| On feeling wanted |
[11 Jun 2008|04:19pm] |
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I love working here.
Funny how this works, but the process of leaving is making it clear how good I am at my job and how much the people here value me and will miss me. It's such an amazing feeling.
See, I'm the sort of person who focuses on what I'm doing wrong, what I can do better, the ways in which I fall short. When people give me compliments, I brush them off. But then I had to write out a description of my job responsibilities so my boss could hunt for a replacement, and the list of duties went to two pages. And then last week my boss showed me some of the resumes she was getting, and talking about some of the people she'd interviewed when I first came on board, and I started realizing there were things I brought to the job that I didn't even think to put on the list, qualities I take for granted that are actually pretty rare.
And if that weren't enough, the RA is throwing me a goodbye party (and, trust me, this is not an office that throws parties!) and they invited my parents and brother. It just... it feels like I'm really valued here, and for once I like I can't argue that I don't deserve it or I'm secretly not good enough. I'm right to be proud of myself.
This was my first real job out of college, and I learned a lot from it, but this lesson is the one I really hope sticks with me.
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| Ow, f**k, ow. |
[28 May 2008|09:34am] |
The city was deserted this weekend.
Which meant an absolutely blissful three days, watching Narnia and Indy matinees, drinking mocha frappuchinos at B&N, reading bits of authors I'm ashamed to say I've never picked up before, like Robert Jordan, as well as old favorites like C.J. Cherryh, and drawing to my heart's content (which I normally can't do at B&N, because the crowded tables mean no room to move elbows or set up reference images). Three days of utter, peaceful awesomeness. I feel replete.
The only snag, literally, was that I was looking up at the buildings instead of watching where I was going on Monday afternoon, and hit a massive crack in the sidewalk. Since I had a slick paperback in one hand, this meant that when I hit the ground, my hands kept going. My knees, cheek and one hand got rubbed pretty raw and bruised purple, and my dominant hand, the one holding the paperback, is kind of hamburger. Which means doing everything one-handed with my off hand for the next week. Grrr.
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| And I'm off! |
[16 Apr 2008|04:14pm] |
Just spent something like eight hours cleaning my own apt. for Pesach (after helping my brother move and editing 2 1/2 book-length projects over the weekend!) and now I'm off to help my mom clean the house up in Mass and spend the first half of Pesach there.
After which, flying to Colorado to check out the school! Which will be awesome. And somewhere in there, I'm getting my freaking learner's permit. finally.
Therefore, I'm probably going to be off LJ for the next two weeks. If you need to reach me, I will be checking my email sporadically.
Hag kasher v'sameah, to those of you celebrating Passover, and big, big hugs to you all.
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| Holy Crap! |
[19 Mar 2008|09:09am] |
I got in! I got in!
I'm going to grad school!!!!!
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| Catching up... |
[09 Mar 2008|11:29am] |
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Just spent a week sick in bed, so I'm making my way through a week's worth of missed posts on y'all's journals. So good to be vertical again...
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| SGA art fest! |
[03 Mar 2008|10:33am] |
This looks extremely cool, and whether you're interested in making art/icons/manips or creating prompts, it seems like it'll be great fun for all.
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| Happy Birthday! |
[27 Feb 2008|09:45am] |
Happy Birthday, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mabfan!!!
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| Belated |
[26 Feb 2008|08:42am] |
Happy Birthday, osewalrus!!!
(Sorry this is late; I spent all day yesterday in bed with terrible back pain.)
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| Frustrating |
[21 Jan 2008|07:09pm] |
There's this massive work project that I haven't had time to do because of all the little but important things people keep dumping on my desk. So, since I'm allowed to bill additional hours for this project, I decided to come in on MLK day, figuring the office would be empty and I could work on the project without interruption.
Instead, everyone came in today and dropped even more random stuff on my desk. I still haven't gotten to the major project and I just put in a ten-hour day that was supposed to be a day off.
This sucks.
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| Birthday |
[17 Jan 2008|12:07pm] |
Happy birthday, gnomi!!!
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| Can't go home again... |
[14 Jan 2008|09:53am] |
...cause it burned down.
Thankfully, it doesn't sound like anyone was hurt, although we haven't yet been able to contact the neighbors we grew up with. They're not answering their cells, but I figure either they left the house without them, or they just haven't had time to charge them. Or they just need space to assimilate all this. I feel terrible for them; they've lived in that house almost 20 years, raised their kids there, and even though no one was hurt, I have no idea what they lost: photos, keepsakes... *sigh*
For myself, I took photos of everything that was important to me when we moved, knowing I'd never be able to knock on a stranger's door and say, "Hi, I used to live here. Mind if I look around?" But there's something sad, something that shakes my worldview a bit, knowing that it's all gone -- the first tree I ever learned to climb, the blobs of paint that looked like elephants, the spyhole in the staircase, our attic kingdom of Utopia -- all gone. I feel unmoored.
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| Getting the vote of the under-10 set. |
[04 Jan 2008|09:15am] |
Had the most fun last night, playing tag and hide-and-go-seek with the always adorable daughter of my former babysitter. Although I discovered that, sadly, my memory for fairy tales involving princesses has almost completely disappeared. Thankfully, I still remember "Gamelan the Dressmaker" by heart -- any story involving pretty dresses, butterflies and beheadings is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.
But the babysitting gig meant getting home around midnight, so I'm yawning happily over my page proofs this morning. Good shabbes, guys!
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| Drawing squees! |
[24 Dec 2007|11:25am] |
I spent 12-14 hours this weekend working on two holiday art exchanges, one of which is staying secret until the big reveal, but the other of which is now posted and is actually getting comments!
Yeah, yeah, I realize I'm being a total dork about this, but you have to understand: I work hard at writing well, but I have some natural talent to build on there. I have NO natural talent for drawing. There is not a single aspect of art that is intuitive or comes easily to me. It's the one thing in my life that I've persisted at despite not being any good at it, so having someone praise my art is really heavy for me.
And now, back to freaking out about grad school applications!
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| Still here! |
[06 Dec 2007|12:00pm] |
I realized it's been ages since my last posting, so I thought I'd do a quick update for those who were curious:
Birthday passed with a minimum of angst, and I'm rolling along with the grad school applications. Thank you guys so much for helping me choose the portfolio, by the way! Now I'm grumbling over the many, many required statements of purpose (very few of which can be recycled), but I'm coming down the home stretch.
Work is INSANE. This is our busy season, neither our email nor our website have worked properly for the past month, and yesterday four separate people came in to ask me where the hell their project was and tell me to prioritize it over everything else. Actual conversation with one boss: "So when do you need this done?" "Last week." "No, seriously, when's the due date?" "Last week." "Okay, that's not helpful. When's the last possible date the printer needs this by to have it ready in time?" "...a month from now."
Took a poetry course and discovered two things: (1) Poetry is AWESOME. There is some seriously cool shit out there and I actually have personal tastes about it. (2) I am NOT a poet. Not remotely.
And I'm taking part in two holiday art exchanges via my fannish journal, both asking for characters I've never drawn before! Which is really, really challenging and a hell of a lot of fun. One person wants various Malfoys, and the other wants MASH. I'm seriously looking forward to trying to capture Alan Alda's grin.
So, that's me in a nutshell (Cue Uri: "Help! I'm in a nutshell!") We now return to me poking about to see what's going on in the very interesting journals of my very cool friends.
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| The Jane Austen Book Club |
[03 Oct 2007|09:54am] |
Karen Joy Fowler was one of my Clarion teachers and, while it's been a while since I read her work, I picked up the Austen book and am trying to read it before the movie comes out on Friday. So far I'm really liking it, and I'm liking what she does with the characters, having each of their back stories unpacked through the lens of various Austen characters. There's also something in the group dynamic that reminds me oddly of Chaucer.
But she's doing something interesting with the POV that I've never seen done before. In the back story scenes, she's firmly entrenched in the third person singular, focused on the thoughts of one person. But the group scenes are mostly first person plural: "We glared at Allegra. We saw Bernadette look to Jocelyn before proceeding." There's never an "I," and the person the "We" reacts to shifts equally between the group members. So the first person plural is not an unnamed narrator from within the group, it's more of a hive mind, like the book club itself is a character instead of a collection of characters. It's a really interesting choice, and I'm trying to decide how I feel about it. Has anyone else read the book?
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| 100% Columbian |
[24 Sep 2007|11:35am] |
With Ahmadinejad scheduled to speak twice today, once downtown at the U.N. and once four blocks away from me at Columbia, I wanted to share my own thoughts on the protests and on the visit itself.
I think it's great that Ahmadinejad is speaking at Columbia. The man is a monster, and he's shaping global politics. College students grapple with intellectual problems in books, but this is a rare opportunity for 20-year-old kids to question a powerful world leader with whom they vehemently disagree. And he has to sit there and answer, or at least listen to, the questions! People who yell that he's taking advantage of our free speech when he doesn't allow it in his own country are missing the point. He HAS a platform to say whatever the hell he wants in his own country, uncontested, and everyone has to listen to him. Here, his audience gets to talk back, to fire questions at him, to tell truth to power. This isn't his taking advantage, it's our opportunity.
Where I have the problem is the other half of the visit: his speech before the U.N. I hate that this monster has an opportunity to speak before world leaders and diplomats. I hate that he has enough clout that we have to negotiate issues of terrorism, pollution, economic policy with him, that our government will have to offer concessions and work with his agenda if they want to contain or mitigate the damage he can do. I wish that we could relegate him to the position of intellectual exercise for college students. And maybe that's what the protest is really about: not Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia, but the larger fact that we can't change, that, monster that he is, he is powerful enough that we actually have to negotiate with him.
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| Post Chag Scramble |
[17 Sep 2007|01:25pm] |
I'm back! A good, sweet year to you all, which I should have said before I left, but didn't have time to post.
What did I miss?
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| C is for cooooookie |
[11 Sep 2007|01:01pm] |
Uri just swung by in the pouring rain with Mexican chocolate chip pecan cookies for me. They are utterly, utterly delicious. Also, we laughed until we couldn't breathe. Life is good.
We now return to the sounds of happy munching.
P.S. Uri had a question I wasn't able to answer satisfactorily. Is there a usage difference between "badly" and "poorly"?
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| Madeline L'Engle |
[10 Sep 2007|09:58am] |
Madeline L'Engle was always one of the three creatives I wanted to be when I grew up. I loved her characters; there was something very true about them, both how textured they were but also the fact that who they had the potential to be as children didn't necessarily play out in adulthood; that sometimes the choices we make to go through one door or stave off one disaster quash or kill other important parts of us. L'Engle's books challenged me as a second grader (when some parts were frankly over my head) and continued to challenge me as I grew. They still blow me away every time I read them.
But most of all, from an early age I admired her spritual integrity. Her characters were religious without sermonizing or evangelizing; religion was just the lens through which they saw the world, just as much as their scientific understanding and curiosity. That balance of holding on to what's meaningful to you without trying to sell it or push it on the audience was something I very much wanted to emulate as a writer.
I had the good fortune to hear her speak twice in high school; both times I found her a charismatic, grounded woman, comfortable with her own power. She could electrify an audience in person as deftly as she could with her written words. She will be sorely missed.
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