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I was riding my bike to work today… Thursday, March 4, 2004 | 12:16AM

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and I realized I hadn’t been through The Quad at all since last semester, and even then I only visited it because of my American literature class. It got me thinking: college has two distinct phases for many people. In the first half, many people live in on-campus housing and eat on campus. Life is centered around what happens at school and in school, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. The second half is when you move off campus and start saving money (since on-campus housing and eating are ridiculously expensive). Life becomes a bit less cliquey, and you start getting into your major field of study, almost exclusively by the very end. You begin to know just about everyone because you have the same classes and, in my case, you work outside of class together for hours on end (read: in the darkroom).

     The second half of college is so vastly better than the first, in my opinion. Actually, I’ve forgotten most of the names of people I knew in my first three years. Well, maybe my first two years. I guess the point is, if you’re still in that first half, college can still be quite a drag. And of course, by the time you’re in your third or fourth year, you’re just ready to get out and have a life. Well, maybe not all of us are, but some people will always wish there was another party to attend.

     As I mentioned on the blog, Stacy and I saw The Passion of the Christ last week. Remarkable. Many of the critics hate it. They say that we should look at it as pure cinema and remove emotion and spirituality from it and see what’s left. That’s stupid. Don’t remove any of that. Don’t think of it as propaganda, as they claim it is, because it isn’t. It’s not a parable. It’s not unrealistic. It’s not untrue. It happened, it was horrible, and we all need to deal with it. See the movie.

     I received my first rejection letter. Here’s hoping it’s the last. RISD was truly a long shot, but I felt like it would plague me if I never even applied, so I did. I didn’t expect to be accepted, so it wasn’t a surprise, but that didn’t mean that it didn’t kinda’ suck. It only took about 10 seconds to get over, however.

     Color photography is the sweetest thing since sliced bread. I feel the same way about this as I did when I first started black and white. See, there’s a big difference between just snapping away pictures and actually developing them in the darkroom. Not only is the process cool, the result is far better than anything I’ve ever done digitally, or even had a lab process. We were originally hand processing each print, which was a pain because every chemical had to be at a constant 95°F. We now use a $9,000 machine that keeps that temperature up for us, and it also spits out a completely dry print in 4 minutes.

     We had our first senior show meeting this Tuesday afternoon. I wasn’t looking forward to it too much because the gallery director is infamously hard to work with. But it turns out there will be 9 of us photographers in the show, which means we will have our own gallery for 2 whole weeks, and it also means we get to be part of the second show, so we have more time to work on our theses. The opening of the show will be April 28th and, as I said, will run for two weeks. More importantly than any wind ensemble concert I mention in the past, I would truly appreciate anyone who could make it down at some point to check out the show.

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Comments

Nathan | Thursday, March 4, 2004 | 4:54PM

Colby | Saturday, March 6, 2004 | 9:53PM

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