I have a personality. 😃
Sometimes I am not a cold, hard, corporate girlboss, and experience real human emotions, including a silly goofy mood. During these times, I see crucial, real-world problems all around me and jump into action to address them.
[picture of tampon curtain]
Situation: I lived in a hacker house with 14 other people. The women living in the house wanted a women's bathroom we could keep nice, neat, and clean (relatively). Despite designating a bathroom for this purpose, the boys kept using it.
Task: I decided to take matters into my own hands.
Action: Along with a team of three other enterprising young women, I designed and implemented a structurally efficient, yet aesthetic, tampon curtain to rightfully claim the women's bathroom as our own and deter unwanted boys from it.
Result: After launch, an immediate 99% reduction in boys using our bathroom, the remaining 1% who dared to venture in were swiftly reprimanded.
Footnote: These were from old tampon boxes left behind by previous tenants, which were opened, so we couldn't donate them and didn't feel comfortable using them ourselves. We would not waste tampons unnecessarily (even for this noble cause).
"The Pit," 2022
Plastic balls, cardboard, misc couches
Egan et al. labored for months (2, to be precise) to complete this avant-garde masterpiece, archetypal of the "Camp" style, rampant in the 2020's with artists of the Zed generation. In an allusion to the universe, "The Pit" contains multitudes, tiny spheres that compose the fabric of a whole - impotent, trivial, and repugnant alone - but extraordinary in composition, the whole much greater than its mere parts.
The perimeters of this piece consist of miscellaneous lounging apparatuses, conveying a modern take on the classic conversation pit, a nod to humanity and civilization - the discourse and comradery in contemporary symposium that distinguishes humankind from mere beasts. This structure encompasses the focal point of the piece, the pit, as humanity and the universe, at once both dissonant and enraptured, are thrust together as one.
To quote Egan herself on the inspiration behind this tour de force, "I've never met a room that wouldn't be better with a few thousand balls in it."
Painpoint: My aforementioned 14 roommates were mostly all gone for the Thanksgiving holiday, so the few of us that remained were bored.
Solution: Me and another roommate thought it would be funny to create mini clay versions of all our roommates, make props that suited their interests/personalities, and take pictures of them around the city. We also took pictures of their mini versions at locations that represented them, printed those photos out, framed them, wrote captions that exemplified the person, and hung the pictures over their beds / outside their rooms.
Result: It was indeed funny, and we managed to successfully entertain ourselves for a few days. Our roommates also enjoyed them. Overall, a 100% satisfaction rate and 73% increase in measured whimsey and joy in the house.
Do you ever look at your love life and think - wow, this is so inefficient, I really need to optimize this? Probably not. This is what separates me and you.
So I decided to turn to my good friend Excel and track my online dating conversion rates to see where my rates were weak, in order to streamline my love life.
Although this did not result in a long-lasting relationship, it did cement my love for the beauty and joy of Excel. In the end, I learned that love isn't found in a person, it's found in optimization, and the real treasures are the spreadsheets we made along the way.
If you're like me, you spend restless nights, tossing and turning, plagued with the constant, existential, fateful question of - if I was a credit card, what credit card would I be?
You see, there are endless resources, websites, and quizzes that will inform your answer to the question of what credit card you should GET, but tragically, there is nothing when it comes to determining what credit card you ARE. Now, for similar conundrums, you can solve this quandary with the age-old heuristic "you are what you eat" - but no, not in this case, as microplastics are already found in our food and are terribly bad for your digestive system.
Luckily, I took on this heafty, earth-shattering endeavor, and though decades of research, devised a quiz to help you identify which credit card you would be, if, in an alternate universe, another life, you had perchance been thrust upon this earth as a credit card. Fear no longer, mere mortals, for through this quiz you can now transcend the natural knowledge of humans, and peer into the multiverse, where you are a beautiful, sleek, crisp sheet of plastic (& misc materials).
At this point, you're probably thinking - she must be done, surely one human does not have time to create that many more stupid projects. Doesn't she have spreadsheets to work on? Powerpoints on which to spend hours aligning text? Meetings to sit in and think about how they could've been emails?
Yes, but I also have many intrusive thoughts and the burning desire (and humanitarian obligation) to act on them.
I'll allow a brief pause here for you to process the mind-blowing genius of what you have borne witness to so far. Take all the time you need.
I zucced the city.
I listed our hacker house as a restaurant and got it to be one of the highest recommended restaurants on the Upper East Side, with 24k views a month.
I dabble in graphic design, but unfortunately, I use it to make things like this.
If you want, it can be yours here.
I thrifted a denim shirt that had the text "University of Delaware Religious and Spiritual Life," which inspired me to teach myself embroidery.
Pretty self-explanatory.
Down with the bourgeoise mega-rich and also down with the commercialization of Christmas!
Unless, of course, the bourgeoise mega-rich is hiring me and giving me money, then we're cool.
Secondarily (but importantly), this served as a power move to our landlord.