One of the weirder side effects of pretty much being forced out of my mind earlier this year has been a notable uptick in my craftiness quotient.

I always liked doing art, but I was never particularly good at it; I'm very uncoordinated and just can't make the pen/pencil/paintbrush/etc move in the right way to make the line/shape/etc I'm seeing in my head. So since the end of high school, I've more or less stuck with doing design on computers; I'm not a genius there, either, but on a computer the gap between talent and diligently acquired skill is much narrower. I can fake it more easily.

But being messed up has made me dissatisfied with that alone. Ever since the roommate art night in September, I've been on a hands-on craftiness bender, and the casualties are mounting.

Below are badly photographed (not false modesty, I really didn't bother to photograph them properly, it would take longer than they're worth) paintings I have made, each taking anywhere from 20 minutes to three. whole. hours. Oh yes, my artistic devotion, it rivals the masters.

These are by no means all of them. Maybe half or three fifths. These tiny things are littering my apartment. I can't believe my roommates haven't maced me yet, or made me eat my oil paints. Instead, they joke about my new hobby and make kind noises about the rectangles they find drying on the bricks outside our door.

As oil painting was the absolute nadir of my high school art classes--I could NOT make it work--I don't know why I find it so calming now. But it is; the simple process of moving the brush over the canvas is immensely soothing, and then (several days of drying later) I have a block of color to throw on the wall.

And, yes, they're all pretty much blocks of (sometimes iridescent) color, except where I threw in scraps of a photo or some plastics I got for about a buck at this neato shop on Canal St. The exception is the horse I tried to paint for my roommate's birthday (she wanted a pony, and since we can't keep a real one in the apt., I tried to paint her one), which I think will make eminently clear why I stick with abstract painting. I SUCK AT REPRESENTATIONAL ART. At least with swirls and grains the viewer doesn't know how off I was from what I intended.

Aaaand I'm still messing around with Photoshop. I sat down to crop a photo of myself to update my Friendster page and, the moment I opened the file, I immediately began fucking with it instead of just correcting levels and shrinking it like non-spastic people do. Still haven't updated my profile! But I have two divergent results from the same photo:

In some exciting news, my older sister will be the 2006 president of the Brown University Graduate Student Council.

Those people had better brace themselves for a most swift and righteous kick in the ass.

Give this woman her goddamn cat back. You are being an asshole.

Cordially,

Adair Iacono

Maybe the MTA should disable their feedback form until they pull their heads at least partway out of their asses. My use of their form:

Subject: Would you settle with the union already?

As a member of the fare-paying public, I would like to express my intense dissatisfaction with the MTA's shoddy, bad-faith negotiation tactics and the strike they have precipitated. Your insistence on a two-tiered benefit system is unreasonable, as you know quite well that its adoption could ultimately break the union and disenfranchise its workers entirely down the line; good for your perennially catastrophic and inaccurate budget--perhaps, in the short term--but bad for the subways and bad for the city. The union has made concessions, you can amply afford their offer (or certainly could if you troubled to, say, take the highest bid on your next auction of public land), and as one of your customers I want to make it very clear that I do not hold the union responsible for this outage. I hold you responsible. Kalikow--whose going out to dinner on the night the initial deadline loomed has to be the most calculatedly insulting act possible for a man who supposedly has the public interest at heart--needs to get back to the negotiation table and work this out. Now.

A thing may look easy when some world-famous pastry chef does it on the Food Network; this does not, however, mean that the thing actually is easy to do.

Case in point: heating sugar, water, and food dye to the point of thickening, removing from pan, and molding it into your glorious artistic vision. It all went wrong between the "removing from pan" and "glorious artistic vision" parts, mostly because while there simply must be a point where the sugar is both pliable and sufficiently cool to avoid serious injury, this point proved rather difficult to come by. So I have a handful of weird knobbly shapes, an intriguing stalactite or two, and some fetching bits of shattered sugar that could mimic mosaic pieces for cake decoration if I decide to salvage something from this star-crossed project. We shall see.

Frickin' Alain Roby.

I won! I won! I more than salvaged the sugar project. I learned from this morning's green experiment and tried again, this time in amber and this time actually trying to make the pull shapes. I was even able to make one with pulls on both ends that wrapped around the cake (see 9 o'clock on the photo below and the piece overlapping it--they're really the same). Fuck yeah! Looks like stained glass, burns like stained glass if mishandled, but oh, much better results when you eat it.

It was all I could do not to start punching into the air, screaming, "IN YOUR FACE!!!"

But I managed.