I have officially completed my first year at MassArt! It has been a wonderful year, and I truly feel like I am where I should be, and doing what I should be doing. I feel like I really fit in with this school, this community, this area of study, and this lifestyle. All this newness has been at times a bit scary, but always exciting, and I think I’ve grown a lot by embracing it.

Bard feels so far away and long ago, but now I am able to look back and appreciate that time of my life, and look to the present and future with excitement. Being at there was not an entirely positive experience for me, but I had some good times and got a great education. More importantly, it really helped me to discover more about who I am and what I want to do with my life, and pushed me to take a huge leap which has brought me here. Now I’m taking charge of my life, doing work that I feel passionately about all of the time, and being a part of a community of passionate artists in a bustling little city, and I am LOVING it!

Yay! Is it next semester yet??

I’m finally back in the zone, and it feels so good! By “the zone” I mean the working zone.

During the past week or so, I was feeling really out of the zone; I would try to hunker down and work on my Time final and did all that I could to make my work environment and mindset optimal, but it just wasn’t happening. I felt unmotivated, uninspired, and unexcited, and as a result, the animating was extreeemely slow-going. But yesterday, somehow everything clicked into place.

I think it was because of my meeting with my Time professor. She wanted to have individual meetings with all of her students to check our progress on our finals. Before the meeting, I felt bad about only having two and a half flipbooks to present, and wasn’t sure if my professor would get what I was going for or find it entertaining at all. But the meeting ended up being SO uplifting and creatively energizing! My professor loved what I had done so far, was impressed with the amount of frames, and seemed excited about the final product. I’ve realized more and more that with in the case of most art forms, feedback is scary but completely necessary while you’re in progress as well as when you think you’ve finished. I’m always afraid and embarrassed to show people my work, but when you’ve been working on something by yourself for a while it’s easy to lose faith in your work’s effect on an audience, because you don’t HAVE an audience. You have to get feedback from others to see if your ideas are effective outside of your own head. Getting affirmation from others that your art DOES work outside of your own head is incredibly rejuvenating! And if it doesn’t work outside of your own head, then at least now you’ll know why, and can figure out how to fix it.

I animated like a beast yesterday; I did nothing but animate steadily from the afternoon until 11:30 at night. I feel completely recharged and ready to roll! Thank goodness, because I have fewer than two weeks of school left, and I’ve got stuff to do! I have to finish animating my Time final, record sound for it and compile it all together, study for a final Byzantine Art History quiz, write a final version of my script, go to the zoo and make a bunch of animated animal studies, re-shoot my charcoal animation, and finish my short and long animation reels with titles and credits. But it all feels so doable! Huzzah!

Also I did a DEEP CLEANING of my room today (we’re talkin’ vacuuming, dusting, window-cleaning, and scrubbing all of the charcoal, paint, and pastel out of my carpet), which has very much added to my good mood. I just need to admit it: I love cleaning, and I don’t care who knows! It makes me so happy.

I don’t understand how packages work. Apparently FedEx attempted to deliver my Amazon package at some point yesterday when I wasn’t there, and left a note on my door about it, with a box marked “FIRST ATTEMPT” checked off. What if they make a SECOND ATTEMPT when I’m not here? How do I know what time they’ll arrive? How many ATTEMPTS will be made before my package disappears into the void?? 

In other news, I’m all dressed up for a job interview later today, and then I’m going home for the weekend! I am looking forward to my summer staff meeting, getting my haircut, and most of all having some good old family time.

Here are a few highlights from my visit with Em and John in California! It was such a wonderful trip. 

Here’s the short version of my visit:

Friday: Flew out to California. Saturday: Took the ferry from Oakland to San Francisco on a perfect day, and then walked around SF for a while, stopping at a beautiful park and a pier that was full of sea lions. In the evening, John and I got Indian food and then went to see Em perform with her Bollywood dance class. Sunday: Drove to Napa Valley with Em and John and their friend Rob, and then met up with two more friends of theirs at a posh bakery after they finished running a marathon where we cheered them on. In the evening, Em, John and I went out to dinner at a lovely French restaurant. Monday: I hung out with John at U.C. Berkeley, and then saw Em’s lab, and then had a relaxing afternoon in Oakland with Em. We planned and shopped for dinner, which we cooked for the three of us plus two of Em and John’s friends who were really great. Tuesday: I traveled back to Boston.

Here’s the long version!

I traveled on Friday and arrived in California around 10:30 PM (West Coast time). On Saturday, John, Em and I took a ferry from Oakland to San Francisco, which was super fun! The ride was fairly quick but provided magnificent views…we even went right under the Bay Bridge! The ferry docked right by an enormous farmer’s market and an indoor marketplace that was sort of like an ultra-classy, ultra-hipster version of Boston’s Quincy Market. We enjoyed samples of locally-grown, home-bred, hand-made, extra-loved, artisan-crafted, exhaustingly-tended olive oils, cheeses, fruits, and chocolates, and that was only the beginning of what the place had to offer! It was magnificent.

After more samples from the farmer’s market (jams, preserves, endless species of fresh, juicy locally-grown oranges), we scouted out some lunch. John got a lovely little open-faced smoked salmon sandwich from an outdoor smoked salmon stand, and Em and I shared chicken and potatoes from an awesome food truck. They had a ton of chickens roasting rotisserie-style, and underneath the chickens were potatoes, grilling and constantly soaking up the sweet chicken juices. It was one of those things that’s brilliantly simple and mind-blowingly tasty.

After our hearty lunch, we walked around San Francisco and soaked up some sunshine. We stumbled upon a beautiful, lush little park, and then hung out at a touristy pier to watch sea lions. We had more time to kill until the next ferry, so we sought out a non-touristy coffee shop to relax at before our trip back to Oakland.

Saturday evening, John and I dropped Em off at the YWCA in Berkeley to get ready for her upcoming Bollywood dance performance while we got Indian food at a cute little place. It was really fun to go to the show and see her dance! Afterwards, we tagged along with the members of her dance class for a group dinner (more Indian food; this time I just munched on some naan and drank more chai). 

Early Sunday morning, there was an earthquake! Em doesn’t like earthquakes but I found it kind of exciting! It was definitely a strange experience; I think my uncle described it well when he said that it sets off a certain kind of caveman-instinct confusion: Earth move?? Earth no move!

Later in the morning, we picked up Em and John’s friend Jim and drove to Napa Valley, where two of their friends were running a marathon. It was a warm, sunny day, and the drive to Napa was beautiful. It really doesn’t feel like the United States, what with the lush rolling hills and endless vineyards and farms, and interesting types of trees I’d never seen before. After the marathon, we met the two friends at a posh little bakery called “Bouchon.” The food was overpriced but still overall quite tasty. 

After an afternoon of resting and researching what to expect from Em and John’s extremely pregnant foster-kitty, Sheila (who was showing all the signs of labor throughout my visit but never actually gave birth to her kittens while I was there), we went out for dinner. The restaurant was a lovely little French place in San Francisco. We shared a half-bottle of wine and all enjoyed really delicious, cozy French food (I had a heavenly boeuf bourgignon), and then went home to catch up on Portlandia.

On Monday, I went to the U.C. Berkeley campus with Em and John! Em had class in the morning, so John took me for a tour around campus (the campus is HUUUUGE and crazy gorgeous!), and then we went back to his office where he worked and I fell asleep while reading (I was a little tuckered out from our weekend adventures). Oh, he also showed me the linguistics archives in his office! That was really interesting to see. His team studies native North American, and specifically Californian, languages. When Em’s classes were over, I got to see her lab! I was so excited to finally see what she’s been working on for the past few years. I didn’t post the pictures of her work here because it’s sort of a super secret science thing (ooooooh), but I will just say that it was super awesome-looking and interesting and I was incredibly impressed and proud to have such a smart and talented sister. The setup included tons of tiny optics and doodads and equipment that she personally had assembled, or built, or designed to have companies build them for her because they didn’t already exist! Not to mention that she taught herself everything she needed to know about everything related to her project. My sister is bad-ass. 

After seeing the lab and meeting Em’s various lab-mates (who couldn’t stop staring at us because they couldn’t believe how much we look alike), we headed back to Oakland where we hung out and had a wonderfully relaxing afternoon of sister time. Before dinner, we went grocery shopping at Berkeley Bowl, which is not your typical grocery store. It housed the largest and most thorough produce section I’ve ever seen in a grocery store, had a huge selection of really interesting local products of every food category, and was PACKED with people. REALLY packed. Shopping there was a bit wild and crazy, but lots of fun. When we got back to the apartment, we started working on dinner: fish (swordfish plus some sole, since we couldn’t afford to get enough swordfish to feed five people) with a tasty lime and garlic marinade a la Rick Bayless, roasted spiced sweet potatoes, and coconut rice, as well as sangria and a dessert of warm grilled pineapple and cinnamon ice cream (writing this is making me hungry…). Two of Em and John’s close friends came over for dinner, and it was really fun to get to know them! They were great.

On Tuesday I packed up my ridiculously huge suitcase and got ready to travel back to Boston. The flight was smooth and went by much quicker than my flight to California (probably because I had forgotten what six hours feels like the first time I flew). Getting back to my apartment involved a lot of public transit but was easy, especially thanks to the assistance of random passersby when it came to lugging my giant suitcase up the stairs to get to the Green line of the T. 

Now I am enjoying the rest of spring break by relaxing at my apartment and getting work done before classes start on Monday. On Wednesday and Thursday it seemed that the California weather had traveled with me back to the East Coast—it got up to seventy degrees! I think tonight it’s supposed to snow though, in typical never-ending-New-England-winter fashion.

I’M OFFICIALLY AN ANIMATION MAJOR! Life is good!!!