senior thesis, my dreaded nemesis, we meet at last

I have a feeling that this is either going to go really, really well, or kill somebody.

I don’t commit to anything half-heartedly. Whatever project I choose to tackle for the three terrifying months between myself and graduation will have my undivided attention; I’ll be all over it like a cheap suit (according to my father). So either the project flourishes under obsessive scrutiny, or I’ll go crazy with the stress of trying to make everything work.

idea numero uno:

Throughout my life, I’ve had various affairs with every possible kind of visual art: graphite, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, acrylic, clay, film, binary code, polaroids, beads, thread and yarn, photographs. Each and every one has stalled, some earlier than others, at the point where I realize that my ability with the medium will never be enough to create what I want. I am not a particularly talented artist, despite the desperate need I have to create things. Childish as it is, I eventually get so frustrated with my inability to create what I imagine that I give up, and move on.

In the middle of one of those fits of transition, where I was ditching any and all thoughts of painting in acrylic, I picked up collaging.  I know this sounds utterly ridiculous, but it was a little like finding God. I struggled so hard with drawing and painting, with sculpting, with photography; I put in weeks and months, years of effort, I did battle with the medium. But making my first collage was like coming home; it was effortless and familiar, like something I had always been meant to do. Creating that collage was like building a poem, in the sense that I could feel the words in every clipping, in the sense that I physically placed them where they belonged, in the sense that I constructed some small piece of my consciousness.

It was a rush, to be able to say so many things without words, to be able to say so many things that could never be put into words.

…

So idea numero uno is to create a book of my work, somewhere between twenty and thirty pieces, with each piece being a poem/collage combination. I’ve already done this once, as a gift to a lover, but that was so much more for her. I want this piece to be about me, to be simply mine in a way that book wasn’t.

idea numero dos:

Last semester, while I was working for the Champlain College Publishing Initiative (CCPI), Tim Brookes and I began collaborating on a project with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) that would allow doctors in remote parts of the world to share their experiences and observations with other doctors on a blog, via SMS text messaging.

Discourse within the scientific community is rigidly structured; your conclusions and theories only matter if you have completed a carefully controlled study with all possible factors accounted for, which has since been reviewed by various members of the scientific community and, in many cases, your study has been repeated with the same results. For a doctor working in the remote stretches of Africa or Asia, isolated from the scientific community and working with very few resources, entering into that discourse is nigh impossible; beyond the technological barriers separating these doctors from the community, it is impractical and, in many cases, impossible to set up a study with the kind of strict controls necessary for the data to hold weight (scientifically speaking). As a result, the observations and experiences of these doctors have been lost.

The project, which still has both feet fairly firmly on the ground at this point, would recapture this lost knowledge. Although these doctors have very limited or no access to the internet, many of them do have cellular phones and fairly consistent access to cellular service. The project would set up a relay system, which would receive text messages and post them onto a blog; the doctors would express their observations and experiences through a string of text messages, which would then be compiled into a single post and published on the blog.

This project is intensely interesting to me, and I was thrilled that Tim had initially asked me to be a part of it. Although it may be difficult to tackle this project as my capstone project—I’d be relying on the timely participation of several individuals and spending a decent amount of someone else’s money—I think that it would be an invaluable experience; I’d be learning to coordinate and manage, to plan ahead, to communicate with figures of authority, to beg for money, and so on and so on. But, first and foremost, it would be helping fill a large gap in the scientific community that I think needs to be filled.

idea numero tres:

Write a short story in which I do not kill a small child.

(Seriously. I'm on twenty-one years and counting.)