Multi-tasking chaos

I'm sitting here at my lap top with both Safari and Firefox open. A total of eleven tabs are up and running at the moment. Plus I'm slowly writing my paper for Print Production in word. I have iTunes open and Illustrator is open and on hold. Had to take a break from my artwork to blog about my current madness on one little screen. It begs the question, can this be considered productive multi-tasking at this point? I mean really, I am all for working on a paper and an art project with music going on and facebook up to cut the tidiness of homework. Then there's Google! I google everything, so there's almost always a tab open for that. Along with my gmail tab I keep open most of the time. Pandora of course, yes that is right I am listening to iTunes but I don't close my Pandora tab..just in case. This is the start of madness! The mere fact that I think it's good to separate my "important tabs" from my "temporary tabs" by utilizing two internet programs should tell me something. Alas, it all seems so normal to me now. I have been sucked in by my own over zealous need to multi-task. I don't confine this to my personal lap top either. When I am in Layout Design class, the first thing I do is open fb, gmail, Google and Pandora in Safari. Sometimes iTunes depending on the day comes up too. Then I make my way to InDesign to work on my project. I could be proactive and downsize..but due to my Libra traits I am horrible at decision making skills so that isn't going to happen! =)

Ribbons

Yesterday was World AIDS Day and I was late for class. Left my little red ribbon at home. Had to make one from a scrap of red fabric from the Interior Design department's stash. Gave it to a friend on my way out of the building that evening. Sharing my artsy red ribbon made me smile. Got home and remembered my red ribbon pin is on my winter coat. It was sixty degrees yesterday so no coat. Would have also made it hard to locate had I been looking for it in a drawer, not on a coat. This is so I will wear it all winter long. Should buy another to pin on my purse perhaps, have one with me always. One day isn't enough for the people I love.

Art of Technology

So my instructor for print production has this odd obsession with making us watch online videos. Sometimes they are interesting little movies on graphic designers. However, more often they are videos she finds on YouTube that she relates back to class. For instance, we watched several short videos on different printing processes and how they work or are made. Now if you choose to make us watch videos in order to take up some time in our four hours together, which is honestly another form of busy work, that's understandable. Four hours of one class is a little ridiculous unless it's a lab class; like drawing. Back to why I started this blog though. If you choose to use an online video in class you would think she'd watch them to ensure they have meaning. Or maybe not, because I watched a six minute video on pressing flowers..and another video covered printing in the sense of teaching someone to write the written word. Informative sure, but at eight in the morning it's a little much to have us watch nonsense because your links are wrong. The best part was when she left the room after starting the pressing flowers video and came back well after it had ended. She was all hyped up asking us if we found it educational and enlightening. She was more disappointed when we told her the nature of the clip than I had expected her to become. So while I can't tell you the inner workings of commercial laser printing; I can go press some flowers for you instead.

Power Pointless

Through the years I have grown to hate Power Point; a hatred that has only grown since returning to college. While I understand how this program can be useful and make presenting easier, some have come to depend on it in an unhealthy fashion. Take school for instance. I go to an art school chock full of designers and creative, right brain individuals. Watching my teacher, who is a professional graphic designer, rely on pitiful power point presentations to get through every class is painful. Not merely because they are boring and dull. They almost hurt to look at! Here is a professional woman that has spent a good portion of her life getting paid to design great pieces for important clients..and she is degrading herself with a bunch of lackluster slides to help aide her in reaching a group of design students. It isn't bad enough that a woman we are to look up to chooses to demean herself in such a way, but when I watch fellow classmates do it I cringe inside. To see someone that in the past has blown me away with their eye for design make a boring and incidentally unnecessary power point presentation makes me crazy. Then of course the audience they choose to show this pathetic attempt at "communication" is our student AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) group. Which brings me to another point on reasons I hate power point. When it is used without purpose. If your power point consists of one word or sentence slides I have a hard time listening to you. I'm too busy trying to figure out why you didn't just jot down these notes on a paper or note cards. It isn't as though she wanted to give us something to look at; unless her goal was to make a power point of notes in the ugliest way possibly. Then by all means, forgive me for criticising such a brilliant choice..
Now don't get me wrong; for one reason or another I too have implemented this program. But as a designer and as someone who thinks (most likely too much) about it, I put a little extra effort into keeping it from making the designer in me want to slit her wrists.

Eighty Candles

I haven't written anything here mainly due to the fact that I self-edit as I write. I am, for whatever reason, far too critical of my thoughts being in written form. I tend to write and then rethink things and erase it all. I'm trying this new thing, just letting it flow and be what it is...we'll see how that pans out.

Today was my mother's 54th birthday. A lot of people her age dislike each birthday more and more as they age, often just another reminder of how old one is or feels. But my mother is different; she loves that she's another year older. It's inspiring to be around someone like that.

A little less than a month ago it was my birthday. This year I was in a funk about life. I remember telling a friend all I wanted for my birthday was for everyone to just go away. Not in the normal meaning of the phrase really, almost as though I was wishing for a strange deserted sort of alone. As though I could wake up one morning and leave the house and the city would be oddly empty, just for one day. Why did I want this? Who would wish to have a ghost town existence for one day? Even now thinking about it, it doesn't make sense to me now. The friend that I told this 'birthday wish' to took me to The Nelson, which is my usual form of peace and solace. So my hat's off to close friends that know what you want even when you are lost and unsure. :)