The first Friday night of every month is a big art gallery open house time in Oakland. Of course, the galleries are all open at other times, but if you want to go and see other people who are going to galleries and talk to them or just not feel weird about being the only person standing in the gallery, the first Friday night of the month is the time for you to go.
We've lived in Oakland since August, and fully intended to go to this art murmur nonsense pretty much every month. But things always seem to come up, usually things like me wanting to go to bed at 6pm instead of going to art galleries. Yesterday we finally went and it was not great. Sometimes I get really enraged at art galleries. This time I just felt sickened. Rage and nausea at viewing art pretty much always comes from the same source for me: the art being crap. There was definitely some good stuff going on. The World's Smallest Post Office was there, for example. But the cool things were vastly overshadowed by tons of art that I felt like I'd seen before and wasn't impressed by the first 20 times.
As you may know, I used to paint a lot. I loved painting. And every painting I made was on the back of cardboard from whatever food box I had just emptied. I spent hours and hours on each elaborate piece of cardboard. When I was in Boston I worked as a model in art classes, and the instructors would always ask me if I was an artist, as most models tend to be. I could never describe the art that I made, so I started carrying some of my cardboard canvases with me and showing them to those who inquired. When I did show them to people, they were always impressed (or at least did a good job of acting that way) and every single one of them told me, in horrified tones, "you can't paint that on cardboard." Because it's not archival, which means all of my paintings are going to rot and the paint will fall off of them after a while. "Paint on canvas" they said, "and you could do really well with these." But I can't paint on canvas. It makes this scratching noise, and the lines are never smooth enough to satisfy my ocd. I can't paint on masonite, either, even though it's a smooth archival-quality surface, because it's too expensive. Even decent paper is too expensive. I kept painting for a while, but eventually I stopped, because thinking about the cardboards warping and rotting and the paint falling off got me discouraged.
So, basically, the feeling I got from the art galleries was "I wish I had money so I could buy masonite." But, more specifically, "I wish I had the money that these people who are doing a shitty job with their art supplies have."
Maybe after I get a real job I will take up painting again. I'm not sure, though. Right now I don't really even have any desire to paint. There are so many things that seem more exciting. So for now I'm going to continue making videos, because it's much cheaper (sort of) and they last forever no matter what shit you use to make them.
We got our own greenscreen last night, so now we can finish filming the golden retriever movie whenever we please.
We didn't get to see the rainforest, and it wasn't the "wet collection" (dead things in jars) but we got to see some books and maps from expeditions from 1568 or something like that, some of which featured beautiful engravings of whales and seals and birds. I'm not sure what area of library science I want to get into, but I'm leaning toward some sort of archivist position. I'm really into old stuff and looking at pictures, so I think that an archival career might just be for me. 
