taking baby steps

It's hard to remember that we're all getting older sometimes. We celebrate birthdays, congratulate people on making it through another year of their life, but we never really feel all that much different because we're really only just one day older than we were yesterday, though our numerical age has increased.

I feel particularly young at times. Not normally, even though a part of my mind is conscious that I'm still considered the 'baby' amongst those I see the most often, but especially lately. Now I'm taking classes with people, working in pairs and groups with people who are anywhere from months to years to perhaps even decades older than I am. The discussions, viewpoints, abilities that we have make me feel my age more than I normally do. Why do I find it so difficult to become closer with these people who are older? I'm sure they have advice to give me, just as I do for them. Perhaps because, on the inside, I'm still ridiculously immature. Which is not to say that being younger in age automatically makes you immature, let's be clear about that.

On the other hand, in the past year and the few years to come, there's been that steady influx of posts from people who are graduating high school, or coming into their VCE and trying to make their decisions about what to do. These are posts that range in tone, but as the year progresses, I'm certain that there will be ever more posts in relation to 'the end of an era'. These posts make me feel my age, too, because these are people that I do often consider my equals (even if not in all areas of life), but it's easy to forget that they can be significantly younger. Most of the time it doesn't bother me, until these posts make me remember that I left high school five years ago. Not last year, or the year before, but five years ago. It's a pretty significant amount of time, especially when I look back at how naive, reckless, carefree I was back then. I've grown, but I still feel incredibly young, inexperienced, irresponsible, immature.

Last week, I accompanied my mother to an appointment with an eye specialist. I've known for a while that her eyesight was slowly going, but it's hard to be shown the visuals and be told that it's 'damaged' and probably 'irreparable'. It's hard to realise that my parents are getting old. Oh, I've always known it, of course, but it's never been a conscious thought that they're getting not simply older, but old. They struggle, are tired all the time, have all these health concerns, how they were surprised by their own ages this year. I can see that they, my mother especially, hates it all a bit. And it's shaming to not be more capable, in life, of taking care of myself, taking care of them. To be unable to be more adult, more grown-up.

But I'm trying a little bit at a time. There's still a long way to go.

the years chase me and accelerate

My sister came home the other day to have dinner, catch up with us all, talk a little bit more about birthday plans. She asked me what I wanted her to get me, which was a little odd because she's never asked this question before. In the past, she's always chosen gifts that I can appreciate. I suppose it's harder this year, when she's been away so often and we've grown apart in so many ways. It will always be easy to fall back into those patterns together though.

I've always considered myself an easy person to buy for, when people have bothered. Perhaps it helps that I do believe in the thought counting. Unless your birthday gift happens to be Christmas themed. Then you're just going on my shitlist. Still, this year I've gotten closer to people that I wouldn't have thought myself to be really friends with before, which made me realise that perhaps it would be a good idea to make a sort of wishlist.

1. Books! I love reading. I'm not an e-book person, though I will succumb to it for the convenience. There's not a lot that's better than opening a new book and just breathing it in, having the covers, the pages underneath your fingertips.
Books I'm after in particular include: Veronica Roth's Divergent trilogy (preferably without anything relating to the upcoming movie on the cover of Divergent). Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series. D.J MacHale's The Pendragon Adventure series and Morpheus Road series. Alexandra Bracken's The Darkest Minds series would be great too, even though the third book isn't slated to be released until next year. A copy of Ela's Gravity (if she still has some printed) would also be super fabulous.

2. Perfume. Specifically, Thierry Mugler's Angel and Yves Saint Laurent's Paris. I received these as samples long ago and liked them both, but somehow never got around to purchasing them for myself.

3. Shoesssss. Wedges, in particular, though I always want new shoes. My parents always tell me I have too many pairs of shoes, but the problem is that most of mine are not suited towards casual everyday wear.

4. Anything from Snack Heroes ! Except the ice cream maker. We already have one. Not that we use it that often since there's never room in the freezer.

5. Jewelry. I like rings. A lot. A nice watch wouldn't go amiss either.

6. Tickets to Wicked, The Musical next year. Or tickets for The Visitors or In The Kingdom of Cha by MTC. I miss going to see plays and these two look super interesting.

7. New flavours of tea. Fruit teas will probably always be my love but I've recently acquired a taste for nutty flavoured tea.

Hmm, I can't think of anything else at the moment, though I'm sure there's more that I would love to receive. I'd be pretty well pleased with just about anything since normally I don't really get anything at all.

we're multiplying, there might be one here

Tonight I went to see 俺俺 at ACMI for the Japanese Film Festival. I've been looking forward to this movie ever since it was first announced because really, what could be better than a movie with Kame playing 33 characters? (A movie with Jin playing all the characters, tbh. Is my bias showing?) Even without the allure of seeing Kame onscreen, the plot itself is delicious. It's not a movie that I could watch regularly, but I'd still definitely put it on my favourites list. T and the older couple sitting beside her cracked up at me though for freaking out before the movie had properly started :( I'm sorry I have a lot of feelings. Subs for the movie are already out online, but mostly I wanted to go for the Q&A session that was hosted with the director afterwards.

It was actually a little awkward (which I expected, because of the disconnect between translations, but also because interviews are almost always a bit awkward) but most of the questions that were asked were great. (Except for that one woman who had a comment and a question and was talking for literally like 5 minutes. I wanted to punch because she would not shut up and I'm not even sure her comment made complete sense because that's what happens when you say things on the fly, ugh.) Satoshi Miki was really nice about it all though, and his answers were all really interesting to hear. I managed to get down most of the Q&A; at some point I'll probably transcribe that for KTL or KTWW or something. He was super nice afterwards too, hanging around outside the cinema to take photos and shake hands and sign autographs :(

I also managed to make new JE friends! Mostly because they were hanging around afterwards too and talking about things and I sort of slyly inserted myself into their conversation, haha. I think B and I will get along great. C and A seem really nice and fun too, as well as the rest of the group whose names I didn't manage to catch. We hung around outside ACMI for a while just talking and flailing about things, and eventually got told off by other people who were standing around in Fed Sq for being too loud. (What else is new though?) We swapped u/ns, and have tentative plans for karaoke in a few weeks, so I think we're going to be, well, pretty good friends. They all headed back to Flinders while A and I walked down Swanston since A lives on LaTrobe and I was meeting my sister at Rooftop in Curtin House since it was her actual birthday.

I ended up walking all seven flights of stairs because there was a group of people lingering outside the lift and I don't have the patience for that. It was probably good for me, anyway, considering that T and I lived the fat life today. It took me a while to work out where my sister and her friends were, I am not good at recognising people from the back, and even less so when it is dark, but I found them in the end. I don't really know many of her friends well plus I was pretty tired from being out most of the day, but I talked to D, M, and A for a while. Right before I left I ended up spotting L, who I haven't seen in months! This was pretty much the last place that I expected to run into her. So I chatted to her for a bit before I left and collapsed at home, about life and her plans and her scooter accident and shitty internet. We'll make proper plans for a real catch up, probably with the whole group, some time soon so that'll be the best.

Tomorrow I'm checking out the RDH function room for my joint birthday with my younger sister, and then on Sunday O is coming to stay over before he leaves me (again) for other, sunnier places, so the next few days will be fun too, at least.

light it up

Semi-short post just to say that today I saw O for the first time in roughly a week and a half, yay. I brought Toblerone cheesecake as a semi-belated gift-thing since yesterday was his birthday, and then we just sat around for a few hours. (What do normal people do? Whenever I go anywhere with anyone all I ever do is just sit around because I'm a lazy fuck.)

I also had dinner at Laksa King as an early celebration for my older sister's birthday. We were late for our booking, not to mention my parents were late, which caused the head waiter to glare at us for a bit. Whatever. Dinner ended up being a shorter affair than usual, which was in part due to the fact that there's always a line waiting and also in part because there was a bit of a wait in between the arrival of all the dishes that we ordered. (Beef rendang, sweet and sour pork, gado gado, Ipoh fried noodles, Laksa King fried rice, plus coconut rice.) We still ended up ordering too much though, and ended up taking the remainders home to my brother, who couldn't make it since he was working overtime.

After that, we drove back to D's house. Mostly we investigated their house, since it's been a good like, 6 months at least since we last saw it. Their fish are super creepy though, but they've decorated pretty well. I guess it's pretty safe to say that my sister's officially moved in there (even though all her mail still comes here) since all her things are everywhere, cluttering up space. We also had birthday cake. The cake was actually super cute and tasty, even though it was quite small.

let's step up

Happy November ! The weather skips between gorgeous and depressing; it's playing havoc with my moods though I really should be used to temperamental weather by now.

I know I said that I would backlog entries, and I will, I promise. I'm feeling a lot better than I was a week ago, so I actually have the time and energy to spend on doing all the things I was supposed to do last week. I should be grateful that my body chose last week to give off fighting my sickness. I'm surprised I lasted as long as I did - I've been feeling like I'm going to get sick for a good two months, at least. Anyway, I got knocked out for about five or six days where all I really did was just lie around in bed and alternate between complaining about being sick to people and just sleeping away the entire day.

I managed to Skype with A and E for the first time in a long while. I'm not particularly good friends with E - mostly I like her because A likes her so much - but she's always fun to talk to. She had to leave for work not long after, but I got to talk to A for an hour or so longer. A is still one of my favourite people, for all that we haven't talked much this year, being so caught up in our respective lives. She is the type where I know that if I reach out to her, she'll always respond. She demo'd something that she's been working on to me, which I really loved, even if it wasn't the best sound quality and I didn't quite understand all of it. She's always been able to find, to make the time for what makes her happiest. She compartmentalises in a way that I can only envy.

C and R left on Tuesday for Bali, so we've been charged, as always, with the responsibility for B, H and P. The more this happens, the less enthused I am about it. Although we did receive oranges and lemons and coriander from C and E prior to their leaving. I don't think I'd like to have pets. They're fun to play with but I think I am too concerned with being clean to be able to care for them and play with them on a regular basis.

I caught up with S on Friday for the first time in a while, mostly because we needed to trade items. Every time I see her, I'm reminded of how different we've become. It's strange to think about how just two years ago I would have counted her among one of my closest friends. Two years ago, we could spend at least six hours together and not run out of things to talk about. Now, it seems an accomplishment if we last 30 minutes without any awkward silences. PT was particularly terrible, so instead of the two or so hours that I'd allocated, I ended up being with her for something like four hours - accompanying her to the orthodontist, and then just sitting around in the city for a while.

I love my mother but, as most if not all of us do, I have a complicated relationship with her. Tonight, I just want to complain that she's driving me up the wall in a very shallow, standard mother kind of way. I understand that she says the things that she does because she cares about me, that she's just trying to look out for me, but sometimes it feels like she thinks I have the intelligence of a child under ten in the 1800's or something. I don't want to sound unappreciative, because it would suck if she just didn't care about what I was doing, but there is no enjoyment in being made to feel as though I am somewhat incompetent and reckless.

Now that it's November, it's officially NaNoWriMo. I'm nowhere near where I should be in terms of metrics though, which is depressing, since it is still early days. Does this herald how the rest of the month will pan out? I certainly hope not. I'll just have to work harder. At the very least, I don't have exams to worry about studying for simultaneously. I've (tentatively) planned a TC session with S and L in ten days, just to talk about how we're all doing. Hopefully I'll have something of substance by then.

ETA: This entry is all over the place. I apologise to anyone and everyone who actually read it. The saddest part about it is that I really don't have any excuse as to why it was so...disorganised? Well, I'll try and do better in the future.