Five things on the week:
1. I get the sense that many people set up a workspace for themselves at home during the pandemic, but those were intense years for me. Anything more than wedging a desk into my bedroom drew on more joules than I had at my disposal. It was easier to blur my zoom background than move the pile of laundry. I’m proud to announce that, four years later, I’ve finally reoriented that desk. Small move, huge rebirth of the psyche. I’m still in the bedroom, but now…I can gaze out the window.
2. There are banana flowers who stare back at me from their side of the window. They are incomprehensibly monstrous, like rogue waves. Impossible. Imaginary. I never appreciated them as much before we could see each other in our peripheral vision.
3. Every time I receive a Covid booster, my body is graced with four hours of fever. At this point I expect and know the timing of this necessary annoyance, but having recently re-read the Virginia Woolf essay, “On Being Ill,” I found myself anticipating my shot differently. When “we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright” our perspective is literally shifted. You look at the sky. You hallucinate. You can only read poetry. There is no stamina for prose. That Seussian banana flower was in total control. And, why do leaves have their specific shapes? Why be small and elongated like the pomegranate or splayed like the maple? How does the sassafras choose which of its three shapes pops out where?
4. I timed my booster for the new school year at Stanford, which begins at the end of September. In preparation we had our annual Teaching Summit gathering of design instructors at The Stanford d.school. This moment of community and possibility feels particularly hopeful this year, much like when the fever breaks. Ideas are crisp and appreciation runs high.
5. We explored overlaps and possibilities in our curriculum, welcomed our new embedded ethics post doc, Emma Duncan, made rubrics with Meenu Singh, made letterpress postcards with Patrick Fenton, and so so much more. Also, I have video of everyone wearing blindfolds making animal noises.