Friendship Park 2nd Sketch

Friendship Park sketch

It's been a while since i've done any sketching from life. I seem to have overused my ankle lately so my usual day's exercise would have been ill-advised. To keep myself busy instead, I went to check out this Japanese park in San Jose. I have 2 sketches. This is the first one, colored in very roughly. Second to come later.

Observations on People/Behaviors

I was at Great America today with bunch of buddies, many of them masters at my kung fu school. There were of course tons of children teaming about, a good number of them below the level where'd I'd see them in peripheral vision without looking down.

When I bump into a small child, I usually start back a little and then proceed to evade the obstacle (child) while resuming my route.

We were standing around when i noticed a little girl bump into Master Jack. Instead of starting back the way I do, he absentmindedly put a hand on her shoulder and guided the girl back in the direction of her dad. It must come from years of teaching children and being surrounded by the running screaming hyperactive midgets.

Looking at the way he reacts vs the way i react reminds me of the time i was placing feature points for a face morphing project over a set of photos of my classmates. The little differences that accumulate to make us unique are never noticed until you try mapping one person to another.

Nerds and "The Right Guy"

This was on 9gag:

I would like to point out "Nerd Friend" does not mean he is the right guy. One of the most surprising lessons I learned while studying CS is that nerds can be arrogant bastards just as much as the next guy. Except they're even more convinced that they're right... even when they are clearly being retarded. So if you're a whiny boy complaining about how your crush only thinks of you as a guy friend but not a boy friend, it may not be because you're a nerd but because a person can only stomach so much of your holier-than-thou attitude.

on being the best and happiness

Those of you who know me (all of you because why else would you be reading my blog) have probably heard my Pokemon rant:

"I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was!" Really? This is a kids' show and they're teaching kids that their happiness depends on becoming the best? Maybe there is some cathartic moment when Ash realizes that he doesn't need to be the best to feel complete and happy with himself. I don't know because I only made it to the Orange League episodes before outgrowing the TV show (I never outgrew the games though).

There is no way you are going to be the best at anything. There are just too many people in the world, and there's always always always someone better. Sure, there has to be one best person for any given category, and to him/her I say, congrats, you win the lottery. Does that mean the rest of us should just feel miserable about sucking?

Something I've realized lately is that being good at something makes me feel no more self-satisfied than when I sucked at the very same thing. It's the process of getting better, of learning and acquiring new skills and knowledge that is rewarding. It's part of human nature. To be happy, we keep having to acquire more stuff. In this case, the stuff is not material, its knowledge, and growth.

Imagine starting a new hobby that you really really enjoy: art, music, sports, whatever. If you happened across a genie that offered to bestow upon you mastery of that particular activity, would you take its offer? I think I'd turn it down. To me that's the equivalent of saying "here's an awesome new game, by the way, I finished it for you." (Note: I said hobby, my response would differ if my ability to make a living depended on this.) It's about the journey, not the destination.

So for all of you who are already super good at everything you care to do, screw you. I have a lot more fun ahead of me than you do.

I live different lives

I've been spending a lot of time wondering what it would be like to be someone else, but in some sense, I know a little bit already what that would be like. Part of what defines us is our experiences and the environment we live in. We change as we grow, partly because the world around us, or the portion of it we are exposed to changes too. The weird thing for me right now, is that every now and again, I find myself re-exposed to parts of my life that are over. When this happens I feel as if i've been jolted into some other Lyn's skin. She's still a very familiar Lyn, still me, but she inhabits a different world.

There's Farmington Lyn, Brown Lyn, and California Lyn.

Most of the time I'm California Lyn. California Lyn is a software engineer. At night she does Kung Fu and works on her comic. In the morning she studies a little Chinese before work. She struggles a lot with loneliness and has a serious case of 20-something angst.

Farmington Lyn is the person I become when I visit my parents, or maybe even when I'm just talking to them. She feels very much like the person she was in high school, except a little older, and a little more confident (or condescending, see it how you will). Farmington Lyn feels like the world is much smaller and simpler than California Lyn, even though she knows its not true.

When I visit Brown, or the people I knew from Brown, I'm Brown Lyn. Brown Lyn thinks of her self as a computer science student. She spends a lot of time in the Sun Lab and hangs out with other CS majors. She's mostly happy except when she's seriously stressed from school work, but now-a-days, since I only become Brown-Lyn for visits, she is mostly just happy and nostalgic. Sometimes Brown Lyn remembers that she is also California Lyn, and then she gets confused and moody.

Tropes(?)

I said a few days ago that I was going to write about tropes. I take it back. I don't think that's the right term. I've luckily managed to avoid an addiction to TV Tropes, and as such I'm not exact on what qualifies as a trope. Apparently anything thats an article on TV Tropes is a trope, which is a much larger category then I intended to discuss. I actually wanted to talk about categories of non-main characters.

Characters play certain roles. You have the main character (or main characters if its a story featuring multiple important points of view) and in every case I can think of, this main character is you. He or she may not look like you, think like you, or even act to your liking, but you follow this character. Whether or not you agree with them, it is their journey that drives the story for you.

And then there are the other types of characters, like the mentor, the nemesis, the damsel in distress, etc. They exist for the main character to interact with. There is an otherness to these characters. You can admire or despise them, but you don't end up developing the same intimate connection you have with the main character(s).

But what if you were to look at the world from the "other" character's point of view? As I was saying before, I suspect the world feels very much the same to you as it does to me. This is why the golden rule exists after all, I assume that in general, the things that make me happy make you happy. But in the case of some of these figures, it's difficult to see them as regular people because of the role they play.

When I was a wee college freshmen, I'd look at my TAs and think "Wow! They're so cool and mentor-ly." And then I got to know some of them as friends, and yes they were still cool and mentor-ly, but they also become people to me. Getting to know them sort of brought them over that line of other-ness and back to the realm of normal people.

And then I became a TA myself, and I didn't feel any different. I felt like the same me as i was the previous year, albeit with some added responsibilities.

There's no moral to this post. It's just an observation that interests me, that those "other" characters are normal people too. Just imagine, Yoda could feel very much the same in his day to day life as I do... minus the youthful angst.