Week Notes 03

16 Mar, 2025

📝March 10 2025- March 17 2025

🌱 Highlights of the Week

• Went for dinner and dessert with my fellow ex-committee members of a club I was part of last year! It was nice to catch up in a non-club-work related context, and just hearing about what everyone has been up to after we completed our term. There was also a lot of spicy tea about the new committee members and another club that we're sort of a direct competition of. Dinner was in a mall and we visited a cute lil bookshop to browse some of their handcrafted items and paid a visit to Toys R Us too. It was mostly all of us going "Wow, these are way too overpriced." or "You could probably get this cheaper on Shopee or something." haha. It was fascinating to see what kinds of trends are happening now by seeing the toys that are being sold. Slimes, blind boxes, and Roblox-game related figurines were scattered everywhere.

• Had a notable therapy session. The therapist I'm seeing now is a permanent one, as I've requested for a non-trainee after seeing about 4 trainee therapists throughout my college and university. I liked my previous therapists, but, as they were there to complete their practicum hours, I would eventually have to switch and restart my whole process. I was getting tired of explaining things again and again. I got lucky and my request for a full-time permanent therapist was accepted!

  Anyways, this therapist did something different than my previous one. I've always had and have difficulty describing or expressing my emotions. It's not something that comes naturally to me, and I've been told by therapists that I have the tendency to describe many of my circumstances but never really what I feel about them. They've suggested the emotion wheel previously, but I never really found that intuitive. We ended up trying these cards, Cope Cards, that are meant as a tool to help associate emotions, using the artwork to explore particular situations in therapy or self-reflection. It ended up pretty useful for me as it wasn't as restrictive as the emotion wheel, and we used a solid portion of the session to go over each of the cards. Rather than focusing on finding a specific word to summarize how I was feeling, the cards helped me provide the context in addition to my emotions as I had the image as something to prop my description of the event on.

  These were my three cards this week!

• Went for lunch with my childhood friend, M, over the weekend. She is on her semester break and she recently broke up with her boyfriend of 5 years, whom I have also known since I was 13. It was deeply disappointing to hear about it - both for my friend who seemed to have had a mostly bad time throughout everything, and pushing through because of the sunk cost fallacy, and also for her boyfriend who I had previously thought was an OK person. It was nice to chat with her and catch-up. She's one of the few friends I have from my primary school days and we've always had the connection where we don't necessarily chat much online but when we do meet up in real life, we go into a really nice flow as if no time has passed!

• A and I made some plans for our 3rd year anniversary! We're going to visit the zoo next week and watch the new Mickey 17 movie. It's been a long time since we've done anything like this, and I'm pretty excited.

🎬 Watched

• Severance S2E08: This one isn't as thrilling as the one with Ms. Casey, but it's not as slow as the last one either. I feel like the highlight of this episode was Milchick with his "Devour Feculence!" move and the way he teared up during his conversation with Mark over the phone. I'm very curious to see what they're going to do with Ms. Huang's character. I'm so worried for Ms. Cobel betraying Mark and Devon as well with the way things are going. It feels too good to be true if things actually work out for them.

• Caught up with the latest episode of Fragrance of the First Flower S02. I like the exploration of Yi-Ming's difficulty in expressing her wants and wishes, that are increasingly causing harm to her and Ting Ting's relationship. We see the push and pull she is having with TT, but her role as a mother as well as a new job holder holds her back from having any sort of meaningful conversation with TT. It's pretty interesting to see something like this in a Taiwanese show, honestly.

  Being Chinese myself, I can see this happening very easily. The avoidance. The lack of knowledge in expressing the self. It's apparent since Season 1 that Yi-Ming has this issue - she did the exact same thing with her ex-husband, holding back her resentment until it just popped the way it did. What I feel a little mixed on is the importance of Ning, the singer-songwriter who seems to have taken a liking to TT.

  From the trailer, it seems that she isn't just a temporary plot device to get Yi-Ming to sober up and do something, but rather, an actual competition as TT and her will get together(?). There's only two episodes left, but, I do have confidence that they will be able to pull off a nice ending. Just hoping it won't be another cliff-hanger.

🎮 Played

• Pokemon Yellow: Made a lot more progress this week as I had a 1.5 hour train ride home and had time to kill! Defeated Giovanni in the Silph Co. building and will now have to get through the random enemies in the Saffron gym.
• Pokemon TCG Pocket: D convinced me to try out the app. He has been playing it frequently, and asked me to try it out. And so... I did. It's been pretty chill so far, seems like a very low commitment game, which is what I like from mobile games. I've been playing the tutorial levels for the battling mode, and it's been... just alright? It's not super exciting, but perhaps I need to learn more of the mechanics as I go. I'm just opening packs and admiring the nice art honestly.

📖 Read

• The Crimson Crown by Heather Walter: I finished the book after two weeks! I enjoyed this one for the most part, and only felt that the ending could've been a little slower... It felt like Alycent just bam and became the evil witch. The romance aspect is still one of the highlights. Hope the next book wraps up the story well.
• Started Say A Little Prayer by Jenna Voris! I haven't been reading much YA as I just never gravitated to the titles I come across, but this one had an interesting premise. The main character, Riley, a 17-year-old girl, gets punished for a fight with another girl from school, and her punishment is to go to Church Camp. Which she despises. She decides to attempt to commit the "seven deadly sins" during her time there to start a revolution. What's interesting (in addition to her interesting goal there) is that there's also a romance subplot that includes Riley falling for the neighbourhood's pastor's daughter. Love the conflict coming already. I've only gotten to the first two chapters, and it seems like an easy read so hopefully I can fly through this one!

🎧 Listened To

• Best Guess by Lucy Dacus
  • I'm looking forward to her new album! It seems that there has been some criticisms of her music getting simpler (versus the days of Night Shift) but I actually kind of dig the cute melody. I love the lyrics to this too. "You're my best bet" is a nice way to express faith in a relationship imo.
• Hard-hearted Way by Tele Novella
  • Found this band via Sona.FM (you can read more about this cool online radio platform here) and I'm really enjoying this specific album. This is probably my favorite song off of it - the melody is just infectious.
• Laura Marling on Tiny Desk
  • Laura's voice is as majestic as always, and it translates well live.

🔗 Noteworthy Links

• Bear blog feels like an allotment garden by stonesoup shack
• Respecting your work is respecting everyone else’s work by Anton
• An actually interesting and actually existing game that uses LLM technology by v buckenham
• Become a Wikipedian in 30 minutes by Molly White
  • Had no idea you're able to do this! This is interesting, and I can see it as a nice hobby if you're someone who loves to discover random things and dive into research into said random things.
• Don't Die with Bryan Johnson
  • I watched the documentary on Johnson when it came out on Netflix, and I thought it painted a pretty balanced picture of him. Bryan has very big dreams and I do actually like what he is pushing for with regards to cultivating habits for better health, but I think the accusations of him being a grifter (take a look at some of the products he is selling) seem to be plausible as well. I'm kind of intrigued to see where this guy ends up in another 20-30 years...

[34/100] for #100DaysToOffload

#100DaysToOffload #weeknotes