rose marshack : whyamistillawake.com

I’m on my first week of No Work and No Holiday and No Vacation: and it’s great! I’m actually starting to work on syllabi now for teaching my classes this August - Arts Technology 388 and Music Business.

I have day 1 of Arts 388 planned now - the class is going to be about Participatory Networked Whatevers (web2.0 and all the other buzzwords) but I want to make sure they will get to do Fun Stuff Like Creating Things and not just talk about theory all the time. Day 1 is probably really Week 1 & 2; since I’m a new perfessor I will probably try to pack way too many things into the class. But anyway Day 1 is the following presented:

If the class is about communication, we need to talk about Graphics first. How to make things readable, understandable, how to clearly present information and data. So I can give nice examples from, say, Edward Tufte; the graphing of the London cholera epidemic, and the screwed up data presentation of the shuttle disaster - and the performance of Richard Feynman at the subsequent hearings (with the O-ring and the glass of ice water)… I have some artwork that works parallel to the cholera map; Candy Jernigan’s “Found Dope” which is a beautifully laid out presentation of all the dope paraphenalia she found in the city around her apartment building. There’s a great parallel between the London cholera epidemic, where just plotting the names along a temporal path according to death would be completely useless (which is what would have logically followed from a bunch of death notices) but the opposite case of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial which works wonderfully because it is names plotted along a temporal path…. and I will end up with the Clock of the Long Now.

There is no way that will all fit into the first class. I also want to talk a lot more about graphics and color choices. That can be for the second day I guess. Then an assignment, but it has to be one that will be awesome and fun and impossible to mess up, just like the best teacher in the world (Doyle Moore)’s assignments used to be.

Yes, I’m totally excited and also scared. But I’m going to plunge ahead and “Go In Like Gangbusters” which is what the Dean of Fine and Applied Arts at UIUC told me to do.

I have scheduled The Music Business Class for Wednesday and Thursday days… this is SO fun, to just sit and work on what to teach people ALL DAY!!! I cannot believe how lucky I am!! (I know I’ll be jaded later, but for right now, WOW! actually I don’t think I’ll be jaded ever, because this is EXACTLY WHAT I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED TO DO! So there!)

So the freaky thing about the Music Bus class so far is that I’m second-guessing myself. So many people have recommended Donald Passman’s All You Need To Know About The Music Business - I finally picked it up - and… it starts out by saying ‘If you want to get anywhere / signed to a major, you need a good lawyer and a manager.’ Which is absolutely the opposite of what I would have told everyone. I just blew $30 on a book! But the thing is, that’s the other way of doing this I guess. It’s lucky that I know both ways! I can just tell everyone about all that. So maybe this book is the one to get. I have taken out about 15 other music business books from the music library here at UIUC and others from Champaign library… I don’t think I’ve ever done this much research about anything in my life. or cared as much.

Rick’s dad has had his operation and they have taken his tumor out. This stuff is probably really private and I shouldn’t be writing about it. He looked pretty good the last time I saw him, sitting up in the hospital. He is recovering now but now is the time to think about what to do in the future. And that’s for a different blog.

We had a long, long, long vacation with my family; all the sisters (my 2 youngers) were together and we had a wonderful and intense time together. It is so amazing that we are so different, but we all love each other so much and have a closeness and bond that we’ll never allow to break. It’s very interesting to figure out how to deal with our kids; we all have such different ways of raising our children! I will go into that in the future.

Why exactly am I still awake? I get so greedy. At night, greed takes over, whether I’m moronically staring at shopping webpages, or trying to squeeze another day’s worth of research out of a night. I’m so greedy.

I wonder what it is like to know what is going to kill you. I’ve been reading about pancreatic cancer. You’re not supposed to eat animal fat. It’s bad for you. I wonder if I should give up eating ice-cream.

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You’re going through life, enjoying retirement (by going back to the office periodically) and then boom, you feel a bit ill, go to the doctor, and find out there’s a tumor on your pancreas.

Boom. Rick’s dad is sick and is going into the hospital. Life is all waiting. Summer is blooming all around us, my sister from London is in town for a month, my family is together for the first time in years, Rick’s first Chicago art opening is this weekend, and the band is starting to practice again. Lots of excitement and joy.
But life is all waiting. We’ll know something in a couple of days. But what will we know? What do we know?

I try to live life like every day is my last (I think). It’s hard when you get these “life lesson” emails and you already do what you’re supposed to be doing. What happens when you’ve got the correct mindset and then the bad thing happens? I guess there is still pain, but maybe it’s in a better context?

I wish there was something I could do to help. I don’t even know what subjects to talk about. Rick’s family is so much different than my family. When my dad was sick, I didn’t have that removedness. I feel completely unable to help now. Plus, I think I kinda know I’m not good at sick people and hospital situations.
I guess no matter what happens there is always pain. I guess at these times it’s important to focus on the joy too.

These are very intense times.

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