home |
musings index |
feedback |
other journals
ast night while I was sleeping, Jessika had a crazy night of drinking and carrying on. Somehow she ended up at Ray Snabley's place with the Brazilian Girls, Monster Boy, Morgan Anarchy and that glamourous "gothish" girl Tasha. According to Jessika, Tasha convinced some guy that she, Tasha, wanted to sleep with him. So they went to his place, she stole a bunch of vino, and then returned. At this point Tasha experienced some sort of females-only attachment to Jessika. "No boys!" she allegedly declared. Meanwhile Ray was drunk off his ass while Morgan Anarchy was (amazingly enough) completely sober. The Brazilian Girls were drinking like fish and refusing Morgan any beer, drunkenly telling him that they were sad to see him killing himself. I don't know if I'm getting this story right.
his morning I rode my bike to the Downtown Mall, mainly to see how the art was looking in the Downtown Artspace. On the way, I stopped at my favourite dumpster at the computer place where Preston Avenue crosses the railroad tracks. While I was getting a few goodies (including a blown Pentium motherboard), a guy from the computer place came out with even more trash. Not only was he perfectly friendly (people don't always like their trash investigated, you know), but he said he was a regular musings reader as well! He told me that the good motherboard I'd found a few weeks ago probably has a busted PS/2 port, certainly not a major problem, but reason enough for retirement in this throw-away society of ours. [Insert appropriate environmentalist tut-tuttery here.] I can't say I especially liked the way my art was hung in the artspace. Nikolai might be a fine painter and draftsman, but when it comes to the meta-task of arranging art in a gallery, he could perhaps benefit from a little instruction. While I in the cool dimness of the unopened gallery, who should arrive but Nellie (of Peirce and Nellie fame!). For those who came late, Nellie has been living in New York City with a recently-acquired husband, but she's back in Virginia for the summer. She'll be spending most of her time in Blacksburg, site of UVA Football's arch-rival Virginia Polytechnic. After the requisite coo-cooing and cuddling had subsided (Nellie's like that), we went to Higher Grounds for coffee. Nellie's being in town amounted to phenomenon, especially as we walked down the warm brightly sunlit bricks of the Mall. Being a popular, attractive, outgoing young woman freshly back from far off meant many warm greetings. The warmest of all came from David Sickman. We ended up joining David, sitting along a wall drinking our coffee with various others who happened along, including Wacky Jen, both of the oldest Durkee girls, a well-dressed guy from the C&O attempting to scare up an emergency replacement dishwasher, and an esteemed artist with a local studio who only shows his huge surreal horse paintings at galleries in the big cities. Conversations ebbed and flowed, overlapped, swirled from person to person or sometimes stagnated. The horse artist told a harrowing tale of chasing a brutal mugger through the streets of Atlanta after witnessing him attacking some woman. David Sickman and Nellie managed to get the horse artist to loan them a pickup truck so they could run some errands related to tomorrow's Artspace opening. Like me, they'd both being showing works there. Leisurely, I rode my bicycle back home.
atthew Hart showed up randomly while I was by myself looking for the mail-in rebate form in the packaging of a new PCI sound card I'd purchased. Matthew had been sent on a mission from the C&O to ask Peggy or Jessika if they wanted to wash dishes. I guess they were having some kind of dirty-dish emergency. For old time's sake, we got a four pack of pint-sized Budweisers, and then Peggy and Jessika turned up. Matthew told us that his eye is permanently out of focus from the incident where he was hit in the head by a maliciously-thrown bottle. He says he'll need to wear corrective lenses from now on. He also says that there is a detective working very actively on this case, trying to track down the Richmond thugs responsible.
n the evening, both Brazilian Girls came over several times. They somehow convinced Deya to adobt a number of orphan baby rats for which they'd been providing care. The rats are mouse-sized and they need to be fed milk from an eyedropper. Cecelia calls the rats "my children" and of all the people she knows in the world, there is no one with whom she could imagine leaving her children except Deya. For her part, Deya has the Ramsden "animal collection gene" and there was no way for her to say no. Ridiculous as this sounds, she could be occasionally seen with a little rat on each shoulder, a cockatiel on her head and a cat rubbing against her leg. I couldn't really socialize much; I received news of a 10am job interview tomorrow. The interviewer had said I'd be tested on my Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Quark knowledge, and, despite what I've been putting on my resumé, I'd never used either of the last two applications in my life. I set out for UVA on my bicycle and tried to find out as much as I could about both programs from various sites on the Internet. Unfortunately, I was unable to get any hands-on experience, because neither program can be found on any UVA workstations of which I am aware. There was a copy of Illustrator '88 (as in the 2000-noncompliant representation of the year) on an antiquated Macintosh Si in Gilmer Hall, but when I tried it out, it was ludicrously primitive.
|