30-Second Vignettes
(Apologies for the randomness of this post, but I think it’s a reflection of my thought processes at the moment.)
I hope the lack of posting during projects won’t become a trend, but this week was pretty intense. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we had to make a 30-second video describing what interaction design is for the 30-Second Visions project. We presented our finished product on Friday evening at 17:00.
My mind is still spinning from everything. After all the presentations were finished, I went back upstairs to studio and sat down at my desk, stared at my computer, and slowly realized that I didn’t have to do anything. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel exhausted and tired, as I’d expected to; rather, I felt like I should be doing something—I felt a lack of work. Strange feeling, this is, as I was always so eager to be done with work at my previous jobs. I’m taking this as a good sign for now, but I’ll have to get back to you in December to see if I still feel the same way.
To say that we had to deliver this video by Friday evening at 17:00 doesn’t begin to describe the rest of the scenario:
Italian class from 9:30 to 13:00 every day. Lunch from 13:00 to 14:30. Lecture from 14:30 to about 17:00. Group work and dinner from 17:00 to 21:00. Presentations from our guests from 21:00 to 23:00. So somewhere among all those other things we were supposed to conceive, film, and edit our video.
Let’s just say that we were up until 5:00 on Friday finishing something that we thought (at 20:30 Thursday evening) would take just an hour or so. “Numerous technical issues” just begins to scratch the surface. It’s been a long week, so after the presentations on Friday everyone hustled off to aperitivo. Sadly, the selection of food wasn’t quite up to par with the previous weeks, so I ended up cooking and eating dinner with a couple of people back in Talponia.
It’s a strange setup at Talponia. We each have our own apartment, and the way the building is arranged it’s very hard to get from room to room. But even so, we still manage to get together in groups and cook dinner together or just hang out. While we lose some of the community feel that a dorm provides, it’s also nice to invite people over to your apartment.
I was also pleasantly surprised with how our group dynamic worked in this project. We had four people in our group. Sometimes people can be great to know as friends, but horrible to work with. Since we had gotten to know everyone as friends (and to a very minor degree that’s how the groups formed), it was a bit of an adjustment to working together. And I think there was some stepping around toes at the beginning, but eventually we got comfortable enough to work effectively.
This morning I was woken up by the cleaning ladies when they rang my doorbell. I’m not the most lucid person when I first wake up, especially not when having gone to bed just five hours earlier. And the last time they’d rung my doorbell when I’d been home, I wasn’t fast enough to answer and they just walked right into my room. When I heard the doorbell this time, my brain immediately recognized the danger and as a reflex tried to communicate to the cleaning ladies that I was indeed home.
So I began yelling incoherently. Yelling might be too strong a word, perhaps: “speaking loudly” is probably a better choice, retaining the emphasis on “incoherent”. Eventually the “conversation” reached the point of them saying “Lunedi Lunedi” and me saying “Si Si Si,” after which I promptly fell right back to sleep. It had all the characteristics of a bad dream…
When I awoke, it was around noon and I ran off to the market to get some food for the upcoming week. My food supply had begun to dwindle earlier in the week, so when I’d gone over to other people’s rooms for dinner I had very little to offer. At the market, I made sure to get fruit and veggies, and tonight we enjoyed some amazing raspberries and kiwi fruit for dessert along with the pasta we’d had for dinner.
Tonight I learned that “cod” is “bacalhau” in Portuguese.
And with that I think I need to sign off. I’ll write more about my new computer, the challenges of typing on a foreign keyboard, and other exciting things in another post some other time. Right now, I need some sleep.