http://wizardofad.blogspot.com

My roommate in a turn of the century dormitory was a NYU philosophy major and an Armenian American from the Boston suburbs.

How do you feel about the Armenian Massacre, I asked. What would you know about that? You’re from The South Bronx, he replied.

Being ethnic-profiled is sometimes one step before ethnic cleansing.

Then I met a fellow student who went out of his way to befriend me until he turned out to be as mediocre a painter as a German dictator he was making a portrait on. He punched me in the back of the head and didn’t stop until he ripped out the ‘Intel Inside’.

The last memory I had was of my American Dream, a beautiful Venezuelan artist who loved me enough to want to marry me. Then I disappeared with eyes wide shut. My brain was unplugged from the life support of higher education. No excuses are offered here.

 I still had to turn in homework on making a tour book to draw tourists to my hometown.

I got finals, you know.

http://wizardofad.blogspot.com

http://wizardofad.blogspot.com

The Moving Day, A Journal

I rebuilt houses after 9/11. Pitch-blackness gave way to mist forming around the outlines of trees and light rose over The Garden State where the Martians landed on the airwaves of the 1930s. Good morning, greeted Mr. Kennedy, the neighbor next door with the son who used to work on The Rover Project for NASA and now is employed by the Chinese. I shook hands with a school administrator who shook hands with the country’s first space age president in the 1960s. Mr. Kennedy liked the way the house was shaping up. He said it added value to the family homes on the road. He asked when I’d be moving in. I looked pass the tall trees to the top of a mountain. What’s up there, I wondered. Mystery, the source of art and science, said Albert Einstein. This mystery tells me to tell a story.

If people knew how to write about their lives everyone would have a great story to tell, said Ralph Waldo Emerson. I wondered what else to write years after the house was made brand new. I stared into a laptop to rebuild memories and remembered peeling back layers of old carpet to a time when people used newspapers to line wooden floors. I found an article by someone with my first name. Maybe one day, someone will find my article and go on a magic carpet ride. As I mused on the past, the future gathered around me in their new home and asked what I was working on. Why don’t I create a blog for you, I replied.

The kitchen table was transformed into a busy newsroom. Sebastian and his little sister Sofia became cartoonists and their cousin, Gabriella, reminded me of a reporter named Lois Lane. And now, the PC plays The Blue Danube and takes me back to a moment in my childhood when I first heard the music in 2001: A Space Odyssey. My cyberspace odyssey began in 2001 with Win95 in the time of XP. This log entry ends with art insights: Creativity does work in mysterious ways and The Wonder Years will never end. This is the Butterfly Effect in Cyberspace.
Enjoy the light show of children’s dreams come true.

Art Draws People Together

Written and drawn by Sebastian Michael Parra. Additional graphics and text by Sofia Parra, Gabriella Parra and the kids of The Art Team of the recreational center of Saint Mary's Park.