may the warmth be not a false alarm

pittsburgh has been obscenely warm the past few days – today i walked around campus in just a tshirt, something i haven’t done since november. we’ve also been seeing a lot more sun than we’re used to, and i’m hoping it stays this way. i know the weather is probably going to revert to the freezing i can barely handle, but i suppose i can dream.

winter weather (written january 31st)

depresses me, and i don’t like it.

it’s been almost a month and a half since my last post, and i have been back at carnegie mellon for the past three weeks. for all of winter break i dreaded returning to a schedule of early classes and sleepless nights in the studio, but have so far been pleasantly surprised. i still have four 8:30 classes a week as i did last semester, and my mondays last from then until 4:30 straight with no breaks, but the latest i have left studio is a little past midnight, which i see as a major accomplishment after last semester. that isn’t to say i have been sleeping anywhere near a decent amount of hours – because i haven’t – but anything that doesn’t involve studio until ungodly hours of the morning is an improvement.

more reason to hate travelling

last night, i landed in hong kong at around seven pm.
i left cmu at noon on wednesday.

here’s the story – i want to write it somewhere so i can look back and laugh. maybe someday after my luggage has hopefully been delivered to me safely.

so. my original itinerary for winter break was to leave cmu at noon for my 4:50pm flight to LA because that was when donner closed. that would leave me a three hour or so layover in LA before getting on the 10:20pm cathay non-stop flight back to hong kong, where i would arrive at 5:45am on friday the seventeenth. to get back to school i would leave on the eighth, flying to LA and then to pittsburgh, no big deal.

what really happened. the night before i left pittsburgh, my dad sent me a new itinerary. my flight back to school from LA had already been cancelled a month in advance, and i’d have to fly first from hong kong to LA, then to charlotte north carolina before getting on a plane to pittsburgh. not only that, but my original flight from pittsburgh to LA had also been cancelled, and i’d been placed on the 6:16pm, which would leave me a sufficient hour and a half in LA. but no. that plane boarded on time only for us to be informed soon after that a door wouldn’t fucking close, and we sat on the runway for two hours. when i realized that i wouldn’t make my connecting flight i texted my dad, but was unable to figure out what to do before we finally did takeoff. this other girl in my row missed a flight to sydney, and i felt bad for her but it definitely made me feel a little better.

when we finally landed in LA at around 11:00pm, my dad informed me that there was another cathay flight leaving for hong kong five minutes after midnight. unfortunately, it was full, as was the cathay flight that was to leave the next morning. instead, the woman at united customer services told me that i’d been rebooked on a united flight to SF at six the next morning, where i would get on the 11:57am back to hong kong – also united. freaking out as i was, i figured there wasn’t much i could do, so i went to the hilton where united had given me a room. i couldn’t get my luggage because it was being held, so that sucked. four hours later, i went back to the airport where they told me they couldn’t check me in on my flight because cathay needed to endorse my ticket to united, which they had not done. also nobody could get through to them because they were closed or something. my dad was on the phone and he asked to speak to someone from united – i’m pretty sure he yelled at them, and my dad never yells. after explaining the situation to him, they basically told him they were going to give me another hotel room so i could fly out the next day after cathay had endorsed the ticket. i love my parents, they refused and ended up buying me a new ticket so i could fly out that morning.

but then of course i spent five long hours sitting in the SF airport, then fourteen and a half hours on the most uncomfortable flight ever. again, united sucks.

and the cherry on top of this wonderful travelling experience – i’ve been in hong kong for two nights now and i still haven’t received my fucking luggage. and even better, the last scan of the tags happened the night i arrived in LA.

fuck united.

edit
my luggage has arrived in hkia and is coming home today!!

today,

i finished studio work for the semester.

seventeen days

until i fly home.

i flew back into pittsburgh tonight after spending the last few days in new york with good company. i would be asleep now, but unfortunately i decided to do my laundry tonight while most of donner is still away. i assume the machines will probably be full most of tomorrow, not to mention the fact that my duvet cover was dusty as anything. honestly, i dont even understand how our room contains so much dust all the time.

just kidding, laundry’s done and therefore i’m out.

an actual post on new york tomorrow, perhaps.

my life

it’s bullshit.

tonight, i got pied

it’s officially my birthday – i’m (finally) all legal in hong kong now, and i’m counting down the days until i’m back for christmas. for now i will get more piercings and buy spray paint + cigarettes. i don’t smoke but i want to do all the things i can do now that i’m officially an adult. except the porn. i’ll pass on the porn.

so pretty much the first thing that happened to me on this particular birthday was getting attacked by a bunch of tsa-ers and designers with platefuls of shaving cream. my tsa buddy came to studio and told me she had to blindfold me so we could go on a “journey.” it was suspicious, but really, what could i have done? she sounded convincing enough, saying that it wasn’t a group thing, just a surprise. false.

but before the blindfolding and all the shaving cream, my buddy called me from tsa glee rehearsal and they sang for me, which was super sweet.

on the academic front, this is pretty much hell week. we had a project due monday that most of the class pulled an allnighter for, another project due thursday whose deadline thankfully got pushed back to next tuesday (i have a newfound love for my professors), a psych exam on thursday, and most of us have a 6-8 page essay to write for interp. the rough draft for mine was due today, but i freaked out and asked for an extension, a request the teacher didn’t seem happy about but granted anyway. monday it is.

six days until new york.

twenty-eight days until home.

more boxes and a design firm

i pulled an allnighter working last night and still managed to not have a rendered castle for class this morning, but fortunately the teacher’s didn’t ask to see them so it wasn’t a big deal. instead, the marks discussed and demonstrated rendering on grey paper, and we practiced doing so individually. in the hour between drawing and interp i wrote my contribution proposal, which to be quite honest is absolutely terrible. i did my topic research this morning at 7:00am before i headed back to my dorm for a quick shower – what really interested me was propaganda in news, and the fact that there has been speculation about the white house employing actors and props to create false news clips (my interp class section is journalism and modern debate, and how they affect democracy), but unfortunately i wasn’t able to come up with a controversial research question on the topic. instead, i decided to write about nonprofit news and whether it is still necessary in a day and age when so many diverse programs are available on satellite and cable television. i had trouble dividing and justifying my division of the authors we have read in class, so that part of my proposal doesn’t even make sense. i’m sure my interp teacher knows that his class isn’t on the top of my priority list, and i kind of feel bad that it isn’t, but frankly i’m a lot more worried about drawing and studio than i am about english.

so the main reason i didn’t have my castle rendered for this morning was the fact that as i mentioned in a previous post, i’ve been spending a lot of time building boxes for studio tomorrow. on saturday i finished my revised version of the platform box, and today i built another hexagonal jacob’s ladder box for my friend sam - he was the one who first suggested i change the shape of the box.

here:

tonight for human experience in design we went on a field trip to southside, where we visited a design firm called MAYA with an upside down A. they do a combination of industrial design and graphic design, as well as work in software, and the firm seemed like pretty much the kind of place i hope i’ll be working in the future. the man who gave my group our tour was called mark (so many marks!), and we started in a circular room where presentations at the firm are given. the walls were made of curved dry-erase boards, and the chairs were arranged in a circle, so that the “power” during a presentation is somewhat equalized, instead of the typical case where the presenter stands at the head of a table. using graphs and illustrations on the walls, mark gave us a basic overview of the firm. it was founded in 1989, and turns out all three founders were carnegie mellon graduates – one an industrial design major, one a cognitive psychology major, and one an engineer.

the circular room had several cameras in the center of the ceiling, and mark explained that a program is used to stitch the different images together to create a complete image of the room – a live image we later saw projected onto a bowl-like structure. there was also a wii remote attached to the ceiling, which apparently sends a signal to a device, that then sends a signal to a camera, which can then capture an image of the section of the board the device is placed next to. i’m aware that that was probably a very confusing sentence, but i don’t have the mental capacity to simplify it right now. that aside, the firm also had a usability testing room complete with cameras and one-way mirrors. boards detached from the walls, and there were even windows that could be turned on and off, which left me completely mindblown.

products mark showed us included the concept of sensors much like those in cars alerting their owners of the need to refuel or to check the engine, etc., placed in homes to alert their residents of that such as open front doors. he also showed us the redesigned interface of a fuse box – he called that project “boring,” which amused me.

during the q&a session (we got cookies), someone asked whether the pittsburgh location of the firm as opposed to a location in new york or los angeles had a noticeable effect on the company and their clients, to which one of the guys there answered that they don’t let it be a problem. someone else asked about finding internships and jobs, and one of the guys said that he started targeting the advertising agency he wanted to work at during high school. not only do i not know what firm i want to work at, i don’t even know what city or country i want to live in.

daylight savings

it’s not even six and the sky outside is dark. i was confused until someone reminded me that yesterday, it would be almost seven. we don’t have daylight savings in hong kong – the only way it has ever affected me was when a twelve hour time difference turned into one of thirteen hours.

last night, my roommate eden and i made plans to go to bangkok balcony in squirrel hill for lunch, but when we woke up, she wasn’t hungry and i couldn’t be bothered, so we didn’t. instead, i went back to sleep and woke up at 2:30pm. i’ve been in the studio for the majority of the time since, but i haven’t done much. no matter how i try, i just can’t seem to draw a castle whose parts don’t seem awkward in proportion to one another.

this castle project is going to be the death of me.

i just want to make more boxes.

sometimes

…people are the assholes you hoped they weren’t.