Laughter is the best medicine

2024-09-23

Note: This is not a sponsored post. All opinions are entirely mine.

I have recently learned that I am a simple person.

A few months ago, I was feeling super down. So what did I do? I hopped onto Reddit, specifically the /r/JeffArcuri subreddit. I watched a few videos and immediately felt better.

Jeff is a comedian who suddenly blew up on Reddit. He does fantastic crowd work and I really like his stuff. I'm not really a stand-up comedy person so it was a surprise. What I really like about Jeff is that he feels like a genuine guy. He kinda just says whatever comes to his mind and it's always funny. What I like about his kind of funny is that rarely is it ever just making fun of a person. He tries to be respectful and sometimes, his awkwardness in trying to be respectful is even the punchline. He's just so good!

After signing off at work today, I felt ready to fall asleep. I debated taking a nap but decided against it because naps always turn into an all day thing for me. I couldn't risk it because I had an assignment due that day. With my eyes drooping and my mind feeling fuzzy, I opened up my laptop to get start some school work. Turns out that I left my browser on the Jeff Arcuri subreddit. I refreshed the page and saw that Jeff had posted a clip just 5 hours earlier. It was only 3 minutes long, so I obviously watched it instead of immediately working on my assignment.

As soon as the first laugh escaped me, I didn't feel tired anymore. My mind instantly cleared up. I was astounded. It sounds crazy but I swear this is what happened.

So, it seems like in most situations, a good comedy clip is enough to perk me up. Feeling sad? Jeff Arcuri. About to fall asleep when I really should be working? Jeff Arcuri. Just need a good laugh out of me to get going.

Pancit

2024-09-19

This may be cheating. This following excrept is from an assignment I wrote but I wanted to share it here, too.

When I was younger, I didn’t know what it meant to be Filipino. From elementary to junior high school, I was one of three Filipinos in my grade. Everyone else was White. I constantly compared my very Filipino family to my friends and their very Canadian families. In my rebellious preteen eyes, the only interesting thing Filipinos had was food.

What comes to mind is pancit, a simple noodle dish. It was a dish I didn’t love immediately. The turning point was during a trip to the Philippines. It was my grandfather’s death anniversary, and, to my surprise, there was a big celebration. I was used to pancit at Filipino gatherings. It’s a staple to any Filipino party. What I didn’t expect was pancit at what seemed like a somber event.

I distinctly remember my aunts on the cement kitchen floor, squatting around a giant wok. Woks are big to begin with, but this wok was unlike any other I had seen before. It was about half the size of a dining table. They ladled out spoonsful of pancit from the wok onto paper plates. My dad instructed me to take the paper plates and distribute them to people waiting outside. We ended up doing this for an hour and a half, and, somehow, the wok never seemed to run out of noodles.

My father later told me that most of those people outside were not relatives. Some were people that no one had ever met before. He joked that, “people smelled the food and came over.” I was stunned.

That's part of my assignment. The rest of it is just the boring history of pancit.

What this excerpt reminds me of is community. I don't think I have a solid community that I can turn to these days. Individual people, maybe, but not a community. I find it quite hard to break into them, often feeling like an outsider. My strategy is usually to observe the dynamics and how people talk to each other, so I have an idea of how to participate. This works for text-based online communities. In person, it can be read as weird and creepy. As you can probably tell, I'm not the fearless extrovert type.

I think another part of it is that I can be very distant. Showing my vulnerabilities can be hard for me. I often wonder if I am overstepping. Or fearing not being accepted. I think having community requires openness and willing to be vulnerable, both of which I have trouble with.

I wish I could say that I'm working on it, but I'm really not. It's not high on my priority list these days but maybe it should be.

No Hobonichi box this year

2024-09-17

After ordering from Hobonichi for 5 years in row, this will be the first time that I do not have the Hobonichi box. After looking at all the offerings Hobonichi had for 2025, I realized that I didn't care to buy more than one Hobonichi planner this year, or any other accessories.

I used to be a big cover person for my Hobonichi. But I've been using Hobonichi since 2020 (bought my first Hobonichi in 2019) and I've largely used the books at home. Now that I'm leaving my house more often, I'm realizing how much of a pain it is to carry around a bulky A5 Hobonichi with a cover on it. Of course, you don't need a cover, but the regular Hobonichi Cousin is just plain ugly without it. I'm usually not a form over function kind of girl but aesthetics matter to me quite a lot. I was originally going to try to buy the Hobonichi Original, which is quite sophisticated looking. It is all black, with a faux leathery look to it and gold embossed logo on it. However, it was only available in A6. I need an A5 for my day to day. It just wasn't feasible.

Enter Sterling Ink. For my planning and journalling, I realized that maybe I needed to try something else. But that doesn't mean that I'll be abandoning Hobonichi entirely for 2025.

My plan for 2025 with Hobonichi is a simple one: I will be using the A6 HON Bow & Tie: Sushi for my book journal. I had a lot of success this year (2024) using my A6 HON as a book journal (you can see how I use it here) and wanted to keep it going into next year. It helped that I am in love with the sushi design and that it was the same design series as my 2024 A6 HON. It's not the most sophisticated look but it is cute and I love consistency. Seeing that I only wanted to buy one item with no accessories and shipping from Japan is exorbitantly expensive, I opted to go with a local group order.

It wasn't until I signed up for a group order did I realize that I wasn't going to get the cute Hobonichi box that come with the order. I was a bit disappointed but then I realized that every time I received one of the boxes, I never knew what to do with it. They definitely helped when I moved out of my apartment but I'm not going to be doing any moving soon. My second thought was that I wasn't going to be getting the Hobonichi pen. Thankfully, a pen is sent with every Techo ordered. Phew.

To my pleasant surprise, I also received a free notebook as well. The notebook comes with only certain techo(s). I didn't expect it and I am quite happy with it. I saw other people posting their notebook freebie and I'm quite glad that I received this design because it's my favourite one from the four different options. The art is apparently woodblock prints from the Meiji era. A very cool concept! I don't really know what I'll use this notebook for. It's an A6 size so maybe I'll carry it around with me just in case I need to quickly jot something down.

Below is a picture of my haul. At the top is just a pamphlet that came with the book. It's quite... Interesting. There is a masked man looming over a little boy, menacingly. I feel like it fits the Hobonichi design aesthetic so well. Like, just a touch of "what the fuck?" The bottom left is the freebie. I love the design on this. It looks like a black clouds against a blue sky. Or the shadow of clouds on the ocean. This small book is 160 pages, which is quite a lot! To the bottom right is the A6 HON. It's a bright yellow (usually not my vibe but I forgive it) and has pictures of little plates of sushi going diagonally across the book. It's so cute!

Despite a smaller than usual haul this year, I'm quite pleased with what I bought. I know that my wallet is grateful as well!

Week #14 - Sep 09 to Sep 15 2024

2024-09-16

• 🌐 I'm giving weekly posts another shot, even though I am notoriously super bad at keeping up with them. But I love reading Noisy Deadlines's Week Notes so much that I want to do them too! I quite like how they are short, informal, informative, and aesthetically pleasing (I am totally stealing their emoji idea, apologies!). I also stumbled upon Jedda's week notes and this was yet another source of inspiration.
• 🎵 FKA twigs released her first single, Eusexua, from her next album, and it is perfect. I love it so much. A strong contender for my song of the year. She first performed this song at a Valentino fashion event last year and I've been waiting for this song to drop from the moment I first watched the performance.
• 📚 Re-started my quest to read more this year, after a two month drought. Mostly reading a lot of graphic novels to ease myself back into it. Black Coat (Volume 1) is a standout. Very interesting fantasy-mystery. In terms of reading actual prose, I started reading Buffalo is the New Buffalo, a collection of short stories by Métis author Chelsea Vowel. Honestly, it's hard reading anything after finishing The Secret History.
• 💤 Having a lot of trouble with sleep these days. It's quite hard for me to get out of bed. Currently trying a lot of ways to fix my sleep schedule (going to bed earlier should be on the list of things to try).
• 🎓 I'm procrastinating a lot with schoolwork. Either I go down a rabbit hole for an assignment and get too ahead of myself, or I just don't plain want to do something and end up on Reddit. It's a bad cycle. Right now in my English Composition class, we're writing Bibliographic annotations.
• 📜 I'm also taking a poetry course, ModPo, on the side. At the end of the week I have been reading poetry from Imagist poets. I quite like this movement of poetry. It's very Dickinsonian in that it says so much in few words. But it's Whitmanian in that it evokes more imagery. Earlier on the week, we read some poets that were more firmly in the "Dickinsonian" versus "Whitmanian" camp. Some people are polarized to prefer one over the other, but I think I like each the same.
• 📝 I ordered my Sterling Ink planners and picked up a Hobonichi techo for 2025. I'm quite ready for next year, stationery-wise!

The Sun saps my energy

2024-09-13

From July to August, I managed to not finish a single book. Also from July to August, I wrote very little (AKA not at all) in my journals. I also stopped going to the gym.

This seems to be a trend for me. I have a 5 Year Journal that I started in 2021, where every day is dedicated a page. Each page is split into 5 sections, one for each year. I've noticed that July through August has the least entries almost every year. I don't know what it is about the summer months that makes me less disciplined.

Maybe it's the fact that the sun draws people out of their homes. I know that in July, I went to a week's worth of concerts. In August I went travelling. In 2023, I was in Japan and the Philippines. In 2021, my cat escaped his carrier during a fire alarm and he was lost for two weeks. 2022 wasn't remarkable but still had fewer entries. For the more eventful years, each of these events only accounts for at most two weeks out of the whole summer. Where did the rest of it go?

One hypothesis I have is that I need a lot of time to recuperate after big events or events that are very social. Summer means socializing and getting out of the house. Not a lot of that happens during the winter.

Another hypothesis is that by the middle of the year, I am simply just tired. Following a strict routine every day takes a lot of energy. By the time summer rolls around, I need a break.

A part of me wonders if I should plan around this or plan for it. The difference being, should I tighten up the reins during the summer or should I just accept the summer just means long lazy days? I'm thinking maybe a middle-ground between the two. I think a big factor, for this year at least, was the fact that the semester ended in April. And I was so done. Maybe if I took another course, or joined a book club, I would have retained some semblance of a routine. Just need something to give me some structure, because I cannot reliable draw on willpower alone.

A few weeks into the semester, I feel my butt slowly kicking into gear. I'm having to reform some of my habits again. I wish they didn't erode in the first place.