I tried to make it as caricature-like as possible. Of course it doesn’t come close to Miyazaki, but I think it turned out pretty okay!

Anyone else think No Face is the poster-boy for Borderline Personality Disorder?

made this for my wonderful sister. february 2012.

For people new and old to Faustus, you have to WATCH THIS. It’s only 30 seconds but it’s the most EPIC trailer for an EPIC stage adaptation of Doctor Faustus. Only a coincidence that my Brit boyfriend Arthur Darvill plays Mephistopheles lolol

Technically not a book because it’s a play. Everytime I read this I get chills down my spine and I end up crying because it’s so damn epic and timeless and applicable. Marlowe answers the questions “What would you sell your soul for?” and “Is anything really worth selling your soul for?”

2.) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Atticus and Tom Robinson

Reading Atticus Finch’s epic line “Courage is not the man with the gun in his hand.” made me both tear up and angry at the world. How fitting is this for our country where as long as you wield any sort of political power (from being a president’s nephew to just being a police officer), a false sense of bravery is immediately installed. /frustration

3.) The Giver by Lois Lowry

My gateway drug into the addicting world of dystopian science fiction. I read this when I was 10 years old and the scenes between Jonas and the Giver recollecting “colors” and “memories” from time forgotten still runs vivid in my mind.

4.) The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

“LET THERE BE LIGHT”. The AMAZING Asimov does the science fiction genre a huge favor with such a short story on The Last Question. Because of this, I was able to deviate from my usual dystopian sci-fi (Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury) and moved onto Hard SF (Arthur Clarke, Neal Stephenson). whoop!

5.) The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

During my entire high school life, I was the biggest Ayn Rand fangirl. I was the obnoxious preachy pseudo-obssessed follower who would light up at anything connected to Objectivism or the Virtue of Selfishness.

Nowadays, not so much.

Aside from the fact the Rand’s philosophy has rendered itself outdated in the Web 2.0 generation, it also has a lot of contradictory ideas (i.e. how Rand always says emotions shouldn’t get in the way of your life when she writes so angrily all the time with so much hate for Peter Keatings and Ellsworth Tooheys of the world).

Also being a white supremacist doesn’t really help with alluring new people into your school of thought.

metaphors between architecture and man are apparent in the fountainhead

Still, reading The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and Anthem and her other books did give me a lot of insight.

I know the feeling of being so alone in your ideas and feeling as if everyone seems to be going along with everything society tells them in an almost robotic kind of way.

Having read almost all of Rand’s works, I have a lot more to say on this subject so maybe I’ll just leave this for another blog post.

6.) The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

I’ve referenced this essay a hundred times on this blog! I love it. The Myth of Sisyphus is Albert Camus’ great essay on the futility of life.

He argues that men are just like Sisyphus, the mythological character doomed by Zeus to push a boulder up a mountain which ends up falling again after the rock reaches the top and this results in a lifetime of cyclic boulder pushing. (..lol..)

Camus says that Sisyphus, from our perspective, seems to be living such a pointless life pushing the boulder up over and over again. But as a mythological character doomed to a life of futility looks pitiful to men’s greater minds, don’t we look exactly the same as Sisyphus in the perspective of someone much greater than us (possibly God)? Doing the same things over and over again in our lives?

In the end though, Camus says that while it seems our mythological counterpart should be pitied and depressed because of living such a futile life, Sisyphus is actually happy with what he’s doing because that’s all he knows and that’s all he will ever know.

:'(

Meta!

7.) Inferno (from The Divine Comedy) by Dante Alighieri

Oh, what Dante would go through just for his Beatrice…

from my notebook. I had to remember all the 9 circles so i actually made a chart of it..... /affected

Along with John Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy is probably where we all got the notion of what hell, purgatory, and heaven are like. Reading this had the same effect to me as reading Faustus. Although I’m not religious in any orthodox way, Dante’s vivid descriptions as he goes along the 9. circles of hell makes you want to run to the nearest confessional in fear of being eaten whole by Lucifer.

8.) The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

atheist evolution, apparently

This is a testament to atheism! The God Delusion is wonderfully written, and less scientific than Dawkins’ “The Greatest Show on Earth” which I didn’t enjoy much. For my Christian friends, this would be a good read to understand the other side of the religious sphere

9.) Animal Farm by George Orwell

This image is less threatening than the feeling you get from reading the actual text

Tell me that communist pigs who start walking on two feet don’t freak you out and I will smack you a hundred times with Animal Farm.

10.) 1984 by George Orwell

RATS. THE ROOM OF LUV. BIG BROTHER. NEWSPEAK. INGSOC. What’s affected me so much about 1984 is the fact that it seems to be coming true little by little.

..crap.

There have been a lot of fiction books which ended up foretelling the future accidentally. It would be creepy if 1984 ended up being one of them.

11.) A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman

A must must must read for fans of Sherlock Holmes and anyone who wants to learn the art of writing in First Person. The story is amazing, but what amazed me more than the plot was how Neil Gaiman used perspective as his main literary device. The ending is kind of /mindfuck/ so I don’t want to spoil it here. This is the first story in one of his anthologies, Fragile Things.

12.) The Killing Joke by Alan Moore

HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAHA AHAHAHAHAHAA

The joke mentioned from the title is the laugh Batman and the Joker share at the very end of the graphic novel. Alan Moore is my graphic novel god just because he deviates from the usual “action” comic and goes deeper into the supposedly comical characters by giving them depth and psychological features. This is also the Joker’s origin story if anyone’s interested.

13.) The Stranger by Albert Camus

Albert Camus means a lot to me mostly because his books are the ones I’ve read during the time I was clinically depressed. I get the feeling in The Stranger where the protagonist/narrator, Meursault, has no feelings, no grievances about a family member’s death. (This book is NOT AT ALL about depression by the way.)

It’s one of Camus’ most famous works where he beautifully explores that man can only be happy when he finally learns to accept that the meaning of life is that it has no meaning.

Start complaining about your weight and not wanting to eat out anymore, and then hear the words “Why don’t we go grocery shopping and cook the food ourselves so both of us can go on your healthy diet?”

Go on a baseless tirade triggered by anxiety and fear. Apologize for acting like the person you swore you would never act like (i.e. mom). Instead of being scolded, be told how much you are appreciated for your temperance and that “you are not like your mother” and “I loaf you.”

Being told you still look great even after a hundred facial pricks from the dermatologist.

Not letting you drive because “the rain is too strong so I’ll just come and pick you up” even if it’s out of the way.

Chicken McNuggets for no particular reason.

Using the word “we.”

Using the word “us.”

Using the phrase “in the future.”

How you just know that there’s something a little more extraordinary than the average emotion lingering about you – in an almost overbearing kind of way – which you don’t really want to go away.

I don’t know what love is, or how love should be, but I’m pretty certain it’s something like this.

“…There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne, Truss and John Humphrey than to write poems, love letters, novels and stories it seems.

They whip out their Sharpies and add apostrophes to public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings. But do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss?

Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm, and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too busy snorting at the greengrocers’ less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well, sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language when they’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.

And the worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be?

If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got.”

Anyway yes. Thank you, Mr. Stephen Fry, for narrating exactly how I feel about elitists who think they’ve graduated to the league of scholars just because they text and type in a very research paper way. Anthony Burgess might agree with this rant.

1.) Avoid everything that reminds me of you – American Psycho, emergency rooms, Roger Ebert, anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and that glorious portrait of a bodacious Victorian woman lying in a chaise longue. (And in respect to our traditions, I also make it a point not to eat anything we enjoy together on a regular basis. These foods include New York comfort food, naked burritos, and canned tuna with dangerous amounts of mayonnaise.)

2.) Wake up. Check the time. Check the date. (And if there’s nothing I have to do for the day that could potentially be life changing or earth shattering) Go back to bed.

3.) Read all sorts of -isms on the internet. Modernism, Postmodernism, Animism, Marxism, Pantheism, and anything else you can stick the suffix -ism to. The sentence “I’m being productive by reading things that would make me smart, or at least sound smart.” would be the safe gauge for reading about something worthwhile.

4.) Go through different states of boredom. These states include: rolling in bed in pajamas, hitting refresh on Pinterest, reading about the latest conspiracy theories, and the worst: boredom eating. Sometimes I’d become so bored I’d start embodying Sylvia Plath and refer to myself as going through a sad phase of “ennui”. (Oscar Wilde, as his hedonistic character Henry Lord Wotton, wrote “The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.” If my overly dramatic Plath act proves anything, it’s that Henry Lord Wotton was right.)

5.) Write about all the things I do when I’m not with you which makes me realize just how boring my life is without you, which in turn, makes me wish you were here and then I’d write a separate post on The Things I Do When I’m With You but I probably wouldn’t because what idiot would I be if I write a blog post when you’re breathing the same air in the same room as I am?

I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it. But I didn’t. Not really. Only the “smudgeness” of it. A pink-slippered, all-containered, semi-precious eagerness of it. I didn’t realize it would sometimes be more than whole. That the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea. Because it’s the halves that halve in you half. Didn’t know. Didn’t know about the in-between bits. The gory bits of you, and the gory bits of me.

The things we have with each other I don’t have with any other person. I don’t have with any other human being apart from you.

Like Crazy, 2011. Directed by Drake Doraemus.

1.) Standardization

High school sucked. Apart from the fact that it holds the memory of the most awkward years of your life, it had what is known as “standardized education”. I don’t know if your school had the same thing, but my hyperconservative fundamentalist Catholic girls school did.

It’s pretty self explanatory – everyone gets the same lesson, at the same pace, being expected to get the same results. Oops, correction: everyone is expected to get the same results, but to the rest of you who can’t (yes, I am looking at you math-illiterate idiots), make sure no one gets anything below a 75/100 alright? Or else, you’ll be forced to repeat a year expected to learn the same thing that wasn’t within your aptitude in the first place. And if on that second year you still can’t get it, you’re out.

Motherf... even Patrick Stewart is facepalming.

First of all, everyone who’s anyone living in this planet knows that people can be vaguely split into two categories – left brained and right brained. This ad from Mercedes Benz illustrates my point perfectly.

In my high school, the maths and the sciences were considered the cream of the crop subjects. And the arts, all extra curricular. That is to say: if you failed Math and Biology, you either repeat a year or get kicked out. If you failed art, meh, no big deal. (it’s not even required in the first place)

There were over 200 people in one batch, and who’s to say that everyone had the same level of thinking, or at the very least, even the same kind of thinking? Our class president thought in such a way as “If A leads to B, then B will lead to C.” whereas I had the thought process of “If A leads to B, then A can lead to the rest of the letters of the alphabet.” Just so you standardized educators know, we’re not all Da Vinci’s who can moonlight as scientists when we’re not painting the ceilings of great chapels in the Vatican City.

And what about kids who are dyslexic? Or those with ADD or ADHD? Do you fail them because they can’t bring themselves to focus on your boring lectures? Do you kick them out when it’s already  obvious that they’re the ones who need more help than other kids who already know what they’re doing? Seriously, standardized education seems to me like it enjoys kicking people when they’re already down.

My proposition: Reevaluate your HOPELESSLY ARCHAIC educational system and consider that people fall into two categories, if not more. Screen kids before accepting them into your schools. Standardize all the basics – basic math, basic grammar, basic science – and after that, give them a choice to either pursue maths & sciences, or arts & humanities. Just thinking about my time trying to solve for X when I would have had much more progress reading my favorite fantasy novel makes me cringe for the other kids who are going through the same thing as I did. You may also want to read Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking if you still can’t grasp the concept that there are people who just think differently than others.

2.) Religion as a Basic Subject

I will probably get a lot of internet flame for this one but think about this: Why is Philosophy being taught only in senior year college when the level of thinking it requires merits the same amount as studying religion?

All great and known philosophers have discussed their take on religion so you can see it’s closely connected. And speaking as objectively as I can, you can neither prove or disprove religion as no concrete, tangible evidence has been brought forth to nail it down to a science. Religion, whatever it may be, requires faith. And faith in a literal sense means “belief not based on proof” (see: dictionary.com) Can we really teach our kids something possibly untrue?

and no, if your counterargument for proof is the Shroud of Turin, I'd like to invalidate it now. I know Jesus existed. JESUS WAS REAL. I KNOW.

Whenever I think about the possibility of a deity, (for example: the biblical God) I try to trace the present to the roots of it. Here I am, living and breathing. I was born from my parents, my parents were born from their parents, and this lineage is traced down to the very first ancestors of man (To others, they are Adam and Eve; to others, this ancestor is the first single celled organism). Then I think about that one ancestor. Where did it exactly come from? A creator? God? But where did God come from? My great theology professor told me that the concept of God is too huge for us measly people to understand. AND THAT’S EXACTLY IT! Religion, God, whoever – it’s all too HUGE even for geniuses to understand. If Plato can’t possibly grasp the existence of a god, how do you expect a kindergartener to fathom what the hell you’re saying about religion?

Religion is supposed to be a a choice, not a law. Sometimes in our old school, teachers would be all “if you don’t do this or obey that, you won’t go to heaven.” And naturally, as kids, you’re taught that going to hell would be the worst possible thing that could ever happen to you. So you obey. (I would call that a little manipulative. Yup.)

My proposition: Offer religion classes as electives in university. If you understand that kids can’t grasp the concept of philosophy, also understand that religion is just as perplexing, if not more.

Further reading on the faults of the educational system: http://www.good.is/post/a-13-year-old-s-slavery-analogy-raises-some-uncomfortable-truths-in-school/. A 13 year old girl’s “controversial” essay about the sad truths about school causes her to be withdrawn from it. Sigh.

 Apologies for the angry undertone. It’s all mostly directed at the narrow mindedness of my old high school. (!@#$%)

but sometimes it’s hard not to

Anyway.

2011 was a terrible year for me.

It started with the semblance of wonder. A midnight kiss on the first day, first hour, first minute, first second of the year. I somehow believed in the idea that starting the year good would be an accurate indication of how the rest of the year would generally feel like. Of course, this was all naiveté worth scoffing at. Because after that first 2011 kiss ended, things got sourer and sourer as the days rolled by.

I became really lost. A non-ultraviolent Alex DeLarge if you will. For some moments in the past year I refused to get out of bed. And during the times that I did get up, I ended up doing a lot of regrettable, destructive things to myself and to a lot of people I love (and who love me.) And let’s just say that during the first half of the year, I’ve tried to pull a Rip Van Winkle every time I went to sleep at night that in the end, it caused me to drink a whole beaker filled with activated charcoal (which will forever haunt me as the worst taste in my life.)

And that isn’t even half of it.

And for a huge chunk of this year, I’ve centered my life on someone who didn’t really show me the kind of love I deserved. I committed the greatest mistake of getting sucked into a relationship so unhealthy that I forgot about all the people who really loved me including myself. It’s insane what love romance can do to someone who isn’t ready for a relationship yet. And it’s even crazier to be settling for someone less than what you really want just because of the desire to feel a sense of intimacy. I guess I was so caught up in the idea of my first sort-of-grown-up love. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure I was more in love with the idea of being in love than I was with the person. I guess all those sappy photos from Tumblr got to me, too. (lol!) So it really is true what they say that you should only love when you’re ready, not when you’re lonely. Lesson learned!

But as the rules of life go, there’s always good to come out of the bad. Life just works in a strangely fair yin yang way. In the midst of that horrible year, I found out who my real friends were. My true friends, I’ve discovered, are the people who kept coming back to me (or the people you I’ve kept coming back to) subconsciously and without any effort. These are not those people you get nervous around because you haven’t seen each other in a while. These are not those people that you say demeaning things about to other “friends”. And these aren’t the people you have to be so cautious around because you know, no matter how much they say “I love you! I miss you!” on Facebook, they still talk trash behind you to your back. I guess these are just the people who feel so natural to be with that you’d wonder what kind of disaster would strike if you were to be apart from one another.

I’ve learned more things this year that any other years in my life. It’s been a strange, multi-faceted rabbit hole. It was my Kerouac-esque coming-of-age story, only that my travels came metaphorically rather than physically. Maybe everyone goes through a shit year at some point in their life. After all, we live such long lives, it can’t be all good can it?

Well, it’s been two weeks into 2012 and so far it has been mediocre and blah. And I have never been happier in my life!

Here’s to a happy happy happy new year!!!

1.) Skinny Love – Bon Iver

2.) Gravity – Sara Bareilles

3.) No Woman, No Cry – Bob Marley

4.) I Am Trying to Break Your Heart – Wilco

5.) Nothing Compares to You – Stereophonics

6.) I Want You to Feel the Same – Radio Dept.

7.) Save the Best for Last – Adele

8.) Time is Running Out – Muse

9.) If You Want Me – Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova

10.) Gone for Good – The Shins

and For Me:

1.) Breathe by Alexi Murdoch

Don’t forget to breathe. Your whole life is here. No eleventh hour reprieve. So don’t forget to breathe.

Title is an allusion of Bon Iver’s album “For Emma, Forever Ago.”