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2024-07-17

Ignore the fact that it's been 3 months!! It's been pretty exciting-- I changed my major to International Law and Institutions, got accepted into the Chinese Flagship Program (!), got accepted into the Honors program (!!), AND got a full-ride scholarship (!!!!!!!!!!)! Things are looking up, although there is a part of me that is scared I'm gonna somehow lose it... but we triumph nevertheless! I'm also doing an early semester, which means I already have assignments before my class officially start virtually on the 5th; I then move in on the 11th, while everyone else moves in around the 20th, I believe. That gives me an extra week and some change to get used to campus, which is nice.

My early semester class is on psycholinguistics and it's been interesting so far! My classes for the fall semester are a research continuation of my early semester, introduction to international studies, introduction to international law, Chinese I, a seminar for my college, another seminar for my dorm, and violin lessons (never played the violin and I'm excited to learn!).

In June, I went to Québec City to meet a close friend of mine and I had SUCH a good time. I need to make a page about it; it was probably one of the best experiences of my life honestly??? It was my first time out of the country and first time meeting an online friend in person and it went perfectly :)

Besides that, I've had one main stressor that I don't really feel comfortable talking about here, but it isn't that huge and it will clear up by the time classes start, so I'm not too overly worried about it. Gotta keep truckin' along!

Hope you guys enjoy the site update ♥︎! There is more coming, but I wanted to put a bit of it out. So if you see a lot of unfinished shit... no you don't.

2024-04-16

Been a bit since the last blog post, apologies! Finally got my day off after a 45 hour work week (not including unpaid breaks...) so I'm happy about that and at least the paycheck boutta be nice.

I went to see the solar eclipse with one of my good friends! It was the first time I wore something extremely femme out in public and I really liked it, but it made me pretty scared to talk to other people who wasn't my friend. In any case, me and her went to an Asian grocery store to get some snacks and we were on our way. My city was just barely outside of totality so we really just had to leave the city borders to witness it. I think one of the most interesting parts about it was just the lighting. When it gets dark it's due to a sunset happening, but as the sun was just getting covered it resulted in this interesting lighting that I can't really describe. Wish my camera was good enough to show it properly. The totality itself was beautiful. Really happy that I had the opportunity to see it :)

In other news, I'm going to double major in Environmental Science. Besides the fact that that field has inherently more career opportunities than Classical Civilization does, I think it would just genuinely be very fun. I love doing very hard-science worldbuilding, so it would help me out on that front. I've never considered myself a STEM person, but I think a portion of it comes from the fact that I was never really trained in any of the fundamentals so it just resulted in me always being kind of lost during instruction.

2024-03-13

Been feeling tired and mildly burnt out from work again. It just feels like a neverending cycle of not really minding that much and then feeling like I am going to rip out my organs if I have to work another day. It's a major fear of mine that this is just how it's always gonna be. I think what stimulates the burn out is this hope of escape, that I technically have the option to leave right now, even if that isn't the greatest of ideas. One of the cases where sometimes hope may not be the most useful of emotions to have.

In other news, I've been reading about Haussmann's redesigning of Paris and I've been kind of inspired by it. I want to create my own "total reimagining" of the city where I am from, with a focus on public transport, walkability, and environmentalism. Urban planning is SUPER interesting to me and I need to read it in a more scientific sense, instead of just Wikipedia pages and "Not Just Bikes".

Side note, I realize when I write I constantly start sentences with "I think..." which just makes my writing feel less confident. Writing this blogpost has had me going back through and getting rid of that starting line.

Also, I finally have been working on my art skills! I didn't do much today because work was really bad but it's actually pretty relaxing when I stop trying to care about what other people perceive it. Obviously there's still a nagging voice in my head telling me how ugly it is, but I also try to remember that I barely drew growing up and thus I lack a lot of the motor skill that accompanies drawing. There's also some benefit in learning as an adult, primarily being that I don't need to unlearn bad habits. My primary goal is learning anatomy in order to create my OCs and fashion ideas, but landscape and architectural scenes are other ideas for me.

Going off that, PricklyAlpaca is SUCH a major inspiration for me. She is everything that I want to be in a creative. I HIGHLY recommend watching her videos, they are super good :)

My main obstacle is really just my laziness. I have a hard time starting and maintaining things, even when I like it, and I genuinely have no idea on how to combat this. There's only so much willpower you can use to force yourself to do something. I try setting schedules on my calendar, but it's really easy to just look at the notification for it and go "what if I just... don't." But I guess the idea is to just, y'know, do it. Perhaps once I get good at forcing myself to follow the schedule I will actually abide by it. Still, even when I had long standing habits (such as dream journaling which I did daily for 7 months) I tend to just stop doing them one day and not pick it back up. So I genuinely don't really know what to do.

2024-03-01

Welcome to the new site redesign, babyyyy!!! It's the beginning of March and what better way to herald in the spring than this. I've been pretty unproductive for the last few days and my sleep schedule has been pretty bad (case in point, I slept for 14 hours last night...). I think I just need to get back into the habit of creating daily to-dos and just being more physically active. My main problem comes in the fact that when I do wake up early, I just fall abck asleep almost instantly because I'm not being active. That's my theory, anyways.

What's keeping me going is knowing that in 5 months I'm going to university, which I'm SO excited about. I'm so tired of working this job that I don't really like 40 hours a week.

I also realized I have a really big problem with executive dysfunction. I want to do so many things, but the thought of doing them (or even the act of doing them) is just super exhausting, even though I want to do it or I like doing it. For example, thinking about making more pages really exhausts me even though I WANT to do it; I guess it's just the empty canvas effect or whatever.