I want my bag to be as light as possible so that I may walk easily. I don’t know how much ink is left in my pen, so I keep some pens in my bag. The gloves were put into the bag before college begins; I never used them but neither do I want to dispose of them. Writing about things in my bag has given me a chance to reflect on my simplistic ideal in packaging, my indeterminacy as well as the ambiguities in life just like the useless gloves. On the other side, it may be a partial reflection of myself but a whole image, because I had to start from what would reasonably be in a bag, and my ideals towards other facets of life may be different from packaging stuff.
The moment when my mom taught me the first character at 4, I, once innocently wandering in the universe of unknowns, tripped down onto the net of meaning weaved by the sounds and shapes of words. All the words I picked up, formless as water yet sharper than the best Katana swords, gradually amalgamated with my experience of everything and pierced my perspective, language, and vision.
My first acquaintance with words is in classical poetry. As a kid, my mom would force me to recite a poem every morning before going to Kindergarten. Though I always tried to resist, the strange imageries flowing on the pages of the likes of Li Bai enticed my fantasy of the Tang dynasty, the chivalrous swordsmen, the hermits, and the palaces; I was introduced to a new world parallel in time to my pre-literate experience living in a modern city.
My best reading experience ever happened on a cool winter night, being alone in my room… I laid on the bed and opened Momo by Michael Ende, a fantasy about a warm-hearted girl fighting with the “bank of time” with help from the “elder of time”.
Soon, I immersed myself completely in the “End of Time” with Momo and lost track of time. Until the red-wood grandfather clock ringed twelve times, I was pulled back to reality. From then on, immersive experience in reading fiction became one of the most enjoyable and precious memories from adolescence.
Meanwhile, I developed a habit of slow reading – I can’t help thinking about the relationships between ideas already covered. For instance, when I’m halfway done with reading Professor Jonathan Spence’s God’s Chinese Son, I had to close the book, take a walk to DCT, and think about how Hong Xiuquan’s policy is/isn’t a primitive form of communism. This habit eventually affected my SAT reading performance, so I had to temporarily give up thinking and do the problems, which was a painful experience.
[One final sketch showing the conflict between what SAT expects of me and how I habitually read]
The moment when my mom taught me the first character at 4, I, once innocently wandering in the universe of unknowns, tripped down onto the net of meaning weaved by the sounds and shapes of words. All the words I picked up, formless as water yet sharper than the best Katana swords, gradually amalgamated with my experience of everything and pierced my perspective, language, and vision.
My first acquaintance with words is in classical poetry. As a kid, my mom would force me to recite a poem every morning before going to Kindergarten. Though I always tried to resist, the strange imageries flowing on the pages of the likes of Li Bai enticed my fantasy of the Tang dynasty, the chivalrous swordsmen, the hermits, and the palaces; I was introduced to a new world parallel in time to my pre-literate experience living in a modern city.
My best reading experience ever happened on a cool winter night, being alone in my room… I laid on the bed and opened Momo by Michael Ende, a fantasy about a warm-hearted girl fighting with the “bank of time” with help from the “elder of time”.
Soon, I immersed myself completely in the “End of Time” with Momo and lost track of time. Until the red-wood grandfather clock ringed twelve times, I was pulled back to reality. From then on, immersive experience in reading fiction became one of the most enjoyable and precious memories from adolescence.
Meanwhile, I developed a habit of slow reading – I can’t help thinking about the relationships between ideas already covered. For instance, when I’m halfway done with reading Professor Jonathan Spence’s God’s Chinese Son, I had to close the book, take a walk to DCT, and think about how Hong Xiuquan’s policy is/isn’t a primitive form of communism. This habit eventually affected my SAT reading performance, so I had to temporarily give up thinking and do the problems, which was a painful experience.
[One final sketch showing the conflict between what SAT expects of me and how I habitually read]
What if Meursault in L’Étranger became the little boy in Akira Kurosawa’s first Dream? Both works are among my favorites, and therefore I came up with the idea of mixing the two when jogging on the track field this afternoon.
Inspired by A Softer World, I found the challenge of the project is to create interesting three-line poetry and to figure out an image in correspondence. Then, I cropped and drew on the picture to make it a three-panel page. I felt my photo editing skill with Pixlr has improved since last time.
There was a myth about the root of a mushroom. Perhaps there exists a reflectional symmetric counterpart under the biggest mushroom in the quad?
In the process of creating this image, the only technical difficulty is to create a relationship between real-life objects. Putting the two pictures together, however, is an easy process.
