death to the empire

No, it wasn’t actually my day of jubilee (although it was very hot, but that’s neither here nor there). I just wanted to grab your attention right there.
No, my day kinda sucked, but that’s not important and has exactly nothing to do with anything. So:
I was very excited, since the book I requested through InterLibrary Loan came in yesterday!

I hadn’t been able to look at it properly until today, and I’m very happy with it. It’s pretty much the definitive book on Remedios Varo, and I can see that I’m going to be referring to it a lot in my paper, since it more or less IS my paper.
…Or what I would really like my paper to be like, anyway. *crosses fingers*
It’s just got so many wonderful photographs of Varo. And early sketches, and color plates (the absolute best thing about being an Art History major, after the slides, are the huge color plates in your books), and so many more wonderful things.

Oh, in class on Tuesday we were talking about artists’ self-portraits, and we were asked to think about what our own might look like. In the discussion, other people were describing theirs in great detail, and I can imagine how I might want to see myself depicted for posterity, as it were.
However, my crippling lack of artistic talent is a rather prominent roadblock in the path of my creativity, trampling my hopes and dreams, and leaving me to cry, alone and unloved, in the corner, as history passes me by.
So instead, I made this in Paint:

There, now that I have bared my soul to you all, I feel that I should explain the iconography of my masterpiece.
The musical notes are because I love music. They are also almost sinfully easy to do in Paint (which is really the reason behind almost everything I’ve done here).

The small dog is not, as scholars studying works such as Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait would have you believe, a symbol of fertility or fidelity or anything profound like that. This particular small dog that is chasing me represents all the things that make my life difficult, such as small, noisy children that sit behind you on the plane and kick your seat; small, noisy children that sit behind you on the train and kick your seat; small, noisy children in your immediate vicinity (by which I mean locations as far away as The Hanging Gardens of Babylon) that have the power of Sonic Screamy and make your eardrums bleed by sheer force of will.
You may now be laboring under the impression that the only things that make my life difficult are small, noisy children. But this is not so. Small, noisy dogs also have been known, on occasion, to make my life difficult.
See? Sometimes you can just stop with the literal interpretation.

And the small dog is also probably rabid. That’s why I’m running. Don’t you enjoy how lifelike and realistic my self-portrait is? The figures are all very energetic and practically leap out of the computer screen at you.

What else?
I like bright colors, hence my hair, which has actually been very bright purple before (and blond, and bright red, and bright orange, and on one occasion, a sort of pinky-orange that looked almost exactly like a Tequila Sunrise).
During that time, a small, moderately noisy child approached me at work (the childrens’ section of the public library, and no, I do not work there anymore) and asked me if I was a princess.
So naturally that’s something I’d like to record for posterity.