CODE RED

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!! It is 2:11 a.m. on the morning of Monday, November 26--but technically it is still Sunday night for me because I haven't gone to bed yet. Why haven't I gone to bed, you may ask? Because I have been at school for the last seven-and-a-half hours working on a museum exhibits project that is due tomorrow (well, actually today). I couldn't wait until tomorrow (actually, later today) to write about the crazy evening, so I'm doing it before I go to bed. I'm also having a hard time getting sleepy now because I just drank a 12-oz. can of Diet Coke and a 20-oz. bottle of Mountain Dew CODE RED soda. It was definitely a code red night. Since I'm the only one of the bunch who knows how to use Adobe Illustrator, I got stuck with the task of putting the finishing touches on the assignment (yes, I too am having flashbacks to the Tilford Dudley days), which was basically a layout of our entire corridors exhibit. Thankfully other people stayed with me until the bitter end, working on other parts of the assignment, so no one was left at school by themselves in the middle of the night.

I am quite upset about tonight's assignment, and I need to vent a little bit, which I hope is okay. Mr. Riccio is a very nice man and a good teacher, but he does not plan out our assignments very well. Some of the things he wants us to do are totally impractical, and he doesn't explain how he wants things done until after he gives us a grade--which is never "A" because we never do anything like he wants it done. Maybe if his was our only class, we would have time to do his assignments, but we still have four other classes!!! So, in class before Thanksgiving break, he gave us a two-part assignment which basically entailed planning out the entire layout of both exhibit galleries we will be setting up and writing all of the label text for the objects. The assignment was supposed to be due next Monday, December 3, but then he offhandedly said, "Why don't we make the first part, the exhibit plan, due on November 26." Okay--first problem--everyone was leaving town for Thanksgiving, and it's hard to do said assignment with class members scattered throughout the country. We broke the assignment into parts which we all completed independently, however, and we planned to meet tonight to just put everything together. Unfortunately, when we got together tonight, we looked at the assignment sheet again, and looked at some samples of what previous classes had done for said assignment, and realized that we were way, way, way off, and there were many other parts of the assignment we needed to complete. We had to produce sample panels using a uniform design layout, reorder all of our object numbering systems, plot out where all of our objects would be displayed within each gallery, and propose a method for producing interpretive panels.

I finished the Diet Coke at about 9:00 p.m., and at about 10:30 I broke out the Code Red Mountain Dew. I am now so jacked up on caffeine that I don't know if I'll be able to sleep at all, but I'm totally exhausted, so I guess I'll try. I have a feeling that this is only the first of many, many, many long nights to come. I thought that our last seven-hour meeting was a fluke, but tonight I'm realizing that it might become the norm. Talk about a "Welcome Back from Thanksgiving Break!" assignment! We lost Alyson tonight at about 10:00 p.m. She totally came unglued. She's super sad because she didn't want to leave her family in New York, and she was stressed about everything else, so tonight's project pretty much pushed her over the edge. Matt brought her back to our apartment, and she's asleep right now, so hopefully she'll feel better in the morning. Can I survive until the end of the semester??? Mom noticed the other night that my eyes were bloodshot, and I'm afraid that they will become permanently so before I make it through this program. I also think I'll have completely gray hair by the time I graduate. Or maybe I'll have no hair because I'll have pulled it all out in a succession of stressed out spells! I must say, however, that the gallery layout plans I made in Adobe Illustrator tonight look pretty freaking awesome. We decided as a group that if we don't get an "A" on this assignment, we will start a silent protest and will never speak in Mr. Riccio's class again.