Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Every time the end of a semester comes along, we have a week like this one. Assignments pile up and end-of-semester presentations need to be cleaned up and polished off. Add to that a unique twist: even though Rebecca is out of school, she was put into a week long training class with a design firm in San Francisco by her company.

We got one decent night of our usual scheduled hours of sleep Sunday evening. Monday morning, instead of racing off to work, Rebecca and I went in to the doctor's for a check-up. It was a nice opening to a long week. But at this point, I need to interject a side note which exemplifies many other events later in the week. We show up at 8:45. The appointment starts at 9 am. They told us that having an appointment so early in the day would help us have a prompt visit; there isn't much of a reason to be late at that time of morning. About 9:15, we start our appointment. This is key to understand why the rest of our week unfolds as it does.

The rest of Monday flew by normally. Rebecca went to "normal" work, I worked on my interview portfolio for teaching (it was for my teaching class) by updating my CV and cleaning up the practice assignments I had written. Essentially for that class, I have had to prepare a semester's worth of assignments, syllabus, etc. for a foundations course. I believe I am a "difficult" grader compared to my colleagues. I am not a believer in cajoling students; I wish teachers hadn't done that to me.

But Monday night, Rebecca went to bed at the uncanny hour of 9:30. In order to get to San Francisco by 8 in the morning, avoid traffic, park and walk to the design firm downtown she had to leave our house at 6:30. Which, of course, means waking up at 5:50 at the latest. I stayed up finishing my project in Second Life for a presentation in my public art class. For those of you connected to Second Life, the link for viewing our data is here.

Tuesday morning, Rebecca left early and I followed suit, trying to help out on my last day of TA'ing for a 2D design class. Rebecca's first day of design school didn't feel so long, because it was mostly introductions and the company employees explaining why working for their company was the greatest thing since sliced bread. My presentation went well. It was one more event to hurdle before the end. Once I was finished with that, I started on my first year review presentation. At the end of the first semester and then again at the end of the first year, the MFA students have a review with professors to look over their progress. Ultimately it is a look to see if the student has been doing anything at all, since the school has stopped truly failing people. Apparently they got burned a couple times because they (the art faculty) failed someone who then went on to show at the Whitney. If that isn't a poignant jab at the criteria of the school, I don't know what is.

I timed my presentation. It ran at 20 minutes. And that was the barest minimum I needed to get the smallest cross-section of my work across, just for the past year. The presentation was supposed to run for 10 minutes. So I hacked away at it some more and was really nervous Wednesday morning when I gave the presentation. I talked really fast to try and get everything in the time limit I was given. I believe I have been told by three different professors that I talk too fast during my presentations. I have decided this is ultimately due to over-preparation, not under-preparation.

For example, I had another presentation to give Thursday afternoon on the 10 page theoretical paper I had to write. And I didn't prepare much of anything (other than some unique and interesting examples). And it went smoothly. I thought I was only going to talk for five minutes and then be done, but I gave a fantastic presentation which lasted almost 20 minutes. The most difficult part of that assignment was writing a ten page paper on "whatever you want, as long as it somehow relates to what we talked about and read over the semester." Could we write a fictional narrative story? Sure. Could we write about our own work and relate it to the concepts? Fine by the teacher. So, what exactly are we supposed to write about? Whatever.

Don't do that to your students. It drives me crazy.

Thankfully, that meant I was almost finished with the week, and since Rebecca practically went to sleep by the time she got home around 6:30pm and had dinner, it was turning out to be a long week. Friday morning was everyone's last day. I went to the final critique for the class I TA for. I finished my editing for the current issue of the Switch Journal for New Media. Rebecca's final day was the first day they actually did any product design participation. [we had other activities and examples throughout the week, basically learning their approach to research and preparation for design work. Since they focus on user-centered design, for them the research is most important because if they do that wrong, there's no way the design will be right. Still, it's funny to go so long in the training before we even talk about applying the research to a real design! -beck] So we went to dinner in the evening to relax. Maybe we should have gone to dinner in the evening just to eat, because I don't think we were ready to relax the way they thought we should relax.

We arrived at the restaurant at 7:00 and there was only a few couples scattered in the restaurant. We were seated and given our menus. And then we waited. For a while. But we had bread so we were at least content. Eventually, someone noticed us and our orders were taken. Then we waited some more. We lost track of time. In fact, we began to wonder if we were getting our food. In perfect non-sequitur fashion, a waiter came up to us and asked if "everything was good." I stared at him a bit confused and said, "Well...we're still waiting for our food." He looked at the table, a bit confused himself, and then went to go get our food.

Think that's funny? Well, it gets a little bit worse. We ate, the food was fine. But then we waited for our check. And Waited. The waiter came over and asked us if we had our check yet. We didn't. He apologized and said he'd go take care of it. This repeated three times. By the time we left the restaurant it was 9pm. 2 hours in a restaurant. That is unheard of for us. There was only one other time we took longer, at the Whiskey Creek Cafe in Oregon - but the food there was unbelievably good. No such luck for our Friday night attempt.

Then, Saturday, we truly celebrated by driving down to Santa Cruz to "sit on the beach and play frisbee." Except that the winds were flying by at amazing speeds (not to mention cold) whipping the sand into our faces and stinging our skin. Good thing we both brought jackets. Fine. So no water, no frisbee, no looking. At least the sound of the waves was nice. It was just nice to be someplace relaxing. Except for the naked guy who then started to patrol the entrance/exit to the beach. We were TRAPPED! Eventually, we hiked the steep exit in the back of the cove, but it was definitely a weird, strange day at the beach.

Lastly? We watched The Fountain. And I was right, I did like it. It was so refreshing to watch a non-linear film which uses the capabilities of film often put aside for the money-making qualities of the entertainment industry. Rebecca and I are planning on watching it a second time before returning it. Which is a rarity for us with movies.