My partner was a junior named Matt Bow. Matt told me the story of when he was at his hometown of Santa Cruz Christmas 2017 when he and a friend of his made a table from scratch to use to play drinking games. I told Matt a story from Christmas 2013 when I gave my then 14-year-old cousin GTA V. Our alternate tellings came down to this: Instead of building a table, Matt and his friend were camping on the beach, and instead of giving my cousin GTA V for Christmas, we lit up fireworks together for some reason.
The purpose of this was to create a model of anything featured in our made up stories. Matt decided to make a rocket, while I made a tent. However, as soon as we got to getting our accessories to make our models, this is when I felt uncomfortable. We had many things to work with, from multicolored sheets of paper, aluminum foil, many markers, post-it notes, stickers, you name it. The thing is, I'm no artist. I wish I could draw well. I definitely would call myself a visionary. If I did have a talent for drawing I could create some amazing, unique and detailed stuff. But that's only in a parallel universe where I have artistic merit and see beauty in everything.
Here is the amazing rocket that Matt made using his spare soda can that he brought with to class:
He even used a marker as the thing at the end that sets it off!
By comparison, here is my shoddily made tent that is just three post-it notes glued together:
Wow. Just wow. An autistic 12 year old on Deviant art could make something on MS Paint with twice the effort as this right here.
Perhaps I could've put in more effort. I mean, I tried to cut out a doorway for the tent but found out that I had too much trouble sticking it together with glue. Maybe I was held back by time pressure. As all the other students were building their stuff with simple arts and crafts tools like they were 2nd graders, I was sitting there confused thinking "What should I do?" or "Why are we doing this?" or "Is this why I enrolled in this class?" I will admit, I was not prepared for something like this and when I was hit with it, I couldn't figure out how to deal with it. But at least I did find a way, even if it was the bare minimum. At least my classmates complemented my tent, but probably because they didn't want to make me feel bad. Or more likely, they were impressed how little effort it took to make what I made.
Luckily, these were just prototypes, so I guess there was a reason why they liked it so far. It's clearly still unfinished but if I knew that I was going to expand on it in the future, I probably would've asked other people what I could do to improve my work to make it look like it had effort put into it. Based off of what I've learned in this little activity, I feel as if my next step would be to expand on it. Since my post-it note tent is only a miniature prototype, I'd probably make a slightly larger version using colored paper sheets and use toothpicks to support it. Maybe I'd attack something like yarn to use as the tent entrance. If we get to work on these again next class, I'll be sure to do it again soon!
As a bonus, here are all the crafts the class made that night!
