Approved

Poor Wayfaring Stranger

When I was little, I used to walk around the yard with a tapeplayer and pretend I was the wayfaring stranger. And I am the wayfaring stranger. I always have been. And I think there is a wayfaring stranger in all of us. We are wandering around a place that we can't call home. When will we find our place? When will we feel like we are at home in our own skin?

Poor Wayfaring Stranger

God's Angry Children

I hate you right now. I cannot be steady. My brother says, "you have lost your mind." I think he is a bastard--a selfish bastard. When he said what he said--I was crushed and hated him. He should go to hell. But I know you would probably send me first. Why can't you save their family and everyone else who suffers like them if you are such a God of great compassion. If I were him, I wouldn't want to believe in you either. I have always been unhappy. You gave me a demon. No one can love me enough. Especially when your love is a lie and they can't admit it. What kind of sicko would send his only begotten son to the cross? The same kind of sicko that would molest his only begotten. Why didn't you hang there yourself? I can only talk like this to you because you are God--the only one who sees deep below the surface of me. Why did I run away this time? From what? Real love? I am sick and messed up. I have lost all faith and surety. Fix me. You can. So don't drag it out.

stream of consciousness--God doubts.

I am needy. I hate myself. I need him. Sometimes I don't know him. I chickened. I freaked. I'm a loser. God is too. I blame my father. He is a coward. God is too. Everyone tip-toes around the truth and then punishes a liar. I am a liar. Everyone lies. I can't trust anyone. Our time has been overall good and overall bad. Our time has been filled with deception. He is really sweet too. He has been there for me 24/7. And still is. Why can't I just be normal like my sisters? Why am I so tormented? God is a coward. God is a pyschopath. He wants to drive me into the ground. No one can love me. I want to die. And God will kill me. I am not beautiful. I am ugly. I am vulnerable. I hate you right now. I cannot be steady.

Boat

Just playing around with Macromedia. It is hard to figure out how to manipulate with the program.

Pouting Woman

I was just trying to draw something in flash. I wasn't trying to make a woman that looks like she is pouting because her man won't pay attention to her, I was trying to draw a man with curly hair. Oh well.

First painting at school. I know. You can tell. 

Fall is my favorite season. This is the next to last I painted. 

Gazeebo Painting--Last one I did 

Graduate School: To Be or Not To Be

I write to you to express hot displeasure toward one of the world’s finest institutions: the institution of education.

It is the institution of education that has made the difference between whether societies become modern and vital or remain stagnant and decrepit. Yet parody lies in today's environmental learning model that only ensures the mechanistic education of our children.

Just as cogs in the wheel are uniform to serve a purpose, the assembly lines of higher education today produce carbon copy compliant citizens of narrow opinion. Education depersonalizes society and yields graduates who then plateau at the Starbucks drive-thru where everyone is happy and having a good day, or else.

As the new school year approaches, that plastered corporate smile finds its way onto many of the students' faces despite their growing discontentment with “the system.”

Everything from piles of paperwork secretly stamped as red tape to the infamous echelon entrance exam, all the way down to the grueling placement test regimen: students wonder if they will survive the system or if the system will survive them.

The bottom line is always a student's performance rating according to someone else’s margin of benefit.

Every fiber of our society is so tightly interwoven with the fabric of the bottom line that pulling one thread would unravel our prefab costumes of care and concern. To challenge education as an ill-fitting, one-size-fits-all is to find yourself outside the institutional walls of promotion and delegation.

The spotlight on the stage of intellect is slow to shine on those homemade successes who refuse to believe that education is a fad or refuse to be institutionally delimited.

Too often, schools dictate rote responses rather than facilitate true learning. Universities require instead of inquire.

Teachers and professors divide and hide instead of guide.

And to make the grade, students flatter and chatter instead of daring to explore what really matters.

But students meekly comply with what is strictly dictated by their syllabus rather than expand their own frontier.

The only sustainable model of education is the unquenchable desire for knowledge.

An overemphasis on scoring, calculated measures of intelligence and bureaucratic protocols are at best stifling forces against those who would otherwise possess a natural desire to learn.

I am outside the clique of education, so I am more aware of education's shortcomings. But I am tired of looking from the outside, in. When I dared to improve my position by becoming a graduate student--to come closer to the front of where I wanted to be--I felt as if everyone was peering at me, secretly whispering that I was born on the wrong side of the educational tracks.

I have just recently been informed that “Although we appreciate your interest in our program, the committee does not feel that it can recommend admittance . . . . In cases such as yours, the committee looks for other indicators of potential success at the graduate level, namely high GRE scores, evidence of past success in quantitative methods or mathematics courses…”

Keep in mind that this was not a rejection from the math department.

Setting everything else aside, standardized testing is the embodiment of my dissatisfaction.

Could it be that standardized testing is only necessary to measure intelligence because individuals trapped in the system have lost the confidence to come to their own conclusions?

Could it be that standardized testing is a way in which the system’s discrimination can be disguised as haughty indignation to preserve an educational “standard of excellence?”

According to the current educational model, my above average but not outstanding test scores—my bottom line-- leave me on the outskirts of success.

But as we all know—the current model is not sustainable.

My desire for more, for sustainable learning, along with the growing unrest by others who are not in the standardized top 20 percent will inevitably challenge the system until the system finally decides to challenge itself.