Reading Day

Today was my reading day.  I covered about 200 pages worth of Chinese poetry readings.  It appears that I overestimated my reading speed.  I was covering much less than a page per minute, as is my usual rate.  Unfortunately, I will have to finish this textbook tomorrow.

I’ve learned that I tend to learn in a two-pass fashion – the first time through, I’ll read or listen or watch and build an index of the material in my mind.  The second time, or third time, or however many times I feel like repeating, I’ll fill in the details.  Not the most efficient, but for now I’ll run with it.

I really enjoyed the Chinese quatrains (绝句), though the more I read, the more I realize how little understanding I have of the Chinese culture or language.  Even if I could read the characters, the context of China’s expansive history would elude me without many more hours of dedicated study, hours which I am not likely to invest.

Five more books to read before February.  And then maybe photocopy what I need for class?

Hope to get everything done.  Think my cool for the day streak officially ends here.  I’ll have to make it up later.

晚安

10 Feel Good Moments

Every once in a while, my cousin will say, “Let’s play the Feel Good game.” And invariably, it will make whoever plays feel good.  Why?  Simple.  We just take turns saying what makes us feel good.  So let’s play!

Since turns take longer this way, I’ll put up 10.  This isn’t “of all time,” but it’s 10 that I can think of.

1. Waking up warm and refreshed, ready for another day…and then going back to sleep
2. Falling asleep in the sunlight on the floor, in bed, or on the couch
3. Cooking something random and then realizing it tastes good.  It’s like winning the freaking lottery.
4. Winning the lottery.  Well, since I haven’t done that yet, how about winning that game where you have to stop the light on at the top and you win 1000 tickets.  How about winning it 9 times in one night and having random people give you coins to win tickets for them?  Aw, yeah.
5. Two weeks in Canada with your best friends.
6. Making someone laugh.  Making someone smile.  Reversing someone’s bad day.
7. Fixing someone’s problems, or helping someone reach their goals, their dreams, and their aspirations.
8. Completing a Tetris.  Or a sudoku.
9. Getting a new move.  Er, I’m talking about real life, like breakdancing or tricking, but I guess Pokemon counts too.
10. Gathering all 150 Pokemon.  Screw the other three hundred or whatever – Red & Blue forever!

Weird Little Moments

I had a dream where I minced cilantro and mixed it into the ground beef I’ve had defrosting and then fried that with some mystery sauces from the refrigerator and ate it with rice and seaweed.

So I did it in real life, because I was starving.  Well, it’s edible.  Better than I can say for some of my conscious creations.

I also had a weird little moment where I thought reality was bending, but it turned out to be my hair causing diffraction patterns.

My fish had a huge crap the other day.  I put it in my potted plant. It actually looked kinda like a beetle.  I can’t find it anymore.  I think it melted.  Or crawled away.

I may be going insane – I started laughing out of nowhere a few moments ago because of something I remembered.  Laughing by myself as I ate my cilantro/ground beef/mystery sauce/seaweed combination.

I was supposed to go shopping for supplies for lunch/dinner, but I slept instead.

Just some weird little moments in my life.

Winter Retreat

…and damn, is it wintry.

So, I escaped from the holiday season with nary a scratch, and a few resolutions.  No, let’s not call them resolutions – too stigmatized.  I came out with a mission.  I’d known for months that I would be returning to the apartment early, and for two primary reasons: to make use of rent that I was spending on it, and to settle myself.  And by that, I mean that I had recently decided to quit Engineering at the University of Illinois for good.

I’ve come to realize that the less I expect of myself, the more I do, the happier I am, and, ironically, the more productive I am.  A poor fit for Engineering, which has a great deal of expectations to live up to, which I merely put off and in many cases simply didn’t do.  All this created was anxiety, and not a productive anxiety.  Let’s face it, I went into Engineering as an experiment to see if I could conform to these expectations, and I was headed for a disappointment, so I jumped ship.

Anyway, settling myself involves just that – being by myself in my apartment and attempting to maintain some sort of healthy, creative rhythm, balancing what responsibilities I do have with developing myself in the ways that I want to develop.  Time to myself has meant that:

• I sleep early. Generally around 11-12 at night, though there are exceptions.  Or rather, there has been one exception.  Got caught up in video editing.
• I wake early and eat breakfast every day.  I think about what to make for lunch and dinner.  Then, I make it.  Then, unfortunately, I must eat it.
• I make an attempt to play guitar…or rather, I pick up the guitar and see where that takes me every day.  I also pretend to watch lectures on it.  The bits and pieces of music theory that I learn, I learn in order to free myself, and liberating it is.
• I sing every day.  But that’s not out of the ordinary.  I guess following the directions on voice lesson videos is out of the ordinary, though, so that’s worth mentioning.  I was skeptical at first with the Arceneaux Approach, but I saw immediate improvements.  Anyone else have experience with this?
• I have been immersing myself in Chinese lessons (Pimsleur and CCTV Learn Chinese) and media (music videos, CCTV 新闻20分) a few hours every day.  I really need to start studying next semester’s characters – hell, I need to study all the characters we’re supposed to know by now, because after a 2 year hiatus, there’s not a lot I remember.  It’s strange, as a result of this immersion,  my mind tricks me into thinking people are speaking Chinese when they’re not.
• I’ve been dancing most every day.  I missed one, so far.  Don Lee gave me a  few bboy toprock videos to work off of, and I’ve been working on that.  I’ve also been working on my dance sharingan, analyzing Taeyang’s Where U At.  I wanted to get this before break ended, but it looks like that’s not going to happen.  Oh, I think I’m on the verge of nailing flares and windmills.  I just have to take days off between practicing those because my shoulder can’t take it.  It’s a sign of poor technique – I don’t think my shoulder should be taking that much pressure.  Naturally, I’ve also been enticed into doing some tricks, because it’s fun.  Oh, while we’re on physical status, I injured my ankle last semester and I’ve been waiting for it to heal.  However, after doing rehabilitative stretches and exercises while idling, I think my ankles are better than ever.  They still twinge, a bit.
• I have ordered all of next semester’s books through interlibrary loan.  I am about a quarter through the first one on Chinese poetry.  I should finish it soon, because I have five more to go.
• But most of all, I’ve been trying to live up to one mission: To make something cool every day.  Something that I think is cool, anyway.  The Sean Hsu Diaries, the Apt21 video series (ep01, ep02, ep03, ep04, ep05), the making of which, by the way, made me realize how awesome my roommates were last semester, and the Mini Trick Montage linked above.  Thankfully, I think that covers every day of this year.  I was somewhat anxious to know if I’d truly lived up to my mission.

Living like this has given me hope for a future that I can look forward to, no matter what major I graduate with.

Well, that’s it.  Just a little of what I’ve been up to.

Now to pay the bills, somehow.

Following Sadness

Had a dream where I was still going out with my ex.  I followed her all over what was suspiciously like a mix of the UIUC campus and the Wisconsin Madison campus as she went to find her classes.  She was always two steps ahead of me.

She was pre-med in this dream and we had made it through the hardest of her starting weed-out classes as  a couple.  Somehow, I knew she was going to dump me.  I don’t know why I was sad: knowing we were going to break up, or knowing that we were actually broken up IRL while I followed her around like a puppy dog.  My mind would point out the slightest incompatibilities between our personalities as we ran around places, despite my dream self’s happy complacency, and say, “See?  That’s why we broke up.  That’s why we’re going to break up.”  But still, all the while, running around was fun.

I’m going to have some breakfast.

No more dreams about this.

Aftermath

It seems really strange not to chronicle my every thought in some sort of journal, now.  Every time I have a thought, I watch it pass and think, “Damn, what a shame.”  Not everything is worth keeping, but for one month…for one month, keeping everything should be allowed.

Had a celebration in honor of my winning NaNoWriMo.  I don’t think anyone really knew that it was for NaNoWriMo except for Spence, but it never really came up again.  I did awkwardly bring it up a few times hoping for a toast.  Eh.  The campfire and smores were good enough.  We snagged some marshmallows, a 2 liter bottle of Canada Dry Ginger Ale (those recent “real ginger” commercials worked on me), graham crackers, and four different kinds of chocolate:  Hersheys Milk, Dark, Crunch Bar, and Mr. Good.  Oh wow, Mr. Good was definitely the best in smores.

We set the top half of a Webster grill down on the floor and used it as a firepit.  It was quite effective and ingenious.

Have to remember I’m not going for word count anymore.  In fact, Elegance is quite the opposite.

Thanks for coming out, guys.  It meant a lot to me.

NaNo Insanity, Day 6

God damn, it feels good to be outside of first person limited narration mode.  It’s been a while. How are you, folks?  To the left, you’ll see the giraffes and the tiger about to take one down…

Here we are.  This is supposed to hit my blog, so you’ll all be able to read it.  I got about 2000 words into my story before becoming totally frustrated, as I usually do, so this time we’re gonna do something different.  I’m just going to write a lot of shit and I’m going to force feed it into NaNoWriMo’s word counter so I can finally break that 50,000 word barrier.  Fuck, when I was writing in my blog every day, I didn’t hit the requisite 1667 words per day.

I didn’t realize that until about five minutes ago.  Purely writing that much alone will be difficult, not to mention writing a goddamn story.  Maybe I’ll save that for next year.  Or whenever I can write my personal blog entries plus another 1667 words a day.  Motherfucking hell, I have no idea how Piers Anthony can put out a book every three months.  He could probably do NaNoWriMo every month if he started bringing his laptop to the bathroom.

I should probably stop writing about frustration.  I’m sure you’re bored by now – that is, you’re bored if you have my attention span, and my attention span can’t be held for more than about 15 seconds.  I feel really bad for those of you who can’t read that quickly – the entire print world must bore the hell out of you.  Frankly, your mind has a higher bandwidth capacity than you’re reading at, so learn to read faster or stop bitching.

I know, you weren’t bitching.  For the purposes of this conversation (which I am essentially having with myself) you have 1) read up to this point, and 2) you were bitching along the way.  That makes me right.

My left forearm has begun to hurt.  I’ve been stressing it a bit, playing guitar and now typing at a rather breakneck pace.  I wonder how long I can keep it up for – I’m going to need to get 2000 words, and at 80 words per minute, which is what I’m rated to type, at the fastest, that’ s a good…shit, that’s only 25 minutes of hardcore typing.  Motherfucker.  Someone get me some ice, my arms are going to be useless after this.

That said, it will probably take over an hour of constant typing.  I don’t think I’ve typed constantly for an hour.  Ever.  Let’s go, bitch.

Ever wonder if you should stop swearing as much as you do?

Was that directed at me?

Yes, it was directed at you.

Who are you?

I’m you.

Then why the fuck did you address a question to me?

Actually, it was originally supposed to be addressed to our readers.

But our readers can’t even read this yet.

Okay.

…

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that every once in a while I think I should stop swearing as much as I do, but that never pans out, especially in certain contexts, like when I’m playing videogames or when I’m typing to myself.  The only way I seem to be able to communicate to myself is through profuse cursing and that’s something I don’t really want to expose others to, because they’re not used to it and might tell their parents, who will have the Parent Teacher Association kick me out of school, which, on the other hand, might not be a bad thing.  I’m working on that myself.

I’m working on a lot of things right now, actually, and I should do much more of it.  I have to put 3 movies out by the end of this month.  Initially, Sean and I were shooting for twenty minute films, but it looks like they’re going to be less than ten minutes each , which is a godo thing -0 at least I’ll be able to put them on Youtube.  The only problem is that the camera records in an MPG format called .MOD, and it’s really pissing me off.  Nothing seems to be able to read it.

I’ve got NaNo on my mind, reminding me over and over that I’m a failure, and I also have stubs of stories from past NaNos.  Hell, if I’m going to cheat like I am now, I might as well just use those and be done with it.  Seriously, I’ll just stick them into the word counter along with this and crow when I win.  But unfortunately, I won’t be able to tell any of my NaNo enabled friends or family what I’ve done, because they would demand to see the manuscript, and I’d show them  a bunch of blog-like thoughts and entries and half-assed stories, and they’d take a refund out of my ass.

The last project I’m working on is…oh right, getting a job and paying for school and not failing out of school in the first place, which is pretty difficult and well nigh impossible, or so I’ve convinced myself.  I would run off to become a writer, but apparently I can’t really pull that off, and I’d run off and become an actor, but I think I would have more success as a gay model, save for the fact that I’m not gay and I’m not tall enough to be a model.  Fuck!

Hopes, dreams, administrations.  I don’t really know why that last one got in there, but somehow it got written into the stdout buffer and I just typed it.  Whatevs.  I wanna be a rockstar, baby!  I wrote my first song – at least, two verses and accompanying chords, and it’s an exhilarating feeling.  I feel like I need to teach my sister how to write songs.  Perhaps I can just look up chords on the piano and teach her those and enable her to make songs on the piano.  Write now, though, or rather, right now, I’m stuck with fairly simple guitar chord progressions, so I don’t know to what degree I can act as a teacher.

G, D, Em, C

I feel so bad right now.  My character is stuck in the story looking outside at me, tears in his/her eyes.  Have you figured out what gender s/he is?  No?  That’s cool.  I have.

Let’s visit him/her, shall we?

15min/500w – Entrepreneur

Someone’s gonna tell me that this isn’t 500 words.  I know.  This is an application for something and I left out the required stupidities.  I also left in little sentences that I used to amuse or motivate myself, like the first sentence.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So I’m a downhome brother, redneck, undercover with my guitar here I’m ready to play.

Look.  I’m an “entrepreneur,” as puissant as that word sounds, as pompous as it is.  Everyone is an entrepreneur.  When you solve problems creatively, you’re an entrepreneur.  When you improve your mile from nine minutes to eight minutes, you’re an entrepreneur.  When you cut down on the time it takes you to get from home to work by taking a different route, you’re an entrepreneur.  Most of us just don’t have the marketing down pat.

I have so little patience with the day to day, whittling away life in an office, in a cubicle.  You use the same skills – ingenuity, people skills, communication – just on someone else’s agenda.  And what really separates us from animals is the ability to self-actualize, to realize our mission in life and to execute it.  So why not include your career in that mission?  One of my friends complained about boredom during a summer internship, and I replied, rather snarkily, “Now imagine doing that for the rest of your life.”

I’m a millennial.  I can’t imagine doing any one thing for the rest of my life, much less one job.  It’s more important to me to effect change in the world than to get a promotion, more important to me to improve myself than to have a source of income, more important to me to have good friends than to know powerful people.  Traveling down this path means that I might not have money, or fame, or power, but I will have good friends, I will be happy, and I will find a Way to make this world better.

Entrepreneur?  Yes.  I take, I shape, I redefine.

Interlude

I’ll give myself three minutes this time.   Til the ten.

Oh, you have to love time constraints.  They make everything worthwhile.

I’m currently listening to a jazz station on Pandora and wondering if anyone wants to buy some 24″ Samsung HD monitors that I just bought.  They’re a good deal and I’d rather pass that deal onto friends (not to mention shipping charges will be less) than listing them on eBay.  Either way, expect some amusing videos to come out of it.

Oh, Joe should be back soon.

Munching on Triple Berry granola from some large chain department or other.  Mmm, tasty.

Wondering about my future.  That is a lie.  I’m wondering about Pandora, and whether I should get the upgrade to infinite music per month.  That would be nice, but what I’m really looking for is the 192Kbps upgrade.

Life is like a box of chocolates
You never know what poetry you’re going to hit upon next, or what prose, or what part of the body you’ll target with your random darts.  Throw them into the air like a sprinkling of rice at a wedding, and wonder and wonder what the world is hiding from you.

Take a chance.

I’m all for it.

When I fail out, or when I succeed, because they are the same, I will have one.

END.

The Perfect Girl

I’ve given up on the female race.

Well, for the most part, anyway.  I’m holding out on a slim hope, and by slim I mean impossible.  The perfect girl might exist, but she would have to be:

1. Beautiful
2. Smart
3. A talented singer or musician
4. Spontaneous and a little crazy
5. All of the above don’t really count as long as, just by existing, she proves that God does too.

I’ll know it’s Her because a choir of angels start singing, the clouds will part, and God’s finger will descend from the Heavens.  He will point at Her and say something concise, like, “That’s the one.”  And that will simultaneously a) show me who I’m supposed to be with, and b) prove the existence of God.

Well, it would prove His existence to me, at least, and I’d have nothing empirical to show for it.  And I’d probably only be convinced for a day or so until I started thinking clearly again.  “Maybe that was just a god,” I’ll say, or, “maybe it was aliens.  Or a hallucination.”

But then again, maybe I would be too in love to notice.