Coming back to Boston has been a crazy ordeal. Lets just say that within the short span of two days, I managed to strain my arm and leg muscles from overworking, stress, lifting heavy things, and sleep deprivation. And as hard headed as I am sometimes, I am truly and finally learning the value of some core life essentials like searching for housing ahead of time, not hoarding so much baggage, thinking fast on my feet in situations of emergency, and making smart decisions with a level mind amid frustration. It’s not that I never practiced these matters before, but I never really saw them as deal breaking factors to living an independent life. But if not dealt with earlier, they steadily grow to be problems, and its only when you go through and overcome an obstacle that you truly learn your lesson and avoid going back. What I’m really trying to say is that planning ahead seems to be the key to achieving success in the later parts of whatever it is that we plan to do.
On a lighter note, in one of my classes today we were assigned to read a short article by art critic Jerry Saltz. While reading, I found some interesting quotes by him that I thought to share:
– As highly accomplished as his work was, it was a bit too much in a highly conceptualized, self-reflexive, intensely theorized, and familiar quasi-visual idiom. Miles lost by winning. He got so close to a good idea of art, that the art he got close to wasn’t entirely his own.
– I think Miles should move to New York and be poor and stay up late with thousands of other young artists. Then, in five years, he could be an artist to reckon with. That he lost this reality TV show will one day actually help him.
– Abdi, on the other hand, had won by losing all along. He won by extending himself and his art, expanding on his weak ideas and making them work for and not against him. Abdi won by not being cynical; by actually putting himself through an emotional-aesthetic wringer; reaching deeper. Abdi’s Brooklyn Museum show probably won’t be a hit with the art world. However, I can image museum crowds getting a lot out of his work, and that his small show might even teach the art world something about its own openness or lack thereof.
– If art magazines are like beautiful immutable still black-and-white photographs – rigorous fixed-images and texts, frozen out of the flux – for me these threads became a changing landscape of different minds, mutation of ‘selves’ flowing through time, speaking an unknown aggregate language that did not solve, but was discovered, changed its mind, generated unpredictable patterns, and was serious but not sacred.
– Evolution happens faster where eco-systems overlap
– …criticism contains multitudes
hilitehead 
elaborate?