Week 2: Famous Last Words

For the second week’s last words, I want to re-cap on what I have accomplished this past week:

Reading for this week:

This week I completed the Ramayana – it was a very good read and I just could not put it down. The Ramayana was an excellent epic, and I recommend it to everyone. It is a very short read (like 200 pages), and gives a good peak into Indian literature. It really inspired me artistically, and I am now in the process of designing a piece based off the way Rama described Sita as a pretty lotus flower (a quilled lotus has a lot of potential!).

Best writing for this week:

I wrote a twist on the section in the Ramayana where Rama and Sita first meet. In the original story, Sita is made out to be a lustful woman who goes ill because is so infatuated with Rama. I think descriptions like this really put down women – she was portrayed a weak and silly, not to mention the way her father basically treats her as property (any man who can string the bow of Shiva gets to marry Sita – how romantic). It is not uncommon in older literature to find pieces like this that do not give women the credit they deserve – so I think putting a little modern twist on it was just the oomph it needed to become a great story.

Other classes:

In my petroleum engineering classes, things are really starting to get serious. In capstone, we are narrowing down our prospective field locations and gathering data. Improved Recovery is turning out to be a really interesting course – we are learning more about waterflooding and how different things on the macroscopic and microscopic levels can affect waterflooding efficiency.

Outside of school:

Other than schoolwork, I haven’t been doing too much. I am in the design mode for most of my art projects. That consists of me finding inspiration in literature or on Pinterest (I have ‘liked’ thousands and thousands of pins). It is really important for me to set time aside to be creative, and I really love the design time because I just let loose and try out all these crazy ideas. Like I said before, I am really inspired by the Ramayana. I was between doing an elephant or a lotus. An elephant may have to happen later on because it has so many possibilities – in some pieces they “filled” the elephant with flowers or other types of designs. Here is a nice example of that, with a link to a tutorial:

A picture of a quilled elephant. (Source)