Week #21 - Nov 20 to Nov 26

2024-11-26

🐲 Server migration

I migrated Bookrastinating to a new server last week. Its contract is expiring next month and I wasn't happy with the amount that I was paying, so I thought it was a good time to change hosts. It was a bit of a debacle. I tried to import a SQL dump into the database and it wouldn't work for a bit, so I had to go in and edit a lot of the SQL to get it to work. And even with that, there turned out to be lingering problems. It seemed that not all of the database migrations applied correctly. So a few days after the server migration, I had to fix that too. I'm glad that's over. Now the website is a bit more snappier and I can save some money.

🍩 Dozens of doughnuts

Recently a new mini-doughnut place opened up and my brother ordered literally dozens of them. Thankfully we were expecting visitors and the donuts were small (like a little larger than a Tim Horton's timbit). They were soooo good. They tasted like Filipino donuts. We ate so many. Thankfully we had a lot to share. My cousins came over the next day and we shared some leftovers with them. We don't often talk to cousins from my dad's side so it was a nice time to bond. It was like three hours of talking though, which was a lot for me, hah.

🏆 MAMA 2024

Last week was the annual Mnet Asian Music Awards (MAMA) show. It says Asian in the name, but really, it's a K-pop awards show. I didn't bother watching until the 3rd day because one of my favourite K-pop artists was performing for the first time in several years: G-DRAGON. He's part of the boy group BIGBANG and they were one of first groups that got me into K-pop. He's a huge cultural icon in K-pop and his comeback was much awaited by fans (including me!).

When GD appeared on stage, I couldn't believe it. He performed his new song, Power (which, honestly, is not my favourite) and it was a lot of fun. Then he brought out Taeyang and Daesung and the crowd was seriously so loud, probably the loudest they got that night.

The three of them performed Bang Bang Bang and a snippet of Fantastic Baby and I was so hyped. I was like squealing and singing and dancing along in my chair. My mom even knocked on my door to see if I was okay. Yes, I am a grown adult woman. BIGBANG is one of the only K-pop groups who could do that to me, honestly. It was so fun and I loved it! It was worth staying up late for.

🎹 Music night

I'm a closet atheist, so my mom dragged us to an event at church and I went along anyway, but I was glad I went. It was a music night where people from the parish showed off a particular musical talent. There was dancing, instruments, and a lot of singing. Really, barriers break down when it comes to music. You often forget how people are still people and how at the end of the day, at least people can connect on one, truly universal, thing: music (or if you want to be more general, art). I was able to see some old friends too. I used to be really active in church so it was nice to say hi to some of them. I really haven't talked to any of them since I moved out (and since moved back in) from my parent's home. I have some talented friends, I wish I had a musical talent! Alas, I can only listen to music.

💿 New release: GNX

Kendrick Lamar dropped a new album out of the blue: GNX. I really liked it. I think my favourite tracks on it are Reincarnated, peekaboo, and heart pt. 6 .I'm usually not a huge fan of rap, but I can make an exception for one of the coolest rappers of our time. There is just something about Kendrick's voice that I really like, it's nice to listen to and then his lyricism is really top notch, too. I also took the opportunity to listen to Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers again because I feel like I didn't give it a proper listen. I honestly think I prefer that over GNX but the new album is still solid!

📊 Weekly listening

In order from most listened to least: Green Day, Kendrick Lamar, XG, G-DRAGON, Little Big League, Coheed and Cambria, My Chemical Romance, AFI. I can't stop listening to Green Day's American Idiot 20th Anniversary Deluxe Version that came out this year. I forgot how much I loved that album. AFI was a surprise to me. I read somewhere that Davey Havok thinks AFI is better than My Chemical Romance. I like both so I was like, y'know what, I'm going to give AFI some love. I've been listening to their latest album. I liked the singles from it when they first came out, but I ended up liking a lot more tracks from the album!

Week #20 - Nov 13 to Nov 19

2024-11-19

• 🧹 I did some winter cleaning in my office. I have a lot of boxes just lying around and managed to put things into more manageable piles and threw some things out, too. Being able to see more floor space gives me a lot of relief. However, I'm nowhere near done. I also put up some K-pop posters in the office!

• 🎬 I'm not much of a movie fan but my mom convinced me to watch Hello, Love, Again with her and some of my titas over the weekend. The movie is a Filipino rom-com and I'd say it's your standard Filipino drama, nothing special. I rolled my eyes more than I cried (I cried three times). A lot of the filming took place in Canada, so it was cool seeing some familiar scenery. It was really nice to see foreign movies being shown in an actual theater here in Canada. My Tagalog isn't the best so I greatly appreciated the subtitles they provided. It was fun! Afterwards, I went to my aunt's and hung out with cousins.
• 🩺 It just now hit me that I watched two movies this week, both Filipino related. I managed to catch a screening of the documentary, Nurse Unseen. The documentary covers stories of Filipino nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. I was really touched watching it and cried a lot. A lot of these events happened just four years ago, but for some reason it feels like a lifetime away. It's times like these that I feel like we don't appreciate people who work in healthcare as much as we should.
• 📖 I actually finished reading something?? I finished reading Only Sisters by Lilian Nattel. The main character has a sister working as a travel nurse in Africa during the first Ebola outbreaks and sadly passes away. But her sister's dying wish is to pretend that she is still alive for the sake of their mother. It was alright, not a must read. I actually read this book before, but I wrongly assumed that I didn't finish reading the book, and re-read it. It was only in the last thirty pages that everything started coming back to me. Oh well!
• 🥀 My Chemical Romance caused some controversy with their tour rollout last week. The tickets were pretty expensive... But I expected this and bought tickets anyway. The seats I have are near the seats I had from the Green Day concert back in August and they were around $80 more per seat. Not bad, and I think they're better seats too, a little bit closer. I can sympathize with fans finding the tour expensive but stadium tours are expensive to begin with. But it really did ignite a bit discussion within the fandom. I really hope the high ticket price means new music, but we'll see.
• 📊 My last week's top artists are similar from last week's. What's notable is rapper Tierra Whack. She's an artist new to me and I've been spinning tracks from the album, Whack World. Other than Tierra, we have IDLES, L.S. Dunes, Leathermouth, XG, Minho, The Used, and miruky.

Week 19 - Nov 6 to Nov 12

2024-11-12

• 🧋 One of my favourite dessert places closed down last week, so I ordered some of my favourite food from them (croffles and bubble tea!) before they shut down. Bubble tea is everywhere but I've never seen croffles as good anywhere else so they will be sorely missed.
• 🗳️ I'm not from the States, nor living in the States, so feel free to disregard this opinion but my hot take after the election is that the results of the U.S. election affects the entire world. U.S. culture and political discourse is one the states biggest exports. They are a world power with significant influence on global politics. 95% of my online friends are living in the U.S. Not all of them may be directly affected by any future policies but I do feel worried for them. It was a bit of a harrowing moment and still is.
• 🎓 I learned about the concept of an argument map. It's exactly what it sounds, but maybe for the more mathematically inclined folks, it's more like an argument node graph. Basically it lays out arguments and indicates relationships between them and the statement they are trying to prove. Very interesting, and I kinda want to read a paper and draw out an argument map for it.

🎵 I am not okay

• 🥀 My Chemical Romance announce a North American tour and I am 111% going even though I just saw them two days in a row not even just a month ago (and if I can compete with all of Canada for tickets). From the teaser trailer and some comments from the band members, this could potentially be larger than a tour and maybe even new material. I'm not holding my breath for new material, as I think they should only release new music if they are confident in it. Still, I'm excited and I'm hoping to either bring my brother with me or go with some friends in Toronto.
• 💿 I've been listening to XG's Howling and SHINee Minho's new album on repeat this month. Some really good K-pop releases recently!
• 📊 My top artists of this week have been Green Day, The Used, Minho, XG, Queens of the Stone Age, L.S. Dunes, Leathermouth, and At the Drive-In.

Intelligence, or lack of it

2024-11-11

I don't feel like I'm a particularly smart person. Of course, "being smart" can mean a myriad of things. Some people might look at me and say that I'm smart because I got good grades in school or because I finished a university degree.

However, the reason why I got good grades in school is because I relied on rote memorization. Great for maths and getting a computer science degree. Not so great if you want to be able to solve complex problems that aren't from a textbook, or if you want to discuss abstract concepts in depth. I can parrot definitions and pull out common proofs but outside of that... Nada.

Looking back on my education, I wonder if I ever really understood any of what I learned, or if I ever "learned" anything at all. It's strange for me to say this as someone who proclaims to "love learning." Maybe I just like listening to smart people talk about things they actually know about.

For example, if you were to take a look at Bloom's taxonomy, I just clear the first level of learning: knowledge. This is simply remembering, identifying, or listing things. There are several levels of learning above that: understanding, applying,analyzing, evaluating, and creating, in that order. Depending on the subject, I can probably engage in high levels of learning, but I would safely say that most of my time spent learning is in the knowledge level.

Knowing this, you would think my work is cut out for me. I genuinely struggle to engage with concepts on a deeper level. Maybe it's because of the English courses I've been taking, but I consistently feel like there is something always out of reach for me to understand something. It frustrates me when I think about it.

I've read a few resources on this and really, and one way to remedy this is time and good instruction. Both of which I feel like I'm lacking right now and lacked in the past. In the condensed courses I'm taking, there is very little time to pause and really think.

This is really a sore spot for me because I can so clearly see my deficits but trying to fix them feels impossible. A part of me thinks that, maybe, I'm just a simpleton who is not made for critical thinking. It feels like I'm trying to cultivate an property that is innate in some people but not in others. Like I'm trying to be someone that I'm not. This is all very self-defeating thinking but it comes across my mind often.

Anyway, no real answers here. I'm about to go and continue to contemplate my life and what I'm doing with it, for the nth time.

I'm not going to meet the challenge

2024-11-07

I've resigned myself to the fact that I am not going to finish 100 Days to Offload this year. I don't know why every year I give it a try and then never finish it. Of course, the "goal" is to just start posting more and I think this challenge did help me with that. I managed to post around 50 posts this year, which I think is actually pretty good. That's like a little less than one post per week. So to say that I managed to do that, I'm quite pleased.

I was posting pretty well until the summer months. I had a routine going. But then June came around. I talked about before how I become pretty useless during the summer. One thing that I didn't talk about in that post is how once my routine changes, it's incredibly hard for me to bounce back from it.

Honestly, I'd say I'm still suffering the consequences from it, even a week into November. No matter how much I may "want" to get back to my regular schedule, I'm complacent. Sleeping in later than usual is one of the things I've been slacking on. Lately I've been waking up just on time to run to my laptop and start my work day. It's not been good. I miss having some time before work, because if I don't have the free time before work, I'm now stressing out and doing things after work all the way up to and past midnight. "After work" enables my procrastination brain and even when procrastinating, I never feel good about it. It's like a nagging feel in the back of my mind. "I should be doing this thing but it's okay, I'll wait until 18:25 to get started on it. Okay it's now 18:27 let's extend that to 18:30." And so on, and so on.

Literally, there is no other way for me to get back on the horse other than to just do it. But it's so hard to get past the sleep barrier. So odd of me to say but I want to wake up at 4AM every day like I used to.

Tonight will be my night, and I will good to bed at a reasonable time and wake up early (hopefully).