10-30-17- Another Monday morning and it looks like were doing a complete 180. Instead of working as hard as possible to get sponsors, our pictures and articles ready for the next magazine, we are getting are stuff and getting out, within approximately 30 days that is. The good news is the landlord is easy-going and doesn’t have a tenant available ready so taking longer than 30 days isn’t a problem. The bad news is, we are now focusing on packing their numerous files, boxes, and various papers… Not exactly what I had in mind for an internship but at least its better than getting some jerk coffee. Anyways I’ve been needing some sort of thing to do that gets me moving, this can’t be that bad. I’m secretly hoping that most of the heavy lifting is done on the days I’m not there.

10-31-17: Networking Event

In the evening on Halloween, I attended a networking event at the Parsons School of Design located at 2 West 13th St. A group of other designers and I entered the building, were directed to a room and were introduced to the Speaker Maya Edelmen. Edelmen showed us her various works and inspirations that she has collected over time ranging from the bizarre to the inspirational. Her slides mostly had themes of waste (or decadence) and death 2 things that can easily be associated with the U.S. I guess the brief mention about her being part of the U.S.S.R makes a bit more sense.

One of her notable creations was something about the DNA of plants of animals. This was done with traditional cell animation and it revolved around a trip to fire island. She was inspired by the wildlife and various colorful plants that are there. What I felt was most unique about this was that the animation looked like a sluggish sequence of images put together rather than a smooth animation. Regardless it looked interesting and was the least odd from her creations and inspirations.

11-2-17- Being a press collective I’d imagine there would be tons of paper and much to my dismay, the statement was true. Boxes upon boxes filled with various magazines, flyers, and brochures filled the conference room. Our goal for today was to organize these mountains of paper, by organization and making sure we don’t have any duplicates. Sounds fairly simple until I realized the organizations they receive flyers from have similar names! Eastern Service Workers Association, Eastern Farmers Workers Association, Western Service Workers Association and several more! Would it have killed these the organizations to create slightly more unique names for their organizations? Oh and we had to separate them by county/borough too. I suppose this was better than trying to lift something like the metal presses. Lot of nitpicking here but the work wasn’t that hard as much as it was tedious.

11-3-17- More of the same from the previous day with slightly less nitpicking. Only interesting thing to note was that some of the flyers from the organizations are exact copies with the only difference being the year the flyer had. This only makes finding duplicates that much more annoying.

11-4-17 A bit more of the same work but know we had to pack these piles of papers into boxes. Nothing really unique here besides the conference room looking like warehouse.

Class reading:

The class read a few pages of a book today about business etiquette and it was quite informative. First was info on business cards and what goes on it, but the interesting part was regarding the “sins” for workers. First one that struck me was lack of initiative, I know I’m a lazy guy and often don’t things unless I’m told to, but even when I’m ready to work I just do what is asked of me, never did anything else that was needed to be done. I thought just showing up on time and doing the work while being friendly was enough but it just goes to show people want more out of their workers. Another was not connecting. Socializing is hard for me and even if its just simple small talk between people I feel a bit nervous and desperately find something normal to talk about or just ends with awkward silence. I’m always willing to listen and its not hard to force a smile though. Last thing was posture. I can’t deny it, I have poor posture, always a bit hunched over and usually with my arms crossed. Not sure what a hunched over posture indicates but crossed arms generally indicate defensiveness,nervousness and negativity. My brother has always mentioned this and its a bad habit of mine, he tells me that there is no reason a big guy like me should look so nervous. Overall its some common sense stuff that I should be using more often.