Sorry this is such a boring entry, but college is a huge part of my life right now, so bear with me. I’m still going to post about what’s been going on since my last personal update, but all my grades are finally in! :D

Art 291: Intro to Print & Narrative Forms: A
Art 342: Intro to Figure Drawing: A-
Art Hist 101: Ancient & Medieval Art & Architecture: A
Bio Sci 104: Plants in Today’s World: B
Celtic 103: First Semester Gaelic: B (Seriously, WTF? More on that later…)

This Semester’s GPA: 3.53 | Cumulative GPA: 3.46

Not bad, but I’d like to eventually bring my overall GPA up to at least 3.5. The best part is I never have to take a science class again! I haven’t been this excited since I was done with math (hopefully) forever. XD I’m definitely going to miss my art history professor I’ve had for the past two semesters, though. He talked just like Ace Ventura, which made even the dullest works of art sound exciting and was so loud that he didn’t use a mic. Most of all, I will miss his Captain Planet, Spinal Tap, and Storylords references, his self depreciating humor and his weird childhood stories. “Yeah, all my friends in grade school had Nitro from American Gladiator posters in their bedrooms, and I had Albrecht Duerer’s Young Hare…” Well, if that doesn’t do it for you, he also referred to Cimabue’s Christ child from Madonna and Child Enthroned as an “awesome Hobbit-Jesus-man-baby”. ...no? Then you'll be glad to know I'm not above admitting that I have a retarded sense of humor.

Anyway, now that first semester is over, here’s what I’m taking next semester so you can get an idea of what kind of art I’ll be posting (and what classes I’ll be bitching about on Twitter):

Art 441: Advanced Drawing Strategies I M & W 12:30 PM – 3:15 PM
Art 221: Intro to Design T & TR 4:00 PM – 6:30 PM
Art 309: Issues in Contemporary Art Lecture W 4:00 PM – 6:30 PM
Art 299: Printmaking Workshop: Sequence & Structure 9:00 AM – 2:30 PM
Art Hist 315: Art & Archaeology of Ancient Egypt Online

I’ve never taken an online course, so this will definitely be interesting. I’ve also never had a class before 11:00 AM, so that will also be interesting (and by interesting, I mean brutal). I figure it’s only one day a week and it’s something I want to do, so hopefully I can handle getting up at such an ungodly hour. I also have no idea what we’ll be drawing in that 441 class, but I pray it’s not just still lifes.

Some of you may be surprised to see I’m not taking another Irish class. I think I mentioned before that it was set up in a way that focused on conversationally learning the language and rarely discussing spelling or grammar. I wish I would’ve dropped the class and picked up Swedish instead because I knew at the time it was going to be an issue. We also weren’t graded on anything during the entire semester except our final presentation, which was a memorized mini-biographical speech about ourselves. I missed one word of my poem, but I thought the rest of my presentation was much better than the rest of the class’s and somehow I got a B. I’m also one of a few students in the class that actually bothered to pronounce everything correctly. The instructor was a nice guy, but we did have two small arguments where he thought I wasn’t learning the material when he is just obviously blind. We had to go around and talk about our hair, I said mine was brown and short and he asked if I was paying attention to what we just learned because to him, it’s black and long. :/ There may have been a couple grammatical errors in my presentation as well, but since the grammar is even crazier than German and he never bothered teaching it, how were we supposed to know how to use it? Just for that reason, I decided I’m not going to continue learning the language this way. Half of the curriculum is just listening to a CD and reading along in a book, which I can easily do on my own time. He also made a huge deal of Catholic vs. Protestant stuff, which annoyed the hell out of me. My classmates weren’t a lot of help because most of them were the “my grandma’s third cousin’s sister’s nephew twice removed was Irish so I have this huge triskele tattoo on my back because I’m so Irish ” types who really don’t have any cultural connection. I hate to be so harsh, but how do you claim pride in your heritage when you don’t even know basic folk songs, stories, history, etc.? It was painful watching one of them struggle through the lyrics of “Óró Sé Do Bheatha 'Bhaile” during his presentation. Besides, to anyone over there, you’re still just a Yank, even if your ancestors are from there and you still have family there. Needless to say, I really don’t want to spend a month over the summer with these people in the middle of nowhere in the Gaeltacht, so I guess that’s that.

Sorry for the rant, but these people are an embarrassment to all Americans with Celtic heritage and continually drive me nuts! Anyway, I plan on starting Swedish next fall, where I can learn how to speak and write it, and we will have normal graded homework assignments throughout the semester. Hopefully it won’t be too difficult, since I took 6 years of German and already know how to pronounce most of it from listening to Swedish music. I’m definitely looking forward to learning another Germanic language, and I hope I can stick with this one long enough to take a second semester of it.

I spent an hour and a half in the printing lab last night trying to get my project to print red instead of hot pink. The same thing happened last time, and I figured by making it more of an orange-red, it would print red, but no. Even the graphic design major that was working there couldn’t help, and I know what the problem is. It’s those fucking Epson printers. I went through two of them when I was in middle and high school because my dad insisted on wasting a bunch of money on that brand. And yes, they always tended to print in magenta, especially when the ink was low. My $80 HP even prints higher quality images than the expensive ones in the lab! Not only am I pissed off about wasting time and having my projects not print out correctly, but money is being wasted on this shitty equipment. The whole sever is beyond slow, which is surprising when all the computers in there are Macs. It takes minutes just to open up a program, let alone edit anything in Photoshop. Part of it might be because the monitors are screwed up in the printing lab as well. In the classroom and on my Mac, the images appear the same, but the colors are all wonky on the ones I need to actually print my project out with. Once again, I wasn’t the only one in the class who had this problem, yet the instructor still blames us and includes it as criticism during the critique. This is just another reason why I’m glad I changed my concentration from Graphic Design to Painting and Drawing. Hopefully there won’t be much more of this bullshit in the future. Although I’m excited that our next project will be to create a Russian constructivism-influenced poster, I’m going to have to come up with a way not to use red. Of all things, she has to choose a movement centered around that color.

( For the hell of it, here’s the aforementioned project. )

Since my professor really wanted us to do something specific and for an organization, I decided to make my own Guerrilla Girls poster.

I suppose it’s alright that it printed pink because it’s about women’s rights and a lot of their actual posters use vibrant colors, but at the same time, the point is to get rid of gender stereotypes and the association with the color pink is a huge one.

I was kind of annoyed that two girls in the class said it was stupid (while I was standing behind them nonetheless) when their projects were complete Banksy rip-offs. As women, they should care that they’re still not treated equally in this country, but then again, I should know better by now not to take the opinion of insecure hipsters who don’t bathe to heart.

Now I have to make another public art project for the lecture portion of the class in the next week and a half, without using photography or digital tools to create it. However, this time I actually have to put it up in Milwaukee, take pictures, and leave it there. This could definitely get interesting.