rose marshack : whyamistillawake.com

I drove David Foster Wallace’s ex-girlfriend to Normal, Il, to take a train to Albuquerque. I only found out that she was David Foster Wallace’s ex-girlfriend as I was driving her. I only knew her as my ex-Tae-Kwon-Do student. But today in the car, she said, “Oh, remember I told you my ex-boyfriend (whom she talked about a couple of times before) used to work at ISU. His name was David; he taught in the English department.” But this time she said, “Maybe you had heard of him?” Like through my faculty links now, I might have heard of him.

I sort of choked and said, “UH…. well…. … Infinite Jest was a very nice book.” Trying to stay on the road.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be David Foster Wallace’s girlfriend - or ex-girlfriend? She talked about how he and Rick Powers used to get compared to each other.

Why would anyone compare those two? Jesus Christ! It would be like comparing Night and Day.
My life gets very intense sometimes. Maybe that is why I cannot sleep.

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Ryan’s Battle Serve - Volley 1Originally uploaded by imagepractice

ISU vs. UIUC : Photoshop Tennis! 

My friend Ryan Griffis at UIUC (I don’t even know which blog or website to put up for him, he’s so prolific; let’s try http://www.yougenics.net/griffis/) agreed to have his Image Practice class (which meets at the same time as mine!) play Photoshop Tennis with my Art/Music/Theatre 388 class! It was fantastic!

Here are the results: http://flickr.com/photos/12356252@N05/ ; the user on flickr is imagepractice. If you scroll up from the bottom, you’ll see the progression of events; these are students who are just learning photoshop. In my evaluation of what went on formally, I think that the UIUC team worked a lot more with photorealism; you can see the correct shadows on images they placed.

By far the best part, though, was how wired the students were in the class. I generally hate any type of competition, but this was very fun. The atmosphere in the class was electric! I wonder if it was the same over at UIUC? We at first were going to to iChat with the other class so we could “meet” but the video didn’t work due to restrictions at UIUC, but I think this was fortuitious; in not meeting the other class, I think it provided more of an unknown opponent. At the end of the class, the students who didn’t know photoshop well seemed way more interested in learning it, so we’ll have tutorials next week.

All seems to be going well! I am wondering, where is the catch?
I guess the catch is that I’m so consistently excited about my job and teaching that I cannot sleep very regularly.

A wonderful volley from the UIUC team.

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http://www.eddostern.com/runnersWOLFENSTEIN.html

actually this might not help.

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