yumenonakae | Recent Entries

school and work have ramped up quite an insane amount (if it wasn't obvious from me once again not posting here) and i am feeling... a bit tired! but also rejuvenated! i miss my free time, and i miss making as much money as i used to (especially for how constantly busy i am), and it's always daunting to remember that i am still in the somewhat early stages of getting to the finish line, but i also feel great. i feel happier and friendlier and more like myself. i don't think i'd feel this way if i were still in an office job.

august finished without much fanfare; i turned 33 and was mostly lowkey about it, only celebrating with a small dinner with friends plus a cake that they kindly supplied! at first i'd considered a party, then a themed dinner, both with a larger group, but as the date approached i found myself more and more exhausted just thinking about it (starting school plus two jobs probably didn't help). so i was happy to keep it small. my brother also had me over for dinner a few days later and cooked for me - i feel he's more into these heartfelt gestures as he gets older, which i'm secretly very happy about. also, it was nice to spend time with everyone before school really started ramping up. somehow i've already finished my first block of exams - and somehow passed quite easily. (how this second exam block season is going is another story.)

in september toni began the low-and-slow active process towards homeownership. i'm very proud of her for being able to get to this point 1) on her own! and 2) in a region as expensive as this. it's been very exciting, even for me, since i will be shipping off to wherever she ends up. but the prospect of moving has been giving me more anxiety than i let on. after living in the same area for fifteen years it's hard to imagine being somewhere new. add on school and the fact that i'd need to commute to both of my jobs...! i have to make it work regardless, so i'm just praying i can pull it off. but at the same time, i'm ready. the amount of new environments i've had to adjust to in the last year have primed me well for a big change like this.

other september honorable mentions:

- i saw bigbang live! it's kind of unbelievable that i've been listening to them for almost twenty years, and to commemorate i decided to see them two nights in a row. needless to say i was absolutely dead after, but managed to recover enough to make it through work and school every day the following week. i'll probably never do that again.

- went camping for the last time this season! i had to study for an exam while i was out there and could only get my class slides to work on my laptop, which sucked a little bit of the joy out of it. but apart from that it was very fun to do some camp cooking, some light hiking, and some reading (which i never get around to). i also had a tent to myself, since toni was sick and stayed in her own. so that was a little luxurious.

- impromptu dinner with qloworkers! noel is not often in town, and when he does pop on over it's always with less than 24 hours' notice. fortunately i was free this time, and as always he kindly acted as my chauffeur (which always gives us extra time to catch up - now that i'm back in healthcare we have endless fodder to talk about). we met up with julian and his new girlfriend at the mall (she was extremely sweet and i hope she sticks around!), then met up with josh for dinner. he had a weekslong on-and-off stint in the hospital, so it was a relief to see him healthy again. noel covered dinner - a relief to my wallet but a guilt to me. someday i will do the same!

- finally found a chance to go home and see my parents! it's been hard to find time and also the mental strength to make that long drive. but it was worth it (obviously). we went to lunch and did some shopping (even dad - who rarely buys things it seems), then tried this hawaiian shaved ice pop-up that's only in town through the end of the month. even just sitting around taking turns getting brain freeze was a good salve for the nervous system. then i drove mom to her overnight shift to watch grandma on my way back to my apartment. fingers crossed i will be living much closer soon and will have to make less of an arduous trek.

i'm in between classes right now, then getting dinner tonight with allison and my sister. a fitting culmination to the month, convening with my sisters who keep my sanity in check (missing toni - for now!). hopefully, october is just as simple...

Current Mood: nervous

hello from a new campus. hello from my first day of classes.

it is very bizarre to be back to school. on one hand it feels totally foreign and on the other it's been a natural and familiar rhythm to fall back into. i hope that, at my big old age, i can do things properly this time and not be so worried about small, trivial things like i was on my first go-around. i have a good feeling that i'll be able to stay focused and see this through properly. finally, i have the maturity to commit to a path and stay on it. and as much as i wish i did things right the first time, better now than never, right?

my mom called me last night to check in and she was telling me how much i've changed since i first started college - granted that was nearly half my life ago...but i don't disagree that i've "come into my own" in a strange and inexplicable way. i don't necessarily feel like the same person i was ten years ago, which i don't think is always the case for people. in fact, for a long time, i kind of just felt like the same, unchanging person. but when i really think about it, 22-year old me and i have close to nothing in common. for one, my younger self was so completely preoccupied with how others perceived me and my accomplishments. i was so insecure over spending extra years in college and constantly comparing myself to peers who finished their degrees "in time." and when it came to work or what i was going to do next i was also just thinking about how i looked on paper. i don't think i really made any choices for myself besides what i wore. glad i kicked that habit to the curb, among others - like intense negative self-talk and letting dramatic people stick around. i'm much more at peace now, despite the semi-uprooting of my routine life. but i know what i want to achieve and can clearly see myself at the finish line in my mind. it's a completely new and freeing feeling to experience that, and in my many years of feeling directionless i never thought it was possible for myself. but here we are, in a new program in a new place, working a new job, feeling very far away from the life i had even nine months ago. what will be different about me in ten more years? (not that i want to think about that anytime soon.)

i've been complaining to a lot of people that this semester will be hard and i don't know if i can handle it, and everyone keeps saying i can. so i think that says something about myself. everyone is also telling me, yes, it is going to be hard, and i'm going to have to suck it up because i can do it even though it's going to be hard. which i think also says something about myself. i think a part of me still wants it to be easy and doesn't want to struggle. a big reason why i turned away from this path in my younger years is because of how much of an uphill battle it is. bringing up my GPA, studying for extra tests, going through the grueling process of applying and possibly reapplying and interviewing and writing a million essays... now, at this point in time, i'm intimidated by it and i'm ready to take a deep breath and do it. i need to keep reminding myself that i want to be here and i want to do well, and i need to fight against myself when i'm too tired to put in the work. i think i spent a lot of my life so far skirting by on the bare minimum because i'm naturally pretty lazy. so unlearning that is going to have to happen real fast. there's just no shortcut; it's a long and intense process by design.

in some ways i do feel like my younger self, talking big about these plans for myself online. i often re-read those entries and juxtapose them with how i didn't accomplish any of those things at all. i want it to be different this time. in fact, with how much money and time and prayer the people in my life are investing in me this time, it has to be different. i know i only ever need to succeed for me, but i also feel in a way indebted to them, so they know it wasn't in vain or anything. i know i have no obligation to feel that way, but it's almost like i'm choosing to. like i owe it to them for believing in me, you know?

(not to mention i got into this program for a reason, so they must see something in me that tells them i can do this.)

i am so bad at updating this so who knows when i'll pop around again. hopefully, i can pull off this whole back to school thing.

Current Mood: optimistic

the most important development i think i should share is that i finally figured out how to grab my old photos from photobucket without giving them any money. i was hoping to find some old cringey point-and-shoot mirror pics, but instead i found a ton of old graphics i made in photoshop. a lot of them were requests from old forums where i ran blend shops (!) but a few were just wallpapers i made myself for fun. i also had a lot of michael jackson graphics (and a ton of icons posted on an old LJ community) from the summer he died and i'd wound up very immersed in his music and persona. funny enough, with the biopic having just come out and his work having quite the renaissance, i'm back in the same old phase. so i cropped one of my old signatures into an icon to use here on an LJ-esque website for old time's sake. LOL.

while i wait on admissions decisions and relentlessly apply to jobs that will give me more hours (still with no luck), i'm also starting to re-teach myself all of the science i have definitely forgotten from high school and undergrad -- or never understood in the first place! i am realizing pretty quickly that i never applied myself in high school. i've been reviewing basic chemistry -- things like what an isotope is and how energy shells work -- and if i'm being honest i never truly learned this stuff. i definitely remember being taught these things, but i've had absolutely no conceptual understanding of them for all these years. IDFK how i got through gen chem in college, let alone ochem. i'm hoping that having a better grasp on the fundamentals will make it easier for me later on... the same is true for physics, which i've never been good at. it's already making my head hurt so much.

of course all of this has come with a healthy dose of "WTF are you even doing this for?" i've been so plagued with insecurity over reaching my goals -- which, yes, are far away, but really they are totally manageable for me as long as i work hard. it's frustrating having to re-learn optimism every time i have a major crisis of faith over all of this, which has been pretty often. in the last two weeks alone i've probably repeated "the universe is not against you" to myself at least twice a day. i understand that this anxiety is normal for me while i'm in an interim phase (and probably will be for at least another month) but it's also exhausting and i worry about the overall effects this stress is having on me.

anyway, all i can really control is how much effort i'm putting into studying so i can set myself up well for upper division sciences and the studying i'll have to do later. and so far that's been going well.

other than all that, life has been pretty fun outside of my house. one thing i noticed is that i have really been back in the movie theater this year. i watched michael more than once (how could i not?!): once with my best friend, then with my best friend and sister, and then with my cousin who also has been going through major michosis lately. and it was worth it every time just from how fun the music is. i know it's probably just a cash grab for his shitty estate, but i do appreciate his nephew and what his own mission was for his performance. then i saw obsession with friends last week. i forgot how fun it is to watch horror in theaters with a lot of people...but i always have too much pride to cover my eyes and end up more scared. i'm still trying to see backrooms too (which i keep calling 'backdoors' now thanks to my cousin misremembering the name). and apparently next week, i'm seeing toy story 5 for father's day -- which is crazy, because i remember when we saw toy story 3 on father's day in like 2010. my dad was pretty critical of the last one so we'll see what he has to say about this one lol.

oh, i've also been playing tomodachi life like crazy. it's gotten to a point where i need to impose rules around when i touch my switch, because if i don't then i just play all day. i understand now why my mom always hid our video game consoles during the week. 'cause my ass would not have gotten ANY schoolwork done. of course, i am unnaturally invested in all of my miis and their lives and have made fanart of them... surely i'm not the only one doing that.

other good things to keep my mental positivity going. we celebrated my grandma's 98th birthday this past weekend. i'm going to a baseball game this weekend. i'm baking banana bread, but i forgot to sprinkle brown sugar on top before i put it in the oven. i have spin tonight which i'm hoping won't be too rough on my body since i just went yesterday, but movement is better than no movement?! WELP. and i really want to write a fic or draw comics so maybe i'll try and flesh that out later. OKAY BYE UNTIL NEXT TIME WHICH IS HOPEFULLY NOT TOO LONG FROM NOW.

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: dangerous - michael jackson

and how life has changed. it's interesting to read my old entries and be able to physically feel how resigned i was to the life i was in. i felt so trapped in a box, always entertaining a life elsewhere, only to return to the same old rigamarole. work, work, work, week in and week out, until you had enough hours to give work the finger and go somewhere else...for ten days. lather, rinse, repeat the cycle once or twice a year. it felt like that would be the rest of my life, and i wasn't fine with it but i decided i had to be. because what other choice did i have?

and yet. here we are.

i finally got laid off at the end of last year. (it was inevitable -- it had been happening since 2022, and it was only a matter of time before the scythe came for me.) to the surprise of no one, i was relieved. it was the only thing that could get me out of there. i'd become so trapped in my thinking that there was nothing else out there for me, and once i'd crested over into my thirties, it felt even more so like my fate there was cemented. obviously, that isn't how a job works lol. and for a while after getting laid off i was looking for jobs like the job i'd had, even though i'd hated it. but it was what i knew how to do, and i'd done it for eight years, and so it felt like what i was supposed to be doing. for some reason, in my mind, it didn't matter that i didn't want to do it. i'd made the choices to get me where i was and i was going to bear the consequences of them.

so stupid. so completely stupid!

i don't quite remember when it dawned on me that none of this irrational thinking was true. i'd never applied it to anyone else, and always got excited for friends and even strangers who would pivot to something else later in life. but for some reason, that wasn't allowed for me. i was so stuck in my learned thinking that once i chose something, i had to commit to it. i know my parents were well-intentioned when they taught me that, but i disagree with it. and i've been working on no longer applying it to myself. i've had to take a long, hard look at what it is that i want to do and the steps i need to take to get there. it definitely doesn't fucking help that everything is fucked right now and it's so hard to get any job, but i'm really holding out hope. i feel like this newfound free time is the space needed for an inflection point in my life. and i was on the downswing for a long time, just from how increasingly miserable i was at my last job. i'd really like to not go any further downward than i feel like i already have...

but it's been really fucking hard. a fresh start excites me, but it's also scary realizing how far i am from my goals. and i don't know who in my life to talk to, because i fear that vocalizing any form of breakthrough i have will somehow jinx it for me. i genuinely distrust the universe and have trouble wrapping my head around the possibility that i'm deserving of the success i dream of for myself. it sounds absolutely ridiculous, but it's true. and trust me, i do not want to be the woe-is-me pick-me girl prattling on about self-inflicted insecurities like this. it's almost certainly the result of lifelong catholic guilt. but it is loud. no matter how many affirmations i repeat to myself, the nagging doubts persist.

what i do know is what happens when i let those doubts win. it happened before, and it landed me where i was for the last eight years. if that's a cautionary tale...

genuinely, other than work, life has been good. i turned thirty and went through a shitty breakup that sort of catalyzed me into doing new things. i did some solo traveling and went to new places with friends and family. i started playing tennis. i saw some cool ass concerts like mcr and nine inch nails, among a lot of others. and i've been exercising pretty consistently since january 2025 when my labs looked a little weird. so all things considered, my life is going well. money is scary, especially these days, and especially without a job. but i'm hoping that turns around soon. i definitely took for granted not having to worry about money for that long. hindsight is making me wish i'd been smarter about it, but here we are.

hopefully next time i update here, things will be looking up a bit more.

Current Mood: anxious

...so much better on holiday
that's why we only work when
WE NEED THE MONEY

i am on spring break, aka the week of the year that i deliberately take off of work because i just need a fucking break from these people. spent the first half of the week (+the end of last week) in chicago visiting one of my good friends/ex-coworkers who's getting his ph.d. out there. the transitional weather worked out nicely -- we visited museums when it was rainy and cold, explored neighborhoods when it was sunny and warm. i traveled alone, which allowed me freedom to sort out my own itinerary, but since i'm boring, most of my stops were just bookstores and record shops. i also spent a fair bit of time sitting in cafes writing, but that was fine with me. with the amount of relaxation i got it really felt like a vacation.

a few other things i did: spent the entirety of business hours in the art institute of chicago (and still didn't see everything), navigated the L alone (and lost a lot more faith in humanity on the red and blue lines), dabbled in fine dining (not sure if it's for me), and made friends with strangers in bars (church songs seem to be the perfect icebreaker for queer recovering catholics). i also visited northwestern, bought a sweater like princess diana's, then briefly entertained the idea of getting a graduate degree in computational bio. fortunately the illusion lasted all of one hour (thank tuition sticker shock for that). then i met my friend's cohortmates who all sort of reinforced the idea that i didn't actually want to commit to anymore years of school. but they were all kind and hilarious, and i surprised myself with my social skills and would like to think i came off somewhat likeable, because i really liked all of them.

i returned here on tuesday to 80-degree weather and gas prices close to $6. it kind of just takes being out of california to realize how much california sucks. it felt very much at the crossroads of gentrification out there, where trendy, cookie-cutter high-rises and white-walled wood-countered businesses are slowly creeping into neighborhoods, but the core of local flavor is still predominant. suffice it to say it was a bit begrudgingly that i returned to bland ol' silicon valley, where those cookie-cutter high-rises obscure all our major skylines, commercial-residential communes wipe out entire blocks of small businesses, and you could ask any bland ol' techie transplant "so, which model are you: the type that hikes, cycles or boulders?" and get an answer. you can't help but wonder which major metropolis is next.

okay, fine. i admit i'm unreasonably scathing with my critiques on the bay area after i've returned from vacation, but it's hard not to grow disillusioned with living here, especially after being someplace else. it seems like unless you're coasting along on a six-figure salary or a generous dose of generational wealth, anywhere is better than here. i think a lot of my bitterness also stems from the fact that i can't bring myself to go anywhere else because my family is here. even with all the trauma they've inflicted (blah blah blah) i still find myself defaulting to "blood is thicker than water" despite knowing the full, actual quote.

this is so depressing. so anyway. probably against anybody's better judgment, my best friend and i are currently trying to flesh out a UK trip. ideally it would be at the end of this year, but i'm also fine with keeping it purely hypothetical because even the act alone of planning it out gives me enough joy. if in the event it does happen, though... literally the only reason we chose the end of the year is because franz ferdinand will be playing in england and i'd much rather see them over there than here. plus she's never been, and i enjoyed the UK quite a lot last time i went with family. i have a cousin over there, and i spent a fair bit of time sitting alone in cafes before anyone else was up just so i could theorize moving and building a life there. it was definitely within the realm of possibility at the time but with you-know-what who knows how much of that still holds true.

midnight now! i should go and savor my last 48 hours of freedom...

Current Mood: indifferent
Current Music: hold - wisteria

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ALEXITHYMIA;

Recent Entries

a monthly check-in(?).

back to school!

summer is for studying, apparently.

well, i forgot about this for a while.

it's always better on holiday...