I know, I know, I'm behind again so we shall begin with a quick catch-up.
My inclination is to say that the reason for my lack of reporting on my days for the past week have been that nothing of great excitement or interest happened. That is simply not true because everyday is a wonderful little mini-adventure in which I get new projects and find out fascinating things in my research. Therefore the reason I have been absent is laziness. I just didn't feel like writing. Simple answer and now I can't remember anything in particular that seems worthy at this time to write about, if something comes to me I will report on it later.
In order to not be completely dull, I will share stories from my weekend. I spent Saturday morning at a coffee house, as I am on a quest to find a favorite one that I will always go to. This is one is not the one. It was really hot and smelled like onions/cooking food and now my clothes smell like that. The coffee was wonderful though. I stayed there for a few hours writing letters and such. Then I had been told that northern Manchester has beautiful homes so I went for a walk, upon which I realized I have a terrible sense of direction and clearly was NOT in what is considered the north side because the neighborhoods were very plain. It was a beautiful day at least. Then I went home and grabbed lunch before walking over to the supervisor of public programs, who I found out lives just a 10 minute walk from me. Along with her 3 year old daughter we went for a 2 hour walk and she showed me a bunch of walking trails near our houses, which is extra wonderful since this neighborhood has no sidewalks. Not fun to walk in. Then Sunday I went to a bakery over by my house that yelp.com suggested and it was heavenly. Made to order doughnuts? Delightful. Then I went on another short walk around that neighborhood. After that I had an excessively lazy day in which I skyped with a few people (just what I needed - I'm getting a bit tired of always talking to new people. It's wonderful to see familiar people) and watched a documentary on Pixar studios-super fascinating. That's all.
Now onto today: I got to present my research on Joachim Wtewael's Apulian Shepherd to 50 docents in a powerpoint lecture and I absolutely loved it. I would have to say that aside from presenting my Blake paper at the art history symposium, this was the single most satisfying thing I have ever done. I just want to teach people about art!
It did start off a bit of a bad note - I spelled 'Shepherd' as 'Shephard' on the title slide and one woman raised her hand and pointed it out. I didn't quite know what to say because well who cares? In the grand scheme of things this is an inconsequential detail. Anyway, I said "well just pretend you don't notice that" and went onto the next slide. From there it went fabulously well. I got hammered with questions and had answers, for the most part. It was just incredible to present all of this information that I spent a week gathering and manipulating into a comprehensible format to an audience that actually gave a shit. So fun!
Then when it was over, the woman who corrected my spelling came up to me and apologized for doing that saying it was incredibly ungracious of her. I told her not worry about it as I didn't take any offense (if there is one thing I have learned about docents it is that they are super particular people and will notice EVERYTHING that is possible to criticize but it isn't personal). Well then she went on to say, "one word of advice, though, it's always good to have someone edit your work before you present it" YEAH. Let it die lady! I mean not only had I looked at this powerpoint a dozen times and not noticed it, Jane had as well and she didn't notice it either. Jeepers.
The rest of the day was spent working on research projects for Nina. You know I am a bit hard on the curators, but I really do like them, especially Nina. With her in particular, though, I am incredibly intimidated by her intelligence and get incredibly anxious thinking that I am wasting her time by asking her questions or giving her the wrong/not detailed enough information. This anxiety is increased by the fact that she never tells me why she needs certain information. Just yesterday she sent me an email listing out 3 different things she wanted me to look up and tell her what information I could find. Well that's great, but to what purpose? That would inform the research I am doing. Of course do I ask her why? No friggin way. So this minor miss-communication is completely mutual. I just haven't yet figured out a way to ask "why?" in a way as to not waste her time with a lengthy explanation or make me seem like an idiot. Another point of anxiety - I desperately want to make sure she doesn't see me as a silly college student. So that's been fun. Mostly the result is me beginning my research or writing, updating her on the where I'm at, discovering a bunch of things I either don't need or there are a whole lot more I need to find and resulting with me back in the registrar office re-reading everything. Tis a bit frustrating, but it's getting better as I increase the thoroughness of my note taking.
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