Pursued by a Bear

#77 - MoMA

Two weeks ago we went to MoMA.

I've been to a lot of NYC museums, but it was my first time going to this one. Can you believe that I have lived here for 15 years and I've never been to MoMA? Well, mostly because I've always been under the impression the modern art is not for me. Boy, was I surprised. But more on that later.

We went on a Thursday night, when the building has extended evening hours.  There was a party going on in the Atruim.  All sorts of Artsy Hipsters were milling around and participating in a photo booth exhibit thingy:

  

You can see the white square on the left, right?  That's where folks were lining up to be filmed for 2 minute stretches.  I'm not sure if it was exactly 2 minutes, but it was enough time to bust thru most people's facade.  Interesting.  Like, people would get in front of the camera and play "cool"...but eventually they would run out of ways to present themselves. In my opinion, most people crumbled before the camera-man shut off the projection on the wall. The people being filmed couldn't see themselves up on the wall, but you could really sense their thought-journey:

"Yeah, I'm cool. Just getting filmed here, no biggie. I'm a model! I'm a rock star! I'm the edgiest and...geez, is this thing still on?  Okay, I'll just stand here. Um. Okay. Um. Yeah."

I thought everyone ended up looking self conscious in the end. It made me think about social networking and the shaping of our internet personas while I watched this.  It's easy to create a vibe about yourself online...but no matter what you write or post, eventually cracks will appear and the real you will reveal itself.

Don't you think?  For example, I woke up in the middle of the night recently to correct two words that I realized that I wrote on my blog without thinking.  I wrote "lame-o" and "crazy" to describe two things...and that's not okay for me.  Where was my brain?

I don't want to be the kind of person who says, "That was lame" or "so gay" or uses the word "crazy" haphazardly.  It's something I decided to change about myself last year and I just caught myself in a slip-up. 

So, it's pretty easy to go into your blog or fb profile or twitter account and clean things up, but the stuff you choose to clean up?  It was there.  It was there for anyone to see (and judge) until you deleted it.

Doesn't that make you feel a little self-conscious?

This exhibit in the Atrium made me think about that stuff.

Art is deep.

Since we can only handle about 2 hours max in a museum, Fred did a little online research and felt we'd enjoy the 5th floor the most.  This is art from 1900 - 1940ish. The first picture I saw was "Starry Night" by Vincent Van Gogh!

This was a joy to me because my parents lived in the Netherlands for awhile and I just love that country. Yep, I love stroopwafels, bikes, soccer, gouda cheese, delft pottery...and Vincent Van Gogh!

Also, the cruise ship that I used to work on was a Dutch ship and the theater that was my "home" was the Van Gogh Theater.  It was the same colors as this painting and the walls had gorgeous mosiac tiles that looked like the swirly sky in this painting.

I was a little emotional when I saw it: the real "Starry Night"!  Right here in my own city!  I didn't know it lived at MoMa.

I saw lots of other famous pictures, too.  Things that I saw in books when I was a little girl:

Dali

(I had a textbook in first grade with a print of this and I used to stare at it and let my mind wander during class.  I defintely remember that.)

Monet

(Oh my gosh!  The famous Water Lilies.  Who knew?)

Picasso

(The Museum has lots of Picasso paintings but this one is especially magical.  I watched people stop dead in their tracks - almost in surprise - and take in this painting for minutes at a time. Captivated. It's very...provocative, don't you think?)

 

Matisse

(Okay - I'm a little embarrassed with the last one.  I didn't read the plate next to the painting before making a snap judgement that it looked like an elementary school finger painting.  Then I read the plate and was all, "Henri Matisse. Oh. Oops." -- I am hardly in the position to make snap judgements about art.  I was humbled.)

This one was my favorite:

"The Bathroom" by Pierre Bonnard

I like the colors...and it's a little voyeuristic.  Kind of sweet and intriguing at the same time.  I often look into people's windows when I am riding the subway above ground (hey, you leave the window wide open?  fair game!) and I've never seen anything like this, but I wonder if other window-watchers on the subway do see a little piece of private life like this sometimes.

Oh. This is funny: see the picture on your right?

I saw Fred from across the room listening to his little audio device.  He checked the number and listened again.  Then, he stood there for ages.

Weird.

Finally, I went over to him and said, "What are you looking for?" and he said, "The audio program tells me there's a FACE in this painting and to start looking by finding the EAR near the BLUE SQUARE."

and then he stopped for a few moments and then was all,

"FER CRYIN' OUT LOUD, DO YOU SEE A BLUE SQUARE?!"

Of course, he was looking at the wrong painting.

So I nudged him and was all,

"Um, honey?  I think the picture you were listening about is the one of the left.  Not the right."

And it was like the skies opened and the angels sang:

"OH!"

He didn't even see the painting on the left the whole time that he was standing there.

----------------------------------

We quickly walked thru the 4th floor.  That was more modern than the 5th floor.  Lots of Jackson Pollack-y stuff: the kind of stuff that my brain automatically thinks of when I think of modern art.  (Like, a big slap of yellow paint on a brown background and it's worth a million bucks and...what? you're kidding right?)

2nd and 3rd floors are sculpture and photography -- we didn't even get to those.  But the 5th floor alone was worth the pricey price of admission. I'll admit, I do think that $20 for admission is a bit steep, but my shock at seeing so many of the paintings that I saw in books when I was little kinda made it worth it.

Dear Dr. Internet...

First of all, thanks SO much for all the personal emails of encouragement that you sent me over the weekend. I am feeling so much better so far this week!

Second, I am so proud to report that I ran 4 miles all by myself this weekend! Fred had to work on Saturday and that was the same day as my 4 mile run for my 10k practice schedule. So I had to put on my Big Girl panties and just do it by myself. All week long, I was hoping for good weather because I need to practice running outside. I used MapMyRun and the JoggyCoach app for help. I got up at 7am (yay! sun!), got my running gear on and I did it! I ran slower than I would like - 12 min miles. But, here's the thing: I don't understand how people run faster than 10 minute miles. I've been running for 6 months now and I can-NOT break that 10 minute mile mark. I was watching "The Spirit of the Marathon" last night - a terrific documentary that features 6 different runners as they prepare for the 2005 Chicago Marathon.  Great film, but do you know which "character" was the only one who ran slower than 10 minute miles? The male senior citizen. Even the out-of-shape female first-timer with a previous back injury was able to run faster than 10 minutes per mile! What is wrong with me? Why won't my legs go any faster?

Ah well, the point of Saturday's run was to 1) do it by myself and 2) run the entire distance and 3) not cry.

Success! Success! Success!

Lastly, I guess I was landing harder on my right leg than my left while I was running because now I have a H-U-G-E knot in the middle of the muscle in back of my right calf. It is extremely painful. What do I do for that? I took an epsom salt bath on Saturday night and I "rolled" it out Sunday night on Fred's big rolly-thing (ouch) but it's still really tender.

Do I put heat on it? Or should I ice it?

I can never remember whether I should use heat or ice. Does anyone have a rhyme or some easy way to keep it straight?

 

On the Radar

I planned to post an entry I wrote last week about my visit to MoMA, but in the wake of the huge earthquake in Japan and the tsunami threats that captured my attention all morning, it doesn't seem right to post about MoMA today. 

That's a cute-sy post. There's more gravity today.

I've been absent from writing because I've been in such a foul mood. 

What's that all about? 

While it is true that I am an emotional person, I usually land on the "perky" side of things. Whenever I do swing over to the dark side, I almost always know how to work with myself to move out of it and get on with my life.

Lately, I've felt...well, I haven't been able to put a word on it for days now, so I'll just call it "depressed".  This is very unusual for me. I sense that I have a bunch of feelings, but everything's really cloudy and I feel pressed on all sides and there's not way to get out.  Is that depression? Whatever it is, it's not the normal me.

It all started two Sundays ago.  I recognized -- for the first time in my life, I think -- that I had the "Sunday Night Blues". I heard that phrase for the first time a few years ago while having a conversation with my sister on the phone:

Denise:  "Oh.  I have the Sunday Night Blues."

Me: "What do you mean?"

Denise: "I didn't get enough rest this weekend. Now here it is, Sunday Night. I will go to bed soon and when I wake up the whole rat race is on again. I don't want the rat race to be back on. I'm not ready."

That is what I noticed in myself about two Sundays ago...a non-descript low-grade panic...only it started happening every night and intensifying, at that. For the past two weeks, more and more each night, I have been dreading my evenings because I have so much to do. I can't get it all done. That means that I go to bed knowing that I have this huge list of stuff needs to get done during the next day...except I don't sleep well, of course. I wake up feeling more tired than the day before and the same thing happens again! My huge To Do list just rolls over at the end of each day and I'm so tired. I go to bed, but I don't sleep well. I wake up feeling even more tired and defeated.

The lack of sleep, I think, feeds an anxiety I feel over this looming To Do list and it makes for a very cloudy outlook in my head. Last night, Fred picked me up from work. I was so tired that my eyeballs hurt. I lit into him without reason and then, when I went to zip up my jacket, I caught my skin in the zipper. Ow. Karma is so awesome like that.

Here's the red flag:

That should've made me cry.

I was so exhausted and so void, however, that it didn't. It would have been better (and more me) to just LOSE IT in a colossal tantrum and MOVE ON already. That's what I usually do. Instead, I went home and popped two Tylenol PMs and slept for 12 hours.

Did I wake up feeling better?  No.  As fate would have it, I woke up to all sorts of tweets and status updates about the horrible earthquake in Japan and all the tsunami warnings. 

Aaaaand, of course, a tsunami is one of my worst fears. If I wasn't so drained, I suppose I could have been more rational about it.  Instead, I was fixated this morning on trying to get news coverage about the quake and the impending tsunamis while I was on the treadmill at the gym, and I couldn't get my little TV to give me any news that wasn't completely in Spanish.  I don't speak Spanish, but I *get it* when they say "posible impacto" -- Is The View, Maury Povich, and The Price is Right so CRUCIAL to the average American that we can't break away from that vapid programming when a major disaster has occurred?!

I confess: I still feel pretty cranky and judgemental about that. And I can't help but wonder if all my thinking about this stuff has done nothing but put me on the radar -- Like, the Universe is sending me difficult stuff to deal with because I am thinking about it and, thus, inviting it.

 If any of you have a word of encouragement or experience in this sort of thing and wish to share, hit me up in the comments.