Vindicated

It's been a long time since I've written. Mostly it's because this year, I've had an extra extended hell week. It dropped be to an all time low for depression to the point where I would cry for seemingly no reason at all at strange times. For example, walking to class I would start thinking about it, and my eyes would start to burn and my mouth would tremble. But now, that's over, and for the first time in a week, I feel like eating. Yes, ladies and gents, I feel vindicated.
So let me tell you what happened. As usual, the last couple weeks of class were spent preparing for final reviews. I was well on my way, doing everything on the computer. I did a lot of AutoCAD and exported into photoshop and saved myself money on paints and paper and had some really nice drawings. And then the unspeakable happened. Monday morning, five hours to presentation, I was putting together my boards. It was probably because I had CAD, InDesign and Photoshop all opened at the same time, but suddenly my computer shut down. Melted down. Geeked out. Flipped out. Threw a tantrum. No blue screen of death. It just suddenly went black. No worries, I thought, so I hit the power button. Nothing. Well, maybe it just needs a moment, I thought, so I went and took a shower. After my shower I hit the power button and it turned on, but then windows wouldn't load. Not good, I thought, so I called Steve Lee (the studio coordinator) to let him know the situation. I tried a few more times, sort of freaking out and finally, I got things up and running. By then, it was about 12:30, and I thought, awesome, I can still do this, so I called Steve and let him know the situation. And then, I realized that most of the files I had open were corrupted. Somehow some of the pdfs had miracuously changed from yellow toned to green toned, and there were chunks that were grey. Not good. But at least my older files were okay, so I figured I would use those. I slapped together what I had into the required 40x40, hoping to get some sort of presentation that day. I wandered over to campus to get things plotted and by then it was 1:30 - that was when I was supposed to present. I went to the plotter and found out I had a couple hours wait, so I stuck around and regaled Buzz and Bob with my horrible tale of computer woes and they offered some good advice about how to fix the computer. So at 3:30, I got my plots and went to present. What happened was horrible. Everyone stared and said nothing. Gerard tried to be nice and said, "Well, let's look at what we do have..." I can't remember most of what happened, except that at the end, first one professor told me there was just nothing there to comment on, and then my own professor, Walbert, said that the presentation had to be redone, that it wasn't worthy of my project. I think Walbert's comment hurt me the most. Fortunately, but then, it was time for me to go to dance class, so I left with Rebecca and immediately started sobbing when we walked into the stairwell. I contintued to sob through half of dance class and cheered up when we started learning a dance for "You Can't Stop the Beat" from Hairspray. After dance, I went home and cried a lot, and called Ben and cried to him. Poor Benny-bean, I didn't mean to make him so uncomfortable.
In any case, I agreed with Walbert that my presentation was crap, so I spent the week recreating everything in just autoCAD and watercolors, this time saving all the hard computer thinking for the school computers. I finished about an hour and a half into studio today and Buzz was kind enough to plot it for me while telling me all about beer and whisky. I now know whisky tastes better if you order it on the rocks and let it melt a little.
I brought the new printouts to studio where Walbert kept giving me apologetic smiles while I trimmed the plots. I finally showed him what I had and he told me that I had too much white space. Waz disagrees, so it's all good. I showed her and Zack and other people in Fisher studio and then decided I needed to see how it looked on a board so I hung it up and started to write down what revisions I need to make (those revisions will most assuredly also be done on a school computer) when Walbert walked in and gave Chang a crit. After he was done with Chang, Walbert asked me if I was waiting for stray professors to give me crits and I replied that no, I was just writing down things that I needed to change for my own purposes. Meaning that now that I know I'm not half bad at creating presentations, it's become a point of pride to make all of my presentations attractive. After I talked with him a bit, I decided I wanted to show Steve what I fixed because he also seemed severely disappointed with my presentation on Monday, so I brought it up to him and he gave it a thumbs up. We talked a bit about Monday and he asked me why I didn't try to explain the situation to which I replied that Gerard was there, and Gerard doesn't take those kinds of excuses.
All in all, I now have a nice final project, and, even if I end up with a C in studio, I know that it was a good project and I really didn my best.