Still life with Apples on a Pink Tablecloth

This painting is one of my favorites. It reminds me of home by way of reminding me of mother. She is a watercolor painter and can recreate beautiful still life's in almost as fair a fashion as Matisse. At this point in time it is Sunday afternoon on December the eighth. I have only 2 exams left and there is only half a paper left to type. Finally, a light at the end of the tunnel. On Monday I will turn in 6 project analyses for Music Theory, a paper for Music Theory, and a final project, also for music theory. I didn't think I would finish this last week alive. I have been getting 3 or 4 hours of sleep consistently for a week now, and I am more than ready to break that pattern. As I sit here at my desk with my Henri Matisse still life on the right and my favorite novels and texts directly above, I find myself wanting to crawl in side one of their stories, or to try and reach into his painting and grab one of the apples and taste it's brilliance for myself. When one is constantly engaging in academic toil for two, three weeks at a time with hardly the spare second to think, they become covered with what I would define as the academic sweat. It is an exoskeleton made up of runoff from fluorescent lighting, computer screens, and dusty books in rickety study carrols. It diminishes the subject's ability to sample the brilliance of existence by distracting him with the mundane. This is not so much a tangible physical film that can be washed with soap and water, it is more a mental cloud that descends upon the subject of toil and doesn't leave until that individual is displaced into an atmosphere of calm, peaceful thoughtlessness. Thoughtlessness in the sense that results for an absence of scholastic toil and hardship. I cannot wait to return home to peaceful Sumter and engage the minds of my family with the acumen I have accrued this semester. I also can't wait to not have to think about whether or not I can afford (timewise) to blog...