elanya

I was re-listening to The traveler (Night Vale ep 17), and realized that it actually described my today pretty well. I mean, I go through a lot of latex gloves at work anyway, but today was a bit of an ordeal @_@ maybe that is why I'm so wiped today - that + bees :p

To recap my life briefly - I work in a glass museum. It's really cool. I have spent the past... 3 or four weeks, maybe? Cataloging Steuben art glass. It's fucking gorgeous. If you want an idea of what it is like... ( Pictures of shinies under the cut! )

Anyway, I usually unpack a box, take all my notes, put all my notes into the database, take picture, process all the pictures, and re-pack all the things. That is pretty much all there is to my job most of the time. Sometimes I do a little minor conservation or labeling/relabeling for variety.

Today I was helping/doing a photoshoot for some marketing materials for some of the exhibits going up after Christmas. This meant getting out about ten different boxes, some of which I haven't gotten to and so are packed horribly, and pulling one thing out of each box, moving all the stuff into the other room, setting up all the photo stuff in the studio, working with the marketing lady to get shots of all of these things that are much fancier than I usually do (the shots I take are generally nice, but they are mostly for identification purposes, whereas these will be on postcards and in brochures and such). Anyway, it was a lot more intensive, and I was kneeling on concrete pretty much all afternoon to get all the photos. I think we more or less got all the shots we needed, but it was after 5 when we finished and I didn't look at them all yet. I also have to put everything away tomorrow, including dealing with all the stuff that came out of really poorly packed boxes that no one has looked at in at least 5 years and possibly more like 10 :p

As for the latex gloves, fingerprints leave permanent marks on glass really easily - especially fancy art glass that has had various surface treatments applied to make it iridescent and such - and we have gloves (technically nitrite and not latex) to keep from getting prints on. You can't use the white cotton ones that are okay for other art handling because they are too slippery. But the gloves get warm - especially when you are doing photography with hot lights - and I went through a lot of them because my hands were sweating so much, yum!

So all in all, my Monday was long and tiring, but didn't harm me, and I went through a lot of gloves. Thanks, Night Vale!

I'm sure there must be people out there who wonder and don't know, right?

Well, I am officially defending my dissertation on May 29. I more or less printed out the committee copies and will distribute them on Monday. Then I just need to write the abstract and acknowledgments. Oh and the defense presentation, I suppose :p

After that... I'll have about a week or so before I start my new job! Wooh! I have a one year position at the Forsyth Gallery as a cataloger. The way I am thinking, this will give me a year to try and do things like get syllabi together, maybe get an article published, submit my dissertation for publication (maybe), and basically try and get everything I can ready to be more eligible for the academic job circuit. Everything except teach, anyway :p And this way I'll have some decent museums experience under my belt and can start looking at those sorts of positions as well, or at least have other options if I can't find a decent academic job or risk falling into the adjunct trap after a few years.

I think that is really all of the big news. I'm still living in the same place. The pets are well. I'm still writing little bits and pieces. Maybe this year I will also make more serious efforts to get some fiction published? I think I may try and revive some of my older works in progress as well, or at least see if I can't bring them to some kind of reasonable conclusion (mostly thinking about my Romulan fic). If I intersperse it with other things I'm working on I think that will help me keep momentum all around, and then I can be producing stuff that maybe someone will be more interested in reading than my other stories. I like to think I am a pretty good writer, I'm just terrible at writing to capture audiences - if only I would write things people actually want to read! :p But maybe that is just an excuse :p

Um... I think that's about it, really. Finishing the Diss should be a bigger deal, but it really doesn't feel it. There have been moments of adrenalin rush and anxiety, but mostly I am relaxed to indifferent. Maybe it just hasn't settled in? Maybe its because I never isolated myself socially as much as some people finishing up, so it doesn't feel like as much of a release? I feel like I should feel more accomplished, I suppose.

I think part of it is that I fear a similar reaction to my fiction writing, where I think it is good and interesting (I also don't hate my topic as much as I've been told I should at this point), but no one else is interested. I guess we'll see. I'm interested to hear comments from my committee, at least - I'm not completely disengaged, or anything, but it mostly feels like the end of an inevitable process rather than overcoming any kind of challenge. Maybe I just don't feel like I have been challenged enough - my chair's comments were almost entirely copy-editing notes (and they were not extensive). I don't have that much faith in my brilliance though. Enh.

I feel like I should reward myself for getting it printed out today, even if I didn't get it turned in. I thought about ordering pizza, but I have pulled pork in the crockpot. Maybe I'll just make Nutella popcorn again.