Here is Seamus posing with an exquisite, original porcelain Crapper.
I’ve been meaning to go on The Underground Tour with my friend Cherie for like… I don’t know, three years or something? And now that she’s moving away we finally managed to squeeze it in. One of the sad things about living an hour away from Seattle (and not having a driver’s license) is that I have a lot of friends there who I never get to know better. If I can ever afford it, I’d like to make a point of taking the train down and spending one weekend per month catching up with people I don’t usually see.
Anyway, here we are happily posing in the scariest place to be during an earthquake:
I'm sure she thought Seattle's basement smelled bad--until she got close enough to smell me.
Behind us, you might see a log. That log is part of the original wooden(?!) sewer system for the city of Seattle. So of course I had to stick my finger in the hole and then lick it. Seamus and Cherie refused to be impressed. She brazenly claimed all the germs had died by now, but even if that’s true, they only died on purpose because they knew like a hundred and fifty years later they might come in contact with the microbial police brutality that is my immune system.
How did the Romans build better plumbing two thousand years before you, Seattle?
If you take the Underground Tour, see if you can go when Terrilynn is the guide. Cherie says all the guides have different entertaining styles (and she would know, since this was her twelfth time taking the tour), but Terrilynn was so fabulous that afterward, I confessed that she’d pretty much convinced me to pursue a job conducting tours. Almost immediately, Seamus asked a historical question about something I had researched, and I was so unprepared to be handing out information that I made a stuttering mess of my answer. As usual, this is me.
And this is our tour guide!
Terrilynn, our tour guide (photo by Craig Nagy)
After the Underground Tour, Seamus and I went to an information session from Vancouver Institute of Media Arts. There’s programs both of us are interested in, and it was nice meeting the head of admissions (who is an absolute doll). Some of the character animation graduates I found on the web were doing well; some I’m not sure should have been accepted; all of them seemed satisfied with their experience. Still, I’m always skeptical of art trade schools, the same way I’m skeptical of most writing workshops. From what I was able to dig up, VanArts seems legit, but if anyone has experience with them, I’d welcome your input. E-mail me or leave a comment!
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I went to one of Vanarts’ info sessions too a while back. They definitely do a good job of making themselves look nice. I haven’t met anyone who’s actually been through the program either, but I remember they had some some stupidly high employment rate for their graduates, which seems encouraging.
At any rate, I’ve been pining after them for a while. It’s a helluva lot of money, though.
Derp, I didn’t see that you did a bit more research on them. I totally want to pick your brain now.
Join up soon and art. That should be the plan. Yes.
I ended up saying “not now” because of concerns about housing and funding, mostly.
My overall impression was that the students who expected a regular high school/college style of learning were sorely disappointed, and the students who knew what to expect from a trade school did well. I don’t mean it to sound like I blame the people who had bitter or less-than-stellar experiences, because to some degree, we’re taught to expect a school to teach! But I’ve been to a trade school before, and my take on it is that you’re not actually “being taught,” in the passive sense, as much as you are pretending you have the job already. At a job, you don’t wait for your manager to tell you what to do–you try and make yourself indispensable by observing, problem-solving, and presenting stages of progress for approval. Trade school is much more like this than sitting in a classroom and having someone give you an assignment and then waiting for a grade, rinse, repeat.
You probably know that, anyway, but I guess what I’m saying is I came to the conclusion that the people who didn’t enjoy their experience there weren’t looking for what the school has to offer.
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