THINGS I NOW KNOW
• The contents of one girl's closet
• Burberry is worn mostly in the Loop and on Michigan Avenue
•TV news sucks relentlessly
• Art students, after four years of study, still produce work unabashedly derivative of Cindy Sherman, English Pop Art, and Richard Diebenkorn.
• Portraits of the artist's friends are dull, unless you paint meticulous, dark, large-scale, anguished portraits of them, as does Heather Marshall, or take saturated color photographs of them in all their disenchanted, tatooed, pierced, and incredibly lewd glory, as does Nicolaii Dornstauder
• Dead tulips smell very strongly of hallucinogenic mushrooms
•It is almost impossible to make an interesting figure painting
• Honey is a sexy word and an even sexier substance
• What it feels like to walk through an open book
• Other people's therapy sessions and simulated breakdowns are mostly uncompelling, which explains why analysts get paid

THINGS I WANTED TO TAKE HOME WITH ME
•Stoic, hilariously earnest dog urns by Summer Hood-though I have never owned a dog, and thus have never had need for somewhere to store the ashes of a late, dearly-beloved pet.
•A choice selection of the books borrowed by an illustrious list of library card holders for Daniel D'Errico. But that would be stealing, wouldn't it?
• Ceramic hybrids of doll parts and toys and other, less-identifiable objects. Their pristine, tame glazing belies their weirdness, but my grandmother would never have placed Krista E. Oswald's figurines in her curio cabinet, next to the balloon men.
• Colorful, pseudo-geometric horticulture paintings by Kate Ann Berube - like collage, like stained glass, like Hans Hoffman, but not.
• Paper cut-outs by Zachary Stadel, with their sublime, better-than-Prada color coordination. If only Rorschach blots were so carefully hued.
• A sailboat sail, cut and twisted and tied and otherwise deconstructed into Jaime Arthur's windy, wonderful, and whimsical floor-length gown.
• The furry insides of Julia Buonanno's three-footed, rough-on-the-outside ceramic pot, which gives new meaning to having your hand in the cookie jar.
• An entire family of P.A.S.B., a.k.a. performative, animatronic, sentient beings, a.k.a. Helen Hsia's elusive, adorable little bundles of plastic blue joy.
• Sardonic tins of sardines, run round with Rex B. Arceo's canned political statements about the Philippines.
•The giant gift box wrapped in red and pink by Todd M. Whatley - but only so I could smash it to bits and put and end to its incessant, piercing bell.
• The dapper, umbrella-wielding, bird-killing squirrel (but not the bloody birds) in Elizabeth Ryan Hoeckel's minty wall painting.

PLACES I WANTED TO GO
• As a lone visitor, to the Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, of Joshua Sterns's pristine, flat, high-gloss, and perfectly square photographs. No people, no secondary colors, no blurry lines, no litter, no movement, and only unbreachable silence in his images of Arctic Oil Field Landscapes.
• In a rowboat, through the uncannily still, ice-covered, blue-gray sea world revealed in Daniel Campillos's alien quartet of photos and their equally unplaceable, accompanying sounds.
• Not at all as a bull in a china shop, into the dim, fragile, rosily warm room which Rebecca Sears tenderly stacked with delicate china tea cups and saucers, and softly drizzled with the sounds of whispers.
• Invisibly, into the walled kitchen Colby A. Shaft would not let me enter (which, come to think of it, was probably a good thing, given the life-sized toy soldier and UZI standing in combat position within). Martha Rosler's Vietnam-era series, "Bringing the War Home," has here come to life.
• When I am dirty and sweaty, to the hyper-geometricized, blue-toned shower, angulated in Tae Ok Hwang's painted bathroom, in a style oddly reminiscent of comic artist Ben Katchor's.
• Quietly and dimly, into Kiley Flores's subtly-lit concert room, where music is made from the vibrations of light bulbs arrayed in a grid across a wall.
• As a shadow, trailing imperceptibly behind the woman in Jaye Rhee's four screen montage, as she tears her way through what aren't but appear to be miles and miles of white, white fabric.
• As a black dot, into the Mondrian-like maze (but without the primary colors) of Raymond Bucher's sprawling, skeletal wall drawing.
• As a colored-in space, somewhere in between the doodled, curved lines of Josh Osgood's drawings.
• As a swimmer, clothed in a flesh-colored suit, to swim in the distilled waters of Heather Holt's Futile, a space defined by beige latex bathing caps and a floor lined with dirty down feathers.
• Like an astronaut on the moon, to explore the nippled landscape of Jeffrey Earhart's photographs. The adventure would be reminiscent of a novella by the late Joe Orton, in which a few hapless travelers get lost somewhere on the human body.
• To watch a movie, clearly seated in Jennifer Durbin's suspended, uninflated but not deflated, transparent vinyl theater seats. Dropping popcorn onto the glossy floor below would be fun.
• Wearing a long, billowy skirt, into Caitlin Moore's big sky, earth-scented wheat field.