[EDIT] Check it out, an old domain name finally put to good use: Animekandi - Art and Design links.

Fuck, I love school.

I’ve only recently come around to this. Ever since I started at university I’ve enjoyed it, but not until this summer have I really started to love it, to get really, really excited about projects and just being there. Last week after class (I’ve been taking some summer courses) I came home and exploded through the door. I had tons of ideas for a million different things flying around in my head and I had to get them down. I filled up four pages in my sketchbook just of notes and little thumbnail sketches of ideas for all these things. Nobody else was home at the time so I cranked up the music on the speakers and sang and danced and jumped around and wrote; I got a little crazy. I was just so excited, and happy. I haven’t really had any doubt that graphic design is where I’m meant to be, but now I know for sure that it’s what I should be doing with my life, and I absolutely adore it.

In the first couple of years - well just first year really - I treated university like high school 2.0, where we had a lot more freedom and didn’t need a note to get out of class. I skipped quite a lot, which at my school can get you kicked out of a class (they’re one of the few schools that actually has an attendance policy - miss three classes and you’re out, regardless of the reason), and I’m lucky most of my teachers were cool and didn’t care about attendance, else I would’ve been more screwed than I am right now. I liked the classes and most (but not all) of my teachers, I guess… I was just too irresponsible, and maybe not quite mature enough, to handle the responsibility of going to class and staying there, rather than say, skipping to go see a movie with a friend instead. I didn’t get much out of first year, but even if I had been a good student I don’t think I would’ve gotten a lot out of it anyway. I’ve actually been told by somebody working in the faculty of design office before that first year is really just a “weeding out” process, and a lot of students get “weeded out”. I almost did. The teachers will all talk about how marks don’t matter and it’s all about the quality if your work, but the school administration will tell you otherwise: you need to have a minimum 65 average to stay the school, you can get kicked out for skipping etc. I’ve actually been reprimanded by the administration for having low marks (usually in the 60’s, I was never a star student), even when the teachers say it doesn’t matter. And when it comes to working in the design world, it really doesn’t. Employers will only look at your portfolio and the quality of your work. It definitely is good to say you went to school somewhere in general, and to “graduate with honors” or something wouldn’t be too shabby either, but otherwise they don’t care. The school just wants to make itself look good, it doesn’t want idiots attending because it would make them look bad. Which is why they try to weed out the bad kids during first year. I know a few people that had to leave, or nearly did because of this whole thing, and they are really good artists and designers, they just aren’t the academic kind. And honestly, an academic art student? Kind of an oxymoron.

Despite the dumb policies my school has, I still love it. Skipping doesn’t even cross my mind at all now, I look forward to going. I would say I started liking it during the second course I took this summer, which it still on right now. It’s not really the teacher, although I do like him I suppose (although I already have some favourites which I absolutely love), it’s just… the atmosphere. I was tempted to start skipping classes this time around, and with the class before this I didn’t really wanna go, but my mentality has just changed regarding design at school. I always enjoyed the stuff I did for myself more because I could do whatever I wanted and have a lot more fun. With school projects I felt like I had to stick to all these rules and just do things this certain way that was kind of all corporate and not very creative or interesting. That’s since changed though and now I find I can have fun and experiment and still do good design.

It’s kind of weird, now that I’m enjoying it so much more I also enjoy doing anything involving design, like research. There’s a lot of research involved. For example, I might be entering ths deisgn contest thing, where we have to design a shirt based around “democracy” and the idea behind it (but try not to include any Hillary/Obama/McCain stuff), so I was researching the United Nations. Normally politics bores me to tears, but I had an idea and I looked into it and I was reading about the UN’s history and found it interesting, when normally I wouldn’t. Another example, we were just assigned a place branding project yesterday, and I chose Pangea (the supercontinent millions of years ago that all the continents we have now came from) just to be different - everybody else chose a place that actually exists right now. Except one kid, I’m not sure if he finally decided yet ’cause he was having a hard time choosing, but he was considering doing Mordor or The Roman Empire, among others. Other people chose Iraq, Palestine, Sheffield, and some islands in northern Canada that are covered in ice. Anyway, I have to research Pangea now, and normally it might be boring to read up on all this history, but since it’s design related, it’s so interesting. I’m learning that Pangea “grew” from other continents and learning what cratons are and all this stuff. As I read I imagine different logos I can make based on all this information - dinosaurs, meteors, puzzle related stuff… it’ll be so cool. I have to design a logo for the place and do a presentation on it, which will be fun since I can do it any way I want: Power Point (which I’ll probably stay away from), Flash, a website, etc. It’ll be awesome. I can already imagine the typeface I’ll use… something history museum-esque, definitely with serifs, and I have to take into consideration that a lot of people have heard of Pangea but don’t remember what it is, and think it’s still an existing country, so I have to include some sort of visual reminder… damn, this is gonna be so much fun!

I just registered for classes for the fall last night/this morning, and although the school managed to screw everything up at first, I’ve since managed to get all the classes I need to take and with teachers that I like. Only two of my favourite teachers were teaching anything I have to take, and my absolute favourite isn’t teaching anything within my year. Still, two out of three isn’t bad, and I’m so pumped. I am screwed for courses though, like I mentioned earlier. Because of all this crap that happened with courses and credits over the past couple years I’m basically a year behind now, so the classes I’m taking this year are for second year rather than third year. I wouldn’t mind so much except for the fact that all my friends are now ahead of me and I won’t have classes with them, and then they’ll graduate before me and I’ll be all alone in fourth year. I can make new friends though, right? I’ve tried playing catch up but it just isn’t worth it. I’ve been taking summer courses for the past couple years but I’m not going to bother any more. You just don’t get the same quality of learning when you try to speed through everything, so I’d rather take it slow and earn my degree in five years and learn lots of valuable things rather than speed up the process so I can do it in the original four years and miss out on stuff. It’s still a bit frustrating though. But I guess if I love school this much then an extra year of it shouldn’t be that bad.

I know I’m a pretty bad blogger. From what I’ve gathered from reading other blogs and going from tiny internet community to tiny internet community, right now it’s a bloggers responsibility to come up with entries on a regular basis that are interesting and thought-provoking and well-written and to respond to every comment you receive and comment on the commenters blog in return with an interesting comment about what they wrote. You have to write almost every day, and lately the majority of blogs have set up RSS feeds for their visitors and added Twitter to “tide readers over between entries and keep everybody up to date” and always have the latest Wordpress features installed.

I don’t do any of that, and I don’t really care. I started blogging when I was about 14, I’d been into webdesign for about at year by then so I knew what I was doing in terms of creating the blog, and I think I enjoyed making layouts and redesigning the thing rather than blogging. For a while I had interchangable skins and like five at a time just so I could make layouts as often as I wanted without taking one down forever after only a day of it being online - I could show off all my skills and cool ideas at once. I guess it’s no surprise I ended up studying graphic design in university. I did blog pretty often back then, not always every day, but I usually had something to say. My friends and I would go out and I would write down every detail: what each person ate, what each person bought; my entries were pretty much glorified lists. But I wrote every detail down. Not because I wanted to tell everybody, I don’t think I’ve ever had more than two or three regular readers at once over the course of my blogging life, but because I never wanted to forget everything.

Of course, I don’t really care who got what on that trip to mall when I was in grade nine today, but combine all those details together and it’s still reminds me of what it was like to be 14 and in grade nine. Who I was friends with and what kind of person I was. I’ve always thought forgetting was the worst thing that could ever happen, because once it’s forgotten, it’s just forgotten. Forever. Gone. I tend to remember a lot of things, I remember tons of anecdotes from when I was a kid and after listening to myself talk to people I’ve noticed that most of the time I’ll end up adding to a conversation by talking about something that happened when I was a kid. Again it doesn’t really matter, and I don’t want to say anything as cheesy as “All of those things are what made me the person I am today” I just… hate forgetting.

I’ve always kept some sort of journal. When I was a kid, a while before computers and the internet were really that mainstream and long before blogging existed, I always had these little notebooks that my mum bought for me and I would write in them. I wasn’t that regular with those either, I would write once or twice and usually forget about the book altogether, and a while later mum would buy me another book (often because she found ones with pretty covers or something) and I would write in that once or twice and forget about it and it happened over and over. Every time I wrote something new in a journal I would write out all the “details of me”. I think I imagined somebody finding this a long time after I died or myself finding it years from then, so I wanted to make sure they knew everything. I really just wrote down the basics: my birthday and current age, where I lived, what siblings I had, what grade I was in, what teacher I had, who my friends were, and as I got older what boys I liked or that I thought liked me. When I finally started creating websites and joining websites online (Neopets being the first one I think) I started to record all my usernames and passwords for everything so in the future somebody could, I don’t know, go in and alter them to say that I was dead (for whatever good that would do) or something. I’ve always thought about writing some sort of letter that people would read once I died, and listing all of these secret things I have online and offline so after my death, especially if I died young or unexpectedly, all my secrets would be out and any sort of mystery surrounding me or anything anybody ever wondered would be solved and answered. I guess I don’t really have any secrets that I want to take to the grave.

I remember in elementary school, I guess grade 1, I wrote an entry in one of those little notebooks where I stated that I was in grade 1 and Mrs. Moran was my teacher, I would probably have Mrs. Schmidt for grade 2 the next year because she always taught the grade 2 class. I actually ended up with Mrs. Moran the next year because some of the teachers moved around and Mrs. Schmidt started teaching a different grade 2/3 class than the one I ended up in. I never actually had her as a teacher… I’ve since run into her on the street within the past year and told her how I was doing and all. Anyway, life seemed to sort of be set for me. Not that my parents had planned my future out for me or anything, I just always knew what was coming. I guess I was aware of highschool and university/college (actually those two confused me when I was young, I wasn’t sure if you did college first and then university or something, I didn’t realize it was one or the other) and I suppose I knew that school would eventually end and I would have a job and all. But I didn’t think of it. When I was in grade 1 there was still seven more years of elementary school to complete, then four years of highschool. Life had a pattern that was school five days a week from September to July, then two months of summer vacation and then back to school for the next grade. All the same people, all the same teachers, the same classrooms, the same schoolyard, the same building. It was like this fact of life or something, you were in a grade with a teacher and blah blah blah. So that’s what I always wrote about.

Anecdote (I have one for everything, I swear): When I was in grade six a few of my classmates had siblings who were in grade eight and graduating (my elementary school was kindergarten to grade 8, FYI) so a lot of them were going to that years graduation ceremony in the church next door. I considered going since all these other people were, and I remember I actually did, although I think just to sing in the choir or something since I remember looking down on the kids from the choir loft. Anyway, I remember standing in front of the big mirror on the back of the door in the bathroom and saying to myself, “I dunno if I’ll go to the graduation this year. I might. Then I’ll probably go next year because that’s Jess’ grad (my older cousin) and then I’ll obviously go the year after that because it’ll be mine!” That was the pattern, and it’s just how life worked. I don’t know why I remember that moment exactly, but I remember thinking about that when I finally was in grade 8 and graduating, then again when I was in grade 12 and graduating high school, and I’ll probably think about it again when I graduate university. I like that I remember that, even if it’s not exactly special and nobody else cares, and my life probably wouldn’t be any different if I’d forgotten. But just thinking about grade 8 graduation and what a big deal that was back then, and comparing it to now… I’m glad I remember.

Even now I sometimes tend to write down all those details, just to keep everything straight. I mean, I know I was friends with so and so at some point, but how old was I? Because if I was that age at that time then that would mean this and so on. I like putting the pieces together and organizing all the details of my life. I guess it sounds kind of boring to put my life into a sort of organized list, but I like knowing everything and having it all straightened out. I think it would be kinda cool to make a detailed timeline of my life… I guess I’m really weird and organized like that, a bit of a perfectionist.

So if I want to have all that recorded and sorted, why do I suck at blogging? I don’t really know. Like I said, I was pretty adamant about it when I first started blogging. I wanted to get it all written down before I could forget anything. Nowadays I guess I just don’t care to remember what who bought and ate and where we all sat and stuff. I think knowing that nobody else cares either might make a difference. It’s always disheartening to create some sort of website, blog or otherwise, and not get any visitors or have any feedback. I also don’t particularly have anything important to say. I have opinions and such I suppose, and there is always something going through my head that seems important to me, but either I know I’m the only person who cares or I don’t want to let the general public know about it. I also don’t care about what “the blogging community” really thinks of me either. I don’t really like what it’s become, bloggers having all these “responsibilities” to their readers and such, what happening to writing for you? Because you don’t want to forget about a particular moment or just want to have your opinion heard. I think that writing thats forced simply to keep some anonymous people on the internet happy gets boring fast. Unless you constantly have things to say that you really care about why should you blog? I guess to hear yourself, maybe. I know I don’t care about somebody else’s gardening project or how well so and so did on their report card, but the people who wrote about that do. Sometimes I find myself reading over my own old blog entries and I find them vastly more interesting than any of the stuff other people write on their blogs, even if it’s really nothing special. Similarly, I can barely stand to read my own entries from years ago (they’re not online for the most part but I do have backups saved on my computer). I embarrass myself sometimes, and I otherwise don’t care about what I was talking about. That stuff is from so long ago and those people have left my life and I just don’t care. I do care about the stuff happening now though, which is why I can read over the most recent entries.

So I guess saying that, if I don’t care about my old entries, why bother writing stuff from the present down now since I’ll probably feel the same way about this stuff in the future? I still want to remember it. I may read over my old writing and cringe but I just have to remember that when I was 13 or 14 that’s how I felt and acted and thought and I would rather be old and remember that and cringe than forget everything that has happened to me and what kind of person I used to be, regardless of how insignificant it might be. Because, again, I think forgetting is the worst thing we can do.

So yeah, I’m a bad blogger. But I’m not here to entertain whoever happens to surf past, I blog for myself. If I want to remember something or tell people something I’ll write it down, but that doesn’t seem to happen that often (at least not publicly). And since I don’t have something to say every single day, you’re not gonna have something to read every day. So too bad and sucks to be you, I do what I want. I won’t apologize.