Things I want to do (in no particular order)

- Finish my needlepoint ("Music by Candlelight")
- Learn how to knit
- Learn Cantonese
- Re-age my wardrobe
- Get weights or resistance bands to work out at home
- Read some classics
- Know more about my religion
- Get back into martial arts
- Revive piano and flute
- Own a nice keyboard (to help with the former)
- Be good at cooking
- Personalize my apartment
- Take more pictures
- Compose music
- Be in tune with my surroundings
- Show people that they are special, unique, and loved
- Be an individual

Opportunity

One of my life goals is to become ambidextrous. I am right-handed, and doing practically anything with my left hand feels awkward and unwieldy. But, I know that I wasn't always able to do everything that I can now do with my right hand. Things like writing, brushing my teeth, pouring milk, etc all came with many years of practice. The body's ability to learn through repetition is absolutely amazing.

There are many things that I can do with my left hand equally or nearly equally as well as I can with my right, including typing on a keyboard, washing mirrors, and playing piano. And for sure, I know that my right hand can't finger notes on a violin worth anything, while my left hand has all the facility in the world. So, I know it's possible for my left hand to learn to do tasks just as complex as the tasks that my right hand does every day. All it needs is the opportunity to try!

As I was thinking about that, I realized that there are so many things that I wish that I were good at that I've just accepted as impossible for me to do. Among those, I wish I were a warmer person. I wish I could get up in the morning. I wish I ate more healthily. I wish I could run for more than a mile. I wish I were good at remembering people's faces. I wish I kept up with what is going on in the world. I wish I were more deeply in touch with my religion. Those are just a few, but the list really goes on and on.

All of those are things that I'd recently given up on ever being able to do. Why? Because I thought, this is just the way I am and maybe I'm just not good at doing those things. One person is born with a certain set of talents, and another is born with another set of talents.

But the more I come to think about it, I think that while sometimes that line of thinking helps keep one's perspective in not comparing oneself to others, I think that I also sometimes use it as a cop-out. I figure, I'll let someone else be good at caring. I'll let someone else be good at understanding the world, helping people to be happy, or whatever else it is that I think I can't do. And so, I don't try as hard. In fact, I don't even give myself the opportunity to try.

Now I realize, I don't have to think that way at all. All I have to do in order to become better at the things that have not naturally come to me is to go to them. And I don't have to be amazing at them. I don't have to set records with just how up I am with religion, fitness, health, whatever. You don't take one leap from the beginning to the end of the race. Just a little at a time goes a long way. And a lot of that starts with creating opportunities for yourself. Placing yourself in situations where you can exercise or practice those abilities.

If I want to be a warmer person, I can place myself around people whom I admire for that. If I want to get up in the morning, I can give myself enough time to sleep at night. If I want to eat more healthily, I can be more prudent at the grocery store and only have things in my cabinet or fridge that I think will be good for my body. If I want to run for more than a mile, I can get myself out there and start with a few steps. It goes on and on.

And with running as an example, I find that it gets easier as you go. The hardest part is starting, and getting yourself over the hurdle of thinking that whatever it is that you're doing is too hard for you to do. Get past that, and just let your amazing, natural ability to learn do all the work for you. Put yourself in those situations, those opportunities, and then let the momentum do it for you.

It's like a swing; the biggest effort is to kick off and get it going, and then it only takes a little bit of follow-through to keep it going.

But you'll never get swinging if you never go find the swing in the first place.

I'm about to brush my teeth. Maybe I'll try that left-handed.

Brainstorming New Year's resolutions

I think that I'll keep my New Year's resolutions list fairly short this year. Sometimes the list gets so long that it ends up looking really intimidating, and I give up within the first week. I figure that fewer things on the list means fewer things to concentrate on and therefore a higher success rate at keeping them.

Here goes a rough draft (I may or may not revise it, depending on how well it works out):

• Manage time effectively: I haven't been getting nearly as much sleep as I need in order to be fully functional and at my best. Particularly, my short-term memory doesn't seem to be working very well these days. I want to distribute my 24 daily hours more efficiently between academic time, work time, relax time, and sleep time. "Relax time" is actually a new requirement I'm making for myself this year separate from "sleep time", which will hopefully be around 8-9 hours a night. Yes, I do need that much sleep!!
  
• Get in shape: Exercising helps so many aspects of life. When I exercise, my mental facility, emotional balance, and physical well-being all improve. I feel a lot more alive and happy, and it feels good to move about and know you're doing something to keep your body from deteriorating. I'm not sure yet exactly what I want to do for exercise, but I'm going to shoot for a modest goal of 30 min, 3 days a week.
  
• Be aware of self: Something I've been dying to do for a long time is to start doing daily journal reflections. I want to see what I felt good about each day, what I didn't feel so good about, ways in which I'd like to improve, interesting or amusing things that happened, and any insights I've had about life. I want to be able to see the direction I'm heading in as a person, and I want to realize what I'm proud of and what I'm not proud of in myself. I want to believe in myself and feel good about myself, and develop a stronger self-image. I want to feel like I'm doing more than just letting life drift along.
  
• Enjoy people: There's so much more to college life than the academics. I want to be more sociable and spend more time with people that I like. It's amazing how relaxing and refreshing it can be to spend even a small amount of time catching up with friends and doing something fun once in a while. And it also makes you that much better at doing things you need to do, in my opinion.
  
• Organize finances: I've never done much budgeting with my money. I just earn as much as I can, try not to spend too much, and hope it comes out nicely. I want to do better about figuring out how much I want to save, and I want to be more careful about how and where I spend my money. My financial goal for life is to never be in debt when possible, but still live comfortably and have the resources to pursue my interests.

Hmm, one New Year's resolution that I ought to make is to actually keep my New Year's resolutions.

I'm thinking of maybe making signs for each of these and putting them up on the wall of my room. I've never tried anything like that before, and it might help me remember what I'm working on. I think it would be fun to make them kind of artsy too, so that they're nice to look at. A future Sunday project, perhaps...

Pressing the snooze button of life

Today's topic in church was procrastination. At first I thought, "Yeah, yeah... everybody does it and we all know we shouldn't." I almost zoned out. But then I started listening and thinking about it, and really so many of the worries and sources of stress in my life (and probably anyone else's) stem directly from procrastination.

What are the things I usually beat myself up about? Homework deadlines. Being late for things. Not being prepared for an audition or performance. Not being far enough along on a project. Not sending important emails or making important phone calls. Not keeping in touch with people. Not telling people how much I care about them. If I weren't such a procrastinator, all of those problems would vanish! It's not like I'm not capable of getting all those things done in the time that I have. I just get into this mode where I lack the willpower to make myself do anything.

I have a terrible time getting up in the morning. I'm the type of person who can hit snooze for over an hour and not really notice that time is going by. Funny thing is, if I wouldn't procrastinate going to bed, I'd get enough sleep and wouldn't procrastinate getting up in the morning. But that of course would require that I not procrastinate my work and have to stay up late. Which would mean that I would have to get stuff done earlier in the day, which would probably be easier if I got up on time. Which means that I would need to go to sleep earlier... etc. Endless downward spiral...

Sometimes I wish I could stop and hit the reset button and start with a clean slate. Nothing would be behind schedule, and then I could try to stay on schedule. But how do you get back to that point once you've started down the spiral? The lesson on procrastination is always to just not even do it. But where's the lesson that tells us what to do if we've already started doing it?

How do I stop when everything's already backed up like crazy? If I don't procrastinate one thing, I've gotta procrastinate something else to keep up. It's like getting caught in a pool of quicksand.

Post-graduation stupor

Home is wonderful. I'm sitting on my couch with my laptop and enjoying all the delicious smells that are coming from the kitchen right now... it's back to homemade dinners! Spending seven weeks at camp really helps one appreciate the comfort and luxury of one's own house. Er, one's parents' house?

Still, it makes me wonder how much or little I actually need to be happy. I probably could have gone on living like I had been at camp for a while longer. Life is simpler when you have less stuff to keep track of, fewer ways of being contacted, and only so many options of things you could be doing at any given moment.

Though... home really is quite wonderful.

Technically, I should have been attending graduation this morning (and playing a violin solo there too), but I slept in instead. No, don't worry, it was entirely intentional -- I'm on the other side of the country! Given a choice between attending graduation for two days and spending the next few weeks at home, I chose the latter. Can you blame me? I just hope they mail my diploma to the right place.

It's kind of weird to be done with undergraduate school. At this point, I can go off and do whatever I want. Granted, I've chosen to stay at the same school for my master's degree, but now everything is just on a whatever-I-feel-like basis. Strange, strange indeed.

Not much is going to change since I'm staying in school, but I still want something to feel different. Something to signify that I've moved on to a new stage of life. Something more than smaller classes, relaxed coursework, living wherever I want, and being able to check things out of the library for over 3 months. I want to feel more independent. More... grown-up, somehow. Being an adult definitely doesn't equate to feeling like one. I still think of myself as a kid in many ways.

For the coming year, I want to try some new things. I want to pick up some new hobbies, meet new people, go to new places, develop new routines. I want to know what's going on around me. I want to act, dress, and speak more like an adult. I want to feel more put together and be confident in who I am.

I've spent too much of my recent life feeling apologetic for the way I am. It's time to change.

My biggest fear is failing to be a worthwhile person

A friend asked me the other day what my biggest fear is, and I didn't know. But looking back on my thought patterns for the last two years of my life, I think I've figured it out (see title of this post).

Yes... I have failing-to-be-a-worthwhile-person-phobia. I think a lot of people have it to varying degrees. Most of them probably don't even know they have it.

I think it could also be called fear of being a boring person. Not only a boring person to other people, but a boring person to oneself. Currently, I am intensely suffering the latter.

I feel like my brain activity is slowly diminishing. There was a time when I thought about everything, all the time. Not in the sense of worrying or stressing about various things. Just pure curiosity about the world. About people, about society, religion, philosophy, the sciences, the arts... you name it. I was always asking questions--how does that work? why does this happen? how did people ever figure this out? what if society suddenly became like this? why couldn't the world have been this way?

Nowadays? If I get a spare moment to think, I'm perfectly happy to waste it staring at the wall. Stark contrast.

One of my theories is that a lot of my questioning used to be sparked by books that I read. Back when I actually had and/or made time to read, my mind was always alive with new ideas and perspectives about life and mankind. I also think that what I read made up a large part of the subjects I liked to talk about. Lately, I feel like I don't talk about much except for the same old things all the time. I really am turning into a boring person...

I went to the library the other day and just reveled in all of the knowledge contained there. I checked out some books that I want to read, but I haven't had time yet to crack open even one cover. Even so, having a stack of books on my chair has put me somewhat at ease. Maybe it's not too late yet to rediscover my love of learning.

Two completely different voices

So has anyone else noticed a huge discrepancy between the way they write and the way they speak? I know a good number of people who write exactly as if they were talking, and some who write slightly more formally. I, on the other hand, am pretty sure that I would never speak the way I write at all. (Okay, well, maybe a little bit.) I think some difference is natural, but in my case it seems like I don't even know how to speak English when I'm having a conversation with someone in person. On the other hand, I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp of the language on paper (computer screen, whatever). My punctuation isn't always great, but I know some good vocabulary and I can express myself decently. But talking? Forget it. I'm about as inarticulate as they come.

Maybe that's partly why I'm writing in this thing. Sometimes I feel like I don't even understand my own thoughts because they just come out so jumbled. It takes writing the words down to hear what I'm trying to think! It's even more of a nightmare to try to talk to someone else while I'm trying to decide what I'm thinking and what I'm trying to say.

I'm a letter writer. At least, I used to be. Nowadays email has pretty much taken over and turned me into an email writer, but I still like to write old-fashioned letters on lined paper ever now and then.

Wait, let me clarify... I'm not a letter/email writer in the sense that I'm good at keeping in touch with people. Man, I am not good at that at all. It's slightly pathetic. What I mean is that when I really want to say something to somebody and have them understand it, I write them a letter. Or an email, depending. I can't get anything out right in person. And, when I want to say something to myself and have myself understand it, I write it down. I can't just think through it.

I'm working on the talking thing, I really am. But I have a terrible time forming coherent sentences, and then I sort of mumble everything. I talk in the back of my throat. It's awful. I can't imagine how people can stand talking to me. My mom's always getting after me to enunciate more.

I wonder a lot what people think when they meet me. In writing I sound perfectly capable of thinking. In person, not so much. I've been thinking that I should take some public speaking classes to fix how I talk, and also work on being more confident about talking. I guess it doesn't help that I don't like my voice. But speaking more clearly and bringing my voice forward would probably fix most of what I don't like about it. Hmm, worth a shot...

I think I sound kind of matter-of-fact when I write. I suppose that might not be too far off from my personality, though.