I just closed my eyes again. . .

Lydia McDermott, my good ole poetry friend, and I have started a project to turn a few of our poems into an interactive, hypertexty comic-book website, complete with pertinent scholarship from the good ole field of visual rhetoric. We're learning Dreamweaver, a program of website generation, and scouting locations for complementary videos/photo-essays.




I'll be writing a handful of posts to log our progress and to share ideas with the class and a wider audience (Rob Strong).

Yesterday, I was helped by three separate, incredibly eager employees of Ohio University (not counting my GAship-toting, wonderful fiancee, Megan, who brought me a bag of pretzels while I watched Hardball). First, I reaped (rept sounds better here) the benefits of the Shangri-La that is the Faculty Commons.

Pounding free coffee and beginning to shake, with excitement over the project of course, I sought the services of one Mike Roy, whom I'd once seen spend over an hour teaching an interior design professor a program on one of the 58-inch screens in what is truly God's library.


(Before I go overboard with OU love, I have to include my disdain for a particular salary-sucker in the registrar's office who continually points out the error of my bureaucracy-bypassing ways without glancing up from her game of Minesweeper. She is NO Mike Roy).

So, Mr. Roy navigated me through the OU website in search of a tutorial for aforementioned Dreamweaver. My roommate Dave had suggested that such tutorials were so badly attended by the intellectually-curious student body that the administration had begun offering custom, individual training.

Boon!

While we were searching (and finding), Barb Duncan, formerly of the English department, brought us Nestle's Crunches. I felt like Seinfeld in First Class while all the Elaines toiled in the 80 degree heat of Coach library.

"More anything?" "More everything!"

Eventually, Mike found me the correct course, and my webship set sail.

Later, I would be helped by a zealous reference librarian who instructed me in the Byzantine art of Boolean searches. He was wearing the same yellow IZod polo I sport in late Augusts, and he had my cowlick. This doppeldaver was emblematic of every reference librarian with whom I've ever come in contact (comparable even to the incomparable Lorraine Wochna, whose very name has become synecdochic for zest).

After getting what I'd wanted from the man, I attempted to scurry three or four times, only to be given one more delightful hint about archives and microfiche. Trained trouble-shooters, reference librarians lust for the chase of a challenge; having shot the intellectual buck, they bludgeon it with "one more thing."

But neither Mike nor Phillip was the real star of the day. That honor goes to Sarah in the CSC lab (and her imaginary friend, Garrick, but we'll get to that). To make a protracted story petite, said Sarah somehow moved two meetings she had in order to properly instruct us in the ways of Dreamweaver. She set us up in a private lab, gave us Kit Kats (my headache today is thanks to such repeated generosities), and briefly, before we objected, wrote us into her will.

Now, Dreamweaver is a $150 program, and the University has limited licenses to offer Her students; but Sarah basically gave us unlimited access to the ten-hour tutorial (Lydia and I brilliantly shortcutted through about a third of it in an hour or so).

This computer opera is hosted by a man I'm deeply in love with--Garrick Chow.


I've strained my Roget's seeking synonyms for "dulcet" to describe Garrick's voice. Honeyed. Euphonious. Golden. Even Dream-weaving. He let me into his web-designing life, sharing his personal way of arranging folders, his easy sense of cyber-humor, his almost maniacal love of high-end teapots.

Oh Garrick, take away my worries of today.
And leave tomorrow be-hi-ind.

In an hour, Lydia and I have another rendezvous with Garrick (sigh), followed by meetings at both Rollerbowl and our local neighborhood Applebee's.

My next post may shed light on such things and will not spare the details of my Mesquite Grilled Chicken Supreme Pepper Jack Nachos Con Carne Deluxe, hold the onions, and how they relate to Gunther Kress and Scott McCloud.

I look forward to seeing you again with my text.