Legatissimo.info

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.

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.

Heck yeah. I've already got my bibliography and cover page in there, too. Of course I did that when I didn't feel like writing. All said and done, each copy of this is going to set me back 61 pieces of paper. I did drop two pages from my outline. Actually, I dropped two from the introduction and two from the conclusion, but I just had so much to say about "technologies to watch" that I made up for my poor bookending of the subject matter.

Anyway, it's 2 AM and I've got a huge day tomorrow. I've decided to go to Psych--I think that it would be in poor form to skip the last day of class. The obvious downside of that decision is that I have to physically get out of bed to go to class. Hopefully I'll manage.

Then I'm going to whip up a little presentation before Computers in the Fine Arts about my project. I think I know how it's going to start:

Since the dawn of buckets, human kind have been miffed by one unending question, "What can be done with this bucket?" And while the languages have changed and the dialects shifted, the sentiment has not. However, through the collaborative, decentralized nature of the Internet, and the revolutionary values of "make culture" and the hyper-neo-progressive-retroactive-blogosphere-podcasting-revolution, we--the collective we: you, me, everyone throughout history, and everyone yet to be born--may finally have a single repository in which we may aggregate our wisdom.

No longer do traditional bucket uses die with the elder of a family. No longer do more exotic uses practiced by Amazonian tribes fall from the global consciousness when their native village is politely relocated. No longer do the buket-related innovations in less-connected Tibet redouble already produced bucket research in Central America. With a click of this mouse, I bequeath to the world, not a fountain of knowledge, rather, a ground-spring of truth, in its most pure, unaltered form. Hallelujah! Glory be. Today, we witness the end of the dark ages. Come with me, fellow students in FA 193 section 12, Computers in the Fine Arts. Under the tutelage of Professor Jeffery Stephanic, let us bask in the beautiful light of the future.

Band's over for the semester, so I don't have that to worry about. But I have roped Maura into copy editing my paper. I'm paying her by the hour to do it, though. So it is very much in my economic interest to minimize mistakes before she has the ability to capitalize on my bad grammar. (This could be interpreted as a play on the fact that "capitalize" also refers to moving to an alternate letter form. However, this coincidence is purely accidental.)

With any luck, that should be done before midnight. And then? Then, I'm going to snuggle into bed and have anxiety nightmares about my thesis somehow getting destroyed.

Signing off in LJ style:

Music Bust a Bucket (Dan Reed Network)

Mood Tired and a little proud

I've told a lot of people to stop talking to me. If I have done this to you, I am sorry. But it is paying off. I just have to write the introduction and conclusion on my thesis. Then I'm ready for the process of revision, which is its own special kind of hell.

Comments are welcome. Moreover, they are probably the only reliable way to get ahold of me for the next 48 hours as I intend to cut off most other forms of contact.

Thesis Update 50/58 (Note: You might have noticed that the denominator is going up. This happens when I write more than my target page count for each section. Generally, I'd say it's a good thing when that happens.)

I'm in the throes of writing my senior thesis. It's all about how political campaigns can utilize the Internet and other emergent technology for better integrating volunteers into the campaign process.

One of the points I'm discussing is that long tail communication is now a very real possibility for campaign communication. Moreover, by warming up to decentralizing a bit more, campaigns can double the size of the audience they reach. Anyway, that's probably boring you.

While writing this paper, I've been listening to a lot of music. And thanks to a nifty little program called iScrobbler and Last.fm, I've got a handy little chart of the music I've been listening to over the course of my writing.

Fancy that, fancy cat! It's a nice little power law graph. Just another thing to distract me while I should be writing. Anyway, back to work. All of you!