Christine's USF Blog

Plans January 5, 2011

Spring Schedule:

Interactive Multi-Media  (Using Flash player to make animated web designs)

2-D Design Problems  (Another design class)

Intermediate Creative Writing

Illustration II

Senior Project  (A whole class dedicated to one big project that you get to pick for yourself!)

This semester is going to be a semester of doubling up.  For my senior project, I am planning on making a book of illustrated poetry.  I have a few of the illustrations already finished because I took illustration in the fall.  I am working on some this winter break too, and plan on having them to show soon enough.

Anyway, about the doubling up.  I am also taking my second creative writing class  this spring which should add to some of the copy I am putting in the book, and I’m taking illustration II.  If I’m lucky, I will have lots of time to work on this book and it’s going to turn out really well.  When it’s finished, I’m going to send it out and get it self published (just one copy or two).  Really excited about my classes, especially creative writing.  I recommend it to anyone interested in writing and looking for an elective.  Dr. Prall is a really good teacher.  Here’s a poem about school that I wrote my first time through the class.  It ended up submitting it to the schools literary magazine Apostrophe last Spring and it got in!

Wallpaper as a Parting Gift to an Annexed Room

I’m beating the collegial propaganda out on the river rocks to make it clean.  It’s bleeding ink into the Eel.  And there’s a pair of rosy kids in the park nearby pretending to conquer a foreign land.  I can feel my skin glow; grow green and hot against the current.

I think about drowning.

After I launder my letters I slip north over a black road named after a number, under a glinting sun that makes all silver things flash and all dull things bake and whither.

In my bedroom I coat the papers with slimy glue and slap them over the memorabilia of girlhood.  The fluffy bunnies, tattoo designs, dragons and wizards, the defiled effigies of disgruntled teachers; vanish under the varnish of a new era.  Admiring its ugliness, peering at the image of the joyous students, I wonder if such places exist.

If pictures can talk they can lie too.

What would really happen if I disappeared for say,

“Four years,”

Into that gaping rift in the world; to those invisible cities were you

“Grow up,” and you

“Grow wiser,” and you

“Broaden your views,” would it really

“Make a difference”?

I’d rather take the time, here, in this place by the river to work with my fingers.  Watch them crack and grow raw.  I’d rather paint roses for my mother and linger in the prickling daybreak eating Ramen for the rest of my life instead of just “four years.”

I’d rather tilt my eyes towards the faces of my closets and my secret drawers and peak past their shadowed surfaces.  Trek through the trees unburdened by straining straps.  Follow schedules that are meaningless.  Work for numbers instead of letters.  Live in the libraries of my choosing.

Through the thin curtains there’s a bunch of leaves growing blackish-green and grass growing yellow-brown.  The empty space on the desk reminds me…the checks, the admission tickets are already in the mail.  The things I haven’t done have already expired in the glow of an annual send off, send out, send away.  The finishing touches have been made to this soon-to-be barren relic.

Today I discarded my calculators in a river that runs brown when it rains.  There, I watched them both short out.

The one read:

“Potential gains” as it drowned in a muddy tide.

The other told of

“Potential” losses as I threw it over the side of the bridge.