Only 363 days until next Christmas

Christmas ended too quickly, but I had such a nice day and I got a whole bunch of wonderful presents. My mom woke me up way too early so for the first half of the morning I was pretty much sleeping anyway. My family gathered around the light up palm trees and had a champagne breakfast, which made me even sleepier. As a family gift, the first present we opened was annual passes to Disneyland, which is a tradition for the last few years, but ours expired 7 months ago and my mom has been saving up ever since. They're incredibly expensive but my family doesn't really go on big vacations ever so it's kind of our treat to ourselves and we usually make good use of them by going a lot throughout the year. We actually decided to go yesterday for a few hours which was fun but it turned out to be one of the busiest days of the year and the park was actually closed to any more people except we already had passes so we got in. We were eating lunch in the tomorrowland cafe when we had to be evacuated because of a fire in the kitchen.

As for my other presents, I got the thing I had been wanting since I took photography last year and now I have! The Canon Rebel digital camera! It's incredible, really. It has all the features of a manual camera without having to go and develop the film, but you can set aperature and shutter speed and apply colored filters and toners to your shot and can play with the contrast, all in camera and then see the result in a matter of seconds on the screen. I also got some filters like UV protection and to cut out the fogginess in landscape shots.



It's not in yet, but as part of my gifts we ordered a large scale printer that can print 13 x 19 inch paper. Ok, I'm sure it sounds lame to most people, but for the last few years, if I've wanted to print any project that's larger than 8x10 I've had to run to kinkos and deal with hours of frustration at the hands of the incompetent and overcharging employees there. It's not fun. So now I can just do it in my room! It's really going to help with design this year.



My brother got me the 1st season Friends dvd and my parents got me a chia pet. I have no idea what was going through their mind with that one, but I suppose everyone has to get a chia at some point or other. I think everyone liked the gifts I got them and, all in all, it was another wonderful Christmas.

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport

Christmas is right around the corner and, as is tradition, my mom puts together Christmas at our house in a nonconventional way. Instead of a Christmas tree, we opted for this.



I was taking a peek at all the gifts under the tree and instead of having all the presents say "from Mom and Dad" or something, my mom creatively thinks of random people who give us gifts. For instance, I spotted this gift.



If you can't read that it says "To Sarah, from Peter Jensen...he's dead but not forgotten"

And even though everyone in our family are democratics and probably on the white house's shit list, all partisan debates were put aside for the holidays because Dick Cheney gave my dad a present.

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?

I haven't written in a few days because when I'm at home I feel like I'm in a different world. I hardly have my cell phone with me and I'm never around the computer to check email or update things. My first week of break was delightful. My parents both took a few days off of work and since we didn't want to leave our dog in a shitty kennel,we decided not to do a big trip anywhere and instead opt for little day trips. So over the course of the last 5 days I've been running all over southern california. The first day we went to Universal City walk, ate at hardrock cafe and saw Chronicles of Narnia. I liked the set design very much in the movie, but having not read the books I had nothing to compare it to. The next day my dad and I went to LACMA and I got to see the exhibit comparing Pisarro and Cezanne, but I don't really care for impressionism all that much. Then we all drove for an overnight trip to the mountains and went to Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear. The lake was such a wonderful break because we spend a few hours sitting in the cafe and reading and drinking tea. It was my perfect afternoon. The coffee shop has gigantic glass windows so you can look out at the lake and we were there right at sunset. Before coming back to valencia, we got to hike around the woods up there and feed the ducks in the lake. Our dog, Mushka, was left in his cage and had peed and pooped all over that area while we were gone. He's getting pretty unmanagable and unannoying with all the knawing on fingers and toes, and whining for hours in the middle of the night. We're hoping that he calms down soon.

Yesterday we got up really early in the morning to help set up the Santa Clarita Homeless shelter which is opening tomorrow and wasn't even put together yet. It was very disorganized with the lady in charge having no idea how to deligate and then my brother and Dan Howell having to unscrew the door to get a fridge through it and then screwing the door back on upside down. In the end when we left, it seemed like things were starting to come together. We'll be cooking some dinners this winter for the shelter which I'm looking forward to.

Tonight I got to see my girls! In celebration of Brigitte's birthday, Tasha, Cait, Brigitte and I went to a tapas bar in hollywood. It was a nice reunion seeing as Tasha just came back from being in England since September and Caitlyn I hardly get to see even though she's just in Berkeley. I can't even remember the last time we were all together. Of course, all of them have boyfriends so I felt a little out of place in the conversation half the time, but it's great to catch up and have things be exactly as they were before everyone went away. The tapas bar had surprisingly good food and it was a byob place and they didn't card when we brought a bottle of wine. I can't wait for the next 2 months to go by so I can be 21 already. It's felt like an eternity.

The Christmas palm trees went up in our living room today and all the presents are underneath it. It's really starting to feel like the holidays.

Three Things

Finals are over. I survived. Out of all my semesters though, this finals period wasn't all that bad. The only real challenge was french, but i was so happy to be done with it forever that whatever grade I got on the final won't be bad because I'll know I won't have to take French next semester. Yesterday was my last typography class and we went to this huge printing factory and had a tour. Everything's so technical and they had a bunch of machines that could chop your hand off or your hair could get stuck in so I didn't want to touch anything. We went also to get the book we've been working on designing for the last few weeks cut. They stuck in this machine with a massive knife and it chopped through the book in less than a second. My book looks so cool and professional! I won't have it back for a few weeks, but I'll post a picture on here when I do. I think when I get it back I'm going to take it to Barnes and Noble, stick it on the shelf with all the other books and take a picture.

I'm heading home today and I'm so in need of this break! I'm going to sit around for the first few days and watch lots of Law and Orde SVU, dozens of movies, knit scarves and work on design. Oh and catch up on reading. Right now I'm reading Notes from A Small Island by Bill Bryson, which I'm sure I've talked about before, but it's about this guy who travels around England and writes about his adventures. The whole book is funny, but there's an exerpt from a part I just read the other day that I especially like.

"The way I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement. Did you know that each time your father ejaculated (and frankly he did it quite a lot) he produced roughly 25 million spermatozoa--enough to repopulate Britain every two days or so? For you to have been born, not only did you have to be among the few batches of sperm that had even a theoretical chance of prsperomg--in itself quite a long shot--but you then had to win a race against 24,999,999 or so other wriggling contenders. Being born was easily the most remarkable achievement of your whole life. And think: You could have just as easily been a flatworm.

Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist. For endless aeons you did not. Soon you will cease to be once more. That you are able to sit here right now in this one never-to-be-repeated moment, reading this book, eating bonbons, dreaming about hot sex with that scrumptious person from accounts, speculatively sniffing your armpits, doing whatever you are doing--just existing--is really wondrous beyound belief.

Thirst, you have plenty to eat, you live in a time of peace, and "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree" will never be number one again. If you bear these things in mind, you will never be truly unhappy--though in fairness I must point out that if you find yourself alone in West-super-Mare on a rainy Tuesday evening, you may come close"

good luck to everyone who isn't done with finals yet. I feel your pain

80% of the final exam will be based on the one lecture you missed and the one book you didn't read.

I've been having an eventful week here at school. In fact, since it's the last week of classes and finals coming up next week, I think I've had ever second scheduled since getting back from Thanksgiving. I've mainly just been running around trying to finish up projects. The nice thing about being an art major is that you're usually done before everyone else, but your final projects are always due earlier too. In my Tuesday design class, the creative director for the Gap came in to talk. It was a really good experience. He's pretty young, 32, and was talking all about how he got started and gave tons of suggestions. He oversees all the creative design of the stores, how they'll look inside, all the window graphics, the branding, and packaging design. It's nice to see the transition from underclassman having to take all these random drawing and sculpture classes to upperclassman and being more focused and exposed to professionals in the design industry. It gets me really excited about starting. I'm learning about more and more outlets for designers. I could go into entertainment design and do movie posters, websites, motion graphics, packaging, magazine design, advertising art direction, or publishing and design for book covers. Here's a shot of our collaborative self promotion project we just completed. I was working with a group of 4 and our goal was to creat an effective way to promote and market each individual's design style in a functional way. We chose to do this set of 4 coasters with a vellum package. Sorry for the shitty quality of the picture, I was sloppy, it looks much better in person.





It's also interesting, 3 years into college, to see the different paths all my friends are taking. It's weird, everyone in high school was relatively the same and studied the same things, but now everyone is getting into their majors and going in totally different directions, but each person's specialty is really interesting.

Tonight I went to the bonfire for the upcoming game against UCLA. I always like going to the bonfire each year, but this year was by far the best. My brother came out and I had a late class but rushed over after we got out and caught most everything b/c it was running late. They had fireworks that they shot off from the parking garage and then after the rally, Jimmy Eat World performed. I was pretty far back from the stage, but it was fun to see a live concert for free. I'm exhausted though after running around all day and all I want to do is curl up under the covers.

I also just found out tonight when I talked to my dad that a family friend died this week. His name was Doug and it was the least expected death I could imagine. He went to my church and was somewhere visiting family with his wife when he had a sudden heart attack and died. He seemed pretty healthy too. It really freaked me out to think about it. He was always really nice to me and it makes me really nervous about my parent's health and stuff. I guess it reminds you to appreciate and love your family because something like this could happen any time. I don't know how I'll deal with that.