I haven’t actually been online shopping for months now (this is really weird for me) and haven’t even had the urge at all, honestly. But these are two very desirable items that I spotted recently:

Since the beginning of the school year, I resolved to forget about my reservations and just go for dressing both super girly and tomboyish whenever I felt like it, rather than opting for the in-between that I’ve usually stuck with. It feels really great. I wear dresses and skirts now whenever I feel like it (though I still don’t really like how inflexible they are and how complicated the simple act of sitting becomes), and I also wear T-shirts and Vans now whenever I feel like it. I’ve been trying to expand my wardrobe colors, too… Anyone who knows me knows that I usually just wear blue of a variety of different shades every day, but I’ve been expanding to green (and not just teal, of which I’ve always been fond) and purple and yellow and black and white.

While I certainly can’t handle dressing up every day like Sandia does, I do enjoy and value looking well-put-together — not for others’ benefit, but for my personal self-fulfillment. I know that I could look fashionable every day, but honestly… It’s too expensive and too much of a pain in the ass to maintain (not to mention often uncomfortable to wear fashionable things…such as flats, gah), and I’d rather spend my money on food, anyway.

mood: optimistic
music: Girls on the Dance Floor – Far East Movement

My parents named me Elaine, and they lent me my dad’s family name, but they left a blank where the birth certificate prompted a middle name. Now, whenever I fill in any forms, whether they be for the bank, for school, or for a job, I have to leave the little space they designate for your middle initial blank, too. Why do they only ask for the first letter of your middle name? What’s the point of giving someone a middle name if they’re only ever going to use the first letter of it? Does anyone ever just forsake the middle name and just give their child a middle initial? And what about those people who have like five middle names? Do they get to pick which one they want to use for their initial, or do they just stick with the first one of the bunch? People with a lot of middle names usually recite them in order. Do their names have to be in to be that order? If the last one was switched to the front of the name train, would that name no longer describe them?

Some people have enough names to fill up all the spaces that they give you on standardized tests, but I only have two, and I can’t even play with the order of that. In English, Elaine comes first. In Chinese, Elaine comes second. That’s all there is to it. My parents tell me that they gave me no middle name in case I grew up and hated my name and so that I had the option of choosing a middle name for myself that I could ask people to call me instead. Sometimes, I suspect that they were just lazy. After ten years of living in America, did they really not know that adults can just change their names if they don’t like their given ones?

Every year, I fall in love with a different name. I realized that most of them started with the letter A so I decided that that will be my new middle initial. I decided so that I could register my name for a professional-sounding e-mail account for my resume. Sometimes, I wonder if I even need to figure out a middle name. I wonder what the government would say if I went to get a name change and just told them to add “A” to where it says “middle name”. I like thinking about names, though, so maybe I’ll just leave my middle name blank forever so that I can continue to dream of middle names that start with A.

mood: proud
music: Listztomania – Phoenix

I love words. I love writing them, I love reading them, I love speaking them, I love studying them. I’ve been called a flake, a hypocrite, and a liar, all because of my love for words and the way I use them too loosely. When I am happy, I love to express it through words. When I am upset, I need to express it through words. When I am confused, I always turn to words to help me sort out my feelings. When I am earnest, I use words to make promises. When I am trying to help, I use words to comfort and advise.

(I know I’m in love because he’s the one person in the world who can really make me speechless — it means that he has the power to extinguish the words swirling around in my head and render them useless to describe how he makes me feel, whether that feeling be good or bad. That’s how I know that my feelings are legitimately strong. That’s how I know that he’s something special.)

I love reading. In the past month, I have read so many books and so many stories. I am still uncertain as to whether I am doing this more out of a desire to read books or more out of a desire to escape to another world where things are different and if not better, at least not directly affecting me. I’m pretty sure it’s a mix of both, but that’s no matter. I love the power that these formations on a page, these sounds that we make — I love the power that words exude. I love the way that a good book can change your life. I love the way that a single line on a single page in a single book can suddenly make you understand something that your friends have been trying to teach you for ages. I love the way that a string of words, phrased a specific way, can remain etched so clearly in your memory even when the last names of half the people you knew in high school start to fade.

I love writing. Since the breakup, I’d mostly only been writing original stuff. Fanfiction was too difficult to engage in with other, suddenly more pressing things on my mind, and anything based on real life hurt too much (well, other than two stories I wrote immediately after everything happened and before I got any answers to my questions). Today, I spent most of my time cooking, working on late Christmas presents for my friends, and watching television shows, namely The Daily Show and Yu-Gi-Oh!. Watching YGO! was fun because I’ve never seen Duelist Kingdom in Japanese and so it’s new while not really being new at the same time. It actually made me really want to read Duelist’s Point, my epic NaNoWriMo story, and so I pulled out and edited a lot of chapters to be posted later (maybe tomorrow). Then, I was reminded of the other recent Darkshippping stories I’ve written. I’d totally forgotten about both Defeat and The Pharaoh’s Ring (which hasn’t been finished yet! I had no idea). I worked on TPR for a while, which was really enjoyable. (It was really interesting to me that after the past four months, I have a totally new perspective on a lot of the character interactions and conflicts. It’s pretty amazing and useful. Maybe the next time I’m upset I can channel it this way, haha. New character understandings!)

It’s one of the best feelings in the world, when the words just flow so naturally from your fingers. It’s something I was always really sad to not be able to achieve with music (upon hearing this, Mark would tell me to practice, haha), but I imagine a lot of musicians know what I mean by that sort of blissful feeling.

Anyway…I’m just really thankful to be blessed with this talent. Or this interest. Or this hobby. Whatever it is, I’m grateful for it. Writing soothes my soul. I may never be a big shot author — or even a small, published one — but I’m proud to be a writer. I’m proud of everything I’ve produced, even the really embarrassing stuff, and I’m proud to continue to produce stories all the time, whether or not anybody reads them.

mood: at peace
music: Dear Vienna – Owl City

I love good action/adventure stories. Watching Avatar for the second time today (with my parents this time), I realized how to better explain my taste. I really love action; fighting sequences are really awesome to me — but unfortunately I’m also extremely squeamish. So I really enjoy action that’s not gorey or gruesome; action that gets the point across without explicitly emphasizing the violent aspect of it. Adventure stories are great for this. Most stories that have “battles” are usually winners for me. I also really like putting action scenes in my stories, but I kind of suck at writing awesome action. I think it’s definitely one of the hardest things to write convincingly (Rick Riordan actually does it really well in the Percy Jackson series; it was always very easy for me to visualize what was going on but it wasn’t like simple or anything; it was clever action that made sense and was exciting), along with romance.

I really love movies that fashion a new world. You know, ones where the writers had to sit down for a long time creating a world. I’m hardly degrading movies that aren’t like that, but those are definitely the ones that really catch my eye and get me really excited and…into them, really. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a total sucker for new worlds, superheroes, magical universes, mythology, all of that good stuff. My friends at Berkeley are always making fun of me for my random plot bunnies/wild imagination tidbits that I like announcing to the world, haha. Once, we were hanging out in C.J.’s room when we suddenly heard a loud train horn outside and were really confused, seeing as there are no trains that close to the dorms. Really excited, I suggested that maybe a superhero had just teleported a runaway train into the soccer field on top of the parking garages and that now our lives would be changed forever. I just love thinking about that kind of stuff. Maybe it’s childish. Maybe it’s unrealistic. Maybe it’s escapist. But more importantly, it’s fun.

Right now, I’m working on an original story about superheroes. The idea was born two summers ago during a family trip to Las Vegas; we had to take my dad to the hospital that time, and afterward, we dropped my mom off at Walgreens to pick up some meds. While we were waiting for her, I chatted with the cabbie. His story, in combination with the David Copperfield show that I’d seen the previous night, sparked my imagination and grew into a full-fledged plot bunny. I really hope that I’ll get somewhere with this.

In fact, I’m going to go work on it right now, before I sleep. Thank god for break and all this freedom!

Sometimes, it’s so easy to give people advice. But to give people advice without being a hypocrite is a lot more difficult.