self-portrait 1-25-99
A look into my eyes will tell you everything. In one small glimpse you see a warmth and a compassion unparalleled in someone of so few years. Peering closer, beneath the speckled irises, more truth is revealed. You behold all of the pain and rapture and anxiety I have known. You sense I am not satisfied by any shade of mediocrity or inaction or apathy. I am at the university to act, to ruminate, and to synthesize. Besides living, education is the single most important thing in which one person can engage, and it is my passion. I want nothing more than every chance to absorb and exude knowledge. I have an enormous confidence in my abilities. I seek out challenges as if my life depends on them. I take the convoluted route, I look at the trees while walking, I always feel the breeze against my face, and I embrace the sharp moments of silence. Irrevocably, life has shaped me. I moved during the fragile high school years: a relocation that destroyed all social comforts and constancy. The resulting introspection granted me the gift of heightened insight. I look into people through their eyes, and I ask the questions they have not asked themselves. I love to challenge as much as I love to be challenged. I hope in time to combine all of these elements. I want to create things people have not experienced before. I want to force everyone around me to think, to feel, and to be alive. I want to overwhelm the senses. The media does not matter; it could be the words in a poem, the pigments in an oil painting, or the metal in a sculpture. They are only vehicles for something more profound in me: a deeply rooted desire to communicate.
 
I am interested in this program [UNC Honors Program] because I want to take advantage of the best classes, the best professors, and the best resources. I want to be in the presence of peers with similar aspirations. History is full of examples of the greatest minds congregating and competing. You find Rilke with Rodin and Cezanne, Picasso with Stein and Matisse, and by no means does it end there. These types of alliances are remarkable because they stem from a source deeper than common interest. Artists, sculptors, poets, writers, philosophers, and psychologists can communicate together, radically impacting each other: a sculptor's technique influencing a poet's style, a psychologist's study critiquing an artist's work, and on and on. This type of fellowship is a thing of beauty because it is interdisciplinary, and it is a thing of truth because it ignores traditional limitations. I believe there is no greater community of which to be a part than one that comprises the entire spectrum of creativity and of thought. And I would like that chance.
 
 
self-portrait 9-30-98
I am ancient and naïve. The world is easy to understand, but I am something else, I have grown out of a self in which I thought would spend the rest of my days. I feel naked. Instinct warns that I should cover myself, that I should take no time in putting up a façade, but I want to show the world what I was, what I have already seen. I want to feel at home in myself. That old, rickety house grew old, became too stuffy. Though I embrace it, I must leave it behind.
 
Now is a different time. I am exposed to the elements, absorbing, and redefining, trying out my new legs of whatever is to come. I feel reincarnated. Like an infant, there is little to describe and more to discover. It seems false to fall back on something already completed, a past life of jubilation and disdain, yet I am filled with the most sublime fear and empowerment, looking ahead at all I must accomplish, at the sum total of acts that are not even figments in the tempest of my mind. I feel as though I must erect a skyscraper with the penknife, that is how profoundly aware I am of the direction I must head.

And with that I am reminded of the purpose of this small composition, an attempt at self-definition, or perhaps a jab at the ego for its naivete:

I simply desire what it means to be alive, I want to comprehend life, I want to feel it as much as I live it. Some have seen my eyes exude more life than they have perceived in anyone, but as of yet, I am not satiated. I am only a child. I have passion and energy and a knack for thought. I falter more often than I progress, I seek enlightenment in tragedy as much as I seek enlightenment in perfection.

and so it begins