out-of-focus

Last night a bunch of grad students packed into my car and we drove to Lake Merritt in Oakland for a dinner party at Linda Geary's house. Linda is the first person I really met from CCA to talk about my work, at a portfolio day in San Francisco last November. I had just started dating Randi and had gotten a week off from work to drive down. Jeanine and Candice helped me get my portfolio together, and I was feeling pretty sharp. I woke up the morning I was to drive down and couldn't turn my head without intense pain. I drove to the emergency room (haphazardly, since I couldn't turn my head) where they diagnosed me with a pinched nerve. They gave me Valium and Codeine and Vicodin and all sorts of numbers and I went home and slept for a day. I drove down to SF with an ice pack on my neck and shoulder and slept in my car in Lady Bird Johnson Sequoia Park. Or tried to-- the intense total blackness eventually got me to drive back down the mountain and I slept until the morning parked on the side of the highway next to a veterans lodge. Eventually I got down to SF, and you can probably guess the rest from there-- I met with Linda, saw the school and liked it. Now I'm here.

At Linda's house I re-met Larry Rinder, who curated a show I installed at Liz Leach's gallery in Portland. I was also introduced to an SF artist named Colter Jacobsen, who draws photographs once while looking at them, and then again from memory. Linda suggested I do an advising unit with him next semester, so I'm going to look into it and see if it's not too late to change around my schedule. I think the way Colter is drawing is similar to mine, but simplified-- which I really appreciate. Maybe I've got to make some more rules for myself to try to make all these projects more coherent. That's at least one argument of what I should do. The other one, of course the opposite, is just to do whatever the hell I want and figure out the whys later. Meh. I'm kind of into either idea and both-- everything's feeling sort of melty these days.