FEAST FOR THE EYES>>
- Hallucinations. Oliver Sacks. I’m actually making progress on this. It’s interesting to realize how closely the hallucinations that Sacks is describing sound like tales of ghost and superstition…
- Understanding Computers and Cognition. Terry Winograd & Fernado Flores. This was actually pretty interesting for me, albeit difficult for my simple mine to understand. I ended up having to take notes on the chapters in order for them to sink in–it’s a pretty dense design philosophy book. The summary chapters helped a lot too. I did come across a really interesting language philosopher named JL Austin because of it. I checked out his book, How to do things with words, from the library and am excited to read it over Christmas break!
- Crime & Punishment. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I’m listening to this on audio tape and am enjoying it, although I am getting frustrated with the main character (as I always do with any flawed/dynamic main character, haha). I know that I shouldn’t, but it’s hard for me to not just lump this and Tolstoy’s War & Peace together in my head. I think I enjoyed Tolstoy a little better. But we’ll see.
ENTHUSED>>
- I’m so looking forward to winter break. Right now I have dreams of woking on my website, reading, and eating home cooked meals. I’ve already started eating salads in preparation.
- If all goes to plan, I’ll be able to see my dear friend Carissa in January for a little bit! She’s one of the most wonderful people I know and seeing her is such a treat.
- I am most likely going to Amsterdam for the Interaction Design Association conference. Prettttttty excited. But also, it seems so far in the future now I can’t even try to pretend to plan for it. I don’t even have the ticket yet.
COMPULSIONS>>
- This is weird, but I keep compulsively checking my instagram. I don’t know when this happened but I’m never super excited by anything that happens there. I need to not be so tied to my social media/cell phone.
- I’m obsessed with getting an iPad now, but I don’t know where it’d fit into my life. I suspect it might be ‘everywhere.’
COMPUNCTIONS>>
- Thesis fretting continued.
- I can’t wait for this semester to be over. I’m feeling anxious to start something new.
- Starting to worry about taxes. What is going to happen there, amirite?
- Managing my freelance work. 🙁
SIGHTS>>
- Macy’s Day Parade!
- My Neighbor Tontoro with the 3 Rivers Film Festival. This was such an adorable movie. And: Cat bus?! Cat bus!
- [X]posed Studio tour with AIGA Pittsburgh. Got to see some of the local studios and a screen printing shop and blog about it. What fun!
- Diwali dinner with the program. It was such fun and so delicious!
- Blue/Orange a play performed by the new Pittsburgh theater company: The Phoenix. I thought it was well done, but I think the end didn’t have the resolution I wanted. It felt kind of like: let’s tie things up now. But then again, I saw this on very little sleep.
- Had career information session with Facebook, Dropbox, DuoLingo, and Phillips home health this month. It was great to see a variety of companies talk about what they do and where they’re going.
- New York!! I got to see the lovely faces of Igor & Shanna for Thanksgiving. One of the best I’ve had in years. I haven’t laughed so much in months.
STORIES>>
- My Neighbor Tontoro with the 3 Rivers Film Festival. This was such an adorable movie. And: Cat bus?! Cat bus!
- Catching Fire. I really liked it! I had to re-watch the first one on Netflix to remember what was going on, but it was a great movie to see with the people. I can totally see Shanna being Katniss 🙂
- Pitch Perfect. My friends’ friend (someone who graduated from the UW theater department) makes a cameo in this movie and I’ve been meaning to see it out of curiosity. It was a silly movie, but not unenjoyable.
- The Breakfast Club. I’ve never seen it before. Are you surprised? Pitch Perfect references it and since we couldn’t find another movie I decided to watch this in order to get my pop culture references right. For some reason I always thought it was a musical because people always play the soundtrack (or something?). It it was nice to see a movie that had a dramatically different story line. I mean, the whole story takes place in one building.
- Dallas Buyers Club. I mean, yes this was a super intense movie that was over 2 hours long about AIDS. It was good, but I didn’t come away thinking it was the greatest movie of all time. I guess it’s just not really the kind of movie you want to watch over and over again, even if it was really well done.
- Hugo. Pretty cute little animation. Another result of not finding anything we wanted to watch on Netflix.