The Way Things Are, February 2008 (part 1)

So, teh blogging hasn't been exactly consistent or plentiful of late. Sorry, been busy. At least, that's what I keep telling myself. I guess, also, I haven't been of that much of a mind or mood to write that much, either. That part is a little trickier to figure out, and I really don't totally know why it is. It started, as far as I can tell, around the time of Jingle Cross (at least for the current duration), where I just felt rather bad about the whole race experience for the first week or so after, and wanted to get that out of the way before writing about it. Because, really, 'cross is a cool thing and the race *was* fun, even if my performance in it was awful. It really isn't realistic to even think about comparing myself, as a first-time-ever cross rider, who had been riding for maybe two months in preparation, against a lot of people who, while still beginners, had been in at least a few other races that year. So, it was fun, and leave it at that.

And then there was work. Which was kind of ugh. Monster projects, stuff sent back by publishers for revision, tight schedules, etc.

And travel. Chicago suburbs for Thanksgiving (actually the weekend after) and Christmas, and then Long Island for the week after New Years. Which cut into things, of course.

And the film. Wormtooth Nation (http://www.theskyisfree.com/). Shot in December and January in various locations around Fairfield.

So. Not a lot of spare time for writing.

So, who I am and what I'm up to, February 2008:

Hi. My name is Patrick. I'm a writer/indexer/photographer/gaffer/sound guy/vidoe editor/whatever. I live in Fairfield, a small town in southeast Iowa. (for those of you that don't know where Iowa is: no, it is not near Virginia. It is not where they grow potatoes in the northwest. It's pretty damn close to the geographic center of the US. Go find Chicago on a map. Then go about 150 miles west, to the Mississippi River. That's Iowa. From there, it goes west 250 or 300 miles to the Missouri River. In fact, that's what the name means: "Beautiful land between two rivers." And some of it is.)

My main income-producing activity of the moment is writing indexes. Yeah, indexes. You know those things at the back of the book that say where everything is? Yeah, those, yes, I write them. Seriously, people do that. No, you can NOT do it automatically with a computer. Really, no. Computers are terrible with semantic information, and good indexes are not literal searches for terms, they require interpretation to be clear and useful. And, no, it's not stupid simple. I've been doing it for two and a half years and I'm just recently starting to feel like I'm good at it. So how do we do it (I say "we" because B does it, too) is, the publisher sends us an almost-done copy of the book, usually laser-printed galley proofs. We read that, and figure out what goes in the index. Then we format and sort and double-check that until it looks good and is actually readable and all that. And sometimes after that we argue with the authors about whether we really covered everything. Not too often, fortunately.

I have a bachelor's degree in "media arts" and a master's in business administration (the dread MBA) from Maharishi University of Management (MUM), which is also in Fairfield. It was a little bit of a default. I hit college wanting to study computer animation. After a year or two of courses, I realized that MUM didn't really have an animation program, but also that I was fine with that, since I was more interested in film, anyways. They didn't have a film program either. So I took a bunch of digital media and video production and photography and theater classes, and somehow accrued enough credits for this degree. I'm not sure many other people got the same degree as me. Before me, it was a specialization in the regular Art degree, and afterwards it was formalized a bit more into Digital Media. Now it has it's own department, Communications. The first graduates in the formal Communications (production specialty) major will be finishing shortly.

And the MBA: well, I was looking for something to do, and kept not getting art jobs because I was lousy at selling myself. Not to mention I didn't have much of an art portfolio to sell myself with. And I'd had a passing interest in business and economics etc. And my parents work for the university, and managed to get it arranged to be free. So, it was like "Why not?" By the end, I was pretty well versed into what is wrong with contemporary business culture, from education on up. I took out my frustration with the system by writing short, sarcastic, Dilbert-esque stories about the ridiculousness of corporate culture. In the end, I was actually probably pretty versed in stuff like Lean Production and Six Sigma (sort of) and basic marketing, but I didn't particularly want to do anything with it. I saw the film "The Corporation" about the time I graduated, and it left me catatonic, kind of like, "Oh, God, what have we done?"

Anyways, after that, I did some IT consulting, some video production, a bit of web content management stuff, and ended up indexing after I'd run through all of those.

I've been gaffer and general do-anything for two student film productions by Geoff Boothby and Cullen Thomas, We Are Theo and Wormtooth Nation (currently in post-production). I was lead videographer on an unreleased documentary on personal experiences of peace. I was a production/sound/light assistant on another short film produced in Fairfield, The Retreat. I've written indexes for around 50 books.

Currently, I'm trying to think of ways to help promote Wormtooth Nation. I'm considering doing some sort of podcast or radio show, or at least help B with one that she's working on. I'd like to do more writing, but it's a little hard to keep that going when I spend so much time working on other people's books. And I'm trying to sort through the over-1000 set pics and production stills I took while working on Wormtooth Nation. I'd like to get some sort of photo side-job going, and so I'll probably be doing a show of my photography sometime in the next few months, at an ArtWalk.

This is overlong already, so I'll leave the rest for later. I really ought to write something about the place Transcendental Meditation has had in my life (short version: everything, from my parents even meeting in the first place) and cover some other hobbies, like biking and music, but it'll be hard to get from here to there in less then several pages, so I think a break between posts will be better for now.