Tuesday, January 31, 2006

I just went to go scope out books for classes (starting next Tuesday) at the Coop. It's one of my guilty pleasures. I stare at books and drool over the required reading lists of classes I'll never be able to take. Sigh.

I found out that the writing class I'm taking (21W.775, Writing about Nature and the Environment) will be reading none other than...

The Meadowlands by Robert Sullivan!

Normally I bristle at the thought of having to read a book that I've already read for a class (not because I don't enjoy re-reading books, but because there are so many books I haven't read yet...), but this makes me really excited.

So talking about my schedule is mundane and boring...but is it prudent to try to take 5 classes and listen in on 3? I already know the answer to that question...

Monday, January 30, 2006

Listen to me live!

Well...not technically live anymore...but it was at the time...

Now, in convenient mp3 format so you can save it forever, here's the show I did last Friday.

(I was extremely tired, which is why I'm talking much slower than usual. Usually I'm a veritable bullet train...)

Jordan gets crafty

I've been meddling with the faux-arts of Mod Podge collage making and jean-partching via hand-sewing. (And I'm probably only doing these things because I have other work that I need to be doing...)

Inuit Art
A collage I shellacked to my wall made from an Inuit Art calendar

Frankenstein Jeans
These pants have become the Frankenstein's monster of jeans.

Space Desk
My space desk: a work in progress I started this morning...

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Once again at 1369…

A coffee shop, Central Square, Cambridge, MA:

There’s an old man sitting at seven o’clock who is drawing me. He gets up every fifteen minutes, takes his backpack with him, leaves his sketch pad and his pencils, and goes outside to smoke a cigarette. The first time he left he flipped over the page to hide his drawing, but not the third time.

He looks homeless. His face a forest of unkempt gray bristles. An over-large amorphous jacket dwarfs him, and shapeless stains in shades of brown kiss his equally shapeless maroon knit hat. When I look at him, he stops drawing for a second.

They’ve left now (together, though they arrived alone on either side of a 40-minute precipice), but I’m pretty sure I witnessed the first in-person meeting of an internet liaison. What would you do if he had an infuriatingly high-pitched laugh (think the Judge from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)? Maybe she didn’t mind.

--You are the most patient person in the world, he said. Let’s just pretend we were supposed to meet at noon and I’m twenty minutes early.

I probably wouldn’t have laughed, but I would have smiled.

What was striking about this particular eavesdropping session (besides the fact that it was overlaid on my reading of Book IX of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the infamous chapter wherein Satan tricks Eve into tasting the forbidden fruit, she takes it back to Adam, they fashion woodland clothes for themselves and “…in mutual accusation spent/ The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning./ And of their vain conquest appeared no end,” (Lines 1187-1189)) is how one-sided the conversation seemed. I now know more than I would ever want to know about high-pitched-laugh-man. He spent his summers at a computer camp (where he became an expert in Logo…remember that? With the turtle that could draw the most fascinating rectangles on your screen…), has his first international adventure in Japan, where he chased Japanese men from pool to pool at a hot spring, travels about 35 times a year (that’s about every-other-week, he told her), and could very easily devolve into a Days of Our Lives watching pile of mush if he finds his sugar-momma. Fascinating? Not really…

On my way to Central Square today a man stopped me in front of the MacDonald’s and asked me if I knew what happened to the Burger King that used to be here. It closed and turned into a trendy-looking restaurant/bar called Rendezvous (though all the fancy-off-white-curtains and professional graphic design in the world couldn’t hide its former identity). And no, I didn’t know if there was another Burger Kind nearby, but I stupidly told him “Well there’s a MacDonald’s right here.” Apparently that’s not the same at all. It was funny, and that brief encounter definitely made my day.

Friday, January 27, 2006

More nuts and bolts

After watching Caddyshack for the first time (how have I never seen that movie before?) while patching my disintegrated jeans (no, not a fashion statement), I went to my drawing class and them promptly left after 10 minutes of utter boredom and frustration. No, I wasn’t frustrated because I was having trouble drawing, but because the teacher of the class is absolutely intolerable. She was drawing a picture of a sculpture visible out the window and the class was huddled around watching her as she used the same token phrases again and again. The only reason I had to stay was to observe what it is that makes bad teaching bad, but I decided it wasn’t worth it. Sigh. Oh well, now that I have all the drawing supplies I need I can draw wherever I want whenever I want without a class, so it wasn’t that disappointing.

All right…backing up further than a few minutes ago, I think I’m a few days behind on my “persons of the day.”

Wednesday’s person of the day was the blind man who almost sat on me while I was riding the T. As he was stumbling around in the vicinity of one of the hand rails, a courteous by-stander took his arm and guided him to a seat. He then got up from that seat and tried to sit in my lap. After generous apologies we started talking (general questions like “Where are you headed today?” and “Where are you headed in your life?”). It was a nice conversation. Speaking to him, I realized that I had never met a blind person before. I was itching to ask him what it was like to be blind--not that he would have had a satisfactory answer, because that’s like asking me what it’s like to be me—but instead we talked about how he’d never met anyone from Oregon who wasn’t friendly (I have).

In addition to sparking questions about how we perceive the world and how we communicate, my conversation with him also made me wonder (yet again) why I seem so approachable to strangers (blind people who try to sit on me, little old ladies, people rapping profanely about Jesus), but I seem so off-putting to the people I interact with on a daily basis. Obviously it has something to do with my body language and attitude, I just don’t know how or why those things change during the circumstances of my life. But that’s a ramble for another day…

Thursday’s person of the day was the visiting professor from Holland who co-taught my poetry and photography seminar last semester. She is in Boston for the week and she agreed to have coffee with me to talk about what graduate school is like in Europe. She teaches American Studies at the University of Amsterdam and is the cutest European I’ve ever seen. I ended up picking her brain about how she fell into her line of work and how her life developed.

Yesterday was, in general, a very good day. I spent the morning looking at possible courses to “listen in” on next semester (Jamaica Kincaid teaches a class at Harvard on Caribbean women writers…how hot is that?), then went to my coffee meeting, then talked to my dad on the phone while looking for a good place to sit and draw buildings. After struggling with my first attempt using color pastels (mixed feelings about those at the moment) I went to Pleasures of Poetry led by the professor who will be teaching the environmental writing class I’m taking next semester. He’s so animated an awesome, and his favorite poet, Galway Kinnell, is one of my favorites. So the verdict is: very excited about the class, even though it’s a HASS-D (sorry for the MIT-speak).

After that my day (though not my dad) took a turn for the worse. I won’t go in the details, but it’s amazing how the slightest bit of emotional turmoil (ok, slight is an obviously relative term) can leave me completely drained and more exhausted then a 20-mile training run.

I recovered as best as I could to head to a meeting (yet again) with my thesis advisor. He’s definitely growing on me. My partner was late, so we talked for a bit about my ambitions to travel the world and teach next year. That really seemed to surprise him (he said “I would have guessed astronaut for sure, definitely an adventurer, but this is quite amazing!”). Most people in the Aero/Astro department end up becoming boring engineers who follow straight and narrow paths.

Next up on my full plate: basketball game against Lesley. They aren’t the greatest program, so I got to play more minutes than usual (maybe 8 or so). I even scored two points (go me).

Wow, now that I’ve gotten myself into the rut of describing my day hour by hour, I might as well finish it. Running (on a treadmill, which still completely freaks me out after my heinous treadmill accident last spring), then dinner, then homemade mojitos (Chandler makes a mad mojito), then bailing out on barhopping to go to bed early so I could wake up early to prep for my radio show this morning, only to get woken up by a 3 am phone call. Phew. Done.

Ok, this morning I hit the snooze button for…let’s not say how long, it’s too embarrassing…and then did my first radio show in almost a year. So, my person of the day for today is (unless something happens in the next 8 and a half hours to change my mind) myself, for not making any glaring mistakes and performing somewhat non-horrendously on the air. Excellent. WMBR now has audio files of shows archived, so you can listen to me here. Just click on the Friday, January 27 Late Risers Club show (it will be up for 10 days, unless you are a hip station member like me and have access to the mp3 file). Don’t make fun of me too much…

That’s about all the incendiary news I have for now. Oh wait, incendiary isn’t the right word to use at all. If only there had been some way to use today’s word of the day, wunderkind…

A more contemplative less catalog-esque entry coming soon…maybe…

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

...no seog efil

It’s been more than a little while (although less than eons) since I posted any kind of real update here (inquiries into “what exactly is a real update” can be directed to, well, the trash…), so here goes. Your generic “this is what I’m up to” post:

It is currently IAP, which means no classes, which you think would mean a lot of free time. That’s a complete misconception. I’m nearly as busy as I was during term, it’s just a less-stressed more fun happy-go-lucky type of busy. For example: it’s been over a week now since I got up later than 8 am (throw in a few 5:30 and 6 am arrival times into the conscious world and you’ve probably got a 7 am average). Why? That’s actually a pretty difficult question. So, as I’ve learned to do, I’ll break it down into bits.

I’ve been:

…working on my pseudo-thesis, whose status was “incomplete and nauseatingly behind so you better get your ass on it or else you don’t graduate” as of the first week of January, and is sailing into the “it’s going to happen, really, but only if you don’t spend more than 12 hours at a time not working on it” region. Which is more comfortable? Can I abstain on that one…

Anyway, I meet with my partner and my advisor nearly every day (usually at 9 am, argh!) to draw diagrams of turbines and blades and shafts and bolts and all sorts of other fun things. Today I met with the machine shop guru to discuss set-screws and reverse threads (not doable). And so it goes. I like to think we are actually making progress but…I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch (or my turbines before they start spinning).

...taking a class on Milton's Paradise Lost because, well, I've never read it before.

…picking people’s (professors, grad students, strangers on the street) brains about “my future” and “grad school” and “life choices” and whatnot. The consensus seems to be that I have many tricks up my sleeve (and careers, too), so don’t sweat it. Easier said than done.

…reading a lot about sex and gender, and the differences between the two (sex being a biologically determined feature, gender being a societally determined one), and archaic (though eerily logical) views of reproductive biology for my Duchess of Malfi paper. Argh, I feel as if I’m falling behind on revising it (some deadline for some writing prize? Oh no…), but I guess the water-turbine takes precedence because if that doesn’t get done I won’t graduate. Anyway, I’ve been reading this book called Making Sex, which is fun not only because it is fascinating and has a lot of diagrams of people peeling their own skin off and it incites the most curious looks from people who notice the title of the book.

…taking my first drawing class that doesn’t involve naked people. I enjoyed life drawing infinitely more than this class, but it is expanding my expertise (i.e., using materials besides charcoal, drawing things besides naked people). The teacher is extremely repetitive and boring, but at least it gets me drawing, so no real complaints there. And this week our assignment is to start working with color…something I’ve never really done before.

…attending a lot of Pleasures of Poetry sessions (daily hour-long discussions of different poets presented by different members of the MIT community—literature faculty, mostly).

...trying to train for the Boston Marathon in addition to playing basketball (emphasis on "trying).

…drinking a lot of tea and coffee.

…eating a lot of scones.

...shaking my fist half-heartedly at one thing or another.

…watching entire television shows (Veronica Mars, for starters)

(Can you tell that this list is going in ascending order of importance?)

Irregularly, I’ve been:

Gallivanting off on adventures to Vermont, New York, New Jersey, and who knows where else. Vermont is cold, New York is…frustrating, and New jersey is…giving me too many things to look forward to (i.e., my PiA interview…they tried to sell me on Korea instead of Kazakhstan), so I don’t want to think about it any more until I find out if they are offering me a teaching fellowship (mid-March…ahhhhhh!).

Ok, I have some business to attend to (not really…ok yes really…ok really not…) so this brings my update (or sorts) to an end. Viva la revolucion!

Persons of the day

A while back (oh, I'd say about two months) I said I was going to institute a "person of the day"-type feature on this blog, where I would give a nod (a shout out, if you will) to the person who gave me the greatest pick-up in my time of, er, darkness. Well, days aren't so dark now (literally and figuratively), but I think it's time to instate that feature for real.

Starting with...

today's "persons of Jordan's day" number one: the MIT women's basketball team. (Not really a person, I know...bear with me...)

For: a) Getting our first conference win since I was a freshman (for those of you who weren't counting, that's three years) over Wellesley (!!!!), b) making it an absolute nail-biter, and c) reminding me why it is that I've stuck with basketball for 11 years through all the, well, losing, bench-warming, bruising, etc., etc.

Hurrah!

(And no, mom and dad, I didn't play, but so what...)

Friday, January 13, 2006

All right folks, here we go…

Dear Readers,

What is wrong with me? You don’t have to answer that question, even though it’s only partially rhetorical. Lately I’ve been listening (almost exclusively) to The Clash (even Sandinista!) and the Royal Tenenbaums OST, so maybe that will give you a clue.

I used to revel in obscurity. Being slightly crazy is also slightly charming, right? Isn't it everyone's dream that someday someone will come along and instantly pick up on all her irrelevant quiddities?

Sorry for being vague. That’s part of why I haven’t updated my blog in a while. I didn’t want to descend into half-formulated angst-splattered quarter-life crisis droppings, but I knew that the flavor of my life right now is making that unavoidable. Every other conversation I have involves that question (you know the one).

I had a good talk with one of my favorite professors yesterday and he told me that two weeks before she died, his eighty-year-old mother had a dream that she was in grade school and had forgotten to study for a test. It’s both heartening and disconcerting that in some ways anxiety about the future never goes away.

All right, I’m not finished, but I need to go. Something more thrilling next time.

Yours,

Jordan