survival tips 2 and 3

day two and i already messed up! there's no good excuse, unless you count skimming Craigslist ads for jobs and descending into a deep bout of depression prohibitive to blogging. which is what happened. so i skipped out on the computer, went to hot yoga, and spent the night watching Frank's Place (see photo above. and which, btw, is SO SO good if you're into representations of race, gender and class in 1980s New Orleans...).
**bonus tips! kick-your-ass yoga and good eighties TV! very healing for the soul!**

well, i'm making up with two distractions today.



First, Puppywar, a website that works akin to those Hot or Not voting sites popular a year or two ago. But it's for dogs. It's totally weird. And why are all the "Underdogs" of the poodle variety? Does this speak to some kind of anti-froufrou trend?

This recommendation is in honor of Slumdog-mania, the Obama search for a "First Puppy" annoyingly clogging the news these days, in addition to my conclusion that if my dissertation is gonna be about violence, it may as well involve cute animals.

Second, check this silly How to Write a PhD Dissertation website. I never get tired of anti-academic humor. it's got moments like:

"There comes a time in the life of every graduate student when she or he realizes that another two years of graduate school cannot be endured. Even though a year spent writing your thesis will be filled with frustration and angst, it will end up being worth it in order to escape school forever.

Remember the following phrase: "No one will ever read your thesis.'' You'll hear this phrase a number of times as you finish up, and it's vitally important that you believe it to be true. The phrase is important because without it you would be tempted to work on your thesis until everything is perfect, and you would never finish."

Not as good as PhD Comics, but worth a quick look.

Enjoy!

survival tips - part 1

As I wade through the sludge that is my qualifying process, I'm realizing I need to be more proactive about identifying and sharing survival tactics. Writing these papers is a slow and arduous exercise, and I'm more of a quick and painful kind of girl when it comes to composing my work. Having to tame the efficiency drive in me has been difficult enough, but I didn't anticipate the added attack on my confidence and psychological well-being. In any case, rather than griping about academic hoops or my decision to veer down this scholarly road (which I can do, at length, and just about every day), I'd rather put my 'suffering' to work!

Without further, tips for surviving the chinese water torture of qualifying...going to try to do one a day, mainly to remind myself there is fun to be hand even when the work never ends.

Tip number 1. Find a youtube video with an endearing performance by a child under the age of, say, twelve. My pick of the day:

building blocks

As a kid, my brother and I played with Legos obsessively. He more than I, but still, I've never forgiven myself for not taking the time to check out Legoland while living in San Diego. (yeah, that's a lego San Francisco alright...)

All the more exciting, then, to have two occasions to celebrate the joy of the building block this week. First, I saw a talk by James Rojas, an architect, planner and artist who uses found objects (Legos, yes, but buttons, blocks, sticks, shapes of all other kinds) to run community workshops on city design.

From what I gathered, he asks participants to build their utopian city with the objects at hand, which they then have to describe and explain to the group. Although it wasn't clear if he then works directly with redevelopment agencies or designers to implement these visions, but the exercise struck me as a useful step in simply starting to understand neighborhood, community and the built environment. I thought of the housing community where I taught DJing and music, Town and Country located in Southeast San Diego. It's isolated in a corner of San Diego that's carved through with freeways and impassable thoroughfares, dotted with an impersonal shopping center or two, and largely cut off (spatially and culturally) from the kinds of things people normally associate with that city - beaches, Sea World, surfing. It's also in one of the more violent, gang-ridden areas of the city, and these factors all combine to produce a fragmented and limited sense of city life.

I'd love to see what the kids i worked with would create when asked to visualize their community and reshape their neighborhood into a more appealing design. Instead of dreaming of "getting out" or trying to expose them to other parts of the city, how might we work with them to actually reinterpret and begin to re-use where they are actually at?

As for the second Lego-rrific moment? Christopher Niemann's tribute to New York, of course!

winter wonder

It's amazing to me that falling from the sky, whipping in the wind, laying gently on the ground, each snowflake looks like a perfectly clear and delicate piece of crystal. It's really hard to imagine that's what's melting on my face, stinging my eyes or clinging to my hair like dandruff. And then they melt, turn to mush, get black and disgusting from passing cars and a thousand Gore-tex boots.

I'm not prone to musing on winter or snow, but I suppose a February in Boston after nearly four years in southern California makes it easier to marvel at the seasons the rest of the country takes for granted. When I was back in San Francisco over the holidays, we checked out an exhibit on early photography at SFMOMA (Brought to Light). It was several rooms of black and white photos from the nineteenth century...early microscopic captures of plant and animal life, documents of planets, lightning, the first x-rays.



For me, it was an experience in imagined memory, in which I could picture how revelatory it was to be able to see bones, the shape of electricity, the motion of the human body, a perfect crystalline snowflake. It was also a reminder that sometimes the camera's authenticity is much more surreal than what the naked eye observes...and reconciling these two forms of vision can get tricky.