yati: The TARDIS standing on a green field. (something borrowed)
There's a scrawl in my notebook, in my hand, written when I was only half-awake: It's not writer's block, it's just laziness.

--

My problem these days is this strange, overwhelming feeling of disconnect I have with everything. I find it increasingly harder to care about things, even those things I used to love. Perhaps especially the things I used to love. This makes me sad.

I can't write, reading has been something of a chore, and I just don't seem to have the energy to do the things I used to enjoy. I keep blaming work, but, despite it being more stressful than before, I actually have more time to myself these days. (Except when we get stuck in traffic jams. God, traffic jams. Why do they even exist. Where are the time machines? The teleportation devices? The Floo Network?)

I've not been very happy lately (but I've never been a particularly happy person) but I don't think I'm terribly unhappy either. I feel mostly apathetic about everything. A general lack of purpose? I don't know. Maybe.

So. Uh. This is me trying to be better.




yati: (So. It has come to this.)
2012 felt like the year I trudged along, not really doing anything. It seems like I spent the whole year feeling off and gloomy and moping, even though I didn't have any particular reason to mope.

There were highlights, sure. I went to Edinburgh and London and Paris and it was lovely. I went in September. Mementos and photos from the trip are still unsorted and will probably remain forever unsorted (oh god the photos -- the evils of digital cameras, you can never stop taking pictures).

Other than that. Well. Due to crappy documentation (uh. new year's resolution: post here more?) I can't really remember what else happened this year? Work has been frustrating; I'm not sure whether it was work that made me mopey or that work got frustrating because of my mopeyness.

Randomly, other stuff:
• best movie I watched at the cinema was Life of Pi (I barely went to the cinema this year (what is this nonsense, did I turn into a hermit and not notice it?) -- I haven't seen both The Hobbit and Les Misérables), though I enjoyed The Avengers a lot.
• but oh, oh, Matilda the Musical is probably the best thing I watched this whole year -- I watched it at Cambridge Theatre while we were in London and it was awesome.
• best new-to-me tv series I started watching was Person of Interest; it's clever enough, and the over-the-top, rather cartoonish violence leaves me laughing. Come on, Reese throwing people out of windows despite the horrible odds against him will never stop being funny.
Doctor Who is probably still my favourite thing on tv, despite, you know, Ponds leaving and . . . stuff.
• best book I read this year is a tie between When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead and The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.

You can still see the "Books read in 2012" list on the first page of my recent entry page. I post a reading list yearly at the start of the year; the 2012 list hasn't even moved down that page much. The list has eighteen books, which is something I find slightly alarming. I'm pretty sure I've never read less than twenty books a year before. Too busy moping, I suppose. Or too busy reading fanfic, I'm not really sure. (I got sucked into Stargate Atlantis, of all things. Yeah, yeah, I know. Very late to the party, as usual.)

It hasn't been a great year for writing, either. I barely posted here, I didn't write any fic, not even drafts. I didn't even sign-up for FFEX. It's mind-boggling.

Here's to better year ahead.
yati: Sora from the Kingdom Hearts manga, wandering around looking lost with a keyblade in one hand. (are you sure this is the way?)
So. So, so, so. If there's anything I can say about the first month of this year, it would be about how I barely managed to keep any promises I made to myself. (There was something about writing more often -- that was pretty failtastic.)

One of the resolutions is to stop letting work bug me all the time, but that hasn't been going all that well. I find myself thinking about work even when I'm not at work, and that kinda sucks. I'm beginning to resent this job, and that's not a good thing. I'm very good at what I do, but lately that they've been demanding impossible things from us and I think I'm getting exhausted from listening to people complaining (all valid complaints, and I join in most of the time, too) than the actual problems.

But never mind work. At the end of last year bought myself a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus (what is with these devices and horribly long names?) and I think it's awesome. One of the reasons for getting it was so I could use it to read on the bus, but I've been using it to stalk people on Twitter and reading fanfic instead. Best laid plans, etc. I did finish Northanger Abbey amidst all the stalking and fic reading, though, so I guess that worked out well enough! I don't get as much reading done in the bus as I used to. Partly it's because of work -- at one point I kept going home when it was too dark to read, and I spent the journey worrying about things in my head and thinking about the posts I could've written had I been better at using a touchscreen. Isn't it strange how all those things you compose in your head just disappear when you seat yourself in front of the keyboard?

So. No posts from me. Have some links instead. Here is a YouTube playlist featuring the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, who are hilarious. This one about period dramas left me snorting with laughter.

And this here is a post by Ana and Jodie in [community profile] ladybusiness which discusses the first episode of the second season of Sherlock, "A Scandal in Belgravia", and I agree with a lot of it, and it's still open in that tab group of stuff that I've labelled in my head as "things I should respond to with an intelligent comment but I'm still flailing around being incoherent about the whole series". I will probably never be coherent enough to discuss the series. I like it a lot. I have issues with it, but I like it a lot.

Speaking of Sherlock, I found that a friend at the office is also in the same fandoms as I am (and quite possibly reading this post, and I find that mildly terrifying for reasons I can't quite articulate). There was a slightly strange conversation about fanfic during lunch once (it was, unfortunately, about Downton Abbey (or is it fortunately? since I didn't know much about it then I couldn't stick my foot in my mouth) and yes, yes, I'll get to finishing the whole thing eventually) and another one in the car about horrible things you wrote when you were seventeen. I can't even remember what horrible things I wrote when I was seventeen, but I'm confident that they were horrible. And me stammering out some sort of explanation about the OTW and AO3; I can't remember what it was I said.

(The answer to "Do you write fanfiction?" was me looking studiously at the side mirror, trying to determine whether it was safe to change lanes. I determined that it was probably safe to answer "yes", so I did. It isn't that there isn't anyone else who knows me in real life who read this journal and my fanfic; it was more of suddenly finding someone who is actually interested in fandom, and . . . I'm still not sure what I think. A real-life fandom person!)
yati: Oathkeeper keychain made by Kairi for Sora (miles to go before I sleep)
A woman across the street is chasing after a bus. It doesn't look like she will make it. I start narrating her chase, and halfway through I notice that the colleague who's waiting for the bus with me (the bus is late again; it always is) is looking at me with a smile.

"You should try writing," she says, and I suddenly don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

What do I say? I used to try once, but I've given up now?

The woman manages to board the bus. She lives happily ever after.
yati: (the future doesn't scare me at all)
Things I have meant to do for the last three months:

• post something.


Yeaaaaaah, I kind of failed at that. I kept thinking, "oh, I should post about that!" and never got to it. It's been a mixture of things, but it's been mostly apathy and lack of time. And procrastination. Let's not forget procrastination. In the past, even if I didn't post, I tend to note things down, but this time there's nothing.

So. Let's see what we missed:

• I had a birthday. It was a nice birthday, all things considered. [personal profile] arianur made me a cake. There should be pictures of the cake, but now it feels like it was too long ago to post it! (But it was a marvellous cake, nonetheless.) I also have an Amazon gift voucher thanks to my sister. I still have it, despite my birthday being in May, because I still can't figure out what I want to buy with it. As far as I can tell there's no expiry date but I seriously should start thinking about what I want to buy with it.

• I also have a cat now. A CAT. He's called Charley -- that's what his previous owners called him -- and quite possibly the most antisocial cat in the universe. He only likes me, as far as I can tell. He actually hides and refuses to come out when I have guests, which frustrates me (and my guests) because I can't show him off.

• I'm now also on tumblr, partly because of Charley. I just wanted somewhere to post photos of him. I'm yatii on tumblr, and this tag is all about Charley.

• I have a Google+ account as well, which I am still eyeing warily. I'm not certain what I'm going to do with it. It's connected to my real name (which technically is not my legal name) though some fandom people are on it.

• Work has been . . . work. I accepted a new post, which is a combination of things I used to do and some extra responsibilities. It's not really a promotion, but there's a raise, and four years doing the same thing warranted a change, and well. Why not have a go. Currently it involves being busy and not panicking, because having to listen to other people panicking is enough to send me into a temper.

• I have hit a reading slump! (Again.) Which sort of explains the unused Amazon voucher -- I can't figure out what I want to read next.

• I seem to be compensating the not reading bit with watching old television series. Right now it's Stargate SG-1. I'm somewhere around ten episodes into season one. /o\ I know, I am like totally behind. I used to watch it, here and there, but not religiously. Most of what I know of the series came from osmosis -- fandom is quite an awesome place.


So. Hello again! I am (probably) back, and will try not to be too horrible with replying to comments, etc. (Please excuse the replies to things months old -- I swear I read stuff, I just am terrible at being timely in replying to things.)
yati: (. . . whatever)
Things accomplished:

• Income tax -- filed! LHDN owes me a few bucks. One day, probably in the far and distant future, I'll start doing it before the last week of April. Obviously this year is not the year.

• That application thing at the office that has been niggling me for the whole week -- sent and done with. They can do whatever they want with it now; I shall stop hurting my head thinking about it.



Things not done:

• My Doink! Final Fantasy Exchange fic! It only has an outline and I have about a week to get it done. asddl;kdgf. A good thing this is a long weekend -- we get Monday off because 1 May is Labour Day -- and I think I'll just spend the weekend curled up in bed, trying to write. Of course it has to be sunny and hot today -- why isn't it raining like the rest of the week? >.>

Or maybe I should go out and get ice cream first before writing. Ice cream, hmmm. And grocery shopping. And dinner, too. (I'll never get this fic done.)




Things I am considering:

• I'm thinking of getting myself an iPad! It would be awesome, don't you think, an iPad? It's my birthday in less than two weeks (I can't believe it's my birthday in less than two weeks) and it's a nice present for myself, yes? Though I'm sort of waiting on how that thing at work is going to work out first, because if it does work out, then I certainly deserve a nice present. (The word "work": the current bane of my existence.)

a number of things

Wednesday, 13 April 2011 08:19 pm
yati: (odd ways of expressing love)
A few things, in no actual order of importance:

• There is a style class being conducted over at [community profile] style_system; the first session starts here, and the syllabus is here. If you want to learn how to modify or make a layout, that is the place to go. It starts from the very basics, so even without any knowledge of CSS or S2, you'd be able to follow.

I guess I actually already know most of the things listed in the syllabus, but it'd be great to actually properly learn S2 this time around. XD

• There's an April Showers Challenge over at Archive of Our Own, where the challenge is to upload your fanworks. Which reminds me, I still have a few fics I had meant to upload but kept . . . putting off. (I'm not even entirely sure I want my name attached to some of those any more, ahaha. We'll see.) If you don't have an AO3 account, I have an extra invite. PM me your email address and I'll send it your way. :)

• I've been taking the bus to work lately so it's been giving me something like an extra 1.5 hours a day to read. (For some reason I can't seem to fall asleep on the bus despite knowing that it's quite impossible for me to miss my stop.) So I've been reading instead. I'm awfully flighty about reviewing stuff, but my Goodreads profile is here if you're interested. I also try to keep an updated list here in this journal.

What I'm still grappling with right now: Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver and I curse the thickness of the book every time I try to stuff it into my bag. Woe. I've been reading it for almost a month (a month!) on and off, and I'm only around two-thirds done with it asfdfljg;flg. A good thing it's interesting. If nothing else it gets an A+ for diagrams annotated in Latin.

• What I should be doing: writing fic for Doink! Final Fantasy Exchange. I haven't started yet! It is far too early to panic, but I am terrified of the tonberry.


Apparently there are only four things! I'm getting worse and worse at this updating thing.
yati: Flonne squishing Laharl (Disgaea) while waving one arm (Default)
I spent three days and two nights on Redang Island with my sister, a sort of a treat to myself. As far as vacations go, it wasn't much of one -- it rained a bit too much.

cut for blather and photos )


---

Also I am watching the new Doctor Who trailer for series 6 and I am ridiculously excited about it. It's a strange feeling -- I've never been particularly excited about television before; I'm mostly blasé about the whole thing and will only get to watching stuff ages after everyone else.

haih

Wednesday, 16 February 2011 09:46 pm
yati: (massive amounts of fail)
I am mostly just flailing around, trying to figure out how is it that everything seems to be spinning out of control.

I feel like throwing things and slamming doors. I'm not. Instead I'm cleaning up the house and wondering whether I should mop the floor. I don't even know what it is I am angry about. The car, yes, sure; I'd definitely feel better if it gets fixed faster and I have an actual mode of transport instead of looking pathetic and asking people to pick me up and drop me off. (That's part of the problem, see -- I've never liked asking for help, even when I know I need to, even when I know it would be better if I did.)

There's work tomorrow. I'll get there fine. There are cabs, buses, trains, little sisters. (None of them particularly accessible, but hey, a girl has to make do.) There are friends who are unspeakably awesome who don't mind having me underfoot for a week (and apparently for a couple more days. [personal profile] arianur is a superhero). This is not a ridiculous place to live -- it's the office that's a ridiculous place to work. It's in the middle of nowhere and I live way too far from it.

Just thinking about work is making me go :|. Maybe it's the long break. Going back to checking pages and scrutinising sentences doesn't appeal much after staying home for a while and reading fic and watching unhealthy amounts of television.
yati: (knowing that you're there)
The problem with the last few months is not not having things to write about, it's getting organised enough to actually sit down and write. My head's a mess -- I'm thinking about too many things at one time and I wake up in the morning trying to sort out my dreams. I have various drafts about various things scattered about, mostly in a document in Google docs, and some notes written in the margin of my notebook, and half-hearted scribbles over the inevitable printed-on-one-side proofs that come to my desk in the office, but none of these actually help. I can't work myself up into writing actual, decent, coherent sentences about anything.

I've never been an impulsive poster. I tend to loosely draft things and keep them for a while, and sometimes (most times) after a while it feels like the draft has become irrelevant, or too distant from what I am thinking now, so I just discard it. I start again, and go through the whole process again. Vicious cycle, that. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing -- the internet doesn't really want me to rehash something someone much more eloquent has already said -- but it does cause some concern to some people that they start poking me just to see whether I'm still alive. XD

I am, I am. I just go hibernate for a while, sometimes.



---

Things I keep thinking I might post about: books, sewing projects, getting people hooked on Doctor Who (my littlest sister went through the whole of series 5 in two days, and I like to think she liked it), movies that I will never watch.

We'll see.
yati: (odd ways of expressing love)
Good morning, world!

I was feeling awful and tired and all out of sorts yesterday, and when I got home from work I just threw myself on the bed and slept something like thirteen hours straight. I feel less cranky now.

It's partly a work thing -- when you get busy you get really, really busy. It didn't help that I was on sick leave for most of last week -- it just meant that I had a whole lot more to finish in less time. Also the air-conditioning is set to way too cold and, let's face it, there's no way in hell that combination of that chair and the desk is ergonomic (desk is too high, I can't raise the chair high enough without bumping the armrests into the desk, and I am crazy and I usually try to sit cross-legged in it but I couldn't this week because my foot still hurts and it made me more cranky than usual). And my shoulder tends to protest if I sit too long working, and, yeah, it was hurting pretty awful yesterday.


---

End-of-year assessment next Monday. I will probably just roll my eyes when asked what my goals are for next year.
yati: Ichigo, Ishida, Orihime, Chad and Yoruichi from the Bleach manga, looking exaggeratedly shocked. (we have no words)
This medical leave thing is making my internal calendar go completely out of whack.

I hit snooze a couple of times when the alarm on my phone went off this morning (it always goes off at six, even on weekends), thinking that I really should get up and get to work early -- too many things to do, and I didn't want to brave the rush-hour traffic. Only after blearily sitting up on bed I looked at the screen and saw it said Sun 17 Oct.

I . . . still wasn't sure it was Sunday. I checked the television, it said it was Sunday. I checked the computer and the internet, both agreed it was Sunday. If it wasn't so early on a (probable) Sunday morning, I would've called people, just to confirm it was Sunday.




Okay, someone online (and in the same timezone) has just confirmed that it is, in fact, Sunday. I should go do Sunday things, like laundry.
yati: (watch your step)
So. I've been staring at this screen wondering how to write this without sounding stupid, and I've decided it's not possible.

I sprained my foot after slipping on my totally flat lawn. No, I can't explain it any better than that. I came home from work on Tuesday and I had parked the car, and I was going back to the front gate to lock it when I tripped over absolutely nothing and fell and sprained my left foot pretty badly. I also scraped my right knee pretty badly, but it seems totally minor when compared to the swollen foot.

The swelling's gone down now, mostly, and now it's all bruised and blue and black and green and I have to keep myself from poking it. I'm on medical leave for the rest of the week, and the doctor told me to sit down and watch television until Monday. (I wanted to tell her that I didn't watch much TV, but she glared at me so I nodded instead.) I rarely get sick, and I think this is only the second time this year I've been on medical leave and it's a three-day stretch at that (and then there's the weekend, and I'm still not allowed to hobble around even then). I don't know what to do with myself. It's really hard staying put in one place, and sometimes I forget I'm supposed to, especially since it only hurts when I stand up.

For some reason, staring at the computer gives me a headache (the painkillers, maybe? I know they make me drowsy) so I'm trying to catch up on my reading instead. I'm halfway through Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and I am sort of shaking my head at how little I know of European history.
yati: (an odd sort of family)
You know when you have so many things whirling whirling whirling inside your head but you can't sort it out and you try to write stuff down so that it'll get more organised but you end up staring at a blank screen? That's me right now. I think I've been not writing for far too long and now I can't get things out coherently. This makes me sad.


--

Apparently I worried some people when I suddenly disappeared last month! I am terribly sorry. I'm an idiot! Sometimes I don't think things through. Everything's fine (mostly fine, nothing to see here; move along, move along) and I'll tackle my horrendously bloated inbox throughout this week.


--

Maybe I should do one of those memes I see floating around. Hmm.
yati: (why me?)
gecko on the wall
hiding behind pots and pans
go away now, scram



---

I have nothing against geckos, usually. It's only when they're hiding in the kitchen and startling the hell out of me when I am handling a big pot of hot water that I have issues.
yati: Sakura from TRC reaching for the sky, with the words "let me reach out to distant skies" in the background. (distant skies)
I haven't been very good about updating, have I.

The drama about the internet connection continued for about a week more after the last post, and my feelings about the whole thing had pretty much boiled down to "what the heck, I don't need the internet anyway". (That is not true. While I have discovered I could live without an internet connection at home, I'd rather not live that way.)

Then I was a bit sick -- a horrible sore throat, low-grade fever combination that didn't seem to want to go away -- and that along with insomnia and fatigue didn't make me the most pleasant person to be around. I found myself drifting off while at work a lot, which made me feel a bit like an idiot, but then again, I doubt anyone noticed.

So now I have an internet connection (hopefully) and am better (mostly) I shall try to be around more. (Yes, we've all heard this story before.)


--
Ramadhan is here. I feel vaguely old and distant from everything.
yati: A prinny (from the video game Phantom Brave) floating in the water. (we'll go with the river's flow)
Hello! I, ah, haven't been here much, have I.

A summary of what happened the last month and a half: I was really, really busy with work, and then I took a break and came back to work feeling even more frustrated because it seemed like I had more work than I had before I went off on my break and things weren't really going my way even though the big project I was working on was already completed. And I was feeling vaguely miserable the whole time -- nothing I can pinpoint, just a general melancholy about everything.

I dropped the ball several places -- mostly things related to wrangling and fandom, which made me feel even worse, because I felt like I had volunteered to help and then didn't deliver. And I still have a DW bug to my name. I probably should unassign myself from that one; I don't think I can focus enough on it to get it done. Hmm.
yati: Sam and Tucker giving an off-screen Danny an odd look (lost his half of their mind?)
It hasn't been a very good weekend.

I planned to catch up on a number of things but I just . . . didn't. Mostly because I spent most of the time napping. I read some stuff, and then I fall asleep. Perhaps it was because I wasn't feeling very well on Friday -- you know it's going to be a bad afternoon when a headache appears out of nowhere and you get into the lift and it moves and your first thought is oh shit, I'm either going to faint or throw up while another three girls are looking at you worriedly, but luckily I didn't do either, or I would've been mortified for the rest of my life.

I can't figure out what triggered that episode. Probably a weird combination of cigarette smoke and someone's perfume (though usually both of those things are more likely to send me into a sneezing fit instead of causing a migraine), or heck, maybe it was the weather.

Well. In any case. Most things I wanted to do this weekend didn't go as planned. I'm already behind the January start for [community profile] intro_to_cs; I didn't do anything last weekend either (not even Python installed, whoops!) so now it's two weeks I need to catch up with. I'll have to find time during the week for this.

Also I need to reply to emails and comments and write up some stuff but I'm already yawning. (Which really seems unfair considering the amount of time I spent sleeping.) Tomorrow, maybe?
yati: Sakura and Syaoran under an umbrella Sakura's holding, both of them smiling (some things are meant to be)
So.

Fic for FFEX is done. It is posted! It is here: On the Precipice of the World, a FFX fic. (Pretentious title, check.) I'll have it reposted here sometime soon.

Dear recipient, I hope it is satisfactory.

FFEX stuff. How the heck did it get so long. )


no work till Tuesday! )
--


I've also lost touch with my books, thanks to work and FFEX. Also forgotten about some DW dev stuff I wanted to try, but that's OK, I'll get the hang of things soon.
yati: An open book lying on a green grassy field. (grasp the horizons)
Things I found after tidying up my room:

  • my measuring tape
  • that thing you use to pick out stitches -- it went missing and I was lamenting its disappearance (do you know how difficult it is to pick out stitches without that thing?) and eventually found it inside a book. Uh. Apparently I had used it as a bookmark. Who would have guessed. >.>
  • two bookmarks (shut up)
  • my copy of The Game of Kings -- now I can join the reread! (And also stalk [personal profile] renay as she makes her way through the book. \o/)


In conclusion: I should clean up the room more frequently than once a fortnight.

---


Some friends were asking me how I manage to write so well. Uh. (My FFEX assignment would probably protest to that -- besides, it's all relative. I know lots of people who write better than I do.) But I manage to write as well as I do because I write, and I write properly. I know it's just a journal entry, or just an email to friends, but if you insist on spelling words the way they aren't actually spelt, or not hitting the Enter key and failing to split things into paragraphs, or overusing ellipses and not ending sentences with fullstops, there's no way you're going to get better at writing. In whatever language you choose to write in.

I'm not saying you have to be formal and rigid. Just try to follow spelling and grammar rules a bit closer, that's all! And don't shorten words to a point where all the vowels are gone and one needs to be an expert in crossword puzzles to figure out what it originally was.

I don't know whether it's ironic or just plain ridiculous it's the friends who are teachers who write these undecipherable emails/journal entries/posts in mailing lists, etc. Maybe it's just revenge at having to write all those reports for school. (Tangentially, I no longer know what "ironic" means. I blame Alanis Morisette.)


But seriously, guys, how did "boleh" manage to mutate into "blet"? It's not even how you pronounce the word!

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yati: Flonne squishing Laharl (Disgaea) while waving one arm (Default)
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