Despite my quarter and my dance stuff, I highly recommend relaxing or vegging out a bit. Why? Because I don’t want to burn out. Burning out is the worst thing that can happen to anyone with a difficult schedule. I can’t function if I’m burnt out. It’s like walking uphill in the ice. Nearly impossible. [...]

In my previous post, I mentioned using veil. I don’t believe that I’ve mentioned my current weapon of choice, A’Kai veils. I only own a set, but I’d love to buy more. They flow beautifully, come in different shapes (half-circles or rectangular), and are reasonably priced. They are handcrafted and the workmanship really shows. Here’s [...]

I’ve been taking a few prop workshops recently. In general, I am not hugely into props for myself. Since I’m still learning, I don’t want to take an impressive but easy way out. I think it’s much harder to capture the audience when it’s simply you than if you have something like swishing fabric about [...]

Tomorrow, I get my first set of labs to grade. I’m trying to come up wi th a fair rubric, which is always a challenge. In general, I believe that I am a fair grader. I don’t look at the names until I enter the grades; people who I genuinely liked in lab don’t always [...]

I’ve been pretty busy this past week. One of my classes uses Matlab, and I am not familiar with Matlab, making it a bit more difficult than normal. That has taken more time, as well as me being away from programming for quite awhile. I’m amazed that I do remember C (a programming language); I [...]

On a board, this lady posted some excellent questions to structure the development of your own style. I’m not one to want to dance like a carboncopy of my teacher; I like my teachers’ styles a lot, but one of the reasons I take from different people is that what looks good or works for [...]

It doesn’t sound like much, does it? However, I know well enough that it’ll get rougher as time goes on. I really like my TAing classes. The electronics students have good attitudes, which is helpful. Most of them have no interest in this beyond fulfilling a requirement. I’m a little baffled why they would select [...]

One of the big themes of my physics life this year has been going on to a PhD. I’ve moaned about the dreaded physics GRE and time constraints in life in general. After lab today, I got talking to the professor who teaches the lab. I may not have to do any of that. His [...]

Despite being horribly rainy and flooding in Chicago, I braved my way to Arabesque/Sonya. Part of me wanted to stay snuggled in bed, but I already paid for these workshops and wanted to go. Single veil is something I do know a bit about. I’m not an expert, by any means, but I do have [...]

A bit different from other CDs/mp3s that I recommend, Raks Sharki 4 isn’t really a CD you coul dance to. It’s a rhythms CD. Regardless of whether you zill, knowing the rhythms is useful to know what’s happening in the song. If you zill, this CD clearly demonstrates what each rhythm sounds like. When I [...]