I have not published anything is several months, it’d true. But fear not, for I am alive! I lived through a painful nine weeks of Biology classes at PSU, being both lonely and anti-social, wasting away physically and emotionally, and desperately awaiting the return of my friends. Unfortunately, it took several more weeks for the cortisol to get out of my system because there were a fair number of problems with my apartment that were far more painful to fix than they had to be due to the laziness and poor communication of the people I was dealing with.
Despite my sensitivity to the poor design of the place (I rather dislike carpet, and also dark kitchens), my apartment is filled with good things: Peaches, Kara, Ally (Kara’s invisible cat — I almost never see her), and a kitchen filled increasingly with good food. I have branched out beyond baking, and now make soups, granola, yogurt cheese, steamed rice, and my own pumpkin puree. And lest I become vegetarian (or even — gasp! — vegan), Peaches marinates and cooks chicken quite frequently. Peaches and I also go to Jose’s “Family Dinner and Show & Tell” every Sunday, where everyone brings a dish and we share stories as we sit around the dining table. It’s a good group of people, and a good time.
I am taking three classes this semester, to go a bit easy on myself — a good plan considering how summer went. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, I have Programming Language Design and Implementation with Jim Fix. We’re writing interpreters in Scheme for simple calculator languages (albeit with lambdas and let statements), and though the assignments have only been modifying Jim’s code thus far, I went overboard and wrote my own interpreter from scratch — and in less time than it took most of the class to do the assigned modifications. It’s the most awesome of my classes, but Tuesday and Thursday mornings I have Morphosyntactic Typology, which has a cool name and puzzular problem sets; Wednesday evenings I have Algonquian, in which we study an American language group (which includes Cree and Fox, among many others) and its speakers — this is essentially a relaxing three hours in which I am lulled by Rob Brightman’s soothing baritone and amusing anecdotes.
In addition to classes, I have been editing Emma Wasserman’s book on the classical philosophy in the letters of Paul (the apostle) and making hula hoops for fun and profit. I went on three Greyfund outings, one to see the swifts funnel-cloud into a chimney, one to see the opera Carmen, and one to see an experimental ballet (it involved Godzilla; don’t ask). In the latter two, the dinner we went out to first was better than the cultural event afterwards. The fine arts, as it turns out, have not impressed me as much as the great stuff I saw at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival. Cthulhu was amazing, and ST’s reading of Sweet Ermengarde was hilarious (who knew Lovecraft wrote comedy?).
But all this is paltry. I must think of the future! No, not flying cars and star travel, but my so-called career. As it turns out, there are actually jobs for people like me, for people who want to redesign everything on the planet, who aren’t content to live in a world designed by others. Even stable money-paying ones. The field is called industrial design. It first hit me when I was looking through an IKEA catalog, where they were highlighting their designers. I quickly made an appointment with Career Services, where I have been checking in regularly ever since.
Two weeks ago I went to meet with an alumnus who owns a furniture design studio. When he called to say he was going to be late, I stopped in The Joinery — full of wooden furniture — to see if they had a designer on staff. Lo and behold, I met someone all too eager to share his enthusiasm for his job and his experiences in the design world. He was an engineer for years, but switched into furniture design after taking a few classes at Oregon College of Arts and Crafts and building up a portfolio. Not only that, but while we were talking, another man came up to us: “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but overhear you mention Oregon College of Arts and Crafts. I’m the head of the Wood Department there.” He gave me his card and bade me contact him in the future. Invigorated and excited by this happy turn of events, I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed by my original date — the alum, in his own studio, hardly got a chance to do creative work, spending most of his time building pieces based on customers’ plans to pay the bills.
My current plan is to try for a summer scholarship to study kitchen utensil design in Europe (a la Cool Tools), sign up for a few weekend classes at OCAC, and investigate design studios on the East Coast over winter break. My career counselor, Julie, even suggested applying for a Fulbright to study design abroad after graduation. But as I was talking with her this morning, I realized — why wait? I could do something as crazy as study design abroad next semester. I have expressed my discontentment with Reed several times before, and this would give a chance to get away without completely disrupting my Reed education. I could take my Junior Qualifying Exam long-distance, finish up any requirements next school year, and graduate right on schedule. Hm… this merits further investigation. Over and out.
