I want to make fan art of this. <3
Today was a humbling experience. My ego is still sulking and making excuses in the corner. But at least now I know where I stand in the bigger game.
I have no plans on being belittled again, though.
I really love that part of the day when I come back from a tiring dose of school to an empty dorm room. Basking in the aloneness lets me unwind from being with a large group of people for most of the time. And it’s nice to be able to unceremoniously heave myself around the room without having to worry about looking like a relatively normal human being.
I visited the LASALLE College of the Arts a few hours before my flight back to the Philippines. The campus was within walking distance of the Bugis Junction and marketplace, and a few blocks away from the National Library and the Bras Basah Complex. I paid a quick visit to their admissions office and went a quick stroll around the campus. The architecture was a breathtaking cluster of buildings made of faceted glass connected together by skybridges. In between the buildings was a wide space with a floating green garden in the center where students hung out on the grass- you could see a large chunk of basement between the pavement of the ground and the slightly elevated garden. The environment was so peaceful and conductive to learning. I think I’d actually do better in the Arrneo if everything around me was that nice. There weren’t even any annoying guards at the entrance, and I was allowed to walk around inside the buildings as I pleased. I didn’t stick around long though, I wasn’t doing a good job of pretending not to be an annoying tourist and students were starting to stop and stare.
My dreams of enrolment isn’t happening anytime soon. Yearly tuition- without the living expenses- is already more than three times the tuition I’m paying for ADMU. :U
Author’s Note: Spam? What’s that. I haven’t had a serious blog in…. ever. And I have no one to ramble to at the moment, and I need to spill before the train of thought disappears. So the posts will just have to keep coming in one after another until the voice in my head stops talking.
I’ve been thinking of doing a serious personal project for the longest time now. I’d love to make a simple video game, or maybe a webcomic? I just want to make SOMETHING and throw it out there for people to play with. Honestly, I wish I was serious about doing something like this ages ago.
Back in high school, I told myself that I was just a kid and that anything and everything I endeavored would ultimately be just childsplay (aka, useless) and back then, I never really understood the concept of “taking things seriously”. I kept telling myself that I still had a lot of time, that the real work could always wait when I was all grown up (point is, this old mindset has now brought to you this troubled and regretful young adult wishing she’d made better use of her time). I only started realizing recently that I didn’t have to be a credible adult to make something someone other than myself can peruse.
Spending my senior year in the high school student council was what had me think differently. The things I used to make, like the websites I tried (and failed) to create, the unfinished drawings and graphic designs(if I can even call them that, guh), the plans I’d dream up, used to end up either forgotten or disappearing into the hellish filing system of the household desktop. The student council made plans, BIG plans, be it organizing inter-school events or making and selling merchandise for fundraising drives. The scribbles on their planners eventually became something tangible and happening . I was just a tiny pawn making ads and posters and chasing after missed deadlines in the larger scheme of things, but it was still pretty awesome looking at my pathetic work going up on a tarp (that was right next to the ginormous, spasmgasmically designed poster of the other media designer in the council, just saying). I was even tasked to organize a (supposedly major, so the council told me) event for the school fair.
On a side note, it was a shortage of staff and an overload of events that needed manning that prompted the council to assign me to…. anything outside my jurisdiction of making pretty little posters. Because really, if you knew me, you wouldn’t even want me to hold anything valuable then tell me NOT to break it in under 5 seconds. I’m exaggerating, but just a little. And that’s besides the point. Anyway.
I tried to do what a sane event organizer would do. It was a cosplay competition complete with the big theatre setting and catwalk, so I mentally put together things I would need. Fastforwarding past the discrepancies between the council and I and the difference of “Cosplay” and the actual nature of the competition as a green-thumb fashion contest, I passed up the paperwork with the plans. I found the whole idea daunting, my cup was pretty full dealing with the posters for the school fair, and I honestly wished I got assigned to something further in my comfort zone; thus, I passionately procrastinated on the responsibility. But whenever the council would prod me for updates on my progress, a voice ominously sounding just like my mother’s told me to buck up and deal with it- or it would slap me back in the face later (which it did, on different fronts, but the disastrous repercussions were so hideous that it’s a different story entirely). I called on close friends to help man the event and handed out tasks which they seemed excited to receive (Cosplay + animu fans, go figure). One of my “dream” goals for the event was to have a well-known cosplayer in the deviantArt community to judge the contest. I’d shakily written and rewritten the request- and sent it off, all the while convincing myself it wasn’t going to happen. I had the council’s facilities coordinator (read: dude in charge of giving out all our equipment and assigning event venues) reserve the equipment down from the sound system all the way up to the catwalk props, somehow convinced and gathered enough contest participants at the last minute (which the council president graciously helped me do, it involved a lot of classrooms and perky public speaking-not my thing), and fuzzily arranged the rest of the tiny details.
The Cosplay competition itself was only about an hour and a half. But I was lightheaded and jittery and scatter-brained on the day itself- an effect of weeks of almost-sleepless nights and pre-event anxiety. A famous cosplayer was arriving from a long way to judge, I hadn’t finished tying up a lot of loose ends, and plans were already going awry during the prep period. But even in the midst of backstage technical problems and my half-baked executions, I watched in awe backstage as the competition smoothly unfurled in front of a rapt, full-house audience without a single stumble, with not a single thing going according to plan. The emcees succeeded in keeping the backstage chaos stay backstage, and the audience left entertained (I think. I hope.) and the council seemed content with the result (Unless they were just withholding their rage and disappoint, derp). Aside from the aforementioned disastrous repercussions, I was amazed that I was actually able to have a large hand in transmuting something written on paper into something people were able to see and enjoy.
And I’d like to do something like that again (evidently, I don’t get out and make stuff happen a lot).
Nowadays, I stick to cheap media and my Bamboo tablet for my arting. Buying high-end branded media used to be a dream of mine, but when I realized that I was essentially making stuff akin to the sum of a crayola plus a toddler with too much free time, I thought I’d hold on the Intuos and Copic markers until the crap I made became…. slightly less crappy.
Just imagine your little monster sister making off with a P17000(about $395?)Copic Marker set. Then imagine your wall covered in little marker scribbles. See? My point exactly.
In other news, I recently got my grubby hands on a very informative book(that I duly dubbed “the Professor”). He isn’t like other books, but following his instruction already assumes being a reader with a higher level of skill (sadly, one that I am still very, VERY far away from). But he teaches with an impression that his student is already buried deep in the mechanical know-hows of his craft, and tries to help them get out of the ditch they dug themselves in and see and transcend beyond the traditional technique. It’s still useful to have even when I’m still at the stage of epic uselessness, it’s like having a GPS telling you where NOT to go while wandering in the dark.
Books and teachers can only go so far in a field heavily dependent on skill. Used wrongly (or, not used at all), they’re just about as useful as that cheap mech pencil sitting on your desk; picking it up and drawing with it isn’t going to make you any better. You could hire the most epic teacher out there or have access to a library with the most epic books, but if what you learn stays bouncing and processing in your brains, it’s not going to work. Alternatively, going out and working your butt off without a smidgeon of enlightenment isn’t going to get you anywhere either. The synthesis between knowledge and action is what results in improvement. And this synthesis is achieved through practice, actively keeping what was learned in mind in the midst of application. Some are good at it- putting down what they learned quickly in their work, but some have to try harder and take longer.
Me? I’m going at a turtle pace. But that’s better than nothing.
Some old man once told me that writing would help me better articulate and envision my thoughts, and that keeping a journal or a blog would help us do so poetically. So here I am, picking up my poor tumblr account that I was sure I’d thrown in the trash right after I signed up (the whole microblogging thing was fine, but having to maintain more beyond a Facebook and Twitter account? It’s a bit of an overkill, and redundant).
At the least, I hope I can use this blog as a medium to salvage what little of my vocabulary and literary artistry I have left, and perhaps rescue what I already forgot. And I argue with myself, It might actually do me some good in the long run. I could read old posts to reuse tidbits of bygone ideas (or to track my notorious periods of divine stupidity over the next months, if I stay active that long).
Besides, I have a lot of spare time (some induced) that needs (productive) burning.
