Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
I just had to let everyone in the office know that we were having a party. Entirely in mime or lounge lizard versions of “Celebration.” How many times have you told your co-worker down the hall “Come to the conference room @ 4:30pm for a party, and make sure to bring your knife and some napkins!” entirely in hand gestures and dance moves from the 80’s while they’re on the phone? It was like being my own roving charades minstrel… bleh, this day sucks.
by krisis
I am restless and twitching and doing tiny spurts of work as if it can release the pressure on my brain. Loosen the valves, let of some steam, be able to breathe again. It is not working. Laughing and chaos keeping bleeding in from every which direction and i have resorted to fantasy credit-card shopping for new cds and sheet music, though i might just click buy just for fun. There are some very specific emotions i attach to this restlessness… a sort of post-tired pre-miserable need for something to happen, and for it to happen loudly. And distraction… i practically have whiplash from all the distraction.
by krisis
Today was a long day. Sandwiched inbetween our normal visit schedule to admissions and the summer orientation schedule, today was a Sneak Preview event for engineers and design arts students. It was also the hottest day so far this year. These two factors combined made every little bit of the day last longer than it was ever intended to, and produced one too many groucy parents for my taste. They complained about everything… tour wasn’t long enough, tour was too long, not enough water, too much water with other things excluded, not enough information about academics, not enough information about student life…. and these contrasting viewpoints were just from the handful of evaluations i snatched a glance at. I suppose the moral is that you can’t please all of the people all of the time, especially when the mercury gets past the 9-0 mark.
However, my day was even longer than all that would imply for a very special reason: i somehow elected myself to be our Dragon mascot. Now, this wasn’t just something i came up with willy-nilly… the perspective engineers were building catapults, and they wanted something for them to be able to aim their velcro-covered whiffle balls at. So, first my job was getting the suit and finding a volunteer, but it soon became finding a volunteer to replace me in the schedule of events so that i could wear the suite.
Have you ever been a mascot? The feet are giant-sized novelty-slippers that are too big to fit onto stairs. The body is saggy and feels a lot like being wrapped up in terrycloth only, when wrapped in terrycloth, how often do you have a tail that’s over a yard long? But, the most important consideration in how awkward a mascot suit is to maneuver in is the head. Since our mascot is a cartoony dragon, i get topeer out of the maw of the mighty beast… and the maw continues for nearly a foot beyond my eyes before it ends. My eyes and ears and spiny-things extend far enough above the top of my head that i cannot touch my hands together over top of it.
Add all of this together to get me, as the dragon, standing in the middle of the grand court of our Main Building schmoozing with our guests and then having them fire small projectiles at my head. In the process i got to pose with our elusive President Papadakis, pick my dragon-teeth with pieces of catapult Connex, and be pummeled again and again in the crotch by low flying whiffle balls. However, as much as i might complain, please note that 50% + 1 of our attendees dropped off applications, which is better than average for an event so early in the application process for rising Seniors. So, if you’ll excuse me, i’m off to take a well-deserved nap before beginning tonight’s recording. Afterall, i went to bed rather late last night…
by krisis
Today i got to leave work an hour and a half early because i went in super-early on Monday and worked all day, which got me back into the apartment at 4pm. As per daily routine, i put my keys down on the stereo, hung up my shirt in the bedroom, washed my hands and face, and went back to the bedroom to get changed. During this bit it somehow occurred to me that i should be singing “Happiness is a Warm Gun” at the tops of my lungs, and i was down to my underwear before i noticed movement behind me so i turned to find Matt attempting to sleep on the top bunk. He snarled a little and i apologized, but, honestly, was i really supposed to look around the room at 4:05 in the afternoon to check if anyone was still in bed? Seems a little ridiculous to me. But, anyway, because i’m actually quite nice i closed the door and left him be, but now i’ve only got underwear on. Oops.
by krisis
My wrist hurts so bad that i’m physically sick, and of course i decided that i ought to type about it; ironically, my mother just had surgery for her rapid onset Carpal Tunnel Syndrome ten days ago. I definitely have CTS, without a doubt in anyone’s mind, but so far it’s been a particularly ineffectual case of it. But, this morning i actually enjoyed my job for three whole hours, so now i’ve got to pay for it somehow, right?
My task for this morning was to make individual mounts for photos of everyone in our department (22 people) so that we can have a new staff board outside of the office. This involved heading across the street to the ECM Creative Group, whose office is totally surreal compared to mine. They have seven people crammed into one medium office space, and each one of them have an iMac or a G4 plus one hi-tech tool (scanner, digital camera, digital film scanner, digital scripting board…), and all of them are delightfully tech-headed in amusing and awing ways (as opposed to those other tech people i met last week). They all go out together in the morning for coffee (small black with shots of vanilla), they listen to 88.5xpn (“Hey, turn that up, that’s George Harrison!”), and they talk about fun things like digitally inserting a prettier color of sky into pictures of our lab building or about who gets to take home their extra registered copy of photoshop.
Their leader is Carole, who seems almost quiet and mousey when you first meet her, but who is really whacky and carries twizzlers on Fridays to get her through the day and rows crew in her spare time. Ally, one of the other office people, is a nationally ranked female rower. They also have a myriad of toys, both technological and for children. They do the university web page, our yearly viewbook (now on cdrom), and a myriad of other visible campus design work. Carole thought i was only an “arty kind of guy” and was surprised when i told her i might be interested in working for her part time and that my goal for the summer is learning PHP/mysql. She asked to look at my cross-curricular project once it’s done. I blushed a little and studiously ate my twizzler.
So, yes, today they gave me a job with a goal and a timeframe and nice company and i loved it. Use Quark to make the picture mounts, slice them into reality with a huge metal rule and an exacto blade, then mount the mounts onto heavy cardboard, and finally deftly place the picture into the mount using a mere two pieces of double-sided tape that do not let go of what they’re holding onto even if you only want to move it half a millimeter. The only problem was that to use the exacto blade, or to edge pieces of double-sided tape into the right place, my right hand kept being twisted every which possible way until finally it felt like the insides of my wrist ached and my fingers didn’t quite want to be cooperative. One of the other women in the office with CTS had a beautiful wrist-splint on to get used to her new keyboard, and i was biting my lip to keep myself from asking her if i could borrow it. We just talked a bit about her condition instead. At first it’s a lot like trying to move your arm when it’s totally numb from sleeping on it, and you know you can move it but it will feel strange and you’d really rather not. (And, i just wrote that without thinking about it, but that’s exactly how my mother described her CTS to me three months ago when it first started really getting to her. And, i’m in two high risk categories because i’ve typed regularly since age 7, and i play guitar every day. Fuck.)
So, ouch. But, a good morning, and i like being here, and i’m trying to contrive a way to get my ass back across the street to play with more Quark and art supplies. Yum.