Curious Notions

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”-Sylvia Plath

Lily, Jamie, and I try to see each other at least once a month for dinner. A while back, I bought a Groupon for a restaurant none of us have been to, which allowed me to join them for dinner without shelling out additional bucks! I say I have about a month more before I’m comfortable financially again without dipping into savings. What’s a little significant for us and this blog is that I think Lily gets to finally make a debut on one of my blogs. I often food blog our dinners but Lily is always the missing face. For the first time in 4 years, she’s allowed me to take ONE picture of her. I thought I’d get more mileage from this photo if I double blog it. Here and whenever I get to writing up the restaurant review.

Lily, Jamie, Me

Jamie is never camera shy with me.

I try to start every day with 3 stream of consciousness pages written in my journal as per The Artist Way (affiliate link). I’m on my 5th week and I did very poorly this week. I kept going to bed too late and last night I stayed up to canoodle with the boyfriend and watch Jersey Shore. Alan’s in the middle of a move into a house with four new roommates so I’ve been giving him some space to take care of stuff and get to know his roomies. I’ve missed him! So spending time with him trumped going to bed early which trumped writing my pages.

This week’s writing prompt was “punishment.” Kind of timely because before we drew it, I had just have a conversation with coworkers about the kinds of punishments we endured as children from our parents. My parents spanked my younger brother and me. Younger brother got spanked pretty often whereas I rarely got the wooden spoon from mom. The only memorable spanking I had was on my open palms with a metal ruler and it was 20 licks. I missed every single word on my first spelling test. I almost spelled “delayed” right but I spelled it like so, “de-layed.” The next year, I won the spelling bee.

Aside from spankings, Asian parents can be pretty brutally creative with their punishments. Alan said his parents made him stand with his arms raised. This reminded me that on occasion I had to do the same thing! Another popular one is kneeling. Not lazy kneeling where you have your legs tucked comfortably underneath your butt, but as if you’re praying on a kneeler in a Catholic church. They’ve also had us stand with our noses pressed against the wall.

Next time I’m in Houston I want to borrow (or steal?) my mom’s sewing machine and jump into sewing and thrifting. This blog is my inspiration. Momma has stopped sewing anyway unless I bring her home clothes to alter or straps to reattach.

I’m always engaged in some kind of self improvement project or dabbling in a new skill. On my horizon right now is to educate myself and gain experience in investing. I’ve already saved up my year’s worth of expenses in an emergency fund, I have no consumer debt. So my new goal is to pay off my $24,000 student loan in 5 years and instead of padding up my emergency fund, I will start an investing fund. I realize this has been one of Neville’s advice to me for a while but I was overwhelmed with my lack of knowledge and kept putting it off. I will dedicate 5 hours a week to read and learn. I got my 5 hours out of the way this week when I read and finished Rich Dad’s Cash Flow Quadrant (affiliate link).

See, my phone is pretty simple. I get a lot of compliments on it because it’s skinny and tiny and sleek looking. I picked it out as my first birthday gift from Alan because it was purple and because it was simple. I just wanted a telephone number pad. Dinky camera is nice. It also has a radio and mp3 player I never use. It is not a smart phone and it does not do geotagging. So when Facebook released Places where you can geotag your locations, I almost didn’t bother disabling it. I disabled it on the off chance that a friend would tag my location and an apartment burglar would know I’m not home. Unlikely, but that’s why I took the time to disable Places.

Last week, it actually ended up being unexpected blessing. I lost a coin flip with a group mostly guy friends and I found myself in a strip club. Not really a big deal but unbeknownst to me, a friend attempted to tag me. My facebook friends and work friends would have had a chance to see on their newsfeed that on a work night at 2am, I was at strip club. Not very kosher, yes? I recommend disabling.