Jesus Fountain For the Win.

Well, Monday rolled around again, like it always does.  You can almost hear the collective sign.  But that’s enough ragging on Mondays.  They’re coming back in style.

Looking back over the week, there was nothing catastrophic or cataclysmic… nothing of that category.  My roommate Eleanor and I launched a Ghost Cat twitter today, and I’m not kitten around (expect to see that pun again soon).  My friend Caitlin stored a box for me over the summer, and when I got it back there was this creepy picture of a cat in it, out of nowhere.  So Eleanor and I put it on our door and have been posting daily messages from Ghost Cat, as it’s been dubbed.  Now it has come to the interwebs.  Don’t feel pressure to “follow” it.  But you won’t be on the band wagon if you don’t.  See the twitter page here: twitter.com/ghostcat_au

Credit: dcshorts.com. This is the shot advertising Paraiso (Paradise)

Last night, myself, Eleanor and our friend Rachel (poor girl got saddled with that crappy name) went to the “Best of” the D.C. Short Film Festival.  It was super inspiring and entertaining, two of my favorite adjectives to experience.  We saw 8 shorts films for the ticket price of $12, and I think it was totally worth it.  One was in Spanish about window washers in Chicago talking about their job and what they think happens to us after we die, which becomes pretty relevant when you’re 57 stories high on a crappy old rope in a place accurately dubbed “The Windy City.”  It was subtitled, but I was happy to be able to understand a lot of what happened without reading.  Maybe I really will survive my study abroad experience, should it take me to a Spanish speaking country (I’m 96% sure it will).

My Green Eagle job/internship is going well.  I’m a peer educator for my hall in all things green, and we’re pretty much given a free rein to do what we want, though we’re only paid for 5 hours a week.  Over the weekend, I signed people up for AU’s Free Bike Lending™ (okay, there’s no trademark, I just like using them), and it went pretty well.  There’s a chance I’ll be blogging through the Career Center about my internship experience, but I’m not sure I want to have more than one blogging commitment.  As my dad enthusiastically says whenever writing comes up, “Writing is hard.”  Eloquent words from an eloquent man.

Speaking of other blogs, Eleanor and I discussed with great enthusiasm the idea of writing x number of letters and sending them to random addresses after watching a clay animation movie with a similar premise.  Then blogging about the results.  Hopefully not in sentence fragments like the fragment preceding this sentence.  That last sentence was also a fragment.

Regardless, I think that is an amazing idea and the result could easily be made into a best-selling book or a very profitable blog.  Aka I get to be President of the United States and did not just commit a logical fallacy.  Call me crazy, but having a series of pen pals (or being ignored by x number of people) sounds like a lot of fun.

Moving on to reality from “If only there were More Hours in a Day” land (I’m bad at knowing which short words to capitalize, forgive me if I just committed a glaring offense).  One of my classes, if you’ve been reading carefully (which I don’t think Derek has—still waiting for a comment!) is Art of the Renaissance.  Through talks with my parents and a series of internal debates, I had some doubts about whether this was the best class for me.  But I had some worthy motivations: feeling smart at art museums, enjoying European art if/when I cross the pond, and sharing Devin’s enthusiasm/gift for art history.  Today I got half of my third wish, and it validated my taking the class.  I have no gift for remembering particulars (dates, patrons, location, etc), but now I can say I think this stuff can be really, really cool.  Let me elaborate on the work that made me feel this way, before letting you continue on your way.

Today, we talked about a sculpture at a French monastery by an artist named Claus Sluter.  It’s called the Well of Moses, because it was placed atop a well, and it was made in the 15^th century.  The part that remains today is a six-sided pillar of Hebrew/Old Testament prophets, most famously Moses (hence the title).  I think the sculpture alone is pretty cool, and would really like to see it.

If you click the pillar you might see that Moses has little horns, due to a common but inaccurate biblical translation. It was supposed to be a halo of light. I guess it's because "horns" and "halo of light" are pretty much interchangeable.

But here’s the part where it gets super intense.  The sculpture was at one point part of a larger structure, dare I say monument, that you can imagine using this drawing of what it once looked like.  As far as scale, the word “monument” would apply, because the figures themselves are larger than human size, and with the tall column it would’ve been pretty colossal.  But the best part of all was that it was actually a fountain, and water spurted out of Jesus’s wounds at the way tippy top and isn’t that absolutely awesome.  I think that is simultaneously amazing and slightly funny.  Water would’ve come out from his hands and from a wound in his side where a nasty Roman soldier nicked him.  That made the piece as a whole totally bad ass.  Yay, religion having some good purposes, one of which is inspiring cool art.

Anyway, kiddos, I’ll sign off before that the 1000 word mark [and if you’re wondering, my novel (I’m so pretentious! It’s not really a novel) is at 2366 words].

-Rachael