I would have posted, but it's

Mmyesss

This fidgety funk is turning out pretty well. Made a cat-shaped laptop bag today, and worked on a shawl.

ALSO: I am making a Flailing Quail shirt today/tomorrow.

I'll finish it by the time I leave for Hawaii, so expect pictures tomorrow.

EDIT: I forgot about sleeping. The shirt will have to wait until next week. The design is all done, though.

I've got an incurable urge to.....ROCK AND ROLL!

Hawky dear, you make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside (like mold! Warm and fuzzy mooooold). Good times. We need to roll around more often, but without the itchiness next time.

I still have yet to see you lion dance! Tell me when your next charity fundraising show thinger is! I want to see you bounce up and down like an idiot!

That aside, I've gotten into this funk where I have to occupy my hands. I'm normally twitchy, but now I just have to make things compulsively, whether it's origami fish or duct tape ducks. I hope someday to make something semi-useful. Maybe a graduated salt shaker.

Hmm, time to start thinking of how to be productive. This utter lack of productivity is not going away, though the current method is to just try to be as unproductive as possible to get all the unproductivity out of my system (it's not working).

WORKWORKWORK! FORCE x DISTANCE! ENERGY! JOULES!

This music is still ridiculously addictive.

Rolling r's is fun. RrrrRRRRrrrrRRRrr.

(I personally don't mind writing in an emo manner. It gives me something to laugh about when I'm all grown up. If I grow up at all, that is.)

I should live up to my name and take a good flail in a quail dustbath. That sounds like fun.

On the Other Wing...

So I've noticed that I've used this blog as more of a depressing emo/pessimist rant corner than a nest of unique ideas. We need, as Quail would say, some inanity!

So it's time to change! And I'd also like to revamp parts of my personal lifestyle that just aren't working out.

I know some of you out there reading this are high achievers. It's so typical nowadays. We often lose ourselves in the pool of negativity instead of focusing on the happy! Getting a test grade should not be "Oh no, it's not 100!" but instead "Yay! An A!" And yes that first statement may sound stupid and unreasonable. Which is the whole point of this blog, as that is what I and a few of my acquaintances are guilty of.

I have horrible technique when I lion dance. Lately I've been so blah about that whole thing and adding it to the mountain of stressful things that make Hawk awkward. I started losing my previous affinity for dancing. I was so focused on trying to get the head movements down that I didn't jump around and move as much, convinced that it would look horrible. But I realized that even if I'm a slow learner or I have a mountain of reasons why I can't perform well a certain day, I have cardio. And I'm damn well going to use it. We all have our own styles. So what if my lion looks a little crazy? It's gonna be a happy, bouncy little fool.

And for every person who is a jerk or every parent who demands too much and gives too little, there are two people out there who would want to go to the mall and hang out with me--or maybe just to the park to roll down (and up) the grassy hills and eat leftover turkey and mashed potatoes with our fingers.

Being so focused on the things you need to do instead of what you've already accomplished makes for a sad bird.

...Now, having read this, go forth and be productive.

Lightforce!

Video game music from the 80s is way too much fun to rock out to.


Rob Hubbard is my new music idol.

Who knew?

"Sometimes I am a bit ashamed of myself when I think how few friends I have amidst a host of acquaintances. Plenty of people offer me their friendship; but, .... I reject the offer in almost every case; and then am dismayed to look about and see how few persons in the world stand near me and know me as I am,--in such [ways] that they can give me sympathy and close support of heart. Perhaps it is because when I give at all I want to give my whole heart, and I feel that so few want it all, or would return measure for measure. Am I wrong, do you think, in that feeling? And can one as deeply covetous of friendship and close affection as I am afford to act upon such a feeling?"

--Woodrow Wilson

Novocain for the Brain

Life goes too fast.

The enjoyable moments aren't long enough. The painful times produce tiny, unsatisfying rewards. You can study your butt off for a test, but the end result is a piece of paper with a few red marks on it. Weighing the cost-benefit ratio produces a rather unsatisfactory result. You can mark up all the papers you want, but time is something you'll never get back.

But, says the average high-achieving teen, it'll pay off in the end! I'll go to college and get a good job..and get rich! Then I can retire and live comfortably. But by then, what is there worth living for when you need a walker (or rocket boots or whatever else technology will have produced by then) to get from one end of the mall to the other? [See digression "42"]

If you look at the documents passed out in history class, such as those written by philosophers (Rosseau) and early American colonists (The Federalist papers), there is evidence that humanity does not need formal schooling to be educated. Okay, so they do have a few spelling mistakes and horrendous grammar. At least by our standards. But they were capable of advanced thought despite not having attended Harvard or Yale.

What school teaches us nowadays is to say recite what others believe. Bombarded with college mails like everyone else, I read about how colleges promote identity and self-thought. Bullcrap when you realize that one of the major factors in college admittance is SAT scores.

Don't you realize that in taking the SAT, you are compromising any pretense of individuality? What you are saying is "I'm like everyone else! The results of this test will show how much better I am than everyone else at thinking like the test makers." If Gaston Caperton wants B, you better pick B. Or else it's -1/4 for you!

It's all or nothing. Right or wrong. But haven't we been taught since we were young that there is always a grey area?

By the time we make it to college, we've been slapped by four years of bubbling in scantrons. It's pretty hard to maintain any vestige of previous individualism.

Where is our true motivation for trying hard? In aiming high, are we shooting for recognition through individuality...or getting into the Ivy Leagues that everyone else admires? We have been brainwashed into thinking big names are prestigious. Those of us with immigrant parents would be so proud to have a Stanford kid. And we give them what they want. Nothing wrong with pleasing the parents.

Hm. Lost a bit of my direction in this post. Well, this topic will come up again. Look forward to it!

A montage of wonderous words!

After the last two monster posts, I felt like putting a shorter post up here to make it more balanced.

Oh man, I had forgotten how good being sore feels. On one hand it means that I'm really out of shape, but on the other, "pain is the feeling of weakness leaving the body".

This post shall be delightfully inane, and delightfully inane it will remain.

The cheese flakes fall with an erratic regularity, controlled only by the machines of fate and the mouse of time. Tis a pity that the benzene ring of Earth is so imperfect as to be fish.


See? Perfectly inane.

All you need is love

So just like my flailing friend, I haven't had the best of weeks.

Maybe it was the impending doom of the SATs. Maybe it was the drama inherent to the life of a modern teen. Or maybe it was all the teachers deciding to dump tests and quizzes and massively confusing lectures on photosystems all in the same week.

Whatever it was, I was so down that I didn't feel like doing anything remotely productive. I should have gone to practice, done my homework, and left today (Sunday) all free for relaxing.

But when does a rebellious teen ever do what she is supposed to?

But yesterday I got to see a friend I haven't seen in a while. We probably pissed off most of the clientele in the supermarket we frequented. We definitely had some carefree moments. But he listened to me rant. And that's the thing. Now we have AIM and email and we forget how much more satisfying it is to see the person you're talking to. And when you get a hug without having explicitly asked for one, it's the best feeling ever.

I hate to be a youtube junkie, but this is one awesome video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4

But I realized that most of the pressure comes from the fact that I don't have enough love for what I do. I'm not talking about relationships or whatever. Personally I don't think teens have a right to say they love if they haven't worked hard for it.

Stress is the antithesis of love. I was having one of my crazy moments over all the work I had to get done for extracurrics and school. As I de-stressed to my senpai, he said something profound. What stresses me out is not being good enough at what I do. But he said that stress or inferiority should not be the motivator. It should be passion.

It's normal to be stressed about school. The core class system requires that you take history, English, math, and science courses for a certain number of years. But not everyone was made to be Rush Limbaugh or Alfred Nobel. And so we stress because we're studying subjects we couldn't care less about.

But extracurrics are the kicker. They are entirely optional. Or at least they're supposed to be. Nowadays colleges practically require that applicants do something outside of school. If you think about it, it'd be so nice to just go home and do homework, then vegetate in front of the tube or play video games. However, the current constraints of society demand that we be productive. Even the most laid-back people I know play a sport or an instrument. And more often than not, they do it "for college." The passion is not there.

In my case, I had a piano test last week. And I worked pretty damn hard for it, too. Not having had time to work on my pieces before, it was down to the last two weeks for me to perfect my pieces. Perfection included memorization. Now I knew I had the option to go into the testing room with my books open. But there was a certain level I wanted to hit. And that meant memorizing all four of my pieces. In hindsight, it would have been wiser to play with the book open. In my frenzy of last-minute practicing, I lost the marchy staccato touch Mendelssohn had in mind. Copland's playful "Cat and Mouse" became a string of running notes that I just had to get over with quickly before I forgot anything.

Prior to the test, I'd been watching Nodame Cantabile, a jdrama about some music students. I was trying to build my confidence (in two days, the main character managed to memorize and bring some gigantic sonatas up to competition par. Makes what I had to do pale in comparison) but I realized that I was focusing on the wrong thing. I shouldn't aim to impress people, but to prove to myself that I deserve to study music.

When you really care about what you do, you take it slow. You make sure your technique is right and that the emotions you want to convey are actually showing. And it pays off in the end.
At a recent swim meet, I lost to people I shouldn't have, people who practice in lower lanes than I do. If during practice I had paid more attention to the number of strokes I had after the flags, I might not have lost at the turn.

It sounds so basic, doesn't it? I bet most of the people who will read this are going to say, "Wow, it took her THIS long to figure that out?" It's easy to understand the principle, but the full implementation is difficult. Especially when you grow up in an Asian household.

Disclaimer: Did not mean to be racist. Post just needed a bit of levity.

Warning: Sharp rocks and long posts ahead

Well, since this past week was just not a very good week in the grand scheme of things, I was doing some thinking of why exactly it was so terrible. I, of course, was helped along by a great many things that lend themselves to philosophical thought (though perhaps I was just taking the time to think about them. I'll get to that later)

These appear in chronological order of events/musings.

-Stress
So really, the thing that got me down the most about this week was the stress. Or rather, I should say, the perceived stress. I had more than the usual amount of work and activities to do, and less than the usual amount of time. It didn't help that quite a few of the things I had to do would be considered non-school related and also rather important.
The administrators also decided to schedule a nice school-wide in-class discussion about stress (it works, somehow). Since I know my own brain relatively well, and I never listen to its input anyway, this was a chance to hear about other people's insights on stress. I heard some interesting thoughts, and formulated a few of my own in addition to that which boil down to:
- Stress is all relative
- it is not conducive to productivity at all (which begs the question, why is it there? (but that is a discussion for another post about psychology vs biology))
- It doesn't work when you tell yourself not to do something.
- How long does it take before a person learns from past experiences?

I don't know how often I've been stressed, and it all amounts to nothing, all the time. Telling yourself it'll all be okay is the same as trying to tickle yourself, though; it never works.

Therefore my stress relief mechanism is caffeine! Makes me twitchy and shaky, but helps me not focus on stress and the constant desire to procrastinate.

-Luck and Fate
One part of the stress was having driving test on Thursday. Stress was caused more by the concept of the test and the fact that it is something that will play a role (however minor) in the rest of my life rather than by the test itself.
Well, anyway, after a string of misfortunes involving my SSN, I finally got to drive and did fairly well until I failed the test in the last 5 seconds of it. With no logical explanation, I managed to crash into the curb about 10 ft from the parking space.
On the way home, my mother insisted that it was because it was a bad day, according to the fortune-telling pages in the Chinese newspaper. She had mentioned that fact during the SSN debacle, and had called my dad to pray to the little buddha statuette (which is weird, because we aren't even remotely religious....). On the way home, she called again and said that he had prayed for the wrong thing (a solution to the SSN problem vs. passing the driving test)
So.....did the Chinese fortune-telling pages have any effect on this? Would praying to the buddha have helped?
What if that day was a good day and I failed? Ostensibly it would then just be my fault, or a fluke.
It is, also, the idea of the self-fulfilling prophesy. Did I fail because my mother said the Chinese newspaper said it was a bad day, thinking that something was bound to go wrong? Someone who knows they are about to die usually does things they'd normally regret, then make sure they don't by fulfilling the prediction (or maybe their last futile chance to take matters into their own hands)

While we're on the subject of futility, let's continue on to the next bit!

-Futility
This tidbit is from my APUSH test on Friday. Hooray for Progressivism!
Is it better to have a reform pass and then have people ignore it (e.g. Prohibition) than to have never passed it at all?
- One argument would be that if it never passed, people would always try again, with more success each time until there is a point where society has changed enough to be able to accept it and sustain it.
If it had been passed and then ignored, it would be far harder to renew it, because other people would say that it already passed once before and failed, which just goes to show that it was never meant to be.
Of course, this leads to the distinction between changing times and learning from mistakes. Is the reform more likely to stick now than it was when it was last passed?
Or is it an exercise in futility, where doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity?

-Self-Reproach?
Today we all took the SATs as Hawky mentioned in the previous post. I was reading the passage in one of the critical reading sections, and I recognized Oscar Wilde which made the test just a little bit less dull.

Part of the passage included this line:

"There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us."
-Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
(Oscar Wilde, by the way, is fantastic. If you're looking for pithy quotes, he is the absolute king.)

A lot of people will immediately blame themselves for things just so that other people will not. This is not entirely intentional, and is quite often subconscious. When one blames oneself, the other person now cannot, as an unspoken rule, blame that person (because that's bad sportsmanship)
There are the people who genuinely blame themselves, who wouldn't even think to use the pity ploy. Guilt is a natural reaction, and quite often, the first one.
And then there are the people who are extremely sensitive to criticism and just don't like to be reproached, so they swallow their pride and act for the camera.

As a little add on to swallowing pride, reverse psychology is a great way to manipulate people, the only thing that people balk at is the injured pride (that may or may not outweigh the benefits)

-Abjection
On another note, I stumbled across this earlier in the afternoon, and thought the concept was very interesting.
Wikipedia: Abjection
"When one encounters blood, excrement, etc. outside of the body, one is forced to confront what was once a part of oneself, but no longer is...A dismembered finger or limb is identified as belonging to one's own body and is 'missed' while at the same time repulsive to the viewer for no longer being a part of the whole"
Or
"For example, upon being faced with a corpse, a person would be most likely repulsed because he or she is forced to face an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject."

This, I think, is a large part of the detachment in life, especially in dealing with death.

Meursault from Camus' The Stranger (great book, by the way, though some people find it strange) was probably heavily affected by abjection, for reasons unknown, beginning with his mother's death.

I had more to ramble about there, but it disappeared from my mind.

Oh wow, this was quite a bit of rambling from my end. Well, I guess this was my method of procrastination for this week. I came up with about half of it while writing the other parts, so it took about an hour (of writing time). Thinking about thinking gets the thinking center thinking!

Hmm, while I was writing this, this rather interesting song/social commentary came on. I normally don't listen to hiphop (in my defense, I didn't even know I had the song), but this one was interesting. I cut it short because I couldn't concentrate and write my post at the same time.
I wonder what that says about me.

Edit: For a little inspirational pep-talk and warning for the future, read this, the 'mission statement' that started everything, from the movie Jerry Maguire (watched it earlier this evening). Just pretend to ignore all the sports references and concentrate on the rest of it.

42

Sometimes I wonder what the point is.

We live, we die, we take the SATs. Roughly in that order chronologically, and in that order of importance.

Why do we work hard in school? So we can work harder once we join the workforce. And then..we retire. Or die. Whichever comes first. Sounds like one of those shady automobile ads.

Is a comfy twenty years worth it? By then, the fruits of youth have ripened, fallen off the tree, and grown moldy. Is it logical that we spend the best years of our lives (I'm estimating around the late 20s or early 30s, which is the approximate time for independence both financially, and more importantly, from parents) working our tails off to set aside some money in a 401k? Why do we stress over high salaries when we know that the Hamiltons and Franklins and Jacksons smiling at us from our wallets exist only at the whim of our government? They're just pieces of paper. Paper with few special fibers and nice illustrations that we pay for with our precious time. You can steal money (I'm not endorsing that, by the way, just saying), you can counterfeit it, you can do a politician a favor. But there is and will be only one March 1st, 2008. And deciding what you want to do with it is a one-time choice. Happens that I'm spending it blogging. But hey, I find it a worthy cause.

Whether you believe in reincarnation or not, you only have a limited time on earth in the body you have right now. So worry about the future when it comes, don't get hung up on the past (In worrying about what's happened, you're wasting time that could be spent improving what's to come), and LIVE FOR THE PRESENT.