Me and my papa at commencement!

For a few years now, I've been wanting a paintbrush tattoo somewhere on my right arm as a reminder for myself to never stop creating. I knew it was the next tattoo I was going to get after my lotus flower (Read about it here), and I was just waiting for the time (and funds) to get it.

When my grandpa passed away suddenly a couple weeks ago, I knew I wanted to commemorate him the same way I had commemorated my grandma with my first tattoo. It didn't take very long to decide what I wanted to get for him - the Chinese character for Eternity. It's the first character in his first name, and it's a nice reminder that he and my family will always be there for me. Even though at one point I thought I'd never get a Chinese character tattooed on myself, I thought it was so fitting - my grandpa has always been good with the language. He's named every new baby (except funnily enough, Hera) that's come into the family with beautiful, meaningful words despite his lack of schooling.

Since I knew I wanted to get the character for my grandpa, I decided to just take the plunge and get both at the same time. I visited Chameleon this past Saturday with my roommate, Emma, after we got brunch at Shake Shack (I highly recommend the SmokeShack because bacon, and also, the guy making the burgers behind the counter was mad cute), and we spent less than an hour in there getting them. Shout out to the tattoo artist that saw me, Jorge Seested!

Just in case you were wondering, no, these two images are not to scale to each other. The Chinese character tattoo is actually quite a bit larger than that, although it's not as tall as the paintbrush.

The Chinese character is on my left forearm. I wanted it to be near the same area as the one I got for my grandma, but I didn't want them to be next to each other - they weren't from the same side of the family and it didn't feel right to not give them an ample amount of "real estate" each. I found out that getting this area of the arm tattooed was actually a really bizarre sensation - you know that game where you walk your fingers up someone's arm and see if they can figure out exactly where their elbow crease was? This was kind of like that, because I kept misplacing where the feeling of the tattoo needle actually was. It didn't particularly hurt more than my other tattoos, although it stung for a really long time afterwards, probably because of the coloring. Also, the skin around it is still a bit red, so it's probably a tad bruised.

The paintbrush is on my right outer wrist. It's pointing towards my fingers, because my fingers are what allows me to create, and it's maybe two inches long and so cute. This one also hurt just as much as the other tattoos (so, not that much) except for the paintbrush tip, which hurt just a smidge more probably because it was a lot closer to the bones in the wrist. However, unlike the character tattoo, this one barely stung afterwards.

All in all, I'm super happy with both tattoos - I think they're both really beautiful and they represent two more important parts of my life.

Will I eventually get more ink? Probably. I've been considering getting a tiny robot because Hera likes to call me her robot, since I do and make everything she asks me to. Is that weird? Maybe I spoil her too much.

I know tattoos are kind of a controversial topic, but these are quite small and fairly easy to cover up with sleeves once they're fully healed if I need them to be hidden. I think they're just another fun way to express myself, and besides, live a little!

How do you feel about tattoos? Would you ever get one - let alone two at the same time?

I have been a painter and an artist my entire life.

Okay, maybe when I was like four, I couldn't really call myself an artist, although my mom is very adamant that my drawing level was much higher than an average four year old. Something about being able to draw more than just stick figures and smiley faces on butterflies apparently, in mom's eyes, made me a better drawer than my peers. I think it's the mom-ness talking.

However, I never put down my brush after I picked it up for the first time. When I moved to China, my dad found me a weekly art class, where my passion for drawing really began to flourish under a man who was possibly the most caring and invested art teacher I will ever meet. He trained me in traditional fine arts, with still lives and sculptures and art retreats into the more beautiful suburbs of Shanghai, through what began as a rather impossible language barrier. He spoke Chinese, and I spoke almost none of it; he would spend so much time on me, explaining the finer details, only for me to ask him at the very end, "What do you mean?". Once, when we went on a trip to some suburb area to draw from life, he was telling me to add texture to the tree bark in Chinese and I asked him jokingly, "What's tree bark?"

Instead of giving up on me, he actually stood there and spent a while racking his brain trying to come up with a different way to describe tree bark for me because he really thought I didn't understand him.

That's the kind of teacher he was, and this is a story that he still likes to tell his students that end up under his wing.

After a few years under his tutelage he asked me to join his Saturday art classes that he held for a few students. I promptly quit my ballet classes to join the class.

That's how much I loved drawing. I spent almost 10 hours weekly with this teacher, just painting. My mom once said that I spent more time painting per week than I did doing anything for any other class.

When I went to boarding school in Connecticut, I was put into the pre-AP Painting and Drawing class with the art teacher, JP, there. His teaching style was so different, and he taught me to loosen up with my artwork and be less technical.

I learned my foundation in China and I learned to be colorful in the US.

After doing the AP my sophomore year, I opted to take a break from the Painting and Drawing class for the next year. I managed one semester out of three before I was almost literally crawling back to the studio asking JP to let me into his year-long pre-AP class again.

I realized that painting and drawing did wonders for my mental health, even though at the time I didn't think of it as mental health - drawing was just a part of me and it felt like I had tried to rip it out of me for that semester. When I took my break from it, I literally didn't know what to do with myself - I had all this specific energy and concentration that wasn't going anywhere and I needed an outlet for the stress from my APs, but I didn't have one.

I didn't think much of it at the time. I just felt better after I went back to the studio and started drawing again.

At MIT, I didn't have time to draw. I painted for my friends, on their birthdays and Christmas, but I wasn't drawing every day like I had been in high school. I wasn't going out on walks and drawing the landscape despite how beautiful Boston is. I was socializing, making friends, stressing out over psets, not getting much sun, and pursuing other creative things that were more mindless, like crochet and knitting. (Not that there's anything wrong with crochet and knitting, I still love my hobbies. It's just not the same for me.)

As my semesters have finally mellowed out (because I'm not taking studio anymore) I wanted to get back into drawing but the activation energy I needed to begin was enormous. I would sketch things out on canvas and then just leave it for months without going back to work on it, because I preferred lying in bed watching TV - it was less energy, more mindless. Somehow over the course of MIT I began preferring activities where thinking wasn't required.

I had become so burnt out, I forgot what I was passionate about.

When my grandpa passed away two weeks ago, I didn't know what to do. I wanted to be able to say goodbye, but he's in China, and I'm in Boston. I wanted to see him again, so I asked my dad for pictures, and I naturally gravitated towards painting to work through my sorrow.

I had painted my grandmother, my mom's mother, when she passed away, and it only seemed right to paint my grandpa as well.

It took me a week to complete it and it was a horrible painting - the photo I was working off of was pixelated and unclear so I had a poor reference, and my skills are still so rusty, but the painting did what I wanted it to do. It helped me work through my sadness. Studying his face, despite the graininess of the photo, really helped with my mental health.

What a classic Grandpa Lu thing to do, to help me rekindle my love for drawing - rekindle my love for the act of drawing - even as he passes away. He always did try to help me when he could.

Since then, I've been making a true effort to draw more regularly. I mean, when the semester began I told myself I wanted to draw more, but I never really acted upon it. Now I'm actually putting into my planner a reminder for something I should do every day. I'm bringing around my sketchbook and when I have nothing to do - which is surprisingly frequent nowadays because I'm trying to take a chill final semester - I turn to a fresh page and draw something in my field of view.

I forget how nice it is to lose myself in my pen and concentrate on drawing what I see.

I'm still rusty, of course. I'll probably be rusty for a very long time, and even when I get back to the level I was at before, I'll still feel like I'm not good enough. That has always been my constant state when it comes to drawing, and it has always pushed me to improve more and practice more.

Drawing has always been there to help me be happy. I just forgot that it was still an option.



What passions do you have that help you work through your problems?

At least, I did.

I used to be a voracious reader. I was the kid that had a flashlight hidden under her pillow and piles of books hidden under her bed, until one day she upgraded to a bed that had a hidden compartment in the headboard (I know, I was so cool) so her current books hid there instead. I was the kid that would have her textbook on the table and a book in her lap and end up getting spanked because of it. I was the kid that had so many books her bookcase couldn't hold them, so she took up the shelves in the DVD cases and in her parents' office. I loved reading. I loved fantastical stories where I could escape and go on adventures with other people; I loved traveling through history on the magic tree house and solving mysteries with the Boxcar Children and fighting the Yeerks with the Animorphs and learning magic spells with Harry Potter.

I still read in high school, but my focus was forced to shift and I read classic literature with my English classes and SAT prep books (I know, how sad) in my sophomore and junior years. I remember loving Brave New World especially, even though I hated it when I had read it a few years prior, and I painted a scene from The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, the beautiful scene on the ocean when he's looking at a girl who has seaweed tangled on her leg, and I enjoyed them but I could never read them as passionately as I had read young adult fiction before because the language never flowed as easily for me. When I could I stole time to read books like The Other Boleyn Girl and Harry Potter (for the millionth time) and at some point I read all of Twilight once and decided it wasn't worth picking up ever again. I fell in love and then out of love with John Green's work. I read The Art of Racing in the Rain and fell in love with the idea of dogs even though at the time I was still scared of them. I read Go Ask Alice and became even more vehemently against drugs.

Books had always been my solace.

When I got to MIT, I stopped reading. I can probably count the number of books I've read out of class on one hand, and even for class I only read a few - the study of architecture is so much more about being hands on than reading literature about other people's works, so the only books I read were for the random humanities classes that I undertook for fun.

And I forgot how to read for fun. I felt so obligated to read books that were "for adults", books that were classic literature and books that were self-help and books that were not categorized as "young adult" because those books were for high schoolers and I was going to be an adult. I felt like I had to be reading short poems and stories with some kind of hidden deeper meaning that I had to figure out and biographies and nonfiction books and all these books that I didn't find interesting because ultimately I have always been a child at heart and I will always want to lose myself in fantastical worlds.

Whenever I go to a bookstore I look at everything that I want to buy and then walk away because I feel like I should be reading something of more importance, but really, what is of more importance anyway? Every well written fiction book has some kind of moral of the story, some kind of reflection on today's society, some hidden thoughts and ideas that only the most committed readers will go and parse through to find. Just look at the huge Harry Potter community - the book series that was written for children and yet somehow, nine years later, adults and children alike are still reading and finding details that Jo hid in her words and recognizing parallels between the Wizarding world and our own boring Muggle world.

I like books that tell me stories and books that I want to go back to constantly so I can read between the lines, not books where I have to spend eons of time trying to understand what it is the author is even trying to say.

When I was in New York my friend Alyssa told me about her reading challenge, where she wanted to read 30 books in 2016. I was intrigued, but kind of scared because it's been so long since I've last picked up a book. I asked her what she thought a good number might be to pick up on, and she said to start with an easy number. We settled on 15.

15.

15 year old me would've scoffed at that number. 15 books in a whole year? 15 books in 366 days? That's about a book every 24 days. That's a pathetic number of books.

20 year old me is wondering if I will even have the time to read 15 books this year. I would love to be able to read 15 books. I would love to be able to read 20, 30, 40 books, but will I have the time? Will I have the energy?

The thing about college is that my brain is so tired from classes that I don't want to spend the brainpower digesting words on a page. It's why I started watching so much TV. Interpreting the body language and having people talk at me is so much easier.

Since I wanted to begin reading again, I decided to start tracking everything I was reading and watching. As in movies and tv shows. I have yet to begin tracking youtube videos because quite frankly, it would be rather embarrassing.

As of yet, I have finished two books (and many more tv episodes than that). If I can manage to read 2 or more books a month, I will be quite pleased, although I am currently working on a French Tintin book that is taking longer than expected because, well, it's in French. I plan on writing a recap blog post once a month or once every two months for what I've been reading and watching, and perhaps that will keep me more on track?

Cross your fingers for me.

Do you like to read in your free time, or are you mainly a tv/movie kind of person? Do you have any book recommendations you think I should read, given what I've said I enjoy reading? Let me know!

Every January of a new year, I like to reflect on the past year. Especially now that I'm going into my last semester at MIT - yes guys, I'm graduating in June and I am all sorts of excited! - it seems like a very appropriate time to be reflecting on not just the last year but also my time here at MIT.

Is there anything I would've done differently?

1. Would I still have come to MIT?

Sometimes I feel really resentful of being at MIT, which I then follow up with feeling really ashamed for it - how many people dream about coming here? There have been multiple times where I have thought back to my senior year of high school and which colleges I could have gone to - I could've gone to McGill, probably still have had a good time without being as ridiculously stressed all the time and possibly had better job prospects just because the application pool in Canada is quite a bit smaller.

But would I have come out with as many stories and would I have been as strong and resilient as I am now? Probably not.

Was it worth it?

I don't know.

I tell myself the friends and the connections that I have now are certainly worth it, but frankly I don't quite know. I have endured the lowest moments of my life so far here, and it really sucked. On the other side of things, would I appreciate the sanity that my friends offered me as much had I not endured those moments?

2. Would I still have studied Architecture?

For the first three years at MIT, I never questioned my choice to study architecture. MIT has a wonderful architecture program. The majority of our professors really do care, our studios are interesting, we're required to take classes outside of architecture design in order to have a more well rounded education. I have learned so much about iterative design and about problem solving and I have exercised my spatial reasoning ability to the max. I have been praised for my work fairly consistently and been asked to be part of the archives every studio semester, without fail. I have a ridiculous work ethic - my professor for my last studio said that often I would make life harder for myself in order to create more beautiful work - and I am efficient and organized enough to do more complex work and be part of more clubs than many of my peers and still sleep.

And yet, this past semester, I began to question that choice.

Architecture at MIT doesn't seem very employable. Just go check out the career fair - every company is looking for course 2s (Mechanical Engineers) or course 6s (EECS). It's disheartening, although the types of companies that come to the career fair aren't necessarily the same as the ones I want to work for. At least, that's what I told myself, time and time again, until this year when I actually began to look for a job so that I could, well, be employed after graduation. Since I'm looking primarily in non-Architecture fields such as UI/UX design and product design, it feels like maybe I should've studied something different. When I first came to MIT, I truly believed that Architecture was the only major that fit my abilities and the only one I could've succeeded in, but now I have no doubt that I could've done well in other disciplines as well.

I suppose if anything, Architecture really helped hone my self-confidence.

I think if I could do it again, I might try to double major - I formed bonds with so many people and learned so much in Architecture that I can't imagine giving that up, but there's still so much that I'm curious about in other disciplines that I just didn't really have the time - or make the time - for.

I'm trying to do that now, since I'm done with studios, but I'm running out of time.

3. Would I have handled my social life differently?

To be completely honest, I don't really have much of a social life. I don't like to go out and I don't like to party because I prefer the comfort and the quietude of my room. Pretty much the extent of my socializing with my friends - who I love, by the way - includes eating things, making things to eat (and then eating those things), and watching something on Hulu or Netflix. Despite my reluctance to go out and party with them, I think they still love me and appreciate me - and certainly I would not have survived MIT without them. (Thanks guys. I love you and you mean the world to me.)

I do think that some extent of my reluctance to go out with my friends was financial - I just didn't want to spend the money - and I think if I went back I would be less hesitant to do things with them and more willing to spend the money for a nice meal or for drinks. I think I missed out on a lot of time because I was too much of a scrooge, and that's the main thing that I'm trying to improve on this year. I have to keep telling myself that it's okay to spend small change on small happinesses.

The other part of my social life comes from the groups I am part of on campus - my dance group, ADT, and Dramashop.

One thing for sure - I would've joined ADT much earlier instead of waiting until sophomore spring. I have always regretted not getting more time to spend with some of my choreographers - I have a massive girl crush on one of my choreographers my first semester, which was also the semester she graduated. It was very sad. I also have varying levels of girl crushes on most of my choreographers. I can't help it. They're all so cute and so talented.

Apart from that, ADT was also my solace away from the craziness of studios and Architecture. It was a place I could escape because literally no one else in ADT was Architecture Design and everyone was focused on learning the dances. There were some days at MIT where I got out of bed solely for ADT, and I couldn't be more grateful for having a group of people like that there for me, whether they know it or not.

4. Are there any resources I didn't take advantage of at MIT?

Yes. So many yes's. MIT has so many resources and cool things for students to do and I really didn't take advantage of any of it, and I regret it so much. The main resource that I should've taken advantage of - and didn't - is MIT's MISTI program.

MISTI is basically a program where you tell MIT where you want to go in the world and they find you an internship and pay for you to go there. It's a program where you travel abroad. For free.

I know. I know! Anyone who knows me knows that I love traveling - I've been to 18 countries and I want to go to more and also all of them again because there's so much more still to explore - and MISTI would've been perfect for me. The only problem is that, apart from Israel, I think, you have to know the language of the country, and at the time I didn't try hard enough to figure out how to take French with my schedule. I am taking French now, and I could theoretically still do MISTI for this coming summer... but I'm kind of planning a Europe backpacking trip anyway.

5. Are there any ways you would've chosen to spend your free time differently?

I've always been a crafter and a maker. When I was little I used to collect our empty toilet paper rolls and kleenex boxes because I wanted to make things out of them - to the point where I had filled an entire cupboard with these useless boxes. My dad finally threw them out after I went to high school, and I'm pretty sure I threw a fit.

When I was in high school I picked up crocheting, and that really blossomed at MIT. Crocheting was an easy, mindless, fast project that I could do when I was too stressed out to focus, and I could make all these cute toys with them! It was a lot of fun, and I could do it in my bed. But when I spent all my free time crocheting and knitting - things I could do in my bed - I stopped painting.

I'm trying to pick it back up. I still see so many more colors in everything, and I still have an eye for color and design and layout. Skills like that, things you're born with, you don't lose. But I'm rusty. I'm less comfortable that I used to be with a brush and a canvas, and I'm less accurate in my sketches than I used to be. It's depressing! I used to be fairly good and now I'm not satisfied with almost everything I paint or draw.

There isn't really a good traditional arts program at MIT and without classes forcing me to exercise those abilities, I let them slide. Now I have to spend more time working to regain those abilities - I wish I hadn't stopped painting in the first place, but I think it'll be like riding a bike. A little rusty at first, but it'll come back with some practice.

Is there anything you would've done differently last year or in the past few years? Let me know!

Counting from today, there are a total of 9 days until the last day of classes. This means that hell week, for me, is about to commence - a project due in each class plus production week for ADT. I'll be spending all of this week trying to finish as much work as possible in order to focus solely on ADT next week.

Before all that, however, I was able to go home and spend time with my family during my (all too short) Thanksgiving Break. Since I don't really have any other updates - I will be writing blog posts about my projects that I'm working on once they're complete in the coming weeks - I thought I could write about my break!

When I first arrived in Ottawa, my mom picked me up and we went to the school and I got a special treat: I got to see my sister playing the cello! She'll be performing for her Christmas Concert so she's been putting in a lot of hard work.

Hera and her teacher with a normal cello and a baby cello

Since my family doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, we didn't have any fancy food. Also, my mom's not a fan of Thanksgiving food. Personally, I've experienced the whole Thanksgiving works, and I will say that I am a huge fan of cranberry sauce.

The next day I spent working on a project for a class which I later ended up scrapping because the project idea was too ambitious. I'll probably make it a side project for IAP or next semester, because I still think the idea is super cute.

I did spend some time showing my mom and her employees my project for a different class, however. I've been working with a friend to prototype an augmented reality application, and while we're still super beginners and we have a lot of kinks to work out, the image tracking that we're using is really good and quite impressive.

And then we had sushi for dinner.

I love sushi.

Saturday was a shopping day, even though we didn't really take advantage of any of the Black Friday (Weekend?) sales, and resulted in quite a bit of shenanigans with my sister!

We found giant present toppers and decided to put them on our heads because we're obviously the most precious presents

Saturday night = baby cuddles for hours

My sister is literally precious

While my break was disappointing in that I spent basically three days working on a project that wasn't progressing quickly enough so I had to scrap the entire thing, I did have a really fun time with my family and relaxing and eating nice things. While I'm at MIT I sometimes wonder if I romanticize my family a little bit because I'm away and stressed out all the time, but going home I tend to realize that for all the faults my family may have, they're still a really great source of relaxation for me.

Although, Hera promised me one thousand billion hugs this break. I only got 11 and about an hour of cuddles. I want more baby hugs.

How was your Thanksgiving? Did you take advantage of any of the sales?

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 Saturday, I had the opportunity to go apple picking with the Architecture department at MIT. I had never been, and the department was paying for the transportation (and I later found out, the apples too), so I jumped at the chance. There were 8 of us in total plus two adults (for supervision?).

So without further ado, here's 10 things I learned about apple picking:

1. It's really fun!
2. Apples grow in weird bunches. It was very strange to me, and now I am questioning if I have ever seen an apple tree before. Also, apple trees don't look like orange trees. I know because we had one in California. Apple trees are much wimpier.
3. There are a lot of different varieties of apples that look exactly the same.
4. There exists a weird foamy-textured apple. It was really unappealing. We didn't pick any of those.
5. Climb all the trees for all of the prettiest fruit.
6. It was also really cold, which made it slightly less fun.
7. Don't go at the same time as every person in the house. We now have more apples than we know what to do with. (But actually, I think across us all we have maybe around 100 apples?)
8. Apple cider donuts are probably the best thing I've ever tasted.
9. Scratch that, hot apple cider when you're shivering is probably better.
10. I UNDERSTAND THE HYPE NOW.

When we first got there, Frankie got very excited. There she is in the tree, munching on apples like a maniac.

I didn't know apples grew in like, clusters? It was very bizarre to me at first.

My roommate is on the prowl for the best apples!

Doh is also on the prowl but didn't forget to throw me a thumbs up for the picture.

My roommate and I both got two half-bushel bags of apples. Mine were free (Thanks, MIT Architecture!). I love free things.

Overall, definitely a fun experience and I would love to do it again!