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For a really long time, the word I used to describe myself was "cynical." Now that I may be coming out of the emo-pseudo-depressed-pessimistic stage of my life, I'm starting to wonder if I really am, or ever was a cynic. Sure, I have this general lack of faith in humanity, but a lot of people, from a young age, have realized that the human race is, eh, not that great.

If I were to ask people who know me well enough to form any sort of substantial opinion of me, I think the following words would probably be the most common:

Cute

Smart

Artistic

Asian

Cynical? Probably not. 

In fact, the only two people who've really heard anything cynical from me are... my parents. And maybe the readers of this blog, but, a) you're not technically "hearing" anything that I write and b) maybe none of this is actually cynical at all, and it's all just... negative. 

I'm not trying to be cocky here or anything, either. I don't like the word "cute"; I don't consider myself cute; I don't like being called cute and I don't think anything about me is "cute" at all except my height and the fact that I'm Asian. But, that is probably the most common word people would use to describe me. I know this for a fact because I've heard accounts of people talking about me (when I'm not there) and most of the comments that have been reported to me are: Oh, yeah, she's so cute! 

I don't consider myself particularly smart. I do have some level of common sense and reasoning, but not much more than the average person, and not much less, either. I'm only called artistic because I draw in class all the time, and, well, I am Asian. 

Anyway, I honestly wouldn't choose these words to describe myself. Maybe it's because I don't like having to "label" myself, but how else would you give yourself an identity? 

Saying that I like to draw, I like to sleep, I like anime, I don't like people... They're all assigning some sort of label to the concept that is "me." I'm an artist, a lazy person, an otaku, a cynic... They're all labels. 

So, really, I don't mind labels. Not the idea of them, anyway. But I've started to realize that there's some sort of disconnect between what labels I consider fitting me, and what labels other people think fit me. 

Which labels would really fit me, anyway? The labels I attribute to myself? But my ego and general lack of understanding of my behavior keep me from really knowing myself enough to describe myself. The labels other people attribute to me? But which people? No matter what, parents, friends, teachers, strangers, they're not me. There's no way they can understand anything about me, because they're not me.

(I swear I had a concrete idea of what I wanted to write when I got out of the shower earlier...)

Um, so, anyway, I guess this is my way of saying, maybe I'm not so much of a cynic after all. Given the popularity of sardonic comedy and internet memes, I don't hold humanity in especially low esteem. This may just be the usual phase of negativity everyone goes through. A couple of years ago, I heard some girls in homeroom say, "I hate people."

Well, I hate people, too! We should totally be friends! 

Not really. I thought, somewhere in the back of my mind, that she didn't really understand what she meant by "I hate people." She doesn't truly hate people. She doesn't understand the consequences of being a true cynic-- a true cynic like what I thought I was.

But there's probably someone out there thinking to him/herself the exact same thing of me that I thought of that girl in my homeroom. 

So, I guess labels just kind of fall apart as you grow up, and it just happens. You can't really know yourself by the time you're fourteen, and it's okay if you're wrong about yourself sometimes. 

So, uh...

I swear, guys, I honestly had a point I wanted to make with this. Ugh, I don't know... Just... Just take what you will from this and please don't think I'm just a rambling idiot... Which... which I am, but you don't have to think that. 

More Realizations

So, my brother got a new tablet, meaning I get his old one! Yaaay, the universe ain't so much of a bitch after all! 


Um, anyway, I realized something else on the way home from school today. 


I have a cousin who's somewhere in Canada at the moment. She is already a decade old, and I may or may not met her nine or ten years ago when she was a wee little bawling lump of skin and mucus. I keep forgetting that I have a ten year old female cousin who's the daughter of my mother's brother. I met her older brother a few times, but I've never met her, so it's a little bit hard for me to believe she exists. 


And then I had this realization:
She's existed every day since the day she was born. 


Yeah, she doesn't only exist when someone talks about her. She's a real, live human being who breathes oxygen and annoys grown-ups with her talk of unicorns and sparkles and unanswerable questions. 


This probably seems pretty obvious. More than pretty obvious. That, actually, should be blatantly obvious. 


And this is just another small look into the brain of an egotistical teenage girl. 

Realizations

(Also: Some perhaps unreasonable complaints concerning the Cintiq my parents got me last December)


I've come to realize the true secrets to becoming an artist. While I've never gained the internet fame (or real-world fame, even in my school) to have dozens of people ask me, "OMG, leik, how does u draw so good?" I have in fact figured out how to get there. 


I first discovered what may be considered by some to be artistic talent in about 4th grade, when we were assigned to draw trees, and the trees I drew looked 6% more like trees than the trees my classmates drew, and they told me that my trees were amazing and that I must be so talented. I let those few comments get to my head and I started drawing everywhere. I'd doodle on my notes, on assignments; I would've drawn on the walls if my parents hadn't been so strict. My fifth grade teacher hated me because of it, but I didn't think too highly of her, either, and that childish spite spurred me on to keep drawing and drawing in drawing. In sixth grade, my homeroom teacher and my art teacher complimented my drawings, and that burst of confidence lasted through seventh grade. 


I thought to myself, somewhat subconsciously, that I was chosen in some way, that I was special, as long as I wasn't looking at someone else's artwork. At first, only the artwork that was better than mine bothered me. Something pricked at the back of my mind, asking, if I was so special, why wasn't I as good as Sally or Joey or Kevin or Rachel? So I quietly pushed those doubts away and kept drawing and drawing, telling myself I'd be as good as them soon enough. 


And then I reached high school, and that confidence, completely unfounded, now that I think about it, started to dissipate. I started to notice weird quirks in anatomy, weird facial features, in middle pointed out and poked fun at by peers. Now that I was in high school, I started to notice them myself and worked and worked to try to fix them. Now, it's not only the amazing artwork that smashes my ego into tiny little fragments. It didn't take me that long to consider professional-level artists waay out of my league, to tell myself I didn't have to worry about them for another ten years. Now, it's the artwork that's as good as mine, slightly better, or slightly worse. With the art that's at my level, I ask myself why I'm still at the level I am. With artwork that's slightly better, I ask myself why I'm not there yet. With artwork that's slightly worse than mine, I ask myself why I still have the flaws present in that artwork. The worst part is, the remnants of my ego from elementary school keep me from distinguishing what's what. 


And so comes the realization that I'm not improving as rapidly or as much as I'd like. So come the realizations that I'm not special or chosen or unique, that I'm not impressive, and neither is my artwork. Drawing can be learned after all, and there are many who can recreate a scene exactly with the slightest effort. It's come to the point that I see my art as getting worse and worse instead of better and better. At times, I wish and hope and yearn (I'd pray if I believed in any of it) to hate my art, just so I could give up and quit and never have to look at a 4B pencil with any more thought than, "Huh, I didn't know there was anything other than HB" ever again. 


So, if anyone would like the know, the secret to being an artist is to practice, of course, and be cocky. Draw whenever you can, at any possible moment, even if your teachers hate you for it or your friends make fun of you for it. You're an artist, so create art. But let yourself get a little bit cocky. Tell yourself, Hey, I'm pretty good at this. There's no other way you'll be able to get over the constant self-criticism or the jeers from your friends. 


And, look, I'm not saying that's gonna get you to be a good artist. You're going to have to study some things and keep working and bashing yourself and trying to improve. But the ego's going to help you get to the point where you're willing to do that. What I'm trying to figure out is how to keep that ego from getting so big that it keeps you from getting anywhere once you've really started to improve.
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Lately, I think I've come dangerously close to quitting drawing quite a few times in that past, say, five weeks. I don't know if maybe I'm just going through a phase, or maybe drawing was just a phase (that lasted almost 8 years) but I don't really enjoy it. Then again, I've come to not enjoy sleeping, either, so maybe there's just something wrong with me.


The good news is, I'm starting to invest in traditional artwork, where I use an actual pencil or a real paintbrush with real synthetic hair (see what I did there?), a bit more. Actually, this morning I was at an art class (because I've started taking real art classes, in which I give someone some money, and in turn someone tells me, Move your pencil like this, keep in mind the light source, and voila, a masterpiece) and I swear to god I heard someone from the kids' painting class in the next room say, "When I was a little kid..." The kid couldn't have been older than 7. Are seven-year-olds allowed to say that, or am I just a senile old f**k who needs to be institutionalized? 


Anyway, I think I started to come dangerously close to quitting soon after my parents got me a new tablet last month. That isn't to say I didn't appreciate it-- tablets are lovely inventions, and I was a stupid prick for not appreciating them in middle school. No, not that at all. It's just the type of tablet they got . 'Cuz it was a Wacom Cintiq. 


That, for all you traditionalists out there who don't know what a tablet is, is a device used for drawing that features a large pad on which you can use an electronic pen and make lines and scribbles and marks appear on the computer screen as if by magic. With most tablets, that pad is blank and you're forced to look up at the computer screen, meaning you're not actually looking at where your hand is, so it takes a few months of practice before the lines start to move any distance away from awkward. With a Cintiq, however (the smaller of the two models, incidentally, costing, oh, about $1,000 [that's a comma, folks]) the pad is actually an LCD screen on which you can see the computer screen, so you don't have to look two feet from where your hand actually is to draw. 


It's a beautiful manifestation of human ingenuity, but it's making me miserable. First off, it has miles and miles of wires, and a bajillion little plugs and it's a pain to start up. Secondly, plugging in the video adapter causes the colors on my computer screen to turn unnaturally bright, and the colors on the tablet differ from the ones normally on my computer, so the colors on my drawing turn out more than a little warped. Lastly, I am a 16-year-old girl who draws cartoons as a hobby. What the f**king hell am I doing with a Cintiq?


A Cintiq is a tablet primarily used by professionals-- because, really, only advanced and well-off professionals are able to afford it. It's the kind of tablet that should only be touched by a professional who's able to sell his/her artwork for thousands of dollars with the confidence that some company or advertiser or other will willingly pay those thousands of dollars to use that artwork. I have a hard time getting people to pay a couple of bucks for my artwork. (*ahem* Artwork that takes me four or more hours to make. Meaning for any four hour drawing sold at $2, I'm basically paid 50 cents an hour.) I'm nowhere near skilled enough to use a Cintiq properly, and I really shouldn't be within a 20-meter radius of it, anyway.


And it's been a while since we bought it, and it's been used, and I doubt anyone I could possibly contact would be willing/able to drop a few hundred (or a thousand) dollars to take it off my hands. I actually stated explicitly that all I wanted was an intuos4, a very nice tablet by the same company. Sure, it doesn't have a screen on it, but it doesn't have 6 miles of wires, doesn't take half an hour to set up, and I won't need to get a separate truck to drive it to another state when I leave for college. 


So, I don't really mean to complain about my tablet, though that's really what I'm doing. My dad, the, er, genius who decided to buy me that monster of a doohickey, gave the excuse of, Oh, it's for my precious and only daughter. If you really thought so highly of me, you'd take the time to listen to a few of the words that come out of my mouth and maybe take them into consideration when you want to buy me a $1,000 gadget that I neither need nor want. 


And as a warning to any aspiring digital artists who may have come across this blog post because I used the words "cintiq" and "wacom" and "tablet" so many times, if you're a beginner, get a bamboo. Once you get better, stick with your bamboo. Once that thing gets old and decrepit and you're serious about your art and you've lost the arrogance that got you so into drawing and you think you may have improved a smidgen since you started over 5 years ago, go ahead and get a better tablet. But stay away from the Cintiq until you're absolutely sure you need it. There are professional artists who are making money without Cintiqs, and who've even forgone the chance to get one because they don't need one. So don't bother. You don't need one. Why would you need one? Honestly? 

So.. Hospitals

Something wonderful happened to me last night. I went to bed at 11pm! And it was amazing. But, when I woke up and my stomach started hurting reaally badly, and so I went to the doctor. She was worried I might have appendicitis, so I went to the emergency center of a nearby hospital, where I had an ultrasound, and they couldn't find my appendix. They said, Hey, maybe nuthin's wrong with ya, and sent me home. 


I am a firm believer in karma and the balance of cosmic energy, so I'm not trying to think of what terrible thing I did last week. Firstly, there are waaay too many terrible things I did. Secondly, no matter what thousands of clueless white people say, karma has bad things happen to you because of bad things you did in a past life. So if you punched your sister in the face for no reason or ran over a cat, your retribution did not come two weeks later in the form of rotten milk. No, the universe ain't done with you yet, and you're gonna have to pay for it in your next life. 


Anyway, what I mean to say is, maybe because I was actually able to get more than 5 hours of sleep last night, the universe decided something bad needed to happen to me to balance it out. 


And you'd think that since I didn't need much done while I was there, I'd be in and out pretty quickly. But I was there for about 5 hours. And any amount of hours is waaay to long to stay in a hospital. It was all white and sterile and noisy and scrubs. And it reminded me of something I haven't heard since elementary school.


Remember in elementary school, your teacher would always call your mother "Mum" and your father "Dad"? Well, it happened again. Turns out they do it in children's hospitals, too. 


I never understood why people do it. What? Don't call my mum "Mum." You already have a mum. Heck, you're old enough to be her parent! Stoppit. 


So, all in all, I'm more or less okay. My stomach hurts if I press it too hard, but, hey, I got to miss school! I thought it'd be a great chance to get homework done, but I still got home at about three, so I won't be getting much more done in the end. 

Wasted Effort

Boy, oh, boy, three weeks into January and I'm already failing at improving myself as a human being. I haven't been sleeping at 11, even though I've had the chance to quite a few times, and I keep putting off homework, and I haven't been blogging... 


And I honestly have no excuse for it. I just never really felt like it, or I just had nothing to talk about, or I didn't feel like it... But I do feel sorry for it. I'm very sorry, guys (meaning the... two(?) people who read this). 


Oh, and, uh, it's been brought to my attention that on a recent blog post, when I gave you my tumblr, I went and wrote "twitter" instead of "tumblr." And I don't even have a tumblr... But, evidently from the URL, it is, indeed, a tumblr. And I don't really feel like fixing it, especially since I discovered it quite a while ago, but I just wanted to put that out there. I did something stupid, ahahaha... 


So, uh, anyway, I, somehow, have been put in charge of writing horoscopes for my school's magazine this issue! Yaaay! Not really... It's hard for someone like me to write stuff like, "Oh, hey, your life is wonderful and you are totally not a waste-of-space excuse for a human being! Don't change anything about your life because you are awesome! Oh, and you'll meet a tall, dark stranger at 5pm next Tuesday." But, I did it, somehow, and it's really, I dunno, 300 words of, what was it, brain goo (a term I learned from a friend, and I've just been waiting and waiting to use!) but it seems to be publishable, at least, so away to the presses! 


I was also put in charge of drawing little personifications of the zodiac signs, like little, weirdly-proportioned anime drawings and I put a crapload of effort into all 12 of them. And then I remembered (all too late) that I only had one page to squeeze them all onto, so they're all very tiny and you can't really see any of the crapload of effort I put into anything, and it really made me very sad. Why did I go spend 3 hours on each one? Bah, it's because I love drawing with photoshop, and I needed an excuse to stay up for hours, just mindlessly drawing and muttering to myself. But I regret it now! 


Though, when I think about it, it's really all my fault. I could've just done little sketchy, half-hour doodle things. And I actually kinda chose, somehow, to write the horoscopes. See, at the beginning of the grading cycle, I wasn't assigned a story, and one of the editors felt bad, and I had a choice between writing horoscopes, a story on basketball (I think) or a list of the 5 best places to take a date! Sadly, my knowledge of basketball stops at "the ball is orange" and my knowledge of dating is limited to "um...what?" so I just chose what I'm best at, which is making stuff up. But I had to make stuff up that was optimistic and happy. So, I wrote stuff, slapped on an awful pseudonym, and that is my greatest regret for this month. 


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Y'know, it's only January, and I already can't wait for summer to come. I have the kind of feeling I get when I decide to stay up all night, thinking it'll be easy. But I don't take into account aaall the hours between 11pm and 7am, which is a sh*t-ton of hours to not spend sleeping, and I think to myself, holy crap, there is no way I'll get through this alive. So I give up and go to bed at maybe 1 or 2 in the morning, and roll around fitfully in bed before falling into a relaxing, fitful slumber, and waking up 4 hours later wanting to stab a small animal. 


But June's really a long, long ways away. I wonder if I can survive that long... I have this vague, uncomfortable feeling that I'm slowly being driven mad by somebody, but it might just be that I've always had that feeling, but I'm just more aware of it now, because I am a paranoid little twit. 


Anyway, I'm sorry this blog post was also a bit of a flop (a bit?), but the whole, "Ha I'mma stay up all night-- never mind, holy crap it's three, I should go to sleep now" thing happened. Last night. So I honestly don't know if I'm writing in English right now.




Am I making any sense?


Comprenez-vous?


私の言葉分かりますか？


I don't know how to write that in any other language. And what I have written is more like, "Do you understand?" because I have really forgotten the majority of French and Japanese I should know... 


Aah, I hope this feeling goes away when I'm a grown-up...