Quick update on what's been going on: I was invited as a panelist at V3 Digital Media Conference this year to speak about internet safety. It was a lot of fun getting to meet other bloggers and Asian-Americans in digital media. If you get the chance, check out the website and register for next year! I hope to attend it again, so let me know if you're interested in going!
Apart from that one Saturday at V3 Con, I've also been volunteering at Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA) as a cello instructor. More details on that in the next post, which will definitely be up in the next couple of days.
Finally, I just started a creative writing class today. I had to submit a piece of writing when I applied, so when I actually got into the program, I thought I must be a superfantastic writer for the program to have selected me. So I walked into the class thinking I was hot stuff. I was really looking forward to showing off some of mah skillz. My classmates are friendly and funny, so the class was pretty easy to get used to. But then the teacher told us that he's a poet, and I knew I was screwed. He had us write poetry—and read it aloud. I'd been thinking I was a good writer, but apparently I'm not so good at all. Not…compared with some of my new classmates. As a matter of fact, I feel a little bit inadequate.
A few of the other students in the class feel the same way I do about poetry: cannot write well. I thought I was really empathizing with this one guy, who was telling me all about how he was hoping to write short stories and couldn't write poems to save his life. But when we all read our poems and critiqued each others' work, this guy was definitely the harshest critic in the room. And don't get me wrong, his poem was good, but he'd just been lamenting about being unable to write poems! Suddenly it was like he'd become the King of Poetryland.
It's funny, because I'd always figured I would always have writing to fall back on if I failed to be a perfect Asian and math didn't work out (and trust me, math has never really worked out for me). And yet I realize now that, when I'm in a group of a bunch of students who are all cream-of-the-crop writers, I'm just "meh". Looks like everything requires effort on my part. Must. Work. Harder.