monday

Hi there fellow bloggers...
Well, I'm using up the last precious moments of my vacation. Last week was "Ski Week," my school's equivalent to mid-winter break. Quite nice, I must admit. And having President's day off wasn't too bad either...
Last week I basically just hung out at home, surfed the internet, worked on my Senior Project paper and drew a lot. Yep. Oh, and my dad and I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Thursday and Santa Cruz Friday. Fun fun fun! Since I worked on Sunday the 19th and it was a SketchCrawl day, I figured I should use my time at the aquarium for my SketchCrawl. I think I'll post those pics on the "SketchCrawl!" blog. It's at the links bar at the left...
We spent the night at the "Quality Inn," which was very cheap but not too bad. I actually had a very rare thing happen that night when I sat in bed; I thought of a picture in my head then began to watch it play out. I watched it for maybe ten minutes, interrupting here or there to correct what a character said. But I hardly did a thing, and at the end of it I just sat there and thought, "Where did THAT come from??" That will probably happen to me two more times in my lifetime.
In other news...
Today I started to gather up all of my CalArts assignments into one folder and I have almost everything finished. The deadline is next Tuesday, the 28th. I'm pretty prepared, excited and quite anxious. If I don't get in, well, oh well. But if I do, it would be one experience I wouldn't ever forget. I've never done anything like that--spend a month away from home, animating at summercamp...but doing something different once in a while would definetly be good. It almost always is.
At the beginning of break, two fridays ago, our French teacher gave everyone in our class the option to take home a tape recorder for homework. Yeah, our homework, due on Friday this week, is to record our voices, speaking French, on these old-fashioned tape recorders. We have to describe two cartoons and respond to two or three questions after each one, allowing ourselves only a minute for each response. When our teacher had given us the choice to take a machine, at first almost no one took up the offer. We were like, "Heh heh...yeeah, maybe next time..." But after a few brave students had taken one out of the box, I figured what would it hurt. So I took one out and brought it home and it sat on my desk, looming over me every single day of the Ski Week.
Finally on Sunday night I went to the store (mainly for ice cream and rootbeer) and bought a couple casettes. Usually I'll tell myself, "Ok, no matter what, I'm going to do this on this date at this time and I'm going to like it!" And usually I end up chickening out and ignoring everything I said about that. This time I told myself the same thing. "You will sit down on Monday night, with the cartoons, with the tape and the recorder, and you're going to LIKE IT!"
But this time, instead of ignoring what I had told myself, I actually did what I was told. I sat down, put the casette in the machine and recorded myself talking. It wasn't easy to do, mind you--in fact, I didn't do any of the questions as well as I know I could (or should) have. But the fact is, even if I stank at it, I did it, and that's very strange for me to do. It's good, but it's strange. So I'm kind of proud, I guess.
Now I don't have to do it Thursday night, at least!

Have a good week everyone. Bite off more than you can chew.

And that's a picture of Chihiro and one of those spirit-things for no reason, if you were wonderin'...