I have been listening to this song about Bob Ross, who happens to be one of my two favorite artists (Turner is the other one). This song reminds me of why I picked Turner's work to imitate for my painting class, and why I spent so much time into it—that sense of endlessness and that a piece of art can express what words cannot. I see art sometimes as a drudgery (after all, I only painted decently on my still life picture because I sat behind a perfectionist that made me feel bad), but maybe I have been going about it the wrong way.
A long time ago, I drew because I liked it—so much I dreamed of becoming an artist. Coming from a family of pragmatists who could not understand anything except academics (I mean this not as an insult, but my parents never even signed me up for the stereotypical music classes because they were hopeless in that field), this was not much of a dream at all. I never knew what my parents wanted me to be when I was young. I don't think any of us looked that far.
Somewhere in elementary school, drawing became a chore. It was a class, after all, and when people like your art they want more and you feel like you can't let them down. One of my classmates was really good at horses, and I tried to learn her style, and when my classmates asked me to draw a horse picture for her I was absolutely mortified.
I never quite did this with writing—maybe I have been influenced subconsciously but I never set out to copy someone else's style. I write from my heart, but I haven't drawn from my heart very often lately.
I drew a picture of what I thought Veronica's character in D&D would look like (she is a grey elf ranger), and it's one of my best drawings lately (in terms of anatomically correctness and expression). But what I really want to do is draw the pictures that haunt my mind, the same way I put them to words. I want to draw that void where the wind blows through, and the grass flows like sand.
I want to paint that quaint town nightscape, with the lanterns glowing faintly under a hazy sky, set against towering rugged mountains. I want to hear the stories from my art.
And maybe it is true, maybe every day is a good day when you paint.
. . .
I had completely forgotten when I gave Sam her nickname how ironic that would be, but this time I want to talk about the real Sam. I am—I won't lie—quite infatuated with him. What started out as simple gaming buddies turned into quite a fiasco. (And talk about a fiasco—Cain, who quite the benign Youtube-watching, Facebook-lurking guy, has now become a fanatic LoL addict on the verge of becoming a rager too.) I'm finding myself logged in to a particular place not for any other purpose but to catch him online—and on his end, I know he's been pretty much glued to his computer to chat with me when he has lots of other things going on (eating, for example).
I know Khajiit has taken this nonchalantly—even with a bit of joking encouragement—but I wonder if that is really how he thinks. Obviously, I don't want this to turn out like how it did with Yuma and I, and Khajiit and I have completely different rules when it comes to stuff like this, but, well, I still have to ask.
Does it count as cheating if I really, really like to spend time with someone more so than I normally would anyone else? If so, is Khajiit really okay with it? And if not, can I keep it this way—just really good friends—because it's pretty nice the way it is now.
Sometimes I feel a bit silly. Sometimes I wish I weren't so flippant with regards to such serious stuff—and yet, I think I have been this way ever since kindergarten when I decided I had a crush on two cute boys in my class. What can I say? I have always matured faster in romantic-attractions more so than my actual maturity.
. . .
Alas, I am hungry again. Must set out for food.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Monday, July 2, 2012
And Who Can Say Why Your Heart Cries
Last week, Dray emailed me for the first time in two years.
Looking back on it, the whole ordeal was ridiculous. I had taken something small and completely blown it out of proportion (and even now, I tend to do that, but perhaps not to such an extent). We still have quite a lot to talk about, even to this day, even after all this time, and perhaps he hasn't changed at all. He is still that hit-on-all-the-girls type of guy. I am.
Well, whatever I am now.
Lately, this blog has been more about my relationships than it has been about anything else. In some ways, it has been inevitable (it's not gossip if no one knows what or who you're talking about). I could write about my university life, but somehow it's less interesting to write about and much more interesting to live it out. I have had so many fun moments (like tonight's outing to see fireworks and have ice cream), but they don't translate to words as well as I thought they would.
My last few stories are all about Nick and Katie, and that is rather morbid to think about.
The same dead Nick Haverford.
In fact the very title, On the Other Side of Saturday, is the same I have chosen for a variety of stories, albeit not all about Katie and Nick.
Some nights, I lie in my bed and I can hardly believe that Yuma and I were once in a relationship. I think about him and I cringe, although I don't know why. Khajiit and I do not have a perfect relationship, but it is such a wholly different dynamic that I can hardly imagine life now any other way.
It is so unfair, isn't it? I broke such a nice boy's heart and I get to go into another nice boy's arms. If there is one thing I could change in my and Yuma's relationship, it would have to be ending it earlier, before I got to hurt him more.
But that's the past.
Tomorrow evening, Khajiit will be boarding the creepy van to Islandtown. In a month, I will be moving into our shared apartment. Last year, when I had him promise to room with me in the fall, I thought we would just be two good friends sharing an apartment. Things sure have changed a lot.
In my latest version of the story, Joss Ritchell saves Katie from her visions of Nick. Would it be fair to say Khajiit is my Joss? In dealing with our various mental health issues, perhaps that is not too far-fetched.
Looking back on it, the whole ordeal was ridiculous. I had taken something small and completely blown it out of proportion (and even now, I tend to do that, but perhaps not to such an extent). We still have quite a lot to talk about, even to this day, even after all this time, and perhaps he hasn't changed at all. He is still that hit-on-all-the-girls type of guy. I am.
Well, whatever I am now.
Lately, this blog has been more about my relationships than it has been about anything else. In some ways, it has been inevitable (it's not gossip if no one knows what or who you're talking about). I could write about my university life, but somehow it's less interesting to write about and much more interesting to live it out. I have had so many fun moments (like tonight's outing to see fireworks and have ice cream), but they don't translate to words as well as I thought they would.
My last few stories are all about Nick and Katie, and that is rather morbid to think about.
Katie Scarlett stood on the half-shielded balcony, where the rain touched her bare legs. She looked over the moss-covered steps leading up to the door. A few days ago, she had almost slipped on those steps, and Nick had held out his arm to catch her.This exact scene I have written about numerous times, but from different time frames. The same steps. The same slippery moss. The same drizzling rain.
The same dead Nick Haverford.
In fact the very title, On the Other Side of Saturday, is the same I have chosen for a variety of stories, albeit not all about Katie and Nick.
Some nights, I lie in my bed and I can hardly believe that Yuma and I were once in a relationship. I think about him and I cringe, although I don't know why. Khajiit and I do not have a perfect relationship, but it is such a wholly different dynamic that I can hardly imagine life now any other way.
It is so unfair, isn't it? I broke such a nice boy's heart and I get to go into another nice boy's arms. If there is one thing I could change in my and Yuma's relationship, it would have to be ending it earlier, before I got to hurt him more.
But that's the past.
Tomorrow evening, Khajiit will be boarding the creepy van to Islandtown. In a month, I will be moving into our shared apartment. Last year, when I had him promise to room with me in the fall, I thought we would just be two good friends sharing an apartment. Things sure have changed a lot.
In my latest version of the story, Joss Ritchell saves Katie from her visions of Nick. Would it be fair to say Khajiit is my Joss? In dealing with our various mental health issues, perhaps that is not too far-fetched.
Joss suddenly stood up, walked over, and pulled one of the gardenias out. He took his pocket knife, slit his thumb, and let the blood drip down onto the petals.
Everyone watched as the blood rolled cleanly off the petals, without leaving a stain.Or maybe I should just sleep.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Push Or Knock; Or Roundabout Gone
Some things I wish I felt more comfortable talking about, out of principle, because I know part of my inability to talk about them stems from a societal prejudice: my mental state, sex, and my inner dialogues. One of my favorite bloggers of late, The Bloggess, does all of these perfectly, so if I were completely honest with myself it's not just societal prejudice but also me.
Then again, how many of us are brave enough to talk about sex in a public forum?
The other two are harder to write about, for me, but they are easier to hint at. To skirt around the edges, like in Fragonard's The Swing, which I drew once as a book cover for my French textbook. Both rococo and romanticism I learned from my European history class from sophomore year.
The other thing I remember from sophomore year was a hazy mix of staring out windows and anonymous crowds rushing past. I wrote about it a lot before, things I kept locked up in the depths of my laptop and hid for two years before I showed some of them to Yuma.
. . .
There is an old Chinese legend (one thing the Chinese have no lacking of) that a poet, late at night, could not decide whether to use "push" or "knock" in his poem to describe his character's internal battle when opening the door.
These days, the two words together mean deliberation.
When I was younger, around seven or eight, I always wondered how people remembered all of these proverbs and legends and folk lores and idioms. It wasn't merely enough to know a saying, you had to know the story behind it too. There were entire books dedicated to the formal four-word proverbs and their origins that schoolchildren my age were required to know.
That, added to the pictorial nature of Chinese words, and you have to wonder: why is it not fading away in favor of something much easier to learn?
I like to cite the poetic nature of it—because, to me, no language is better suited for poetry as Chinese is—down to each word imbued with meaning, but who am I to say? I am neither a poet nor am I a proficient writer of Chinese.
. . .
Khajiit says the younger generation of French people are slowly abandoning the rigid structures their language imposes upon them in favor of their own blend of French. What the equivalent would be for Chinese I do not know, but I hope it does not happen.
Because it is a language of thousands of years' worth of stories, legends, and lore, and there is a part of me that finds peace in allegories.
. . .
Writing for many people is ultimately a cathartic process. Haruki Murakami speaks of writing as a poison, and writing to overcome that poison. Natalie Goldberg believes you should write "what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about." Tim O'Brien uses his writing of a fictitious yet real world to make sense of the absurd yet very real world he had to live in. Andre Aciman repeatedly writes about place as a cover to what he really wants to write about.
For me, writing is about making sense of the past. It is about digging up what I have buried in the past—what I have been afraid to face—and putting them in front of me to finally digest after all this time.
I have been told many times, by many people, that I do not have the courage to face reality. That I am weak, that I do not have the determination. Writing is a cheap alternative, a way to pacify those claims without having to make any painful progress. I can say that writing has helped me to name my demons, but in the end, didn't Seymour Glass still shoot himself? How far can you go with writing when your demon is reality itself?
. . .
It is now six in the morning. This far north, the sun has already risen, although I wouldn't know sitting here in the basement of the tallest building on campus. I woke up yesterday morning at 8:25AM, with ten minutes to spare for my morning class, and with an apathy that has set in lately, told myself it didn't matter and fell back to sleep. The next time I woke up—fully, truly awake—it was already getting dark.
On the bus from New York, I thought about how I used to tie myself to the road. The music I listen to, the colors I love, they all have one trait in common: they're hollow. This emptiness inspired historical fictions, with Vermont and their Green Mountain Boys being my favorite, although any road could evoke endless stretches of fields and the nonchalant wind mussing up my hair.
This is my American dream. The loneliness is only a requisite.
For some people, a vacation is a relaxing break, and when they get back from their far-fetched locations they can settle down and work another half year in their fascinating fields. I am from a family fueled by wanderlust—my father, who cannot settle in any one place for long, no matter how tempting the place; or my mother, who takes to trips as other people take to hobbies.
I can stay in one place for a very, very long time if I had to, and if it were the only option in front of me. I would be okay with an entire year without vacations if it meant a regular schedule and the expectation that this is it. But once I am on the road, no amount of travelling will satisfy me. I have been on day-long trips, and week-long trips, and month-long trips, and it is all the same. If I start, I cannot stop.
. . .
Deep in the nights, we talk frankly. Khajiit about his cuts, me about my panicked nature. He tells me to take a deep breath. We talk frankly but nothing much meaningful ever comes out of it. We revert to the same conversations.
My parents say I never write about anything truly meaningful. It could be because I do not show them the extent of what I write, or because I have not, in their eyes, suffered. I have not lived an entire year on pickled radishes and plain rice because I could not afford anything else. I have not woken up before sunrise and come home way after midnight working in a lab to sustain a meagre way of life. Compared to that, I have lived a life of luxury.
I think it is more than that. When Khajiit and I give someone on the streets a dollar, I wonder where our moralities lie. When we talk so frankly of being nineteen-year-olds and of the world giving us more responsibilities than we can handle (Khajiit more so than me, obviously), of, as he calls it, "Everything conspiring against me," I wonder if we truly know ourselves.
Through this year of tumult, political and personal, can I claim that I know myself?
. . .
The first time I formally learned about allegories was also in sophomore year, when my English class read Lord of the Flies. There is something to be said about things coming full circle.
Then again, how many of us are brave enough to talk about sex in a public forum?
The other two are harder to write about, for me, but they are easier to hint at. To skirt around the edges, like in Fragonard's The Swing, which I drew once as a book cover for my French textbook. Both rococo and romanticism I learned from my European history class from sophomore year.
The other thing I remember from sophomore year was a hazy mix of staring out windows and anonymous crowds rushing past. I wrote about it a lot before, things I kept locked up in the depths of my laptop and hid for two years before I showed some of them to Yuma.
. . .
There is an old Chinese legend (one thing the Chinese have no lacking of) that a poet, late at night, could not decide whether to use "push" or "knock" in his poem to describe his character's internal battle when opening the door.
These days, the two words together mean deliberation.
When I was younger, around seven or eight, I always wondered how people remembered all of these proverbs and legends and folk lores and idioms. It wasn't merely enough to know a saying, you had to know the story behind it too. There were entire books dedicated to the formal four-word proverbs and their origins that schoolchildren my age were required to know.
That, added to the pictorial nature of Chinese words, and you have to wonder: why is it not fading away in favor of something much easier to learn?
I like to cite the poetic nature of it—because, to me, no language is better suited for poetry as Chinese is—down to each word imbued with meaning, but who am I to say? I am neither a poet nor am I a proficient writer of Chinese.
. . .
Khajiit says the younger generation of French people are slowly abandoning the rigid structures their language imposes upon them in favor of their own blend of French. What the equivalent would be for Chinese I do not know, but I hope it does not happen.
Because it is a language of thousands of years' worth of stories, legends, and lore, and there is a part of me that finds peace in allegories.
. . .
Writing for many people is ultimately a cathartic process. Haruki Murakami speaks of writing as a poison, and writing to overcome that poison. Natalie Goldberg believes you should write "what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about." Tim O'Brien uses his writing of a fictitious yet real world to make sense of the absurd yet very real world he had to live in. Andre Aciman repeatedly writes about place as a cover to what he really wants to write about.
For me, writing is about making sense of the past. It is about digging up what I have buried in the past—what I have been afraid to face—and putting them in front of me to finally digest after all this time.
I have been told many times, by many people, that I do not have the courage to face reality. That I am weak, that I do not have the determination. Writing is a cheap alternative, a way to pacify those claims without having to make any painful progress. I can say that writing has helped me to name my demons, but in the end, didn't Seymour Glass still shoot himself? How far can you go with writing when your demon is reality itself?
. . .
It is now six in the morning. This far north, the sun has already risen, although I wouldn't know sitting here in the basement of the tallest building on campus. I woke up yesterday morning at 8:25AM, with ten minutes to spare for my morning class, and with an apathy that has set in lately, told myself it didn't matter and fell back to sleep. The next time I woke up—fully, truly awake—it was already getting dark.
On the bus from New York, I thought about how I used to tie myself to the road. The music I listen to, the colors I love, they all have one trait in common: they're hollow. This emptiness inspired historical fictions, with Vermont and their Green Mountain Boys being my favorite, although any road could evoke endless stretches of fields and the nonchalant wind mussing up my hair.
This is my American dream. The loneliness is only a requisite.
For some people, a vacation is a relaxing break, and when they get back from their far-fetched locations they can settle down and work another half year in their fascinating fields. I am from a family fueled by wanderlust—my father, who cannot settle in any one place for long, no matter how tempting the place; or my mother, who takes to trips as other people take to hobbies.
I can stay in one place for a very, very long time if I had to, and if it were the only option in front of me. I would be okay with an entire year without vacations if it meant a regular schedule and the expectation that this is it. But once I am on the road, no amount of travelling will satisfy me. I have been on day-long trips, and week-long trips, and month-long trips, and it is all the same. If I start, I cannot stop.
. . .
Deep in the nights, we talk frankly. Khajiit about his cuts, me about my panicked nature. He tells me to take a deep breath. We talk frankly but nothing much meaningful ever comes out of it. We revert to the same conversations.
My parents say I never write about anything truly meaningful. It could be because I do not show them the extent of what I write, or because I have not, in their eyes, suffered. I have not lived an entire year on pickled radishes and plain rice because I could not afford anything else. I have not woken up before sunrise and come home way after midnight working in a lab to sustain a meagre way of life. Compared to that, I have lived a life of luxury.
I think it is more than that. When Khajiit and I give someone on the streets a dollar, I wonder where our moralities lie. When we talk so frankly of being nineteen-year-olds and of the world giving us more responsibilities than we can handle (Khajiit more so than me, obviously), of, as he calls it, "Everything conspiring against me," I wonder if we truly know ourselves.
Through this year of tumult, political and personal, can I claim that I know myself?
. . .
The first time I formally learned about allegories was also in sophomore year, when my English class read Lord of the Flies. There is something to be said about things coming full circle.
