Tuesday, January 28, 2003  3:16 am  <|>
<170> Holding it together: Well I've been gone for quite awhile, now haven't I? I didn't mean to disappear, but I have been busy. You would have thought winter break would have brought a lot more progress to this website than it did, especially since I don't know where half the time of break went, but alas, this site got even more neglected and I'm sorry about that. The good news is, I'm back, and hopefully will be updating here and a lot of places much more often now. Yes, winter break came and went, and I went back and forth between home in New Jersey and my place in Philly too much yet not enough because I was never really in one place long enough to get anything accomplished... isn't that always the way? But now I'm back in Philly full time, the semester started again last week, and I'm getting ready to get a lot of things together (finally)! I did a lot of listening to Nora Jones and John Mayer (and still do). I hung out with a few of my good friends from home who I don't get to see nearly enough during the year or on breaks. I contemplated all the things I wanted to get done, but most of those things remain in theory, even now, but I'm ready to change that. My course load this semester *should* be my easiest yet. We'll see if that proves to be true though, I'm only a week into it keep in mind. So far I have one class, our required business seminar for about two hours on Mondays. Now that's short as our classes go, but the class was originally supposed to be on Wednesdays (giving me Mondays in addition to my Fridays off like last semester) but it was changed at the last minute. It's ok I guess, but I had been trying to not have classes on dialysis days (Mon, Wed, & Fri), though this semester not only do I have class on Monday and Wednesday but I have class DIRECTLY following dialysis. Now I handle dialysis pretty well, but I do usually leave not feeling so great, so it kind of sucks to have to go directly to classes two times out of the three days I go each week, but nothing much can be done about this. My Tuesday is 1-7 intro to glassblowing. Yes, I'm being a real art student and taking a real art class. After one day of it it seems pretty cool. I don't know how good I'll be at it, but we're all beginners... so at least it's a good place to start. And to make it better I got my best girl friend here to switch into the class with me, so now I have a partner to work with (we are supposed to have one anyway) so I'm excited about that. Then Wednesday I'm taking a class called Issues in Multimedia. We have a different speaker come each week and talking about various topics and issues and we also work together on a project partnering with our local public broadcast tv station. You know that one near you that's in charge of showing things like Charlie Rose and Sesame Street. We're going to help repurpose some of their archived content. It should be pretty interesting and at the very least look good on my resume. Despite the courses name I'm one of two multimedia majors in the class and because no one signed up they pushed the class on a bunch of communication majors - of which I only know one really - so this should be an interesting collaboration. That brings us to Thursday, my final day of classes in the week and my longest too. It was going to last from 8:30am until 10pm with just one break from 11:30am to 1pm, but I dropped my Screenprinting class to ease up my day and because of other reasons too, so now I just have my required main multimedia studio in the morning until 4pm then a break until 7pm when I have Bookbinding, which also seems like it will be interesting and fun. Our studio is basically setup in 3 5 week blocks, with a project due at the end of each but really bits of the project are due all throughout the 5 weeks, something due every class, so you are always working (and need the time) but the class time itself is setup mostly for free work time. Sometimes we have to present, meet with our teacher, or have a crit, but otherwise it's free time to work on our projects which is very nice.

Otherwise, my life has been... well holding together I suppose you could say. I'd love to say how great I've been doing, or how happy I am, but I just don't want to get your hopes up too much. I can say I'm hanging in the best I can be, dealing with a lot of issues from all sides of the spectrum, but then again, who isn't? And like I said, I'm getting along alright. Not every day is perfect, but at least every new day comes, so I'm not about to be complaining. Healthwise a little progress seems to be happening that I won't get into right now, but not enough yet.... soon... you wait, you know, you wait until you realize you get to wait some more and then when something is about to happen.... you wait a little longer. But it's a process and one I'm a part of whether I like it or not, so take the hand you are dealt with and play the game, because you have to and because you just might win big someday...