Worst/Best Week Ever

This past week was one a tough one. I had the normal routine for the week - preparing lectures, doing class readings, meeting with the student newspaper staff, etc. - but this week, everything hit at once. Paper due Tuesday, rough draft of thesis due Wednesday, not too bad. Then...Friday came. The day start relatively early (especially for me), with a meeting at APU at 8am, about the nature of the role and nature of the student newspaper on the college campus. I had to leave the meeting early at 9:10am to head to Monrovia to present at the Christians on Diversity in the Academy conference. When I first sent in a proposal for this conference, I thought I was requesting the usual 15ish minutes slot to present on my research but when I was accepted, I found out I had an hour (bring it on). My session was titled "It's Just a Movie: An Oppositional and Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Reading Film." I provided an approach to viewing film for people without a film background that would allow for an appropriate use of the medium that considers film technique important along with a greater attentiveness to issues of representation and ideology. Here's a link to my PowerPoint presentation.

After the conference, I returned home to prepare filming for a class project. It was quite the event. There's four of us involved in the project with 9 people involved in shooting. I won't give away the details of the content of filming just quite yet but say we had a lot of fun doing it. We filmed from about 12:00pm to 4:30pm. We got a lot of great stuff and a bunch more we didn't plan on getting. We did have a few interesting set backs however. We filmed at my house and when I attempted to get out of my attic, I thought it would be appropriate to just jump out, not realizing I was falling about 8 feet. Most of the weight landed on my left foot. I thought I broke it. We had to revamp a bunch of the shots we were filming because I couldn't walk without a limp and in fact can barely stay on my foot. Sure it was a damper on the day but the film footage we got was so fun.

Back on the foot. Luckily, I didn't break it-just a bad sprain. As the day went on, my leg got worst. The roommates took care of me and busted out the frozen vegetables and icing tools. I couldn't move for the rest of the day. As the swelling got worse, I couldn't put any weight on my foot. Suddenly, a phone ringing or the need to go to the bathroom became a chore only resolved by hopping on one leg. I ended up using crutches for the rest of the day. I was a little worried at night because my bed isn't close to the ground but I found a way into it. I kept the leg elevated and wrapped, planning to go to a doctor, but then I woke today and I can move the leg more and put some weight on it. That's a nice twist I think. Anways, this week=crazy. Friday=crazier.

I'm online!

So for those of you who don't know, along with adjunct teaching journalism, desktop publishing, literature, and writing compoistion and attending Claremont Graduate University for my second master's degree, I also write film reviews the Beverly Press in Los Angeles. It's a local newspaper for the Wilshire, Hancock Park, and West Hollywood area with about a 12,000 a week run. For people that subscribe to our paper and the Los Angeles Times, it's actually distrubted with that paper every Thursday. Well, the website just got a new template that's more user friendly. In the past, PDFs of the weekly paper were there for upload and now individual stories can be accessed. It's nice to have a direct link online to your work. Only one of my reviews is online right now, but I imagine they'll be updated more often. Here's the link.