Oh, ahha, no, i can only draw stick people

 Over the past 13 months, i've rediscovered my love for art. i've been attacking all sorts of genres, i've grown a lot, and, apparently, i have some kind of innate talent that was given to me by fairies under a full moon.

i respect and appreciate compliments - they encourage me so much - and i suppose i acknowledge that i have some kind of visual gifting. But you wouldn't believe how many people i have met who, upon seeing my drawings, immediately place themselves below me on the talent scale. "Oh, i wish i could draw like that!"

Newsflash: when Mrs DaVinci  was putting little Leonardo's artwork on the fridge, it probably looked like this:

Okay. Mountainbikers. Have we got any mountainbikers here? That's great. i'm happy for you. i'm glad that your passion is the outdoors, or maybe plumbing, or cooking or surfing. There are people who aren't artistically inclined - lots of people. YAY. Diversity. A+. Fantastic. Live great lives doing your thing. Do that.

But for everyone who wishes they were born with the flower-nymph gifting of Art, please listen to what i have to say. i am not putting myself down, i am trying to share the joy i find in art, and give everyone a chance to experience it.

Art is not genius. it is not a case of Either You Have it Or You Don't. True, some people are more inclined towards painting or sketching than others, but i have found that there is a ridiculous mentality that you have to start good and get better. Nobody starts good. You suck at design? Awesome. i sucked at design before i started developing more of an eye for it. (Yes, i know that my blog's layout is awful). Actively pursue your talent, even if you're convinced you don't have any. There will be years of frustration, years where you can't quite capture what you want to capture. But just the fact that you're frustrated with your own skill shows you have an eye for what you want to do.

Oh, you protest, but the world doesn't need another artist. There are so many good artists out there. Look at the internet!

The point of art is not to be the best, guys. The point of art is not to be the best. The point of singing is not to be Adele. The point of smiling is not to be a dentist's kid. The point of sleeping is not to be Rip Van Winkle. Make art, because art is a form of self-expression that is healthy and therapeutic and fun. Make art because it is a form of communication. Make art because you've always wanted to. Don't make art because you want to be good at art.

Make art. Treat yourself to some fancy supplies you don't know how to use; none of us know the principals of watercolour when we get our first set. Scribble down your depression with a 6B pencil. Put your happiness on your driveway with chalk. Photoshop your fear.

Make art, and don't wait to be good enough.

Make art.

More Glory Than the World Has Known

well it's been like four months since i last posted.
But I had to dump my soul out. So here I am.

Before we get onto this actual post, a brief update on my life:
-i met a platonic soulmate
-i watch a lot of tv
-summer cannot come fast enough
-[obligatory comment about how freaking tough school is right now like don't even talk to me]

-all the songs make sense now

There's a quote from a tv show called Castle, which I don't watch, but is very relevant to my life right now.
"How do you know you're in love?" "All the songs make sense."

Now, I hate the "I'm dating Jesus!1!!<333" stuff as much as the next guy. So I'm not making this comparison idly. I'm making it because I finally understand all the hymns, all the worship music, all the crazy things people say about wanting to live for Jesus.

I don't know how to talk about what's happened. Everything I'm typing reads like I'm calm. I don't jump up and down in church. but i wANT TO TYPE LIKE THIS AND I WANT TO SCREAM AND SHOUT AND DANCE IN THE AISLES. I KEEP REPEATING "THE HOLE INSIDE ME HAS BEEN FILLED" BECAUSE IT HAS. THE EMPTY SPACE IN MY STOMACH THAT I FUTILELY TRY TO FILL WITH FANDOMS AND RELATIONSHIPS FEELS LIKE IT'S BEEN STUFFED WITH NEVERENDING HOT FOOD. I FEEL LIKE I'M JUST TASTING THE VERY EDGE OF THIS, GLIMPSING THE HEM OF GOD'S ROBE.

"'Cause I got changed by what I've been shown,
It's more glory than the world has known,
Keeps me ramblin' on,
And skippin' like a calf
Loosed from his stall,
I'm free to love once and for all,
And even when I fall I get back up
Through the joy that overflows my cup.
Heaven filled me with more than enough,
Broke down my levees and my bluffs,
Let the flood wash me."

I'M GOING! TO! EXPLODE!
I HAVE FOUND THE KEY TO LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING. IT'S NOT 42, IT'S TRUSTING IN GOD COMPLETELY AND LETTING GO OF YOUR FEARS AND DOUBTS AND BEING STILL AND KNOWING THAT HE IS /GOD/ AND SHARING THE GLORY YOU'VE SEEN WITH OTHERS. THIS IS SUPERNATURAL. THIS ISN'T NORMAL.

I COULD GO ON IN ALL-CAPS FOR A VERY LONG TIME, BUT I HAVE A FEELING THAT PEOPLE TAKE ME A LITTLE LESS SERIOUSLY WHEN I AM SCREAMING AT THEM SO HEY HO BACK TO LITTLE TEXT

So, anyway. Today in church, my dad gave a really good sermon about suffering for Jesus. Me and my friend Mary had been talking a day or two before about how much we'd rather burn up than stick to the shade.
Log book: April 2013. I'm fifteen years old, and I'm tired of living for the distant future. I don’t want to go to school, get married, go on a honeymoon, pay the bills, and die. I can’t stand that. Not because I don’t like the idea, I do. I want to kiss someone and go to Iceland with him and maybe have a kid or two.
But I have discovered a love and a truth that blows everything out of the water and I can’t live normal. I was just sitting in church, soaked in jealousy of Paul the Apostle because how he suffered but still knew the truth. He was out there, preaching, moving the Gospel forward. The church is advanced through the blood of the martyrs. You cannot live safely defending this. And I don’t want to. I want to feel great pain and know that my God is greater and know that I am honouring him. I want to throw away my entire life. I want to live with insane radness. I don't want to get to heaven and cry because I wasted my life. I want to live in a way that is not safe and is not fun or comfortable, but that is sustained by God.

I JUST.

I'M SORRY I HAD TO SPILL THIS.



MICAH OUT.

PEACE.



P.S. LISTEN TO THIS MUSIC BECAUSE IT'S THE BEST MUSIC EVER.

character looks and likeability and orwell and bradbury

Guy Montag is really an honestly likeable character.

The first time i read Fahrenheit 451 i didn’t like him at all, but i think it was for the same partial reason i didn’t like Winston in 1984 - they were reportedly ugly, or i imagined them ugly, and human beings are drawn to beautiful things and in the midst of such an ugly world i needed some kind of light. is that superficial? i think it’s human to go after lovely things. the flaw in that is that sometimes the loveliness isn’t immediate and we can dismiss a search after the initial disappointment.

anyway once i put faces - faces i can relate to, that don’t blend in with the grey setting - on characters, they get a lot nicer and i can see them for who they actually are. Montag torched a guy with a flamethrower and burns things for a living and has killed lots of people. yes. but he’s also genuinely loving towards this woman who he feels nothing for. He gets worked up and treats her badly once in a while. That is a conflict in his character and great characters have those. But he just acts in a way, no matter what his words are, that says he cared a great deal for her at one time, and that is still there somewhere.

he is very lost and rediscovering the world outside his grey entertainment. He tastes the rain when no one else will. He wants to yell at the world blasting him with noise to shut up. he is frustrated and flawed and just doing his best. He’s observant. He has fears. Somehow, to me, Winston from 1984 represented the worst of humanity, covered in indignity, fighting but losing - and Montag is rising from indignity and winning against the odds.

I guess maybe what separates a hero from another is the outcome of their character battle, in literature. I guess we want to be, need to be told that humanity will conquer and beauty exists. montag represents that. He searches for books, which are beloved to me. He quits his job burning things. he’s intimidated by people and runs but eventually finds a way out and survives. Winston just sinks into his human waste more and more and after a moment of struggle is crushed inevitably. You can’t blame him for that, for being ugly in an ugly situation, you can’t blame him for circumstance. But the message he carries is so full of despair that I think shying away from him is not a wrong response.

I have no idea what the point of this post was.

And if you read it i love you to bits. come let me embrace you.

ermagersh firefly

I finished Firefly and the sequel movie Serenity. It was so beautiful. As I posted on Tumblr, Serenity was hellish perfection. If you've seen it, FANGIRL WITH ME. If you haven't - it's on Netflix and I highly recommend it. There are a few scenes that have, you know, mature content, but in general the series is really worth watching. It is so lively and real, filled with absolutely vibrant characters, gripping plots, heart-shredding tragedy and a real uplifting inspiration - the themes of nomadic freedom and having a code of honour and doing better than people think you will and survival and perseverance and  finding your way in the 'verse. Good stuff.

Also, MERRY CHRISTMAS. In celebration of happiness and creys, I give you Wash spam, consisting of gifs that I don't own. (for those of you that haven't seen Firefly/Serenity, Wash is a very loveable comedic relief type character. Usually I'm not that fond of these characters, but I just attached to Wash. He's got integrity and his relationship with his wife is adorable and - I hardly even know why I'm so fond of him. I just am.)

how i feel when sticking my head outside the window. maybe i just need to get out more often

Nights like this, you feel the earth's potential, the fact that outside your little bubble of comfy backyards there is a swarm of people who all have different worldviews and situations. Sonder is the word, I think, and it means that somewhere opposite of where you are, on a little backstreet in a quiet brick and stone English village next to a florists' down a little lane there is a house with willow trees choking it up and an old lady lives there with her passionate nostalgia and  it's a little muddy misty lane and the windows are fogged up 

and somewhere else in a teeny apartment a woman with cheap jewellery who has never really known a really comfortable life like yours, whose little bubble world is not inclusive of hours of pleasurable internet browsing, who only knows love as an abuse, lives - reading, reading is her pleasure, her passion, with crossed legs on a little couch and the apartment is the kind that you don't think smells very good when you walk in and the curtains are out of date and her whole world is trying to make her struggle worth it without even knowing it and she's in dull pain but she just loves to read and she sits with her back against orange  patterned curtains in front of a little boxy tv and waits for someone she doesn't really like to come home and makes pasta with one hand on a book

and somewhere else there's a really cold flat desert and what actually is a television? and life is lighting fire in the cold and she is human too, just as human as you but her world is a different planet earth and she is not someone who should be worried about social issues; she is a social issue, but she's happy getting an iron pail up from the well with frozen fingers and her jokes are simple and she shares a tent with her brothers and they tell ghost stories about wolves while buried under rugs and she exists outside your planet earth.

and there is a beautiful woman in london with a short skirt walking up the midnight street from Harrod's with shopping bags, chatting on a cellphone, red lipstick flashing in the city lights and she soaks in the joy of being  alive while the cars rush around her and busses  cough smoke and architecture is smogged and little does she know later on in the evening her boyfriend will pull out a diamond ring in an indian food restaurant with puppets on the ceiling and she will say yes and they'll kiss on the top level of an empty red bus as it heads home and

there are lots of lives and none of them has anything to do with yours.

HEY GUYS I'M NOT DEAD

So, a few minutes ago, I was all, "You know what would be cool? If i kept a journal online where people could read it if they felt like it. Because I journal a lot and I almost want to share it."

and then i thought

THERE IS THAT BLOG YOU ABANDONED IN THE SUMMER MY FRIEND

there is that blog.

You will have noticed some things. Like, I haven't been around for months, there's that. This is because I got a blog on another blogging platform (Tumblr), as you've probably heard, and I use it 24/7, so Blogger was sort of left behind. Which was not entirely right, of course.

you will also have probably noticed that my grammar has disintegrated into dust. I would apologise, but, you know, I won't.

Basically, welcome back to Snippets, Slices and Scenes, and I will try to be less pretentious this time, if you'll have me.

If anyone cares, my life has been this since September:

- Intense school with a new system. This includes lots of flailing around in the dark and working harder than I ever have (which, unfortunately, isn't saying much). Side effects: sporadic crying. Also a new sense of purpose and happiness, when I've had a good day.

-ART ART ART ART WHY CAN'T I WRITE ANYMORE I SCREAM AS I MASS-PRODUCE PICTURES OF TOM HIDDLESTON. (spoiler alert: I got over my writer's block. But it took a very long time. And I wasn't just being lazy I tried and tried to write. But I was just on an art kick.)

-The Fault in Our Stars, and along with it, an almost-new way of seeing the world. Nerdfightia. All things John Green. Re-reading Hazel Grace's story on a ferry boat, crossing the ocean to see history on an island, looking out the window and seeing a timeless hazy grey sea-meets-sky line. New people to meet.

-Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Bordering on a worrying obsession. As in, I looked up the COMICS and am seriously planning to buy them on Amazon. Oh yeah and I'm watching Firefly.

-Apparently I like going to the gym, which is kind of a revelation. It feels almost like being more honest with myself. Like, before, everyone said they hated it so i focused on how crappy i felt when i ran - instead of how the stairwell is all glass and the lovely smell of new paint, and how the facility is really nice, and how it actually feels very, very good to have lost some weight and become a little more fit. I get how people hate it, and i'm not trying to say I'm better than anyone for enjoying it. It's just a weird quirk of me, I guess.

It's kind of ridiculous how much I feel like I've changed since SEPTEMBER. I want to keep track of this little life, and the teeny lovely things like I said before. I feel like I wasn't writing straight from the heart, almost, though, before. Now I want to do my best to do that.

If you're still here and reading this, bless you. If you're new, hi. Bless you too.

Review: Divergent by Veronica Roth

I feel divergent.

In my opinions, I mean. I'm not on the "hate, kill it with knives and spoof it to death" side, like I am with some YA fiction, but I'm not raving, flying flags in the streets, spamming Tumblr with joy notes, or falling out of my chair like I sometimes am, either. I'm somewhere in the middle.

The following review contains spoilers.

On team "this was epic", I felt extremely engaged in Divergent. Maybe it was just that I was wondering whether I'd make it through Dauntless initiation the whole time, but I felt inordinately connected to the story world. Not the characters, not the setting, but the challenges. Jump of a roof? Could I do that? I don't know, could I? It was really interesting and I think back on the reading experience as a startlingly interactive one, and vivid despite the fact I feel like we didn't get enough description. Because yes, I sort of felt like the story skimmed a little, and not enough description was given. It took me a while to figure out things about the city, and most of the time I could never quite picture the setting.

There weren't a horrible number of Hunger Games similarities, but … is it standard to use the name "The Hob"? And when Tobias "confused enemy with friend" under the power of an injection, I was forcefully reminded of Peeta in Mockingjay.

As for characters, I just feel like they could have been clearer, faster. Fears were confronted before Tris, the main character, had struggled with them, and everyone's worst-fear simulations - well, they didn't seem unique, except for Tobias'. Anyone at all would be scared of crows pecking your face off, right? And these fears didn't seem to carry out into the real world; I never saw Tris being scared of water outside of the simulations and one life-and-death situation where she's wishing for anything else. She was held over the chasm, sure, and that involved water,  but again, anyone would be terrified if you dangled them over a river at the bottom of a cliff. So I didn't feel like that was support for that particular thing. Also, sex was one of Tris' biggest fears, but she never expressed that when she and Tobias were kissing up a storm all over the place, before. And right after that revelation, she and Tobias went to his room and she asked him to take off his shirt, and they kissed some more, and then chilled on a bed for a while. Like … I don't know, it didn't seem real.

Tobias was terrified of heights in one section, and in the next he walked up precarious stairs backwards. Tris scorned Al for crying, then cried a lot, herself, all over the book (or was always on the brink of tears) - and then claimed that she wasn't the crying type. Tris was supposed to hide the fact that she could manipulate hallucinations - in fact, wasn't supposed to be able to manipulate them, at the last test - and then goes ahead and blatantly relies on her manipulation anyway. Just small things like that, but they added up to make the characters feel a bit vague.

Tris never felt like a really sympathetic character. She was both selfish and brave, and while those can balance out beautifully - I've seen it done in my favourite fictional character of all time - her sadism when she fought Molly, her thirst for revenge, that brutal refusal to forgive Al, a refusal she didn't really ever repent of, even after his death - they were off-putting. I'm not saying that a character shouldn't be flawed. But when the biggest thing I remember about them is their flaws, when even their best trait - bravery - feeds their pride, they're not sympathetic.

As for secondary characters, I did appreciate Tris' mother, and her death was really sad and well-done. Christina was great except that little moment with the flag in Capture the Flag. Like … what was that, anyway? It made her feel untrustworthy, was it supposed to be that way?

Pacing? The ending cut off really fast. The build-up of 500 pages, then 80 of substance and life-and-death, and then … and then it's over? Everything went fast except for the training, which went on for a very long time. I feel like this could have been more balanced out. The romance rushed ahead at full speed, and I'm not going to yell about that, because I'm a teenage girl and deep down I don't actually mind all that much. But I did feel it was strange that Tris and Tobias were so together, and then only began to figure out that they loved each other at the end. Is it just me, or do you normally love someone before you kiss them in public, defying what might be seen as right, before you can't bear to shoot them even when they're crazy, before the sound of their voice wakes you up from zombie mode?

To get really annoying, I found a few typos. Nobody likes a nitpicker for punctuation, so I'm sorry. *ducks head*

I have to admit, having just finished Divergent minutes ago - I want more.  But not in that I'm-going-to-slowly-die-if-I-don't-get-the-sequel-NOW way that I wait for a book that's fed my soul. Do you know what I mean?