Goodbye for Now

My Dear Petri Dish Readers,

I will be away for 33 days in Kenya. I will miss you. I plan to return with good stories and a tan.

All My Love,

Luria

Above the Line

I will be spending 33 days in Kenya. During that time it will be important for me to stay above the line. Let me explain.

Below the line is complaining, getting annoyed by others, trash talking, melancholy, making fun of myself, insecurity, paranoia, scaredycatness, wimpy, closed-in-on-myselfness, shrinking into a ball.

Above the line is absorbing a once in a lifetime opportunity, learning about fossils, remembering where I began, remembering how far I have come, drawing, joking the good joke, lightness, progress, growth, new people, wide eyes, wonder, health and fun.

I will let you know how it goes...

anemones ranunculus tomatoes olives cheese chianti and perfect light

This is what I think I want my life to look like.

(Via the small stump portfolio-click on the title of this post for a link to their site).

The Silence Experiment

I spent the last two days of this week at the museum. I was looking, and I was drawing with a fine tipped mechanical pencil on light brown craft paper. My ipod was blasting calm fluttering tunes. Its been so long since I have drawn. Its been so long since I have really looked at something without the rushed and stressed semester steadily breathing down on me. Because of the stress and because of the slow drudgery of school related requirements, I had almost forgotten what it is that I like to do. 

But on Thursday, I remembered. 

I was looking at the skeletons of various mammals in preparation for my trip. On my trip, I will be going to Africa to look for fossils at a Miocene site that is approximately 17 million years old. The mammals that I was looking at in the museum this week were not 17 million years old, but they were sort of general representatives of the types of things I might be finding in the dirt.  

I am very lucky to have the opportunity and the time to look at this material. 

It was occasionally raining. Clear rainy day light was spilling in the large old window in front of me. I was at a table, alone. Pencil on paper gently explaining the outline of the shape. look. look. look. The quiet sound of drawing. The silence of looking. The intimacy of shading of gradual gradual gradual gradual shading. I make the drawing twirl because the bones do. I think the bones are beautiful. I said that to a classmate once, he left me feeling silly, naturally. But there was no one there to make me feel silly this time. Just me, my three pencils, a kneaded eraser, the poor deceased Potamochoerus larvatus and exactly how only I see it. 

Talent Show

What if someone asked you to empty out all of your talents into a bucket—all of the things that you can do well and that give you a peaceful pride, even tiny things that only you know you are good at. What if every last crumb or cent of your unique skills were no longer a part of you?

And then what if someone told you that you had to pick the thing you were very worst at—the thing that you are so astonishingly bad at that by about the 4th grade you already knew it wasn’t happening—and what if someone then told you that you had to do that thing. for a living.

This is how I feel sometimes. But there was no “someone”. It was all me.

CHANEL No. 5 ad thats pretty beautiful...

CHANEL N* 5 (Extended) from Foro Dinastías on Vimeo.

7 Reasons to Remain Silent

I dont talk in class, unless I am the teacher. As a student, I sit there with a sometimes knitted brow, occasionally nodding or sniffling a half-laugh if its called for... but I hardly ever, ever speak, unless spoken to. Apparently this is detrimental to my career as a graduate student, so I need to think about why it is I do this...so here goes...

I dont speak in class because:

1) I am not sure what I am going to say is correct or worth hearing.
2) I am probably wrong.
3) I dont want to compete with the talkers, I dont want to interrupt anyone’s rant, even if I think they are wrong and/or overly confident and/or absurd, which is often the case.
4) I didnt read carefully enough so asking a question may accidentally reveal this.
5) I am not really that interested in what I am learning.
6) I dont want to be judged, even though sitting there in silence does not totally absolve me of this I suppose.
7) I dont want people to know what I think.


Writing this list just convinced me again to remain silent... and I like this quote by Lincoln:

{Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.} -Abraham Lincoln

and finally I leave you with this quote from Liz Lemon from the show 30Rock, which I think I love even more than the Lincoln quote....{SUCK IT NERDS!}.