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March 13 Cancer Update and Grad School in London

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Goldsmiths Graduation, 2005 (Annette, Professor John Wood, and me)

Last week’s chemo infusion was pushed back to this week to give my body a chance to recover from the rib radiation and for my new mutation med kick in, so I have a chemical drip-line to look forward to today. As I keep telling people, the chemo is so mild! Really, it is. The cocktail of drugs that are pumped into my port are so dialed in that I shouldn’t lose any hair, don’t really get sick (fingers crossed), and don’t get my insides torched along with the tumors.

I can’t remember if I told you about the port… it’s a small device that was surgically implanted in my chest about a month ago…it connects to a vein on the right side of my chest – above my lung but below the c-collar, and is used to draw blood and give chemo infusions without needing to go in through my arm vein. It will probably remain in place for the rest of this year(s)? There is a visible bump under my skin on my chest…tank top season this year is going to be lit!

So yes, the big item on my agenda today is chemo, then I’ll take my daily walk.

I’m up to a 45-minute walk! I can walk 45 minutes before my right hip starts hurting. There is so much going on in my right hip that my PT and I aren’t sure if the pain I am feeling is muscle or joint, tumor or not, so I’m doing a combo of stretching and strengthening to help rehabilitate that side while I try to gain back some semblance of my strength. This strength-building is going to take a while. I realized the other day that I’ve been in this compromised state for six months now. Six months! That’s half a year that I haven’t been able to go about life as normal. It really does feel like a time warp because there is no way I would have told you that I’ve been suffering from my injuries and this cancer, for that long. Time flies when you are in denial?

I’m also getting into the doldrums of the between treatment days. I binged the entire first season of Hacks yesterday. It didn’t feel great to stay in bed most of the day in front of HBO Max, but it also kind of did. I can see where it will be easy to slip into binge mode this year. I can be quite the sloth when I want to, and often feel there are two sides to me (I am a Gemini after all) duking it out…the extremely motivated side vs. the extreme sloth side. It’s almost as if these two sides have to balance each other out… I can be so incredibly on, so productive, so task and goal-oriented that the other side of the coin almost has to be a complete shut-down, reset, and veg mode. I seem to have two speeds. 120% and 3%. Is that such a bad thing? I guess it’s been working for me this far… let’s see how it shakes out in this cancer year.

These look-backs into pieces and slices of my past are almost all look-backs to the 120% of me, the other periods aren’t dramatic enough to have whole chunks of time worth reflecting on, maybe that’s why it works? There is moderation?

But today I think I’ll go back to 2003 and grad school. I’m doing a decent job of filling in the spaces for many of the other phases of life. We have:

Grad School

What next? was one of the main questions I asked myself after returning from Burkina Faso and hiking the Appalachian Trail.

What next? I asked myself as I was in Washington DC interning at the Smithsonian.

What next?

Well, grad school seemed like the next logical step at this point.

I was exploring a career in museums at the time and grad school was almost a pre-requisite into that career choice. In DC I was surrounded by extremely educated people, and I’ve always been attracted to the school vibe. Most likely, my love of books goes hand in hand with my love of education, gorgeous college campuses, and libraries. Higher ed has always had a great allure and romanticism to it….and having grown up on college campuses (my dad worked at UW Stevens Point and then Bradley University) certainly played into that.

I wanted to go back to school. I was excited to go back to school.

So what does one study when they want to work in a museum? I had decided on museum exhibition design because I could combine my love of design, experiential learning, three-dimensional spaces, and education into creating exhibits that people could walk through, interact with, learn from, and engage with. I was very drawn to multi-sensory museum exhibits at the time, and the great thing about the Smithsonian museums was that they were free. I could pop into one of them and walk through for an hour, sit in one exhibit hall, or visit one corner and not feel like I had to spend all day because I had just dropped $30 on the entry fee. I fed my brain regularly on museum exhibits, and those trips all went into the big jumble of experiences that fed into my grad school applications. 

Where would I even go? When researching master’s degree programs for museum exhibition design, I found that there weren’t many explicitly designed for my interests. That wasn’t a huge problem because I have lots of experience learning around a thing to get at the thing, and figured I’d need to piece together different aspects of study to get at my chosen field. The University of the Arts in Philadelphia did have a museum exhibition design program though, so that went on the list. Other ones I ended up applying to were Museum Studies at JFK University in San Francisco, the University of Washington Museum Studies program in Seattle, and the Design Futures program Goldsmiths College in London.

JFK University isn’t even around anymore…it closed in 2020, so I guess it’s good I didn’t go there? The museum studies program at U of W ended up being the only program I didn’t get into, which is just as well because I would have had to cobble together that degree to make it into what I wanted. Then there was the University of the Arts. I took a trip up to Philly to tour and interview at the school back in 2003. (This is another school that closed!!! Just last year in fact. That sucks). Had I chosen this program it would have explicitly involved designing museum exhibits, which seemed very practical at the time. On my visit I met many students in the program and had great fun looking at some of their dioramas of exhibits they were putting together (man, I love a good diorama!). University of the Arts would have been the most plug-and-play school choice for me; the program was designed to create exhibition designers, and the course work was very clearly created to prepare me solidly for that field. The Museum of the Arts was at the top of the list, but the exotic, multi-disciplinary, and non-traditional choice of grad school in London was pulling at me from the background. Museum of the Arts would have been a solid choice, and I was accepted into the program, but the expense gave me pause. It would have cost about $50,000 a year (for two years) to go to school there, and sure, I could take out loans for that amount (I was very lucky to get out of undergrad without any student loans), so it was clear sailing for me and the debt I would be taking on, but $100,000 grand for a fairly low-paying field of study did give me pause. (Side note; money has never really given me pause. I’ve never really had it, or thought much about it…money has never stopped me from doing what I’ve wanted to do, and I’ve always made enough to squeak by with my chosen lifestyle, but for some reason this debt did give me pause).

There were other reasons that London rose to the top of the list. There was a boy. A boy at the time who was going to grad school at London School of Economics. If I were to go to grad school in London, we could be in the same city and see what was what between us. So yes, the boy was a big factor at play when deciding where to go to school…we had in fact gone to the same high school and joined Peace Corps at the same time too. He served in Guinea, West Africa at the same time I was in Burkina Faso, and we reconnected back in Peoria after both of us had returned from our two years of mind-melting mid-west counter cultural experiences. 

What else did London have going for it? Well the program I decided to apply for was called Design Futures and was a very interdisciplinary and utopian look at how good design could help make the world a better place, which were ultimately my operating principals at the time: making the world a better place. The Design Futures program was solidly above and beyond all the others for its aspirational goals. It was based out of Goldsmiths College, which was the University of London’s creative college, and best of all? I could use federal loans to go to school overseas. I would be in school for about a year and a half, continually, rather than the two years with summer off schedule in the US, and it would be cheaper (cheaper!) for me to go to school there. The only drawback was that the degree wouldn’t necessarily line up with a degree program in the states. Design Futures was non-traditional enough that it might not be recognized as a graduate program in the US system, but, as I rarely subscribe to the system, that aspect really didn’t matter to me at all. 

Design Futures was a deep dive into sustainability, into deep ecology and theory, and heavily based in reading and writing. Each of us in the program chose our own method of design that we wanted to apply our thinking too. I chose museum exhibition design, while others in my class were furniture designers, textile designers, graphic designers, architects, etc. We were quite the eclectic group from all over the world. I loved that aspect. I was the only American; other students came from Norway, Spain, Japan, China, Korea, the Netherlands, the UK, and beyond. In fact, I was often the only American around during those few years, and I enjoyed it.

Shortly after arriving in London in August of 2003, the boy and I broke up, so I didn’t have any connections when I was trying to find my footing. It was a discombobulating time, but it was also a sink or swim time. I eventually swam, but it did take a while.

Soon after arriving I found a room to rent in a group house on Coldharbour Lane, a notorious street in SE London, and threw myself into becoming a Londoner for the next while. I loved my flatmates. Again, I was the only American, and lived with a creative and electric bunch: Franka and Janette were from Germany…Franka was an architect and Jenette was a fashion designer. Jesse was a Brit and was an illustrator, and David was from New Zealand and played music among various other pursuits. There were other housemates who came and went during my time there…they were all fun and eccentric in their own ways, and we had great times together. 

My house was about three miles from campus, so I would often walk to classes. It took about the same amount of time to walk to school as it did to take the bus. At this time I was very very poor. Like count my pennies, I could only afford one-beer-a-week poor. Taking out loans and eeking my way in the expensive city of London became its own challenge, but fortunately my parents helped me out with some small loans of their own, and I also started working, which helped me eventually work up to a two-pints-of-beer-a-week allowance. Being poor in London wasn’t all that bad. I couldn’t afford to take the tube anywhere and instead walked the city. I was a hiker by that point anyway, and walking everywhere was natural. It was my entertainment too. It took me a while to make friendships while I was there, but I had my walking. On weekends I would walk to new destinations in the city, go to museums, visit a cafe or two, and always had my eye on free entertainment in the city. There was always music or street fairs, and being a student also helped with discounted tickets to shows and such.

My time in London was kind of a struggle, but a good struggle. Like I said before, a time of sink or swim, and after treading water for a bit, I swam.

So school, what was that about? From the start my professor, John Wood, was feeding us ideas around designing utopias and creating new social and design structures that would foster community and societal order. It was brilliant. We looked to Buckminster Fuller and many philosophers. The schooling was incredibly different than what I was used to in the states. We would have one full day of lectures a week, and the rest of the time was ours. We had four essays to write during the length of the course with a dissertation at the end. That was it! We had to read and think and apply those principals to our chosen design disciplines. It was much like the Peace Corps in that we were left to our own devices to make of it what we could.

I am really good at writing papers, and found I was well-suited to the structure. I spent many hours in the library, and many hours visiting different museums around London. I even had a short stint, not really an internship, at the London Portrait Gallery. There was a relationship of sorts with the museum I had interned at in DC, and I pulled on those connections to get me a gig at the London museum. I spent a few days with their staff behind the scenes, but after I almost cut my finger off with an Exacto knife on one of the first days I was there, the gig didn’t really turn into much. I think they thought I was too much of a liability…no matter though, much like the DC museums, many of the London museums were free so I could come and go frequently and pop into exhibits that I was drawn to.

I was very interested in multi-sensory exhibit experiences….and I’ll stress experiences here. I thought the more senses an exhibition could entice, the richer and more evocitiave the exhibition experience could be. At the time the Tate Modern had a wonderful exhibit by Olafur Eliasson that I would visit again and again. It was called the Weather Project, and the old turbine hall was turned into another world. The ceiling had been plastered with mirrors, and on one end half of a glowing sun appeared against the mirror, evoking a sunset atmosphere. Clouds of moisture would be puffed out from time to time, and the experience was so immersive that people would lay down on the floor and bask in the sun. It was an experiential exhibition to the core, and I loved it. 

So what came out of my time there? Ultimately I decided that I wanted to take the museum out of the museum, and my dissertation was all about developing an “eco-interplay ethic” where museums could be a safe place to study and play with ideas, many around sustainability, and give visitors a chance to see and interact with different sciences and disciplines side by side. It was about moving away from an object-based museum to an experience-based museum where an object could come alive with more interpretation around its holistic story….a story that included people, place, setting, and purpose.

I still have the program from our year-end degree show which encapsulats all the thinking we were doing that year. The show was called “Yet/Still to Come” and may do a better job at illustrating what I was doing during this time than my words above do.

At the end of the Design Futures program, I wanted to stay in London and work in a UK museum, but none of my job applications went anywhere, and I ran out the time on my student visa, but not before making a wonderful trip to Norway with one of my classmates Elizabeth to visit her home country and spend some time in Oslo and the country-side. I returned to Illinois in October 2004 and made a quick turnaround time to order to move to Oregon that November. That means I became an Oregonian just over 20 years ago! Does that mean I’m an Oregonian, or do you have to be born here?? 

How has that time influenced my work today? Well, like I said before, after grad school I moved to Oregon and couldn’t find a job in museums, so hiked the PCT in 2006. From there on the desire to live and work outside has become more of a framing reference for ideas and aspirations, but Design Futures still lives on…. 

It was quite a jolt years later when I realized after I got the job to establish the Oregon Desert Trail that I finally had my museum exhibit. I had created an opportunity where I was curating a three-dimensional multi-sensory experience in a thru-hike so that a hiker could immerse themselves in place, learn about the history, ecology, flora, fauna, conservation opportunities, public land issues, all the while walking through one of the most remote landscapes left in the US.

THIS was my dissertation.

THIS was me putting my grad school experience into practice.

This is the foundation of my business today.

Through the full-bodied, holistic, experiential experience of thru-hiking a trail and creating the resources and experiences for hikers to learn and interact with, I am creating a better world. Good design can change the world, and by designing a hiking experience with the goal of creating a more engaged and informed hiker, I am putting Design Futures into practice.

So yes, grad school has been an important phase of my life and continues to influence everything I do today. Living in a world of ideas for a while can have practical implications, but I wonder if ideas don’t always get enough time and space for thoughts to fully develop…we need to give ourselves and each other the time and space to think, dream, read, write, be, and explore. I will always go to bat for a liberal arts education…it helped make me who I am today, and a realm of study where we can apply different principles to many of life’s disciplines is invaluable. 

So with that I’ll close my grad school chapter and retun to the land of cancer to think and read and look at this time of pause in my life as another experience of playing with space and time…perhaps I’ll come out the other end of this nebulous cancer year with a bunch of new ideas and ways to apply my thinking to the trails community, or maybe I’ll fully embrace my sloth state to binge watch a bunch of TV and read a ton of books. Regardless, I know the inputs, and conversations, and musings of this year will go into the big stew–pot of my experiences and will somehow influence future me…the how is yet to be determined.

Cancer Update 2/25/25 (but really this one is about the 8 months I lived in Washington D.C.)

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It’s hard not to do a deep dive into a past life when friends send you cards, videos, and memorabilia from old adventures. I’ve been reliving so many of these lives this year that it has brought a real vivaciousness to what can sometimes be old and stale memories.

A wellspring that keeps on giving is my Pacific Crest Trail thru-hike in 2006. When anyone asks what my favorite trail is, it’s hard to keep from gushing all over the PCT that year. And I say THAT YEAR. Every year on a long trail can have an entirely different vibe and flavor. Much of that can be determined by the weather, and the specific hazards of that year, but for me it almost always comes down to the people. 

The people in 2006 are what made the trail so special for me, and judging by the number of folks I’m still connected to from that hike 19 years ago, I was not alone in basking in the afterglow of humanity we met that year. We were bonded by something that year. It could have been record level snows in the Sierra that forced us to hike in groups and look out for each other at hazard points. It could be that we were hiking before GPS and smartphones, so again, had to dig deep, read the terrain, and help those who weren’t as familiar with navigation (Note: that was me! I learned so much from my fellow hikers about reading maps and terrain that year…and I’m a much different hiker for it!). It could have been the fire that closed the Canadian border to us until right at the end when it opened again. It could have been so many things.

So, you might indulge me in this blog post because I’m going to go deep. What was it like to hike 2,663 miles from the Mexican to the Canadian border? 

This photo will help kick us off:

This is a little of the flavor I brought to the trail that year. I think the flavor was “CRAZY”.

How about some backstory?

My real initiation into the thru-hiking life began four years prior when I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2002 (another story for another day). Suffice to say, I was hooking on the walk all day everyday thing, and knew that I wanted to keep my nomadic nature alive in the future, but wasn’t sure how or when.

After the Appalachian Trail, I had committed myself to figuring out the whole career thing. Shortly after finishing the AT and returning home to my parent’s house in Peoria, Illinois, I found myself stitching together a series of jobs to make ends meet. I made coffee drinks and slung pastries at Panera and was a cashier at Kohls, I can’t even remember the other odd jobs I had during those months at home, but they were the kind of jobs where I would occasionally run into old classmates from Dunlap High School or Bradley Univerisity and try to decide if I would hide and try to escape notice, or embrace it and tell them my story. That I was working there because I was between adventures (having just finished two years in the Peace Corps and a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail), as a way of explaining why I was buttering their bagel, but it really served to push me to figure out the next thing. No offense to buttered bagels. Love them. 

I was an english major and graphic design minor in college, and LOVED design and information. Information design. I wasn’t quite sure what that could or would look like, but I knew I wasn’t interested in the traditional career options of advertising or PR like many of my Bradley classmates. I wanted something different, something that made a difference in the world, something exciting. 

During the months at home, I was scouring the internet for internship ideas and hit on one in Washington DC at the Smithsonian. They needed an exhibition design intern for the National Portrait Gallery. Interestingly enough, I had been thinking a lot about exhibition design as a career choice. As an exhibition designer I would be concerned with how a person would interact with a three-dimensional space, how I could tell a story or relay information within that three-dimensional space that would inspire, educate, inform, excite, etc., so I applied to the internship and promptly continued buttering bagels. I mean, the chances of landing an unpaid dream-gig like that halfway across the country seemed like a pipe dream. 

Nothing much was happening in the way of job prospects that winter, so I made plans with my AT hiking buddy, Cindy, to move out to Portland Oregon, and try life out there. I knew that I wanted to hike the Pacific Crest Trail and I figured at least moving out west would bring that step a bit closer. I would have to get a job for a while to save up money and establish myself, but Portland seemed like a solid decision. 

Come January 2003, I was two weeks away from my Portland move when I got a piece of mail from the National Portrait Gallery. I got the internship!!!

My first I thought no way, too late. I already had my plane ticket to Portland, I had a place to stay until I could find a long-term rental and there were just too many things in motion to pick up and change directions so suddenly.

Then I woke up. I mean, come on!! Miss this opportunity??? No way. I changed plans, accepted the position, and threw my future into the wind. I was moving to DC, baby!

Fortunately, I had a number of friends from the Peace Corps who lived in DC, and I was able to couch hop for a while until I found a room to rent up on Wisconsin Avenue by American Univesity. And what a room! For the tidy sum of $525 a month, I had a walk-through room in a big group house. A walk-through meant my roommate had to walk through my room to get to hers. This whole set-up was very college-ageish temporary. I had a mattress on the floor, no furniture, and no privacy. It was all good. My internship was 30-hours a week, and I had to get a job so I could afford to live there, so I worked approximately 30 hours a week at Armond’s Pizza around the corner…I was barely there anyway. BUT my housemates were all pretty rad. They were a very diverse bunch, one worked for the Fullbright program, several were in grad school, and several I just can’t even remember. We lived in a pretty nice neighborhood up on Wisconsin Avenue, and I got to know the surrounding neighborhoods really well as I walked and walked and walked them. If you didn’t know, I like to walk, and one of the the best ways to get to know a new city (especially if you are a broke 20-something) is to walk everywhere, and I did.

For work every day I would hop in the metro and take the train down to the middle of DC. I was officially the exhibition design and production intern and an intern at Center for Electronic Research & Outreach Services at the National Portrait Gallery. The two teams split my time in half. And for all of you who vaguely know that the Smithsonian is a big museum in DC, it’s actually a collection of big museums in DC. 

The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, with 21 museums, 14 education and research centers, and the National Zoo. I was going to be working at just one of the museums, and it didn’t even have a physical space while I was there.

The National Portrait Gallery had recently decided to relocate to the old Patient office. The building was undergoing renovations (I got to take several tours of the gutted building while I was there; one of the big to-dos happened when they found some civil-war era graffiti on the wall from when the building served as a hospital for wounded civil-war soldiers. That’s pretty cool!)

The National Portrait Gallery was going to share the space with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and it was all a very exciting time; the museum directors were in the middle of re-thinking and re-imagining what these museums would look like. Think about one exhibit that might be shown there: perhaps a permanent collection like the Hall of Presidents. I got to sit in on conversations that discussed things like: Would we hang their portraits at eye level with the public, which would make for a much more humanizing view into the leaders of our country? Or should they be hung up where we had to look up to them, venerate them, celebrate them? What kind of objects would we place next to their portraits? What colors would we use? How much and what information would be on each label next to each piece of art? These decisions were far beyond my intern position, but it was endlessly fascinating to think about…and these were questions that would be at the center of each exhibition that I would be involved with. It was so exciting!

And here you thought you’d be learning more about my Pacific Crest Trail hike, it just goes to show you where 3am brain goes! (BTW, I had a WONDERFUL night of sleep last night. I almost got in a solid 6 hours! #winning, so I think I’m firing on all cylinders today…or most of them anyway)

My main point of contact for the exhibition position was Caroline. And Caroline was amazing. She was the museum’s graphic designer and was in charge of all things graphics for the museum. She really took me under her wing and made sure my internship was so much more than hanging one exhibit while I was there. We took tours of all the museums, often to the collection areas where a vast array of objects never get displayed to the public. Check this out:

The Smithsonian Institution—the world’s largest museum and research complex—includes 19 museums and galleries and the National Zoological Park. Currently, the total number of artifacts, works of art and natural science specimens in the Smithsonian’s collections is approximately 155 million. The bulk of this material—more than 145.8 million specimens and objects—is part of the National Museum of Natural History. In addition, Smithsonian collections include 162,000 cubic feet of archival material and 2.1 million library volumes.

Among the vast collections are irreplaceable national icons, examples of everyday life and scientific material vital to the study of the world’s scientific and cultural heritage. The objects in Smithsonian collections range from insects and meteorites to locomotives and spacecraft. The scope is staggering—from a magnificent collection of ancient Chinese bronzes to the Star-Spangled Banner; from a 3.5 billion-year-old fossil to the space shuttle Discovery; from the ruby slippers featured in The Wizard of Oz to presidential paintings and memorabilia. Collection items vary in size, from the Concorde at 202 feet to the Fairfly wasp at .0067 of an inch. The largest single collection is Natural History’s invertebrate zoology collection with more than 49.8 million specimens, ranging from corals and vent worms to parasites and squid.

Only a small portion of the Smithsonian’s collections (estimated at less than 1%) is on display in the museums at any given time. Many collections are acquired and solely used for research purposes utilized by scientists and scholars from all over the world. Whether they are acquired from the depths of the oceans, tropical rainforests, archaeological sites, everyday life, or even extra-terrestrially, Smithsonian collections are preserved and maintained for public exhibition, education, and study.

And I nerded out on all of it. Moving to DC was one of the best decisions I made during this time of my life, and working at the Smithsonian helped me decide to apply to grad school in museum exhibition design. DC helped me go all in on information design. 

So what did I do for my internship? Well, because we didn’t have a physical museum to work in, Caroline and the curators worked on getting a temporary gallery space to hang A Portrait of the Art World exhibit. We exhibited at the S. Dillon Ripley Center which was notable for the underground building’s copper-domed entrance between the “Castle” and the Freer Gallery of the National Museum of Asian Art. The Ripley Center also connects to the African Art Museum and the Sackler Gallery of the National Museum of Asian Art.

The exhibition consisted of 100 original vintage prints of photographs reproduced in the ARTnews magazine since it began publication as Hyde’s Weekly Art News in 1902. Included were portraits of both European and American artists by a cross-section of such noted photographers as Zaida Ben-Yusuf, Alice Boughton, Hans Namuth, and Richard Avedon. 

I worked with Caroline and the other exhibition designers on the show, as they decided on colors, labels, label content, label style, label fonts, brochures, exhibition signage, exhibition press, and one of my favorite parts of the job, directing the museum’s cabinet maker in making stands, cases, walls, and pretty much any kind of furniture or display element that would be used in the show. 

I got to spend hours with David in his cabinet shop, and I loved it. This guy could make anything. He had an amazing array of skills and tools and could take Caroline and the other’s vision for a display case and make it come alive. David also initiated me into the world of packing and unpacking the priceless works of art. I told you that each museum has an extensive collection of objects, and the exhibits throughout the year will pull from these collections to tell the story the curators decide to tell for each show. This means extensive and impressive systems for storing and preserving the art. Because we were a portrait gallery, there were thousands and thousands of portraits in collections, and each one of those portraits had to be packed and crated (and uncrated) when it was time to hang a show. One day David gave me a power drill and instructed me to open a Roy Lichtenstein painting. Oh boy, my hands shook, and I gladly handed over the drill once I got the first few screws out. I didn’t want to be responsible for a slight slip of the hand that could have massive implications for the painting. 

I felt like I was operating on a different level the whole time I was in DC. I was doing it. I was there. This was exciting and important. 

One of the fun projects Caroline had me working on was to come up with a series of swag that could be sold in gift shops that would commemorate some of the paintings from the ArtNews exhibition. Now in the real world these swag items had been designed and put into production months and months ago. For example, in the Smithsonian gift shop, you might be able to buy a silk scarf that carries a motif from one of the paintings on display in the exhibition. Just coming up with the design is one thing, then a vendor and production facility would have to be found, a display created, and just like the show was a curated affair, so is the gift shop. Each exhibition has a carefully selected set of note cards, gift items, memorabilia, and more to commemorate the exhibit. Caroline’s project for me was more of a fun assignment than a real-life opportunity, but I had so much fun with it. I came up with a bunch of different designs based on some of the paintings in the show…and I still have the project as an item in my portfolio. (remember those? Artists types had actual portfolios with pieces of work they had done over the years?)

So Caroline and I had great fun with graphics and hanging the show, but that was just half of my job. I reported to the other side of the building in the afternoons where I worked with Linda Thrift to help digitize portraits of the presidents. At the time I was part of an effort to build the Catalog of American Portraits. The goal of CAP was to build a body of information about portraits of “historically important figures” in collections everywhere, public and private, using a team of researchers who would photograph, measure, and record available information on a portrait-by-portrait basis.

What this meant for my day-to-day was hours and hours of photoshop work, and I primarily digitized photos of President George Washington. The museum had staff that would get to do the fun stuff, like track down said portraits (many were well known, but many others surfaced over the years….how many portraits of George Washington are out there? Thousands).

I scanned in the physical photos of each portrait and photoshopped each image so it would be color-corrected, cropped, scaled, made to fit within the digital container of the CAP system. It wasn’t the sexiest job in the world, but I often got to put my headphones on and photoshop the afternoon away. I had great fun getting to know the others who worked on the project, one of my favorites being Warren Perry who was a wonderful excentric who brought life and color to the room. I went back to look for some email exchanges with Warren and my search uncovered this little tidbit that gives him a bit more color: “I am writing a play as part of the NPG public programming for the re-opening and it is based on Walt Whitman’s time there as a nurse.” I mean, how fun and cool is that?

All in all my time at the Smithsonian was quite short. I applied to grad school while I was working there, and narrowed down my choices to about 5 schools, only 2 of which accepted me for the fall of 2003: The Univesity of the Arts in Philadelphia, and Goldsmiths College in London. Guess which one I chose? When I learned that I could get federal loans to go to school abroad and that their grad program was about half as expensive and could be completed in just over a calendar year compared to the University of the Arts’s 2-year program, it was a fairly easy decision. And my boyfriend at the time was living in London going to the London School of Economics, so that was a point in favor of moving overseas. 

I wrapped up my time at the National Portrait Gallery by that August and was flying across the pond for the fall semester later that month. My time in DC though, really helped cement in my mind that I could do anything I wanted, and it was worth going for gold. It was worth putting in for the job I might not get, or the grad school application that might not get accepted. What if I did get the job and I was accepted? What then?

I’ve been living in the space of what is possible for years now. And it’s a good place to be. Imagine big, go big, deliver big, and you will be handsomely rewarded for your efforts. Oh, and make friends along the way. I can still touch base with many of these folks I worked with in DC all these years later and share stories and a laugh. People make all of these experiences and adventures truly come alive.

Well here I am and there was more I wanted to tell you about my DC experience…the Armond’s Pizza chapter of my life was a whole other world into itself! And then grad school…that all comes before my Pacific Crest Trail hike, in addition to the year I worked in Portland as a graphic designer…so I guess those adventures will be chronicled in other blog posts in the coming days and months. Did I know I would be writing my life story in these cancer updates to you? No, but it’s quite fun and I think I’ll continue as long as you all are enjoying it.

Are you? Should I keep going?

I think I’ll wrap it up for this installment, but not before giving you a big ‘ol gift from the Pacific Crest Trail class of 2006.

Back in the day when there weren’t that many of us ni the trail one hiker would often solicit photos from that year’s batch of hikers and put together a “class video.”. In 2006 that hiker was Pro Deal. Pro Deal (or Ryan Christensen) was a park ranger in Yosemite and a digital video guru who has brought many other excellent film projects to life (like this one called We Are Grand Canyon).

The PCT 2006 film is a doozy! Get yourself a bowl of popcorn, put on your cozy jammies, and immerse yourself in an hour and a half of hiker joy. It’s worth it!