So I’m writing christmas cards again.  I’ve always liked christmas cards.  At our house they go up to decorate the room around christmas time.  It’s one of the only times of year where your mail is more actual letters than bills and junk mail. Receiving them is fun, writing them less so worst of all though is the addresses.  Writing the note isn’t so hard but, finding the address is a chore.  Last year my purse was stolen with my address book in it, the address book that I had made specifically because I had had trouble with addresses the year before.  So I’m doing the whole thing over again, and it makes the whole deciding who to write christmas cards to an interesting process.  Because there end up being two different types of people among even your close friends and family …. the christmas card people, as in the ones you know their physical address, and the non christmas card people, the ones you have only electrical addresses.  Often the groups are exclusive one from the other.  The ones with the physical addresses don’t have electrical ones or vice versa at least as far as your world goes.  I think I fit into the non christmas card people for mostly because so far my email address has remained more constant than my physical one.  The problem for me though is that I find myself more capable of writing a letter than doing alot of other things (like calling for instance).  Christmas cards are in a way ideal for me… they say hey I still care to make sure I know where you are and to let you know where in the world I am so that if it so happens that you pass by my way you’ll know you’re doing it…. but it isn’t really necessary to say much.  Ideal since I am often socially constipated in any other type of communication besides physical presence.  This year somehow it seems almost more important because we are leaving italy.  Because I have to collect the addresses that are important to  me in italy and also because writing the christmas cards I’m telling people that I’ll be back on the same continent again so it feels like the physical address is more important again.

I’m readjusting my portfolio right now.  I have been working on this project for this whole summer.  You know in order to apply for grad school in a design field they want your portfolio, which is great and all except….. Well, so I managed to get through my schooling without touching InDesign or Photoshop or Illustrator and I kind of wanted to learn them at least a little so I said well….I have to do a portfolio why don’t I do it and learn at the same time.  Great idea, actually it worked quite well I’ve learned  alot and now I have a portfolio design and ready to go.  There were lots of times in the middle where I was complaining that the computer program required me to do ridiculous things that made no sense whatsoever and my patient husband explaining that that is just how it is….my response to this is almost always “WHY? why would it work that way that is ridiculous, it doesn’t make sense to do it that way.”  This conversation happened even more when it came to discussing changing my design into an actual book.  Printer standards and color worlds or whatever I must say are very seriously beyond me.  We’d get into these long conversations about color environments and printer standards that were so full of jargon that I couldn’t tell heads for tails….. I must say though that I don’t understand why if most all printers, print shops etc. print using the same standard in a regional area why the programs don’t have atomatic settings.  I mean why if the operating systems are specific and the programs themselves come in different versions (albeit slightly) for different regions shouldn’t these different regional programs come with different print and color world set up presets?  Given that if your savy enough you will want to be able to change your presets but, really why not have a preset?  So that is my question and it is probably illogical and unfounded considering I’m having trouble understanding the concepts anyway.  Right now in the middle of the night I’m trying to send my design to a printer…who will make it into a book…but it turned out that the printer’s 10×8 books are really 9.61×8.24 so I have to go through and resize everything for the whole design…and I’m stopping now because I am terribly afraid that I have messed up where the centers of my pages are on all the pages I’ve already worked on.  Again I don’t understand why if you advertise an 10×8 book the actual size would be half an inch less wide.  All kinds of things I don’t understand.  Picas and regulations and color space (ha I remembered the jargin! here I’ve been saying color world all the time) and blah and blah and blah……I hope landscape architecture school is worth it!  

So last night I was considering joining Facebook.  Well….I’m still considering it.  Maybe I will join but, at the moment I’m putting it off by creating a blog instead.  Yesterday was the first time I actually looked at the Facebook website and I’m afraid I felt some of the on coming unease that always assails me when I meet someone from high school at the mall in the town my parents live in.  I feel like some how I’m supposed to have something to say to this person but, I find myself dismayed by the fact that I don’t.  That’s not true for all the people you meet that way…. sometimes it’s a revelation of all the things you want to tell this person, but it’s rare and I don’t know if I want to voluntarily experience all the other unfortunate meetings electronically via Facebook.  I don’t think I’m ready for it.  I haven’t been to a high school or college reunion yet.  I have yet to experience that particular excruciating experience.  And I think I’m going to choose to not relive that before I need to ….. I’ll see if this blog will help me communicate instead.