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As planned, I am now home in Iowa after completing my last exam and sitting here ready to review the semester in my blog.

This semester has felt like a marathon and I can't tell if it is more relieving or more disheartening that I am not sure if it happened at all. I feel as though I've gone through this drawn out journey and now that it's over I have no idea what to do but just sit. Despite the culmination of major stress (the most I believe I have felt up to this point) and more meltdowns I thought possible, I don't feel like the work went as far as I traveled psychologically. To attempt to track specific thoughts and their correlating emotions through the months may be the way for me to see the path for myself.

When I made the transition from home to school in August, I had been resting myself, post-dirt. Over the summer I had been doing a lot of reading on environmental issues, activism, growing my own victory garden and working on the farm. I had began to find more peace in art through direct action in the way I lived and tried to put the problem of how I could transfer that to video (and to my apartment in KC) out of my mind. I started to become more bitter about the difficulty of the place we are in now and the ease of inaction. I focused this frustration on my fascination with bones and furniture and made a somewhat dark peace about what corn meant to me at the time and how things were starting to feel backwards at home on the farm.

After Acidosis for Economics the bitterness had found a pessimist stasis. Not inspired to make a video yet, I felt I needed to dive more personally into this frustration of mine. When I looked at books of high design in furniture I started to feel disdain towards the value being put on trivial objects like a stream lined desk chair when all I could see was the ugliness "those kind of people" enjoy the ignorance of. (I was on a very high and judgmental horse for awhile) Just, angry. Then I would ask myself how my "art" was any more relevant or valuable than a desk chair. Down and down I plummet into the most basic questions, "what is art?" and "what am I doing with my life?"

So I then decided to express in a project, explicitly or implicitly, a rather painful experience I had watching a steer merely exist in a sling until he died. This experience would then be related to a more global issue that was directly related to my experience. After our mid-term review I came to agree with my teacher very emotionally that it is about the quality of life of the animal.

Without writing an extremely lengthy post (I guess it already is) I move to my ideas for my final piece. By the end of October many sources of anxiety were starting to have a physical toll; roommate issues, safety issues, beginnings of familiar unrest. I started to get really upset about misunderstandings and a divide growing between my family and thought I had a pretty clear picture and plan for my final project.

This idea was to project on 4 sides of a bulk feed bag cube. Each side would have a personal confession addressing my recent work and their opinions about it. After a succession of calamities, the installation felt all wrong. I felt that now I had come full circle back to video. At this point the clarity was all but nonexistent in my thoughts other than basic survival by making a video. I decided to try and externalize all the confusion and bitterness in the days I had left before my final crit. I had been watching so many videos about corn, and way to many animal abuse videos captured by animal rights groups. It was awful. It was pain that I felt about everything and guilt for failing at accomplishing the piece I had set out to do. I hoped that the viewing in crit would be away for me to release that bad energy and find again the good place I had found in the summer with my family.

Turns out, I feel the video was more successful than the realized installation would have been but it wasn't any less painful to watch. I wanted this semester to be over, I needed it to be. Watching the video let me see a little bit of myself from the outside. I don't think I'm over it yet and I'm dreading when my family sits down to watch it this weekend.

All I can say right now is that I'm glad that it happened, and I feel that I'm ready to move onto narrative pieces again. Not so much ready as feeling it's okay for me to do something fictional next semester. After our documentary unit last spring all I wanted was to focus on real things. I saw so many problems that I wanted to take to the world and let other people tell made up stories. I felt I had a duty to, I guess. Now I think I will try and draw narrative from real life, but try and take literal action in response to my frustration of problems versus inserting it directly into my work. For example, volunteering with Badseed in downtown KC and learning how I can bring organic and sustainable practices back home. I need to also remember to not worry about everything, but I refuse to take a step back into apathy in any aspect of my life. I don't care if I can't do anything about secret dolphin poaching in Japan for the sake of false nationalism. I will not default to apathy for the sake of a struggle-free life.

I don't know about you, but I think Angel Redinger is also struggling with some of the same issues I am.

Maybe I'll have more wise to say in a week or so.