A new beginning...sort of.

I've decided to chronicle the good and the bad of my life to remind myself of the small, nondescript things that make the days worth it.

GRRR: Am dealing with some passive-aggressiveness bool-sheet that I DO. NOT. WANT.

YAYZ: I've already dealt with this type of asinine behavior before and I have very big balls.

GRRR: Don't have much time left for some very important deadlines coming up for me.

YAYZ: Received two emails over the weekend that I've been waiting for with bated breath.

GRRR: My room looks like Chernobyl and I haven't done anything about it for a week. Or two. Okay, three.

YAYZ: I found my braided belt that goes with everything. It was hiding under my towels.

GRRR: So many things to get done at work before Thanksgiving break!

YAYZ: Food, family and friends await at the end of the week. I can do this!!

2010

The only constant in life is change. How true this trite and laconic saying is, especially this year. I can certainly attest to the constant ebb and flow of events that unfurled this year, and it just keeps going.

My life now.

After several years of very deep, profound discontent and malaise, I can honestly say that right now, at this very moment, I am happy.

2010 is one of those years I know that I will remember forever as a year where my life changed drastically for the better. If nothing else, my twenty-fifth year has taught me to always trust my intuition, even when it is telling me to do something that goes against everything I have done in the past. Breaking my old self-forged rules and creating new ones feels so damn good. I feel sure of myself in a way that I never thought possible. It is quite different from the youthful and immature brazenness that I had as a teenager. It's something that I feel at the core of my existence, something that gives me the confidence and faith that I can achieve what I want to with my life, and not in an "Everyone can be an astronaut!" way either.

I am now floating in a sea of blissful contentment. I am happy with me and I wouldn't want it any other way.

The Land Before Time

As a little girl, I used to be obsessed with dinosaurs. I was a strange little person...with strange interests. As a small girl who wore bright neon yellow shirts with pink and white polka dotted short, courtesy of my relatives in Korea, I wasn't so much into Barbies as I was into eating Playdoh and climbing trees and riding my bike up and down hills. My fascination with dinosaurs, which, according to my dad is actually very common among small children, began when I was five. I really think it was the precursor to my obsession with horses that followed soon after. My obsession with the brontosaurus, which looks like an elongated version of a horse if you think about it, eventually led to my die-hard love for horses and anything equestrian-related.

But this post is not about horses. It is about dinosaurs. Rather, the dinosaurs that still exist in the present.

The dinosaurs that I have encountered in 2010 in a professional environment are the following:

• Typewriters. From the early 1980s, possibly 1970s. Used to be gray/white in their prime, now are a dusty grayish yellow. I actually witnessed one of them being repaired one day. Why, WHY, WHY! Just leave it alone to die. Please. Nobody is benefiting by resuscitating a broken typewriter from the land before time.
• CRT monitors. So old, that they have the classic fishbowl curve to them. Concave/convex, the hell if I know. All I know is that these give me a level 10 headache if used for too long and that they are given away for free on Craigslist.
• Computer-Illiterate People who think that not being able to know how to use a computer is OK when their livelihood is actually based on using the computer to complete their responsibilities.

Thankfully, these dinosaurs no longer haunt my present but it makes me wonder, how many more places are there out there that have stegosauruses and ankylosaurs roaming around, plundering the good earth of its natural resources.

There is much more I could say about modern-day dinosaurs, but I will save it for another day.

I haven't blogged in a very long time, and I quickly skimmed over some of my old entries. It just reaffirms the decisions that I have made in my life recently. It is amazing how the person I used to be and am supposed to be can reappear so quickly. Since I graduated college in 2007, I felt like I didn't know myself and I could feel myself turning into someone that I didn't want to be at all. Today, I can safely say that I am the happiest that I have been in the past three years and it feels amazing. I can't say for certain that anything fortuitous has happened recently, or that my life is perfect now because all of the pieces have fallen into place, it's more of the opposite in that I have just started putting the pieces together but not because anything was broken, but because I am assembling my life into the way I see fit.

My mentality has changed and widened so much and it is a change for the better. Life is nothing without passion and drive, and nothing can be achieved without hard work.

All I know is, that from now on, my life will be done my way.

I Refuse

I refuse to let it break me down. What's the point? I refuse to waste emotions on something that is not worth my time. I'm learning...

Salvaging the Wreck

Today was a bit of a struggle for me. I was irritable, moody, and in pain for part of the day at work, and it was a little stressful in the morning. Regardless, I made it through and now I am back at home. The more and more I stay at my job, the more and more I realize that I'm not just satisfied with a bachelor's degree. I need to go back to school. I really do. And part of me has this funny feeling that once I go back, I will stay in academia for a long, long time. I yearn to be challenged again in a way that pushes my brain to its limits. I yearn to be victorious when I work my ass off. I miss the feeling of just "getting it," when "getting it" means grasping a multitude of concepts and applying them to achieve an even higher understanding of something. It's almost like a religion, this education is. For me, academia is very spiritual in that you struggle through something very difficult, such as a text or a concept, and once you are able to grasp it, you reach this nadir where you suddenly see things as they are. I recall as an English major, grasping concepts from obscure deceased philosophers as I pored over the texts and realizing that this was truly a spiritual and knowledge-based awakening in the truest sense. I miss that.

This picture is of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. I thought it was a fitting picture for this post. This is a marvelous place to go if you want to educate yourself (or re-educate yourself) about the solar system, how seasons work, how tides ebb and flow. Although the details are very scientific, I found it to be very poetic in a way. The galaxy as well as the universe is too large for the human mind to fathom. Time is calculated in light-years. We went on a beautiful Sunday morning and I found it to be very peaceful up on top of the hills.

Chronicling My Life

Inspired by a blogger I know, I've realized that I haven't really taken many pictures of the last few years of my life. I've done so much, yet haven't documented much of it and I do want to remember all of the best years of my life. While I realize this period of my life is quite painful at times, I know that ten, twenty years down the line, I'm going to look back and remember this as the best time of my life. It's a gut feeling I have. So I've made it a priority now to document the beautiful, ugly, unique, stark elements of my life that make it truly my own. Instead of using this blog to mull over the unpleasantries of my my life, I am going to try to turn it into something beautiful. A way to remember that even through the darkest rain, there is at least one element that makes my life beautiful.

I've always had a thing for candles. There's something about the incandescent glow, the way I can stare into the tiny, flickering flame forever. There's something eternally beautiful about a flame. It moves as though it is alive, and even when the flame is still, it still breathes a fiery life of its own. Candles have a soothing affect on my nerves and I remember fondly in high school I would light one up and read for hours on my bed.

In a world where everything is in transit, there is a lovely permanence associated with candles.