Summer Project

Floaties

A short film.

The end to a great summer

It’s been stressful, nerve-wracking, and tiring, but this summer has got to be one of the best of my life. Volunteering, Water World, hanging out with friends, making a movie, and YFAT have been fulfilling and tons of fun. I’m sad to see it end, but someone (dunno who) once said, “Don’t be sad that it’s over. Be glad that it happened.” It takes a big person to do that, probably bigger than me…

Thoughts on Prop 8

Even though I’ve done volunteer work against it, today’s ruling has made me realize I don’t know much about the legality of it all.

A Numbers Game

Results of the popular vote on Proposition 8 (Nov 5, 2008)

Yes 52.5%	No 47.5%
5,387,939 votes	4,883,460 votes

That’s a margin of 504,479. For the sake of scale, the population of San Francisco is 808,976.

The population of California is 36,961,664. About 14.6% of the population voted for prop 8, and 13.2% voted against it. The margin between is about 1.4% of the population.

For comparison’s sake, 69,438,983 people voted for Barack Obama (52.87%), and 59,930,551 voted for John McCain (45.63%). That’s a margin of 9,508,432. The population of Oregon is 3,825,657.

The population of the United States if 307,006,550.  Approximately 22.6% of the population voted for Obama. Approximately 19.5% of the population voted for McCain. The deciding margin was about 3.1% of the population.

And those are the numbers. Overall, there was a smaller turnout for the statewide election, as there should have been. I’ve seen a lot of different statistics, such as how today’s ruling overlooked the opinions of 7 million Californians, and now I see that number isn’t quite right.

LOVING ET UX. v. VIRGINIA SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 388 U.S. 1 June 12, 1967, Decided, landmark case that declared the ban of interracial marriage in Virginia illegal: “Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.”

Amendment XIV

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Thoughts on Once

(Watching the movie now)

I really like the script, especially in the beginning, when there’s a swear in every sentence. As my dad says, the pace is slow, even too slow sometimes, but that kind of reminds me of the tone of a play, where I like slow bits of dialogue.

We’re at one point of the movie with a lot of talking, and my dad says, “At this point, an American movie would have car chases and gun fights and dead people.”

Having fun with directing

I was really scared of directing in the start of summer, and I still kind of am, but I really enjoy choosing costumes, props, sound effects, and songs to set the mood. It’s a lot of fun, and I hope the audience will be affected somehow. They probably won’t be, though.

Frustration

i don’t know what’s worse, when things go bad and it’s your fault, or when things go bad and there’s nothing you can do about it.

For some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot in swear words now, probably related to the time of month and my level of stress, definitely related to the fact that I’m “directing” a play and a film, directing in quotation marks because I really have no idea what the hell I’m doing. It’s not so bad in YFAT, where the cast and crew acknowledge that while everyone is nearly the same age, responsibility must be delegated and respected for the sake of efficiency and optimum performance, but damn, the film is killing me.

X

X/1999 is my new love. It sucks that the series is so old and has been hiatus for so long that Borders doesn’t have any copies. I’d have to order the books online, and I never order books online… Hopefully, someday the series will be finished and I can die happy.

I’m never thought of myself as a yaoi fangirl, per se. I like some yaoi pairings, usually when fanon is better than canon (*cough* Digimon, Naruto *cough*). But the few yaoi pairings that are canon (Yukito/Touya, Fai/Kurogane) I’ve never really paid attention to, either.

AND THEN I READ X and discovered the craziness known as Fuuma, Kamui, Seishirou, and Subaru, and my world will never be the same. I’ve been scouring the internet for fanfic and been pretty successful. Even though the fandom’s pretty dead, there’s still a lot of good stuff. I’ll post the links eventually, probably…

The art for X is great. Not too fluffy, like Cardcaptor Sakura, or too stylized like xxxHolic, but a nice balance between ornate and realistic. I hope the four year hiatus doesn’t change the art style too much, but that’s probably inevitable.The artbooks for the series are wonderful and a definite change from the usual artbooks I’ve seen. Very…risque in some cases, heh.

At volume 18 out of a planned 21, this series is so close to ending. As much as I don’t want it to end, I need to know what happens. Please Clamp, finish X!

My mom makes me depressed.

We were talking about my cousin whom I’ve fought with a lot because he’s homophobic and blindly republican, and I’m from San Francisco. I don’t like him very much, but my mom said that she feels sorry for him because we rarely see him go out of the house, and whenever he does, it’s with his brother. It doesn’t take long for me to realize that I feel sorry for him, too.

When it comes down to it, though, I can’t think of anything I can do. I cringe whenever he comes into the same room I’m in, though I’ve made more of an effort to be congenial. His parents don’t seem to notice, which is the alarming part. I’m afraid that I’ll end up like my cousin, which is why I can’t ever understand why my parents don’t want me to go out.

Thinking about the future but not in that kinda way

I seriously thought about becoming a physicist, but after taking the AP Physics B exam, I realize what a colossal mistake that would be. The fact that I struggled to spell the word physicist also made that painfully clear to me. The first half of the year, I was breezing by the class. Maybe that’s what I felt so good about it. Then electromagnetism came around, and down went my grade and confidence in the subject.

Do you have to be good at something to major in it? Maybe not, but it’s made life a lot easier. What I would do to be naturally gifted at a subject, so that I could sleep in class, get an A, and make six figures. Of course life doesn’t work that way, but boy, does it feel like I’m the only one that has no idea what to do with her life, no idea what she could do or should do. If everything I’ve done in high school has been for the sake of college and the future, I really have done nothing. Maybe there are somethings you can’t learn about yourself through studying.

School has always only been school for me. I’ve never been excited by doing homework or labs. Even the thought of it makes me laugh. I love watching television programs about biology, physics, and chemistry, but those shows are meant to entertain, aren’t they? They peel away all of the droll technical bits and throw all the interesting facts at the audience to keep them glued to the screen. English and drama are the highlights of my day, but I’ll never major in either.

Maybe I don’t want it to be easy. I like challenges. I like the idea of them, some obstacle that you have to conquer that makes you stronger and better. If something was easy, there’d be no pleasure in completing the task. Maybe it’s all life’s lesson that you don’t have to be good at something to succeed. Maybe sometimes you just need to keep at it.

Of course, when the third week of July comes around, I’ll be back to hating myself.

I think I’m slowly going crazy

They say schizophrenia usually happens around the late teens to early twenties, but usually to unusually intelligent males, which rules me out, but still, I wonder. Sometimes I talk to myself, but I don’t have a coherent conversation. I just say something totally random. And then I look around to see if anyone heard me.

I blame it on drama class. Sometimes I pretend I have this great, crazy role (because I want to bring out my inner schizophrenic) and say something “in character”. Which really means I’m losing my mind, of course. But sometimes, when I’m walking down the long and lonely street on my way home from school, I rehearse my lines, which is completely normal and practical. But then I say something weird or crazy and I suddenly notice that cars have appeared where there were no cars before, and I tell myself I should stop talking to myself. And I just realized how weird that is. And I keep talking to myself.

I need inspiration from something. I feel as though I’m really thirsty, but I’ve reached the bottom of the well. The figurative well, that is. Of creativity. That exists only in my mind.