motion|sound

I’ve discovered I’m a mesh of two very strong, very different personalities…my fixations and obsessions are proof of this.

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1. DRAWING/DOODLING
I don’t think I’m alone with this one, but if you ever set a piece of paper in front of me, regardless of what it is, it will be covered with doodles the next time you see it. I draw when I’m bored or when I’m thinking. In elementary school, I used to draw large colourful pictures on the backs of my tests and around each question (especially math tests because they’d give you a lot of room to show your work). They’d take up the whole back page! They’d amuse some teachers and annoy others. Even now, I tend to draw on the test papers, and my lecture notes are always filled with more drawings than actual notes.

2. MUSIC
I need music and lots of it. Wherever I go, and whatever I do, I need to have it with me. My music collection is probably my most prized possession, and in a fire, that would be the first thing I’d grab. In relation to my daydreaming, music helps me concentrate…not necessarily on my work, but I tend to focus on one or two things max, as opposed to the millions that fight for my brain space. My mind tends to wander unless I have my headphones on and one of my favourite songs is blasting full volume. A friend who used to supply me with music once attributed himself to my dealer, and me to a junkie looking for her next fix. Not an ideal picture, but it’s true in some respects. I lost quite a large bit in The Great Move of 07 (from PC to Mac…the CDs i burned them on got corrupted), and I haven’t been able to recover a lot of it, but I’ve been extremely overprotective of what I have amassed since then. I listen to quite the variety, and each genre has a different effect on me.  Classical & Meditative music help me to focus, Oldies & Indie Rock put me in a really good mood, Soca & Reggae/Dancehall get me moving wherever I am, but Electronic music is by far the genre that I connect with the most. It’s sort of an out of body experience—with the right track, I can close my eyes and be “gone” for hours. My current obsession (and has been for a while)…there’s just something about this part

3. DAYDREAMING
I’m a very quiet and private person; I tend to be “in my head” a lot. Because I don’t talk very much, there’s always 50 things going on in my head and it’s really hard to focus my thoughts (which I assume is the reason I sometimes forget what I’m taking about mid sentence). The only time I’m ever focused on one thing is when I’m dreaming, and I do that a lot. There’s the regular dreams that happen when I’m sleeping and the daydreams that plague me during the day. They come out of nowhere and remove me from reality for a significant portion of time. My dreams are always vivid, full colour and in third-person; they play out like movies (and pretty awesome movies, I might add). They start the second my head touches the pillow, before I’m even asleep, and they end while I’m eating breakfast, or walking to school. I saw a movie about a month or so ago called Waking Life. It was a completely rotoscoped movie, but the messages in it were so big. It really spoke to me about the importance of dreams, and how real they can seem sometimes.

These three are all connected, and stem form my inability to focus. I think that rotoscoping or loose illustration is something that would fit with the surreal and looseness of my mind.

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Conversely, I’m also compulsively organized or structured.

4. CHECKING THE TIME
I’m not sure why, but I have this sort of “obsession” with time. I’ve always worn a watch since I was two years old, but last year, my watch broke and I didn’t have the time (no pun intended) to replace it. I soon forgot about getting a watch, but I’m now attached to my cell phone because of the built-in clock. I absolutely have to have a clock wherever I go. At home, I have a bedside clock. When I stay over at anybody’s house however, I tend to sleep with my cell phone in hand or under my pillow so when I do inevitably check the time, I don’t have to fumble around looking for a clock. Every little while, sometimes multiple times per minute, I feel compelled to check the time. It’s more so the action of it though because sometimes, I “check the time” but I don’t actually look at the numbers. I often wake up in the middle of the night, half-asleep, check the time and go back to bed. You’d think this fixation with time would make me a punctual person, but unfortunately not. (ugghh, I think this is the 4th time i’ve checked the clock while writing just this paragraph)

5. COLOUR COORDINATION
This is a big one…I’m not sure how it started, but since I can remember, I’ve been very anal about having everything organized by colour, size or number; the biggest one was colour. I used to get furious with classmates who borrowed my crayons, only to return them out of order. I don’t have an excessive amount of clothes, but take a look in my closet, and you’ll see it organized by colour too. My pens and markers are all organized based on colour, my collection of Post-It notes…even the files on my computer have little coloured labels based on subject, term and status (not to mention my dock)…

It’s a little weird that I can be both obsessively organized, and yet so unfocused. I guess it creates a very interesting dynamic in terms of personality, and it’ll be interesting to see how I can tie these together in project 3. I’m thinking loose drawings and concept, but structured loop?

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♥ MD