Oh my godness, I cannot believe that I did not update this blog properly since September, and now is November already, which means this semester is going to end in a month, dafuq. LOL When I say blog properly, those personality quizzes does not count, haha.
So I guess I will use back the old format to tell my story for this semester, it is easier for me to organize and read, haha.
Academic
Taking 5 courses this semester, 2 visual arts, Image and Time Based, 2 communications, Message Design and Theories of Communication and Media, and 1 art history, Modern Art.
I going to start with Time Based first because Image is a bitch to talk about LOL. So I have Ken Giles again this time, same evening class, same boring as hell. Time Based here is a medium that has a durational dimension, in short, VIDEO lah. The ultimate reason why I put myself into visual arts this dumbshit is because of Time Based okay, because I do not want to go into production in communications which is so bitchy that you have to count budget, decide angles, find casts, scripting yada yada stupid materialistic stuff. Time Based has more meaning (I think), which you can be subjective with it, and people wont judge it as a consumer item but ART.Which means, you can make it without meaning, even randomly, but your peers will sense meanings from it somehow from their perspective. The course itself is interesting, we learned Photoshop and made a triptych for the first assignment, which is easy pissy for me, however choosing a subject is difficult, it is also the core of this course. We also learned how to cut Final Cut Pro, a video editing software, super easy super cool, love it right now. Just submitted assignment 3 on Wednesday, it is about montage technique, how we can condense a 3 hours experience into a 3 minute video. I chose the stupidest idea ever. In that video, I was frustrated with my uselessness at the beginning, then another me from another dimension of the world appeared and offer some drink (milk) for me, said that it will help me life better, then 'she' disappeared with a snap. After I finished the drink (milk), I got super powers like teleport, walk through walls and stuff. I am thrilled, teleport here and there, and finally I hit on a door then I want to pass through it. Later find out the drink (milk) is a trial version, only valid for 3 hours. I basically do all these by myself, without a tripod. And I found out, I CANNOT TALK TO A CAMERA. Dafuq, the whole process and the final product are just plain awkward. And we need to show our assignment in class, I was the second one to go, Ken started with the last last name, madafaka -_- I told the class the reason I chose to do is because we (students) were so frustrated these days with midterms and papers, we will do anything to get more time to deal with studies, thus this video represents the wish, also act as a temporally escape from reality. The GA, Eric loves it, but Ken, meh, I will take it as he was in a bad mood that day, he criticized everyone's. LOL. So yea, for most of the time I feel so blank because this course is so abstract, define time? what the fuck is this.jpg Topic for final project is "what is your favourite vegetable," how can you use time to tell us what is your favourite vegetable? Damn vague right? I have no idea how to do, and I cannot even decide which vegetable to use, corn, broccoli or potato? Help maybe?
And oh if you want to watch the stupid super power video just write a post about it to my Facebook wall, LOL.
Move on, Image class! Have Nadja Pelkey, fresh MFA from University of Guelph. I hope you did not died from reading my Time Based story if not you totally going to die in this. LOL. So, Image is ten thousand times more vague than Time Based. First assignment is to make a colour chart, very easy, but assignments get weirder as time passes. Second one is we have to paint ten panels with portrait or object. Paint, not draw! Many people confused with this too at the beginning, we even being taught how to hold the paintbrush properly in class. The only rule for this assignment is, you cannot paint it NICELY. Da heck? For the whole life we have been asked to be good, the best, flawless, bla bla bla and now you want me to do mistakes, to do it not properly? Maybe you will not feel the difficulty when you are reading this, try to do it! It is like the most painful feeling for me ever! I broke down because of this assignment, lol. Basically what she is looking for in this assignment is the gestures and expressions of how we execute a painting, mainly wants us to step out from our comfort zone, try with other styles of painting, for not being too precise in details (pfft modern art). I got A- for this mostly because she could see how pressured I was when in studio. I would say this is the toughest assignment ever, especially for a perfectionist like me. Wanna hear about the third assignment? Way creepier. Choose and locate a place within a space. Yes, this is the ONLY instruction for this assignment. The heck, the heck, the heck. My original idea was playground, which it is a heaven for children while another dimension for grownups, like they treat society as their playground now. Does not make sense right? I had no idea too. I dropped it because the nearest playground is like 30 minutes of walking distance, I really do not want to spend that much of time walking back and forth to take photos of it. LOL.I ended up use the space under the chair of my room, and Nadja actually likes this idea more, whut. However the final project of this course is to make an artist book. An artist book is an artwork that is presented in the form of book. That means we, artists twist the feature of a book to make it into an artbook. Like what Nadja did was she find quotes which contain the word "hope" and substitute it with "Nadja," which what her name stands for. Then compile the quotes together and published it into a book. Taa-daa, this is art deska. wtf. Right now I have no idea what to do for this project yet, kinda want to do a collection of indexical marks from human body, footprints maybe?
The last art history (maybe not if I am doing art history as minor) is Modern Art, it is offered as online course. I got a lot of people saying "oh, so you get to cut some slack because you do not have to go to class for this." NO! I rather go to class for this course, because the readings is madafaka many as shits.We have 5 chapters to read averagely every week, and 1 research paper, 1 online discussion and 1 online quiz every month. I used to hate this course at the beginning because the texts does not make sense to me, why psychologist like Sigmund Freud will be included in the text?! The moment I started to love it is when I got back my mark for first assignment, omg I love Jeanne (the prof)! From this course I now know why artists started to paint nude and going abstract (stupid/crazy). But if I really doing a minor for art history, Modern Art is definitely not my concentration, I will go back to Renaissance. Hahaha.
For communication courses, I am taking the second last required course which is Theories of Communication and Media by Michael Darroch. To be honest, I did not really concentrate in this class, mostly because I do not do the freaking long and complicated readings and I have Thao, Lei Gao and Charlie (will introduce later) beside me all the time in class. Haha. Contents of this course actually has a lot of similarities with Modern Art and Image, I always see terms from those 2 classes in here. Holy, it confuses me sometimes. But what I really learn in this class is, human are really "lebih" creatures.Its like someone made something and present it to the society then other people (so called critiques) appeared and give contexts that has nothing to do with the person who made that thing. For example we studied about map last week. GA in the lab threw us a question: why people create digital map today? Apparently he does not want "navigation" as answer. No one in the class answered, then he said is because the developer wants to make it as a guide to what they want their user to be, especially things, for instance shopping place, that they want to promote. If you are in the class you might go like "ohhhhh, why I never think this way." I got this reaction hell a lot in this course, lol. Another thing is we need to give a small presentation about the topic we talked about in lecture, my topic is "media screens," will be presenting at the last week of school, wtf, and I am the only Asian in that lab, stupid Thao dumped me lol. Oh and I did pretty good for the photography analysis heh, I am comparing with the three person I mentioned above O_O I have a 8 to 10 pages of research paper to write for this and a take home final paper. What is take home final? I do not really know, will figure it out eventually. And this is the only course that I have to write a final, yay?
The last communication class I am taking is Message Design by Dr. Richard Lewis. The reason I am taking it now is because of my mentor's suggestion. She was like "take Lewis' course no matter whatever course he teaches," LOL.So this "legendary" Richard Lewis is a Canadian with Pakistan ethnicity. Message Design initially is like to learn how to make people convinced by the message you create, means persuasion lah. In this class, we do not have assignment, do not have to write papers, and lastly, no final. All we have is presentations, 1 mid term and 1 final projects. Sounds kind of laid back right? He wanted us to get into group of 4 to 5 people, Thao is definitely with me, another 2 group members are Adam and Sam. This is the first time (I think) of me teaming up with local students, I mean for a class that requires groups for the whole semester. Honestly I did not really learn anything from this class, perhaps is because I did not take it seriously. LOL. We only concentrate on chapters we need to present, other than that most of the time we just space out in class while others giving their presentations. Lewis is a weird guy, he hates formal presentation, he wants us to present things we studied from textbook to the class in creative way. So ended up most of the groups do game show, jeopardy and stuff. While for final project we can do anything as long as it has something to do with persuasion. My group decided to do university promotion, targeting at international students, also how to make them stay here longer, instead of drop out or transfer to somewhere else. Do not ask me what does this has to to with persuasion, I have no idea. And we actually took 2 weeks to decide this topic :|
Overall, this semester considered not bad academically, I did not see any course that will end up getting C (finally). No, actually this semester is kind of fucked up because contents of Modern Art, Image and Theories of Communication and Media are very similar to each other, gahhhhh. Okay, it is not that bad, I just want to highlight this only, LOL.
Clubs/Social
Omg this shit is epic. Right now I am in
1. AIESEC - vice president of communications
2. V.I.S.A - associate publications
3. UNICEF - webmaster/vice president of internal relations
4. Connecting for Success - Mentor
Before becoming the vice president of communication in AIESEC, I was the director of public relations, wait did I mentioned this during the summer? Yea I guess so, lol, so skip. To be honest, I feel like I am already the vice president in COMM since the real VP does not really do things, or I should say she makes me feels like she does not even want to be in AIESEC, for example recently, I have to ask her 3 times in a week to set our portfolio meeting time. Oh god. So right now I am in transition, still doing the same thing, spam Facebook, design posters, bla bla bla. And oh I held a portfolio meeting last week, first time in my life!
While for V.I.S.A, it was like magnificent at the beginning of the semester, we had bowling event, trip to Pelee Island, bla bla bla. But since last month we have NOTHING, not even executive meetings. And I feel like the current coordinator kind of drift V.I.S.A off what it used to be, sigh, I think he is not even in this group before this. My unofficial main job in this group is the photographer and part time designer, my boss (executive publications) loves to design so much so I will just let her do all the flyers posters she wants. Most likely I will leave this group soon because everything is too Indianized, not even kidding. In Windsor, when you say international, like events or groups, Indian is the represent of "international." One of the events we did for V.I.S.A was samosa sales, it turned out pretty good. Then the executive team says want to do Diwali stuff, and another Indian festival. People, please, why don't you guys just go have an Indian society or whatever?
UNICEF is another headache for me. I cannot get it why people applied for an executive position but not willing to work, or even fucking reply my texts or emails? The one and only event of this club was the Halloween bake sale which we had it on October 31st, and until now I still do not know how many money we made. B-R-I-L-L-A-N-T.
All these clubs above I tried so fucking hard to push all things to happen but people are just so fucking do not respond or irresponsible. Where is the excitement of university student supposed to have? DARN.
The only one that I do not have to put too much focus is the mentor-mentee program. But the funny thing is that my mentee is not exactly in the same majors as me, we only share the visual arts part, and the more hilarious thing is that we are in the same Image class. AWKWARD TO THE MAX. However, she is a good girl, does not give too much trouble to me, what I have to do is just meet with her monthly and write report to send it to the program coordinator.
Work
So, I work in the International Student Centre as front desk, but will be the soft landing coordinator for this coming winter, which main job is to help new students with transition. Bad thing about this job is, I only get 1 week of break during Christmas week. However working in the ISC is not bad, learned a lot, especially talking to people, I am less nervous when talking to strangers now.
Friends
Made a lot of new friends this semester, mostly known by people recognize me as the Chinese who works in the International Student Centre. And mostly Indians......I do not want to talk about this anymore, urgh. I am trying my VERY best not to be racist okay but can you guys just freaking leave me alone, do not spam my Facebook message, do not randomly ask me what's up, do not say 你好 to me, stop trying to impress me by saying you are in engineering, arts is easy those stupid shit, just fucking stop these and be normal please. (Holy crap, I just realized I am writing all these in a terribly bad mood, lol). And for Chinese, please stop asking me why I speak Mandarin, please, please, please. I AM A CHINESE JUST LIKE YOU GUYS! I am getting frustrated each time when people question my identity. Please, leave me alone, or study more about other people country, do not simply make assumptions. (LOL shit, off topic already) Okay, right now in my communication class I have one more person to hang out with, she is Charlie transferred from Hong Kong, same stream in communication with me, wheee. And have Adam in Message Design, a Japanese and Scottish mix, punk style of kid, not bad to work together with. Also I met Sonin, from Mongolia, Master of Management student, looks like Small S of Taiwan, fun to hang out with too. People like Sheylen (Malaysian), Eric, Missy, Vincent, Ada, sometimes too. Occasionally Heidi, Ivy and Linda.
Housing
Living with Fantine, everything is good so far if the another housemate would find a room to do her stuff with her boyfriend or keep the volume down. Cooking by myself while studying and dealing with club stuffs is not fun, most of the time I do not have the time to sit down and eat properly. However, moved to here is probably one of the wisest choices I made, it is so convenience in terms of going to LeBel building. Most likely I am going to live here until I finish university. $300 per month is totally a good deal.
Le Crush
LOL I know I never have this section in previous report. Ahahahahah shy.Like I expected, we did not hang out as much like during summer because both of us are super duper busy people. However one of the things that is worth to mention here is that we went to the library together on the first day of school. Awesomeness feeling. The second thing would be the trip to Point Pelee. In case you want to know, the current cover photo on Facebook is shot by him. Haha. The most recent one would be last week? We went for Fuji Sushi, where we used to go during the summer and have their awesome salmon, and watched Iron Fist. We planned to watch Silent Hill but found out Iron Fist is on the cinema already which both of us thought it will not be released until next week. So we sneaked out from Silent Hill and went for Iron Fist. I honestly have no idea what is going to happen to us, and I like the current situation, it would be nice if something good happen, lets just hope the worst will not come.
I wrote a lot at the beginning but the length dropped down a lot when comes to the end, probably because the writing mojo is gone. I will stop here for now.
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