On Chambermaiding

So I'm sitting in my filthy bedroom reading Tiger Beatdown's commentary* on the We Are All Chambermaids slogan at the French rallies in support of the woman who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted rape. Flavia wrote that the slogan isn't real solidarity since it erases the different levels of vulnerability that women experience across the class and power spectrum. And I thought, I would like a maid.

I graduate in two weeks and whenever I am not doing school stuff I am sleeping, and at this point I can't wash my dishes or my housemates will realize I have 30 dishes hoarded in my room. And I needed my bookcases for an installation I'm doing on campus, so I just piled everything in the corner. And I can't take two steps with all of this dumb lighting equipment everywhere. So, I would like to be reciprocal maids with someone. I could clean her place when I am bored and she was busy, and hopefully our finals would be at different times so we could both have a clean room all the time. This won'tt do a thing for women who are maids for a job, but I think it is a good way for me to not clean up after myself without being awful about it.

I have worked as a maid for four months or so at the hostel, and it was okay. It was nice because it isn't rich people who stay there. A lot of the regulars don't have permanent housing so I kind of liked making sure at least the bathroom was dehaired for them. Anyway, now I have to get dressed up Stepford wives style because a friend is coming over to watch me clean.

*here is the link, but on my computer each word is a separate line.

Brick Barbell for Metal Fab

I weigh all the weight!

Home Project Metal Fab

Our final project for Metal Fabrication is on the subject of home. I am remaking the metal book (formerly a purchased photo album) of homes of loved ones from my piece last quarter, What I Would Save In a Fire.

This is my house where I live now- ground down plasma cut sheet metal

I couldn't buy embroidery floss today because I forgot where the sewing store is and the art store only had big packs that included a lot of colors I don't need, so I used paint to plan out where I can anchor the colors.

This is my whole little book before I sanded it- the discoloration is from heat from the plasma cutter.

Here it is sanded, cleaned with denatured alcohol, and coated with clear spraypaint.

Metal Fab: Metal Notebook

This notebook is a birthday present for my little brother. It's made from 18 gauge mild steel. 

 The inside is filled with fancy graph papers (hex, polar, crosses, one point perspective) I printed off incompetech.com. I cold bent the hinge with a hammer and pliers. The hinge pin is a piece of rod that I built up on the ends with weld. The N is written in weld and then ground flat, and I also ground off the sharp edges all around. The graph paper part took a bit more than an hour and the metal part took two and a half hours.

Why Reagonomics and Keynesian Economics Failed

HC 106.8 S28 1987

It is because people hoard surpluses instead of reinvesting them. Okay, this book showed me what happens when tables are translated directly into paragraphs. It is boring and harder (for me) to follow. So I guess I should be glad that most books use tables.

New Video Skills!

Fall quarter, I wrote

I am having an extremely hard time thinking like a filmmaker. My professor told us to think of it as sculpting in light and time. My strong inclination is to point the camera at something I like and not move it except to replace the dv tape every hour. I am comfortable with the camera as a tool for recording but not as a tool for point of view or explanation or composition.

But today that switch was flipped and I can do it now, I can make videos. I'd been trying all week to hit my vimeo upload limit of 500mb, which is 20 of my videos. I didn't reach my target, but I did force myself to think in terms of videos all week, and tonight I made this:

Then I made a video diary about how much i liked it but it turned out bad so I made a second one and then I watched them both at once and they synced up in content, sentence by sentence, but not in phrasing, so I recorded them (that is called 2-channel video) and then I spliced together:

1. webcam video diary #1

2. webcam video diary #2

3. laptop display of video diaries, captured with camcorder

4. camcorder video I recorded during video diary #2

I'm excited not because either of these are good but because my brain works in a new way all of a sudden after months of trying.

Math Feelings!

In April my housemate had to add some numbers so I showed her how I can do it in my head --I had been doing drills for a week or so-- and she said that was stupid and could I find my calculator. So I started crying. Not crying like something bad happened right then, but crying like something was painfully, permanently wrong. That showed me that I need to make it a priority to work out my math issues, so I am.

I'm considering buying a simple K-12 set of workbooks and working on it every day- preferably in public like in a cafe, the library, or at the bus stop. While researching these, I found out that some systems are meant to be long spiraled, and I got chills. They did that on purpose? I thought I had to learn absolute value, variables, and so on over the course of 8 years because the standards were sloppily implemented across grades. By the way, the thing about chills wasn't hyperbole- I am still trembling and my hands are white.

That project is a big commitment of time and money, so I decided to start smaller and work my way through a couple of books that I have on hand, Stats and Algebra I and II.

This whole math aptitude and feelings thing has been in the works for rather a while, as evidenced by this video I made last year:

In fact there is a seven minute version of this that is much better, but it is trapped on my external hard drive that is configured for macs.