I’ve got the urge to animate something, which is pretty weird considering I’ve never really animated anything before. This project has been nagging me for a while. I’ve tried writing it as a serial, but that didn’t work. It didn’t convey what I want the project to be, it just ended up weird. It’s supposed to be an art piece, not a word piece. It’s something my brother, his wife, and I came up with last year while I was staying with them for a while. Now I just wish I could draw. 🙂 I might be able to use a 3D computer graphics program, like one that my other brother Steven uses, and then just take screen captures as I make the characters move around. Maybe one day I’ll actually finish the silly thing. Or, I’ll just hire someone to draw it. 🙂
I saw the stupidest ad the other day. It was for the Volvo XC Cross Country, proudly proclaiming, “It’s everything you love about ocean racing, except the sea-spray.” And not to mention the ocean, the boat, and the race. Volvo is, of course, the sponsor for the Volvo Ocean Race (appropriately named, isn’t it?) where boaters go from Southampton to Kiel,but instead of taking the sensible route in a slightly northeastern direction, they travel via Capetown, Sydney, Hobart, Auckland, Rio de Janeiro, Miami, Baltimore, La Rochelle, Goteborg, finally ending up in Kiel. Silly men. 🙂 But, I ask, what does a car have to do with going around the world in a boat? Yup, that Cross Country, it’s absolutely everything that I love about boat racing. Hehe.
I remembered the other thing I wanted to blog about! A week or so ago I went down to Fredricksburg to attend an old friend’s bridal shower. We stopped outside Manassas to drive along with some other old friends, who happen to have three young girls, aged 2, 5, and 7. It was great driving from Manassas to Fredricksburg, crammed in the backseat between the five and seven year olds. The way there we played Opposite Day, where we swapped names. I happened to become the two year old in the seat in front of us. We all decided I was one highly advanced two year old. It was great fun and games. On the way back, though, the five year old fell asleep and I spent an hour talking with the seven year old. That was the most fun I’d had all evening. That girl was amazing! We started discussing world travel, and how much she wants to go places and learn about new cultures. Her dad works for the “State Department” (meaning, another branch of the government I shouldn’t mention), and she said that when he came home from a visit to South America he brought pictures of the people there. She said she loved looking at them, but at first she was caught off guard. “Those women were walking around without shirts on,” she said calmly, “But that’s okay because that’s just the way they are. That’s their culture, what makes them different from us. And that’s okay.” At that comment I just stared blankly at her, not knowing what else to say. Here I was sitting next to a seven year old with a complete understanding of differences in culture from country to country, and she was completely accepting of it. I haven’t met many adults with that much tolerance and love for other cultures. I was incredibly amazed.
We went on to discuss our long lists of countries that we want to go to. We both decided we wanted to go to Egypt, but she said she wouldn’t want to go there any time soon, “I’ve heard it’s dangerous,” she said, “Do you know why?” I went on to explain about stories I had heard about Egypt and all that, and she completely understood it. Sometimes when we’d talk about certain places she’d know the basics, but not too much detail. Understandable for a seven year old. The funniest was when she said she wanted to go to Mount Everest. I expressed my concern, saying that was awfully dangerous. She laughed politely and said, “I don’t want to climb it, I just want to stand at the base and look up and go, ‘Whoa, that’s huge! That’s so tall it’s like a hundred of my dads!'” I had to fight it so hard not to laugh at that one. Her dad’s tall, but not that tall. It was awfully cute, though. It really makes you see how big everything seems to a kid.
That talk with my little friend Lauren was rather nice. It renewed my hope in the intelligence of children today. I’ve met an awful lot of highschoolers with good grades who don’t know half as much as this little seven year old. I wish she lived closer. That was the most interesting conversation I’ve had in a looong time.
My friend Simon wrote an interesting blog today about architecture and how art influeces how you act and react. Which I find rather funny since he and I used to have long, involved conversations about how spartan websites are, in his opinion, preferable to more elaborate ones. Design’s design, baby. It affects lots of things, even on websites. 🙂 But, of course, as a designer, I’m the antithesis to programmers, so hey, it all evens out in the end, right?