Yesterday, I saw this peacock. It seems pretty chill for a bird that usually is a symbol for pompousness and flashiness. Never judge a peacock by the type of bird it is, I guess…
After living so many weeks, it surprises me that it took this long to figure out that every one is the same. I mean, like, they always start on Monday or Sunday or whenever it is that you think that it starts, and then seven days later the whole thing starts over again.
Or maybe it just feels that way sometimes. I don’t know. We should have one week every year where we run through the days backwards just to mix it up a little bit. Kind of like during the Daylight Savings Time switch in the fall, when it’s 2:00AM one minute and then an hour later it’s still 2:00AM.
Anyway, in an attempt to make it a little bit less monotonous I’ve started trying out some new hobbies. I already owned a few plants, so I decided to buy some more plants, and I’ve been building a little garden on my dresser next to the window. I got one yesterday that’s a few succulents inside of a neat looking little rock. I have no clue exactly how to take care of a succulent, and this one was kind of expensive because of the neat looking rock, so let’s hope I don’t ruin it.
I’ve also started actually using my notetaking Kindle for reading, which to my understanding is what people are supposed to associate with Kindles/Amazon/wasn’t it just so much better when Amazon was a bookstore and not an AliExpress knock-off?
At first, I started reading Vern Sneider’s A Pail of Oysters because that’s a period of history that I don’t know a whole lot about (like, post-WWII East Asia/China/Taiwan) and I wanted to get myself a little bit better perspective. It was a pretty well-paced, understandable, well-written thing, though, and it kept my attention really well. I finished it earlier this week, and I decided that if I liked Vern Sneider’s writing so much, I should read his other famous one, Teahouse of the August Moon, which I only knew was a comedy about something Okinawa (I don’t really know that much about WWII or about Japan). So, I started reading, and it was also really well-written (I mean, that’s probably why it got so famous). Unlike A Pail of Oysters, though, it was definitely intended to be a comedy, and the humor was pretty great (although, as I always warn everyone, I think everything is funny).
The book also did a really good job at giving a little bit of perspective to the target audience of closed-minded Westerners like myself. As I was nearing completion, I went to Target to buy some tea (because, apparently, that’s where we go to get the tea?) and came back home to finish—I wanted to get some sushi at some point, too, but I haven’t gone out for that yet (maybe for lunch later today?). I still drink my coffee a little too quickly, but I can work on that. As a vegetarian, though, all the talk of sweet potatoes and soybeans had me feeling a little bit patriotic.
So, anyway, giving myself a little bit of perspective and some escape has had me feeling like maybe every week isn’t so much the same as I thought. I mean, it’s really up to me whether I have the ambition to go out and try something different when I have the time. Once I finish my physics class, who knows what I can get up to? I have a passport application in processing right now. If I have that back before school starts, maybe I could just drive around freely and see if I end up in New Brunswick or one of those places up there across that arbitrary border they drew in the middle of this corner of the world. And then, once the school year starts, I can try to put it to even better use.
I mean, I don’t know, dreaming about the future is the only thing that can keep me sane, so as long as I write about whatever I’m thinking about here, I’ll probably say a few things that are a little bit too hopeful or a little bit of a reach. But, really, a study abroad would be cool. Employment abroad would be even cooler. Really, I just want to see things and to learn things.
The longer I wait, the more prepared I can be. Have I mentioned “好好學習，天天向上” yet? I read it when I was checking out after buying the MDBG Chinese-English dictionary that I wrote about a few blog posts ago. It’s a neat short phrase that you can keep repeating to yourself so that you don’t forget your study time.
Sometimes, people say that my generation isn’t as motivated as they were in the past, or something along those lines. I think that the path to motivation looks like “freedom > creativity > planning > hope > work > motivation”. Whenever there’s a break in there, it’s a little difficult to recover the whole thing, but writing it out like that makes it easier to imagine how you can put that back together just for yourself. When we use them responsibly, I think, books/movies/podcasts/video games are good ways to help build up the creativity. Learning is hard when you feel like the information you want is far away, but when you have those well-written books or some good teacher to give the information to you in a way that sticks, that also makes learning/working a lot easier.
All this is to say that the semester starts in about a month and it’s going to be great.
I just need to not die before the end of my physics class. Lowering my GPA constitutes dying.
Thanks for reading!