Songs without Words

This past year has been my first continuous year of trying to stay in shape, and it’s interesting now to compare statistics between the present and a year ago.  In March last year, I was able to run one mile, and it took 8:30 (after which I was gasping for breath).  I’ve made it to three miles in 24:51 this past weekend.  There’s still a long ways to go, but it’s refreshing to know that even a sedentary body for 22 years can still slowly adapt to new demands.  I’ve seen my sweat glands return to normalcy (they were previously only giving out pangs of itchiness instead of sweating), while the necessity of bringing a water bottle has disappeared (because I don’t have to breathe anywhere near as rapidly as I used to).

In cardiovascular class last year, we had to record our heartrates in response to steadily escalating numbers of jumping jacks.  This morning, I decided to try to replicate the experiment and see if my heart’s response had changed.  The results are below:

My hope is of course that the curve will continue to lower over time!

Continuing with the ‘colors’ series, here’s BLACK.  This time, I wanted to practice using perspective.

Black

It’s really interesting to me how differently this turned out compared to ORANGE.  The original nucleus of each image is simply a pair of jeans dyed a certain color.  From that nucleus comes a style, a color palette, and ultimately the personality of the model.  I find it interesting how much of an identity can be packed into a simple portrait like this.  There’s something subversive about her childish expression over the backdrop of adolescent intellectual rebellion – a conscious self-parody of conformity to nonconformism stemming from precocious maturity.  The ignorance and mastery of emotional lability reside on either side of the ’emo’ subculture, and she embraces both.

Now, which color shall I explore next?