When I moved into my apartment, there were a number of objects left behind by the previous tenant. These include the bed I currently sleep in, the TV I currently watch and the pots and pans I previously used to make delicious chicken and pasta.

There was one thing, or...I guess "things" would be more appropriate...there were some things left that ended up being a blessing in disguise. Sitting on the bare floor when I moved in was a big ole stack of magazines. Mostly Oprah Magazines, with a dash of Vogue or Elle for good measure. Lovely magazines, I'm sure, though a bit outside of my demographic.



For the first month or two that I was in Chicago, I was lonely as hell and was using my isolation to fuel various art projects. Except I'm also cheap and hate buying art supplies, so I tended towards a more DIY aesthetic...basically "what is in my apartment that I can use to create something else?" Obviously, Oprah and friends' days were numbered.

I spent days tearing out pages from the mags, organizing them by color into a ton of tiny piles across my empty floor. The goal was to create a mosaic piece...use text pages to create a canvas and then do my best to create some scrap-created approximation of Oprah on top of them. It was an Oprah on Oprah project. And it kept me busy.



For awhile. I was getting blocked, which is weird considering that I had a pretty clear endgame in mind. I just couldn't fit all the pieces together...and I was too worried about making the wrong decision and wasting the scraps I had spent so long tearing up, which was stupid because they were scraps of articles and ads from a bunch of magazines that I didn't care about. It was that kind of overthinking which used to plague a lot of my creative projects, and I hated it.

I got as far as gluing together a good portion of the canvas, which you can see below. Then I gathered all the scraps up, put them away in a binder, and the mosaic sat half-finished in various corners of my apartment.



Flash to now, specifically last weekend. In the course of a few months, I found my niche here in Chicago. I gained friends and creative partners through my comedy studies, I write more now than I ever have before and I'm no longer afraid to make decisions...I care, but I don't care, if that makes any sense. I think it's the improv training starting to affect the other facets of my creative life. You learn to work with mistakes and turn them into gifts.

So I did that. I finished my Oprah on Oprah project, finally, to complete this task. Except instead of trying to overcomplicate it and start a project I'll never finish, I decided to complete Oprah on Oprah with doodles.



In this case, the things I love aren't so much Oprah or the magazines, as they are the experiences that they remind me of...and no, not the loneliness or the creative frustration. Those magazines were a found object in my first home out of college, in my first move to a different city, that I took and tried to turn into something better...and in the process of trying to turn them into something better, I got distracted by a new life, new friends, new studies, new experiences...a heaping load of real things that meant I had a little less time to glue magazine scraps together.

For the record, I still have never thrown them out. I just moved them to their own cabinet in my bookshelf. You know...just in case some weird mission popped up where they would be useful. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself.