This post doesn't really belong in My College Blog, but for some reason I wanted to share it. In any case, this blog will be used for remembering things anyway, once I get old and tired.
Remembering Art School refers to this one summer in the early 2000's when my brother and I took an art class at the local 'museum'. I put quotation marks there because I'm not really sure if it is a museum despite the fact that it is called 'Museo ning Angeles' (trans. Museum of Angeles, my hometown) because I never really bothered with the works of art found in that dingy old building. But anyway, I'm not here to argue the purpose of that building, I'm here to reminisce that one day in "Art School", as I used to call it, that I was a total badass.
Memories often get distorted as time passes by so I can't guarantee that I was the sole instigator of this epic day in Art School, but I'm pretty sure I was one of the ringleaders. But first let me explain (or remind my future self) of what Art School was like. The first day of Art School was what I know now to be called a diagnostic test. We were asked to draw anything we wanted using crayons on a piece of black paper. I was about seven or eight (it was around Grade 2) so naturally... I copied what my brother was doing. We weren't very artistic to begin with (not saying that I am now, though I'd love to be) so we just drew your run-of-the-mill mountains and trees type. Oddly enough considering I copied off him, he got placed in the Green level (which was either the 3rd or 4th, not quite sure whether Blue was 4th) while I was placed in the Yellow (2nd) level. But I suspected it was merely because of the age range--either I'd be too young for the other Greens, or my brother'd be too old for the Yellows. But anyway...
The Red (1st) and Yellow levels were on the ground floor while Green and Blue were upstairs (which supported my theory of the age-thing, since younger kids were normally discouraged from climbing stairs back in those days--what?). The class was nice enough, I wasn't the painfully-shy-bordering-on-neurotic-introvert that I am now so I made a friend or two. I even got close to this one girl whose name I'd forgotten long ago, and shared a crush on this singer guy whose name is probably JC.
Anyway, back to my badass story. I'm usually a rule follower, and I never, ever disrespect my elders unless they give me reason to (case in point: Spagz). But for this one day, I simply disregarded the rules--not that there was a specific rule about it--and blatantly ignored the cries of our instructors. I was unstoppable, uncontrollable. I unleashed an inner beast that triggered the unleashing of other inner beasts. It was mad.
Are you wondering what I had done yet? I'd hate to sound anticlimactic but all I did was start some sort of paper fight with the Reds next door. We were connected by wooden double doors, and for some reason it felt fun and cool to throw crumpled up pieces of art paper at the little munchkins behind them. Of course, young and artistically challenged as they were, the Reds retaliated and it snowballed into one screaming, paper-throwing ordeal for our instructors. They shouldn't have given us all that much paper.
It was all rather exciting. I recall the feeling was akin to the Battle of Helm's Deep in LOTR, with the wooden doors being swung open to risk a well-aimed throw at a screaming Red, being shut again against the flurry of papers and crayons. My sharpest memory in all of that was when the doors swung open and I aimlessly through a ball of newspaper and it hit one of the female instructors. For a fleeting moment I looked at her with what I can imagine was a sheepish, guilty smirk before running back to reload.
Unfortunately, I don't remember how that ended. All I know is that we eventually got tired, as kids usually do after having their short attention spans highly stimulated. I'm sure we all helped with the clean up, because our instructors asked us to. And I remember nobody getting in trouble, unless they spoke to my parents behind my back in which case, all was well because my parents never said anything to me.
While writing this I thought something interesting. Why is it that we, the Yellows, felt so inclined to think that the Reds were our 'enemy'? I mean, for all intents and purposes of a paper fight (or war, rather) we could have done it between ourselves. You can chalk it up to arbitrary behavior, but what comes to mind is the idea that if you deliberately segregate people into groups, they will tend to form some sort of 'loyalty' to their group, if not 'hostility' toward others. I'm sure there are tons of studies on this but now is not the time to be researching about them. It is 11:44PM and I am ready to go to bed.
Good night!
EDITED (March 12, 2014, originally published December 18, 2013): Coincidentally, the last topic in Philosophy class was this exact thought! Note to future self: look up Amartya Sen's "Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny", this is what you learned in class! Basically, it talks about cultural identity and how we form a cultural affinity with those of similar culture, simultaneously including and excluding ourselves from certain groups. Violence (exemplified by that paper war I claimed to have started) arises when people ignore the fact that we are all multicultural, and focus instead on a singular identity (read: stereotype) that is different from ours. Anyway, it's 10:40PM so don't think about it too much.
