Go College

So, um, I'm, um, going to college. For real. Unless a deal to control the universe/a million dollar-three-book contract/a gorgeous wealthy man with EU citizenship come my way before next September. And if I'm going to get into college, I have to write an essay. Scary. If you've seen this before, it's changed a lot since then.
AgthisissonervewrackinggahIjustwanttoreadKlainefanfictionalldaylong. That is how I feel. Also, today was a snow day and that was fantastic. Even though my eyelashes froze. And I couldn't feel my thighs.


When I was five, I wanted to be an artist. When I was fifteen, I knew that art was something that I loved, but not something that I could do. A career in art was unattainable. No one ever said that it was impossible, but the feeling was there. I knew there were people who worked as artists and designers, but they were not like me, they were other people. In my junior year, my art teacher pointed out that I had been in his class for three years and asked me what I was going to do with my life. I stuttered out some kind of incomprehensible response involving old buildings. We talked about that for a while, then looked into schools that had programs in historical restoration. Later, I decided that I would much rather make new things. First, I thought that I was going to make buildings. But buildings, after all, have things inside of them. They must have furniture, and without good furniture, no one would appreciate the building from the inside. Without good furniture, the building is just a building; no one can inhabit it and make it into more than just a building. When it becomes something more, it becomes a part of the fabric of our lives, and that is everything to me.
I want to make pretty things. I want to allow people to live with furniture that make their lives easier and more beautiful. But there's more to it than that. I want to create things that work, to design furniture that is effective and attractive without being inaccessible to people. The ability to try and experiment with new things is an important part of my art. I tend to struggle with proportion, but I'm working on making that better. I see this as a challenge that I just need to work to overcome.
My interests other than art are about current events, books, and service to others. I need to know what's going on in the world and I like to be able to intelligently discuss things that are happening in the world. Over time, it seems as though political events have huge effects on the art of the age, and it's very interesting to see correlations between the two. Reading has been a part of my life for as long as art has, and I love the way books can take me out of my normal life and allow me to be a part of something else, to experience a life that I would never reach normally. In the spirit of telling stories that need to be told, I've written a novel every November for the past four years. This is a part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which embraces the idea of being creative without being self-conscious and just making things. My novels aren't good, but that's not the point. The point is to step outside of your box and do something that is crazy and new and fun. I also volunteer at a camp every summer. I find this to be very valuable and humbling. I'm a counselor who is supposed to be teaching campers about life, but I find that they often teach me more than I could ever teach them.
Everyone who makes things has inspired me to become an artist. By making something, a person can add to the material history that we as humans build. That can be your life's work, making things, and each of those things becomes a part of our collective past. To build the future, we draw things from our collective past, and that gives us an element of the cultural future. It's important, and anyone who creates makes a little part of our future.
Most of the art and culture absorption in my life happens on line. I read blogs about furniture and design. Because these are constantly changing, it's much easier to read blogs and see what people from all over the world think about design and trends than it is to try and find current books and magazines that cover the same things. One of my favorite bloggers is Anna Dorfman from Door Sixteen, who blogs about design, mostly pertaining to book covers and furniture. Without the Internet, my view of art would be limited to the things I see in my daily life and the things I can get from more traditional media. Things change fast, but those changes don't always reach my life immediately. The Internet allows these changes to reach me instantly.
While I attend THIS SCHOOL, I hope to gain the skills necessary to succeed in the furniture business while expanding my knowledge of art. I want to improve my abilities so that I feel comfortable calling myself an artist and feel confident about my work. I've been working towards this goal by taking art classes outside of school and practicing my skills. I want to be someone who adds to that vital material history of our culture.