Today was truly an extremely “fuck it we ball” moment — yesterday I was reflecting on the day and my mind kept going to “FUCK vivi’s actually SOOOOO insanely pretty” for like, legit an hour before I fell asleep. I went to sleep at 1am, so it’s not like I wasn’t tired or anything — I genuinely couldn’t get her out of my head. She’s genuinely insanely pretty. Like, maybe top 10 prettiest girls I’ve ever seen in my entire life. So this morning, I was thinking to myself that I’d probably get no work done ever if I kept thinking about her, so it’s purely +ev to just find out if she wants to go out on a date or something. I don’t think I was initially attracted to her, she kinda seemed like a fairly “normal” person — her friends seemed like they were a fairly established clique. My impression of her was that she was strikingly pretty from the start — in some ways I thought she was “out of my league” (not that I believe in leagues, and I’ve tried to avoid saying this in previous journals since I try to avoid negative self-talk as a principle, but I thought she’d get a ton of attention). But as I got to know her, she was a super funny but also interesting and nuanced person — I was positively surprised in every way.
The process of me psyopping myself to ask her out was “actually insane”, as I like to say. I was thinking of how to do it — I have 10 days left in Calgary so it had to be soon. We’d next see each other on Sunday, meaning if I asked then, we’d have 6 days together. So in-person was out of the question, sadly — I would have quite liked it to be in person. Text is obviously out of the question. So I gotta somehow get on the phone. Luckily, she DM’d me late last night, so I had an easy in to joke around. After a bit of that, I devised a devious (well, not really) plan; I’d ask her to call me when she was free, then just spill the beans. I wanted to plan out every word I’d say, since I knew I’d be super nervous. I wrote it down on a slip of paper and put it in my jacket pocket, walked to a park, and sent the texts. What I wrote was super simple, just “hey! just wanna be straight up, i’ve had a ton of fun spending time around you at badminton lately, and I would love to take you out. how about happy hour at the market mall keg after classes?”
My heart was beating out of my chest as she called, but I recorded a super quick voice memo on my phone to “snapshot” the feelings — I think you only feel anxious/nervous like this a certain number of times in your life, so I feel quite privileged to feel the emotion. When I picked up the phone, I asked her how her day’d gone, and we had a short chat before I pulled out my script and read it word for word. I was super eager for a response and she went “hey sorry can you repeat that again?” Internally, I said to myself “bruh WHAT do you not know how much COURAGE that took??? i spent ALL MORNING building that up”, but I just quickly reread it. She said a resounding yes, and said that she’d be free Friday!!!!! So, now we have a date planned for the evening on Friday at The Keg. I’m super excited. Afterwards, she texted to say she’s sorry she made me say that twice, she legit couldn’t hear and thought she was in trouble 😭. Yesterday, she made self deprecating jokes about how Viet people always run money laundering business in the form of a laundromat/nail salon. A week or two ago she also teased me about how I fit into the stereotype of people who went to Sir Winston Churchill High School, after I told her I did, and she joked that every Asian dog owner has a crusty white dog (I’d argue Zoey is a crusty golden dog, but close enough).
I wanted to show mom a picture of Vivi but I literally could not find a single picture of her online, which is kinda… 1010101010 respect tbh, she’s so insanely pretty that I thought she’d post a ton. But no, all I found googling her name was her listing on the UCalgary honour roll (courtesy of Mom, no less…) Honestly gained a lot of respect from that alone. And I should stop stereotyping people, what’s wrong with me, making so many assumptions about someone’s character without knowing someone at all.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from cat was to appreciate my emotions more. He always tends to have unique views on life/purpose, but his thoughts on emotion were particularly impactful:
many people champion the being the best of yourself, or reaching your peak potential. in le current world where everyone is online, the only thing that differentiates us from software is that we have emotions, we get to feel happy, despair, love, etc, not some peak potential thingy. lotta ppl appears to cat as numb and detached, yall are gana regret it later in cat opinion so appreciate every emotion, even if its bad, go find love, etc
He definitely takes it a step farther than I’m able to, though:
cat almost never get to feed sadness, but its a beautiful emotion. whenever cat feel sad, cat immediately feel grateful, for being able to experience sadness then, because of that, cat is immediately happy again ? how do ppl feel sad ? pls advice, or is cat mentally disabled ?
But nonetheless, it makes me more appreciative of emotions in general — even if I can’t feel grateful to be sad/upset, I’m much more cognizant of moments where I feel scared, anxious, etc. because they are all so transitory. For better or for worse, we only get to experience the Teenage early 20s Love Experience once; you don’t get that level of vulnerability very often. Job offers matter less as we get older. Anxiety decreases every time you do an action that causes one to be anxious. Nothing lasts.
This sounds awful to say.. but in some ways, I almost rely on love/crushing as a form of escapism. I’ve matured so quickly in almost every other aspect of life because I had to. I didn’t wake up one day and go “hey, I wish I was cool to the touch and obsessively self-controlling”. But over the course of a few years working with mid 30’s people, I just… became that way. It was such a subtle change that I never even noticed until Sarah commented on how I even spoke very “presentationally”, and then other friends concurred. And now, when I look back, I realize that the “child” inside me is, in most ways, long gone. And the cost of that change really upsets me sometimes. Some past me had to die for me to be the version of myself I am today. And probably the past me would’ve died anyway, at some point years down the line, but I rushed it. I wanted so much to grow up. I didn’t know that adults are always looking back. But love is such a new facet of life — in a way, I’m less “mature” romantically than all of my peers, having never dated, held hands, kissed, etc. Until earlier this year, I hadn’t even crushed since junior high school (if that can even be called a crush). It feels like I’m just carrying on from the same perspectives from those 5-6 years ago, and I’m discovering a new aspect of life as if I was a teenager again. I still think love is the point of living. I also believe that we write to exorcise, and I have written in the hope of banishing my ghosts. I have written in an attempt to figure out how to be in love without needing to control it, but also without being subsumed by it.
Was feeling confident so here’s a (rare) sudoselfie. I’ve been wearing this same zip up sweater since grade 8 (6 years ago!?) I used to daily-drive it, but not anymore. Wore it for some old memories.
I burnt like, legit 2 hours at the fucking bank to create a new corporate bank account because my Vault business bank account got frozen yesterday because I tried to transfer to Kraken. So incredibly stupid and I almost pulled all my hair out from the bullshit I had to sign and say. The clerk was pretty funny, she said there’s a lot of Chinese/Korean old people because the old manager was Chinese. I complimented her on her nails, they were some traditional chinese tree-ish art. I don’t know what it’s called. When she asked me my corporate balance sheet and I was like “REDACTED in liquid assets”, I saw her internally go “the FUCK”, which often happens when clerks open up my file. Always slightly amusing.
Today marks 1 month of journaling! I didn’t journal every day, but, I’m still pretty happy with it. Definitely been +ev to my life.
Here’s a wordcount snapshot:
find ./content/2024/*.md -type f -exec cat {} + | wc -w
16145