Resting on the shoulders of your name

Resting on the shoulders of your name

This evening while we were waiting for the pizza that my mom ordered for dinner since she burned the taco meat, I took a two-minute nap on my sister's bed, on top of her giant stuffed dog called Big Dog, as she showed me all the coloring sheets she's colored after CST testing this week.  Thirteen years old, and she's spending her post-test time coloring in pictures of Blue from Blue's Clues and Tinkerbell. 

There are vacuum lines on my carpet right now.  I love the way they feel when you walk on them with bare feet.  I used to always notice the feeling of the carpet on my feet, and now I never do.  Maybe I've just gotten used to it - or maybe I've just stopped paying attention.  I used to always get really excited about bringing in the mail, too, and I used to love the way a binder looks when it's full.  But now the mail isn't as exciting anymore, and binders full of work that I actually worked on are just not as cool as the sparkly ones Lizzie McGuire kept in her middle school locker.  I sort of miss all that, though - the way something feels when it's new, when you haven't gotten used to it yet, when the shine hasn't warn off.  Junior year was shiny for a month or so, way back when.

A few weeks ago I heard this crash at my window and I looked out and there was this really giant black bird (I suppose it was a crow) attempting to catch a squirrel.  The squirrel climbed up into the little shaky tree right by my window and the crow landed on a higher branch on another tree.  And then all of a sudden the squirrel jumped down and started to run across the street, and the crow swooped down and tried to catch it in its claws.  As far as I know, the squirrel got away, but it was sort of traumatizing to watch anyway.

Anyhow this is only relevant because today we were learning about art installations in my art history class.  (I'm always afraid that if I talk about art on here someone will google it and find this and question my authority, of which I have none, or my sanity, of which I have a small amount.)  One artist, Jannis Kounellis, took twelve horses and tied them up in this enclosed area, and that was his art.  The point was that people questioned it - they'd come and stand and look at these horses tied to the walls and smell the manure, all the while thinking, this is art?  That was his whole point.  But the entire time the slide was up, and the entire time we were talking about the woman who put the peacocks in the room with the billowing sheet hanging from the ceiling, all I could think was, did they feed the horses?  Or were they just tied to the walls, helpless and hungry, for two weeks, until Jannis came and took them away?