”I think you could fall in love with anyone if you saw the parts of them that no one else gets to see. Like if you followed them around invisibly for a day and you saw them crying in their bed at night or singing to themselves as they make a sandwich or even just walking along the street and even if they were really weird and had no friends at school, I think after seeing them at their most vulnerable you wouldn’t be able to help falling in love with them.”

(Source: incenses, via cherrietopdworld)

memorial diamonds

yesterday i got curious about man-made/laboratory cultivated/HPHT/CVD diamonds, especially how they have challenged/impacted the mined diamond industry. its pretty interesting. lab made diamonds sometimes have properties that are superior to naturally formed diamonds. also the mined diamond industry has done a lot to protect itself (creating spectrometer-thingies to differentiate between mined and cultivated). 

but while i was reading about all this, i found out about this thing called memorial diamonds. apparently you can extract the carbon from someone’s hair/cremated remains(ashes) and cultivate a diamond from it. basically, you can make a diamond out of a special dead person. just think about it.

so i was thinking about this for a bit, and while i was eating breakfast this morning, i suddenly burst out laughing while my dad and brother were talking, and my brother asked me what i had thought of this time. i told him: “ryan, if i die before you get married, this is what you are gonna do k? so there’s this thing called memorial diamonds…” and i went on to tell him that he should cremate me. and then create a memorial diamond out of me. and then set it in his engagement ring and propose to his girl with it. 

“will you marry me? …btw my sister’s in there.” “make sure you don’t lose my sister.” “my sister is embedded here as a guardian to the bonds of our marriage.”…. AGHHHH there are just SO many RIDICULOUS things you could say with that!!! and its all so gushy and stupidly sentimental and so CREEPY and WEIRDLY ridiculous. 

he wasn’t too thrilled though. i told him to promise me that he would honor me by doing that, turning me into a diamond to perch upon the ring finger of his beloved until her dying day. LAWLS LAWLS LAWLS. he just shook his head and sighed. 

priorities

i was seriously born for a different era.

i like climbing trees and walking around in my bare feet and not being professional and not using tablets to paint and typing on typewriters and using film cameras rather than instagram. lol instagram is such a recent phenomenon that the spell check on google doesnt even recognize it. as i was typing on the typewriter my brain just went flying to all these different places and it was so calming and it was like i wasn’t sitting on a chair in my house anymore. i was far far away deep in the annals of my brain. it felt so wonderful to have the words i was typing come into immediate being before my eyes. and to hear the weird electronic buzz for every letter i hit. and the thoughts just kept flowing. tons and tons of them stored in my brain and finding release in vintage methods. 

i was talking about this to my ex-roommate recently. about how i am so technologically un-savvy and so unprofessional and so inefficient and so confused all the time…like how i try really hard to keep track of normal daily things like time and locations and items… but i still show up to the wrong classrooms late in the semester, sit through sections without knowing that i went to the wrong one until the very end, think someone else’s shopping cart is mine and start taking things out of it until i get in trouble, put another pair of contacts in without realizing that i already have contacts on, bring to school un-matching shoes…and all this happens even though i check and double-check. i just seem to get confused.. and how i read really slow and i have never kept up with a semester’s worth of reading in any class before, no matter how hard i try, and if possible, i avoid taking classes with a lot of required reading. and how peers around me pick up things like adobe photoshop cs5 really fast these days. they fiddle around on lightroom or something for 4 hours and they create all these fun and fantastic things. but when i go on photoshop i feel like a clumsy handicapped bozo who keeps knocking things over and i have to get help every 10 minutes because i envision something but i can’t seem to make it happen on the computer. things are so much easier when i do it manually, just some pens and a paper, some oil paints and a gessoed board. but all the art people want online graphic-looking submissions these days. i dont have what it takes to compete in this system. i told her that maybe i should move to the midwest and be a farmer. and paint landscapes and portraits once in awhile to sell at the fair. 

sometimes when i make these blunders, it’s a real hit on my self-esteem. i feel so inadequate in this microwave-fast-high-tech-make-spotless(just the right amount of natural+just the right amount of professional)-first-impressions bay area culture. but she told me that it’s not because there’s something wrong with me. everyone is created so differently, and some people have the skill-set that fits really well with the system. maybe if another system that valued different things had been put into place, i would have fit all the demands. it’s the system that’s selective. and it leaves a lot of people behind in a lot of different ways (see cartoon drawing below) and i remember one evening while we were sitting outside in the cold, she smiled and said, i really really believe that God is going to take care of you. just don’t let anything crush you. ever.  

and God’s been telling me that ALL of the above doesn’t even really matter at all:

“I knew what I was doing when I made you. There is an entire world inside of you. And I have been breaking chains and barriers all this while so you can shine with what I put in you. be patient. be patient. I know what I’m doing and I AM working. don’t think that I forgot about you. or left you behind too. don’t get caught up with these things, little things, that you feel lacking in. they are just little things. I have SO MUCH more for you. these things seem like they matter so much in this world, but what’s really worth something is your devotion to Me. Before me, you are stripped of everything, and I see your heart. And lacking in these things may put you at a disadvantage in this world and workforce, but it in no way disadvantages your heart before Me. I know what I was doing when I made you this exact way. I know what I made you for. Don’t compare. Don’t get caught up. Just know me, and listen to what I think of you. Know who you are in me. Love Me first. That is your number one priority.”

View high resolution

this is unfortunately true

typing on a qwerty keyboard

one summer, my dad told the three of us: you three have to learn how to type on a qwerty keyboard. it is a very important skill in this day and age.

i already knew i needed to learn how to type because all my classmates already had email addresses and xangas and neopets and all this stuff that i didnt really know much about. i was also really embarassed whenever we went to the computer lab cuz i would type really really slow, searching madly for every single letter while other kids pattered away. 

so that day my dad took out this big clunky-looking plastic box and opened it up and inserted some paper into the top. it was a typewriter. and he bought us a “learn how to type!” booklet of some sort, and so the three of us learned how to type on the typewriter. 

today, i re-found the big clunky-looking plastic typewriter abandoned on the top shelf of a cabinet in the kitchen. i am going to start typing on it again.

today i looked up:

“cultural mercantilism”

“the Dada movement”

and

“terminal velocity”

it was a good day.

bummer days

just shot through a roll of film. was really excited at the compositions and lighting i got until i realized that the film expired 2 years ago. lame. 

"It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest."

Mark Twain

1. when the commotion of relatives packing boxing breaking down and moving was swirling 360 degrees around me (swirling is a cliched word now, but that is the best way to say what it felt like) and i was removed and still and staring at the empty spot where the ikea desk used to be

2. when the elevator door opened to the fourth floor of the berkeley public library which is the children’s section

3. when i sat at the bus stop outside of trader joe’s and utrecht, waiting for the 51B to come. it was cold. i looked down university, towards the marina.

4. when i woke up in the middle of the night, turned over, and saw the white walls, the wooden floors, the stub where a radiator used to be.

i woke up this morning and started tearing because my life is so full of beautiful things coming together in such beautiful ways only now in this time. 20 year long frustrations, a double decade of vague and unhappy oddities are just now beginning to make sense! i can see His hand so clearly. the silence, the aloneness, the fear, the disappointments, the anger, the outsider-ness, the hiding behind the winepresses…it was all meant to be resolved in this way and i am emerging as a pearl out of a clam (yes, a clam, not an oyster. i know clams don’t actually make pearls in real life, but these were the words spoken over me 6 months ago). there is no shame no shame no shame. i will be dancing and i will be in a dress and i will be twirling, as if privately before a mirror, only i will be outside and i will be free and i will not care what you say or what you see. i will be established. i will be joyful.

and the wheel is turning again. things are changing again, as they always are, and i am moving forward in complete faith. all the people around me are telling me about myself, describing to me a melanie that i cannot see. i cannot see or understand, i can hardly believe what they are saying. i can only trust that they are being honest. i am stepping into a reality created by the truth spoken in love. it is an invisible and fragile net of words, and i am moving forward as if i believe that the farther i go the more this net of words will materialize. 

i am a daughter, i am a daughter, and He knew what He was doing at every every single moment (and each one is passing through my mind now) that led up to this one.