Maybe I’m a little naive

So, maybe I’m a little naive for saying this but you know when people say, “You can’t be in love just after a few days!” when they hear little teeny couples telling each other “I love you” like it’s no big deal? Well. I get that. I really do. Sometimes it’s really easy just to spit those words out without thinking twice. I’ve been there. I get it.

But….I mean, why couldn’t it be true? Sometimes two people meet at just the right time, at the precise moment in which they are just ready for each other. Life prepares us for certain things at a certain time. Some things really aren’t coincidences and I firmly believe that.

So what if they want to say, “I love you” or skip ahead to “When we’re married…”s? So what if they want to be affectionate after a short period of time?

Just because it’s infatuation doesn’t mean that it can’t also be love, or whatever-you-wanna-call-it. I also don’t understand when people say, “Oh, I thought I was in love but it obviously wasn’t real” just because it didn’t work out. Well, what if it doesn’t work out? That doesn’t erase everything that happened or anything that was felt.

Maybe it’s super immature of me to think these things. Maybe I’m just a total romantic and refuse to let the world ruin that for me. Maybe I want to be able to tell a boy that I love him without feeling like the whole world is staring at me and scoffing at my silliness.

So maybe I fell in love with a boy in a matter of just a few days. Who’s to tell me what I do or do not feel?

So maybe it will work out and in a few years I will have to chance to laugh at life’s face and recite the famous little words from The Smiths' song that go, “How can they see the love in our eyes, and still they don’t believe us?” happily as I skip around the block with The Love of My Life.

Of course, there is always the chance that it won’t work out. So let’s say it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t true and right and real (or what-have-you) in its moment.

But who knows, maybe I’m just a little naive for feeling this way after all.  

(image source: simplewritings)

Let me share a lil' something about friendship

(Relationships in general, really.)

“True love ‘beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.’ So Christ loved us, and that is how He hoped we would love each other.”

—Elder Jeffrey R. Holland (source)

When you meet someone who changes your life, when that someone cares for you despite all your flaws, when that someone understands and shares your faith, when that someone reminds you of your divine nature and worth, when that someone is willing to support you in all that you do, when that someone inspires you to become better and to fulfill your potential as a child of God, when that someone shows you enough maturity and willingness to be your friend....the very least you could do is cherish them with all your heart.

It isn't about making rash promises to each other.
It isn't about planning for the future.

There isn't any time to worry about how your friendship will be in the future. There isn't any time to think, "Is it worth it?". There just isn't any time for that. Because it doesn't matter.

It is about the Now. It is about what you are doing for each other Now. It is about the unconditional love and support that you can offer each other Now. It is about constantly praying that you will have all it takes to make sure you can fulfill your individual mission towards this person. Now.

Heavenly Father doesn't put people in our lives just for fun. He doesn't put people in our lives for us to make each other worse. He puts people in our lives for us to uplift one another, to pull each other through the thick of things, "to bear one another's burdens" (Mosiah 18:8), as we promise to in our baptismal covenant. He wants us to learn from one another and to love one another (John 13:34). Loving one another can take a lot of work, but it wouldn't be a commandment if it didn't have a special and specific purpose.


For us to characterize an important relationship as anything less than divine would be wrong. For us to treat it like anything less would be defiling it.

With steadfastness and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, we will be able to fulfill our missions in life, we will able have better relationships. With the same principles, we will eventually be able to rejoice in eternal life (2 Nephi 31:20).

All it takes is true desire, willingness, and pure love. It takes ever-growing faith and constant prayer.

It takes a change of heart and mind:

 2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by therenewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. - Romans 12:2

Once we have this change of heart and mind, we will be able to recognize what our Father expects of us. With a change of heart and mind, will be able to recognize how to treat certain relationships and what is best for one another.

It it my humble testimony that our Father in Heaven knows us perfectly. He listens to our needs, hears our prayer, and answers them. We have to keep a faithful and careful watch of how he is going to make those answers manifest. Once we find those answers, it is our duty to make the best of it. If our Father sees fit that the answer to our prayers should be made manifest in the form of a person in our lives, we must make sure we care for, support, and cherish that person.

It is my testimony that the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ is true. I know this because it has proven itself to be good in my life. The light of Christ has absolutely transformed everything in me, and continues to do so. I love my Savior and I will continue to cultivate my relationship with Him, by following His commandments and feasting upon His word. I share this beautiful knowledge that I've been able to acquire through Him, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

All the little children

Yesterday I started thinking about children and I pretty much mentally planned how I’m going to raise my own future kids. I couldn’t even sleep for a while just thinking about it all. Of course, I know raising children is going to be a lot more difficult than I like to think and I know that I’m not going to be the ~awesomely perfect~ mom I hope to be. I know half of the stuff I’m planning probably isn’t even going to happen.

But here ya go, an ever-growing list of the things I have in mind for the future little boys and girls that I hope to raise:

• No television in our home. We might have a TV in some corner of an attic or our garage for when we want to watch quality movies or home-videos.
• Limited amount of toys. I want my kids to cultivate a big imagination, enough to create their own toys and means of entertainment. If we have toys, they will be simple toys that require lots of critical-thinking.
• I will be strict enough with them that they will grow up learning self-discipline skills so that when they reach18 they'll be well-organized and fully competent adults ready to succeed in the world. Unlike a certain someone I know (cough, me).
• They’re going to do all their own chores and clean up all their own messes. We might even have a “chores calender” so that each of them will know what they have to do everyday. Part of learning organizational skills and self-discipline.
• My children will read books. Lots of them. Beside holy scripture and religious material, I will encourage my kids to read all types of books appropriate to their ages.
• My children will pick a musical instrument of their choice to learn from an early age. If there’s one thing that I regret (for the lack of a better word) about my childhood is never having pressed my parents to let me learn to play an instrument. Of course, money was a problem for us at the time, but I still could’ve learned another way. My kids will learn to play an instrument of their choice whether they want to or not. Again, discipline. Once they’re of age they can choose to quit if they truly don’t like it.
• Similarly and for the same reasons as the last bullet point, I will enroll my children in a sport of their choice.
• My children will naturally be involved in church activities and the like, and I will raise them with the principles of my religion (LDS), but will always encourage them to do critical-thinking and “soul-searching” of their own. Really the best thing I can do is be a great example for them to follow.
• Instead demanding respect, patience, or anything like that from them because I’m their parent, I will show respect, patience, etc., to them as their parent. Another example of leading by example, I guess. 

I will (hopefully) be adding to this list as I think of things since there are definitely a lot of aspects of parenting that I have yet to consider, but this is will be it for now. c:

And here's the only picture that I have to prove that I actually like children, as opposed to what most people seem to think:

My little cousin "Joshi" and I. It was taken in 2008 or 2009, uh, I can't really remember. 

And I promise I didn't pinch her so she would smile! (ehem)

xx

Homeschooling: Week 1

So a few weeks ago I finally starting teaching my little cousin at home in preparation for the big bad Kindergarten! Here's the post about how it all started.

I've been teaching her most days for the past weeks and it's been going quite excellent. I documented the whole first week in photographs (and admittedly stopped doing so the second week, so there probably won't be much more about this for a while).

Day 1: Learning basic colors, matching, finding colors in nature, and a little snack

Day 2: Basic shapes, drawing + coloring, forming shapes with pipe-cleaners

Day 3: Revising colors, learning numbers 1-5

Day 4: Revising numbers 1-5 by counting groups of objects, introduction to the alphabet

Day 5: Learning numbers 1-12, revising colors, recognizing colors from gummy bears as a Friday treat

I was so impressed at how much she was able to retain everything she learned each day. She caught on to all the names of shapes, colors, and numbers 1-12 so quickly! Fun fact: That wooden clock in the first picture of Day 5 is actually mine from when I was in elementary. My parents bought it at IKEA and it was a huge help for me in learning how to tell time, so I was pleased to have found it for another little one's benefit.

So the first week went great. My cousin was so excited about learning, even after some difficulties she faced with the alphabet. The second week and going on into this week, we're still trying to get past those difficulties with patience. We've slowed down considerably, which I hope will help in her remembering and understand the alphabet.

Which brings me to something I've been wondering: Is it normal for the alphabet to be so difficult to learn? For some reason she can name all sorts of things, including "animals" and "elephant" and even a couple of phrases, but easily forgets the one-syllable names of her ABCs. She can sing the song well, and adorably so, but when I ask her what the letter "A" is called, she blanks out and struggles to get any sound out. But like I said, we're taking it slow and we're both exerting a whole lot of patience into this task.

Teaching has sure been an experience, not as "fun" and "exciting" as I initially thought it would be. But it has helped me tremendously in many aspects and I'm proud to say it has helped my little student as well. We're both learning together.

I send out my respects to real school teachers. Thankfully I was never much of a trouble-maker in school and was excellent at knowing when to behave, so I don't feel too guilty. c;

xx

"Juice for the Soul", or something cheesy like that

After an insanely stressful time working on my current art project and feeling that my goals were absolutely unreachable, I decided to calm myself down with two things:  Patti Smith's Just Kids  and fresh fruit+vegetable juice.

Just skimming through some pages of Just Kids really did the trick. I became inspired enough to get on my feet and do the best with what I could. It also reminded me that my dreams aren't going to come true overnight. I figuratively told myself, "Patience, dear grasshopper" and patted myself on the back.

Ultimately all the stress and feelings of afflicted ambition did wear me out and I realized that I had lost all my appetite. It's something that I've learned from the past that when I'm feeling too down in the dumps to care about solid food because 1) I know I will just end up throwing it up anyway and 2) let's face it: chewing is hard work , I decided to put my abandoned juicer to use and make myself an extra-healthy and easily-digestible treat. 

But before I bore you with so many words, I'll just show you the pictures I took during my juice making. My parents were watching and laughing at the fact that I was actually photographing the entire process, mind you. It's not a nice feeling. It actually made me feel stressed again... but I'll leave that for another post. (I did give them half of the juice that I made, just so you know that I got over being bitter at them.)

     

A pretty  mess

My favorite part about making anything with beats is the pretty pinks that are left dancing around in the sink afterward

Hi c:

...and with that I leave you to go write a raging journal entry about how upset it makes me when others, particularly my otherwise super-supporting parents, make fun of me while I'm in creating-mode.

In the words of Holden Caulfield: "It kills me!"

xx

Leilani....the homeschool teacher?

So, for a really long time I’ve felt like public schooling wasn’t the thing for me. Especially not at the middle-school and high-school levels. I’ve already accepted that I went through it and not only did I survive, but I learned a lot in the process. That is all fine and well, but I still think that my learning experience would have been greatly enhanced had I been given an alternative. Yes, I did learn to grow in social aspects. Yes, I did have many character-forming and life-changing experiences; all which I am thankful for. But I still wonder how much more knowledge I could have right now, how much more I could have enjoyed learning if I hadn’t been constantly trying to dodge all the extra stuff that comes with public education.

 
(hmmm...)

Anyway, I don’t know if I will ever be able to accurately express with words my true feelings about this. I don’t even have my true feelings very well sorted out yet. Maybe I’ll write a book about it one day when I’m feeling really inspired. But right now, I’m done ranting. I have something really exciting to tell:

This morning my aunt came over so I could give her some art tips on these pieces that she’s working on (she’s been trying to replicate some paintings that my mom has up on our walls for months, and it is just the cutest thing ever. I love her!) and we ended up talking about how her daughter is entering kindergarten real soon and how it’s going to be difficult considering my cousin is very, um, spoiled (for the lack of a better word) and also doesn’t speak very well for her age. I asked my aunt if she’d ever considered home-schooling and she said she hadn’t but that she was trying each day to teach her very basic things like numbers and colors.

She must have sensed my enthusiasm right away because she proposed that I be a tutor for the summer. She offered to pay me if she could drop off my cousin every day for about a month so that I could teach her! I wouldn’t be so excited about this if it weren’t for my recent mommy-blog obsession. Also, I’m not the most patient with children and in fact, I get worn out by them real quick. But a few weeks before school ended I had the opportunity to be an art teacher to 2nd graders for a day and I loved it. I’m excited about this because I like being creative and I also, admittedly, love any opportunity that I have to rub-off some of my more ~free-spirited~ tendencies on little children. It’s just a thing that I do. (Shh..don't tell their parents!)

I am a little bit nervous about how all this will work out. But I plan to take full-action and soak up as much as I can from this experience to see where it will take me next. Who knows…maybe I’ll like it enough to become a full-time (art) teacher one day! But just kidding….*cringe*.

xx

Happiness is a developed roll of film

In the past week I've had the pleasure of finally shooting and developing three rolls of film that I've had either lying around in my room or unfinished in my camera. I've felt so inspired to be the photographer I hoped to be when I was 14, so much that I declared myself as a Photography major to my college today. Yep, I'm going to do it!

If I had a list of "The Most Pleasurable Things In Life", somewhere at the top of that list would be: The first peek at the photos that have been so cozily sitting in a roll of film, waiting to finally be processed. There's just a peculiar sweetness in seeing photos far from the time that they were actually taken. I appreciate digital, but nothing beats the thrill and patience that comes with analog.

But before I go on a tangent about how much I love film photography, here are three slideshows of my latest memories, in order older to most recent:



Days at home, two of my favorite missionaries, a trip to San Francisco


A shot from my backyard, another trip to San Francisco (Exploratorium), a day with friends, random shots at home
 

Silly photo-shoot with my little sister- spanning 2 days, a shot from the road

Miss Moody Unicorn

I found a little unicorn in my backyard. She's cute but a little moody and...well, I don't know what to do with her.

 

I liked this one in grayscale too:

Make sure you take pictures of all the mystical creatures that you find, or else no one will believe that you actually saw them.

Then again...who cares if they don't believe?

xx

A photographer's confession

Finding old pictures is an extremely rewarding event. Well, at least it is for me, a girl in love with the feeling of nostalgia and deep reflections on life. When I picked up photography in 2008 my intention was purely to create good-looking and artistic photographs. Photographs that I could promote and become known for. I didn't think for one second that the photographs that I'd eventually be most proud of would be the candid ones: the real, the unedited, the photographs that I snapped without much thought. I didn't think that it would be these photographs that would give me a heartache to look at, years after they were taken. Today I graduated high school. I don't really know what much to say about this fact because I haven't been able to sort out my feelings about it just yet. I don't really know what it even means, to have graduated. I am aware of what it probably means to others since all these years we've been emotionally built up, by our mentors and teachers, for this moment; the supposed "freeing" moment of going into the "real world". I don't know if I quite agree with that thought. The world I lived in all these years felt pretty "real" to me. The point that I'm trying to get to is that today, whatever significance it's suppose to hold and whatever significance it will hold for me in the future, is just another day to remember. I have the pictures to prove that it happened. I have the pictures that I will be able to look back to in the years to come. Well, that's just it. How is this day, my big graduation day, any different from any other day? Each present moment is always a little bit dreamy.

It's there and it's honest, but it's typically not until we look back and remember it that it becomes truly accessible and real. Why else would we miss a moment in the past? Why else is it difficult to continually live in the present? These are not rhetorical questions, I simply ask them because I don't know their answers. The photographs on this post are two of the many photographs that I took on a normal day back in March of 2010. Over two years ago. I remember I was at my aunt's house which was located in front of a small park. My cousin, Emily, and I were at the park, poking at bugs and doing much of nothing. It was a perfectly normal day, not boring but not spectacular either. For some reason, as I was looking back at these photographs, I started to long for that moment. I felt a pull in my heart, the wanting to go back in time and relive that day, that month, that year. Of course, pining for the past is sometimes hurtful and unhealthy, so as I recognized this I immediately stopped myself. It was just a day. Just an ordinary day. Maybe two years from now I'll look back at my graduation photos and think the same way. I'll remember it, I'll miss it, I'll get over it. But in between those actions, I'll have some space to reflect and to learn. Maybe it will be then that I'll be able to grasp what graduation really meant. Maybe I'll finally be able to figure it out. For now it's just a day that is nearing its end and I don't feel the need to stop it from doing so. I long for tomorrow and the many more days to come, the many more memories I'll be able to make more accessible with the click of a shutter.

Hmm. Maybe another day I'll remember exactly what it was that I wanted to say with all this. Maybe not. Either way, I do have one last thing to state:  I am thankful for the blessed day in which I picked up a camera.

Rainbow Symphony

My little sister went on a field trip to the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and brought back prism glasses. I peeled the plastic prism-lens off the glasses and I've been snapping pictures through it for the past few days.

Look at life through a rainbow filter when you get the chance. It's fun!

x

another's memories

The lovely Oriana (who runs this Tumblr blog and this blogspot) and I snail-mailed each other disposable cameras with which each of us took photographs of our daily sights. It was quite strange for me to send my photographs out for someone else to get developed instead of doing it myself, but at the same time I was thoroughly excited for the little exchange. I enjoyed taking my photos and even more, I enjoy looking through hers. It is like delving into her mind and being able to experience her life for a second at a time. It is almost like looking through old, forgotten photographs--remembering lost and faded memories.

She has such an eye for the beautiful and simple sights of daily life, just take a look:

Take a step or two 

in someone else's shoes,

why don't you?

xx