Color me pretty

I have sort of always wished that I had synesthesia. Synesthetes perceive certain words or letters as colors, and sometimes certain words, days, and numbers have distinct personalities and are viewed three dimensionally. I might be partially synesthetic, or maybe just a wanna-be, but when I'm laying in bed at night or have my eyes closed in a quiet room, and then hear a sudden sound, colors and patterns flash in front of my eyes. This probably happens to everybody, but let's just pretend I'm special. Anyway, these were my thoughts when I saw Rachel Berger's fun project "100 Colors, 100 Writings, 100 Days." Every day for one hundred days, beginning on October 30, 2008, Rachel picked a paint chip and responded to it with a memory.

07 Lipstick

What’s the difference between Sarah Palin and the next vice president of the United States? Lipstick.

23 Pale Orchid
She was the best reader in third grade. She knew it. We all knew it.

If we were lucky, we had a thing we were best at. Josh was the best swimmer. Michael was the best at math. Liora had the best clothes. I was the tallest. Being tallest meant I was often line leader, asked to reach things, mistaken for a fourth grader. But my superlative was born of dumb luck. Reading was a real skill. And I hated her for it.

She read in a smug, fluid sing-song, rarely bothered keying her inflection to aspects of the content, ignored most punctuation. Speed and precision were it. One afternoon, her turn came to read from a text about the tropical rainforest. “The tropical rain forest is a forest of tall trees in a region of year-round warmth. An average of 50 to 260 inches of rain falls yearly.” etc, etc. It poured out of her in an unrelenting cascade of perfect. “Some of the better-known epiphytes include ferns, lichens, mosses, cacti, bromeliads, and orchids.” Wait, did she just say orCHids? The corners of my mouth turned up in a terrible, triumphant grimace. But it’s or-Kids.

I mouthed the word. Meanwhile, she stumbled. She knew something had gone horribly wrong, but it was too late.

57 Cool Melon
Only three times in its hundred-year history has the Crayola company changed the name of a crayon. Prussian Blue became Midnight Blue in 1958 and Indian Red was renamed Chestnut in 1999, both in response to requests from educators. In 1962, the company voluntarily changed Flesh to Peach, partially in response to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

Take Your Time.

One of my summer goals was to visit the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, "Take Your Time," at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and despite living only 2 blocks from the museum, I just got there this afternoon. The exhibition was gorgeous, and I would recommend taking advantage of the MCA's free Tuesdays to go see it.

The exhibition was truly a sensory experience; my photos do not do it justice. The essence of the exhibit, in my words, is objects creating their own beauty and the individual creating his or her own sensation. In the slightly more poetic terms of the artist and museum, the works are "devices for the experience of reality...light, air, water, moss are put to the service of artworks that are less objects than experiences." Every room engaged multiple senses, not only sight, but the smell of moss or rubber, the feel of a light mist, the sense of humidity, and more...

MCA Entrance

"Room for one colour"

"Moss wall"

"Moss wall" section

"Beauty"

"Your eye activity field"

Since I started law school, sadly, art has really fallen out of my life. In college I was surrounded by it- I was a studio art minor and my college boyfriend was an art major, so I was either working on a project, modeling for a project, or critiquing a project. One of my new life goals is to make more time art, and I'm hoping to start doing that with the new camera on my birthday wish list!

la bella vita

I can hardly believe that it has been four years since I spent the most beautiful summer living in Florence, Italy. I can still sense that love. I can still taste the vibrant flavors of the gelati (which added a few pounds to my frame and happily gave my dentist two cavities to discover and fix). I can still feel the thickness of the heavy Italian red wine that I drank with dinner every night, even though it was 95 degrees outside and it made my mouth pucker with dryness. And I can still imagine the feeling of freedom and anticipation that came with exploring such a foreign, storied city and documenting it through photograph. One of my favorite places to spend time was at the San Miniato al Monte cemetery, an often overlooked oasis at the top of the tourist-trodden Piazzale Michelangelo. That adventure has been on my mind lately, as I just completed an iPhoto book of photographs of my summer in Italy for my mom for her birthday. Below are a small sampling, accompanied by quotes from one of my favorite Italian-setting books, "A Thousand Days in Tuscany" by Marlena de Blasi.

"I can make you feel loved but you can't make me feel loved. No one can. And if you try too hard, I'll bolt. I'm a runaway, after all."

"Under the weight of lesser or greater fortunes, I think what happens to a great many of us is that we really don't know what we want or with whom we'd like to have it. Nothing seems real until it's already gone. Until it's sealed up tight, out of reach. Until it's dead. Be it a person or a dream. And then the light comes, and so we mourn."

"Most of the pain in life is caused by our insistence that there is none."

"And I wonder why it is that, of all the thousands upon thousands of people who pass through one's life, most leave not a trace. Into abandon and oblivion they are consigned, as though they were never there. And more curious, why do those few, only those few, stay somewhere safe, dying, even, but never entirely so, engraving the heart, deep and smooth? The cut of the eyes, some voluptuous sting, one exquisite phrase, a voice like chocolate just before it melts, a laugh like thin silver spoons chinking across a marble floor. The way the see crashes into crisp champagne pools behind him as he kisses you. A hand resting on a hip. One mesmeric glance, brown or black, green, topaz. Blueberry."

"You trust risk more than comfort. I've always been afraid of comfort, too. Bring on the pain, because during those moments when I can neither see it nor feel pain, when it's quiet, I know it isn't really quiet at all but only gathering force. Better that pain stays where I can keep an eye on it. There's risk in comfort. There's comfort in risk."

"Each couple has a child: the Florentines a daughter, probably not yet four, the English, a boy of six or seven. The handsome blond boy seems to have caught the eye of la fiorentina...Dispensing with all other preliminaries, she says, 'Allora, baciami. Dai, baciami, Joe. Forza. Un bacetto piccolo. Well then, kiss me. Come on, kiss me, Joe. Try. Just a small kiss.' Stella has learned young to ask for what she wants."

"Maybe it's true that life is a search for beauty, for the harmony that comes from the mingling of things. Maybe life is a search for flavor. Not the flavor of food but of a moment, or a color, a voice - the flavor of what we can hear and see and touch."

"It's sensations rather than things I'm after. Only the mysterious is eternal. I prefer to feel this life rather than to grow foolish enough to believe I own it."

Note: These are all my original photographs. If you would like to use one please message me first and credit appropriately. Thanks!

More to worry about than a lost glass slipper...

This project, "Fallen Princesses," was recently brought to my attention and I had to share.  The woman behind it all is Dina Goldstein, a professional photographer who does not take herself too seriously.  The photos elicit such an odd sensation- they're shocking but understandably real- sort of like a child who sees Dad dressed up in a Santa costume.  My favorite princess has always been Cinderella- clearly such a romantic.