To avoid being an emotional wreck while writing this post, I’ll get the angry shit out of the way first – it’s that time of the month and I was in a cranky mood earlier today. But as is usual with my PMDD, that shit goes away as soon as I start menstruating. For fuck’s sake.

I bought a new plant. It’s a satin pothos, though technically is not from the same family as other pothos/epipremnum plants, but it does generally require the same treatment. I wish I looked deeper into it because I wanted a pothos specifically, but I’m a plant newbie, and I think I did enough research for what I wanted without giving myself a headache and without screwing things up royally, so let’s go with it. 🌱 I don’t think I will amass dozens of plants due to the fact that I’m a minimalist, and have been very intentional with the ones I’ve chosen so far (except my snake plant, maybe that was a bit rushed because I felt sorry for the poor thing sitting sadly in IKEA as well), and I won’t just pick up a plant willy-nilly.

I really love my armchair, by the way. It has been a really comfortable spot to do things that aren’t work – surfing the internet on my phone, just enjoying a cup of tea, talking on the phone or being on a call, that kind of thing.

I must admit that I’ve been finding it difficult to feel motivated this week since getting back home from holidays. I don’t want to blame it on holidays – in fact, I really hate doing that – I’ll just put it down to hormones for now. I’ve enjoyed the couple of PT sessions I’ve had this week but I’m starting a new program tomorrow and it will be intense! Maybe it will take me a bit of time to feel motivated again, but I have already tried to adopt better habits since coming back home, so I hope that helps. I’ve been buying healthier snacks and actually planning out making my own lunches again. I want to make bagels again but I have been to the supermarket a few times already and haven’t found the bagels I wanted. 😖 Maybe they are presently out of stock.

I have been looking forward to writing these weeknotes again, and on a more regular schedule than when I left it before we went on holidays. I have more holiday posts, soon, too – I hope they’re not boring. I often can’t tell if people love when people share about holidays, or hate it. I also have a lot of portrait photographs in some of the posts I’ve written already, because obviously I take photos on my phone the way many people do, and that is to follow the orientation of the phone. It does make me want to adjust the typography and layout of my blog a bit, though, because it looks like a bit of a mess on some viewport sizes. But I also lose motivation to do code-related stuff outside of work sometimes. So I’ll get to it when I can be bothered…

My hair is bothering me a little bit because it has grown pretty fast in the past month. I couldn’t get a hair appointment earlier than 21 July, so I will have to live with it for now. I really liked the last haircut I had. It’s currently at a length where it’s a bit tricky to wave/curl, especially at the back, so I have resorted to wearing it straight most of the time. Otherwise I have half-curly half-straight parts at the back and it honestly looks a bit shit. The length is also at that awkward length that when I do curl my hair, and the curls become straight, the ends of my hair don’t. And they flare out like I’m some kind of ridiculous cartoon character. And then I push my sunglasses on top of my head and I just look like an even hotter mess. I don’t get it.

Anyway, that’s being pretty superficial. And that reminds me of another related point, and that’s the fact that I re-read The Catcher in the Rye today. For no particular reason, but I just felt like it after looking at my tiny book collection that I don’t really read much of anymore. I first read Catcher when I was fifteen. A pretty depressed fifteen-year-old, I should add. And then I had to study it for English less than a year later. But I don’t mind, because I’m one of those people who generally loves and appreciates the texts we have to study in school. But reading that book as an adult, twice the age I was back then – made me feel this weird sense of nostalgia. I tweeted:

I wasn’t going through the best time when I first read this book 16 years ago. I related to Holden a lot. This book was a reminder that adolescence is a shitty time for so many people, and often for good reason, because you come out the other end having learned a lot.

Say what you will about the book. I know its had its fair share of controversies and some people plainly hate it because of the repetition of the word “phony”, and I feel like that was the case in school, but it was actually really funny reading it as an adult. It’s like reading into the mind of someone from a younger generation, with their own vernacular. You could probably read this book at any point in time and have the same feeling of “kids these days…” But I think it paints a poignant picture of a lost adolescent who is able to just see past the superficiality of the life they’re expected to live. This book was written in the 1940s, published in 1951, and the underlying societal issues in it are still present over seventy years later, and even more so, with social media and more digital outlets for youth to express themselves with.

That’s enough philosophy for today. I have been enjoying some new TWG tea I ordered from Singapore, but the flavours I know and love – Ritzy Earl Grey and Golden Earl Grey. Ever since I finished my two tins of those about four years ago, I have been missing them. I did a combined order with my friend Sam and it arrived really quickly!

In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden asks where the ducks go in the winter. I cannot believe I didn’t realise this until now, but that recurring theme in the book holds a lot of meaning for me. Ducks are my favourite animal. Lucky for me, they seem to hang around in winter. I walked around our neighbourhood recently – obviously the first time since being back from holidays – and being winter here now, and snowing and ice not being a thing in Sydney, well – I guess our ducks don’t go anywhere.