College Stress

I just feel the need to express my feelings of AAAAAAH because I feel like I don't really know what's going on, I constantly feel like I'm missing something or forgetting something big. Like I'm going to get to school on the first day and they'll be like "haha, you forgot to sign this form, we'll have to cancel your entire enrollment, sucks to be you!" I just filled out the MPN for financial aid which I feel like I'm really late on, but it's confusing because there was no deadline or timeline or anything! UT just randomly sent me an email saying they released "some or all" of my financial aid funds and I'm just so confused because I hadn't even signed the MPN yet. (At times like these, I remind myself that people like [redacted] who are literally constantly late and overdue and disorganized on everything still manage to survive somehow... and calm down just a little...) I feel like I'm doing everything wrong. I feel like this financial aid stuff is pretty much dealt with but there's going to be other stuff that I have to deal with, and the amount of anxiety I feel about it is disproportionately large. Even though I'm freaked out, though, I know I'll be okay in the end as long as I make my plans well and keep track of things.
Just some thoughts from today.

It continues

The bronchitis. IT STILL HASN'T GONE AWAY. I guess it's really not all that bad because at least the fever is gone, but now it's just the cough, which is really annoying, mostly because it's been keeping me up at night and making me throw up.

Anywho, I have been sick and also kind of busy BUT I still managed to make a really bad painting. (Idk, one day I just got this sudden random urge to paint, which I haven't actually done in a long time. I should really make more art!)




So yeah... This is a somewhat abstract painting of a modern art statue found in Banff. I just thought the reflections on it looked really interesting and might be fun to paint, which they were. I wish I paid more attention to what I was doing with the paint colors, because that greenish color did not look nice at all. Actually I didn't do a good job of reproducing the grayness of that one, probably because I did all the colors in big patches,,,, oh well, this painting was a quick impression anyways. Also, if you noticed that it's actually sideways on the easel and that the photo is rotated over, that's because I painted it sideways, the only reason being that I was looking at the reference photo on my phone which I couldn't stand upright because it was charging. XD

Here's the original photo by the way so you can fully appreciate the extent of mediocrity that my painting turned out to be. I really didn't have the right shade of blue/cyan paint to achieve the right colors that I wanted, and if I were to do it again, I would abstractify all the way to get something more colorful and interesting. As it is, right now this painting is kind of in-between-ish, not quite abstract enough to be good, not quite realistic enough to be good either. I think I went into it wanting to make a really bold abstraction of it, but not quite knowing how or being brave enough to really bring out the interesting bits. Also, the brushwork is just really lazy and disorganized. If I did it again I would arrange the brush directions to actually kind of make sense. When it became clear this painting wasn't going to be it, I just skipped on the background entirely. I just picked a really hard subject to paint in the first place, so really, I don't feel bad about it at all. Just a bit disappointed I didn't get something cooler out of it I guess.

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If some stranger came upon this blog they would probably think I'm just a somewhat shitty artist, and I know I'm trying not to care what people think, but there's a difference between someone thinking something about me based on valid representations and straight up just not being represented fairly or truthfully, and I think that in this case I'm justified in wanting people to know that I actually can make much better art when I actually try, and it's in a more familiar style rather than being something experimental. So please allow me to prove to you theoretical reader my skill in one of the only things I actually feel I'm somewhat good at.


Oil painting of glass swan


Colored pencil drawing of doggo <3


Oil painting of street through wet car window


Pen and water of snail <3

Ok I think that's enough self-congratulation ahaha. Well I hope anyone who sees this likes my art. Anyways, I better go practice violin.

Where have I been?

Got bronchitis, have been very sick for the past few days.

The most borrect thing she could possibly say, as promised

Things that she said 4 by Samantha Liu

I figured I had to get this thing out of the way. There's not much to say about it, I guess. It's just really freaking boring, I just made it as like a baseline as reference to. I mean the plan is to make 50 of these, anyway. But I think I actually have to start trying next time and maybe making it longer and not just have blocked chords. I mean honestly... I haven't done anything to really step out of my comfort zone yet. Maybe next time just take this basic foundation and add some texture, maybe do some voice leading or like arpeggiate the bass or something idk....just to get a feel for things. ok yeah sounds like a plan. i feel like i'm making really slow progress though.

more things that she said

I made 2 more "things that she said"s in rapid succession, this time focusing more on the chords instead of the melody first. They're just really simple outlines I guess. i did this by putting 10 minutes on the clock and forcing myself to just put out the first thing I thought of. I wrote them without listening to them until the very end, so that makes me feel slightly less shitty about how bad they came out. even though i shouldn't feel bad because i'm just starting out and i was intentionally trying to experiment with weird things so really, it's expected that they come out weird. i gave it roughly one chord per line of the poem so they're really short. They both sound really shitty wonky because idk chord functions, and i should probably go and learn about that. and listen to more music analytically. also I was reminded about that "make 50 of something" challenge that Vi Hart did a while back; the idea is to make so many different versions of something that it forces you to try new things and improve on it, and it also helps you be ok with a lot of them being bad because there's less focus on the individual versions and more focus on the whole thing as an exercise. So I think i'm gonna do that; making 50 versions of things that she said, or at least as many as I can before I get too tired/bored/annoyed.Things that she said 2 by Samantha Liu

So for this one I learned that just because it's a major chord doesn't mean that it's going to sound happy (exhibit A: measure 4). I think I compartmentalize too much in my mind because I was thinking only about that one chord change without the context. So I learned I'm bad at stringing things together into long coherent phrases. I think the motion of the melody also contributed to its weirdness, with that fall from F to Eb and then the wistfulness of a minor 6th, was definitely NOT the mood I wanted for the line "Let yourself go." Maybe I should just start with writing things that use like NORMAL chords (1, 4, and 5) maybe I'm trying to jump ahead of myself by putting in weird spicy chords just because. i think maybe next time I try this I'll make one really "borrect" example just as like a control or something.

Things that she said 3 by Samantha Liu

well, this one's more normal than the other one at least. I still don't like what happened in measure 4 though, and I can't figure out why. I think I don't like the movement from G to C back to G so quickly in this context. like the peak was at the wrong place. maybe I should take the cues from the poem even less literally than I already am. because I made the melody peak on the G relatively where the "go" in "let yourself go" would have been but it musically doesn't make sense. Or maybe it's one of those deals where it just sounds weird because I've been thinking about it and staring at it for so long. (Actually, coming back to it after lunch, it does sound less weird than I thought it did. But I still don't entirely like it.)
Also, I've already hit my 5-score upload limit on the free version of Musescore, so it looks like by the end of this project I'm going to have like 15 musescore accounts. whoooops?
the good thing is I already feel SOOOO much better about making these. It doesn't make me want to kill myself whenever I listen them anymore. Now it's more like slight cringe and disappointment, but even those easily go away when I sit down to analyze my mistakes more systematically. So yay!!! This is progress! i'm feeling good. :)

it has been several days

it has been a few days since i posted my first attempt to make something stupid and this post is just me making sure to myself that i'm still committed to this idea, i just haven't had the time to make anything else yet. thanks a lot daniel kahneman
now i find myself worrying about the prospect that anyone who would see these posts, and me struggling to make something happen that isn't happening, would find my whole situation kind of pathetic
which is entirely stupid because 1) it shouldn't doesn't matter what anyone who sees this thinks and 2) NO ONE IS SEEING THESE POSTS ANYWAYS. i'm literally just suffering ghost embarrassment. Which is STUPID.
which i don't mean to say in a self-judgmental way- i know that everybody suffers from irrational thoughts and emotions, so this doesn't make me any more stupid than a normal person; i'm just saying that the embarrassment is stupid as a what I feel is an objective fact, because it's so irrational.

all of the cringefest

in the continuing struggle to defeat fear, i forced myself to contact someone that i felt nervous to talk to, even though the nervousness was completely and utterly irrational (as it usually almost always is). the conversation is now awkwardly under way.
Funny how awkwardness necessarily involves fear of judgement, which is exactly what I'm trying to get over. I just have to get to a place where I'm ok with that. THROUGH PRACTICE AND A LOT OF CRINGING BEFORE IT GETS BETTER.

7:13 left to say something useful

i've been a bit apprehensive about this whole idea of just putting whatever on here even though no one is going to see it. very afraid that i'm going to quit this whole thing really quickly. maybe not afraid but more like worried. pessimistic? or that it's really just going to be a lot of garbage for a long time and that it's NEVER going to get better. all this and i haven't even really started yet! and I haven't even sorted out how this thing is going to work in my day to day schedule yet. (Ha, what schedule?) and i'm just constantly jealous of people who are able to put themselves out there and make the things they want to make, and make them well. i think maybe later today i'll give another go at "things that she said" because my last attempt was really a non-attempt and i just gave up at the ed really. i'm thinking about if i can pass this blog off to some strangers online, or maybe not strangers but maybe paulo or the LWSH. Just so i'm not really just posting a lot of shit things out for nobody to see, like some sort of insane person talking to herself.

Things That She Said 1 by Samantha Liu

So this is my first "stupid thing" that I'm posting on this blog. I figured instead of sitting around being sad about how I suck at music, I should probably, you know, practice making music? so I took this old shitty poem I wrote as a basic constraint, and wrote a simple melody around the poem. The poem isn't supposed to be lyrics or anything, just a basic guide for how the mood of the song should develop over time. Here's the poem:

Things that she said
Open your heart
Uncloud your mind
Let yourself go
But stay on the ground
Look up at the sky
And come back inside

The poem has a three-ish feel, so I thought the music should be in 3. The poem was actually about things that my violin teacher said, and my struggle to resolve the paradoxical advice to let myself be spontaneous and free, but then also to show discipline and restraint and control.
So it starts our sorta casual and attempts to expand and brighten culminating in "let yourself go" but then falls back down (i think measure 16 is the best I got in this regard).

What I really want to say about this, instinctually, is OH MY GOD IT SUCKS SO MUCH WHY AM I EVEN TRYING I HATE THIS I HATE MYSELF AND I HATE EVERYTHING I DO I SHOULD JUST GO DIE RIGHT NOW AND I'M EMBARRASSED FOR THIS THING'S EXISTENCE AND WHYYYYY DID I EVER THINK I COULD DO THISSSS

but I gotta REPLACE NEGATIVE THOUGHTS with MORE POSITIVE ONES and not be FUCKING TOXIC FOR ONCE so, the rational thing to say about this is,

I guess it starts out ok enough. It's really unoriginal, but the point of this exercise wasn't really to be original, it was more about just getting started with something, no matter how simple AND SHITTY it is. I guess it accomplishes what I set out to do, which was to make a simple melody which roughly follows the emotional contours of this poem, even if it doesn't accomplish it all that convincingly or interestingly. I dislike the ending though, because jarring key change. Turns out I have no idea what I'm doing. I already knew that. If it makes it any better, I wrote the whole thing down on paper without listening to it first, and I already knew that it was going to sound kind of funny, but I didn't know HOW funny it would sound until I put it into musescore at which point I was like oh no this is really bad.
well, I remember thinking coming out of measure 16 that it would be weird to end the thing in G major/brighter key than it started in so basically I was like i should probably switch to something else, I need more of a mood change anyways. I thought about just ending in G minor, but I wanted it to feel calmer/bittersweet, not darker. so i was like fuck it i'm just gonna do whatever and just end it. The result was a jarring key change and also deviation from the 4-bar phrase pattern that had been set up, because I tried to force the music in a direction I didn't know how to make it go.

So what I learned from this is that you can't just randomly decide to change keys in the middle of a melody. use pivot chords. note to self, learn how to do that.

So that was my first post of a stupid thing I made. How do I feel about it? Still a little bit embarrassed. There is a lingering feeling that what I have just put out into the world is a shame upon myself, my family, and anybody who's ever associated with me, and especially my music teachers. But I know that all of that it just bullshit in my head. Even if this were really the worst garbage that anyone in history starting out in composition ever wrote, I'm just going to have to be ok with that. I have no delusions of being good. I'm just trying to do this for myself, I'm just trying to not be afraid anymore.
Ok, well... I guess that's enough for today.

To get over fear of judgement

I've been doing a lot of thinking, and I've come to this single idea that everything I do is shaped by fear. Fear of judgement, of not being good enough, of not being able to make it, of things being difficult, etc. etc. And anybody who really knows me (actually not a lot of people now that I think of it ) knows that I hate fear, and I believe fear is the absolute worst thing ever, a mere evolutionary remnant from a time when the environment was full of tigers and whatnot trying to eat you. Fear is good for helping you not die, but is literally the most maladaptive trait to ever exist when you're trying to accomplish things and make friends and get things done and just live life the way you want to.
I forgot what I came here to do lmao
ok, well, fear of judgement. I figure if I just do enough stupid things/make enough shitty things, I'll have nothing left that people can judge me for that I haven't already given over willingly to be judged. IF that makes any sense. I don't think I'm ready yet to announce this project out to the world, but I'm going to start putting really, really shitty things and ideas onto this really old shitty blog that I used to post on when I was like 13 or whatever. (Actually I say it's shitty but I look back at some of the stuff and actually start to like some of it. It's nice in like that naive optimism sort of way. I could honestly stand to have some more of that nowadays.)
So yeah, anyone can technically see this, but not anyone who isn't intentionally searching for this, i.e. knew I had a blog back in middle school and was like "hey i wonder if that old thing is still up"
placing my bets now, it's gonna be pat or jennifer (if anyone at all.) if it's one of you then hiiiiiii
what's uppp
lel
wait shit my analytics say i have one follower
whatever hopefully they don't actually check
BUT THE whole POINT of this is to BE OK WITH BEING JUDGED so i guess, let them see this. it don't matter to mE (well right now it still does but hopefully that changes.)

Progress

I think I've finally gotten to a point where I can look back at the posts on this blog and feel no shame or embarrassment about them. I think this is progress.