quote

"...a breakthrough is part of both the past it came from and the future it starts, in the same way that a bend in the road serves as the end of one direction and the beginning of another. You can stand at the bend and look back to where the road came from and then turn to see where it goes. But if you stand elsewhere on the road, you see either a straight line that ends at the bend or a straight line that began at the same bend. Only at the point of breakthrough can you see both directions at once."

 - Strategic intuition by William Duggan

the best of...

i'm home but working on finals so i can't exactly do a proper update. just thought i'd do a best of this semester from my instagram account.

so in no particular order, here they are:

 hurricane sandy at ihop

 the library is so spectacular

 reading period hot chocolate and work

 from this past weekend - fancy weddings call for fancy attire

 first night in boston, great subway art

 staircase where i live

 it's official!

 grinding

 cool chair at the ed school library

 os gemeos and DTM in boston

 you don't even want to know what this tastes like

 another library shot

and finally - my arrival at school!

only 3 more assignments and evals to finish up before i can officially say bye to my first semester. can't believe there's only j-term and spring left. where did the time go??

belated halloween

if you know anything about me, then you would know that

i love halloween.

i love dressing up, i love hanging out, i love being creative and doing makeup, and i love having fun. it has been a tradition for the boo and i to also hang out and celebrate halloween together which is probably why i love it even more. this year was certainly no different.

i had 2 awesome group costumes this year. 

first up:

 the spice girls.

yes, i am scary spice.

yes, the boo is animal. and yes, i am keeping the hat.

next up:

where's dtm? ok, it's really where's waldo but can you spot me in these pics?

Service is not...

i really love this:

Service is not the same as helping. Helping is based on inequality, it's not a relationship between equals. When you help, you use your own strength to help someone with less strength. It's a one up, one down relationship, and people feel this inequality. When we help, we may inadvertently take away more than we give, diminishing the person's sense of self-worth and self-esteem… Serving is also different to fixing. We fix broken pipes; we don't fix people. When I set about fixing another person, it's because I see them as broken. Fixing is a form of judgment that separates us from one another; it creates a distance. So fundamentally, helping, fixing and serving are ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak; when you fix, you see life as broken; and when you serve, you see life as whole. When we serve in this way, we understand that this person's suffering is also my suffering, that their joy is also my joy… We may help or fix many things in our lives, but when we serve, we are always in the service of wholeness.

Rachel Remen, mid-20^th century

re: last weekend

the bff visited me over the weekend and it was nice to have a little bit of ny here. 

we basically:

drank from this giant bowl on friday night.

took a DTM tour of campus and found this building, which is the same name as a friend of ours.

drank hot chocolate at burdick's. twice.

checked out some really old cemeteries. 

watched this tour group on segways (it was weird).

after she left, i needed to get some work done so i headed to the largest library on campus (the 2nd largest in the USA):

before i went on a haunted tour of campus.

spooky....

weather

i hate this weather. i hate how it rains one second and is sunny the next. i hate how suddenly it's cold. i hate how grey it is most days and that the sun only shines about one day out of the week. i thought NY was bad, but this is torture for people with seasonal depression (not saying that is me but it's just a thought).

and yes, that is a picture of a puddle that i took. for class.

brilliant

in one of my classes this week, we were asked to write about our favorite k-12th grade teacher. 

my mind went blank, before briefly thinking about a college professor that i really loved. i then remembered that the TA asked us to write about a teacher during our k-12th grade years. so i thought about my public school teachers but i couldn't really think about the specifics she was asking us to describe so that seemed like a bust. middle school was ok, but my feeling of being unsuccessful in school doesn't bring up warm and friendly memories of teachers. i was all over the place in high school...but then it hit me.

i took an african-american literature class in high school with a teacher that i had heard a lot about and hoped to take a class with. most students seemed really transformed by his classes and raved about him. being a shy student, he scared the shit out of me but i knew him and he knew me because my sister had taken several classes with him. small school settings make it hard to hide.

he was a burly man with a big pot belly and a lot of facial hair who always wore a flannel shirt, jeans and hiking boots. he looked like he was straight out of the woods. in reality, he was straight out of the woods - he actually lived in a log cabin in the woods somewhere by himself with no tv or phone. (i might be making part of that up, although i am 75% sure i am right about 100% of what's in that sentence). i always imagined him in the woods with all of his books, observing nature and smoking cigarettes. he was obvious about his love of teaching, literature and smoking. he never hid that from his students. it honestly felt like there wasn't a lot he would hide from us.

i can't tell you all of the books we read or the assignments he had us complete but i can tell you that something happened in that classroom which i had never experienced before in a class at this school. he was the first teacher who sat down in the circle with us. he was actually listening to us and we all knew by the way he leaned his body towards the person who was speaking. he told us about his own experiences when he lived in predominately black neighborhoods (harlem, to be exact) and how they related to the texts. here was this white man relating to all of the students in his class. all of us. in an environment that wasn't very diverse, this was the first class where i actually felt diversity. he taught the class without skipping any chapters or telling us that sections weren't important (i swear to you that happened earlier in hs when we read "invisible man" - my teacher told us that one of the chapters wasn't important so we can skip it but i read it and used it in a paper i wrote for that class. BOOM!). but he was the kind of teacher i wish i had taken earlier in my hs career and every year after that. 

i recognized then, and i see more clearly now, that things aren't always as they seem. 

as an adult and someone who works in education, i recognize now that he probably did hide things from us. it's almost impossible to not hide something because there are things that young people should not know about their teachers and that's completely ok.

he once told us in class that seriously brilliant artists are also the most fucked up people in the world. i believed him then but believing him also confused me. to me (and many others), he was so brilliant. but also a strange and isolated man. i wondered, and still wonder, if there was more to his story than we could have known.

in 2006, he passed away not knowing the impact he made on me and still such a mystery in my mind.

i've been thinking about him and this and more all week. i even dug up a blog post a classmate wrote about him after he passed away. at the end of class on tuesday our teacher said, "you should all think about emailing the teacher you wrote about to say thank you." i wish i had taken that opportunity back in the day when he was still alive. even with all of the mystery that surrounds his memory for me, i am grateful i had the opportunity to learn from him and get to know the brilliant, strange teacher i had always observed from a distance. 

wherever he is now, in whatever other worldly place we go to when we pass away, i want to say thank you.

wonderful ideas?

one of my favorite graduate classes is called "the having of wonderful ideas" but it's probably one of the hardest classes to explain to people. it sounds like a real hippie type of class but it has to be the class where i feel the most inspired! i'm clearly drinking whatever lemonade the professor is serving up in class.

the quick and dirty of the class is this:

we spend every week learning how to follow people's thinking in order to help them learn more about a given thing/topic/new idea. this class consists of demonstrations during class time that inform the fieldwork (aka - experiments) that we do on other people, fieldwork reports, small group sections where we talk about the ideas together, weekly journaling to think deeply about what we are learning, lots of readings and a moon journal. yes, i said a moon journal.

because moon journaling seems to intrigue people the most, i will say that the general idea is to (almost) daily write down any observations we have of the moon. we are not allowed to look up anything about the moon though. through our observations, we should be coming up with questions and ideas about the moon. when we discuss it in class and section, i love to hear people talk about the emotional and personal connections they have made with the moon and what they are learning. we are all learning different things, which makes us also learn from each other. it's fascinating.

here are my moon journal entries that i keep in a mini moleskin the boo's mother bought me when i left ny:

so if you notice the moon, think of me. add to my observations. i would love to hear about what other people are observing!

art in boston

this past weekend, the boo came to visit so i decided it would be the perfect time to check out the os gemeos exhibit at the ica with my good friend. my pics can't do the exhibit justice - the colors, patterns, paintings, installations...it was really exciting.

i took more pics but these are my favorites.

we also checked out the art in the rest of the galleries:

i really loved these two sculptures. the one on the left was a hanging sculpture made of fragments from a building fire and the one on the right was in the elevator shaft. 

 i was a total geek for these mirrored chandelier sculptures. they were designed after chandeliers in the metropolitan opera house and look like galaxies. i like art where i can see myself in it.

after roaming around the museum, we also decided to find the os gemeos street art around boston. 

 the size of this was amazingly impressive.

 i had fun walking up to this wall and touching the art.

i wish i could paint like os gemeos. love.