Better late than never

My second minimalist Cyclops white board art. 

I bought this cool dish in Germany and use it as a tea candle holder

After an intense day of school, I did some minor retail therapy in the form of some new Wisco basketball shorts and a Street Pulse, the newspaper sold by Madison homeless.

This MASSIVE icicle has been chilling outside my bedroom for months. It's so cool.

Nail polish, iPod, pizzaaaa, Nic Cage on a mug, and an issue of Nylon- my celebration after submitting an 8-page German midterm. 

Artsy Fartsy

 I am now beginning my experimental white board art phase. Here's minimalist Cyclops:

ZZZZZZZAPPP!

 The other week, I saw an amazing show by Astronautalis and Why? at the Sett. I couldn't pass up this limited show print poster! I even got Yoni Wolf and Astro to sign it :D

POW!

Current reading digs: Hawkeye by Matt Fraction. It's biting, exciting, and has funky art. I'm going through 4 issues a day atm. Finishing just means real-people reading, so I'm prolonging the last issue. 

Living Sitch Update

I've had quite the array of bizarre only-in-college living situations the last four years. First the dorms, with a roommate who spoke Thai and was not fond of me. Then was the closet in Bromansion 1 with 8 housemates, a shared sliding door wall, and no heater. Last year was kick ass living in my own arcade at Bromansion 2. It was 11 people total and I had a pool table in my room, a couch, a big comfy yellow chair, a porch, and two closets. I lived in a one bedroom with a bunk bed for 5 five months last semester, and now I'm in Buttercup, a closet with the bathroom down the hall and shotty electricity but overall fantastic. :]

This is Buttercup

I have my own crawl-in closet!

Behind that rack of cloths is a whole Ikea dresser. 

Tadaaa. It ain't a Rayna room without at least one X-Men poster.

Germany,  my grandfather's photograph, Toler's travel buddy, and Crego's 'r'

My pride and joys

And that's that!

Semester update

There at times during the year when everyone has their canned small talk responses down pat. We've just finished the "How was your break? What are you taking this semester?" phase and moving into the "How are classes going?" part of the year. I, personally, love small talk and hearing details about peoples' lives, so here's my beginning of the year update! 

My main job is the WUD Film Committee Director. I've been in this committee since freshman year, ranging from 'personal assistant' to Associate Director to Summer Coordinator and finally Director. I love the group of kids in this org and we're in the process of putting on another busy exciting semester of film programming. I also get to be a part of Directorate as a whole, along with all the other committee directors and presidents of the union. We're a really really attractive bunch. 

You know we're classy because it's in black and white

I also very recently got hired as a media assistant at the Instructional Media Center in Vilas. So far, working at the IMC kicks ass. There's no real set list of tasks for each day. I'm either running a screening for a comm arts class, checking out camera equipments and editing suites, running various engineering equipment all over the building, or rocking out to Spotify. I hope to be working there for the next year and a half. 

But wait, there's more! I rock out during my radio show at WSUM every Monday night from midnight to 1 am. My show concept is the first and last song from an album, and I'm really enjoying it. I want to give people a taste of an album as a whole, because in the modern era, I feel like people rarely purchase a whole album and stick to just the radio single, or forget to ever listen with shuffle off. (I know I used to be guilty of that second one). Besides, I absolutely love when the first and last songs correlate and are perfect bookends (See The Way Out by the Books and Mirrored by Battles). Here's my show site: http://wsum.org/shows/Monday/2400/start-and-finish/

Now that I don't have that pain of a 3-hour Wednesday night class, I can make AHA meetings again. We're the UW Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics, and the only secular student group on campus! Last week's discussion centered on whether you can reconcile being religious and being scientific. I love how tangential and serious and funny we can be.

Can you spot me? 

Improv is still going. We've got a show this Friday, actually! I had to miss our first shows of the semester due to being away for Sundance, but I'm really looking forward to performing again. The has changed, with Ethan graduated and Emilio back from studying abroad, so I wonder if our style/humor will change again.

Class wise, I'm taking a 600 level German seminar 2.5 hours once a week about Literatur, Kultur, und Migration, a comm arts class about the history of documentary film, and an education policies class about school and society, and an ed psych class about adolescents and development, along with my practicum student teaching out in the field twice a week. My first lesson plans are due on Wednesday :3  Very exciting. Very busy.

Winter Break

I'm rarely in my hometown anymore since going to school ~9 hours away, but when I am home for break I love catching up with friends and seeing my family's beautiful crazy faces. I found this pics (mostly from driving through Chicago) on my computer that I never uploaded from winter break!

Billboard outside a synagogue. They know what we (Jews) want.

Despite having a normal-ish digital camera, I caught this cool shot through the puka shells of the Chicago skyline. 

The Leaning Tower of Pisa! ... in Chicago.

Family trip to the Toledo Zoo for the Lights before Christmas. They had one of the biggest and best Christmas trees in the country!

At the entrance. I love polar bears

ANDREA WATCH YOURSELF!

Bright lights

Oh heyyy

Family photo

Sundancing

Now, I'm going to have a mega post on this later I'm sure, but I wanted to photo dump what I took while at the Sundance Film Festival this past weekend! I was lucky enough to travel there with a bunch of really great people from the WUD Film Committee and had the time of my life. 27 films and 5 hours of sleep over 3 days. It was such a whirlwind, but all my planning paid off and everything happened without a hitch. I can't wait to bring back some of these films to Madison.

There's a bro version of this pic, but I gotta get it from Bess ;] 

One of the sponsors had a photobooth set up with props. Tom and I went for 1) American Gothic 2) trees as guitars 3) climb them 4) throw trees at camera. Phil and I were just confused as when the pictures were even being taken XD 

Pow. Iconic

The director of my favorite U.S. Dramatic film, Concussion, at the Q&A following the screening. I got to speak with her afterwards and tell her how much I loved the film!

Two of the actors from Concussion

So this is what a Sundance screening typically looks like. Here's the screenwriter/director and two producers of Newlyweeds during their Q&A.

The Newlyweeds director who I'm totally in love with. He said he'd love to come to Madison with the film!

Part of the WUD Film member description: giving MUBA members back walks as they please.

Park City at night.

The two directors of the doc Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer

Jason and I saw so many films at the Holiday Theatre!

Prepping box office requests at the house one night 

We haven't even taxied out of the runway, and Huppert was asleep. (In his defense, it was 6 am and we hadn't slept for  >26 hours).

Ich bin Lehrerin? Wowza Dowza

If you don't already know, I would love to be a high school German teacher one day. Who knows what path I'll take to get there, but right now I have the pleasure of student teaching at Leopold Elementary school in Madison. Last semester I helped out with a 2nd grade dual language immersion classroom with hands down the most lovely, funny, caring group of kids I've ever met. I used to not be able to stand young kids, but they just cling to you so quickly, you can't really help it! My amazing amazing mentor teacher sent me a couple pictures she took of us in the classroom, and I thought they were pretty cute.

Lizbeth and I working on some math

The gang! So many things in this picture crack me up 

I just started a new semester at Leopold last Monday. Now I'm in a 4th grade and 5th grade classroom, and I'll be teaching for 45 minutes in each every Monday and Wednesday starting in one week. I still have so much to think about in terms of lesson planning. Should the students call me Frauline Rayna? How much Deutsch is too much Deutsch? There are so many questions, and I think the only way I can tackle this thing is to just dive right in. I'll be with them until June, and some of the kids have specifically requested German because they want to take it in middle school, which makes me really happy.