Room to Think

Welcome to Florence, Italy Firenze, Italia Last year, I was rejected from the graphic design program at WWU.  I don't blame them.  At the time, I blamed budget cuts and the fact that I was already a Junior for my rejection.  But now I can't even open my portfolio without wanting to change something. I procrastinated, rushed, and came out with design pieces that were definitely below par.  I'm actually glad they rejected me.  Because that forced me to pursue plan B:  sending myself to an international design school in Italy.   It's called the Florence Design Academy .  And it's "50metres away from the Piazza Duomo"...which I hear is tourist central.  The school teaches classes in English... which is GREAT.  But also offers an Italian language course so  I can read my way home should I get lost  exploring...or be able to convince some cute Italian boy to walk me home. =) I chose the school because it was i...

12:34am I've decided that's it's not best or most productive for me to write later than about this time of the night.  Tuesday night got a little crazy--definitely a little out of hand.  And though when I read through those posts, my only thoughts were: "Wow, I can still write cohesively at 3 in the morning!" and "Wow, I can get incredibly carried away" especially when my fingers can manage to keep up with the strings of thoughts as they pass through the ticker in my head that is in charge of motor control. A wordle of Tedtalk Tuesday--Happiness vs. Satisfaction I apologize. I love words. I love having things to say, and multiple ways of saying them.  But sometimes I feel like I should revel more in the beauty of being succinct. Last quarter I took a workshop class where I was required to write critiques for my classmates' work, and in return, they would critique mine.  It was  Kate Trueblood's senior seminar for fiction writing, s...

"It was more as if she had brought them up—perhaps through indifference or through laziness or even through some kind of possessive cruelty—with an imperfect sense of right and wrong . It was as if they could never know when they were being good or when they were being bad." -on a young Sir Gawaine and his brothers  in T.H.White's The Once and Future King, pg 214  This quote comes from one of my favorite pieces of literature--one of the few books on the "classics" list that I've picked up and really, really enjoyed reading.  I'm more of a reader of contemporary young adult novels of the fantasy/sci-fi realm ( The Hunger Games , The Ender Universe, His Dark Materials , The Lost Years of Merlin ...and, Twilight , unfortunately.  But it was a necessary part of growing up.)  So The Once and Future King sorta fits that fantasy/coming of age novel feel, minus the "contemporary" bit.   I read this book when I was a freshman in high school...

So, obviously I'm a little late on the "Tuesday" part of TEDtalk Tuesday, but I don't have followers yet, so I suppose it's not going to matter in the end.  Besides, I haven't gone to bed yet.  In my mind, that means it's still Tuesday. Regardless, I intended to post this while I was in the Atrium today, but I ended up forking up $120 to the rec center all in one go because I decided to be on two intramural teams this quarter, and the line had me occupied for a good portion of my 2 hour break.  By the end, I didn't feel like blogging at all. BUT here is the reflection on my post I put up earlier today.  If you actually watched the nice embedded video I put up in the last blog, congratulations.  I'm happy that 20min video didn't make you feel like you were wasting time.  TED does have much more engaging presentations, I promise!  It also means you can skip most of this blog, down to the only graphic in this mass of words.  If you...

From my experience, the best way to start a new blog is to jump right in.  Today is Tuesday, which means that later today I get to sit by myself for two hours between classes, pretending to do homework while I'm actually watching people in and around the Atrium.  I figure that's as good a time to reflect as any. So, no, this won't be your typical blog from my bed, which means I'm already going outside the parameters of why I established this blog in the first place. BUT, I did start watching the video I'm going to talk about before I went to sleep last night, and finished it when I woke up this morning.  Take that  theme . The video is a TEDtalk--which, if you've never heard of it, this guy gives a fairly short explanation of them, I suppose.  If you'd like to watch more TEDtalks, because you agree that they make you think, there's a link to all twelve-thousand of them over there in the bar to the right. --------------------> or, you can just cli...