My Official Apology

Dear Anyone,

My most sincere apologies in not updating this since August. I did not realize how key the internet was as a tool to get my work, words, thoughts and feelings out there.

Love,

Jessica

Dear Mom,

Thank you for saving everything ever from my childhood. I love rummaging through all the bins in the grey basement and discovering I had a tiger that looked like this.

Where on earth did we get these animals?

In addition to these delights I found the bin of my horses. I had the most fabulous collection of horses. Horses, horses. From ages 4-14 I lived, breathed and sometimes smelled like a horse. I can recall spending hours in the basement of our house in Massachusetts playing with my horses. Setting up jumps, creating Dressage routines, imagining complicated scenarios between the horses, their riders and their owners. I was big on drama from the beginning.

It was surreal to hold them once again. It was strange to realize, wait, I can't recreate my feelings from before. It's a plastic toy now; a beautifully crafted plastic toy that I cherish.

But if you look past that, past the desire to be seven again, past the relationships between yourself and the horses you once rode, you discover these plastic objects are vessels. Vessels to tap into memories that get lost in the mess of the mind. Have you ever seen the film "Donald in Mathemagic Land"? Most likely not. There is a scene where they clean out his brain. It's a mess of filing cabinets, cobwebs and dust. A great visual for how I feel my mind operates.

These horses are my "search tool," my command f, my tangible reminder that I was a child and I lived a life prior to this one and for those few days of being at home, in my flame pajama pants and small, paint splattered hoodie I can reflect on how those days were and apply that new knowledge to the days to come.

I made a movie!

Every time I'm at my parents' house in Kansas I like to take a trip down memory lane. This could also be known as a trip down to the grey basement where my mother has neatly labeled and organized everything from my child hood. These little deer came from the "Kids Animals" bin.

This is also my maiden voyage into stop motion film. Kind of awesome.

Glasgow and Baltimore are really similar

Where do you think this photo was taken?

A letter to Dinoman

Dear Dinoman,

I found you pinned up in the space where I facilitated Art Camp. Why are you there?

I noticed your lower jaw sticks out a little far. Have you considered seeing an orthodontist?

Your face looks similar to a whale. You don't happen to be related to that one that scares the crap out of my boyfriend at the aquarium are you? Because if you are, I would have to ask you to ask your relative to quit being so scary. It's not normal for an employed, 26 year old man to be afraid of whales in tanks at the aquarium.

Lastly,

Are you wearing pants, or do your legs really look like that, and if your legs do indeed look like that, where on earth do you buy pants?

I guess I should have a post about Baltimore

Ok. Step one in diving into the world of blogging. Yea, sure I did it in Africa, but...that was well over a year ago.

Have you ever played a game called Photo Tag? It's a game some of my students thought up on the last day of art camp. We had a handful of point and shoot disposable cameras and decided to play tag. Only in this version of tag you try getting a photo of someone's face to make them it. Here's some of the results of that hilarity.

And you thought these were museum pieces

The rains have arrived!

With the rains comes mass farming time. Every big patch of ground becomes a tiny field of beans or corn. Other patches have these mounds with tubers stuck in them. Those are my personal favorite because they look like alien farms.

Anyway, this is how we prepare the fields for planting. Tie up the cows and donkeys to the simple plow. Amazing how tools and machines I used to only see in museums are now a part of my everyday life.