Category: Other Projects and Ideas

My Relationship with Art

I come from an artistic family. My mother repairs antique dolls, my aunt is a painter, my sister was a make up artist on the east coast, and I am always willing to learn different forms of art. It is difficult to pursue art and be paid a living wage. The average artist is starving yet rich in creativity. As a student, and one who never really grew up with the security of financial stability, I always thought an art-based career was a risk. Times have changed and it depends on your media as to how much money you’ll make. Graphic designers like my friends at Microsoft make a great living doing it.

I am committed to art in the community, visiting galleries and often purchasing local art. My favorite experience of art to date was making a deck of cards out of metal. They were more like throwing stars, very impractical but beautiful. I took a Ceramics class at TCC and fell in love with the craft. I plan on going to a few of the places in Tacoma, which have open hours for clay play. My goal is to have made all of my own plates and bowls for my apartment. Hopefully ones that have been thrown, not hand formed.

My Relationship with Math

I went to a private school until 3^rd grade. I was the most pathetic school, all I remember doing is playing all day. When I went on to public school I was completely lost in writing and math, my skills were not ever close to standard. I was in special learning for reading and writing. There wasn’t a class like that for math so I had to sit with everyone else. When the teacher called on me, I had no idea of the answer or a clue as to what we were doing. This was traumatizing and embarrassing for me. I associate that with math. Many times I don’t try because I don’t want to be ridiculed for being wrong. I have always struggled with it and therefore it’s not my favorite subject. As far a my history with math, I have taken the last two years at TCC to take the core math classes up until Math 142.

Three things I am good at…

I enjoy cooking, gardening and motivating others to lose weight. I am a pretty great cheerleader when it comes to weight loss. I help people with their goals and they are inspired by my weight loss (65lbs). I develop meal plans, communicate with them through phone and email, and have a website they can reference. I think child obesity is a huge problem in an overfed country like ours so I would at some point like to work with kids to feel better about veggies and spark interest in cooking. When you can cook for yourself you can eat healthier.

I enjoy gardening in the spring and summer… fall and winter= not so much. So I stick to shopping at the farmers markets during the cold seasons and I plant what I can during the sunny days. I hope to have an inner city farm where people can come for canned goods, veggies, meats and dry goods. I think I could incorporate the children into something like classes on the weekend to learn gardening. I plan to have chickens, goats and a cow or two. I would love to have a pig since they have such personality but I think that would lead to 5-6 pigs. It’s a slippery slope!

My mother is an amazing chef. She owned 3 restaurants in Seattle, cooked Mexican food on PBS, had a grocery store and is now retired. Her and I cook together when we can and I always learn something new. I find spices to be very exciting. To me they taste like colors and I coordinate them to make a beautiful piece of art. I am working on a E-cookbook associated with my weight loss blog but it is hard to develop something as large as that, when I have little to no experience in book writing. I learned much of what I know in my mother’s household and I cant imaging being someone without the power to nourish myself. Many of my friends “Don’t Cook” and I think that is a privileged legacy I will not pass on.