my skull that relentlessly bitches about all the things we have to do and how behind I am on everything. I don't know when I started saying "I wish I could, but I just don't have time," but it falls effortlessly from my lips these days, even as I find myself blatantly, shamelessly wasting time.

I don't want to spend any more of my days avoiding work or lamenting how long I procrastinated before buckling down and getting something done... but I'm sure I will. It's finally spring, the sun is out, and it's almost warm enough to start going out on the water, but I am sitting indoors on my computer, listening to the birds through the windows and wondering if I can take a walk with my camera for a little bit (instinctively, my mind says "I really can't"). This was all completely avoidable.

I have a lot of social stuff planned in the coming weeks because I expected I would have finished my thesis by now (having no actual plan for how to do so other than Just Doing It). I neither want to cancel plans, nor spend concerts, operas etc. worrying about how much work I have to do. I want to be able to spend afternoons sitting outside with friends, talking and relaxing and saying how relieved I am to have finally gotten that damn thesis out of the way.

More than anything, I want to stop looking at everything in terms of time and whether it was well spent. There is no intrinsic value to time, and its elasticity enables one to stretch it around whatever level of consequence seems most appropriate to a moment. I want time to stand still again because I am no longer constantly cognizant of its passing. I want to listen to stories without rushing to the conclusion so I can wrap up conversations. I want to gaze lovingly in someone's eyes and will the universe to wrap itself entirely into that instant because nothing else matters.

The only way to get time back is to write this thing and calm the hell down.