This is me! Everywhere online at least. I saw this picture of the Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl at some point in early high school and loved the colors and shapes so much that I've used it as my universal pfp ever since. It's so vibrant (!) without having too much eye-strain.

Okay, now here's me (circa 2021) for real. I prefer sketching on paper, but the vibrancy (!!) and ease of digital coloring is definitely my preference for finishing pieces.

This one has a lot more detail. I wanted to really pull out all the stops on the photorealism here. My clothing preference is 1. Practical 2. Comfortable 3. Simple. Same goes for doodle style.

Speaking of drawing, I really started getting into it in middle school through anime and manga. The classic styles totally grabbed me, and Princess Jellyfish is one of the most memorable. This thing will do crazy stuff to your gender. We visited my mother's cousin in California once, and he bought me this volume at a bookstore there.

Going back a step, an elementary age grabber: the Eragon series. First, it courted me into an obsession with dragons and swords (this has not decreased), and second, with languages (this obsession has only increased). The author, Paolini, wrote this novel when he was 16 years old—which definitely shows in comparison to his later work—but it still blew my mind that somebody could do something so amazing at that age! He's an author inspiration for me, especially because of how carefully he designed his magic and language systems in this series.

Another round of thank-you's to Mr. Paolini because it gave me something to do with my dad at garage sales and Gem & Mineral Shows. I've been collecting "dragon eggs" for over a decade now. The white disc that the agate (cream and red) egg is sitting on is a shark vertebrae that I also got on my trip to see the Mom Cousin. The bird nest is real too! I haven't added very many recently, which I need to do something about.

Besides buying rocks together as a kid, I also occasionally did my dad's job for him. Not in a child labor way, but in a having fun running around outside opening fire hydrants and learning about water quality way. The open case in my doodle is full of a bunch of dissolvable crystals and chemicals to test oxygen concentration, temperature, etc. Lesson: please for the love of god whatever you do, do NOT touch the stream that flows by Bolton. We measured that site and the water is scientifically, verifiably, vomititiously Disgusting. Hats off to fecal coliform.

It was fun while it lasted, but I'm glad to be done with stream shit. I've found my niche as a psychhead. The Social Animal was a volume I found on my mother's bookshelf as a kid, and I absolutely devoured it. She studied psychology in college, so it's filled with all her marginalia too (and thus, here arises another passion of mine). One chapter addressed the Stanford Prison Experiment, which introduced the spectre of Philip Zimbardo to my young mind, where he lurked until high school AP Psychology rolled around. The man holds a baby quite unsafely in one of his educational videos, besides all his experimental ethics violations.

Following the bountiful path of a Zimbardo-critic, I have entered the realm of educational psychology! I've been working in Dr. Barger's (the guy on the right) lab since 2021, studying student motivation in elementary math learning contexts. It doesn't quite match up with my plans to teach high school English Lit, but it's still incredibly interesting. For the academically curious: you can see my presentation here, or read the entire paper here. I'll be back with new results at the Spring '24 symposium as well!!

Thank's for visting, and I hope you enjoy the rest of my projects on this site! I'm having a lot of fun making them ^_^