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!
Filed under: Rant
The dreaded day has come once again. My jeans are falling apart. I know that is probably too much information, but it’s true and it’s infuriating. It never happens as a singular event either, it’s always en masse instead. A week ago I found my favorite painting jeans had holes in them in unspeakable and needless to say unwearable places and then this morning I discovered that the legs on another pair are about to become no more. This has happened before to me. My senior year of college I literally had three pairs of jeans gain irreparable holes while I was wearing them. Twice is happened in my dorm room which was frustrating but saved me from any embarrassment. The third pair however ripped right open in the middle of a horse back ride down a road where cars also came. So there I was sitting on top of a horse which is conveniently on eye level of human beings and cars with a six inch hole in my pants. So now it’s a little less than 4 years later and it’s happening all over again. The problem is that your favorite jeans the ones you get attached to and actually wear or bother to take with you to Europe become like your skin in a way, they are a precious well worn in thing that fits properly! It’s already a heart wrenching experience to see them go away, to have to throw them out, discard them but even worse is the search that must begin right afterward. Once they break you have to buy more! The ignominy of going to store after store to find out that your body isn’t built the way clothes companies think it should be starts all over again. Yes, you know that you’ve been avoiding this exact experience for the last 4 years because you had found your jeans but guess what you have to go back. Yes, you have to face the fashion worlds stereotypes in there full fledged and throughly sadistic forms. I have to face it. I have to go and try on jeans again. Inevitably this means trying on dozens of pairs before finding something that is comfortable or wearable let alone flattering or nice. And that is why I dread this cycle. Seriously dread it. By the way I have to modify my post on Facebook….I joined I’m afraid even after having said such things. The feeling however the rather creeping odd feeling is still there though. I don’t have it when I’m writing this blog though so if you find me on face book you could opt to communicate with me here and I could avoid the creeping feeling…..well maybe I’ll get used to it….I did after all sign up after only 2 days of resisting.
I had to go to the doctor today. It’s really quite and interesting experience here. This particular doctor is in her office 4 hours a day and everyone comes and gets a number because you can’t make appointments. Literally, you take a number like if you were in the supermarket deli line and then you wait. Well you don’t actually have to wait there in the office. I went home and set up this blog for an hour. Then I went shopping. Then I sat and waited…anyway. It was fairly confusing trying to figure out the system when we first moved to Vicenza. Me: “Hello, I’d like to make an appointment for sometime next week is there a time available?” Doctor:”I’m sorry why did you call this number?” Me: “Because it was the number they gave me at the insurance office for my doctor. Why?” Doctor:”You don’t make appointments at my office. Just show up. Don’t call this number again please.” Me:”oh…ok.” One of the strangest phone conversations I’ve ever had. The confusion itself aside I have had a less than amazing experience with doctors and the health system here in Italy. Which is interesting because the other day I was surfing the net and found that Italy has the world’s 2nd best health system according to the World Health Organization. I surfed for a little longer though and found that the vast majority of italians agree with me rather than the World Health Organization. Only 20% of italians are satisfied with their own health system whereas the US system even with all of it’s issues still manages to satisfy over 50% of the people it serves (see “The Public Versus The World Health Organization On Health System Performance” by Robert J. Blendon, Minah Kim and John M. Benson) All facts that you probably didn’t need to know, but that satisfy my inner need for objectivity. There are two major factors that I think have influenced my own opinion of the health system in Italy. First of all I think it must be really, really, I mean terribly hard to bottom out as a doctor in Italy once you set up practice. People may transfer away from you but, the state will just hand you more, so incompetent or rather recalcitrant doctors remain in their positions as long as they want and they don’t have to make a good impression on their patients. And if you’re lucky enough (like me) to be new (like me again) and you don’t know which docs have a bad reputation you get to meet them quite often. The other factor is the lack of record keeping. There are no records kept in doctor’s offices ever, anywhere in the country as far as I can tell. Coming from a system where the moment you step into any doctor’s office even to get cold medicine they make a record of your entire medical history and take all your vital statistics it is extremely unnerving to be in a place where the doctors apparently never care about records of this kind or even a record of your visit. If you get an x-ray done at the hospital guess what happens to it……it goes home with the patient. What if you get a kidney scan or a blood test done…it goes home with the patient. And that’s that. No stacks of files in back rooms keeping copies of all the tests and all the diagnosis’s of all the patients they’ve ever seen. No files, no copies, and no clerks. I guess it saves money.
