I hate art.
I could never gather enough patience in my art classes to sit down for 100 minutes and draw something that won't be of any use to me except to pass the subject. I had to put up with 100 minutes a week, one semester a year, for three years. Which, in my opinion, is about 6,000 hours too many.
I also hated Visual Communications, also known as Graphics or Graphic Design. Not that it wasn't a shit of a subject taught by a dragon. Oh no. It just bored the shit out of my skull. Well, nearly. The worst bit was having to do art along with the graphical drawing, so that it looked like a house with some stupid-looking bushes. Urhh.
In Year Nine, I discovered something I liked. The idea was to draw a cube using a compass, ruler and grey-lead, then use a set square and the same pencil to draw a letter onto one face of the cube, carve out about a centimetre so that the letter stands out, and finish it off with a fineliner.
I intended to do the whole alphabet, plus the digits 10 and a few punctuation marks. Sadly, I fell short by about 6 numbers and 10 punctuation marks. I no longer have graphics classes, so I have no time to waste anymore. But, the moral of the story was, keep plugging away at something, even if you hate it. You never know, you might find something that you enjoy.
A year later...
I love using compasses. I have a nice, fluid wrist, which tends to help with my wrist-spinning in cricket. It also makes using a compass a piece of piss. So, last semester, during Year 10 Chemistry/Physics mostly but other subjects too, I took blank sheets of A4 to school and I drew on them with compass and grey-lead, and I made about 15 new, interesting and different little pieces of art.
I was going to do more, but then someone snitched reported to my parents at Parent-Teacher Interviews that I was doing this, and they would like me to concentrate a bit more on my work. Not that I'm the dimmest crayon in the box, but I was just spending a bit more time on circles than work that she set after we had finished our regular work. (To this date I have no idea who the teacher was, but I bet it was my Chem teacher.)
So I went off them for a while. But then, this semester in History I felt myself getting the itch to draw a letter carved from a cube again. So I did. I drew a 'C' - the first letter of my real name. So, I decided to make a sign for my room that said:
CJMS
ROOM
Nice, eh? So I coloured those in, and stuck them together. Even sweeter. So, I thought after I had stuck it up, I haven't lost the knack after all. So I set to work making then all from more sheets of A4, sadly lined this time. Ah well. Can't have 'em all.
I have now accomplished that feat, and now play a game similar to Boggle that I used to play in Grade 4 in Primary School. Our teacher would select 12 letters at random (I do 10, unless I pick out Q without picking U) and, after ten minutes of writing as many words as we can (I do five now) our teacher selected a letter and ringed it, which meant that any word containing that letter scored two points and any other word scored one point. Typical scores were/are about 60 to 80.
I am also creating something that I would have done last semester. I've done a circle with six equidistant points on its circumference all joined to each other, like a mesh topology for a LAN. I want to make it look as old as possible. I've covered it in white-out and I am going to scrape it off. I will dip it in coffee and dry it out. I will burn a couple of the edges of the page, but make sure the drawing (in colour of course) is not disturbed. When I finish, it won't just be another project I'm working on. It'll be a piece of art.
So I now have fun in my History classes. The moral of the story is: Face something you hate with a smile. It may just turn out to be a good asset later in life.