collegiate diversion

How easily my perception is altered.

 

I remember being seven, and my parents giving me the much anticipated ‘Samantha’ doll from the American Girl collection. I remember that, holding my two-foot high doll on Christmas morning, and I remember loving her name, loving my name, loving myself. Here was a girl with dimples and dark curly hair and a vintage-appeal for the Victiorian era. At 7, she was just what I wanted to be.

And she had baby fat, I remember thinking how we both shared that fullness to our faces and thighs. I loved Samantha.

 

But you remember how little girls are, or maybe now you know. Next I wanted the Ariel Doll and that little fairy from Fern Gully. These were heroines I admired so my parents were happy to oblige, as long as I deserved a reward for my finished five pages of Hooked-On-Phonics. They kept me ambitious.

 

But then, the dreaded Barbie Doll. It was what I wanted.

 

“Mom, please!”

 

My parents were intelligent, and aware of a little girl’s thoughts. They named me Samantha just in case I became some high-powered CEO that needed to fool the market into thinking Sam Allen was just another guy in a suit. They were great.

 

“But Mom, everyone else has one!”

 

The cost of conformity was so high.

 

I remember the doll, and I remember loving her as much as Samantha. But then Samantha started to disappear from my mind, and I wanted to be just like thin, happy, smiling, loved-by-Ken, Barbie. I slept with her, and our affair cost me my purity or at least my freeness of thought.

 

Soon I was conscious of my clothing, what made my chest look like Barbie’s, what made my face glow, just like Barbie’s.

 

Samantha was lost.

 

And as I grew up, women walked by and of course I judged their bodies based on mine and picked myself apart meticulously.

 

“I want her face, I want her teeth, I want her calves,” I would think.

 

Ew, gross.

 

If this were some sick Palahniuk novel, I would have gone to stripping these girls bare of all there best parts and created some Frankenstein-ish thing.

 

Instead there was just me. My monster of thought trudging through my head and judging myself and my body against the harshest critic.

 

When it’s your mind, there’s no fair judge on the board.

 

I didn’t start out this facebook note wanting to talk about body image, such a cliché source for angst. I wanted to talk about perception.

 

I find that my exposure to new things greatly alters the way I view the world – that’s nothing new.

 

But today in my introductory painting class, as I marveled at a delicateand still dark piece by Carot, I saw how he saw the world. Amazing! It’s not items and objects and scenery and light.

Well, sometimes light. It’s shape and texture and geometric objects that are most apparent.

 

It’s like when Colin Firth bends over Scarlet Johansson in that movie about the pearl earring, this beautiful rugged circa 1740s painter says to sexy Scarlet, “What color are the clouds?”

 

I’d say white. So does she.

 

“Look at the shadowing,” he says, “What are the colors?”

 

Oh my god, so many blues and yellows and violets and reds in these clouds of perceived white!

It’s such a metric system of thought, when we give someone an instrument or a palette and say “Here, do something. Create.”

 

Dork that I was in high school, it is the true SAT of my life. The standard test for all creative creation.

 

It’s a detour of the brain, a mind road map.

 

So after detouring my brain, and Carot’s, and then walking back to my building after a numbing two-and-a-half-hour class, there are so many colors, and shapes, and shadows.

 

It’s like the first time I edited film, and then watched a movie with my mother later than night, something stupid and corny like  “Where the Heart Is.” She’s always been a sucker for those cheesy chic-flicks. Well, so have I.

 

But the entire time. Although the film was not artful, there were so many cuts and nuances and camera placement to it. Who would spend so much time doing this?!

 

I can’t imagine when I read and paint or view paint or listen to music or make my own music, how much art and detail there is to it.

 

It’s beautiful.

 

And it’s stunning, isn’t it?! That people are so dedicated to a craft.

 

************

 

My crying jags have become all the more arbitrary and I find I can’t cry at things that are sad. I cry at what is beautiful.

 

The prof Jeremy was telling me what a beautiful selection I had made to copy. How Carot intentionally finds notes and keys in a landscape and places them intentionally in the still, certain dark shapes that contrast with light shapes and create a collage or mosaic of movement throughout the canvas.

 

“And he’s always certain to add just one subtle point of bright red.”

 

One point to the red and I was gone, my mind shut down. I was amazed. But I suppose I am so vain that I link my tragic spout for beauty back to myself.

 

Can I ever dedicate myself as much to a piece or craft? Will I ever get to be THAT skillful and artsy that people won’t be able to dissect all the genius in one piece? Do I rush my art? What am I leaving out? (Oh Sarah Jessica Horse Parker, how you have altered my writing style so much and changed my perception of the useless rhetorical question).

 

I thought about what I may have left out when a soul-searching friend on the road called me to tell me what it was like to keep heading down through the country so South that he’d have to fly back to get back to Boston.

 

He started talking, almost randomly, I don’t remember how our conversation led up to this pinnacle part of the dialogue.

 

“I’m finding that I can’t discuss myself with any type of specificity,” he said.

 

He surrounds himself with people I guess, he doesn’t consider himself too often.

 

How lame is it that I had to cry just then? This admiration thing is kind of getting in my way.

 

But I didn’t want to be embarrassed, I told him I needed a second to quickly sob and get over it, and then just listen, stunned, to the rest of his findings.

 

I guess I cried because I found how I could relate it back to me.

 

Is it vain to think everything is relatable to my own existence?

 

I wonder if he appreciated my moment of breakage, and the ways I wanted to build myself back up in the splendid thought of what he is doing, that you can search yourself and find the things that flaw your character, and then discren want to change.

 

Perception of life, perception of self.

 

That’s what I loved about my friend who was traveling, and who I miss still so much, that he was searching and finding a place to change his soul.

 

And I thought, maybe I could do that.  I could paint, or I could edit film, or I could travel the East Coast and search out my life.

 

The beautiful things that affect what I am perceiving in that instant can also alter my perception forever too. What a beautiful concept.

 

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