Seven and Seven is.

It is vacation time, and I am at school. I am at school, and freely updating my journal from school, because there is only one other person here but me and it is no longer a big deal that someone see me writing in this thing. So there it is and there we are.
I have sort of done some work today, my first weekday of my spring break, which makes this the most productive spring break of all time, ever (not counting last year's when I had no choice but to finish writing my final paper that had been due the week before). My accomplishments so far may be meager but I plan to feel good about them anyway, because well, how often is it exactly that I am more studious than the average student here? Truth be told I could work my fingers to the bone 8 hours a day for the next two weeks, and when school started again, I would still be woefully behind everyone else. Overachieving fuckers! (Not really).
Part of today's work was an hour of talking with the school's one intern. Since I had never spoken to him before, and had no plan going into the speaking practice of what I should do exactly, the whole experience was completely terrible. It looked and smelled like a bad first date, without the distraction of drinking or food. Once I did manage to get up and leave to get coffee, but I just felt guilty leaving the kid to sit around and wait for me to come back. God though, what was I thinking when I agreed to do this. I didn't realize that the kid would not ask me any direct questions (though I should have realized that), and I probably came across as completely asshattingly rude for asking him direct questions about what he studies and what he wants to do in the future. I suppose it was good speaking practice for me at least due to the fact that all I did was talk for an hour to fill up the silence.
The previous two days, I didn't do too much, and it was pretty great. I went with a friend to see a great and completely creepy exhibit on "Goth" at the local art museum, which I had been meaning to see since it opened 3 months earlier. Some of the art was creepy and terrible, not terrible-bad but terrible emotionally, as I suppose was its intent. Only one of the exhibits was actually just bad (a video installation whose main screen showed a piece of meat frying on an electric fence -- come on people, try harder). And one part, a huge exhibit by the Mexican artist Dr. Lakra, was so great it was obsession-inspiring. Dr. Lakra is a tattoo artist by trade, but also an artist who uses the tattoo style in his work. And man, is it fantastic. Dr. Lakra primarily does tattoo-style drawings over old ads and prints from the 40s and 50s, and the result is by turns creepy, fascinating, and offputting. But the exhibit here showed the products of his 2-month residency in Japan, and they were completely amazing. I wish any of it was on the internet so I could show it to you; it is good enough that I want to go back again before the exhibit ends and take a more serious look at everything. I especially love that Dr. Lakra took old Meiji-era prints, works of art in their own right (and not cheap), and made them his own works. The feel of the erotic-grotesque that's so overt in his work is already present in these old Japanese prints, I would say, so it's really a perfectly conceived match. Even if, or especially because, it pissed off some of the museum curators.
I would like to write more but it appears I am starting to shiver and shake, for what reason I can't figure out. I have eaten today, and had coffee, and I don't think I am cold -- but there it is. The human body is ever a mystery, eh?