Reileen van Kaile

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Established in 1977 or so, Branko's is a family-owned sandwich stop just off of Fullerton, near DePaul University. It's run by a Macedonian couple who are super-nice and super-courteous. The food is standard American sandwich shop fare, affordably priced, but they make it nice and hot and serve it to you with a smile. It's excellent comfort food, and in fact I'm sitting here typing this entry while eating some fried cheese sticks that I got from there.

I started going there in my sophomore year because I kept on passing by it on my way to the art building. Its proximity made it ideal for me to pop in during a studio class break, get some minor eats, and pop back out to get back to class. Recently, I've begun stopping by the place after classes to get food to-go that I then eat at the school cafeteria while sitting with friends. Mr. and Mrs. Branko both know me by face now and have learned what my usual orders are (either cheese sticks or a regular hot dog with ketchup only and a side of fries, plus Mountain Dew), and so I sometimes get minor discounts for being a regular customer.

All in all, the food is good, but it's the service and comfortable intimacy of the small sandwich shop that makes Branko's a regular stop for me.

***

I'd wanted to finish up an ART224 project that's due tomorrow before going to ART113 later tonight, but the lab times are from 6-10pm. Which kind of fails considering that I have ART113 from 6-8:40pm. But since ART113 is a studio day today, I may possibly get away with leaving early to do stuff for ART224, since I don't foresee that the main part of my ART113 project is going to take too long. On the other hand, I could just do it during ART260 tomorrow (since I think that's another studio day). Decisions, decisions.

Two book reviews to go up soon. There are also some thinky thoughts that have been swimming around in my head about the consumption of music/film/books vs. the consumption of visual art and what that means for an artist trying to expand her horizons, and about my place as a second-generation Filipino-American and exploring the boundaries of where I'm Filipino and where I'm American, but I need to (attempt to) study for my ART237 midterm on Thursday as well as pull together something more coherent, so those will have to wait until I find more brain cells.

Also, Borders performance on Friday! Old friends may possibly accompany me again so I'm not so alone, though I do have a friend from college who wants a looksee. I think I had a working setlist floating around somewhere but hell if I can find it in my room (which, not surprisingly, is kind of a mess again!).

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I actually have a number of LJs. My oldest one is almost 10 years old by this point - I got it when LJ was still invite-only, in 2001. IIRC, my first LJ entry in that particular LJ was about school and grades. I discovered while re-reading both my old digital journals and my old dead-tree journals that I bitched about school and grades a lot. What can I say, I had a boring life. I might've rambled on a bit about anime, too.

My first entry in reileen was basically a faux-contemplative thing about why I chose the name "Reileen" and about where I was at that point in my life, which was...not really in a very good place. Better than some, worse than I would've liked.

***

Skipped ART227 today in favor of taking an early nap (about 8:30am to 10:15am) before working on my poster mockups for ART264 later tonight. I'm slowly getting used to Illustrator, and am beginning to see why people would like using it, especially for layout and logo design. Because it's vector-based as opposed to pixel-based like Photoshop, it's easier not only to get smoother lines, but also easier to resize things if you decide that you fucked up on something. And it just feels...more organized, somehow. I can't imagine using Illustrator solely for - lulz - illustrating, though. I might try experimenting with doing outlines in Illustrator and then importing those over into Photoshop, especially because Illustrator has that miter thingamabobber thingy that lets you get points on all your sharp corners, which I've always had to add by hand when doing outlines in Photoshop. I think I need to get my hands on an Adobe Illustrator CS3 bible or someshit, to get more familiar with all the doodads and thingamajigs in this program. I've become quite competent with the Pen tool and its crazy Paths over the past few years, so I think I should do fine in picking up Illustrator over my time as an A&D major and then applying it to other stuff (work, play, in-between).

I still have no idea what the fuck is going on in HAA115, but I'm going to have to do some early research on the three-eyed hairerection-sporting deity statue. The professor hasn't handed out, like, an official outline sheet for this paper or anything, but the paper is due May 8th, which is, uh, the day of ACEN! Yeah. So I might as well get familiar with some general stuff. In the meantime, I suppose none of y'all out there would be able to help me out on making sense of the history of ancient Indian art, would you?

I'm going to need to start going to bed earlier on Mondays and Wednesdays; taking a nap in the library is good for a decent recharging of the biological battery, but it's not exactly the most comfortable thing in the world, and I could be using that time to work on homework, or at least to get my urge to dick around on the Internet out of my system before I start being productive.

***

I've suddenly been trampled by a bunch of hangout plans. First up is the Vienna Teng performance at Schuba's Tavern this Friday, which I'll be attending with lysis_to_kill, Lauren, and Melissa. Before that, we'll be eating out (probably at Clarke's Diner), and then after that we'll be crashing at lysis_to_kill's apartment overnight. I might have to bail out early, though, because I need to get homework done and then do Artist Alley stuff which I still have not started WTF. D:

Then there's ACEN from May 8 to May 10. The crew this time 'round consists of myself, Lauren, Melissa, lysis_to_kill, Melissa's friend Susan, and Susan's friend, all crammed into a four-person bedroom at the Crowne Plaza. All of us are flailing around a bit as we're ironing the wrinkles out of plans for things to bring, when we'll be checking in, et cetera and so forth. This has the distinction of being lysis_to_kill's first ever anime convention, so I imagine that the vets in the group will all have fun playing "horrify the anime convention n00b" with her. :D! (Also, Liz, if you want, I'll lend you the first five volumes of a manga called Death Note. You may like it - it's got serial killers, the FBI, and other such things, but with a supernatural twist. Also, the art is purtyful.)

And then finally, it seems that there are plans in the air amongst Lauren, Melissa, and others to go on a weekend Las Vegas trip over the summer, since the prices there have dropped to ridonkulously low levels and airfare is also dirt-cheap. Now this should be interesting if we can get this off the ground!

***

Random: I freakin' want Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels.

-Reileen
it seems that the whole experience is terrible and crippling