and the pursuit of Happiness...

So, uh, it's occurred to me that I do indeed have a blog, and that I do indeed have people who read it regularly (plus ou moins) and that I ought to write another post. So here I am, after several weeks of lack of motivation, laziness, writer's block, and a couple weeks of all those plus utter bewilderment at the new format of the blog page... dashboard... layout thing.


Anyway, here I am, slinking back after months of no word. 


Actually, the main reason really has been writer's block, and instead of mashing keyboards and pouring out brain goo, I decided to wait until I actually had something to write about. And I do. 




So, a couple of weeks ago, I was visiting my father's coworker's house out in the suburbs. They're a very Korean and very suburbsy family in a very suburbsy area. They have two small children, one of whom was at a baseball game or something. So, I only had to deal with one of their children. Unfortunately, it was the younger one, this extremely unnerving three-year-old girl. 


Now, I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but I really, really hate children. This is probably awful to hear from a teenager, and you're probably all going to tell me that I'll change my mind when I have some. Three things. No one can say that I will have children, even if I have children I'll probably end up only liking my own, and I do not have any children at this moment in time so please shut up about that, and that's really not a great argument anyway. 


I've come to realize one of the reasons I hate children is that they're so undeservingly happy. That, and they're a bit creepy. At least, this particular little girl, who actually looked about four or five, who kept staring at me with this blank expression as if she'd seen my murder the day before and was going to do absolutely nothing to stop it. 


But, anyway, let's focus on the happiness. Children are happy. I'm not talking about the children in middle school, or even late elementary school who're starting to learn that life absolutely and truly sucks. I'm talking about children before they reach double digits, small children whose entire worlds are Mommy, classroom and candy. Those children are happy. They whine the most, but they forget what they whine about the fastest. 


These kids have done nothing to be happy. They whine, they poop, get sick, get other people sick, sleep and do it all over again the next day. They put minimal effort into life, and it's okay because they're children and Mommy will do everything for them. And yet, you have mature, young, middle-aged and elderly, adult men and women working their butts off in some office building somewhere, trying to make the money to put their kids through college, pay off credit card debt, pay mortgages, and maybe take that trip to Hawaii before they die and they're miserable. Even if they get that trip to Hawaii, they have to come back and be miserable again. 


And then it hit me, just recently. Maybe happiness isn't actually something we have to work for. A lot of people say that the key to happiness is to accept your lot in life. Take what you got, cut your losses, give up while you're ahead. And children do that. They're perfectly happy where they are. Their worlds are tiny and they're happy with tiny worlds. You don't need a bunch of stuff to fill up that tiny room. So  they're happy. 


Of course, this doesn't make me like children any more.
Anyway, those are just some thoughts I had.






It really hurts me to click "publish" because then this'll be the first thing people see when they come to this blog...

Maybe...

-Maybe all we're trying to do is survive.
-We are. At least, we were, trying to stay alive and better the species. But we don't need to anymore. We don't need to evolve because we've shaped this world to fit our needs exactly.
-Maybe that means we won.
-What are we looking for, then? A prize?
-Yes. Heaven, Hell. Enlightenment.
-Maybe they're just a prize.
-Or maybe we think we deserve a prize. After all, we won.

School closes down to make way for strip club

Students at a Texas high school were surprised to see ten poles installed in a row in their courtyard this Monday. The school has since revealed that it will be closing down this year to be turned into a strip club.


"This is a great way for students to learn valuable skills they'll need later in life," said one administrator. "They're really going to need them, too. It's not like they actually learn anything here."


Some students have expressed outrage over the change...
__________________


So, my school has installed ten poles in the courtyard on Monday. It's been a few days, and all they've done is put some pieces of metal on top of them. They're just there, in a row by a wall of the west building. 


The general consensus of the students is, however surprisingly, that they're for pole dancing.


My theory:
     They'll take the ten most productive people in the school, chop off their heads and mount them on top of the poles as an example to the rest of us. How dare you try to be productive human beings! 


Other people seem to think that they're for flags, but the poles are square, not round. So they can't be for flags or pole dancing. (Though, honestly, that's what half the girls at my school are going to end up doing, anyway.) (Hey! That's someone's daughter!)


Ahem, so, the poles are a bit of a weird addition to the outdoor decor. Cuz they're isn't any. It's as ugly as sin out there, and the poles ain't helping.


Someone said they might be for banners or something. Whoo hoo, more propaganda. Like we don't have enough of that with the flatscreens they put up in the hallways. 


________


The real use of the poles has yet to be confirmed, but we'll be back with more updates as soon as more info's available. Back to you, Bob.

I think I have issues

And, no, I don't mean that I like to hang pictures of celebrities on walls and sip tea while talking to them in a room lit by red scented candles arranged vaguely like a magic circle. I have just been seeing a few changes in myself that I find... more than a bit disconcerting, and, as they're not really the kinds of things you'd divulge to someone in real life, I decided I shall go into them in detail here, on my blog! In front of the whole internetz!


Or, at least, the very-very-very-very-close-to-but-not-quite 0% of the internetz that actually read this blog. 


So, I've been having the uncomfortable feeling that I've become a bit dumber. Not even the "Oh, god, I was such an idiot last year. I sure hope I've made progress this year" kind of feeling. I truly and sincerely believe I've become dumber. I'm no longer as eloquent as I am fairly convinced I used to be when I speak (not that I was particularly eloquent at any point in my life), and I can't even write fiction as easily as I used to, and it's taking me longer to understand mathematical concepts than I used to, the list goes on. 


It's a very uncomfortable sort of feeling, that you've become dumber. I don't know if it is because I'm becoming stupid or if it's a testament to my growing maturity, but when I think back on how I was last year, I think less that I was such and idiot and more that, Oh, given the circumstances and my emotional state at those points, I suppose there wasn't much helping it. Is this because I'm becoming a bit more accepting of the fact that sometimes even I think and say stupid things, or am I just trying to rationalize because my brain knows I won't be able to do any better in the future? 


And maybe I'm overthinking this, but this is the kind of thing I worry about late at night when I should be sleeping. That and zombies. Yup. 
______________________________


I've also come across a few other disturbing moments in the past few weeks. For the last issue of my school's magazine, a large part of my work was drawing these cute little personifications of the horoscope symbol... things. Because the editors thought it would be a good idea or something. Anyway, I spent two or three hours on each drawing, giving us a total of about 30 hours of drawing. Since then, it's been pretty hard for me to draw. Like, anything. And it didn't really kick in right away, but the amount of stuff I've been drawing has been decreasing and decreasing, and now it's dwindled to a whopping two or three pieces a week. And don't think I mean finished pencil drawings, either. I mean barely shaded, 30-minute sketches that take up about a third of a page in my sketchbook. 


But art slumps are manageable. They happen. Sure. 
But. 
For this issue of the magazine, I've been assigned 2 articles, plus the comics (I usually do two 4-panel comics)! I mean, I've talked to one of the editors and maybe I'll be able to drop one of the articles. Maybe. But, I still had to do two rough drafts for those two articles, and I was up pretty late writing them.


And as I was writing them, a thought came to me:
God, I hate writing.


It was terrifying. 
So, yeah, it's as if the magazine's ruining my love for anything and everything. Next thing you know, I'm gonna hate kittens because of it. 


Hopefully, though, that won't happen, and maybe I'll be able to write and draw and stuff eventually. But art blocks are always a terrible thing to go through. 

Labels

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.