Paper Riceball

The lights cast a nice shadow on my retainer case, so I drew it…

In keeping with Prof Smith’s requirement of sketching from life, here are this week’s sketches. They were much easier than previous weeks’ sketches, because I didn’t have the pressure of creating something from my imagination- I like this. Compared to my past sketching experiences, it was also easier to do the actual drawing for some reason. Everything looks a little bit more realistic in these drawings than in my previous drawings.

Drawing without lifting my pencil- works out well with wires.

Broom in the NAC Cafeteria- don’t know why I drew this one, but I really like it.

SUV across the street- it looks too fat, like a cartoon car. The day before I drew this one, I tried drawing a sedan, but it drove away before I could finish. I’ll upload that sketch, along with a finished sketch of a sedan, some other time.

Experimenting with my first set of calligraphy pens!

Bamboo…waves?…a boat…wind?

Inspired by sand art (or more like I just thought about this video while sketching):

Image courtesy of Burke Institute

Thinking out loud about a simple trick I learned to prevent myself from making wrong decisions.

I don’t think there are such things as wrong decisions. There are definitely bad decisions, but there aren’t any wrong decisions. Making a “wrong decision” suggests that we could go back in time and fix the decision because it was wrong, like a mistake- like when I play a piece on the piano and hit the wrong key, I can pause, go back a measure or two, and replay the piece with the right note. But in life, we can’t always go back and change our decisions. The decisions we can change are no longer decisions- they simply become mistakes that we can fix, they become those cases of “whew, I almost made the wrong decision but didn’t”.

I can think of many times when I almost made a “wrong decision”, but somehow changed my decision. Like during junior year of high school when I chose to take AP French class, but dropped it after a month and switched to Japanese Level 1- I almost took a year of AP French, but I didn’t. Taking AP French may have been a “wrong decision”, but because I didn’t go through with it, it’s as if I never made that decision in the first place. A lot of times, we (or at least I) tend to focus on what we consider to be “wrong decisions” instead of what we consider to be “right decisions”- the “wrong decisions” stick in our mind while the “right decisions” slip through our memories. It’s easier to think of what went wrong and hope or wish for a different outcome than it is to think of how something good can become bad- we don’t want to think of losing the good things in our lives, but we do want to think about getting better things.

I’m guilty of spending a lot of time thinking about how my life could be better instead of focusing on what’s already good about it. After a year, I was finally able to stop thinking of how things would be different if I’d gone to a different college. I should be happy with being able to go to college, and I could have spent all that time thinking of important things to do while in college. Heck, I should be happy I actually have the time and ability to write blog posts.

Long story short, the trick to not making wrong decisions isn’t really a trick- it’s logic plus a mindset. Just believe that it’s not possible to make them- if you believe there are no such things as “wrong decisions” then how can you make them? When you think you’ve made a “wrong decision”, pause and realize that you actually didn’t. Think of the best situation and the worst situation- chances are, you’ll find yourself somewhere in the middle, which is actually a great place to be.