“Another Day”
Well, I chose this assignment from the “Writing Assignments” section of the DS106 website. I kind of randomly picked something that seemed somewhat intriguing to me. This particular assignment focussed on natural beauty and being able to take a moment to truly take the world in for what one can see. It is 25 degrees outside, and absolutely miserable. This should go well…
I like to get outside and to see the world beyond face value. I like to take a much-needed break from what’s currently troubling me, and just zoning out. Thus today, I genuinely tried to focus on the outside world. I sat out on my balcony in the bitterly cold weather, looking up at the sky, as my neighbors stared at me assuming I was on crack or something. The sky wasn’t much to look at, and the air didn’t have much to draw from, and that’s fine. What matters is that when I did look out, when I did leave the world behind me, I felt something other than the momentum of the so-called bleak world we focus on in life.
Well, there’s that. I ignored the cold and did it anyway. The weather in a way made me focus more, as not an awful lot more crosses your mind when your body is in survival mode.
“By Any Sketch Of The Imagination”
I am an absolutely terrible artist. If that hasn’t been reflected by my previous visual assignments, I would like to make that perfectly clear now. I can make pretty good stick figures and whatnot, but any level of detail….. no. I decided for this assignment, that I would try and turn some image that’s significant to me into something that somewhat resembles a sketch. As I’m terrible with anything related to the word art, I decided this would provide a different perspective to some of the images that I hold dear to my being.
The picture I chose means nothing to me. I chose it simply because it was an interesting picture that I took at work. The original image was of a barn at a deserted farm. The original photograph almost makes it appear fake, with the curvature of the ground meeting directly with the hill behind the barn.
It still obviously is a computer-generated “sketch”, but I like the level of detail it added to the original image. It still looks somewhat surreal, yet realistic at the same time.
“My Favorite Picture“
I see this picture almost every day of my life. It’s my phone background and has been for the past several years. When I read the prompt for this assignment, I automatically knew that this was my favorite photograph and that this would be the one I’d immediately submit.
This picture means a lot to me. Even though I hardly stay in touch with the two others in it, sometimes I wished I did. When I left for college, the first time around, I was extremely naive. about it. I was at school in Southwest Virginia, and it was my first time “away” from home, as it was for pretty much everyone else. I found my tribe quickly, joined a fraternity, and was enjoying life. This picture is from a trip I had early on, to McAffee’s Knob, perhaps the most scenic point of the Appalachian Trail. We woke up at 4 AM to watch the sunrise over the mountains, and this picture kind of just materialized with the sunrise. It was one of the most surreal, and spiritual experiences I’d had in my life, and opened my mind to whatever else the world offered for me. That trip made me realize the person that I was, and made me think more deeply about myself. I left that school after my grades slipped significantly. I moved back up to Northern Virginia where my parents lived and changed my life by doing things I never would have done had I stayed in school there. In the end, that trip, personified by that picture, changed the trajectory of my life. There are many things in my life that I would change, but this wasn’t one of them.
