Musings

Throughout everyday life, I find myself thinking of the strangest things. I have so little real interaction with others that I suppose this is how my mind fills the dead space. It's nothing to complain about; on the contrary, it is really quite amusing sometimes. 

I find myself staring at the clouds often. I can't really think why, besides one instance at my art class. Someone had painted a beautiful spectacle of a cloud front and I wondered why I couldn't do the same. The teacher explained that, although clouds look like fluffy amorphous blobs of random colors, they are actualy quite hard to paint for that reason. Shadows fall randomly, lighting is inconsistent, and there is really no right way to do it. Ever since, I find myself staring at the clouds often. Perhaps I took it as a challenge and now I'm studying them, trying to decode their secrets. It's strangely entertaining. Sometime's I glance up at them expecting them to start moving, blowing across the sky like so many tumbleweeds like in some music videos. Sometimes I stare at holes in the clouds or study their colors. Sometimes I just make up random non-scientific scenarios for them. Today I fancied that the sky is really a huge galss table that scientists are hiding from us, which explains why many clouds seem to have flat bottoms as it they're resting on something. I wonder how they feel sometimes; I know clouds are nothing but mass collections of water vapor but, still, misty coolness is a really nice feeling on the skin (not so much on clothes, though...). When I was walking my dog, I couldn't help but admire the clouds the whole way. They really looked amazing today, pastel-ey as if placed there by strokes of a painter's hand and beautifully arranged. Yellow-orange, orange-grey, and dark blue clouds gathered all over the neighborhood as if to warn us and mesmerize us simultaneously. I couldn't really believe that something so beautiful might exist by pure chance- It truly looked like a painter's doodles. A paint stroke here, some scribbling here, a few shadows spread around here.

I find myself often wondering how real life objects would have been drawn were they pieces of art. The farm fields in my neighborhood, for example. What artist's musings led to this particular arrangement of trees? Why add that patch of yellow over there? The fences on that side seem a bit too close for a balanced piece. Rendering all the little details seems like it would be a big challenge. 

Another thing I do is I stare at the walls every day walking from calss to class. Ever since I arrived at this school, perhaps even before then, I've found that the individual bricks look like cartons of ice cream. They're speckled and texture just the right way to look like jagged peaks of frozen cookies n' cream! I can only marvel at the extraordinaty amount of ice cream the school has just on display 24/7; if only different flavors were available! If only I could truly walk up to one with a scoop, serve myself some, and scurry off to my next class! Ah, but then I become bothered by the jaggedness of the bricks and I find myself wishing for a giant baking spatula so I may smooth them out when they melt a bit. Level them off, you know? 

Another one I used to do a lot as a child was stare at the walls next to the freeway as we drove. I don't know why, but they often had random blocks of deviate colors on them, as if the builders ran out of paint halfway through and had to use the next closest color. I used to imagine that they were true, real, 3D objects that were thrown behind us as we drove; that was why they always sped by so fast. And then I wondered why, who threw them that way? For what purpose? My strange little mind came up with the solution that perhaps there was a giant behind us, an ogre! And from then on I thought of the castle and its soldiers every time we drove on the freeway, fighting valiantly, catapulting items at the looming monster on the horizon.