Braving Times Square: The Introvert Gets Involved

A whorl of chaotic colours, blacks and indigos, fluorescent yellows and oranges, pulsating at the edges of your eyes. A cacophony of shouts and honks drowning out the sound of your own breathing. The smell of greasy hotdogs, sunscreen, and cologne suffocating you. Arms and elbows and hands tangled with others as people nudge past you to get to one of the many fast food restaurants, shops, or stores stretching along either side. Times Square, a force with which to be reckoned in all its sights, scents, sounds, and touch. While some people can handle the hustle and bustle of this chaotic mass, others are overwhelmed by the amount of people, scents, and sounds crushing them and have to leave the vicinity from time to time to catch their breath. Similarly, after socializing with other people for a period of time, introverts need some “alone time” to recharge because they get drained from the activity. Some get drained after a couple of hours, others after several hours. But, what is an introvert?

Sports and Recreation at UofT: A Second Look

Like most U of T students, I’m proud to be one. People like to call us pretentious and I like to argue there’s a big difference between being pretentious and being justifiably proud. We boast top 20 spots on lists of the world’s best universities and I’m “sorry I’m not sorry” that gives me the warm fuzzies. While we excel as an institution overall, according to UniversityHub.ca (contributor to the Huffington Post), our sports and recreation programs are less well known. Clearly something’s wrong here. We have a wealth of sport and recreational facilities, services, activities — there’s a lot going on here! We have FOUR athletic centres (if you count Varsity Centre), FOURTY-FOUR men’s and women’s varsity teams, the ONLY Olympic-sized pool in the city, a wide variety of registered and free classes, drop-in recreation, a FANTASTIC, SUPER-AFFORDABLE sports clinic open to students, more playing fields than I’m aware of and SO, SO MUCH MORE.

A Doll’s Eye: To 2016 and Beyond

I pray I’ll be able to colour a doll’s eye by the end of the year—specifically, the eye of a Daruma doll. Last summer, when I went to Japan, I saw these dolls sitting on window sills everywhere, and when I asked my relative what they were, she called them Daruma dolls and explained that people used them as good luck talismans and goal motivators. You’d make a goal, colour one of the doll’s eyes in, complete your goal, then colour the other eye in.
A small Daruma doll on a table.
One of the smaller Daruma dolls!

Getting Paper: A UTFOLD Origami Experience

A large origami structure of Hello Kitty, with more colourful folded pieces in the shelves in the background. The Hello Kitty structure is made up of many many smaller folded pieces of paper stuck together to create the larger model.
An origami modular of Hello Kitty made by last year's UTFOLD team. Look how cute it is!! (please also note the Totoro model in the back). Photo source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/utfold/
As mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I’ve been meaning to check out UTFOLD for some time. I thought that it’d be cool to advance my paper-folding skills beyond paper airplanes (is that even considered origami???).