Week 2: Program Intensive Magic

This week, I faced my fear of the word "patching."

I feel like in the Nixon the word patching is code for: "we don't know how to operate the board properly and something isn't going as planned so we're going to blame it on the commonly used word that we don't understand, which is patching." This in essence leads me to face my overarching fear of numbers, as well as my small paranoia about electrical outlets. Apparently as a kid I tried to kill myself A LOT with forks and electrical outlets, and now as an adult I seem to be notorious for touching the wrong cord and shocking myself. I also grabbed a TON of hot wire livestock fences growing up. My cousins thought it was funny to watch my hair stand up.

I was told as a little girl (as many women are) that my strengths were not in math, and this led me to begin to hate it and veer away from it and tell myself I'm horrible at it, and really steer clear of something that in essence is kind of beautiful as a universal language. I think of math and I think of quantum physics, the expansion of the universe, and music. All things I would like to learn about. However math in practice for me has been being compared to my engineer parents and bio sci older brother as the little art girl who can't do long division.

Yet, I'm realizing, I don't HATE math. In fact, it's kind of fun. When it becomes a puzzle, when it becomes something you can use as a skill to assist in the creative process, it's amazing. I think lighting may be my first real experience liking math. I like that it's so objective. There is an answer, and you have to find it, or you might blow the building up.

During the lecture I found myself wanting to figure out all the rules of the patching game as quickly as possible so that I could have all the answers when I got to the board. There is something reassuring about knowing which lights are programmed where- I've never experienced knowing which lights are which numbers because I put them there. This much make the whole deal much faster.

Some day I would love to work on a show top to bottom- designing, plotting, hard patching, soft patching, programming and all that jazz. What I really walked away from the lecture with is that the creative playground of light is even bigger than I thought. It's up to LD to make those decisions that previously had been done for me, but that's not something to be afraid of, it's something to embrace.