Up the Spout – Mateo Messina
I was having lunch at Macaroni Grill with the fam the other day. Its not one of my favorite places. I prefer the one off, holes in the wall over the chain restaurants, but this place does have yummy bread and nutella puff pastries, not to mention that it’s also one those restaurants where they give everybody crayons regardless of age, so you can doodle and write all over the white paper they drape over the actual tablecloth. I like drawing, but like a lot of the things I enjoy in life – I pretty much suck at it. My brother Robert on the other hand can be quite the artist when he wants to be. So to pass the time waiting for our entrees, I commissioned him to draw an image that’s been stewing in my mind over the last few months. The image i’ve been trying to manifest was inspired by the lyrics to a song that goes: “a fish swims in the sea, while the sea is in a certain sense contained within the fish” Though I’ve always been someone who has led a life more resembling that of a cameleon than a fish, this line really spoke to me, as it reminds me that you cannot let your current circumstances define who you are. Put that fish in a different body of water and the knowledge that the fish must swim and belongs in water to survive is not lost on the fish, just as a person should retain a basic concept of who they are regardless of who they are with or where they are in life. Anyways, so I have been trying to capture the essence of this quote in a single image. But how do you capture the image of the sea WITHIN a fish? So I threw the challenge to my brother…telling him to draw a fish filling up with water. Him, being the fool / genius that he is, took my description literally and drew this. It’s a bit light, but if you focus in a bit, it’s a picture of a fish, mouth open, beneath a running faucet (A fish literally “filling” up with water). I was frustrated with him at first, thinking that he missed the point of this little exercise, but after staring and stewing over it a bit, I think he came up with something even better. I realize now that maybe more so than the cameleon, I have often behaved like this fish, in all its ridiculousness – a thirsty fish swimming in search for water, not realizing that all I am desperately searching for, all i need to sustain me, can be found all around me. Great family, good friends, a job that pays the bills, okay health, & a million and one hobbies to keep me busy. What more could a girl ask for? It’s time to stop looking up the spout. sidenote: this song is from the movie Juno. great movie, great soundtrack
If My Life Had a Soundtrack 