thursday, july 19, 2007
Between the end and the beginning of a year
My second year of college is over and I’m waiting at home for a couple weeks until I escape to intern at del.icio.us again. On my birthday, a week and a half ago, I usually list things learned in the past year (see 19, 18, 17, 16), so here is what I’ve learned this year: CCS Literature is a nice way to get a degree, and I might want to go to a library/information science graduate school, but I like my self-assigned website stuff most. I’d rather do all these classes later, when I’m tired of working. On my birthday I also usually post twelve of my best pictures from that year.
Anyway, here’s what I wrote from September to June:
- An essay about language use (foreigner English, native English, and non-English) in Maus II.
- A handful of little autobiographical comics.
- A long essay discussing the use of various mediums in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #13 (it’s good; buy it).
- A mini-essay about “Fantomina” and Moll Flanders.
- A list of the pages on the website of the Nonprofit Support Center of Santa Barbara, which was trickier than it sounds.
- The outline of an essay about taxonomies of memory in philosophy and neuroscience.
- A rant about “Remix and Remixability” by Lev Manovich and another about “The Futures of Literacy” by Gunther Kress.
- Long theoretical explications of an ugly collage and an interactive map.
- Several pages of wandering thoughts about stories by Jorge Luis Borges.
- A formal essay about fears of cloning as portrayed by a play, book, and movie.
- A blog post and accompanying analysis about my jeweled platypus.
- An edited compilation of my diary entries about a couple boys.
- A description and history of the CCS Computer Science Lab.
- A list of the best things I’ve eaten in Santa Barbara.
This may be less substantial than last year’s list; next year’s list needs to be better. Also, compare that post’s picture to this one:
Soon I’ll post a picture of my as-yet-unknown summer room in San Francisco, and it’ll look pretty much the same.
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thursday, july 12, 2007
Dense and mixed, tense and unequal, mostly yummy
These are tiny impressions of some places within walking distance that I’ve visited in the past couple weeks:
- Little Otsu
- I liked browsing through their quirky notecards, vegan wallets, handmade books, and arty branded t-shirts, but I didn’t have a reason to buy anything. That might have crossed the line into too much hipster anyway.
- Therapy
- This cutesy gifts/clothes/useless junk/etc. store lacked the moleskine that I wanted but has a sizeable selection of greeting and note cards, one of which will be mailed to my sister in the Peace Corps in Mongolia when I figure out the right postage.
- Taqueria La Cumbre, Pancho Villa Taqueria, Taqueria Can-Cun
- Tasty burrito with grilled vegetables, a lovely sauce, and cashews. Dry veggie burrito with stringy broccoli. Delicious soft veggie burrito with hot salsa. To be continued.
- Pork Store Cafe
- I’m vegetarian and Doug is omnivorous with an emphasis on meat, so when he visited last weekend I couldn’t resist taking him here. It was nice and neighborhood-y on a Saturday afternoon, and our veggie scrambles (plus bacon for him) were greasy and good.
- Tartine Bakery
- This French bakery’s reputation means a long line and endless debates over whether it’s worth the wait. I don’t know; I ate a couple of their cookies and liked them.
- City Art Gallery
- This is friendly, accessible art and some of it is nice: understated urban photo prints, modernish feminist watercolors, wacky thick oil paintings, art glass, linocut prints, chunky jewelry, etc. Like all college students, someday I will move up from grabbing promotional postcards to buying stuff.
- New College
- I haven’t been inside here, but I got curious about the bright green buildings and found out that the college has a rather interesting history of scandal and dissent. It’s even on probation for its accreditation.
- Bombay Ice Creamery
- My rose and cardamom ice cream insisted a little too much on the rose flavoring, but I’ll be back for the plain cardamom ice cream. I adore cardamom. I like rose too, but I don’t need to taste like perfume. With ginger ice cream and more, this place might satisfy my taste for weird sweets like Sheng Kee Bakery did last summer.
I like this neighborhood — it’s part of what a city should be, and I have fifty more places to try in the next two months.
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thursday, april 26, 2007
Writing about school instead of doing homework, again
Today I had a striking thought that I realized is common knowledge: a class is not a way for me to completely absorb a subject, but a way for me to develop a grasp of it that I can use to learn more and to create things. So initially I’m interested enough to take the class, and my interest deepens as I learn more about the subject, and then I go find ways to learn more (including taking other classes). The element that redeems intellectual entertainment like this is that I’m supposed to use my growing knowledge to create original work.
This is what the creative part of College of Creative Studies means; it’s a mediocre name because “creative” makes people think “fluffy artsy college” instead of “what your tedious college dreams of being”. Why create original work, anyway? The college seems to imply that you do this to get into graduate school and help other people further their own self-justifying spirals of intellectual development. People reviewing my college once recommended adding a goal to the mission statement like “To encourage students to use their original work for the betterment of humanity”, but the administrators ignored it. They trust that they don’t have to tell us to be good people.
My most successful classes so far have been ones in which I:
- Completed the class with full credit or a good grade (equivalent measures that depend on the college in which I took the class)
- Deepened my interest in the subject and learned more about it for fun
- Created work that I’m proud of (we’ll save bettering humanity for later)
Most of my classes have had one or more of those elements, but not enough of them have had all three*. They’re equally important to me, so I need to focus most on whichever one I’ve been lacking, and that’s (1), which is closely related to (3). This is a fancy way of saying again that I need to work harder in my literature classes.
Right. I’m supposed be doing my homework for them right now — including creating a Second Life account. “Wtf?”, you might ask, and you would have a good question, but I think my virtual class session tomorrow morning will be amusing. Class without changing out of pajamas. I like that. Maybe I will blog about it. In pajamas.
* Successful classes: “Beginning letterpress printing”, “Evolutionary medicine”, “Language and linguistics”, “Writing for new media”, “Malaise, melancholy, and the production of art”, “Islam, Arabs, and Arab-American voice in American literature”, and maybe a few others.
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tuesday, april 24, 2007
I think I’m an intellectual lolcat
My “Culture of the Copy” English class intertwines with my “Borges and His Precursors” Literature class, and they’re both branches off the “New Media Reader” book I borrowed from a professor last quarter because her Writing class included some readings that I would have read just for fun (that is, the fun of tearing them apart). I like that many of these related seeds in my brain were planted and cultivated by my del.icio.us network, and that I use my brain to help make del.icio.us better.
This process of learning what I want to learn — synchronizing some of my formal and informal learning — is a little scary because I’m not sure whether I can absorb, process, and contain it all.
In my creative-writing Literature class, we’re reading and imitating New Yorker profiles. One of the things I’m writing is a short history of my college, which is hard because I took the class on that subject last quarter and my memory of it is already fading (I also took a class about memory that quarter). The other piece I’m working on is about my college’s Computer Science lab, which is much easier and more fun. The professor assigned the subject to me because she knows I spend time there; I like that I may be the only person who both does that and wants to write about it.
I should write about del.icio.us too, especially during this summer, but that’s difficult in the way that writing about relationships is difficult: I couldn’t publish any of it because the people involved could tell me I’d written their secrets down wrong (also, the nitpicky details of non-disclosure agreements and future potential boyfriends shunning me). One solution is to write something now, wait until the people involved don’t care anymore, and then publish whatever it is. But I tried writing like that once, and after a few months I read it again and didn’t care either.
Bookmarking links is usually a way for me to learn things, but writing posts is almost always a way for me to put off doing my homework.
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saturday, april 21, 2007
I like my name
At a family day at the old Getty museum (pre-1997), a person wrote “Britta” in Persian for me:
This name originated as a nickname for Birgitta, a popular Swedish saint. She is also known as Bridgid and Bridget, which are variations of the name of the Irish triple-goddess Brigid (or Brigit/Brighit), meaning exalted one, who was the goddess of poetry, fire, wisdom, etc., equivalent to Minerva and Athena, and the daughter of an all-powerful harpist god. All of this is nice, but I usually forget to celebrate my name day on October 7th.
