The Joy of Doing Things without the Need for Justification

Recently, i gave a talk at TalkCSS about drawing with pure CSS. It seems the header of one of the slides made a good tagline, and that is the title of this blog post.

You can watch the video here, courtesy of Engineers.sg. You can follow them on Twitter here.

From young, i have always loved drawing. My first inspirations for going on drawing spree when i was young were manga characters, from series like Sailor Moon to Inuyasha, from Naruto to D Gray Man. I could draw for hours on end. I (and my sister, who is actually my twin) basically led to the formation of a drawing club in my secondary school, because one fine day during a period where students were supposed to register for a club to join and attend their session, i, who obviously did not register for any because i thought i could just walk in (hail the power of youth ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), assumed there would be a drawing club (i only realized there was none months later).

I spotted a teacher whom i knew to be an art teacher, but not of my class.

We walked up to him and ask: Sir, is there a drawing lesson today?.

He thought for 3 seconds.

And he said Yes.

And that was how my sister and i attended the lesson as the only two participants. We drew trees on our school playground and learnt how to go about shading them.

As weeks passed by, more kids joined the lessons. A long time later when we both were too busy preparing for our exams, we quit the club, but i can still remember passing by a growing group of kids, sitting on the school benches, drawing away.

Now back to topic. We as responsible adults in developed countries such as Singapore are conditioned to act rationally. But i do not think we were all born like that. As toddlers, we did what we want. Kids do not rationalize their actions. It is us adults who teach them to.

So when i saw this Pure CSS Francine by Diana Smith, i decided. I will draw whatever i want, with CSS. Just because i want to. But first would explore the idea of drawing anime characters because they allow for creative manifestations of the human body parts and of course, because i am a fan of anime.

Does doing things like this feel right? Maybe not. But to me, i know it does feel one thing. It feels…

Liberating.

You can call this escaping reality, or going back in time. Be a kid again. Both work for me.

This reminds me of a Japanese fairly tail i read about a kid asking the Sun to let him stay a kid forever, to which the Sun replied that we would one day return to being a child again. The boy grows up to be an adult and then an elderly. Eventually getting so old to the point of losing his mental agility, the man behaves just like a kid, looking at the Sun innocently.

So this is my call out to you. If you have not already, consider doing something which you do not have any confirmation about whether it will pay off (as to what pay off means, that is a very objective question ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

But try this.

Get on a random train and figure out the correct way later. Give drinks to a homeless person (if you are wondering where to find them, contact Homeless Hearts of Singapore). Talk to a prostitute. Befriend a same sex couple. Go to Dorothy’s bar. Even better, find out if they have any dress code and blend in. Oh, while you are at it, go spend your New Year countdown party there too. Get a haircut in the next foreign country when you are traveling.

You might find some of these things making no sense. I know. I did all of them.

And i still do.

~Cheerio~

SmokinClove, currently lives in Singapore. Her Twitter handle is inspired by a quote by Kuroko Tetsuya from Kuroko no Basuke: "I am a shadow"