Internship . . . Secretary . . . Same Thing

But I'm not complaining. I've actually really enjoyed keeping things in order, taking notes, and sitting quietly in a corner. Tonight I get to start on Real Media Arts work! And that's such an exciting prospect that when I got home from Simon's apartment, I promptly took a two hour nap. Some things are priorities. Especially when I think I'm getting sick.

Three times in a row now I've managed to get where I wanted to go without getting on the wrong subway or going the wrong direction. But here's the funny thing - just as I think I'm getting the hang of the subway systems that I'll need to know well, they change something. I start hearing voices through my Massive Attack and Thievery Corporation, and when I finally drag myself out of the paper-writing stupor that I was in, I gathered that the subway station I needed to stop at was not the subway station that my train was stopping at. Sometimes they just decide to skip stops - I assume to keep you on your toes, no matter what they say about "maintenance" - and today, three days into my tentative understanding of the byzantine labyrinth, was my first direct experience with it. But like I said, I figured it out. And these are the small victories that I'm probably most proud of.

So today Simon loaded the 30-day version of Adobe CS5 on my computer, which was of course something like being handed a trial version of the holy grail (that is to say, both heartbreaking and awe-inspiring). He shows me a few things, hands me an external hard drive with 40 GB of video, and tells me that he wants me to rotoscope a few things. Naturally, I've never rotoscoped anything in my life, so he boots up After Effects and tells me that this is going to be the greatest moment of my life. He brings up a frame in a sequence, swipes a broad line over the body of one of our characters, and watches as it picks out her entire body. Almost flawlessly. But that's not all - he drags the frame to the left and right, extending the reach of the rotoscope brush, lets it work for a second, and shows me that it has captured her figure through the entire sequence. Mind blown. That's not to say that it's flawless, but it does a really damn good job of it, thereby simplifying my job to swiping, correcting slightly, and pointing this crazy tool in the right direction. It might be love.

OH man. During our lunch break today, Simon took me down to the "Pickles and Olives, etc." shop about a block from his apartment. Wow. Just . . . wow. Not only do I think I could live in this city for the prospect of specialty shops devoted to pickles and olives, but these pickles and olives are amazing. The owner immediately started handing us samples out of these huge barrels and telling us about the recipes. I bought a pint of the full-sours, about half of which I've already eaten, and realized that I'll be stopping at some kind of pickle shop at least once a week for the entirety of my stay here.

I spent fully an hour today looking for parking after I had to move my poor car. It was street-sweeper day on the street that I parked on when I first got here, so you have to find someplace new to park, which is turning out to be far more of a hassle than I thought. People told me it would be, but I was like, nahh. I want my car here. Which I still do, but if it's going to be this difficult every time, I might just try to find somewhere outside the city to park it. Funny story: when I first got in, the landlord warned me about the street-sweepers. "Just move your car whenever the signs say to," he told me. "But you're used to it - I'm sure you have these at your home." And I just laughed. Columbia street-sweepers. HA.

I'm done with the semester now! Simon told me I wasn't done until I got my grades back, but I told him to shut up and let me have my moment. After loading up both my Courtney and my Cooley papers (thanks to Courtney for not putting up the SafeAssign link until literally two hours before the paper was due), I breathed a sigh of relief and started the purging process. I take the syllabi off my computer, take a number of deep breaths, and try to release a semester's worth of stress. It's time to start reading books, watching movies, and doing my Real Media Arts work. Thank God the semester's over.

One more thing: I miss my couch. Beds come and go, but the love of a good couch is hard to come by, and leaving that wonderful thing at home was so much harder than you might think. I have a napping system, understand. I think most talented nappers do, and I'm a pretty talented napper if I do say so myself. I'm sleeping well in my bed, but naps just aren't the same in a bed. I lay with my face towards the back of the couch, one knee half jammed into the seam, and my favorite blanket woven around me. Now you can laugh all you want, but once you find a killer way to sleep, you have to stick with it. First thing I do when I get home is to pull that couch out and remind it how it feels about me.