Legatissimo.info

I'm in Portland, writing this in the living room of my parents house -- which, if you're reading this Mom and Dad, looks fantastic. We just got back from my brother's wedding. It was a wonderful ceremony at the Leach Botanical Garden. I'm going to keep this short, all the family is here. Congratulations, Andrew and Diana. I'm so incredibly happy for you, and I wish you two the best of luck.

Mornings are the worst. I always seem to find my initial waking state largely inhospitable. The fact that my alarm will only snooze ten times and then shut off is an issue I confront at least three times every morning.

I sleep with my travel alarm clock in my hands--I am a runner on a starting block; I am strung in elastic vigilance; I am waiting for a pistol shot. Three years of roommates necessitate such potential energy. On the same subject: though I do not have roommates at the moment, you don't forget how to ride a bike.

I found balance in keeping the morning peace amongst roommates while simultaneously feeding a snooze habit. Snap too fast, I'm liable to wake with a start, which, while useful, is less enjoyable than a well-planned, responsible oversleeping. Too slow, and I incite the ill will of my cohabiters.

I am amazed, bordering frightened, of the achievements of myself asleep. Passwords entered, complex menus navigated, hidden clocks found. Half-way, I fear that simply for the sake of poetic justice I will one day discover my resting self has been rising at night and deftly fighting against every cause I have steadfastly supported. I only fear it half way, because everything I know tells me there's no way I--or any variation of myself--would get out of bed, unless it was in an effort to secure more sleep.

Technically speaking, I have no right to be upset. It's always a premeditated, unprovoked attack on my part. Before I lie down I set a trap. When it goes off, I know I will win the inevitable war of attrition. Battle after battle, then eventually I persuade myself there is no option but to rise.

I fight for consciousness. The alarm clock is our war, and the snooze button is our Appomattox.

Strange, I struggle to surrender to sleep in the evenings then fight to pry it away eight hours later.

When I was a child, my mother would drop me off at Montessori school. Kicking and screaming, I did not wanting to leave her. In the evenings I tried with might and tears to stay at school as long as I could. (I think this an early manifestation of whatever it is that makes me late.)

There are some mornings I am forced to use techniques, which I consider to be in bad faith:

--I schedule important meetings, doctors appointments, etc, at hours I have no business being awake at. Even half asleep, I have the good senses not to sleep through something important.

--I go to sleep with the dryer running, knowing full well I would feel irresponsible if I didn't wake with enough time properly put the clothing away. (As a point of concession, I acknowledge that the clothing must be fluffed for at least 15 minutes--time enough for one more snooze cycle.)

--I set my coffee maker to start brewing coffee before I am awake. My frugality forces me to save enough time to drink it. As an aside: I enjoy my coffee warm, consequently, the time elapsed from carafe to empty cup is atypically long.

--I drink large quantities of water shortly before falling asleep. This has not resulted in bed wetting since I was in middle school and one time when I was drunk, but I believe the latter event to be an aberration from my norm.

--From time to time, I ask friends to set my clocks ahead a reasonable amount of time (2-25 minutes). I do this on the advice of Sun Tzu: "All warfare is based on deception. Therefore, when capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far away; when far away, that you are near."

--I have contemplated buying a "shake-awake" alarm clock. I think it may still be on my amazon.com wishlist, but I'm not sure about that.

--Most days I take showers that are unreasonably cold.

These tactics are not things I enjoy. Suffice it to say: if a simple bell did the trick, I would use it. It doesn't; I don't. Instead I rely on complex methods and calculated tactics. They serve me well, and I am forced to full mental acuity by the process. Perhaps the struggle is nothing more than the normal course of a boot cycle of my human mind.

A victory over oneself is subtle wisdom. Lessons learned: The battles I cannot win today I will win tomorrow, so long as I do not raise my flag to defeat. And the battles I don't win? At least defeat didn't come for lack of trying.

Instead, I start every day locked up tight in a test of wits and will, facing my only truly matched competitor, reminding my upright consciousness I'm racing no one but myself, and truth be told, we're on the same side.

I do the laundry when I need to feel professional. When I need to feel clean. Or when I need to feel like I'm a responsible person. Even though I firmly believe that the word 'responsibility' has it has way too many Is in it for its own good.

I am twenty years old. But I will be twenty-one in just a few weeks.

I have a job that lets me be creative. (And also lets me be late from time to time.) And I live in an apartment in the basement in a neighborhood that's nice.

I can take out the trash twice a week, but I usually take it out once every 3/2 of a week -- once every week and a half. It's not a conscious decision. It's just I don't produce much garbage.

I don't have a roommate -- for the first time in my moderately short life. Not that I had a roommate as a kid, but I had a brother, and that was pretty close.

I don't get scared at night. There's not much to be afraid of when the lights are off. But even the snoring that kept me awake at night was still a subtle reassurance. Not a promise that everything was okay, just that if something did go wrong, I wouldn't face it alone.

Now, the thought doesn't cross my conscious mind much. Maybe I've stopped hearing it, or maybe it can't break the surface tension between the blue sky of my higher capacities and the ocean of my deep thoughts.

No matter the reason I do not hear -- whether it is for lack of trying or for lack of sound -- the silence has become the reassurance when I slowly coast my mind asleep.

Although I should say this: the only reason I would wake up to turn off my alarm clock is because I didn't want to wake up my roommate.

If you look at my posting frequency over the last two months, you'll notice that it's been woefully insufficient. I know I've noticed. On one hand, it's a problem. I feel that it is in my own intellectual best interest to be writing every darn day. On the other hand, there's no real appreciable difference in my life if I don't. So it falls to the wayside. If I had a paper to write, writing a dumb story wasn't high on my list of things to do. Now, if I come home from a day of online work, there's a good chance that I won't want to sit at my computer long enough to produce. But when writing becomes a second-order priority, my own ability to write diminishes.

Now, when I try to pound out 500-1,000 words I find myself dragging, unable to come up with deep thoughts to support the veneer that actually makes it to the page. What I end up with is like an iceberg without any ice under the surface. Maybe it looks the same at first, but it's missing its defining depth. But that gives too much significance to crap like The Return of Android Steve.

However, disregarding quality, in the last three months my ability to simply produce written words has diminished. I can't write because I don't write. If I could start again, it would become more routine.

Maybe the point is not that I need to remember how to write, but I need to remember that writing isn't easy. Sure I can say that I know writing those dumb short stories took a lot of time, but I can say that with out internalizing the realization.

Thus I have resigned myself to sucking until I can get back in the rhythm of expending the effort. I will not put artificial goals such as one story a day on myself. Such promises -- bound to be broken -- will only provide an excuse to stop once the inevitable occurs. Instead, I simply offer myself this one hope: I would like to write more.

As of yesterday afternoon, I am no longer a student at the George Washington University, instead I join the ranks of alumni they'll hit up for money a few times a year. The Commencement ceremony was held on the national mall, just in front of the Capitol building. It's a pretty big thing, usually with around 20,000 people in attendance. It's full of pomp, circumstance, academic regalia, and two herald trumpet players.

Now what is a herald trumpet, you're wondering. This is a herald trumpet:

It often has a banner hung from the extraordinarily long bell, and folks play them when they want to look cool. Here's where I enter the equation. As a graduating senior in the music department, I was selected to be one of the two people who play the fanfares to open the commencement ceremonies -- this year, keynoted by former president George H. W. Bush and his lovely wife Barbara.

Okay, I thought, this should be pretty cool. I'll get to stand on stage with a former president, play a few notes, and go sit down with my friends. Except that's not exactly how it happened.

I was waiting backstage with the other trumpet player and the university marshall, when she told us it was time to go on. We walked towards the platform where we saw the Bushs standing there waiting. George shook our hands, talked to us a bit about jazz, and I thought that was pretty cool. I'm not a huge fan of his policies, but you've got to respect the fact that this man was, at one point in time, the leader of the free world -- that's pretty impressive.

Along with one other person I didn't know, the six of us walked up on stage. The university marshall pointed at us and we played. Then the graduating student started to process in. But, lo and behold, who was standing next to me? Why, Bush senior, of course. And for the hour while people processed in -- 45 minutes to an hour, I'm not exactly sure -- I stood next to him and chatted.

We talked about his grandkids. We talked about his advice if I go into politics: "Never get between a man with a camera and an Oriental woman." -- What? We waved at people. We talked about the research I did for my thesis on volunteer integration in political campaigns via emergent technology. The other trumpet player's phone rang -- it was on vibrate -- but when he told Bush that, the former president insisted that he give him his phone, and he called the person back and left a message saying something to the effect of "This is George H. W. Bush, number 41, sorry I missed you, congratulations." We talked about how it's a weird feeling to be elected president, how impressive the oval office is, and what it's like to go to school in the District.

The photo editor of the school newspaper was there taking pictures, and being the outgoing senior design editor, I was able to get a CD of all the pictures he took. I asked Bush if I could get the picture signed, and he told me to mail it to him, and then he gave me his business card. If I can find a scanner, I'll get a picture of it uploaded.

It was an unexpectedly awesome/surreal day. And now after that little adventure yesterday, I'm here at my full time job working away. I can't wait until I get the picture back signed. It's gonna look great in my collection.

A huge thanks to Sam Sherraden, outgoing Hatchet photo editor extraordinaire, who gave me a CD of a bunch of wonderful photos of Bush and me. Have fun in China, Sam.

The week before I left home freshman year for Foggy Bottom, I was convinced that I only needed two things: a P.O. box and a job. They were legacies of my childhood. I needed a permanent address and I needed to stay busy. While I had deeper worries about coming to college, somehow, I thought, if I could take care of those two things, everything else would fall in place.

And without much planning on the job front, before I really stopped to consider what I was doing, on my third day in college, I found myself gainfully employed by the second-oldest newspaper in Washington, D.C.

If I had known how much my life would be influenced by The Hatchet, I probably would have stopped to think. But even if I had done that, I would have pushed forward, anyway - especially knowing what I know today.

Now, staring down a commencement date within spitting distance, I can see just how much my personal, professional and academic development were shaped - some professors might suggest "stunted" - by The Hatchet. But for all its ups and downs, the experiences and achievements I have been a part of in the last three years have impacted me in tremendous ways.

The start of my employment was unceremonious. About the closest thing to a "welcome aboard" was when Mosheh Oinounou lost my high school portfolio, which consisted of a half dozen issues of my semi-monthly/monthly/whenever-we-could-get-it-out-the-door high school newspaper. (Mosheh, if it's any condolence, Barnett found them when he was cleaning the office.)

Within days of becoming The Hatchet's newest production assistant, I was making graphics and corrections. Within weeks, I was cursing the old Xanté, making pages and moaning about missing fonts. And within a couple of months, give or take, I don't recall exactly, I was promoted to assistant production manager. I had become a part of The Hatchet, and it had become a part of me - and the walls of the production "office" will never be the same because of it.

The job was an interesting one. I wouldn't go as far as to say that production is the glue of the newspaper. But we are the house ads; we are the leading and the kerning; we are the last deadline before it hits the fan. We wrestle with the computers and turn off the lights. We take stories, photos and ads and put them together like a big puzzle, and then we check the jumps, and somehow when the paper comes out the next morning, the jumps are off anyway.

Things coalesced. I settled in. And when Andrew Snow called me late one February night, five months into my employment, I knew something was wrong. He told me I had to come to The Hatchet. I told him I'd be there as soon as I could.

That evening we learned Jenny Dierdorff, production manager, my boss and friend, had taken her own life. While it ripped us apart individually, it brought us all closer together. We carried on. Despite the strain of not just missing a key staff member but dealing with the emotional toll of losing a friend, we went to press on-schedule after a production night that still seems like it should have been impossible.

Unwittingly promoted, I can say with total certainty that if it weren't for the hard work and dedication of Sarah Brown, Kyle Spector, Josh Stager and of course Andy Phillips, there's no way I would have been able to hold things together. Forced into shoes I didn't think myself capable of filling, I had to step up, but the support I had made my transition possible.

As we pushed forward into the spring, a sense of normalcy slowly began to return. Instead of just working hard to hold things together, we could work on improving the paper.

To impress oneself is the hallmark of success, I think. For me, it's a great feeling to do something that I didn't know I could do. I know the reputation I have around The Hatchet builds me up as some kind of miracle worker. Can't think of a headline for this fancy layout? "No sweat, Stoneman will think of something." It's flattering, and it would be a lie to say that I don't enjoy a bit of ego stroking from time to time. But I think that my reputation is more or less undeserved. Sure, it may look like I know a lot of stuff, but I'm really just picking it up as I go.

When I was in high school, I worked as a counselor for a week-long science camp that was run through the public schools. Though I still remember the Latin names of most of the native Oregon trees, one idea that I come back to more often is a bit of advice the staff would give to the incoming student leaders: fake it 'til you make it. It's disarmingly simple, but it's served me very well.

Back in March, Michael Barnett approached me to see if I was interested in designing a 32-page magazine about the basketball team. "Of course," I told him. Never mind that I had never designed a magazine before; never mind that beyond my understanding of the technical workings of the computer programs involved, I didn't have much of an idea what I was doing; never mind any of that. Even though I didn't know how to make a magazine, I knew I could fake it.

I'm going to let you in on a secret that I haven't told anyone before. I've been faking this whole time. Hell ... I'm still faking it.

But that's the thing about me; I don't do something because I know how to do it. I do something because I don't know how to do it. That has been why I have loved working for the Hatchet so much. I can succeed. I can fail. And that's okay. We're all doing the best we can; making the best newspaper we know how to make.

I came to college with two dilemmas - where could I get my mail, and where could I spend my time - and I'm leaving with one solution. Three years ago, after only a few days on the job, I explained my P.O. box plan to an editor, who promptly dismissed it. "Just have it all sent to The Hatchet," she told me. So I did. And for the last three years when anyone asked me what my home address is, I've always said, "2140 G St."

-30-

-The writer has been designing pages and doing magic tricks at The Hatchet since September 2003.

I know how much you all love to post comments here, so I'm a bit hesitant to make it harder, but there have been way too many spam comments as of late. Consequently, comments now require registration. It's pretty fast and easy, and there isn't really much of a validation on it. So it shouldn't slow you down any, should you chose to post comments. Sorry about that, but going through and having to delete the 100+ comments that the spam filter didn't catch, enough is enough.

Also, I'm traveling with the women's basketball team to Norfolk, VA. I leave today, and I get back sometime Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on how well we do. If you need to reach me, cell's the way to do it.

You can tell if I've got big deadlines looming if I somehow find the time to redesign Legatissimo.info. Sure enough, here's a whole new look, and true to form, I've got a whole lot to do.

• Interface design for a company I'm starting
• Big proposals and designs coming down the pipeline at work
• Second draft of my thesis and one pager are due in no time fast
• Client for a local Oregon race isn't sending me much needed imagery for their website :-(

Anyway, a little about this design. First and foremost, I must give huge amounts of credit to the tutorial in Computer Arts Projects - Illustration magazine. The treatment of the picture of me in the upper left corner is based very much on their tutorial, which inspired me greatly. Start to finish, it took about an hour. It was the first time I used the Firefox web developer's extension to just make live edits to the CSS the site was already using. That in hand, I set to work with a clear plan of attack.

As always, feel free to make comments.