I get around to things. I'm into completion. It was pointed out to me that one of my most prevalent cognitive biases is the unit bias, which is "the tendency to want to finish a given unit of a task or an item," after I became tortured to see that a guy who hadn't yet finished filling in his tribal arm tattoo was embarking upon a new rib piece. Get your shit together, dude! Last August (oh my god, why is time crumbling in upon itself?) I wrote about this drawing/painting/pasteling I did for a teenage contest:
"Sprint asked students to submit a piece of artwork that communicated the theme of how powerful communication can be. I painted a rocky bluff hanging over a midnight beach. The moon shone large and high above, was almost iridescent and 3-D due to some very intricate highlighting and acrylic layering around the craters. On the sand below I placed a mermaid, drawn with Prisma colors, then cut out and transplanted to the canvas so that she appeared to be closing the gap between art and eye. On top of the bluff I glued a sweet little boy-- tussle-haired, maybe Aryan, and definitely a good student-- also drawn with the Prismas and similarly popping from the canvas. In the mermaid's hand? A seashell. A conch! And in the little boy's? Also a seashell. Two unlikely figures brought together through the power of communication-- there's your message.
The whimsy of the mermaid was just the entry point for additional themes, including the bridging of racial and gender differences, the acceptance of variety in human beings, the necessity of suicide hotlines (the little boy was sitting on the verrrrry edge of the bluff), and even the dangers of failing to listen, as represented by the conch, which was supposed to call to the judges' minds Piggy from Lord Of The Flies and his futile cries for mercy before death. Next time I'm at my mom's house I'll take a picture of the piece so you can see the themes at work for yourself. (Or maybe now that my mom has actually figured out how to use her Hanukah 2006 digital camera, she can take a picture for me and send it along.)"
And the weird thing was that a few readers even emailed me about this piece of artwork (obviously, I've attracted some serious mermaid aficionados), asking where a picture was. Of course, I'd gone to my mom's house in the meantime and even looked through my portfolios she'd so carefully stashed behind the leaking washing machine, thus giving them an antiqued feel through the age-old "water damage" technique, and I found the ink and watercolor pirate goat drawing I'd been searching for, but I didn't see the seashell cell one with the rest.
But then this weekend I was going through the fifty or so photos I have of my childhood/adolescence, and I found a picture of the contest entry that doesn't completely do it justice (the camera flattens the various textures) but gives the general idea.
I'd forgotten little things about what I'd done here, like that I apparently put the boy in a Missoni sweater and driving moccasins and that I gave the mermaid some serious ab definition. Otherwise, it's pretty much like I made this yesterday, which is troublesome. My twenty-ninth birthday is coming up toward the end of the month, and I still am at least twelve percent surprised when I'm standing at the entrance of a bar and the bouncer is checking my license and I remember that's my real one and not the one Louie M. got me made in high school after trying to bail out on our deal, and after me threatening to call his mom and tell her he was facilitating fake ID purchases if he didn't produce mine, and after him promising to remove my teeth, via the curb, if I did so. We eventually worked things out. I hear he's become a doctor.
It doesn't help that I got a letter from the DMV telling me I have to come in before my birthday to get a new license, as if they're trying to force me to recreate my sixteenth birthday, which, incidentally, is exactly where I think my perception of my age stops. My mom wrongly informed me that I'd need to take the written test over again, and tapping directly into my student years, I immediately went online to take three practice exams-- completing each fully, obviously. Clicking the very first answer, that same confusion set in, where suddenly I was convinced it was just yesterday that I was sitting in my high school's auditorium, watching heads roll in the CHP classic Red Asphalt.
Just yesterday I bullshitted my way through my bat mitzvah.
Just yesterday my parents threw me that raging sock-hop party in the garage.
Just yesterday I cried at the dragon-slide park when everybody began to sing happy birthday to me.
Just yesterday I came slip sliding down the birth canal.
Well.
Okay. That one feels less present.
