A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl Part 1

Happy October! I read in a book once that if you wake up on the first day of a new month and the first thing you say is "rabbits, rabbits, rabbits," you will have a lucky month. I've only managed to do this 2 or 3 times in the past several years. Today wasn't one of them, but I'm still optimistic.

You may have noticed that this blog has once again become private. It may or may not remain that way, depending on how the war between convenience and privacy plays out. Actually, to tell the truth, the thing most likely to make me change it back is the flood of emails and questions that I get from my parents (sorry guys, and Happy Anniversary!) asking what the password is.

My adventures have become more scholastic these days. I'm getting used to having two-hour classes, and am even really enjoying most of them. My Health Care and Public Health teacher is totally unexpected. On the first day of class he wore a leather jacket and no one knew he was the teacher so we didn't go into the classroom for about 20 minutes. He's 26 years old and a Ph.D. candidate doing research in comparative health care systems, but he says his real passion is music (quelle surprise). He gave us his cell phone number in order to text him if we are ever going to miss class. He also gave us two oral presentations, which made me hate him a little, but he says he's buying two rounds of beer for our class tomorrow, so I think I may find it in my heart to forgive him...

Anyway, the class I really want to talk about is my drawing class. It is great! It's all levels, so I'm very much the worst artist in the class, but it's so much fun. Also, because I am a beginner and perhaps the only foreign students in the class, the teacher and even some of the other students give me extra encouragement. And now you can, too, because today I begin a new series of weekly graphic updates about my art class and my (supposed) progress. I'm calling it, you may have already gathered, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl" because I am incapable of resisting corny, and usually irrelevant, literary puns. Take a look:

This piece--"Untitled 1," if you will--requires a bit of an explanation. This was our first exercise in class. We were supposed to close our eyes and draw, without looking, with the charcoal just to get a feel for it. Pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, with my eyes closed and the window open over a noisy street and the teacher speaking French in her soft, art-teacher voice, I missed all of the directions. In order to work out what I was meant to do without disturbing the serene atmosphere she was trying to create, I peeked a little to see what everyone else was doing. Through slitted eyes, it looked as though they were all just drawing designs, so I did the same. Unfortunately, the ultimate purpose of the exercise still escaped me, so I did the entire thing with my eyes semi-open. At the end, we had to look around at each other's drawings, and it was VERY clear that I had cheated.I'm still not sure it was a good idea to start with portraits. This is actually supposed to be a person (a male, it may be necessary to clarify) in my class. Poor kid had to sit there for an hour and watch his eyes grow to 3 times their original size. Luckily, he wasn't much better; I only got 1 eye.

There is something vaguely inappropriate-looking about this one. For the record, it is a chestnut.

And now to begin my massive amounts of homework. France, man...