Sorry I didn't notice sooner.

Hello tree.
How long have your branches been bare?

Since when did you shed your leaves
To the deathless wind
Headed for another place?

For how long have you been naked
Beautiful in the light of autumn,
The blazing sunset?

How long will it be 'till your branches are dead
And the cold covers all
With its icy touch?

.

Luminismia

(This post is an imitation of Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, on of my favorite things ever. Go check it out.)
Luminismia- n. The feeling of waking up to find freshly fallen snow outside your window, the struggle to remember and catch and keep just a moment of your passing life to keep forever, a reminder of all things wonderful and an invitation to slow down and remember that life is about more than grades or school or corporate success.

Etymology:
From luminism, an American landscape painting style of the 1850s – 1870s, characterized by effects of light in landscapes, through using aerial perspective, and concealing visible brushstrokes. Luminist landscapes emphasize tranquility, and often depict calm, reflective water and a soft, hazy sky.
Lumi is also the Finnish word for snow.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~


You wake up. The first memory of the day. A fresh moment, a moment of brief clarity before the chaos of the day starts.

In a short time, this moment is going to fade into the background of your memory.
So you wake up, needing for something different. Something to cling onto as torrents of other memories dissipate into the darkness. Something to keep as proof of a beautiful life lived. Something to remember tomorrow of who you once were.

Snow.

Looking out, to find that everything has been covered over with a blanket of white. It's something so simple yet so powerful.

There are so many shades of white that you'd forgotten existed. The world has decided to be different, just for a while. The trees, the branches, the rooftops, the lake.

Even the sky has turned white.

The children run outside to laugh and play in the snow. Adults stop what they're doing, just for a short moment, to recognize that today, here's something special. One out of 365 days. Your senses seem to sharpen so as to take in and retain as much as possible before it all melts.

Such is the pull of freshly fallen snow. When the world stops to celebrate life's moments, you think to yourself, what am I doing? Trudging through life and school and work, as always? Worrying about people and grades and places? Snow is an invitation to stop and remember, just for a moment, that joy is found in small places, added up, each tiny brush stroke an addition to a beautiful canvas of memories that make up life.

You're not going to remember each stroke of the brush, each carefully planned and loving line your creator has placed. But looking out at this snow, you realize that's okay. This is only a small part of the bigger picture. The darker parts and the brighter parts, though you may not remember them all individually, they're not going anywhere. Take the time to be grateful for that today. Take the time to be grateful for everything that's happened to you, or you'd never be here today.

And enjoy the snow.


(An unofficial Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows entry.)

The problem with the internet or culture or art or entertainment or society or whatever because I'm not exactly sure what this is about.

I've been thinking a lot about culture. Culture is so hard to escape. Impossible actually. I don't really like the way culture has gone. Why does our internet culture promote complaining all the time and being insensitive. It's so mean sometimes. It's a destructive force sometimes. When the internet teams up to shame someone for making a tiny mistake, like i watched a ted talk about how Justine Sacco's one tweet ruined her entire life because people didn't get her joke. She was being sarcastic and no one got it and those who did and tried to speak out also got called racist because they were in the minority. I don't know what I'm going about because at this point I'm just repeating what others have said. My view is very narrow. Culture is a huge thing with many many subcultures with different values and expressions so I don't really know what I'm talking about... so many layers... See, when people complain about culture (music these days is so bad, modern art sucks, etc) they're not actually attacking what they are complaining about, they are attacking a way simplified and two dimensional projection of it that lives in their heads. Actually culture is a thing that lives in peoples' heads but it's too big and each person can only actually see in detail a tiny part of it, but that's not what I was gonna say.

I guess I would be the same. I'm too unwilling to wrong anyone to criticize anything. But still I feel like culture these days, at least mainstream culture is so... idk, the attitude is all wrong. Culture is so obsessed with criticizing others. It also feels like it's cheap and repetitive. I just can't have fun participating with culture anymore because it feels so pointless to me. I turned the tv on and there's always at least two channels with like a divorce court show or something. And there's some game shows some sitcoms and like some show about celebrity news or whatever. idek. But like what's the point?? It's soo pointless and apparently people watch stuff. People think I'm childish for watching the PBS Kids but honestly it's so much more... morally pure? I've also watched the world channel more and more.. what have i been missing on that thing? so much stuff there. independent documentaries, glimpses into places and lives I've never witnessed or experienced or known or comprehended before. And then all the happy commercials trying to be happy but it feels like a parody of the actual thing, happiness.

The internet is even harder to say anything about in this context. Am I the only one who hates those "so relatable" posts? When I first got a social media account, these posts intrigued me so much.. They made me feel not alone I guess. My whole life I've been isolated and the internet opened up this whole new level of connectedness. Those posts were like, the small things that the internet noticed and decided to summarize in a neat little posts. But these seemingly common things or so-called first-world problems aren't very relatable at all considering the number of people who need to struggle to barely scrape together a living every day. At the end of the day, many of these posts are just people complaining about things that matter so little. These posts are so unsensitive and when I realized it I felt so guilty. Why is it that people pay attention to these things and not the important things in life? In some ways culture just serves to distract people from what's important.

And as you spend more time in the internet, you start to see the rules and the patterns. Culture is better at noticing some things than other things. It tends to notice completely arbitrary and completely unimportant things. You see that the simple act of defining and describing something changes that thing. The internet is obsessed with pointing out things that you'd otherwise probably not notice on your own. And when you notice things their nature changes. And then your life becomes... crystallized. Fossilized. I don't know. The mystery and unknown is just.... killed. Previous to the beginning of my internet citizenship, I didn't have such things to define the things in my life and I lived in a muddle.... you know, I really miss that muddle. It just feels different. And with my personal discovery of the wealth of information on the internet, it was all so new and fresh you know? It's exciting. With this new discovery came the foolish over-confidence. Like, I know stuff now! I have the internet now! I have learned stuff via this magical info-space and now I am an ascended being!! ..It's funny. Have you ever noticed how there's an inverse correlation between confidence and competence? Me, an amateur interneteer (i just coined a word) learning new stuff at a fast rate gaining confidence at that fast rate. But as you gain competence, you begin to realize that you haven't even begun to understand, not at all. Not at all....

But then, there comes this point when suddenly you emerge, you realize that you haven't been expanding your view by learning, you haven't been growing and maturing... in fact, you've grown more and more increasingly dependent on a glowing rectangular machine. Creating an illusion of expanding your world when actually your world has become more and more and more restricted until it's just a screen. And like all addictions, you are left wanting more but never satisfied. Because once you've seen what's on the internet that you couldn't ever get the chance to experience in person, you become acutely aware of how stuck you are in life. The same cycle of being a student, or maybe if you're an adult, work.

Actually, all music, literature, art, games, are to some extent addicting. Art just has a tendency to make you feel so small. The thing is that the internet is the tool for accessing anything you want. but it's not the same as seeing it in person. When you see some things on the internet (or in a magazine or on tv) it's not actually the thing itself you're seeing, it's more like you're seeing a description of it or a representation of it. Obviously this doesnt apply for music or literature but in the case of literature, I think there's something about having a physical copy of the book that just can't be replaced.

Wait I got it. What I think I'm trying to say is the media makes us lose sight of the scope of the world. Creating an illusion-space, calling attention to small pointless things rather than big important things, and it makes you feel better than you are. Obviously it depends how you choose to use the internet and media and stuff. Idk. Maybe what I'm actually trying to say is that entertainment these days makes us lose scope of the world. But then that's being kind of grinchy because life is about fun. And if you don't have fun, then life isn't fun. So maybe the problem is too much fun, resulting in it being not fun anymore. You can't have fun all the time or else fun isn't fun. So as society keeps trying to have more fun, our perceptions of reality will become more and more diminished. Then we're screwed. You know what terrifies me? When virtual reality becomes more and more of a thing, what is going to happen when people decide that they like their virtual reality more than the actual one? Then we're screwed.

What am I even doing. I can't afford to spend time thinking too hard because it will only distract me more from what matters. And I am the world's biggest hypocrite so I'm just going to stop now.
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There's this thing that's been bothering me since we read Phantom of the Opera in English class last year. Other people seemed to be fine with it but I wasn't, and I didn't say anything about it because I was confused I guess. I don't usually think about it but it still bothers me when I do. They had the thing with inner and outer realities: Erik believes he will never be accepted by society, while actually people would accept him if they got to know him. The concept of there being an "outer reality" is something I can't take. I went along with it in school because that's what you have to do in school. You don't argue. There is no such thing as an "outer reality" separate from all human belief and bias. The only reality I have to measure against Erik's is my own. And by calling my reality an "outer reality", I basically just selfishly, insensitively, ignorantly, narrow-mindedly assert MY reality as more valid, true, real than Erik's, or anyone else's. Maybe there's an average reality that somewhat applies for some people, but in taking an average you're failing to represent the wide range of people with different outlooks on life. And even then, what does "average" even mean? You can't average people like numbers. And the average person doesn't exist. Even the most typical person would deviate from the mean in some significant way(s). It irks me how everyone just went along with inner reality and outer reality. I'm sure some people probably see things in terms of inner and outer reality in real life too, not just with fictional characters such as Erik. Someone will see someone else who, idk, believes a different religion and be like "oh, that poor person is so trapped in his inner reality that he doesn't see the reality of things," when really it should be something more like "That person's reality is different from mine" and that is okay because people are different. It doesn't mean you have to agree with them but it would do you some good if you would admit that your reality is not the standard for being correct. I watch people talking about other people like they're misguided and lost and delusional. Yeah, maybe they are. But I'll never know will I? All I can do is speculate about my own life and about others. I choose to believe certain things, and I acknowledge that there's a chance I might be wrong, but I'm willing to accept that chance and place my bet on what I believe.

Snowflakes

My attention was brought back to this blog that I half-deliberately forgot about, and I looked at it and was like, "...yeah I have to write something to get the most poisonous thing I've probably ever written away from the top of the page." I don't want to delete it because in some twisted way I'm proud of it.? Oh geez it's terrible. So yeah let's all just forget that existed and mooove on to the next thing... please...

It's actually quite, IDK, somewhere between amazing and horrifying, how different a person (me) can become when circumstances are changed. Just the way I think and the way I feel. It's different. I don't feel the same at all. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I actually have not felt this way since last summer, and I remember thinking and feeling with similar thought patterns in elementary school. It seems like I've returned to my original state or something? Maybe it's how I always feel (or should feel) when I'm unstressed and away from the influence of people and culture. I guess that should be a good thing. It also worries me because I feel younger again, have I even grown at all? The past year has brought so many changes that I'd like to keep please and it feels like I've just circled back to where I've started. Just another year. That's the horrifying part. I've grown, but removed from the school environment I'm kind of scared that I'll just return to my original state. If things do not keep being pushed forward, they will fall back. I'm so scared I'll forget what I learned. It's easy to think something now, but is it even possible to maintain the same attitude and psychological state when circumstances and settings have changed?

I read half a book last year, The Geography of Thought, and it was about How Asians and Westerners Think Differently. In many cases the Westerner tends to think of things in terms of objects and the qualities of those objects, objects as their own entities, clearly defined and governed by sets of rules. The Asian sees things as being a part of an interconnected system, where things are always changing and things are collections of their relationships with other things. I feel that the Western view is just, I have to say wrong. A Westerner thinks of himself as a unit, a thing with qualities, for example the quality of "being shy" or "being honest," and he is a thing in himself. The Westerner moves around in a sea of other people-things, navigating, but operating separately from each other. An Asian sees themselves as the collection of interactions with different people in different situations. The Asian does not attribute "being shy" or "being honest" to being a fundamental intrinsic quality of himself, he sees them as the result of circumstance and setting. Not just in the spacial dimensions but also in the time dimension. He's not shy because he is shy, he's shy because he's in a new situation or because he feels no one wants to talk to him or he happens to not know anyone or he just doesn't want to talk.

Realizing this "Asian view" is painfully crippling as it dawns on you that the certainty of knowing who you are isn't something you'll ever feel again.

Now it's summer. I don't feel like I was during school. I can't figure this out. I'd just reached a state of psychological stability and equilibrium (basically) during the school year. Finally figured it out. Had about a month to relish in that. Now summer. And I feel like I'm going mad because without all of the people and things that made me, what even and who even am I now. It's unfamiliar and I want to go back when I actually felt that I knew myself. I feel this heavy sense of loss because once something disappears it's not likely to come back, and I liked who I was. Now I've lost that, it feels like. I've gone nowhere. It's just augh. I also feel so horrible even complaining about this problem-that's-not-a-problem-when-you-think-about-the-hardships-that-people-with-real-problems-have-to-face. I wish I never wrote this because now I am just feeling disgusted with myself.

I'm not afraid of change. The uncertainty of the future doesn't scare me (anymore) or at least not compared to the fact that what I already have is not something I can keep. My life now is so beautiful, and I'm so grateful to have it. I thank God every day for everything. Gratefulness should have been second on my list. This beauty is so so so so special and I can't keep it forever. Only in my memory. I can only save small fragments of it in my memory.

I am reminded of Snowflake Bentley who went out during every snowstorm and blizzard to save as many snowflakes in photographs as possible. Each snowflake is a beautiful breathtaking work of art created by God, and they hit the ground and melt away. The millions of snowflakes that no one has ever seen, the beauty that came and went. It's so tragic. Sometimes I just want to sit and cry over the loss of so many beautiful things that died, not just snowflakes. The things like memories and ideas that fade into oblivion. Moments of pure peace and perfection, when all the stars align and the trees are still, not daring to break the beauty, and there's a soft breeze, but no one is there to witness it. Or, maybe it's only me, there, struck by the beauty and joy and sheer wonder of it, but it's accompanied by the sadness that people are missing it, that there are people who aren't here to see this and feel this. This world is not perfect but it's so chock full of beauty. It makes you want to cry. This world crafted with love by God. Maybe it's because I'm an artsy person, but I know that intimate connection between the artist and his work. It takes love to art. I feel God's love more through the beauty He's created in this world, as this world, than through anything else. It's endless. that amount of love.

One last thing. Snowflake Bentley died of pneumonia after walking six miles in a blizzard.

Satire with Extra Mashed Potatoes

The wind speaks to me and there are colors. Am I sleeping or am I dead? I am not blinded with sight. Eyes lie. I am not deafened by hearing. Ears lie. Truth surrounds me. I am truth. I feel nothing. Nothingness surrounds me. I am nothing. But nothing is not blank. Nothing is not dark. In nothing, there is something. Truth, pulsing throughout the universe, like life in a seemingly lifeless tree. In nothingness, there is swirling certainty. There are colors, pink, purple, yellow, and blue. They are not seen, they are not felt, they simply exist. My pocket of reality is contained in nothingness.

You are deceived. You think you know. You think you know everything. But how can you know when you have eyes to trick you, and ears to fool you?

I stand still and strong, stretching forever upwards towards the light and warmth, the freedom forever unobtainable, the overwhelming, the wonder of everything out there in this world. Reaching down into the dark and damp security of darkness and quietness, where nothing can seep into, hiding, burrowed and buried into myself again and again. Seeking to disappear into safety and quiet.

Time is just yet another illusion that the you buy into. Consciousness isn’t real. It’s a veil obscuring the nothing beyond it. Consciousness isn’t real, emotions aren’t real, beauty isn’t real. The only thing real is nothingness, and truth. Sometimes people say that the truth is harsh. It is not. It simply exists. It is like wood of a tree, hard and unresponsive. Still. Emotionless. It’s hard to believe it’s actually alive.

Instead you chase after the fluttering leaves in the wind, dancing on branches and letting bits of the blue sky through, waving like little flags with their rustling sound. The leaves seem alive. They move beautifully. They offer a promise of truth, hope, and salvation. Then the wind blows harder and the rain comes, and the leaves fall away to the ground, dying, paper-thin lies. The black trunk is all there is left. The hard wood is by no means a bad thing, or a good thing, or any sort of thing. It simply exists.

That is the thing about truth, is nobody understands. And the harder you try, the more obscured it becomes. You get lost in circles and paths that split off infinitely  and then loop back, drop you off into the void and lead you towards madness.

No, come, see me. See how I live. I am strong. I am timeless. I know the truth, which you will never know like I do. The truth is in nothing. Are you jealous? That I live in a world pure and free from confusing senses and feelings and thoughts? That I dwell in simplicity? That I know truth, and you don’t? That I live in nothingness? You wish you could understand, but you cannot. You will never understand. You are a human being suffering under your own ignorance. You can’t unsee things. You can’t unhear things. You can’t unthink things or unfeel things no matter how you try. You can’t get to the center of the universe, where I always was. I am better than you, and there is no denial. Are you jealous? Jealous? Jealous? Ha ha ha. Look at you and your confused little mind. All those swirling silly emotions. You will never understand. You will never know.

The rain talks to me. There is music. The earth whispers to me. The sun sings to me. I simply live. That’s all there is to it. And yet you can’t.

You will never understand. After all, you are a human, and I am a tree. We will never stand level. You will never see truth.

I have no life

People like to think they're more complicated than they actually are. I just randomly realized that while reading about John Green's snapchat on Buzzfeed. John Green actually has ideas. Ideas are complicated, or at least, well-formed good ideas are. Ideas are what create art, and feelings are the raw material of ideas. People like to place importance on feelings. I agree. But a feeling is a long way away from being an idea and even further from being art. Sometimes I am guilty of over-valuing my feelings. Intense, beautiful feelings that get lodged in your chest and make you feel short of breath and demand your attention, and paying attention to your feelings suddenly it seems like your feelings are super important and big and real. And wow, these feelings, okay great, well, the problem is that feelings are felt individually only. Your feelings that are so real to you, exist to no one else. Other people have their own feelings. And sometimes, when you are so focused on your own feelings, it's easy to forget about other people, and then sometimes you get self-important about your feelings and you feel like your feelings are bigger and realer than everyone else's, which gives you importance. You're the main character of your own story. You're the center. You're the one with the feelings. You're important and less so everyone else. That's just so utterly completely wrong though. Even though you don't consciously think that, it's embedded in your subconscious. That was me two months ago. A time when my feelings of sadness, frustration, hopelessness, but also of ecstasy and joy and wonder and awe grew to beasts that surrounded me and tossed me around to each other in some cruel game of catch, until I was limp and blinded to everything and unable to see clearly. It's easy to get selfish about feelings. I try my very very very hardest not to be. I used to be one of the people who thought that, since I have feelings I'm important. And yeah sure feelings are important?? But really, seriously, what use are feelings going to be if you don't use them to build ideas, or if you don't learn something from them, or if you don't use them to sympathize with others? I think that's the difference between people who have feelings and people who have ideas. Having good ideas is hard. John Green has ideas. What's more, he's good at communicating them. Ideas give feelings a mind, but they're so hard to hold on to. I respect John Green. He has lots of good ideas. Maybe it's a thing that comes with being an adult. I don't know. I think Hank once said that the difference between being a child and an adult is thoughtfulness or something. Well obviously I have a long way to go before being an adult then. See this is why I can't art. You can't art without ideas. Well, actually, you can art, but no promises on being able to art well. All I can do now is practice drawing so that when I actually have good ideas, I can have the skill capability to actually make them come to life. This is why teenage writing always comes out cliche and unoriginal. Just look at those teen ink books. Sure they're written well enough but you find the same values repeated over and over again across stories. And you'll find that a lot of them focus on feelings rather than ideas, which is great and all, but you just read it and then forget about it, while an idea will play over and over in your head and stimulate emotional responses anyways. And the ideas in teen writings are often laid out straight, not woven into a story or anything. Which is just harder to feel. Like for example in A Glory of Unicorns compiled by Bruce Coville all the writings are by adults and it's not anything like the teen ink books. All of them are very good because the ideas are actually part of a story not just stated plainly. While a teen ink story would be like "independence is important" a glory of unicorns story would be about a unicorn coming to a girl who is being ignored by her sister, and luring her out into the forest and then accidentally burning her with its fiery mane of passion and teaching her how to dance on her own, thus teaching her that she doesn't always need to follow her sister and others.

Okay, so I just typed all of that. That wasn't even the original intent of this blog post, I came to say that "people like to think they're more complicated than they actually are." Because I just realized that and turned around and looked at myself and my feelings, and realized that my feelings are not as big and huge as they seem. And then I wanted to write a list of feelings in order of how frequently I feel them. Idek why but I feel like if I write them down they'll be, idk, contained somehow and less scary and easier to handle. so ok, I'm going to try my best to order these from most frequent to least frequent.

1. Awe
2. Guilt
3. Defeat
4. Peace
5. Dread/fear
6. Optimism (which is probably not even a feeling but I feel like just putting "happy" is too broad)
7. Sadness
8. Frustration/anger
9. Numbness
10. Joy/ecstasy
11. Determination (screw this I define feeling how I want to)

Ok there horrible list that I wrote while I should have been doing work

And probably my worst blog post yet and that is saying a lot

Daily Challenge 5/9/15

In my dream life, there would be no need to fear anything. Without fear, I'd be able to reach out and do all of the things I want to do but am afraid to do. In my dream life I'd value every second and minute that passes and use it to do something meaningful. Now, I can't do that yet. I like to pretend time doesn't exist. But it does. In my dream life I'd never turn down a free cookie. In my dream life, I'd know exactly what to say to make people feel better, but right now I don't know and instead I kind of sit there going like "It's ok you're going to be fine." or "I'm sorry." I'd be able to gather my thoughts and make real art, not like whatever crap I'm producing now. I'd be able to express exactly how I feel in few words. I wouldn't waste my words. I'd make every word I say matter. And yet I'd still be able to joke around and have fun. In my dream life I'd actually be good at helping people. In my dream life I'd be hardworking and passionate. In my dream life I wouldn't be addicted to the internet. The internet ruins my life. In my dream life I wouldn't even procrastinate. And when I say that, I don't mean just school work and stuff. I mean... like Vi Hart put it,

 …people often say, "maybe I’ll write a book some day," or "some day I'll do a huge composition project." The time is now to do things. So if you have something you think maybe you’ll do someday , what better time is there than now? Life is now! Not . . . when I graduate, or when I’m done with a midterm. Life will always keep coming at you. You’ve just got to do what you want to do! And there is the time, even if it’s only a little bit. You always have enough time to do something if you really want to.

In my dream life I'd actually finish what I start, instead of having like a million abandoned projects lying around. In my dream life I'd know Jesus better and be able to understand deeply what I read from the gospels instead of reading a passage and then rereading it like 100 times in an attempt to get a better feel for it. In my dream life I'd actually try harder to read the Bible while these days most days I don't even look at it. Before bed I sometimes will read a bit but since I'm always procrastinating and sleeping late I get tired and don't read a lot. And when I read I feel like I'm reading something foreign because I don't really know Jesus yet. And that makes me sad. In my dream life I'd practice and get to know my instrument better and get to the point that my private lesson teacher is at when everything makes sense and is in balance, and I can really make the colors shine out. In my dream life I'd be able to play syncopation at 208 beats per minute for 15 straight measures without screwing up in the first 2 measures. In my dream life I'd understand things, and also understand that some things aren't meant to be understood. In my dream life, I'd be at that perfect introversion-extraversion balance point. In my dream life I'd understand people. In my dream life I'd be familiar with drawing and painting, a familiarity that takes years and years to accumulate. I'd have a better relationship with my parents and sister. I'd know just what I should do and what is right. In my dream life, I'd be able to actually do things, not just sit there and think about it.

So I Was Reading My Diary from Fifth Grade

And facepalming sooooooooooooooo hard.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH WHAT EVEN IS THIS
I kept that journal in my top drawer next to my bed for all these years and all 70 college ruled sheets of paper in this spiral notebook are filled with.. just... what?!?
FIRST OF ALL, DID I SERIOUSLY HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO THINK ABOUT THAN THINGS LIKE HOW TO IMPROVE MY HANDWRITING AND WHAT I'M GOING TO GET FOR MY BIRTHDAY AND WHAT I'M GOING TO NAME MY FISH AND HOW I'M GOING TO ARRANGE MY SCHOOL SUPPLIES FOR THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL?!?!?!! I'M NOT EVEN KIDDING..... I LITERALLY RANTED LIKE HALF A PAGE ABOUT THE PINK METAL RULER THAT MY SISTER STOLE:

I got crayons for 25 cents, really cool colored pencils, a large assortment of erasers, and fine tip sharpies, and a pink metal ruler (that my sister just stole and I'm in a pretty bad mood right now... I'm just trying to write happy) I want my ruler back. My sister doesn't even like pink. She was actually afraid of the color in second grade. She stole it because she knew it would make me unhappy. I hate my sister. I want us to make up, but she enjoys torturing me. I try to be nice to her and she stares at me like I've gone crazy, with a "who are you and what did you do with my sister" look on her face. SIGH. Anyways see you after I find my ruler.

OKAY I AM FACEPALMING
SO
HARD
WHAT
EVEN
OKAY AND THERE WAS ALSO THIS FARMING GAME THING I PLAYED AND IT'S RIDICULOUS HOW MUCH I WROTE ABOUT THAT
WORST OF ALL, ARE THE MANY SICKENING PAGES SPENT OBSESSING ABOUT MY FIFTH GRADE CRUSH. IT'S. ABSOLUTELY. HORRIBLE. I AM MORTIFIED. I AM DISGUSTED. I AM REPULSED. I AM REVOLTED. I AM ABHORRED. I AM GOING TO GO SIT IN A HOLE IN MY BACKYARD IN SHAME AND MORTIFIED EMBARRASSMENT NOW.

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NO ACTUALLY, I LIED. THAT'S NOT THE WORST. THE WORST IS HOW MUCH OF AN ARROGANT SPOILED CHILD I WAS. I WAS SO SELF-RIGHTEOUS. IDIOT! IDIOT! IDIOT! IDIOT CHILD!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

I WAS SO JUDGMENTAL OF OTHER PEOPLE AND I THOUGHT I WAS SO GREAT AT DRAWING AND I THOUGHT I WAS SMARTER THAN EVERYONE!! HOLY BIRDBOWLS!!!!! I WANT TO CRY FREAKING RIGHT NOW!! 

YEP, DO YOU SEE THIS EVERYONE?!!!?!!!?!??!?!! THIS IS ME!!!! I SUCK!!! YOU KNOW THE TRUTH NOW AND SO DO I!! IT HURTS!! IT HURTS SO MUCH AND I CAN'T EVER CHANGE A THING ABOUT THE PAST!! 

The moon follows faithfully wherever you go

I came for the sunset and missed it.
But while leaving I looked up,
And realized I'd forgotten that
The moon follows faithfully
Whevever you go, like a
Loyal friend.

I could not stop walking,
Looking up again,
And smiling
Like a child discovering this fact
For the first time.

How could I have forgotten?

Robot Unicorn Attack is my life

Every once in a while I feel the need to just binge play this game. It's so SATISFYING. I like to turn the volume all the way up and lean sideways in my chair and prop my legs up and tilt my keyboard for easier access to the x and z keys and sing along harmonizing in thirds loudly and horribly out of tune and smash the keys hard and FLY UNICORN FLY, REACH FOR THE IMPOSSIBLEEEE

This game is perfect in every way. The first time I saw it, you know when it used to be all popular and stuff, when I first saw it it was like OMG MAGICAL. The music! is amazing!!! I have no idea what the lyrics even mean as a whole, but the individual small bits and pieces of it just come to me through the drunken gaming crazy fog I have, like "LIVE IN HARMONY HARMONY OH LOVE" "ALWAYS I WANNA BE WITH YOU" "JUMP INTO THE OCEAN" "OPEN YOUR EYES" "WEAR NO DISGUISE FOR ME" "MAKE BELIEVE WITH YOU" "MELTING THE ICE FOR ME" "WHEN ITS COLD OUTSIDE AM I HERE IN VAIN" 

I mean it's about a unicorn. Unicorns are symbols of purity and truth and innocence and love. The type of love a child has which is pure and unconditional and true. That sort of magical thing. Unicorns as a concept are so amazing. They can tell truth from falsehood, they can purify people, they can heal people. They're symbols of something lost that people frantically try to find. People don't feel whole. People feel lost. People are wounded. People are broken. 

I have this book, A Glory of Unicorns compiled and edited by Bruce Coville, yes Bruce Coville who must have like specialized in writing unicorn books or something. This guy was really obsessed with unicorns. The book is one of my favorite books and people just don't understand it. It's a compilation of short stories about unicorns and they're all so good. To be honest, I don't really like Bruce Coville's writing style, but I like his ideas, and after the preface and first story there's no more of him. Anyways, the stories in the book are all about unicorns who... well, I'm trying to think what the recurring theme is. There is a wide range of themes. In one story the unicorn kind of represents reality and he teaches the main character to be independent. In another story the unicorn represents innocence and love, and he lives inside the heart of this old grandmother who tells her granddaughter the story of how the unicorn saved her from the nightmares and problems of the real world. And in yet another story the unicorn was being cared for by an ungrateful, cold, and insulting girl, and yet the unicorn still loved her and actually helped her to become a better person. I think the recurring theme might be that the unicorns always heal somebody or help somebody. They give back a part of somebody that they may or may not have known was missing. Isn't it beautiful?

I am fascinated by the idea of unicorns. They're everything missing. Don't you wish they were real? ;)

Robot Unicorn Attack. This game. A unicorn. In this game you're a unicorn. Running, leaping, flying. Dashing through stars in fiery explosions, going faster and faster, but every time, you hit a wall and fall and fail. You try again, running harder. You hit a wall and fall and fail. You're this unicorn, you are purity and truth and innocence and love. All you want is to live in harmony, harmony.. oh, love! Wear no disguise for me, you say. Open your eyes, you say. Show your true self, and let me love you, you say. You keep running. The tears fall. Melting the ice for me. We are all trapped in ice. The ice numbs and there is no feeling. You are a unicorn, don't you feel frustrated that people won't open up themselves and allow themselves to be vulnerable... but free? It's a sacrifice, yes, I suppose, to give up the only real protection we have, that shield of icy ignorant unfeeling. But how else do we find the real truth beyond the cold? 

This is how I feel when I play Robot Unicorn Attack. I play it when I just can't be satisfied with life. There are expectations and responsibilities and obligations that I have to keep up with, that I try to keep up with, that I utterly fail to keep up with, and then I feel sad and useless and frustrated with myself. Then I play this game and remind myself of what's important. I want to help people. I'm no perfect unicorn though. I fail, I hit the walls and fall. That's fine though. The fact that I get hurt and feel emotions and fail, that is how I know that I am alive. 

Twitter and blogs

I really wish there could be a thing like a blog combined with twitter. Blogs and twitter are like, opposite things and if you combined them you'd get epicness. Twitter with its character limit, it's like, for short random thoughts, like small epiphanies and interesting tidbits. And then a blog is like large ranting thing for elaborate thought webs and stuff. I mean technically I could write like, one sentence blog posts but that's lame. That's like wasting the awesomeness potential of a blog. Plus the actual long, ranting good elaborate posts would get buried by the short random ones. I could also just use my blog and twitter separately but no one uses twitter and it would be so much easier to just combine the two onto one website. but still have the posts and the tweets separated so the posts wouldnt get buried by the tweets. Having a blog and having a twitter are both so awesome I don't know why more people don't get them. No, everyone has like Facebook and G+. The mainstreamish platforms, like a shared ground for everyone to share stuff but everything gets buried by everything and there are people competing for likes and stuff and there's nothing good like the things you'd find on blogs. Like, halfway between a twitter and a blog, the worst of both worlds. For me, at least. The advantage for most people is that it's better for socializing with the reshare thing and the comments system and there are no limits on what you can post, whereas on twitter you only share short things and on a blog everything you share gets shared publicly and it's like your own website and other people are looking at it as opposed to just your post on a shared ground. With a blog you have an opportunity to customize it and make it your own. That's especially appealing to me. Like, I can put whatever I want on it because it's my blog. It's not going to appear in other peoples streams or notifications or something. Well except right now its automatically set to post to G+ when I post something and I'm not going to lie, I like that people can see my blog. It's like I can feel like I'm actually contributing stuff. But really the main purpose of my blog I feel like is to archive important things that I don't want to lose forever. Literally all the posts so far have been results of me ranting to someone on Hangouts and then going like "This is good stuff, I must save it" so I write it. Anyways G+ and Facebook aren't for me. Twitter though. I originally got it with the intent of seeing what the heck Vi was up to because of the lack of videos. However I quickly found that I really like the format of Twitter. It's simple and instead of liking or +1'ing you have favorites but the thing is that it saves all of your favorites so you can go back and look at them. Retweets work pretty much the same way, but like instead of having comments you have like reply tweets? I don't even understand how it works but it's cool that you have a character limit. There's so much you can do with a platform like this, and yet half the tweets I see are links to other pages. Like wow. Guys. You are taking something beautiful and ingenious and you are killing it. You are murdering it. You are massacring it. But really it's not anybody's fault. Twitter is a fascinating thing and I'm sure that there are people out there who use it how it's intended but here in Plano no one seems to use Twitter. I'd like to use Twitter, at least it seems better to me than G+, but no one is there so I couldn't really use it even if I wanted to. It's not the type of thing that suits everyone, so the people who actually use it are doomed to never have any sort of audience ever. Unless you're famous like John Green. Then everyone actually wants to see your tweets. Otherwise your tweets just get buried by everyone else's tweets and no one will ever see your tweets unless they're specifically searching for them and no one does that. Twitter is such a wonderful concept but from where I see it, it's nowhere near its full potential. It would be so much awesome if a twitter-like thing could be incorporated into my blog. There people could see it and it would be on my blog, happy and safe from being buried by all the other tweets. Safe and protected, on its own website instead of being a part of a larger platform. Wouldn't that be nice?

Oh hey look there's a twitter gadget! Says I after a long time of messing around with blogger. How perfect! Now I can get what I wanted!! Hooray!!
*15 minutes later*
NOW HOW DO YOU GET THIS FREAKING GADGET TO FUNCTION CORRECTLY

Humans are Highly Trained in the Art of Ignoring Things

Humans are highly trained in the art of ignoring things.
Ignoring things is a form of self protection
Because if you open yourself up to everything, you'll die
You'll literally die
With all of the problems of the world rushing at you

The people who just safely keep ignoring things blissfully and ignorantly
They have relatively safe and comfortable lives
They bar themselves in from all the things that can hurt them

Ignorance and apathy is a shield, built into people by default
But there are some people who just stop ignoring
Some people who just, their default, built-in emotional shield of ignorance broke.
And suddenly everything breaks through and connects with their souls
These people become so opened up
They become so sensitive
They acutely sense and feel everything and everyone
These are the people most in touch with beauty.

And the overwhelming feeling, the beauty, the awe, the vastness, the freedom
But also the sadness, the pain, the loss, the hurt
And it's swirling and confusing and evoking

And then you wonder how you're going to keep on living like that
Because the beauty, it hurts
It's too intense
It's too much
And then you try to capture it, but you can only for a moment if at all
It escapes, to be replaced by more

You know that things will never be the same
To back when you had a shield
Things just seemed so much simpler then
No, now you're exposed and you can see and feel, really feel
Sometimes you just wish you never had to deal with it all
But deep inside you know that it's better this way
Because now you can see the truth
You can feel the truth
The truth hurts

The Problem with Stereotypes

Right now I am pretty pissed on behalf of my good friend Annie. 

So you know that blog post from Saturday? Annie read it, and we started talking about it. 

We started talking about gender stereotypes, and how people are expected to fit gender stereotypes, and how that type of stereotyping absolutely sucks for people who just don't fit. I don't know anyone who would know this better than Annie; she's the most tomboyish girl I've ever known. She hangs out with the guys and she consumes a vast quantity of what people might consider guy books (and she's a really fast reader, too. She can finish a trilogy in like two days.) and does martial arts and practices throwing knives in her spare time. (What an odd duo we make-- she throws knives in her spare time and I read art history in my spare time. Most beautiful combo.) She out-guys the guys. I've actually been pretty jealous of her life in the past-- she's always been a tomboy. She has so much more fun than I do. She's got such freedom! I wish I could live like that. When I was very young I did. But as time passed and I got more girl friends as well as guy friends, I started to stay away from the boys because I was afraid, of being judged and being left behind by my girl friends. At first it really sucked but I got used to it, and I loved my girl friends very much. We were a crazy bunch, and we weren't stereotypical girls but not exactly tomboys either. We did more boy stuff but with a more girl-type group dynamic. Then middle school happened, and I saw all of my friends less often, so I had to make new friends. Sixth grade I had Annie in all of my periods so I didn't really try to find any new friends, but then seventh grade, ugh. Obviously I first tried to make friends with girls but it just didn't work. It sucked. The girls I met in middle school were nothing like my friends from elementary. I just couldn't do it... but I was still afraid to make friends with the boys after being away from them for so long. What if they wouldn't accept me? I basically spent the year alone, with a few of those friends that you only have in one or two class periods. It's not exactly like I disliked being alone. I'm naturally introverted so a bit of silence doesn't bother me, and I like having space to think by myself. I talked to both sexes so it's not like I was one of those hermit people either. However not having any close friends really sucks. 

I really was envious of Annie. How awesome her life must be, not having to worry about what people think of her, I thought. BAH, I HAVE RARELY BEEN MORE WRONG IN MY LIFE. I know now that the stereotypes of typical girls are obstacles that Annie has to deal with every day, and it angers me that this should even be a problem. 

I feel like crap for being friends with Annie for so long and never truly understanding the extent of the struggles she has. "Why do people simply stereotype gender roles into these specific categories that have no meaning except they separate the apparently normal from the apparently not?" she said, bitter and frustrated. "Even at church people try to be accepting, but there's this huge gap. They can't relate with me and I can see them giving me glances when I talk even with the boys or act "un-girl-like" in any type of way."
"Annie, I think it's not that people judge you, it's just that people see you as different. And that's not a bad thing," I said, just not getting it. Following, we had a mini-debate. My own experiences greatly differed from hers in the fact that I eventually learned to become friends with other girls and be able to see things the way they see it, but Annie never did. "I hated girls and girls hated me last year," She said. "I can stand them now but I still half-hate them." 
"Girls are just different," I tried to explain. "I didn't get girls last year, but now I can. Girls make very good friends. They're much better with emotions and stuff. They sympathize more. Guys are just so awkward and they're like incapable of sharing their feelings or something." It's true. Forcing myself to make friends with girls opened my eyes to how caring and open and understanding girls can be. That's something I never really had with my guy friends, with exceptions. Of course, throughout this entire conversation we are speaking extremely extremely generally, because in reality people can't be fit into categories like that at all.
"Emotion stuff! Who needs emotion stuff. Whack a knife or a sword at a tree, that's all it takes. Maybe have a little fight with Zach or someone, that's all it takes me." Said she. 
I was skeptical. "Annie, emotions are important." I gently stressed. 
"Yeah they're important, it doesn't mean that you should like freak out over them."
Referring to girls. 
And subsequently me.
Heh. 

Also our friend MK was also there. He's a boy. This is where he comments that "Uhh, both of you are crazy." 
And also turtles. 
Thus proving my point. 

"Well I just mean that you shouldn't judge girls just because they're girls. They're amazingly nice people when you get to know them." I said, trying to get her to understand. 
"And then have them reject you?"
"Annie, they don't reject you, you reject them! You don't give them a chance!"
"Yeah, I tried to be like them and be friends, and the next thing you know they're calling me stupid for hanging out with boys and shipping me with them. After a while they just ignore me. I've been there plenty of times. There's no point. Plus, I can't stand the gossiping stuff going being peoples' backs like that. It disgusts me."

(This is where MK unhelpfully adds, "#zannie")

"You shouldn't judge people like that. It's not like people are out to get you because you're different."

(Mk: *puts down pitchfork* wait we aren't?)

"I never hated the person, I hated the interaction. The urge to run when someone said hi. That was terrifying. And I know they're not out to get me, but they always managing it. I've heard several things between people. They say that I'm actually a boy. They say that well I you know, do certain things with boys. Urgh. I've heard them." She said with disgust. "And you know how [name omitted] used to be nice, she kinda gossips really badly and ships people and insults people behind their backs with [name omitted] at our table every day. It's horrible." I countered by listing several girls that I consider, like, paragons of virtue. Apparently, she doesn't know any of them well except one. Then we started listing people we consider nice. After a while, Annie had to leave, and we ended the conversation. 

The conversation left me with a strange feeling. I still genuinely believe that most girls are great people, just in a different way from boys is all. But I now see why Annie has such a crappy time with them. Heck, the reason she hates girls is the very same reason that I was afraid to make friends with boys. Anyways, there are always those few people who are such crappy people and sometimes they manage to really screw Annie's life up. I must say that I've never really experienced bullying, so I may not exactly know what I'm talking about. However I can see that Annie is genuinely hurt and her experiences have lead her to have bitterness towards girls in general. Even people in general. I've witnessed her go from mild social discomfort to flat-out social anxiety. Constantly living feeling like people are judging you every moment is terrible and scary and crippling. No one should have to live that way. The most infuriating part is that Annie has to deal with all this crap simply for choosing to live in an unconventional way. We live in a society that as a whole, claims to be universally accepting and diverse, but really, the odd people out, people like Annie, have an extremely hard time interacting with everyone else. I've been there before. What a crap society. Come on! We can do better. Why is it that people are expected to be a certain way? I know it's not like people shun and hate different people but it's the mere fact that people even think of them as weird or unusual that people like Annie can't be normal. Everyone's unique, so why is it that when you're different in a certain way that suddenly you're not normal. So you prefer cake over pie. (although why, I will never understand.) Fine, that's forgivable. You prefer hanging out with boys over girls? What a strange person you are, people think. That's what's wrong here! We as a society need to stop thinking this way! It's stupid and gah, I'm so freaking angry! Stereotypes suck! Stereotypes are the reasons for much suffering! Heck, it's not just Annie! Look at some other people I know! People who try to hide themselves! People who just accept it as a part of life and keep on being miserable! People who build themselves so much into something they're not, I don't even know what's real anymore! People who never open their mouths to speak what they think because they know the sucky truth, that most of everyone won't understand and won't care and won't listen and won't accept! We're fortunate that we go to a school that has an extremely diverse population (personality-wise, by race not so much) and we're a relatively accepting school because there is a large cast of odd characters. Still though, there are people like Annie on the extreme ends of different. Why?!? Why do we do this to them?!?!? Why do we do this to ourselves?!?! Freaking idiot world. As a creative person who values independent thinking and diversity, who has quite a few eccentricities herself, this pisses me off so much. 

Come on, world!! DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS!!

"Miss"understood

Happy Pi day everyone. I literally just made this blog so that I could make this post because I felt like it was actually something important enough! Look at me I'm contributing to the internet!

So anyways, I saw this video

Yeah thanks Vi, your twitter brings me so many interesting things to think about. Well, watching this video made me start questioning myself, once again. Laci says, women are thought of as hysterical, irrational, crazy, and emotional. I'd already noticed that; they are hysterical crazy irrational and emotional. Laci brings up the fact that these qualities of women make them harder to trust as they're always overreacting. Truth is I've already been thinking about this for a while, though in the context of my own life and not all of society. It's so sad that it's true.
Even I myself, a teenage girl, tend to trust guys more than girls. I've had my crises, the "OMG IM FREAKING OUT AND NO ONE CARES" and I go rant things at people like (or spam people with messages of) "OMGOMG"s and "AWREHJGTRSEKAREHRAKAERHYKSTHJTRSJ" and "AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH" and "I'M GOING TO DIE WHAT AM I GOING TO DO I CAN'T KEEP PROCRASTINATING AND DEPRIVING MYSELF OF SLEEP LIKE THIS" and "|********" and et cetera. Sometimes it just really feels like my life problems are going to eat me alive and I just want someone to listen to me rant and care. Words sometimes don't seem to be enough when I'm overjoyed at something or deeply moved by some awesome art or something.
Sometimes I try to express it with art, but most of the time it just results in me freaking out for a long time and spamming people with messages about how pretty this painting of waterlilies is. Because I want them to know, I want to share my feelings, I want them to feel with me, and maybe the number of letters in this string of random letters will convey the intensity of my emotion. Because right now this painting is the most beautiful freaking thing in the whole universe and it's worth crying over.

Just look at it! It's perfection!!! 

Well anyways, it's ironic because I emote so much in an attempt to get people to understand and sympathize and to BREAK THE WALLS OF SEPARATE HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS that people listen to what I'm saying less. It's like, the meaning behind my words gets... diluted, somehow. Like, I spend so much time talking and freaking out about small things like what color the stupid dress is, that when I actually want to say something important, some deep philosophy I want to share, I feel like its meaning is less... meaningful. 

And I know it's not just me. Laci points out that women in particular tend to be more crazy with expressing their emotions. Why, though? Do women feel more intensely? Are they more sensitive? Or is it that they feel more of a need to express and be understood? What's the real difference here between the genders, and why? Maybe women just have a rougher time, especially during the teenage years that I'm currently going through, and they need to talk about their emotions as a way of getting them in order. I imagine it like this cycle: 

                                                   people trust less/

                  --------------→     pay less attention  --------------

               |                                    to them                                          |

                                                                                                              ↓

women are more                                                                   women try harder 

       hysterical                                                                         to communicate

               ↑                                                                                           |

                    -----------------------------------------------------

Forgive the crappy quality. 

Anyways the cycle makes sense to me. So then what sets that cycle into motion? The root cause must either be at "women are more hysterical" than men by nature, or "people trust them less/pay less attention." It makes sense that this would happen. Women have for most of history never had voices. They've been treated like property in the past. They had to work much harder than men to make themselves heard, they're more, uh, vocal, because they aren't listened to. Obviously things are changed now, but the cycle remains there. That kinda sucks. I don't know, it's my own theory, but it makes enough sense for me. 

So one cause is that women were historically given less power. But that doesn't prove women to not be naturally more hysterical than men. Maybe it's both reasons, fueling each other. 

I used to be a really quiet girl. I didn't like talking and I usually kept things to myself, but only because I felt no one listened. In middle school my close group of friends was broken so I was forced to talk to new people. That's when I began getting louder, I began talking more. It probably has a lot to do with becoming a teenager. Emotions get scary real then. I've always felt the desire to be heard and truly understood, but I didn't have the courage before that. Now I'm so loud and annoying I honestly have no idea how my friends put up with me. And I'm noticing it. I see clearly that my over-dramatic reactions to everything are not helping me communicate. It's like increasing the volume of everything until you get to that point that everything sounds the same volume and the important things get lost in the large amount of other trivial matters. I'm trying to pull back and reserve my speech. I disabled my social media account, resetting everything and then getting my account back and now I only have like 8 people in my circles. Social isolation. I tried. It's not easy. Now that I'm in the habit of sharing every little thing, it's hard to stop. 

Trying to communicate more effectively by being louder and more enthusiastic and emotional is counterproductive. Being too quiet isn't great either, I've been there too. Well, it's not like I exactly disliked being quiet. It was easier in a lot of ways. But it's not so nice to the people who care. And in any case the need to feel understood still exists. There's a delicate balance between talking and not talking, between trivial small talk vs world-changing philosophical discussions, and between blunt honestly and politeness, in order for optimal communication. 

In the meantime, please keep in mind not to dismiss others' words and feelings-- just because they're women or they over-exaggerate everything, or they always seem to want attention, or they often lie, or they talk a certain way that just rubs you the wrong way, or maybe they don't talk at all because they're shy-- because really, we all just want the same thing, to know that people out there genuinely care and believe and understand what we're going through, what we're thinking. The different ways people try to go about achieving this don't always work. That perfect delicate balance is hard to find. Usually people end up talking way too much trying to get people to listen, or way too little out of fear or feeling of not being wanted. It's nobody's fault that communication is hard. The least you can do is try to pay attention to other people more. Try to understand. Try to look at the world from another person's perspective. After all, when it comes to the important things, we're not all so different. 

(I like how this entire post had like nothing to do with the original video.)

(Now I'm going to hope that the fact that I'm a female and a teenager doesn't somehow ruin the credibility of this post.)