all the things i shouldn't have forgotten

forgot to talk about all the things that happened in december. for posterity's sake.

hung out with this bunch before leaving for shanghai with the family. pics from all our last few meetings. extremely happy that all of us got to know each other and that next semester won't be so lonely anymore. i only wish we made our acquaintances sooner! but still, i'm grateful that at commencement there'll be people to take pictures with haha. first outing, drinks at emerald hill. then jumping around at amped.

counted down to new years on noreen's roof. drank, shouted, laughed... people got drunk. it was really fun. twas a great way to ring in the new year, am looking forward to a great 2014 with everyone above :)

pics from shanghai and korea. all i know is we were so excited to get to korea that everything in shanghai slips my mind. thankfully i found this picture of shanghai's skyline along the bund. to be fair i went to shanghai with a very confused mindset of what china was and is (it's my first time there) and i'm glad to say that i was pleasantly surprised by shanghai. i know its the most modern chinese city, and i can't say for sure what i expected to see, but it was really lovely, even just walking along the roads, listening to buskers play the guitar, admiring the driving skills of shanghai's cabbies... i'd come back i think. 

my birthday (17th) morning was celebrated on the night of the 16th. Gus had run out to buy me a bouquet of flowers and i'm so upset i didn't get to keep them because we had a flight to catch. my parents rang up a bottle of champagne and wine and a cake from the hotel concierge and i made my sister drink so much that she puked a disgusting amount of wine-laced puke. i felt bad so i blow dried her hair after she showered. i'm always overseas on my birthday. i wonder what it'd be like to celebrate in singapore? 

by the night of the 17th we were in Seoul!!! idk we were just looking forward to it so much. had an awesome kbbq dinner for awesome prices relative to korean restaurants in singapore of course. stuffed myself full of chadol baegi. downed 2 soju bombs with Gus and my brother and Karina. went off to noraebang at night which was really fun as well. singing gets so incredibly tiring. you don't even think singers get tired from singing do you? it doesn't occur to you but i guess anyone who's been to ktv will know haha. insane. ended my night dancing and singing to big bang's 'bad boy' in korea haha pretty awesome stuff tbh 

we also went snowboarding at yang-ji resort which was only an hour or so outside of seoul. SO FUN. i miss snowboarding the most. reminds me of boarding in France one year ago. finally started to carve nicely! sad we only had so little time there. nowadays all i think about when i'm bored is snowboarding. i want to plan a ski trip in july to new zealand or one of the australian ski resorts. before i die i have to make it to the whistler mountains in canada to snowboard. def one my favourite sports!

and lastly a narcissistic photo of myself once we came back home. seoul withdrawals, impending commencement of work... all this shit has begun. it's 10.30pm and Gus is still at work. don't really enjoy this life. wish we could do something that would let us stay the way we were. wish we didn't need money at all. been struggling to get up every morning for work... struggling to come up with ideas that are useful and relevant. nevertheless i'm grateful for the opportunity. everyone at work has been really nice to me and really helpful.

ok bye

feels odd i haven't been writing a lot at all but will commence a job tomorrow that involves a lot of writing, albeit about things that i'm hardly an expert in but i feel like i want to do my best, honestly, for myself, just to see what i am capable of. i can never feel like this in school, sometimes i feel like school is so impossibly hard, and it's so impossible to achieve anything in school that i can be proud of. even though looking back i recognize that is a bad attitude to have, i'm glad that this job makes me feel confident, and excited, and capable... i don't really remember the last time i've felt this way. if it goes well hopefully some of this good feeling translates to the new school semester

gus starts work as well. for 6 months. after which he goes back to school and i start work for good. feel like this is an important milestone. today, actually. the moment we both go to work the wheels won't stop turning until forever. feeling uneasy about the way we've sort of sidled up to the Monday without really acknowledging what it all means. am unsure if we've been avoiding it or it just doesn't seem like a big deal. i hope it's the latter. am going to call gus soon  to talk about this i think.

tomorrow is new years eve and then it will be new years day and it will be 2014. what i've resolved without writing down but has become ever more concrete in my mind because of the idea of 'work' and a 'job', like ok this is the time to get my shit together

- drink more water
- exercise more
- sleep earlier, wake up earlier, also sleep less
- moisturize haha
- talk less shit about people
- work harder in everything
- make time for myself
- make time for the people who matter
- cook more
- less procrastination

i met rachel the other day and we ate ramen and talked about many things. i don't know if this ever happens to anyone else, but when a certain topic weighs heavily on your mind, it keeps coming randomly in conversations without any prompting from you? seems strange to me, it always happens. anyway, tammy told me the other day about this book called 'quiet' by susan cain, which explores the power of introverts in a world where extroversion is the ideal. i picked it up today and in the first few pages i felt so strongly what she was writing about, how much i feel the pressure to be happy all the time, to be able to speak up and hold a memorable conversation, to use body language to convey a sense of power and dominance, when in all honesty what i want to do is lie in bed and read a book, scroll through humour blogs on tumblr, drink ice milo with just 2 or 3 people and talk about non-awkward things... yet everyday i try to convince myself that i am this crazy, happy, outgoing sort of person who is capable of making a million friends and being liked by everyone. it made me feel really sad and really fake. i haven't come to the end of the book, but i have a pessimistic outlook on this. i know the pressures of the world will continue to force me down this energy-draining path.

but anyway, i met rachel, and i like it when we meet and talk about books, we always somehow happen to pick up and read the same books. it happened with:

a tale for the time being
taipei
mr penumbra's 24 hour bookstore

given that we meet very rarely because she's in the UK most of the time and i'm here, i feel warm and happy inside knowing that we have the same tastes and have things to talk about that don't drain me. i also sort of feel glad that we don't run in the same social circles, in the sense that the people who irk me and i always feel like bitching about it wouldn't know her and she wouldn't know them. so i don't bitch and the gossip is limited and it just paves the way to better conversation i think, that's what i like

(what i was saying about the things u think about randomly appearing: tammy told me about the book, it came up in conversation with rachel, came up again today during dinner at jamie's)

i think it's time to sleep

back from shanghai and seoul my mind is just buzzing with so many things good and bad, but mostly bad. it's like the moment you reach home you breach the border where all the bad, stressful, unnecessary things have been straining to reach you. suddenly everything goes wrong. i hate it so much, having to deal with shit i don't want to deal with, things i feel make no progress or growth to the personal development of anyone involved. feels like this shit involves just closing the door to a circular pathway, in that i will inevitably have to open the door to this same shit again in a few months, a few years, idk. i've been pondering if perhaps some things are meant to exist in a constant state of misalignment, never to be fixed. i wonder if you aren't meant to fix them, if they're meant to just be a constant thorn in your side for god knows what reason. if this fucking suffering is supposed to be normalized, and that i'm just putting too much worry and too much stress into something that should just be considered normal. when i look at the situation there are so many people to blame, who should shoulder the actual blame, but for some reason i end up feeling guilty because i'm so helpless in my ability to do anything about it.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKING FUCK

"The Hungarian-born philosopher Aurel Kolnai gave the horrifying qualities of bugs some serious thought. Kolnai ultimately decided that what upsets us is “their pullulating squirming, their cohesion into a homogeneous teeming mass” and their “interminable, directionless sprouting and breeding.” That is, it’s the quantity of crazy ants that’s so destabilizing. As the American psychologist James Hillman argued, an endless swarm of bugs flattens your perception of yourself as precious and meaningful. It instantly reduces your individual consciousness to a “merely numerical or statistical level.”

This is what’s soul-crushing about crazy ants: What wafts off them is the same faintly nihilistic feeling that comes the moment you realize hammering the pound sign won’t connect you with a human being and only funnels you back to the same automated instructions. It’s what drove Mike the Hog-a-Nator to grab an assault rifle. And it’s also, apparently, the feeling Tom Rasberry has been left with, having watched his alarm about these creatures be sucked up into an unintelligibly massive system forced to juggle lots of other, equally terrible problems, and then quietly disperse into the goop.

Insects, Kolnai wrote, unsettle us, existentially speaking, because they “arouse generally the impression of life caught up in a senseless, formless surging."

- via The New York Times 

lately i have felt an exhaustion in my body like no other time in my life
have googled 'chronic fatigue syndrome' on webmd like other paranoid freaks
am afraid that this is what i have because it is essentially untreatable

have been thinking a lot lately about how much your body can betray you
it is everything that is you on earth, that sustains your own perceived sense of living
and how others perceive you as living
the litmus test of a life on earth is a body part moving at the will of an autonomous mind
the only thing you can control
but the only thing you also can't

if you think about it your body is your biggest responsibility
you have just this one thing to take care of tbh
i keep thinking how shitty my physical body is might be related to my emotional health
hormones and whatnot
still i have a fear that there are cancer cells in my stomach
or a tumor pressing on a nerve in my brain
it's weird but i feel like these arbitrary catastrophes happen all the time,
it might as well be me

was watching a movie in bed with gus, and he fell asleep, and i saw him fall asleep halfway through the movie and i paused it, and he opened his sleepy eyes and insisted on continuing because he wanted to watch it. pressed play and he was asleep in 10 seconds. looked at him snuggled up under the covers and felt reminded that we, us, we have something special that exists right now that has broken down the barriers of two strangers to the point where i feel myself breathe a sigh of relief, physically relax when i am with him. i think it's sad that i cannot say for sure where we will be in a few years. but i suppose this uncertainty only compels me to appreciate even more whatever special thing we have together now.

recently i have been thinking about a few things, like exercising, taking dance classes, cooking... the other night i cooked lasagna and potato salad for dinner because i did not do anything for gus on his birthday (circumstances). at the moment i felt disappointed that i put too much mayo in the salad, annoyed that the top layer of cheese browned too much and the sides were too crispy. but when i think about it now i think i should give myself more credit and cut myself more slack. for someone who has cooked a grand total of less than 8 times in my entire life i think i did a decent job. as long as nobody went to the hospital i think i have things to be proud of. process > destination

another thing i have been thinking lately is that to progress as a person is a tiring thing. you have to constantly be thinking about thought processes or actions that you can take to better your life or make it worse. actions are far more controllable than thoughts, but the moment you rein your thoughts in, i think you begin to make significant differences. the difficulty is that thoughts come at hte speed of light, and you're usually caught off guard. thus, you have to be vigilant in protecting yourself from certain thoughts. i feel like you literally have to be constantly observing your mind from as objective a perspective as you can get, and arresting bad thoughts the moment they arrive. some thoughts you can't catch in time and you can actually notice the marks they've left behind in their wake.

what i mean is it's scary to let your thoughts run wild. imagination is a good thing but not when it dives into the realms of what hurts us most. i feel interested in how our parents have shaped our mental health, but also feel a little scared at what i'll find. i can't stand the idea of putting my parents at fault for anything ever.

apparently actions done consistently for 7 days become a habit. you can't hit a perfect 7 days with thoughts, it's such a long process. constant reminders, constant checking yourself. it's not easy, but i also feel like i have never been faced with such a task before. i've never felt the need to check my thoughts, use pure willpower to push through emotional pain. it's a funny feeling -- using your mind to conquer the doubts & fears produced by the same brain. just goes to show how everything is in your mind really.

Feeling drained today because I started doing my applications. Felt ridiculous but at the same time felt like it was a rite of passage... Don't feel particularly excited for anything I've applied for. I constantly feel upset that I haven't found that one thing in life I'm desperate to do.

If you want to feel like a failure just start searching for a job.

Still, end of the night, comfy in bed, Gus' arms around me as he snores lightly. Things could be a lot worse I suppose.

Haven't felt the urge to blog at all recently, or to write down anything important to me, really. It isn't even that I'm busy with school, I just don't even remember or feel the urge. In the past I would always feel like writing. Nowadays I just don't care. I wonder why that is? I only decided to write things down now because I read someone else's blog that reminded about how cathartic writing can be sometimes.

It's so difficult to explain what I'm feeling also because it's so difficult to justify. It's unreasonable to some extent, which makes me feel ashamed for feeling it. But again, this is something I read awhile ago but has always stuck with me: you can't apologize for how you feel. You feel what you feel, you can't control that. You can only control how you choose to act on those feelings. And what I feel is: disappointment. I feel that I've trusted myself and pushed myself hard enough to get past certain things in life that I know for a fact are not worth harping on or clinging onto or giving in to. And at times I've felt like I've truly succeeded, and that I've really made progress. And then at other times I feel like I've taken two steps back instead. It gets so confusing. I can't explain it. When I feel like I've taken two steps back, I feel that exact same pull, the exact same gravity that's always dragged me into the void, like the light I've worked so hard to crawl towards is just shrinking away from me.

On the other hand I am having more fun in school. On Friday we sat in the Honours room and someone said, do you feel like we all only made friends in year 4? And it felt good that other people felt the way I did, that the first 3 years of university was pointless but making friends now, if it all lead to this point, I suppose it could be worth it. It feels like I've been waiting for this for a long time as well, that for so long I've been telling God that I'm ready for whatever this is, this static, unmoving piece of life I'm living, to be over and done with, and that the time is finally coming. I hope I'm not speaking too soon but I'm glad that this year's honours cohort seems to be quite close and friendly and generally fun people.

I just thought about things I always try to avoid instead of facing. I never really realized that I was the type of person to run away I think mostly because I never had things to run away from. I can't help feeling like you're being forced to grow up all the time. I can't imagine children who lose their parents and are forced to grow up overnight to care for their siblings. Often I get stuck pitying myself and all the shit I go through when it's honestly nothing compared to others. When I think about last night, that's what I think.

Also, been hearing of a lot of people passing away. People my age. It feels surreal. I wonder if to some extent I'm trying to desensitize myself to all this news. Almost to the point where if I start thinking about it I automatically start thinking about something else. It's weird.

I don't even know how to blog anymore.