Update on my "30 Before 30" list

2024-09-06

It's way past half-way through the year but I'm re-evaluating my "30 before 30" bucket list.

Since January, I've accomplished the following:

1. Bucket list concert: Saw Green Day play both Dookie and American Idiot in their entirety in one night. It was amazing. I also have two other bucket list concerts coming up: Coheed and Cambria playing Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV: Volume One and Protest the Hero playing Volition.
2. Travel within Canada: Had to travel to see Green Day and I explored Toronto for a few days. Most of it was eating at new restaurants, hah. But I did manage to wander around downtown and the harbour.
3. Visit museum/art gallery: Earlier on in the year, I had plans to go with some friends but the museum was closed. Bummer. But! While in Toronto I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario. It was a huuuge museum and I spent around 4-5 hours looking around. By the last hour I was kinda fed up so I may have rushed the last few exhibits, but otherwise, I enjoyed my time there.
4. Go to a random gig without knowing who is playing: Some family friends invited me to go to a Benson Boone concert. I had no idea who he was but he was a fun show. He took his shirt off and did a lot of back-flips.
5. Volunteer: Volunteered a few times. Sorted some books for a book sale and then did garbage cleanup along the river.
6. Watch a movie in a theater: My cousins, brother, and I went to watch Dune part two together! It was such a cool movie. I was stunned by it. I also saw Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire with some friends and let me tell you... That was not a good movie. It was lighthearted but I just could not turn off my brain during it. I kept inwardly groaning through the cliches. Good excuse to be with friends, though.
7. Go back to therapy: I did this! Am still doing this! Not going to lie, I kinda dread it every time. I know it's good for me. Growth is never comfortable.

I've also realized that there a few goals that I'm better off dropping:

1. Get a tattoo: I am too indecisive. Can't think of what I would want on my body permanently. Actually, that's a lie. I have ideas of things that I want to get tattooed, I'm just overwhelmed by potential designs. Maybe one day I'll find an artist that resonates with me.
2. Skinny dipping: As the days get colder, I think my window for this has closed.
3. See a play in the park: The troupe that did this every year, cancelled all their shows this year. Big bummer.

The rest are still on the table but I know I won't be able to accomplish much more with around 100 days left of the year. I tried prioritizing them in terms of what I think are urgent, important, or both.

1. Finish 100 days to offload: This is why you're seeing this blog post now. I just want to finally accomplish this and just be able to say I did it and forget about it. It'll be tight but we'll see how it goes.
2. Go clubbing: I feel like my window for clubbing and not being an old fart is closing rapidly. Urgent, but definitely not important.
3. Submit something, somewhere: Would this count if I submitted something that was utter trash somewhere? I'm trying to write more but I'm a little off the mark in terms of quality. Maybe I can scrounge something up.
4. Learn to cook "my dish": This is still something I want to do. Important, not urgent.
5. Finish first year of school: In progress! I started my second semester and it's already kicking my ass. I'm taking two courses and it's pretty rough.
6. Stretch more: So simple and I keep forgetting to do it.
7. Work towards figuring out my mystery ailment: I've been taking antibiotics and another form of medication that my doctor prescribed me. I think it's too early to tell if it works. But this is a journey I'm slowly making progress towards.

Everything else (13 items) I can live with not accomplishing. I'm always too ambitious when it comes to these things but I think it's okay that things don't always work out.

A week with Sterling Ink

2024-09-04

It is Hobonichi season! And you know what that means. It means it's time to buy more Hobonichis!

Or... Maybe not.

Recently I came to the conclusion that the Hobonichi Weeks doesn't actually work for me. I wish it did. I spent a few years with the Weeks and had mixed success. I always wished that I could use the horizontal week layout more effectively. My main gripe with it was the fact that the Hobonichi weeks is so narrow. I could never fit everything that I wanted to fit into the tiny space. What I really wanted was an A5 Weeks. Hobonichi is quite stable in their products so I had no hope of that happening any time soon.

Enter Sterling Ink.

I know Sterling Ink through their sticker collections. I'm not a big sticker person, so I kind of dismissed the idea of a sticker company creating planners. Until I actually looked at their offerings. This year, they have an A5 horizontal week planner, with enough pages for a page per day at the back. This is my dream notebook!! I need it, and badly.

But I was unfamiliar with the Sterling Ink format. So. I did what any rational person would do and bought one of their 2024. Yes, I bought a 2024 planner in August 2024. Thankfully, they provide half year books so I got a July-December 2024 planner. They only had the A6 size, but I just wanted to get a feel for the product.

First of all, I loooove the cover. It's a sophisticated, sleek, faux leather cover with minimal branding. It's a bit more in line with the aesthetic that I'm trying to cultivate nowadays as well.

Now, there's a lot about the inside of the planner that I haven't used yet. Such as the quarterly sections and the goal breakdowns. No pictures because I didn't really use them.

Monthlies and Weeklies

Speaking of not using. Or not using effectively. I never really know how to use the monthly and vertical weekly in a beneficial way. I put in my due dates for the courses I'm taking this semester and other random occasions in the monthly.

The vertical weekly never works for me. I used to time block in the Cousin but then I would never look at it again. I rely more on my calendar for hour by hour planning. Things change way too often for me to commit to something on paper. And I like how I can easily play around digitally compared to paper.

Towards the end of the week, I wanted to try something new. I wrote in astrological transits and events. But as you will see later, I like to write that information down in my dailies instead.

On Thursday, you can see that I tried writing down my distractions down at the bottom but then quickly abandoned that idea. I am fully aware of my own vices but I don't think this format is the best way to reflect on them.

Dailies

My daily spread is pretty consistent. I used a similar format in memo pages of the Hobonichi Weeks. The only change here is that for every heading you see, I would usually create a new page for it. I'm not sure why I'm trying to conserve pages when I often didn't use that many pages in the Hobonichi Weeks. So far I'm using around 3 pages per day. But also keep in mind that the A6 is quite small.

I did mention in the previous section that I don't like putting my time blocking on paper. However, I do this every morning to get an idea of what my day is like. The specific times don't matter too much.

The next page is a continuation of Wednesday and onto Thursday. I was playing around with the headings of each day because I wasn't sure how to make it stand out. I also do a little bit of journaling as well.

These next two pages are me trying to plan out September. I get pretty granular. For each item that's due, I try to estimate how long it will take me to accomplish that task. I even try to break down tasks to smaller tasks. I am pretty accurate when it comes to reading assignments but writing assignments, I tend to feel like I overestimate but often end up not estimating enough.

You can also see that I started writing in cursive. I feel like it just looks nicer.

Still trying to play around with headings. I like the little sparkle emoji and tried to replicate it. But I think it doesn't stand out quite enough for me. You can even see me meta-journaling about bullet points vs. check-boxes.

And on the other page, you can see me write out the criteria and steps for my next assignment.

How I feel about Sterling Ink so far

The paper is nice but I am noticing how much ghosting and bleedthrough there is with my pen and ink of choice (Platinum Century 3776 EF with DeAtramentis Document Ink Fog Grey). I suspect it's mostly the ink, because the lighter blue writing looks great (Kyo no Oto: Hisoku with a Sailor Pro Gear F nib).

I was worried about the unstructured blank pages at the end. But I never really had a problem with in it the weeks. I am missing the amount of page space compared to the Weeks. The Sterling Ink grid is 35x24 squares and each square is 3.7x3.9mm. The Weeks is 49x23 with 3.7x3.7mm but somehow each individual square feels smaller. That 0.2mm makes a difference, somehow. That being said, this is the A6 size which is obviously smaller than the N2 Weeks size.

All of my thoughts about the vertical weekly are my same thoughts about the Cousin weekly pages. I just cannot make it work. The structure makes me want to use it that way it's intended. Any dense writing in the small columns are a no go for me. I'm so excited for the horizontal weekly layout.

Either way, I'm quite happy with the book so far! After this little trial run, I have made the decision to buy Sterling Ink for 2025 but that's for a different post.

Rethinking the Ending of Crime and Punishment

2024-05-11

Kendrick Lamar:

When are we gonna understand that we are put on Earth to love? That's all it's about. Everybody wants to figure out how complicated life is and break it down. I really think that it's going to keep going on. War will keep going on. Frustration will keep going on. Anger will keep going on. 'Til we finally go back down to the simplest word: love.

Growing up, I went through the public Catholic school system. Seeing how Dostoevsky is quite forward with his Christian morals in his writing, it's no surprise that Crime and Punishment was on the reading list for my English high school class. Okay, admittedly, I was not a very bright student so the fact that this was a deliberate choice was lost on me. Not until I read the book. What little I got out of Crime and Punishment in my first read of the book was all through the ending.

Back then I was a devout little Catholic so after reading Crime and Punishment, I was deeply moved by the ending. Raskolnikov finds redemption through Sonia and converts to Christianity. The image of Raskolnikov and Sonia exchanging crosses is forever burned into my mind. I thought it was so powerful that Raskolnikov went back to religion in the end. That his morals were finally straightened out and that he chose a better path for himself.

After re-reading the book over ten years later, I don't view the ending in that way anymore. One: I'm no longer religious so the moment no longer holds any awe for me. And, more importantly, two: I don't think Raskolnikov finds redemption through conversion. What comes to mind is a clip of an interview I stumbled upon on the Internet. In it, Kendrick Lamar talks about the importance of love.

It feels reductive to assign "love" as the main theme of Crime and Punishment. But it was one thing that came up on my mind throughout the entire novel.

Raskolnikov is surrounded by love from beginning to end. His friend Razumikhin (almost weirdly) never gives up on him, asserting himself into Raskolnikov's life to give him help when he needs it. His sister and mother are devoted to him and care for his well-being. Sonia deeply empathizes with him and sees the utmost good in him, even after learning that he is a killer. Despite it all, Raskolnikov rejects their love. He withdraws into himself and is obsessed over his own ego. Even when Raskolnikov is sent to the camps for murder, he still cannot get over himself. He toils over the fact that he is not, by his own definition, an extraordinary person.

The only thing that snaps him out of this is when he realizes that he loves Sonia. He is pulled out of his own mental hell and is confronted with the fact that he cares for her well-being.

Granted, I don't really buy the fact that Raskolnikov actually loves Sonia. I truly wonder if he is capable of love at all. He says he loves his mother and sister but does very little that would actually show it. He was once engaged, but to sickly girl that he used as a microphone, to voice all his inner thoughts to.

But what I really think lies in the redemption of Raskolnikov is that he finally accepts the love from those around him. He constantly pushes away those who loves them. He deems himself unworthy. He assumes that they would be better off without him. It isn't until the end of the book that he finally sees that he would be better off with them. Life is finally worth living once he accepts love and he is ready to give back love in return.

In my humble opinion, I think that compared to a religious epiphany, this is a more powerful epiphany to have. It's a much more universal theme that can speak to all people, regardless of religion.