Recent update
- My old eight grade blog
- Just let it rain
- A little something for marifish
- “Chalked Up” by Jennifer Sey
- Gymnastics
- “I am so bored”
- Inspiration is lazy (as well as random)
- Courage vs. Evil
- Infinity
- A blank Word document, and nothing to say
“I am so bored”
April 28th, 2008 by arielal09
I bet at least once a day you think to yourself, “I am bored.” Well at least I know I am and the people I live around me are. Boredom, in fact just seems part of human nature. Most of us are easily bored. At least, when we do not have way too many problems, which is unfortunate to say since a lot of people do. But still, those people whom tragedies rule their way of living still have experienced boredom. Being bored is just part of our feelings and emotions. I know there is not (well I least I do not believe so) a smiley face in the class chart that reads as an emotion “bored” just like there is one for “happy” and “sad.” But even if boredom hasn’t been granted the honor of a smiley face it is still an emotion most of as (as if not to say all) have experienced. Sometimes is just like a topic that bores us. Like lets say I am in a class which I really do not like (I am not going to mention any to my teachers’ benefit), instead of facing boredom and paying attention for a change I find a distraction, something to keep my mind active. By the first ten minutes of class I will probably be doodling in my notebook. I love art so in this way it is a convenient distraction. Some other people who do not feel this way about art will probably sneak a book under their desk, day dream (that is also one of my favorites), put an earphone under their shirt all the way to their ear and then cover it with hair to listen to music, send text messages with their phones under their desks (which by the way we are not allowed to bring cell phones to school, but really who listens?), between many, many other distractions. And all that effort; the sneaked cell phone or ipod, the drawn on notebook under the desk, the face of seriousness when the brain is in outer space, to keep us from being bored. To me it is just so, well boring to be bored. So I try to find a distraction to keep myself from going crazy. Let’s put a different scenario. For example, I am at home a Sunday afternoon not doing anything really, but I have to be doing something, even if it just lying on my bed thinking and day dreaming. I cannot face the fact that I have nothing significant to do and would rather do something insignificant than being bored. I’ll watch some mindless TV, search the Internet while not looking for something, go to the supermarket with my day, and basically ANYTHING rather than being bored. When I think about it is like I am afraid of being bored, so instead of facing the challenge (being bored) I will do something, anything else to push myself out of it, to not have anything to do with it. So I guess it is just natural for humans to be bored. Someone once told me that animals do not get bored, and even if I do not have the papers to prove it, it sounds believable. I mean how else could the dog in your house sit on the floor and look around, maybe pass hours without moving? The dog is obviously not sleeping or having an entertainment of any sort, then why is it not bored? Maybe it is fact just part of human nature to be bored. It is one of those emotions (if it is in fact an emotion) that only we experience, just as many others. So next time you think “I am so bored”, at least you will know you are not alone.
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Inspiration is lazy (as well as random)
April 21st, 2008 by arielal09
Inspiration is so random. One day your Word document fills with the snap of your fingers and the next you have absolutely nothing to say. It is like the post I wrote a while ago “A blank Word document and nothing to say”, that was one of those uninspired days. But today it is different, in a way it is better, I am for the first time since we started blogging inspired. Not by anything in particular, my life is not spectacular but I very weirdly feel as if I could write forever and ever. In a way I am scared to. I am mean, what if the inspiration runs away? What if I give all my ideas in one single week and then that is it? Like as if G-d said, no more inspiration for you, you’ve had enough? I mean I of course know it doesn’t work that way, but it surely feels like it. There is what I think is a popular saying that I have heard many times that says “Inspiration is lazy.” I do believe that is true, just when it feels like it, it works, it clicks, and it creates wonders. But those lazy days are just a pain. You cannot feel it inside you. You feel (well at least I do) washed out, unoriginal, and most importantly uninspired. And what makes it so unbearable is that there is nothing really you can do about it. Even when you try to wake up that inspiration inside you, by reading other blogs or doing something creative, the harsh truth is that if it is not in you, you can’t bring it in. I am sure a lot of more professional and serious people are able to ring the alarm clock on their inspiration and get it rolling. But even if they do have magical powers you know, you just know, it is not the same as if you were inspired. I am not specifically speaking about writing, although I am partly. I am speaking about life. Everything in it, it depends on how you see it. For me it is art. There seem times when you get a sort of “writers block”. You can’t draw. I mean, you can draw (of course you can you just grab a pencil and clean sheet of paper, it is that simple) but you can’t draw right. Your brain isn’t flying with ideas, your drawings look sloppy and weak and you just can’t feel it. It is like an emotion only it is not an emotion. Does that make sense? You cannot draw or write or whatever you are doing unless you are truly inspired. And only a really big person (I do not mean size wise of course) can do so without being inspired. Unfortunately, I am not that big of a person (in fact I am really small, size wise) and cannot seem to do it. Last week for example, writing my blog was hell. In the end I did not “make a difference” (remember “A blank Word document and nothing to say?”) and just wrote what to me is nonsense. Since nobody responded I assume the world thought the same, and frankly I do not judge or resent them, I applaud them for not giving me any comments on such a bad written blog. Not in the sense of paragraph placement, word choice, etcetera, but in the sense of its insignificance to the world. I tried everything that week to inspire myself, but the task was not completed. As for “Inspiration is lazy”, all I have to say is that is also very random.
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Courage vs. Evil
April 21st, 2008 by arielal09
Tomorrow we have a guest speaker at our school. The speaker is going to be a girl from Dallas who is planning to talk to us about the holocaust (us being the seventh and eight graders). Apparently she did a bat-mitzvah project about courageous non Jewish people who saved and helped Jews. Today in class, a teacher was explaining to my class that we were going to miss class the next day due to the lecture. Several students didn’t understand what the speaker will be talking about. I explained to them what I wrote above, which is what my mom told me days prior. As it turned out, they weren’t really supportive of the whole thing, and seemed confused. One said it made no sense for the speaker to be a girl our age who will be talking about the holocaust; I mean she was no survivor or anything. The teacher smartly told him to make his own judgment after the lecture.
When I got home today I asked my mom the same thing as the student. It did seem kind of weird we would have a guest speaker talking about the holocaust when she did not live through it, or is a professional in the field. My mom said she thought students would question that and explained that when you stand up and praise people who did something brave it is a way to stop evil, or at least take it off course. At first this did not make sense to me. I mean yeah we kind of all know that right? Even if we do not put it in those same exact words. Then why do we need a guest speaker to tell us so? Is it that we are so ignorant of the fact, or that we in fact do not do anything courageous on daily life? Then it came down to me like a wave. It wasn’t that we did not understand the dangerous and life risking situations that these people were in (which I believe we probably didn’t) but it was the fact that this girl was brave enough (I’ll explain the brave later) to praise and acknowledge these people who risked so much. It was that she went out of her daily life to research people most of us might never have heard of, and congratulate them in a way for making something kind and unreasonably brave and making something else in life a little less evil. I mean not an act of stopping evil, but an act of giving these courageous people an acknowledgement for making something kind in this world full of horror. When I say brave I am both referring to the people who saved Jews (of course that was brave of them) and I also give some praise to the girl, for whom she gave the honor.
What this girl did as a bat-mitzvah project I think is something very important that not many people do. I of course, do not know this girl and had never heard of her before this. She may give the most boring talk in the world, and I would probably be too busy with the so many possible distractions to pay attention. Obviously, half the middle school will be thrilled to be missing two periods, and they as well as I will be busy with the many possible distractions. I probably could not help but feel sorry for the girl (no matter how much she loves to speak in public) who will be standing in front of half the middle school and thinking they are paying attention, when indeed they may be looking at the person next to them while they pass little notes. This is what I consider brave of her. I may be completely wrong (not probable) but I know that there will be at least one person in the audience (probably a teacher or maybe my mom who is coming) who will be listing to her and understand how courageous and significant these people during World War II who saved Jews actually are. They were a form of stopping a little evil or at least making a stand against it.
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Infinity
April 16th, 2008 by arielal09
After last week’s post I decided I needed to find some inspiration and since I clearly couldn’t do so in my mind, I made up my mind to look in another person’s mind. This of course doesn’t mean doing some sort of mind reading or anything a la Harry Potter style. This to me means looking at another artist’s painting or work to see if I could connect myself to that. After googling countless words, phrases, and artist’s names I could not find anything that truly pleased me. That is when I remember something Mrs. Rumford told be last week. She had showed me some abstract pictures and told be I could describe and analyze them, only doing it with art. Since I didn’t find any art I looked for photography and found the picture above. I feel like I just assumed my blog had to be about art, but now that I reconsider it “Inside the Bubble” doesn’t suggest art at all, so instead I am using photography to express myself through this blog.
I looked at several abstract pictures on the web, but this one made me think. It is weird when looking at that picture I can come up with many explanations to it. I believe when people first see this picture they think, “The beach, duh.” Well I did too but when looking at it more closely I realize that depending how you analyze it, it could just be about everything. When I look at it, it kind reminds me of the globe’s surface, rough, with mountains, plateaus, and oceans. The unclear surface also reminds me of a rocky mountain, road, or dirt itself. The round marks at the side remind me of the moons surface, full of holes, just like a Swiss cheese. The marks make me think back to sand. Those marks were not left there on their own. A dog could have step there, as well as a baby, an old man, a bird, a dead fish, a mother. Anybody could have been there when the photographer took the picture. It could mean anything to anybody, depending on who is seeing it and what they are getting out of it. The possibilities are endless.
Looking at this picture makes me think of many varying topics. What I wrote is just what I thought the moment I wrote this. Ten years from now I can look at that picture and find many varying possibilities. I do not know if this post is either inspiring or interesting, but I am okay if it is neither. I chose this picture because I could analyze it endlessly, which in effect makes you think about the possible idea of infinity.
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A blank Word document, and nothing to say
April 9th, 2008 by arielal09
I am struggling to find a topic to talk about. I mean what do I care about? I obviously care about a lot of things; my family, school, my friends… the world? I mentioned in my last two entries that I love art. I do. Then how come I have nothing more to say about it? I mean, to me it is obvious I care enough about that aspect in my life to write more about it, but somehow it just seems irrelevant. How am I going to move people and inspire them while talking about… art? It just seems vague to me. Like not big enough, not important enough, not actual enough… just not enough. I want people to believe in my blogs, I want to believe in my blogs, but it just seems like I cannot make it happen. How am I going to let people know, what I Ariela care about? If all I write about is art it seems like I am stuck in my room all day drawing none stop. Which just in case you do not know, it more like the opposite. How can I inspire people to believe in my drawing when I haven’t gotten a clean sheet of paper and a pencil and just drawn in…almost a month? Maybe I am not such an outcast in the not knowing what to write about department. Maybe I am like most of the teens these days, unconcerned about everything that is going on in the World. More into their ipods, cell phones, computers, and all the other electrical gadgets the modern world provides us with. But I do not want to be like that, I know I am not like that. I mean electrical gadgets are not my thing, and anyone who knows me well enough knows that is true. Then why can’t I sit down and pour my heart out into this blank Word document and say everything I have to say about… everything? I am not sure, and I think I would never be sure why, maybe that is just the way things go. Some days your brain is flying with ideas and other days it seems as blank as this word document was before I opened it. And it is not like I did not have any options to write about. I mean a friend and my mom supplied me with ideas. None of which were bad, but I just cannot seem to inspire myself to write about something I truly care about, believe in. Maybe today was not the day to write my blog. Maybe I should have done the wrong thing and leave it for the last minute. But yet my mind can’t escape the idea that I have nothing to write about. An interesting question could get me going on the topic. Or maybe something that happened to me today, but nothing seems right. I have wonderful topics for long blogs, but none of which I am inspired by. I have been supplied with ideas to write about fun facts about art, teenage usage of alcohol in Costa Rica, road traffic in Costa Rica, and other topics which are not worth mentioning. But when I tried to write about any of those topics my mind seemed to be swiped by a broom and left blank. So for anyone out there reading this blog take on my ideas and get some profit out of them, since I clearly failed miserably to do so.
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What is freedom of speech to me?
April 3rd, 2008 by arielal09
According to the United States Constitution under the First Amendment we have the right to say whatever we want to. This means we can express our thoughts as long as we are not threatening anyone. This to me means we are allowed express our ideas, feelings, and thoughts no matter of what they are. We have every right to say whatever we want to. That is according to the United States Constitution. The Internet does not follow the laws of the United States, at least not when being used outside it. The Internet is a global community, were you can be linked to anywhere else in the World. So what are the laws of the Internet? Since there is no written Constitution referring to the Internet, I can only guess based on what I believe in, what freedom of speech means on the Web. My definition of freedom of speech is that you have the right to say anything regardless of what it is on the Internet, but keeping in mind you will have to deal with the consequences it brings. It may be true that there is no written Constitution on the Internet, but you cannot be breaking any laws if there are no written laws. The laws you will have to live with are the ones that apply to the country were you are from and the community you are living in. Right now if I say whatever I please on the Internet and somebody in my community finds it I would have to deal with the consequences. Not the consequences of the Internet community, since that would be very unlikely considering how big it is, but the consequences of my community. I could get in trouble at my school for putting offensive material on the Internet for the whole wide World to see. Freedom of speech allows you to say and express whatever you want but you have to keep in mind there would be a response to what you write and express. You cannot expect a huge community linked to millions of places around the World to see what you are writing and agreeing with it. Of course they would not. But you have to be careful and draw the line between what is appropriate and what is inappropriate to say. And once you draw that line you would be able to express and write your ideas, thoughts, and opinions without the worry of getting in trouble. To me freedom of speech is being able to say whatever you want. Freedom is “the capacity to exercise choice; free will.” We have to make that choice on what is okay to say and were you are writing things that may be considered inappropriate. Every user of the Internet has that choice to make a decision on what the World would be able to see from them and what it would not. Freedom of speech is being able to say whatever you want, you would just have to deal with the consequences that brings.
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April 2nd, 2008 by arielal09
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Beyond the leaves
April 2nd, 2008 by arielal09
Since I decided to write about drawing, I thought I might as well show some of it. I usually do not seek for opinion on what I draw. While it feels good for someone to say they like, it is also does not feel so good when someone says they do not like it. I do not mind people commenting on but I usually would not ask for their opinion. In the end, even if the World does not like my drawings it is okay. To me what counts is how I feel when I draw and not what comes out of it. With that in mind, I decided to post two drawings I really enjoyed doing. I decided to post both of these drawings together because they are both based on the same thing, trees. It may sound unusual but I really like drawing trees. To me these drawings require a lot of detail. You can add so much to a tree: leaves, branches, shades, roots, flowers, birds, and mostly anything to do with nature. Trees are the only thing I really enjoy drawing that has to do with nature. I do not like drawing landscapes or animals in particular. But to me trees are different because they include so much detail. Some people may find drawing details tiring and stressful, but I find it relaxing and entertaining. That is why I have fun drawing trees. Also, tree drawings have many interesting interpretations that make drawing trees intriguing.According to different faiths, religions, therapists, and writers trees have many different meanings. One idea is that through tree drawings you can identify your personality. There is even a test called House-tree-person test (HTP) to identify your personality. Some therapists believe tree drawing can be a subconscious way of communication. Trees can represent important parts of religions and cultures. In the end, what trees and tree drawings mean depend on who you are and were you come from. For me the bottom line is I like drawing trees. So whatever my drawings mean; I would leave it up to you to find out.
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