Just Be Yourself

That's what they always tell us nowadays. Be yourself and you'll be fine! Follow your heart!

Sounds great and lovely, right?

But for crying out loud, what does that even mean? To "be yourself"? Maybe it's just me, but it seems to just be a feel good "do what makes you happy" saying.
I mean, you really can't be anyone else except you. And what inherent value does "being yourself" really have?

I mean you're going to be you. You can try to be someone else but in the end you'll still be you just with some surface appearance of them.

And "follow your heart"?
The heart is deceitful above all things. If you don't believe that, just think how many times your friends have "fallen in love" with their boyfriends or girlfriends, only to break up a couple weeks later and date somebody else. Their excuse for this, honestly, extremely shallow behavior, is that they're following their hearts.

Good job, Hearts.

There are a ton of other similar phrases. "Do what feels right" for example.

I think all those sorts of advice are confusing and unhelpful at best. Maybe even harmful and deceptive.

Maybe next time you advise your friend to be herself, think twice. Maybe instead you should advise her to try to be the person she wants to be. Have her think of how the nicest and most awesome girl she can make up would act.

Maybe don't advise your friends to follow their hearts and do what feels right and makes them happy.
Some times doing the best thing is horrendously hard and you feel freakin horrible afterwards. But you'll look back some day and realize it was worth it.
So tell them to do what they think is right.

That's what I think. Maybe I explained what I think very badly. Ask me to clarify! Maybe you disagree. Tell me why! Maybe you'd like to add to what I said, mention some similar phrases. Let me know! Comment below :)

Or, if you're on twitter, tweet #justbeyourself and I'll check it out. (My twitter username is @stormmariewhite... creative, I know)
Or post on my new facebook page.. 
Or email me.. storm.marie.white@gmail.com
Or google+ me.. just search "Storm White" and I should come up.

Yes, I'm pretty much everywhere. Have fun stalking me, guys. ;P

And here's a lovely song by Mree that partially inspired this post :)

Darker, darker. Darker?

     They're always talking about it, aren't they? How our society is descending into darkness. How it's just getting worse, how we live in horrible times. Poor us, living in these times. Haha. Haha. Ha. Ha.
     I guess yah, we do live in hard times, but I feel like everyone has. It's just a messed up world and maybe we just need to get over that and deal with it. Sure, let's try to make the world a better place, that's great, but we're really just doing damage control, the world is never going to be good, no matter how much you and I work to make it good.
     I remember learning something in chemistry about how disorder only increases, never decreases as a whole. I feel like the bad in the world is like that.
     However, before you write me off as some depressed pessimist. I do believe there is still good in this world (hallelujah!).
     I just wish people would stop complaining about the bad stuff so much and take time to appreciate the good while we still have it. Everyone has their own problems but not everyone has, say.. the amazing mom you have, or adorable puppy, the beautiful wildflowers that grow in your yard, or that crazy musical talent you're blessed with.
     Deal with the bad things that happen, you don't need to ignore them, but don't let them take over your life. Please. For my sake and your own.
     Admit it, we all hate whiny facebook statuses. ;P
 
     On another note. ARTISTIC UPDATE, OH MY GOODNESS. I recently submitted a couple pieces to the governor's art exhibition or whatever they call that. I don't expect to win or anything, I just picked out a couple pieces I'd already done and submitted them very last minute. Next year I WILL remember to actually make something for that show. Maybe.
     I've been working on the robotics website a lot, it's coming along well, check it out here.
     I've also been doing a lot of photography. The photo at the top is one of mine. Black food coloring dropped into a glass of water. Fun stuff. I also did a photo for the theme "natural beauty". It's a picture of a friend of mine with her hair sculpted (by me) into a tree shape. That was fun and required a ton of hairspray. :P I'd post it on here but I'm not sure if she would feel comfortable with a portrait of her being available to the public on here, haha. Or well, you'll just have to use your imagination ;P
     I think I mentioned trying out for my school's forum show, unfortunately we didn't make it in. We had some guitar malfunctions, so I don't think it was our fault we didn't get in ;P I'm thinking of buying some recording equipment and recording it, not sure yet, that stuff is pricy and I'm clueless soooo... yah. But if I do, I'll upload the recording to youtube or something so you can hear it.
     The viking jewelry craft I did at the library went really well, had nine people show up and they all did very well and seemed satisfied with their creations before when they left, so that was good :)

     I originally didn't include this in this post, but am adding it for a couple reasons. A: it's one of my favorite songs. B: it kind of goes with the post. C: I really like adding songs to posts. ;P
     This song makes me think of the sense of entitlement we all tend to have. "They said we'd live forvever" seems like a cry of "You promised!" to me. And maybe we don't all expect to (literally on earth) live forever. But we feel entitled to things. A lot of things. When really we deserve a big fat nada. Worse than that, we deserve punishment for being sick sinful creatures.
     We've sure got off easy, huh? Just a little simple faith and we really do get to live forever. And here we are complaining about the hard times we live in. Hmph. Shoot that sense of entitlement in the heart and let it die.  Give up everything and serve other people, serve them because it's what God wants and He sure deserves whatever He wants out of you.

Be glad when your sun comes up tomorrow and make the most of what you're given. Because building those airplanes isn't going to save you.

Since Bold Sophia Has Crossed the Sea

"Fear is a sign of humanity. Only fools are not afraid."

That's a quote from somewhere, and, so atypical of me, obviously, I don't remember where its from. But I thought it was cool.
Heh. It's true too. I mean, what kind of person falls off a cliff by accident? Not the one that's too scared to get within ten feet of the edge. It's the brave fellow who wants to show off how cool and daring he is to his friends or to himself, or maybe he's just foolish. Or she. Not necessarily just guys who are stupid. Well actually... HAHAHAHAHA.. Ignore me. Well. But don't really ignore me. Just ignore anything stupid I say. Pay attention to all my good aspects, of which I have many, like my humbleness.

But yah, maybe fear isn't always such a bad thing. It's always looked on as a negative thing, but even though it's not fun to feel afraid, it sometimes prevents things happening that are worse than that feeling of fear.

Lord Bateman wouldn't have been captured and put in prison and he wouldn't have nearly died if he had some fear and stayed home. But he was brave and went sailing around for the heck of it. If it weren't for a disobedient daughter, he'd have been a goner. What a beautiful rhyme I made this time.

On the flip-side.  Living in fear is a sucky life too. Especially when we've got all those promises from God that He'll take care of us. And besides, what happens to our earthly bodies doesn't matter, we'll be whole in heaven, man can't take away the most important part of us.

OH THE DEEP PHILOSOPHICALNESS. Is that a word? My spellcheck says no, but my spellcheck also says spellcheck isn't a word. Do you deny your own self, spellcheck??!!

Anyways, if Sophia was too afraid, she'd never have crossed the sea and gotten to marry her Lord Bateman, and there wouldn't have been such a pretty song written about them.
Of course, come to think of it, she might have sailed away across the sea because of fear of her father who was probably pretty darn mad at her.
Now, some general updates. I HAVE NEGLECTED YOU, MY DEAR BELOVED PROBABLY NO ONE, BUT HOPEFULLY NOT NO ONE, BUT A WONDERFUL PERSON WHO READS MY BLOG!!!

I use caps lock too much. Actually I just hold down shift and don't literally use caps lock. I believe in complete honestly, if you haven't noticed. But I use capital letters very much, which is ironic because it tics me off when other people use capitol letters too much.

I meant to spell tic that way. Because I like the onomatopoeic word relating to clocks far better than blood-sucking Ixodes scapularis. Random fact, I have a huge fear of ticks. If I think I might have one on my head, I am likely to pull all my hair out and scratch my scalp off. That is really disgusting. MOVING ON.

Okay, I was supposed to be giving you some general updates. Okay. So yes, I haven't posted much lately. I'm prepping for forum show at my school, in which I'll hopefully be performing a song by Dou Wei, called Shangdi Baoyou, or God Bless. I'll put the music video in this post somewhere.

I've also been busy doing stuff with the Red Plague robotics team. Hopefully redesigning their website. I'd link it but it isn't very impressive YET. But it will be. I'm working on it. Kind of. And I've been working on their open house prep and such as well.

I'm taking a photography class right now so I haven't done much of my typical art. But I'm finally learning to use photoshop. Which is good and bad because now I really want it and it's so expensive.

At the library, I've scheduled a craft club day. Made some samples and bought the materials. We're doing this really awesome viking knit jewellery thing with norse rune charms to go with the mythology theme we have right now. I'll get a pic on here... maybe... yes... alrighty. So I think they're cool, and not really bragging about myself here, because viking knit is an ancient technique (check this blog out for some of the history of it) which I never would have thought of myself. It looks pretty high end, but it's easy and cheap to make. Which is ridiculous. And awesome.

So yah. Thinking I might add some extra pages on my blog here to put some photography, maybe a poetry page, might even start posting some of my book I'm writing . . . anyone interested in seeing any of that stuff? Lemme know. If you'd like to have some of YOUR stuff on here... maybe I could do a gallery of stuff by readers.. that might be pretty sweet :) Anyways, just brainstorming right now. 

Thanks for reading, Imma heading to bed. Night!

Blablabla

     I like to say that quite a bit, "blablabla," I also write laughter like "bahaha," and write "bleh," as my term of slight disapproval. I guess I have a thing for Bs. Bees are cool too though.
     Anyways. What's happened since my last post? Don't be ridiculous, that was a rhetorical question! Yah, so . . . the very next day I decided to do NaNoWriMo. Even though I skipped the first eight days. Do you know what NaNoWriMo is? Just in case you don't, its national novel writin month, so you write a novel at least 50,000 words long in the month of november. Exciting stuff.
     To finish on time you have to write an average of 1666 words a day, I b'lieve. I started 13,000 ish words behind, but now I've about halved that. Which is cool, but obviously still way behind. It's a lot of fun doing NaNoWriMo, but it's fun too, just like its name, annoying to type because of the capital letters, but sounds pretty sweet to say. Bahaha.
     I started another art project and finished the previous one . . . unless I had already finished it by the last post, don't think I did. I'll post it when it comes out of the display case. The new project is an acrylic painting on canvas. It's supposed to be photo realism, but we have to choose one of four color schemes: complimentary, split complimentary, analogous, or monochromatic. (I won't explain these color schemes here, but if you don't know and want to, this page explains it) None of which will produce extremely realistic results, and the point of photo realism is extreme realism . .  I don't quite get what my art teacher was thinking, but okay.
     I finished my drivers ed classes, they wouldn't let me keep my beautiful doodled-on written-on-in five-languages folder. :( I was going to show you that, but oh well. Now I just have my driving sessions with my instructor still to do.
     Another exciting thing: I got hired by my local library! Which is totally awesome. It happened after a fairly complicated series of events that I won't explain, (bwah ha ha ;P ) but I had my first day of work today. I was only there an hour but I got the grand tour and got introduced to everyone that was there, they all seemed really nice and everything, but I don't know if I'll ever know all their names D: Apparently there are five people working there named Debbie. I'm not sure I even met all of them. So that's a little overwhelming. But I have my own little desk and laptop to use, which is.. pink.. Oh my goodness. Honestly not sure whether I like or dislike the color yet. On the one hand, at least it's not boring, but on the other hand, it looks more girly than I really am. Coincidentally, I do happen to be wearing a pink shirt. Epic fail. Actually, just fail, it's not even epic. What does epic even really mean except when we're talking about Beowulf or the Aeneid? Bother.
     Well hey, that's all I feel like saying today. Thanks for reading! Ali bye bye Alibaba!

Driver's Ed Ambling Doodling

     As we all know, driver's ed is about as fun as Cedar Point. I mean, as fun as the waiting lines for the biggest coasters at Cedar Point. Bahaha, before the second sentence you were thinking I was either nuts or had an amazingly unusually exciting class. Or you've never heard of Cedar Point so you assumed it was something boring. Which it might be to some people, but it's been the #1 amusement park for a while I believe so it can't be too bad. Or maybe you get a ticket discount if you vote for them. That's probably not legal. And definitely off topic.
     Anyhow, drivers ed is boring. So I amuse myself by doodling. No wholly unproductive doodling, it relates to what the teacher is talking about, so it helps me remember stuff. For your amusement, since this isn't an amusement park, just an amusement blog, but not even really that.. check out my doodles.

      We were on a chapter about driving in cities. The first thing our teacher talked about was how there are more hazards per mile in the city, and he said we should remember that cuz it'd be on our end of class quiz. So I doodles about various hazards.

      During our fifteen minute break halfway through each session we get lollipops from this huge basket full of them. And the snake's heads are bell shaped because of a string of bells in the room. I'm aware that I missed an L in the word "lollipop" Hey, I was listening to the teacher instead of paying attention to my spelling, okay?

      We have two different instructors. One's an older lady and the other is a younger guy. This time we had the guy. He's fun, makes the class a bit less boring, and he likes to make Judge Judy references, I have no idea why. But yah. Then we were talking about signs. And that made me think of the song "Polar Bears and Shark Fins" by my favorite band, The Myriad. Thus, the hammerhead shark. Wham. Have a nice day!