Meaning of Life

In the class Journalism in 2017, a course focusing on all manner of news, this first unit has risen with the awareness of the art of photojournalism. There were some challenging points of finding the right subject matter to the pictures of as not everything is practical or symbolic. For the Action Project, we were assigned to start up an interview and ask the interviewee what their meaning of life is. My interviewee was an former underclassmen and still is a close friend of mine, who'll be known as Manny. The project goes off into being 1000 words in length and touches upon how photos can relate to the meaning of life.

"Manel", VG, 2017

With a medium aperture and high shutter speed, I snapped this picture of Manny as he operates on a laptop. His vibrant hat defines his head as it rests on a focal point and center stage, with his face and eyes centered and looking towards the dim screen. His room is captured and the most bland and uninteresting angles, effectively highlight the focus to his hat. Who's wearing the hat? Manny is, and your eye proceeds to scan the rest of the figure seeing him hunched over with  his hands contrasting with his lighter colored shirt. Matching with his opinion on life, there's not much information from this picture aside from the laptop being relatively used, so there's experience shared with it. Other than that, it's a plain background with no more information than the blank error screen due to a lack of internet connection. This aligns perfectly with how he sees life.

"I don't really know what life means, because it's a subjective flaw we all must overcome."

There's nothing but emptiness on this fixed perspective. A single touch of personality almost overridden by the bleak and blank environment. In a world where everything is common, there are minuscule defining points. "Flaws" if you will. The picture, while barren and uninteresting, as an art piece, captures this tone of one or a couple things standing out to make it distinguishable. The lack of information adds to the mystery that is life and the very fact color is reserved to a focal point was actually a bit of luck on my framing. You can really hear the silence in that room.

Transcribed Interview:

Has life always meant the same thing to you or has it changed? Why?

I don’t know what life means yet, and the level importance for things times change.

Do you have any story about the meaning of life or more specifically, why you don’t know what it means?

It’s not my job, it’s not our job to live life to understand it. Well that’s just me, I don’t think there’s a big message in the end or a destiny everyone has. But what I think life is will always be different from the next person.

Is there anything that influenced your thoughts on life?

No, I think it was just a general consensus I’ve had since I was a kid.

What image would you associate with the word “life”?

I think of either a spark or of the color white because of how spontaneous and somewhat blank it can be.

Considering you live life but aren’t aware of its meaning, have you come across anything that’s made you doubt reality?

Well when something is too perfect or lines up just too well, and I also have an interest in the glitches in the Matrix theory. I don’t believe it but it’s interesting. But before I get sidetracked, I just know that when something is too flawless, it gets me suspicious.

So in that right, you might say that you think life is flawed. Going off of that, do you think life should be flawed or is there someway we can make it perfect?

What would be the point of living a life where you have everything at your disposal with no reward or achievements? You’ll be miserably bored and want to die by the time you’re 25. People work for what they want to feel accomplished, or else there’s no point. That’s like booting up the game and then you use a gameshark or something, which gives you everything, then there’s no point.

Alright then, so as a final question, in this concept of flawed life, what would you say is the best example to explain these concept?

Well since everyone perceives life differently, there will be different flaws. For me, there are certain societal expectations that I don’t understand, so human nature would be my example of a flaw. Flaws are subjective, and everyone’s life has some flaw. If there weren’t any flaws, there would be no point.

So life itself is a subjective flaw?

Yeah, basically.

Hm, alright, thanks for the interview.

Mhm.

Comins Dot Com

The first and last Action Project for the STEAM course Social Entrepreneurship. As the name implies, the class is in regards to entrepreneurship. Throughout the units, we learned how to develop a business, identify key members, find our target audience with demographics and psychographics, along with discovering just how we can pitch our ideas to investors. Initially, I immediately knew I was going to relate my project to art, but thinking about a specific business I could use my art for was a bit challenging. I settled on making comics that could connect people. My main motivation was the fact that I could share art that people could connect upon. It was definitely a challenge to say everything I wanted whilst staying in my 2 minute time frame, but real elevator pitches have no leeway, and despite my business model directly consulting the consumer (instead of an investor) people's time is priceless. You have to make what they're hearing worthwhile and quick.

Victory. Tranquility. Respect.

The final Action Project for the humanities Endurance course has been assigned. And we must write out our own survival guide book to success. This third unit, Apotheosis we reflected upon our survival. What we've endured, how we've been reborn, and how we're dealing with our lives now. The struggles I went through included stating requirements to reach my goal, as I could technically reach it at any time. To be an artist has no specific requirements, it's such an open term and I consider myself an artist currently. Others have called me skilled and I've worked in so many mediums that I don't think isolating myself to just one style would be accurate. Just below, you can read through the book and I thank you for reading.

The Spice of Spanish

So this 3rd period class I've taken all year was Spanish. The final assignment was to write a story, 100-200 words, entirely in Spanish while using 2-4 new words we look up. Everything else was reviewed in the course and I can actually say that while I was doubtful of the course at first, I definitely learned the basics of Spanish by the end of it. Gracias para leyendo.

Mi vocabulario:

Pájaro

Picante

Migraña

Irritante

Un pájaro de Puerto Rico tiene una migraña… El pájaro está enfajado. El pájaro es un chico se llama Falconie. El pájaro tiene una migraña porque comió patata frita que es picante. Falconie mirada para un bebido. Falconie encontrar un rana que se llama Pepe. Pepe es irritante, pero sabe dónde está la bebida. Pepe hablas, “Hola, quieres vai para come?  Yo soy un rana. Tu no es un rana. ¿Que comes? ¿Comen mosca? Comemos mosca! Seguir me!” Falconie no comen mosca y esta frustrado con la rana. “TU ES UN RANA! Yo preciso agua. ¿Donde esta?!” Falconie diche. Falconie toser y toser porque la picante batata frita eres mucho seco. Falconie caída y morir… El fin.

A Dozen Hours

The Humanities course Endurance rolled up with a new project. Dedicate your life to something for 12 whole hours... Wow, that's... Much easier than it sounds in my case. You see, I have much spare time, but instead of taking the easy route and choosing something that would make a loophole, I thought about being productive. After seeing David Blane pursue his own passion of his career, which was holding his breath for the longest anyone ever could (being the amazing magician that he is, this stunt was one of his greatest feats), I decided to stick to my realm of comfort and expertise. Art. I wanted to animate for twelve hours... And I've done that before too, which is why I actually found it challenging to expand upon the... well challenges of making art for 12 hours.

Considering how this animation project was intended for school, I thought about being more organized, so I made a storyboard for my animation. That lone took 2 fun hours and then I thought about animating for another 5 hours, but on that day, I only got in 3 for before growing tired of the character I was drawing. More specifically, the software I was using (Krita) was not meant for animation. That painting software restricted me to keyframing each and every frame. At the time, I didn't have the means to make layers for stills or moving parts, I had to make a new drawing each time, and considering my lacking attention span or at least my speed art habits, I wanted to move on. I managed to draw about 12 frames whilst trying to figure out just how exactly I would go about with the rest of my storyboard, which would have no doubt lasted at least 30 seconds. Mix that with the only option of making a new drawing each time, an estimated 8 frames per second, and that's... 240 drawings. So I went with someone I thought was a little bit more fun to draw.

A villain's strut.VG.2017

Sonic the Hedgehog​ is a beloved character from Sega, and one big part of my childhood. His rather splendid design was always exciting to draw, and I used my actual animation software, Tupi, to create the GIF you see below. 

Sonic Bouncing About.VG.2017

And this video right here was a documentation of my time spent, thanks for reading through. 

A Service Beyond Hours

My Senior year of high school was a busy one... The classes demand your attention and truly prepare you for the real world. That being said, I've had to finish up my service hours that I didn't fully complete back earlier on in 2016. Specifically, I completed a multitude of service hours at local libraries and even a few back at GCE. Finding the time and managing said time to get all my service hours was a bit tough but with perseverance, I managed to optimize my weekends to spend on work and the hours equally. Tasks such as organizing shelfs, files, papers, or cleaning up some sections to tidy up the children's area.

Helping out the staff actually made me realize that no matter how many employee's you may have, there's never going to be a moment where you're 100% perfect or out of work. The realization came to me as even professionals needing help some times, as no one can manage to keep everything in check. And considering that, I think it's a good reminder to myself, to know that it's ok to ask for help.

Live & Learn - The Starting Line

So a new term has come and with that, I'm writing a blog for the first Action Project of my Humanities course called Endurance. This first unit, Morpheus, we focused around The Hero's Journey and endured our our physical challenges, focusing mainly on increasing our own strength. An FE we went own featured us doing a bootcamp style exercise, which had ourselves pushing past our own limits. So this unit was to see how far we can go and how far we're willing to go beyond that breaking point. The Action Project for this class is to write out an autobiography and talk about my childhood but speak about the future of where I see myself in a few dozen years, as if it had already happened.

Chapter 1: Timid to Tenacious

When I was young, I didn't have much of a childhood. Things like holidays didn't necessarily exist and my dad was more than busy working to support this family of 4. The 6 year gap between me and my brother was actually something that kept us rather distant, and my memories of my mother consist of her being stressed by my brother. On that note, I was the exact opposite. I was shy, never really spoke out, and whilst I loved being social, I don't think I ever really went out of my way to be social. I had a few nice friends until I was transferred to different schools all around the city, whether the was because of me or because of my brother always depended on the situation. I have fond memories of my 2nd grade, 5th grade, and middle school life because they were when I actually wasn't being constantly bullied or when I learned how to make those kinds of people stop with such judgmental and scrutinizing behavior. However that didn't come without its struggles. That means for the other 4-5 years of my childhood, I had to try and keep myself up when I was constantly pushed down, which was without a doubt a mental challenge for my kiddie brain. I was taught that life was black and white, right and wrong, which couldn't be any more presumptuous than most stereotypes. Slowly I grew to understand that it was the refusal of humility that made me kept being bullied. If I went along with some teases or made it a competition of sorts to exchange insults, I wasn't nearly as ostracized as I was if I just went to being frustrated or upset. This was actually quite the good lesson to keep me charismatic and social, impacting my public speaking skills and allowing me to gain confidence towards who I am because I started caring less about what people saw just by looking at me.

Now the challenge of pushing through the barrage of hurtful words which would sometimes be said at home was what definitely drove my passion of art to its fullest. My escape from reality back then was cartoons, TV shows, and other fictional works that would distract me from my heavy worries. While sometimes they would distract me from responsibilities too, the main benefit of being ever so heavily immersed in oh so many communities of fans when I was a kid and even a teenager made it so that I always felt welcomed somewhere, even if it was a place that didn't have any real people. My mother, being a brazilian immigrant, clearly couldn't communicate with me properly in English as well as a parent probably should. Me as an American raised in English speaking schools means that I had very limited knowledge of Portuguese and couldn't communicate with my mother all too well when I was young either, but that also came from the hesitation caused by fear. I don't think saying the way I was parented was abusive is corrected, but it used fear to the fullest. Ironically, I have... Not so fond memories of my mother questioning my intense fear or hesitation to speak during these moments of her intimidating me, and whether or not it was necessarily sarcasm or even ever on purpose is something I still don't know... So in other words, me being bullied and having no practical (or productive) escape from said stress —an always tense atmosphere at home, being isolated through a majority of elementary school— was like Aron Ralston cutting off his own arm to free himself from the boulder that crushed his hand. Me immersing myself extensively in fiction took a couple of tolls on my academic productivity, so but alleviated me the stress that would block my creativity or thought process to even complete any school assignments. It was a double-edge sword, and just like Ralston, I had to hurt myself in order to progress further in my life, or else I would have just been stuck where I was. That mental challenge of trying to bring a balance between immediate necessity and long term needs was definitely one of the aspects of my life that molded me into who I am today, the internationally recognized manga artist.

Some of you may even recognize my work, as this is the avatar I used for my early career when I was creating series such as "Clans", "Labs", and a couple other series that seem to have their own animated adaptations... It's really quite fascinating to see how far I've come, like Batman from his first year to his dozenth. My skills once were simply mediocre, and now I've achieved my dream of bringing my creations to life. They're even on the big screen, and even if I didn't direct those adaptations, they've stayed beyond faithful to my original work. I've truly achieved my mission in life... I've gone through troubles and struggles when I was young but had the help of fictional worlds to console me. now I can do the same for others.

"VTR". VG. 2017

But getting this far didn't come naturally. My greatest physical challenge was back some hundred dozen donuts ago... I was young, still in college, looking for employment. The only opportunities I had involved harsh physical labor, so I went for the job for an industry I can support. The food industry. In some twisted and ironic fate, I became a water delivery man, just as my father once was when he was young. The job was supporting my college life but I was lacking back support, and the hours were rough... The delivery of oh so many gallons so frequently actually reared down my back greatly, but I was able to continue my art career in college because of it. The stress of carrying the literal weight of water and the weight of my courses was as heavy as the boulder Sisyphus eternally is pushing up the tall mountain. However enduring through that struggle, I've managed to reach the end goal of my life. Granted I'm not nearly as physically capable as I once was due to long term strain, I did manage to reach my goal. Making comics, illustrating, creating stories. That's my career. I've successfully managed to pull it all off. And my key to success was believing that I could. Despite that sounding cheesier than a pizzeria, I kept myself confident by imagine the end result of my hard work, and the satisfaction is... Well no metaphor there, it's truly indescribable. My childhood wasn't the greatest, and that may have weighed me down or upset me the more I thought about it, but knowing that it does sadden me is exactly why I don't think about it. Perseverance, persuasion, and even being under pressure. That's how I went from some timid child who didn't see much value in himself into someone who's humbled to be love by such a vast number of people just from doing what he loves. However the most priceless diamond of mine is my patience. If I —as narcissistic as it sounds— hadn't been gifted with foresight and the ability to process logic as well as I do, I would most likely by some criminal by now, because I'd just say nothing is worth it. My limits in themselves are limited, but learning the value of humility as a child and understanding that soon enough I'd be free from my job as a young adult, I was able to dial down the input of stress or disbelief that grew in me.