An Idiodyssey

Well, yesterday was quite the idiodyssey. (I made up that word. It means 'odyssey of idiocy'. I like it. I think it's an excellent word.) I was the one perpetrating the idiocies, this time around: I spent most of the day editing my couch out of video clips in Photoshop...frame by painstaking frame. Each clip boasted between 300 and 1400 frames, so it was no mean feat. Why am I using Photoshop for such a momentous task? Surely, there must be some quicker way! Why?--because I don't know any other way, and apparently, neither does Google.

There's got to be a much easier solution, something that involves a few mouse-clicks, a series of drags and drops, and the press of a Render button, perhaps, but I can't find it. So, first I broke down the videos into individual .bmps; then, I opened them in batches of a hundred in Photoshop, and added the non-couch backdrops. I'm really quite proud of the result, all things considered. Instead of looking like a dork with a fake moustache on a couch, I now look like a dork with a fake moustache in some murky room behind a window with a glare on it: fear my cheesy lighting! I'm going for the bad spotlit look, right here. So, do I look like Charlie Chaplin, or what? I got asked, yesterday, if this was a picture of Bela Lugosi. I also heard I look a little like Johnny Depp in my moustache. I think I'd make a rather sexy man. I should dress in drag more often!

Anyhow, anyhow--what else is on the docket for today? Cleaning my apartment, that's what. I have to bite the bullet and throw away everything that's not coming to Sweden with me. And picking up everything that's on the floor might be a good idea, too. By the end of today, I want everything either in the closet (ready to wear), in a box (ready to ship), or in the dustbin.

Once I've cleaned my apartment, I need to edit all the videoclips I didn't get around to last night, then see what I can do about stringing them together into some sort of coherent movie. I'm hoping I'll be able to put it on a videotape for my class presentation, but I'm not sure how to transfer files from digital format to VHS. That'll merit some more Google research, I reckon, and after that--well, there's still a nice long list of greyscale paintings to work through. It's not getting any shorter while I'm bogged down with schoolwork.

Finally, I think I'd better clean out my refrigerator. I've been eating takeout food every night for a very long time, and sticking the boxes in the fridge. Who knows what ancient horrors might be lurk within? Nothing edible, that's for sure. Except, perhaps, for ketchup. I believe ketchup is immortal.

[Footnote added in August of 2005] - When originally posted, this entry was several paragraphs longer. Unfortunately, those paragraphs were devoted to poking fun at a fellow artist. I ought to be--and am--ashamed.