Back to school, back to school...	September 13, 2007

...to prove to Dad that I'm not a fool. I've got my lunch packed up, my boots tied tight, I hope I don't get in a fight."

That stupid song, from that STUPID movie, is in my head, like, all the time (anyone who hung out with me in college will know it in an instant).

Anyhoo... school is back in session! I am taking two classes: Typography on Thursday nights and Interactive Design on Saturday mornings. So far, they both look awesome. I particularly like my type teacher, and she assures me that by the time the class is over, I won't be able to read street signs or move credits without calling out the names of the fonts they used.

For the other class, we have been tasked with redesigning a website.  The teacher said it can't be our own vanity site (darn), and though we could do something totally made-up, he encouraged us to find a real client to work with. I wanted to do a museum or gallery site, but it had to be a small-ish museum or gallery with a fairly simple site, who'd be willing to accommodate my semester-long schedule and be somewhat flexible about the design. So, I contacted the folks in charge at Future Tenant, the gallery that I started up in downtown Pittsburgh when I was in grad school, and I asked them if they want a free website. They said yes (of course) so now I have a bit of a task before me! But I'm excited about it. My classmate (Myungsun Ko) who designed the initial site did a beautiful job, but over the years, successive classes of student/managers have stripped a lot of her design, and I'm eager to restore it to its former glory.

But the thing that I am enjoying the most about school this semester is that I CAN DRIVE TO IT! The Corcoran campus is in north Georgetown, where no metros go, and the bus-to-metro-to-bus method that I would've had to use when my evening class ended would've gotten me home at something like 12:30, which would've sucked royally. Getting to class on Thursdays at 6:00 does mean crossing the Key Bridge at rush hour, but even that's not so bad, and it's so so so worth it! I love my car. Rabbits rule.

Books, books, books	September 8, 2007

I have a theory as to why I haven't been blogging very much lately - I'm too busy reading!

A while back, I blogged about how reading has become a part of my life now, and how that’s exciting. Here it is, five months later, and the trend continues. Since moving to Virginia, I have successfully kept to an average of finishing one book every two weeks, which is unheard of in my lifetime. Of what I've already read, I highly recommend you immediately run out and read the following:

World War Z
Both Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns
Middlesex
Water for Elephants

I am currently reading Reading Lolita in Tehran (I keep putting it down and picking it back up), and The Black Dahlia. And up next, I'll be reading The Life of Pi, The Time-Traveler’s Wife, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.

I don't really have any strategic method through which I pick books to read--usually I'm going off of someone else's recommendation (my mom or Stef or the dude who sits in the office next to me). So please recommend!