Family Weekend at Stephens

I have a lot of pictures for you! Sarah, my lovely roommate last year, drove in from Kansas City and we spent the entire weekend together having a grand old time!

We visited the vintage costume gallery on campus, which is CIRCUS themed right now! They have the grooviest stuff in there! If any of you are around Columbia, you have GOT to check out this gallery. The themes change (I think every semester?) so stop by while you can!

After visiting the costume gallery Sarah and I headed to Stephens Lake Park, where there was supposedly a Puppy Fair going on. It was way too cute to pass up!! We spent literally two hours just standing around petting everyone's dogs and snuggling with the cats at the adoption tent.

My friend Kathleen brought her dog ChouChou to the Puppy Fest!

My friend Emily brought her dog Parker as well, who totally gussied up to the camera.

It was all I could do not to shove this cat in my bag and take her home.

The rest of the weekend I spent time with my good friend Courtney and her momma, who came in for family weekend! Her sister Ashley and Ashley's boyfriend also drove in for a while, and we all got breakfast at Ernie's this morning. By the way, Ernie's has the best cinnamon toast in town, which I ate with garden vegetarian sausage.

I wish more weekends were like this, a combination of good food and good friends leisurely enjoying each other's company. There's something so functional about it. I know many of you readers are fellow students who had family come to visit, and I hope all of your weekends were happy ones, too.

love, rudi

Kappa Plant-a-thon

Last week I adopted a little baby plant! Kappa Delta, one of two sororities at Stephens, had a booth set up during lunch one day where you could pot your own baby pansy. I couldn't resist!

Thank you, Kappa Deltas!! My little plant is so very happy and growing on my window sill. What happiness.

love, rudi 

Doing Your Homework

The mobile in the basement of the library.

There’s some weak part of me that wants to avoid researching other designers and their work, and concepts. Every time I see a new idea I find myself saying, “Well, there’s one less that I can use.” I’ve been going on like this for the past few hours, mixing my evening between sketching and trying to pull together concepts for some assignments with forcing myself to be explorative. It’s like exposing my mind to these works deletes that part of me that now must accept the fact that now, whatever I do come up with, has to strive to be pushed yet another step further.

But if I didn’t force myself to take all this in, to digest as much art and design and other people’s good ideas, I’d be taking the easy way out. But after spending an entire evening on pinterest.com (wow, by the way) I’ve taken myself one step further- seeing all the art out there makes me braver. Check out what I’ve marked in just an hour or so of searching- there is so much good art out there. And that fact- that it’s everywhere and it’s amazing and there’s always some awesome thing that you’ll never have even thought of- reminds me that whatever I do will be created, and it will exist. And that’s saying that every time I have some project or feeling, all I have to do is throw it out there and then there it will be. Forever. For anyone who finds it, it’ll be another reminder (in a world filled with them) that every piece of art is a beautiful byproduct of everything. I’m finding bravery in being anonymous.

But still, it's always a pit of disappointment when you see something brilliant that you didn't make. I've been doing a pretty good job of keeping my chin up anyway. I hope you can do the same.

By the way, and I meant to tell you all in some big awesome post before life got in the way, I was elected Sophomore Class President Monday, and I've been riding on a I'm-Really-Proud-of-Myself cloud all week. I was never elected ANYTHING in high school despite my desire to be, and it's just one of those zero-to-hero stories that seem to come up so frequently around here. Dreams come true at Stephens. I promise you that.

love, rudi