I wasn’t going to write one of these this year. I wasn’t sure what the point was, normally they’re a list of accomplishments, places I went, projects I worked on, events I planned. But I feel like I didn’t do anything this year. It was a year that felt more like college, with long days that melded together into walks and work sessions. I loved it, but it also lacked the intensity that usually pumps through the months. As I started writing this though, it was surprisingly easy to fill, even without my usual go-tos like travel filling it in.
Okay, I did hop around the east coast a bit. In January I went up to Montreal for Synchrony once again. I spent the trip up making a PICO-8 sketch of the snow falling around our train up north.
Later, in February, I went up to Pennsylvania to volunteer as a performer for a LARP for the first time. I played an animal, a cult member taking part in a sacrifice that included biting into a giant cake heart (that everyone was touching, so much for that world), and played a hellhound bringing people back to a mystery portal in the middle of a field. We camped and hiked and took day-trips to Wawa for lunch.
My last trip was to Nashville Tennessee for a library conference. I loved it, library conferences are much less vendor-focused than ed-tech ones. I got a suitcase full of free books that I’m still reading my way through. My co-worker and I stayed in cool Airbnbs and found our way to a speakeasy inside an old phone booth. I had never been to Nashville, but thought it was like a cool weird Disney land with great food and incredible music around every corner.
Afterwards I headed down to Florida to see my grandparents for a week, and then went back to New York... and didn’t go anywhere for the rest of the year. A couple weeks after I got back to my Brooklyn apartment I packed a bag and headed upstate for the next three months to play animal crossing and hang out with my parents and dog.
When schools shut down, a couple things happened. First, we put our school product available online for free. Second, I started a coding club for kids who were home from school. I met with kids for an hour twice a week, and really saw them grow and experiment with code. It grew to a few hundred kids each week, all meeting up to code along and share their work. I was able to get a better feel for how teachers used our product, and was able to test out project ideas live. It was such a joy, and my favorite part of my job during that time.
I co-organized Livecoding in Space at the start of shutdown. It was a day of workshops and an evening algorave that was originally going to take place at the Kennedy Center. I made the website, ran the lineup, and managed the Twitch stream the whole day, and somehow got a p5 workshop and performance livecoding visuals to a series of poets in there at the same time. It was wild, super fun, and I’m really glad I did it.
I continued the Twitch streak performing with musicians at sPaCYcLoUd Livecode Thursdays, bringing in what I was learning at monthly shaders workshops. Working in GLSL was a completely different experience than working with Hydra, I was much more limited with a much higher chance of things going wrong. I moved more slowly, and was really able to get lost in the performances in a way I hadn’t before.
Back in New York City in the summer, everything was boarded up. Bars had tables outside, and people were in scattered groups around Astor Place. We went out one night on St. Marks and bought pre-bottled drinks from a place that had once been an impossible to get into bar. Cop cars were driving up and down the street announcing for us to stay apart on their loudspeakers. The whole thing felt very apocalyptic. We played tennis in courts without nets, with piles of leaves that no one had cleaned up since all the parks were technically still closed. I spent time walking around Manhattan and Brooklyn, more than I ever did before. I walked 13 miles to the dentist and back, walked over the Williamsburg bridge over and over again. I met up with friends to practice skateboarding, I walked up to the Williamsburg park for a picnic with friends, I walked to Bushwick for the same. I got better at electric unicycling and did yoga in different parks staring at the trees. And when I settled back into my Bed Stuy apartment John would come over every weekend and we’d cook and get work done. I’ve never been happier in my life.
I got much better at painting this year, which is something I had wanted to experiment more with for a while. I finally understand the difference between supplies and the benefits of good paper and brushes. I took part in virtual figure drawing sessions and around the world painting lessons.
I did a lot of figure drawing this year, most of it was online. My favorite, however, was at a place called Outerspace in Brooklyn. It was an hour walk from my apartment, and I loved the walk there through Bushwick and back. I went a few times, sometimes walking back in the dark past the largest church in Brooklyn, sometimes grabbing food in one of my favorite parts of the city and taking an uber after. Figure drawing online gave me the space (literally, usually I’d be too close to other people to have them out) to start experimenting with paints, something that followed my practice throughout the year.
In March, my friend who’s an elementary school art teacher started posting her prompts for her class online, which was an awesome first way to get back into traditional sketchbooking on the floor of my bedroom upstate. Above are some of the elementary-school art prompts that kept me occupied this Spring.
I also followed along with someone I had followed on Instagram, Travel Write Draw. The whole thing was definitely a bit out of my comfort zone, my sketchbooks tend to skew stranger and she comes from the fashion world, but I had always wanted to paint more and took part. The paintings above are in the order I did them, I think I got a lot better as we went through. The places are in order: Rome, Marrakesh, Capri, Cartagena, the Serengeti, and Paris at Christmastime.
Over the summer I took part in Arsiliath’s Intro to Biological Simulation with Compute Shaders. The above are some of the experiments from the class. I read math papers and implemented them for the first time.
I applied to grad school, which took up most of my free time and energy this fall. Nothing to share here yet, I’ll know what’s up around March/April. I took the GREs as well, and did surprisingly well given I haven’t taken a test in about a decade.
I’m heading out to Mars now, a remote spot in Southern California, to wait out the winter and try and make the most out of a weird quarantine world. I wonder if this should be longer or more interesting, end in bullets of things I can feel proud of from my 20′s. I don’t know. When you come back to this 2021 Leandra, I hope you’re happy and have finally found your footing in a world that feels like it’s constantly trying to drown you with the next wave.
gummygunk
2087
turnnoffyourmind
stormborns