DIY Poster

Free poster + printer + craft supplies = Sweet poster mod for my room.

I got this giant black-and-white poster of a lone bird from a recent trip to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  I wanted to spice the poster up a bit without ruining the poignancy of the shot, so I went at it with a minimalist design and some basic craft supplies.

The words I chose for the poster are the final lines from a gorgeous e e cummings poem that reminds me how love is often more emotional than logical:

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,

and kisses are a far better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers.  Don’t cry

–the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for eachother: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

e e cummings, “since feeling is first”

Apartment art doesn’t have to be expensive; the total cost of this project was just $0.11 for the yellow paper.  On an adjacent wall, I’ve hung an iconic image of actress Audrey Hepburn from her 1961 film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”.  It’s actually a cardboard box that used to hold a canvas of an identical image; I found the empty box at Goodwill and convinced them to give it to me at no charge.  It too was a triumphant moment in my career as a thrifty college student.

If you liked “since feeling is first”, or if you’re just not a big fan of capital letters, read a small collection of other e e cummings poems here.

A Machine To Toilet Paper Trees

One cool feature of WordPress is that it allows you to see what links and search terms people use to find your blog.  I get a lot of hits from search terms like “TI-83 programming” and “the hills mtv” that relate to articles I’ve written in the past, but once in a while there’s a hit from a totally unrelated search:

I do not in fact have a blog post about machines to toilet paper trees. True story.

My curiosity as to how this search term somehow led someone to exploringberkeley was piqued.  I did a bit of investigation on Google, and while I did not find my blog on the first page of search terms, I did find:

• Fun facts about toilet paper from toiletpaperworld.com
• A (fake) advice column discussing the ethics of using toilet paper
• A video of a woman named Stacey very enthusiastically demonstrating how toddlers can craft a tree using nothing but scissors, green construction paper, a roll of toilet paper, and their bare hands.  Thanks, Stacey.

These findings bring up some very important questions, not the least of which are Has MacGyver watched this important how-to video about making toilet paper trees? and Why does a website called “Toilet Paper World” even exist? But the question I most want answered is Who are you, mysterious and/or shady person who demands a TP-ing machine from the world, and how did you find me?

So many questions.  At least now we know the answer to the age-old query on Chris’s Threadless shirt:

He'd build a green construction paper tree, that's what. BAD ASS.