"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.