At the end of last month's post I said that maybe I should 'lie down or something'. I regret to inform you that I have not managed that. October has been a lot, but less in the fun 'Emma is doing weird stuff' way that September was, and more in the 'Emma is absolutely slammed with work and melting down' way.
Turns out managing two cohorts of students (the incoming and outgoing groups on our 15 month masters course), other teaching commitments, freelance workload, and preparing for not one but two weird events at the end of the month has all been a bit much.
Still, I power through and eagerly await... well, realistically, Christmas break is when I will actually get to lie down, so that, I guess.
And I had the exact realization that this was going to be a heavy month on... the 1st
As is often the way when I am either a) a bit stressed, or b) have been travelling, my guts got kinda bad for a while. I had a weird day where I barely ate anything because I was too busy and not feeling good (very rare! Emma lives for dinner!) and then woke up at 2am STARVING, but the only thing I could stomach was a bowl of white rice (and lo, it was good). Then accidentally ended up eating white rice meals for most of the following week, which is probably not advisable, but did see me right (my guts have actually been great for the rest of the month, thankfully)
Bought some jeans on Vinted which were super cute but way too big on the waist and way too long. Liked them enough (and got them cheap enough) that I could afford to spend £25 at a local tailor to get them *chef's kiss* perfect, and I am delighted. I am now very excited by the idea of buying stuff cheap on Vinted then tailoring it to a perfect fit. (Also rare departure from all black wardrobe for Emma)
Another thing I find when my brain is tired is that earworms become stickier and more frequent.
This day started with the realisation that there are distinct similarities between the Vengaboys 'We like to party' intro and Steve Reich's 'Different Trains' (part 2)... Just me?! I think it'd be a fun DJ set transition anyway...
Then of course there's this cursed banger (warning, may cause PTSD for those particularly well acquainted with HMRC)
Talking of cursed bangers, 26 days on and I still haven't freed myself from this one (yes, I know it's AI — as I said to a friend at the time, maybe the greatest threat we actually face from the machine is our brains melting as they become capable of ever more all consuming songs that are ultimately devoid of content but so perfectly engineered we all lose ourselves to them)
(For anyone who needs more, this extended version goes further and was actually made by a human)
And finally, me and my partner have been really enjoying the Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex series, with this frankly baffling and kind of cringe closing credits song which has firmly embedded itself in my brain against my will (not helped by my partner insisting on singing along to it every single time we watch an episode).
Talking of Vinted, I got this great... jumpsuit? Onesie? Overalls? Anyway everyone at work liked it
Justin asked me yesterday 'Does this make you feel alive or does this make you want to die', so for anyone worried it is definitely the former (but I do wish my hands were slightly less full right now)
SOMEONE in my block persists in flushing wet wipes, but luckily I am the sewer whisperer (i.e. it's literally always me who spots there's a problem before anyone else and calls Thames Water, who every time say 'wow this was just about to get really bad')
It's not the super power I would have chosen, I'll be honest
We live in a ground floor flat with front and back gardens. The back garden is safely enclosed with high fences, so when the weather's fine, we leave the back door open and KJ can happily potter around out there, which is nice for her and us. However, what I'd forgotten was that the previous day I'd left the back gate unlatched so the Thames Water engineers could gain access to unclog the sewer. Because it swings shut, there was no visual cue for me to remember to close it. However, it does sometimes blow open in the wind, and this must have been what happened when KJ was bimbling around out back.
So I'm just sat by my front window eating lunch when suddenly I look up THERE SHE IS!!
She'd obviously exited the back gate, and then — upon finding it had swung shut behind her — had bumbled along down the 50 metres or so of back alley, through the communal car park, and back all the way along the front street to the front of our property.
Obviously I dived up and immediately opened the front door, and she sauntered back in happy as larry, while I had a total meltdown about all the catastrophic things that COULD have happened because of my idiocy. What if she'd met a cat or a fox! (She'd definitely have chased). What if she'd met another dog! What if she'd met a human who had approached her in the wrong way?! (She can be reactive)
Anyway, I was filled with renewed affection for her just being extremely chill and mature about it all, and making her way safely back to our front door, then politely waiting to be let in. Then shortly after further wracked with guilt after realising that due to a miscommunication, no one had given her breakfast that day. A confusing day for a good girl (for which we apologised profusely with goodies)
Weird side quest — got invited to write a review of "Mapping Britain's Railways" for Eye Magazine (not published yet). This was mostly because a friend who works there was like 'who do I know who is a designer who also loves trains', and YES hi that's me!!
Anyway I mostly only had good things to say about it, so if you know someone who's a designer who also loves trains, this would make a pretty good christmas gift.
One those months, regrettably.
Co-organised and ran another super fun collaborative workshop with our MA (Design for Data Visualisation) and MA User Experience Design students. Making the students do data vis and build 'apps' using only craft supplies in three hours is always extremely amusing (and like, they make good stuff!! Stuff they would never have otherwise considered!!)
I normally think I'm pretty savvy to this stuff but I CLICKED THE BAD LINK (and had a stern phonecall from IT, and felt thoroughly shamed by my own stupidity). (Though I am actually choosing to blame it on being tired and distracted rather than stupid because that's easier to come to terms with)
"Yeah let's just schedule all the meetings on the same day, that'll be a good idea"
(It was actually very satisfying to have so many fun/interesting conversations but I did feel quite fried by the end of it. Luckily the last meeting of the day was with my line manager Keir who is always there to tell me I'm DOING GOOD)
"I'm... doing... good..." [Melts]
I was feeling so exhausted at the end of that week that I cancelled all my weekend plans and aimed to (mostly) not work and try to de-stress. Unfortunately destiny had other plans, and KJ spent the whole day screaming with pain every time she tried to lie down, and generally acting extremely weird, so we had to take her to the emergency vet. We were worried it was something acute like another pancreatitis flare up (she didn't have any visible gastro symptoms but her tummy might have been sore), but it turned out to just be a really bad arthritis day :(
Anyway, the vet gave her an injection of 'the good drugs' (opioids) and she spent most of the rest of the next day lying in the wet grass staring into the middle distance, but obviously feeling much better. Seems like she's going to have to go onto longer term permanent pain relief/anti-inflammatories, sadly.
Our outgoing cohort of students are rapidly approaching their final show, and as they're masters students I think it's especially important to give them some amount of agency over the show branding/show space etc. So I kind of said to them 'look, do what you want within reason'. Unfortunately our ideas of 'within reason' were quite different...
Are dogs allowed at uni?!?! idk but am not a grass
Took an afternoon out of the madness to go check out the small Vera Molnar show at the V&A with one of our cool alumni (it's only small but very very good for anyone with an interest in digital/algorithmic art, pen plotters). I really liked it!
My old friend and former housemate (way back in like, 2013/14ish?!) Rachel was in London so we went for drinks and eats! She is somehow one of my most enthusiastic readers of this blog, so HI Rachel, it was lovely to hang out, I'm sorry this drawing is not better, but also you're always telling me not to be so self deprecating about my drawings, haha
Weather got baaad (I miss long hot summer)
Because it's good to do things which are not work, I also went to see the Gabriel Orozco show at the White Cube, and REALLY liked it. Felt like a weirdly good compliment to the Vera Molnar stuff, despite them working in very different times/contexts. I recommend (both shows are free too!)
In other attempts at not working, trying to play my silly video games and enjoy my silly fandoms (is anyone else DEVASTATED by the news that Archive of Our Own is going to be down for like, 4 weeks?!?!)
I am trying to finish Yakuza Kiwami slowly over the next few weeks in readiness for hopefully diving deep into the new Zelda game at Christmas — like I cannot overstate how excited I am to simply lie on my sofa and do little else
Because right now MY BRAIN IS TOO FULL!!!
I teach on a particular unit which involves putting students into groups from a variety of different courses. In previous years the groups have been randomly pre-assigned to ensure course mix, but I've always felt this really takes away from the students' agency, and leads to a lot of difficulties and unhappiness, so I wanted to try and come up with a system for allowing them to select their own groups this year (while still ensuring course mix). In some ways it worked really well — typically, only around 10 – 20% of students are happy with their groups, and the rest are mildly to seriously dissatisfied. This year, I'd say like 80 – 90% were genuinely happy/excited by who they ended up with. But I had around 3 students who are like, actively angry/tearful with me for who they've ended up paired with, and I'M NOT SURE THIS IS BETTER. Might just make it easy on myself next year and they can all have a medicore experience again!! All the colleagues I've spoken to have been like 'eh, you can't make all the people happy all the time', but I simply cannot shake the feeling of overwhelming guilt.
I'm running another version of The Data Emporium this weekend at Games Transformed festival, which has been a source of a great deal of my stress, but also it's very exciting and a super cool opportunity I really didn't want to miss! Anyway, as a new part of this I am using a thermal printing camera, and it is very fun (if this technology had existed when I was a child I would have been absolutely obsessed)
Saw this railway worker with the longest litter picker I've ever seen for collecting items off the track, and it pleased me
There are two parallel stairwells in the tower block at LCC (in a way that is quite weird and I have never encountered in another building). On this day they both had a distinct olfactory vibe, and tbh neither was what I'd have *liked* but one was definitely better than the other.
Today was the first day of the Data Emporium at Games Transformed!! It went well! Trains suck this weekend which means getting anywhere central from my neighbourhood is a bit arduous and everything is more tiring than it needs to be, but I powered through with a ton of help from one of my amazing students Ana.
Ana is going to be running the whole thing singlehanded tomorrow, because I have to be somewhere else?! And I guess I'll tell you all about that next month?!
Happy halloween for those of you who celebrate — I for one will be going to bed early.
No comments:
Post a Comment