I moved away from home - at the time, that was China - to go to boarding school in Connecticut when I was 13. I have lived away from home for the bulk of every year ever since. I am very familiar with being homesick, and you'd think that having lived away from home for 7 years and running now should mean that I'm very good at being homesick.

I'm not.

Actually, I don't really remember ever being super homesick during high school. I did begin listening to a lot more Chinese music, because it reminded me of China which in turn reminded me of my family. When my family moved back to Canada, I stopped listening to so much Chinese music and instead started binge listening to a lot of childhood music - Disney music, musical music, et cetera.

This is my ridiculous mom who got really excited being at NASA.

And this is my ridiculous little sister and my dad waiting in line for Disney tickets. My family is adorable. How could I not miss them all the time?

Homesickness really became a thing when I came to college. I think coupled with the stress of being a student at MIT, a lot of the time I just wanted to run home to my family. Obviously, this wasn't something possible, so to deal with homesickness I did some of the next best things. Here they are:

1. Skype my family. I skype call my family every week, and if we miss a week I start feeling really awful. My sister is the number one person who can cheer me up - last semester, when I was really sad most of the time due to numerous reasons, she would stick her (slightly stinky) little feet in my dad's face to make me laugh. When I called her this past weekend, she told me she was going to give me "one hundred - one thousand - one GOOGLE hugs!" when I got home for Thanksgiving.

2. Watch a childhood movie. I almost always had a lot of "down" time where I was building models and didn't really need to think when I was taking studios, and so I would just play all of the disney movies back to back. Classic Disney is the best kind of Disney. Also, Mufasa's death scene always helped me cry out all of my frustrations. I also watched all of the Harry Potter movies about a million times because that was also a token of my childhood.

3. Last but not least, go find the people who are the next best thing: my friends. My friends are my family at MIT, and I know I can always fall back on them when I'm feeling down and awful and homesick. While none of them are adorable 6 year olds (sorry, guys) they're almost just as good at making me laugh and smile and forget my worries.

I doubt that I will ever be "great" at being homesick. My mood gets pretty affected when I'm missing my sister who will run around and pull my hair and give me "one google" hugs, or my dad who makes weird faces at me, or my mom who never fails to feed me all the nice things when I get home. These are ways that I've been managing.

How do you deal with being homesick? Let me know!

Anyone who knows me knows that I am practically obsessive in my organization. I am that person that writes copious to-do lists, will block out everything - including break time - in my google calendar (to the point where it gives my roommate anxiety, oops), and has had a long standing love for anything paper.

It's no wonder I chose to study architecture. What other discipline would allow me to utilize my organizational skills in order to accomplish everything that's needed to be accomplished - building overly-complex models (my professor once said that I was a masochist because I would plan out the most complicated and intricately beautiful models even though they were way too time consuming), creating beautiful and minimalistic and informative drawings - and still, somehow, succeeding to sleep more than most of my classmates? And most importantly, I got to play with nice paper and nice pens all the time.

One of the things I've regretted the most about my past few years here at MIT is that I never took the time to document my experiences here. Sure, I still have my memories, but memories are fleeting and easily forgotten. Writing things down on paper or drawing them out or blogging about it on here makes it all so much more memorable and tangible. For example, most of what I remember of the past few semesters is all of the struggles and long nights in studios and arguing with studio professors trying to explain to them why I thought my ideas were valid and good. But I'm sure those semesters weren't all awful - I was probably spending time with friends, watching TV to relieve anxiety, learning to dance - but I don't remember because often the miserable memories outlive the happy ones.

I've been making a push towards documenting everything this past semester in a forgotten sketchbook that I have - making it kind of a planner-journal hybrid, where I've been drawing weekly spreads, making to do lists every day, and journaling a little bit of what I did and how I felt that day. It's really helped me notice trends in when my anxiety flares up but also it's helped me remember all the little things that I do to make myself happier. The sketchbook is really fun to flip through - the other day when I did so I realized that I had totally forgotten that I had gone to the New England Aquarium with my class and I found how nice it was to be able to bring back that memory.

I've been slowly coming to the end of the sketchbook - it most likely will only last until the end of the semester - and so I have been looking at replacement notebooks. As a child, I hoarded notebooks and would write in them a little bit before abandoning it for a newer, prettier, better notebook, and now that I know I actually will use up this first sketchbook I'm letting child me come out to pick out the newer, prettier, and better notebook. I happened upon these Midori Traveler's Notebooks the other day and child me (and grown up me!) fell in love.

here's an example of a Midori Traveler's Notebook from the blog True Life on Earth

I love the flexibility that these notebooks offer and all the different types of inserts that you can purchase to go inside, and the mission statement is something that really speaks to me. These notebooks seem so nice and sophisticated and timeless, which really aligns with my aesthetic as someone who prefers minimalism, like many other architecture students who have been immersed in architecture for so long. It's been taking a lot of effort for me to not immediately go out and buy one, but I promised myself I had to use up my sketchbook first. Grown up me can't succumb to all my childhood whims, and I definitely don't have the space to be hoarding more notebooks.

I have, however, promised myself that if I don't finish my current sketchbook by the end of the semester, I'm allowed to buy this Midori notebook for myself for Christmas and also to document my Christmas vacation in its own separate little notebook. Especially since, if I'm not wrong, I might be crossing off another continent on my list.

What have you guys been into recently? Do you also think it's important to document your memories?

There's less than 5 more weeks of the fall semester (!!!) which means it's time to start thinking about all the final projects. We just got the constraints for the final project for my Advanced Visualisations class, and I thought this week's blog post could be about exactly that.

For a little background, I took this particular class because I thought we were going to be able to do a lot of animation. Unfortunately, this was not so much the case - we explored a lot of different ways of visualizing architectural projects, but less so storylines and characters.

It was no surprise, then, that the final project had to revolve around an architectural project (existing, non-existing, a studio project, etc). However, I had already thought about this project and how I wanted to make an animation about a little girl and her pet, and I was really disappointed at first because I thought that my dream wouldn't come true.

During class, while I was desperately thinking about how I could come up with a way to showcase a building while also doing the animation that I wanted to do, I was able to come up with a storyline that I think will work.

I will be using a studio project from two semesters ago (read about it here) which was a fitness center that was all about manipulating a user's view. I think this works well because it will be a fun project to showcase, but also because I have the model for the surrounding area, which will help introduce the project. The building and surroundings will be 3d rendering, but the people and characters will all be 2d. A little girl will be walking her puppy down the street when suddenly, the puppy hears something from inside the center and decides to take off into the building. The little girl will then have to walk through the entire building to find her puppy.

I think this way I will be able to showcase the building (as the little girl explores it in order to find her puppy) while also doing a fun, cute animation about a girl and her pet as I wanted to do previously. The little girl will obviously be my little sister, Hera, who I already have a character designed around, but we don't have a puppy so I'm not sure what to model the puppy off of or what to name it (I did recently come across "Fifi" as a puppy name which I think sounds adorable).

Here are some of the inspirations I have looked at which helped me come up with my idea:

Both of these shorts show characters who explore different situations - the little blind girl who explores the city in her own way as she finds her dog, and the dog in Feast who explores life, food, and human nature. Both of these shorts will be helpful for me because I can learn about different styles of animation and explore what I'm more comfortable with, while also showing me how I can tell a story with minimal dialogue.

All in all, I'm super excited about this project and I will definitely update you as I work on it! Even though my professor said that the final project was "small" I really want to do something above and beyond, especially since I think it will be a fun addition to my portfolio.

What are you guys working on? Are there any projects that you're excited about?

Last year, I bought red and gold fabric and red and gold face paint because I wanted to dress up as Iron Man for Halloween. Last Halloween. I've always liked Iron Man - someone who was more or less a normal human being-turned superhero. I suppose I'm also biased, considering Tony Stark went to MIT, and a product I helped design ended up being shown in Iron Man 3. (I will always show off about this. A product I designed is in a movie. A superhero movie. A movie about an engineer from MIT who becomes a superhero.)

I HAVE PROOF. The tablet the kid uses to charge up the suit is called the Vinci Tablet. I designed the handle. I'm cool. :P

That never happened. I got busy and never ended up making a dress in time... so I made it over the summer. I self-drafted and patterned a dress inspired by Iron Man's armor - so here's some pictures of the process.

I first came up with a sketch for the dress. I wanted it to be mostly red with some gold elements and, after looking at some inspiration on google, I decided to add pleats to mirror the armor plates on the actual armor. I kept the skirt simple mostly because I knew I was going to spend forever on the bodice.

This was the first sketch I made and worked off of! The skirt actually ended up not being a circle skirt - it was a rectangle that I box pleated at a few points.

I had to self-draft a pattern out of tissue paper because I didn't have any patterns premade to fit my body (and also because I'm too cheap to pay for patterns). I gave myself a lot of allowances on the sides because I know from prior experience that I have a tendency to make things too small.

And so, the fabric manipulating commenced.

I spent literally years pleating. Well, not literally, but like, at least a couple hours.

Here I have laid out some of my (janky made out of wrapping paper) pattern pieces onto my pleated fabric.

I totally forgot to photograph some steps, but here's the front of the bodice coming together!

And a close up of the side pleats.

The dress came together in a few nights, although I had some trouble with the zipper (I hate zippers but I hate buttons more, so I opted for a zipper) and because the pattern wasn't perfect, I had some weird fabric bunching around my sides. I decided it wasn't a huge deal to me - The dress was only going to be worn for Halloween anyway. The one thing that was a little sad for me was that the pleats, when pressed down, aren't super visible - I don't know if it would've worked out better if I had made them deeper.

Also, the skirt on the dress differs from the original sketch because I ended up opting for a box pleated skirt - I thought the pleats on the skirt would look more cohesive with the pleats on the bodice.

I also painted on the Iron Man crest on my chest. It's a little higher than where it's supposed to be (canonically), but whatever. It gets the point across.

I was originally planning to also paint my arm to look like the armor, but I decided it was going to be too hazardous since I was working in the library (hence the books behind me). I didn't want to chance getting red face paint everywhere. I opted for wearing my brass rat (which I wear all the time anyway) because Tony wears his.

All in all, it was a super fun project and it was my first time trying to pleat anything or self-draft something that was more complex than like, a t-shirt dress!

What do you think? Do you think I got the idea across? Also, did you dress up for halloween?