I’m a huge procrastinator. No matter how much work is on my plate, I’ll always deal with it the minute before deadline. Last summer, I did the whole summer holiday’s assignment in the last 5 days.
To procrastinate, you have to know your limits. There must be a point where you just know that you have to get started—or you won’t finish even if you pull an all-nighter. Like 5 days before school starts or every Sunday night.
Every Saturday night I tell myself to work, but I always end up working my butt off on Sunday night. Every Psychology project, I do it the night before it…
Being the huge procrastinator that I am, I don’t recommend stalling. Change is hard, for me and everyone else. Whenever things become habitual, they stick like super glue—and tearing them off would hurt a lot.
Why not start little, one day at a time? We have to fight fire with fire, strengthening a new, better habit while damning procrastination.
Change can be hard, but it’s possible. Even the huge procrastinator I am, I didn’t wait until Sunday to clear my plate of work. Sometimes it’s not just work, work, work if you manage your time rightly. I’m done being lazy.
I wish I could say it to you, but we are on a strictly no communication basis.
The only thing we share now is our existence and hatred towards each other.
It’s sad… my greatest love turned into my strongest hate.
happy birthday, you’re an adult now.
I hope you move far far away and buy a house of your own thousands of miles away from here,
but I hope you’ll be happy.
I still wear the necklace you got me for my birthday. People tell me I should get rid of it, and I probably should, but I can’t because its the last piece of you I have left, and, as much as I want to, I can’t bring myself to let you go.
I want you gone but I want you happy,
I want you to feel awful for what you did, but I want you to come back to me.
I want to hate you, but I want you to love me…
because I love you still.
So happy birthday, thank you for the memories, the laughs, the smiles, and thank you for the love we shared.
I hope one day it will overcome the hatred we share.
Back then, war was a card game, race issues were about who ran the fastest, and protection meant wearing knee pads,
and a timeout was the worst punishment we knew.
Back then, our parents were our heroes, the safest place was in mom’s arms, and the highest place on earth was dad’s shoulders.
Back then, we shared toys, not boys. Back then we said “thank you” more than “I’m sorry,” “yes” more than “no,” and “I love you” instead of “I hate you.”
Back then, guys played sports, not girls,
back then, we looked forward to every day instead of dreading it,
back then, we were scared of the dark, not the world,
Last year, something horribly tragic occurred on a large road about a quarter mile away from my house. In the early morning, around 4am a car crashed into a tree carrying four teens, three of them dying on impact. It was horrific, I didn’t learn about it until later that day. However, the night of the accident I had a horribly lucid dream in which I woke up in my bed and it was pitch black. The only reason I could see anything was because of the pale blue tint to the pitch black night, my windows were open and I could see out into my street. All of the sudden a shuddering scream arose in the distance, so prominently loud, accompanied by millions of other screams; the world was crying around me, falling into indescribable chaos. I was confused to begin with, until I could feel the feel screams shift as if they were a wave, the amplitude approaching my street, and it was in that moment that I completely froze. It felt as if every soul, petrified in doom, burst out in a thunderous cacophony of deafening terror, a vocal representation of the gothic interpretation of hell. I was unable to move. It felt as if the screams were searching, surveying the world for a single living thing, for me, and any movement I made would lead them straight to me. So I waited, I sat there and waited as the apex of noise approached, peaked, and as it passed I simply awoke. I checked the time to see if I could return to sleep and I saw that it was only 4:30 in the morning so I could get back to sleep, it took a while but I returned to sleep peacefully, although still bothered by the dream I just had. I woke up that morning with the dream lingering in the back of my mind but without much worry attached to it, so I went about my day as if nothing had happened, because to me, nothing had. We went out to lunch, on a different road from the wreck, and when we returned we came down that road where my father told me about the conversation he had with one of our neighbors earlier about the wreck and how it had happened there early in the morning yesterday. And as the words left his mouth the feeling of dread became so strong that I couldn’t speak. I just sat there dumbfounded as we approached the site of the crash where a candlelight vigil was being prepared.
Getting out of a mundane lifestyle is refreshing. Especially if you are a boarding student. It is really painful to spend your whole week in a tiny room. So school provides weekend activities for student’s entertainment every week. The activity could vary, from hiking to a mall trip.
Personally my favorite activity is a mall trip where I can have fun eating and shopping. However, every single time I go shopping I tend to overspend. I always think that it is ok to waste my money on stuff that would be a waste for me eventually. Because of my habit, I have bunch of waste that I don’t even look at. I always regret when I look at stuff that I bought a while ago under my bed covered in dust.
From this point I will not over spend on stuff that is
unnecessary.
Recently I had a dream no different from most, I was at a grocery store with an old friend of mine. It used lightbulbs that just made the store appear sickly (obviously not LED), the flickery hospital lighting that evokes the smell of latex gloves from nowhere. Anyways, apart from the lights that bothered me a lot, the shelves were only partially stocked, but they were all stocked wrong and without any tags. This made it especially difficult to find the ramen that my friend and I had gone in there looking for. After wandering through rows of of tall, black, and poorly built shelves with pretty much anything thrown on them, we finally came upon the milk section. Now this was a bit of a problem because we had gone in there looking for ramen, and I was now browsing cartons of milk that looked as though they smelled like goat urine. After my brain had somehow remembered that the dream had begun with the task of looking for ramen, we began to move away from the milk and towards the rest of the store.
Now, personally I do not know why I so vividly remember this dream. I can only attribute it to me having had a boring day, and the dream being the only interesting thing that had happened to me since the morning.
When we finally came across the ramen, it was behind some boxes of Chinese snacks that I can only describe as milky bread sticks. The ramen was also sub-par because it was the off-brand Korean kind that was made to burn your eyebrows off that once made me sneeze chili powder. I was upset but still willing to take it, because after an extended period of time in a poorly managed grocery store that I have dreamt about many times before, I was getting fairly irritable. However, this is when my hulking, pigmy of a friend decided to grab it and run off.
I was furious, I had just wasted so much time staring at milk, wandering through aisles of nothing, and putting up with stress-inducing incandescent lighting, all to have my crappy ramen stolen away from me. Normally, this is where I would wake up, barge downstairs, and make myself food, but my dream-self was feeling particularly determined tonight. I continued searching for ramen, I spent hours searching the shelves of the store, running into half-asleep janitors, and many soulless patrons, destined with the same fate as I was.
After my search of the store came up empty, I somehow stormed myself to the loading dock in the back of the store that for some reason was also the location of the dumpster. It was beside this dumpster that I had found almost exactly what I was looking for, garbage bags full of contaminated ramen noodles. I do not know why I thought to look in the trash bags, I do not know how I knew they were contaminated, and I also do not know why I eventually took two bags home, but I do know that the story did not end well for me.
I don’t remember exactly how the dream ended, I eventually woke up, and I remember being fairly put off by the end, but as is common with dreams, I quickly forgot it. I didn’t find much meaning behind this dream. This is by no means the first dream I have had about grocery shopping, those have always been quite common for me. I didn’t think about the dream again until I came home that day from school, and saw that among some of the things my mother had bought from the grocery store was a few packets of ramen. Needless to say, I did not eat the ramen. That was the night I discovered that perhaps store bought ramen wasn’t for me, that was also the night that I discovered I was clairvoyant. So if there’s anything you should take away from this experience, and I seriously doubt there is, I’d say it’s probably to use LED bulbs, because they won’t cause irrational and dangerous decision making like incandescent bulbs do.
Being someone who considers themselves a second language speaker, I have always found that my native-language of Mandarin (although no longer as good as my English), holds a few words or phrases that I realized couldn’t translate into English. I say this not because there weren’t words for them in the English dictionary, because there were plenty, but because of the meaning that is lost in translating them into another language.
Mandarin has roots that trace back 3,000 years to the origin of the Chinese language, more recently becoming the common language of China over 700 years ago. Because of this, over the centuries, Chinese characters have gone from simply representing ideas or objects, to imbedding themselves into the deeper meaning of these ideas, becoming symbolic of what they represented.
I really don’t know if that would make sense to anyone who doesn’t have a non-English language where they can find an example of this. But essentially, what I’m trying to say, is as time as progressed, these words have solidified themselves as the sole-identifier for these ideas, meaning that the word in itself evokes instant imagery and clarity on whatever is being conveyed, it is the ultimate adjective, noun, verb, it requires no follow up, the word is a definition in itself just from the emotions it lets off.
Below I have jotted down a few that I’ve heard over the past several weeks that I don’t believe could ever be translated into another language and hold the same significance that it does in Mandarin.
香- xiang, like very good taste, smell, just feels right on the palate
哎哟，你做的饭好香啊
aīyō，nǐzuò dèfànhǎoxiāng a!
Oh my, this food that you made is so savory!
(Personally when I use this word, it evokes an image of that scene from Ratatouille when Remi takes a bite of the cheese and strawberry together and colors begin to swirl together on screen as he’s just in ecstasy. Just to give an example of what I mean by evocative)
情 qing, like very caring of, adoring, affection, lovey-dovey
转盼多情
Zhuǎn pàn duōqíng
a loving (or soulful) glance
辛苦- xin ku, working very hard, deserving of praise, worked to exhaustion, withstanding bitter hardships
路上辛苦了。
Lùshang xīnkǔ le.
You must have had a tiring journey.
脑海- nao hai, mind, same symbolic connotation as a heart that just doesn’t exist in English
你存在我深深的脑海里。
nǐ cúnzaì wǒ shēnshēn dè nǎohǎi lí
You exist, deep in my mind
存- cun, to exist, to protect it, cherish, withstand the test of time
Everyone on my mom’s side suffers from depression. Some members on my dad’s side are alcoholics and suicidal.
Addiction is 50% genetic and 50% due to poor coping skills.
Depression is 40% genetic and 60% environmental.
Due to this, I am 90% screwed.
Mental health is something that has affected my life for years and will continue to.
When I was thirteen I was diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and OCD.
By fourteen I was engulfed in an eating disorder that controlled and altered my life. My eating disorder was a blend of all evils, a coping skill for all my problems.
I hated my body, felt out of control in many aspects of my life, experienced great anxiety around food, and believed people would love me if I was skinny.
Starving myself fixed my problems, or at least I thought it did. I lost weight rapidly. I felt in control when I refused to eat. I got hooked in my ways.
But like for all things, the high only lasted so long… Even after losing sixty pounds, being underweight, and having every rib and bone in my spine visible, I still looked in the mirror and thought I was fat. My anxiety began to get worse, the panic attacks were hourly occurrences, and my heart began to fail due to the lack of calories and nutrients. I felt out of control once again, so I restricted even more.
It was a vicious cycle, and it continued… leaving me falling deeper into darkness, insanity, and sadness.
By the summer of that same school year, I was in the hospital. My struggles with mental health were close to taking my life.
Years have gone by now, and much has changed.
I no longer cope with anxiety and depression by restricting my food intake, I no longer weigh 80 pounds. I’m back in school, back in sports, and am much more emotionally stable.
But some things haven’t.
I still have anxiety attacks weekly, I still hate my body and worry about weight, and I am still extremely insecure and it affects how I act (making me seem full of myself when in reality I just need someone to reassure me that I’m not absolute shit). And lastly, I still feel out of control around food. I am unable to stop myself around certain types of food and it scares me. I feel like my previous ability to say no to food has disappeared, and it scares me. I feel like I have gone from starving my self to binging. It scares me a lot.
I need to find balance and balance is hard to find.
Due to statistics and my past, mental health is something I am going to have to deal with for the entirety of my life.
I don’t like this, but I can’t change this. So every day I strive to find healthy ways to cope with the way my brain thinks, the emotions I feel, and my general outlook on life because I believe, with effort and dedication, everyone has the opportunity to be happy, no matter how hard it may be.
“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
From the smell of fresh baked goods always circulating the house to the comfort of a warm bed, the idea of home sparks warmth and happiness, and I have been so lucky to consider my home in that way.
The white door that creeks and the roof that leaks is where I find home currently, but I have a vision of where I want to be or see myself once I have finished growing up.
Being a mix of all cultures, the Philippines in itself represents me. Living in a higaonon hut on one of the several islands, I would devour salty chicken adobo and lumpia.
Settling into my home, I would write in my journal about the culture that I experienced that day while looking out from my hut into the orange sunset reflecting off the ocean.
With beams of warm colors bouncing off the water, I would feel my late grandmother and her mother, wrapping their arms around me with their soft, delicate arms. Eventually, I will feel a sense of comfort and understanding of my surrounding culture.
Living the simple life and knowing my roots, I would sense closure and be able to flee to my new home in San Fransisco, California.
Even though I was not born there, my roots are in California and more specifically, San Francisco. Like my little Filipino grandmother, I would come from the Philippines and go to the Golden City.
My fate would bring me to the perfect two bedrooms and bathroom apartment on the seventh floor having an auburn red door. Decorated with poems written by my father, my apartment would have the smell of essential oils embedded into the walls, specifically lavender representing my mother’s spirituality.
This would be my sanctuary where tears would be shed, laughs would explode, and love would be felt.
The Mission district, where my brother was born, would give light to the art forward theme that I created in all the rooms but made sure that every area had its own distinctive flair.
Wanting to explore more about my culture and ancestors, I would travel to the plains of Africa. Settling down in Nairobi, Kenya, where the lifestyle is filled with the history of the Bantu people and the Swahili language, my home would be in a Kikuyu house with no rooms.
Compared to my other homes, I would be connected with the earth where elephants and antelopes have carried their children on their migratory voyage.
This home would give me insight to my African heritage before Europeans came into their territory, before slavery, and before segregation. Instead of learning about the hardships of my culture, I will learn about the rich tradition that the country brings.
I have always been a homebody. I find extreme comfort with the idea of my home and enjoy its atmosphere. I am excited to see where my future home may be.
OVS Journalism Blog 
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