The Doing and Making

One of my most memorable incidents in IB visual arts is a comment made by the teacher near the very end of senior year.
So I don't remember anything verbatim, but to summarize what he said, was that I had good ideas, but couldn't execute them... though, positive point, was that I was very meticulous with my research book.
(He put it in a nice way. Personally, I think I was obsessive.)

Point was, I expressed myself better in the research than the actual execution.
In those high school art days, I did what I liked, for my sake (though it was for IB), and despite the loads of frustration, I had fun - in both research and execution.
I wasn't so discouraged by the teacher's comment. Rather, he was, and still is, right about that. My art portfolio was pretty whack.

And so he asked if I ever thought about taking art history in uni, in what I believe was a sort of compromise between my passion for the creative, and the reality of my skills.
To be honest I kinda gave up on myself, on creating things.
Besides, by that time I think I had my mind set on doing some social sciences at UofT, so that was that. High school was the end of "executing art" for a very long time.
Then at uni, I seemed to do better the more I distanced myself from writing. So that was more or less the end of literary "making" for me. I barely took a "creative" course except some lit studies, though I did express myself through all the academic essays I had to write (some were good, some were horrible).

Through those years, I'd be happy just thinking of ideas or easy doodles on the notebook margins, and doing nothing with them. I never really "made" anything.

But since post-grad, where I was hit in the face with the importance of "making", I think things have come full circle. I'm now equipped with the experience, however little, of other important things like dissecting or thinking or just observing the world. After my hiatus, I think I'm back to feeling confident about... myself, actually.

What I want to say is that I'm having a lot of fun making - writing - things. I'm at the point where I'm comfortable doing more with my ideas, actually executing them, for my own sake.
It's like high school all over again, but this time, it's purely and completely for myself. Selfish, I know. But it sure feels good to "make" things again.

A New Year (and Cheese)

The new year's was great (happy new year!) - I was able to watch the Kouhaku Utagassen (an iconic Japanese end-of-the-year song show), I read Nuribotoke no Utage: Utage no Shimatsu (which was fantastic, obviously), and did not freeze my toes off during the crazy cold spell (it's really cold again the past few days...).

And it's rather unrelated, but I realized I am ok with cheese.

Well, long story short, I never grew up eating a lot of cheese. Japan isn't exactly a cheese-loving culture. And for some strange reason, I just didn't like cheese.
In my past few years in Canada, I've become used to - even like - cheese on stuff like pizza and grilled cheese sandwiches. But I was still very reluctant to eat chunks of pure cheese. I would most likely stay well away from it at parties and the like.

Recently, I was exposed to brie. I realized I could eat that, since it didn't really taste like cheese (I think it tastes closer to butter).
So, over the holidays, I decided to be bold and bought a whole round thingy of brie cheese. It was surprisingly good.

And that is my new year's cheese story.
I mean, it's a good start to the year, right? I tried something new and it was a positive experience.

Other than that, I've been drinking way too much half-caf instant coffee and I think my stomach is very much harrassed by the caffeine.