today, i wore eyeliner.

The problem with make-up is that it feels so good. Not that it literally feels good, having all that cakey powdery black stuff on your face, but that it makes you feel so much prettier.

Today, I decided to put on some eyeliner and mascara and pull my "bangs" (it's too long to be bangs and too short to be regular hair... GROW!) back and look pretty for once, and throughout the entire day I got comments like, "wow, you look so different, so much prettier!" and "is that eyeliner? It looks so good!" And I'm thinking in my head, what the hell. I know they mean well, but it's really sad, you know, because they're only encouraging me to wear this fake artificial stuff.

Sometimes I wish I didn't need this kind of shallow support to keep me going.

Hey Soul Sister by Train

Freak, guys. This song is amazing, and will definitely be my jam for the next two weeks.

& would you look at that, all my posts ever since October are on ONE PAGE! Now you can see my first post, ever! Hahahaha. I thought it was pretty cool.

School tomorrow. Yuck. I feel like I'm running a marathon, with no pretty scenery on the side to look at.

Kindergarten

Mrs. Moss, my kindergarten teacher, with the innocent Shirley Temple face framed by short curly blonde locks. Her lips were full and a bright red; her eyes were striking green. She thought she had had a brilliant idea when she told us we’d be celebrating Father’s Day at school. We would show them all the drawings we drew and the writings we wrote and present to them some sort of I-Love-My-Dad card after a song of thanks. The classroom was in an uproar of excitement, a chaotic frenzy to perfect everything. Shannon shouted for me to pass the tape. Ryan demanded that I finish his worksheet that was due over a month ago.
My dad was out of town though. He was always out of town, working to support a family. He was, after all, an authentic, hard-working Chinese man, determined to succeed with the ten cents in his pocket. When I relayed the message to Mrs. Moss, she advised that I make a cardboard cut-out of him, darling.
On Father’s Day, my white friends proudly showed off their achievements to their dads. As I sat at my desk and stared at them with envy, I didn’t glance once at the cut-out cardboard figure of my dad that now leaned limply against the back of a plastic chair at the other end of the table. All my hard work was lined up neatly for him to see; I had drawn eyes on his face for exactly that purpose.

I didn’t get it; if he was allowed to show off the promotions he received from work, then I should’ve been able to show off the A+ on my April Showers poem too.

Bad = Cool ?

I don't understand, why we find it so necessary and so tempting and so enthralling to be bad. Don't get me wrong, I fall victim to it too. But when we take a step back and look at the big picture here, we just look like bumbling idiots grasping onto an absolute nothing. I mean, what is it? Is it cool to be bad? Like, where did that even come from? I've always wondered that- how did the "popular people" become "popular," and what does that even mean? Does it mean you party more? You sneak out at night? You drink? You smoke? You're not afraid to walk around with skimpy skirts and lie with boys you've never even met before? Call me extreme, but you've got to wonder- what's the point? Who are you trying to impress? And since when was "being bad" something that impressed someone?

People, we've got it all mixed up, and it's bothering me. Gosh I know it's the whole individualism hedonistic thing, but really, exploiting pleasure and squeezing it to its death honestly won't make you happy. If you're looking for happiness, the bad side isn't going to get it for you. There are things in this world (or should I say out of this world) that are much greater than you being cool.

Besides, I already know I'm cool. You don't got to tell me, foo'. :)

On another note, I watched Avatar today, and it was amazing. It exceeded my expectations, which, mind you, were already really high from all the hype going around about the movie. But holy crap, the graphics were so mesmerizing, and I almost forgot for a few seconds that I was sitting in a movie theater in Johns Creek, and not in the middle of action on the planet of Pandora. And let the tears flow too; I could not stop bawling when that tree fell down, because I just felt so helpless. And this is me getting emotional about moving pictures on a screen, because nothing exciting like this ever happens to me in my life. Oh, how I want a bird to fly on...

I also took the SATs today, which were alright. Not much to say about those until the scores come out. But seriously, I felt like I was bubbling in my death wish as I took that test, haha.

So, that's it! More webassign time, yay!
Aw, shoot. I forgot to practice piano today.

Btw- thanks guys for commenting!!! It took me long enough to embed that code in there, and I'm glad to see that it's being used. SUCCESS!!

Love Makes the World Go ‘Round

Okay, so you know that Laws of Life essay? I wrote one last year and forgot to enter it, and now it's a required assignment this year, so I was wondering if the one I wrote last year is good enough to turn in, or if I should write a new one. It's about Nashville; here it is:

A cooling sensation filled my body as I stretched out my fingertips and embraced the wind that so easily enveloped me, until at last I fell to the beckoning arms of gravity. My eyes fluttered shut; my feet lost connection to my brain as they freely galloped down the steep hill, jumping, dancing. A smile spread across my face and transformed into a laugh as I glanced behind and saw bundled figures attempting to roll down the hill, figures that were instead playing bumper cars while painting horizontal and zigzagged shadows across the landscape. These were, needless to say, the newly met friends who I had spent the past week in Nashville with. These were the people who I had cried with and laughed with through homeless stories and service projects during one short-term mission trip.

My feet hit hard cement, and with a body still filled with the light ecstasy of the night, I jumped in the air and cried joyfully into the sky. I was surprised to hear a reply.

“Are you drunk? Are you drunk?”

An odd question. My eyes wandered around until they locked on a dark figure, sitting alone on a bench. Walking toward him, I shouted out, “No! No, not at all! We’re just having fun!” He smiled and nodded; I could tell he was another tragic homeless story on the streets of the city. We dived into a conversation, so much easier than the past conversations I had tried to strike that week. The presence of the others started to fill the space around me, and we huddled into one captivated body and listened in awe to the man’s tale of faith- a faith that was starting to crumble. Fifty years he had spent on the dreary streets of Nashville; he asked us if another year would really make a difference. The man, Richard, then took off his shoe and revealed a deformed foot; one red toe bent around the other, and the big toe was half the size of a regular one yet equally swollen and huge; it bent this way and that way until the foot could not even resemble a body part anymore. The grotesque image stole the words out of our mouths, and a silence hung over our heads.

“Let’s pray…” a small voice whispered. Holding hands, we murmured our prayers in one voice, willing comfort and love into this life. Amen. Richard looked up with eyes anew, a bright twinkle of hope that had not existed before. A child’s smile shone on his aged face.

“Thank you… thank you…”

Then, I knew. I knew that we had saved a life, that we had completely altered the path of another human being, and that we had flown down a hill and played the roles of angels in Richard’s cold and lonely life. Our eyes sparkled with identical tears, and my hands clasped the hands of the girl beside me, holding it dear to my heart. For although we had re-colored Richard’s hope to a purer shade of white, he had planted seeds in our hearts that continue to grow- even to this day. He taught us that even a small conversation or a random act of kindness can calm the roar in another person’s life, and that so much more lies behind the fundamental needs of a human. Given, we need our food, our shelter, our health. But perhaps the most significant thing that a human needs is not something that teachers can train little kindergarteners to recite, but it is instead something abstract that can’t be stuffed in a bottle and brought to a desert island. For we realized that the beauty of love was what instead made the heart keep beating, and love was what my little church group vowed to bring back home to Atlanta.

---
So yeah, hopefully somebody will tell me yes or no?
I honestly don't have time to write another laws of life essay, but half of me wants to.

I'll post later on today about other things in general, but I have webassign to do.
Oh webassign... why dost thou hate me?

Friend Me?

So what exactly is it that differentiates a "friendable" girl from a "dateable" girl and if you want to go even further, a "sexable" girl? I've never realized how weird it actually is, how it seems like we were all intrinsically categorized into these three divisions from the beginning. As if it's in our genes, whether we'll be a friend or a girlfriend (which would mean we could blame our parents).

But when I started digging deeper and seriously wondering what the differences were, I found it so ironic. Think about it. A friendable girl can't be a dateable girl because she's too nice. She's too friendly, too fragile, too caring and kind and understanding and innocent. So, she can just be a friend because the guy doesn't want to have the responsibility of dealing with such perfection (plus, apparently, it's not as much fun dating a goody-goody). Either this, or she's too manly.

Now if you're the dateable type, then you're a bit more playful than the friendable one. This one likes to joke around with the guys, act cute and batter her eyelashes while giving playful pushes on the shoulder to initiate some kind of intimate touching and closeness. She's girly and unreserved and pretty. Screw the fact that she's not nice; she's cute and therefore dateable.

And if you keep moving to the extremely sensual side, you get the playboys and the Ke$has.

But isn't that sad though? It goes the same for the guys- the friendly ones just aren't the dateable ones, and I can't place my finger on why exactly they're not, because they're certainly the best kinds of guys. But then again, who said that a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is better than a relationship with two regular friends? So maybe the friendable ones are getting their deserved places after all. But whatever, things always end up working out in the end.

I absolutely love this woman's photos (mainly of weddings & lovers)

i would like long hair.

The problem with me is that I try to too often to assimilate. Staying up, for instance. The only reason I stay up is so that I can seem cool, all BA staying up past one in the morning, because strange things happen at night and you know it. Except good thing I'm sane enough to be kidding; I take sleep seriously, and I would so sleep if I could, but I can't because there's an impossible apush test coming up on Friday, and a 50-point webassign and SATs on Saturday which, by the way, I have not had time to study for. I'm so exhausted. I've actually stopped taking naps, except for short 20-minute ones at 9pm. But I complain too much. That's another problem with me.

I forgot what I was supposed to write about.

All I can really think about is how I still have so much things to do... and how Saturday might be one of the worst days I'll ever experience. You know, it feels like I've been preparing my entire life for this test. Classes ever since seventh grade that never really helped, trying to stuff equations that I didn't understand into my undeveloped head, attempting to grasp the long vocabulary words and realizing that they were nowhere near the ones that I stumbled along in Harry Potter. It's relieving to see though, after a few practice tests, that things have clicked in these past few weeks- but still not enough to satisfy me. Not enough to satisfy the five long years of anticipation of this dreaded moment.

Except the thing is... I can just retake it. So really, it's pretty anticlimactic.

I think I already wrote a post complaining about SATs before. Which brings me back to how I complain too much... see how I completed the circle? Pretty awesome (who, me? Nawwww, you're definitely more awesome!) Ohmygosh, which brings me to another point. I like complimenting people. But then what do I do when the complimentee snaps her head up with a determined fiery look in her eyes and drawls out a "nooo, you're sooooo much better!" or a "giiiiirl you're like soooooooo much prettier!" Am I supposed to argue back? Because then we'd look like two brainlessly preppy girl having a completely pointless conversation about who's prettier, that'd go something like this:

me: you look so pretty today!

her: no way, YOU look so pretty!

me: have you seen yourself? You're so much prettier!

her: hello? YOU are! I'm so jealous!
me: girl you have no reason to be jealous! You're so pretty!

her: Can you just stop it? You're prettier, and that's it.

me: no!

Which is, quite obviously, a ridiculous conversation. But then, if I casually laugh, I'll look like a jerk/bad friend/conceited brat who's self-centered enough to not compliment her back. So then it'd just go like this:

me: you look so pretty today!

her: aw thanks! you do too!

me: haha. -hair toss-

You see my dilemma? But I'm probably overanalyzing things, because I don't actually recall a time when this has happened to me... lack of compliment-returning, perhaps? Haha, just kidding guys. I'm just awfully tired.

Dude! If only I could toss my hair like this.

Am I?

Am I really that naive because I believe in the good of people?

Is that what you'd consider "stupid?"

I'd Rather just Stay in Dreamland.

This is my second post of 2010! Hooray! I hope this becomes habit, just not at 1 in the morning, like I did for my last post and this one. It's not healthy. But really, my sleep schedule is so messed up that I literally can't go to sleep at eleven. It's not physically possible anymore; I literally lie in bed tossing and turning until two a.m. Then I have a dream that I never remember, which is just about one of the worst feelings to feel when you wake up, because you know you had a fantastic dream, but you just can't place what it was about or who was in it, and so you try to go back to sleep to enter back into that ideal world but you just can't. So then you have to grudgingly wake up and live your boring life as if on repeat... I wish I could remember my dreams and enter them at command. Like, if I were about to get shot or something, I could just snap my fingers and find myself drinking pina coladas on a cloud. Of course, I'd still end up getting shot, but at least I wouldn't die with the fright I'm sure would overtake me in that situation... hopefully that won't happen though. (According to the facebook surveys though, my future doesn't look like too bright. Somehow, I'm going to end up in an electric chair sometime in my life).

(These are called nacreous clouds, in Antarctica... don't they just give you chills?)

So today, I had lunch with two Tech girls; they didn't know each other, but my mom decided to set up a meeting between the two since they're looking into the same major, and one of the girls was feeling a bit lonely over there, so my mom played the heroine and saved her social life. I just sipped my water and nibbled quietly on my almond and cashew chicken as I sucked the marrow out of their conversation. It was code talk. Casual mentions about taking BME classes and hating ECE and EE, about Rush and REs and Co-Ops. But it was so interesting. One of the girls- Willa- I've known her since I was in second grade, because she lived in my neighborhood, and we'd have bible study together, and she babysat me one summer, and I grew up admiring her because she could stuff a million grapes in her mouth. And now, here she is, this sophisticated college girl already working with a steady pay. I can't believe how quickly she grew. And listening to them talk- it made me realize how real and how close college is. A few years ago, college was a ridiculous thing to talk about, because it seemed so fake. But it's coming, people. It's coming, and we're going to be swiped out of our hometown before we can blink twice.

But I'll save that sentimental nostalgic post for later, since I do have another year and a half to contemplate how close college is. But the thing is, I need to stop idealizing that place, college, because really, it's just another school. Yeah, I need to calm down.

After all, I'm only a junior. Right?

Who I Want to Be

Do you know who Paul Farmer is? If not, you should at least know who Mother Teresa is. These two figures have been extremely inspirational to me, especially Paul Farmer (whose book- Mountains beyond Mountains- is extremely amazing by the way). He pretty much changed the entire way medicine was looked at in third-world countries, by making it possible to cure diseases that the world thought was impossible to be cured (like tuberculosis). He built a hospital in Haiti and gave medical aid for free (with money only from charity help), transforming and saving lives; then he expanded this method to other places, like Puerto Rico and Russia. He's genius. But when I was in APUSH the other day, these two girls (don't get me wrong- I love these girls) completely bashed on him and referred to him as conceited and one who hated all who weren't poor, which is why they hated him and didn't want to donate to his organization- Partners in Health. I'm not gonna lie- I was so offended. Obviously, someone like him who's doing so much is going to know he's doing so much and will be a bit conceited, but the point is, at least he's doing something rather than sitting around in an office all day and wishing for a better life. He's saving lives and doing the dirty work that the majority of America is too scared to do. He's living to his utmost potential and that is exactly what I want to do. And if you're going to hate me for it, if you're going to refuse to donate to charity because you don't believe the money is actually going somewhere, then you'd better change how you look at things before the people in Haiti start dying by the hundreds (which unfortunately has already happened... pray and donate!) Then they started talking about how Farmer hated all the rich people and only loved you if you were poor. Obviously, this is an exaggeration, but there is truth to these thoughts. Rich people are the ones after all who spend so much money on things like manicures and pet grooming while starving kids are dying not too far away... excuse me for the extremity. But man, I got so worked up, and I actually threw a pen. Yes, a flying projectile.

It's just that... making such a huge impact as Farmer did is what I want to do if God wills it, and when someone bashes on that, well, I can go crazy. Plus, charity is not bad. Goodness.

Anyways, I'm unbelievably happy for Monique, Kasandra, and Rebecca- we started an accountability group, met today, and had an incredible time. I'm so excited for the ways God will work through us. I've been praying this past year for an accountability group, and I was so focused on the thought that it would be of me and my regular group of girls, that I didn't realize that I could make one with my own church friends... I'm so happy. The thing I really need to work on is like Rebecca said- trust. You know, if God told me not to go to college, I'd be scared to death and refuse to listen. I'm so stubborn, so set on this one path in my life that anything that was different would absolutely scare me to death. That's the same for not getting into a good college, not making it to GHP, not getting a good-paying job when I grow up... these are all the things I absolutely crave and desire and want for myself but what in the world would happen if God told me no? That would be one heck of a struggle. I need to stand strong. But as Monique said- He'll open and close doors for me. And plus, He knows what's best for me.

So, trust. That's all I can do.

(picture taken by the amazing Alice Young.

On another random note (wow, this post is pretty long), have you ever thought about how funny it is that the font/font sizes of words can mold you into a different person? I'm a typography freak, I'm not going to lie (newspaper did this to me), but Papyrus (which I hate) and Comic Sans (which I hate even more) give completely different impressions from Times New Roman or Arial. I just thought it was funny. How'd that even happen? That the aesthetic nature of a font can change you from a immature boy to a sophisticated woman? (No, there are no sexist/feminist undertones to that comment). This is why the Internet is so dishonest.

Intimate touching for the win.

LOL So I saw these youtube comments asking what "FTW" meant, and someone replied with "Oh, it means 'what the eff' backwards. Like, 'eff the WHAT?'"

Cracked me up.

I'm so bipolar that I'm back by the way, if you haven't caught on yet.

PS: donate to Haiti relief fund with Red Cross- text "Haiti" to 90999 to donate ten bucks. Pray too. You know that when they did a Facebook event for forty days of prayer to stop the crime rate in one of the most dangerous places in California, that for that entire stretch of forty days, not a single crime happened? That says something.

http://redcrosschat.org/2010/01/14/your-mobile-giving-by-state/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RedCrossChat+%28Red+Cross+Chat%29