Room to Think

I suppose it's only fitting that today's Florence Friday be about The Italian Carnival, as it just ended on Tuesday. "The Carnival starts 58 days before Easter and ends on Shrove Tuesday (Fat Tuesday or Marte di Grasso, the day before Ash Wednesday." -Wikipedia It's been held (officially) in Venice every year since 1979.  The Italian government decided they needed to bring back Venitian history and culture, and Carnevale seemed like the best way to start. **So, Venice isn't Florence, but, it's close enough, right?** "Teatime" by Horst Raack It was voted 2012's La Maschera piu bella" (Best Mask) Supposedly this "Best Mask" contest is held in the last week of the Carnival and is voted on by a panel of international costume and fashion designers. I'm digging her hat.  Horst Raack also won in 2011 and 2009. There's also another fancy designer who won Best Mask three times as well: Tanja Shulz-Hess . ...

This week's TEDtalk is short, and it's about sleep. For now, I'll just post the video and hope you watch it because it's short, and it's also given by Arianna Huffington at a TEDwomen event. I'm a fan of this video because we're getting to that point in the quarter where sleep becomes less important than better grades. Where we've lost control of our new year's resolutions to do yoga every night before bed, or are stumbling around the internet until the wee hours of the morning as our dogs call to us from our beds. This video is about the value of sleep.  The idea is a simple one.

Happy Sunday! Well, on most accounts, I hope it's a happier Sunday for you than it has been for me.  It's been a mediocre day, at best: full of homework, zero interaction with other humans, and the slight itch of impending doom coming in the next week. Here's a list of things I did today: Woke up late. Made pancakes that made me sick. Ate carrots and drank water to make me feel better. Watched La Femme Nikita. Showered. Ran out of hot water in the shower.  >.< Microwaved leftover ramen for lunch. Drove to campus to be reminded that the library was closed. Drove to south campus to work in the AW mac lab instead. Ate a half a pear in the mac lab during the 6+ hours I was there. Watched Once Upon A Time at 8pm. Made chicken and orzo for dinner.  Ate more carrots. Finished off the box of Trader Joe's cookies I bought 2 days ago. Denied an invitation to lay-up the chassis on the formula car. Fixed my bed just to lie in it. (I intend to yoga ju...

I love cookies. But Cookie Monster is a traitor. They switched him over to veggies.  =( Today is Sunday, and I'm frantically searching around for a scanner that's not being used so I can scan some of the things I drew this week for today's Sunday Scribbles.  I dread using mine at home, but 90% of campus is closed today! =/ How am I supposed to be a good student if my favorite haunt in the library is locked?! On another note, my sister has painted her nails since I last posted about her. She painted them several  times.  And she gets more creative every time.   Kae, have you run out of nail polish yet? For Valentine's Day. She's using Crackle nail polish, there. On kinda the same note, The Hunger Games movie is coming out in March, and I"m super excited. Those books were my only friends last spring, and there's a certain catch in my voice, and ache just above my stomach that I attribute to the magic of those books. M...

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 ...