I only have one full month left of college! Whaat? (A month + some weeks, but that’s still only one full month.) I just need to take it day by day and focus on making the most of each one… *I say as I continue to fall into Youtube holes.* I’ve been trying to stay out of my apartment for as long as I can each day, because once I get back to my apartment, it’s game over–don’t expect any productivity from me! As a homebody, staying out of the apartment for extended amounts of time is a real challenge. I could honestly stay at home, not talk to anyone for days, and be totally content with life. I told a friend this the other day and she said she couldn’t do that but she wished she could. I think maybe it only works for me because I still have my blog as an outlet. Thank you guys for being here for me!
Pie & Plate Cafe
I had Louise and Steph over at my apartment for an evening in of cooking, chatting, and eating. It was their first time in the suburbs of Philly, as they’re Penn students and so are in the city of Philly all the time, and they were struck by Haverford’s “small town life.” I had never thought about my town like that before as it had always been my normal, but when they commented on it, I realised what a contrast it was from the city. In the evenings, it was quiet. When the occasional car passed by, you could hear the friction of tires on asphalt. String lights shaped as snowflakes decorated the street lamps (they’re there all year round, not just the winter). I began to see my town as my own lil Stars Hollow. But then I visited the town of Ambler, and boy is that town a Stars Hollow!
Pizza, margs, mangoes // weekly update
This past week was my week back from spring break. With all the prep I had done over spring break in anticipation for the week back from it (and in anticipation for the rest of the semester as well), I thought that the week back would be a breeze, but it turned out to be exhausting because I hadn’t properly recovered from my hustle. On Monday and Tuesday I was dozing off in a few classes, but thankfully we had a snow day on Wednesday, which I spent inside my apartment and took three naps. It was just what I needed!
Spring break recap + vlog // weekly update
People talk about self-care a lot, but I think that most people don’t think about it the right way. They use it as an excuse to “treat yo self,” when in reality, self-care is “often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do,” and it’s explained so well in this article by Brianna Wiest on Thought Catalog. “True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.”
This past week I was on spring break, and the previous week I shared my optimistic plan for spring break on the blog. The most important but most daunting item on the to-do list was making headway with my job search. At the beginning of spring break, I had a feeling that I’d get through most of the other items on my to-do list as a way to productively procrastinate my job search, and I was right! I completed all my academic assignments for the week back from break, completed the first iteration of design work I was hired for by the campus theatre department, and prepped four weeks worth of content for Her Campus Bryn Mawr. No wonder I felt like I couldn’t catch a breath! But it’s been a good kind of busy–a kind of busy that relieves stress. Now I’m getting back from spring break to finish off the last half of the semester, and I think I’m in a good place.
Highlights of 2017
I recently read an article in Mind This Magazine by Ilya Yefremov that referenced Nobel-laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s TED Talk, in which he talked about how the mind is divided into the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self,” where the experiencing self “perceives the world in the immediacy of the moment” and the remembering self “reflects on the moments that have passed and constructs a narrative which serves as the basis for our memories.” Yefremov adopts this framework and asks, “Is it not almost better to focus on the more lasting world – the world of the remembering self – a world which we can affect?”
I found her advocation for the remembering self striking, because the common argument in the modern day seems to be for the experiencing self. We always hear “be more present.” And for good reason. We spend a lot of time behind our screens, and even when we’re out experiencing things, we feel this urge to document everything, whether for social media or otherwise, so we pull out a screen and snap some shots.
But perhaps the experiencing self and the remembering self don’t need to be at odds with each other. Yes, be present. But that doesn’t mean we need to devalue the remembering self in order to do so. In fact, the remembering self is what this virtual space is all about. It’s why I started blogging. And so, even though it’s March, I am writing this for my remembering self. When I look back on it, perhaps at the end of 2018, it won’t matter that I posted in March rather than January, but it will matter that I posted at all.
Spring break plans + weekly update
I’m finally off for spring break! There are so many things I want to do with this week off from school, one of which is to give this space an update. Figuring out what that update is is also part of the update. I was thinking about starting with revamping these weekly updates, perhaps reorganising or refocusing them, because I feel like they’ve sort of just become disorganised brain dumps. But some of you have also told me how you enjoy these weekly updates, bless you, so maybe they’re not as confusing as I think they are? Perhaps it’s just my life that’s confusing and so has been reflected as such in these weekly blog posts.