"Wish you've gone-a, wish you've gone away; what you've gone-a, what you've got has always gone away"
Holy shit, have you guys ever used Clinique's pore minimizer thermal-active skin refiner? Fuck me, this shit is INTENSE. I literally just used it a couple of minutes ago to...well...minimize my pores and all I can say is SHIT. It does the job. I mean, if the "warming sensation" doesn't freak you out, then maybe the slight redness of your face will after you rinse it off and you look like you have mini forest fires happening around some of your pimples. It's SCARY.
But after all of that weirdness, your face - and more importantly - the pores on your face are instantly smaller! Yeah, it's probably classified under "caution: use at your own risk," but I don't really mind. My pores have never looked better!
Okay, that's the end of that little public service announcement. Really, I'm not here to babble on about a beauty product (even though it's freakishly amazing!). I just had to share with y'all, because that stuff is serious.
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What I am here to babble on about is, um, well, myself. What else! Hello, this is my blog.
Welcome 2009! (well, in roughly 20 hours and 45 minutes). All I'm really going to be doing when that clock strikes midnight is sitting on the floor rocking back 'n' forth with my fingers crossed saying to myself, please, lord, let this year be good. PLEASE. I can't bear for another bad year. 2008 was really bad for the most part and all I'm hoping for is a nice and neat little ending to wrap this chapter up.
I am walking into this with high hopes, though, as I always do. God, when will I wise up and stop hoping for each year to be better than the last one? But no matter what, I always end up thinking to myself, yep, this year is going to be different. I can feel it. Really, I don't feel shit except even more hopeful than the year before. I'm sure I'll get it into my little head one day to stop hoping and just accept that a new year doesn't mean anything really. It's just another day on the calendar and a way for keeping ourselves organized with the dates.
I was having a little browse, though, through some of my old archives (because with me being hopeful, I also get nostalgic) and perused through some of the past new year's that I've shared here on My Mumbling Thoughts. There was one time when I celebrated early and another one that I didn't post, but where I ended up passing out at half ten and waking up on my bathroom floor alone with an empty bottle of vodka in my hand. 'Cos you know, I'm a classy gal like that.
Oh, this shitty holiday.
This year, I'm not going anywhere, I'm not doing anything particularly special or acknowledging it in any way shape or form. Wednesday is Wednesday, just like how it always is, and when I wake up, hey! it's going to be Thursday. Look at that.
I was thinking of going out with Mendy and celebrating with some of her friends, but to be quite honest, I'd much rather sit at home with my fingers crossed and a bottle of wine. I guess that would be considered "acknowledging" this so-called "holiday," but whatever. I never was good with following through anyway.
I did have a laugh looking through some old posts, though. I mean old posts. Old for me, considering my wee blog is only a mere three years old. First of all, I used to ramble! Good lord, I would never shut up! All I did was bitch about this thing in the office, or that thing in the office. Blah, blah, blah, moan, moan, moan. And my writing style wasn't very good either. I was quite boring and who knows how I managed to snag some pretty cool readers (I love y'all!). But I was consistent and wrote pretty much Monday through Friday like a dedicated little bee. I have certainly come far since being an administrative assistant in a power company working for stereotypical archetypes that get turned into sketches for SNL. Now I want to go back to the admin world, but with a little more life experience under my belt and a better understanding of who I am as a person and my voice that I want to project into the world.
Sure, these past two and a half years at university have been a rough ride for me. I know I've blogged about how this sucks, or that sucks, or how goddamned depressed I am one day and how I'm perfectly fine the next. I am a constant, never-ending bouncy ball that hammers through each day completely blind and yet still sees everything in front of me. But it has overall been AMAZING and I wouldn't change one goddamned thing for the whole world. Coming here to university and being surrounded by my uni life has been tremendously helpful (while at the same time being curse since I can NEVER get away from it). I've learned a lot at good 'ol RoeHo about being a writer, myself as a writer and how I want to continue my writing "career" whenever that gets started. My expectations have been put into perspective and while I do think that my degree is a bit of a toss off, it's still challenging and forces writers today to really look at what they're doing and think twice about putting something out there for people to read. So aside from all of my "life issues," being at university has helped me, I think, in more ways than one.
One of my lecturers, Leone Ross, said to a room full of 25 potential and - here's that word again - hopeful writers that about five us will move on to have successful writing careers and get published in some form. The writing industry is more competitive than the music industry and perhaps if we're lucky, one of us might even be the next J.K. Rowling* even though it's highly unlikely. She didn't want to tell us to crush all of our hopes and dreams, but really, c'mon...we're not all going to get published, be successful and live happily ever after. That just doesn't happen in real life.
She did say, though, that there are different alternatives for us all other than aspiring to be the next Big Thing. We can publish short stories in anthologies, work for freelance newspapers and magazines, publish online and still have a successful writing career. It may not always be glitz and glam, but hey, who said we were writing for the big bucks anyway? Those who write solely for money will eventually run out of steam and their lack of passion will end up being their downfall.
I'm excited to see where I'll be in the next three years. If anything, these past three years have been a means to answer some of my very own quesitons I had for myself before I even stepped one foot at university. The girl who once didn't know what she was going to do with her life, now has a better idea and clearer picture of where I want to be in this world and how to get there. I suppose ending each year with a big celebration is fun or necessary for some people. I certainly know what it's like to need closure for some things. But I don't want to stop or pause or put an end to things. I just want to keep going and going until I'm satisfied with where I end up.
* Why is it that J.K. Rowling is always the one person to get compared to whenever being judged on how successful you are? I can't stand it anymore.