Tuesday, August 15, 2006

At Least The Weather Was Nice

It's been interesting to see how hard it can be to perform supposed bum jobs in a factory, to the point that you are chronically hassled by factory workers who openly refer to themselves as "scum" -- jobs like reading five two-digit numbers on a piece of paper and adding them together with a calculator to find out how wide you must cut a piece of steel; or like holding a cylinder in position against a metal plate whilst a menacing, formerly-dangerous machine (it once took the end of a guy's thumb off, but then OSH came in and insisted a safety guard be put on it) puts a crease in it. Factory workers must think in a completely different way to arts students -- obviously to such an extent that my apparent intelligence does not allow me to perform the most mundane of physically tangible technical tasks, that even a high school drop-out can carry out with ease.

It's also been annoyingly interesting to discover how deceptively hard my last two assignments that I want to complete before Saturday are. I've been stressing out of my head today, trying to find Web sites -- it was specified that my sources must be Web sites -- about the traditional and contemporary music and dance of a Polynesian island group of my choice. It turns out that just about all of the Web sites about these island groups are tourism Web sites, that approach the music and dance on a very shallow, yuppie self-indulgent level.

What's worse is now that I've got the idea into my head that it could be possible to finish all of my assignments before I go away on this trip, it's going to feel extra-bad if I don't finish them, and there would be definite potential for it to harm the experience for me. I am gruff.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home