What Amateur Linguists Do For Fun

So, today I was totally going to write something serious and important or something, but then I got very distracted by playing around with a font I made yesterday. You see, yourfonts.com had a thing going on yesterday whereby you could make a font from your handwriting for free if you had the coupon code... and I had the coupon code.

The unfortunate thing is that I didn't have any time to immediately play with said font, because homework was eating my life (thankfully, I can say without sarcasm that it was the funnest homework I've ever done, because I got to try deciphering Chinese characters and figuring out which English words several Japanese loan words came from based on what they sound like. This may not sound like your cup of tea, but it is totally mine \o/), which meant that I didn't have time to play with it until today.

In Which Thea is Not Exactly a Feminist

My younger brother and sister (and probably my parents) get a little tired of me pointing out the overwhelming number of male main characters in movies, and the lack of a realistic sample of female main characters in books.

I know my sister didn't like it when, after we watched the trailers just before the Hobbit, I pointed out that not one of them portrayed a movie with a female main character. This wasn't a comment on the apparent quality or creativity of the movies (because we were both pleasantly surprised with the apparent originality of Oblivion, and can't wait to see it). This wasn't to say that those movies were somehow evil for all having male leads. All I was saying was that every single one had a male lead.

You know what you say with the main character of your story? You show through who they are, the things they do, the values they hold, the change(s) they undergo, and the consequences at the end of it all what makes a person important, what makes them worth thinking about. And, whatever you say, if you say it often enough, without any notable challenge or alternative, people tend to believe it.

Surviving a Lifetime of Shyness

When I was really, really little (like, younger than four), my parents took me to Sunday School for the first time. I went in the room, saw the group of kids, freaked out internally, and hid under a table. This happened for a few weeks, my mom dropping me off, me hiding under the table, her coming back and getting me. I wasn't hysterical, I just was frightened of all these kids that I didn't know. Well, after a while of watching all these kids doing fun things, and getting bored with the table, I finally got out and joined them.

2012: The Year the World Didn't End

I've seen several people reflecting on their blogs about what went well/not so well the past year, and I rather liked that idea. It seems a more productive thing to take a moment to see where you've been and then organically growing from there than it is to just decide where to go next. Context allows us to see more clearly what's needed, and can give us ideas for how those needs can be met. At the very least, context is great for picking up new vocabulary. :)

What went well this year?
1) My writing. I finally proved to myself that I can finish things, not only by finishing the first drafts of several short stories (via Written Arpeggios), but also by self-publishing my anthology. On top of that, I completed the first draft of a novel for the first time ever this summer. How much I enjoyed doing all these things has only confirmed to me that I love writing. :D

I Never, Ever Thought I'd Do This... part 1

As you all know, I've been working like crazy on this term paper thing. The assignment was to write a section of a chapter for a hypothetical textbook on the subject of social influence (seeing as the class is called Social Influence, this assignment was extremely on topic and reasonable. I just hated the class, which is why writing this darn thing was such a big deal for me). 

Now, as much as I loathed a great deal of things about this paper, I actually ended up having a lot of fun writing it. Not only that, but I realized partway through that the subject matter I was covering would be interesting and informative to you guys (unless you've gone through a psych degree... in which case I'd say just to look at the pictures). And, lo and behold, I found myself submitting this assignment with excitement because I had decided about a thousand words prior that I'd post this paper on here.

My prof may hate it, and I might even get a failing mark on it. I don't care. You may hate it (somehow, I doubt that), and I really don't care about that, either. It has an xkcd comic in it. Nothing can ruin my mood.

Without further ado, my section of a chapter for a hypothetical textbook (part 1):

How the Value of Art is Like the Meaning of Life

Dear five year old me,

I discovered the point of art! Remember when you were wondering why you even kept those stickers in your sticker book? Sure, they were pretty, and it was nice to open up the book and look at them, but they didn't do anything for you.

What would happen if you had all the stickers in the world that you loved and then there were no more to gain? You'd have walls and books and bedframes full of stickers, and you wouldn't be happy with them. Once you had them, all you could do with them was look at them sometimes, and what was the gain in looking? What did that do for anything? They couldn't do anything to add value to the world; they would just sit there and look back at you as if to ask:

Why Do You Want Wealth?

I've been doing a lot of learning about what it takes to make money and how to make it so that becoming successful won't destroy me (because it definitely can -if my character is lacking in the little things, that will only become worse as those same things increase), and one piece of advice I came across was rather awesome and I wanted to share it with you:

Find out why you want to have wealth, write it down, so that you can refer back to it from time to time and use it to keep yourself on track. (paraphrased from Dr. James B. Richards)

Something about that set off fireworks in my brain, so I started writing it out, even the silly-sounding bits, and I decided afterwards that I wanted to share it with you.

Why Do I Want Wealth?

One Night, I Dreamed I Was a Beast

Fear: An unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat. (definition from Google)

This post is brought to you by the theme song 
for book 4 of my fantasy series.

One night, I dreamed I was a beast.

A Letter to Myself at Fifteen

(for maximum reading experience, start this song and then 

continue down)

I Am So Sorry About Me

Dear You,

I've spent so much of this blog talking to me.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think me is great, but me isn't the only thing in the universe.

And I really need to stop talking just to me so much.

When I first created this blog, I did it because I wanted to have my own place on the internet to talk about what I wanted to talk about. Now, that's great and all, and it really is important for me to write what I want to write (rather than what I think you want me to write), but that by itself is empty, meaningless.

"If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate." 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 (Message)

Making Abstract Philosophy Practical

As you may know, I'm working on revising an anthology.

As you may not know, I originally wrote some of these pieces eight years ago (aka, when I was just barely a teenager). I'm discovering that I've changed a lot since I wrote them, and it's weird to find another person speaking through my words.

Which means I have a problem. Well, more like a choice:

In my first year of university, I took a philosophy class called "Knowledge and Reality" which is a shorter way of saying:

The Scariest Thing on the Internet

"The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story." Chimimanda Adichie

I'm scared out of my mind to say that I'm a Christian, or to talk about Christianity.

In one of my earlier blog posts, tried to talk about this, but I skated around the issue and explained everything very poorly. I didn't say what I was thinking because I was scared.

Mostly everywhere I go on the media and everyone I hear from that's not Christian has Christians as the enemy. As bigoted, controlling, hypocritical, stupid, foolish, backwards, crazy, hateful, pushy, uncaring, oblivious to the real world, ignorant… look at Sheldon's mom in The Big Bang Theory for the harmless version of the stereotype and US politics for the more destructive.

When I read or listen to conversations on the subject of feminism, slavery, the LGBTQ community, or various other topics, Christianity is portrayed as the oppressor, the killer of freedom, and the instigator of harm and fear. Christians are the scum of the earth, the cause of slavery, racism, and sexism; they are the close-minded and small-minded, holier-than-thou and bible thumpers. They are the WASPs and all the negativity that comes with them.

Even if the wording isn't as strong as that, repetition has this funny way of making even the weakest words take on greater meaning and significance.

Unobservant, or "Differently Focused"?

Several years ago, my siblings and mom ganged up on my dad and me for April Fool's Day by setting all the clocks in our house an hour ahead.

They pulled it off brilliantly, even changing the alarm clocks in our rooms without our noticing. The only things they couldn't change were the phone and the stereo in my room and so they thought we'd figure it out in a couple of hours.

We went the entire day.

We probably could have gone an entire week if they hadn't told us at supper (they had to because I needed to get somewhere on time that evening -aren't they nice?).

It's probably one of the best pranks that's ever been pulled on me, and it always makes me laugh to think of it. I or one of my siblings would always tell this story to prove just how unobservant I am.

For example, whenever my mom rearranges the furniture in a room, she will take me into the room and ask me if I can tell what's different. Fifty percent of the time, my sister will walk in five minutes later (while I'm still trying very hard to figure it out) and say:

How to Make Breakfast Like a Pro

(vaguely inspired by My Drunk Kitchen)

Step 1: Enter the kitchen at 2:30pm, because you've spent the past four hours in your room and only realized fifteen minutes ago that you had low blood sugar.

Step 2: While staring into the fridge and getting distracted by so many options, decide to keep a running commentary in your head so that you can stay focused in spite of food brain.

Step 1: Pretend the first two steps weren't actually steps and pull out a banana. Leave it on the kitchen table.

How to Get Fit Without Exercising

I hate exercising.

Seriously, I find treadmills and exercise bikes boring, weight lifting utterly pointless, and jogging? Ugh. About as exciting as drilling holes into my own skull*.

That can't be comfortable.

There's a huge worry in our society about the costs of inactivity, ranging from the fact that sitting on the couch all day watching TV is socially frowned upon to the fact that a sedentary lifestyle can lead to premature death. Studies keep coming out saying that being active is one of the best things you can possibly do for your body**.

Sometimes, I Just Need to Kick Myself in the Butt

When I started this blog, I had a vague idea of blogging every two weeks.

Then I missed my deadline for one post in my second month and decided I'd alternate between two posts and one post every month. 

This worked for three more months, until life happened and I felt like crap about myself for two whole months, resulting in no posts.

"It's okay," I said to myself in August. "I'll just pretend that that was my summer break and keep up with the pattern like nothing happened. Of course, then came October, and I got inspired by something on Twitter, resulting in two posts instead of one, like the pattern had demanded.

At which point, I tried to return to the pattern, but then came January and I ended up with four posts (I think it was the air).

In February, I crashed and just put up one post.

Just Like Pimples

When I was about seven, I discovered the joy of raking a stick over an ant hill for no other reason than to watch all the ants flip out.

It's probably the most effective form of pest control I've ever employed, because my siblings and I managed to cause either the eradication or relocation (they were gone, at any rate) of two whole anthills in our front yard before we got tired of freaking them out practically every single day (Me: 2, Ants: 0).

"Oh, poor ants!" you might say, envisioning the situation from their eyes, watching every day as sadistic giants scrape away your roof, your friends, your pet aphid.

All I have to say is that my mom seemed quite happy when we pointed out the empty anthills to her, demonstrating their barrenness by raking them vigorously to no effect. In my opinion, I done good.

You know how playgrounds are supposed to be immensely entertaining to children of all ages? They're really not.

The Worst Part of Death

I remember the day my great-grandfather died. It’s not like it was unexpected, after all, the man was 101, but it was because he was 101 that I had thought he wasn’t going to die. He was the oldest person I knew, and I thought that he would beat the Guinness world record and die at about 130. Sometime nice and far away. It made sense; when he turned 100, my mom sent him a birthday card and he wrote her back a letter. He called his walker his Corvette, and the only reason he didn’t have his drivers license was because they had made him give it up when he was in his nineties (“I’ve had it for this long; I’m going to keep it!”).

On his last day, my grandparents -my mom’s parents- went to visit him around 5 in the evening. He was very weak and tired, but his mind was as sharp as ever, and they all enjoyed themselves. After they left, the sun was setting, and he asked the nurse to help him sit in a chair facing the window so that he could watch it. When she came back a few minutes later, he was gone.

When I went to the viewing, I couldn’t go pay my respects. I couldn’t bear to see his body, life gone out of it and sagging with the victorious pull of gravity and time. It would have made me vomit, or want to. My parents gave me odd looks when I said I wouldn’t go up, but they didn’t understand and I didn’t tell them. I didn’t want to weep, there in full view and hearing of all these relatives who I didn’t know and who weren’t making much noise themselves.

On his hundredth birthday, all his descendants except for a handful came to celebrate with him. We filled a hall, hundreds of us wanting to wish our father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great grandfather a happy birthday. Someone had made a video recounting his life, and we watched it and my respect for him grew and grew and grew. He grew up in modern-day Ukraine and, when the communists took over, he was married and his wife was pregnant with their first child. One Sunday, not long after the Bolshevik revolution, he felt very strongly that he had to leave the country that day. He told his family, but they told him that he shouldn’t. It was the Lord’s day; he should rest. He would be able to leave the next day. If he had listened to them, I wouldn’t have been born because the next day the borders closed, no-one in or out, and only he and his pregnant wife, of all his and her family, managed to escape. My great-grandfather was a legend, and legends don’t die. But he did.

Becoming Who I Already Am

I found some old sketchbooks of mine that I filled up years ago, and decided I'd go through them from the very beginning and see how my drawings have changed. It felt very nostalgic, remembering drawing all those pictures. Then, as I came to the end, I realized something interesting about my writing, including this blog. In order to explain this better, I'm going to talk about horses.

First, the best picture of a horse I've drawn to date (please ignore how dark the signature is; I'll make it better when my computer is more cooperative):

I Have a Confession to Make...

I'm sorry to say that I haven't been taking blogging as seriously as I should have. When I started, I thought that the only things that were really necessary were writing as regularly as possible, making the blog look pretty, and writing about things that I thought were cool. While all these are wonderful things that really do help make a blog work, there was just one thing that I was missing:

Purpose.

To be completely honest, I've felt claustrophobic every time I entertained the notion of deciding what this blog was actually about. It frightened me, because I thought that, if I decided on something, I make things too narrow, and I would cut out most of the things that I'm passionate about and that I could talk about for hours on end simply because I think they're just so darn fantastic. All my interests felt mutually exclusive, like choosing one would be denying everything else, and that terrifies the heck out of me.

Let me tell you something I've never told anyone else. Being told I must decide what to do with my life gives me so much fear that I want to high-tail it to the farthest of far corners of the earth, so that the person who mentioned it can never, ever find me. Laugh if you want, but picking a career is the stuff of nightmares. I'm afraid of just thinking about it.

Right now, my entire body is shaking, my heart is trying to beat its way out of my chest, and my fight-or-flight response has kicked into high gear. You could tell me I'm going to die tomorrow, and I wouldn't be as utterly frightened as I am right now.