The last semester, one of my best lifelines during the chaos of studio and school and MIT and life was - other than my friends - crocheting. When I got too anxious or too tired or just wanted to cry, I'd put everything down and crochet a little granny square. It was an easy, mindless activity that took less than 10 minutes (per square), so it was a short enough break that I wouldn't feel guilty for taking some time away from my work.

The pattern I used is called something pretty which I found on Pinterest, and is linked here.

Soon, I had a little collection of squares accumulated in a wicker basket by my bed and my roommate called them my stress squares.

Originally they were going to be a blanket, but I didn't have enough yarn to make a full blanket so I had to change course. I had made 28 squares over last semester and hadn't touched them over the summer, but I had also bought some lining fabric over the summer and the perfect solution, obviously, was to make granny square pillows!

Some of you might remember that I made a granny square pillow last summer too while I was still living in the dorm, so it seemed fitting to add to my little granny square pillow collection and make a family.

Say Hello to my little granny square pillow family! The white one is from the previous summer, and the two matching ones are made from my stress squares. The little one is super cute, and might end up going to Hera!

For those of you who did the math, yes, I have 2 granny squares left over. I'm not quite sure what to do with them yet.

I think that it's important for everyone to have some short de-stressing activity they can do when life gets too overwhelming. I've found that sitting in bed with some music or Netflix in the background while I knit a row of seed stitch or crochet a square has been really helpful to my mental wellbeing. Of course, my friends and going to MIT Mental Health are undeniably helpful as well, but unfortunately those are not perfect solutions when panic attacks arise at odd times like 3 am.

If you haven't found a good outlet to destress yet, I really do encourage something like this! And if you do have an outlet, I'd love to know what they are.

So approximately a quarter of the semester has already gone by. It simultaneously doesn't really feel like we've been in school for long, because of the snow days we ended up getting, and feels like we've been in school forever. I can't wait for a real break - just three more weeks to go!

Confession time: I did a dumb thing and overcommitted, again. Silly me thought, oh I'm only taking 3 classes this semester, I can fill all the extra free time I'll have with fun things like dancing all the guest performances.....and jobs. Except I didn't think about the fact that my biggest time crunch is and always will be studio, and I am still taking a studio.

And by the time I realized, I was already committed and I'm now technically working 4 jobs. 2 UROPs (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program), one with John Ochsendorf, who's a professor in Civil Engineering (course 1) and Architecture (course 4), and who's possibly the coolest person on the planet (shh don't tell him I said that), and the other a continuation of the UROP I've been doing with Meejin Yoon. Which, by the way, is super awesome because that project I worked on kind of over the summer? Yeah, the Collier Memorial? Its being built and I get to see it happen.

I'm also babysitting a 15 month old boy 3 times a week for an hour each, and tutoring about once every two or three weeks.

Just so you know, no one should ever do this.

Just no.

Don't do it.

All of it is pretty fun, some more fun than others, and I get to make bank, but I don't have any time, at all. I wake up at 8 every morning and sleep at 1 or 2 every night, which seems like a fair amount (6-7 hours? College students can survive on that, right?) but the lack of sleep adds up. Just Sunday, my friend took one look at me and asked me if I had lost weight.

The last time she saw me was the Sunday prior.

Oops.

On the other hand, my classes have been going fairly well:

French II is surprisingly more difficult than I thought it was going to be. French I was a breeze, and I kind of assumed the second course would also be fairly simple. Wrong. Grammar is hard, and the fact that the only two languages I speak, English and Chinese, have approximately zero grammar at all doesn't help.

Also sometimes I get French confused with weird Japanese phrases that I know, which is probably the strangest experience ever. The languages are not similar at all.

Psychology of Gender and Race is super awesome, just as I thought it would be! I'm taking it with one of my roommates, so it gives us something to talk and laugh about as we trudge through the snow on our way home every Thursday night at 10 pm. Also, people are really uncomfortable talking about intimate things - not meaning intimate stories about themselves, but intimate things such as clitorises and penises and piggy-piling - in the class, which makes it infinitely more entertaining.

Last but not least, studio. My biggest nightmare. We've been working for the past month on a mapping exercise, where we study a certain aspect of our site in depth and quite literally map it out. Our review was last Friday, and my professor decided that I should redo the entire thing over the weekend to reflect the critiques given, which was good in that now I have a stellar map that shows what I want it to show and conveys multiple layers of information, and bad in that the review was over and I really didn't want to draw more lines.

To quickly walk you through the board, this is the same area of the Back Bay / South End area of Boston (the red-outlined and shaded section is our site) shown in two axonometric views and in a top view. The line type corresponds to the type of infrastructure it depicts (city fabric, turnpike, orange line, and commuter rail), the thickness corresponds to the amount of traffic frequency the infrastructure averagely receives (the thicker the line the more congestion, basically), and the lengths of the line corresponds to the width of the roads.

I also have two sections - one with buildings and one without - next to the axons to depict the two layers of infrastructure that goes on around the site.

I guess that's what I've been up to lately, busying myself with a bunch of stuff and getting not enough sleep to make me sufficiently happy! How have you guys been lately? Comment below and let me know!

Originally this post was going to be about the World Cup finale and Peel Play Olé Olé (my body is still fighting off the sodium bloat, embarrassingly enough), but a very one-sided conversation about cherishing opportunity (and not being money-driven) with my very Asian parents will be taking the limelight today.