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!

This past long weekend I visited my friends in New York City, and we spent the weekend alternating between exploring (read: shopping) the city and hiding out in her apartment from the cold. As expected of being in NYC, I spent quite a bit of money. After all, is there anything else to do there?

Friday, February 12:

$22.50 Bus to New York City (purchased in January)
It was a long ride and the girl that sat next to me was Korean and had very long bleached hair. It was brassy. Brassy blonde is a pretty gross color, in my opinion. Also, it looked really unhealthy, as to be expected when you try to bleach black hair to blonde.

I took the BoltBus, which let me off on 1st Ave. "Basically on the moon", as Alyssa, my lovely friend who came to pick me up, said.

$20 MTA ticket refill
This money was spent much more quickly than I expected. The MTA is very expensive.

$30 Dinner at Schiller's Liquor Bar

Amazing burger with amazing fries and a very bizarre pickle

Schiller's was recommended by Caitlin's Spotify coworkers, who I'm guessing are quite young and hipster because Schiller's was quite a lively hipster place. They said we wouldn't have to wait for a table.

We waited for an hour, so, apparently the Spotify workers are liars. Thanks, Spotify.

I ended up ordering the cheeseburger (medium rare, cheddar) with fries. It was very good and juicy, and the mustard was not Heinz mustard even though it was deceptively held in one of those cheap mustard squeeze bottles. It was spicy and very tasty and probably homemade, gauging the hipsterness of the bar.

The pickle, however, was not a pickle. Do not eat the pickle. It was bizarre.

We also got a sticky toffee pudding to share, which was very amazing, and thank you Foursquare people for recommending it. If I hadn't been so full from the burger and fries I probably would've ordered a second one for myself because it was that good.

Saturday, February 13:

$15.13 Brunch at The Grey Dog in Union Square

French Toast at The Grey Dog

We're silly.

Caitlin and I had very early brunch at 9:30am on Saturday (Alyssa stayed in bed like every other normal person on a Saturday morning). The Grey Dog is also very hipster and adorable. I got French Toast (it was huge and amazing) and a warm cider.

Caitlin opened up her care package and she got very excited about the owl washi tape I brought her. It's very cute.

$3 (probably) for Hot Chocolate with Marshmallows at Vineapple Cafe

Hot chocolate with giant marshmallows!

Alyssa had squash with one of her friends so I chilled in a coffeeshop on Pineapple Street. Brooklyn is weird. There's a Pineapple Street and Orange Street and Cranberry Street.

The marshmallows were huge except they got stuck to the cup and I had a hard time getting them out. I eventually asked for a spoon.

I didn't spend any more money on Saturday because Alyssa made me dinner. She made risotto and homemade bread and I ate my face off and then couldn't move for the rest of the day. My tummy was still hurting when we went to bed at midnight.

Alyssa's homemade bread is the best thing.

Sunday, February 14:

$6.52 at Paper Presentation
Caitlin told me about this paper store which Alyssa then told me her friend is in love with. I was very adamant about going and then I had a hard time convincing myself to not buy out the store. It's very probably my new favorite place in New York.

I love paper.

I ended up buying a set of magnet bookmarks so that I would stop using paper clips, because warping the pages on my notebooks with paper clips is annoying to me. Plus, the magnets are very cute.

We went to Sephora where Alyssa used her gift cards and I vicariously lived through her makeup shopping.

We also went to MUJI where I convinced myself to not buy more pens because I need to use up the ones I already have, and then we went to Nordstrom Rack, Burlington Coat Factory, Forever 21 (where Alyssa scored two sweaters for less than 8 dollars - she's very proud) and DSW in search for a hat for my sad little cold ears. We didn't find anything and my ears continued to be sad and cold.

$5.80 at Whole Foods
Alyssa and I got hungry at some point so we decided to pop into the Whole Foods cafe to grab a snack - I got a chocolate croissant and a chai latte. When I asked how much switching to soy would be, the guy gave me a weird look and was like, it's free. The duh was implied.

Soy is never free anywhere else. I was very excited about my free soy upgrade. Usually I just get the milk because I'm too cheap to pay for the upgrade and deal with the tummy pains later.

We watched a couple get into a very loud argument, which was fairly entertaining and also probably very awkward for them because they were being very loud and it was Valentine's Day.

$14.95 at The Strand
The Strand is one of my favorite places in New York. There's nothing better than books on books on books - literally.

I finally found a hat at the Strand. It's grey and has a giant pom pom on the top and I feel like a total nerd when I wear it because it says Strand Books on it. I love it.

I also found a bunch of books which I photographed in order to find on Amazon Kindle later, because I didn't want to bring a bunch of books back to Boston with me. Also, because I already have too many books and moving out will be a pain. I've decided I want to try reading more instead of wasting all of my time on Youtube (not that there's anything wrong with that).

$11.25 at Bravo Pizza


A New York trip is never complete without pizza. I had a pepperoni and sausage slice, a tomato and broccoli slice, and a peach tea.

I love pizza. I love peach tea. What more could a girl want.

$15.60 at Regal Cinemas for SkullPoopL
Alyssa and I finished off our Valentine's day with Deadpool at Regal Cinemas. I thought the movie was very well done and hilarious - a lot of fourth-wall-breaking, a lot of crude humor, a lot of making fun of Marvel Studios and of MCU fans. It was great.

Although, we saw someone bring their 7-ish year old kid?? The movie is rated R. It is well deserving of its R rating. Someone is a very irresponsible parent. VERY irresponsible.

$10 MTA ticket refill
My MTA ticket ran out of money and it was sad. I consoled myself by making Alyssa take a selfie with me.

Subway selfie!

Monday, February 15:

I didn't spend any further money in the city itself on Monday. Alyssa bought me breakfast bagels and then I felt sick from too much cream cheese, and I visited The STUDIO which is a visual communications firm in Manhattan.

$30.50 Bus to Boston (purchased in January)
I took the 7pm Greyhound back to Boston and we got caught in the snow, so I didn't get in until 12:45. When the T had already shut down. Which means I had to take an uber home.

I was not pleased with having to take an uber home.

$29.80 Uber
The Uber was the same price as my bus ticket. I feel somewhat cheated out of my money. If the Greyhound had arrived on time I wouldn't have had to spend this money. Sadface.

All in all, despite the rather horrid trip back to Boston because the weather sucked, the New York trip was very fun and a good break from.. well, from not very much considering the semester has barely started.

What's your favorite place to visit in NYC?

Hey guys. I have a confession to make - I'm secretly a hoarder.

Well, not to the extent that I've seen some people be, but I've always collected things. I collected pens and notebooks as a kid (who am I kidding, I still do) and for a while during my pre-teen years I collected empty Kleenex boxes and toilet paper rolls with the intent that I'd make something out of them. I did, with a few of them, but the rate of my collecting was far greater than the rate of my making, so we had a cupboard full of random junk that I was very stubborn about not throwing away.

My dad eventually threw them away.

Now that I'm in college and living in my own space, I'm astounded at how I manage to find nooks and crannies to hide all my things when I really don't have very much storage space. Things just collect over time; random junk that you keep convincing yourself is important or has too much sentimental value to throw away.

On the other end of my hoarding tendencies is my anxiety over messy spaces. I don't mind other people being messy, but I can't really handle messiness in my own living space (this comes from my dad. You know, the guy that threw out all of my Kleenex boxes because he's like this too?) and so once in a while I'll go through my stuff to clean up and reorganize.

I love reorganizing. Nothing brings me more joy - well, except food, and sleep, and Hera, and... - than to find designated spaces for each and every thing and to keep them there. I am the kind of person that gets annoyed when the can opener turns up in a drawer different from the one it's always lived in. I am the kind of person that likes to have all my pens categorized and my wires and cables sorted into little zip lock baggies. I am... well you get it. I like things to be neat.

This past weekend I took on the task of reorganizing all of the junk I have in my room. I haven't tackled my closet yet (I did a couple months ago, and will probably do so again sometime in the next few weeks) but I did get rid of a garbage bag full of stuff, and a bit more. I got rid of so many papers (because why will I ever need my tests from freshman year again?) and pens that no longer write that it felt so liberating. I reorganized my bookshelves so that everything is more compact and now my collection of wrapping stuff - like boxes, and tissue paper, and other random knick knack that people need for christmas wrapping - is no longer homeless and strewn on the floor but actually part of my bookcases, with its own little section.

The hardest part of all of it was convincing myself to throw away some models and some modeling materials. While throwing out pens and papers had been easy, I have formed an emotional attachment to all of my architecture studio models and their associated things. It's not hard to be attached like that - after all, I did spend many hours building all of these models and all of them have very specific memories attached to them - mostly of being really tired, but also of those professors and experiences. Many of these models I look at and see the hours I put into it, and it always seems like such a waste to just... throw it away.

I threw away three models. I threw away three models that were associated with my last studio, a studio that thinking about still gives me headaches and makes me feel like a panic attack is coming. I threw away the last portion of the model that I had spent over 48 hours nonstop sitting and gluing and folding and crying over, and taking it out of its place to throw it away hurt because I still remember all of the pain from that class but throwing it away also felt so good. It felt like I was liberating myself from the demons of that class and I know I'm being totally over-dramatic but that class, god, that class really, really was awful. The final project was a good one - one that I'm almost proud of, maybe - but the journey there had been so awful. I suppose part of me will eventually be grateful because I learned to be stronger from it, but I don't think I've had enough time pass to look back and not have feelings of resentment rise up within me.

And after it was all gone - the trash taken out, permanently outside of my home - my room felt so nice and clean and good to be in - not that it hadn't been nice and clean and good to be in before, but it's better now - and I can look at that section in my bookcase that once housed three models which reminded me of a horrible experience and smile because it now houses wrapping paper, and paints, and canvases, and happy things still waiting for me to work on.

Plus, it's nice to know that I won't have as much to throw out when I eventually move out of this apartment.

Are you guys also hoarders / collectors of random things? Do you ever go through times of just wanting to clean stuff and throw stuff out? Let me know!

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?

On Thursday last week, I had a bit of a meltdown.

I got back a test that did not receive a grade I would've liked (don't worry, I didn't fail) which I had studied fairly hard for, and somehow became irrationally upset about it and ended up crying for most of the day. The meltdown, thinking back, must've been about more than a poor grade - I think the stress of job hunting and MIT started to get to me again, even though I purposefully chose to take a lighter semester with only 3 classes instead of my usual 4 or 5 (For reference, 4 classes is standard at MIT).

I'm not a stranger to meltdowns like the one I had this past week. I had them frequently last year, which was arguably one of the most stressful years I've ever had. However, I have learned how to deal with stress and meltdowns better. I sought help last semester, which helped greatly, but I do not feel like I'm in that poor of a state again to warrant another series of meetings with other people.

Instead, I chose to take the weekend off. I managed to get all of my immediate homework done by Friday (apart from a few last minute things on Saturday which took all of 20 minutes), so I could afford taking the weekend off. On Saturday, other than dance and work, I watched a movie and went out for brunch with a friend where we talked about everything other than classwork; Sunday, I spent baking.

So here are my top 10 ways I reduce stress, and I hope at least a few are helpful for you too!

1. Knitting and Crocheting: crafting has always been a source of stress-relief for me. My hands don't do well when they aren't used, and knitting and crocheting are easy for me to do while not really paying a lot of attention. It also helps because I make things for people for Christmas, so I also get to cross things off my Christmas To-Make list!
2. Doodling: As shown in a post here, I've recently gotten into my DIY planner. In the extra space per day, I like to draw a little picture of me and what I wore, or what I ate, etc., and I also take a few notes on what happened during the day (i.e. today was so cold, I bought food today, I had a lot of fun with my roommates today... etc). Super mundane, super simple, but it's surprisingly fun to look back on.
3. Watch a movie or a TV show: I especially like to watch kids movies and tv shows to destress. Recently I have been watching Steven Universe (Cartoon Network) and Gravity Falls (Disney), both of which I greatly recommend. They are now both on hiatus, so I will probably return to watching all the classic Disney movies on repeat.
4. Take a Youtube break: I like to do this when I don't necessarily have time for a longer break. I've been ridiculously into watching planner videos - they're really good for white noise, and I don't really have to pay attention!
5.  Cleaning: I hate mess and cleaning makes me feel like I'm being productive even though I'm really procrastinating on doing schoolwork. 
6. Put the stressors away: I am very bad at doing this, but it's so helpful to do. Put whatever it is that's stressing you out away for 20 minutes (or a full day, if you can afford it). This includes closing all related tabs on your computer! It really helps to take your mind off of it, and it makes you feel a lot more rejuvenated when you go back to it.
7. Baking, Cooking, Eating: I like to stress bake. I like to stress cook. I like to stress eat. I also like to feed other people. This all works out very well for me.
8. Take a nap: Personally it's really hard for me to fall asleep when I'm stressed out because my mind doesn't turn off. Taking the time to take a 30 minute nap without distractions helps me clear my mind. Also sleeping is great.
9. Call my sister: My sister is adorable, as exemplified about a million and a half times prior. She's really good at cheering me up! The last time I called her crying, she stuck her feet in my dad's face to make me laugh.
10. Dance: Taking breaks to practice my choreo helps me get out all the negative energy and also helps me learn choreo, which I'm sure my choreographers don't mind me doing.