Tag: #ds106

It’s a black plastic base, rectangle-shaped with a clear lid that lets me see the prize inside. Ten pieces of sushi, circular, and lined up in pairs. The last two in the lines are the end pieces and thin slices of carrots rise out of them like orange vines. The ingredients wrapped in nori and rice would probably make any true sushi critic howl; carrots, cucumber, and avocado. Not very traditional, but the only vegetarian choice the sushi shop sells. I am not disappointed, my love for sushi is not limited to only the most elite variations of rolls. This one tastes good enough. The flavor of the rice vinegar covers a multitude of sins of the carrot variety, a pea-sized bit of wasabi, even more. It is cold and a perfect mix of crunchy and soft. Because all of my meal money went to the meal, I just drink plain water from the water fountain, though I might heat it up and make some tea later. 

The tray it came in reminds me of a canoe, long and thin, pieces of roll lined up like people at the oars, the ginger at the end packed away like a picnic lunch. 

There was an exhibit about boats at the children’s museum near my house. They had this sort of canoe simulator, basically, just a canoe set into the ground with some kind of mechanics below it so that as you stepped into it, it rocked. Then you could stand and row the oars that descended down into the machine and it felt like you were moving with the screen in front of you that showed a video of similar riverboats. That’s what this reminds me of as the not quite sweet not quite savory flavor of ripe avocado washes over my tongue. I’m not sure why, but I suppose with the chopsticks next to it, the similarities are too much to ignore. 

“Skip the filters and the art of cropping–we are going old school…..DESCRIBE your (or your character’s) lunches! So whatever it is you’re eating or ate earlier, or would love to eat, describe it! Don’t be afraid to be silly, and don’t skimp on the details. What color is it? What does it taste like? What does it remind you of? If you make it into a poem–that would be even better!”

ds106 Assignments: Instagram is done…DESCRIBE your lunch to me! 

I had no idea that this was gonna go like this. That describing my sushi lunch was going to bring up memories of a children’s museum that I haven’t been to in years or make me think of canoes. That’s the beauty of writing for you. I honestly think that is part of what I like it so much, the spontaneity of creativity that only happens as you are writing. I think it happens in all mediums, I don’t think Bob Ross has the ability to know exactly how his paintings will turn out. They will just happen as he paints them, that’s part of the beauty of it. It wouldn’t be fun if the painter was worried about the final outcome being exactly as they first envisioned it. That sounds like a recipe for anxiety. Because Bob Ross does so much the opposite, it is relaxing and freeing. For me, that creative spontaneity is the joy of painting/writing/drawing/singing/art.

I know the whole point of the assignment was to describe your lunch because you can’t post a picture of it. So I post a non-picture. I post the aftermath.

I am probably not wearing enough layers and it is completely my fault. The campus walk is the same as yesterday and the day before, the brick and snow patches illuminated by white winter sunlight, and a tirade of other students walk beside or against me on their way to class or library or food. Even with my hands in my pockets, shoulders hunched up against the chill, the wind cuts through the fabric with practiced ease. As I walk, it brushes through my hair, ruffling my clothes against my skin and repositioning my outfit. The wind says I should open my collar, pushing it out to expose my neck, says I should let my flannel blow back behind me like a cape. I don’t disagree. Who can argue with the wind? I stop fighting it, both the wind as my personal fashion expert and the cold in general. I let the frigid air permeate my skin, my muscles, veins, and arteries until it touches my bones. It feels like cleansing. Like the cold is freezing off all of the detritus of the day, all the nagging leftovers of all the moments before this, letting me just be. Just walk down through the tunnel by the bridge and be a cold boy on his way to class.    

“People often forget about how beautiful the world is, the way the trees blow in the wind, how flowers bloom in the spring, and how amazing the grass feels on our feet. We come from a generation where the only beauty we actually see is over an electronic. Go outside every once in a while, smell the fresh hair and the flowers, lay down on a blanket in the grass and look up at the sky and see how the clouds look. We don’t really live in a bad world, you are just blinded by what you see. Show me what you see.”

ds106 Assignments: another day

It is probably no surprise that this is a true experience, what with the weather we have been having recently. As you have just read, I love it. I find that there is something refreshing about the cold and I wanted to write about it here. It was the first thought that came to my mind in response to this assignment, besides the more overdone topics like flowers and sunrises and the like which I pushed to the side. Not that those things are bad, they are not, but they are talked about a lot. I wanted to give a view to something not really talked about. I wanted to try something a little more risky than just ‘look at all the pretty colors’. I hoped it worked, maybe it just made you shiver. I’ll take whatever response I can get. 

This took a couple of days to come back to it and get it right, and I made very good use of a thesaurus. There weren’t too many roadblocks, but I am noticing that if I don’t have a way in, if I don’t have a first sentence that is interesting to me, I can’t start. I remember staring at the blinking cursor on this page for a good while before something acceptable turned up.  

All baby capybaras derive effervescent flight gifts. However, ill-meaning jackalopes kick sneakily low-riding minotaurs, never offer pardons, quite regretting silly trifles. Usually, vexations with xeruses yodel ‘zap’.

For context,

“Create a story that uses words that begin with the letters of the alphabet consecutively. For example, A big cat dug eight… But you have to go all the way to the letter Z. Try to make as much sense as possible. Or if you really can’t, then go crazy. Be creative and have fun!”

ds106 Assignments: A Story In Alphabet

This was quite a bit more difficult than I thought it was going to be. The constriction of only using words that begin with the next letter of the alphabet was a delightful challenge. I wanted to make it somewhat sensical, as much as these sentences are technically sentences in a grammatical sense. They don’t make much logical or normal sense, but what is normal anyway? It kind of turned into a strange folk tale and I am not completely mad at the result. The last six words/letters were really really difficult and are the weakest point, but again, they were very difficult. Thinking about words in this way stretched my mind in ways it doesn’t usually. Overall, it was a very fun puzzle-like experience.

I had so many tattoos, more than the single one that I have on my waking body, midnight sketches of things I don’t quite remember. Most of this dream is shrouded in murky swirls and vague half-imaginings, one image fading into the next, indistinguishable unless actively focused on and sometimes not even then. And now I am getting another tattoo, adding two pirate-themed dioramas to my back and side. I don’t remember the tattooist or the pain of the needle, but the tattoo shop’s room was walled in sand-colored paint. Like dreams tend to do, I was then in a new place with no ready explanation or knowledge of how one scene bled into another. This place I had never seen before, and all of the details are nothing but blurry colors—burgundy, charcoal, mahogany— in the background. My dorm’s RA is managing a booth of dark wood paneling, wine glasses hanging from their bases from the ceiling. He washes a clear mug with a rag in his hands, over and over again, the dim light catching in his cherry-colored curly hair. The tattoo parlor didn’t give me the wrappings I needed to keep the raw flesh protected, so I approached my RA. I ask for the wrappings and he gives them to me for free, though I worry about pricing. But when I ask, he just says that he wants to see my new ink. I don’t want to take my shirt off in front of other people milling about in the periphery of this public space, but it doesn’t matter because I wake up. 

Or maybe the dream shifts again. 

I don’t remember the next bit. 

“Write about a dream you have had. It could be a recurring dream, a vivid dream, or even a dream that you make up. Be sure to describe every detail that you can remember from your dream.”

ds106 Assignments: Dream It…Write It!

So this was a dream I had a few nights ago, or at least, a figment of a dream I had a few nights ago. I tend to dream a lot but have little to no memory of them besides the vague impression that I did indeed dream. It is a strange thing to not remember something, but know—feel—that it happened. But I thought it was very fun to try and describe the strangeness of dreams as it’s not easy, done very often, or much like real life at all. I tried my best to describe the potentially indescribable, or at least the usefulness of the sleep-world when so much of prose is about the wake-world. I definitely had fun and hope if nothing else it was an interesting read. 

One of the many iconic parts of Bob Ross’s Joy Of Painting is his palette. He has very specific colors and knows how to use them in his art to make a cohesive product. Colors are something I wanted to try and focus on in this piece as this dream had a very particular pallet. But I also didn’t want to come out with the boring names of colors, does Bob Ross have boring names for colors? No. He has specific names for each shade and so that is part of what I tried to emulate.

“Choose an emotion (happy, sad, excited, hyper, sleepy, suprised, inspired, ect..) and then choose three songs that elect that emotion. Name emotion, the song, and why it makes you feel that way. This can be done in three separate tweets to allow for character count. Have fun with this!”

ds106 Assignments: Emotional lyrics

Music is one of those things that I am surrounded by all the time, whether by my own volition or not. I’ve got headphones in nearly all the time or asking my Alexa to play one tune or the next, or the radio is on in the gym, or even bobbing along to the song stuck in my head without any external input. I love music. But I am in no way a musician. I do not play any instruments besides a horrid stint of tin whistle in second grade I try my best to repress and my voice is average at best. I also have no intention of becoming a musician. I am perfectly happy to enjoy this medium from an outside point of view, unsullied by an intimate knowledge of its inner workings.

So when I saw this assignment, I was like ‘yes’. These are a few of my go-to songs when I need a pick-me-up. It was honestly hard to narrow it down to three, I had to just go with the first ones that came to mind. I hope you maybe give a quick listen and enjoy!

Stay safe and give yourself some love,