Friday Five: April 24th, 2015

• People have been complaining about their lack of inspiration for thousands of years, its almost as old of a tradition as birthdays. It could be the most widely used excuse for writers. Travelling to exotic places has always kindled my spark of creativity. Let’s say you are having trouble writing. You decide you need some inspiration. How about a little trip to Cuba? Recently opened to trade with the U.S., it is like a place frozen in time. Old cars in perfect condition roaming the streets, it is almost as if you were back in the ‘50s. Beautiful beaches, pina coladas and an unnatural vintage air.  Won’t this inspire you?
• People listen to music for everything. Driving, exercising, and even cooking. (Admit it, those exotic brazilian albums won’t play themselves.) Even writing can be an excuse to listen to your favorite songs. They think you’re writing that essay for English on your laptop, but actually, you’re jamming out to Bruce Springsteen while pushing random keys to make it seem like you’re typing. I like to listen to music while doing things alone, because it filters out all of the sound of this chaotic world, it only plays one thing, a melodious tune with a beat you can replicate with typing and head bobbing. Listening to music calms me down and gives me ideas for writing.
• Writer’s block is the enemy to all writers. It is the lion to every gazelle, the baking soda to every bottle of vinegar; it is the most common disease afflicting writers. I have suffered from this, and trust me, there’s no cure for this, no immunization shot, and no alleviator. It can be a real pain, but, its also the greatest excuse of them all, one that can be used to do some crazy things. I’ll bet that if Charles Dickens had google, his most searched query next to “cute kittens playing basketball underwater ” would be “how to overcome writer’s block”. When I am hit with a writer’s block, going out for a run or shooting some hoops seem to help.

College Visits

Different representatives have come to my high school, talking about their respective colleges, trying to convince us to apply to their school, making it almost seem like we were choosing them instead of them choosing us.

They seemed passionate, but you could see that all of this is a mask. They were sizing us up, rooting out the stupid kids, avoiding the over­achievers, and smiling incessantly at those whose eyes bored right through their soul. After their little spiel, they would mutter the most cursed words for any college advocate in a school full of anxious teens, “Any questions?” Immediately, every hand would go up, except one or two. Now these college reps are smart, they glance at their watch, set a few brochures down, and make a run for it with hordes of kids trailing them, as if this college officer was some sort of celebrity and these kids were paparazzi.

Next comes the stampede. Kids realize that there are brochures sitting back at the room, and they rush to it. I’m just waiting for that day where on the news we find, like, three kids injured in a stampede during a UC Berkeley presentation. Isn’t this just like people getting injured during Black Friday sales? Ridiculous. At least this shows that the percentage of college graduates in the US will increase, right? I dream of a day when the college application process is less bewildering and more joyful.

Fashion Trends

Society is built on conformity, that’s why most people want the best smart phones, best cars and best computers these days. We see other people doing something that looks appetizing to us, no matter how stupid, we follow. Quite frankly, we are like sheep. We like to follow. We are so caught up in society that we don’t quite realize what we are doing, like sheep being controlled by sheepdogs. A lot of the new fads display this phenomenon. For example, who would have ever thought that bell­bottoms looked nice. When a few people stopped wearing them, so did everyone else. Not just in fashion, but in practically everything has this phenomenon been applied. Since when has Starbucks been so popular? Two years ago, only middle aged people went to Starbucks. Now all I see when passing by are large herds of wild teenage girls. Since when has it been “cool” to wear overly large glasses? Anyways, I know that with the fickleness of today’s fashion and fads, they will wear off soon. Just for fun, I think I should start a shot trend in the fashion industry. It’ll blow Forever Twenty­One out of the water. It will be time­saving, free, and quite universal style. I’ll call it  “AU NATUREL”

Wants and Happiness

Its is human nature to want, this is the motivation that pushes us to create new things.  Some of us want things that we might never get, but we continue to research, dream, and work towards that goal, may it be a new pair of headphones, or reaching nirvana. But once that goal is achieved, a feeling of emptiness settles in. I spent two weeks researching about the new Mac OS X Yosemite.  My computer is an old Apple Mac from 2008. Now, I did tons of research, I thought of all the new little features I would be able to discover, all the new software I could find, all the different aesthetic appeals I could use. Finally, I got Yosemite. I was stoked. I downloaded all the software and set everything up, which took another week, it was the most fun I had in a while, but now after all that it seems useless. I don’t need any of this. Who cares if my desktop picture is cool, no one’s gonna see it anyways, right? 

I play basketball because I like to play it, not for the trophies. I code because its fun, not because others might like my website. You see, true happiness comes from the process of doing something, not for anybody, not for anything, not even for your body, but for yourself.