Another semester over
Earlier in the semester, there was a moment when I was just furious with my Typography instructor. He handed out sheets that listed the three components that went into making the overall grade for the class, what the points and letter grades were in each of those components, and the grade for the class calculated from these.
I had at that point missed two days of class, one of them was a day when we were turning in projects. Because serious sleep disorders are a disability, I’m usually allowed to slide a little on attendance. Instructors have understood that sometimes I just can’t manage to sleep at all and am unsafe to drive an hour each direction to get to and from class. However, this one informed me that I could not turn in my project at the next class, in spite of my disability. I got zero points for that project. That seriously lowered the projects grade component.
On top of that, I had all kinds of points missing on the sketchbook and class participation components. I knew he’d seen my sketches before I began working on projects, and yet there were multiple blanks in the point breakdown where I should have gotten points. In class participation, I always contributed to critiques, saying more and more to the point than pretty much any other single student in the class, and yet a had lots of zero points in class participation. The letter grade for sketchbook was F, and for class participation it was a D.
I knew that the smart thing to do was to challenge him on it, but I couldn’t. Every time I even thought about it, I got so furious I was incoherent. I knew that things would come flying out of my mouth that would not help my grade. “Go fuck yourself, you fucking asshole!” is not diplomatic enough to make my point, but was about as coherent and logical as I could be over the situation.
Today was the final, and during our conference over my entire body of work, he told me that his policy is what it is because he normally is dealing with people straight out of high school, who have little to no work ethic, and who disappear from class for weeks at a time for no real reason. But after a semester of getting to know me, how I work, and that I have a great work ethic, intelligence, talent, and excellent critiquing skills, I deserved better than my projected grade would be.
So, during our little conference about the semester, he logged into the database and randomly added points in class participation, sketchbooks, and the one project I missed until my grade came out to an A. Then he told me that if I haven’t registered for classes yet, I’d better, because he’s talked to the rest of the graphic arts department, and they all want me to keep taking any and all classes that catch my eye. He said that teaching a student like me is a great experience, a privilege.
I am so relieved. I thought I was going to get a C, at best. Of course, I’m entirely over my great desire to slap my instructor into next month as well. When I finally headed back to Delano with pizza for the family’s dinner, I was happy enough that I was singing most of the way, which got me a few surprised looks. Around here, if there’s loud music of some sort, it’s someone’s rap CD blaring at top volume, not some crazy chick belting out “Nel cor più non mi sento” or something of the sort.
It may not be much…
…but it’s something.
A couple years ago, I put up a Zazzle online store. I wasn’t really doing this thinking I’d make anything on prints of my student work. What I was really doing was getting set up to have nicely-printed portfolio-sized copies of my work, since I needed a portfolio in order to apply to the Italian art schools I’ve been considering. While I was at it, I said, “What the hell.” I decided I’d make them all public, rather than private. You know, not really expecting anything was going to sell, but thinking it’d be a nice surprise if something did.
I just got email tonight, more than two years after I started the thing. Someone actually bought something. My commission isn’t much. I made $1.12 on the piece.
I’ve done some graphics for friends before, taken a couple commissions, usually on a kind of barter basis. But this is the first thing I’ve ever done that was bought by a stranger, which makes this buck and change some kind of milestone, at least to me. So I may not have made much, but it’s more than okay because someone I didn’t know bought it, and that’s exciting.
Nearly 7 am
And I haven’t slept yet.
I think I might be able to soon. I had hiccups all bloody night, and they wouldn’t stay gone for more than ten minutes at a time, no matter what I did. However, I’ve now been hiccup-free for nearly 20 minutes, so maybe I can finally get some shuteye.
When I was a kid, I used to get big growth spurts twice a year, conveniently timed to hit just before we needed to buy summer or winter clothes. Whenever these growth spurts were going on, I’d have hiccups for at least ten minutes out of every day. They stopped when I stopped growing.
When I was living in New Jersey, I had an unexpected late-in-life growth spurt. I was in my mid-twenties, long after the time I should have been growing, but shot up an additional three inches anyway. And I had hiccups for at least ten minutes out of every day while it was going on.
Tonight is the second time in two months that I’ve been kept awake by hiccups that went on all night long.
I wonder if I’m growing again.
If I am, I should probably turn myself over to science so they can figure out why I’d suddenly be growing at 39.
It’s one of those nights
The police helicopter is circling overhead, shining its spotlight from backyard to backyard. Cop cars are blocking the ends of the street I live on. The police are moving along the street, shining their flashlights along the walks and the fronts of the houses. When the helicopter passes over, the sound of the blades echoes back from the walls and houses, a stutter of sharp reports. The effect of the echo makes it almost sound more like automatic weapon fire than what it really is. Welcome to my least favorite game, Find the Fleeing Felon. This has sometimes gone on for hours, late enough into the night that it even encroached on my 4 am bedtime and kept me up. I envy my grandmother’s hearing loss and my mother’s ability to sleep through almost anything on nights like this.
When I was here during high school, more than 20 years ago now, this never happened. Not once was it necessary for helicopters to fly overhead and cops conduct a walking search. It might have happened on the other side of town, the “bad” side of town. Now there is no good side of town anymore. This area is a major center for production, distribution, and use of crystal meth. With it came gangs, people who’ll shoot each other because of where in Mexico their families originally lived, north or south. Drive-by shootings are so common that the one time I had to call 911 to report shots fired outside my house, they asked me if I’d seen the car and could give a description. I had to explain that I hadn’t even heard a car, and the reaction was rather surprised and disbelieving. They asked me several times if I was sure I hadn’t heard the sound of tires squealing or a speeding engine. It took until about the fourth go-around before they accepted that I hadn’t heard anything that would indicate a drive-by. I haven’t forgotten, either, the time I went to the grocery store and got a reminder of what this place has become. I went in, and everything was fine. While I was inside doing the shopping, way in the back in the dairy section, I thought I heard yelling and, faintly over the 80’s music the store plays on its speakers, firecrackers going off. It wasn’t until I was halfway down an aisle, headed to the front of the store, that I heard the sirens and realized what was up. Two sides of the parking lot have heavily-trafficked streets. The third side is a smaller, quiet street that almost never sees any traffic. The cars parked in the spaces facing that road were riddled with bullets, apparently. There were injuries, maybe fatalities, I don’t know. I didn’t want to see.
And people wonder why I call this place Hellano.
The amazing (and amazingly stupid) thing is that you’d never know about the drive-by shootings, the executions, the home invasions that end in death for the homeowners, and all the rest of it by reading the paper here in town or watching the local news. I have family that work in law enforcement – corrections, not the police department, but they still get a lot more of what’s really happening here than we’d know about otherwise. Our local “reporters” (and considering they don’t really report so much of what happens here, I think the quotes are quite justified) are quite happy to tell us about the homecoming festivities, or what the city council is up to, and sometimes petty theft. The paper doesn’t even come out daily. It’s once a week, on Thursday, and quite slim even though they have a week to gather, write, and print the news. The local news on TV is produced in Bakersfield, and so is more concerned with what’s happening there than in the satellite communities.
But maybe it’s a good thing for most people that they don’t get as much of the details of what really goes on as we do. They don’t listen to the darkness outside their windows at night, wondering what that crackling or squeaking or knocking sound is, and whether it’s time to call 911. They don’t see yellow tape (which turned out to be caution tape because of some repair work on the house, not the police tape I thought it was at first) strung across the driveway and go into a panic thinking that their family was murdered.
Or listen to the sounds of Find the Fleeing Felon and wonder if the felon in question is going to get in here, as one did early one Easter morning a couple years ago.
Hasty la visty
Stick a fork in me, I’m done.
It’ll be seven years this month since I started this LJ out of a need to rant. That’s a long time to keep up a journal, much longer than I’ve ever managed before. I’ve generally been happy here on LJ. I’ve had most of my friends here, and reading the whole bunch of them in one spot was only a friends page away. I had fun periodically customizing the look of the journal, choosing or making userpics for various moods, and so on.
The thing is that I’ve been growing to like some of the “innovations” on LJ less and less for some time now. And their near-hysterical “OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN” thing is getting on my nerves. The suspension of a number of accounts in response to some prudish idjits was not a good thing a few months back. The adult content filtering thing is annoying. Yes, I can go jump through a hoop to turn it off. But what’s the next hoop? And the next? And if I choose – as I have – to turn off the adult content filtering, what happens when some yahoo or someone with a grudge comes along and flags this journal as inappropriate or offensive? I swear, I have been known to talk about things various people could find offensive, and it may not happen very often, but I’ve been known to post about sexual things in a varying range of explicitness. Very little of that is posted friends-only, nearly nothing is marked private, and I don’t tend to censor myself. I have no interest in a wrangle with LJ abuse, LJ’s trend toward censorship, or possible account suspension for not bowing to the trend.
As of tonight, automatic payment to LJ for this account has been stopped. The paid account will expire on the 12th.
Content is being moved to a new place. (And LJ doesn’t make this easy. You can only export a month of your journal at a time, and with 7 years of this, that’s a lot of exporting XML files, which then have to be imported one by one at the new site.)
This account will be largely inactive. I’m not deleting it, and will likely continue to log in daily to read what everyone staying writes, but future posts will be located at http://christophine.wordpress.com/ and there is an RSS feed that anyone remaining at LJ can add to their friends list. I have already syndicated the feed at for your convenience.
Bye bye, LJ-land. Hello, WP-land.
ETA: It is possible to make posts protected on WordPress. Individual posts can be password-protected. Those rare times I make protected posts, I’ll mostly use one password, so friends can still read it if they want to. If any friends want the password, let me know and I’ll email it.
