New Old Interests (NOI?): Drawing.

Megs:

Haha second post in a day; I'm quite sure this hasn't happened in a year! Which reminds me; Frivelocity just had its first birthday a few days ago. Yay! happy birthday, dear blog-thing!!

Anyhow, it is currently the same day, but later; just came back from a good stroll around the department store, visiting the same bookstore as yesterday, plus had some pseudo- but delicious Italian/Thai combination of lemon chicken and spaghetti at Good Man Caff'e (sic).

But I digress about food; right now I'm returning, again, to that state of mild fever for looking at art. Drawings. This was somewhat helped by all the books on Graphic design in Kinokuniya in Sydney, full of wondrous and beautiful and wild illustrations. Often of seemingly nothing in particular.

Drawing is something I abandon again and again, largely because of the lack of results the activity produces. It's not that I don't finsish any drawings or never improve, but over these three years, lined with exams, I rather think I've been shaped to pursue, as best as possible, hobbies that have to be slightly unusual, and/or productive. [They include and are not limited to:

~ Early '09: Juggling ((Not only is it entertaining, I decided this was productive because The Reader's Digest has referred to studies which show that this helps the brain store information different ways.)) I went from being un-co queen of klutzes to being able to juggle three well, and four not-so-well. Hooray!

~ Throughout '09: learning to solve puzzles such as crosswords and Sudoku. More brain training. I didn't get very good at either of these.

~ Late '09, Early '10: 'Energy' manipulating - similar to what energy healers/reiki practitioners work with, except this was purely experimental. This was very exciting and rather tingly, because it's unseen but felt forces at work. Or play.

~ Early-mid- '10: Writing poetry.

~ Late '10: Gymming (okay, so I've only been five times, but still.)

The viola doesn't count. I'm going to be blunt and say it stopped being a hobby and more of a chore about two years ago, despite being the one I stuck with for the longest (10 years?). I admire Music students for their perserverence and performances. And stylish dress sense, but that's a different thing. ]

Drawing, as a hobby, comes and goes. By drawing, I don't mean silly little doodles like in the sidebar to the left here, I mean drawings that take a long time to get "right". This thing that I do threads in and out of existence over weeks, maybe even months. It's like a faithful dog or sock or something that just keeps popping up (not that I would ever abandon a dog!). This is because I dislike my lack of personal "style", and because there's nothing I can really do with a drawing after I've drawn it.

The aspects of drawing(s) which define how I draw appear to make it very narrow:

- I love drawing people, much over drawing anything else: animals, still-life, landscape, etc.

- I like drawing women, over drawing men. Women are just more beautiful to look at.

- Intricate patterns and detailings mesmerise me, and I stare at them for ages, and try to commit them to memory.

- I like stylized pictures more than attempts at realism.

- I don't like spending a lot of time on precision - fluid, robust and fast etches for me; portraying the general 'feel' of an image, rather than reproducing what's there. (Otherwise I'd do photography).

- I revere colours, and all aspects of colours. How colours contrast; which colours grab one's attention; how people see the world through colour-deficient eyes. They taught us about hue, saturation and brightness in Part 1 Optometry this year; I've understood these for years and years.

- I am not inclined to draw if I don't think someone will, or should, look at it afterwards. This is why I used to draw so much when I frequented forums. People love digital art. Maybe this is attention-whoring, at its zenith. But it really makes it very fun.

- I flit through drawings styles a lot. This has frustrated me an equal amount, because only once have I only ever come close to capturing a signature way of rendering, and that was when I was 14 and drawing chibis.

***

In my search of a productive hobby I've rediscovered my fondness for drawing; and something exciting has come to light. Everything I've named above suggests that my love for drawing can go hand in hand with a specific genre - fashion illustrations.

And I'm not sure why I've never really noticed it before. I only really realised this after looking at the scores and scores of art in massive graphic design books in Sydney, and seeing that some of the artists work in fashion illustration.

Now I can't say I'm hooked - yet - but my interest is really piqued and I'm thinking about how I've ever drawn, how I've always drawn, and the types of pictures I've collected (online and from cuttings).

It turns out that a lot of fashion illustrators have blogs. Very exciting - this means I can follow a whole horde of them, and learn more about their way of drawing. More specifically, I am interested in knowing how the concepts are transmitted from the runway, to paper, to the interests of other bloggers.

I haven't drawn regularly in a very long time. Thinking about starting it up again.

Kinokuniya; Kaohsiung greetings

Megs:

Greetings, all, from the arid and smoky-brown city of Kaohsuing, Taiwan! Arrived at Taipei on Sunday at an hour at which I could have watched the dawn break through the airport windows while waiting for the plane down to Kaohsuing, but I was too absorbed in playing Pocket Frogs. (Brilliantly simple, stupidly repetitive, ridiculously addictive application on iTouch).

Now I'm not documenting my three-day adventure in Sydney for the same reason that I didn't blog while I was in Sydney (Best reason: I am going out soon); but it was lovely, and warm, dry, and involved a lot of walking and trawling through shops that line George Street, which is the Auckland equivalent of Queen Street, and Wildlife Worlds and Sydney Aquariums and Sydney Towers.

What I do have to rave about is the gigantic bookstore kinokuniya which is basically exemplary of would happen if an army, bigger than the population of China and India combined, came and seized the entire floor of a very large shopping building and claimed it as their own (and if the army is not of Chinese or Indians, but of books.) Like, foly hucker, was there a gigasmic forkload of books. Got quite, quite lost in there for a while.

I think I could live there forever and if I got hungry I could just eat a book. Books don't have much nutritional value but there are so many in there it would definitely make up for it.

Okay, I do have to go again, but at least I've posted this time. Will update!

Let's collect and recollect

Megs:

My dear Wil, I hope you realise one day that you are absolutely off your rocker, and in the meantime I will keep telling you politely, and with much applause. :D

I have a new interest (obsession?) with nothing to show for it. It is collecting things.

I admire absolutely any person who hoards, like a pack rat, paphernalia that all revolves around a certain subject of interest. It's like having a passion for collecting trophies and everything you gain is your reward. How efficient is that?! And in the end of it all you can rope off your room or your front door with a specially purchased velvet rope (scarlet) and charge people to come to your place and have a peek at your huge display of loot. Like in a museum! Think how rich you would get when you invite your friends round for tea.

Okay, so you shouldn't really charge visitors when you ask them over, but you get the idea. It's the display at the end. It's like being enthusiastic and artistic and a maniacal magpie all rolled into one.

I mean, people will look on your passion with interest, just because you will have so many things to show them! I shall shamelessly namedrop and say that my favourite collector will have to be Shirin, because of all the amazing stuff she's hoarded and the fact her room is like a Library of Pure Awesome (while still much, much neater than mine. My room is a puddle.)

Anyway, like I said, I have nothing to show for this new obsession for collecting things, because I don't actually adore any particular type of item enough to go and collect it. Eye - row - knee. But I still like thinking about collecting things. So I guess right now I'm collecting ideas for what to collect. Which isn't the same thing, because I have nothing to show for it.

Ideas, ideas, ideas:

- Not stamps. (Why do people collect stamps?! Someone enlighten me please, I don't get it. They don't even taste that great on the back.)

- Stockings, esp. those pretty patterned ones that make your legs look like they've been put through a printer. Although, it isn't really stocking season.

- Dolls. Not those creepy china ones, because they look like they're about to throttle you any second. Other dolls. Um... I'll come back to this one.

- Gothic Lolita Dresses . I like these very much. I have one already! There's something thrilling about all those frills, and ribbons, and bows, and things. These look a million dollars and cost around that much too, so I might make this a very long term one.

- Hats, eg animal hats, because they're so darn cute. Like my purple rabbit one!

- Books?

- Drawings by people (not art, exactly. It'd be more fun to just ask people randomly to draw me something, like a frog or something.)

I like how Shirin's basically made a shrine to Michael Jackson in her room. Or, rather, made her room a shrine to MJ. My Favourite Singer of All Time is Lily Allen, who is absolutely talented and lovely and beautiful, but I guess relatively speaking she's not as much of a legend as the Pop King, so it'd be kind of weird doing something similar...

Okay watch this space. I have to go rehearse with string quartet for wedding.

BOOYA

Wil:

Wow is it the end of the [academic] year already?! How time flies, as they say. This year has been magical like you wouldn't believe. I have many great things to report on, stories to tell, and lessons to leave - let us hope I don't get bored before I finish :P


I entered 2010 with bright brown eyes that sparkled enough enthusiasm to light a car on fire. Fresh (or not so fresh...) out of Health Sci, I bounced around with my new found freedom in my very own flat. I could finally cook my own meals, wash my own bedding, clean my own toilets and showers, and empty my own rubbish! I was drugged up on filthy delusion and I flailed my arms around in naive contentment.

Throughout semester one I fed myself the grey slurry that all pharmacy students are forced to swallow: biopharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical science, biochemistry, and physiology. While practical dispensing labs became the highlight of the year, cooking and cleaning and rubbish-emptying became the nuisances of daily living. While my tummy juiced the sciences for all they were worth, I sat through endless lab exit tests, end of module tests, term tests and lab prep material. One after the other, I became obese with knowledge. My brain swelled beyond its bony confines and oozed out of my nose and ears in the form of well structured and reasonable test answers.

Semester two fell out of nowhere like the iceberg out of Titanic. Being one greasy semester wiser and having survived a full TWO day community pharmacy placement, I felt like I truly knew what being a pharmacist was all about. While I rationed the motivational fuel that was my community placement, the looming disaster that were the FIVE end-of-semester exams constantly reared its horribly-disfigured-probably-due-to-surgery-gone-wrong head in my already emotionally unstable mind. While I tried, with varying degrees of success, to push that thought onto the back burner, I trudged day by day through the classes, tutorials, laboratory and workshops. The unforgiving 8am classes wiped all my faith in justice, while the history lectures evoked such fear (and boredom).
During this time of learning to be a good health professional, healthy researcher, and careful thinker (almost), I made some wonderful friends. Meet lithium and Prozac! haa jokes >.>
Actually, I have met some great monkies this year and I've formed friendships that I hope will be as everlasting as covalent bonds (i.e. permanent, but with the odd exception!). I've never played so much Buzz, Rock band, or Wii in my life! (nor have I ever had such an exclusively Asian bunch of friends...)

As doomsday drew closer, 5 exams felt like the blade of my guillotine. The nagging at the back of my head that felt like the annoyance of a mosquito bite grew into the piercing stab of a lumbar puncture. With my palms sweaty and my heart racing, my eyes flew over my lecture notes on the pharmacology and medicinal chemistry of adrenergic drugs and wondered where the hell non-selective beta adrenergic blockers were when you needed them?!
During the daytime, I fitfully induced insomnia with the joy of No Doz. However, the phenomenon known as tachyphylaxis foiled my dependence on the tiny aid of caffeine pills (and now whenever I read or say the word tachyphylaxis, all i hear is Wen Xin saying "TACHYPHYLAXIS!!" trying to imitate a Microsoft text-reader).

My first exam, PHCY219 (Microbiology and Immunology) brought me quiet confidence in my abilities. Studying turned out to be a good decision.
PHCY255 (Physical Pharmacy B) became my joke of the semester (or year, even). I could've done it with my hands behind my back! I could have smashed my face against the desk and even the bloody imprints left on my test paper would have been correct answers!
PHCY258 (Drug Action, i.e. biopharmaceutics ugly and unwanted sister) slashed the rainbow road that PHCY255 had paved for me. Fawcett (a lecturer for this paper) jack-hammered each and every beautifully laid brick. Brick dust (and questions on colorectal carcinoma monolayers) assulted my airways in a way that not even salbutamol could help me!
Drunk with despair, I entered the PHCY259 (Quality of Medicines) exam with standards as low as a cheap whore ready to earn some quick money. Surprisingly, I left that exam feeling mighty self-assured and powerful! It was truly a wonderful day and not even the fact that I spent hours and hours teaching my peers that one calculation question that never showed up in the exam could have brought me down! While the child in me skipped into the sunset and my grown-up self waddled off home like a duck, the giant hypodermic needle stuck in my spine shattered into a billion pieces and flooded my body like a really advanced case of metastases. Like the ultimate boss at the end of a video game quest, life had saved the worst for last. What cruel goddess would blend the subjects of epidemiology, history, health system, drug information and dispensing together to bake the vile cake that is PHYC263 (Pharmacy Practice)? Well, we know the answer to that one - she wears trendy leather boots!

I sat at my exam desk staring at a paper titled, "PHCY263 Principles of Pharmacy Practice." I made scared puppy sounds as the supervisors gave the pre-exam announcements. Looking around me, I swore I saw someone soil themself. "You may now begin" boomed from the speakers as the clock ticked past 9:30am. With hands that could pass as being from someone with Parkinson's, I turned over my exam paper and flicked to the epidemiology section. "It's basically a repeat of HEAL192 (epidemiology paper from last year)! This should be easy!" I thought to myself. My vision wandered sporadically over the words which dictated my doom while my eye muscles twitched in a manner that imitated some mal-diagnosed musculoskeletal disease. My heart stopped - WHAT LANGUAGE IS THIS IN?! My mind blanked in such a way that would make the world's best(?) underachiever proud.

Being the clever boy he was, Wil decided to make up award-worthy nonsense that he could throw up all over his exam paper. Why not calculate the Odds Ratio? Great idea! Wil jabbed away at his whimpering calculator with a finger that could bore holes through the earth all the way to China (or London, actually). With a Cheshire grin, Wil scribbed down that interpretation of his calculated odds ratio and kissed his pen with passion. He was on a roll! Suddenly, Wil's eyes settled on a rather unnerving piece of information given in the study data - the adjusted ODDS RATIO. They had already given you the odds ratio for the study! Weeping, Wil drew thick blue lines over his calculation, invalidating about 5 minutes worth of work. A sad smiley face accompanied these crosses.

Two hours of this torture finally signalled the end of the exam, the semester, and the year. I still believe that 2 hours was much too short for this exam. It was like trying to push a baby out after just 6 months. My exam script would have been VERY messy to mark. Like a post-labour mother, I gave a tired sigh as sweat dripped off my forehead and my muscles relaxed in unison, leaving my body as a thankful puddle on the exam venue floor.

Pharmacy 2nd year 2010 had finally ended for a very happy Wil. He frolicked among the shattered beer bottle glass that littered Dunedin streets as he celebrated having arrived half way through his undergraduate degree. Only two more years to go, he pondered. What would he do with his summer? Little did he know that it would be filled with iron-fisted, headache-inducing slave labour, originating from the depths of literature searching and 9 to 5 work days. Buuuuuuut, that's a blog post for another frivolous day ;)


Mission Complete!

SUMMERSUMMERSUMMER

Megs:

OMG so this year has come full circle and I am free from the craziest semester I've ever had at uni (granted, I've only had four). YAY YAY YAY YAY. Now I have time to plan a million things-to-do-but-probably-won't-due-to-laziness. But I will do that later, because right now I have all the time in the world to do absolutely nothing :D :D

I guess it's a good time to be reflecting on what I've learnt this year, in Part I Optometry at Auckland Uni, and about Life In General. In no particular order, they include:

- How a colour deficient person sees the world
(there are some cool simulations on the internet. This one's pretty fun:
http://www.colblindor.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/)

- That there are more colour deficient people around than you realize, but they only happen to tell you that they are when you tell them you study eyeballs

- That Magnum Gold is really rather sickly sweet, ugh (I learnt this yesterday). And that there ads for it everywhere in the city, like massive billboards that shout "COME GET YOUR ARTIFICIALLY COLOURED ICE CREAM", and that I am a consumer who falls prey to these billboards.

- That Optom Class of '13 class is full of quirky and kooky and damn awesome people, and I love just about all of them

- That I like perfume. I want lots of it.

- That you CAN wing tests and do very well on minimal study. But you can fail too. Whoops.

- That getting Bs and Cs is okay.
You once said to me, "I believe [the grading system] proves work ethic and ability, otherwise there would be no point in having A, B, Cs..." That is true, I agree with you. Getting straight As feels good and looks nice on a transcript of grades. But I think it becomes counterproductive and narrow when it becomes the only goal of one's existence. Having really limited time for revision because of AYO was a nightmare this year, but getting grades that are lower because of that was taught me that it's not the end of the world. Overall (note the OVERALL, haha) I worked hard this year, and I will continue to work hard next year, so I won't beat myself up about grades any longer. It's a freedom that I always had the freedom to give myself.

- That writing stories/poetry/on people's faces is more fun than a lot of things. And far more productive.

- That "you're not dreaming big enough until someone is laughing at you." Kudos, Marianne.

Huzzay!

*

News from home:

So I have a crooked rabbit. Leo's been suffering from head tilt since the last day of uni, and it makes him look like his head's at a 90 degree angle. It got so bad that he was unable to walk for about three weeks and the vet even suggested euthanasia. And I had to look after him continually while revising for exams. Anyway, this semester had the worst exam season ever, so I'm damn grateful to Renee, who really listened. :] Plus I found loads of support and advice on a forum for rabbit owners going through the same thing. So thanks to everyone from On The Wonk :) Funny how strangers on the other side of the world can make all the difference!!

I'm going back to Taiwan these holidays - going on that 3-week tour around the island that's meant for Taiwanese kids who grew up overseas. Excite! Yee!
Oh and I was talking to someone about it who went last year, and apparently lots of Taiwanese people live in South Africa because there were lots of SA Tw people on the tour. Who would've thought!! Dad says it's because years ago, people who could gap the country did so at the first opportunity, regardless of where it was. I find that quite interesting.

Burble, burble.