Cupcakes & Carnage

i'm very far from giving enough thanks. i just hope that you guys will stick around long enough to a point where i can show my appreciation properly.

HE'S BACK! JACK WHITE, MY LOVE, HE'S BACK!! And he's back with his trademark simple but meaningful tunes. Oh, St. Valentines, you truly are a useful little thing! You found me someone to fall in love with again :-) And the lyrics to this one are so eerily awesome... Totally my type of thing. AUGH. AUGH. MY HEART, IT HURTS AND IT HURTS GOOD!

BOOYEAH MOTHERFLUFFERS, THIS MAN WILL FILL YOUR HEART IF YOU LIKE WOOD. I picked this book up when I went to my Central when I was actually supposed to be picking up books about something completely different.. But, I mean, who could let up a good book about minimalistic architecture involving WOOD. Seriously though people, as you have probably figured out, I am a big fan of light-brown woods, particularly cedar, used in architecture.

My favourite picks from the plans and building shared in The Ozarks was the Keenan TowerHouse, Arkansas House, and the Srygley Office Building (but only when illuminated.)

Here's Keenan:


HOW FREAKING PERFECT IS THIS?! Wood, an elevator, one simple room, and you get to see everything happening around you! Also a very good spot to have in case of a zombie apocalypse. Love it.

Next is Arkansas:

Not as big of a fan of this one because of it's size... I prefer smaller studio spaces. Maybe if I had peeps to live with, or if a family comes into play... But on my own? Not a chance. I got this in a lottery and I'd be selling it off, easy. Well. Maybe. It's pretty damn beautiful. And look at that wood! LOL

Here we have the ILLUMINATED Srygley:
There was actually a nicer picture of this in the actual book. It's 10x more gorgeous there because it just bursts with linear beams of light and it's at a much darker level of night. Ah wellz.

Here's Mr. Blackwell's firm website: YEUH BUDDAY.

Some of these designs weren't in the book I was reading, so based on the website, here are my added favourites:

CABINS AT FALLINGWATER HNGGGGGGGGGG!!! WOWOWOW, freaking genius. And the name is pretty legit too, wah!
I

I am in absolute love with minimalism, both in architecture, in art, and in life. Another thing I find that I absolutely adore apart from the clever arrangement of wood and wooden beams is the use of glass walls. It has to be walls with me for some reason-- windows just don't compare hahaha! But yes, windows that are open to seeing a cityscape, or more, trees, or even more, THE SKY. Like the above. Perfection, man.


And yep yep, that's it for not. Shud probably go study for the accounting final that I'm going to rulez tmr :-)

later days,

- j

i am an individual. i am unique in the sense that i am a one-of-a-kind combination of reused ideas. there is no other person in the world exactly like me. there are people similar to me, certainly, as is the same for everyone i think, but no one is exactly like me.

i find this all quite thrilling, but i have been asking myself and almost lethal amount of questions lately, freezing me up and making it hard for me to function. here are some of them (mixed in with statements/conclusions that i've ended up with:)

• when people say they "don't judge," they can't possibly mean that to the full extent because everyone judges. 
• what is the point of Tumblr? i understand that it can be a source of inspiration, but mostly, it seems like a recycling of moments of other people's lives.
• why is it that society, as a whole in general, tends to shun the black sheep when there's nothing freaking wrong with being the black sheep?  
• Facebook, in my opinion, puts things in whack. I mean this in the sense that its changed the way that people talk to each other. "Catching up" doesn't really mean the same thing as it used to.

SOMEONE please just take me to the forest and hang out with me in an awesome hut. We'll hunt deer and bake cookies and sing ukulele songs and NOT record them and NOT care about how many views our awesome song gets...

but there it is again. YouTube is a great GREAT tool to get your creative content out there, but at what point doesn't it get to be more a contest for views and shit than being about the actual music, or film-making, or... soul? (AUGH WHY DID I TAKE THE PHILOSOPHY CLASS?! Now I question everything that doesn't have a FREAKING ANSWER.)

another thing-- i have the desire to be beautiful, but i have thought about this way too much and almost each time i've hammered at the whole possibility of buying myself clothes, dressing myself up, etc. ... more than being beautiful is being true. which, if you allow it, can be synonymous with beautiful.

my studio art teacher shared with the class an enlightening essay the other day, reading it to us as the class tried its best to draw a skeleton on paper with conte. (so difficult, hahaha.) he concluded with his own thoughts, basically telling us that money should never be the main motivation to produce art as an artist.

i know that sounds painfully obvious, but it was sort of a wake up call for me. and big font so i'll notice it straight-away when i come around in the future.

see, i'm a pretty jealous person. it's kind of my vice. like, i'd never do wrong onto someone out of jealousy. it's just something that i keep to myself-- but it's intrinsically destructive. 

AND MY GOODNESS, I'M GETTING FLIPPIN' TIRED. i hate hating. it's uncool, man. seriously, it's so intertwined with the way i think and breathe and live... it's a lot better than when i was in high school-- i've gotten better at seeing the awesome side of things in the past year or so... but want to rid this self-depreciating darkness out of myself FOREVAAAAA. so i'm working on dat hahaha

hmmm... in terms of my appearance and my character-- more, my being-- i am by no means what is deemed by social standards "elegant," or "sexy." i'm this lanky, filipino kid who likes to wear coats that are too large with leggings. i swear like a sailor, love typography and design, and the fact is, i'm quite the walking contradiction. by this, i mean that, apart from my underlying love for irony, i am a kid who has always not always favoured the thought of becoming an accountant... i'm an artsy-crafty kid by nature, but i ended up on an unusual path.

and despite it all, i'm starting to like it. people i know don't believe me, and sometimes i don't believe me either. its good and well even though sometimes i feel a little like i'm going insane as i buffer between a world of numbers and a world of colours and writing and drawing and singing...

but i hope that somehow, on this journey, i find a way to be elegant and beautiful and great in my own, weird way. and mostly, i hope to make myself my own and to stop giving a shit about what some other people think... because God knows i think about that more than i think about anything else. soooo....

i'm sort of just going in circles with this now, like major brain puke... but i still don't know what i'm going to do about Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook... I've been thinking about it long enough to know that the best idea would be to ditch the world of social media. It may not be like this for others, but it all takes a pretty negative toll on me... But I'm A BIZNE$$ STUDENTTTT!! Social networking seems sort of mandatory...

damn it, this is sort of when i wish there was a manual to guide people in.

business student? Not happy with societal norms? Don't want to be part of social networking but still interested in networking? Then, YEAH OKAY DO DIS !! ---> ________________. if only, right? :-/

i have SERIOUSLY been debating this internally for, continuously, six months now, and on and off since three or four years ago. I DUNNO WAT DO I DO. :-( like, i invested so much fookin time into FB and i have pictures and friends and shit... but like... what the hell man.

and notice how my blog formality sort of just went out the window, puahaha. but yeh, some questions for you to hurt your brain a little. or a lot.

- jen

PS: I LOVE MEME FACES YAYAYAYA

An interesting evening, this one... Just straight chilling, listening to Gorillaz, checking up on my favourite blogs-- and thought I'd take this time to share one of my favourites.

Vancouver has a great street artist in Jerm IX. The man is fragging genius. Example:

He seems to specialize in stenciling and what I believe is wheatpasting. On top of this, he has a brilliant, poetic blog called Abandonment Issues, wherein he takes pictures on his explorations to old, abandoned places which look entirely likey places from a different planet. It's unbelievable.

So yeah. 'Sit for now. Will be back with more ponderous goodies in the near future :-)

- j

I'd just like to take a moment right now to say thank you to life, my friends, any existing higher power out there, karma and all that jazz for making my last year fruck-ducking amazing. I am so grateful for everything. And it snowed last night too! I'm off for my birthday (from school at least,) and good food and family and stories and CLEANING are in my near future! I love cleaning hahaha... So many things. Thank you. May the 21st year be amazing in its own way ♥

I had heard much about the movie "10 Things I Hate About You" and I was thrilled to find out that it was a modern adaptation of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew." Another thrilling fact was that it was available on YouTube, so I could watch it from the convenience of my covers off of my sister's iTouch. Dearest Mr. Ledger played the most fabulous character. I will definitely be watching this movie again in the future. Though I never knew the man, I miss him very much :-( RIP, sir~

- j

It's been awhile since the me and my sibling's room has been moved around, so it doesn't exactly look like this anymore. However, I'd like something to look back at so here are little snapshots of the place one day in the past :-)

- j

It's quite possibly the biggest truth of my life. I was never really the one to smile. People asked me to smile and I would try but it would never feel right. I need to really be exploding with "YES" to smile. I wasn't really the happiest kid when I was growing up. It wasn't because I had some shitty upbringing, but more that I feel my creativity was smothered. That, and I was, and still sometimes am, painfully shy. I feel that my creativity is the only gateway to my happiness. At least that I am aware of, as of now.

But I'm happy to say, that I am smiling more than ever. Which is synonymous with me creating more than ever. I think this might be what it feels like to be in love-- because I am. I am in love with almost every aspect of my life. It's insane that I could've been feeling this earlier, that I didn't have to be miserable when I was in high school, that this is what kept me wondering about other people who were kind and happy with their lives.

I predict a great year ahead. So far, 2011 has definitely been one of a kind. I am proud, and most of all, grateful.

- j