Even after

From Antigua - Lucky Shot

nobody@vox.com(Jenna) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:13:54 -0400

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Graduated

nobody@vox.com(Jenna) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:31:49 -0400

S'been a long time. I graduated from Brown, and right now I'm in my last week of archaeological lab work in Guatemala City. Then I fly home, watch my sister get married, find a job, live somewhere, and do something for a living probably. Cuz you know, theoretically I'm qualified for stuff now.

I can teach you how to do-si-do

I can show you how to scratch a record

I can take apart the remote control

and I can almost put it back together

I can tie a knot in a cherry stem

I can tell you about Leif Ericson

I know all the words to De Colores

And I'm Proud to Be an American

Me and my friends saw a platypus

Me and my friends made a comic book

(And guess how long it took?)

I can do anything that I want cuz, look:

I can keep rhythm with no metronome

And I can see your face on the telephone

It's good to be alive in such a small world

I'm all curled up with a book to read

I can make money open up a thrift store

I can make a living off a magazine

I can design an engine 64 miles to the gallon of gasoline

I can make new antibiotics

And I can make computers survive aquatic conditions

I know how to run a business

I can make you wanna buy a product

Movers, shakers, and producers

Me and my friends understand the future

I see the strings that control the systems

I can do anything with no assistance

Apparently it's time to grow up, and figure some stuff out. And when I stop being petrified long enough to think about it, I see that I can do anything I want now.

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Eye Candy

nobody@vox.com(Jenna) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 14:29:54 -0400

So life isn't all that great just yet. I'm waiting on comments from my thesis advisors about the (ostensibly) final draft of my thesis, the one that needs to be given some amount of verbal approval before I get it bound and it turns into approval-by-written-report. I have to get my GIS up and running and making some sort of analysis, and that seems like it will be a whole lot of work, but it needs to be done by Tuesday (with an accompanying 15-minute presentation, and 12-page research paper). On Wednesday Christian turns 25, which is awesome, but on Tuesday (after GIS) and Wednesday I have to write my final research paper ever for Brown (provided I pass my classes *holds breath, freaks out*)--it's 15 pages about Brown integrating women into the University in 1971 (while Barnard decided to stay segregated from Columbia), and I've already given the presentation that was to accompany it.

So thesis worries. I think that my colloquium went well (thanks to all who attended, by the way!), and I know that my final draft is so much better than the first draft I handed in at the end of March, but I'm afraid of a few things. I'm afraid it isn't honors-worthy, that I've forgotten to address some really substantial issue that will therefore completely invalidate my argumentation. Gah, it's so nerve-wracking. It will never feel done to me, regardless of its length (99 pages). I need to just think about it as just one of many potential incarnations that it could be.

But whatever, the real concern is the GIS, and that's one that isn't going away anytime soon. The good thing is that it'll be over by Tuesday. I just really want to do a good job, but I've been so busy with the thesis that my coursework totally suffered this semester. So the moral of the story, when I get this stressed/depressed/generally unhappy, I look at pandas. And this video is the best of all of the panda videos I've seen.

Pandas

So yeah. Even if my life sucks (a bit, I of course realize how good I have it in an objective sense), at least somewhere (China), someone has that job.

I cannot wait until senior week.

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New England weather

nobody@vox.com(Jenna) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:54:13 -0400

history fly jack name business place fisher dalliance timing art thrill post-apocalyptic problem dancing cherry indecision deliverance heady indirect inflate entire quiet wither enduring rely tide youth understudy iniquity populace acquiescence sure thing dial favorite gamer heredity liminality king judgmental zones of expectation color valor bother nano molecule tangental sadness place better.

The purpose of my life is the sandwich I'm about to enjoy. I wish I could make a better attempt at articulating the current anxieties I have for the next segment of my life. I feel equal parts terror and fascination (two sides of the same coin?) and I believe in the possibility of something excellent, and something that I could be proud of. I feel like escaping again. I two or three weeks of class left, and then finals. I have to finish (finish for real) my thesis. But then I'm basically done. I don't know exactly when it'll happen, but I need to move from RI, after spending 21 years in various parts of it. I think it's likely that that will happen when I matriculate somewhere a year from this coming fall (say, 18 months from now.)

I'm sick of me.

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Now what?

nobody@vox.com(Jenna) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:08:33 -0400

So I got comments back on my first draft of the thesis. The meeting with my advisor went really well, and he had extremely helpful and completely legit suggestions and comments. Not much was unexpected--I need to rework the intro and conclusion, which I absolutely intended to do because the ones I wrote were very much a place holder for when my brain became solid again and could produce actual writing, rather than babblebabblebabble which it was producing by the 25th hour of my thesis-writing march toward completion.

One of the suggestions that I was completely happy with was that I should just sit down and re-read the whole thing in one sitting so as to remove the repetitive stuff. I think it'll be useful also in order to create a well-worded and useful introduction and conclusion, as well as to get a handle on what I want to add (there's quite a bit to add, in my opinion, but we'll see...)

So now it's just making a list, creating an agenda, and getting to it. Tonight I'm making all the suggestions he wrote on the draft (which looks so much more foreboding printed out than it did on my computer screen), and I'm going to try to recreate the intro and conclusion. Tomorrow is April 1st, which means I have to hand in a draft to my second reader. So that'll hopefully be draft 2 of a draft, rather than it in its current state.

Because it's such a large job, I think I'm going to break it into themes--like fix typos first, then citations, then sentence structure, etc. etc. etc.

Here's where I wrote the thing, in my bed/library/nest/desktop/cafe, at the height of thesis writing the week of the 17th to the 21st:

Thesis Nest

I think all changes will be done at my desk, and will be aided greatly by extra large post-it notes all over the place.

Oh also, I am SO into Vampire Weekend this month, which is good, because they're coming to Brown for Spring Weekend this month.

04 Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa

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Vox Hunt: Looking Back on March

nobody@vox.com(Jenna) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:54:27 -0400

Show us something that represents how the month of March went for you.

This was March for me. Mostly I spent it writing these pages on that computer, in this window or on my bed, covered in books and fueled by tea.

Pages and Computer

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Floating

nobody@vox.com(Jenna) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:14:22 -0400

So as of the 22nd, I handed in a draft of my thesis to my advisor, who is reading it this week. It's Spring Break, and so the timing is all really confusing because I would have said that I'd be frantically writing all week (probably the smart thing to do) but instead I'm just sort of existing, doing nothing particularly productive, floating around. I worked at the Rock a few days this week, and Monday and Wednesday were spent mostly in bed sleeping, shopping, or playing Zoo Tycoon 2, which is a little bit of a bummer for Mac because I have to play it on the lowest graphics level or it spontaneously crashes, which was supposed to be fixed in version 1.1 but so wasn't...

I should have done a lot this week and instead I did basically nothing, which I'm currently justifying by the logic that it's Spring Break and I could be in Cancun or something and if I were there I'd be doing just as little school work.

Being half-done (that is, having a draft in but a draft that is drafty and very obviously needs more work and more research) on the thesis is a really odd half-state that doesn't suit me at all. I worked so ridiculously much on it for so many months, just plugging with a pot of tea and lots of stress, and now it's all sort of drifting away and I feel lonely and icky about it. It'll be nice to have comments so I can fix everything. I think tomorrow afternoon, after I get my homework for the week done, I'm going to just sit and read it (as devastating and depressing as that will inevitably be) and make a list of everything that needs to be fixed so I have a really good agenda of work. Because this week has been a lesson in how easily one can spend an entire afternoon playing computer games, how easily 2 hours can turn into 6 hours, how addicting it is. I forgot that time moves at the same breakneck speed whether you have stuff to do or not.

In that same vein, I'm graduating in 2 months, minus 3 days exactly. I'm going to Guatemala City to work in a lab from the end of June to the first week of August. (I'm flying home for my sister's wedding in July). After that, no fucking clue. The future's so bright I'm gonna hafta wear shades.

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Caffeine, Typing, Books

nobody@vox.com(Jenna) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 04:06:20 -0400

I realize now that I'm a bit punchy. This is the inevitable result of too much writing/researching/agonizing over my senior thesis. As Christian would note, I am losing perspective in the world because of the stress I feel over my thesis. Currently over 70 library books live in my apartment. They live in piles on the floor of my bedroom, on tray tables and in bookcases (if they're lucky). I trip through a sea of research notes, copies of my thesis sections, sixty-odd pages which must represent a thousand work hours of my life. My walls are stuck with adhesive sticky notes, some of which are lists and chronologies, while others record scattered thoughts and ah-hah! moments. I live in my writing clothes--fleece sweatpants and an Oxford sweatshirt Jill got for me while she was abroad in the UK. It's four in the morning, and I've written 8 more pages today, although perhaps 10 less than I ought to have by now.

When I finished, I ballet-danced across my hardwood floor, ate stale buttered bread from dinner, attempted to decide whether I should move on to the next objective or ride out my caffeine jitters watching late night / early morning television and drifting (hopefully) to sleep.

I feel as though I exist in a semester of perpetual finals, and I feel alone most of the time. I dream about bibliographies, sources, imagined research leads I missed. I toss and turn and have epiphanies in my sleep about the most effective way to organize a chapter. I think I thought I'd think this was cool. I think I thought I'd feel like a scholar or intellectual in a way that was not previously experience, as if writing this thesis was a right of passage or a microcosm of the life I will [/may] one day choose to lead. Instead I feel nervous, jittery, tired, disinterested, guilty. I feel as though I'm constantly late for an important meeting, that I'm constantly offending my professional contacts. Perhaps in retrospect this will all seem part of the process of academic writing.

I know that I have done more for this project than for any other single project. I know I have written more, read more, become more informed about the general context of the scholarship. I just wonder when I will feel as though I have actually done enough to warrant a general sense of contentment with this senior honors thesis. I dread the signs of spring for the first time in my life (I hate winter), because it heralds my oncoming deadlines and due dates. I wonder when my second semester senior experience will kick in. If I can produce a draft by this Friday/Saturday, which is my overwhelming intention, I hope that Spring Break will be the beginning of a more leisurely existence. I wonder if I missed out on an essential experience by taking on the workload that I did. It's hard to tell.

I miss you, social life. I miss you, leisure. I miss you, guiltless fun time. I hope to be coming home soon.

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Vox Hunt: The Luck of the Irish

nobody@vox.com(Jenna) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:48:42 -0400

Something Green

Show us something green!

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Operation: Articulated

nobody@vox.com(Jenna) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 01:58:17 -0500

I've for a while had some sort of view (worldview?) about images, violence, and people (populations). It originated as an inexplicable hatred for the Saw horror movies (of which there are now four), Hostel, Turista, etc. etc. and others which fall into this genre called "torture porn" by some. I couldn't seem to shake this feeling that these movies are somehow profoundly bad for people, and for society in general, regardless of my usual tendencies to "to-each-his-own"-away any other propensities for censorship or restriction of media. So why did I find Saw and Hostel so different and so much more damaging than violent video games or graphically violent movies (i.e. Boondock Saints, The Departed, etc., not to mention the more graphic-novel violence of Sin City and the Kill Bill series, in all of which I saw artistic merit)? I don't know. But I do believe that images are inherently desensitizing, that their capacity for evoking wonder, terror, sadness, anger, inspiration, etc. is in no way limitless. I even believe that this process happens on a macro-level, in addition to personal, individual desensitization. I'm not sure what I want to happen--I can't ever see myself acting toward to banning of (really almost anything, including) these movies or websites (rotten dot com comes to mind). Anyway, while frantically researching my next written portion of my thesis, I came across this passage of an essay regarding photography that I had first read about a year ago.

On Photography

Susan Sontag

"Images transfix. Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs--think of the Vietnam War. (For a counter example, think of the Gulag Archipelago, of which we had no photographs.) But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real.

The same law holds for evil as for pornography. The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wears off after one sees a few more. The sense of taboo which makes us indignant and sorrowful is not much sturdier than the sense of taboo that regulates the definition of what is obscene. And both have been sorely tried in recent years. The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary--making it appear familiar, remote ("it's only a photograph"), inevitable."

I think this appeals to me because the draw she makes between violent images (which I, in some sense, disapprove of), and porn, (which I, generally, approve of). I've used this analogy of porn, because I think it holds true in the same way, but affords the benefit of being infinitely less about value judgments (i.e., what does it mean that we've become desensitized to violent images vs. does porn wear off?), and more ...quantifiable? (i.e., the question, "does porn wear off?" is measurable by how much and what type people consume from their first exposure onward, and to what ends).

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