to all the teachers

i can't teach you how to teach

the first unreal scene i made

i’m not sitting in class to hear you read the textbook

for you to repeat the youtube tutorials 

to write 100 word responses to a discussion board.

i’m here to hear your experiences of navigating the lost lands

your tales and stories of scaling the mountains 

what you wish you knew and what you’ve taken back

that time you almost gave up

that lost pathway you found

that workaround you made

i’m here to learn how you learned 

i’m here to see how you saw

i’m here to hear how you scaled the mountains

so i can too

---

what i’ve been up to

• a couple days ago i had a dream that my late high school track coach smiled at me and said ‘nancy you can do it!’ and i got out of bed crying. earlier this year my creative writing teacher reminded me of my sixth grade teacher and i started sobbing in class. there’s so few times you have teachers like this come into your life and i feel like these days i search for a sort of high when i pick classes. sometimes i don’t think you need someone to walk you through step by step but just someone to motivate you to and share their stories of how they got through just what you want to do.

• i watched spare parts last weekend and it was absolutely incredible. it’s about a team of four undocumented mexican high school students who compete in an underwater robotics competition using spare parts they find for cheap and beating mit. it takes place in phoenix and is a real story. they continue to beat mit in years following. the portrayal of mit in the film is so funny

the real students + prof the story is based on and the writer + director!

• i went to a hispanic heritage event last weekend as part of my art fellowship and heard from this poet alberto rios and his words just cut into me so deep

• i went to sit in on a puppeteering class today and the guest speaker tom lee was just so incredible. what really stuck with me was the idea that puppets feel more real because we bring them to life.

  “with a puppet dying, it’s more real because the puppet is already dead. it’s only when a puppet brings it to life that and when you see the life removed that it’s really painful”

  we also made paper puppets

• ive been learning touchdesigner and houdini and it was really really rough first few weeks and felt super helpless like i was trying to speak words without knowing the alphabet, but im finally starting to get it and i feel powerful. here’s the first dumb thing i made in touchdesigner

also from alberto rios

• i found a lychee mead made by a viking themed brewery that i hope to one day go to a two hours away from phoenix. you drink the mead out of a horn!

• i made soy milk and cashew milk this week and then i realized a lot of things are beans plus water… red bean soup is red bean and water. almond milk is almond and water. oat milk is oat and water. tofu is just soy bean and water and another special powder. and then i started to realize things are just simpler once you understand what it is. once you understand each ingredient everything becomes easy. just like you don’t learn to cook in one day, you don’t learn a language or a software in a day, it takes years to learn each part and seeing them more makes everything easier

• i got a pet basil plant and he’s always misbehaving. some days he falls down and other days he withers out of thirst or not enough sun. he’s very moody but i’m slowly learning what he likes. it occurred to me that my prospect of one day being a cat mom let alone a human mom are slimming if i can’t even keep a basil alive

  

• i discovered there’s a sticker machine that does dye cut stickers in my building >:) so stickers coming soon. there’s also a lot of 3d printers that i’ve figured out how to use so more to come

<3 thanks for reading!!