DONT MESS

...this is sort of incorrectly labeled as procrastination because I already did my homework which was actually quick and funny for the first time in the history of mankind ever. quick and funny is how all things should be. except for the TV show Gossip Girl, I prefer that to be long, drawn out and over-dramatized. Tonight I sort of snuck out of class early (my teacher literally kind of encouraged me to leave) to go home and watch gossip girl. it was very satisfying. I literally squealed with delight. while I watched I ate a Burrito with rice and veggies and guacamole and cheese and I drank coka cola with maybe half a lime in it. I am only allowed coca cola when I eat chipotle (BECAUSE THEY HAVE LIMES!) and watch movies (BECAUSE THEY HAVE POPCORN!)

okay here is a sample of my homework, inspired by rachael london:





(this was the assignment)

yes. I am getting a BFA by doing this. life is incredible.

Hey, does anyone want to live with me in the LES in New York? Andrew will be studying abroad from Jan. 1st to May 1st and is desperately looking for someone to sublet his (very nice) room in our (very nice) apartment. He's trying to find someone who can commit to it before the end of this month and I am freaking out because I don't actually have a room in the apt so if I don't get along with this potential roommate who potentially will be a stranger I am potentially screwed for all of next semester. there isnt a door on the room (although there is a staircase up to it so its not like one can see into it) so the roommate would have to be comfortable with me being able to hear them when I am awake. But it's pretty easy to be comfortable with me because I am a very laid back calm person all the time and sometimes I'm funny and I make great Limeade and I can sleep/work through pretty much any kind of disturbance so you wouldnt have to tiptoe around me because I am laid back and calm like that. The price he is asking is very reasonable, so email me (there's a link for that on the right) if you want further details.

And while I'm announcing stuff, we could always use more questions for the radio show, I made a panda sex flyer for it even:



http://newschoolradio.org
send questions here

winner time.

I got an e-mail the other day:

Dear Julia,

Congratulations! On behalf of the jury members of the Vera List University Art Collection Writing Award, I am pleased to announce that your submission "The Butcher" to the 2007/2008 writing competition was awarded the first place in the category of creative response, with a prize of $400.

This means I wrote a story and sent it into a competition and won. The competition is for all the schools within the new school university. This means that a lot of people take part. this means that a lot of them are americans and native english-speakers. this means that some of them are writing majors at eugene-lang.

I still won. The Icelandic girl who never took a creative writing class in her life won. The Icelandic girl who just recently started writing secret stories when she was angry at people and/or had interesting dreams and/or real or imaginary conversations.

AMERICANS = PWND

This makes me happy.

Now you can all say "hey I started reading what Júlía wrote before she won an award and became famous."

joke.

I have one problem that I want to talk about. I have a borderline unhealthy obsession with real people other than myself. I guess I am interested in myself too but I am more interested in people who I know or know of. I am not interested in imaginary people. I never ask these real people permission to draw them or write about them because that would be weird. They would think I was in love with them or something. That is not the case. I am never in love with people. So I just go ahead and draw them and write about them, telling myself I'll just never show anyone. Like when I wrote The Butcher. Of course I change names and details when I write because that's easier than changing people's faces when I draw. But I still thought "I will never tell anyone I wrote this. I will not win anything in this competition because I am foreign and this story will never be published and no one will read it."

Well I was wrong.

The story is about being foreign too, in part. It's about me and being foreign and angry and tired. It's funny. The jury used the word "Irreverence" about something in my story. I had to look the word up in the dictionary because I am foreign.

Okay. this might make me seem productive. I am not. I never make anything serious. except this story and another story that I illustrated for my lithography class. I am happy with these 2 things. Even if I get bad grades, which will probably happen, I will be happy that I accomplished two things that I like this semester. Here is a picture of the book I made:



I don't want to post the inside because I wrote and drew a real person in it and I didn't ask them permission and I'm scared they will not like it. But if you want to buy one of these they might be for sale. You should ask me.

I want to now apologize to everyone I might ever draw or write about without their permission. I'm sorry.

I should do my homework. Instead I always spend all of my time making very unserious things. Like this unserious thing I made today for Alex Fitzgerald. I like Alex Fitzgerald because he makes me smile and he likes the internet more than I do which is rare. Before I knew him I thought he was a lame internet person. Then I got to know him as an awesome real person. Now we talk to each other regularly both with our real faces and with our internets. So today's conversation resulted in this:



I am going to leave it up to you to read into this piece. Here is a clue: "Irreverence."

I am going to drink my tea now, it has probably gone cold. then I will draw tesla coils. good night.

life plan and things you need in order to acquire eternal happiness:

I think I am trying to fix my state of "nothingness", by sleeping less for example. And doing some other things. I feel less like "nothing" right now. Maybe it's just because I went to mama's food shop though. Here is my new life plan: I will seduce someone who works at mama's. He will in turn bring me food all the time because I practically live next door anyway. very convenient. He will like horror movies and videogames and our lives will be perfect.

Now I just need someone who can teach me mad seduction skills.


joke.

Hey. I am really happy that people like to read this even though I'm writing about "nothing". And that icelandic people read this even though I'm writing in english = betraying the motherland. ACTUAL FACT = most icelandic people read english, but most foreign people do not read icelandic. It's a twisted world, I know.

Now I will talk about fun things.

Fun thing number one: Playing chess. I really want a nice chess set now. Rachael London has one and sometimes we play chess and drink tea or red wine and that makes for a very "happy sophisticated lady"-time. I'm probably better at checkers though. I will somehow acquire one of those double time sets. Then I will seduce people to play chess with me and we will drink limeade and look like this:



Fun thing number two: Limeade. Here are some reactions to my limeade:
Rachael: "Oh my god you are so incredibly good at this!"
I think that's it. Nobody else has tried it.



Fun thing number three: The brothers Quay are coming to present their films at my school on Friday! That is very exciting! If you are not familiar with them, they are basically a set of IDENTICAL twins who want to be Jan Svankmajer. If you are not familiar with Jan Svankmajer, you should be. They are almost 60. They looked like this when they were younger:



They pretty much are pretentious for a living. There latest film is called The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, possibly the most pretentious name of a film ever. At least their pretentious shit is really good. I tried hard to find a clip on youtube that wasn't 10 minutes and incredibly pretentious but this was almost impossible. But here's one from the Institute Benjamenta, which I watched several times during my video store days.



(Parts of the beginning reminds me of Vera. She will know why.)

If you don't have patience for that, here's a short scene they did in the film Frida, probably seen by more people than all of their own films combined.



nice, yes?

Well, one can only take so many fun things in one night. I think I need to stop now.

p.s. here are some titles I considered for this post: "The Piano Tuner of Pretentious Wannabes" and "Limeade Seduction". Neither one qualified.

p.p.s. I am enjoying this book very much now, both as reading material and a headrest for when I wall asleep in class:

on not sleeping

I want to write about sleep a little bit. while I haven't slept in 32 hours. after writing about it I think I'm going to go to sleep.

well. During my first year at Parsons I would constantly do this. I would constantly not sleep. either I stayed up all night because I had so much homework to do, or I willingly stayed up after finishing my homework to go to a party, or just make out with someone attractive all night. I'd take a 1 - 2 hour nap before school, or not. consequentially I would frequently fall asleep during class. my teachers complained about this. I did okay anyway. not great. semi great.

I remember when I started sleeping. I started sleeping around the time when I moved into eric's apartment for a few weeks. It was an interesting time to start sleeping at night because a) for the first time I only had school 2 days a week and b) a didn't really have a bed to sleep in. although I did have a couch and 2 beds in other locations that I took turns sleeping in.

last night I stayed up totally and completely all night doing homework for the first time since that time when I was superhuman and never slept. It was like this: at 7 AM I am finishing what I considered "the most important homework". Turns out later it wasn't even that important. Anyway, I finish it and it's 7 am and I think "Oh my god. this means I can't go to sleep at all. I have to get ready for school now. I am going to die." I look in the mirror and see a scary dead zombie hag looking back at me. Not sleeping/ eating a lot of greasy food for a couple of days has made my skin break out. I think "okay. okay. I will take a shower. I will take a shower and put on makeup and try to look slightly better and then I'll be more likely to make it through my first 6 hours of classes. I'll skip the last 3 hours. I'll go home and sleep. ben katchor won't care." I almost fall asleep in the shower. I make breakfast. I almost fall asleep in my breakfast. I fall asleep in my breakfast for 5 minutes. I think "okay shit I have to go. I'm going to die." After the shower I look slightly better but still completely living-dead. That's okay. I miserably get the hugest cup of coffee before I get on the train. I look miserable with my coffee on the train. I get to class, finish my coffee, feel better. feel better through the 6 hours. decide to go to ben katchors class because i feel better. ben has a slow voice and it's dark. I get sleepy. ben is saying dumb things about my picture story. I decide to be mad at him and send him mean thoughts. I hope he notices. I decide to stop being mean and take a nap in the middle of the classroom. there's 3 of us lying down in the middle. ben doesnt care. he just talks slowly through the 3 hours. I buy a lamp on my way home. a cozy bedside reading lamp. the guy in the lamp store is really nice. he is going to give andrew and I a big discount on a lamp for the living room.

I come home and write this. I feel like I accomplished something today. I will take a nap now and then i will wake up to have a beer and maybe dinner and watch project runway with nice people and then i will sleep for a long time.

He has killed a lot of animals in his lifetime but mostly lizards

I need to tell you about one of my classes. It is one of my favorite classes; a writing and drawing class called picture-story workshop. One of the great things about this class is Ben Katchor. He is the teacher. Another great thing is this AMAZING little korean girl who has not failed to bring all the best stories so far. What makes them so good is that they're sort of unintentionally amazing. She just sort of hangs out in the corners all shy and polite and quiet and cute and then she opens her mouth and amazing things come out with her polite and quiet voice.

example 1:

we had to interview a subject of our choice and she interviewed her male friend. When she was a few seconds into her account of the interview I manically started writing down some excerpts from it (this girl does not actually look like the freak of nature child-humans that i like to draw during class)



I will elaborate for you:

"He was bragging about his digestive system and how it is so good. He has great control over his digestive system and can relieve himself whenever he likes or hold it in for days. He has killed a lot of animals in his lifetime but mostly lizards and other cold blooded animals. He fears lizards and other cold blooded animals. He was in the Korean army and there he killed many lizards and snakes. A dream he remembers is him dreaming of himself dreaming."

And then the dude drew a picture of A CRUCIFIED MACBOOK AIR WITH A MACBOOK PRO LOOKING AT IT SAYING "MACBOOK AIR SUCKS!"

I want nothing more now than for this young man to be my friend. he can brag about his digestive system all he wants and kill me some lizards.

example 2:

we had to write a story about our "life of crime." I wrote a really boring story about dairy products because I am too much of a wuss to write about anything interesting/ too innocent to have committed any serious crimes. failure.

but SHE starts talking and it goes something like "well I had a boyfriend here but then I went to Korea and had... an encounter with a very nice boy there..."

snap.

so that wasn't too outrageous. but next we had to draw pictures of the crime scene. and this girls picture was possibly the greatest crime scene picture I have ever seen. She didn't give it to me but I tried my best to reproduce her drawing for your viewing pleasure.



and it gets better with the explanations:

Ben Katchor: wait... your hair is completely straight. Why is there an afro in this picture?
awesome girl: oh, this is just to show all the confusion in my mind.
Ben Katchor: so there was striped wallpaper in his room?
awesome girl: no, this is to show how it was like a prison.

I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE... OH NO WHO DO I LOVE! OH NO I HAVE AN AFRO AND I'M GIVING A BLOWJOB IN PRISON.

I will try to be her friend as soon as possible.

kisa/dying

This is me seeing how it will look if I post pictures on this blog.



This is my favorite picture that I drew last semester. It portrays a cat who is happy because it is his birthday, while simultaneously remembering that he is constantly getting older and one day he will die. I drew this in a class called intro to design and visuality or cultural studies or something serious like that, the class was mostly really boring but sometimes awesome (like when I said "porn" in front of a few hundred people, this ended up being the only word I ever said in front of my whole class). I had this class with Eric. Now I have no classes with Eric. Eric is a really gay jewish person with a filthy mouth and I used to live on his bright orange couch. I drew this picture for Eric. I miss him.

serious

This is my new, serious blog. I previously posted in Icelandic and film photographs on http://juliet-capulet.blogspot.com/ from May 2004 - June 2007, and in all sorts of fun languages and images (moving and still) on http://blog.myspace.com/juliaher from June 2004 - eternity.

This is my attempt to be more serious and efficient (myspace is not so current anymore) and also put to use this URL that i got for my web design class last semester. I didn't make anything cool in the web design class because I was really unhappy all the time but I got an okay grade anyway because my teacher was really nice. He is dutch and he spent most of our in-class time talking enthusiastically about politics, philosophy or anything else you could get him to be enthusiastic about (which was very easy), or showing us videos of his amazing musical son Taiyo who makes up songs and lyrics and plays the guitar. Here he is.

This is the first post and I will probably not show this to anyone for a while, or maybe just one person.