on yesterday
answering the prompt, "What happened yesterday?"
8:35 am
I wake up.
8:41 am
I fall asleep.
9:14 am
I wake up again.
9:19 am
I fall asleep again.
9:56 am
I wake up again, and this time, I don’t fall asleep. If I had the choice, I’d stay in bed all day in a perpetual cycle of waking up and falling back asleep, but I can’t. I hate setting alarms–I’m on summer break for a reason (and I always hit snooze anyway), so this is the next best thing: making myself get up the third time I wake up in the morning, no matter how much I want to go back to sleep.
10:16 am
I finish getting ready. Something I’ve realized recently is just how much nicer mornings are when I’m not rushing and/or running late (which was pretty much my constant state of being during the school year). It seems pretty trivial in comparison to the rest of the day, but being able to take my time with my morning routine, washing my face, brushing my teeth, putting on my moisturizer and sunscreen, and getting to experiment (and often fail horrendously) at messing around with makeup–these are all things that I didn’t give myself the luxury of enjoying and relishing in until recently.
It feels good to take care of yourself–who knew? Over the last few weeks of summer, I’ve been perfecting my morning routine, adding in a step here, taking one out there until it’s just the way I like it. It now takes me about 15 minutes to complete in total, and it’s my favorite part of my mornings.
10:25 am
I make myself brunch. It’s a really simple meal, and I have it practically every morning, but I love it. I’ve been trying to get better at cooking this summer, so this is an exercise I’ve challenged myself to meet every day. Chopped cucumber, tuna poké, sliced red onion, and tomatoes together with sugar and black vinegar–reading it written out, it sounds so incredibly random, but I could genuinely eat it for every meal. I fry an egg and make myself a matcha latte, and that’s my meal.
Barely any real cooking, extremely low effort, and a far reach from the gorgeous dishes my Mom is capable of concocting–but it’s reliable. Also, an improvement from the cup ramen I’d be making myself otherwise.
As I eat, I scroll mindlessly on Youtube for something that catches my attention. I’ve been enjoying watching these Geoguessr videos1 recently, where different players compete against each other to see how close they can get to the actual location of a random Google Maps shot. I’ve never even played the game, but it’s weirdly entertaining to watch what’s basically a geography competition being turned into a competitive game and streamed on Twitch.
I finish eating in about 20 minutes, clean my desk up and wash my dishes, and get to work.
10:48 am
I’ve been reviewing for the 18.02 ASE–I took MVC in high school and enjoyed it, so I’d figured that I would at least attempt the ASE since I’ve technically learned most of the concepts before. However, l definitely didn’t realize just how much of a toll time does on my memory, and so I’ve been going through some of the videos on OCW to refresh my skills. I review spherical and cylindrical coordinates, taking notes as I follow along on the lecture videos.2
Whenever I feel like my brain needs a small break from pure numbers, I get up, walk around my house, sit back down, let myself scroll on various social media for a little bit, and then refocus and do a Duolingo Mandarin lesson.3 It’s the best way I’ve found to allow myself to keep myself from getting too distracted while I take a break–I’ve found that keeping my brain engaged in a different, less strenuous task makes it much easier for me to jump back into whatever work I was doing before after my break.
By about 2 pm, I’m feeling pretty tired of integrals–and sitting at my desk in general–so I get up and go to my room to work out.
2:11 pm
I have absolutely no clue how to weightlift. Genuinely zero idea. I have a couple of friends who started weightlifting and going to the gym this past spring, and since summer break started, I’ve been tagging along with them a couple times and just following what they do in an attempt to stay active.
But because I don’t really know what I’m doing, it’s kind of.. scary to go to the gym on my own, simply because I feel like I’d get lost among the rows and rows of machines without someone to guide me. So, my compromise is stealing my Dad’s lightest dumbbells and trying to follow my friends’ workout circuits at home until I feel confident that I can navigate the extremely terrifying Planet Fitness landscape on my own.
From what I’ve gathered, I’m supposed to work a different group of muscles each day, so I copy my friend Emily’s arm workout, stopping intermittently throughout the workout to search up reference pictures or videos on how to do certain exercises because, again, I really don’t know what I’m doing. I’m hoping that by the time college starts, I’ll be able to just go to the gym on my own to get quick workouts done whenever I have time, but for now, my little at-home-yoga-mat-corner works just fine.
I finish my workout in about 45 minutes, take a shower, and then relax on my bed, alternating between texting my friends, reading my book, and mindlessly watching youtube videos (in addition to the Geoguessr videos I’ve discovered, I also just love watching cooking videos–there’s something about seeing someone put together a meal that both looks and tastes good that makes me want to run away and become a professional chef in some tiny corner of the world). My current read is a book called The Chosen and the Beautiful, which is a fantasy twist on The Great Gatsby told from Jordan Baker’s point of view, except Jordan is asian, queer, and capable of magic. As someone who actually really enjoyed reading The Great Gatsby in junior year of high school, I’ve been really enjoying comparing this retelling to the original and all the variations that the author Nghi Vho added.
By around 4 pm, I pull myself out of bed, moving to my desk to get a bit more work done and then eat dinner once my Mom finishes her meetings for the day.
5:36 pm
I finish my dinner and head out to go for a walk. I know I’m blessed with California weather, but days in the summer still do get too hot to go out before evening. I take a path around my neighborhood until I get to the park near my house, where I walk around for about an hour before heading back.
6:28 pm
I get home and see my Mom working in the garden, so I go and join her. Ever since I was in Kindergarten and brought back bean seeds from a science experiment, we’ve had a tradition of starting a garden each spring that we can take care of and eat vegetables from through the summer.
Right now, we have beans, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, strawberries, and a few new sprouts of spinach and kale that we recently got to replace an area where our corn seeds failed to grow. As she pulls weeds, I help water the plants and the nearby bushes, picking anything ripe that I see to take inside.
Over the years, gardening has become a really therapeutic part of my day, and it’s a consistent highlight to be able to end each day by enjoying the cool summer evening breeze. As the sun slowly slips below the horizon and the mosquitoes start coming out, we head inside with our arms full of berries and vegetables to be incorporated into the next day’s meal.
8:49 pm
I clean out my inbox, respond to emails, and wrap up any work I had been doing during the day, and figure out my general plans for tomorrow.
One of my friends has been trying to get me into gaming, so I play a few rounds of Overcooked4 with her and a couple other friends and then quit before the game makes me literally lose my mind.
10:56 pm
Before I head off to get ready for bed, I fill out my journal for the day. I’ve been keeping a journal since 2016, and every night, I write a short blurb on how the day went and then rank my mood on my mood meter, where bright pink means on top of the world and dark gray means a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day.5
After I’m done, I head to the bathroom, where I take out my contacts, brush my teeth, shower, and go through the steps of getting ready to flop down among the stuffed animals that take up almost every corner of my available bed space.
11:23 pm
And just like that, I turn off the light and get into bed–the day is over, and I’m asleep by 11:30.
There are certainly days in my life much more exciting than this–where I meet up with friends, or try a new restaurant, or simply leave my house for longer.6 Days where I’m busier, with more obligations, meetings, and tasks piling up that I spend hours completing.
Of course, there are also many, many days where I wake up at 12 pm instead of 10 am, where I don’t even check my email inbox, where I laze around and barely leave my room, much less go for a walk.
I think, among the chaos that is the summer after my senior year, yesterday represents a happy medium that I’m striving to achieve more often. By enjoying days like this more, I’m getting better at accepting that I don’t necessarily need those exciting, adrenaline-pumping, brighter-than-the-sun days–sure, I love hanging out with my friends, but I’m learning to be more comfortable taking control of my own time and finding productivity and joy in my solitude.
I could have written about one of those more exciting, arguably more interesting days, but I’ve realized that the reason I enjoy writing–and blogging–is to capture these smaller, everyday moments of my life that I would otherwise forget. I’ll have ticket stubs of movies watched and photos of trips taken with friends, but this may be the only memorialization of the exact angle the sun makes on the tiles of my kitchen before it’s gone. Everything is going to change soon, but this summer, I’ve been learning to romanticize a quiet life7 and find joy in the mundane “laundry and taxes”8 tasks of my life.
an online game that randomly places you somewhere in the world based on Google Maps coverage, and you have to figure out where you are through signs/scenery/context clues.
I love that the videos provided are actual recorded lectures–I find them so much easier to follow than shorter, conceptual videos. Also, I find it hilarious how the 18.02 lecturer always tries to erase each board in succession as he lowers them (and how the class laughs each time).
I'm a native Mandarin speaker (it was my first language!), but I'm not literate in it at all, so I've been trying to learn a bit so that I can at least read the WeChat messages my relatives send me without needing to use the translate feature.
a video game where you work in teams to prepare and cook meals, except it’s almost designed to frustrate you with how chaotic it gets.
yesterday was a warm yellow - a good day :)
I've definitely had a lot of versions of this kind of day where I walk to a cafe near my house to work instead of staying home, which helps break up the monotony that comes with summer.
Phoebe Bridgers, “I know the End”
a particularly poignant quote from Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is also now easily one of my favorite movies of all time.