I had great fun with the first crocheting workshop and had just as much with this one as well. The project that I had started in the first workshop was well underway and now a little bit of time after the fact it is completed. It is rough and has plenty of mistakes in it. But I made it and that is what is important. It is awesome to have something like that which I made. You can so easily buy anything you want from the internet and yet this misshapen cowl is something that I hold very dear exactly for its imperfections.
Author Archives: jap482
DIY Old-Time Radio is for Everybody!
I thought this was really an excellent presentation. Nick did a great job talking about how to get set up with a radio podcast and what it means to him. Lately I have been finding myself listening to a lot of podcasts and I have also considered for almost just as long to start my own. I have always felt that there was too high of a barrier to entry though so I never took it seriously. One of the big takeaways for me from this one is that it really is quite easy to get started with your own podcast, and that even if you don’t have any actual listeners, just the act of making the podcast is worth it rom a creative standpoint.
Art is so much more than just the “art”
As somebody who is rarely involved or even aware of the art world, it always surprises me so much how much the art that artists do has little to do with the actual physical art that is made. Their is always this greater purpose behind the art, something that makes you think, and it is always refreshing to be reminded of that. They always do something on the surface which seems kind of silly or perhaps very straightforward and then make it into something powerful.
For example, Kadie’s SNAFU series at first glance is just some guns painted with red paint on plywood. Looks almost like some street art or something somebody might spray paint for fun. Certainly not a serious piece of art. But as I was listening to her talk about the piece, how it was her commentary on America’s current culture on guns, and that SNAFU is an acronym for Situation Normal: All F***ed UP, it started to become so much more. I saw that what at first seemed like something simple was more complex. The color of the paints, down to the choice of canvas, the wood backgrounds, all contributed to this feel and I have to say I am still thinking about it. And I think that is the purpose behind a lot of this art, to get people to think about these issues in a different way, see an aspect of it that they didn’t really look at before, perhaps look back on their own life in a way they hadn’t really done before.
I resonated strongly with the SNAFU series by Kadie because it made me think about the culture of people around me where I grew up and how stubborn they all are to not see any other viewpoints. It made me look back on my life and look at my experiences with the issue. Others though I am sure felt strongly about other works, maybe Kadie’s other works involving endangered animals or Crystal’s work in NYC that she does. The strength of the art isn’t necessarily in the physical pieces they create, but in the subtext and meaning behind them.
Probably just picked up a lifelong hobby with crocheting
So I was pretty exciting to get into the crocheting workshop. I have knitted before which was fun and have also done macramé in the past which I really enjoyed, but somehow had never done crocheting. It certainly took some time to get going and past the initial learning curve of what is even happening. But after getting the hang of it this is tons of fun. It is also almost addictive in a way. “Just one more crochet” over and over until suddenly an hour has passed. And the feeling once you get the movement for a certain pattern down and can do it fairly fluidly is always fun. Not to say it starts out that way. I have restarted my project 4 times so far after getting the loops so tight that I couldn’t really move forward. Perhaps that is even self reflective of my stress level with school, being wound up all tight. Anyways, I am now on my fourth iteration of this cowl project, and I am decently happy with how it is turning out. I sadly don’t have as much time to devote to it as I would like, but I can see my self doing this in the future and look forward to a part 2 workshop whenever that happens!
Chess can be super intense
I haven’t played chess in a long time. I actually can’t even remember the last time I played. But I do know that this was my first time playing with a timer. Boy is that stressful. You can easily lose a game by default if you run out of time on your side so quick decision making is very important. I found myself making some dumb moves or moving my piece to the wrong spot based on that stress alone. However I also found it a lot more fun. Rather than being a grindy overthinking game, it was suddenly an intense battle where quick thinking was incredibly important and things moved quickly. I have to say that even though the stress level can get really high, this style of chess appeals to me far more and I can easily see myself continuing with it. It is interesting to see what appears to be a massive surging in the popularity of chess lately. I am sure part of it has to be due to the popularity of Queen’s Gambit on Netflix, but after playing today I can definitely see why it is as popular as it is in general. It has been a while since I have had that much fun in a competitive setting. Thanks to Bassel for organizing this and if there are any more chess meetups in the future you can bet that I will want to be a part of them.
Calligraphy Workshop II
Today I did the second calligraphy workshop. It still surprises me how difficult even what seems like the most basic calligraphy is. I am definitely not an artist normally so I don’t have the muscle memory and fine motor skills required to make deft lines. I spent my whole time just drawing a basic swoop trying to get those darned upstrokes to look right. I felt comforted at the end when others also shared that they had difficulties with the upstrokes. Despite being absolute rubbish at calligraphy I still really enjoy it. I find it relaxing just looking at the page and focusing on a single line at a time, and the repetitive nature of it is relaxing. And getting a really a cool brush pen to use in an amazing hot pink color was lots of fun. Using a brush pens is so different to a normal pen and I found it surprising just how much control is needed to make a line look good. Anytime you watch a pro do it it seems so simple but like all pros, they make it look far easier than it actually is. Looking forward to any other calligraphy workshops that are done in the future.
Writing Seminar
Writing is something that I have always struggled with. Even on something as simple as a blog post for Rose scholars I over think things and find myself putting it off further and further. I have spent a lot of time working on my writing skills and I like to think that when I actually get around to sitting down and writing, I am capable of putting together a decent piece of writing to turn in. But boy, I don’t know why I just try to avoid writing like crazy. I find that going to these writing seminars and just soaking in the advice and talking to people who are writing does help me get into the mood to write though. In terms of actual advice from the seminar, I felt not a whole lot of new information came through, but that is not a problem with the seminar, and more an issue of the fact that the basic writing techniques are so effective and they are easy to lose sight of when writing. I found the explanation of the paper titles quite funny. It is something I have noticed in academic papers and is a style I found myself already doing just after learning through osmosis by reading so many papers.
Trivia Day
Trivia was fun today. I certainly learned a lot of new things. Especially being a new transfer student there were plenty of questions which I felt I should be able to answer quite easily but I definitely did not know the answer to. So in a way it was neat being able to learn some new things. Than there was also a good mix of more general trivia questions which I also learned a lot on. I found myself trying to metagame a lot of the questions. “Hm well they wouldn’t ask this question if it was what I think the answer is.” But this only marginally helped. Occasionally I would get it right, but I really doubt I did a whole lot better than just guessing overall if I looked at the stats. That’s one thing I wish I had been able to see, my individual stats on the questions. I think that would have been an interesting thing to see. Such as what percentage of the Cornell based questions did I get right and how did that compare to the median. But overall this was a very enjoyable time and shoutouts to Karina for that fire trivia playlist.
Calligraphy Class
I have always had terrible handwriting ever since I was little. I never got any better at it and at times it frustrated me. I felt those frustrations come up again when I tried to do some calligraphy on Sunday. It seems like it should be so easy to just write these letters in a certain way. But despite following the steps, doing what felt like the same curves, crossing in the same spots, my letters still did not look right. Maybe that style of font wasn’t for me? Okay, so I tried another one. Same story. Movements and marks on the pages which I felt should be the exact same as the examples in mechanical terms, but somehow mine looked awful in comparison. The most frustrating was the letter ‘c’. Despite being nothing but a single curved line, in order to make it look good, the line has to be perfect. It has to curve in exactly the right spot, in exactly the right way, with exactly the right thickness. Otherwise, it just looks like nothing. And that kind of line precision is a skill which I have never developed. I haven’t ever really practiced drawing, training my muscle memory to translate the lines in my minds eye into the same physical marks on the page, and boy does it show.
But despite the frustration and the challenge, practicing this calligraphy was quite enjoyable. I liked that challenge, and there was a lot of intricacy in making even the smallest lines to letters which I hadn’t fully appreciated before. I can really see how calligraphy is a skill that needs to trained and honed. I know I am certainly going to try calligraphy again. I doubt I will ever take the time to become a master like some do, but it certainly is an enjoyable pastime.