Hello mom and Lola and James and future me! (Only writing this because I know you are the only ones who read this blog.)
The last time I wrote anything about my daily journals' anniversary was on December 14, 2015. I bring this up again because this year, I celebrated the ten-year anniversary of my daily journals. That means that if you ask me what I did on any given day in the past ten years, I have it written down somewhere. I like to think that's a big deal and something to be proud of. My life has been a wild ride so far with lots of unanticipated twists and turns, all of which exist not only in my memory but also in the form of ink on paper. (And also in this blog–which celebrated its five year anniversary this year but I never pointed it out–but that's beside the point.) For a while I wondered what I would be doing on this day of particular significance. So for posterity, here is a record of what I did.
At work, I have three lovely coworkers who are also in their early 20s, two of whom also studied anthropology, oddly enough. Their names are Isabelle, Natalia, and Annika, and our conversations and antics are always the highlight of my work week. We have a group chat on Skype, where we'll write to each other even though we're all literally next to each other in the office, and laugh out loud when somebody says something funny. (Our poor male coworker Jeremy is always so confused.) On Monday the 10th we decided to have a Secret Santa, which would be held on Friday the 14th. There had been an ongoing debate between doing a Yankee Swap/White Elephant or a Secret Santa, and I was an adamant advocate for Secret Santa because I am all about personalized gifts and completely against useless shit that only clutters my space. So I was elated when in the end, we decided to do a Secret Santa. The names were drawn that morning, and I ended up getting Isabelle. It was funny, because before the names were drawn I joked, "Isabelle, watch me get you and give you a ukulele serenade."
While I did end up bringing my ukulele to work on the 14th and doing a little serenade (more on that in a bit), I also gave her something else.
I really love doing homemade and artsy gifts, and I knew that I wanted to do a rendition of a picture Isabelle, Annika, and I got taken on the roof when it snowed one day. As for what I would do it on, I tried to look for cardstock or heavy paper so I could make it into a greeting card type thing. When I couldn't find anything after spending a suspiciously long time in the supply closet rummaging around, I settled on a folder.
To make it Christmassy and to make a cheeky reference to Isabelle's favorite Christmas song "The Holly and the Ivy," I added holly and ivy on the corners of the folder and colored them. I wasn't sure how the watercolor and ink I intended to use to complete the drawing would appear, but it ended up working out extremely well. Here is a picture!
It makes me smile every time I look at it and think back to that depressingly early November snow. I am completely pleased with how well it turned out and pat myself on the back for deciding to include sharpie ink to fill in the really black parts rather than forcing my 0.3 mm gel pen to do things it cannot do. When I finished it I almost didn't want to give it away, but I did, and was very happy to see that Isabelle loved it. I told her now she could use it as a folder, but she said, "I kinda just want to frame it" and let it stand on her desk.
As for the ukulele serenade? Well, the day before, Isabelle, Natalia, and I were looking at the collection of origami T-rexes Isabelle had folded and that were sitting on her desk. I'm not sure how it happened, but we started talking about Christmas songs and dinosaur versions. I jokingly said, "Away from the meteor" instead of "Away in a manger," and we laughed, and I returned to my desk. Isabelle then proceeded to write an entire verse onto the Skype chat:
That floored me. She typed it line by line onto our Skype chat and the last line was so unexpected yet so fitting that I could not control my laughter.
(I promise, we're actually productive employees. Stop looking so concerned.)
At the end of our Secret Santa gift giving, I sang the entire Gene and Steggy song with my ukulele. It is so hard to keep a straight face but that's how humor is most effectively delivered, so I tried my darndest best. I lost it at the last line, though.
Anyway, I found a YouTube video tutorial for an origami stegosaurus, so I added it to Isabelle's little Nativity scene complete with other dinosaurs and "meteors" (and Christmas trees!).
To be honest, nothing. I had completed everything that needed to be done and followed up with all the people who needed following up. I also try to avoid sending people emails on Fridays because I don't want my emails to get buried under other emails when people go back to work on Monday, so there was that too. Instead I ended up doing a lot of reading about the Guatemala genocide trials, the Dominic Ongwen trial, and the return of the Balangiga bells to the Philippines.
Ever since I decided to go to Rwanda I've been very interested in how the justice system (especially on an international level) works with communities and societies to help them heal after devastating conflict. I find that the more I read, the more I want to enter that arena and work in that field of international law, even if it's incredibly depressing, difficult, and at times dangerous work. I like to take opportunities to read about what's going on just so I can imagine the kind of contributions I could one day make as well as the kind of stories I want to hear.
I was particularly drawn to a newsletter sent by the Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP), an organization I visited in Gulu, Uganda as part of my study abroad semester. They wrote about how they've been organizing screenings and focus groups about the ICC trial for the people in the affected communities in an attempt to make the people feel more involved with the proceedings, so the trial wasn't just something inaccessible and hard to understand happening in some faraway land. Another article talked about how the defense in the Dominic Ongwen trial was using possession by spirits as part of its argument. They claimed that Dominic Ongwen was possessed by spirits while in the Lord's Resistance Army with Joseph Kony, so he cannot be held accountable for his actions. The JRP noted the importance of the community's knowledge and comments in evaluation of this argument. Since the trial is still ongoing we have yet to see if the court rules that there is the existence of a spiritual world. Meanwhile, the anthropologist-aspiring lawyer in me is *screaming* because I am all about this kind of thing.
Even if I didn't do much work, I'd like to say it was a personally productive day. I hope to have more to write on this subject soonish.
Of course, I also wanted to do something special for myself to celebrate this personal accomplishment of ten years' worth of journal entries. I had been wondering what to do when one day, while watching a series on Hulu, I saw a trailer for a movie called Mortal Engines. It sounded familiar, and then I remembered that it was the name of a book I read around ten years ago. Specifically, when I first started keeping a journal. I distinctly remembered writing comments about it in the very first entries. The trailer ended up being for a movie based on the book itself, and the opening night happened to be December 14th.
I thought that was serendipitous, so I decided to go watch it that evening. But first, I went and treated myself to dinner at a place called Bareburger a couple blocks away from the movie theater.
Mortal Engines is a steampunk, sci-fi young adult movie, so not normally a genre I would pay $16.40 to watch in a movie theater for, but I honestly ended up really enjoying it. Since I read the book so long ago I didn't remember that much of it at all; nevertheless, I thought the book's world was beautifully imagined in the movie and given the advances of CGI technology that have been made, I could see why they didn't make the movie soon after the book came out :รพ
For now, I can't wait to return to my first journal eventually and read what I said about the book, and say hello to my 13-year-old self.
What is going on? Has something completely unprecedented occurred?
Well, kind of. I've decided to leave New York earlier than anticipated. Unfortunately, that also means leaving my job earlier than anticipated.
I've been alluding to my misery in this city a lot in my blog entries, so I decided to actually do something about it. It's really ironic that I explicitly said I dreamed of living in NYC or in a similar city in that last entry about my journals, but I think I intended the dream to take place someday in the still far future when I'm looking to settle down somewhere with a (well-paying) job I'll be staying at for a while.
The thing is, I've been staying in an apartment with no gas and consequentially no working stove and no heat ever since I got here. I thought it would be resolved with some phone calls and scheduling, but I was wrong. But I wouldn't be so upset about that part if I weren't paying almost a thousand dollars a month for this place. Long story short, the management sucks, and after hearing stories from roommates and other people who live the not-high-life in this area, that isn't uncommon at all. Everyone wants a piece of New York, so real estate companies capitalize on this and get away with a lot of fraud and practices that suck the money out of tenants. I knew I wanted to move out at the end of the lease, but trying to find a room to move into in this city is already an expensive, time-consuming mess. A mess I really wasn't feeling like involving myself in. I tried to find a new place to live at first, but then asked myself: is it worth all the effort and stress? Do I want to drop between $1600-1900 at once to move into a new place? Do I want to keep spending around half of my pay check on rent and utilities every month just so I can sustain myself here? The answer in my mind to each of those questions was a resounding no.
I admit that electing to work in a tiny nonprofit in one of the most expensive cities in the country (maybe world) while coming from a low-income family was not one of my greatest decisions. I'm kind of kicking myself for it because after my experiences in 2017, I told myself that I was tired of the NGO world and I really needed to do something else after I graduated, yet there I was. The job just seemed really cool and I couldn't resist the prospect of international work travel. Don't get me wrong, I do love the job. If I didn't love it so much, I would have been out of here after a month. So rather than resign, I put in a request to become a full time remote worker, which was only semi-accepted. Thus set into place my first serious work issue.
To cut a long story short, I will still work remotely for my job after I leave New York in February, but only until May 1st. I will return to Oregon, a place I never thought I would be so eager to return to, and live with my parents while helping them out with household finances and things. I know for certain I will feel more fulfilled having part of my paycheck go to help my family out instead of to greedy NYC landlords and overpriced rent.
As unexpected as this is, I do know I made the right decision. After I wrote the draft email requesting to work remotely, I felt such a huge load lift off my chest. Even if outwardly I said I was fine and okay living here, deep down inside I was hating it and knew I had to do something about it. As I have already made sure not to do in other occasions throughout my life, I wasn't going to force myself to do something that didn't feel right. So I decided to put my needs first, as I always have, and take the leap.
What comes after I leave my first full-time job is unknown, and that's okay. As long as I'm saving up to be able to travel (still on my mind after all these years, though now there's also a boy who accompanies the thought), helping my family out, and preparing to go to grad school, I'll be content.
To end my account of this plot twist and of this entry overall, I will take a piece of revelatory self introspection the college sophomore me wrote when she experienced a very similar dilemma. Although I wrote it as it related to my academic pursuits, I find that it applies very well to my current situation in this city, and this personality trait has definitely informed my decision to leave. In the end, I've kept a pretty good sense of self, and for that I am proud. I've rambled enough, so here is the little nugget of wisdom:
I realized that if my heart wasn’t fully into something, if I didn’t feel a certain intense passion towards it, then it wasn’t worth my time and attention at all. I can’t feel lukewarm about something, because that’s just a waste of my time. If I wasn’t absolutely in love with the idea of doing something and then the act of going off and realizing it, then why should I even bother?
The last time I wrote anything about my daily journals' anniversary was on December 14, 2015. I bring this up again because this year, I celebrated the ten-year anniversary of my daily journals. That means that if you ask me what I did on any given day in the past ten years, I have it written down somewhere. I like to think that's a big deal and something to be proud of. My life has been a wild ride so far with lots of unanticipated twists and turns, all of which exist not only in my memory but also in the form of ink on paper. (And also in this blog–which celebrated its five year anniversary this year but I never pointed it out–but that's beside the point.) For a while I wondered what I would be doing on this day of particular significance. So for posterity, here is a record of what I did.
WORK SHENANIGANS
At work, I have three lovely coworkers who are also in their early 20s, two of whom also studied anthropology, oddly enough. Their names are Isabelle, Natalia, and Annika, and our conversations and antics are always the highlight of my work week. We have a group chat on Skype, where we'll write to each other even though we're all literally next to each other in the office, and laugh out loud when somebody says something funny. (Our poor male coworker Jeremy is always so confused.) On Monday the 10th we decided to have a Secret Santa, which would be held on Friday the 14th. There had been an ongoing debate between doing a Yankee Swap/White Elephant or a Secret Santa, and I was an adamant advocate for Secret Santa because I am all about personalized gifts and completely against useless shit that only clutters my space. So I was elated when in the end, we decided to do a Secret Santa. The names were drawn that morning, and I ended up getting Isabelle. It was funny, because before the names were drawn I joked, "Isabelle, watch me get you and give you a ukulele serenade."
While I did end up bringing my ukulele to work on the 14th and doing a little serenade (more on that in a bit), I also gave her something else.
I really love doing homemade and artsy gifts, and I knew that I wanted to do a rendition of a picture Isabelle, Annika, and I got taken on the roof when it snowed one day. As for what I would do it on, I tried to look for cardstock or heavy paper so I could make it into a greeting card type thing. When I couldn't find anything after spending a suspiciously long time in the supply closet rummaging around, I settled on a folder.
To make it Christmassy and to make a cheeky reference to Isabelle's favorite Christmas song "The Holly and the Ivy," I added holly and ivy on the corners of the folder and colored them. I wasn't sure how the watercolor and ink I intended to use to complete the drawing would appear, but it ended up working out extremely well. Here is a picture!
 |
| Me - Isabelle - Annika #anthrosforjustice |
As for the ukulele serenade? Well, the day before, Isabelle, Natalia, and I were looking at the collection of origami T-rexes Isabelle had folded and that were sitting on her desk. I'm not sure how it happened, but we started talking about Christmas songs and dinosaur versions. I jokingly said, "Away from the meteor" instead of "Away in a manger," and we laughed, and I returned to my desk. Isabelle then proceeded to write an entire verse onto the Skype chat:
Away from the meteor
The dinos did run
Except for poor Steggy
Who said, "Where's everyone?"
The smoke in the heavens
Obscured the night sky
While poor little Steggy
He lay down to die
I was almost floored. (I was actually floored from the last verse, which comes later.) I needed this song to keep going. I said something like, "Omg, at the very end of the song, one of those dinosaur scientists should be digging up Steggy's fossil. What do you call them again? Not archaeologists, but..." "Paleontologists!" Isabelle said. Isabelle took charge of writing this initial last verse, while I worked on a transitory verse. Put together, this is what happened:
The earth kept on turning
For millions of years
The dinos were silent
They cried no more tears
Instead up in heaven
They found a new home
While humans took over
The land they once roamed
On one dusty Christmas
A bone digger came
A paleontologist,
Gene was her name
She dug through the sand
Until Steggy she spied
And stayed by his fossil
Till morning was nigh
That was going to be the end. But then Isabelle made somebody cry while singing it for someone later that night, despite the fact that there is nothing new in the song and everyone knows the dinosaurs are extinct, so she wrote a final last verse and showed it to me on the 14th:
That night in the desert
Strange winds did arise
Gene tossed in her sleep
And then opened her eyes
Assembling before her
The old bones took form
Till once more stood Steggy
Like Jesus, reborn
(I promise, we're actually productive employees. Stop looking so concerned.)
At the end of our Secret Santa gift giving, I sang the entire Gene and Steggy song with my ukulele. It is so hard to keep a straight face but that's how humor is most effectively delivered, so I tried my darndest best. I lost it at the last line, though.
Anyway, I found a YouTube video tutorial for an origami stegosaurus, so I added it to Isabelle's little Nativity scene complete with other dinosaurs and "meteors" (and Christmas trees!).
WHAT ELSE DID I DO AT WORK?
To be honest, nothing. I had completed everything that needed to be done and followed up with all the people who needed following up. I also try to avoid sending people emails on Fridays because I don't want my emails to get buried under other emails when people go back to work on Monday, so there was that too. Instead I ended up doing a lot of reading about the Guatemala genocide trials, the Dominic Ongwen trial, and the return of the Balangiga bells to the Philippines.
Ever since I decided to go to Rwanda I've been very interested in how the justice system (especially on an international level) works with communities and societies to help them heal after devastating conflict. I find that the more I read, the more I want to enter that arena and work in that field of international law, even if it's incredibly depressing, difficult, and at times dangerous work. I like to take opportunities to read about what's going on just so I can imagine the kind of contributions I could one day make as well as the kind of stories I want to hear.
I was particularly drawn to a newsletter sent by the Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP), an organization I visited in Gulu, Uganda as part of my study abroad semester. They wrote about how they've been organizing screenings and focus groups about the ICC trial for the people in the affected communities in an attempt to make the people feel more involved with the proceedings, so the trial wasn't just something inaccessible and hard to understand happening in some faraway land. Another article talked about how the defense in the Dominic Ongwen trial was using possession by spirits as part of its argument. They claimed that Dominic Ongwen was possessed by spirits while in the Lord's Resistance Army with Joseph Kony, so he cannot be held accountable for his actions. The JRP noted the importance of the community's knowledge and comments in evaluation of this argument. Since the trial is still ongoing we have yet to see if the court rules that there is the existence of a spiritual world. Meanwhile, the anthropologist-aspiring lawyer in me is *screaming* because I am all about this kind of thing.
Even if I didn't do much work, I'd like to say it was a personally productive day. I hope to have more to write on this subject soonish.
THE ACTUAL PLANNED PART TO CELEBRATE THE DAY
Of course, I also wanted to do something special for myself to celebrate this personal accomplishment of ten years' worth of journal entries. I had been wondering what to do when one day, while watching a series on Hulu, I saw a trailer for a movie called Mortal Engines. It sounded familiar, and then I remembered that it was the name of a book I read around ten years ago. Specifically, when I first started keeping a journal. I distinctly remembered writing comments about it in the very first entries. The trailer ended up being for a movie based on the book itself, and the opening night happened to be December 14th.
I thought that was serendipitous, so I decided to go watch it that evening. But first, I went and treated myself to dinner at a place called Bareburger a couple blocks away from the movie theater.
Mortal Engines is a steampunk, sci-fi young adult movie, so not normally a genre I would pay $16.40 to watch in a movie theater for, but I honestly ended up really enjoying it. Since I read the book so long ago I didn't remember that much of it at all; nevertheless, I thought the book's world was beautifully imagined in the movie and given the advances of CGI technology that have been made, I could see why they didn't make the movie soon after the book came out :รพ
For now, I can't wait to return to my first journal eventually and read what I said about the book, and say hello to my 13-year-old self.
A PLOT TWIST
What is going on? Has something completely unprecedented occurred?
Well, kind of. I've decided to leave New York earlier than anticipated. Unfortunately, that also means leaving my job earlier than anticipated.
I've been alluding to my misery in this city a lot in my blog entries, so I decided to actually do something about it. It's really ironic that I explicitly said I dreamed of living in NYC or in a similar city in that last entry about my journals, but I think I intended the dream to take place someday in the still far future when I'm looking to settle down somewhere with a (well-paying) job I'll be staying at for a while.
The thing is, I've been staying in an apartment with no gas and consequentially no working stove and no heat ever since I got here. I thought it would be resolved with some phone calls and scheduling, but I was wrong. But I wouldn't be so upset about that part if I weren't paying almost a thousand dollars a month for this place. Long story short, the management sucks, and after hearing stories from roommates and other people who live the not-high-life in this area, that isn't uncommon at all. Everyone wants a piece of New York, so real estate companies capitalize on this and get away with a lot of fraud and practices that suck the money out of tenants. I knew I wanted to move out at the end of the lease, but trying to find a room to move into in this city is already an expensive, time-consuming mess. A mess I really wasn't feeling like involving myself in. I tried to find a new place to live at first, but then asked myself: is it worth all the effort and stress? Do I want to drop between $1600-1900 at once to move into a new place? Do I want to keep spending around half of my pay check on rent and utilities every month just so I can sustain myself here? The answer in my mind to each of those questions was a resounding no.
I admit that electing to work in a tiny nonprofit in one of the most expensive cities in the country (maybe world) while coming from a low-income family was not one of my greatest decisions. I'm kind of kicking myself for it because after my experiences in 2017, I told myself that I was tired of the NGO world and I really needed to do something else after I graduated, yet there I was. The job just seemed really cool and I couldn't resist the prospect of international work travel. Don't get me wrong, I do love the job. If I didn't love it so much, I would have been out of here after a month. So rather than resign, I put in a request to become a full time remote worker, which was only semi-accepted. Thus set into place my first serious work issue.
To cut a long story short, I will still work remotely for my job after I leave New York in February, but only until May 1st. I will return to Oregon, a place I never thought I would be so eager to return to, and live with my parents while helping them out with household finances and things. I know for certain I will feel more fulfilled having part of my paycheck go to help my family out instead of to greedy NYC landlords and overpriced rent.
As unexpected as this is, I do know I made the right decision. After I wrote the draft email requesting to work remotely, I felt such a huge load lift off my chest. Even if outwardly I said I was fine and okay living here, deep down inside I was hating it and knew I had to do something about it. As I have already made sure not to do in other occasions throughout my life, I wasn't going to force myself to do something that didn't feel right. So I decided to put my needs first, as I always have, and take the leap.
What comes after I leave my first full-time job is unknown, and that's okay. As long as I'm saving up to be able to travel (still on my mind after all these years, though now there's also a boy who accompanies the thought), helping my family out, and preparing to go to grad school, I'll be content.
To end my account of this plot twist and of this entry overall, I will take a piece of revelatory self introspection the college sophomore me wrote when she experienced a very similar dilemma. Although I wrote it as it related to my academic pursuits, I find that it applies very well to my current situation in this city, and this personality trait has definitely informed my decision to leave. In the end, I've kept a pretty good sense of self, and for that I am proud. I've rambled enough, so here is the little nugget of wisdom:
I realized that if my heart wasn’t fully into something, if I didn’t feel a certain intense passion towards it, then it wasn’t worth my time and attention at all. I can’t feel lukewarm about something, because that’s just a waste of my time. If I wasn’t absolutely in love with the idea of doing something and then the act of going off and realizing it, then why should I even bother?
Comments
Post a Comment