Growing Ripples

I don't have much to say, except that I'm absolutely thrilled to know that there are people out in the world that I went to high school with, some that I would have never considered close friends by any means, who have donated to the UN project. And others that have found connections to share the story of the project with. It's truly heartwarming to watch those ripples of awareness and support grow and spread. I can only hope that they continue to do so until we have reached our goal of $250,000.

Don't let the ripples die off before it happens!

Many Hands Make the Load Lighter

Just after the crisis in Haiti, I bought a t-shirt from Threadless to donate to the cause. The slogan of the shirt was "Men anpil chay pa lou," which translates to "Many hands make the load lighter." I didn't think much about the phrase at the time, aside from admiring the beauty of such an idea. That idea feels a wee bit more pertinent to me now.

Last week, I almost lost my job. Sort of. Without going into detail, I'll sum up by saying that the project I've given my heart to for almost two full years now may not see the light of day without some serious fundraising. We're talking about $250k of seriousness. That's a big number, but it could come down quickly.

If you're reading this, you probably know me at least a little. Maybe we're not friends that give gifts to each other, and maybe we haven't seen each other in years. But if I bumped into you on the street and asked if you could spare five bucks, would you give it to me? What about just one dollar? Well, I'm bumping into you on a metaphorical street right now. And if you have one, five, ten, whatever dollars to spare, I'd ask you to donate it to my project. Make my project into our project.

You may not have seen the same faces of young boys that I've seen, and you may never have wondered what those boys are being taught by their peers and elders about how to treat a girl and how to love someone. But I hope that you at least believe me when I tell you that they're out there, and that the project I'm working on could give them a chance to question the things they hear, see, adopt, and someday might practice.

If you can't spare that few dollars, or even if you can, perhaps you can instead spare a few minutes. Tell someone else about this project, forward my message, or just share the donation link. It would quite literally mean the world to me.

You can read about the project here, or jump straight to the donation page. Many thanks in advance for your small acts that can make this enormous but powerful load a little lighter.

Schoolwork, Internship, Apprenticeship, or Ownership

I've just been introduced to an interesting thought regarding my workplace that had never occurred to me before. For anyone reading that is not familiar with the Emergent Media Center's project structure, we hire students for pay to work on projects under the supervision of staff and faculty advisors.

I've always been aware of the fact that this is very different from a classroom experience. In a classroom, the teacher challenges the learner to exercise gains in knowledge through activities that mean little beyond the educational realm; your homework does not profit the teacher in any immediate sense.

This is also different than an internship; while an internship is provided to a learner by a teacher in order to acquire profits and sustain a pool of employees, interns are notoriously buried in menial tasks that are not worth the time and effort of a more skilled worker. This makes for a very long process of gaining knowledge and transforming learner to teacher. Someday, that intern may be the skilled worker laying tedious assignments out onto new interns, but that ladder may be a tall one to climb.

The closest comparison I could come up with is apprenticeships of old; someone would take in a successor to their profession and teach them the craft. This process also allows the teacher a degree of profit based on the learner's progress, and the knowledge gain is steeper. There are no intermediate positions, just a transition from learner to fellow teacher. Still potentially a long process, but more focused on the topic of knowledge gain from the start.

Even this does not suffice to explain the model here at the EMC. Here, teacher and learner both strive for the exact same goals, and may indeed be doing the exact same task. Given how much responsibility for the product is laid in the hands of the learners, one can even argue that the learner's progress, product, and profits become more important than the teacher's. This is not to say that the presence of the teacher is unnecessary or insignificant, but the fruits of the teacher's labor are minimal and sometimes nonexistent.

Having reflected upon this, it truly is fascinating how similar and yet different the dynamics are from classroom to EMC: similar in feeling, but different in realization. While we can only hope that there are never any tremendous failures on the part of our learners, the rewards or consequences of good or bad work have so much more impact than one letter of the alphabet stamped on a paper or inserted into an email. And I think perhaps the teacher's interpretation of the learner's progress is far different. In this space, a major failure can still be an "A moment" if the conclusions and resolutions that come out of that failure express true learning. Here, the process to reach the final product is just as important as what you "turn in" at the end of your time on a project.

The evaluation of a learner's growth is so interdisciplinary here too. Sure, maybe you're a writer, and if this were a classroom environment we would grade you on the script you turn in. But even though you're a writer, we still see and appreciate your communication style and behavior management. You may not be an artist, but we find value in those stick figure storyboards you used to get yourself to the end goal. You didn't have to talk to the programmers, but we admire your choice to learn how your script will be programmed into a game. Teachers don't have the time to observe every moment of work on an assignment in order to grade the process, but aside from it sounding a little creepy, I think our world would see better learners, and ultimately better teachers too, if the entire journey were under examination for praise or critique.

I've digressed a little, but my main point is that I like where I work for all the whos, hows, and whats involved. The process is just as awesomely emergent as all of the products it generates.

Ho Hum

Another work week off to a slow start, and it's already half over!

I feel like I accomplished quite a bit today. Read a 60 page design document, gave my Info Lit team members an assignment to complete by the end of the week, and started a massive art asset list. Unpacked 283 books, took pictures of 75 or so, and started processing around 50. Attempted to diffuse a concern one of my team members has about another team member. Still at work until 10 doing the processing bit. This is my break for the day; when I go home, I only plan on reading a little before I succumb to the blankets.

I haven't been feeling very philosophical lately, but one thing that has begun to stick with me is a strange sense of comfort when I'm around other people, with little matter who they are. I've always imagined the people I know as having rope twined into my heart; those that know me better have thick ropes that twist deep to hold tight, while some ropes have been chopped off completely, leaving behind only the stump of a past friendship. Lately, I feel as if so many forces are anchored to me that I've somehow begun to lie suspended between all of them in a happy social stasis.

On the opposite side, one thing that seems to bring my feet back to the ground is the idea of a meaningless moment. With so many parts of my life feeling right and purposeful, those that I spend doing something mindless are painful; worst of all are the moments when I can't muster the brainpower to think of something good to do. It feels something like clawing at the sides of a deep hole and making the hole even more difficult to get out of in the process. Fortunately, those moments don't strike too often.

And on a completely random note unrelated to any of this, I miss listening to music. I used to exercise my creativity by listening to my music collection on random and adding the songs to playlists that were named as imaginitively and elaborately as possible; things like "Looking Up at Skyscrapers with Neon Signs at Sunset" or "Rowing a Boat Past Grassy Hills on a Painfully Bright Day." I rarely got more than one song onto a playlist, but it was absolutely delightful to me to be able to look at one of those descriptions at a later time and feel that exact feeling again on cue. Memories tied to music are powerful in a way that I don't understand, but it never stops me from completely adoring it and allowing it to carry me away.

Keep Moving Forward

It's only Thursday, and I feel as if the week has already run itself dry. I missed a meeting about an event I'm not sure I have the time or sanity to attend anymore, and I have a huge team meeting tomorrow during which I've no idea what will happen. I didn't even get as much done at the library as I expected to, and I have to head downtown around 4 tomorrow to cash a check and take my boyfriend out to dinner. Sigh.

But I've just finished watching Meet the Robinsons, and I loved that a motto in the movie, "Keep Moving Forward," was taken from a longer quote by Walt Disney:

"Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We're always exploring and experimenting."

I love this quote because it could apply to virtually any situation in life, at least in the sense that it is an ideal to strive for and a great philosophy to stand by. Oddly, I also have the song from the ending credits of Prince Caspian, a new Disney spin on an classic British novel, stuck in my head. I looked at some of the lyrics, and these are the ones that stood out to me the most:

"Just because everything's changing
doesn't mean it's never
been this way before.

All you can do is try to know
who your friends are
as you head off to the war."

It's strange that everything lately seems to come back to other people in my mind. Every once in a while, I get a great idea that excites me to the core of my existence. But that kind of feeling never lasts as long as the ones that are encouraged and cherished by others too. In light of this, I've just made my first addition to the photo album that Ann gave me with the EMC award.
I was opening my desk drawer and sorting through the knick-knacks to pick up my motivational monster when I noticed something else that didn't mean much at the time that I got it, but that nevertheless showed thought on someone's part. Just now, however, it sparked a greater feeling that someone out there believes in me. Whether this is true or not, it warmed me a little inside, and I immediately set about placing it in my book, next to the last picture and below the words "Follow Your Dream." Whatever my dream is, it is fueled by those around me. I hope that as time goes by, I will gather more mementos to fill that page.

Lazy-ish Week

I've been sleeping in until 8:30 or 9 for the past few days, and it feels sooooo good. I feel a little bit guilty about doing it, but I just don't have the motivation to get up bright and early in the morning to do a job that a trained monkey could probably handle, as long as it wasn't as technologically savvy and therefore utterly frustrated as I am by the amount of paper filing I have to do. I don't mind the days when I can sweep through my boss's office and make her feel like half the problems in her world have disappeared, but when I get bogged down with a grueling, menial task like cutting up slips of paper and stapling them onto index cards while writing the purchasing year on the corner and paper-clipping them if they were requested by faculty before alphabetizing them and indexing them for four hours...you get the idea. I don't like it.

Sadly, I think tasks like this suck the creative juices out of me, too. I really wish I had pushed to get two paid positions at the EMC this summer. Whether the pay would be better or worse, the effects on my mental state would have been worth it. As it stands right now, I have such a strong desire to sit down and literally do nothing to take away the feeling of having done so much that means nothing over the course of the day. This is all coming out of a week in which I've spent only 4 hours on a creative project and the rest on lists and books, so perhaps even getting back into my regular routine will feel better next week. Plus a three day weekend! Woo-hoo!

A Language Tangent and a Subscriptions Budget

The weekend is off to a slow but steady start. Last night, I watched an Ang Lee movie entitled Lust, Caution. Everyone I know says that Chinese would be too difficult to learn or too hard to speak or that it's just plain ugly compared to similar Asian languages, especially when sung, but after watching the film, I think I disagree. In all fairness, the lead actress had a relatively soft and low voice, but her speech and singing alike were beautiful to me. It was interesting to see a portrayal of a Japanese tea house in one of the scenes, because I have often been impressed with the idea that Japanese culture is so much more graceful and peaceful - here, it was quite the opposite.

It was also strange to realize what few parts of the Chinese language are still drifting around in my head: wo (I/me), ni (you), ta (he/she, distinguished by the written character but pronounced the same), men (pluralizing suffix), shi (verb to be), bu (negative), ma (question), and of all things, gege (older brother) and didi (younger brother). I don't even have any brothers, so I've no idea why those stuck. There's also xiexie (Thank you), ni hao (Hello), and zaijian (Goodbye) for actual phrases, as well as meiguo (America) and zhongguo (China).

From every language I've been exposed to, there's one sentence or phrase that I keep in my head. For French: Je ne comprends pas. Parlez-vous anglais? (I don't understand. Do you speak English?) For Spanish: Hola. Como te llamas? (Hi. What's your name?) For Japanese: Ima, nanji desu ka? (What time is it right now?) For Latin: Semper ubi sub ubi (Gibberish that sounds like you're saying "Always wear underwear" when translated aloud). For German: Volkswagon (No translation needed, but they just say it funny). For Russian: da (yes). And Chinese: Wo shi meiguo ren. Ni shi bu shi zhongguo ren? (I'm American. Are you Chinese?) I'm not sure why these sentences have been tucked into my mind. Logically, they should all have to do with asking for help or getting the other person to speak my language in one way or another, but clearly it hasn't worked out that way. Some are from languages I never formally studied. Some are from encounters from people living in the culture from which the language comes. All have strong memories, both good and bad.

Today, I have been at work since the relative start of my day. I've spent the majority of my time attempting to come up with scenarios for Amanda's game. It's harder than you'd think to come up with situations for teens to ponder that would expose them to cultural or class differences without delving too far into morals. In essence, it is hard to create questions that do not have one right answer, at least on the count of 100. I will nevertheless persevere, because I am honored that Amanda asked me, and more so with each day. She truly is an admirable game developer, if only she would show it more often. I saw her yesterday with the board game Trouble tucked under her arm. Today, she told me that she had taken out the cardboard bottom to the game and redesigned it to be a game about oil use and how it effects the world. She's going to get it printed on cardboard soon, and I hope to see it when she's done. I'd never think to do something like that. I hope I'll be that smart in another 10-20 years.

The rest of the day will most likely be devoted to games and movies - ha! I hope to sneak in some reading outside before the clouds and dusk chase the sun away, but if I don't, I have a game that Amanda gave me for inspiration sitting on the desk beside me, I still need to finish playing the Myst series, and I just signed up for a Netflix account so I won't keep buying movies that I don't particularly want to see again. There's apparently an option to instantly watch movies on your computer in addition to those you receive in the mail: that's my kind of plan. I suspect this subscription, along with my music and video game ones, will take up my recreational budget for the summer. Fortunately, I should have a beta to try out in a month rather than paying for an MMO on top of this. Assuming no one drags me downtown for food too often, I think I have a solid basis for enjoying my months off from school to the fullest.