misc – Page 7 – Honest Lies

Never ever

I finally got around to changing the site layout. I’m not particularly certain about it, but the change feels good.

I have a bunch of other ideas floating around in my mind regarding further changes to the layout, although the chances of any of it coming to fruition is, admittedly, slim. It was a pain just trying to make the little edits I did to this layout – my HTML/CSS knowledge is stuck somewhere around 2006 and my PHP knowledge is non-existent – though having experience in C/C++ means I can just about analyse and edit existing PHP to do what I want. Its a little frustrating trying to translate the images in my mind to the screen. I remember how much I used to enjoy this challenge though. I used to love coding when it came to my web site. When I thought about going on to learn programming as part of my degree I was actually quite excited. I even contemplated going into robotics and mechatronics! Thank goodness I stuck to electrical and electronic engineering. My degree killed any spark of interest in coding I had. I realised just how hard it was, and just how terrible I was at it, and it frustrated me, it still frustrates me. It feels like something an engineer should be able to do. I should be able to handle programming but I’ve never been able to wrap my head around it. I can’t even handle MATLAB, and that’s definitely something pretty much every engineering graduate can do these days.

So staring at those lines of code in my theme, not quite being able to grasp it, just triggers those feelings of inadequacy and frustration. I should learn how to be content with using themes as is, but then it would be pointless having my site self-hosted wouldn’t it? And it wouldn’t…feel right. I want to make my site mine in some way.

Oh and I’ve also just discovered WordPress has a full screen writing view. How great is it? I really like the new color schemes for the dashboard too. Finally WordPress is becoming a bit sleeker and less cluttered. Its a much nicer writing environment than it was.

hen and chick
I passed an hour or so gardening today, of the tending to indoor plants variety. Cutting away the dead leaves from a chrysanthemum, throwing out a dead coriander, re-potting a hen & chick, rinsing out the leftover pots, pruning a few of my other plants of dead leaves. At some point, a few hours on a sunny afternoon tending to plants became an enjoyable past time of mine.

For my 18th birthday, my best friend gave me a hen & chick plant as a present – with the intention that it would eventually brighten up my dorm room when I went to uni. It was a little unexpected, I’d never been a plant person and wasn’t sure how I was going to keep it alive. A year later, my father, probably inspired by my friend and taking my dedication to taking care of that plant as enthusiasm, gave me a schefflera and a mini cactus, in a pot painted with other cacti, when I did go to university. Those three plants sat on my dorm windowsill, and I diligently watered them, and kept a close eye on their condition, scared of killing them off. I did not want to report back to my friend or my father that I’d killed their presents. Slowly, I began to realise my friend had a point – they cheered up my room immensely, added a touch of much needed colour and warmth to the bland colors and tired state of my dorm room. I began to enjoy taking care of them, and when I was in Malaysia I would occasionally ask my dad to report on their conditions – feeling ridiculous about it – and he’d laugh at me, as expected, but reassure me they were fine nonetheless. Now that I’m in my own rental my indoor garden has rapidly expanded.

I tried to grow some herbs – basil, coriander and parsley. I faithfully split them up and re-potted them in fresh soil, but the basil quickly died away, and I’ve just had to throw away the last of the coriander. My parsley clings to life, but just. I cannot cook with it and have definitely been put off herb growing. My three parsley pots are on my kitchen windowsill, alongside a christmas cacti. I had some trouble with my christmas cacti as I was over-watering it. After letting it dry out I’m now watering it sparsely once a week and it seems to be making a slow recovery. I had a chrysanthemum on the kitchen windowsill but it got aphids. I put the mum outside, alongside my then flowering and growing nicely coriander which had also become infected with bugs. The coriander died, and my mum shrivelled up, but seems to be clinging to life still. Now I’ve pruned off the dead bits, I hope that it recovers. In the living room I have two windows. On my one living room window sill I have an army of miniature cacti – the original one, and five others. On my other living room windowsill I have an ivy, alongside my original hen & chick, and an array of chicks from that mother plant that I replanted last year and which have grown up quickly. It looks a little bit ridiculous having that many hen & chicks, but I love how the stems droop down which, alongside the ivy’s crawling branches, have begun to cover the wall below the sill. I would like to get more vines and maybe something flowering to drape down my wall to break up the hen-&-chick-ness of it all though. On my bedroom windowsill the schefflera, now double the size, and two ferns.

Every week I water them, and every day I spritz my ferns. I keep an eye on their condition and act accordingly when problems arise- usually involving a lot of frantic googling. When I was younger, I could hardly keep anything alive and did not much care for plants, but I now enjoy the process of taking care of them, and I love how they cheer up my home. I admit, instead of feeling bewildered and nervous as I once did, I now feel a weird sense of pride and joy when it comes to my ‘garden’.

“Sometimes there’s nothing left to save”

14. Nothing is coming to save you. Let yourself sit with that for a second. It will feel like rock bottom. Stay there for as long as you damn well need to. Lay down at rock bottom and look up at everything that you fell from. When you’re ready to stand, you’ll climb your way out by your own volition, and there will be no other hands to let go of yours, and that’s what’s most important. Nothing is coming to save you. We eventually have to let go of the idea that there is.(source)

→ I read this today and it really resonated with me. It describes quite well my situation these past few years. I did not learn this lesson as a twenty something, I learnt it as a teenager, which was a awkward time to do so. It took me some years to climb my way out of rock bottom, I still feel like I am climbing sometimes, like I’m always going to be climbing, heading towards the light at the end of the tunnel, but never emerging. I feel like I am stronger, having fought so hard, that I have a good amount of independence. But, I have also become very withdrawn too. I am fiercely protective of myself and my feelings, scared to trust other people because I never quite believe that they have good intentions, that their kindness is not some sort of lie. I test people – I am too scared to reach out to them, of rejection, so I wait and hope they will approach me. They rarely do. If they do, I say no to any offers of friendship, hoping they will push the invitation. They never do. I wonder if university would be easier if I had friends. I had a taste of it last year- of being able to work on coursework together, or revising together, and its one thing I miss about being there. I was alone, but not too alone. Here, I am very much alone. It’s third year, everyone is all paired up, and there are so many people, I slip into lectures unnoticed, and slip back out just the same. It’s a quiet existence, and I do not mind that, but sometimes I do want to talk to someone – sometimes I do want someone to ask about my day, or to talk over work with someone. There’s no one there. I never made enough effort, I was always too awkward, I always said the wrong thing. I end up feeling like there’s something wrong with me. I spent so many years trying to become something I was not, so that people would like me, they did not, so I gave up and became myself, and still people do not like me. They do not understand me, nor do I understand them. I realised the other day, that I actually do not really know what it means to have friends, to have a social life. It makes me feel flawed, wrong. I look at other people my age and feel so different from them, like there is some invisible barrier between us I’ll never be able to cross. Like there’s some fundamental knowledge I am missing, like being the only person that does not get the joke.

→ I am feeling very overwhelmed by things at the moment. I have my six modules, none of which I am really getting into at the moment. I go to lectures, I make notes. I’m not really processing the information. I worry about doing so many exams at once. Tonight I realized that I have a coursework for the one module, which involves using a particular software that I cannot use, so I am panicking about that. (Especially since I have no one to ask, as I have no friends.) Meanwhile my group project trudges along and I am so stressed out regarding that. I feel like I am envisioning this project totally different to my group members and its infinitely frustrating. I try to be flexible, to listen, to join in discussions not to impress my ideas on them, but to consider, to process all our ideas and try and bring them together. But I find myself getting confused by what they are saying. I cannot understand their vision, and that’s the true problem. In a fit of desperation I wrote down all my ideas as a rough draft of a project proposal last night and sent it out, and today in the meeting they tore it to shreds. Of course they did it kindly enough, but they started talking about things that were similar, but not the same, to what I was written and going off on tangents and I tried to keep up but I found myself so confused. I need to finish off the proposal, to try and change it to fit their standards, even though I am so uncertain about what they expect, and I really need to get stuck into my research. I’ve sat for hours reading through the internet, research papers, textbooks and each time I find myself feeling overwhelmed and confused as to how to get my ideas because I have many, I know what I want to write about and how, down on paper. Third year is so different from all the years that came before it – we’re expected to remember every little thing from previous years, to be competent, to be independent. I feel like at some point I was left behind, and now its school all over again, staring at the backs of my peers, desperately trying to catch up, coming close, but never close enough. I talked about this last year did I not? How I do not feel like an engineer. And its even worse this year, because I need to have a certain level of knowledge, I need a certain amount of confidence in my abilities, and I do not have it.

→ I have had a miserable week, hell, a miserable two weeks. I’m tired, I am always tired. My mind drifts from random thought to thought, never quite focusing on anything for too long, my nights are filled with strange dreams and I wake, with a fleeting moment of images and dialogue flitting through my mind before its gone, and all I’m left is with a sense of unease. It carries on to the long walk to university, and I find myself thinking things I’d rather not be dwelling on, unable to direct my thoughts away. Walking to university is exhausting, lectures are dull and time drags by so slowly, the material washes over me. I told someone today that I have no idea what modules I am doing, I just go to them. They gave me a very strange look and I understand, it does not make much sense, does it? But it makes sense to me. I am just going through the motions at the moment. I feel disconnected, uneasy, exhausted. It’s terrible, I know. It’s week 5 of university and I am already behind on my personal goals for my work.

→ I started Japanese lessons again last week and thus far I am not enjoying them – I am acutely aware that I am not at the level of the other people in my class and it makes me feel desperately out of place, very uncomfortable. I do not like it. I wish I was better at languages. Really, I love Japanese and I am in love with the idea of being able to speak it, but I wonder if I am really doing the right thing by actually taking these lessons. I do not think I am committed enough, and even when I do study, I am uncertain if I am doing it right. I’m not really certain of how to learn a language? When I do try and learn, I never really feel like it clicks, that I am really learning. It’s just a very different learning experience compared to engineering – the small class size, the interactive manner of teaching, working in groups and one on one, having to go up and write things on the board. It’s nothing that I am used to, and it makes me feel awkward and uncertain, and deeply embarrassed. I don’t feel like I should be there. I don’t feel like I should be learning Japanese- I struggle so much to wrap my mind around this strange, foreign language, to get to grips with writing the symbols and being able to read them, to remember all the new words for items. You’re looking at the world in a whole different way, Roman letters replaced by symbols, sentences reversed and held together by particles, each one with its own list of uses, past and present tenses, counting systems. It’s confusing, and I cannot bring it together in my mind. It’s not a problem to be solved, to be worked through to the final solution – its on ongoing effort, constant memorization, learning how to view the world in a whole other way. I find it really difficult, and I wonder if I am doing the right thing.

→ “I want to stay in a good frame of mind” I wrote, and how ambitious was I.

Bread

This summer I decided that I would learn to make bread. I think I have become enamoured with the idea of being fairly self-sufficient- in the sense of baking my own bread, making my own cereals, whipping up fresh and delicious nutritious meals for myself. I want the health benefits and money saving benefits of it. I want to know that I can take care of myself. Alas, the reality is that I am actually a little hopeless in the kitchen. It’s not something I want to admit, as it clashes so much with my images of what I want to be, but as much as I enjoy pottering around in the kitchen the results don’t always match the pictures, to put it in the kindest way. I have improved over the years. My desire to be a good cook and baker is something I’ve been struggling towards for years and as embarrassing as that is, at least where I am now is much better than when I first started- I can manage a few basic dishes and I am an adequate baker of biscuits and cakes, but I still have many limitations.I think I perhaps became comfortable in those limitations, and it only now I’ve given up dairy that I’ve begun to play around a bit, trying to become even better. (Not being able to rely on cheese kinda forces one into this position…)

It’s really not as easy as it looks, though.

To focus on the bread.

I began yesterday morning with a recipe pulled from the Internet and a lot of optimism. I followed the instructions and formed my dough seemingly as it should be, then set my little ball of dough in a greased bowl, all wrapped up and warmed up by the dishwasher running beneath. Five hours later and my little ball of dough had not risen at all. Worried, I began to frantically google and was forced to accept the truth about my bread- I had killed my yeast. I’d not only put them in too-hot water to begin with, but left them hungry with no sugar to feed on. Reading through forum posts and recipes with their comments I realised that I’d probably not even kneaded it right. Annoyed, fed up, I threw the dough on a greased pan and shoved it in the oven just to see what would happen. The results were a lump of heavy, dense, gooey ‘bread’ that…actually tasted very nice. My optimism was restored- all I needed to do was keep my yeast alive and everything would be OK. With the help of my frantic searches earlier I rewrote the recipe- adding in sugar at the beginning, making careful note of the ideal water temperature , extending times for letting the yeast develop and kneading. Today, I did it all over again. I made the water neither cool nor hot and mixed in a tiny bit of sugar. Then, I added the yeast and let them sit for 5 minutes, watching in fascination as the yeast bloomed before my eyes. They were alive! I added in the olive oil then slowly began to add flour mixed with salt, until the mixture became too stiff to mix and thus I began to knead. I kneaded and kneaded and kneaded- forcing myself to keep going for 10 minutes and only then did I ball the dough up and put it in a greased bowl, covering it this time not only with a damp cloth but a layer of clingfilm. I set it beside the stove as I cooked lunch to keep it warm and in an hour- it had risen! Hopeful now, I formed it into something resembling a loaf and stuck it in the oven. The results were much lighter and just as tasty but alas, it is still a little too dense, and it looks utterly deformed. although the first rise was successful, the second rise in the oven…well it did not seem to rise much in the oven. Neither did I shape it correctly. I still have a long, long way too go with this bread making business. It really seemed so easy, too.

I think its time to phone my grandmother.

laneige
I remember when I first bought my sister a BB cream. I had been a fan of Korean cosmetics for a while then and my sister just did not get it. Then I tried one of my BB creams on her and she seemed to like it. So I offered to buy my sister a Korean BB cream all of her own. She was a difficult customer- she refused to have anything whitening, no matter how much I told her it would not whiten, and my sister is also very pale with extremely dry skin. Eventually I remembered all the good reviews I’d seen for the Skinfood Red Bean BB cream from pale, dry skinned girls and had my “a-ha!” moment. I ordered it and when it came I sat down and applied it for her, laughing helplessly and making a right mess of it because doing other peoples makeup is strange. She loved it though and has worn it nearly every day since. But I will always remember my mother looking on at me and my sister playing around with her new BB cream and remarking that I would not do anything like that for her. I did think about buying my mother a BB cream after that, but she does not like wearing a lot of makeup, heavy foundations especially and a lot of BB creams can be that way so I had to leave it be.

Then HERA released their BB cushion. I was dying to get hold of one for myself and when I realized I was going to Korea that was top of my to buy list. Then I realized it was my mothers birthday coming up, I remembered her disappointment when I bought my sister a BB cream and not her, and I realised how perfect the HERA BB cushion would be for her. It was lightweight, dewy, from a brand whose target audience is women my mother’s age so the packaging and formulation would be suitable, it even came in a very pale shade. It was the perfect BB cream for my mother, even if technically not a BB cream. When I went to Korea I went to the HERA counter and I bought just the one BB cushion, I could only afford one unfortunately, and I bought it for my mother. I sent it back to the UK, nervous as anything. What if she did not like it?! It was an expensive gamble to take. Of course my mother went to Cape Town before she could receive it.

Today I received a phone call from her telling me that she wore it for the first time today. She was gushing about how much she loved it, how it made her skin look very glowy and radiant, how her friend said she looked beautiful. I was elated. It is so wonderful to think that I managed to get her something she loved so much!

And I admit, on a selfish basis I love the fact that I’ve been able to share something I love with my sister and my mother both now, and having them love it too. I’m so used to people giving me weird looks, critiscm or making unnecessary remarks about the things I choose to like, and I am so used to keeping things close to my chest because of that. Even today, I had someone ask me about how I was spending my time and I froze, tried to deflect, and I knew I was rude in that reponse, but I just do not like talking about my hobbies and interests. Nothing makes me quite so uncomfortable as I feel like people will judge me, and find me lacking. Several years in high school and even university taught me that there are certain acceptable things to watch, listen to and read, (etc.) and if you don’t then its best to act like you love those things too, and keep your real interests to yourself. It is nerve wracking to share something you love, when you expect to be met with scorn. The fact that I’ve managed to give my sister and my mother something they cherish as much as I would, and been able to talk to them about Korean cosmetics with them, being able to talk about something I love with the people I love… feels pretty great.

And no, this picture is not the HERA cushion but rather the Laneige BB cushion. As I could only afford the one HERA BB cushion, I had to settle for the Laneige one for myself. At first I loved it- it was lightweight but offered fantastic coverage despite that, and gave my skin a healthy glow without making me look oily. It was strangely cooling when I applied it and did not disappear in this heat even when I was out all day. Alas, it is yellow. Very, very yellow. It goes on a little to dark for me, and generally looks a bit off. And I may be applying it wrong, but it can apply quite patchy. I’m a little disappointed as it has so much potential to be really great. :/

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