Trying too hard?

When you're so tired and so sleepy, but it is 3:15am in the morning and you've been lying in bed for the past five hours, you start to wonder if sleep is one of those things where the harder you try, the harder it is to succeed.

And then your alarm clock rings at 5:30am and you heave yourself out of bed and you feel alright for most of the day until just after dinner when you get that drowsy feeling you sometimes get after you eat a good meal but this time the drowsiness just doesn't go away.

And then you decide you really do have to sleep, no matter what else you needed to do tonight, now that it's almost 10:30pm and you look at your bed and you're nervous all of a sudden because you're worried that tonight might be another night like last night where you lie in bed and lie in bed and try and try to sleep but never succeed and then by the time you get up tomorrow morning you'll basically be a walking zombie of yourself and that's not the face you want to show to your friends and teachers at school or to the professors and admissions officers at the university reception scheduled for tomorrow evening.

So your fingers are crossed while you brush your teeth and you hum yourself a lullaby and try to sleep.

An artist at work

I had the amazing opportunity today to watch abstract expressionist painter Cesan D'Ornellas Levine as she created a vibrant painting in front of her eyes at the Petroff Gallery in Toronto. My friend H and I sat and watched her for a bit as she transformed a wooden canvas into a part of her Sun Series Paintings. It was super cool!

While I know very little about visual art and art history (and I hope to learn more soon), I really enjoyed watching Cesan D'Ornellas Levine paint. I would never have thought of some of her techniques. She used white a lot; she would paint with colour, and then 'take off' portions of the dried coloured paint with white paint. She used water; spraying the paint with water seemed to create a really interesting effect. She used a wood-carving knife to etch patterns into her painting since she was painting on wood, rather than canvas. She used paper towel to make a soft, unique texture.

It really is amazing how many opportunities are available to people living in and around the Toronto area. Cesan D'Ornellas Levine's exhibition today was free of charge, and I am sure there are many such events around Toronto that go by without Torontonians taking full advantage. Concerts, art exhibitions, historical sites -- there is so much to see and do, and so little time to do it all!

Skating with Colour

I adore figure skating. While I don't have the chance to do much figure skating myself, I still enjoy watching the artists at work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOyrvFE-OZo&feature=player_embedded is a beautiful and inspiring combination of visual art, dance, figure skating, and music. Regina Spektor's "Après Moi" is a lovely song, and Oksana Domnina and Maksim Marinin are amazing figure skaters and amazing artists!

The Cello Song

Some good vibes by The Books ft Jose Gonzalez from Dark Was The Night.

Lyrics are below.

Strange face, with your eyes
So pale and sincere.
Underneath you know well
You have nothing to fear.
For the dreams that came to you when so young
Told of a life
Where spring is sprung.

You would seem so frail
In the cold of the night
When the armies of emotion
Go out to fight.
But while the earth sinks to its grave
You sail to the sky
On the crest of a wave.

So forget this cruel world
Where I belong
I'll just sit and wait
And sing my song.
And if one day you should see me in the crowd
Lend a hand and lift me
To your place in the cloud.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FwU230utKY

Traveling by transit

Living in the suburbs of Toronto, it's usually much less efficient to transit than it is to hitch a ride from a friend or family member, so I rarely find myself in a bus, streetcar, or subway. Still, whenever I end up transiting, I find that the extra few hours it takes me to travel is well worth it; somehow, I always feel much better after riding the rocket.

I wonder whether this positive feeling is the result of knowing that by choosing to transit (instead of asking a parent or sibling to give me a ride), I've lessened the car count on the streets by one. Reductions in our carbon footprint, however small and insignificant they seem, feel good. (The dangers of these 'feel good moments' and how they sometimes make us 'feel like we've done enough' are important to discuss as well, but perhaps I'll leave them for another blog post.)

I wonder whether the positive feeling comes instead from some other satisfaction -- a satisfaction rooted in traveling with people and sharing a space with these people whom you don't know but who are heading, at least in part, in the same direction before you all split into your separate, occasionally-overlapping lives.

Improvisations

It may be March Break for the kids at my school, but my friend M and I decided that we'd go to school anyways for a little jam session on the piano and cello. As someone who is primarily Classically-trained and who hasn't had much experience with improvisation, it was very exciting to do some improvisation with M. Considering that I've studied piano for so much longer than I've studied cello, I was surprised to find it much easier to improvise on cello (or as a 4-hands piano improv with me on the upper ranges of piano with M on the lower ranges). Perhaps the fact that I've had less training on cello makes me less rigid or less stiff.

Time really does fly when you're having fun. M and I were only able to stay for about 1.5 hours, but those 1.5 hours sped by quickly; it was 1:30pm before we knew it! I left our school (and headed over to Chinatown and Kensington Market for a nice long walk and a bit of getting lost with my mum) feeling so much more refreshed than I've felt in a long time.

My favourite part of today's improvisations was the absence of metre (and tonality) in most of our music. Everything just flowed from one part to the next; there was no ticking metronome inside our heads. I suppose it can be considered the equivalent of a free-writing stream of consciousness with commas and dashes but no periods.

What a beautiful day.

Fashion

In recent months and especially in the last two weeks, I've started to become very interested in clothes and fashion. I'm not positively sure why, but I think it has partly to do with the fact that I'm graduating next year and can no longer rely on throwing on my uniform every day, and partly to do with the fact that I am feeling very academically inspired by my English teacher, and she happens to be extraordinarily fashionable. My best friend also has a stunning sense of style, and I occasionally think to myself that it would be nice if I could be a stylish as her (you could analyze it and say something about wanting to be as an amazing person as her -- she has spectacular character traits -- and transferring those traits to her clothes).

The reason why I find my sudden interest (borderline obsession, considering the amount of time I've been spending on online clothing shops without actually buying anything, Pinterest, Etsy, fashion blogs, etc.) in fashion so startling is because of my strong adversity to it in previous years. I had formerly told myself that fashion should be functional (which I still think is true), and devoting so much time and energy into fashion seems to be rooted in some sort of unfortunate values of artificiality and consumerism.

It occurred more recently to me that fashion may in fact be yet another form of art.

Life of Pi

I fell in love with Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil about a year ago. There was something beautiful in his luscious sensory language that kept me riveted and enchanted. Where some Victorian novels are (in terms of their descriptive language) like a very, very, very dense cake, and where some modern novels are so sparse in their use of language that they are so geometric and almost bleak, Beatrice and Virgil seemed to be just the right blend of descriptive language and plot.

Yesterday, I finished reading Yann Martel's Life of Pi. What an amazing story! It is considerably different from Beatrice and Virgil, although they both actively employ animals in their stories (albeit in very different ways). I highly recommend both Beatrice and Virgil and Life of Pi!

1984

About a week ago, I read George Orwell's 1984. I did the majority of my reading on in the airport, in the plane, in the car, and in the hotel in Halifax. Living in in the GTA, I would have thought I would have spent more time enjoying the outdoors of Halifax (especially considering the spells of nice weather that we had for two of the four days spent in Halifax), but I spent most of the time indoors at Dalhousie University and the University of King's College. The time I spent outside was mostly the 20 minute walks to and from the university and the hotel. I would have gone out more often, but it always seemed to be quite late when I finally came to the hotel, and by that point, my parents were quite tired to go with me, and they did not want me wandering around an unfamiliar city on my own at night.

So, I spent my evenings reading. Orwell's 1984 is a captivating and fast-paced dystopian novel. It is a social critique. Published in 1949 and set in the then-future 1984, the novel follows protagonist Winston Smith as he quietly attempts to challenge the oligarchical dictatorship of Big Brother's Party.

The premise of the dictatorship is the Party's ability to limit all thinking. There is no critical thinking in the society of Oceania. The language, Newspeak, is so limited in its vocabulary that it lacks all the beautiful subtleties and colours of today's English, known derogatorily as Oldspeak. Newspeak users speak in a quick staccato, and the language's quickness makes it so much easier to rush over the meanings of the words. You don't dwell on the words meanings because you don't have time. The word "Minipax," for example, which refers to the Ministry of Peace (which, oddly enough, concerns itself with war), is so easy to roll off your tongue that you don't think about the word "Ministry" and its meanings of institutions and hierarchical judgement. You don't think about the word "Peace" and its corresponding ideas of contentment, values, safety, security, and its opposing associated ideas of war, violence, discontentment, etc.

The book makes me wonder about Tumblr. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good (few hours?!) spent on Tumblr -- there are some posts that are absolutely hilarious! I wonder whether the pace at which we scroll through Tumblr though means that we don't have time to actively think about the images and text that we see and read. Instead we just digest it, without any sort of critical thoughts. We talked about this in English class a bit. It stuck with me, and came up again while reading 1984.

There's no such thing as a setting sun.

Canadian hip hop musician Shad is the man behind Keep Shining, a beautiful video with beautiful music. As someone who listens mostly to Classical and contemporary music, smooth jazz, indie pop, alternative rock, and pieces that can only be categorized as easy-listening, I was surprised to find myself so enraptured by Shad's hip hop piece. The music and video is centred around eliminating prejudice and empowering women to speak out and speak up; having only men in the rap industry means that only half the truth is being spoken.

My favourite part of his lyrics are posted below.

Well, you can’t be everything to everyone,
so let me be anything to anyone.
The world turns, and there’s clouds sometimes,
but there’s no such thing as a setting sun.
It always keeps shining.

Listen to his work on YouTube at this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3nbTB2KHuM

A draft of the introduction to the play that I am writing

Dim lights. A clarinet plays a light melody with a pure tone.

A large wooden chest is on the stage, just off the centre and to the right. It is deep brown and is perhaps made of mahogany. It gives the appearance of being altogether mundane, antique, and oppressively heavy. A lock keeps it tightly closed.

With slow and deliberate movements, a girl enters the scene. She appears about twenty-seven, although she could be older. Still, there is something in her movements that make her seem sixteen or seventeen years old. Perhaps it is her light step.

Eventually, she notices the wooden chest. She steps towards it, but hesitates. She takes one long, visible breath, and then approaches the chest, bends down, and touches the lock.

GIRL: It's funny how we forget some things and how we remember others.

Silence. There is no one around to answer her. She jiggles the lock lightly.

GIRL: I don't remember them giving me a key.