Hedonistic Life

Maybe life doesn't need to have some sort of grand meaning. Maybe looking at the eternal life is an easy solution to the uneasy feeling we get when thinking about our purpose in the 80 or so years we are alive. Maybe it is not about the house in the suburbs with the two kids and a cat.

Maybe life is just an accumulation of daily experiences, the good and the bad kind, which come together, not necessarily in a grand and meaningful way, but surely in a beautiful way: a symphony of all the different types of notes.

Perhaps the beauty lies not in the purpose of the piece but simply in the experience it provides. Maybe life is supposed to be an experience, a treat or vacation and we're just over-thinking it.

Or is this an attempt to sugarcoat the difficulties faced in life? Or maybe it is justification for laziness and condonation of a hedonistic lifestyle?

CRC Ratification

There are certain unalienable rights and protections that all human beings should be granted. One such protection should be given to children- a right to freedom, and privacy, especially in terms of governmental oppression and surveillance. However, since the UN proposed a treaty on the rights of children, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989, three countries have failed to ratify this treaty, which include the Somalia, South Sudan, and yes, the United States of America, the "land of the free."

Some of the reasons given against ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child treaty in the US were that we want parents to be able to homeschool their kids (even if the kid wants to go to public school) and make sure they never learn about other religions or evolution and can't get an abortion without parental consent. Is it just me or are willing to infringe on children's rights for the sake of conservative christian religious ideals? Last time I checked, there is supposed to be a separation of Church and State.

Side note, Vatican City was one of the first ones to ratify! What is going on?

Thought for today

To be able to understand inequities even in terms of unalienable rights and not get angry takes unimaginable patience and optimism (which I seem to somewhat lack) and deserves respect. Bravo to compassionate activists who are calm in temperament!

Powerful quote: "It is precisely the role of human rights to identify the workings of power that keep unacceptable things as they are, and to challenge that power with a different vision of human well-being. The challenge does not have to be confrontational or angry; it can proceed softly, through dialogue and consensus. But it will always be daring because it requires us to dare to imagine a different reality, and to have the courage to call, each in his or her own voice and with his or her own means, for the rearrangements of power necessary to change the unacceptable."

All Asians are Smart Vent

If I might complain for just a second: I really despise this crazy American notion that all Asians are just naturally smart. There are two things very wrong with that statement.
First, I have worked really hard for my education, and the circumstances in my life have become motivators for me.
Second, I am sorry but I seriously don't have anything in common with Chinese or Japanese or Korean or Malaysian or Arab people. We do not share a common ethnicity, nor a common race or culture or language or food or preferences. I know next to nothing about these cultures and I have a long journey ahead of me trying to familiarize myself to these different and beautiful cultures. Physical proximity to these countries does not provide me with any advantage in terms of knowledge or understanding.

Okay that's all.

Reality Through Books

Excerpt from an essay I was writing: 

"I grew up in an underprivileged community in Karachi, Pakistan. The patriarchal values of the society suggest that the main purpose in a woman’s life is to become a good housewife- know how to cook food, clean to perfection, and be obedient. If I remained in Pakistan and did not get educated, I would probably be getting ready for marriage. 

I then moved to a relatively low income neighborhood in Houston, Texas. Around me, I witnessed kids carrying guns, displaying and painting gang signs, and getting brutally murdered in drive-by shootings. I do not know that I would have joined gangs by being in that environment, because not all kids who witness such frightening activities take part in them. But when living in such an environment, it is very difficult to recognize that life does not have to be so formidable. 

Living life is parallel to playing a game without the rulebook. We are brought into earth without the slightest idea about our purpose, our self-identity, ethics, or society. So the easiest solution is to learn the answers by what we perceive around us. The environment around us penetrates our psyche, and it guides who we become. What we see occurring around us seems like the correct way, and often the only way of being. The fact is, there is no rulebook to life, and there is no one-way of being. Education is the tool that empowers us to realize our self-potential and awakens us into the understanding of complexity in society beyond what we are familiar with. It is the instrument that helps us understand our immediate society and life along with broader society and ethics. 

Education empowered me to realize not only that the environments I was raised in was unacceptable, but that I am of much more value to this world; that I have plenty of talent to share with the world. This broader understanding of life through education is very liberating but also comes with great difficulty. Similar to Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," education has enabled me to view reality outside of the cave's shadows. And when a philosopher becomes aware of reality, it becomes difficult to live in chains under the same assumptions of a false and limited reality. That part is liberating. The difficult and frustrating but essential part is coming to grasp reality and realizing that you were so limited due to society’s restrictions for so long. Education is vital to unraveling reality and it has been crucial in who I am today..."

But what is a puzzling fact is that I was not the only one with the access to education. American kids are very privileged in that they have access to a free quality education. I want to emphasize that yes, I have done my homework, and there are huge disparities in education quality based on socioeconomic class in the US. However, I have also seen government schools in Pakistan, where basic conversations, such as "Hello, my name is ____, and today is tuesday..." were being taught to fifth graders. The gap in education quality in developing countries is significantly higher than that in the US. 
But even then, I am gripped by the reality that most of the peers from middle school probably did not end up attending college. So what is so special about me? 
Well first, I went to school in Pakistan for several years and I recognized how financially burdening it was for my parents to provide me with a good education so I would not have  to attend a subpar government school. And then I came to the US and realized that I could just get educated for free- and the resources provided to me for free were astounding: libraries with endless books to check out, great colored textbooks, qualified teachers and computer technologies. 
But I think more important than any other influencer in my life were my parents' emphasis on attaining a top class education. I am indebted to my parents more than anything for their emphasis on education. Even if I was denied other luxuries that other kids might have access to, if I ever needed anything for my education, that was given first priority. Nothing was as important as learning. 

It was always emphasized to me that my parents left their lives for a better quality education for me and my sister. This reality, although quite burdening, is also a great motivator as well. 

Large Scale Disaster?

Okay, so I have spent like 17 hours on one project, and one would assume that effort is related to result. In my case, I think it went backwards, and what I have now is a project that really looks ugly and doesn't really make much sense. I am not sure.

What I was trying to do is make a large scale structure of my small water bottle sculpture. I made it a personal challenge to not use any wires or glue to hold up my bottles. So my entire project is made with just water bottles supporting themselves. It is supposed to look like a tree. The point is to create an "organic" structure from water bottles to remind people that, hey, water is beautiful and pure, and we need to remember that. It may be in a disposable container and we may have control over this element, but without water, we cannot survive and we are still dependent.

The mini model is in the right corner. I should quit art projects from now on. What was I thinking? ;) 

This piece actually reminds me of Dan Ariely's recent TEDtalk, "What makes us feel good about our work." (http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good_about_our_work.html) Ariely argues that we are more prone to liking a project of ours and finding value and beauty in it because of the fact that we made it. He reasons that that is why parents parents find their children to be the most beautiful and wonderful, and why we value IKEA's complex furnitures. When we put effort into something, we find beauty in it. So although I am telling you that I dislike this piece, a part of me wants to say the exact opposite, and I know that it would hurt my feelings if someone agreed with me. 

Man's Alterations of Nature

As I mentioned before in a prior blogpost, we have been working on a contemporary art piece involving LEDs in my sculpture class, and I said I would make something that would explore the four elements of nature, fire, earth, water and wind, and how they exist in our daily lives.

The final product is a sculpture made of used water bottles. I used forest wire, and painted seashells, which not only hold the structure together, but also look like vines and flowers. I hoped for the water bottle structure to look like a mini tree with branches, and the seashells to look like little flowers sprouting from this tree. I basically spent about five entire hours trying to get LEDs to work inside my structure, which was absolutely a failure. On the bright side, I got to use christmas lights which kind of look like little lit up vines in the tree. I used blue cloth pieces to symbolize beautiful and clean water flowing. Altogether, I used modern objects, basically junk, that exist all around us, and I arranged them in a manner to create a beautiful (or at least I think it's beautiful) structure. I hoped that the structure would remind the audience that the elements of nature are all around us, hidden in their modern shells.

My hope was to convey to the audience that respect should be paid to these elements that make up our world. In the past, these elements were worshiped because we humans could not exist without them, and we were at their mercy. In modern society, these elements are at our disposal, and they have become commodities that lay in the the backseats of our cars, and get thrown away. However, it is important to be reminded of just how dependent we are on these four elements, and that what we have and need in our daily lives could not exist without these basic elements. Electricity, paper, Coca-Cola, study tables, and basically everything around us in modern forms, are man's alterations of nature.