it pays to eat lunch

That's what I learned yesterday, after I spent my two-hour mid-day break in the computer lab trying to figure out how to reduce the size of an InDesign file so that I could attach it to an email. I went straight from there to my one academic elective, which I have since dropped from my schedule. It goes a little something like this...

On Mondays, I'm in an afternoon seminar devoted to professional practices for visual artists. On some Monday evenings I'll have dinner with the next day's visiting artist. On Tuesdays, I'm the TA for a painting seminar, which hosts aforementioned visiting artists. Our first VA, next week, will be Fahamu "the Guru" Pecou. On Wednesdays, I'm in an all day screenprinting class called Special Projects (for special people, of course), followed by (my last!) graduate group critique in the evening. On Thursday and Friday mornings I sort of semi-TA for two Text & Image Arts courses, 'Type as Image' and an advanced projects seminar. On Saturdays, I'm the screenprinting monitor for five hours. On Sundays, I try in vain to complete a long list of housekeeping, grocery-shopping, art-making, reading, blogging, watching of television, and maybe a little yoga...before the cycle begins again. The academic course I'm in the process of dropping (and having serious mixed feelings about being a "quitter" and stuff) would have been on Thursday afternoons, driving me a teensy bit more insane by the end of the spring semester. Instead, I'll work on the large pile o' books I was gifted or purchased with gift cards I received for Christmas. Books about memory and cognitive science (Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open, for example) and theoretical writings on design (including Ellen Lupton's Design Writing Research).

And somewhere in there I'll find time to spend in the studio. I've been up to my old ways again, scanning family photos, and I kinda like this one of me on the merry-go-round, back in the day. You know how some people use a picture of themselves at a more ideal weight - say stuck to the fridge with a magnet - to remind them of their new year's resolutions? Well, I think I'll look at this one from time to time to keep it all in perspective. I mean, the name of that particular piece of playground equipment sums up the way you want to feel at least occasionally in your hectic week, right?


Which reminds me, somehow, of a sign I saw in Baldy's, a BBQ joint in Bend, that read, "maybe the hokey-pokey really is what it's all about." My brother pointed out that that would be the kind of thing I might blog about, but, alas, I didn't have my camera with me that night.