A Goodish Sort of Tired

I could sleep for a hundred years.  I am so tired.  I didn't sleep well last night.  I had weird dreams.  I dreamed I was having problems with a student who started out as just an average kid but who slowly morphed into the devil.  He had horns of a sort and everything.  I woke up actually saying, "Get out.  No.  Stop. You will stop. NO."  I woke myself up with it because I was talking funny in the dream, not able to articulate the words, and the kid was sitting there with the most horrible leer as though he was making it happen.  Then I realized that I was asleep and that was the cause.  Just like that I was able to pull myself out of it.  Horrible, though.

I don't know what they're putting in the water up here in Louisville, but my roomie's had one night of talking dreams, and now I have, so I guess we're even...

The day was productive, grading-wise.  We're getting the job done.  It feels, as it did last year, good.  I did seven full folders today and a piece of another one.  I want to break 1000 essays this year, but I don't know that I will make that.  That's an awful lot.  I'm not fast, actually, but I am steady.  There are people that whip them through MUCH faster than I do.  I don't worry about it.  As long as I get at least my six a day, I'm doing okay.

After the reading, we had our "Night Out" in which the museums and whatnot stay open late for the Readers.  I went to the Kentucky Arts and Crafts Museum's gift shop and found something that is a cross between a clay rattle and a face jug before walking down to the Frazier Museum of International History.

I love that place.  They have the coolest stuff in their gift shop, for one thing.  I got a Bubo the Owl bobblehead there.  I can't believe it!  Mom and Dad and I just sat around one day last week watching it on BBC America talking about how every person my age wanted to have a Bubo growing up, and lo and behold, there he was, just like he was waiting on me, the only one in the store.  Since I collect owls, bobbleheads, and kitch, he is sort of the perfect cross collectible for me.  I could not grab him fast enough.

The reason I went to the Frazier, though, was to see their Da Vinci exhibition.   I am just a little obsessed with Da Vinci.  He fascinates me.  I went to the museum in Rome, and ever since then, I have been looking up his art and so forth.  He was so far ahead of his time, I am not quite sure we've caught up yet.  The exhibition had only reproductions of his works which was a little disappointing, but since it was a travelling show, and since everything of his is fragile, worth more than the entire city of Louisville, and highly contested by the various nations that own it and Italy, I understand.

There was a fascinating section about the infrared explorations done on the Mona Lisa.  I had no idea they'd been able to discover so much about how the colors of paint had changed over time and how much Da Vinci himself had dabbled and altered the painting before he died.  I think I liked the original color scheme better. I like his color palette in general, and the brighter colors are....I don't know....happier.

There was also a room where they had a film about The Last Supper fresco.  It was wonderful because they showed it projected as large as the whole wall so you could really get a sense of the detail of the work.  Then animation came in (tastefully) and pointed out points of interest and told the story of the creation of the work.  There was no noise.  It only took about five minutes and it was on a loop.  You came into the dark room, sat on a bench, watched as long as you wanted, and left.  That was very nice, too.

The only other part that really made an impression on me was one of his inventions they'd recreated.  It was an eight-paneled mirrored room, called an infinity room.  The idea was that by going in and standing one could see every angle of one's body at once and all angles reflected over and over to infinity.  At first, I didn't want to go in, because let 's face it, who the hell wants to see their (you fill in whatever you hate about your body here) repeated over and over and over and over..... However, as I was eyeing it sideways, a woman, one of the other readers stepped out and was a little unsteady and she saw me looking at it, and she said, "No.  You should.  Really."  So I did.

I stepped in and I pulled the door shut.  And it was weird.  There I was.  Everywhere.  Millions of me. And it wasn't bad.  Even in a dressing room's trifold mirror, you can only see part of yourself; to see all of yourself is a very rare thing.  I took a long look.  It wasn't nearly as bad as I had in my mind that it was.  No, I won't be entering or winning any pageants, but at the same time, what I saw shouldn't scare small children in the streets, either.  I looked rather scruffy at the end of a long day of grading 175 essays and schlepping a backpack, a camera case, and myself up and down the streets of Louisville, but other than that, it wasn't the monster I carry around in my head.

I staggered out of the room a little like the woman before me had done and wandered across to an exhibition of diving suits and double-hulled boat bottoms, moved on through the rest of the exhibition and out to the street.  Maybe the most unexpected thing I learned at the Da Vinci traveling exhibition today is not what the Mona Lisa might really look like but a truer mental image of my self.  That's worth a ten-dollar admission ticket any day.