During the school year my calendar tends to look like a colorful array of meetings, classes and lunches. During winter break I have an imaginary excuse to stop paying attention to email, affairs and work and my calendar miraculously clears out to look more like this.

It’s totally awesome.

I’m a busy person. I like to have things to do and frankly, I’m really really bad at sitting still. I’ve filled my winter break days working on little projects and completing the hundred tasks that piled up during the semester. I also found plenty of time to hang out with friends, most of whom get pushed aside in favor of doing school work.

In grad school we get plenty of opportunity to have great conversations with smart people. That’s kind of the point of being there. I was missing that for the first part of break, and lately I’ve been filling the void by meeting up with friends and having other great conversations about design, art, life and other. It’s a great thing to take a break from your work and grab a coffee with someone who might have the answer to the problem you’ve spent all day trying to solve; it’s a nice reminder of the importance of getting outside of our own heads when working on a project.

I wish I had time for stuff like this every week, but school starts back tomorrow and soon enough I’ll be blissfully buried in colorful calendar-land again. Hooray!