Today, I woke up early enough in the morning to get a shower and start driving into town for the final meeting on my calendar project. I was in such a rush to get out of the door and on the road that I forgot my cell phone on the drafting table in my room. It had left it on the charger cord and only remembered that it was still at home as I was pulling on to campus.
I wasn't expecting any phone calls, nor did I have any calls of my own to make, so it really didn't matter if it was home. Still, the cell phone is such a presence in my pocket these days, it feels weird not to have it. It is also weird to think about how something that seems like a necessity today was something that I comfortably did without for several years before. I remember thinking to myself how odd people seemed talking on their cell phones out in public back when cell phones first started showing up in any kind of great numbers. If you passed by someone talking on the phone in the street, you might have needed a moment or two to note that they weren't addressing you or that they did not have a mental illness. One usually only saw mentally ill homeless people talking to themselves in public before the advent of the cell phone. Today, phones are evolving further, and it won't be long before we're holding them in front of our faces to talk each other instead of pressing them against our ears merely to listen.
Once on campus, I printed up my calendar project, had the meeting with the art gallery director to get her approval on it, and then worked on fitting it into the printer's online template. The fact that I am getting a heck of a deal on the printing costs almost makes the various idiosyncratic weirdness of their print process worthwhile. They don't use the industry standard software that the majority of their clients do, so their is ton of fussing with things on the computer to get things to print correctly. However, because all of this fussing occurs on the computer or over the phone, you really have to cross your fingers and hope the project comes back in the way you envisioned it. The last thing I would want to have happen is for the calendar to come back folded nine ways to Sunday, and have eight of those ways be wrong.
I expected the process to take an hour or so, but the adjustments and the uploading took three and half. Thankfully, we (me and the lab/print technician) finished it up before my 2:00 p.m. meeting.
The meeting at 2:00 p.m. was concerning some minor administrative issues regarding my finishing up incompletes that I regrettably received in Fall 2008. My plan thus far is to finish them up this term, but I've been in school long enough to know that even the most carefully laid plans can get irredeemably haywire if you don't shepherd them through the bureaucracy as you go along. Fortunately, it seems that things will work out.
I bought a sub sandwich when my school obligations were done, ate it in the computer lab, and talked with the art director and some of the other students for a bit before finally returning home. I spent much of the evening at home in front of the computer surfing through design and photography sites, watching television, and playing silly games. Later that night, since there was nothing on the television worth watching, I listened to some Grateful Dead on Itunes.
This is my second day on the new medicine, and I cannot tell if it is having an effect or not. My arm is a little sore where I put the patch, and I am more tired than usual, but I can't tell if any of this is related. At some point, I plan on getting a hair-cut, but I have to make an appointment, and I have to emotionally commit to spending about 20 bucks to do something I only half want to do. I also need to finally finish up that picture project I've been promising everyone that I am working on. Tomorrow might be the right day for that.