Post-Romantic Love Conquest: The Dreamiest Life

Valentine's Day amiright?? All the love-themed memeing has got me thinking and reflecting about love in my own life, and what my love "conquest" is going to be now that I'm A-OK in the romantic love aspect.

A lot of us grow up thinking that we are to search life looking for that other person to complete us, and V-day is supposedly about that kind of love. Recently though, I find that people are more sensible about it being a commercial holiday and have decided to own it instead and put their own spin: it's morphed to become a holiday that's about just love itself, and we express it to people who are important to us, not necessarily just our lovers or crushes. Our friends, parents, siblings, even our pets! Personally, I've been spending the past Valentine's Days with either my friends or my family. And now that Emmy and I are actually together on Valentine's Day for the first time?...

 We both spent it with my family. Haha!



I got to try Umenoya for the first time - it's located in the Microtel by Windham hotel that Emmy's family stayed in two Christmasses ago (woah! I almost said "last Christmas", how fast time flies!) Only my mom has tried it before in my family.

I had a Nigiri set meal as usual, and I find this place to be REALLY GOOD. The fish was fresh. The Uni was clean on the palette and service was nice. My mom opted for a private seating room - the kind where you can put your feet down into the floor - not sure what the terminology is! It has interesting decor, but it's muted compared to Ryuma, which is more kitsch. It was more relaxing and intimate. And the prices are lower, at least for the meal I got.

Emmy and I got a picture taken at the entrance - this was where we dropped his family off after New Year's Eve - it was very bittersweet for me. 

The day after Valentine's, we remembered that we had downloaded Sense and Sensibility in January so that it could be our special V-day movie. We figured it was never too late, and since our Mondays are free for now we had a nice Film/Show watching day complete with Mcdo and the long-awaited V-day Bob's Burgers episode.

Today though, I decided to openly ponder, through writing, about my current love conquest. And that is the search for my own ideal life. I want to take a few moments to fangirl over not my dream boy or girl, but my dream life... Aaaaaah.

And because most of pondering occurs in lists, let me list down the aspects of this dream life in bullet points!

• I want a creative life - It seems like it should be obvious that a creative person automatically will have a creative life, but as I grow older it takes more effort to seek creative activities actively. I want to spend more time deliberately painting, drawing, crafting, generally working with my eyes and hands, alone or with friends! My best friends and I have been discussing activities that can make this happen in a communal kinda way, because everything good is better when shared.
• I want to get back with music, and to stay together with it - because it's been hard for me to write songs lately, I've stepped back from singing and playing at all, and that's super strange! Especially since, like I told Emmy a few weeks ago, music used to be what I identified with when I was younger. When I self-identified, I would say "I'm a singer and a songwriter". And for years now, that hasn't been true, and it feels very bizarre and surreal how far away I feel from that person now. I know people change, and if I've naturally moved on as a person to something else then I'd be fine with that, but recently I've been itching to come back to that. It's not gone from me. It's still inside, wanting to come out. I just haven't taken the chance to have a real go at it again.
• I want a lifestyle change!!! - I want to take charge of my daily habits even more.

1. I want to wake up earlier and sleep more soundly, 
2. I want to eat less meat and dairy, and more whole foods, and to drink more water 
3. I want to move moderately and regularly, and form fitness habits that work for my lifestyle (I don't like pushing too hard, I don't want to have to go somewhere else to do it, I like dancing)
4.  I want to use my time more actively rather than passively. Less browsing, more editing videos, writing content, practicing my skills in those areas, and in art and music! And French.
5. I want to be more mindful of my belongings and have less unaccounted-for stuff in my place.
6. I want to start saving for my future and my creative projects. I'm currently in the process of finding a job that suits me, and I gave myself an ultimatum that if I don't find anything else, I will do what I used to do: be a call center agent! Scary! But I found a place that seems less stressful, and again that's just my option for when I don't find anything more suitable.

I've been going towards the right direction but very slowly, and it's a forward-and-back-again kind of process. But once Emmy and I move into our own place, I'm looking forward to really dive into it face-first! That being said, even now that we're still living in my room all of the time, I can still do a few of these changes:

1. Using my free time more purposefully. I'm still struggling at this bigtime, as can be seen through my very sparse posting habits here and on YouTube, but I'm sure I'll get a hang of it, I just have to keep at it everyday. 
2. I'm going to have a major decluttering session! I'm going to apply the KonMari Method (with alterations) to the things in my room, so that when I move into a new space, I will feel like a NEW WOMAN. whoo. It will also help me worry less about the attic caving in from the weight in my room. Haha.
3. Less-intense diet changes. We have trouble keeping our ideal diets when we live with other people, and end up eating McDonald's a lot! But even though we can't make our own food, I've kept on pulling my intake into the reasonable side, which was greatly helped by my #eatmindfully project last year. To be honest, I've been eating a little more, but it's still under control B-) And we still keep our owl water cups handy all the time!
4. Very easy exercise! A little goes a really long way for me. Just 12 reps of weighed squatting leaves me sore for a couple of days! Then I can go again. And I really feel improvements right away. It's pretty nice.
5. Keep learning about how to make things happen. I know I say this all the time, but Gretchen Rubin books are so effective and helpful to me. I love that she takes into account everyone's idiosyncrasies and real data, statistics, and sprinkles personal accounts and accounts of real people in the mix. It's just... So easy to understand and doesn't ring my "THIS IS BS" alarms. Right now I'm reading Better Than Before, which I was thinking about preordering on her website, thinking it might take a while to get here, but suddenly found on a shelf in the bookstore with the minimalistic original cover that I really like!!! Anyway, it's teaching me how to prioritize and effectively attempt change, so that's exciting because I can really use the guidance.

So yeah! A creative, functional, healthy life! So dreamy!!! I hope I make it werqq this year!

Last Moments of the First Day

New Year's Happiness Guidelines, because I did say the reflecting will come later for me.

Wrote this on my journal. They are not exactly measurable Resolutions in the usual, effective sense but more of a meditation and an emotional compass. There is so much negativity and hung-up-ness that needs shedding, even after years of thinking I was a positive person. Goes to show that it's not about staying happy all the time, but about aiming for wellness, which is to say, you explore your demons and work through them and move on from them, rather than just dousing everything with icing on the surface.

I see myself as more flawed than I've ever seen myself, but at the same time I've never loved myself more.

HELP ME I am TOO OLD.

Hello. I'm a twenty-five year old, able-bodied female person who has always felt too old.
Not old, I'm not old, I know I'm still in the young end of the human age spectrum, but I feel too old for where I am in my life right now:

I'm a person who lives at home, is technically unemployed, not famous, not rich, no patents, no published work, nothing.

It's been easy to tell myself "You just have to get a job, any job, be 'of use to.. whoever, society? sure' and you'll feel good." for most of my adult life; heck, it's been easy for most people who find out about my situation to tell me that. But see, I did work for a while, and I didn't feel like I was of use to anyone, I felt like my purpose in both the jobs I had was lubrication in human form, just letting the gears of the machine work smoother, not really making any changes, just making things easier for "the man", totally out of touch with what that man is even trying to make happen. Is he trying to nuke North Korea? Is he trying to bulldoze more homeless shelters for Trump? Realistically, he's just another guy who has a lot of money, or a bunch of guys who have a lot of money- trying to keep himself from making less money. I've lost myself there. Just --Whatever it was, I was keeping the gears from rusting and grinding.

So I saved money from both jobs, and up to this point, I've been trying to figure out what it is that could actually make me of use to society -that is, cause change in a way that I actually want to be responsible for.

Some of this has been searching for jobs that are more engaging (yes, I'm still on the lookout for that possibility), some of it has been thinking of business ideas because I ultimately want to work for myself, some of it has been trying to figure out what skills I need to gain in order to get to a place of doing what I want to do, and admittedly, a lot of it had just been living life normally as a stay-at-home person - exploring things online, entertaining and educating myself, cleaning, cooking, trying not to freak about about how slow things are progressing.

In all of these, an important and kind of funny thing I realised is how important it is to, and forgive me for how cheesy this sounds, actually know and accept yourself  before coming into your own and presenting your ideas to the world. I realised how much I have been censoring myself and trying to "prune" myself before letting myself grow to my full potential, and how limiting that has become to me.

I decided to write this now to come clean about all of my insecurities - to lay it all out there - to give context for the existence of this blog and to let you know that there is a human behind all of these. An incredibly, disastrously flawed one. And so, this won't be written like an article like my recent posts. This will just be me baring myself to you, to humanise this corner of space that I have made for myself here in the vast interspacewebs.

First, the thing in the title that was definitely not meant to mislead you - I am insecure about my age relative to where I am in life. Whenever I see people who have done more by now and are younger than me (and there are many of them - I started feeling this way at FOURTEEN for godssake) I always manage to wonder if it's too late to start anything by now and I should just find a desk job and not look left and right and try to forget about all of my old passions. 

Today though, I found out that Bunny Meyers from YouTube (grav3yardgirl) started vlogging at 25 - MY AGE! In her 5-year YouTube anniversary video, she said she was a "late bloomer" and my bitter brain was like "She probably meant starting at 21 or something and you're already four years down the road from there, hun" But I googled her age, and nope. Born in 1985. I know how silly the next part is going to seem, I know how crazy I sound, but I actually, literally TEARED UP from relief. It felt like once again my existence has been validated by this lady - the first time was when I started watching her and saw how delightfully weird she was and I felt quite okay about myself and started letting myself be myself more. Yes I just said myself three times, Beardy. Four times now. Sorry. Love you, *kiss*

Every time I fail to convince myself that age is just a number from now on, I'm going to tell myself that I've been half-assing my whole life, so when it comes to self-actualisation, my real age is only twelve and a half. So I could just shut up about being too old, and get immersed in things as openly as I did when I was 12 and just starting to learn how to play guitar.

I was having a good skin day the other day so. *feelin myself*

Second, I fear that I'm too out of touch with what used to be my natural talents - and yes this is sort of still the first point, because it has to do with my age and how I didn't form the right habits in my formative years when it comes to harnessing my skills and whatnot, but it deserves its own spot because it's just HORRIBLE. I am so afraid of not being able to write songs anymore, not being able to learn new software that would allow me to digitally draw again. Not being able to dance well anymore because of my hip problem. So many fears! But recently (and yes, all of the points here are going to come with reassurances because this blog is about being encouraging to oneself and others, after all) I've been successfully maintaining two habits- eating moderately and cleaning regularly - for a long time now, so I have some ammo against my own brain telling me I can't create any new habits~!!! >.< Shuddup brain. You know nothin. Or.. enough. You know enough, so stop doubting yourself, shh.

Third, I don't know if I'm likeable enough. To be listened to, for my opinions to be valued, to simply get enough hits online when I publish my content! Okay, maybe that last one is more about marketing knowledge, but you get the point. And this is the bottom line to many smaller insecurities that I could have considered as separate: my looks, my tone, how dumb I come across... I'm putting them all here because essentially they are just about being received positively after I put myself out there. The only reassurance I have for this point is the hunch I have that it simply does not matter. That's one good thing about growing older, I guess. Things become less and less about what people think about me, but rather my experience of life. I just want to give this a shot man, and if it fails, if nobody ends up reading anything I write, then I'd know for sure that it just wasn't there for me. I'd prefer not having to live my life wondering.

So there it is. Right now, I'm still figuring myself out, yes, but at the same time, I've finally come to the realisation that this is just simply not meant to end! I'm never going to come to a point where I've figured myself out, where it's done, a thing of the past. I'm one of those things that Elizabeth Gilbert calls "hummingbirds".. People who live through life going from one thing to another. My life simply is about figuring things out. This blog is where I document myself figuring things out too, and sharing things along the way. Nothing is final and unchangeable here. I know that things I feel today will evolve, and maybe I'll regret many things I say from now, much like I regret many things I said when I was younger. That's just how life is. And I'm far too old to keep resisting. ;)

Five Friday Favorites

Here are some recently acquired/crafted/appreciated things that puts a smile to my face / have been making my life better. For good vibes, cos it's Friday!

Pretty Journals

I've been on the lookout for a journal for a while now and I recently found this really cute one; a simple watercolor woosh-y washy design with purple detail. I know I wanted it to be in the purple/blue color scheme to be calming because I intended to write on it before bed. Of course, I just write on it whenever in reality :D The floral one is a notebook where Beardy and I just write letters to each other. It's meant to evoke the feelings from when receiving letters from each other was the only way we could communicate. I don't know, it's kinda romantic. :)

Tin Lid Magnet Mount

I really felt bad when I didn't have a use for these lids. There are four tins and I used just one lid and stacked the other three under so these were left without a purpose! Until I got the idea to stick them onto this blank space on my wall because I was desperate for a way to use some cute magnets I got. And now the blank space is used! I like sticking stuff on it like paintings and stuff :)

Water Heater

This plug-and-heat thingy is a lifesaver. We've been having water pressure problems, and water doesn't eat in our room when there's not enough pressure. And if you know Beardy well you'd know that he can't bathe if the water isn't hot. This heats water SUPER FAST. It's so awesome! Just plug and drop it!

My Most Favorite Owl Mug

I have two of these but this one keeps the contents cool faaaar longer than the other one. I think it's that thick double wall. We have been looking for a twin so that we can both have one to keep water in the room, but we haven't found one that's as cute at this one :)

 WiFi Extender!!

Okay, this has been here for a while. We get bad WiFi reception from the router downstairs so Emmy had the brilliant idea to get an extender! Now I can use the internet anywhere in my room! You don't understand! I used to have to stay near the door to use the internet or just keep lugging my laptop up and down the stairs to get stable internet everyday. This just makes life so much better.

Taking time to appreciate the small things has really made me happier overall. Try it! Just focus on the little things that make life better, stare at pretty things more, and don't be ashamed that they are little things. If they make you happy, then that makes them great!

What Love Could Feel Like

Guess what! Beardy and I are celebrating our Fifth Year Anniversary today!!! Yes, five whole years of being in each other's lives. It's a little crazy to think about! To celebrate, we filmed a vlog together doing The Boyfriend/Relationship Tag:

And on my own, I want to share some insights that I've gathered and observed to be things that need the most sharing from people who have experienced a nurturing, stable kind of love to people who are looking, or have been perhaps going after the kind of love that isn't really what they want in the end. In things that are common among us humans, we need to have a better line of communication in order to guide each other. That's what I think.

And love is a pretty common goal in people's lives. Humans are vastly preoccupied with romantic love. Not everyone, of course - but a lot of us are. We can philosophize about why this is so, but for most of us it's a very real, very deep-seated need, and done the right way, it can do a lot of good to a person. But it's as if we are used to being preoccupied with only the stage where it is sought, and when we have it, we are preoccupied with fixing it because a lot of the love we find is broken. I observe this a lot in the way that we often speak about love. How it feels. How it hurts. It's lead me to think that maybe we are made to have the wrong expectations about what it is, what it should be. I feel like maybe in a large extent, we are being made to look for the wrong kind of feeling in our search for love. I sure had the wrong expectations before befriending Beardy. I was looking for, and kept crashing head-on towards an idea of it that was simply unsustainable. Luckily, even without realising it at the time, starting a friendship with Beardy five years ago today eventually led me away from a long, painful path towards a really nice easy-going one so that I could, you know... Start worrying about other things. Life is about so much more than finding a partner after all.

Like being able to act like dumdums together once you've found each other.

Love shouldn't feel like competing to be the best one around in order to deserve being loved. It should feel secure, like the decision has been done. You should treat each other in a way that makes you feel confident and secure in your relationship. It shouldn't feel like a constant competition, like you always have something to prove. You should be able to show your whole self, not just the best parts. To be accepted for the good and bad, and to accept your partner wholly as well.

Love shouldn't be something we brace ourselves for, and reserve our strength for, but rather, something that gives us strength, and is a safe place to rest in in times where we are weak. Love should give us strength, not take it away from us. Yes, sometimes challenges may come that will need us to be strong, but it shouldn't come from the way we treat each other. I've observed that some people in relationships tend to fight and bicker a lot - about things big or small, and I think this causes a lot of lovers to have their guards up when they are around each other. I think it should feel like you are coming from the same place from every time you wind down, and face the same direction out to the world, together. The space you create should feel safe and nurturing, not like a battlefield.

Love shouldn't feel like the goal, the happy ending. It should feel like a beginning. It should improve your life in many ways, and not be the end goal. It should be a source of your energy, and the light to your way for the rest of your life.

Please mean something.

I'm doing a lot of planning.

Typical, but this is my actual occupation right now. I don't have to be doing anything else. I'm not in school and I quit my job. This is all I'm doing and I hope it will mean something when 2015 rolls in. I'm taking it slow at this stage, but I know that if I really decide to pursue this path, being an entrepreneur, the tides will be rougher. But I'm hoping I'd have built a lot of muscle by that time to hold on to the raft (...or the yacht, really. If I'm going to be totally ambitious.. amiriiiiiiigh).

I'm thinking not only about possible ventures but about optimizing my daily life. I'm aiming at geting focus, strength and motivation by controlling daily activities like sleep, eating, and physical activity (and yoga- which is a physical activity but also a little bit more than that). Much as I feel bad because I'm totally starting at 0 and there's no telling if I'll even get anywhere with this, (huge chance I'll fail and will still be at zero after a few months) I feel grateful that I have time to think things through.

There are gaps between constant moments of feeling inadequate and sorry for myself where I still see the light and I get to smooth my own ruffled feathers, remembering that there's still hope if I look hard enough, and the fact that if now is all that really exists, life is pretty awesome. It's hard, but I'm getting over my sadness. I'm getting over my fears. I'm getting over self-sabotage.

Plus I gained weight and it doesn't bother me at all. I think that's pretty remarkable.

Jarring

 (I almost called this post The Conjarring but I decided that banking on current events does not look good on me.)

Remember the jar I bought at the start of the year to put strips of paper in that recount good things that happens during the year? I abandoned it while Beardy was here, because somehow it's hard to stop to take a moment to write about good things happening while they are happening a lot. 

So I typed all the good stuff I remembered happening as of late and from Beardy's vacation in the summer. On one whole sheet of paper. Using my favorite colors of course.

I couldn't remember when stuff happened, so I gave up on the part where I put the date in the strips. I figured they werent that important, so long as I remember that the stuff happened. (although it would be nice to know but meh) and that I should let go a little bit. I'm trying to do this thing where I don't micromanage every single little thing. I'm going to focus instead on macromanaging ... and normalmanaging. I JUST WANT TO BE A NORMAL PERSON STOP IT BRAIN

There's a couple of cute things in the jar that I like, the heart-shaped candle on a stick from my free birthday sundae from Ryuma, the candlestick from Beardy's free apple pie on his going away/birthday dinner, and the blue spade toothpick (fave color and fave card suit!) from when I met my friends and Pia made us try her aunt's bread pudding. Fitting souveneirs from nice days spent with loved ones! There's also an origami rose I made around my birthday, I wrote about my birthday in it. Then I stuck it into the lid. Fits perfectly and looks really pretty. 

In other life news, I've just finished my first week of training! Doing well so far, and my co-trainees are pretty awesome! They're super funny and we all get along well. I really hope I get this job! I adjusted to the 10pm shift pretty quickly and well, (not to mention they pay more for nights) the workplace is super near and I don't need to be smoked bea-cued by pollution, and it's just a good first job I think. I think after graduating is the best time to work for a BPO. It will give me time to think of what I really wanna do and it won't be wasted time because I'll be interacting with people every day and I'll get to start saving money! Which is the best part for me, I won't lie.

lists don't take you everywhere

do you ever get the sense that you list so much on your to-do list but end up doing so little?

i'm trying this thing where, when ideas come to mind, like little chores, i do them instead of noting them down for later.

i got so many little things done today because of this. i feel like when i list tasks, they somehow feel partly finished to me, and i end up being lax at actually doing them. weird.

so far i've done a lot of preparing for tomorrow and other random chores, namely:

1. cleaning up and repolishing my nails
2. using my nose strip thing
3. brushing my teeth a second time (im trying to brush three times a day to whiten em; so far i only remember to do it twice a day)
4. packing up my bag 
5. queuing two blog posts for tomorrow and the next day
6. fixing my room
7. taking out the trash
8. charging my phone and camera
9. etc

and i do feel like i accomplished a lot. if i listed them down before doing them i don't think i'd have done them all. so even though i was really itching to list them down because i felt like i was going to forget some if i don't, i resisted and mentally checked them off instead. surprisingly, my brain was able to remind me of things just fine. as long as i kept moving. i'm learning to trust you more, subconscious. yay for our partnership.

i think i'll stick to doing lists for the next day instead of the present day. a bad habit of mine is to pace too much back and forth, gearing myself up to do something. i mentally over-prepare, but i under-do.
listing them down the day before will prepare my subconscious without me having to look at the list again and again while im in the middle of things. i think that's what i did in freshman year anyway. back when i was super productive.

diaries, notebooks, blogs.

At the start of this year, I decided to keep a dated diary. Not for organizational purposes, I had my planner for that, but to keep as a day-to-day account of 2012. I figured it would be a good way to make myself commit to doing something every day without fail.

I don't think I will need to say it, but it failed. A year was too big of a goal. There'd been many blank pages and often I felt forced to write on the ones I did fill up.

While my motivation was sound, it left me no room for error. I feel so bad for the tree whose life was sacrificed to make this notebook! I thought it would be enough to guilt me into doing it everyday, but as it turns out, I don't like being guilted into doing things and am therefore likely to just forget about them altogether. Sorry tree/s.


I had two reasons for the diary, with which I felt justified spending a lot more on it that I normally would for a notebook:

1. The diary purpose. I wanted to have a record of every single day to track my progress in efficiency, work ethic, and because I knew this was going to be a great year because of reasons *cough*beardy*cough*
2. There was a vertical calendar thingy which served as my mense tracker.

Neither really worked to their full potential.

1. Even when I have a lot to write, I get turned off because, as the notebook made me realise, I'm not a fan of hand-writing bursts of thought. Add that with the compact size and it's not very comfortable. While Emmy was here I often found myself just writing the week's events in a notepad file except for that brief time where we lived in an island for eleven nights. 
2. I started using birth control this year, which means I didn't need it for a few months since the pills changed my cycles. Although I will be using it again for my next period until December since I'm off-BC again.

Next year, I just decided, I will just keep a notepad diary file that I will save online. More room for freedom in terms of write-erase-write haphazardness that tends to come when I write freely, and in terms of space elasticity. I can write as short or as long as I want and I won't feel bad. Also, I won't be limited to talking about a day. I can talk about events in say, a week, together in one entry, especially when my mind frames events that way anyway. According to meaning and significance, rather than chronologically. 

I will also write little details of my day on my planner as I've done in years past, and as for the mense tracker, it's really easy to make on my own. I didn't need to pay a big corporation for their layout. But well, the year was new and I was feeling splurgy.

Overall, I won't be doing it again but it was a good learning experience. Notebooks are only a safe investment for me when they are blank. I apparently don't like being told what to do. Even if it was my idea.