This is Amir! A 1 year old I babysat my last semester of high school.
This was by far the most challenging Sunday Sketch this semester. I knew I wanted to go in a comedic direction with this assignment. I saw the strip from “Nancy” heading the Sunday Sketch assignment page and immediately thought creating a funny triptych would be the most natural direction for me to go. I read comics like “Nancy” with my dad all the time growing up. Sunday paper comics are nostalgic to me, so I thought writing a triptych with those type of comics as inspiration would be easy. I was wrong. It’s been longer since I’ve sat with my dad after church to read the funnies than it has since I’ve spent hours scrolling through “relatable” Twitter pictures. That being said, while creating this comic, I felt strongly compelled to craft it like a meme. The impulse to create a meme and not a comic led to my decision to use from life photographs – reaction pictures.
The narrative I chose was
inspired by an ongoing joke I have with my cousin. It’s a little pessimistic,
but it’s real. The joke’s got some attitude; it’s politically charged, but it’s
something that should be talked about like it’s a reality and not a ambiguous
forecast.
I expected this week’s Sunday Sketch to be much harder than it was. Having this photo editing assignment hanging over my head all week as I stressed about midterms was nerve-wracking. I was worried about having enough time and energy at the end of the week to put in the necessary amount of effort. However, because I spent nearly every waking minute this weekend cramming for two back to back exams, this Sunday Sketch felt like a much-needed break as it turned out to be the least intense academic work I had to do this weekend.
The idea behind ‘Mary Poppins Parachute’ came to me at the end of a 30-minute-long brainstorming session in Woody’s dining hall at 9:30pm as I consumed my first proper meal of the day – chicken strip sandwich with a side of seasoned fries. When I proposed the idea to my friend and dedicated NBB 201 and Bio study partner, she exclaimed, “Oh! You ‘bout to make a whole new Mary Poppins,” hence the title. Altogether, I’m thoroughly pleased with how my photo came out. I was not sure I would be able to blend two pictures separated with a straight edge crop as well as I did. The blue sky backgrounds work well together giving the entire photo a cohesiveness that adds to the editing’s realism. Finding images that blended well together was undoubtedly the most challenging aspect of the editing.
This week’s Sunday Sketch represents information from the Brain Basics lecture of my Anthropology 200 class. The assignment allowed me to meditate and reorganize the content in my mind that, at first, seemed daunting. The class is cross listed as an NBB class, which intimidated me in the first few weeks of class but I thought as long as the topic stays on primates and human phylogeny I’d be fine. This lecture about the brain was our first in neurobiology. Taking the time to illustrate my notes and attempt to convey the information in another format felt like another method of studying – one that’s more entertaining rereading bullet points on a notebooks page.
This week’s Sunday Sketch was intimidating. I was traveling this weekend, and I wasn’t sure, after reading the prompt, that I would have creative capacity to conjure an idea for this assignment. I needed a common object, one that would be accessible from both my house in Nashville and my dorm in Ashbury circle, lest I start workshopping an idea around an item at home only for it not to fit it in my backpack /one carry-on. Looking around my bedroom at the things I knew would come back to Atlanta with me, the idea for the VSCO ballerina came to me.
Like earrings or a choker necklace, scrunchies are accessories
I am not often seen without. I knew I must use one if I did not yet know what
for. The idea for making a tutu out of a scrunchie came naturally. Dance was a
significant part of my life for most of my life. From ages 3 to 14, I trained
in classical ballet in Nashville Ballet’s academy. I recently reacquainted myself
with dance through taking a jazz class at Emory.
In drawing this week’s Sunday Sketch, I exercised my ballet muscle memory in a way that surprised me: I was able to illustrate a human form – ballet sculpted arms and legs – without reference or stencil. Demonstrating this ability on paper, I realized that my image of the human body contorted with ballet technique is still crystal clear in my mind, left over from hours a day spent in front of mirror-paneled walls wearing tights and a leotard. Drawing this figure – ambiguous and silhouetted – with such ease and assuredness, reminded me that the preteen dancer with dreams of principal roles from I am long distanced is still inside me.
I found the freewriting exercises different from the
experience of writing the literacy narrative itself, although I did find it
helpful. I ended up using one of the free writes almost verbatim in my literacy
narrative. That one sparked some deeper level ideas about my own progression
and a writer and reader.
In the process of writing my narrative, I discovered that my
anxiety has more control over my work ethic and my perception of myself than I originally
thought. In my narrative I explored how my relationship with writing has been
both hindered and helped by my anxiety.
Overall, writing the literacy narrative was difficult for me – but writing always is a labor-intensive process for me. This assignment, however, bore much reward in the sense that it made me reexamine what powers my writing and what inspires me to read.
A picture captured from the
reflection of a darkened computer screen shows one of the few images of myself
I keep on my phone. I like to think of the photo as a candid selfie: a still
life taken without any intention besides capturing the moment – that moment involving
me studying for junior year finals in a dragon pajama onesie at my dining room
table, probably eating Twizzlers, bored out of my mind. By the end of my junior
year, similar scenes had become so commonplace in my life that by the time
finals rolled around, not commemorating that part of my life somehow felt like
an injustice. I chose this particular picture of myself to add to my collage because
it is an honest depiction of me.
The main picture in my
collage is of a summertime dusk in my neighborhood with Venus and a yellow, waning
moon that, from a favorable vantage point, looked to be hovering directly over
my house. I love to watch the sky from my neighborhood. In the suburb of a suburb
where my hometown nestled, the sky always seemed to answer our unspoiled stillness.
Living 45 minutes away from the city among the locally owned coffee shops and
the single acre family farms, phenomenon such as golden celestial bodies piercing
through the deepened blue of an early evening sky are possible. Later that night,
just enough starlight would seep through lightyears of space, blackness, and the
light of streetlamps to keep me up for hours, dizzying myself with wonder and
an uninterrupted upward gaze, bemused at my luck to witness something so
clearly that was wholly hidden to so many other peoples and places in the
world.
Of course, none of this
magic is remotely perceptible through the lens of an iPhone camera, and I knew
that when I reached for my phone. Taking this picture was less about my camera’s
ability to represent the scene the way I saw it and more about securing a keepsake
from time. If that photo had been taken in better quality, I’m sure I would be raptured
by the beauty of the sky all over again with each viewing, but the photo would
call for less mental work reliving the experience. Through time, the memory conveyed
would become less and less concerned with recalling the night itself and more
about the photo. That being said, this photo (and others like it) functions
best on a personal level; its significance is not something readily accessible
to an unfamiliar eye.
This is exactly why I chose
it as my avatar.
My blog is intended to be a
space not only where readers can hear my voice but can see through my eyes. In
my writing here, I want to express what I perceive as true and real – to learn
to communicate clearly enough to make the esoteric recognizable and intimate.
As A writer, I want to be able to lend whoever chooses to hear me my whole self,
so they can feel through my experience and see from my point of view.
