21:47

currently listening to: see the sound - etro anime

hello! today tired me out but for the first time in forever i feel like i can breathe again. i submitted a project today and now we're in the starting stages of the next one, and i don't have much homework in the rest of my classes which is a huge relief. i read a few pages from a book today and watched a playthrough of a game to celebrate this calm before the next storm.

recently one of my classmates made a discord server for our cohort so that we could chat outside of teams, and only me, my best friend, and three other students joined. i feel a little bit bad for him, but these classmates are people i feel like i can talk to comfortably about things outside of class, so i don't think it's really bad honestly. it's definitely a better attempt than what happened the last time another cohort member tried to make a server, and now that server is pretty much dead save for the few instances she posts in it. we've been talking a lot in this new server, which is nice.

something awkward happened just now... a few years ago my dad gave me some sd cards for whenever i needed to store something on them, and today i popped one of them into my computer because i needed to move something between computers, but then i found out the sd card i put in held a lot of old pictures and videos of that woman as well as the baby. it was a weird feeling, seeing all these photos you know you were never meant to see, and seeing photos of someone who's long gone. i'm not sure what to do with the sd card. my cousin said if she was in my place, that she would delete the photos, but i feel like i just shouldn't touch them at all. i just put the sd card back in my collection, but that was definitely not something i expected to see ever. feeling a little lost and vaguely uncomfortable now. head hurts.

21:12

last listened to: swansong - electrocutica (HUGE shout out to amrita by -45)

hellooo... long day today. did my 9 to 5 and i honestly was not as drained as i expected to be. i started feeling it after 3 pm and hmmm idk if the 9 to 5 was a good idea. but i did work until 30 minutes before my shift ended so i dunno. wish shorter work days with good pay was possible for all of us. i managed to get 2 projects done for my workplace and currently i have 3 i'm assigned to. they're not anything crazy honestly, which is nice!

so much work to do this weekend. i don't think i've ever been this swamped in the first half.. even the first quarter of the semester. so tiring! waiting for spring break. wish i could write more but i feel blocked right now so i'll stop.

19:22

last listened to: basement music - moodorama

oogh. hello! very busy week. i have so much to do this semester and it's only the 2nd week. it's times like this where i wish i was a stem major or something instead. but i know i wouldn't be as content if i was in anything outside of graphic design. two days ago i looked up how hard people on reddit (sorry) thought graphic design as a major was, and someone said something really insightful that really resonated with me and how i feel about graphic design. i'll link the comment here if anyone is curious to read it, but essentially they talked about how they're a graphic designer that also loves to illustrate, but that they don't illustrate for others because illustrating is very personal to them, while graphic design feels less personal to them. i remember when i took liberal arts classes to get the credit for my major, i cried in the university bathroom at least once a week or i just broke down crying after the class because i was just really miserable with drawing, but i never knew how to describe why i felt miserable. only recently i came to the conclusion that i feel more removed from graphic design, while drawing and illustrating in general is just too personal for me to share with people who i don't know offline. but it was nice to see someone who had similar feelings about graphic design like i do.

internship has been lovely so far, the people i work with are lovely to talk to and they've all shown me so much kindness so far. tomorrow is my first actual 9 to 5... think i might go a little crazy. but if it's in a place i love then i don't think it will be as draining as it could be. i hope i'm leaving a good impression on everyone there.

i miss so intensely that it can be crushing sometimes. sometimes i find myself missing my cousins and then for a bit i feel really empty. my classmate friend wasn't in class today because she got exposed to someone with covid yesterday and i missed her. i'm not really close with anyone else in the class because i feel alienated on a deep level that's hard not to feel. it's nice to talk to them, but i just don't really click with them in the way that i do with the people i've stayed friends with. i wonder if that's too selfish of me? it's not like i want to be friends with people that are exact carbon copies of me because that would be boring, but i dunno. you just feel when you can really get along with people.

think i'll end this entry now. tiring day, tiring next week. won't be doing homework tonight because i just need a break, even if it may cost me.

19:26

last listened to: pokémon heartgold & soulsilver soundtrack

hello hello! it's only the first week of classes and i feel so busy. busy busy! i'm envious of my roommate d who's a stem major, she always has it easy during the first half of the semester and is almost always relaxing while i'm going in and out of the dorm because my semester is so demanding from day 1. ack! i feel like i'm going to be horribly busy from start to finish this semester and i'll just keep getting busier with every coming semester. eek! just hope my internship is fairly easy. i'm nervous i'll do poorly and mess up badly somehow, but i'll see how it goes. everyone there seems really nice so far, so i'm hoping things will turn out okay.

not really much to write about. i'm trying hard to not be working from day until night and trying to do something not related to uni for at least half an hour if i have the time (reading a non-class related book, listening to music i want to listen to, working on my ocs, etc.). sometimes even just taking a detour and walking around campus is enough. still not sure if i truly want to be a graphic designer. if i end up being one i wouldn't ever want to be a freelancer, that's for sure! i'd rather work in a studio or something. but even then i feel like i wouldn't really be happy with my career. things to think about lightly.

17:42

last listened to: black lilliana - u2 akiyama

hello! it feels like it's been months since my last entry, but it's only been a few days. time flies when you're busy!

i met my supervisor in person today and it went really well! i met some of my soon-to-be coworkers and they were all really nice. i hope they liked me. my supervisor gave me a rundown of some of the projects i'd be working on and i'm actually really excited to work on them! they seem really fun and fulfilling, so i think i'll really enjoy working here this semester. i'll see how it goes before i can fully say that i'd like to keep working here until i graduate.

i actually planned on taking the bus to my workplace, but the bus that runs during the time i planned to go out was really small and couldn't fit a lot of people, so in the end i had to walk anyway. i've actually walked close to that distance once before, but it was to the gas station that's right next to work. it's a 25-30 minute walk which honestly i can deal with. i didn't bring my music player, but as i was walking i kept thinking about how walking to and from work would be a perfect way to get more exercise during the semester and put my music player to use. i've already sent my proposed hours to my supervisor and i was able to make it work with my class schedule. i'm planning on working the standard 9-5 on fridays since i need time on monday and wednesday to work on classwork. i still have to come in on monday and wednesday, but i'm only working 4 hours monday and 3 hours wednesday since i have class on wednesday. they only require a maximum of 20 hours and a minimum of 10 hours, which works out for me cause i'm doing 15... heh. it's $11/hr but since no one in my immediate family is super strapped for money, i think i can save most of the money for myself and save some on the side if there's a family emergency or something. i'll still ask my mom what she thinks i should do with the money whenever she calls me.

ummm yeah! new year, new beginnings. not looking forward to most of my classes, very much looking forward to working this semester.

19:27

last listened to: hysteresis by electrocutica (and also a shoutout to art millenium by elabjer)

hello, the freezing cold has just arrived for us! hands and face and feet were really chilly as we walked outside to get lunch and dinner. d didn't join us for dinner because it was too cold for her, haha.

you might notice i've been using 'we' to describe myself, and that's because the system is more active today. our systemisms are a little strange; the activity tends to fluctuate depending on what's going on in my (the host's) life. usually it's very quiet when things are relatively calm, sometimes headmates will peek out to see what's going on but they usually won't fully join me in the front. i was thinking too hard about something in the shower and then i felt a pang in the side of my head and felt someone go "you're thinking too hard", so i decided not to think too hard after that. feeling a bit dazed and out of it because of that.

i have been thinking about how i react to people comforting me. when people try too hard to act parent-like to me when they're giving advice or something, i start to get really angry and have to fight hard not to lash out. it just makes me feel deeply sick to the point i feel like i could throw up and i'm genuinely not very sure why. i feel like if i brought it up to anyone they would ask me what my problem is. i wonder too! it's the same thing when people tell me they love me. i find it really hard to reciprocate even though i'm so grateful and full of love, but a lot of the time being told i'm loved makes me feel kind of... upset? angry? it's a deeply uncomfortable feeling. it's to the point where the idea of someone telling me that they love me in a romantic way would disturb and anger me deeply. isn't it funny. how i want to be loved by people but get angry when i'm told that i'm loved. things to talk to my future hypothetical therapist about.

lately i've been playing pokemon quetzal, a rom hack of pokemon emerald that adds a lot of quality of life features to the base game. usually i can't play pokemon games for long because i get bored of it after a while and drop them, but i've been coming back to quetzal often because it has a lot of features that make the gameplay experience much better. it gives you the option to access pokemon from your pc through the menu, and it allows you to obtain every single pokemon up to generation... 9? 10? i dunno, there's a lot of pokemon now but i don't really keep up with the official games anymore. quetzal also gives you the option to see the pokemon hiding in the wild grass in the overworld itself, which is good for this game because of the sheer amount of pokemon, and it also added the dexnav feature from i believe omega ruby and alpha sapphire. very cool! all those features included in one game is what keeps me playing the game, i suppose.

i didn't use 'we' for those last two paragraphs since those are my own experiences rather than the collective system's. but anyway, classes start tomorrow for us. the university announced that all classes tomorrow would be held online since they're worried that it won't be safe to drive on the roads. here's to a smooth-sailing first week of classes.

08:33

last listened to: blue green iixii by avtechno!

hello hello! i'm heading back to my dorm today. classes are starting in a few days and i feel... somewhat prepared. i got everything settled with my supervisor the morning after my last entry and i'll be meeting them in a few days to take a look at the place i'll be working at. i know that this semester will be even busier than last, so i have to do my best not to go crazy. i made a resolution to read from a book at least once a week and well... it hasn't been going too well even though i still have a lot of time, haha. maybe i'll read some in the car ride? i've started reading the hundred years' war on palestine close to the beginning of the year, and so far it's been a very enlightening read. i have a lotttttt more books that i'd like to read at some point (diana wynne jones, ursula k. le guin, etc.) but i'll get to them when i get to them.

i suddenly woke up at 3 am today and i heard my dog walking around outside my door. he'd keep walking around and then laying aganst my door, so eventually i felt bad and opened my door so he could come in. i think he sensed that i was leaving and so he wanted to be closer to me before i left. he laid down next to my bed while i tried to go back to sleep. he shuffled around the room a few times but i remember him coming back to lay down next to my bed before i finally was able to sleep again.

i also finished this off-brand sakura potted plant last night too. aunt t was doing it while she was recovering, but apparently it broke when she was taking it back to ông bà ngoại's place, so she asked me to finish it. it was a bit of a frustrating build, but it wasn't as frustrating as the balloon dog. i'd say it took around 4-5 hours.

21:18

last listened to: one sided love by d-crew with melissa petty

tiring few days. the entire day from when we drove to the airport up to when i came back i just felt this deep nausea. don't even know why i felt sick to my stomach, at the time i thought it was because the idea of leaving a place where i've been so happy and loved made me upset. i've been building lego sets my mom was gifted to give myself something better to do since. finished two; first one was a bouquet that took me 2-3 hours and the second one was a knockoff balloon dog that took me approximately 13-14 hours between yesterday and today. balloon dog was tough physically and mentally to put together because the pieces were grooved and needed to be slotted in with each other, and the pieces hurt my fingers a lot. tips of my fingers are still really sore, ouch! some pictures from the past few days:

yesterday i went to dinner at a hotpot place with my mom's family. being thrust into a group of people where i didn't really feel loved and respected and repeatedly thinking about how well my cousins' family treated me, i didn't really have a good time. i was really short with everyone and mostly ignored everyone too. hotpot didn't even taste that good either, the only thing that i liked were the fish balls. almost cried a few times because i felt so isolated compared to when i was with my cousins. i kind of feel ashamed that i acted the way i did, but at the time i didn't even feel like i could act like i was having fun. ông bà ngoại hugged me a lot out of the blue too and told me they missed me. should i feel guilty that i barely thought of them while i was away? i bought some souvenirs for friends from a cat cafe i went to with my cousins, and when i showed them to my mom she said i should have gotten something for aunt t. i wasn't thinking about her.

i'm waiting for the person who's supervising my internship to respond to me about a form i have to send in to the graphic design coordinator by the 10th, but i might have to contact their cell tomorrow if they don't respond before noon. just deeply tired in a lot of ways. hope this year enriches me somehow.

22:51

last listened to: spreading silence by etro anime

have to leave tomorrow. i realized i've been calling this place home because it's where i feel the happiest. as i grow closer to my cousins, i start to see their flaws more clearly, but i think their flaws are more tolerable than the ones of my own side of the family, and i'm sure my cousins feel similarly. we wrapped up our last dnd session earlier, and we felt sad because we knew we wouldn't be able to do our next session during the school semester. i will... cope with this by placing my own ocs in a dnd setting. i will definitely get to see my cousins again at the end of this year as always, i hope.

i'm nervous about this semester. i have some time-sensitive things to take care of before the beginning of the semester and i'm admittedly a bit stressed about them. most of them are related to the internship, though. i'm nervous about how busy i'll be with the internship alongside my own classes. but i'll make it out alive at least. best friend told me that i was one of the top three people she wanted to see at uni when we get back from break.

been watching the x-files with my cousins lightly. it's surprisingly a very moving show, i can understand why it's such a staple of 90s american pop culture because in our opinions, it genuinely lives up to its reputation (until after the 5th season or so, as i've heard). i think i'll try to clear at least one season during the semester. i've also set a goal to get through at least two or three books this year if i have the time. i really need to read more about the roots of current events... and just read more in general.

08:48

currently listening to: total science volume 2

good morning! let's hope today is a better day.

last night i had a hard time falling asleep because i kept thinking hard about if i should try looking for an online community. i ended up talking to my close friend about it and she basically told me, "if you think it will benefit you, you should". we were also talking about how after we found more friends offline that we started talking to people online less and started to use social media more passively. at some point during the conversation i suddenly went, oh wait, i can also find these communities offline too! so for this new year i'll try to find an online community, and then when i'm able to drive (if this will ever happen) i'll try to be on the lookout for an offline community i could join. it's kind of hard, because i admitted this to my friend, but i've found that many of the online people i encounter are just people i'm happy to follow, but not people i'd personally want to get to know better. i'll try to focus on this more when i actually have the time to do so, maybe over break or so.

i'm still really tired from my messed up sleep schedule, so i'm going to try and nap a little before the day properly starts.

11:33

last listened to: music for space tourism vol. 1 by visit venus

hello and happy first day of the new year! there were some things i forgot to write about in my last diary entry because i was tired, haha.

the other day, my cousins and i went to a local game merchandise store that also sold anime-related stuff, and i found a puzzle of the millenium puzzle from yugioh! i got so excited that i bought it immediately and tried solving it as soon as we got back. although it's a really cool puzzle to see the final result of, i have to admit that it was a bit flimsy and that there were some pieces that would keep falling out because they weren't secure enough. i'm also not a big fan of puzzles where part of the method of solving it is just trying every single piece until one fits. in my opinion it's not mentally stimulating at all and just plain boring. i ended up having to pull up a walkthrough cause i didn't feel like solving it by myself was worth the time and effort. the final puzzle was really cool though! it was really surreal holding the completed millenium puzzle in my hands. i kind of felt like a protagonist in that moment, haha. here's some photos i took of it, i only had one photo of the puzzle before i put it together because i was really fixated on solving the puzzle:

very cool!

i've been mostly apathetic about holidays and new years celebrations. i'm not necessarily ecstatic about the coming of the new year, but i am willing to see what it brings me. i don't think it's depression or anything, because i don't feel muted in general. maybe the repetition of these holidays is boring to me, i dunno!

oh yeah, my cousins and i did another dnd session but with a different story. i ended up making an elf monk and surprisingly she was so strong! my oldest cousin's character went down (but didn't die) while mine just kept beating up all the npcs HAHA. she's such a fun character! i've been passively thinking about a universe where all my dnd characters are in a party together. i even made a bard character because my oldest cousin made a passing joke about one of my existing ocs being one, haha. i'm kind of invested in dnd! it's a lot of work though.

the other day i talked to my oldest cousin about how hard it is for me to stay close with online friends for long, and she told me that she's had problems with that before too. we came to the conclusion that when it comes to the internet, we set stricter boundaries on ourselves because we're less tolerant of people than her younger brother (my older cousin). in my case, it's hard for me to deal with people that seem to breathe the internet. i've also had trouble trying to integrate myself into existing friend groups because they're so close with each other that it's hard to nudge myself into the group. i dunno. i have an easier time keeping in touch with irls even if they have existing friend groups, because i can see them in real life and so i guess for me, it's easier to keep a connection because i can talk to them both offline and online. is that too stubborn of me? i dunno. i'm just really passive on social media nowadays.

i'm not sure what i'll be doing today with my cousins! i think we'll watch monster or some other movie or show later. i'm sad that i only have a few more days left to stay with them, but i'm glad that i was able to be here for christmas and new years. here's to a few more wonderful days before i go back.