As usual, I’m not used to typing out the date on the first day of the year. But that’s all good… again, I have been really consistent and this is the third year in a row that I’m writing a blog on New Year’s Day, and have titled it “Hello [year]“.
I have seen a lot of people recap on 2011 or have new year’s resolutions. There’s quite a popular recap questionnaire going around and for the year of 2010 I posted it on my other random/planning blog glassfields.net. For 2011, I also posted the questionnaire there; so feel free to take a peek and do the questions yourself. Great way to look back on the year, in my opinion.
I don’t really have any new year’s resolutions but I know people will always ask and will always get curious about what other people say. However, I don’t see the new year as the only time to turn over a new leaf, or make a new goal, or shoot for the stars. Last year I did “Monthly Goals” and failed a fair few months and didn’t get all ten goals of the month done. This year, I’m happy to have my 101 in 1001 list that I can keep referencing. I’m going to sort of focus on that, and getting things done from that list. Or getting things started. Because even though it’s summer here, I may need to start knitting a scarf now in order for it to be ready in autumn when it gets colder.
So I really am looking forward to this year, I think it’s going to be great. I’m starting a new course at university, I’m going to be working a lot more, my cousin’s getting married mid-year, I’m turning 21, I’m graduating from my Bachelor course that I finished last year. It’s all looking really bright. I guess I do have some minor resolutions, including reading the ten books I bought last year, sleeping earlier, and cutting down on websites.
As many of you know, I did a lot of consolidation last month and I cut down on a lot of fanlistings and website content. I’ve already moved my writings, so now you can read my poems and my Letter to a Domain series. Soon, I’m going to write a whole list of everything I did in regards to cleaning my websites, just so you can see.
Since I wanted to sort of recap on my year, other than in that questionnaire, I’ll quickly sum it up in this post.
January
Went to my first show, for Ben Jorgensen. Met him, chatted with him, and had a wonderful night hearing his music.
I read a lot of books, including A Clockwork Orange, which was fantastic.
I went pretty far in the novel I’m writing and reached a quarter of the way through.
February
I lost my iPhone and went on a huge search for it. Turns out I dropped it in the store where my mum works, and security footage showed the thief. It was passed to the police but nothing came out of it.
James returned from his trip to Hong Kong and we had a breakfast date.
I finally caught up on watching Doctor Who. Seb, Ryan and James convinced me to watch it. I was all done with the fifth season just before the sixth came out.
March
Became really good friends with Michael.
James helped me reboot my laptop, Fin, completely. He was upgraded to Windows 7 and I shifted things around to my external hard drive and reinstalled all my programs.
My iTunes borked and as a result I had to re-add all my music. All play counts and playlists were lost.
I ran from university to the train station to catch my train in six minutes. What a beast.
I voted for the first time in an election.
April
Got a new laptop battery.
Bailed on my ex-boyfriend (who is one of my good friends). He asked me to go to a barbecue but instead I went to the forest and had a picnic with James, Lilian and Michael.
Went to Galaxy World (arcade games) with James, Michael, Andy and a bunch of other engineering students and played bumper cars. There was a kid there who played every game, on his own, and he looked like he had no life.
Applied for a scholarship for the first time.
Spent time with Michael at the Chinese Garden of Friendship, taking photos. Went home and found that I had forgotten my keys and the boys had to keep me company until my parents and brother got home late at night.
Went to James’s house and we made muffins, but they came out very bad. We made tacos, though.
Found out that the lesion in my chest is fine, and it’s not cancerous. Thank goodness.
Won tickets to one of my favourite bands’ shows, Avenged Sevenfold, as well as a merchandise pack. The hoodie was so huge. I had a blast at the show though.
August
Got diagnosed with a full colon.
Went on a gluten-free diet for several weeks, and ate so much fibre during this time. I experienced a lot of pain.
Took an oral enema to flush out my system. It really did me a lot of good.
Was selected for a photoshoot but it turned out to be a semi-scam.
Went to the old milk bar two towns out of university. It was a quaint experience.
Cleaned out a lot of the junk in my room and sold some of it.
Got my new digital camera, a Canon 1000D.
Started a new job as a web designer. Got stuck in a stairwell because I forgot that only the door at the bottom opens from the inside.
My relatives came over from Indonesia to visit – my aunts, uncles, and one of my cousins.
October
My cousin in Australia got married and we attended her wedding.
Struggled with one of my photography classes as I was the only one doing it as an elective subject.
Became good friends with Johnny and Fern.
Bumped into my ex-boyfriend Kiah, again, but this time in the subway near university. He was busking by juggling and playing a harmonica.
My dad started painting our corkboard floor with floor polish. The family spent a lot of time jumping over furniture and bits of floor to make sure we didn’t step on it.
November
Went to my primary school Spring Fair. It was a hot day and my dad and brother and I just ate some of the food there and browsed the stalls. I bumped into my fifth grade teacher and we caught up a little!
Celebrated the end of my best photography class of the year with Johnny and Fern.
Won tickets to see Jebediah in concert.
Had a huge argument with my mum, didn’t see Jebediah. I was so cut.
Decided to take part in a depression study and was medically diagnosed with depression. I got put on antidepressants, Efexor-XR (venlafaxine) and it started like hell.
I went for a job interview and got a new job, and I ended up loving it. So much.
I watched a heck of a lot of Futurama.
December
James and I saw Explosions in the Sky in concert and were completely blown away.
James returned to blogging.
James and I saw Bob Evans and Adalita at a music restaurant. Our first dinner date, ever. It was a beautiful concert. I met Kevin Mitchell (Bob Evans).
Lilian and I caught up for the first time in a long time!
Began cleaning out my websites. Big time.
Bought Christmas presents for my family. None of them expected it since we don’t give each other presents much.
I haven’t blogged as per my usual schedule… but I don’t care. I’ve been enjoying my days and don’t want to feel pressure to blog. I’ve been enjoying listening to my favourite music and really pumping out the best of Bob Evans’ (aka Kevin Mitchell!) music. Let me just tell you how breezy and beautiful Your Love is… so I recommend you check it out if you get the chance.
I do miss catching up on everyone’s blogs though, and I still like responding to comments but I haven’t had the time. I’ve actually been cleaning out a lot of my websites. With 2012 coming very soon and knowing I’ll be exceptionally busy working and being back in classes, I decided to cut down on my fanlistings and clean up my domains. I’m moving my writing portfolio here, to Heartdrops. I don’t update it enough anymore for it to have its own domain, but I value them enough to keep them somewhere online.
As you might have noticed I’ve also merged the “owner” and “website” sections and deleted a large amount of visitor content. There were a lot of terrible articles, severely outdated, and they weren’t written very well either. However, I know that many people like my layouts so I’m working on finishing the Pastel Collection series of layouts, and I’ll be releasing some new themes/layouts as well, in different collections. Hopefully I’ll have some new smilies as well. Getting rid of a load of domains and fanlistings this year has been rather liberating. Less is more.
I’m quite excited to release the premade layouts once I’ve created a bunch. It’s felt really great taking care of my websites and cleaning them up. It’s my summer break and I’m trying to squeeze in as much as humanely possible.
This doesn’t just include cleaning up websites, psh. There are some shows I want to catch up on (Futurama, hello!), shows I want to start watching (Fringe, cough James cough), books I want to read (yes Lilian, I’ll read my books…), e-books I want to read (thanks Tiffany!), movies I need to watch, anime I should probably watch… not to mention places I want to go and stuff in my room that I have to clean. That includes my vinyl records and my horrible desk.
Speaking of vinyl records, yesterday I bought Jebediah’s album Kosciuszko on vinyl. I absolutely had to – in my opinion it was the best album of 2011. It sounds amazing on vinyl, as most music does. It also came with a poster, which I immediately put on my wall.
I received my results for last semester recently. I passed everything with Credit grades, which was better than I expected, but not as good as I’d hoped. My GPA went down by a few notches, and I don’t know why it upsets me since the GPA isn’t really looked at here, but it was still disappointing. Nonetheless, I have completed my course and am eligible to graduate. Graduation doesn’t take place until next May, but I’m still looking forward to it.
Seb said he would buy me a plushie if I don’t get Facebook once we graduate and I suppose he really owes it to me now.
I need to wrap Christmas presents. Two days until Christmas and I haven’t done this. Ahhoooooo.
Over the past few days following the Bob Evans show – and honestly, I insist on calling him Kevin Mitchell because Bob Evans is just a ridiculous pseudonym that people from America tend to laugh at – I’ve been loving his music even more. Doing the old celebrity stalk is not really a part of my daily routine, but you know there are multiple spam lands scattered across the internet where you can ogle over your favourite celebrities in image and moving picture form.1 I adore his music and I’ve just been immersed in it completely lately, to the point where his band Jebediah have made it to my top artists in Last.fm. You know how I said my mum grounded me from going to Jebediah when I’d won the tickets?
Well, suck it up baby, because I’m going to see them next Thursday. I’ve purchased my ticket already and don’t have a friend to accompany me. I’ve asked a few, and if Seb is unable to go, there’s a good chance I’m going alone. That’ll be a new experience, but the only thing I’m worrying about is getting to the station when it’s rather late. I might have to hail a taxi/cab if I miss the latest buses.
Lilian and I hung out in the city yesterday. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t too pleasant and we actually encountered a lot of rain along the way. It started raining in the morning and that wasn’t a good outlook for the rest of the day. We spent most of the day indoors anyway, browsing the shops. Mostly the cute shops that sold stationery and notebooks. Lilian bought some post-it notes, after some boys from her class thought it would be funny to waste all her post-it notes writing silly things and sticking them everywhere. I thought only fifth-graders did that…
I spent a long time trying to decide which notebooks to get, but we decided to come back in case I spotted notebooks I liked elsewhere. I am quite bad with notebooks, as I sometimes buy very cute ones I look forward to using but eventually deem too cute to use. This time I promise I’ll use the three notebooks I bought. I do look forward to using them and I will use them.
I also managed to buy Christmas presents for my parents. I settled on a home journal with tips and things for my mum, but changed my mind when I found a thermos designed like a paper coffee cup. Unfortunately the bookstore I bought the book from didn’t accept refunds. I might just give it to my mum anyway. I got my dad a huge sudoku puzzle book because he likes those. I just need to wrap the presents. They’re simply hidden under my bed.
We ate at a restaurant called Meeting Point. I’m happy we ate somewhere new because I like eating at new restaurants. That’s another restaurant visited out of 10 – my goal on my 101 in 1001 list is to visit ten new ones. In the past week I’ve also managed to cross off 1) not swearing for a month and 2) having a dinner date with James. Awesome stuff. Lilian and I had the same pork bento box and as usual, we took photos of our food. I know it’s rather pointless to take photos of food as you’re going to eat it anyway, and it’s “just food”, but I love documenting my days.
As per our tradition we got sticker photos in the photo booth and decorated them. The first few times we ever did this, we went crazy with the digital decorations. Now we’ve sort of lost creativity – or maybe it’s just that we think simple is best and we try not to decorate them too much. Hahaha.
Since I didn’t want my family seeing the presents I was carrying, I chose to catch the bus home. It was my only option otherwise. Unfortunately it was not the best option as it was pouring down with rain. I did have an umbrella, but it wasn’t useful. The wind was blowing all the rain in one direction and that was unfortunately towards me. I managed to keep my face from getting wet by holding my umbrella on an angle, but it was not very cool that the rain completely wet my boots and legs. I was wearing tights and my boots were made of leather, but I still got soaked through to the point I felt that horrid squelch in my toes.
Eek.
Everyone knows I’m just talking about Tumblr, right? ↩
Lilian. My best friend. We haven’t seen each other since – I can’t even remember now. I think the last time I saw her was when I visited her university while I had a five-hour break at university. We talk all the time, but we need to hang out some time too.
James. I haven’t seen him since university ended, which really was quite some time ago. It’s long for us – because usually we get by with seeing each other once a week. I’m seeing him tomorrow though. I’m going to the Explosions in the Sky show, which should be amazing. The show is apparently sold out, so I’m glad we got tickets early. James will be picking me up from home and we’ll be going to a train station with parking, then catching a train to the venue. I’ve read many reviews about Explosions in the Sky being the “best concert” some have been to, and the crowd behaved so well that sometimes people forgot they were there. I won’t truly know until I see for myself. I’m excited but a bit nervous at the same time because I’m not quite sure what to expect. All the shows I’ve been to so far have been very different. I guess different is good – but not knowing what to expect always makes me a bit nervous.
My long hair. I was just looking back on my old videos that I recorded, and my hair was so long. It was layered and I had a side fringe, and now it’s so much shorter and I have a straight fringe. I’m keeping the straight fringe for a while, because I absolutely hate how a side fringe grows out. I really want to grow my hair a lot before I decide to get it layered.
Ballet. I just didn’t have the time to keep teaching so I stopped. I reached what I call the better end… which wasn’t the real end of the journey, but it was an end for me. A qualified student teacher, I’m really happy with how far I went with that. I’ve participated in so many activities from my childhood up until now, and I’ve never really fully mastered any of them except ballet. I loved ballet so much that I chose to continue it even though I stopped my other dance styles, and even though I took a break from ballet, I went back. I remember crying before I went back because I realised how much it meant to me. I miss it now simply because I haven’t had the time to dance even for fun, my pointe shoes don’t fit so well anymore, and I’ve lost a lot of the strength I had in my muscles. I still have a dancer’s legs, but I cramp a bit more easily and I need to regain the strength in my calves.
Sushi. I haven’t had it in a while, and I just miss it so much. Since my appetite has been a bit of a mess since I started taking antidepressants, I’ve only been eating fruit and small meals of pasta and vegetables. I feel like eating really light stuff a lot of the time.
The bloggers that stopped blogging. Gillian, Swetlana, Kat, just to name a few. The blogging world isn’t what it was before. A lot of the people I know stopped blogging or disappeared. Every now and then I remember them and how fun it was having them around. Now I only see them on Twitter, or they’ve just disappeared.
The patience to do pixel art. I honestly don’t know how I had the patience. I did a lot of this back in 2006, and though I wasn’t that good, I eventually improved. But pixel art took so long; it took up so much of my time. A lot of people were so much better than me, their pixels were perfect to every detail. I admired those people very much but I soon moved into designing more textured layouts with brushes… and I was much better at scribbling and drawing and doodling. I deleted the pixels page from my website today without any regrets. I would love to try my hand at pixelling again, but I honestly do think I’ve lost the patience.
My two dogs. I didn’t own them for a long time, but I loved them so much. As a family, we were just far too busy and returned the dogs to the original owner – a family friend – who gave them loving new homes.
Indonesia. (Just a little bit.) It shocks me that I’m writing this, but even though I claim to hate the country in which my parents were born, I sometimes like a fair bit about it. I hated people making sexual comments about me in the street, and I hated the toilets and the smell and the pollution and the traffic, but I miss the food stalls, especially the bakso soup (meatballs) and the noodles, and I miss just glancing in the shops even if I didn’t want to buy anything. I also miss my cousins and the routine of waking up early and… I don’t know how to word the rest.
Work. I know I worked just yesterday, but I miss it.
Big fat announcement: James finally blogged! I urged him to blog at least once a week during our vacation, so now you can see his side of things and admire his humour just as much as I do.
Earlier this evening I was talking to Lilian about cleaning out my websites. I have decided that I need to consolidate. It is much nicer having just a few websites than having so many scattered everywhere. That said, I will most likely be moving my writing portfolio and A Letter To A Domain project here. I also mentioned to Lilian that I would get rid of any superfluous visitor content, to which she responded, “I bet as soon as you get rid of them, people will want it back!”
I realised this was partially true of my old free layouts, which I thought were horrid, so I took them down, replacing them with new ones. People asked me for the old ones because they liked them. Ah, oops.
This got us discussing Murphy’s Law:
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.
Of course, this is relatively similar to Sod’s Law and Finagle’s Law:
“Anything that can go wrong, will”.
“Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment”.
Sod’s Law is more commonly related to fate – such as Beethoven being a deaf composer, or athlete Lou Gehrig developing the neurological disorder known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Finagle’s Law was made popular in science fiction, such as Star Trek, and can often be seen expressed as “Inanimate objects are out to get us”. Now that would be the worst of it, wouldn’t it?
Often, I find myself expecting the worst. Seb always told me to expect the worst, but hope for the best. In all situations I worry about, I find myself excessively expecting the absolute worst to happen, even if it is something ludicrous and, though possible, is very, very, very unlikely.
Being very curious about these laws, I looked into more of them, including Sturgeon’s Law, which will probably relate to everyone who thinks that knowledge is pointless.
“ninety percent of everything is crud” or “ninety percent of everything is crap”
My high school friend Karen used to say – the more you learn, the more you know; the more you know, the more you remember; the more you remember, the more you forget; the more you forget, the less you remember; the less you remember, the less you know; so why learn? I suppose Sturgeon’s Law summed that up nicely. And this too reminds me of a boy I used to know who thought that high school and the HSC (in my state) was the most important thing. It isn’t. Everyone who has graduated high school will probably agree with me that a lot of it was useless. Oh, thank you Sturgeon.
Now, this one is for the ones who are angsty about grammar and spelling. Ever felt like slitting a throat or killing a kitten every time someone misuses “you’re ugly” and writes “your ugly”1 instead? Or perhaps you’re like me, and feel compelled to correct every apostrophe catastrophe you see on someone’s forum post?
Muphry’s law – “if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written”. (The name is a deliberate misspelling of Murphy’s law.)
Skitt’s law – A corollary of Muphry’s law, variously expressed as, “Any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself,” or, “The likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster.” (Thus often referring to the internet.)
I find it rather ironic that people like to correct spelling and grammar and boast about it, when I see that they make their own spelling and grammar mistakes…
One that I probably have to be a little sad about, being a fan of Doctor Who and Back to the Future, is the following law. I mean, I never really wished I could change the past anyway, but sometimes rewinding just a bit into the past, just ten minutes, to buy myself a bit of time or to fix just one mistake that ends up rolling down the hill into a chain of unfortunate events later on (Sod’s Law, dude!)… is all I really wished for.
Niven’s laws: “If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.”
I also find myself thinking too much at certain times. I have to tell myself to relax, take a break from whatever it is, and come back to it later… because by then it’ll be clearer. I used to question the silliest things, like why I have a reflex, or how I learn to read a word in a foreign language so easily. Not only is the answer painfully obvious, but sometimes it’s just not. There are, of course, things more mundane, like walking and brushing teeth and showering, which don’t need to be thought about. Don’t think. Just do:
Humphrey’s law – conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance.
And to end, a few other favourites, of which I think the first two would benefit to people dealing with a relationship breakup:
Stein’s law – If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. If a trend cannot go on forever, there is no need for action to make it stop, much less to make it stop immediately; it will stop of its own accord.
Sayre’s law – “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.”
Herblock’s law – “If it’s good, they’ll stop making it.”
Hutber’s law – “Improvement means deterioration.”
So, got any favourite laws? Found some in this post that you could live by? Found some you already swear by but could never find a name for?
I had a blast at the show though.
Let me know what your resolutions and plans are. 
You know how I said my mum