Room to Think

It's hard work planning a trip two years in advance.  Part of me likes a little spontaneity.  Sometimes I think I deliberately wait for the last minute in order to help myself plan less.  Plans always  go awry. This weekend I planned to visit Vancouver, BC. But the only part of the plan that I have currently is that I'm going--as long as it's not raining too hard-- tomorrow .  I'm either going to get terribly lost, or have a ton of fun wasting gas.  =) Despite living four years in Bellingham, and having my own car and passport, this will be my first trip to Vancouver without my family. They came up for my 20th birthday and took me up there for an overnight experience .  It was then, with my entire family at the table in a so-so mexican restaurant in downtown Vancouver, that I discovered my absolute dislike for the taste of grenadine in my mixed drinks. They also made me wear the sombrero.  AND they never carded me. The b...

First of all, what I love about Joe's talk is that he truly is a storyteller. He even uses his own theme music! I took a storytelling class a few quarters ago, and I loved it, but it was hard work! Just getting my brain to remember the course of the story and all the words and motions that went with each story was a challenge.  Joe here had to remember his script, the order of the buttons he used, their placement on the iPad screen, and push them all at the right time so his story made sense. I can tell you it takes a lot of concentration to tell a story in an exciting way. I almost feel like I could see it on Joe Sabia's face a few times, despite how careful he was to seem excited about his narrative. It's the same way for blogs. Blogging is just another outlet for people to tell their stories--with new perspectives and through a new medium. And it still takes a lot of work to keep the stories interesting What I've found most interesting in the last coupl...

Good morning! Today's TEDtalk Tuesday is by that hipster man up there, Joe Sabia.  He's known for things like videos like " Tupac in Kazakhastan " and " A History of Lyrics that Aren't Lyrics ". He's a technological storyteller...which means that he tells a story about the evolution of stories in under 4 minutes . And, he uses his iPad. So I'll keep my summary short so you can actually watch the video. He begins with the book. "The book was the king of storytelling. It was venerable. It was ubiquitous. But it was a little bit boring...In its 400 years of existence, storytellers never evolved the book as a storytelling device."  (about 10 secs in) Then he shows how a man named Lothar Meggendorfer   started the revolution that led to the evolution of how we tell a story. "But the way that humans tell a story has always evolved with pure, consistent, novelty." (3:15) And that's what I'm going to ...

Happy Sunday everyone!  It's been a week since I drew my chubby Kidney Man, and I haven't posted like I promised.  So today you'll get a double dose of Sunday Scribbles! I had to do some fancy stuff with the flash on my point and shoot to get rid of the nasty reflection. Drawing inspiration from my classmate Maddie's  blog on the body, I've sort of become fascinated with learning how to draw boobs (breasts? I never know what to call them.) That's right, Maddie, you had better do a blog on breasts.  =) I've never really been great at managing to draw spheres.  The shading/lighting really throws me off.  So one night I decided to see if I could copy one of the paintings I have up in my room. "Butterfly Tattoo", by Amy Brown . Obviously, fairies don't have nipples, so I had to make her human. The interesting thing about Butterfly Tattoo is that whenever people come over and see her, their biggest problem is not that...

A week ago (practically), I suggested you all watch Shawn Achor's TEDtalk on Changing the way we achieve happiness .  I also said I was going to put up a Part 2. Due to an etiquette dinner, a volleyball game, a career fair, a group project, two days of dressing up professionally, and an incredible amount of lazy time laying in bed, I could not effectively finish this post until now.  I sincerely apologize for having a life.  =) But upon refreshing my memory on my last post, it occurred to me that I didn't really do his talk much justice.  Here's a better summary, written at a more sensible hour: Shawn Achor is CEO of Good Think, Inc. where he researches and teaches about positive psychology.  Shawn's work concerning positive psychology questions why there are those positive outliers in his psychological research. For Shawn, that dot off in the upper left-hand corner of your graph is an above-average person, not a measurement error.   ...

I'm blogging from a classroom today ( A classroom, not the classroom), in response to this post that my professor, Brenda, put up on the class blog. The class itself is "Online Writing as Literature", which is how I ought to refer to the course, instead of saying "oh yeah, I've got a class on blogging"  in that drawling sort of voice that implies an eye-roll, or lifting my eyebrows expectantly, as if to say, "you jealous ?" With this class, we're attempting to establish the importance of blogging in a "literature" sense, and I'm not exactly sure what that entails.  Let's see what wiki says .  (That's right, I'm calling up wikipedia during a midterm...you jelly ?) Wiki says: Literature is the art of written works , and is not bound to published sources.   The word "literature" literally means "acquaintance with letters" . The two major classifications are poetry and prose . It is u...

Roman Amphitheatre in Volterra Good morning!  It's a beautiful Florence Friday and I'm cheery not because of the weather, but because I just skipped an interview with a potential employer...on purpose.  (but that is a post for another time) In truth, I'm still in my bed, so I can't see what Bellingham looks like today, but it's certainly not sunny. And I just checked the weather in Florence... It's not so cheery there, either.  30degrees Fahrenheit and it's drizzling. (shouldn't it be snowing then?) Regardless of the weather, I'm still terribly excited about Italy.  I haven't made much progress in planning my Italy trip since last Friday, and blogging has made me acutely aware of how quickly the weeks go by.  I'm still a little disgruntled about Mr. Franco's email to me. But one of the reasons I've always been drawn to Italy (and Greece) is the ancient history built into the cities. I'm a huge fan of Gre...