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Thursday, June 30, 2005

 
6:12 PM: fleeing the hive [#] [0]

i'm done! i finished the final hive report just now! hooray! i have art to take to the calligraphy show tomorrow morning, and then i'll meet w/ maggie one last time, and then i'm reallyreallyreally done! independence day, indeed! :D

Monday, June 27, 2005

 
10:48 PM: raspberry beret [#] [0]

what are these crazy sounds? could they be...music? it's been so long! finally off media dep but my head is swimming and too much music actually hurts it. bobby mcferrin is a good choice, actually. tomorrow is busy & the report is due thursday and psu hasn't sent a check i invoiced 3 weeks ago. i'll be glad when this week is over; media dep was just the first step.

Saturday, June 25, 2005

 
7:42 PM: release me [#] [0]

i'm. done! adding. things. to. hive! let's have a hip and a hip and a hooray! *dancedancedance* now just 25 more hours to create a report and documentation. and fortunately, my sense of relief is finally overcoming my sense of futility, so it all seems doable and even worth doing. whee!

now i'm off to see seeger's cats ariel, noodle & lestat, who will be hot & lonely all week while seeger's gone unless i go see them, and i'll spend some quality time w/ them while working on the report or the next artist's way class. :)

Friday, June 24, 2005

 
6:08 PM: plato's shadows [#] [0]

so for the past month i've been poring over a multi-worksheet excel file that has over 700 entries, the largest being a list of 669 jazz mp3s and lead sheets. i've been meticulously adding those files to hive and checking them off one by one, refusing to think too far ahead lest the despair and enormity swallow me whole. today i looked up and could see what looked to be light, and i hurried along until i came to the end of this dark and quiet place, and i think i have lost language for what i see so open and wide and green before me: is this known as "the future"?

of course, i'm not completely done or i'd be dancing and using a lot more exclamation marks: i still have 40 more files to add to hive (assignments & lectures, etc.), and i still have to write a report by the end of the month, which is the end of psu's fiscal year. i also want to watch an episode of angel w/ dinner despite being on media dep, and i think julia cameron will forgive me this once.

but allow me a little "yay!" thanks. :)

Thursday, June 23, 2005

 
11:56 AM: still deprived [#] [0]

i may not be able to read, but i can -write-! and yesterday i broke with media dep long enough to watch "stomp out loud" to prep for the next artist's way session. the hardest part is no music while tediously adding items to Hive, or during the labyrinth, or during tonight's Artist's Way Open Studio.

anyway, just got back from a lovely bike ride where we explored some of the side streets off the springwater corridor trail and met a cat even moodier than amelia. i think this might be the longest ride yet, which for me is a big deal, though we have yet to cross 136th on one side or jenne on the other. i'm consistently getting up most hills, now, too. yay!

ooo, and in honor of discovering that blogger now allows direct image uploading, here's a picture of me & stella biking on the springwater corridor trail today:

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

 
10:01 AM: observing radio silence [#] [0]

i completely forgot that when i assign media deprivation to my artist's way students, i observe it, too! which is very sad timing because michaelmas just sent me a gorey-illustrated war of the worlds (oooo, look at the cute tiny burning people on the cover!), and when shall i read it? or simon of space? and how will i bribe myself between Hive objects if i can't pop into email or one of my daily blogs?

so now that the irony of blogging about not blogging has dissipated somewhat, this is just to say that i won't be "around" for a week. happy solstice! we'll be putting out the labyrinth tonight, so pleeeeeeeaaaasssee don't let it rain...

Sunday, June 19, 2005

 
10:21 PM: these are a few of my favorite things [#] [0]

terrific storm tonight! thunder and lightning and aggressive rain and a large bright double rainbow dissolving as the sun set. and after all that, now stars!

 
7:52 PM: everyday people [#] [0]

last night sven & i went to cheer jalex & mari on at the dyke march and today we went to the pride parade & wandered through the festival. the weather was -perfect-, neither too hot nor too cold and not a hint of rain. sven ran into marvin, and i was first irritated then amused at the woman next to us who demanded people throw beads & other prizes at her, though she never clapped or cheered.

Saturday, June 18, 2005

 
2:58 PM: on the edge [#] [0]

i took sven to the edgefield thursday night, which was a really neat experience. reconstructed from a poor farm and old folks' home, it is packed with art, including an on-site earthware mason and glassware studio. and they have one of the best package deals for 2 people: dinner, lodging, breakfast the next day. and the dinner was mighty fine, too, with plentiful and delectable items. afterwards, you can linger on the large porches or wander the gardens, or simply move from pub to pub, if you're inclined to partake of homebrewed beer, wine & spirits. and it's the kind of place that gives you comfy robes and leaves towels neatly folded on the bed. at any rate, it was nice to be absent from the world for about 24 hours.

not related to anything but sort of neat: the mit media lab invited me to participate in a blog survey.

Thursday, June 16, 2005

 
4:54 AM: the trouble w/ trifles [#] [0]

augghgghhhhhh. it's impossible to convey in letters this sound of exhaustion. -now- i remember why i never wanted to move my email to another server: i have to move my sent messages in 2-month batches and even then it's excruciating. sometimes even that's too much for its tiny mind to handle and it fails, whereupon i have to painstakingly discover where the transfer went wrong and do it all over again. thanks, imap. even reading cheeseburger brown archives is proving insufficient to maintain any decent level of alertness, so the past couple of hours have been a blur of words and numbers that are making me question the nature of reality. and the haze made me copy a month's worth of messages into the -same- folder once and i'm too tired to pick through them.

i can hear the damnable pre-dawn birds singing their murderously cheerful songs, and the sky is becoming watercolor. but we're not done yet! oh, no, not yet.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

 
9:56 PM: stay hungry, stay foolish [#] [0]

so i finally got tired of having to guess when my mail would be available and asked the wise & benevolent mph to set me up on his domain, which so far has been running smoothly, if slowly, and if i'm lucky, nothing will look any different. but it's eaten up my whole day.

steve jobs gave a speech at the stanford graduation ceremony i would have loved to have attended, in part because he cites the calligraphy classes at reed college as having helped inspire the mac! "i learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. it was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating."

oh, i think that was the sound of my heart just melting...! of course, perhaps this is the kind of speech that should be delivered to high school students rather than ones who have already graduated college...

Sunday, June 12, 2005

 
5:22 PM: the ability to fly [#] [0]

sven & i went hanggliding yesterday! we got up at 6 a.m. to travel to pacific beach and got home around 11:30 p.m. after a stop for dinner. a long, exhausting day trudging up and down the dunes, but well worth it. there were just three of us: sven, me, & an older man named michael, and even with intermittent rain, the weather was pretty good. and when it wasn't, the instructor fed us homemade strawberry pie underneath the shelter of the hangglider.

hanggliding only has 3 steps:

1. get ready


2. get set


3. fly!

and landing, of course, but it doesn't look a whole lot different than flying 4 feet off the ground. i had been worried about the concept of landing since twisting my ankle after skydiving, but in hanggliding, especially on the beach, it's not hard at all.

we had two perfect object lessons: when one hangglider saw us below him he waved and spun completely around in the harness just to prove that you don't need hands to fly a hangglider. another hangglider unpacked his glider, launched himself in a lovely arc off a low dune but as he was landing, overcompensated for a wing imbalance, panicked, pushed the nose over his head as if he was landing, and spun himself onto his back before crashing. he crushed one of the down tubes and had to pack it up and go home.

after dinner and after the sun finally set (we're about a week away from the summer solstice), on the way home we saw cassiopeia rise in the north. that means orion's not too far behind...!

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

 
3:41 PM: snakes & snails [#] [0]

random biased gendered observation: a girl would not come up to someone sitting alone in a conference room and say, "can i share?" while already moving inside the door. grrrrr. -now- i wish i had my headphones!

[update: and then he asks about my cookie! is it time to go yet?]

 
2:28 PM: sisyphus says... [#] [0]

so i'm involved in a marketing club for "creatives" in order to facilitate getting artist's way off the ground for fall. since michael's been working till 6 on tuesdays, i've discovered that after the meeting i can stay in the world cup conference room entirely by myself for the next few hours until it's time to go see him, which gives me a few hours to work on psu stuff -- which is way better than trying to work on campus or even in the coffeehouse proper. it's pretty quiet, i have a ton of space to spread out in, and i have a huge window where i can watch the glisan traffic stream by. alas, i have forgotten my headphones today. oh, and i forgot to mention that someone at today's group compared artist's way to a bible study group. heh.

this week -is- kicking my ass, but as sven points out, i drop things off the plate as the week goes on, and so by tomorrow i should be pretty focused on the mhcc final project & psu work. but i am so tired.

btw, thanks to all of you who helped contribute to my artist's way marketing plan. i received a terrifc wave of very complimentary things, and i appreciate all of them. when i sort it all out, i'll write about it more detail, but i wanted you to know your effort was not unnoticed nor underwhelming. thank you again. you know who you are. :)

Thursday, June 02, 2005

 
2:15 PM: field study (conclusion: darkness) [#] [0]

i'm swinging into a tough week. things due every day next week. on my way into work yesterday, i heard the chanting street preacher say, "satan who deceived everyone especially the mormons the latter day saints." yeek. after dropping me off, sven got me a bouquet from the farmer's market! i love the farmer's market. but my day at work ended with struggle and a surprise which left this quote in my head: "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." (André Gide) yesterday may very well have been my last day at campus, though i'll continue to work from home till the end of the month.

we had a new server at palio's, one who doesn't know how to make my drink and didn't think to ask if i wanted whipped cream and he didn't want to turn the air conditioning off even though joanne had to get her shawl and the rest of us shivered. i -miss- our old server!

tuesday night: pizzicato & the new dr. who ep 3 w/ michaelmas.

my email has been up and down for the past couple of days. you can't change the "from" field for mac.com, so i can read it but i can't reply to some of them. and the airport's been wonky for a day or so now.