Soul Food part 2

You wake up greeted by a dandy daytime. The weather feels windy enough to ease up the stresses of the peripatetic. You predict that this must be one of those days when everything is beautiful and is convenient. But, by how, you soon find your expectations massively unfulfilled. Rain starts pouring torrentially. Traffic congestion hinders you from coming to school or to work on time. Your umbrella breaks because the wind becomes unmanageably strong. Your superiors bark on you for your tardiness. Your socks become soggy, your clothes soaked, and your bag and everything inside it drenched. Everything starts taking a turn for the worse. The day has been cruel to you and it’s beyond salvaging. Raise your hands if you’ve had one of those days. Actually, I think everyone has had them. 

Sometimes, your life just sucks. You just get those days when you’re the receiving end of Lady Misfortune’s unrelenting hissy fits. It doesn’t matter if you earn millions per day with your real-estate enterprise, or if you rule Singapore, or if you are the most read and most quoted and most ass-kissed blogger in the ‘sphere, or if you are Mister T or Samuel Jackson: Things are not, and will not, always, be peachy on your end. So imagine yourself having just gotten a disastrous 9-5, and you’re in dire need of making yourself forget those problems and feel better for the rest of the day. What do you do?

As catharses, some blogs. Others go to gym. And then there are those who post rubbish on Twitter/Plurk. I know of someone who vents his problem by pestering me with phone calls that go nowhere. I know of another who marathons CSI Miami and mocks Horatio. My brother watches replays of old Tom and Jerry episodes. As for me, I do these:

Play Fighting Games

If I have my ways, I’ll make beating people up a way to solve problems. That will make everything so much easier. Is Bush pissing you off? Sock him, problems solved! Your favorite basketball team has been robbed by biased referees? Shove your boots up their arses! Oil price is hiking? No worries, just kick Caltex’s face!

But since the world is governed by namby-pamby axioms like “what doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger” as though we are born to be martyrs, making people your punching bag is not an acceptable way to release stress. Yet, it can be said that rearranging people’s faces is a stress-reliever; if only you can do it without consequences, no? That’s where fighting games come in.

Okay, seriously, I don’t condone violence, but I think fighting games are therapeutic. They test my reflexes, and they require my undivided attention. Which means, the better I play in a fighting game, the less I get to think about anything else. It’s my favorite escapism: I’ll just go ahead and Shoryuken all my problems away.

Sketch

I like to draw. I like observing the fine details of every creation. I like looking at people’s faces. Did you know that a well-proportioned face always follow certain rules? Example: your ears - their upper tip will always be level with the eyebrows, and their lower tip level with the lower end of the nose.

So yeah, sketching. I pretty much count on it to cheer me up because, in much the same way as fighting games, it forces me to focus on something. Of course it is important to be wise in choosing what I want to draw - I don’t want to draw a poop. No. I draw pretty things, like a cat or a woman. It’s always better to observe the details of these things than to recall the bad lucks that transpired in a miserable day, don’t you think?

But hey, sketching and fighting games are merely the therapies I need. What about you?