Snow at the Beach

As usual, I’m starting this way too late to be actually inventive and witty.  But it was an interesting week, so I’ll do my best at this late hour (23:46 EST).

For starters, last Saturday I awoke to snow on the ground, the first we’ve had (while I’ve been in D.C.) since a light powder in late October.  So that was pretty exciting.  I included a pretty nondescript picture of the field, but I thought it was ironic, because it’s nicknamed the Beach.  Beaches usually don’t have snow.  (But have you seen pictures of waves that freeze mid-crash?  That’s cooler than my picture.)

Sketch for Bottle/Box Pile

My classes have been going pretty well, but they’ve been super intense.  Monday was Painting, and we were supposed to do three black and white still lives, which involved mixing three different shades of gray and doing a “wash” (painting a blank canvas with paint-y water to make it look gray so that white shows up on it) (also, do you spell gray “gray” or “grey”?  I prefer “gray” because I think a’s are warm letters, which makes the world sort of ironic.) (Speaking of a’s as warm letters, that’s why I 100% objectively prefer Rachael to Rachel.).  Also the things she had us paint weren’t that inspiring: a pile of wires, overlapping sheets of construction paper, a pile of bottles and boxes.

Bottle/Box Pile Painting

Nevertheless, I did my best and this is what I came up with for the last painting.  I didn’t include the wires or construction paper paintings because even if I did do a good job, they're boring.  For the pile of bottles one, we were supposed to ignore the lines separating the objects and paint them as a blob.  I ended up coming back to the studio on my own time to finish it, which was much more relaxing.

My other classes are Intensive College Writing, Spanish, Microeconomics, and Education for International Development.  My Microeconomics prof is basically the opposite of Hiles: young, liberal, graduate of U of Oregon.  And, as the saying goes “I like that.”  Also, my textbook was written by a dude at Derek’s school.  And by a dude I mean a guy with a doctorate.  I just like saying dude in that situation because it makes me feel hip and like a total rebel.  Frig yeah.

Education for International Development is basically “Why Finland is perfect and everywhere else sucks” and “the IMF isn’t actually that great”.  Which is awesome.  It’s sort of depressing, because there are a lot of things making it hard to save the world, but since I’m considering doing a five years master’s program in International Development, I’m glad I took the class.  The professor has a voice like a radio talk show host and I love listening to her.

On Thursday, I had art again.  It was more black and white paintings of bottles and boxes, but this time we got to look at how the light hit them and stuff.  The realistic one of these photos is the actual thing I was painting, and the sketch looking one was my sketch.  I haven’t finished the painting itself, but I’ll show you guys that eventually.  Sorry if this bores you, I’m just trying to get a return on my investment on all the art supplies I had to buy for the class.

Other factoids- it was rush week for my frat, like Jason’s, and I also had my interview with ThinkMath.  ThinkMath is a tutoring program executed by undergrads in local elementary schools.  They teach math on a Singapore, not American, system, and in exchange for tutoring small groups of children ages 5-10, they pay you $12/hour to start and it only gets better from there.  So that’s exciting.  They also are expanding their Southern CA program and I may have a job offer for the summer.  I hope the interview turned out well.  I don’t know where I would fit a second job into my schedule, but it would only be like 5 hours a week, so I guess it’ll be okay.

My eyelids are drooping and so it’s off to dreamland for me, but I hope your weeks went well.  Also, Nicole, just want you to know I thought about you this week and sent happy thoughts your way.  Hope you got them.

Night,

Rachael