the art of art...

im at work right now, and mildly wishing i was somewhere slightly more interesting. so i thought to myself, why not share something from psych class with you all?
these are drawings from the dutch graphic artist escher. he is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs (a method for printing using a plate or stone with a completely smooth surface) and mezzotints (a printmaking process, technically a drypoint method). these feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture and tessellations (to quote from wikipedia, haha). so anyways, his drawings are very strange, and like mentioned above, impossible to real life. so i'll share some with you and you can see if you can find the impossibilities of them...

#1



#2



#3



#4



#5



#6



-now, if you look at #1, you will see that the water leading to the waterfall is going uphill instead of downhill...
-in #2, you don't know if you're looking upwards, downwards, or straight ahead in the picture, and also, the cones hanging in the open spaces are hanging from all different directions...
-looking closely at #4, you will see that the pillars are all mixed up, from where they are connecting from the top to the bottom...
-#6 is a still a mystery today...did escher draw himself holding the ball and being reflected off of it, or is he drawn from inside the ball looking out? his left hand is holding the ball, but in the picture in the ball, his right hand is the one that is outstretched...

of course, there are probably many more things to notice and realize when you study the pictures more closely, but these are some of the ones we discussed in class...

if you want to look at more of escher's art, go to http://www.mcescher.com/...

a blog post about something...

i need to post again...but i don't know what to post about!!!!!!!!!! this is a real dilemma. i had an idea and i completely forgot about it...and now i can't think of anything else. what would interest all of you blog-readers? i don't know how many ppl actually read this, but i'll just pretend that it's so popular that i have a million viewers on a daily basis! pretending can be fun sometimes. so anyways, now that i'm pretending i have a million viewers, i have to make sure to catch all of your interests! now how can i do that? that's a tough one. let me think for a minute, or two or five or so.....................................................................
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........................ok, maybe i'll tell you a little about my musical life this semester. first of all, i'm learning the barber violin concerto, which is amazing! if you want to listen to it, here are the links:

-1st movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=t2ifFuF3FoQ&feature=related
-2nd movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=uql9IV5M_j8&feature=related
-3rd movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=p_cbnyWG4Fo&feature=related

currently i'm learning the 1st movement, and man i love it!

so besides that, i'm also working on a bach gigue and it's going pretty good. i like bach, but i'm continually liking him even more and more all the time, especially throughout college. both on piano and violin. so anyways, i'm sure some other pieces will come along soon, but those are the two main ones for now.

speaking of piano...my piano teacher has a bunch of new piano majors to teach this year and wasn't able to fit some of the non-piano majors into his teaching schedule. and the other piano teachers aren't exactly the type of options that i'm looking for, since they tend to teach students that are more at a beginning-learning level. so we'll see if i can take piano from my teacher again next semester, and if not, then next year. in the meantime, this semester i'm taking organ lessons instead! i had my first lesson this past thursday, and it was really cool. the lessons are on the really big and awesome pipe organ in the college church. it was really cool to play using the pedals, and i was kinda getting the hang of it by the end of the lesson. so i'm doing some exercises to get used to the articulation you need to play the organ with, and to get used to the pedals. then i'm also starting two preludes. one of them has a pedal solo, which is gonna be so fun to learn! so i'm pretty excited about it. the main thing that i'm sad about is stopping my streak of taking piano lessons from when i started when i was 6 until i graduated from college, since i can't take lessons this semester. at least i'll have my streak of taking violin lessons from when i started when i was 3 till i graduate from college. plus i'll be getting some organ-playing learning and experience, which will be good and also hopefully beneficial. oh and i'm also sad cuz i learned the 2nd and 3rd movements of beethoven's pathetique piano sonata last year, and i love the 1st movement so much and started learning it on my own this summer, and i was ready to work on it in piano lessons this year so that i could know the whole sonata. but now i'll just have to keep working on it on my own until i take piano again.

so here are the links for the pathetique:

-1st movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=lq4G3KRAuXc
-2nd movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=n2nG1bt7IBM&feature=related
-3rd movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=qRkr7WgQ_Y4&feature=related

i call the 1st movement the alex macarthur song...because i always heard this guy alex macarthur playing this song in his piano lessons or practicing it when i was at the music school where i used to take violin lessons at home before college. so ali and i dubbed it the alex macarthur song. the main alex macarthur part that we remember him playing is the fast part after the descending chromatic scale. i love that part so so sooooo much! when i play it, i get thrilled to the bone. i played that section constantly throughout the summer, haha.
anyways, i call the 2nd movement the milo and otis song...doesn't it sound like the milo and otis movie music?

now for symphony...we're playing the hary janos suite by kodaly, which is really cool. especially the 5th and 6th movements. so here's a link:

-5th movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=zSv5CvhOEsA&feature=related

i can only find a good one of the 5th movement...too bad cuz the 6th is really cool too.

we're also working on beethoven's 7th symphony. here we go with the links again:

-1st movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=s1qAWcd4rr0
-2nd movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtPVEuAbzM&feature=related
-3rd movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=Td3mRRne39I&feature=related
-4th movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=VLkZvsp62iU&feature=related

alright well maybe that's enough music for now. i hope you enjoyed at least one of them! bye...

cheek puffs...

so this summer i had a dream...i don't remember much from the dream other than that it had one aspect very similar to anne of green gables. remember thomas, rachel lynde's husband? well, my siblings and i always used to laugh whenever we saw him on the movies, (which sadly, was very seldom). so the reason why we laughed at him is because of this, if you'll take a look at this picture of him:



he had cheek puffs!!!

well, getting back to my dream...in my dream, i had cheek puffs too! although mine weren't white and fluffy like his...they were long and silky and sleek! like this:



haha...well they didn't look exactly like this since i have basically no drawing talent...but hopefully you get the idea. so anyways, i remember thinking in my dream how hopeless the situation was because even if i shaved them all off, i would still have stubble on my face...and then they would keep on growing back. when i woke up, i frantically rubbed my cheeks to make sure there were no puffs there, and when i realized none were there, naturally i was relieved. so there's the story of my cheek puffs dream...as much of it as i can remember...

wow i'm back at southern...

describing:

S-tudying...already
O-utstandingly beautiful campus
U-nlimited potential for this year
T-oo hot and humid outside
H-ousekeeping now cleans my shower!
E-nviable new room in girl's section of guy's dorm
R-eams of new freshman
N-ew wellness center building almost completed

it should be an awesome school year! so far it has been at least...

ramblings and thoughts and questions...

i don't really know what this post is about yet. i thought maybe for once in a long time i should actually write something instead of posting a video or pictures or something to that effect. so, maybe i'll just ramble until i can think of a clear focus and goal for this post. in the meantime, have you ever wondered what life would be like if there were other added dimensions? such as if there was not only male and female, but also a third gender...symale? i don't really know. but wouldn't that just turn the whole entire world in a completely different spin than it is now? how would marriage work, or would we even have marriage? if we didn't, how would we repopulate the earth? it's all very confusing and mind-boggling. on a lighter and even more pointless topic...what if there was naturally a different style of hair? instead of just straight, curly, wavy, frizzy, and i guess corkscrew...what about diamond hair in the actual shape of diamonds hanging from your head? or maybe having naturally jagged hair that looked kind of like lightning bolts? can you even imagine how hilarious that would look?! i'm sure everyone's thought of the possibility of having only one eye in the middle of your face...so i won't dwell on that one. but what about if we had ten more letters in our alphabet? that would completely change our whole language...not to mention the fact that i can't even imagine what other letters would be like and what they would sound like. i hope one of them wouldn't be a rolling-your-r's sound because i wouldn't be very good at english then! one of the ultimate wondering in my thoughts, however, is what if we were incapable to feel or show any emotion. this world would be the most boring and unworthy place to live. emotion is what connects us to other people. we can detect what they are thinking through their emotions and feelings. if we had no emotion, i guess that also means that we also would be extremely limited in our methods of communication. you would have to directly tell someone what you were thinking, but even then, since you have no feeling, you wouldn't be happy or sad and etc. you could think thoughts such as, "i'm going to go outside now," but it wouldn't be linked with any reason other than that's what you decided to do. not because you felt like it...because you don't have internal feelings. i'm not talking about feelings such as the sense of touch, but feelings in your brain...being exuberant or bored or ecstatic. all in all, i'm glad that God thought of all these issues when he created this world. and if only a few differences in our world could throw it off so much, think how many trillions more He had to think through to make our world work. it's pretty amazing! just imagine how much MORE amazing heaven will be and how many more things God has and will think through to make it spectacular! it will be something i don't want to miss out on, and i hope you don't either! so i guess this is where my thoughts have lead me...hopefully at some point throughout this thing my rambling became an actual focus. in any case, i think wondering is good for the mind. once you wonder once, it becomes addictive and your brain gets flooded with many more wonders. see where your brain leads you when you allow yourself to wonder...i dare you to try it...

pictures pictures pictures...

self-explanatory title...pictures mostly from the past few years, but also some from many many years ago...

water water everywhere!...

episodes from 3 different lakes in one day...