Not what you’re sure to be Or what you’ve become.

Updates, then?
How was my Xmas, you ask?

It was very laid-back and un-religious, and for that I am very thankful. I didn’t have to vehemently kiss inhuman looking Greek icons or try to calm my mother out of a hissy fit.

I spent a portion of my weekend helping my grandmother shift around items in her overstocked home, which is what the venture usually amounts to. She calls the event cleaning but I call it moving dusty purposeless stuff from one room to another. The only objects that met the trash bin were the most useless of the useless; wrinkled, blank sheets of paper, never read magazines, dollar store trinkets and the like.

We did a little bit of shopping and as a result I discovered three pictures for my depressingly bare apartment from an antiques warehouse in Stratham. The first two wall hangings are the back & front cover of sheet music. The packet was only seven dollars, and I resisted buying it until I noticed that the front cover stated that it was a “Fox Two Step”. Of course, at that point, I had to buy it. To explain to my listeners of lesser taste, “Two Step” is a Dave Matthews song and while it isn’t my favorite, it is on my list of intense likes.

The back cover is of an odd sort but a likable one maybe as a result of its queerness. It is sheet music for an “Operetta with that Oriental sound you hear everywhere” encompassed by the title of The Egyptian or something like that. There is a black & white sketch of a girl, who looks neither of Oriental or Egyptian decent, in fact she seems of the classical Grecian variety. The whole thing is altogether confusing but esthetically pleasing, especially with the frame that I dug up from my grandmother’s porch.

My third picture is the most expensive and the smallest. It came with a grassy green frame that is obviously a match for the background, but antithetical to the “Girl in a Blue Dress” theme. I wasn’t in love with it, but chose it out of my identification with it.

My grandmother tested my slight artistic knowledge and I was able to say immediately that the replica painting was a Renoir. I have seen in detail about a dozen or so actual Renoir’s at the Boston Museum of Fine Art in my most frequented ‘Eastern European Impressionists’ room. Renoir was placed with other popularized artists that you’d likely see plastered across your art teacher’s walls; Monet, Bazille, Degas, Cezanne, etc. I wasn’t reaching for the stars when I identified him, but it would be hard for me to forget the wide sloppy-ish and intensely colorful strokes of a Renoir.

The rest of my weekend consisted of a whole lot of reading, a little bit of writing, some discussion and a whole lot of procrastinating.

I think that’s the total synopsis of my holiday weekend…. in retrospect…. it wasn’t as long as I’d hoped… Well, at least the next two weeks will be shorter than usual…