#9 An Ode to Diane Keaton & time capsules—

I spend much of my life thinking about who I want to be. What’s next for me? Where am I going? These questions are behind the majority of my thoughts. I often daydream about the evolution of my career, my thought, and my passions. But rarely do I think about how I am going to evolve. And I think this is because I often get lost in the weeds and forget to keep perspective. It’s incredibly frustrating when I know that I do this and repeatedly keep doing this where I forget to take a birds-eye view of my life. 

So, in an attempt to keep perspective with my thought that always precedes me, I’ve decided to illustrate how I hope to evolve:

I hope to learn to be more patient with people. I have little tolerance for people, and yet, ironically, studying people and societies has proven to be the most interesting avenue. I hope to get comfortable in a slower pace of life. If I’m taking a vien-adjacent approach to this daydream, I would describe my future self as a quirky, or rather zany, woman with a glow that radiates enjoyment, humor, and health. Odds are, by that time in my life, I will have grown tired of contacts and opted for a bold pair of glasses. I wear confident clothes and have run out of fucks to give. I will care for myself, and my body and mind will show for it. I have an affinity for accessories and have let them grow bolder with time. 

Now, this will not come to fruition exactly as I envision it. But in the spirit of time capsules, I’ll be curious to see whom I evolve into in the near and distant future. So, my take away is this—I can try to land on my feet, and I very well might, but also maintaining a healthy dose of humility to remember that I probably won’t, at least the first time, and that that’s okay is the lesson to learn. Here’s hoping this cements into my brain sooner rather than later so I can stop dancing the line of insanity, said humorously.  

I have a conflicting relationship with coming to realizations like this. Because it’s so obvious when I land there, but it’s simultaneously so frustrating because of how long it took me to land there. And maybe this “epiphany,” to be dramatic, is two-fold: Maybe I need to appreciate the pace and let the cards lie where they shall. Then again, theory can sound different in reality. But only time can tell that, I suppose.

This leads me to my next thought. People have many opinions. Sometimes it can be hard to navigate people’s many opinions of you. Especially when you’re still “figuring it all out,” as people like to say.

I don’t think I will ever figure it all out. But I’d like to try because it’s more interesting that way. I suppose this thought has led me to the following two conclusions:

  • Care less about what people think of you as long as you do little to no harm along the way. 

  • And embrace the attitude of Miss. Diane Keaton: The woman, who at least to the public eye, has mastered the art of gracefully walking through life while also knowing she doesn’t know it all, can’t know it all, and won’t know it all, but maintains a seemingly-effervescent, daydream-esque-styled life. 

Where the pondering happens as of late.

#8 A “lofty” goal.

My "comfort watch" as of late has been Eat, Pray, Love. I am imagining what you must be thinking about me right now. Part of me shares your thoughts. Nonetheless, I began to ask myself why this has become my latest comfort watch. 

For me, a comfort watch is a show or movie you have seen repeatedly, but it's because it brings you a sense of solace. It's a similar feeling to a home-cooked meal or a weekend with your loved ones where you do nothing but sleep in, enjoy a slow morning of coffee, exercise, drink a drink, read a book, play a game of spite and malice, and finish the day with good conversation that lasts late into the evening. It's a familiar, known, and sometimes even nostalgic feeling. After a long day or week, I often feel that need for comfort because I've processed enough information but still need to decompress.

I just aged myself, saying that I need to decompress at the end of a work day. 

Friends was my comfort show during my undergraduate years, albeit it didn't age well. And yet I still enjoy it for what it was. Part of me wonders if that show was my comfort watch of the time because although I had more friends than I had in high school, I still felt lonely. I felt like I had begun to meet people I connected with but still felt disconnected. Then there was New Girl. This show was cyclical during my graduate years. I felt like I had found some life-longers (life-longers: defined by me, & represents those friends that you'll always have in your life in some capacity. And that capacity can ebb and flow, but they are always there). And maybe that's a feeling that New Girl offered me. 

Now, I know these shows or movies are not "profound," nor do they do much to enlighten thought, but they are restful and comforting. So, I suppose, the kicker, in my opinion, is knowing when you're needing that comfortable, familiar feeling too often.

Of course, I bring this back to balance. Because I'm on this mission to understand balance, but now I wonder if balance can even be understood. This realization may be why Eat, Pray, Love has become my current comfort watch. Or I've thought entirely too deeply about why I tend towards different shows/movies at different phases of my life. But that realistic thought is entirely boring.

I feel "silly" for thinking that shows or movies can be such a form of interpersonal connection. But then, when I think about it, some shows/movies have been written by someone that feels similar to how their writing-turned-show/movie is interpreted. There is a sense of connection between a writer’s storyline, characters, life stages, perspectives, messages, and themes that can deeply resonate with me. 

And so, as I watched Eat, Pray, Love for the sixth time in four days, I was inspired to write. I was inspired by the bold, unapologetic character of Julia Roberts, the moral of the story, and by the love that exists in movies.

One might call that inspiration ‘kismet'. Perhaps me obsessively watching Eat, Pray, Love is simply an inspired fate of my thought becoming written & cinematic. 

This is yet another photo that, at first glance, feels disjointed from its corresponding writing—I’ve come to form a sort of affinity for “fashion”. By this, I mean that I have come to appreciate the fact that I can express parts of my identity through the clothing items that I chose to put on my body. I feel like appreciating “fashion” can be construed as vein, but it also can be creative. And so I’ve found the beauty in that, and in the simplest of outfits like these jeans, with a t-shirt and jacket. Some might argue its not “fashion”, but I would argue that it inspires my thought.

#7 Otherworldly

I was messaging a friend last night, telling her how I found myself deep in the ‘fruitarian’ social media world. Yes, you read that correctly. 

To me, the fruitarian world on Instagram is a version of what some people might call “Heaven”. I sent the aforementioned friend the attached photo of papaya, lime, passion fruit, and coconut that I had enjoyed while, wildly hungover, in Spain this past summer. And her response was, “I bet it was otherworldly”. So I immediately googled ‘otherworldly’ to see one of two things: 1. Either she is brilliant and created a new word, or 2. I need to reacquaint myself with some books to re-inspire my vocabulary. It turns out it was the latter, although I’d still consider her brilliant. And so, I felt inspired by the mysticism of the ever so curious, and some might even say otherworldly, fruit-centric experience of fruitarians. 

Let me set the scene: you’re living on a tropical island, and everything you own you can carry on your back. You live light but full. You are on a “sort of” natural high from wholesome and fruitful, no pun intended, food. You see life a bit clearer because you’re not clouded by the reality of this narrative we’ve spun. And you feel healthy, alive, content with boredom, and are at ease. 

There are people that live like that. It’s doable. It’s a mindset shift. But I suppose that’s a good thing. It’s a commitment. Or does it have to be?

Can it be a two-week experience where you dip your toes in? I think yes.

Well, it turns out that this writing might be another half-baked thought about balance to concert my former fragmented thought turned writing (#5 below).

Regardless, in an ideal world, I might be a fruitarian. Perhaps after enough existential crises, I will be. The idealist—she wins this round? 

I was in deep; I created lists.

Favorite fruits (in a thoughtful order):

  1. Mangosteen

  2. Rambutan

  3. Watermelon

  4. White dragon fruit 

  5. Passion fruit

  6. Papaya with lime and passion fruit

  7. Yellow mango

  8. Yellow kiwi

Fruits I’m on the lookout to try (also in a thoughtful order):

  1. Monstera deliciosa 

  2. Chempedak

  3. Soursop

  4. Durian

  5. Coconut sprout

I don’t understand balance. I think the idealist in me might make achieving balance challenging because she understands balance to be a perfect harmony at any given moment. In an ideal world, balance is that smooth, juxtaposed feeling of consonance. 

If I’m in the weeds—which is often how I land myself in convoluted thought—I find myself grappling with how much time different aspects of my life should get to achieve that balanced state. I know there is no rule book for this, but I suppose I’d like there to be because I think it’s easy for the busyness of life to get the best of me. I feel ashamed to say it because it feels as though I’m admitting to knowingly prioritizing the wrong things in my life. But how do you simultaneously feel intellectually stimulated, excited, and fulfilled through career, personal, relational, and well-being aspects of your life without feeling exhausted? Is it possible, or is this just the reality of adulthood?

At one stage, swimming consumed 15% of my life (roughly 25/168 hours per week). That doesn’t seem like much, but it felt like my whole world when I was in it. So, perhaps the key to balance is perspective. Luckily, I am both a realist and an idealist, meaning I can dance between the two perspectives. But isn’t that why I am writing this today? To help reconcile my dancing thoughts. The type of thoughts that feel like tug-o-war in my mind.

I don’t know if a flow-like balance is regularly attainable or even realistic. Is a balanced diet 80/20? Is a balanced life composed of work, play, and health? What about all the other factors at play? How does one balance it all? 

Balance in my life feels polarized. It’s 0 or 100. And I don’t know how to land on 50. Is “50” even balance? Logically, yes. Balance for me is felt in extremes where I have a week full of wins followed by a week of not-so-many wins. (But that doesn’t mean losses either). And I wonder if that is how balance feels for you, reader? Or is there a more even-keel feel to how you might experience balance?

Perhaps balance is contingent upon me better embracing the ebbs and flows of life, in which case that means the seesaw of balance that my life feels like might be “normal” and it’s a user error situation. 

I guess I’m asking you, reader, how would you describe your most balanced life? What does that look like? I understand that comparing my experience to yours is an apple-to-orange comparison, but I guess I’m trying to gauge if my experience is shared. 

I don’t understand balance.

#5

A fragmented thought about balance.

#4

People boxes: noun (?)—the social categories we place people in.

I’ve long wished that I had siblings. And recently I realized that, when possible, I refrain from sharing my only-child status with people. Not because I am ashamed; that part of my identity is entirely not up to me. Rather, I often omit this information because people like to put me in a box based on that information. There are stereotypical ideas about only children, some of which may apply to me, but certainly not all. My problem with categorizing people based on these generalized assumptions is that it means we are looking to confirm biases rather than looking through a curious lens to know and understand. 

This thought is bigger than my desire for a sibling and not wanting to be misunderstood through the ills of a stereotype. This thought speaks more to how I run through life. Do I categorize people every day? Yes; I put people in boxes when I do. I think we are conditioned socially to do so because we like to make sense of a complicated world. Putting people in boxes makes understanding, interacting, and reconciling thoughts about one another easier.

But is that fair to humanity—to one another—to make generalizations in order to simplify social life in our minds? Should we? The idealist in me is asking. Does the pace at which our lives move make it hard not to assume or generalize? So what is an alternative solution to avoid putting people in boxes based on stereotypical thoughts?

My answer is that of a mental Venn diagram. Rather than categorizing people based on one aspect of their identity, instead I’m working to consider the many boxes a person might fit into. And each box can serve as a component in this mental Venn diagram. 

In theory, this is not rocket science as we know people are multifaceted. But, unfortunately, life is not lived in theory or as an ideal, so I think the day-to-day application is easier said than done.

So, for example, only children are stereotypically described as “maladjusted”, “socially awkward”, “selfish”, or “spoiled”. I would admittedly own that I occasionally can be “socially awkward”, and prividleged. Nonetheless, that is the only generalization within this context that I see aligning with my identity. My point being—do I fit into the “only child” box? In a literal sense, yes. But below the surface, I’d argue no. 

Ultimately, this train of thought leads me to this: I don’t like to be socially categorized based on a surface level component of my identity, so I then need to do a better job of not categorizing people for the sake of simplifying social life within the walls of my mind.

Do you, my reader, place people into social categories? If so, do you use “people boxes”, as I’ve decided to call this, more often to try and distance yourself from people unlike you, or as an attempt to find similarities? Do “people boxes” contribute to polarization among us on a local level, or does categorizing one another bring us closer? Might our categorizing of people be too simplistic? Maybe it’s merely a matter of having more, all-encompassing “people boxes” or rather mental Venn diagrams. I don’t really know.

At first glance, you might think, ‘how does this photo relate to this writing?’ Worry not, it very much does; this photo was the impetus behind my thought.

Each olive is separated based on the “type” of olive they are, but depending on how you categorize it, the katamalas could live among the pitted green!

#3
Is love still serendipitous?

I’m hesitant to share this writing because I don’t want to run parallel to a “Carrie Bradshaw” by writing about love. I do see good qualities in her character, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to write one excerpt of thought about love and put myself and my writing in a box. Because we humans love to categorize people. But this writing is merely a piece of my puzzle; it’s not all-encompassing.

I guess that’s all the hesitation I needed to share because now I’m feeling ready to dive into what I really want to write about today.

I’m often told, “it will happen when you least expect it”, or “when you’re not looking, it will find you”. And while laughing over the absurdity of these statements with a friend, I realized that these phrases are synonymous with losing your keys, not looking for them, but expecting to find them. 

I’ll entertain an argument that I could see opposing my current stance: Perhaps there is a stroke of magic behind love, making it, unlike a set of lost keys. And I’ll define magic as an unmapped force. A force that helps people find people (or keys?). I can’t prove magic to be untrue. In fact, I like the idea of believing in it. I do believe in magic. People believe in more inane things than magic. But magic, if it’s an unmapped force, also just sounds similar to gravity. 

I’m not convinced that love has any chance of being serendipitous anymore. I believe that many people in this world want companionship in a way that suits them, to share a closeness with another person and to be understood. So, why is that so hard to find when you’re looking for it? That’s illogical. I suppose many might argue that love is illogical. If so, that would explain a lot of my qualms about love. But I don’t think love needs to be illogical. It could make perfect sense. 

In order to access a serendipitous type of love, is it simply a matter of believing in something you’re skeptical about? And don’t let my written thought convince you that I don’t believe in organic love; I do. You can believe and be a skeptic simultaneously. It’s like being both a realist and an idealist—I’ve seen versions of love that are inspired. And I’ve seen tumultuous love. But I still have not answered my question. Is love still serendipitous amid a world of dating apps and fast paced lives? 

Perhaps I have to revisit ‘love’ in another writing. In due time, of course, as to avoid fitting into another box. 

#2

The First Montage, perhaps of many.

This montage was inspired by the significant amount of change I’ve had in my life over the last six months. It became a way for me to measure the ebbs and flows of my days in a constant way. The taking of the photo was the control variable and the realities of life were the experimental variables. And I’d argue it was quite an effective measurement—because, I don’t remember the days, but each photo, while seemingly static, shows the change in me day by day.

I didn’t anticipate that I would form any particular thought after looking back at these moments-in-time, but here I write. I see contentment and independence, confidence and responsibility. Passion. Tired, morning eyes. Followed by the rest of 11 hours of sleep. This montage illustrates a key theme in my life that has surfaced: I set out on new paths, or take on new passions and I only think about how it will go well. I forget to factor in the natural challenges. So when life throws me a curve ball (forgive the sports metaphor), I feel frustrated and confused why each day is not seamless. But it shouldn’t be. I want to have days where I am exhausted from thinking in new ways. And days where I am more confident than others. Because if each day was an utter “success” (used loosely) then that wouldn’t be reality.

The idealist in me accepts defeat this round.