In praise of procrastination, and Star Wars

"What should you have been taught in the LIB100 class?" queries the bulletin board.

See, I do a lot of work in Clemson University's library, down in the basement next to the Congressional reports from the 1880s and the shelves of appendices to the Iran-Contra investigation, and the entrance on the floor above is dominated by a bulletin board on which students are asked a different question each week, ranging from "Give us a midterm assignment!" to the above.  Rainbow sticky notes and markers are provided for answering.  I stop and read them every Monday; they're like one of those witty, brilliant Facebook or Twitter conversations in concrete form.

My second-favorite answer was this gem of wisdom: "That procrastination is inevitable ... grab a coffee + embrace it."  This is one of those important lessons I learned in college that it's hard to convey.  Sometimes, you just work best under pressure.  Sometimes a task needs to be completed in one marathon block.

Interestingly enough, the students who best understand this, I've found, are ex-military men.  I assist a few in the Writing Center, and generally they're not coming in an hour before the paper is due wanting to be told how to make it an A, but coming in a couple of days before with a polished product waiting for critiques.

In every tutoring position I've had, I've realized that moral support is a massive part of my function.  My entering freshmen, smart kids who'd happened to flunk the Writing Placement Exam for one reason or another, had overall much higher GPAs than freshmen who didn't have tutoring; a success for the pilot program I was working for.  They often found my editing and chatting about their topics useful.  And yet I'm tempted to suspect that a significant part of their grade increase might have been as a result of having someone to ask where they could go to get the free cough drops and stress balls, what recourse they had if they were being taught by an incompetent TA (or a competent TA and a lazy professor) -- someone whose dad was the football captain in '85 at the high school where they graduated in '10, someone who would listen as they talked about their depression over being unable to bridesmaid at their sister's wedding due to an exam -- someone to suggest a mediator for roommate disputes.  Someone, in short, to talk to.

I'm less patient these days with students who spend their half-hour appointments telling me how hard everything is ("It's college.  College is hard," I want to say.  "Did you expect this was easy?  Do you think I did it because it was a cake walk?").  Yet I understand that this is part of my job -- not as large a part as some students like to believe, but an important part, like the secretarial work and plagiarism reports that also form part of my week.

And yet -- to circle back toward one of my points -- ex-military students don't tend to need this.  The student who recently returned from his tour in Iraq and who comes in with a bleakly and elegantly phrased cause-and-effect paper about how his PTSD has affected his wife doesn't want my sympathy, he wants me to help find comma splices.  He wants a good grade, not a shoulder.  The man who served for 29 years doing First Aid training is far more interested in whether he wants "quicker" or "more quickly" than he is in telling me how difficult it is to be a returning student of non-traditional age.  I'm not saying these issues aren't hard or deserving of support, only that it's nice to be helping people by providing them with my expertise, not by functioning as a listening ear that anyone could be.

It was the above-mentioned First Aid trainer who explained to me why military students don't seem to have a problem with procrastination.  "You don't get advance notice," he told me.  "You're given a project and you do it now, and if you complain you end up with more work and the same deadline."

"So you don't have the same trouble handling the stress of it?" I asked.

"None at all.  This is business as usual.  You get the work, you do the work as best you can in the time you have."

Bravo, sir!  That's a healthy attitude for all college students to adopt.  Procrastination can be treated as scheduling if a student is well-acquainted with his or her working pace and ability to cope with the stress of the fast-approaching deadline.  Now that's a real life skill -- one that I'm still developing as I learn how much copywriting I can actually do in a given period.

My favorite note on that board, however, wasn't actually the one about procrastination.  It was the green one that asserted that LIB100 should teach students how to "bullseye Whomprats with a T130."  A blue one below advised the original sticky-noter to turn off his targeting computer.

The world isn't doomed.

A shopping guide

If you have a bit of back-to-school shopping left to do, or (like us) you work in education and the first paycheck after Starvation Summer is burning a hole in your pocket, check out the shops of some of my recent Etsy copywriting customers:


Is liberal guilt about brown-bag lunches setting in hard yet? Reusable bags from SeaCute Designs, whose profile page I wrote, are surprisingly affordable for the category, and appear nicely made and rhapsodically cute; the very professional shop owner donates a portion of proceeds to Feed the Children.


For playing after school, tutus from avasmommy07 are made with lots and lots of US-made tulle so they're soft and poofy like the imaginary fairy princess gown you had when you were little. That isn't the item I wrote the description for; I just love that picture, which balances posing and naturalness so well, and which has a very nice contrast of background and foreground.


This purse hanger and similar ones from talented Etsy graphic designer Topview are great; original artist design, and those things are massively useful when there are narrow aisles between desks (one particular classroom in the anthropology department at UCR, in Watkins Hall, was pretty much where we shoved all the spare furniture so they wouldn't take it away before we were able to lay claim to another room. We guarded our classrooms jealously so we could keep artifacts and posters in them. But that room was hell on earth in the summer).

Topview also does very cool Etsy banners -- and, as you can see, very crisp professional photography. She's one of my absolute favorite customers so far; I edited the content for her very useful website for international students hoping to apply to colleges and universities in the United States, which I'll link to once it goes live.

Starting Monday with a Nastygram

I received this email in June from the business school attached to my undergrad university.


Dear Chelsea,

Our records indicate that you have either recently finished or will soon complete your undergraduate degree at UCR. I am proud of your accomplishments and certain that you will continue to be successful in the future.

While finishing college is an exciting time in the life of any graduate, you may be feeling discouraged in your search for a suitable job. As the Dean of the Anderson Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at UCR, I am keenly aware of the impact of the economic downturn on professional careers available to recent graduates. It is indeed frustrating and disheartening to attempt to enter the job market in the current financial climate.

The good news, however, is that this is an excellent time to consider starting your graduate studies. Our records indicate that we have been in touch with you about our graduate programs in the past. Therefore you may already know that a Master of Business Administration (MBA) is, by far, the most sought after and competitive graduate degree. At AGSM we offer an MBA program that is accredited by AACSB and is focused on developing leaders ...

[further platitudes ensue]

***

Dear Dr. [redacted] (or manager of this inbox),

Thanks for your interest in having me apply to the Anderson School of Business Management.  While I have moved across the country and my degree from UCR was in fact in the social sciences, not in business, I am now a freelance copywriter having reasonable independent success despite your concerns about my employability.

Consequently, I have a counter-offer for you.  For the relatively competitive price of $25, I will ghost-write the email that you send to candidates like me in such a way that it removes the paternalistic and condescending tone which, sadly, reeks from the first two paragraphs of the email I received from your program dated 16 June, 2011.

If you intended for the air of condescension to be so apparent, then I apologize for the assumption on my part.  Thanks in advance for your consideration and I wish you the best in your future endeavors.

Sincerely,
Chelsea Clarey
Copywriter
 scribblegoat@gmail.com
elance.com/s/scribblegoat/10180/
scribblegoat.etsy.com

This is how I felt the entirety of last fall

It's funny because it's true, people.  It's funny because it's true.

Some interesting stuff from my anthro classes

I've written a couple of interesting papers in the last couple of weeks -- and by "in the last couple of weeks," I of course mean, "I had the prompts for a couple of weeks but the actual paper writing was accomplished as a three-day, fifteen-page marathon."

The first was for Gender and Archaeology -- which, side note, I honestly thought I disliked this professor?  I'd taken an Intro to Archaeology with her and been avoiding her ever since.  But she's wonderful.  Anyway.  The paper is about the recent trend in anthropology (of which archaeology is a sub-discipline) of dedicating some time to describing the cultural context from which the writer is approaching the subject.  Until quite recently (the late 70s/early 80s, from what I can tell) this was considered both unscholarly and unscientific, but the trouble there?  The only way we look at a scientific perspective and say "this is objective" is if it's at least a passable imitation of being from a white middle-class Anglo-European male.  Think about the Sotomayor confirmation hearings a few years back -- remember how everyone thought she would be biased because she was a Hispanic woman?  Remember how no one ever said "Well, being a white male should by that logic be an equal bias in the opposite direction?"  See what I mean?  The same is true of the social sciences.  Work that isn't from a white Euro-American male is peripheral.  You can't just be an archaeologist, you're a woman archaeologist or a Filipina archaeologist or a Chinese archaeologist.

So I argued that the centralizing of the observer as a part of the narrative forges a new objectivity.  I called the paper "Through Scientific I's."  Oh, the pun of it.

The other paper was for Language and Culture and it was about transmodal stylization and appropriation of homosexual group identity in the linguistic construction of the self, which is linguistics jargon for "why gay men talk that way."  I studied a couple of gay characters played by openly gay white American actors -- Chris Colfer's Kurt in Glee and John Barrowman's Jack in Torchwood -- and analyzed how the use of stereotypical gay speech is important for negotiating multiple identities.

So that was fun.  And now I go sleep.

A Last Quarter List

1. Dear God, I haven't had my jewelry stuff out in weeks.  It's a darn good thing I have such a backlog of photos to post.  It's just ... see, I have this issue where when I'm staring at things to do, I get incredibly overwhelmed very very quickly.  So pulling all the stuff on the shelves and then having to put it all back to get it off my mother's table does not currently feel like an option.  I'm told this can be a sign of Tourette's or ADHD.  Ya don't say.
2. Assuming I don't manage to do it again in the next month-and-change, the total number of times in my undergraduate career I have locked my keys in my car is 2.  I'm pretending this is an excellent final score.
3. I've developed a weird habit.  Rather than have a key dish like a normal person, when I get home and tear my clothes off to change into representatives from my growing collection of Threadless tees and gypsy skirts with pockets, all the stuff from my pockets -- the Pilot G2-07 ink pens I insist on, five-dollar bills, loose change, two kinds of chapstick and my cell phone -- are filed carefully in a shoe.  I actually now have a shoe I don't wear but reserve solely for this purpose.  It's a left Croc knock-off with fleece lining.  It goes on the floor under the window.
4. If I don't make 50 sales by the end of the year I am going to drown myself.  Please don't consider this a guilt thing, O Gentle Reader.  I've just been sitting at 49 since spring.  Mind you, I'm getting more attention than I used to, treasuries and blog-offers and such, and once the front page, so I assume this is just the summer-fall sales slow-down.  I'm writing this way ahead of time, mind (almost all of my list posts take a few weeks to slowly compose), so I might hit that goal by the time I post this thing.
5. On a vaguely related note, my favorite line from a Shakespeare play remains Roderigo's "I shall incontinently drown myself" from Act I in Othello, just because in modern parlance that's a great freakin' metal image.
6.  One of my shirttail cousins, Roland's girlfriend D, loaned me a book called The Girls Who Went Away which is several case studies of adoptions after the first Great War but before Roe v. Wade.  It's brilliant and heartbreaking and reads as smoothly as fiction.  I was desperately in need of a book to relax with, having read my way through Discworld again, and this fits the bill beautifully.
7. Why, why in my final quarter at UCR have I finally started making undergrad friends?  Surely these cool people have always been here.  Where were they?  Where were all the other socially awkward/steampunk-loving/lunch-packing/vintage-shopping/sexually-liberated/too-loud/Twilight-hating/anime-watching/any-or-all-of-the-above Anthro majors for the last three years?  Have I just been missing them?  Actually, this is horrible but I think what happened is half have graduated and the other half have moved a few places down their people-to-talk-to list to me.
8. I think I might start posting links to more of the treasuries I make.  Treasury used to be a nightmare, but now it's wonderful.  Easy to do and easy to get a spot and wonderful relaxing fun.  Great for a nice positive way to connect with other Etsians too.  As I believe I've said before, the forums depress me, so this is nice. 
9. For the first time in years, I didn't dress as anything recognizable for Halloween yesterday.  I was all set to wear my LOLcat costume from two years ago, but I forgot that I was working at the time and I designed the costume to go under my apron.  It doesn't work without the apron.  And all the other costumes -- my RAF uniform, my Gibson Girl dress, my Ren Faire stuff, all the ones from the Azkatraz con last year -- went with M to South Carolina in my cedar chest.   Now, mind you, I RP, so it's often recognizable to M which of the various characters I play were allowed to pick my clothes on a given day -- black and red and poet shirts and a short chain necklace is one person, skirts and heels and a lot of green is another, brown boots and a brown leather collar is yet another -- but this isn't detectable to anyone else.  Hence, I threw on the hand M and I made and my combat boots and called it a costume.
10. I like to refer to this day as All Saints' Day.  It makes me feel educated.  I generally manage to resist spelling Halloween as Hallowe'en.
11. I shall now resist the conventional list-of-ten format by making this very statement.  Aha!

Our Bloody Alma Mater

Remember that thing I said a bit ago (like a month ago) about clinging to the romance of my insanely punishing class schedule?  Remember how I said I hoped it wouldn't wear off?

One of the, ah, things about UCR, and symptomatic of the reasons I cannot in good conscience recommend it to any undergraduate, is that there is not nearly enough parking.  For a largely commuter school with terrible overcrowded dorms, you would think they would provide enough parking space handy to campus.

Instead, the parking is Disneyland-distance from nowhere, and there are about a hundred and fifty too few spaces for as many commuters as are on campus at midday on any given weekday.

I thought they had fixed some of the problem this year.  They've certainly painted in more spots, and I've had no trouble thus far.

Some days ago, however, I discovered that reason it seemed fixed was entirely due to my class schedule.

I can work the equivalent of four part-time jobs, right?

So classes began yesterday and already school is ... well, gruelling.  Item listings will be slow.

I'm attending five classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays from eight to five -- no lunch break in there, either -- and then two classes plus six tutoring appointments on the other three days.  Twenty units.  A full-time schedule is twelve.  Plus a part-time job.

But that's okay.  I can do this.  I fantasize that I'm walking in the weary footsteps of heroic scholarship students in the insular worlds of Victorian universities.  Hopefully, the romance of being overworked and underslept won't entirely wear off for about ten weeks.

However, some awesome things:
- My history professor refers to lectures as "storytime," requires laptop use, and encourages us to comment on the class Facebook page with questions.
- All of the lecture halls are still filled with colorful helium balloons, too high to reach, with signs calling for academic strikes.  This is brilliant -- I love creative nonviolent political action.
- Nothing makes me feel smart like going to class and hearing someone define self-actualization as when you're so self-actualized that you're fully self-actualized.

And we should be getting some new special offers here soon/at last!  So stay tuned.

The Internet is sometimes strange.

This has not been the best of weekends.

First of all, I've pulled a muscle. Not being athletic, I really didn't understand the level of crippling pain that can result from stress injuries. I used to see my high school's sports therapist for tendonitis, and he told me they're uncommonly similar. I can see why he'd get this idea, but the level of shooting, fetal-position-inducing agony reminds me of nothing more than shingles, which is when the Son of Chicken Pox comes back to rake its fiery claws through your nerves until you scream for mercy from God. Stress-induced, of course. How surprising that I've had this. *rolls eyes*

I feel slightly guilty for the level of pain, because I really don't do anything particularly strenuous with my shoulders -- and then I think about the positions I sit in. Sit upright, type, mouse, make about a dozen different small repetitive movements for an hour at a time, return to typing, mousing and typing, return to pliers and further small repetitive movements, hand-write for half an hour ... Other designers take note: The only wonder is that it's taken so long for me to hurt myself.

On a slightly more interesting note: I have a midterm today in Biology 40, Diseases and History, and am following my usual study method: search Wikipedia for study-guide terms, compare to textbook, note differences, rinse and repeat. It's a little weird to come into a Wikipedia article as it's being edited. The guy (why do I assume it's a man?) working on the stub about virulence factors is noting his place as he consults his books. It feels like he's leaving me little notes as I follow along. In the deliberate sterility that's created to give an impression of impersonal banks of objectivity, an odd moment of personal connection. I mean, we know there are people constantly editing wikis; it's strange to run across it as it happens, like an unplanned meeting of eyes with the nameless person who has the shift before yours at work.

So that's enough self-absorption out of me. Special offer to come!

Random List of the Week

1.) It's raining, but not yet pouring. Apart from wiping rain off my glasses, this is an awesome thing.

2.) I discovered there are electrical outlets on the balcony in the building where M teaches her last class. Since I necessarily have time to kill during that period, this now means I can sit outside and watch the rain while I update the shop and talk to any friends who happen to be online.

3.) A particular student in one of my classes threw a fit because she decided that a neighboring student's laptop's fingerprint ID check was recording secret films of her. She stormed out. After a long silence, someone else in the class suggested we pass the hat to buy the "perpetrator" a nice present.

4.) I have a D'Anjou pear and an Aero bar. Both are tasty.

5.) My high school friend A, who is deployed on the front lines in Afghanistan, emailed to let everyone know he's alive and celebrate his weekly shower.

6.) M has health insurance again. We found out last week, though she's had it since October. Without revealing details, we've needed it. Now, the university never bothered to tell us she had it or submit her paperwork, but that's a whole nother story.

7.) I have discovered this awesome webcomic called Something Positive. I've been reading through the archives all week. It's a very intelligent, dry work -- think Peanuts with late-twenties characters who drink a lot to fuel their biting verbal wit. It has touching moments, and a tendency to batter the emotions every three months or so, but it's worth it, and hilarious. The story so far will be pretty clear from the cast page.

8.) My Bio 40 professor's favorite phrase: "Patience at once!"

9.) I'm almost done with my custom-order forms for a consignment line.

10.) And I have one more commission to finish up tonight, which makes me break even nicely for the month. I think this may be the first time.

ETA: Oh, and I almost forgot!

11.) There's a rock album based on Tolkien's Silmarillion. It's by Blind Guardian and it's called "Nightfall in Middle-Earth." It's not bad. Not groundbreaking, not Metallica, but not bad. I really like the voices they cast as Sauron and Morgoth, and the singer who does Maeglin's part is pretty good too. I've been listening to it pretty much nonstop.

Back on the chain gang

First day back in classes after the New Year. Am currently in the Physics lecture hall for Biology 40: Diseases in History. Class sounds very cool. This lecture hall, on the other hand ... well.

Let's begin with the fact that you enter it at the back, and the tops of the slide projector screens are then about level with your toes. You're looking straight ahead ... at the ceiling. From this non-Euclidean plane your eyes skate down ... and down ... and down. The floors and ceiling are dirty ivory; the walls are an odd eggshell iron-grey. It's generally mop-water colored.

If you laid a ruler along the tops of the long lab-style desks, you'd get a 45-degree angle. This room is nauseating already, and you haven't even started to descend the stairs. When you do begin to descend, you will notice that the stairs alternate: two slightly shorter than the average human stride, and then one slightly longer. You will wonder how many have died here.

As you try to enter a row, you will notice an odd proportion. A six-foot person, seated, will find that the previous row's table is level with the back of their head -- but the rows are scaled such that the passage behind an occupied stool is roughly a foot wide (narrower in the top two rows, probably to make room for the rather degrading corral that constitutes handicapped seating). Me? I literally cannot get through a row. I just swiveled five tiny Asian girls fully 90-degree turns trying to get to an empty seat. I can't decide which is better -- this, or the theater-seating halls where my hips don't quite fit into the seat.

I'm a size twenty. This is four inches larger than the U.S. average. And I don't fit in UCR's lecture halls.

Gaaaah.

Medieval Polish Voodoo Zombies and New Special Offer

I just took a final in my Medieval Law and Society course. I wrote an essay in which I used the phrase "zombie of good repute." I restrained myself from "the voodoo that Saint Stanislaw do(es)," but I did manage to work in "This leaves the reader with a perhaps-unintentional impression that the prior of Barnwell was afflicted with grabby hands."

I hope my professor appreciates some mildly ill-placed humor. I think he will -- he wore a Tigger tie the other day, always a good sign -- but this is a guy who loves medieval primary sources. He waxes lyrical, saying things like, "This is my absolute favorite medieval document. It doesn't have to be yours, but it's definitely mine." He grows furious with intrusive translator footnotes, like a tender suitor disturbed in his lovemaking by an unsubtle voyeur with his textual pants down. I must say, it adds a layer of fascination to the Polish ius commune of the eleventh century.

ANYway, now that I'm between exams, special offer time!


Available here.

Since I posted my 111th item on Monday (and I'm not expecting to survive tomorrow night's law final, so what the hell), take 11% off your first two items when at least one of them is from the section called "Earthy, Tribal, Ethnic." Use the discount code "clemson" in the Notes to Seller section and I'll refund you through PayPal.

Now to study for the intro class that technically precedes the one I just final'd for ... which, again, is going to be the death of me. Pray for my soul.