2 Down, 3 to Go (Alternatively Titled: Apologies for my Incessant Ranting) (#3)

I added a gallery page on Wednesday, I want to say? (I have no concept of how time moves or what day it is anymore. Blame the sleep deprivation.) Go check it out if you want to see my pieces (and my terrible photography skills). It looks fine now, but let me just say that it took me like an hour to properly format it. Blogger is so frustrating that I wouldn’t be surprised if its sole purpose was to confuse and annoy people. I’m imagining that the creator of Blogger is just sitting in a dark, creepy lair, the light of his or her computer screen casting an eerie glow upon his or her face, cackling evilly, knowing that thousands of people have suffered as result of Blogger. Okay, so maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but inserting images into a page and arranging them is surprisingly difficult. There’s no real way to line them up next to each other, only to order them left, right, or center. I’m already dreading put my next group of pictures on there. Enough complaining though. On to the actual origami part.

I received the answers to my interview questions from Robert Lang, and I’ll post them later this week along with his TED Talk and website link. There’s a chance that I’ll ask him some follow-up questions as I go continue with the project, so stay tuned for that. Anyway, I was really impressed that he replied to my emails so quickly and so cordially and grateful that he was even willing to participate in the first place. Others had said that their expert turned them down or that they still didn’t have a reply, so I guess I was more on the lucky side.

By accident, it turned out that the origami pieces I chose to do this week all had a ton of inside reverse folds, a fold I’m terrible at. While it did make some parts of the folding process more difficult, I think it helped improve my ability to do one. Especially when I compare my inside reverse folds in the elephant trunk to the ones I did for last week’s sea turtle legs. The most difficult one out of these five pieces was either the cuckoo or the cardinal. As the only piece whose instructions came from a book rather than online, I was expecting the cuckoo to be hard, but it was way more difficult than I anticipated. I think from now on I’m sticking exclusively to online instructions since while I like having a physical how-to, I don’t have the spatial awareness to follow them properly. There’s plenty of videos online, so it’s not like I’ll have a shortage of tutorials.

This week’s batch of origami is definitely my favorite, because they’re all just so cute (excluding the cardinal which didn’t turn out great). I made an elephant, cardinal, cuckoo, lotus flower, and bumblebee. The elephant and the lotus came out smaller than I expected, and for some reason, tiny things are naturally adorable. Plus, the new origami paper I bought last week is far prettier than the patterned ones I received from my grandmother (sorry, Grandma). I will say though, that the quality of the patterned ones is better. The paper is thicker and so doesn’t rip as easily as the plain ones. Also, shout out to Nikki over at Painting My Own Picture for letting me borrow her Sharpie for the bee. (Sorry if I used up all the ink!)

On the work day I took notes on the history of origami, and it was nice to take handwritten notes for once. I only have the opportunity to write them in German where our notes are taken by hand. No offense to my laptop, but I (low key) hate it with a burning passion. Frankly, it’s hard not to when it flashes the “Seizure-Inducing, Purple Screen of Death” every time I so much try to wake it up from sleep mode. I take notes on it for the majority of my classes, and while it’s certainly more efficient, time-wise, than taking notes by hand, I miss handwritten notes. The aesthetics and enjoyment level far surpass those of OneNote notes. I love taking notes in pen, but since I often mess up, the whole thing usually ends up coming out terribly. Overall, they look pretty good, though the timeline at the bottom isn’t very accurate in terms of sizes. However, since it was in pen, I figured I’d just work with it.

I seem to be stressed 24/7, and it’s probably not a good sign that the comic at the right is one of the most relatable things I’ve ever seen. It’s a pretty accurate representation of my life right now. I need to stop procrastinating, but for some reason, my brain would rather pretend that homework and projects are nonexistent. The knowledge that I have to do all this work stresses me out, so I put it in a box, pretend it doesn’t exist, and wait for it to later explode. It’s not a great cycle, and I’m trying to work on it. Of course, it’s hard to break any habit, so there hasn’t been a ton of improvement. This Genius Project is the only thing I willingly work on ahead of time, so at least there’s that, right? It helps that I actually like this project. I genuinely enjoy folding the origami and writing these blog posts. In fact, I probably enjoy it too much, because I keep spending all my time on this project instead of my other work. For example, this blog post ended up at a whopping 976 words. That's like an entire essay. Whoops. I’m going to end this now before I bore you all to death, though stay tuned for both the interview post as well as a gallery update with a new batch of origami.