This is a sunset by van Gogh, and it's currently my desktop background.  

I really recommend that you save this picture and even if just for a moment, make it the background on your desktop. You'll see this picture up close and get to delight in all the many different colors and brush strokes that (granted this isnt half a kool as seeing it in person) give it luminosity and dare I say it... expression.

Yeah, I'm really enjoying art history (now that I'm sure I'm not failing it) and am really glad that I took it. Although, to be honest, as energizing as art can be, it can also be exhausting. I'm not talking about creating art, but just being there and taking it in can be quite the job. So much beauty and creativity to get your mind around, so much delight for your senses to experience; that combined with the traumatic and gruesome literature I've been condensing and grappling with, this experience of art and emotion is changing how I handle what I see.

There is a play by Sarah Kane called Blasted. There is another play by another woman playwright called The Conduct of Life. These are the two most recent works of war literature that I've read for my Literature Across Borders class, and although I am fascinated by the discussion of war and how it deforms humanity, I can't help but suffer from the emotional pain of continual exposure.

Truly horrifying.

And all of this has been culminating and building up inside me until this past weekend when I was pushed past my very breaking point. I saw the movie Sin City, and I haven't been able to explain what it did to me, other than to say, I felt brutalized. I've seen movies like Man bites Dog, a french film about a deranged killer and his video crew, I've seen Requiem for a Dream, a film about a bunch of junkies and the lengths they go to in order to get a fix, and I've seen Trainspotting, a lesser traumatic movie with just a few scenes to chill your bones. Sin City somehow managed to do what all of these movies has managed to do in the past, but with all the weight of emotion already on my mind, I just couldn't handle this film.

I'm afraid I'm tired. I'm tired of internalizing all this brutality. I can't help feeling witness to a bloody crime. As I revel in the majesty of art history, I also tremble with the haunting picture of child rape, eye balls being sucked out of a living persons face and eaten, skin melted off by an atomic bomb, families crushed under burning buildings, eating a dead baby, raping a mentally retarded girl, in addition to the atrocities in Sin City.

I just want to run away sometimes. It's all just too heartbreaking- I havent been very good at describing what I mean, other than to just say; I feel brutalized.