Spotted

Not really in the right mood to write much tonight, but wanted to put up another picture anyway.  Pretty cool macro shot from my last trip through the gardens.  I always like the blurry background like this one that you get with macro photos.

-Ben

Clouds

This was taken last night out by the duck pond.  I really liked the way the wispy clouds looked and tried to compose a good shot with them in it.  It turned out pretty nicely.  There’s a good amount of symmetry along the line of clouds, with the clouds on each side of the center seeming to point out to the upper corners of the picture.  I tried to put the tall tree in the middle of the cloud bank to line up with the bulge at the center.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the tree to appear any higher, since if I had taken another couple of steps forward I would have been in the water and if I had lowered the camera any more, there would have been too many plants in the foreground, though I do like that I managed to include the tops of them in the shot.  The colors are nice, and the reflection turned out pretty good as well.

-Ben

Slow Down

This is another picture from my walk through the Hahn Horticulture gardens a couple of weeks ago.  I’ve walked by this statue several times in the garden but never really gotten a good picture of it until this one.  The plaque in the bottom right corner reads:

“Maid in the Mud” Garden Sprite
by Frank Lloyd Wright
Gift of Warren and Margie Kark
June 16, 2007.

I won’t pretend to know a lot about art, my only real academic experiences with it being an art history course last fall and some on site information from the Beckers this summer.  But to me at least, it is a very haunting piece, brimming with both longing and regret, as if she has just lost something very dear to her.  The nature of the sculpture also adds to the effect.  There are no smooth curves at all in this sculpture, only sharp, angular cuts, creating a figure of purely flat surfaces.  I think it serves to immediately put a distance between the sculpture and the humans viewing it.  In human-like sculptures we look for things we can identify with, things that remind us of ourselves, in a way things that affirm our own humanity.  By having a sculpture, especially a female one, be made of hard geometric shapes like this rather than the soft, gentle curves we tend to associate with women it is much harder for the viewer to make a connection with the subject.  Rather than a benevolent, welcoming figure, we (or me at least) unthinkingly assign to it a negative emotion such as loss or regret rather than a more positive one such as sympathy that we might bestow on a figure that we could relate to on a “human” level.  But she is the only one in the scene, we really have no way of knowing what she’s gazing down at, if anything at all.  Is she mourning the loss of a loved one?  Is she a worried mother standing over an injured child, full of worry and love?  Is the subject of her concern something physical and concrete at all?

We watched another very interesting video for our TED talk colloquium tonight.  The talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/carl_honore_praises_slowness.html), given by journalist Carl Honore, advocated a “slowing down” of our arguably fast-paced society.  It struck a particularly strong cord with me as I watched it, as it had been something I’ve given a fairly good amount of thought to before, and kinda written about here before.  The basic gist of the argument is that the best way to get more out of the time we have is not to try to pack as many things into it as possible, but rather to try to get more out of the things we do.  More what?  A simple question, but one without an equally simple answer.  More enjoyment, more fulfillment, more meaning, just more.  I see this as deeper than just an “enjoy the simple things in life” message.

Another point he seems to make in the video is that eventually our fast-paced lives catch up to us, we reach a breaking point, and once we reach this point, we either make an effort to slow down or risk truly burning ourselves out.  Our lives are full of stress, regardless of whether we are in school or out in the workforce, but we all try to find the best way to deal with it.  However, it never seems to really go away, and over time it builds up inside us until it can manifest in some physical way, be it a sickness that forces us to take it easy for a while, or an emotional outburst, whose consequences can, and should, lead to a reflection about their true cause.  This can be that crucial breaking point.  If we ignore what our bodies and minds are trying to tell us, drown them out with neverending work and worry, the consequences can be catastrophic.

I think I reached one of these breaking points last spring.  Overwhelmed with work and a couple of personal issues, and without a real way to remove myself from the stressful situation, it felt like things were falling down all around me.  There was a week where all of my deadlines and responsibilities seemed to converge.  I made it through the week, but paid for it that weekend.  I remember not being able to do much on account of some particularly bad headaches.  But while this weekend was certainly not productive on an academic level, it made me slow down, really stop and think about things.  I know I’ve talked about this here before, but I realized that my priorities were not in the right order, and had been skewed for quite some time.  Getting a B in a class wasn’t going to kill me, it wasn’t the end of the world, and I really needed to cut myself some slack personally and academically.  I took a pretty deep look at what my motivation was for all of the things I was doing, realizing that a good deal of them were pretty superficial, doing the activity for the sake of doing the activity, and not really getting anything out of it.  I had to look for my “focal activities,” which I talked about a couple of posts ago.

Since then, I have tried, and it is very hard at times, to slow myself down.  Breaking out of a mindset in which I’ve been fairly firmly set for the past five or six years has taken, and is still taking a good deal of effort on my part.  It’s not something we can simply switch on or off, but requires a change on a much deeper, more fundamental level.  But it’s a goal that I feel is worthy of the effort it requires.

Anyway, I have a tendency to ramble when I’m up too late past my bedtime, so I think that will have to do for tonight.

-Ben

A Light at the End of the Tunnel

Those of you that know me here at Tech have probably noticed that I haven’t been around much the last week or so, or that when I have, I’ve been pretty stressed out.  I had a huge project for my Computing Systems class which I probably spent about 30 hours between Tuesday night and Friday night working on.  I also had a big test in my Real Analysis course Wednesday night.  That being said, it’s been a hectic week, and I haven’t had much time for anything fun, with the notable exception of teaching my first Salsa class Monday night.  Sometimes, I wonder exactly why I put so much pressure on myself to do so much, and I wonder if it’s really worth it or not.

But luckily all of that is behind me now, and things are starting to look up again, at least until we get our next project.  We had our annual Main Campbell Halloween party tonight which was a lot of fun, and luckily I was able to spend all afternoon working on a costume rather than on that project.  I’m also looking forward to a big salsa workshop tomorrow afternoon.

So, the title of the post has two meanings, the first from the way I feel after making it through the last week, the second from the effect of the shot itself.  It wasn’t actually taken through a tunnel, instead just through a poorly lit archway.  I really like the effect from the stone archway, a jagged frame for a nice scene.  It also turned out nicely that there wasn’t any light falling on this side of the arch as it gives it a really nice solid feel.  The scene through the arch also turned out really well.  The colors are nice and vibrant, and the sky isn’t completely blown out like I thought it might be when I took the shot.

Hopefully things will be getting back to normal during the next week or so, and I’ll be able to get back to doing a lot of the things I enjoy, hopefully both running and dancing again, not to mention taking some new pictures.

-Ben

Filler

I haven’t gotten as much sleep as I’m used to the past few days, and at this point am not sure if I can write coherently for more than a few sentences.  This is another picture from the Hahn Horticulture Gardens on campus that I took last week.  Turned out pretty cool.  I’m off to class and then back to the systems lab to work on this CS project…

-Ben