If I’ve had to choose a creed or motto I’ve lived by, it’s “There are no such things as excuses. Only reasons.” It’s something that my dad taught me when I was younger. I used to be a pretty good fibber. And I would fib all the time to my parents. In high school, my dad got fed up with it, tore me a new one, and told me to “stop making excuses”. And since then, that’s the one life lesson that I’ve held onto: That excuses are for the weak.

What’s the difference between an excuse and a reason, you may ask. In my mind, an excuse is an escape route. It’s something we offer to ourselves and to other people to make ourselves feel good and make our failure more palpable. It’s something that we use to hide our weaknesses and our shortcomings. The blame is safely shifted onto someone or something else. A reason is for realists. Reasons aren’t sugar coated like excuses are. Reasons tell you where you failed, what you didn’t think through, and why things didn’t come out expected. You are at fault for your own failure. Saying you couldn’t study because of the television isn’t an excuse for a bad grade, it’s the reason why you failed. You should have tried to make an effort to study, to move away from the TV, turn it off, something to make your time more useful. Circumstances out of your control aren’t exempt. You were late because the train broke down. That’s an excuse. You didn’t plan for the worst case scenario and you are late because of it. It’s your fault for not being prepared. Excuses are unforgivable. Reasons provide areas for improvement.

My dad taught me this lesson in my sophomore year of high school. Since then, in four years, I’ve made maybe 50 excuses. There has always been a reason as to why I failed. And most of the time, it was my fault. I didn’t study hard enough. I was overconfident. I didn’t think ahead. I didn’t account for certain variables. Just like now. I should be studying for my Organic Chemistry examination on Monday. I know I should, but I can’t put myself in the mindset to do it. Should I fail that test, it’ll be because I should’ve forced myself to study, not because I couldn’t. Or if we could, let’s look at the big picture. I’m doing terribly in my major. Not because my teachers are bad or the subject matter is uninteresting. It’s because I made the mistake of choosing a field of study haphazardly. I should’ve weighed my options, studied something I enjoy, waited before I dove headfirst into the sciences.

I know that this seems a little extreme. There are times when even if you account for everything, you won’t get your desired outcome. But I can’t help but think in this mindset. If you fail, it’s your fault. End of discussion. If it’s true that old habits die hard, then old mindsets die harder. But, it is also true that knowing I failed and passively observing it does not help me. So  for now, I’m a proactive thinker with a sloth-like attitude, thinking critically of mistakes that shouldn’t be dwelled upon.

It seems I’m missing a unifying theme to relate this issue to myself. I should have thought this entry out more…

This is a spur of the moment type of rambling, but I think it’s long overdue. It’s time I was honest to myself about my goals and what I want from my education.

My parents are very smart people. They claim not to be so, but to me, they’re some of the smartest people I actually know. Both came as teenagers, not knowing the language here. They now speak with minimal accents. People are actually surprised when I tell them they’re not born here. One’s got their bachelor’s degree from Cal Berkeley, the other from UCLA. One ended up earning a few post-grad degrees the other has a Pharm.D. from USC. They are a hard act to follow, by anybody’s standards. I think that’s what made me want to go into Biology. That was the one profession that I knew you had to be smart to excel at. Being the child of those two people, believe it or not, is a little stressful. Early in life, there was a pressure to make sure that I was at least perceived smart, and it perseveres to this day, even though everyone I know now deems it untrue. Doctors are naturally smart people, at least that’s the stigma we give them, positive or otherwise. So in order to impress my parents and other people, I think I subconsciously decided on Biology way before I even got into high school.

I think the other part is my inherent enjoyment of griping and complaining. I enjoy it, I’m not going to lie. Sometimes, I enjoy it too much, to the point where it may be considered masochism. Like take my current situation. I hate and have no drive to excel in Biology at all. But I’m here, only to complain to others studying the same thing about how bad it is, how hard it is, how completely useless it is. And it makes me happy to do this. It’s sick and stupid, but I like complaining about that kind of thing.

The last part of the equation is probably the peer pressure aspect, though not really peer pressure. Most of the people I live with are Bio majors. Four out of six of us, actually. But that’s not even the actual bit; that’s all peripheral. Most of the pressure I put on myself comes from people I’ve never met. People that don’t know I exist. And most of them do what I envy: art. I’ve written earlier about how at my first birthday, I chose a paint brush; I was “supposed” to be an artist. But I’ve cornered myself into this Science major, that I can’t really go beyond it. I look at people on DeviantArt, the professionals, the hobbyists, the students. Take ravenskar, a person studying commerce and law, but hating it. She plans on studying art later on. Finni is a Human Biology major, but still makes amazing pieces digitally. Then there’s rufftoon and all the other Avatar people I follow, as well as the many art school students. They do what they love doing best. And each of these people have their own effect. Rufftoon and similar people inspire me to go ahead and be that artist that I wanted to be. But then I see people like finni, producing great work even though she’s working towards a similar degree as me, and I then want to stay in Biology for whatever reason. And then I see ravenskar, probably the middle ground, and I think of finishing out my degree in Biology, but having the conviction to study art.

I don’t know what I want because I don’t know what’s best for me. And not knowing what’s best for me is making me waste time. And honestly, I’m not talented enough to go and actually do art. So I guess you can say I’m at a crossroads with a few options. One is to keep going in Biology even though I don’t like it at all. Two is to go into what I think I love doing or something similar which right now, is Computer Science and Art. Three is something else.

I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do.

It’s basically 3AM now, and I’ve only just finished a 40 minute pre-lab assignment that I started at 10:30PM. And it’s quiet. It’s the only time I feel like I have the apartment to myself; the only time I really feel comfortable blogging, and this one is going to be about cars. More specifically, my first car.

On my latest trip back home, I had found out that my grandmother’s Saturn’s transmission was hopelessly trashed. And so my dad proposed to sell her my car and I agreed. I did this not because I wanted to get rid of it, but for two reasons. 1) My mom told me that it was probably going to get trashed anyway and 2) with me in college, it doesn’t get much time on the road. That happened about three weeks ago now, and I’ve only just been able to write something about it. It was an amazing car, and you never really forget your first.

I don’t try to publicize this, but I failed my driver’s test twice times before passing. The first two times were in a Chevy Blazer. Now, I can drive it just fine, but that car just gives me bad luck, I guess cause I had a terrible time in that car at the DMV. The third time, I took it in the car that would be mine for the next three years: a forest green 1993 Honda Accord SE. The feeling of passing in that car, along with the fact that it was almost the end of school made it a very good day that day. You can even pinpoint the day, if you’re willing to, on my Xanga.

I have a lot of fond memories in that car. Within the first hour of my having a license, I had already shown off that I could drive and that I had a car to drive to my friends by giving them rides to Walgreens. I remember, there was one Saturday before school ended that I just sat in my car for a good two hours in the driver’s seat, just relishing the fact that I could turn on the ignition and cruise if I so choose. I got into my first accident a month later, and my second half a year after that. I took it on a total of four long car trips. I’ve driven it at literally every hour of the day, from dusk ’til dawn back to dusk. It was an integral part to my Senior year of high school. It’s what enabled me to know more of my city, to make my first real earned money, to become independent. It’s been stolen and returned. It’s been broken into. I’ve taken it to Berkeley, Vallejo, Oakland, Santa Cruz, San Jose, and Cazadero. When I moved into my dorm, it was the only thing that I had with me. I’ve had so many people in my car, I couldn’t even start to count. But I’ve let only a few people drive it; off the top of my head, outside my family, I can count three. And many other stories and feelings in between.

For me, that dark green now 16 year old sedan was irreplaceable. It was the car that got me through some of the hardest times in my life, as well as some of the greatest. It is iconic to having fun, to enjoying high school, to growing up. These past three years would not have been the same without that car, and, as cheesy as it sounds, I will never forget it.

As I write these words, there is a lecture going on. Not a school lecture that I’ll be quizzed on or midterms or any of that. The lecture is being offered by one Michael B. Johnson, head of Moving Pictures Group at Pixar. His lecture is entitled “Making Movies is Hard Fun”. He’s lecturing about how his company works.

And I really wanted to go. But I couldn’t because I needed to “study”.

I just got back from my Organic Chemistry Lab, and on the way back was thinking about learning. Educators, parents, even students say that learning is a fun experience and that it’s good to go to school and learn about different things. But that’s not true. They say it as an absolute when it’s obviously not true. If learning was so much fun, then nobody would drop out of high school, everyone would be good at most everything, the world would be, I think, as a whole a better place. But obviously, these things happen. And on this walk, sulking and housing a huge desire to not learn, I figured out what is so key that makes learning “fun”: The Desire to Learn.

Now I know that some (most if not all) of you read that and scoffed and said, “well of course! that’s obvious!” And I guess it is. But it still begs the question why people don’t learn things they want to learn. I mean, the fact that people study what the actually want to study isn’t true either. I don’t remember the exact number, but a huge majority of people who earn bachelor degrees end up not using that degree for their job down the road. If it was true that people wanted to learn what they were interested in, the phenomenon, the “Mid-Life Crisis” would not exist. Because if people had a genuine interest in it, why would they give it up, except to learn more? And again, these things do happen. People go back to school in their late-30-40s to learn what they “really” want to learn and everyone would be happy with what they know, despite not having a job. But, they feel the pressure to succeed in the corporate sense of the word. To provide for families, earn a comfortable living, buy nice things. And that just takes all the fun out of learning.

If you’re learning something to earn money, and not to be happy, then of course you’re not going to like it, and maybe even be miserable. You’re going to procrastinate. You’re not going to try as hard because you don’t care about the subject material. And you’re going to compare and play with standards of the people who either try really hard regardless of interests or have a genuine desire to learn.

I’ve been wrestling with what to do with my life for the past six months. I suppose I’m having my Mid-Life Crisis early. And not once had something looked so good than going animation or art. But I’m 85% sure that I won’t do it. Because it’s a hard field to excel in. Because I exhausted and was comfortable with my talent for it when I was in second grade. Because the competition is amazingly tough.

But it’s only 85%. There’s still that 15%. That is the part that wants to know more about the field of animation. Of 3D design. Of Pixar. And often times, that 15% is much much louder than that majority that says I should stay and learn Biology and become something or other. And, in response to that, 85% is still a majority. So two sides of me are at ends, trying to figure out what the best place to focus myself is.

I’m trying to figure out my life. And I’m going nowhere fast. And it’s depressing the hell out of me, while I sit here, studying Math when I could be hearing about how making movies is hard fun; when I could be happy.

For those who don’t know me very well, let me start off by saying that I am a real sucker for nostalgia. It’s probably the main reason why I show interest in the things that I’m interested in. One such example: I love watching new animated movies and TV shows because those are rooted very solidly in my past. But I have just recently found a brand new way for me to relive yesteryear: cleaning out my many email inboxes.

Off the top of my head, I have four email addresses my current one, my school one, along with my other defunct ones: my first one [albro8190@yahoo.com] and my other one [stealingthewind9348@gmail.com]. I know, most of these are very gaudy and/or tacky, but keep in mind that I was only 14 when I made my first two. Well, I recently signed up for another yahoo account because I felt that I had outgrown my first one. So I decided to go on a email deleting spree. And I found emails dating back to 2005. Holy crap. I was like 5′1″ back in 2005. And most of them I was right to delete for multiple reasons: spam, spam, spam, outdated email greeting, spam, spam, princeton review update, spam spam… you get the picture.

But want to know what my oldest email kept was? It was HTML sent to me. For my Xanga. It was archaic, the code in this email. But the one thing that made me smile was who it was from. It was a girl from Georgia I had a slight crush on way back when, during a trip to Korea. It was the Korean Spirit! trip I went on before I was even in high school. It’s how I know James Ha the body beatboxer (but don’t quiz him on that, he probably does not remember me at all). And the name alone, along with the message she sent with the code was a nice gift from the past for an otherwise bland and cruddy Sunday. So, to Carol Lee, thank you for that wonderful code almost five years ago. And thanks for making me smile now.

A suggestion from me to you: go look at your inbox or your archived messages in your mailbox. It’s bound to surprise you, and maybe even make your day a bit better.

Like all blog posts, this is written as a means of procrastinating. Not from homework. Not from chores. Not from having to pick up friends. From packing. After a lot of indecision, I’m going back to University of California, Santa Cruz for another year of academic learning. But only for academic reasons.

I think I did the most growing this summer. At the very least I had an amazing summer. June was the first month, with the house to myself along with my brother, doing whatever we pleased, even bringing friends home at the wee hours of the morn. Summer school and City College Track were some of the best times I’ve ever spent inside an institution of learning. Los Gatos meets and the trips down there were a lot of fun and memorable. Going to AX was an amazing experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything. Going to Camp Royenah again. Planning and executing an actual field trip to Six Flags in Vallejo. Visiting Berkeley a grand total of three times. Two trips down to Los Angeles. And, of course the other smaller, no less significant events that made up this summer. Swimming, basketball, lunches, ice skating, tag, late night bowling, movies, mahjong… Besides high school senior year, probably the only part of my life that I want to live over again.

I’ve realized a lot about myself and about how I act around others. I complain a lot. I tend to be late all the time. I make promises I don’t keep. I get offended easily. I’m not happy at Santa Cruz At all. And those are negative things to learn about oneself, but I hope it helps me become a better person and eventually get my things in proper order.

This was written less as an introspective, round about way of improving myself (though not in any means not here), but more of a reminder to myself. Of what I did, who I met, and where I went this summer. I hope my coming summers are just as good, if not better.

I have a feeling, down the road, I’ll be sitting on a bar stool with friends, and no matter who it is, start great conversations with “Hey, remember the summer of ‘09…”

Well not all school. Just high school. And not all of high school. Just the mornings. Especially mornings like today. Today, as I was dropping off my brother and my mom at school and work respectively, it happened to be a very blistery, windy, yet sunny and oddly enjoyable late summer morning. It was this kind of morning that I did not mind waking up “ridiculously” early at 7:00AM every morning to make it to a 7:35AM class. It was this kind of morning that definitely added a skip in my step, so to speak. This kind of morning that made me eager to see my friends, even if I had seen them the day before. These kinds of mornings I was excited for school. Waking up with only a few hours a sleep seemed justified. I lived for these mornings.

What I wouldn’t give to go back in time and relive just one of these mornings, seeing old friends, new friends, track friends, reg friends…

Now that I’m about to start my sophomore year of college, I look back on high school with much rosier glasses than I could have before. But not completely to the point where I call them halcyonic days. As Shawn said in his graduation speech, “I could’ve done better” (Boy Meets World). I definitely would have made different choices. Tried harder in school. Faked being outgoing. But, given who I was and where I ended up as a person, I’m satisfied with what high school has done for me. And even if it wasn’t what I thought it would be, high school and the people I met there have given me the ability and the fortunate grace of being able to appreciate the small, and often insignificant things in life. Even if it is just a windy Thursday morning.

I promised a fried that I would analyze my dreams that I remember because I unwittingly told her to do the same. So here’s my second dream that I remember. Analysis will come after.

I was in a very big auditorium, I think at some college, or at least somewhere very prestigious. And the function must have been important. Because the auditorium was packed. It looked like the center of an Olympic stadium and it was filled to capacity. Maybe it was some sort of exhibition or gala, cause I was supposed to perform with a few other people that I don’t remember, except two. I remember Thomas Tran and Jackie Boone having to perform with me and whenever either of us did something embarrassing on stage, we’d cover the other. There were a few times where I wasn’t in the auditorium, either for a intermission, or before the show, but I’d be riding on the back of a bike with my friend Gordon popping wheelies on the street. It looked looked a run down section of Gueneville with train tracks at the end. And every so often, I’d be down by the tracks, and have a close encounter with a truck or train coming down.

But anyway, back it in the auditorium, we did a total of three performances, the first two I don’t remember, but the last one involved a bus and us painting it. There was no stage fright, no inhibitions, I just went up and improved and had fun and tried to get a laugh out of the audience. I threw my prop cause I knew I did terribly after it was done and the director scolded me for it. Then he asked all the performers to sit in the bleachers on stage and me, Thomas, and Jackie sat in the top of them, over looking the audience who had curiously become emoticons. I saw one of my middle school classmate’s younger sister, and we had a brief conversation. The only thing I remember from that conversation was she was going to Riordan High School in the fall. Then a Filipino guy walked in. This guy was terrible at jokes, and would always produce awkward silences. He was showing off a piece of art to be put up around the place I was, and he continued to make the most awkward silence he had yet. While he was going on about the piece and before he made the silence, Jackie told me that her mom and her were going to move out of the state because Jackie had cancer. I remember turning back to the presentation and when the awkwardness was palpable I made the drum sound effect, the entire audience turned into various shades of the same emoticon, and the silence was broken. I grinned and laughed. But then the gum that I was chewing that I did not know I had went down my thoat and woke me up.

So for the analysis then. Just a note to say if there are symbols that I don’t explicitly explain, it means I was unable to find what the meant.

A bicycle means trying to find balance between work and play. A pick-up truck represents hard work or the need to go back to basics. Train tracks indicate either a diligent working towards my goals or that I need to get off the beaten path once in a while. The train itself represents conformity, a passenger train (which is what I saw) specifically means mental work. It also has the other possible meaning of being “in training”.

Painting is need to let go of creativity or covering something up. It was yellow paint which supposedly means joy, happiness, and energy. When someone else has cancer, it means I need to start thinking positively before I start a cancer in myself. To chew gum means I am unable to express myself effectively. Most of the other motifs in this dream were disappointingly elusive.

I can’t even begin to wrap my head around what all this means, so I’ll save it for another time.

All these interpretations were found here: http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/.

I don’t know where that saying is from, but it was what I used as the basis of my tweet at 2:00PM today. You see, at 2:00PM today, I biologically turned 19. And I don’t feel that much different, though slightly sick all the same.

So like most of my birthdays since 2003, I celebrated some of my birthday in Cazadero, California, specifically Camp Royaneh. And this year, I was a real “adult” leader, since I wasn’t a scout anymore. It was still a lot of fun, and probably one of the few places where I could have a crappy day and still feel it was a good birthday. Although, it is probably better if I celebrate at Royaneh either sober, or with a lot of sleep the day before.

I expected this to be longer, but that’s all I feel like I have to say on the subject. Just know, Alex Yi, that your nineteenth birthday, specifically between the hours of 12:00AM and 3:00AM, was just too ridiculous for words.

Today, July 26th, 2009, is the last day of ComicCon International. And from seeing things from sxephil, Wong Fu, and The Stunt People have made it very clear to me that I want to be there badly. The hype from all the booths and events that are going to be there is all great in of itself, but there are a couple reasons why I really want to go next year, if I can.

1. AX 2009 – A good time as any to say that Anime Expo this year was amazing. The fact that it was my first convention for anything made it all the more awesome. I honestly didn’t know what to expect from the experience. But, I learned the gist of what con going is, and I have to say it was a lot of fun. From the panels we went to, to the expo hall, to the cosplayers (GAH! the cosplayers), to artist alley, to general shenanigans, to geeking out openly about anime. AHMAHGAH. And that fact that ComicCon is supposed to be bigger and better than even that just blows my mind.
2. DeviantArt – I lurk on DA. A LOT. And a lot of the artists I follow on DA are con goers. Given what was in the first reason, you’d expect them to be all anime fanartists, but there are a lot of serious artists that go to ComicCon, if nothing else but to see what’s new in the animation world. They sell their own side projects and other pieces of art that they wouldn’t have a chance to sell otherwise. And a lot of aspiring artists go for work. Yeah. Work. ComicCon is so big, that major studios like Cartoon Network, Marvel, DC Comics, Dreamworks, etc. have booths there so artists can submit work and apply for jobs. And that just makes me really giddy.
3. The Cosplay – Yeah, it’s dumb. Yeah, it’s expensive. Yeah, it’s geeky to a fault. But it’s just too cool. When you see these costumes and the amount of work they put into them, how can you not appreciate them. And not surprisingly, some of them are very very well done. It’s a lame reason to want to go, I’ll admit, but it’s just as good of one for me as the other two.
4. The Cutting Edge – ComicCon is not just another anime convention. It’s a convention for all types of comics, animation, and games. Meaning that a lot of American companies and studios, comic or TV, pay attention to and hype up ComicCon. Some even go themselves and subject themselves to being asked uncomfortable, stupid questions by hard-core, slightly pathetic fans. And sometimes, they’ll preview stuff before it’s even set to air or publish. Avatar and Heroes comes to mind. But if you follow any kind of series, the  odds are good that ComicCon will have an event about your interest.

…aZooRe, let’s go to ComicCon 2010. And let’s drag tommy with us. I’m itching for the chance to go.