Warning: next three paragraphs deal with the intractable issues of work and social life. For something actually interesting and new, skip to the photo.
I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but for quite some time to come, I think my main job is actually putting myself out there. It’s actually been a lot of fun to put together the portfolio and teaser and resume…and I’m sure the cover letters will be fun in hindsight, too. Now we come to the part where I actually send them all out, though, and that’s a whole other story. I’m less than excited to send them into the abyss, to ask for jobs that don’t exist and to profess how wonderful I am to people who can’t really care.
I can’t help but feel a reflection of this work life issue in my personal life, too – I may know all sorts of people here, but I’ve yet to rebuild a group of friends of the sort I had in Oberlin, Vermont, or, in fact, that I pretty much developed here, pre-graduation. Not to mention that there’s a good chance that I’ll move to a whole new place and actually have to make an even bigger effort towards friendship than I do here now.
I’ll admit, part of it is a problem of commitment. I’m not sure where I want to move, not sure what I want to do, not sure who I want to spend my time with, so in some ways I’m not making a strong case to anyone, let alone myself. Howard’s recommendation of actually writing out a five year plan or two seems like a great one. I vaguely know where I’m going and what I’m doing, but defining things a bit more, while having an alternative plan, seems like a good way to stop faffing and actually move confidently towards doing the things that I want to do. I feel like I’m back in high school with all this self definition and worrying about who I’ll be friends with. Thought I was over all of that.
On another note, I saw this today:
Along with five other lamps, it’s part of an impressive graduation project, Light Movement, by Noam Bar Yohai. Each of the lamps employs wood, elastic bands and heat-shrinking tubing, with metal components to weight them. They are each adjustable because of the friction of the tubing, weight of the metal, tension of the elastic bands, or flexibility of the wood. I think Yohai has done an excellent job of exploring this object as a series of mechanisms. For me, they come to a pleasing level of refinement – they seem like abstracted models of joints: skeleton, sinew, muscle, and nerve poised before some action. Tell me what you think, and perhaps, if you’re ambitious, compare and contrast with Moooi’s Brave New World lamp.