practising a method I gleaned off somewhere...

I've been spending the past few weeks working my own Happiness Project after listening to a TED talk a few months ago. My bad, I have not been keeping tabs on the original talk so no video link as for now. It boils down to...

Getting myself to work better by practising one of these methods daily: being thankful of three things, and meditation (these are the two points I remember, there are four in total.)

I started off by being quite easy-going about it for the first month - doing a recount either in bed before falling asleep or first thing in the morning. A few weeks ago I started writing down my thankful items to track how my emotions and the way I see things change according to circumstances.

The past few weeks I have been doing the Happiness Project, I find that there may be tough days when all I could find are two things to be thankful of. There are also plenty of days where six or eight events to be thankful of are too few to summarise the gladness I experience. I am not sure if this is going to be a long term project, and probably the monitoring factors will be adjusted as time passes, although sure it is heartwarming to do such a project.

I did not do my Happiness Project because a birthday/event/deadline was approaching. I simply thought that if I wanted to harness my power of thought, maybe I could give this method a try and something good would come out of it.

Take care :)

Out here

So, after much preparation and to signal there is more to come, I'm introducing:
Marie + Lu
Reliably stylish, with lots of wearable pieces can fit right into your wardrobe.

Do buy, enjoy and refer Marie + Lu around :)

thrice struck

The first instance I recognised a piece of clothing I really liked was when I came across an article about a particular paletot and a bulbous cape I saw in a magazine article. The creator had passed away a good few decades before. I came across the article by chance, as it was kept in the house-helpers' room, and a few times I sneaked away from rote learning to read and re-read the article. I was not even fourteen when this took place.

A few years later I went on an art class trip to this museum. During the requisite guided tour, I saw my first saw-it-in-books-and-like-it-even-more-in-live painting (a Rembrandt with amazing cut gemstone rendering). After the tour I went over to the bookshop section and bought a book on... beautiful clothes. Of all things. In hindsight, I'm not sure if my art teacher felt joy or exasperation that I bought something which was related to the exhibition by merit of being next to it.

So business school came into life, and with it the RWL (manga central, coffee table colour books, no studying please). I hung out there regularly to get an eye-hunger fix. One of the books that I revisited repeatedly was this.

Can you guess the fashion designer whose name was fixed onto my mind?
His name is Cristobal Balenciaga.
I came across his body of work three times without remembering his name and each time I liked it. That man is a genius.

This is my little patch of motivational memory, the one designers conjure when they get asked why they got into fashion. It was only after I was out of college did I remember the events and marvelled how I kept on gushing over 'this designer I just read about' on three different episodes, and they all point to the one and same person.

And thus thrice struck was I by the Cristobal - Balenciaga the dead, I'd clarify to friends at college.

Good night.

it's not meat fruit, it's meat dress

I came across this article regarding older people dressed in meat that forms a collection of artworks. It raises up a few thoughts regarding dressing in meat.

1.
I did not pay so much attention to the fact that the meat dress was seen by the interpreter/commentator as something that looks offensive because it was meat on an old person. What I experienced was this vague awareness that the skin of the person in the picture was vaguely older, and that the texture of that beige thing occupying the visual expanse I would usually denote to feminine clothing items were interesting - no thought of meat or the feel of cold carcass on skin. It was just interesting and engaging. Scale and resolution of print versus screen resolution may have something to do with it.

2.
Gaga is not the first one that did it, and even though it is the most publicised meat-wearing event to date, it's not the first. I have this obsession with finding out who is first to come up with ideas, and Mr Formichetti chronologically is not when it comes to wearing meat. I'm glad to find out wearing something made out of meat is a lot less pop than I had made it out to be (not that it's something I'd like to do).

3.
I don't have to punish myself internally for not being so instantly popular. For someone whose career is often made or broken on the point of "whether people want to adopt my idea so much they are willing to part with their cash for it", it's quite a soothing point to learn... it's a revelation some readers may find a bit silly, but that's how I see it at the moment.

patience, forgiveness, and unwillingness to eat shit all the time

Cheating exists in all sorts of forms. It exists in fields as diverse as student plagiarism, to two-timing and tax evasion. Usually it involves some sort of dishonesty or lack of disclosure, misrepresentation, and a lot of grief (or fines or bribes) if it is uncovered.

Basically, I had my first student-cheat today. I was marking some sewing work and it was just so obvious that the work was entirely not part of a natural progression (or even a freak natural progression) of something that a student could make. I had the student re-do certain parts of the work afresh to gauge how genuine this done-and-submitted work could be. At the end of the day, whatever understanding and benefits of doubt I had given her was negated with at least two very obvious mistakes she did - after taking into account the handicaps that could have been in completing this 'believe-me' task.

I'm actually rather generous and understanding and occasionally forgiving (as of last count) when I'm on the receiving end of not-so-honest behaviour. At the end of the day it boils down to the dissonance between being able to overlook the disappointment of being cheated and not wanting to eat sh*t all the time. I'm not always able to resolve this dissonance on the spot, for every case is different.

If you're wondering what I did on the case of today's plagiarism discovery, as per college policy, the project's a fail.

Actually, if that student was at LCF, it would have been instant expulsion.

So... I still have lots of work to mark, I'm going back to my pile of work. Dum dee dum dum.

seeing skills

I don't profess to have an extensive knowledge of Japanese language, nor read it fluently, but when I saw the first four character of this blog's title I smiled. It is "one day one flower" - or a flower a day. Like an apple a day for the soul I suppose.

Yes, a flower a day would be nice. Now where is that posy of peonies?

shameless?

The truly famous don't need online networks to network, they just need to drop their names.

I hope I'm on my way there.
Not that I'm craving for fame, but because the industry I'm in is so amnesic a good whack on the head (in the form of a big name) is quite handy to have. I prefer to be famous professionally, and for all the right reasons too, just to make life easier.

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with Sylv over how some of us tremble at the thought of adding our more infamously difficult ex-teachers on Facebook. It's quite amusing to observe myself finally acquiesce onto linking with my ex-teachers on LinkedIn because, well, two years after graduation is enough time to grow out of the they-were-my-tutors mentality. Not to mention that LinkedIn is free of drinking-spree pictures, which means that it is politically correctly preferred than to add them on Facebook.

So yes, I've been recalling names and going through stacks of name cards to keep on top of my network. The best thing, really, is just to pop down for a coffee with the person in question.

Now, back to garment sampling.