Be in the Biz

I am having a wicked blast teaching a class in publication tools and design this semester.  There are roughly 283920483 outtakes to the actual business of teaching this class two days a week. For example, a couple of weeks ago, we designed bottle labels for a sparkling juice beverage that we, as professional beverage makers, invented. Doesn't that sound like a blast and a half? Blast!  My students produced some amazing work full of color and pizazz. A regular design pizazzerie. Now one of the students had a creative delay (see also: procrastination station) and he brought me project a few days weeks after, like a streetcorner swigger, he pulled that bottle out of a bag and then...

And then we both laughed.

Because, label design prowess aside, I was feeling very much like my office had turned into a lab for dropping off samples of...you know...a different kind of liquid, n'ah mean?

We're now moving on to our propaganda unit. Soon the students will be Here's the demo poster I've created.  I'm so proud that I welcome you to download it as a free printable. Bon apetit!

Download pdf here awesome2

Love from Design HQ, Kendra

Joy-filled Season

There is no denying that this has been one of the most joyful seasons in my parenting life. The fact that this has also been a season in which I have spent the least amount of time with my children is no coincidence. Make no mistake, I love spending time with my children, and I do spend plenty with them, despite this new regimen of classes and office hours and sprints back and forth to Mac Labs at 11 p.m. to set up technologies that will just make a liar out of me. But let me be honest: my children are smiling more and my Baby Girl has run through the Creation story in skit form and my Little Man has started spouting vocab words like woah, and I have had very little to do with all of this. Oh sure, I hired the outsourced care. I scoped out the school. I earn the scrilla that writes the checks. But I am very much the mama who rides in like a hero at the end of the day to hear all about the day's playground drama and what kind of cement mixer passed by our house. My capacity has been reduced. I am more than a freelancer, but less than a full-timer if we're really counting direct service hours in parentland. Of course my children are always on my mind, they are inextricably linked to my heavy heart. I enjoy their company more than I remember enjoying it and I attribute it to all the support I have right now in helping them to explore the world.

I am generally okay with it. The guilt does come in waves and sometimes, because I am in the South where mothers of small children with careers seem to be an anomaly, I feel sucked in and spit back out to shore by it all. I stand over my sleeping children, warm little pajama-clad marsupials breathing in all the peaceful molecules in our home and breathing out all the yawps of glee of the past day, and I think, Was I there enough for you today? Did I give you enough hugs and peanut butter today? Will you remember this day ten years from now as a day in which we put away the silverware together and talked about hot air balloons, or will you recall how I got all sorts of bent out of shape because you kept interrupting me reading a Mercer Mayer classic and FOR THE LOVE OF PEDRO CAN YOU PLEASE STOP SNARFING ON YOUR BROTHER'S SOCKS.

All of this enJOYment of my children comes in contrast, though. Had I not the privileged opportunity to stay home with them for months and sometimes whole years, I am not sure I would feel this way. Grateful doesn't even come close to expressing the hearty thanks I have to my husband for working all of those insane jobs (with the insane) to provide that opportunity for me, for us. The days of placating newborns through the witching hour, of wrangling toddlers who boycotted nap are a part of my past career, but the skills are transferable to my current position and the memories of the sweetness and the struggle inform all that I do now, all that I am now: Wife, mother, professor, hapless student of this joy-filled mess.

***

outdoor photo credits to Lovey Loverpants

Funk

I was in a funk today. I'm still teetering on the fringes of that funk, but I guess that means I've arrived. Things aren't all shiny and new, pretenses have dissolved. I'm feeling authentic things I'm meant to feel because, teaching and parenting and living in the world is sometimes sunshine and lollipops but it's also half-eaten gummi bear vitamins stuck to the bottom of your shoe, isn't it? The window of being the new kid is quickly closing and the grace period of not having my stuff together is on the wane. I remember a friend of mine writing that post 9/11, everyone in New York was just being way too polite and sensitive, and that she was actually happy once people got back to their cranky selves on the subway commute because she got her old NYC back.

While nobody terrorized me this morning, things didn't go as planned in my design class and I felt super bummed about it. The very sweet teaching assistant e-mailed me and said that she really enjoyed class and that I was doing a good job. She must have been in someone else's design class by mistake because the one I taught this morning was a disaster like something fierce. The lasso tool in Adobe Illustrator was totally conspiring against me and making a liar out of me right in my own classroom in front of students on a big projected screen. Economy size can of urrgh is what I was projecting, that's what.

Oh, but then? We had a convocation with an embedded journalist who had spent his summer with a crew of Marines in Afghanistan. Summer. In Afghanistan. Can you say put an umbrella in my drink??? F-U-N. No.

I lifted the body armor of the journalist and it weighed far FAR more than Little Man. And I cannot carry Little Man across the dog food aisle without huffing and puffing because boyfriend be heaveh.

That really put into perspective for me what the men and women fighting overseas experience. They experience, at the minimum, having to wear a body armor greater than Little Man's bodyweight in order to defend our freedoms.

I cannot say that perspective snapped me right out of my funk, but I am certainly grateful for moments and feelings and people and body armors that are so real that they remind you that you are alive and that this life ain't all that bad. Sometimes it just seems that way.

*** Sometimes when I'm in a funk, I look at old pictures. Like reaching into a pocket of cheer.

This day a year ago:

This day two years ago:

This day (sniff) three years ago:

Gulp. Four years ago:

Five:

*** One more week to support the ASH campaign. Ending malaria! Let's do it!!!