Tried baking over the weekend, with much help from HW and Chom - the strawberry cupcakes were a tad disappointing but the red velvet cupcakes were yummy :D Frosting was a bitch, took me super long to figure out what was wrong with my mixture... and it's still not up to par :( Think I'm way better off cooking than baking haha, not a fan of sweets and desserts anyway; savoury food ftw!

But oh well, at least baking helped keep my mind off certain issues. Out of sight, out of mind. At least for now.

Alright, hope the week gets better. It should. And I need more sun, I need to go outdoors more often. :/

Losing A Best Friend
By Mila Jaroniec

When it happens, you won’t want to believe it. You’ll take their word for it when they say they’re busy, swamped at work, “just doing me.” You’ll make excuses for them, put your ringer on extra loud in case they call. But you’ll still feel the change, and because you can’t rationalize it, you’ll try to ignore it.

It’s a specific kind of loneliness that hits you like a wave of nausea. When the two of you are having a beer and you realize that you have both been staring out the same window for twenty minutes, nothing to say, the opposite of a comfortable silence. When they cancel plans consistently and stall when giving you reasons. When you scroll through your contacts and stop at their name and almost call but don’t, feeling suddenly, inexplicably, abandoned and confused.

Sometimes there’s no huge fight that marks the end of a friendship. No falling out, no major disagreement. Sometimes it just falls apart for no good reason. Distance. New relationships. Priorities. Somehow these things can become more important than your connection; they shouldn’t but they do. And as we get older we tend to downsize, prioritize. Trim the corners of our lives, keeping what’s important and discarding what isn’t. Sometimes we stop needing people in our lives and it isn’t even conscious. No one wakes up in the morning actively thinking “Hmm, I think I’ll stop being friends with so-and-so today.” It just goes out with an empty fizz, like a cigarette hitting the bottom of a Coke can.

In so many ways, losing a close friend is worse than losing a lover. Lovers are transient for the most part but friends are supposed to be there for you always, or so we like to believe. Friendship is a special kind of love that’s not supposed to fade. You never expect the one person you thought you could always depend on to disappear without saying goodbye. And when they do you feel sickeningly stupid and cheated, wondering what you meant to them all along, whether you were just convenient or in the right place at the right time. You never really know for sure.

You look through pictures from back when you were happy — holding each other up drunk and ecstatic, working on art projects on a rainy Sunday afternoon — and can’t understand what happened. Reach for the phone. Attach a photo to an email, start the subject line with some fusion of “Remember this?” and “I miss you…” Get suddenly overwhelmed by a horrible emptiness and discard the draft, leaving the phone untouched. History. So much history flushed down a dirty sink.

And the worst part is, you don’t even know how to explain yourself. You know if you bring this up with them they’ll give you a blank expression and a blank excuse. You don’t want to explain how you feel. You can’t. You just want them to get it, to read you like they used to be able to. You want to take them by the shoulders and shake them, screaming Where are you? What happened?! Until you’re blue in the face. But you can’t do that either, because you’re no longer on the same level and it’s going to make you feel crazy.

In life, it’s a given that you will lose people. People will flow in and out like curtains through an open window, sometimes for no reason at all. But losing someone important to you will feel like a suckerpunch every single time, and you’ll never see it coming. Which makes the friendships that do hold out, the ones that make it through countless breakdowns and breakthroughs and changes and years, so damn important.

A Day without Laughter is a Day Wasted.
-Charlie Chaplin

Taking a break from all the intensive work so far... Yep, up at this unearthly hour trying to complete the never-ending pile of work and projects. Doesn't help that I've got a full day of school tomorrow, coupled with the terribly heavy eyelids despite 2 full cups of coffee. I don't think I've ever worked this hard so early in the semester before; am so terribly terribly exhausted. :( Dying to go out and to do so many things, but am cooped up in this room with a half-conscious state of mind and a terribly overheated laptop. Hai. Please remind me once again why is this all worth it.

Hate the way things are changing but shall aim to stay positive. Food & Music are my sole source of comfort at the moment. How nice would it be if I had the guts to drop everything and just solely carve a career purely out of music and arts. But no, Conformity, Expectations, Regrets.

Sometimes, we are just too mainstream for our own good.

Back to work. Go go go.

I've never been the kind to hold back
though I'd never felt the burn before
and all these years I begged for vengeance
and was only left with wanting more
but I can't be whole until I let all this anger go,
a silent strain I've carried long enough

I won't be free until I've made peace with never knowing what went wrong and was the fault in me.

School has been really wearing me out a lot lately. Been sustaining on an average of 3 hours of sleep a day for the past two weeks, energy at an all time low. Taking a lot of shit from certain individuals, tanking projects one after another, putting up with friends who are acting like total jerks, ignoring the fact that you guys are constantly making use of me - since when has being a teenager gotten so tough?!

I need a break. And some help.

Happy Valentines Day

Just another Tuesday for the #foreveralone club. Had an intensive project session at my place for the whole of last night which lasted till this morning... chilled a while after with my group mates, and then they were trying to complete composing the lyrics this song that J came up with. SO DAMN NICE OMG. Can't wait to hear the completed version. My group mates are seriously too talented. :D But it was really epic trying to complete a breakup song on Valentines hahaha.

Alright, back to work. Here's a heartbreaking song for all the #foreveralone club people. Have a Happy Valentines :D

Random Instagram Fix.

These two weeks are gonna be rather emotionally crippling, due to a myriad of personal reasons, but it all mainly stems from the fact that I'm incapable of change. I wish I was less dependent, wasn't so emotional at times; how carefree my life would relatively become, if only I learnt how to be more numb about certain issues...

But anyway, been doing several random things these few days. Watched Bear Grylls in action on Youtube a couple of days back, and I literally threw up moments after. I don't know how I got to that; but it could be linked to the Fear Factor episodes which I was watching earlier. Certainly not for the faint-hearted - watch at your own discretion. Beastlyyy. And caught some discovery shows about human trafficking and abduction. Watching the family in moments of despair was just too heartwrenching :( Violent crimes are rife in our everyday societies, many just simply go unreported. What a stark contrast to the miniscule nitty-gritty we lament about everyday huh. :(

And am pretty glad I've got to talk to some people to gain fresh perspectives on life. Some whom I'd gladly respect in view of the major decisions they have undertaken. You know the cliche - "Don't judge a book by its cover" ? Just got a crash course on that this week once again. Learning to look way beyond the superficial surface; goes to show that we learn so much more through our everyday interactions, rather than simply through pure academics.

Alright, back to work. And to convince myself that change is good. It should be good.

Dreams & Reality

"The dream undreamed is fairer yet
Than these, that turn to dust."

Actualization

How to be Emotionally Stable without Getting Bored
By Nick Cox

Start as someone who loves with above-average intensity. Fall so in love with people and with things that you forget to eat and sleep. Stay up all night reading a certain book or listening to a certain song or gazing into a certain person’s eyes or just pacing back and forth thinking about whatever it is you can’t stop thinking. Know what it’s like to lose all control over the operation of your mind. See abyssal profundity where others see only surface. Experience moments in which the whole universe seems to close in around you and your head feels like an astrolabe and you feel the entire concentric cosmos click together into one unified image of perfect beauty and harmony and all you want to do is hold it in your mind forever and fall down on your knees and worship it.

Start to see this image more and more frequently, often at inopportune moments. Feel its beauty morph slowly but inexorably into terror. Start looking for ways to drown it out; settle on booze and drugs and deafening music. Go to bed every night drunk enough to pass out immediately, but then wake at 5am, feel it bearing down upon you once again, press your face into your pillow, and weep with fear.

Slide into the dark period you knew was coming. Go for months feeling okay only when you’re asleep. Open your eyes every morning just in time to feel the okay-ness seep out of you like blood from a stab-wound. Stop checking your email because you know it will just be your friends asking you if you’re okay, and you don’t want to admit that you really aren’t but know they won’t believe you if you lie and say you are. Stop showering because it seems like too much effort to undress. Step outside on the first beautiful day of spring and think absently about how it does nothing for you. Feel like everything is impossible; feel like doing anything at all would require a greater suspension of disbelief than you are capable of. Feel burning itches in places like the lining of your stomach and the backsides of your retinas.

Hit rock bottom. Lose your job; flunk out of school; drive your car into a tree. Wake up in a hospital bed and see your parents staring at you, weeping. Move back into the room you grew up in and spend weeks in your pajamas eating canned soup and staring at the ceiling. Feel as though you are lying on the ocean floor with seven miles of water pressing down on you. Let your mouth hang open because it seems like too much effort to raise your jaw. Feel nothing. Forget that you exist; forget that anything exists. Feel like you have passed into death.

See a psychiatrist; get on meds. Start feeling a bit better. Watch a sitcom with your parents and laugh a little. Go for a walk expecting it to do nothing for you and find that it does a little. Pull fresh air through your nostrils and feel something. Feel, after a few weeks, a vague sense of coming out of something; feel a certain presence, which you had taken for granted since before you can remember, start to pass out of you. See a bird flapping its wings on a telephone wire and laugh for no reason. Wonder if this is what people mean when they talk about happiness.

Start seeing a therapist. For the first time ever, see your entire life laid out in front of you all at once, like a dollhouse. Realize with a shock of recognition that you were depressed the whole time. Realize that, the whole time, you just assumed that life was this difficult for everyone, and that everyone else just had better self-discipline or better self-control or a better attitude than you did. Realize it wasn’t your fault and feel something inside you burst and dissipate. Talk about your life — family, friends, relationships, traumas — and realize that everything is connected to everything else, that every feeling you carry inside you has a history and a reason for existing. Start to figure out which of the feelings are yours and which are not; start to let go of the ones that aren’t.

Start to understand that feelings are much more than just the amorphous clouds of pain or pleasure that they feel like when you’re in them; start to see those clouds as mere surfaces, concealing complex and highly specific configurations of memories and obsolete assumptions and vestigial unfulfilled desires and lingering residues of people and things that you used to love, all hooked into one another and pulled taut like a cat’s cradle whose total shape sometimes flashes in your mind for a moment all at once. Notice that the experience of these moments of Gestalt illumination reminds you a little of what it used to feel like to fall in love, before love turned into terror and finally burnt itself out, except that now it’s not scary or overwhelming so much as gently rewarding, something like the feeling of solving a challenging but still low-key riddle.

Keep feeling out, little by little, the inner structures of the emotions that once ruled you. As you explore, start to feel them coalesce into something solid and unmoving. Start to understand that the solid and unmoving thing was there all along, waiting patiently for you to notice it. Realize you have already begun to think of it as home. Wonder if this is what people mean when they talk about emotional stability.

Realize one day in the shower that the unmoving thing you’ve arrived at and the cosmic image that once drove you mad are one and the same. Realize that it’s just you, that all along it was just you and nothing more. Laugh at how stupidly obvious that seems now. Feel the unmoving thing settle into you, and you into it, and notice, almost casually, that for the first time in your life you are completely without fear. Look at your reflection in the bathroom mirror and feel like you are seeing an old friend you haven’t seen in ages. Realize that after years of false hopes, you have finally arrived at something real, something that no one can ever take away from you.

Realize that this arrival, which is what people mean when they talk about “finding yourself,” is not an end but a beginning. You have nailed down the vital center; now for a lifetime of filling out the periphery. In living through, then recollecting, your own story, you have learned implicitly that there is a story coiled up inside of everyone and everything. Maybe you knew this all along. Maybe this was why you were so quick to fall in love with everything in sight; maybe you sensed instinctively the overflowing fullness of all things too soon, before you were ready to grasp their interior complexity. Maybe when you were in love with things, what you were really in love with was not the things themselves but rather something inside them that you could never quite get at, which was why you loved them with such annihilating desperation, as if throwing yourself over and over against a locked door. But now that you have found yourself, now that you have fought for and won your emotional stability, you will find that you have been granted a master key. As that unmoving thing was waiting all along for you to notice it, so too does the whole world now stretch out in all directions, patiently awaiting your discovering gaze; and so too does every thing hold its story trapped inside it like a spirit, waiting for you to utter the incantation that will release it. Don’t be overwhelmed by the abundance: your life has only just begun, and you have all the time in the world.