Writing this entry in the dragon year has made me understand a few things:

1. My female friends all really enjoy buying red underwear for me

2. Traveling spontaneously is not a bad thing

If you’ve ever screamed into the ocean when the tides are rising, you know that the voices go in will never come out. No matter how loud you are, her waves will hit the reefs even louder. To let my voice be heard, even if it seems to fade into society's cacophony, just as my screams into the rising tides are swallowed by her more powerful waves.

cred: Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue

everything about goodbye

“Sunk costs are those which have already been incurred and which are unrecoverable. In business, sunk costs are typically not included in consideration when making future decisions, as they are seen as irrelevant to current and future budgetary concerns” - Investopedia

While this hot earl grey tea is clearing my mind, I wanted to come write about how attachment styles are what they are. There are four in total: secure, anxious-ambivalent, disorganized and avoidant. As far as I’m aware, there is no one with one singular type. Most people have all four styles within their personality due to the colorful experiences and encounters an individual will have while going through developmental phases.

pic cred: @glyvees via twitter

I think that opposites definitely attract each other. Just like spongebob and squidward, black and white, ice and fire: the most dark person will always find the brightest person in the room to be around. If there’s any take away from this specific attraction force, it is that as human beings: everyone needs balance in life. Slowly, the positives and negatives meet together to grow as an individual.

I love watching fire dance around on a newly lit candle. The oblivious energy that bursts and sways around often reminds me of myself. More specifically, the part of myself that is accounted as human and most importantly female. It seems that no matter how radiantly I present myself, I am burning away slowly by the gaze of others.

Man and kind are two different things. Most of the time people aren’t both things. You can be a man without being kind and you can be kind without being a man. I wouldn’t encourage being kind without being a man though. This is not saying that if you identify as something besides a man it does not apply, I’m just generalizing humanity in a patriarchal society.

A great example of humanity’s existential yearn for meaning is receiving a name. Whether that’s pre, during or post birth, most individuals aren’t nameless. After being birthed, people survive on values such as “life is what you make of it”. I’m giving two examples here because I believe that there is a difference in being bestowed meaning versus giving yourself meaning.

TW: depression, mental health mentions

Have you ever seen a wave swallow a whale before? I love using this analogy because each time before the whale submerges, it surfaces one last time to let air out: it’s blowhole will literally shoot plumes of mist out of its head. Sometimes like a big grand display, sometimes in small, beautiful flashes and sometimes in ways we don’t expect. Kind of like humans: we love to emerge for a single moment before submerging to our comfort zones.

From a young age, I’ve always been obsessed with the ocean, river, creek, lake and pretty much any form of water. My obsessive behavior was not only tolerated but encouraged by a tarot reading in which I discovered that I was quite literally attached to the water. In order to rejuvenate and heal, I am recommended to go near bodies of water. This is why I never really had any particular opinion towards this obsession. That is, until recently when a friend pointed out that it was because I was in fact, sad. Not only this friend, multiple people chimed in to agree with that point of sadness. That I liked bodies of water and the color blue because it was melancholic and arguably, depressing. This got me thinking: As cathartic as being sad and expressing that sadness may be, society has had an unhealthy amount of ongoing trend to encourage negativity.

I had a great conversation with an Uber driver this week. This man has been persevering his own niche project of promoting underground musicians for eight years now. While that stood out to me with an immense amount of fascination, something that caught my interest even more was his long running battle with alcoholism. Out of respect and privacy for him, I will call him Fred.

pc @九水巷/twitter

Today is incredibly hot. After receiving a brutal amount of leg day torment from boxing (it’s the upper calves, hip adductors and that joint between glutes and hamstrings if you must know), I’ve decided to sit down at the cafe beneath my apartment to write about the topic of morality. From the perspective of a newly adolescent whose entering adulting, I’ve recently come to understand that people work for different reasons. Some enjoy their work, some don’t. Some enjoy their work at first and then don’t later. Some don’t enjoy their work at first and do later. Some work to not work while some work to work. You get my point.

If there is a term besides minimalism and maximalism that can describe home decor, mine would be “nonmalism”. No this is definitely not a clever excuse to begin this blog but I wanted to make an announcement of my recent commitment to acquiring a bean bag. Among many other reasons, I’ve moved around so much in my lifetime for any desire to decorate a new living space. Not sure since when I started dissociating but if you know me in real life, my apartment spaces have always screamed one thing: lifeless.

pc: @saitoukazu/twitter

Fashion is just a big inside joke. The people who get it, get it. It recently dawned upon me that in order to be an outstanding fashionista, I needed to just be branding myself as one big inside joke. To put into familiar terminology, I needed to be unique but in a relevant way. It’s really all about self expression. What we wear dictates not only our physical image but most of the time, our intrinsic values. If you don’t care for the brands you wear, that shows that you aren’t concerned for labelling. If you care about the design but not the material you wear, that shows you have a big heart xoxo.

I’m not really sure where this will end up going but I’ve had a really rough morning dealing with disrespectful calls and ignorant people. Since this is my own journal and space to ramble, I will go into specifics on how rude and disrespectful these calls were. The first was this scam caller that had emailed my parents about this $625 purchase on internet security software. The claim was that they had purchased it previously and it is now being renewed. My mother explained that the money in fact was not transacted and hearing his thick heavy accent talk was already giving me a migraine. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with people who have accents, my issue is targeted to people who choose to not be communicative. He was so delirious in his line of speech that he eventually started saying the words “damnit” and “god damnit” when I told him the website which he directed me to did not exist.

I usually would write up a much more niche and creative title but too bad because I wanted to stay more grounded for this one. I’m currently struggling to create my own self publishing webpage. The struggle in this case embodies my lack of expertise on anything related to web design, coding, software implementation as well as the overall anxiety regarding the lack of foreseeing achievements coming out of this decision. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still doing it. In fact, I think I overcame that brief hiccup a little bit by finally sorting out which theme I wanted for my page. It’s really the little things that make me feel less like a useless piece of shit that’s wasting planet earth’s oxygen.

So I’ve been having repeated mental breakdowns ever since returning from China. After going to a therapist from Healthiest You who just told me to “hang in there” and “have faith”, I decided to sit down on my self built IKEA couch and make a list of problems that have influenced my life for the past month.