felicity

my roommates are totally into "felicity". i am not. mostly because every single line of dialogue is whispered.
"hey"
"oh... hey"

"i think i love you"
"hu"
"do you love me?"

"no... i love the other guy. the one who cheated on me last week"

"hu"
"hu"


anyways, yesterday jacob took a super long, super late nap, and i ended up watching an episode of "felicity" where she and the one guy are in a drawing class and the class is critiquing her drawing of two hands. and they're tearing it apart. not literally, but with their words. using phrases like lack of composition, flatness, inconsistency, blah blah blah.

and the tv viewing audience is going, "um.... felicity's crying because people didn't like her drawing of hands... they're hands. i mean, what's the big deal? they look like hands. they're great hands... i'm pretty sure this would never happen in real life."

and i will now tell you that i was on the couch laughing like a fool remembering the countless times i sat in the back of my art classes in bewilderment that people could so passionately hate my drawing of a shoe. "this shoe doesn't show any personality".
i remember especially one time when this one little chinese girl's drawing of a shell was being torn apart (again, not literally, but with words.) and she was sitting with her head down, feeling like a shell drawing failure, and i tried to make a comment...

"there's a huge sense of contrast between the shell and the background-"

my teacher: "-ya, it's ridiculous isn't it?" (constructive criticism , right?)
mortified me: "um... no. i like it. it makes the composition interesting."
some guy: "it's so right heavy."

teacher: "ya. you can afford to make things left heavy because we all read left to right... but when it's right heavy it's incredibly distracting."

nodding heads and grunts of agreement.
stunned and furious me: "maybe we should take into account that not all people read from left to right. in some places (like china) i hear people read right to left. to them, this wouldn't seem right heavy."
i was so mad. i hated that class. i hated that teacher. and she hated me (stupid subjective grading), but my drawings pretty much always kicked trash and there's no better feeling in the world than seeing the people in your class trying to draw like you.

what it all comes down to is i was outraged over... a shell.
a shell.
and it's all just so incredibly funny.

because people are morons.

Comments

maltovermilton said…
i really like this post. and your links under "makes me laugh." I was a creative writing major and we had workshops about writing but it seemed to me that people were a lot more gentle with critiquing words... I don't see why it should be so different. I mean, though it's a hand or a shell, it's still exposing...