Present Joys

voxsart:

The Bow Tie Crowd.

André Gide.

On election night, 6 nov, I got to see John Vanderslice and Crooked Fingers play at a really cute, local bar here in Columbus. JV was super cool. I got to talk to him while he was making his setlist. I requested a couple songs, one of which he acceded to play. (It was “Keep the Dream Alive”!) He dedicated it to me in the middle of the set, and performed it un-amplified! I bought a vinyl LP of one of my favorite JV albums, Life and Death of an American Fourtracker, which he signed for me. (Crooked Fingers were also great!)

• Drove all the way to school monday morning and realized I’d left my package design final at home. So I turned around and went to get it at 7:50am. Rush hour torment.
• Turned in my package design final and had a crit. It went better than I was expecting, considering the embarrassingly poor craftsmanship on my final.
• Butted heads with my “literary studies of comics” teacher. The ideological antagonism is becoming less and less bearable.
• Stayed late after marketing on monday night to finish a video group project. If all goes well, I shouldn’t have to turn in anything else for the class.
• Drove to school on wednesday night for a 9:30pm meeting. It was kinda fun to see all my friends late at night.
• Turned in ad finals (our second project of the semester). Looked at everyone’s finals and wrote comments on papers. The comments were largely worthless.
• Got a ton of work done in jewelry. I bezel-set three pieces of jade. Also I helped Amanda with her bezel-setting. I’m getting pretty good at soldering.
• Learned how to use the hydraulic die forming machine.
• Printed out a bunch of résumés and examples of my work and talked to companies at the Internship Fair on friday. Very thankful to be done with that.

• Called off my monday independent study meeting for fear of not having made enough progress. (It was a good call.)
• Started getting sick on monday and was sick for the rest of the week.
• Stayed late after Marketing to film a short, low-key video for our group project. We shot it in the admissions meeting room and had some fun with staging.
• Lost my hat on Cleveland Avenue in monday’s Hurricane Sandy weather. Had to chase after it.
• Worked really hard to create color comps for my ad class.
• Made some rivets in my jewelry class, including one my teacher said was the best in the class.
• Redid my ad concept, rendering my hours of comp work pretty much worthless. That’s how she goes.
• Tried to finish my package design final and failed miserably. It is probably the clumsiest-looking thing I have created in all of college.

2012 has been a great year for live music. Here is further evidence: October 27, I drove to Chicago with friends Ian and Andrew to see the Mountain Goats. We slept in sleeping bags on Olivia’s apartment floor, got up early and went to Covenant PCA the next morning (which was a beautiful experience in its own right), and drove all the way home! A terrific jaunt. I could go on forever about tMG. They were amazing. tMG forums friend Thom recorded the show, so I’ve got a little memento. It was my first time in Chicago, and though I didn’t see a whole lot of the city, I enjoyed it a lot. The Vic Theatre was a pretty cool venue and I ended up quite close to the stage, which was great. And there’s really no topping a Mountain Goats show. Personal highlights included: “Wild Sage”, the full-band “Mess Inside” and “First Few Desperate Hours”, and (of course) “Tetrapod”. SO WORTH IT.