I'm morally deficient!

( What threat to the Bush administration are you? )

Annoying thing about this quiz — the first question has to do with being a stereotypical Arab, and if you answer Yes, the quiz tells you to pick a particular answer to the next few questions. Leaving aside the possibly offensive stereotypes, this is just plain awkward. It would be best handled on the back end, by having the quiz’s code just ignore the the rest of the questions if Yes is chosen for 1. But I don’t suppose Quizilla supports that level of detail. Hm. The whole quiz could have been much better done, and I belong in the Atheist and Democrat categories more than I do in the one they actually stuck me in.

Awake

My old workplace (the one I shared with womzilla and cattitude and jayspec462 and quility) was a rather social one, and we’ve got a mailing list for all the folks who used to work there. Yesterday, one of my ex-coworkers told the list about the opening of a new art gallery where he lives (literally — it’s some kind of combined home/studio/gallery kind of thing) today. I thought the address looked familiar. It’s right around the corner, a place I’ve been walking past for months, wondering what it was. How could I not go?

There were two artists showing, a painter and a — sculptor? Furniture maker? He worked in found wood and plexiglass, and his work didn’t do much for me. The painter (Orlando Reyes) works in enamel on large canvases, doing abstracts with flowing organic shapes and some really interesting details created with immiscible fluids. There was one piece I kept coming back to, staring at the random flame-like shapes in its center, trying to remember what they reminded me of, till I realized they looked like the way mamishka paints flames.

I discovered that Jersey City apparently has quite an arts scene, and chatted with one painter who’s been living here for years, and another who moved here recently from Brooklyn and is planning to open an art supply store just a few blocks from me.

At some point the painter in me, which I didn’t even realize had been asleep for months, woke up, and I started seeing everything blocked out for painting. This was when I was hanging out on the sidewalk, where the party had spilled out. I’ve got an idea for a series of paintings, that I can start on after I’ve finished up my current commission. I felt bouncy and energetic on the walk home (I decided to split after seeing a cop drive by, slowly, and then turn around and drive past again, slowly).