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In February I saw Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. I’d seen the movie once years before, but this was my first time watching the musical and I had high expectations. Unfortunately once the show started, it only took about 20 minutes before I realised I wasn’t a fan.

Actually, I enjoyed many elements of the show. I loved how elaborate the production was — the costumes! The staging! The effects! I loved the music! I loved the almost ridiculous drama of the whole show! But there was one problem: I hated the operatic elements. Which is a bit ironic considering that this whole show revolves around opera. But it was true. I disliked the opera-esque singing. I knew and understood its technical difficulty, but every time it began, I cringed inside. I left the musical excited to listen to the soundtrack, but also fully resolved to skip all the opera.

Imagine my surprise, nearly a month later, when I listened to The Barber of Seville and promptly fell in love.

My dad had recommended this opera for years, but I’d never gotten around to it. One day at work, I needed something to tune out coworkers, but also something that wasn’t in English so that I couldn’t get distracted by lyrics. I also needed something lengthy enough that I could play it ad-free on YouTube Music. The Barber of Seville fit all the criteria. And now, a few weeks later, it’s my go-to background music when I need to focus.

Let me qualify my love for this opera a bit. I don’t know what it’s about. I don’t know a single lyric. I don’t know who composed it. I don’t know its history. I really only know that it’s Italian. And I love it. I love the singing. I love the score. I love the musicality of it all. It’s so pleasing and pretty to listen to and makes me feel light and airy and lively. And that it makes me feel this way even when at my office desk is nothing short of incredible.

One day I’d love to see The Barber of Seville in person. Maybe even in Italy. Maybe I’ll bring my parents and we’ll have a fun night out — an early dinner of pizza followed by our favorite opera, and we’d end the night discussing our thoughts on it while we slowly walk home. One day.

A few posts ago, I mentioned setting over 40 goals for 2023. In January, I was pretty meticulous about working towards the ones I’d planned for Q1. Just a few weeks later, however, I had to reevaluate. I was coming home from work every day, feeling stressed out and tired and overwhelmed. And I constantly felt like I wasn’t able to do what I wanted to, even though I had all these goals I supposedly wanted to accomplish. So I took a step back and narrowed things down to just a few items.

1. Health/Fitness
2. Work
3. Climbing
4. Personal project

I feel a lot better about this. I can focus on using my energy on what’s really important to me. And the best part is, I’m still seeing progress on my other lower priority goals, since I still work on them when I feel like it. This model also helps remind me of what I should be spending time on if I have free time. I’m liking this a lot better, and I’m seeing a ton more progress on my main goals as a result. Huge fan.

Now I’m going to post this and go to sleep (since I prioritized health and all).

Funnily enough, I didn’t realise the Willow of this album was Willow Smith until just now as I sat down to write this post. This album is definitely entirely unlike Whip My Hair, a song that I still genuinely love over a decade later.

So. Coping Mechanism. On the first listen, I strongly disliked it. After a few more listens, that faded to just a slight dislike. And now, after having it on repeat during work for the last two days, I can fairly confidently say that I’m neutral about it. I get what the album is going for, and why people might like it, but it wasn’t for me. Part of the issue was that guitars, drums, and that type of scream-singing all feature pretty heavily on this album, and for me, the last album I listened to — Reason in Decline by Archers of Loaf — just did those better. The other problem was that I wasn’t in the right emotional state for this. I’d probably need to be in a more angsty frame of mind to properly enjoy this.

There are 11 songs. I didn’t particularly like or dislike any of them. Here are the ones I appreciated the most.

WHY?
Favorite lyric: ”I just wanna, I just wanna stop asking myself why… I just gotta, I just gotta stop questioning my life”
I loved all the lyrics that are sung in that… falsetto? Head voice? I’m not exactly sure what the term is. I really liked the chorus especially — the lyrics are pretty and the way they’re sung is is pretty.

ur a stranger
Favorite lyric: “the least you could do is find someone else, the least you could do…
This is the song that made me feel something. It evokes exactly the heartbreak and hurt and loss that the lyrics are about. The betrayal feels tangible. The drums are done well, and surprisingly, I quite liked the interlude with the screaming.

So, I love this album. Honestly, from the first song — Human — I was hooked. It’s only been a few days of listening, and I wish I’d heard of them sooner. I don’t know how to explain my feelings about this album in depth. It makes me nostalgic. It makes me want to throw open the windows and have the music playing at maximum volume. It reminds me of Love Drunk by Boys Like Girls. It makes me want to know the words so I can scream along in joy. It tugs at my heart. It makes me want to cry.

There are 10 songs. I like them all. These are my favorites.

Saturation and Light
Favorite lyric: “Beautiful dreamer, pitiful failure”
This song makes me feel like running through the woods. It makes me feel like living fiercely. It makes me believe that anything is possible.

Screaming Undercover
I don’t know a single lyric from this song yet, but I so badly want to be at an Archers of Loaf show, yelling along to this with a full crowd around me. This song makes me feel the way the movie School of Rock felt when I was a kid. In a strange way, it also reminds me of how I felt listening to Untouched by The Veronicas when I was in middle school. What a song, to make me feel this alive.

In the Surface Noise
I just like this song a lot. Somehow, when I listen to it, life feels more possible. It makes me feel like being rebellious and defiant. It makes me feel like standing at a pier in front of the ocean and yelling into the wind. It feels like something is expanding in my chest, fighting to get out. And when the song ends, it feels like it’s over too soon.

War is Wide Open
Favorite lyric: “The days grow cold as you wave goodbye”
This song makes me feel like I’ve lost something too early. It makes me want to move out of my apartment and go back home to be with my parents. It makes me want to never grow up.

So the last few years, I haven’t really set resolutions or goals or anything like that. The only goal I’ve consistently set the last few years has been a reading goal. The rest have been more general themes that I wanted to incorporate into my life. But this year, for some reason, felt different.

Maybe it’s because 2022 was so crazy busy, but I’m only now feeling like I have the time and energy to take a step back and think. I had a bit of an emotional breakdown over the holidays, at the end of which I came to the realisation that among other things, I’ve been feeling a bit sad and bored and generally uninspired. So on a random Tuesday (Jan 3rd, I think?), I sat down and made some goals. 40+ goals in fact.

Is this realistic? Is this too many goals? I don’t know. But even if I don’t achieve all of them, I might as well try. I’ll be better off for it. The more I think about it, the more I’m realising that my recent general dissatisfaction likely is a result of not pushing myself to do things that I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve been living life aggressively the last year, but in big, wide open ways. In grand gestures like trips and one-off milestones, and not so much in the small ways. The things that take time and effort. Like working at a new hobby or getting out and exploring the city I live in.

So I have a lot of goals set up for the new year. They encompass all kinds of things — adult stuff like finance and career, but also hobbies and creativity and such. Maybe I’ll post them here at some point, but right now, I think it’ll be more interesting to talk about things as I do them. And the first thing I’m doing is starting climbing.

This is just as spontaneous and random as the process that led to me setting goals for 2023. On a Monday, I was offered to go indoor bouldering with someone who had a free guest pass. By Wednesday, I had my own membership and a pair of $85 beginner climbing shoes. For someone who overthinks and meticulously researches everything she does (especially when it comes to spending money), this was kind of wild.

But, I love it. Climbing is new in so many ways. It works muscles that I don’t really have yet. It has an element of problem solving (something that’s lacking in running and strength training). And it makes me uncomfortable, in the way that going to the gym used to make me uncomfortable. With the gym, my hurdle was getting over being self-conscious. Once I saw that no one was actually looking at me — everyone was busy with their own workouts — I was fine. Now, with the climbing gym, the fact is, people look at you. That’s just how it works. People take breaks, or wait for other people to finish routes, and during that time, they’re watching you climb. And I need to get over the embarrassment that I feel every time I sense the eyes on me while trying out a route.

I actually first tried climbing in 2018. It was the cool thing to do in San Francisco, so I went. And I hated it. I was physically weaker than I am now, and even more self-conscious. Everyone at the climbing gym seemed to know each other and they were all talking about tech and I just somehow felt out of place.

I’m not sure if I like the climbing gym I just joined more, or if I’ve grown as a person since 2018. Either way, I’m excited to work at something new. I’m excited that I’ve found a new physical activity that I enjoy. I’m excited for this to augment my typical workouts at the regular gym. And I’m excited to be excited about something! That’s a lot of excitement.

Actually, between climbing and the list of goals I’ve compiled, I’m already feeling so much more motivated and inspired about life than I thought I’d be right now. On my last post — the 2022 year in review one — I said I was excited about 2023, but how I felt then pales in comparison to how I feel now. I am. Really. Excited.

This is my third year in a row doing an end of year review. I really wanted to make a nice graphic like I did two years ago, but ended up procrastinating and putting something together in less than 6 hours. It’s not perfect at all — there’s some noticeable pixelation on the hand-drawn stuff. I think I didn’t put a high enough DPI on the digital canvas when I started working on it. That’s okay though. It was cool to see this come together within the last few hours, and the deadline really forced me to set aside perfection so that I could work fast.

The end of the year came so quickly, I haven’t thought at all about new year’s resolutions yet. On last year’s post, I said I thought 2022 was going to be a good one, and I was right. 2022 was a good one. So I’ll write it again and will it into existence: I’m excited for 2023. I think it’s going to be a good one.

So I missed my November monthly post, which means I missed my unofficial goal of writing one post a month for 2022. It was bad planning on my part — I had a busy month and I went on vacation and I procrastinated. But while those are all valid reasons, the biggest reason I missed the post was actually, well… I did NaNoWriMo!

NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month — a challenge where the goal is to write 50k words all within November. I last did it two years ago, in 2020 when I was stuck at home because of the pandemic and had nothing to do. This time, however, was harder. I had normal life stuff to do in addition to writing, and so the month really didn’t go smoothly at all.

I basically didn’t write at all for the first week, and spent the remainder of the month playing catch up. In fact, I wrote over 10k words — 1/5th of the goal — in the last two days of November. I also happened to be abroad at the time, and was writing between midnight and 4am due to jet lag. It was rough to say the least.

It definitely was worth it though. I like that these challenges are exercises in consistency. Sitting down nightly and forcing out words started to become a habit. And even though I had to write more and more towards the end of the month so that I could meet the goal, doing so got easier. At the start, I would struggle to get even a thousand words out, and by the end, I could write around 3k words with relative ease. It was neat to see my brain rewire itself to be able to do that.

To be clear, most of the 50k words I wrote were not the best words. But NaNoWriMo isn’t about perfection for me. It’s about writing and making the time to do something that I normally don’t prioritize. It’s about exercising a part of my brain that I don’t typically get to use. I do these blog posts for the same reason. I don’t write much as part of my day job, so this blog is my way of making sure I’m writing a bit every month, even if it isn’t anything incredible. It’s more important to me that I do something, rather than nothing. Which is why I’m also not too bothered that NaNoWriMo caused me to miss writing my November post. It’s okay that I missed my goal of a post every month. After all, I’ve already written far more this year than in 2021, when I only wrote one quick end of year post. So I’ll disregard where I fell short and choose instead to be proud of myself and celebrate my wins — both my increased blog activity and, of course, NaNoWriMo.

I’ve been watching a lot of farrier asmr lately. I didn’t know about farriers until recently — those who care for and maintain horses’ hooves. This includes things like cleaning, trimming, and shoeing the hooves. Another thing I didn’t know until recently is that hoof maintenance is hard. The videos often come out to 10-15 minutes for just a single hoof. And that’s after being edited down. At perhaps 30 minutes per hoof, it could take as much as 2 hours to care for just 1 horse. Time aside, the work is physically intense. The farrier is often hunched over, crouching with the hoof between their legs. The tools they use require a lot of grip strength. Every hoof needs to be addressed individually, with attention to detail.

I watched one video recently about an Arabian horse that had been neglected. Its hooves were long and curved and looked unnatural, almost like shoes. The farrier had to pull out a chainsaw to help get rid of the old growth. The end result looked so much more comfortable and correct. I can’t imagine how much time it took to do. It was interesting though — the horse had gotten so accustomed to its old, neglected hooves that it looked like it needed some time to get used to walking in its new ones!

I find these videos so weirdly fascinating. I love cutting my nails. The amount of relief I feel after is insane. At any given time, I vastly prefer my nails short and clean. Looking at the horses’ hooves, I can’t help but imagine how uncomfortable they are before having their hooves cared for, and how much better they feel after. Wild horses have their hooves naturally worn down because of the long distances they run. They run across a variety of surfaces, some of which are rough and help trim the hooves. Similarly, at some point in time, humans didn’t cut their finger nails. Instead, our nails naturally got eroded from manual labor and walking around barefoot. It’s always interesting to learn how something much history and change there can be for things as mundane as hooves and nails. More importantly, now that I’ve watched so many of these farrier videos, I’m so glad that human nails are easy to care for, especially compared to horse hooves.

I think everyone feels this way but I’m going to say it anyway: I can’t believe it’s already fall. Summer felt way, way too short, especially since getting covid meant I lost the last few weeks of August. Summer also felt way, way more busy than I had anticipated. Between travel, friends visiting, relatively frequent support rotations, and normal life stuff, it really feels like I blinked and summer just passed by.

It doesn’t really look like things will be slowing down either. I have two more trips tentatively planned, more friends potentially visiting, and a whole slew of unfinished business that I really need to get to. Also, I want to do NaNoWriMo and make a year in review report with artwork (I did both in 2020, but not in 2021). Still, I’m excited to tackle it all! And hopefully become more efficient with my time along the way.

Change of topic but I do what I want: fitness. Health and exercise have been on my mind lately. I was on a bit of a health kick in August pre-covid. Now, about a month later, I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of things. My cardiovascular fitness has definitely decreased. I’ve been slowly building it back up, but it’s definitely been a bummer — I’ve never been much good at cardio and it was really cool to see my previous progress. This setback has been discouraging, but at least I’m still better then I was when I first started! Strength-wise, I think not too much has changed. I’m a little weaker than I used to be, but not too much. Hoping to see more progress here in the coming months.

I’m excited for fall. I want to put more emphasis on just doing the thing instead of waiting or trying to make it perfect. Summer has already been hectic in the best and most unexpected way, and it’ll be fun to see what the next few months have in store for me.

It’s about 2.5 years into the pandemic, and the inevitable finally happened. Covid got me.

The timeline:

1. Day before testing positive — general exhaustion and the slightest tickle in the throat, but I was sleep deprived and dehydrated, so nothing really out of the ordinary for me
2. Night before — an unusually rough headache that I attempted to counter with Tylenol (it didn’t work)
3. Day of — about 16 hours of the worst headache I’ve ever experienced, a ton of nausea, and a bit of vomiting

Severe headache isn’t something I associated with covid, but it was bad enough that I had a feeling something was up. And sure enough, the positive covid test ended up confirming my suspicions. It was lucky that in the days leading up, I didn’t interact with many people, and most of those I did hang out with had already gotten covid.

From there on, it was pretty much the typical story — exhaustion, sore throat, cough, cold, headache, the works. Now it’s been about seven rough days since I first went out of commission and I’m almost back to normal. I’m still a bit under the weather, but it was kind of weirdly refreshing to have nothing to do but focus on recovering. I slept constantly and did whatever I had the energy for in the rest of the time, which wasn’t much. I did finish a book and catch up on a TV show I’d been meaning to get to though.

I still have a few more days of isolation left, but as soon as I can, I’m interested to see how my physical fitness has been affected by this. Before getting covid, I was at the strongest I’ve ever been. Now I feel a lot more weak and I wonder how long it’ll take to bounce back.

The good thing is now that I’ve had covid, I feel comfortable with being a bit more adventurous. I’m hoping for some excitement in the coming months. Maybe could plan some travel now that I hopefully have some immunity? We’ll see.