I don't have much time today, because I have to read the "How to Think" chapter of the book "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter" for my next paper due in 1.5weeks (as if I, the Queen of Neuroses, need to be taught how to think - haha), and I have to get started on writing my draft for my philosophy paper. But at this exact moment I am taking an hour - a whole hour and probably a bit more - to reward myself for the 100% I got on my psych test. May I be so lucky with the next one.

On a freaky personal mama note - my mom's bladder problem - they don't know what wrong still and the doctor tried to do an internal exam to see into her bladder but her urethra is so swollen they can't, so the doctor is setting her up for invasive surgery to check to see what's going on. 5 weeks till school is out...I must survive the stress of this...and successfully get my new ID too.

I never got to writing of my Friday out on the town. I will do so now.

It has been almost two years since I really went downtown last. My disorders and too busy of friends, and those friends moving have been deterimental to my hanging out in the oldest part of town. Going there Friday was was good and not good. There's actual water in the Santa Fe river!! :-P But it has changed significantly in some ways.

There were four discernable and terribly distracting (and loud) construction projects taking place, causing many road blocks (and panic on my part - I don't do 'change' well). One is a new museum a block from the SF plaza, it's already a graffitti ridden eyesore, but perhaps when it's "mudded up" it will look more Southwest. Another is the final destination for the new slllloooowww "rail runner" (we don't do fast here 'cept on Cerrillos road where you can go 20 mph over the speed limit and run red lights and dodge pedestrians :-P)...I'll complain about this train project in a sec. But, the name if you have no knowledge of this town is a joke on "roadrunner" a native bird which I have yet to see, and apparently the train will only go as fast as one.) Another one is a HUGE obvious, ugly, 3 floor hotel. They have that dreadful look in infancy, it's amazing, I never knew that. And another is the actual re-doing of the pavement in the plaza, which I actually like broken up, I mean 40 years ago the plaza was dirt...like everything else here in Santa Fe. Then they paved it in the 70's sometime, except for some pathetic grass in the center (grass does not stay green here and I have yet to see the fountain have water in it - there may be a correlation). So, I dunno...I remember my mom telling me that some politician once said something like 'progress isn't necessarily good' and once I stopped laughing and analyzing the Latin definition of 'pro', I realized what this (out of context of what this person was referring to) could imply...a newly paved plaza in a town that's like 600 years old is a good example.

Back to the rail runner...Now, the "new" train station looks like a steel horse shed. haha. I must go take photos. It is not adobe. It is sheet metal. I kid you not. Now that I think of it, it looks a lot like W's airplane hangar if it had skylights. For many (annoying) tourists, this will be the first landmark they see here - their own fuzzy reflection in the sheet metal. I dunno, contractors, I know they only care about profit, but here we should do real adobe whenever possible - an adobe train station would have been awesome and unique. I doubt that they can get mud to stick to that metal, but maybe one day, on a rainy day, I'll try to adobify it. See if some real mud *can* stick to that thing.:-) Undoubtably some tagger will claim the attempt for their own and sign that it was their doing. Also, the train is not a high speed modern train, we don't do modern here. We do 1940's and before here. It looks modern but goes as slow as the coal-driven ones. So if anyone comes from ABQ, it'll probably take more time than it would to drive. Okay that was my complaint...moving on.

Now, before I start on discussing the museum, I have to say I'm officially not really a museum person. At least not here. I have this tendency to compare the small ones here with the REAL ones I went to in Seattle. Museums that left my jaw stuck on the floor for an hour as I tried to figure out my favorite question in art: 'how did they do that?' (Like the glass-art Chihuly museums and galleries!!) The art here is not really as astounding as local artists like to present it as being. Perhaps it is on drugs and booze, but not so much when sober. But my adventure, just the same:

I'll start from the beginning...

I was going downtown to do two hours at a museum for a thing at school...that is as detailed as I'm going to be as to the 'why'. But since I get out of the house maybe twice a year now, outside of school and appointments, I'll document the rest for it's utter rarity.

Me and the only person willing to spend any amount of time with me - my mom - went to the library downtown. I again was, as I was last time, utterly disappointed. The philosophy section has about 40 books in it.

I really do miss the library in Seattle - 6 huge floors, the reference section just about took up a whole floor - THAT is a library, people. Ours, well, it has two floors, but only 6 small sections. It has a bio section - 4 shelves, a small lit and arts section - 3 shelves, a teeny room as small as my bedroom for periodicals, a religion/philosophy section - 2 shelves, a reference section, and upstairs it has the small childrens room and and an even smaller media room. That may be more than 6 sections, but I don't care. So, I got bummed pretty quick and decided to ask my mom to do some agoraphobic exposure stuff. So we walked the block to the museum, and back to get a feel for whether I was capable of doing so on my own afterwards. I would have to cross two one-way streets on my own. The construction made me nervous, but I decided that it maybe was possible. So when it was time, we walked back and mama bear stayed far behind waiting for my 'okay' to leave me - this means someone i know from school is present. So, I was there. It was really warm. I was dressed cute with my black sun hat and light teal sweater-jacket. Only one other person besides me showed up. He was a guy. I'm not being mean in acknowledging that he is deaf, though, oddly, when he said 'nice to meet you' and shook my hand, I didn't hear the accent he has due to his deafness at all. I got nervous. He seemed really nice, but he didn't seem to like me. Such is my life. I however really liked his flip-flops as they looked like green sponges. :-P After waiting out in the warm sun, watching the plaza from the steps of the museum we got let in - there was an interesting discrepancy about whether we would be let in or not. But the lady-teacher with us is a Texan, and so they let us in :-)

The only other time I've been inside this museum was me and W's either 2nd or 3rd date, I can't remember. So to have that as a reference, and remember seeing the exact same paintings two years later (sans the Salvadore Dali that I loved :'-() And remember him being there and all that we hadn't done yet (like lose my virginity and cry over my broken heart) was a bit overwhelming and I struggled to stay in the moment and not reminisce so much, after all, W and me decided that we both liked and didn't like the exact same art in that museum. So, anyway...this time around it was really weird. First we saw all the paintings I'd seen two years ago, and felt lonely. Then we saw the 'hippie' exhibit. It's as psychadelic-floral as it sounds. But I finally got to see a genuine series of Andy Warhol paintings, of daisies I believe. And in person, they work much better than they do in a book. And a matching set of tea cups and plates was on display in a case and I wondered if they had any for sale. :-P Other than Warhol, the artists were all apparently 'stuck' in a really bad era. Most of the paitings were not genuine 60's art as I'd hoped, but 1990's and beyond art in 60's style. Only a few pieces worked as graphic design pieces, but not as paintings that they were. My favorite pieces in the hippie exhibit remain the following three: There is one piece, with audio, it looked like a red coffin-box opened to reveal audio speakers. It had a mirror. The mans voice was hypnotic - no for real - he sounded trance-like, and was going on, telling a story I didn't have time to listen to but wish I did. It was a story that involved something about a mini black hat on the tip of a man's thumb...it was like being on acid, I thought. So, after the acid trip, I got to experience an acid-trip hangover of sorts. In the form of a peace flower with - well there is no way to describe this. hmm. It is a statue, of sorts, in the shape of a flower, I believe it was called POWer Flower. Ah yes, thank you google it has a subtitle "a subversive botanical" haha...now the guy with us saw it and stared for a bit, then turned around, spread his fingers in a peace sign, and said "I come in peace". And that is really all you think when you see it...it's like space creatures gone hippie on your ass. With I presume bomb-like things hanging from the ceiling, and flowers popping from the base, and sawed off bomb-shaped...protuberances. All painted in surreal cartoony flair. And it's huge. I wonder what the artist will do with it when it's...moved.

The third is a Japanese artist Takashi Murakami...well his stuff sort of speaks for itself, probably recogizes itself too. :-) Kind of disturbing in a really cute way:

Now what you can't see, is the back of that thing's head has eyes all over it and another mouth. Hence it's name Wink...okay maybe he needs to work on names.

After this we went to the other exhibit "Art on the Edge" well to be honest I think most of the art shown was reclaimed after having been thrown off the edge... Although that thought made me think of the lyrics of Bjork's song Hyperballad. "...every morning I walk towards the edge and throw little things off - car parts, bottles, cuttlery or whatever I find lying around..." that is what the art is made of. The art included used tea bags preserved in dipped in wax and attached to a board. Those pill packaging pop-it things attached to a board. And there was a video of a performace artist shooting/popping balloons in somewhat creative ways. There was an arc of...paper lunch bags on the floor...and a wall of what looked like ink-dripped post-it-notes. There was a really neat hanging divider wind-thingy made up of accupuncture needles. It was beautiful in it's delicacy. A teacher at my school had her really neat surreal people watercolor illustrations on display. Her art show was titled "Art on the Edge", and I think they named this exhibit after her work as it was the only real art in the exhibit.

So that was it, other than the teacher's art I wasn't personally inspired by much.

After we left the museum, the people with me wanted ice cream. So I had to brave eating in front of the people in plaza, which made me nervous, so I never did finish all of the ice cream. The real mariachi's playing music distracted me a bit, but not enough. And what I had intended to do...walk back to the library by myself - didn't happen because the teacher parked by the library, so she walked me most of the way back. I tried, really, to cross the street alone. I never did it because there were too many witnesses when I tried, so I panicked at all the people and cars - in particular one jeep playing The Beetles - and asked my mom to come outside. But, on a first note of me not panicking - I did cross the street technically alone as my mom was on the other side as I crossed. Ironically not only is it a one-way street but there wasn't one car around when I actually crossed...baby steps...it made me wonder too if it's the cross walk that causes me to feel panic and if I might not try next time to wait for traffic to stop and jay walk instead. Maybe I'll feel like less of an obvious pedestrial target.

Anyway, so after that I was freaking out, but less so, and I had a homeless guy try to buy a cigarette off of me - I am not opposed to the majority of homeless men here and if I'd taken up that habit instead of say, pulling my hair, I'd have obliged his request.

I stayed in the library another hour and got a few books that I have no time to read, and we left. We sat in the walkway, which feels much more than a block away from the plaza, but isn't. The trees are dropping 'stuff' and I kept waiting for one to hit me in the head. A tourist - from New York - very friendly but rather eccentric needed change for a dollar for the meter and mama exchanged her dollar in quarters for it. She was nice...mama bear said : "let's go to New York" to which I said: hahahahaha...no.

The van came a bit later and he drove the really beautiful scenic way all the way home. I've never gone down Camino Rael before, but the street is basically, well...an arroyo (not-always dry river bed) crosses the street itself, or the road is in the arroyo, and there are really neat signs that warn to not continue further if there's water in the road.

Oh and I saw a really cute prairie dog...cutest rats in the world, I swear. :-P

So that was my day. Loong few hours, really. And then I got to talk to Josh, the best part of my week now. aww...

Sadly, I don't remember much after that, but I vaguely remember Saturday and Sunday and most of yesterday being something about a philosophy paper...hmm...

~e

P.S. I'm glad to know people besides me and Josh read this thing...really. :-)