Amour-Fou♥Net

Believe it or not, part of the reason I haven’t blogged in so long I actually am not allowed to talk about at the moment for legal reasons. (It has to do with my newspaper…) But suffice it to say, my life has been absolutely consumed since last weekend by psychiatric quantities of headache-causing drama. Thankfully, it all seems to be wrapping up about now, so I can get back to the rest of my life.

On a sad note, on the same day that all this craziness was coming to a peak, Madame Mirabelle, my wonderful frog, died. Nothing really to say on that subject, but I’m really sad about it, even though I only had her for a few weeks.

Gonna talk about other things though, that are less depressing… Last weekend, I went to Boston and Maine with Tom and his family for his cousin’s wedding. It was a wonderful break from my routine, and a lovely trip. Tom’s parents have an adorable house on a lake up there, and it was just cold enough to really feel like a New England fall.

Oh, and we went to Tom’s grandparents’ house, where there are drawings on the wall that he did as a child. SO CUTE!!!

Most importantly, now that the weather is all autumny and stuff, pumpkin pie is in season again! I’ve been eating as much pumpkin pie as I can without gaining back the 14 pounds I’ve lost since my epic summer weight gain.

Helping me to accomplish this goal is the greenmarket next to Columbia, which has a stand that sells these:

FIRST OF ALL, how adorable is that??? Anything that tiny is cute. Second, yay I can eat a whole delicious pumpkin pie without… you know, eating a whole pumpkin pie. Fantastic. Best discovery ever.

And here’s your newest chance to tell me you’re sick of seeing my drawings from drawing class, but I actually ended up really liking today’s project, so I’m going to include it here.

The assignment was a mixed-media collage/drawing/India ink situation, and for once, I love how mine turned out:

The face is made of print-outs from various images from FFFFound, and the girl on the right (I pasted her on the paper, then cut out the whole thing, then pasted the whole thing back on) is an image of a sculpture of a girl holding a scissors, which I thought was apt.

And on that note, onto more bloggy things!

Beautiful & Gorgeous Blogger Award

Alice from onlyanne.com has generously awarded me a Beautiful & Gorgeous Blogger Award (Awww thank youuu!!!), which requires me to list 7 things I think may be interesting to y’all, and then pass the award to 7 blogs. Lists after the jump!

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Obviously I’ve been super busy–I think I just have to accept that I’ll be blogging less frequently during the school year.

But at least when I finally do blog, I actually have things to blog about! Wow, hella silver lining! And yeah, apologies in advance cause this post is loooong.

So the most important thing going on right now, clearly, is the fact that Tom and I just booked plane tickets for our Round-The-World trip next summer. No but seriously. Round-The-World trip. Next summer.

As I think I mentioned a few posts ago, Tom bought tickets to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, and put me down as his plus-one even though I’m totally ignorant about soccer. ( him) Then I decided that as long as we were going to the other side of the world, we might as well go all out. Yesterday we finally purchased our tickets, and below is our final itinerary.

Epic awesome trip destinations!

1. South Africa (Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town): 1.5 weeks
2. Bangkok: 1 week
3. Hong Kong: 1 week
4. China (starting in Shanghai): 2 weeks
5. Japan (starting in Tokyo): 2 weeks

Could I be more excited? Absolutely not. Between now and then, I have to finish learning Japanese ( ) and possibly learn lots of other languages.

Speaking of really ambitious goals: I’ve finally finished the Human Japanese textbook app that I was working through on my iPhone. Since I realized I’m going to be in Japan for 2 weeks next summer (OMG OMG OMG) I’ve started to get more into teaching myself Japanese.

So earlier this week, I went downtown to Kinokuniya Books and bought some things to help me continue my haphazard studies: A book of Japanese short stories with parallel English text and translation notes, a book that teaches Kanji using comics, and two of the same manga: the first volume of Bleach in both Japanese and English. Clearly excited about that.

Also I’m psyched about the Karate classes I’ve been taking for my PE requirement. I can officially punch and block in a few different ways, and as a small and weak girl, I have to say it’s empowering. Ridiculously cliche as it sounds to say that–I punched Tom to test my punch-power (with his consent, of course), and he actually stepped back from the force of it! That’s so amazing to me!

Next semester I want to continue taking Karate in some capacity, and also take Japanese lessons at the Japan Society. (They’re not that expensive, so I think I’ll ask for the language stuff for Christmas…)

What else… I’ve been working at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, and it’s been wonderful. Such a great environment, the books are ridiculously cheap, and it’s all for a good cause so I don’t feel guilty spending my money. It’s kinda like my version of heaven, in other words.

And now for a visual tour of the work I’ve been doing in my drawing class. Enjoy! (I hope…)

Drawing 101! (so far)

Here are some figure drawings from a model we had in a couple of our classes. I tried to incorporate color into two them… (Done with combinations of a graphite stick, colored pencils, & compressed charcoal)

Here are some attempts at a self-portrait… The one that’s clearly worse than the others (the full-color one) was supposed to be in another student’s personal drawing style, but I clearly forgot that proportions exist, but I still kinda like it for some reason. Overall, though, these look way more like me than I expected. (Done with vine charcoal and colored pencils)

And below is my final self-portrait (the first one is from before I added color, of course). I actually really like how it turned out, even though there are definitely a couple weird proportion issues. (Done with vine charcoal, compressed charcoal, & oil pastels)