These past few weeks have been physically and mentally exhausting.
It seemed like my whole year's to-do list suddenly decided to cram itself into this incredibly short timespan of two weeks. But I admit that my procascination and putting things off is mostly to blame. I had to prep for my under prepped Kiwanis competition and finish my overdue Art projects for my school's art show before leaving for Galiano... And orchestra raffle tickets to sell, rehearsals to attend (I finally get to play a solo part and I have no time to practice it!), VDSC meetings and presentations to attend.. And to top that off, PMS! I feel like this twitching on my left eyelid is like a time ticker for my head to blow up.

I have been playing the flute and performing for years now, and I annually enter the Kiwanis Festival, for more performing opportunities and scholarships. This year, I unwillingly chose Borne's "Carmen Fantasy" and and Bach's "Partita". I first watched Carmen in Germany, then in England, and never in France. It is a memorable opera, and it was one of my favorite, until these past few weeks of nonstop listening and playing of it that has made me resent it and fear it completely.

First of all, as I mentioned earlier, I "unwillingly" chose Carmen Fantasy and Partita. I really wanted to perform something that I was familiar with, due to my lack of time to practice and, well.. my desire to win. I had many other performing and learning opportunities but this was one of the few festivals that offered opportunity for international performance and scholarships. But my teacher insisted I play something new and extremely difficult for "my own educational sake", which my mom totally agreed with. These two pieces required for at least 2 hours of practice a day, time I could not possibly afford. It was irrational choosing this piece because not having practiced the expected amount of time and just barely perfecting it wasn't going to teach me the full lesson of this piece. Maybe later, if I hit a major traumatizing turning point in my life and decide to become a teacher, I will understand but in my right mind at the moment, I can't say I agree the littleset bit with my mentors for making me do this.

And to top that off, my pianist burnt her hand (I realize I sound like a total bitch making this about me...) and I had to find a new one two weeks before the concert, which meant I had to repractice the whole thing and familiarize myself with the new pianist.

It was three days before the concert that I started exceeding my usual and rational 2 hours of practice time. I was headbutting into impossibility, practicing 8hours a day, even skipping school and consuming enormous amounts of food (playing flute makes you stuff your face in food). Stupid last minute adrenaline.

Oh, and did I mention I had to miss my mom's birthday and 420!? I felt like I was sacrificing everything to this monster called limited time.
And although I already knew I wasn't going to win, I practiced and practiced.. because I guess that's what great and mindless musicians are supposed to do.. The two performances turned out to be pretty devastating. At least it's over.

..Not really. I woulda been able to say, "Finally! Fuck Carmen and her l'Amore and Habenera business, I'm going back to loving and friendly moby and britney"... if it wasn't for my orchestra. I play in the VYSO, and one of our music for our May performance happen to be Carmen. I got a solo part, which is awesome, but after this performance, I'm really gona lose it if I have to play it again any time soon.

I love art and one of my many dreams is to one day run my own art gallery and support the arts as it transforms. Just last year, as I sat flipping through Cosmopolitan, flat out of ideas for my art project, I came across a perfume ad that caught my eye, and in the act of desperation, I decided to paint it. And to Joanne (our art teacher) and my surprise, it turned out quite nice. And from then, Joanne has been encouraging and even pressuring me through art works. I could say it was from then that I really started to take interest in art. If there was one thing I regret from my Eurolife, it is having stared at my gameboy screen playing Pokemon (Yellow version!), instead of at the face of Mona Lisa when we were at the Louvre years ago.

Despite my love for art, or maybe because of my love for it, I hate doing art under a deadline, although it is the only way I can get anything done, because for me it's one of those never-perfect and forever incomplete kind of work. But because Joanne wanted to showcase my painting in our Dessert and Drama Night, an artshow our school hosts annually, this week was crowded with due dates, including a finish for my painting. And because Joanne knows my inaffection for deadlines, she threatened to kill me if I don't finish it, which she clarified it as not being a threat, but a fact. LOL.

I'm going to call this painting "the Lady in the Green Dress" for now. It was, once again, found in a magazine and I just loved the affective color and the soothing and exotic and even an abstract feel of it.
I rushed the bottom part of the painting because I am exhausted and I was about to faint and rip my painting, but it's done for now.
I feel like I should feel a ton of weight lifted off me but all I can think of is the list for tomorrow. I have two more projects to go, photography and art, and for the art project, which is done on a 2m paper, I'm praying to get an extended deadline. Otherwise I'll just have to leave without finishing it and actually meet my deadline.
And I should pack. Of course I haven't packed yet.

One of the best things about life is leaving it, and tomorrow, I'm leaving to Galiano with 13 students from Vancouver and Port Alberni to share ideas and make a video about anti-discrimination. More than anything, I'm just happy and relieved to be leaving this space right now, and hopefully this week away will do me some good.

One of the things I love about being in VDSC is the amount of free workshops and presentations you get invited to. I just got back from a presentation by Craig Kielburger, the founder of Free the Children. It was, like any other, an inspiring and informative presentation about tear jerking events that changed the world and becoming the change. I remember the first few presentations I attended really shifted my paradigm of the world and made me want to "be the change". I still enjoy the presentations but now they are starting to feel like Red Bull for a temporary motivation high, a repetition of powerful words whose effects are starting to wear out.

*** said (4:34 PM):
dami?
*** said (4:38 PM):
thanks for the lecture
no sarcasm
it was more of an eye opener sort of thing
*** said (4:39 PM):
it was almost getting to the point were it was like a repulse action when talking about it with ** afterwards
*** said (4:40 PM):
kinda realize now i don't need to cheat
to do well
so yeah thanks

This was gonna be a serious angry rant post until a few minutes ago, before I got this message.

One sunny day, my friends and I got into an argument about cheating; before leaving from school, I caught them on their routine pre-test-lingering-around act. And although both sides of the already screaming argument tried to avoid the sensitive and condemning topic, what could have been a rare and peaceful sunny walk home, couldn't be so.

I find that in most arguments, unless both sides are both very reasonable and detached from emotion, no one really wins, no matter now plausible or reasonable either side is. So the whole way home, this sensitive topic, like all issues concerning morals, morphed up an intense atmosphere and became an unwinnable battle between the "good guy" and the "joker".

In front of my friends and a mob of "it's just a test"'s to try to fend off, once again, I had been forced into the role of the too-sensitive, too-much-pride Goodie Two Shoes, whom I preferably like to call the "good guy". "Good guys" are ones, maybe duller than the other kind, that have nothing to prove but the fact that they have morals; and couldn't cheat their conscience only because they are unstable and shapeless without their sturdy rock called morals. They have too much pride to let their ambitions budge and too much ambition to let the "jokers" off the hook. Also, they probably have a foolish if not subconscious hope that "you reap what you sow" and they will one day be rewarded for their resistance.

Jokers aren't stupid. They understand that their actions are wrong but cleverly and even subconsciously justify their actions with everyone-does-its and it's-not-so-wrongs, and lessen the enormity of their injustifiable decisions. They cleverly disguise themselves well and try to turn the whole situation into a joke. Some of them also hide the deceitful and cowardly act it in a facade of a rebellious act, which in today's teen culture, is mostly accepted without question; what could be "cooler" than "not caring?" But if the so-called rebellious teens don't care, why cheat in the first place for grades they don't care about? One thing I want to say to them is, if you really don't care, don't come to class. Simple as that. (And if you're worried about graduation, it's actually quite effortless to just barely pass to graduate without attending much of school) The hippocricity is overwhelming. However, I think this type makes up only a small portion of the popular joker association (most cheaters prefer to cheat in groups/partners, thus the "association"). Another portion is made up by the saint-by-day and cheater-by-night type. This type irritates me the most because I think they are a great example of "wolves in a lamb's costume". They are rarely blamed for anything because they claim their righteous morals on a daily basis, by trashing the moral crimes they are not related to and have no genuine interest in defying. They are the biggest hipocrites because their fiery opinions on moral issues mysteriously die down when it comes to cheating. This is a great example of betrayal of morals for ambition; maybe the true temptations are not drugs or alcohol, maybe they're the ones that offer a easy way up on the ladder and give way to our neverending ambitions.

∴ambition + temptation = evil?

The great mystery. In today's English class, we discussed if ambitions are the root of evil, and if we should pursue it, nevertheless. I think.. we concluded that once your ambitions turn to greed, you are more likely to betray your morals. Macbeth encounters the same dilema, and must decide between his raging ambitions or his familiar morals. After much scorning from his wife, whom I think represents Macbeth's ambition, chooses to murder Duncan; and don't worry, I won't say "look what happened to Macbeth" because, well, we all have our own battles to fight and soliloquys to write.

Then, you may be saying, if we ultimately make our own decisions despite the full-throttle attempts at "guidance", why not just leave the poor friends alone?! Well, that's because I'm no moral saint, and I don't, and won't ever, pretend to be one. Pretending to be a moral saint has one definite result which is hipocricity. (In fact, life would be very sad if either we or the ones close to us were "moral saints")
I have had my share of pocket-pickings and test-peakings and I admit the wrongness and will suffer the consequences but I won't try to justify it because in most our cases, it can't be justified. We did not suffer a moral dilema of wrong vs. another wrong. For the ones who chose to cheat, it was a dilema between right vs. wrong, making it inexcusable.

Anyways, before I got carried away with my idea of justice, I was talking about why I taunt my friends if I believe it is ultimately their decision. Moral saints don't do much of self-construction or self-development. When people, not moral saints, help, not only is it highly unlikely to not feel even the least amount of pride after positively changing a course of someone's life, it is what get many people motivated. Which makes "helping", sort of like a good selfish act.

Therefore, because I am a selfish person like any other, I "help" and try to fulfill my purpose-One of the purposes in life being, whether you are religious or not, to positively influence others into a direction that offers the most against all the odds because it's just not logical to think that you are the shining star in this world populated with 6.7 billion people, with roughly 5babies being born every second and 25000 children dying each day due to poverty, and with nearly HALF of that 6.7billion living on less than $2.50 a day, with less than TWO percent of that getting a post-secondary education, it is just so pointless climbing on top by betraying your conscience, which should be the most important out of like... everything.

So in the spirit of doing my part, I attempt to influence. And it was uplifting when I got the message, although I have no way of telling whether it was an honest confession or just BS, but as friends, all you can do is have faith.

Oh, and of course, there's that good old "if you cheat, you're only cheating yourself" business.. But seriously.. Although I believe and hope my friends are not stupid enough to think they can get away with this elsewhere, it does have potential of becoming a habit. I'm not tryna pour the negativity and jinx the promising futures, but you could actually get kicked out of college for cheating and it will without doubt majorly affect your life. Also, if you believe you get away with this moral crime, with the right motive and ambition, you could bend any moral crime. Moral is no moral at all if it can be compromised.

In a time where we more likely listen to tips-of-the-days and Oprah instead of our conscience, cheating has become something so commonly practiced and practical, the true hideousness behind it becoming clouded, along with our judgment.
I'm just gona finish by saying I lied when I said it wasn't gona be a rant post because it so obviously is..