For our first task as SF0 noobs, MisterEnt (my illustrious boyf) and I (also rather illustrious) teamed up to do some serious ethereal cartography. We brainstormed a few different ideas, but ultimately landed on creating a map of our relationships with other people. This is how we looked after we finished:



And then Appa flew in:



(He attacked because he did not make it onto our relationship map :/ )

For our map, we began with a simple system: we both wrote our names in opposite corners, then started piecing together the big relationships in our lives, trying vaguely to go from earliest to latest. Green meant that it was a healthy relationship, yellow meant less than stellar or just an acquaintance, red meant a troubled or rocky relationship, and black meant that the relationship is no longer existent. We started getting to work:



MisterEnt's corner was some serious artistic bullshit, filled with hearts and other gay stuff.



My corner, on the other hand, looked quite a bit different. I kept things more literal, and more simple. We both started with family members first, and those relationships of mine were few and mostly severed. I noticed an overall pattern though, that my more recently developed relationships (from about 2005 and on) had a lot more green, even those relationships that have sort of subsided. That made me feel optimistic about my developing little self.



It got a bit more complicated as we continued working-- combinations of these colors inevitably occurred as we felt torn about the people in our lives, or simply couldn't easily define "whatever the hell that was." Small hearts were added next to a person's name to indicate that they were ex-boyfriends/ex-girlfriends. We were also running into people that we both knew so we both had to connect to them, creating what we called the "college clusterfuck":



The system we decided on using unfortunately changed throughout the creation of this map, leading to a fair bit of inconsistency and the like. The spatial planning and overall aesthetic of our map also suffered due to increasing complexity, especially when we started knowing the same people. Still, the map turned out alright, in it's own twisted way. It paints a nice visual picture of our lives, together and as individuals. Things like MisterEnt's mom's eight brothers and sisters is interesting to see represented visually, anyway. Seeing all of the people that have fallen out of our lives, too-- people that really mattered to us when we were five, or nine, or fifteen, or twenty-- it's sad to see it all at once, laid out in a concept map. Doesn't seem to do those relationships justice at all. Still, we probably wouldn't even be thinking about them if not for this task, you know?

Anyway, we had a lot of fun, and it certainly was a nice way to spend the evening.

Uuuuhhh, that's it! Have a good day..?

(No really, have a good day!!)