The Wax Lion

Woof. Been a while.

2009-05-07T18:31:00.000-07:00

I'm ashamed to say I don't even really have a good reason for not blogging to this blog in so long. It's gotten a little blurry, what goes to the main blog and what goes here... and furthermore, I just haven't felt much like writing anything particularly deep. Either this means I've been too depressed, or just not depressed enough--probably depends on the day. At any rate, I'm not quite prepared to kill this blog yet, though I know that only approximately 2 people read it even when I am posting. I still need a place to vent and moan.

The bizarre event of the last week involves the death of a high school classmate--not one I'd kept in touch with, and not one I'd ever been particularly close to--unlike last year at this time, when Paul's death by overdose rocked my world rather a bit. But the thing is, when you go to a school of only a few hundred people, and it's a K-12, you're inevitably friends with everyone. There are cliques and anger and bad feelings and meanness--but there's not a lot of room for it to go very deeply. The cliquish girls in middle school were all the same people I'd been in girl scouts with for 6 years of grade school. The boys on the football team were also the boys in band/orchestra with me, who were also the boys I'd played kickball with on the playground in second grade. So really, I don't hold hard feelings about anyone in particular from school, and I was sorry to hear that he'd died.

What kind of got me thinking--and this happened with Paul as well--was when I started poking around Facebook after I'd heard he died, and I found his page. Facebook pages are this kind of strange limboesque thing. It's not a memorial to him; but until someone takes that facebook page down, he's still alive in a meta internet sense. You look at his profile, and it tells you all the things he IS doing--not WAS doing, but IS still doing, frozen in time until the page gets removed or edited. Which it may never be, if no one has his password. I presume Facebook has some way of dealing with removing pages of the deceased by request of the family... With Paul it was particularly disturbing, as I was able to read all of his recent blog posts on MySpace, particularly the ones about having beaten his heroin addiction and how excited he was to be starting his life over. Sucks to read something like that when you already know how the book ends, so to speak.

Anyway. It just struck me as an odd and unforeseen facet of the internet age, with its endless caches of pages and free social networking/hosting sites, that people will continue to have a sort of ghostly virtual existence for months or years after they auger on. Frankly, it kind of gives me the willies.

A Wax Lion of One's Own

2008-09-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

I just got round to checking this blog again (filled as I was with fear and loathing that some of those hardcore folks might follow me home from Jane's blog comments) and realized I'd left things on rather a downer note over here. So hey, September's here, the cat is on the mend, and my job is frustrating but tolerable. The toy company we're partnered with which rhymes with Eggo has been having some issues with our budget--namely, not enough of it is being spent on Eggo models. So for our next exhibit, they're requesting a guarantee of a certain amount being spent on Eggo, which may pretty much shoot all our ideas for using interesting technology for our interactivity. This makes me sad... But I am all about the trying to find ways to combine models with interactives. I'm trying to look at the whole thing as a spur for my creativity rather than an "Aw, crap, seriously??"

In other news, checking my sitemeter to see who the hell has been bothering to hit on this thing (so to speak) in the last month, I see that I am most commonly found by people who are trying to track down the wax lion from Wonderfalls. That is, of course, my moniker for a reason--I love the lion. He's a wise sage, and yet fantastically annoying, two things I aspire to in both my home and professional life. But if you're honestly looking for a wax lion of your very own, you need to find a Mold-a-Rama machine with the Standing Lion die, and pony up the $1.50 to get it. I got mine at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago; the lion Mold-a-Rama is right outside the exit to the dolphin building, and when I was there a year ago, it did indeed have orange wax loaded in for us big nerds. It won't be all smooshed and melty, mind you... but we can't all be defective.

Back and Forth

2008-08-07T19:54:00.001-07:00

I haven't been posting much on this blog lately, obviously. I can't really say for sure whether it's that I've been in a good mood (this being the blog I channel the moodiness to, and when I'm feeling good I'm more likely to post to the main one) or whether it's actually that I've been mildly depressed on and off lately, but felt that blogging about it would be unproductive. Not that blogging is ever all that Productive to begin with, mind you!

I'm kind of suspicious it's the latter. I haven't really been rolling with the various punches all that well in the last couple months, and relatively little bitty stuff has been rocking my world a bit. Work today was good, I got to do some fun stuff... and yet there were some setbacks on a couple projects I'm working on, and I came home with a hefty dose of angry sitting somewhere in my midsection which has yet to fully wear off. Tomorrow, I suspect, will be much the same. But these things don't last forever, and the state fair is this week. There's nothing wrong with me that a corndog and a lemon shake-up won't cure...

This Seems Like a Bad Start.

2008-06-21T11:17:00.001-07:00

I'm in the airport, en route to England, and already we're under an "air traffic delay." I should have been on my way to Newark a half hour ago already, and instead I ponied up $8 for wi-fi and am sitting staring out the window at the plane I am not yet permitted to board. To add to the indignity, I really have to go to the bathroom but do not feel like packing up the laptop and hauling my two carry-ons up the concourse so as not to leave them unattended as targets for bomb sniffing dogs. Sigh.

Ironically, the plane's engine reads "Express Jet." Right now, I am expressly not jetting anywhere.

Returned from the Depths...

2008-06-09T18:22:00.001-07:00

Howdy, folks. Been a while. The month of May was utterly hellish--started with death, ended with disease, and there was more fun in between. But I have bounced back with a flourish, more or less.

I was going to do some serious downer blogging about my friend who died, and I just never could make myself do it. I had so many thoughts swirling around in my brain, and just couldn't quite get them to gel--it had to do with friendship and the nature thereof, and how you sort out a person's true self from all the crud that can accrue over years of substance abuse. Was the Paul I knew more the "real" Paul than the one that the other 200 people at his funeral had come to know over the last 20 years? How do you separate out his growth as a person from all the messed-up-shit that came from too much acid and heroin? I couldn't come to a satisfactory answer, and thinking about it just made me sad.

However, I'd been mulling over another post that I think turns out to be in some ways related. I've been reading Spandau, which is a diary account of life inside Spandau prison by Hitler's architect, Albert Speer. I've always been troubled by the question of how Hitler's Reich came about--how someone who (to modern American eyes) seems so un-charismatic, and so obviously on the brink of madness, could have persuaded an entire nation of people to embark upon a war of aggression against the entirety of Europe. Not every German who joined the National Socialists was made of pure evil (my mother's opinions of the German nation to the contrary.) So what are we to make of someone like Speer, who seems in so many ways to be an intelligent, thoughtful, and entirely normal man--and yet played a key part in the most monstrous genocidal act in history? Speer was the only one of Hitler's close associates to admit his culpability at Nuremburg, though he denied having had direct knowledge of the death camps. Of course that probably wasn't true--it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't have, and there's some evidence to the contrary. But what interests me more about Spandau is Speer's own musings--he had 20 years to think about it--on why he did what he did, and whether Speer-the-architect-of-the-Reich was the true Albert Speer. Was he a different person before he met Hitler? And did admitting guilt and taking punishment for the acts committed on Hitler's orders absolve him at all? It's interesting, and I've been thinking about it a lot. (Had plenty of time for thinking and reading while I was sick... bleh.) Anyway, hopefully back to a more regular posting schedule now--and hopefully less depressing posts!

A Week of Glorious Triumph

2008-04-11T18:40:00.001-07:00

This week at work consisted of prep for big meetings, then three solid days of said big meetings with our exhibit partner whose name is similar to "Eggo," only their product is small plastic interlocking bricks rather than fortified breakfast waffles. It went really well. I think we showed them a good time, and our upcoming exhibit looks to be nothing short of fantastic. We may have the opportunity to create further exhibits with their toys if this one pans out, including a hot movie property whose name rhymes with "Bar Floors."

Honestly, I probably could be a lot more forthright about who we're working with, but it's way more entertaining to make up code words. Or maybe I'm just still giddy at the thought of one of my exhibit proposal documents being read by someone at Mucousfilm....

Hey, it's AWESOMETASTIC!

2008-03-29T07:46:00.000-07:00

I woke up with a sinus headache this morning, which was awesometastically wonderful--it took me more than 2 hours to shake it and become the shining example of productivity that I normally am on weekend mornings. My excitement/obsession for the week unfortunately requires me to spend a lot of time staring at my computer screen, which doesn't mesh well with sinus headache for me. (I'm always inclined to call these things migraines, though I don't technically think that's what they are. They start as a sinus issue, but then they're worsened by visual stimulus like bright light or rapid eye movements--so maybe they're si-graines? or migruses? Anyway... whatever. Better now.)

The new fascination is with a fantastically expensive piece of animation software called "Toonboom Studio," which I discovered earlier this week. I downloaded the free 30 day trial version on my Mac, but the learning curve on it is rather steep and I fear most of the 30 days will be spent trying to figure out how the hell it works. (Much like Adobe Illustrator in this respect--I know full well that me using Adobe Illustrator is like your grandma taking her Lamborghini Reventon to the grocery store and back.) The problem is that 90% of its amazing features pertain to 3-D digital animation, and I'm interested primarily in 2-D. I know Flash is the starting place for most people with this, but my understanding is that Flash is primarily designed for people doing simple web animations and is a bit clunky for "real" (ie, film style) animation. I'm working my way through the Toonboom Studio tutorial, but I've already run into the hurdle that I do not own a Wacom tablet and have no intention of buying one. I'm just using my touchpad mouse to get through the tutorials. So the part where they say "trace over this figure" ends up looking like a deranged chimpanzee got hold of the Wacom stylus. But I'm hoping that working through the tutorials anyway will give me a handle of how basic features work, and I can apply them to imported 2-D pen and ink drawings which is what I had in mind in the first place. There's actually a stripped down "express" version of Toonboom Studio which is much cheaper, and I bet the features I'd lose by not buying the $350 version are the ones I'd not use anyway. But we'll see. I'm still looking for other 2-D programs to download and fiddle with.

When I finish a full 5 seconds of animation, I will post it here for you loyal readers and you can marvel at my drawin' skillz...

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid.

2008-03-16T20:21:00.001-07:00

When I first started working at the game store in high school, there were a couple of guys about my age who were regular customers and occasional employees. One was named Brad, and one was named G.J. Brad had a fairly sunny disposition, was smart, had a good sense of humor, and I enjoyed his company. G.J. was kind of a dick; he took a long time to grow up, occasionally treated his friends badly, and was generally obnoxious. I didn't dislike him, he could be a nice guy when he wanted to--but he was difficult. Brad went on to work at the store for a few years back when I was the assistant manager, then moved on to other things. G.J. disappeared for a while, then reappeared looking for work one Xmas; I hired him to help in our seasonal puzzle store, he helped for a week or two, and then--as I remember it--quit. Later on I heard that G.J. had joined the military. Good for him, I thought--he's the sort that will be improved by a stint of enforced respect, organization, and responsibility. That was about 10 years ago.

In January, I unexpectedly ran into Brad. It was great to see him--he's managing a restaurant now. We caught up, and I told him that a few of our older coworkers had died in the last couple years. "Wow, that sucks," he said. "Did you hear about G.J.?"

Your premonition upon reading that sentence is probably correct. G.J. suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury in Iraq--but he didn't die in Iraq. It was a minor injury, he served out his deployment with increasingly bad migraine headaches. Then he came back to the states for treatment. He died in the Fort Knox "Warrior Transition Unit" in September of last year. He didn't die from his injury--the injury took place a full year before his death. He died from an accidental overdose of prescribed medications for his continuing pain and depression. He died in his bedroom at Fort Knox; no one checked on him for three days despite his failure to show up for mandatory roll-calls. He was apparently unconscious for a full day before he went into respiratory failure and died--during which 24 hours he could have been given treatment which probably would have saved him. They finally found his body because his increasingly frantic wife called the fort to find out why he wasn't returning her calls or picking up his messages. If you have a desire to read the full story of G.J.'s death and his family's fight to get answers from the military about how it happened, you can read it here.

This has been big news in the local paper. Our governor is demanding answers from Ft. Knox, Ft. Knox is blaming his doctor, his doctor is blaming the military, the military is complaining that they're shorthanded. For myself, I don't know if the military made G.J. a better person; from some things I'd heard here and there over the last decade, it probably didn't. Once a kind-of-a-dick, always a kind-of-a-dick. Still, it was his career of choice, and if he had died on a battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan, I could have been glad that he'd died doing something he personally believed in and cared about. But the military--that band of brothers that promises never to leave a man behind--lied to G.J. They left him behind, when a 10 minute walk to his room by the platoon sergeant who noticed his absence at roll call could have saved his stupid life. Fuckers.

My God.... It's Full of Stars...

2008-02-12T17:40:00.000-08:00

I did it. I finally did it. I signed up for Marvel comics online. Now I can read through their library of thousands of comics in beautifully scanned gloriousness... What's even better is that if I pull up an old issue of, say, Uncanny X-Men to get the background of a particular character, they'll also let me know if that series of issues has been reprinted in a trade recently so if I wanted to own them in hard copy format, I could. But I like that this gives me a chance to read some books that I'd never bother to buy--never will I be bored on the internets again!

The tipping point was helping our collections department go through a collection of comics acquired from a local business scion's family on Monday. We wanted to grab some stuff that was likely to get used in the exhibit, and since I have a lot of basic knowledge about comics from the era during which this collection was amassed, I got to be the helper bee. Which meant in the course of about 7 hours I looked at the covers of probably about 10,000 comics. Mostly Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Hulk, X-Men in all their various stripes, and Fantastic Four--but plenty of other stuff too. It was great fun, pulling out suggestive or otherwise entertaining covers to show each other--Spiderman covers from the 1970's are endlessly hilarious--and of course tons of it was a trip down memory lane for me. I started collecting around 1985 or 86, and spent about $20 a month on comics until around 1996 or so. The collection we were picking up was amassed by a guy about my age, who spent more like $200 a month on comics during that exact same period of time. Our tastes were similar; so many of the books he had, I have, and I remember reading them with great fondness.

Might be time to drag out the longboxes and start reading from the beginning....

The Things That Pass For Knowledge...

2008-02-04T20:19:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or is there some sort of strange Steely Dan convergence going on in local radio at the moment?

I'm serious, every time I get in my car and flip through my radio stations, there's Steely Dan. And I've got nothing against them, mind you. I enjoyed them a lot back in the 80's, and I'm always happy to sing along with Reelin' In the Years now and then when I happen across it. But in the last two weeks, it's like there's some kind of Perfect Storm of Steely Dan on the radio. I noticed it at first when I'd be driving to work in the morning and hear I Got the News, and then on the drive home 8.5 hours later I'd hear it again, or another one just like it on a different station. Now it's to the point that when I got out of the car at Trader Joe's this evening, Black Cow was on 103.9; I got back in the car 20 minutes later and 93.9 is playing Deacon Blues. WTF, Steely Dan??? Why are you following me????

The likely possibility is that it's because two of the 5 stations I tend to listen to have recently gone to "Oldies of the 60's, 70's, and 80's" (and fuck you very much by the way, for including the 1980's in that format) and Steely Dan had a lot of hits in those decades. But I'm not hearing, say, America's Muskrat Love every day or two.... I'm not hearing the electronic stylin's of Duran Duran and Rio every time I start my car. It's weird, I tell you. Weird.

Apres Moi, le Snowluge

2008-01-31T18:18:00.001-08:00

Supposedly, we're having a blizzard tonight. Supposedly. I am all stoked to be snowed in; fed my parents' birds and fish a little extra this evening in case I can't make it there in the morning; stayed a few minutes late at work getting a project to a good stopping point in case I can't get in tomorrow. And so? The snow?

NOWHERE. Not a fucking flake so far, and it's now 4 hours after it was supposed to start coming down with a vengence. I cannot even convey how disappointing this is, it's like there's some kind of forcefield around the city preventing me, personally, from receiving the promised snow. Even the weather radar shows that I should be up to my ears in it by now--but direct Window-Cam technology confirms that this is a massive load of bull crap. I'm so depressed I may just go to bed early in hopes I will wake up to a winter wonderland and the museum being closed. (That almost never happens, though. I'd settle for my car being encased in ice for the better part of the morning.)

I know, I know. If this is the worst thing I can complain about, I should be pretty damn glad with my life. But what can I say? I'm a cranky bastard. And I wants my snow.

Ashtanga? Geseundheit.

2008-01-13T07:39:00.000-08:00

It wasn't a New Year's resolution (I don't do those, it just leads to sadness) but I did attend my first ever yoga class this weekend. I'm tired of being in kind of awful shape, and my friends who do yoga seem to like it. I've always been leery of it, as I've got no interest in the spiritual aspects of yoga at all; I've got a spiritual system that works very well for me, and while there's certainly nothing wrong with the philosophies behind yoga, it just doesn't really jive with my personality. But my friend the expert informed me that ashtanga yoga does not have to have a spiritual component to it--there's no chanting or meditating, just a very intense athletic workout over a series of stretches. So I figured, what the hell Archie, wotthehell? and set off for a Saturday morning class.

The most surprising thing for me was that it was a lot easier than I expected. By easier, I don't mean that it wasn't a serious workout--I am mighty sore today--but I was anticipating that there would be some positions I just Could Not Do, Period. And that was not the case at all. There were plenty of stretches where my limited flexibility prevented my going "all the way," but nothing where I couldn't get at least a semblance of close. A lot of the stretches reminded me of the warmups we'd do before fencing practice in college--same essential position and movements, but the stretches are held instead of doing 10 quick repetitions of the movement and going on to something else. The hardest part for me were the balancing positions--my problem sinuses mean that my balance even under ideal conditions is rather poor--but I didn't actually fall over or crash into the person next to me, so I call that a success. I'll probably go at least a few more times to decide if I want to make a regular practice of it. Assuming that my hamstrings return to normal over the course of the week, that is.

Well That Was Unexpected

2007-12-29T08:15:00.001-08:00

This week I experienced a huge crest in hits from people following a link I left on this year's Cavalcade of Bad Nativities; it's been entertaining looking at Sitemeter and seeing a radical level of geographic diversity! So far my favorite hit is from "Export, Pennsylvania," which I think is a hilarious name for a town.
Tragically, many underprivileged countries around the world experience painful shortages of scrapple, cheesesteaks, and Lancaster County tourist items. This is why we have begun our program to Export Pennsylvania.

I've been enjoying my week off, though of course it's still ending too soon and I've got tons of stuff to do. Unfortunately I discovered a spectacular time-waster on K2XL.com a few weeks ago, and in the last week it's been an utter time suck. With that warning in mind, if you like spacial puzzles, here it is: Psychopath. It's a series of puzzles wherein you try to find the shortest path between point A and B on a grid; as you complete each one you gain access to a new level/puzzle. There are 72 levels, I am now on Level 45, and Level 44 must have taken me well over 100 tries to finish. Infuriating, invariably on the levels where I get stuck I am making just one dumb error that costs me a couple moves and yet it takes me forever to find that error. Needless to say, I love it even as I'm cussing a blue streak at my computer screen.

And There Were in That Same Country Jawas Abiding in the Fields, Keeping Watch Over Their Droids By Night...

2007-12-24T14:00:00.000-08:00

Click the picture for the full view.

1. And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Jabba the Hutt, that all the galaxy should be taxed...
3. And all went to be taxed, every one unto his own planet.
4. And Darth Vader also went up from Coruscant, unto Tatooine, into the city of Mos Eisley, which is called a wretched hive of scum and villainy
5. To be taxed with Padme, his GFFL, being great with child...
7. And she brought forth her first born, twins, and wrapped them in Jedi robes, and laid them in a manger, because there was no room at the Cantina.
8. And there were in that same country jawas abiding in the field, keeping watch over their droids by night.
9. And Lo, Master Yoda came upon them, and the glory of the Force shone round about them, and they were sore afraid.
10. And Yoda said unto them, "Fear Not! Tidings of great joy I bring you!
11. For this day born in the city of Mos Eisley a Jedi, he is! Hmmmm?"
12. "And a SIGN unto you this shall be; find him, you will, wrapped in Jedi robes, lying in a manger. And he has....a sister! Yesss.... there is another!"
13. And suddenly there was with Master Yoda a multitude of rocking alien band members, jamming and saying,
14. "Glory to the Force in the highest, and in the galaxy peace, and goodwill toward all beings, men and otherwise!"

Curse You, Santa Claus!

2007-12-17T19:52:00.000-08:00

I actually had to go out Xmas shopping tonight. After 14 years in retail at the holidays, if I never saw a mall again it would be too soon, and this is doubly true this time of year. The last couple of years I've managed to do all my shopping online and well in advance, so that when the holiday rolls around I do a leisurely bit of wrapping, put the presents under my tree for a few days for effect, and stress is kept to a minimum.

This year, however, is my first year with a real sort of an income in quite some time, and so I felt the need to thank my family for their love and support by going a little further this year--not overboard, just 2 CD's instead of 1, or a movie and a book as opposed to one or the other. I did my usual one-stop shopping at Amazon, only to find that their selection of Large Type books is awful and the one thing they had that wasn't boring or the Bible was out of stock. Plus mom wanted some kitchen stuff that I was too late to order from cooking.com... She's always hard to shop for anyway, I think one of the most successful presents I ever got her was a jar of Miss Scarlett's Olives because I knew it was something she would use. So tonight I braved the cold and headed out to Borders and Bed, Bath, and Buffoonery. Xmas shopping is always very stressful for me, if I don't find exactly the thing I'd had in mind then I get all sweaty and anxious trying to find a substitute, and I walk in circles around the store thinking if I just keep looking then the thing I had in mind will appear, mis-shelved in the self-help section or something. It never happens, though. So I stomp around with an expression of tense, barely contained fury on my face, frightening children and store clerks alike, until I suddenly come up with a new idea and go rabbiting off to see if I can find Thing 2. This can take way, wayyyy longer than I like to spend shopping; so it was a relief tonight that I found all the things mom wanted at the BBB (not the Better Business Bureau) in under 10 minutes. I did about 15 minutes in Borders before I broke down and asked a clerk to just TELL me if they had the book I was looking for in the computer (they did, obscurely shelved) and after another 5-6 minutes of line waiting, I was on my way back out into the cold and home to make chili.

So with all this grumping, what do I enjoy about the season? Why, a few rounds of Handbell Hero, of course! Thanks to SirValence and Bushi for that link, it's been hugely entertaining. Though I can't help but wish that this was real, too.....

We Wish You a Scary Christmas

2007-11-27T16:22:00.000-08:00

Well, the manger scene turned out splendidly; I'll be linking to it on Flickr shortly. The addition of Jar-Jar as little drummer boy was fairly alarming. But frankly, if there's anything more annoying than Jar-Jar, it's that damn carol. Stupid drummer boy, with his incessant rum-pum-pumming. How I hate it. And now I'm working in a job where there is a high statistical likelihood that at any time I might walk out of my department and find it playing on the overhead speakers throughout the museum. GAH.

To be perfectly fair, they do also play reasonably good holiday music on the overhead occasionally; I've heard the Eurythmics version of "Winter Wonderland" and Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "Wizards in Winter" in years past, when I was working on contract. But there's a lot of hullabaloo about what music museums can or can't play over their public speakers these days, and if we don't have the proper agreements with ASCAP we might find ourselves listening to the Emmett Otter Jug Band all holiday season. Personally I'd love to hear them fire up DaVinci's Notebook's Dreidel Song, but I think the odds are against it.

Some Cheese with my Whine?

2007-11-20T20:47:00.000-08:00

See, now I've whined about the sadness of our recent exhibit here.... I've discharged considerable frustration about it on a locked LJ post (and thanks to H for reminding me that I do, in fact, have a Livejournal and that I could be using it for something)... So what happens when the thing is open and it's time to move on? The following:

Work is silent. People are already leaving for Thanksgiving. I go downstairs for a cup of coffee. Refused access to the holiday "Yule Slide" I am forced to walk down the ramps. Upon returning to the Exhibits department, I am greeted with the following:

COWORKER #1: Ninja! (this is my nickname at the office. no, you cannot ask why.)
COWORKER #2: Ninja! We need you!
ME: Uh oh.
COWORKER #2: Specifically, we need your Star Wars action figures.
ME: Ok. No, wait, WHY?
COWORKER #1: We're making a nativity scene for the collections department.
COWORKER #2: We've got it all planned out. Anakin and Amadala will be Mary and Joseph, and we're going to use LEGO minifigures of Luke and Leia in the manger.
ME: ........
COWORKER #1: Will you help?
ME: Well, duh! Ok, wait, so who are our shepherds? Is the Emperor one of the wise men, or is he more a King Herod type...?

Yeah. I continue to play a vital part in the life of our museum, by supplying the rare but valuable element of Nerdolinium (periodic symbol: NRD) whenever needed.

A Gasp of Relief

2007-11-10T11:42:00.000-08:00

Today the big exhibit opened. Instead of blogging about the trials and tribulations of the last week before opening, I wanted to give some serious thought to the emotional content of the exhibit.

It's intense. As I mentioned in the last post, I have to wonder about the intensity level for our visitor base. We're warning folks with kids under the age of 9 or 10 that we don't recommend it for them; this is all well and good to tell people, and yet on opening day I saw a hundred kids under the age of 10 zipping around the space. Did parents ignore the greeters? Did they not hear them? Does it matter? It might, at that. At several points, I saw small kids tugging on their mom's hand and saying, "I don't like this. Can we go?" And I've no idea if that was a reaction to content--the unfun subjects--or if it's a reaction to the fact that there are no activities geared for younger visitors in the gallery.

For me, this week, it's been a re-opening of the emotional responses I've had over the past 6 months to doing content research for the exhibit. On Monday, Ryan White's mom came to the gallery for the first time since the structures went up. I was applying some graphics of her son to a panel, and I stepped aside so she could read it. We exchanged pleasantries, I told her how happy we were to have her there and how I hoped she liked what we'd done. She's a lovely woman. And then she went into the "Ryan's Room" area of the exhibit, which is pretty much all of his stuff from his room at the time he died, all arranged as an immersive environment. And all I could think about was how I can't even begin to imagine what that would feel like--to walk into a museum exhibit, 16 years after the death of your son, and see his whole life on display like that. It was wrenching.

This exhibit has been a long series of emotional blows to the gut. Which is what it should be, don't get me wrong--I'm proud that we did this exhibit, it's important. But working on it has been months of that kind of wrenching. I watched films about the holocaust, and the children who experienced it--not just once, but over and over and over as I made selections for editing, transcribed them for captioning, and reviewed them before installation. I watched news films of kids who were my age back in 1986, talking about how they were going to kick Ryan's ass if he came back to their school, and interviews with Ryan's friends and family and Ryan himself talking about how that felt... over and over and over. To see the exhibit finally open gives me a sense of pride in the accomplishment of the small part I played in it, and a sense of relief; but most of all a sort of hollow sensation of knowing that working on this exhibit has changed me, too.

Lo, I am returned

2007-11-03T07:41:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what's kept me from blogging the past couple weeks; work has been alternating between busy and waiting for the other shoe to drop as we blitz forward toward the opening of our new exhibit. I've talked to a lot of you in person about this exhibit over the last few months... It's a history exhibit, fairly serious in its subject matter, and I think the community in general is going to have a bit of a shock reaction that we're talking about the Holocaust and Civil Rights and AIDS in an exhibit for kids. Most of the people I know who have kids have been really positive about the idea once I've explained the theory behind it; but I wonder how it's going to play in Peoria, so to speak. We'll see, I guess! I think it's a really amazing and ambitious exhibit in lots of ways. But the tension as we work to get it done by opening day is rather palpable.

You might wonder what working at a kid museum is like when the holidays roll around. Let me tell you, Halloween was awesome! Not only did I spend a Saturday volunteering at my work-away-from-work, the zoo, handing out candy to over a thousand little kids in a thousand cuter than hell costumes... but I got to dress up Wednesday and wear my costume all day. Every time I went out of my office and on the floor, kids would yell "Hey, Luke Skywalker!" at me; my next-door cube neighbor was an awesome Barbie, and the staff at the welcome desk were dressed as the Lollipop Guild. One of the interpretation managers was wearing a bright green track suit, unzipped slightly to reveal a yellow t-shirt underneath, and a pointy yellow foam cone with a tassle atop her head. "I'm Corn!" she cheerfully informed me--pronouncing it "COR-UN." It was fantabulous. Even with the spectre of Holocaust and AIDS looming, we manage to have a hell of a fun time.

I'll Miss You, Stmnnn Grnsmnsnsamm

2007-09-30T18:28:00.000-07:00

I don't often have voice mails at work; I'm at my desk plenty, and even when I'm not, I don't get a lot of calls. Most of the people I need to talk to are in shouting distance, and if we don't want to shout we use email. But way back in July, I got the best voice mail ever.

PLEASANT FEMALE VOICE: This is a call for
COMPUTER GENERATED VOICE: Stmnn Grnsmmsnerhsnsmnn.
PFV: If you are not
CGV: Stmnn Grnsmmsnerhsnsmnn
PFV: then please hang up. If you are
CGV: Stmnn Grnsmmsnerhsnsmnn
PFV: please stay on the line. This is an attempt to collect a debt from
CGV: Stmnn Grnsmmsnerhsnsmnn.....

Obviously, some dude had given a fake phone # and name on some kind of credit app. The first name sounded kind of vaguely like it might have been "Stephen," but the last name was total gibberish as interpreted by the voice software stuff. So I laughed, and hung up, figuring that was the end of it.

Except, two weeks later, it happened again. Same message, same incessant repetition of the garbled name--and it said it in kind of a singsong, so it was more like StmNNN ... GrnsMMSnerhSNSmnn... and it reduced me to giggling fits as I listened to the entire message to see if there was some way to call them back and tell them they had the wrong number. There was a number; I called it, and got put on hold for 5 minutes before I gave up.

After the third or fourth time, I began to wonder why they never called while I was at my desk. I mean, it happened again and again--I even saved it in my voice mail so I could forward it to co-workers on slow days. Could it be that Stmnn Grnsmmsnerhsnsmnn was stalking me? Who IS Stmnn Grnsmmsnerhsnsmnn?? And why is he such a bad credit risk? What did he default on, and why is he haunting me?? The calls increased in frequency; I'd leave my desk for 10 minutes, come back, and there he'd be again. It was worrisome.

Then, last week, I got a call while at my desk. I said, "Hello, this is me" and there was a pause, like there is when a computer is dialing for someone, and then a voice came on the line. "Can I speak to Steven Peterson?" "Umm, nope--no one by that name here, sorry." "Thank you." And they hung up. A moment later I realized--was that the credit cops? Could this be the end of Stmnn Grnsmmsnerhsnsmnn?? It's OK, Stmnnn. You will always live on in my heart. And in my saved voice messages.

Avast, Ye Lubbers

2007-09-19T19:16:00.000-07:00

Surely ye didn't think I'd be lettin' this day pass wi'out some piratey goodness! True, this holiday gleams upon me calendar like a silver real winkin' at ye from the sandy bottom of Dead Man's Cove...
I did swill some grog with me crew at a Pirate Party this evening, and couched many if nae all of me work emails in pirate talk in remembrance of the occasion.

It's Phlegm-tastic!

2007-09-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

I have a cold, which is extra-fun since the weather outside is amazingly gorgeous and all I can do is stare at it and sniffle. When I was a kid, I was sick a lot--at least, I remember being sick a lot, I had a tendency towards bronchial infections and became intimately familiar with chalky-pink-crap medicine, aka Amoxicillan, over the course of my childhood. My mom used to keep a supply of small but entertaining toys hidden in the linen closet for me, so she could pull them out when I was bed-ridden and cheer me up. Now I'm 37, and mom's linen closet is a 15 minute drive from here, and I think it's just got linen in it at this point. (Though she does occasionally present me with some trinket that was bought in the early 80's and squirreled away, only to be rediscovered when my newly retired dad makes her clear out the nether reaches of the storage cupboards at their house...) Anyway, so last night I was feeling low, but not too low to actually leave the house, so I went out to the toy department at Meijer. Meijer on a Sunday night is not as deserted as I would have imagined, and it took me a while to check out with my loot. But I considered this a work-related activity; we're starting work on the upcoming LEGO exhibit, and I needed research materials.

I was disappointed in the small selection of Star Wars LEGO at Meijer, so was forced to buy a few--ok, several--action figures to meet my need for a Lucasfilm fix. They had slightly more in the medieval castles LEGO line, so I selected a LEGO arbalest and a catapault, both with heroic knight defenders and evil undead skeletons to operate the machinery. I'm a LEGO fan from way back; if they had had the huge castle playset at Meijer I would have been sorely tempted to buy it. But the two war machines I bought work quite well, and I'm having fantasies about purchasing the Jawa sandcrawler in future. It's all for work, mind you. Work.

Gahhhhh!!

2007-09-04T19:26:00.000-07:00

My blog lies fallow--all is lost! No, seriously, I've just been kinda busy, and I'd been planning to get my photos from the San Diego zoo up online so I could post one of them to the blog and it'd be all cool. But instead of uploading photos I've been doing all that grownup stuff I keep hearing other people talk about, like cleaning the house and working. And complaining about work, over beers with friends. (Not that I have a lot to complain about, it's still the most awesome jorb in the world, but like all jobs it occasionally has its moments of "oh, for heaven's sake, WTF??" And now I feel guilty for even mentioning it, because they're sending me to New York this week so I can go to some cool museums. Aw, I'm sorry, job! I didn't mean it when I said you were annoying me earlier this week! Forgive me, you are still cool.)

Bring Em Back Alive!

2007-07-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

Back from Sandy Eggo, only slightly the worse for wear. There were many excellent things about the Comic Con (not the least of which was that I was there on the museum's tab--my per diem covered the basic needs of food, water, and action figure exclusives each day.) I'll post more exhaustively later--being as I am somewhat exhausted now, since I returned at 1:30 am to an enthusiastic household of pets who all wanted to stamp on my face in a welcome-home dance at random times during the night. High spots included a frantabulous trip to the SD zoo yesterday morning; seeing the ever-amazin' Stan the Man Lee in person; watching in jaw-dropped amazement at the 10,000 people lined up to watch a sneak preview of "Heroes" season 2; and the schmoozapalooza in which I talked about our exhibit to the McClouds of Clan McCloud, Shannon Wheeler of Too Much Coffee Man, the Ever-Fabulous Foglios, and many others. I went to an amazing panel about writing hosted by Marv Wolfman, who along with Mike Grell and Bill Sienkiewicz is responsible for my entry into the comics hobby in the mid-80's. I got a book signed by Peter S. Beagle. I fed my inner nerd. And now, y'all, it's m'birthday! I'm off to drink beer and play pirate mini-golf! (not necessarily in that order, though it might enhance the experience....)

Wait, what?

2007-07-22T19:49:00.000-07:00

July is rushing past me like a freight train; it's very disconcerting. The month just started, now it's nearly over, my dad's birthday was last week and mine is next week and holy crap what the hell just happened? Foosh.

I think part of the problem is I've been having some (minor) health issues in the past couple weeks, which have resulted in my coming home from work most days and crashing, maybe watching some tv, foraging in the fridge, reading a book and going to bed early. So I feel like I'm not really doing much of anything consequential lately. I'm travelling for work for most of this next week, so that'll shoot the rest of July and I can get a fresh start of laziness for August.

On the bright side, one of the great things about where I'm working is that my coworkers send me links like this one:
Real World Metropolis

Joining my Nerdwork...

2007-07-07T10:37:00.000-07:00

Despite my persistant protests that I am too old to have a MySpace profile, I finally gave in and jumped on the bandwagon. I used to have a profile that I merely used to check out other people's profiles (kind of like my LJ account, only Even More Lame) but the email account it was attached to finally died--choked to death on spam--and I decided I might as well make a profile that didn't wholly suck. So far I have 6 whole friends, which doesn't particularly worry me. But were I, say, a 14 year old girl, I can see how MySpace could become a vital new tool of the social dissing that formerly only occurred in the locker bays and gym classes of high schools around the country. Friended by the popular kids? Unfriended by your former best friend? A sudden friend request from the hottest jock on the football team? Who's got the most profile views this week? Jesus... what a terrifying vision. Though, really, I was damn oblivious to my own unpopularity in high school, I probably would have been the one whose MySpace was all pictures of Star Trek mashups and ewoks and 70's metal bands, and who was perfectly happy with only 6 friends. But I can see the potential here for the kids who do care--now you don't even have to leave the comfort of home to know you're not popular! Hooray! Wow.

BIG TOP RETURNS! Sort of...

2007-07-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

My pal Rob Harrell's comic strip, "Big Top," was discontinued a few months ago, to my unending sadness. However, I just got an email from him a week or two back, and Ucomics is re-running all the strips from the beginning! So if you, like me, find Wink, Pete, and the gang irresistable, bookmark Big Top and you can catch it all there. Or buy the book. I know it's shameless plugging, but honestly, Rob is a nice guy and a really talented artist, and he deserves all the acolades I can give him.

Go Toby! It's Your Wedding!

2007-07-01T20:59:00.001-07:00

Went to a wedding today; the groom was someone I have known since he was very small and cute. Now he is big, though still cute, and has married someone almost as nerdy as I. I'm very proud of him.

I'd rather wondered if I would see a bunch of people from my rich-kid high school at this doo-dah; I was braced for possible encounters of an oh-my-god kind. But only one teacher, and three guys who I hadn't seen in 20 years (all younger than me) and of course the bride and groom. I'm not sure if I'm relieved, or disappointed.

Firefight Averted

2007-06-25T21:13:00.000-07:00

My "semester" just ended, and it would seem there were no major casualties from that aforementioned grenade. Things were a bit tense, but the gentleman in question gave up emailing me after I gave him my final word on the matter (which was "It's my class, and if you don't like it, you can complain to the dean") and ended up with a decent grade despite his antisocial behavior on this point. I do think he's making some kind of complaint about me, or maybe just giving me a bad course evaluation, but frankly I don't much care; my dean already knows this whole story, and I have the entire conversation saved on my computer if I need to pull it out.

I'm just glad it's over. I felt guilty, because I know it could have been a better class than it was.... if I teach online again, I'll be far better at it. But there were some good elements to online as opposed to F2F lecturing, too. If I ever do the latter again, I may try to find ways to apply some of the discussion techniques I used in the online class (minus the crazy angry guy, of course.)

I'd go on further about little things, like how amazing the lightning bugs in my yard look tonight and every night in June.... But I'm tired, and I keep mistyping. So it's off to bed instead.

Please Shoot Me

2007-06-03T19:45:00.000-07:00

Remember that online class I was teaching? The one I was trying to "figure out" a few weeks ago?

It has, in the space of 2 days, gone from a slightly boring but perfectly adequate short course in art appreciation to completely nuclear, red-zone flaming chat room. In the words of the immortal Han Solo:
"It's not my fault... It's not my fault!"

One dude basically took offense to what another student had said (which to me seemed completely inoffensive, I keep trying to understand and failing) and it was like someone pulled the pin on his personal grenade and dropped him into my foxhole. I have spent the better part of 2 days trying to diffuse the situation, with no effect. Now he is accusing me of not grading his work impartially (despite the fact that I've not actually graded any of his work yet) and I think I may have to email the dean of my school tomorrow just in case this gets any worse. Better to get the paper trail going. There's only 2 weeks of class left, dammit! All I want is for everyone to calm down and get along... but somehow I think that fleeting dream is already lost. Gah.

Complain, Complain

2007-05-27T07:42:00.000-07:00

Someone was giving me a hard time last night for not having blogged for 10 days here.... I should point out that the aforementioned sickness rendered me completely non-functional for a significant part of those days. And now I'm at a sci-fi convention with a sinus headache. Is there no end to my self-pity? I think not, friends, I think not. But I do have a hot cup of coffee, and I'm about to go to a panel on picking fights with people at cons (in a nice way, I sense--though my temptation was to hum the fight music from Star Trek when tensions run high in the panel.....dun dun DA DA DA DA dun dun DA DAH...) We'll see if that gets me cordially evicted from the room....

Sicko.

2007-05-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

Friday night, I played board games at a friend's house. His daughter was on the couch with a 103° fever. I didn't come within 10 feet of her, but apparently her plague aura had a longer radius than anticipated. Saturday, I started feeling a bit oogish. Saturday evening, my enjoyment of the Roller Derby was somewhat marred by an achy feeling in my chest and throat. (It was also marred by the worst hot pretzel I have ever been horribly overcharged for--who knew you could form kindergarten paste into a pretzel shape and then get some poor slob to pay $3.25 for it?) I stopped at CVS on the way home, picked up some Vitamin C, some Dayquil, and a new box of Kleenex. Then spent a semi-miserable night feeling my sore throat and congestion get worse by degrees until 5 am, when I took more Tylenol and symptoms receeded somewhat. Today I've been a pathetic lump all day; I finally went out and got some of that "Zycam" homeopathic stuff, and I'm going to try one of its little fizzy tablets right now. Hang on.

********** <---represents tablet dissolving on my tongue.

Ok, this is simultaneously more gross and less gross than I was anticipating. I'd envisioned something sort of alkaseltzery exploding in my mouth, and instead it's like mushy, vaguely-cherry flavored chalk. I'm not supposed to drink for 15 minutes after taking this thing, and so of course the one thing I want more than anything right now is to rinse my mouth and rid it of this grainy residue. Uk. Well, if it makes my cold go away faster I am all for it... but next time I think I'll get the nasal spray version of the stuff.

Ding! Toast is ready.

2007-05-07T10:45:00.000-07:00

OK, grading is done. Done-ish. I still need to go down to campus and determine whether anyone slipped a last-minute please-don't-give-me-an-F assignment into my mailbox. I somehow doubt it though. I do still have to figure out this whole online class I'm teaching; my style is so lecture based that I have a hard time understanding how I am going to convey all the coolness that is art appreciation in an online format. Mmmm.... maybe I'll link them to the Museum of Bad Art website for week #1....

I went to a concert on Friday, and I was going to do a post on "Why I am not a good concert-goer"--but think I will save that for the main blog. I'm not saying I don't like live music--far from it, I love going to shows both big and small when I can. I'm just saying I'm not anyone's ideal audience. Especially when it's a concert where 90% of the audience is taking the music very.....VERY.....seriously. My own ability to take any music that seriously is long ago impaired. I far prefer a relationship song by Christine Lavin to endless "you changed my life" or (conversely) "you ruined my life" sentimental chick with guitar songs--one or two is fine, but when it's more than 50% of the set list I do start squirming around a bit in the seat. And then Rat Girl whispers something funny, and I lose it completely. And then Coaster Woman punches us both. Yeah. I'm a bad concert-goer.

Grading Blows.

2007-05-03T13:32:00.000-07:00

Hm. Yep, that pretty much sums it up. Just as last time, I am avoiding grading exams by blogging about how much I hate grading exams.

So far, the best thing I have seen on the Art 101 exams was the person who identified Georges Seurat's "Sunday at La Grande Jatte" as "Sunday on La Latte Grande." Starbucks really IS everywhere these days....

Stand Down Red Alert

2007-04-26T08:33:00.000-07:00

Ok, things are now under control, more or less. For those of you who were in on last week's crisis, thank you for your support. For those of you who weren't--believe me, you do NOT want to know. It was the most fucked up awful week I have had in recent memory (I can think of only 2 other times that compare even slightly in my life) and in the middle of it I had The Big Job Interview, followed by The Interview With The Person Who Was Out of Town During the Big Job Interview But Was Still Important. The fact that I managed to remain coherant and relatively poised during both of those Importances still amazes me. I had a big fall-apart on Wednesday night, but have been picking the pieces up and sticking them together since then and I think things are going to be OK. I hope. At any rate, it's out of my hands.

And the capper on the story, of course, is that I did get the job. Which makes me very happy, and of course also apprehensive--not that I will do it well, I'm actually pretty confident of my abilities. More just the nervousness of adjusting to a new situation after years of being my own boss, more or less. And it's going to be a big mental adjustment as well from a financial standpoint; after years of living pretty much right on the edge of insolvency, and before that having been comfortable but not having a huge disposable income, I am about to have a huge disposable income for the first time in my life. Not just from this job (which does pay well) but my parents are insisting on continuing to give me my "dole" payment that I've been living on in recent years--their argument being I'll get it eventually anyway, and this way I don't have to pay taxes on it. I am not an extravagant person, and I'm pretty good at managing my finances; I have a few things I want to spend money on, when I have it. But I've never even really thought about things like travel..... or investments. Or major home improvements instead of frantic emergency minor ones. Suddenly all this stuff is lurching into my head, and while I'm not going to fly off the handle and just start buying a ton of random shit and taking trips to Timbuktoo, the sudden opening of possibilties is a little mentally overwhelming. A month ago, getting carpet in the downstairs room was a source of extreme financial anxiety. It's going to take a while to not have a panic reaction to the thought of spending dough on something I don't desperately need. I know, poor old me! I'm not complaining, I'm just being my usual nervous self. The squirrels in my head are talking to me again. :)

Please Stand By....

2007-04-20T10:52:00.000-07:00

I have been experiencing technical difficulties this week. Will return to posting when my blood pressure returns to normal. That is all.....

Mrs. Peel, We're Needed.

2007-04-13T06:53:00.001-07:00

I am a Bowler Hat.

I'm very proper, often politically correct, precise and dapper. I generally look down on the masses, but I usually try not to let it show. What Sort of Hat Are You?

High Finance

2007-04-07T08:03:00.000-07:00

Thanks for all your kind words of sympathy and occasional snorts of laughter regarding the great fence disaster of '07. My neighbor informs me it will probably be around $500 to fix.... So whenever he gets around to doing it, I'll need to hand him a check. Which is totally fine; on one hand, I feel like I ought to ask for a receipt or something just to know he's not rooking me, but on the other hand I destroyed his damn fence, and he's fixing it himself, and I should really be glad it's not worse than $500. So it'll be no questions asked, I think. That plus the $1200 in taxes, plus the $800 in dental work, has me wound up a bit tight this month.

I find out about the big job next week. Right now I'm doing contract work for them, so I keep getting sympathetic glances from the people in the office who know I'm up for a job.... I actually found a page from one of my competator's "tree briefs" on the copier on Monday, and I was all like, "Hmm, I probably shouldn't read this.... oops! Too late!" It made me feel better, it wasn't all cool lookin' and stuff (obviously, that applicant didn't know Bushi!) and the content was.... well, let's say it was kind of scattered. Part of the fun and challenge of exhibit design, for me, is needing to keep a focus on a Big Idea--what's the point we're hoping to get across here to kids and adults? How does each element of the exhibit point back at that idea while expanding on it in some way? It reminds me a bit of theatre design, back when I thought I was going to be a drama major and design sets and lights--because your space is limited, and you have to achieve purposes X, Y, and Z with your set or your lighting, you have to stay very focused and keep asking yourself, "Is this necessary? How can I make this work in the context of the play?" So I tried hard to keep my project tight, and made a point to clearly relate everything back to my big uber-idea. The person whose project was on the copier? Not so much. So who knows? I could be top of the pile, or someplace in the middle... but don't think I'm at the rock bottom. Small favors, eh?

Dude.... Where's My Car?

2007-03-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

You know what's even better than waking up painfully early to go to the dentist to get a crown installed, after a late night of wargaming?

Waking up painfully early to go to the dentist and finding, as you walk out the door, that your car is no longer where you left it at 1:00 AM. Rather, it is down near the end of your gently sloped driveway, halfway through your neighbor's cyclone fence. Apparently I failed to set the parking brake. And while ordinarily the car will start to roll instantly if I don't put the brake on, I gather that last night I parked in some sort of slight divot which kept the car in place while I debarked and headed into the house, blissfully ignorant that sometime during the night, the heavy rainstorms that went on for hours would cause a loosening of my driveway's substrate.... resulting in Car In Ditch Syndrome. When I came lurching out my door yelling "What the fuck!?!" at 7:30 this morning, the town marshal was already there, patiently filling out an accident report. So I called the dentist to postpone my appointment. Called Triple A to winch my car out of the ditch (said rainstorms had made mud soup of the embankment.) And called my neighbor to say, I'm so terribly sorry I destroyed your fence, do let me pay for it or fix it myself, or something... Gah. What a great start to the day.

Trees: Can't See the Forest For 'Em

2007-03-14T16:57:00.000-07:00

With the extremely able and generous assistance of Bushi, I've finally completed my sample project for the job interview. My cluelessness about Pagemaker and associated software knows no bounds; Bushi kindly took my document in hand, and turned it from a pile of lifeless text with randomly inserted images into a thing of beauty and refinement. In exchange for.....lunch. Admittedly, it was a very good lunch--but I'm very, very lucky to have such awesome friends.

Some of my other awesome friends assisted me by suggesting possible titles for my topic, which was "Trees."

"Trees: Nature's Phallic Symbols"
"Trees: Haven for Terrorists"
"Acorn to End Table: A Tree's Odyssey"
"Fear the Tree: A Million Dwarves Can't Be Wrong"
and my personal favorite:
"Silent But Deadly: When A Tree Falls in the Forest"

Ok, technically only one friend suggested all of those, but she's still awesome. And kind of sick. I told her I thought the end table one would make children cry....

Up to My Ass in Alligators

2007-03-04T08:14:00.000-08:00

I still have over a hundred exams to grade, and this is weighing so heavily on my mind that I've been unable to rise from the chair where I've been screwing around on the internet for the last hour and a half. Sad, but oh so true. Much of my brain space is currently taken up with the writing assignment which is phase II of the job app I've been whining about, and I need to divert at least long enough to finish the grading before Spring Break.

My comment about getting the suit too soon proved incorrect; I wore it to a funeral this week. It was the father of a childhood friend of mine; we were thick like thieves from ages 6 to 12, then parted ways as she went through a much rougher adolescence than I did. At the time, I just thought she'd gotten mean for no good reason, and started messing with drugs, and she was no fun to hang around with anymore. Later on, with a bit of perspective, I realized that there was a lot going on in her life--not the least of which was that her extremely unpleasant and (I gather) emotionally abusive father had left her mother for another woman. At least, that's what I think happened; adults are pretty sparing with the details on these crises when you're a kid. She and I kept in touch--I think even as the teenage years were treating her badly, she kept thinking back to our hours playing in the woods and acting out Star Wars drama as the happy part of her life--and though she's moved to Portland now, she touches base with me a couple times a year and we usually get together for lunch or something when she's back in town. I found out her dad had died the day before his funeral, and decided I should probably bust my ass to get there. She and her mom and sister all seemed really happy I'd come. It was odd to sit through the mass hearing the present wife's eulogy of what a wonderful husband he'd been to her over the last 20+ years, knowing what a devastating effect his various actions had had on his 3 kids and his ex.... But I guess this is pretty standard at funerals; there will always be someone listening to the eulogy and saying, "That's not the guy I remember."

Is it just me, or is it odd that the priest invites non-Catholics to come up during communion, not to actually receive communion but to refuse it and then receive his blessing instead? If I'm not Catholic, why would I want a blessing from a Catholic priest? To me, that's about as inappropriate as going up to receive the eucharist--neither holds meaning for me as a non-catholic, so why would I even go up there? Odd.

Teeter-Totter

2007-02-24T10:16:00.000-08:00

I have 260 exams to grade. Boo.

I'm almost done with a project I've been working on for a year. Yay!

The online class I'm teaching is yomping my ass. Boo.

I made it through the first cut of candidates for the job I interviewed for last month. Yay!

Now there's another 3 weeks of tension in store before the next cut. Boo.

I don't have an abcess in my lower left wisdom tooth, which would probably eventually require oral surgery. Yay!

I have to get another crown instead, requiring approximately $700. Boooooo.

It's been a fun week! I'm also still trying to get my downstairs den back in order, which involves going through every damn thing I took out of there (boo) and either keeping it, Goodwilling it, or selling it on ebay. Last week I got $20 for a Playmobil toy I've had for 10 years; apparently there are people who collect that stuff just as rabidly as I do Star Wars figures or Green Arrow merchandise. (I'm thinking of spending my ebay proceeds on some original Mike Grell artwork.... it's like Geekswap.) This week I have 8 people avidly watching my auction for a box set of the Paranoia RPG--I'm hoping this will result in a brutal bidding war on the last day. And there's oh so much more to sell. Joy, joy. But there's also all the stuff I can't sell, or don't want to sell, or need to keep ("Hey! So that's what happened to my copy of my 2004 tax return!") and going through it piece by piece is just fabulously slow and boring. I'll finish.... but it's not fun.

De-Funked

2007-02-16T21:16:00.000-08:00

I'm about out of my funk (well, the most recent one, I'm sure I'll have another soon. I'm due to find out I didn't get the uber job any day now. In retrospect, I should've waited to buy the suit.) I've finally been forced to migrate my other blog to New Blogger, and so far nothing disastrous seems to have happened. One thing I do like in New Blogger is the ability to tinker with my template on the fly, as evidenced by my continual adding of links in the last week. Old Blogger required you to go into the template html, and dig around to find where you wanted to stick your new link, and then copy and paste code from existing links to make sure what you did matched up. New Blogger gives you this keen little toolkit icon when you're logged into Google, that lets you add links to the roll on the side of the blog pretty much at will. So I've been going "oh yeah, I forgot to add so-and-so!" to my little blogroll all week, and I've added a few comics that I've picked up in my daily reading regimen. I've finally added Beaver and Steve, which is sometimes a little sick, but usually impresses me with its all-out weirdness; and Questionable Content, which didn't impress me the first couple times I ran across it but now it's grown on me a bit--we'll see if I stick with it. Animals Have Problems Too isn't to everyone's taste, but there's something about it that just hits my funny bone consistantly--I'm even thinking of buying his book, and I've not even done that with Sluggy, my first and best internet comic love.

I'm debating putting PvP on there, even though I do read it daily. Not sure why, other than that I've been finding it less and less funny lately, and Scott Kurtz's persistant ranting about the cruel unfairness of a world that won't let him easily transition from webcomics to newspapers gets on my nerves. Come on, dude--your comic is targeted at a very narrow market, in the grand scheme of things, and wouldn't fly to the average newspaper reader; there's nothing wrong with being a webcomic. If you wanted to be in print medium, you need to be doing something that appeals to a wider range of ages/interests/personality types. Hell, I'm a big ol' nerd, and half the time I don't get the joke in PvP coz it's about World of Warcraft, or an in-joke about Penny Arcade, which I don't read.... So I get annoyed with PvP, and keep thinking I'm going to stop reading it, and so I've not added it to my list. Kind of lame, really. Much like this post! But I figure, even if you didn't like the post, you can go read some of the comics...

Little Mary Gloom-shine

2007-02-12T15:08:00.000-08:00

I'm fighting off a mood crash, and it's not helped by the fact that the entire downstairs of my house is an utter Pit of Despair at the moment. Everything from the den has been disgorged into the other 3 rooms down there, in order to make it possible for the gentlemen from the carpet place to remove my stinky and gross old carpet, and replace it with newer, fresh smelling carpet. Which is a great thing, and I'm happy about it, but the prospect of going through all the crap and disposing of the excess before reinstalling it in the room is..... well, depressing. Add to that the fact that I didn't get a call for job #2--not even an interview, at the place where I've been volunteering for 4 years and you'd think they'd at least give me a courtesy call for god's sake--and I'm beginning to strongly suspect I didn't make the cut for job #1. So my prospects for the summer are bleak. One of my friends keeps offering to get me a job at the brokerage house where he works.... and while the prospect of steady income is tempting, the thought of working there makes me cringe. Not my cup of tea, plus I just can't stand the thought of throwing away yet another degree. Why did I bother with grad school at all (I ask myself in my more frowny moments) if all that work and time and money isn't going to get me a job I like and want? Which means, the summer will likely be much like last summer--ie, a financial near-disaster, with correspondingly spikeing stress levels. Lord, but I'm tired of this.

This May will be the 5th anniversary of my losing my job at the Game Store. And while I do often get fed up and tired of my present situation, depending on my parents for money and working piecemeal jobs, I very seldom have any regrets about getting off that boat when I did. Though my leaving was not by choice, and though the experience was very emotionally painful and damaging in some ways, I think I'm far better off now than I would have been had I stayed. Even with all the frustration of unemployment now, it frankly beats one of my alternatives! So things aren't so bad after all.

The Idiot Box

2007-01-31T12:08:00.000-08:00

Ordinarily I don't watch too much TV; but in the last couple weeks I've had a couple of DVD-inspired epiphanies that have warmed the cockles of my heart (such as they are.) The first one occurred while hanging out with my good friend, Rat Girl. She had I have had some issues to work out lately, and they came to a head a bit a week or two ago. We had to have a long talk (at Denny's, of all places) where we sort of went around in circles, and expressed our frustration with each other, and we finally got to a place where we were both tired and a bit unhappy, but had said all we had to say. So she said, "wanna come over and watch some TV?" and I said sure, why not.... so we went to her place and (after determining that The L-Word was not an option) popped a Justice League DVD in the player. This is the recent incarnation of the old Hanna-Barbara Superfriends cartoon that I knew and loved as a kid; more edgy animation and plotting, and really overall pretty sharp looking. So we watched about 4 episodes, and about halfway through the experience she shook her head and said, "God, Green Lantern is such a choad." Which was exactly what I had been thinking at the time. I laughed, she laughed, we agreed, and I think that while we may not agree about some issues, we may have hit a rough spot, it's not insignificant that we still both firmly recognize Green Lantern to be an asshat.

Such things are geek friendship based on. Another kind of geekdom got brought back to the forefront of my mind when I went over to January Molasses' house to help her buy a new fish (HER fishbuying, unlike mine, does not end in tragedy--details forthcoming on my other blog.) After acquiring 2 new members of the Molasses household, we ended up watching some of her vast DVD collection of Xena: Warrior Princess. She wanted to show me a particular episode which I hadn't seen before, and which presented some of the frustrating lack of internal logic that got me to stop watching the show way back when it was originally airing in the late '90s. I present for you, here, the issue and my frustration:
Xena, Warrior Princess and Erstwhile Sidechick Gabrielle hook up with another woman warrior, who is an odd blend of Joan d'Arc and I Dream of Jeannie. She is fighting for light and good, because the voices in her head tell her to. She kicks ass and takes names, and kills the hell out of a lot of bad people, assisted by Xena's sword and Gabrielle's bonkin' stick. Bodies stack up like cordwood, as they do in every episode of this show, and that's fine because that's why we watch it! Combat sequences without end! RAHHH!! So after each battle, the Light Champion offers to let the survivors "turn away from the dark," in a ceremony that looks surprisingly like a cult initiation ("No, Gabrielle! Don't drink the Kool-Aid!") And then surprise surprise, it turns out that if they don't convert in 3 days, she kills 'em. Xena and Gaby are shocked and amazed, and proceed to lecture her on how these evil slavers deserve a fair trial (but slavery is technically legal in this fantasy world! so who's going to convict them of what exactly?) and then turn her in to the cops, who are probably going to kill her because she's been yomping on bad guys all over the countryside. Hmm. Nice work, guys.

I know some of my friends get frustrated with me because of my "negative attitude" about things they like, like Xena or Battlestar Galactica or CSI. But really, I get frustrated because I care--because I think Xena was such a great show when it WAS good! And then you get episodes which beat you over the head with a seemingly illogical moral point, like this one. Or are painfully badly written--don't start me on the opera episode! JM and I spent an hour trying to figure out which one that was in her vast collection of DVD's so we could watch it with actor commentary... which was, by the way, hilarious. Even a bad episode of Xena is much enhanced by hearing Lucy Lawless yelling, "Yeh, look there, I'm slipping ya the tongue! Whooooo!!" during a sensitive Xena/Gabrielle moment. Two thumbs up!

Just for the sake of variety....

2007-01-18T17:56:00.000-08:00

Instead of worrying about a job that I don't have yet, let me take a moment to express frustration over a job I've already got.

For anyone who doesn't know the backstory, I work in the hobby game industry. I work for a very small company which, despite being small, has a rather rabid following of fans on 3 continents, and makes a really, really good product. It has all the ingredients for blockbuster success, except 1) capital, and 2) a good businessman at the helm. I love my boss, he's creative and funny and talented, and yet he seems to have no clue how to manage the company in any way other than just-barely-surviving mode. He refuses to even consider taking out a small-business loan, so when we need to do something which has a high up-front cost (like, say, a print run of one of our books) we can't. Today he told me we're down to a 6 month supply of one of our core books. As his sales manager, I pointed out that it could be a 6 month supply, or a 1 month supply, depending on distributor ordering cycles, and maybe we should consider a new print run soon. No, he said, the smart thing to do would be to let it go out of print for a few months and let orders pile up. Then we'll be able to pay the printing costs when we do reprint it. But, says I, it's our core product! We don't want distributors to ever be out of this, because without it on the shelf a new player can't start playing our game! If they're out of it for 6 months, that will have a serious effect on sales of our entire line; and it's part of the nature of printed products, that they have a high upfront cost. This is what loans are for--you pay them back over time, as the product sells down. (And, think I to myself, we sold a ton of misprinted books at cons this summer, which were cost $0 since the printer had to replace them. That pure-profit money could have been set aside to pay for a new print run, if you had thought of it and planned ahead. But I didn't say this.) Nope, he says, being out of print will increase demand, and I don't like asking banks for money anyway, they'd probably just say no. So no. Now, as sales manager, very soon I am going to have to be the one to explain to all our distributors, including the ones I have carefully recruited and cultivated overseas in the last year, that we're real sorry but we'll be out of the basic rules of our game for--if I know him--six months to a year. That's going to be awesome.

This would all bother me a lot more if I hadn't made a new year's resolution to stop giving a crap about what happens to this company. As I said before, I love my boss, our product, and the hobby industry in general; but damned if I'm going to get an ulcer worrying about the fate of a company that is so completely beyond my zone of control. I've spent two years agonizing over poor decisionmaking at this company. Now I've reached a sort of detatched level of "Meh--oh well" about the whole thing. Not that I don't hope for success--but I'm getting pretty used to us falling short of the mark.

Fingernails that Shine Like Justice...

2007-01-16T09:54:00.000-08:00

No, I didn't really get a manicure before yesterday's interview. I did get a haircut though, and wore the aforementioned nice shirt, and it was all very pleasant and more or less unstressful. Now comes the waiting part, during which I try not to think about the scary possibilities (both not getting the job, and getting the job.) I also went back and bought the first jacket, with complimentary-colored pants, so my clothing options have increased still more, and am sending out 2 more resumes this week.

The big get-off-my-ass project that now stares me in the face is the downstairs den, which needs new carpet. I've promised myself I will order said carpet before the end of the month; the room has to be completely de-junked before then, and the foldout couch from hell needs to be dismantled and removed. (Removing it without dismantling it isn't an option. All my friends who helped me move last time have witnessed the pure evil that is that couch---among other things, it weighs appoximately 800 lbs and likes to unfold its dangerous steel innards while being lifted and carried--and there's no way I could con any of them into helping me move it ever again.) So sometime during this week I am going to tackle the de-junking of the room, and the boxing up of small objects which are not junk, and the clearing off of the desk, and then maybe I'll be ready to call the carpet guy. Whooo! On a roll now.....

Ill-Suited For the Job

2007-01-13T19:00:00.000-08:00

Today I bought a suit. Having the prospect of job interviews means needing clothing that 1) fits, 2) looks professional, and 3) looks even more professional. I actually think I dress quite well most of the time, but I've put on some weight recently, and I felt like I might need to stage things up a notch for the possible uberjob interview anyway.... so since there's safety in numbers, I called up a friend and invited her to be my fashion consultant for the day, in exchange for a beer afterwards. I figured she would be a sympathetic shopping partner, as she too has somewhat eclectic taste in clothing and would not dress in a suit unless the occasion overtly demanded it. She told me once about finding out that a potential employer had described her as "an Earth Mother type." I asked her what the hell that meant, and she said, "I think it means I have large breasts and wear a lot of natural fibers."

So the Earth Mother and I hit Macy's to check out the possibilities. Frustratingly, I found a jacket which I really liked right off the bat... only to find that there were no matching pants available to turn it from a jacket into a "suit." It was a slightly odd color, and 30 minutes of searching throughout the store found nothing that looked quite close enough to be convincing. WTF, Macy's?!? If I were a guy, I'd walk into the men's department, and every freakin' suitjacket would have matching pants. Dammit. So anyway, we combed the store and found a suit that was workable, if still not quite as satisfying as my first jacket love. I'm now the proud owner of a black suit with a tiny blue pinstripe, and an additional shirt for the not-quite-demanding-a-suit-but-still-shouldn't-wear-a-regular-shirt-and-sweater occasions, which I think this Monday will be. As someone who has always passionately hated shopping for clothes, I can say this wasn't half bad, other than the lack of pants for that one jacket. I actually might check out the other Macys in town before I give up fully on that... Having 2 possible suits wouldn't be a bad thing. Hell, it doubles my dressing options.

Moving Right Along

2007-01-12T07:37:00.000-08:00

And today, a third job app opp drops in my lap. (Hey, that's a lot of aps and ops.) Must be something about January, a lot of places get their new budgets sorted out, and can finally advertise positions that might have lain fallow for the last months of 2006. Good-o for me, the more the merrier. I'm still printing out my portfolio--and trying to decide what to leave out. I want 8 projects in there, and I have 7 good ones, and 3 of questionable value but more visually exciting. (Basically, we're talking research papers vs. projects with pretty pictures. Both are useful, but I wish some of my group projects hadn't actually been done by a group, if you get my drift...) And then I need to type up a summary sheet. And then I am actually prepared to respond when people say, "Sure, I'd love to see your portfolio!"

The question arose as to why my Current Life plan isn't making a list and crossing stuff off it; that's what most people do, after all, and it gives them a sense of satisfaction and completion, while allowing them to organize their thoughts. But for me, a list is all about the things on it you DIDN'T get done..... and there are things that I've needed to do for months--like, say, take the pets to the vet. That is going to have to happen when schedule permits, but I've been putting it off for various reasons (time, money being the two big ones. Three cats at a vet isn't a cheap visit.) If I made a list, and that was on it, I'd feel more and more inadequate each time I looked at the list and couldn't cross that off, even if I'd done a bunch of other minor things that also needed doing but hadn't made the list. I mean, how often can you write "laundry," and then cross it off, then write it again, then cross it off..... Now, I can sit at the end of the day and say, "really now--what did you get done?" and I can say, well, I swept the dining room (even though I didn't recycle all the newspapers on the table) and put oil in the car (though I didn't take it in for a tuneup, that'll hold it til I can get over there) and paid some bills, and hey--if I spend 15 minutes before bed tidying up the bathroom, I can write that down too! Look how much I did!

To each their own mind games. If it gets the bathroom clean, I'll take it.

Another Day, Another Job App

2007-01-08T19:12:00.000-08:00

Another modestly promising-looking job listing got forwarded to me today. This is well and good; as I mentioned, the last job app is quite the long shot for me. It's becoming even longer, as I have not yet finished the contract project I've been working on for the last 3 weeks, and I sense that completing it in an impressive manner will be key to my getting an interview for the Uberjob (as we'll call job #1.) Getting one for job #2, which we'll call the Fishjob, is probably reliant solely on my ability to convince people that just because I don't have a degree in wildlife sciences doesn't mean I'm completely ignorant about natural science and biology. I wish I did have a degree in Wildlife science. Maybe I should go back to school again. And again. Because degrees are like potato chips, once you start it's hard to stop..... and then you get really, really sick.

Checkin' It Twice

2007-01-06T10:37:00.000-08:00

I've begun making a list of everything I accomplish each day; I think this will help with my general sense that I never get anything done, along with motivating me to get a few more things on the list each day. Somehow writing it down seems to be a reward for me; I took a lot of pleasure today in adding "20% H2O change + filters, paid bills, returned Ed's DVD, took down Xmas tree," to my journal, all before noon. I'm inching slowly but surely toward a more energetic Me, I think.

I've watched 2 of the 14 Tarzan movies I got for Xmas so far, I'm trying to ration them out. Though I somehow suspect that the further we go, the worse the films will be and the more I'll want to just rush through them--particularly the RKO years, that blonde Jane just doesn't do it for me. It's generally accepted that the best of the lot is "Tarzan and His Mate" (1934)--higher production values, more risque interaction between Tarzan, Jane, and the bad guy, aka Martinmyfriend. The nude swimming scene is restored in this version--I'd seen it before, of course, it's been available since the late 80's. But still, serves as a pleasant reminder that our puritanical ideas about sex in the media were really a creation of the 1940's and 50's; and the wheel has obviously come back around again. But there's a tendency to assume that every generation before "ours" was uptight and straightlaced, and of course that's not true at all. Just ask Tarzan and Jane!

An Exercise in Futility

2007-01-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

I'm applying for another job this week. It's at a place where I've applied for 4-5 jobs in the last two years.... I begin to feel like I should start my cover letters with "hello, it's me again, sorry to bother you." Actually, I feel like that with a lot of institutions around town. Merely making myself sit down and write the cover letter today was a bit of an achievement, and I also feel like I shouldn't be putting a lot of effort into it because I know they're looking for someone with a lot more experience in the field than I've managed to gather. So I'm grumbly.

Some of the grumble at the moment though is stemming from the fact that I've decided to put together a portfolio (a wise decision, as I've been telling people "Let me know if you'd like to see my portfolio!" Good if I could back that up.) I actually have a number of projects which will look quite shiny in said portfolio; the grumbles come in with the fact that a number of them are a long series of single-page documents in Adobe Illustrator, a fantastic program which I barely explore the potential of. This means printing takes FOREVER. I've been printing for an hour and I've only got about 15 pages of one of my projects done. And I've not even gotten to the pages with the hi-res photos of actual artwork. Still, I'm getting it done, and should have an actual zip binder full of projects to show off by the end of the week. Here's hoping I get someone to show them to!

So, What is a Wax Lion Exactly?

2007-01-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

The Wax Lion is a character on a television show called "Wonderfalls." Jaye Tyler is fresh out of college with a philosophy degree, and has gone directly into a crappy retail job selling cheap Niagara Falls souveniers. She's cynical, she's bitter, she's funny, and she's not doing anything other than bitch about her life. One day, one of the tchotchkes, a small misshapen wax lion from one of those injection mold machines starts talking to her and telling her to do things that don't make sense. She resists, she thinks she's going crazy, but when she finally breaks down and does what the lion is telling her to do, things work out, weirdly, for the best.... and her life starts to change. As the show progresses, more and more inanimate objects start talking to Jaye and telling her to essentially get off her ass. We don't know how it would have turned out in the long run, because the network cancelled it after 13 episodes--but it certainly seemed like Jaye was going in the right direction.

I am the Wax Lion. I'm also Jaye. I'm 36, I'm single, I have not one but three liberal arts degrees, and yet I don't have a job that pays the bills or provides me with health benefits. I want to be able to listen to the inner voice that's telling me to stop feeling so sorry for myself and get off my ass. I want to be the person who does rather than is done to, acting instead of just reacting, who can face individual defeats with confidence, and see the big picture of my life rather than obsessing over each piece of the puzzle. The Lion is an articulation of my own thoughts. Plus, he's also funny as hell. And he sings. Badly.

Stepping Out

2006-12-31T14:47:00.000-08:00

In trying out Blogger 2's capabilites, I figured it was better to start a whole new blog than to try to migrate my old one, only to see it crash in a spiral of destruction. I like my old blog too much for that. So here's The Wax Lion, so named after the first of many voices in the head of Jaye Tyler on Wonderfalls. I'm hoping this will be a place for a bit more introspective writing on my part, maybe a place to try out some things I don't necessarily want attached to my name in the wide wide world of internet. Here goes.