Some New Things

So, since it is a new year, I've decided I'm going to try a few new things. Here they are!

1. This year will be my 21st year of life. That seems rather important to me. Call it a "quarter-life crisis," but I want this year to be the awesomest year of my life thus far. Therefore, I will be working on many great projects, doing many great things and taking advantage of all the opportunities God sees fit to give me this year. :) It's going to be SPECTACULAR!
2. I'm going to stop swearing. At least out loud. As a writer, however, I don't feel that I should limit my words when I'm writing, so if it is in a character's nature to swear, he or she will swear. Personally though, I'm going to cut out all words that are any more offensive than "crap." Instead, I'll be replacing them with my own made up swears! Mostly they'll be funny, rather than offensive. Like so: "What a pile of pirates!", "I hope you step on a Lego!", "Fire breath on your face, then!", and "Curses." Hopefully this will help me stay in a good mood, even in frustrating times.
3. I'm going to write! A lot. It most likely won't all be short stories or fiction. For the past few days, I've actually been arranging music on a really neat website called "Noteflight." It's free and lets you compose and arrange music, then share it. My first work is an N'sync/Backstreet Boys mash-up. It's not the greatest, but I've passed the frenzied creative outpouring phase and am now in the "let it mature and get back to it later" phase. You can take a look at  it here.
4. I'm going to start posting up YouTube videos. I already  have a huge list of ideas for videos, and all I need is a decent video camera to tape them with. I'm not looking to become famous or anything. I just want to encourage thought-provoking and enlightening discussion about the inner workings of the Harry Potter world's Ministry of Magic, the lessons that are being taught through the lyrics of popular songs, and the reasons why girls like bad boys, why some people enjoy being scared, and the good and bad sides  of mob mentality. Also, I want to show you guys what sorts of crazy conversations my sisters and I have when we're making dinner or in the car. Because they are seriously hilarious!

I'm sure I'll add to this list of awesome-ness as the year rolls on, but I figure this is as good a place to start as any. :)

Happy 2012!

 ~Becca

On the Edge

Do you ever feel like you're on the edge of something great? Of becoming someone who makes a difference? Of finding something you're truly passionate about that will also inspire passion in others? That's kind of what I feel like right now. I feel like I could be someone extraordinary, and I just have to figure out why and how. There's something or someone inside me, waiting to be discovered, and I just have to be brave enough to go looking for her. It's a little scary though, heading into uncharted waters. There's no telling where I might end up or what dangers, disappointments, betrayals, and losses I might face, or what I might be called upon to sacrifice. Am I willing to give up what I have for a chance to get what I want? Who am I, really?

I guess the only way to find out is to move forward, one step at a time, and always ask myself at each new stage: is this who I want to be? am I on the right track? would God be proud of what I've done? am I proud of what I've done?

VLOG!

I made a vlog. You should watch it! It's about Stonehenge and the Roman Baths. :) Enjoy!

You are More than Your Facebook Page

A while ago, for my Creative Non-Fiction class, I read the article "Generation Why?" by Zadie Smith, a youngish black British female writer. It was both a creative essay and a review of the film "The Social Network" and it totally summarized all the feelings I have been feeling about Facebook. I got my Facebook page way back in high school, after everyone else had already gotten one and was always asking me "Hey, do you have a Facebook page?" I was kind of slow, in terms of being "internet savvy" or whatever. I think I'd actually just gotten a Myspace page a little while before Facebook exploded all over the place. That's how out of touch I was. But I digress. So, I got my Facebook page and started friending everyone and anyone I knew even remotely. It was all a competition to see who had the most friends. And it was alright for a while. I thought it was pretty useful to keep track of my family back in Seattle and also see what was going on in the lives of my classmates and whoever. But then I went to college. I got wiser about who were my Facebook friends and who were my real friends. Cue my first friend purge. And later, my second. Sure, sure Facebook was still kinda fun and what not. Games and things, comment wars, chatting. But its charm was wearing off. And then I read this article. You can read it here: Generation Why? by Zadie Smith

To summarize it's main points:

• The real Mark Zuckerberg is nothing like the Jesse Eisenberg version. Of course the screenwriters spiced him up with witty one-liners and what not. The real Mark Zuckerberg is quite boring, actually. He seeks the "elimination of desire." (A quote from one of his interviews.)
• The internet "underrepresents reality." (from Jaron Lanier's "You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto") On Facebook, all you are is boiled down to a series of likes and dislikes. Human beings are complex, confusing creatures that can't possibly be summed up in a bunch of random little facts.
• Facebook forces people to perform. It's all a big contest in who can get the most friends, who has the most pictures tagged of them, whose status gets the most likes. If a person's Facebook page doesn't have a lot of pictures or updates on it, people usually assume it's because that person has no life or is really boring.
• It allows people to do the very barest minimum in actual communication. And in some cases, people are starting to replace ACTUAL HUMAN INTERACTION with Facebook. (OMG He liked my status? HE'S TTLY IN LURV W/MEH!)

I would really just like to add to these arguments that I think Facebook is a poor replacement for real life. I'm not saying that I'll delete my Facebook or that anyone who uses it is wrong or an idiot or whatever. In terms of businesses and media and all that stuff, Facebook is great because it allows them to get in touch with all sorts of customers and push their products on people. I'm just saying that, eventually, I hope that Facebook goes away. It is killing the English language. It's making people more and more socially inept. And everyone should know that you are more than just your Facebook page. Go out and BE SOMEONE, and then share it with all your friends. Your REAL friends. Because, honestly, if you really wanted to be friends with all the people on your friends list, you'd call them up and talk to them, or do stuff with them.

That's all.

Peace out.

My New Hobby

Parkour: getting from Point A to Point B in the most efficient, quickest, but still safe way possible.
Free-running: like parkour, but with more flips and acrobatics and not so focused on the "efficiency" part.

So I went to my first parkour class last week and BOY HOWDY was it tiring! It was probably the most intense workout of my life. I don't know if you have figured it out yet, but I am definitely NOT a regular exerciser. The most exercise I've gotten since I arrived in London is probably lugging my groceries four blocks home. But then of course I figured out a bus route that cut that distance to half a block, and there went my exercise. haha.

However, for the longest time, I have been really interested in parkour. When I saw my first clip of "Urban Ninja" on Youtube, I freaked out. 'I CAN BE A REAL LIFE NINJA!!!' People were flipping off the roofs of buildings, scrambling up walls, climbing fences, jumping over railings. I know it's a little bit racist, but I thought 'I'm Asian, so I have to be able to do this.'

Well, I am proud to say that I have, and it is awesome. It took me about 45 minutes to commute to the gym where class was held. I was going all by my lonesome and was afraid that I would get lost, but luckily for me, the gym was actually within sight of the tube stop. Yay! I was actually really early, and class didn't start until about 15 minutes after the posted start time because of some sort of miscommunication where the teachers couldn't get the keys to open the storage closets and get the equipment. Still, I was super really a lot glad that I wasn't the only girl in the class. As far as I could tell the class was actually about 1/3 girls, and one of them was also named Rebecca. (We high fived and became BFFs. lol)

Class started with stretching. I took a yoga class last semester, so all of that was pretty familiar with me and I've always prided myself on being rather flexible to make up for the fact that I had almost no strength or stamina. And then we started warming up. Holy. Cheese-on-a-stick. The stuff we did was absolutely crazy! Every single exercise was either crouching down or on all fours. We did this with almost no breaks. We couldn't stand up to stretch. For like, 20 minutes. I lasted maybe 15 before I had to stop because I thought I was going to hyperventilate. I joined in again at the very end so I wouldn't feel like a big fat wuss, but still. I felt like a big fat wuss.

After the warm up, things got better. I still felt like a pile of cooked noodles, but now we were going to actually learn something. And we did! I managed to learn how to vault over an obstacle and only tripped twice. Eventually you're supposed to be able to do it without the use of your hands, but that was way too advanced (and scary) for me. I also learned how to 'tic-tac.' That's the actual name of the move and it looks like this:

At the end this dude in the video does a cat leap, which I also learned. All in all, I ended up falling less than a dozen times and I'm pretty sure I bruised the three smallest toes on my left foot from landing on them funny. But it was so amazing to have actually accomplished something. Sure, I sucked at all the moves, but I had the basics down and it was definitely a good start. After class I had to make the 45 minute journey home, and I was poooooooooooooooped! I was so tired that I actually considered not taking a shower, even though I'd sweated like a pig. I did eventually somehow shower and make it to bed, but boy, I was sore for the next few days. It took me about five days to fully recover, but I was so looking forward to the next class.

Unfortunately I had to skip last week's freerunning session because I'd fallen behind on homework, but I'm definitely making it to the next one. I'll try to take pictures and maybe even some video to put up later. :)

Pictures and Portal

Time is such a precious commodity, especially here in London where I spent close to an hour and a half everyday commuting. It's difficult for me to find the time to blog! I've been quite busy with school and work and exploring and shopping and eating and playing. Here's what I've been doing lately.

Improvising. Our kitchen here is really small and I don't exactly have a lot of room to store food. In fact, I have exactly half a drawer in the freezer, one and half shelves in the fridge, and one shelf in the cabinets. So sometimes, I have to be creative with my dinners. This is what I made last week and it turned out absolutely AWESOME. I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out, but boy, did it ever. I wanted to try and make breaded chicken, but I didn't have any bread, so instead I tried crushing up croutons. That didn't really work, so I just threw them in with the chicken and some butter and let them cook. Then I warmed up some frozen veggies (to be healthy) and also melted some cheese over left over spaghetti noodles. It was super tasty. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing the 'croutons-as-breading' thing again when I get back home. I can't wait until I have a full kitchen and my disposal again, though. There are a lot of recipes that I want to try out that I just can't here. Specifically ham and egg corn muffins. They're like cornbread, but with ham and egg in them! A portable, delicious breakfast. :) Yummy. 

Went to go see a musical in Piccadilly! This one, actually, which I've seen before, but it's super awesome and I found some pretty cheap tickets, so I went again. I got the tickets at the TKTS booth in Leicester Square, where they sell tickets for shows that aren't sold out yet the day of. My Phantom of the Opera ticket cost me about 42 pounds, which translates to about $55 USD. I'm probably going to buy tickets there for all the other shows I'll be seeing, like Lion King and Sound of Music. Yay musicals!

This is the theater I went to. It looks big, but once inside, it's actually quite small. I'd actually say that my high school auditorium was about the same size, or perhaps even bigger than the theater. I liked the performance though. The small space made the show feel more cozy and the singers were really spectacular, especially the girl who played Christine.

Kensington Palace!! Rumor has it that William and Kate are going to move in here soon. Right now though, there is a lot of construction going on and there's also a gallery thingy featuring all the royal princesses who have lived there. In order to get here you need to walk through the Palace gardens. While I was walking all I  could think about was "MAN! I missed green things so much!" There isn't a whole lot of open space or grass anywhere in London, except for the parks and palace gardens. That's definitely one thing I miss about America. So much space there!

This is just a neat garden arch in the palace gardens that I found. :) I thought it was cute.

A cool mirror in the displays in the Palace.

IT'S A GHOST! Just kidding. Another display thing. A lot of displays were very sad and haunting. British princesses were not very happy ladies.

SQUIRREL! The wildlife, if you can call it that, here are not shy at all. I was standing about two feet away from this squirrel and he was just like 'Meh. I'm eating this nut.' Also, not a whole lot of people know this, but I'm kind of like a dog when it comes to squirrels. I think they're cute, so when I see one, I yell out "SQUIRREL!"

Pelicans in St. James's Park. They were really big and a little intimidating.

I also went to a little art gallery. This is just giant blobs of acrylic paint on canvas that the artist swirled around to make this image. I thought it was really cool, because up close you could see each and every individual paint blob, and even some white canvas underneath where he left it open.

The Beatles, obviously. But this portrait is made out of VINYL RECORDS! How cool is that??

Doesn't this look absolutely delicious? It's actually just strips of paper rolled up and bent in certain ways, then glued onto a board. This form of art is actually pretty old. It originated back in the 1800s and was called "quilling." Originally one would wrap the strips of paper around a quill, thus the name.

Walked down what is called an 'arcade,' which is basically like a mini strip mall, but also sheltered from the rain and weather. This particular arcade was near the Bond Street area, which is famous for being the center of shopping in London. There were soooooooooooo many fancy dancy shops there, like freaking Louis Vuitton and Chanel and all that name brand stuff. Very posh. Anyways, there were also a lot of really neat jewelry shops. All way out of my price range, but super duper pretty. I don't know what this skull was made out of, but it looked really cool, so I took a picture. :)

OMG SO SPARKLY! Some of these jewelry bits ran up to like, 14,000 pounds. THAT IS SO MUCH MONEY!! D: But they were so pretty.

Fancy perfume bottles. Didn't see a price tag, but no doubt they were all very expensive.

This green pendant reminded me of the Sailor Moon locket. LOL.

Really neat little pins!

OMG LONDON! Guards. I wanted to take a picture with them, but I was traveling with a group, so I couldn't stop.

The changing of the guards! It was pretty neat to see, actually. I didn't want to take video, because my iPod was running out of battery.

The view of Westminster from St. James's Park. You can see the London eye!

Here's another shot of Westminster Abbey, which we walked by. I think I'm going to have to go take a tour of that before I come home.

Other than exploring London, I've really been into playing Portal lately. It's a physics based puzzle game that is super duper fun! It came out in 2007 in a sort of "game pack" and quickly became a indie favorite. The whole premise of the game is that you are a 'test subject' who must solve puzzles using a 'portal gun,' which can shoot two interconnected 'portals' onto any 'portal-able' surface. The portals are set up so that when you step through one, you come out the other, and momentum and gravity are not affected by the portals at all. So, if you shoot one portal on the ceiling directly above you, and then shoot the other directly below you, you would fall FOREVER. It's so much fun, but can be pretty disorienting if you play it for too long. Anyways, the game company, Valve, just came out with a Portal 2 a while ago, and I haven't been able to play it yet. I've watched a few people play it on Youtube and it looks sooooooooooo fun! Once I get back home, I will definitely get it though. Yay! Fun!

Writing Wednesday: Madness

Here's a piece that I wrote for my "Writing London" class. It's a class mainly focused on essays and creative non-fiction, but the prompt "What is madness?" just got me going too far for me to focus on the non-fiction part of it. I have to say though, that I've recently been getting into lists and visuals, in terms of writing. I get lots of images and thoughts in my head, which I then translate to paper. Anyways, this one is really "trippy," but I enjoyed writing it and hope you enjoy reading it! :)

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Neurons firing randomly, like suicidal lightning bugs, driving with their feet stuck on the pedal, racing for the edge of the world. Don’t tell me I don’t know crazy. There are lots of ways to go crazy, and I’ve walked down all of those lines. People look at me like I’m some sort of mutant, crawled up from the dark, bubbling marshes, here to infiltrate and contaminate their perfect, limited lives. I see you. All of you, floating around in your safe little bubbles, just waiting to be popped and injected with cold, black sludge, until your insides feel like their floating in the empty void of deep space and the Milky Way stretches between your navel and your appendix. I’m still trying to find the last half of my liver and the lower portion of my right lung. I think they’re lost in the Hourglass Nebulae somewhere. Hopefully they’ve found each other some how and are floating around together. My liver’d be lonely otherwise. Sometimes I wish that I was out there with them. Then I wouldn’t be alone either.

Instead I’m stuck here, inside a circular room, and they’ve told me to sit in the corner. I’m pretty sure the room is located on the end of a telescope and someone is trying to adjust it, because it keeps getting smaller and smaller. Sometimes there are shadows, shaped like people or doors or trees. But they’re never there when I look straight at them. The walls are like marshmallows. They taste like marshmallows, but they feel like rocks in my tummy. It’s comfortable here, except on laundry days when they throw my marshmallow room into the dryer and put it on tumble. I hate laundry days. It washes away all the pretty words on my marshmallow walls. The words say “crazy, insane, batty, loony, lost.” They remind me of who I am. Who are you?

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So there you have it! Until next time!

~Becca