Instant happiness

People usually have a hard time to understand how I can go nuts about some celebrities that is to say rather random people I don't actually know and whom I most likely won't ever meet (though, you shouldn't be so sure with me... hehe ^^)... the thing is, celebrities are most often artists ( at least the ones I like) ~ and isn't art supposed to give you energy and make you happy? I enjoy falling in love a lot ^0^ Yeah, sounds weird, but I don't know why I should put any energy into negative emotions and isn't love the best thing you can feel? But since I only have one heart and already gave it to one single person, I have the starcrush option ^^ There are people who are amazingly inspiring and who give out love and energy so generously, so whenever I need positive emotions, I know what to do. That's why I call some people ~ injection of instant happiness...

Anyway, yesterday I almost got a happiness overdose ^0^ OMG! One of the best bands on this earth came to perform close to the place I live at! Fanfare Ciocarlia ^0^ Now, check them out!

 This is a tiny concert, now imagine a cheering crowd going crazy in front of them ~ that's what it was like yesterday ^0^ I arrived really early since I always want to be in the first row and then two of the band members walked by and greeted me ^^ We shook hands and I told them how much I love their music and how happy I am that they came to play here at last ^0^ They were like ~ ok, then you have to go crazy in the front row... I said ~ok... because that's what I do ^.^

Apart from that, the last few weeks have been crazy... our flat was a chaos and work was like ~ hey, you have a million things to do! But things have been settling down a bit... I also felt a little odd because I can't stop drawing the person I showed you last time... I have over a dozen drawings in different media and sizes so far and after I hung up five picture above my desk, I thought I should be more selective ^^ It's pretty freaky, but her wonderful face (and personality ^^) teach me SO much about drawing, so I even made a tumblr blog to record my experience...

here are a few tries that I don't find too bad ^^ and a work in progress that I should finish today...

 yes. she speaks Greek and I'm learning that too ^^ no, not just because of her ^^ but she inspires me here too, so I'm saying 'thank you' here ^^

 an older one with markers ^.^ not very much alike, but I think I caught a bit of her positive vibes here ^^ at least it's a picture that makes me happy when I look at it because it's so cheerful ^^

 bookmark for my Greek stuff ^^ she says ~ let's go ^.^ have you noticed how I went almost to the waist?? she totally pushes my boundaries ^.^

 My favourite Greek word so far ~ kalimera (good morning) ^.^ 

gosh, this original photo totally blew me away that first time I saw it... it's an amazing portrait of female beauty, she's a freaking goddess! and I was very happy to see that I didn't screw it up ^^ I love markers, they're just so freaking expensive... and I don't even use copics... sigh...

 should finish this one soon... she's so charming on this original photo, I could almost see her fairy dust, so I added some fairy-like things, I couldn't resist ^.^ it's also quite a flattering picture, so I think she might get it ^.^ (it says 'fairy' too) It was also done in an A5 book, so I'm getting bigger ^.^ 

OK, but I have to say that I'm not cheating on Maura ^.^ I miss her terribly and hope that I can watch the new series soon... How splendid she looks on the promo pic! You must be insane to cheat on that woman *.*

 

while I was writing this (mainly waiting for my photos to upload ~ that's exactly the reason why I use tumblr for my other blog +.+) I bought the latest album of Fanfare and my beloved Eva Quartet (they made me fall in love with all things Bulgarian more than a decade ago) and discovered that their most amazing singer Gergana Dimitrova has made a solo album... I adore her! And she has that kind of hair that I love ^.^

I wish everyone a great week ahead and don't forget to pursue your dreams!!

Decluttering...and finding treasures

Well, we've sent like 50kg of books (mostly dictionaries) from Japan and we definitely need storage space... I've also been planning to go through all my books and to get rid of some of them... I mean, there is stuff that I just don't need and I'm wondering why I even had that... Like a book on tarot cards or 'inspirational quotes for girls', what the heck? I remember, I had friends who would just send something that sounded remotely close to my area of interest... which was mainly 'gothic' and 'China' in my teens ^.^ so voilà... I even got books from a (random) dead man's home because my former friend thought I'd like some of his stuff... By the way, does any German- or French-speaker (who happens to come across this blog) want to start learning Chinese? I still have some of the beginners stuff that I just have no use for anymore and I'd like to find it a nice new home...

Speaking of which... I've been trying to organize my crafting/art supplies... I've bought a lot of those awesome clear boxes and my deco tapes and postcards-to-send have already moved ^0^ Today, among all kinds of papers and stuff to recycle into ATC backgrounds, I've found a bunch of old homeworks and tests ^.^

This was an amazing class about characters during my first uni year! Our teacher told us a lot about their origin, meaning and development, we had to solve riddles and we had to write characters beautifully as our homework. It was an optional course and not many students joined it (and I had to skip lunch to attend the optional classes), but it was totally worth the effort. Also, it was taught in Chinese and it was such an amazing experience... What a patient teacher we had who took time to explain everything a thousand times and to correct our scriblings... Well, it totally pissed me off that I couldn't write my last name beautifully (the one in the third row), so I totally wrote it like a thousand times... the comment below says that it almost looks like a native...uhm...writers' characters... It was the best reward I could get!

Some homework from the first year's conversation class... We had the best teacher ever! We were afraid of her first, because she was very strict ~ but in fact, she was very kind and sweet. I even slept at her place once after a party ^.^ The comment says 'finally I've found some mistakes (in your homework)' ^.^

Another homework from the first year. This teacher was no good at explaining grammar, but she had her creative methods and I liked that ^.^ (The story is about how it's more important to have a good teacher instead of multi-media learning ^.^ I was so anti-progress ^.^ ) Also, being from Taiwan, she helped me a lot with learning traditional characters. At that time there were no cool online dictionaries and I guess I didn't even have internet at home. I think I didn't even possess a computer o.O So, I took the vocabulary list we had in our book with simplified characters, copied a list with the most used simplified/traditional equivalents (well, we had copy machines at least ^^) and looked up every single damn character in that list when I wrote my homework, then wrote the traditional form in brackets beside the simplified character ~ and the teacher went through that mess and made corrections. I actually wrote both, simplified and traditional actively in my first year o.O Crazy! Later, in Taiwan, I switched to traditional and just stayed like that ^.^ I sometimes make the effort to write simplified characters for non-native speakers who can't read traditional, but otherwise, come on, they're ugly and make no sense!

For the ones who have no idea about simplified and traditional characters: Traditional characters are, well, traditional. They were like this all the way, changing only slightly in the course of an endless amount of years. 

Here's an example (which means 'Ireland' ^^) ~ 愛爾蘭

Then, in the People's Republic efforts were made to alphabetize the masses, because well, all those characters were such a bitch to learn! So a few hundreds of characters were simplified, which means that the number of strokes was reduced.

Here's Ireland once again in simplified form ~ 爱尔兰

Looks quite nice to those who feel overwhelmed by the traditional characters' form... Well, the problem is that the characters' structure gets destroyed when you 'simplify' it randomly (yes, in many cases the simplified form is random). Imagine, if I would 'simplify' the above sentence by leaving out the words 'structure', 'character' and 'destroyed' ~ it would make no sense. Simplified characters are often stripped of important elements that are hints to meaning and pronunciation. The most often cited example is the first character of Ireland ~ ai, love (as you might have seen as a tattoo on somebody's most attractive body part). The simplified form replaces the part in the middle 心 'heart' with 友 'friend' ~ decide yourself what you like best ^.^ But being a person who thinks about language structure a lot, I certainly prefer the traditional characters.  And ~ simplified characters mostly look crappy in calligraphy...

Speaking of which...

Another homework in my first calligraphy class ^0^ I must say, the dots are the hardest to make T.T

An example of the times when I went slightly beyond the dots... I guess it was my second term in Taiwan ~ when I joined the Hakka club (I might have mentioned somewhere that I'm quite fascinated by the Hakka people). We had lessons with Taiwanese students who were beyond the basics in calligraphy ~ and our teacher was (still is!) such an amazing artist who let us be creative as well (this is why these characters look weird ^^). It was a lot of fun to try out crazy stuff ~ and to ask the teacher for a performance (and a souvenir ^0^).

I can't believe it was all ages ago... But to tell the truth, today I really felt like I (re)discovered treasures ~ because those two years were among the most happiest (yes, I'm using a double superlative and I mean it) of my life. 

Why am I writing all this stuff about how I learnt Chinese? Because I really want to tell you ~ please, find something that you really love and DO it! No matter what the others say, no matter how much you would be paid for it later, no matter whether it drives you crazy at times and makes you skip a few lunches ~ DO it! I'm not getting paid for Chinese right now (I would be though, if I didn't have a different job) and I've had my share of people who said that I'm a nutcase but I love it with all my heart and I will never regret any minute I've spent learning it. I'm also sure that if you're really good at what you love and what you learnt with passion, it will also pay off professionally in some way (well, if you love having fun more than having money). So ~ DO it ^.^

Now I'm trying to DO it with Japanese... 

I think I've overcome my language learning burn out and well, I'm looking forward to plunge into a new world of linguistic awesomness ^.^ 

Speaking of which...

I love Maura, did you know? 

Baby Maura ^0^ Whatever this antiquity is doing at getty images...

Recent mail

So far it's three sent, three received for November... Not a bad start, actually... This weekend was Chinese time ^0^ I noticed that it became harder for me to write in Chinese after not practicing for a long while, who would have thought... Now I also prefer to have my online dictionary available, but then I prefer shutting down my computer when writing letters, because internet and crap always distract me, so that was a kind of a dilemma =.= Soooo, I grabbed my good old paper dictionaries to use... I've a small one that is German-Chinese and Chinese-German and a big one that is Chinese-English only, so I sometimes need to be inventive when expressing myself ~ but it's still good to look up characters I forgot how to write (*yeah, shame on me*) and those that I could never remember (silly things like 'wall' or 'lazy', it's ridiculous, but obviously I can't help it...). Do you also have words you always spell wrong? Somehow, Chinese is pretty compact, both in writing and structure, so if I write like 5-6 pages, it's already like a pretty long letter ~ and these few pages have pretty much taken up my free day... But letters are always worth spending time on, right? ^^

 

My incoming from last week ^^ My mail all came on the same day... sigh... some more Chinese letters to write ^^

I've ordered those amazing books on amazon... I adore illustrators and secretly dream of being one (just dreaming, actually... in reality I just want to draw something once in a while ^^), so I've got this huge book with sketches and illustrator stories in the middle, then 'drawing lab' for just drawing (there are soooo many fun ideas ^0^) and the hand lettering one because I looooooooove fooling around with letters and characters but I'm too impatient to learn real calligraphy, so I'm going to try some of that ^^

My ultimate goal would be to draw Maura ^0^ But now I'm still too scared of 'disfiguring' her wonderful face, so I've just tried one eye... and her dog that sat by her side ^.^

oh, my sweetheart... 

yeah, I know, I'm derailing my own post... so here's my outgoing... (I forgot to take pix of two letters last week... mehhh)

well, I feel like this space looks too blank without a comment ^.^

 I had such a wonderful time with this Kagoneko calendar all this year, so I'm happily recycling/sharing it ^^

insert another nonsense comment...

 I've copied a page from a book by Jimmy Liao, a Taiwanese writer/illustrator, because my friend likes bunnies ^^ This book is 'Turn left, turn right' and it's about two people who live next door but don't know it, then they meet somewhere by accident and lose each other again and oh, it's such a sweet story and I love Jimmy for combining text and pictures so brilliantly...
I watched the movie that was made after this book in Taiwan and it bears so many memories, because well, this was what Taiwan looked like for me too... and isn't Takeshi Kaneshiro one of the best looking guys on earth?? ^0^

I've found a good trailer on youku, but this page won't let me embed it, so here's a link...

Turn Left Turn Right Trailer

Some more nice pix from Jimmy's homepage ^.^