Sunday, October 24, 2010

Threadless Threads Run Deep

Most of you know that my love for Threadless shirts runs deep. It was a love affair that started back in college, and it has continued ever since. I first noticed a guy in my Spanish class wearing what I thought was a rather amusing shirt of two squirrels:
I asked him where he got it, and he directed me to the now beloved Threadless website. I took a gander at a few, but I was a poor college student and couldn't afford to buy humorous shirts, so I forgot about it. It wasn't until later that semester when another friend posted on her blog about the upcoming Threadless Holiday sale that I decided, why not?, and bought my first Threadless shirt:
It didn't fit quite right (which is probably why most of you have never seen me wear it), but I didn't let that stop me. I bought others, and now I have so many that I probably have enough to wear a different one every day for a month.

Well... do I? A few friends got me thinking about how many I actually have. So, let's count and see. Here are all the Threadless shirts I own in no particular order (besides the aforementioned "Vegetarians Are Eating the Rainforest" one):
This has seen better days and has some bleach stains, which is why I don't wear it too much.







This one I recently acquired in hoodie form.


It's not pictured, but at the bottom on the inside of the shirt there are 4 other little monsters (which is what the arrow is pointing to).

Another one that doesn't fit quite right, so I don't wear it much.







Ok, I think that's all of them. Counting the vegetarians one, I own 18 Threadless shirts (including 1 hoodie). So not enough for a month, but 10 shirts away from all of February on a non-leap year. A few I don't wear very much, but I still love them all the same. There have been others that I've wanted but they have been sold out and have yet to be reprinted, and there are others that I have bought for friends and family, too. I've even been tempted to buy a few prints, but at the moment I have nowhere to put them, so I've resisted.

But, clearly:

Sunday, October 17, 2010

My Personal Aesthetics

Ok, so remember last post how I said I've been working on this school project and I was stressing and worried I might die? Well, I finally finished it (well at least the main part of it; I still have to write the one-page paper that goes with it). It took me 3 days, but it is complete. So, I thought I'd share. :)

The point of the project is to show a visual representation of my personal aesthetics, also incorporating quotes from the philosophers we've studied previously that support our definition of aesthetics. Let's see if you can guess what my definition is by watching the video:



What did y'all think? Believe me, it was hard for me to cut out and down some of these clips. I had many more video clips, like from Mother, Dead Poets' Society, and Bright Star and various other film favorites (when I had the raw footage of everything I wanted to include all together, it was 45 min. long). But, our teacher said it should be about 5 minutes, and this is 6:20 minutes. (I'm hoping she won't notice.)

If you couldn't tell from the video, what I see as beautiful is really anything that invokes or conveys an emotion, whether that's through music, color, landscape, or reality. The main thing is that I value things that portray reality and make me think or contemplate what it is I'm viewing and why I'm feeling the way that I am.

I just hope my teacher realizes that and gives me a good grade. I'm already having difficulties with this class/teacher (another blog post for another, less stressful time), so we'll see what happens.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Just a Quick One

I just wanted to post something real quick, mainly cause I'm avoiding doing homework... I mean I'm taking a break. :) I am alive, and if I can get past the 20th, I'll be doing much better stress-wise. I feel like I haven't done anything fun for a long time, which is why I'm really looking forward to this upcoming weekend. On Friday I get to hang out with my friends and watch Young Frankenstein (which I love), and then on Saturday we're going to the State Fair of Texas!

These last few weeks/weekends I've been cooped up in my house doing homework and reading and writing up stuff for school, and I have had little to no social interaction with anyone outside of school and work. Even though I'm trying to not think about the fact that this fun-filled weekend is the weekend before a presentation/project is due in both of my classes, I'm really hoping to just relax and not let that fact keep me from enjoying myself. Let's hope I can do it.

Sunday, October 03, 2010

My Favorite Thing About School

I don't know if you know this, but my favorite thing about school is when I learn something in one class and can form a connection from it to another class or to real life. I know it's super nerdy of me to say, but it really is something I love and I've missed it. When I was getting my undergrad, I loved being able to connect something I learned in one class to something I was learning in another (especially if it was within the same time period). I think it all goes back to when I was little:

When I was in preschool/daycare, as soon as I came home I would watch Sesame Street and then Batman (dun na nuna nuna nuna duna nuna nuna nuna BATMAN!). I thought it was the coolest thing ever when the letter they learned on Sesame Street was the same letter I learned at preschool! It didn't happen all the time, but when it did, I got so excited. I would shout out that I learned that letter too! Yeah... way cool.

Now, that I'm back in school again and really my classes are about making connections to what we are reading and studying about to what's going on in the real world, it's a little easier for me to recognize those connections. I still get excited though. It's like a brief little happy moment when I realize that I can relate something in the theory I'm reading to what happened to me last week or to a show I watched.

Want to see what I mean? Well, because I worked so dang hard on it and if you haven't done so already, you should check out my school blog post. It's all about the connections I recently had between my reading and a couple TV shows and movies.

Anyway... hope everyone is excited for the fall. I'm just hoping I won't die by the end of it. Let's hope these brief little happy moments can sustain me.