esprit de l'escalier

Penultimate day of work

Today was my penultimate day of work. I got a little blurry a couple of times. There was a surprise going away party for me and another guy, whose last day is Tuesday. I almost thought no one was doing anything. Especially when nothing happened in our staff meeting and I got cut off during my good bye to the group by our head person. But then a friend acted weird about something, and then my boss did, and I thought the meeting scheduled for today might be a party. I wasn't positive, but was when I caught my boss coming out of the elevators with a cake.

It still doesn't feel like I'm leaving for good. It's hard to get your mind and body prepared for a change when you continue with your daily routine. Today, around 3:30 a huge storm slammed into downtown, quickly turning the sky to black and engulfing the Sears Tower. Everyone left their work untouched for about a half an hour, congregating by the windows, watching the sky unload, chatting with each other. Odd I won't see them next week, or the next.

I packed up all my decorations at the end of the day. My cube is denuded, and will probably bum me out tomorrow. Somehow my umbrella escaped my bag and there was a torrential downpour by the time I reached my stop. For some reason I thought I'd chance it. I was immediately drenched and my shoe broke. I made it halfway until I ducked onto a porch stoop and waited for it to let up. Somehow most of my prints made the trip unscathed, even with water pooling at the bottom of the bag.

After toweling off, I set to work on a stack of papers to sift through. I found some doodling quotes in the mess. I like both of these quotes. They resonate with me today. Hopes and haunts.

I probably won't post again til next week. Wish me luck with packing! Less than a week til moving day.

My first relief print (almost)

I had my first first-time relief print making class tonight, and boy are my arms tired. No really, they're exhausted, between the carving of a linoleum block and carrying a large oak armoire up the stairs the other day, my right arm is ready to go out to pasture. My class was really fun, though, regardless of my noodle arm. It consists of me, my friend Shana and another woman. Our teacher teaches various printmaking techniques at the Art Institute school and does a lot of woodblock and linoleum block prints. He's pretty cool. I jumped into this class because it piqued both my and Shana's interests, though I had no idea what I was getting into. I'm very excited. My simplistic doodles (I like to think I draw like a sophisticated 3rd grader) may lend itself to more simple prints. At least they'll be easy to start with. I decided to make a print of our dearly departed pooch, Miss Ivy. I drew my little shorthand sketch of her on the linoleum and now I'm chipping away wherever I didn't draw. We made rubbings after we'd been working for a while to check out our progress. Fun.

This post is brought to you by the letter "G"

These are little doodles from the margin of a meeting's agenda on Wednesday. My chickens usually look a little different-- usually they have necks. I thought I would experiment with scanning things via the copy machine at work. It sends docs to you in PDF format and then I cut it up. The quality isn't the greatest. I like my little birds, though. I often doodle alphabets. I've always been drawn to letters and fonts. Lately I've been taken with the curliness of the cursive "G", as you can see here.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Okay, so it's not the greatest thing I've ever made, but it's the best I can do today.

I do doodle.

Buffy: What is this?

Willow: A doodle. I do doodle. You too. You do doodle, too.

This is a new category for my blog, brought to you by my brother's new used Epson scanner! (Not to mention the lovely tongue-twister from Buffy.) As anyone that has ever sat next to me in a meeting or in a class would know, I tend to doodle. I do doodle. It's true. Now I have access to a scanner I can share some of my doodles with you all, my audience out there in the dark, whoever you are.

I just started taking a class in a new master's program at DePaul. It's called New Media Studies, and I'm not entirely sure what I want to do with it, but it seems to be very flexible, and I think I'm going to get all that I want out of it (and possibly more). This past Tuesday was my second class and one thing we were discussing was semiotics and symbols. The professor passed out crayons and blank paper and asked us to draw a representation of quality time. This was a task I enjoyed. I do doodle, as I said. So this wasn't a huge stretch. I just didn't include people because I don't do people very well. Anyhow, I thought this would be my first doodle I'd share. It's in color, which is nice, as my doodles are usually monochromatic. (I don't tend to bring crayons with me to meetings. It's probably bad enough that I'm doodling.) The little dog is my representation of Ivy, the beloved dog in my family.