bee

Holy I didn't realize how poor my concentration is during the evenings until I watched this and could not compute the results at all. No wonder I felt I've been glossing over the latest books that I've read.

3Blue1Brown is such a gem of a channel

2021 clothes r1

 r0 / plan from beginning of year / covid sale check-in

Since I already set the theme for 2021, this will be a short check-in of everything I purchased in 2020 and comparison of the results against my plan from the start of the year. I have no wear count to update because switching phones made my lose the little data I had from barely getting dressed during covid. 

1. Abercrombie & Fitch lace dress - $52.83
2. Burberry two-tone trench - $1717.60
3. Sandro lace shift dress - $218.40
4. Frank&Oak wide legged pants - $76.35
5. Proenza Schouler PS11 chain bag - $545.30
6. Stuart Weitzman  lonnie boot - $484.87 
7. Babaton leather wrap skirt - $105.74
8. Vickyoung pleated pants*
9. HM x Giuliva pleated pants - $49.94
10. PH5 knit skirt - $220.50
11. Rebecca Vallance silk backless dress - $283.27
12. HM cotton backless dress - $39.99
13. Skye band collar dress*

*from Taoabao, waiting for me when I can make it back to China

**overflow from last year

Total: $3794.79 (guess this is where all the wfh savings went)

So I'm obviously over the 8 item limit that I set for myself, which really is ok but I can justify it as I decluttered several pieces of clothing when I moved. But the question I'm really asking is what is the point of setting a purchase limit? Is it because I want to spend less money? Not grow my closet? I don't actually know how useful it is to stick to a hard limit, but I will continue to choose a number as a guiding post. So let's try 8 pieces again for 2021.

I am pretty consistent in the styles that I buy, I guess I've settled into the elusive ~personal style~. Most of the items are also what I planned to buy, although the list of planned purchases at the beginning of the year is almost entirely irrelevant (aside from a different pair of Maguire loafers that I'd like).

bowl

December is nearing its end and I really haven't posted at all. 

2020 is nearing its end, and it feels like not much has happened but actually a lot has happened?

• Career is progressing: civ is one of those fields where you can experience by doing your tasks. I can clearly see how the expertise I gained from finishing a large restoration and forensics project apply to my work on other projects. I am immensely lucky that covid didn't negatively impact my job in any significant manner, in fact working from home has been great aside from ergonomics. 
• I'm not sure if wfh has made my sleeping habits better or worse, but it does seem that I need to sleep more hours compared to before. Now days I try to get 9 hours on weekdays and still end up sleeping more than 12 hours on weekends, and feel lacking in energy everyday. I wonder if this is something a long vacation will fix, if I just spend a whole month sleeping in everyday... but everyone wisely recommends that exercising is a far likely fix. All I can say from several failed attempts at consistently exercising is that it's not the most horrible activity, but I've also felt none of the joy that people describe from doing so. 
• Wfh has definitely reinforced my introverted tendencies. Just let me hibernate. 
• Hobby wise I've engaged the most with my interest in clothing and beauty. What this really means is I've watched a lot of youtube videos on these topics, mostly by mandarin speaking youtubers which has the added benefit that my chinese is a little better (at least vocab). I find there is several high-level differences between the content of fashion & beauty videos catered towards chinese vs western audience. For clothing, english speaking videos focus a lot on finding your personal style whereas mandarin speaking videos focus on how to pock clothing within a style that is flattering. Like picking a pant shape that makes your leg look straight. Extrapolating from this, it is reflective of the east vs west cultural difference of individuality and conformity. 
• A good habit I've picked up again is reading before bed, thanks to the Libby app. It has about 80% of the books I want to read, which is far sufficient to tie me over until covid ends. Aside from Alain de Botton and existentialism, I read several books on the subject of a minority group's experience in Canada/US, such as undocumented immigrants (Children of the Land), indigenous people (From the Ashes, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, All Our Relations), and queer people (I'm Afraid of Men, We Have Always Been Here). I'm not sure how much reading about their experiences has impacted me, but at least I know about the injustices these people have suffered and will speak up against the bias against them. 
• Aside from books, I read (both present and past tense) a lot of manga. The current series is dominated by the reincarnation theme, either in isekai (with the villainous sub-theme) or to take revenge. There's a lot of really mediocre stories in this theme, and they all have the same fault of the over-powered main character just blazing ahead, and if there is a love interest, s/he is instantly smitten. The better ones retain some vulnerability to the main character and have him/her develop meaningful relationships with the side characters. I suppose this underscores that relationships are the most meaningful part of existing.

fluff

 I think I broke my own record of longest time spent sleeping last night: 15 hours.

clasp

 

Things from Frontrow that I hope will be further discounted at the end of the season waaaaaah.

Children of the Land

I didn't feel like posting about the last couple of books I finished (From the Ashes, Hand to Mouth, How Proust Can Change Your Life), although it was not because they weren't impactful. It's because there weren't singular items that stood out, and I haven't given enough thought to form overall impressions (not that I explicitly undergo this exercise for other books either).

But here is a long quotation from Children of the Land that stood out. For context, the book is a memoire about the authors' experience being an undocumented immigrant. 

Going to La Loma was the only way I would unravel and return to the world of the living. It happened when I was young. I wandered in the woods of the Sierra Nevada in the warmth of the summer, when the small mountain flowers and mule's ear sprouts were lush, I tried to open. I yellow and yellowed and sang and chanted, but even the warm breeze felt like knives to an exposed nerve. And a few years later, I came close to that disentanglement again, but again there was nothing for me to hold on to, nothing of substance to replay the centre, so I buckled up and tried to drive my car into the river. I didn't want to come back. And once this feeling of emptiness at my core started, it wouldn't go away. It was too late and it felt like I was becoming smaller day by day, unthreading, I could feel how much of myself I left behind everywhere I went. I was almost reeling in it because I felt it as a kind of ecstasy - parts of myself scattered over an entire landscape. A little of me here, a little of there. My anxiety no longer mattered, my sadness, my invisibility, and my hopelessness felt foreign to me, which is to say, they were inconsequential. I withdrew and let the world move my body without me, I tumbled like dried grass. I didn't have anything like La Loma, with its thick walls built by my ancestors, to bring me back to reality. No semblance of permanence. 

I felt most of the writing, and the quotation above especially, has a poetic quality to it. The author is a poet, so that's some basis for my vague feeling as it'd be hard for me to describe what exactly is poetry (and not that I read any). 

If I were to make some generalizations about all of the quotations that I've noted down in my blog, the commonality in style would be this vague poetic quality and the commonality in theme would be...lacking in substance? 

stone

 A representative sample of my meals at home lately:

(the iPhone 12's photography capability really is a vast improvement over my 6s)