Just a beautiful life

Like I promised, here are more pages from my sketchbook!!

Kindly, ignore my chipped nail polish...

More to come at the next post...so stay tuned!

In the meanwhile, you may want to know what I've been doing with my life.

Or you may not...

If you don't..well too bad because I'm going to tell you anyway....

I've been enrolled in an Oral Communications class at the University of New Orleans, and at first I was incredibly pumped; I mean here I am a high school junior embarking on my first college course, right?

However, the class, thankfully only once a week, has made me dread Mondays now; more precisely dread Monday evenings from 4 to 6:30 pm. Two and a half hours of a "public speaking" professor mumbling about how politicians manipulate us and how if a car ad claims that you only have to pay $699 for 6 months you're supposed to be like "Well how much after that?!"

That last part is an example of how "critical listening" helps us avoid real world problems.
My only "real world" problem is that my days and my workload are beginning to take on this inverse relationship: my days get shorter and shorter and my workload gets larger and larger.

I'm sure my prffessor is actually a great person; he's doing his disertation on a political science realted topic!! I just wish he taught us from the book, Public Speaking :Building Competency in Stages by Sherry Ferguson which is actually a very thorough and informative text. (Thank goodness for Amazon.com, I paid only about $8.00 including Shipping&Handling for the $90 textbook!)

That being said, my life isn't entirely monotonous...Just two weeks ago I tried out for the New Orleans Bhangra Club and made the team! Bhangra, by the way, is an Indian folk dance which originated in Punjab among farmers celebrating the arrival of the harvest season. It is marked by upbeat music and lively, bouncy dance moves.

It certainly isn't like Bharatanatyam, the Indian classical dance I've been learning for about 7 years, which is very linear and requires a stiffly held majestic upper body, but it is fulfilling nonetheless. Our bhangra coach, Venky, is so down-to-earth (even though he's like 6 feet tall) and easygoing so I look forward to bhangra practice every week.

Bharatanatyam is my passion, my work, my play, and bhangra is pure fun. THANK GOODNESS FOR DANCE!!!

This video of the Bhangra Empire, one of the many really really talented bhangra groups all over the world, will surely make you fall in love with the dance form: