♥ Mango pudding is one of my favourite desserts at Chinese restaurants. As are egg tarts and dim sum in general. (Especially the dim sum that comes on push-carts!)
♥ I’m grateful to live in a place where I can often see the pale feather of the moon soaring high in cloudless blue skies, long before the sun has begun its evening descent.
♥ Meet-ups with old, high school friends are sometimes the best. It never ceases to amaze me how much some people can still care for one another over distances and time, and I’m humbled by what you give me.
♥ New notebook to journal in for the new year! It is black with a pattern of coloured peace symbols that really cheers me up just looking at it. Also, new posters for my room which quite delight me.
♥ I have a supervisor for my thesis, hurrah hurrah! Was quite worried I wouldn’t find one for this term and then have to do it next term, which would have thrown quite the spanner into the works. Discussions are going splendidly.
♥ UBC has some of the best events to look forward to throughout the year. Have you noticed? There was the SLC last week, UBC’s Got Talent tomorrow, and the annual Vagina Monologues will be playing next month. Students here rock!
♥ A couple of friends recently introduced me to McCormick’s cinnamon sugar blend. Who knows why I crave this like nothing else when ill, but I do, and am so thankful to have a bottle to myself. Sprinkle sprinkle pooouuur.
♥ Lastly, but certainly not least important, are the comments that you leave me. Thank you for letting me know when you like or can relate to something I’ve written enough to let me know. I always do this little inner happy dance when a post has done a little more for someone than pass the time. You make my day — sometimes even my week — and you ought to know how lovely you are in the simple things you do.
Posted on12 January 2011|Comments Off on Setting a Sleeping Schedule 2.0
As if the universe was actually paying attention to my ramblings for once, it heard me say, ‘I don’t have the willpower to go to bed early,’ and sent an evil bug into my system that knocked me out for most of yesterday.
Oh, right, staying healthy is a good reason to get enough sleep.
It’s my fault, really — in high school, I discovered (through many rounds of trial-and-error) that if I lost out on so much as two nights of good sleep (read: 9 hours), I would be down and out for the week. Since coming to UBC, I’ve managed to go many, many more nights without this happening and was obviously lulled into a false sense of security on the subject of my immune system. Well, no more.
(Of course, I could have just picked something up lately from goodness knows where, but let’s run with the sleep thing for now, ‘kay?)
I’m currently throwing all my responsibilities to the wind and am doing nothing but sleep. This isn’t really hard, since I feel too lousy to do anything else, and have no inclination of dragging this out.
Also boiling down the rules I set for myself in my previous post down to one:
At 6 pm, everything must stop. This includes the laptop and internet.
Advice for things to do instead:
Cook dinner so you can eat at 7 pm, as opposed to, you know, 10 pm. Shower early. Find activities unrelated to the internet and/or computer to do. (There was a time before the internet, you know.) Do not read fiction in the evening — you know you’re incapable of stopping once you start and will just read the whole book in one go, which might be until 3 am. If you’re desperate for something to do, go to bed earlier to get up earlier. Now there’s a novel thought.
But just go to bed at the same time everyday.
I leave you now to go back to sleep, but not before sharing an awesome Nike ad:
Posted on10 January 2011|Comments Off on Setting a Sleeping Schedule
We’ve all heard the news before: a good night’s sleep helps you do better in school and/or work. Getting more sleep keeps your immune system up, energises you for longer periods of time, helps with memory retention, thinking on the spot, and a number of other good things. From personal experience, I know that my grades show as much as 10% in difference when I’ve been running on little sleep for several weeks and when I’ve been getting adequate sleep for a few.
I know all this, and yet still have trouble putting myself in bed at a reasonable hour. Why?
Lack of willpower.
Sounds odd, doesn’t it, that I don’t have the willpower to go to bed, especially when I’ve been feeling pooped for hours? It makes more sense when you look at all the tasks I have to do for the week and all the readings I haven’t done, particularly when I’ve fallen behind (yes, already!). I think, ‘If I stay up a little longer to do [insert task here], it’ll be one fewer item on my list tomorrow.’
But that’s not what always happens, because more often than not, I get distracted by technology. See, I’ve been pooped for hours! I just want to sit in my chair and read emails, or write a blog post, or do something completely unrelated to school when I get home. To top it off, I’m often also quite hungry because I find it easier to skip meals when pooped than to get up and make a good meal. (Yes, I need to change that too.)
So I’m setting myself a bunch of new rules:
At 6 pm, all work for the day must stop. Go make dinner. Read a book. Plan for tomorrow. But no actual work.
Laptop may only be switched on before 6 pm if it is actually needed for the task. Internet time should be scheduled and limited. (Make a list of things I need to do on the internet for when I am online, not as they come up.) After 6 pm, I can only switch it on if I have fed myself and showered and have a specific purpose for switching it on, e.g. writing for myself.
Be in bed to fall asleep by 10 pm.
The problem with these, of course, is that they’re really hard to implement. Sometimes I can’t fall asleep knowing that I have way too much to do and not enough time to complete everything in. Then what? Stay up to do more or stay awake worrying?
These are the arguments I go over, but hope that if I keep insisting on these bedtime hours, I’ll use my time more wisely and procrastinate less before 6 pm because I know that I’m not going to have much more time in the evening to do anything I don’t do now.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to make me go to bed on time, I’d be happy to hear them.
On an unrelated note, the bright side of the world being this cold is that the ground is frozen over and I can cut across grass without worrying about my boots getting muddy.
As usual, the UBC Student Leadership Conference was a great start to the term. Drew Dudley was amazing. The Buried Life boys were cool. If there were a few pieces of advice I would give to new students, one of them would be to go to the SLC at least once during your time here. Like many things in life, you simply don’t know if you’ll like something or not until you give it a go. So give it a go.
I trust that my fellow bloggers over on the UBC Blog Squad will give a much fuller and more exciting account of their experiences on Saturday, so I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to share what I have actually been rethinking, as a result of the SLC, and also of my own thinking over the last several months:
Significance.
Let’s think of it in terms of leadership first, because that’s what the conference was about anyway. The conference which I’d faithfully attended for three years and was seriously considering not attending for a fourth.
You see, in third year the question I asked myself had changed from ‘What can I do on this campus?’ to ‘What have I done?’ I wasn’t really happy with the answers. In fourth year, the question has become even more pressing, and I felt even more dissatisfied, particularly when I compared myself to the many high-achieving students that I know and hang around — you know the kind, the ones who seem to do everything, and everything well. Many of these truly admirable, wonderful human beings were presenters and facilitators at the SLC this year — and part of me didn’t want to go because I was afraid of thinking, all the time I was there, how much they were giving and how much I was not. It took some encouragement on the part of one of the SLC Faces of Today (who didn’t know what I was thinking, bless their heart) for me to sign up, but I was still nervous about feeling lousy.
Until I got an email about opening keynote Drew Dudley, and I knew it was going to be a good conference.
His story hits home for me because it clarifies something I’ve been wanting — and struggling — to believe: that the small things matter.
As Drew so eloquently pointed out, we’ve made leadership into something bigger than us, a title that has to be given to us by other people. We think we can only be significant when we’ve made big changes, so most of us go about thinking that we’re not significant, because we’re not among the exceptional 10%. We’re so used to considering that topmost tier as the standard of excellence that we fail to acknowledge the hugely significant groundwork that’s been covered by the other 90%.
And yet what we do everyday is perhaps what leaves the greatest impact for all of us — including that top 10% — because they are so daily.
The Buried Life guys were lovely, but they didn’t affect me as much because I already have lists (e.g. Day Zero) that ask me what I want to achieve by certain set dates, rather than my death-day. It’s never a question of what I want to do before I die — because frankly, I could die at any time — but how I want to do it all. How do I want to live my life?
A couple of months ago, an old classmate from my primary through secondary schools died after a decade-long battle with cancer.
Over the winter break, one of our volunteers also passed away.
I don’t really know about their other commitments and achievements, but I do know that they were both exceptional in the lives of their families and friends. Their love and kindness mattered. They were significant in the gentlenesses they exhibited and the sincerity and enthusiasm with which they approached their lives. They were important.
For most of my life, I thought I had to do everything in order to get the upper edge on someone else in university, job or other applications. I was inspired by the sheer number of meaningful activities that the student leaders who mentored me in my first and second years here could do, and told myself I had to be like them before I could think of myself as significant. I’ve made my resumé as jam-packed and high-achieving as many other people do (particularly in my first two years here) — yet I’m not feeling any more significant than when I started at UBC. I still worry that I’m not competitive enough.
And there are an extraordinary number of people who manage to achieve extraordinary things in their limited time. It’s a little impossible to hear the sheer number of activities with which the SLC Faces of Today and the Nestor Korchinsky nominees are involved and not feel overwhelmed and admiring. They deserve to be recognised for what they do.
Not everyone can be like them, however — and the rest of us end up despairing, because we don’t know how we’re going to stand out in what sometimes feels like an ocean of exceptionality.
I’ve got a theory I’m going to test, though: be passionate.
Some people do things just to put on their resumés. They don’t really care. I can tell you that at Speakeasy, we don’t want that kind of people, and if we, a volunteer organisation, can afford to look for the people who want to be here, then it stands to reason that larger organisations which are going to pay you will ask for the same. Caring about what you do will make you significant.
I’m not saying you don’t need skills and qualifications to succeed — obviously you do. What I’m saying is to get the skills and education you need and get involved in the things that matter to you. This last clause is important, because there are plenty of people with skills, but a shortage of people with passion. Find what you like, and do it well, because when you really care, you make a difference. Passion is one of those things that is hard to fake; we can tell when someone genuinely believes in what they’re doing, because it lights them up and changes their whole being.
Doing twenty things at once is surely impressive, but doing a few things you are truly passionate about will also make you stand out.
Doing what you care about is also what will stand out to you when you look back on this period in your life. I’ve been reflecting a lot on the things I’ve been involved in, many of which I’ve enjoyed, but few with as much dedication as I devote to Speakeasy. I want more of that — more times when I feel like I’m committing myself to something I really believe in, more certainty that I am giving something back to the community.
Finally, I’ve decided to stop moping about what I haven’t achieved and focus on what I can still do in my time here. I want to be significant and do the things I care about, to have the courage to follow my dreams (the ones I hide under my bed because I’m too afraid to tell people about them).
More importantly, I want to be significant to the people around me, on a daily basis. Because I’ve decided that if I change the world in some large way yet neglect the people around me, I will feel like I’ve failed somehow. Even if I don’t change the world, however, as long as I feel like I’ve been important to the people around me everyday, I will be okay with that.
Holidaying in Hawai’i with the family was awesome on so many levels, not least because I got to tick another item off my Day Zero list. Although I always envisioned going whale-watching in Vancouver, this was definitely a very acceptable change of plans.
According to our on-board naturalist, humpback whales go down from Alaska to breed in warmer Hawaiian waters from December to April. Although we wandered the decks diligently for some time, we slowly concluded that we weren’t going to see any whales this early on in the season.
Just when my family and I’d given up, though, the naturalist caught sight of a mother humpback whale and her calf.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get any pictures as they were a fair distance from us, and it was hard to time a shot, but I did get to see them blow spray and the baby’s beautiful tail came up a couple of times.
I think I would love to go whale-watching again, but the sobering sight of this plastic bag in the middle of Pacific blue has got me wondering about the ethics and environmental impact of this activity. Did I just help to make the world a little better or worse?
