More wonderful stuff

[gement]

First, lest I look back on this time and go, "Sunshine and roses every day!"...

I avoided doing my job hunt for almost two months, leading to gut-wrenching panic and missing the first big round of deadlines for some very tasty looking jobs.
I accidentally tattooed my finger when playing with art supplies on Sunday in an incident related to trying to dig a bit of grit out of my sumi-e ink stick with my Leatherman knife.
Jason digging most of said tattoo out of my finger the next morning hurt like a ^%#&*$^%.
I had a surprise panic crying attack just before presenting on Tuesday, which never happens to me.
There's still a layer of underlying relationship tension (aforementioned in locked posts), which has not been resolved.

But, let me move on. These are things that I forgot to mention Tuesday, or in a couple of cases hadn't happened yet:

I went to the school Arts show and actually submitted an entry! (Thanks for reminding me, adularia.) I submitted a collage, made from photocopies of my knotwork and doodles from three quarters of class notebooks. The title: You Don't Want My Lecture Notes
My entry was semi-critically acclaimed and admired, but the thing I liked best was acting as support staff for a performance piece, the "iArts Information Retrieval System" - this is a massive in-joke for the libsci program. She was a professionally dressed violinist, standing in an inset doorway so she'd be out of the walkway, with user interface instructions hanging on the wall beside her. She never spoke, but kept pointing to the instructions:
1) Write request on slip
2) Show request to system
3) Place request or anything that will fit in box.
(There were slips of paper, golf pencils, and a box with a pack-of-cards size slot in the top.)
When you showed her a request, she started playing about a minute's worth of music in response. If you asked for a song, and she knew it, she played it. Usually she didn't know it, so like any good retrieval system (such as Google), she played something that she hoped would be close.
So we started putting in much more google-like queries. Some of the requests:
existential angst
Yellow Submarine
my cat fears the printer
metadata
gender confusion
something irish/celtic flavored [she seemed to interpret this as the food and had a low opinion]
spiders
The Joe Show [the lecture style of a notorious professor]
Wipeout!
a pepper grinder [Jason had one in his pocket, and it fit in the box]
the collage over there [mine!]
The best part was that I made her night by standing there, making a lot of requests, making other people come and make requests, and generally advocating for people to use the system. It was a shocking reminder of how few people will bother to go use a resource, even a really cool one, unless you poke them with a stick. So I kept her from feeling lonely or ineffective, and we all had a great time and Jason came too and had a great time and yay!

Okay, that was just one thing but it ruled so hard!
Other things:
I gave a 2-minute speech on why programs for migrant workers are essential to the health of the entire community, and my ball-of-fire Public Library Advocacy teacher (who I haven't posted about, whaugh!) said that it "gave me shivers" and made her want to go kick some more activist butt.
We had a house conference a few weeks back and worked out the chore woes without bloodshed.
I've been effectively doing enough of my homework as I go along that I'm feeling really confident about the end of this quarter. AND I've been reading for pleasure at the same time!
I made even better contact with "Jonah," after he burst out crying during math yesterday, and he actively sought me out later to tell me he was doing okay, and smiled at me and thanked me for checking on him!

Comments

[gement.livejournal.com]

Re: what did she play?

Difficult to describe.
"Metadata" was a lot of disjointed, somewhat tense plucking.
"My cat fears the printer" got the SCREEEEECH (pauuuuse) hisspit (pauuuuse) SCREEEEECH! timing just right!
"Gender confusion" had a competing high theme and low theme which never ever ever harmonized well and kept trying to drown each other out.
"The Joe Show" rolled on in a ponderous, repetitive, yet cheerfully quirky and arrogant way, on and on and on and on until several students and one fellow instructor were laughing to the point of tears.
"5 lemonheads" [another item entry] was a succession of five sharp, high spirals of notes ending in a kind of scream.
"Spiders" was teeny tiny whispery high, with little pauses, like a lot of little feet tiptoing. It was creepy.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Yaayyyy!

[corivax.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's really, really cool.