Monday, January 2, 2012

Happy Belated New Year's! o_o

Wow, I looked through some of my old blog posts and there's this certain point where I start to write extremely long posts. I mean, I've noticed that lately I've had a lot of long posts, but I hadn't realized that my old posts were really that short. How did I stay so brief? Maybe they were shorter because the time between posts was shorter and because many of them were describing links and music and games.

Anyway, happy belated new year! I'm not really sure what New Year's resolutions I have. Hmm.. The same as every year, I guess!

1. Get good grades
2. Be happy
3. Make new friends
4. Learn to project
5. Do less thinking before speaking
6. Don't hesitate
7. Figure out what you enjoy doing the most
8. Get into a good college
9. Do well on the SAT
10. Stop procrastinating
11. Go up to at least 5 people and say hello

Ok. I guess I shouldn't have so many resolutions because it'll be hard to keep up with them, but most of these are obvious or constantly in my head, so really the only ones I need to remember are #5, 6, and 11.

About resolution #7, that's pretty much what I must do in the next 24 hours, because I must write an artist statement for school and pick a concept to focus on. For the rest of the semester. It's so difficult to figure out what I am most passionate about/what I most enjoy doing. Isn't that weird? I always wonder whether I will eventually get really bored of what I choose.

Ooh, and the poll! I was making a list of words that I like or that inspire me and among the words I listed are the ones that are in the most recent poll. I noticed as I composed my giant word list that a lot of the words were beige or sandy colored, with some grey lavender and light slate blue-like colored words every once in a while. This was caused either by the meaning of the words, or the sound of them, or just by the letters. So I am curious what colors everyone else sees in these words? Maybe none of them are the right color for you, but just pick the one closest to grey lavender, so that I can get some results :D Or you could comment on the colors... which would be even more informative! Anyway, I am interesting in seeing what the results will be.

Ok, bye!



- - -
Oh that's right, I am also attempting a take-a-photo-every-day thing this year! So at the end of the year I will have 366 photos recording my daily life. 


Finishing that will be my 12th resolution for the year! :D

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Apple Cider

Last night I checked the date right before going to sleep, and the computer said it was Sunday, December 24th, and I thought, "WHAT? If today is Christmas Eve, then tomorrow is Christmas Day, which is really when Christmas will be over! And why didn't anyone tell me?" (and why didn't I notice a christmas google logo and why didn't msn advertise its annual last-minute christmas shopping themed article and santa-tracking thing on their daily slideshow?) And I didn't even get to enjoy it like I normally would have. D: It was also horrible because it was really late so I had to go and wrap all my presents and  put them under the tree and figure out a way to sneak out some of those ribbon bow things that you stick on top from a crumply plastic bag thing and do that all without letting my parents hear, because that would just ruin the hey-when-did-that-happen feeling even if it was obvious that it must have happened whenever. The gift wrap was extremely loud, and I kept dropping things like paper bags while adding last minute stuff. Also, if you have not experienced this before, one of the most annoying things to do quietly is to try to take something out of a crumpled up plastic bag that is in another plastic bag that is tied and rolled up under a giant bear in a closet.

Anyway, at the time I'd just forgotten that it was that really-late-at-night time that's really just the early morning of the next day, which was Christmas Eve. So that meant that if I went to sleep and woke up in the afternoon, it would still be Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day, and I thought I had figured that all out in my head but for some reason I hadn't and instead I kept thinking that I totally forgot that the night of Christmas Eve was really the day for celebrating, not the day of Christmas day, and I was like, ugh, if I were still a kid I would have totally remembered that. 


So wrapping and adding stuff took longer than I thought because I had to do everything really slowly to minimize the sound (although now I think that just made everything louder) and the next time I looked out the window it was morning. That was also disappointing because I was unable to sleep and pretend to wake up Christmas morning like I had just gotten a full 9 hours of sleep and instead I had to just transition into Christmas morning without the hey-I-just-woke-up-and-it's-Christmas feeling. And then since it was still sort of too early to be awake I decided to just sleep for a few hours and set a bunch of alarms which I later ignored. Then I woke up in the afternoon and found out it was really Christmas Eve and then I had a great day.

There really wasn't much of a point to this story actually. I just felt like posting. Here's a song:

Carol of the Bells by George Winston - Hey, on youtube the little circle that moves along the loading bar as the video plays is no longer just a circle but a snowflake covered up by a circle! It looks nice but kind of weird once you realize that it really doesn't look very much like a snowflake at all even though it instantly reminds you of one. Anyway, this is the best version of Carol of the Bells that I know of. The whole thing is piano. If I could have it as my alarm, I would, because it wakes you up even if you don't really feel like waking up. It's like the music clears your head and makes it work because your head wants to listen to it and make sense of it even if you want to keep sleeping. It reminds me of giant dewdrops dropping on piano keys. Anyway, my friend played this over the phone sometimes when she called me in the mornings to carpool to school and it worked surprisingly well in waking me up.

Anyway, merry Christmas Eve! Apple cider would be nice right now but I don't have any, which is ok because I'll just go get some hot chocolate instead. :D

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Paint

Ah. Regarding the poll to the right, my room is currently a musty dull yellow tan color. It's really sad. It matches the color of the fuzzy brown-like carpet. I have a lot of brown woody furniture. So everything is brown! Ahh! And  I have been wanting to paint my room for a while now but my parents keep saying next summer. So hopefully sometime before I set off on my adulthood voyage I will get my room painted into a nice lively, happy color fit for teenagers like myself. Hooray! I just can't decide on a color. So yeah. Please vote.

Now I must go off and try to sleep in order to prepare for the first day of school. Goodnight!

List and Lights

Wow. School is starting again, in 2 days. Summer was even shorter than usual. It just started feeling like summer a few weeks ago. WHY? I guess I'm ready for school, somewhat. I used to be so bored by the time July came around that I would be really excited for school to start. But now that I've discovered the computer, and the library, and friends, and now that I actually have stuff I want to do, I feel like summer could almost go on forever and I'd never be bored. Well before, I had all those things, but I got bored of them all so fast(except for friends, because how do you get bored of friends? Unless you spend every waking hour with them until you get sick of each other, which is rare, I think) so I just sat on the couch and made boredom noises.

I feel like I have an endless array of things to do. If bored, go on the computer. If you can't, go read a book. If you haven't visited the library recently, go do some summer homework(which you probably should have been doing anyway). If you don't feel like it, go paint. If you don't feel like it, go draw. If you don't feel like it, go make something. If you don't have the stuff to make whatever you feel like making, go eat some bread. If you ran out of bakery bread, call a friend. If they aren't there, write something. If you don't feel inspired, then go check and see if the computer is open. If it isn't, sleep. If you wake up and nothing has changed, then there's nothing you can do.

It rarely comes to that though. Anyway, I guess I should make a list now.

Things I want to do

Sit on a roof - I have always wanted to sit on the roof of a house. A real roof, not one of those flat ones with pools and gardens on top. I imagine there'd be wind and birds and a giant tree swaying by and random people jogging down the sidewalk. And it would just feel weird, to be able to see the roofs of all the houses down the street, and to actually feel the wind and to be the only person on the roof of anywhere. I think you would feel more alive, because it's just one of those things that you can do that makes you feel like you're the only person aware of it, and because this is one of those things that people can go through their whole lives not doing. And you can be one of the few people that have experienced something like that!

Punch someone - I really think I may live my whole life without punching anyone. You read about it in books and see it in movies and hear that other people have done it and yet you have no idea what it's like. It's one of those first-step kind of actions. Just like sewing up a hole in a pair of pants or playing a piece of music or driving a car. Each one of these things is the first step to a whole realm of stuff, and since stepping into each realm is so different, I want to experience all of them. So punching would be like the first step to the fighting realm! Not that I want to go any further than that.


Go to a concert - I think it's pretty sad that this is on my list. But just in case I don't go to one of those concerts where everyone is a fanatic about whoever is performing and random people in the crowd scream, I have listed this down. It's just one of those random things that every person must experience.

Work at a cafe - As a part time job during college or something like that. This is just too cool. Everyone seems to have worked at a restaurant or a cafe or a bakery at some point. I always hear about how you start off as garbage-taker-outer and then you move up to dishwasher and then you move up more until you become a cashier and stuff like that. And I want to know what it's like to be whoever it is that takes my order. By the way, this just cannot work at a chain fast food store. It's too depressing. I want to work at some little or somewhat well-known place. Somewhere where there are regulars and people that sit at tables and do work for hours and only get coffee refills. Or somewhere with several super busy hours of the day where people line up and yell orders and everything is hectic. 


That's pretty much it for my list as of now. I have other things I've always wanted to do, but those either aren't notable enough or I've forgotten them. It's a pretty short list, but I want to do each one so much that it doesn't really matter. The list used to have just two things on it anyway, and I don't know why I called it a list then either.

Well, that's all. Ooh, the song I'm about to link to is one of those songs that you happen to listen to on loop while doing something specific. And it plays several times so that that song and whatever you were doing at the time are forever linked in your memory. So whenever the song plays, you instantly get this weird nostalgic feeling and it's like, flashback! That's why I associate this oldie song with playing pokemon on my gameboy. It's also why I associate this architecture thing I did last year and with this Mike Posner song.

Lights by Ellie Goulding - I was at this art workshop earlier this summer. Sometimes when we painted, this guy's ipod would play from some speakers at the far end of the room. I didn't like most of the songs on that ipod, so I was kind of surprised when I liked this one. Anyway, when we had paintings to finish in the studio on the top floor of the dorms, the same person would play the music on their ipod, and I always noticed when this one came on since it was one of the only ones I liked. So I associate this song with late nights of painting in the studio and being tired and just being in the same rut as everyone else in my class. It was fun.

Actually, on the second to last day, several of us stayed up all night to finish our pieces. They blasted that ipod really loudly from the other room in the studio. It was super tiring. The whole workshop was intense and we had homework every day and we had to replenish materials every other day and in that city people walk everywhere. And meals were a long ordeal if you wanted to go out to eat. You have to walk to the place, wait for the food, walk/run back, depending on whether there was an evening workshop thing, then buy stuff and stop by several stores to get more paper towels or another tube of toothpaste. By the time you got all the necessary stuff out of the way, it was well into the evening and everyone's feet hurt and by the way we stand all day in class while painting. And we stayed up late and had to wake up early to stop by Walgreens and get our reference photos printed because the printer in our dorms had no color ink and the other building's computer room is closed on sundays and the actual building in which our classes are held has broken printers. I hope you realize that we walked all the way to all these buildings and then had to walk all the way back. Anyway, this led to everyone being super super tired by the time it was evening. People periodically slept on the ground right in front of their canvas, on the brown paper we laid out on the floor so that we could go around barefoot and not get paint or charcoal on our feet. A lot of us had snack breaks to the vending machines and random compilements of food in the kitchen for a snack feast, which was pretty sad because we were all kind of still high school kids that hadn't realized the importance of buying groceries. So we had some sausages and bread and pizza rolls and goldfish and soda from the vending machines.

My point is, all this just made us even more tired than normal, which was why I was so surprised when the effects of late-night-sleeping hit earlier than usual. Normally staying up late doesn't show its symptoms until the afternoon, when I get really drowsy. It was weird there because as soon as you woke up, you felt super tired. And not even walking around helped.

So in the morning, people would sway while painting and have hallucinations and mix the wrong colors because they thought they had aimed their paintbrush at the brown but when they put it on the canvas it turned out to be green and getting perspectives wrong and not seeing the teacher until they were right next to you. Before that, I didn't know it was possible to fall asleep standing up. The hallucinations were funny though, I have to say. During lunch, we would share our own hallucinations and talk about the weird feeling you get where you can feel the room tilting but you can't see it. And then the giant canvases propped on the wall would look like real people and every once in a while you would be like, whoa! There's a person right there! And then you'd realize they weren't real. And then you would be painting a head when suddenly the head would look like Hogwarts and you would lean in and be like, what a mess, that looks nothing like Hogwarts, and you'd wipe away the whole thing with an oily rag and then jump back and go, wait, what'd I just erase? And then you'd think, oh my god, I just erased the entire head! and have a mini moment of clarity and hilarity at yourself and horror.

Wow. I think I really needed to get that out. I haven't told anyone this experience in detail yet really. Anyway, that workshop was really one of the funnest long-ish experiences I've ever had. Weird too. Maybe I'll just write a series of posts describing the experience, because there was just so much that happened. I'm going to end now with a question, even though my English teacher always told us not to, because my song link ending is no longer really an ending anymore. It was a beginning! Haha.. Yeah, anyway have you all ever had similar long-ish fun experiences?

And YES! I finally ended that thing that I kept doing in my recent posts where I felt I needed to have correct grammar and no run-on sentences by rambling away about that workshop I went to. Just in time for school!


Oh by the way:


Current status: eating bakery bread :D

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Shadows

Ok, short post. I just saw The Voice's second to last episode, and I have never watched an episode for that show before. I actually wanted to see it before it came out, but then I saw a part of an episode once and it didn't seem that great. I decided to watch this one because I heard that the four finalists would be singing original songs.

Anyway, that's how I found this singer, Dia Frampton. I love her original song. The other songs were cool too, but I felt like some were too repetitive or something.

Since the episode just aired, the song hasn't gotten on grooveshark yet, and it's probably not on project playlist either, so here's a link to the youtube video of her song. I think her song is on iTunes though.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

no bubbles today!

Aaah, I'm not that tired. I keep feeling like I should say I am, but I'm not. For a while now I've been waking up around 4pm, and the days always feel so short. And so when I actually do wake up early, the day feels amazingly long. I've been staying up later and later every night, and usually when I do that, there comes a day where I stay up until morning and still feel super awake, and so I decide to just stay up all morning until I conk out at night, this time at a really early time. So then everything is reset!

Ugh, I'm also trying to get my voice back. Not my actual voice, but my how-I-speak-differently-from-everyone-else voice. Recently I've been trying to post stuff and I feel so stiff and contained. I think this must be because of all the essay training we've had during the school year for english, and because I've been typing and editing so many e-mails and letters to adults this year, which always takes me unnaturally long. Therefore, when I send regular e-mails to people, I always use "in which" instead of "when" and "where", and I try to keep myself from using smileys and from using exclamation points and from typing super long sentences and from making up words. Right now I am trying to break away from my essay-voice. And ah! I'm still separating my contractions! I recently began using smileys again, but I'm still trying to contain that a bit because I realize that I keep depending on them too much and when I try to keep myself from using one, I realize that I can't find the right words to express what I want to.

I forgot the other thing I was originally going to talk about. Oh well.
Hmm. What's the opposite of brown? Or the complement of it? It feels like all colors have their complements, but I can't think of one for brown.

I'm slouching right now. Normally I can bring myself to unslouch when I realize I am, but it's like the staying up late has this side effect of making me not unslouch. Now I keep switching between slouching and what I call the dancer pose. That sounds a lot better in my head, like most things do for people. Anyway, the dancer pose is basically just when you don't slouch, but more extreme. Every time I think I'm extremely not slouching, it's not extreme enough. It's like your shoulders have to go all the way back and down or else everyone thinks you're not sitting up straight enough. When you actually do accomplish this spine-straightening activity, you kind of look like a dancer, and that's why I call it the dancer pose. I only say this because my school has a dance department, and it is always immediately obvious who is in this department because they are the majority of the people who sit up straight.

For some reason, I can't stand listening to any of the music I normally listen to. I went through all the music I had on my grooveshark account, and I just couldn't stand any of them. So then I watched youtube videos, which I never do. And then I went to the old playlist.com, and listened to everyone else's playlists, which surprisingly worked. It really reminded me of last summer, or maybe even back in 8th grade during the school year, which was nice. I've been listening to the same kind of music all year, and it's like when I listen to the same kinds of songs now, it isn't summer or something. Even The Fray, which I love. Suddenly all the sound in the background of their music really bothers me, like I'm suffocating in too much sound diffusion. It's very strange.

As a result of my music search expedition, I've found a few new songs. I found this apparently well known amazing singer/piano girl on youtube who's name is Christina Grimmie. I'll pick one and link it here in the middle of my post, just to change things up.

Just a Dream by Sam Tsui & Christina Grimmie - So this was a really popular song a few months ago, sung by someone else. Tsui and Grimmie did their own cover to this song, and it sounds really nice, and different enough so that it didn't sound like the stuff I listened to all year. Listen to it!

Do you think there's such a thing as negative babies? As in negatively aged babies? Because we're 9 months or so when born, so before then we were 0, and then is there a before then age? Are all babies fated to happen so that there are baby souls somewhere, each one counting down to their birth? Maybe there's a -102 year old baby someplace right now, so in 102 years and 9 months, it'll be born. I always imagine these beings to be bubbles. Everything I don't know about are bubbles. Dreams too. I think it's because I feel like they should always be floating.

Now that we're on this topic, one of the reasons I oversleep sometimes, other than when I'm doing it to avoid doing inevitable things that day, is because I'm chasing dreams. You know when you have a really good or interesting dream(maybe even nightmares that are too interesting not to continue) and suddenly you wake up either from an alarm or a phone call or other people or your internal clock, and you really want to get back to the dream? Normally if it was your internal clock that woke you up, that's not a problem. Alarms are ok too, if you've gotten so used to slapping it off and stuffing it under your pillow that you can't remember how it got there. But if it's a phone call, just looking at the caller id will bring you too back to your senses, so that it's almost impossible to get back to your dream.

Dreams are like bubbles, I think, and so you have the bubble when you're dreaming. When you wake up, you let go of the dream bubble, and it starts to float away. Usually it's easy to catch if you're half conscious or if you woke up normally, because it's only a few seconds you're asleep again. If you stay awake too long, the dream bubble floats out of your reach, most likely taking other bubbles with it, so you don't have any more dreams that day no matter how many hours you spend hoping it'll come back.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Thumbnails

Wow, it's been so long since I last posted a post. Every time I felt like posting these past few months, I would get distracted by something and then I wouldn't feel like posting anymore. Because of this, I have collected a lot of links and a lot of things I feel like talking about. So let me get the links out first, and then I'll go on with everything else I was going to say.

There are a lot of links. I really don't feel like describing each one, so I've decided to just write a few words related to the link as the description. Then you can go click on whatever sounds interesting. I also put a small thumbnail of each site under its link because for some sites, I think the pictures explain better than any description I'd write. Ok, here's the list:

grammar type search hits match this or that

music sound make island small bump objects

notes find save ideas remember

sliderocket
powerpoint online slides presentations nice animation

bomomo
drag moving paint canvas cool unique

muro
deviantart mural graffiti paint tools

blank writing clear space simple dark
harmony
draw shading sketch instant awesome

post-it sticky note mural huge print upload image

music like recommend list track summary

google chrome set time no distractions

tune music bump click simple repeat change

game choose click path grow up text

Oh, I also have a list of books and anime and maybe music that I feel like recommending. I'll do that later. This is already longer than I expected, so I think I'll just post what I was going to post originally later.

Now for the end song! Sometimes I feel like adding two songs at the end of my posts because I can't decide between them, but it just doesn't work because I always feel like the song at the end is the theme of the post or something, even if its not. Usually its a song that's either my current favorite, or one I was listening to while making the post. Right now I don't really have a current favorite, just songs that haven't gotten too old for me yet. So here's a song that fits into that category.

Never Gonna Leave This Bed by Maroon 5 - This is pretty popular right now. Or maybe it was a few weeks ago that it was? Anyway, I especially like this song because as soon as I hear it begin, I want to listen to the rest of it. Sometimes I hear a song beginning and I go, "too depressing", or "ugh, not right now", but this song is so versatile for many moments, and that's why I like it.