rose marshack : whyamistillawake.com

I’m calling it the land of the sunsets because it’s west of the fields here. But doesn’t it sound like a paradise?

I’ve had almost a week of meetings and orientations at ISU, watching faculty clap for each others’ achievements, smile at each other. It’s just the culture there, I guess. One speaker noted that “The word is getting out; if you want to go to a college where you’ll be taught by a PhD and not a graduate student (’and not a TV set,’ I would add), you’ll come to ISU.” People nodded. We’re definitely the Second Ship here in Illinois, and UIUC is the First Ship, but I don’t care because this is the Teaching Ship and I want to teach.

I saw a kid with a mohawk today, looking for keys. I wanted to grab him and give him a little squeeze and acknowledge his alternativeness (which probably would have upset him greatly.) The other day, I saw what I think might have been a Music Business student. Next week I get to meet all my new students and start teaching them! I’m SO in the right place. The ISU website is great; has all kinds of information I can use to learn to teach, it actually WORKS and you can find info on it. In fact you can get your class roster and even see the students’ pictures along with their names!! It’s incredible! ISU is just like a lean, mean, fighting machine to my old school’s dreadnaughtness, that’s all.

I have to say I miss all my old colleagues and teachers though. I had a moment where I realized I was in a different place, yesterday, in fact, and I wished I could have run over to A&D and given everyone hugs. But I’ll do that next week sometime when I return some keys and paperwork. And instead, today, I just sent everyone an email from my new ilstu.edu account.

We played a Poster Children show in Millenium Park a couple of days ago, and it had to have been around 95 degrees out there. It was great to play a challenging show again! We had tons of fun but it really was kind of like fighting a war, which is pretty much what we’d do anyway on the stage even if it wasn’t over 90 degrees. So by the end of the show I was exquisitely happy and probably 2 wrong breaths away from fainting.

Millenium Park - especially the water area - is gorgeous. I will post some pictures, but there is a water area where you can walk on 1-3 inch high water on grey slate-like rocks, and there are two giant monolithic towers on each end of the water, filled with LEDs surrounded by glass bricks and water pours over them. Giant ‘video’ faces beam out from the monoliths, and water sprays over them and sometimes out the mouth of the face. Every so often, the amount of water falling over the top intensifies and the people standing underneath (beside) the monolith scream in glee as they are pummeled with water.

The beautiful thing about this water-park is the social aspect of it. I found that the personal space barrier between people was the smallest I’ve ever seen in my life, in this water area. People of all colors sat next to each other, left their shoes yards away from where they were playing, smiled - no, grinned - at each other as they dashed past each other. Little kids ran around half-naked, adults stood with the kids under the waterfalls. Everyone got really close to each other, in a way you’d probably never see anywhere else, not even in a pool situation. I’m not sure if it was the feeling like we were all dwarfed by the incredible Chicago skyline all around us (we’re all in this together sort of thing) or the happy faces beaming down on everyone, but everyone felt like friends.

Now that I think of it, it’s probably the water that brings everyone together; it’s something that’s touching all of us in the park. And it’s hugging us, it feels wonderful in that heat. It’s like we’re all a bunch of babies in a womb or something. I remember someone (either my dad or a famous comic) noting that on the street, if a car passes you by, you want to kill it and the driver, but on the water, on a boat passing by, everyone waves to each other like they’re long-lost relatives.

Time for me to go to bed and worry a bit about how to record oboes. That’s the one thing I might not know how to do so well. But I have a book!