I have friends who eagerly check their horoscopes each and every week, consulting the pages of Cosmopolitan or clicking into Refinery29 to see what the stars have in store for them. I don’t dis-believe in astrology, but I don’t believe in it in that way.
To me, it makes perfect sense that the universe has an influence on us; look at the way the moon influences the tide or the sun influences the temperature, how could it not affect humans the way it affects the world? And it makes sense that the influence can be emotional as well as physical; anyone who experiences SAD (seasonal affective disorder) or simply gets gloomy on a rainy day or excited about a warm summer afternoon understands. And there’s no denying that things like the full moon and the infamous Mercury in retrograde have a huge impact on many of us. But I don’t personally believe that the location of Mars on a certain date lets you know that you should buy a lottery ticket or whatever; I think celestial influence is much broader and less personalised.
It’s also not something I tend to seek out too much information about, so occasionally I discover something new to me that relates to my interpretation of astrology’s impact, and that happened for me last week when I learned about Saturn returns.
One of my favourite things to read online is Refinery29’s Money Diaries. This ongoing series features a different subject each time, recounting a week’s worth of expenses in their city of residence. A week in London on a 50k salary; a week in NYC on a 12k salary; a week in Dallas on a 200k salary, and so on. From the good (detailed budgeting from people with similar jobs and incomes as me!), the bad (the people who’s parents/partners/gift cards pay for everything so they don’t “count” those expenses), and the lol (that writer who spent 70 quid on cocaine and then got her credit card declined at a takeaway), it’s always interesting to get a glimpse behind the curtain of someone’s financial life.
When I moved to New Zealand, I sadly had to mostly give up on using my favourite budget tracker, Mint. While I can still log in to keep an eye on my American accounts, my New Zealand bank is not supported on their interface and so I can’t connect it for all-in-one account-monitoring convenience. The exchange rate also makes the budgeting feature fairly useless. However, as tempting as it is to use this as an excuse to let my expenses be a free-for-all, I decided to track my spending the old fashioned way and see where things were at.
So for the month of February, I made a list in my bujo of every single dollar I spent. Whether it was several hundred dollars for rent or a single dollar to contribute to the work lotto pool, I accounted for all my spending. Now, unlike R29’s Money Diaries, this isn’t an anonymous post, so I’m not going to share every single detail of where my money went, but here’s a look into the cost of living in Wellington, NZ (all numbers in NZD unless otherwise noted).
One of the most important things I’ve learned since starting a regular yoga practice about a year and a half ago is the power of small movements. It’s easy to get caught up in the thrill of or desire for the most intense and difficult postures—sinking a millimetre deeper in pigeon pose or your heels a nearly imperceptible amount closer to the floor in downward dog just don’t bring the same adrenaline rush that dropping back into wheel pose or managing your first headstand. Social media does not always help either. The “simple” poses just aren’t as sexy as inversions, backbends, and splits. But they’re equally important, and it’s equally important to notice and acknowledge our progress, however small, in whatever we do, and to recognise that there are different types of progress which are all worthwhile.
Many people have discussed the negative effects of social media on yoga, and I definitely agree with many of those critiques. I am beyond tired of Instagram yogis preaching truthfulness and honesty then making undisclosed sponsorship posts an hour later. But I love social media’s other impacts on yoga—finding inspiration from more advanced practitioners, participating in “yoga challenges,” and learning tips from teachers around the world. Still, I think one thing that’s sometimes lost, not only on the internet but also in my and probably many folks’ personal practice is the way small progress can enrich your routine. There’s a reason, after all, that yoga is called a “practice.”
One of the first times I ever tried wheel pose, a difficult one for me due to a ganglion cyst on my wrist.
In every aspect of life, I am a big fan of setting small, achievable milestone goals on the way to a larger goal. Yoga-wise, one of my New Years resolutions for 2017 was to get my splits; I didn’t achieve that, not even close. I’m not disappointed, but I realise that what I should have done is set smaller goals to work on, from one to another. From X to Y degrees (with Y obviously not being near 180 yet), for example. Reaching these small goals would be a good way to motivate myself to stay on track.
I used to be a fairly good pianist. Not impressively good, I don’t think I had the raw talent and I certainly didn’t have the dedication to practicing to take it anywhere beyond a serious hobby and a minor role in my high school orchestra. But I was also far better than “knows chopsticks and picked out the melody to ‘My Heart Will Go On’ once”; 12 years of lessons (more, if you count the keyboard classes before I was old enough for private instruction) will do that to you. At the end of each school year I participated in a program called “piano guild,” in which students were tasked with playing—from memory—a number of pieces for an adjudicator. One year, I presented 10 selections by Bach. In others, I included movements of sonatas by Mozart and Haydn. So yeah, I was good.
Then I went away to college. And grad school. And across the country. And to Canada. And I just stopped playing. Sure, I occasionally got to put my fingers on a set of keys, but I never made any effort to seek out regular access to a piano so I could continue practicing regularly.
And that’s okay. I’ve always loved making music, but it’s just something I enjoy rather than an unyielding passion for me like it is for some. So letting it fall by the wayside wasn’t a heartbreak.
Still, though, I have always enjoyed it, so since I’m back at my parents’ house for a few months before Steve and I head off to NZ, I decided I wanted to shake some of the rust away and start playing again. My parents were kind enough to have the piano tuned, and I’ve made it a point to practice a few times each week.
Here’s the thing: I’m still good. You don’t just lose your skills at something you worked at for over a decade just because you spend some years away. I don’t remember most of the songs I once knew by heart, but I can still play them if I look at the sheet music, and they still sound pretty decent.
The problem is this: while I know logically that I am undeniably rusty, my intuition doesn’t seem to be able to make the connection. I still have a degree of muscle memory so my fingers try to fly over the keys a tempo to hit notes they don’t quite know anymore.
You may have noticed that my last post was the day after Election Day. Sometimes when we need our creativity the most is when it’s the hardest to find. Hoping to write more this summer.
Since the majority of my blog’s readers are either my friends or my mother’s coworkers, most of you probably already know that Steve and I spent March to June traveling across the United States from Vancouver to Philadelphia. Our zigzag route took us about nine thousand miles in a beat up ’03 Ford Windstar (RIP) and to amazing destinations both natural and metropolitan. We went hiking in the Grand Canyon, boozing on Bourbon Street, ate pretty much everything we could possibly eat (plus a lot of soup cooked on our camp stove), and more.
At the Tunnel View viewpoint in Yosemite National Park
All along our trip, so many people told us that it was the trip of a lifetime (definitely) and that they would love to do something similar, so I decided to put together my top tips for a cross-country road trip.
Build a sleeping platform
Our humble abode
Honestly, sleeping in a van isn’t as rough as it sounds. Sometimes the lack of ventilation makes the night overly hot and humid, but for the most part we were pretty comfortable. However, if you’re traveling for more than a few days and don’t want to spend all your money on motel rooms, a sleeping platform is a must. We took out the back two rows of seats and Steve built ours in an afternoon with a piece of plywood and a bunch of 2x2s. We were able to put almost all of our belongings underneath the platform and a super-cozy piece of foam with bedding on top. At least one road-tripping couple we encountered were sleeping on their seats and so every night they had to shuffle all their luggage around to make room—the last thing you want to do when you’ve been driving for nine hours and you’re completely exhausted.
When I was a freshman, my best friend and I decided to try our hands at the “101 Things in 1001 Days” challenge. Somewhat like a bucket list, it’s pretty much exactly as it sounds: we each made a list of 101 things we wanted to do in the next 1001 days. We even made a blog to document our efforts. Well, our enthusiasm faded fast, and the 1001st day came and went just over a month ago, with much of our lists uncompleted. At 54 out of 101, I came in at just over 50%. However, I don’t want to feel let down with myself; instead, I’m going to use the rest of the list as inspiration for the future. I want to look back at a couple of goals on the list that I did manage to complete, and look forward to a few I’m hoping to accomplish this year:
Study Abroad: Completed Spring 2011, Spring 2012
¡Te extraño, Sevilla!
A lot of my goals tied into this one: go to Europe, go to Paris, get an internship, become fluent in Spanish, even seeing Bruce Springsteen in concert, since I managed that just before I left Sevilla at the end of last semester. With five months in England and four in Spain, I’ve spent an entire academic year abroad, and it featured some of the most incredible experiences of my life. I don’t know how much travelling I’ll get to do in the future—although I’m hoping I’ll have some opportunities, but I do know that there are several locations on my list that I have yet to visit and hope to someday, from as close as Chicago to as far as Australia.
Participate in NaNoWriMo: Completed Fall 2011
I even finished ahead of schedule, very proud
National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is essentially this: during the month of November, write a 50,000 word novel. The point is writing, not editing, so these novels mostly turn out to be a mass of wordy, unedited work, but the point is to get your words out, and that’s really important. I took part for the first time this past November, and I “won” (wrote 50k). That novel’s still a work in progress, but I hope to finish it eventually, and to participate again this year (although I’m so busy I don’t know if it’ll be possible).
Go to a fan convention: Completed Summer 2011
The overnight crew for the Doctor Who and Supernatural panels
For this one, the name of the game was Go Big or Go Home. When I decided to go to a “fan convention,” I picked the biggest and best: San Diego Comic Con. It was four days of waking up at 5am, waiting in line for hours (or in the case of the Sunday Hall H campout, all night) and being packed into the convention center with tens (hundreds?) of thousands of other people. It was also a week of meeting online friends (and making new friends as well), seeing panels of my favourite tv shows (one of the highlights was a “Lost: One Year Later” panel where the surprise guests were Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse), and having an amazing time. I couldn’t go this year but I’m hoping maybe in 2013!
Play Quidditch: Fall 2012?
I’ve gotten back into playing sports this semester, joining an intramural soccer team (go Heartbreakers!) and even coaching a team for the local youth soccer league (which was another item on my list, actually). While Quidditch isn’t exactly the same thing, one of my roommates is really involved with the Ithaca team. I’ve always been intrigued by it and since she let me know that they have “open play” once a week, I’m sure at some point this fall I’m finally going to get the chance to give it a go.
See Ten Performances by Ithaca Students: 2012-2013 school year
Being off campus for two out of the past four semesters has made this somewhat difficult, but there’s so much talent on at this school and with this being my last year I want to take advantage of it. It was cool to kick off the year and celebrate the end of Jumpstart watching the fantastic Second Dam perform, and I’ve seen a few other shows and plays over the past three years, but this year I’m going to go to as many as possible. One of my roommates and I have already bought subscriptions to this year’s theatre schedule, which includes performances of Translations, Spring Awakening, and Legally Blonde The Musical, and of course we’ve promised to see our other roommate, a music major, in anything she does.
Run a 5k: 2012-2013 school year
“Exercise” is one of those new year’s resolutions that almost everybody makes and almost nobody keeps. Usually I start off strong and then lose interest pretty quickly, but starting this summer I’ve been running several days a week. While it’s gotten a little more difficult now that I’m back at school, since my schedule is so busy, I’m still making sure to get to the gym or run around the campus (I’ve discovered a route that is exactly 5 miles, which is a nice workout… even if almost half of it is uphill). And I’m hoping to put this practice to good use; I’ve got my eye out for a good 5k, I’m hoping to find one sometime soon.
thebestpossibletime 