The Tales of Carmensakura

  Yeah, it's been a hot minute since my last post. Life has been pretty busy. Things have changed a lot since the last time I was here.  Anyhow, I started doing invisalign.  Yeah, I did not expect to be doing this but alas, my dentist said it was the best way to prevent further bone loss.  I don't really know what to say either. But in the end, I decided to do it. In the past, as a teenager, I struggled with whether I should do braces. I am aware that I have very misaligned teeth and apparently, that's not good.  I was made fun of as a teenager regarding my misaligned teeth. But I thought it was just aesthetics so I really didn't think much about it in my teenage years or my adulthood. But my latest dental visit proved something else and so, I decided to do it.  After a few trays in, it doesn't feel too bad.  But to say it's easy is also false.  Wearing invisalign puts a lot of responsibility and discipline on the patient and that's actually quite...

To my dear friend, thank you for being there for me in my darkest hour. Thank you for being the friend that sat next to me as I cried, confused and angry. Thank you for being that friend who was honest with me. I appreciated the harsh truths because I needed to hear it. Thank you for being the person that I can make a pact with. Thank you for helping me defeat a fear that been haunting me for a long, long time. Thank you for pushing my beliefs regarding work and the world. Thank you for breaking those beliefs. Thank you for reminding me that we can dream again. Thank you for making new pacts with me.  May we achieve all that we want. May we be there for each other. May we hold each other close in our darkest hours and to celebrate together in our deepest joys. Am I afraid to lose a friend like you? Absolutely. But I'm old enough to know and understand that friendships come and go. And although, I may lose you one day, to life or other consequences, I just want to say, you'd had...

  Yeah, in a way, I'm finally back. Yeah, I'm sorry for abandoning this blog for 2 two years.  It's just a lot happened in the past 3 years. Mainly, it's the pandemic.  Boy, that hasn't been fun for me at all.  I'm just going to be honest here because I promised myself that I'd be honest here. The truth is, the pandemic was my worst nightmare. I have always been a person who was anxious and my anxiety mainly was triggered by health related things. I was often sick in my younger toddler years. Although I don't particularly remember most of it, I think it stuck to me. I think the effects are clear.  So the pandemic was my worst nightmare come true. It's a little insane to have your worst nightmare and worst fear come true.  The stories you tell yourself when you were a kid. The fear you had. The biggest exaggeration of it. Most people can ignore theirs and say it won't come true. But mine did.  And it's a funny, funny thing. Well, less funny an...

  I been watching some Japanese drama and it's been hitting home for me. I was watching one Japanese drama that happens to also be a comedy but I could relate to one of the main characters because our jobs were quite similar. We both worked in big corporations. We both had to analyse things. He and I were alike because we both didn't hate our jobs. We rather enjoyed it and took pride in the work that we did. But in a big corporation, when you are one worker in a sea of many workers, it's easy to be invisible and under appreciated. I completely understood that. When I was watching this drama, I had friends who were having an awakening. A friend of mine quit his job because he can no longer stand a job. The idea of working 9-6 disgusted him. He said we were wasting our time and time is our life so why are we doing that. It made me rethink. I am also working a 9-6. Am I wasting my time? And at that time, I did feel rather under appreciated. I was also wondering wha...

  I was watching The Farewell (2019) film and it made me feel alot of things.  I both related and didn't relate to this movie. This movie was a surreal experience for me. I am of immigrant and chinese descent. My great grandfather left China a long time ago. But I can't relate in that sense because my family is in the same country as I'm in. So I don't know what it's like to have family in another place while I am somewhere else.  But I admit it must have been hard on our immigrant ancestors to leave home. To make that first step. It's unfortunate that for my family, we don't know much about our history. Personally, I wish to know more. Maybe one day, I'll search for it. It'll be nice to see our ancestral home.  First of foremost, despite growing up in an Asian country where Asian values persist, I grew up with slightly leaning western thinking parents. Hence, I couldn't quite relate with my own culture as I growing up. It only got worst as I gro...

  I just started watching the queen gambit on Netflix and it's about a girl who's a prodigy in chess. It makes me think a little because when I was younger, I was "good" at chess. I was nowhere as good as Elizabeth Harmon but I think I was above average. I could defeat some players but once I hit a more serious player or a better player, I'd probably be stumped.  This game was taught to me by someone at school. At that time, in my school, one of the parents was an international chess master. He was obviously obsessed with chess. He volunteer out of his own time to coach the chess club in my school. My school saw that this was something we could be good at, made every kid play chess and those were "good" would have to join the chess club. So I joined the chess club. I didn't particularly love it but I didn't hate it either. My parents knew I was playing chess at the time. They didn't encourage nor did they discourage. They just let me be....

I attended a virtual financial festival of sorts last weekend.  I was expecting to learn things.  But in the end, it was the same old thing being said. The reason for these sorts of things is to increase financial literacy. But what is financial literacy? To understand your money better? To handle your finances better? One of the main things that was said in the financial festival and everywhere else was that young  people should start saving for retirement or just saving for a rainy day.  I do admit that, yes, financial literacy is important. You should know how to handle your finances.  But I find it a little tone deaf sometimes to generalise an entire generation by s aying things like, you young people need to start saving. While some young people might need to learn to save, not everyone is in the same boat. Did it ever occur to some people that, there might be a reason why young people or people in general can't save? Maybe because we earn to...

There was a financial virtual learning festival thing done in my country. So I signed up with a financial planner.  Honestly, I wasn't expecting much. I had meet financial planners before from bank and it generally wasn't a great experience. The ones I met generally focused on how we wouldn't have enough for retirement or whatever your financial goal is if you only save.  So they'll always recommend investing. Investing isn't a bad thing. But the thing that always annoys me is that they'll try to sell their unit trust funds.  It annoys me because  1) their sales charge is high (but they won't tell you this because this is their commission) 2) they don't know which fund would do well so they can be recommending me a fund that tanks I'll be honest. I'm a little hard to handle for financial planners. I'm generally pessimistic. So when people ask me when do I intend to retire, I always answer, I don't intend to retire. I'm realistic enoug...

  The iPhone 12 was just announced. So what did I think of it? Although technically, 5G is a great deal right now because well, most of us aren't even on it yet. But it's something neat to have so that in the future, when that's out, you have it and will be able to use it. As new phones go, we all expect a new chip for better processing power, better battery life and better camera.  This is just the norm now for having a new generation of phones.  For the iPhone 12, the new chip and better camera is ticked off that list. I'm not sure about the battery life though.  Honestly, Apple upped the camera again on their latest iPhones. Nightmode on all cameras. That's actually pretty neat. But if you aren't someone who's picky with cameras, these little things don't matter. As someone with an iPhone 11, I only have nightmode on one camera. But honestly, due to the lockdown, thanks to covid19, I haven't been out much taking pictures so it's not r...

  I just finished watching Emily in Paris lately. Honestly, it wasn't a great show. It started out okay. It had the whole Parisian dream vibe going for it and for a while, that was nice. But after a while, you'll realise the characters are a little shallow.  Not only that, the everything always turns out fine for her. I guess after a while, it gets abit boring that nothing terrible happens to her. Nothing is at stake for her. However, I totally lost interest in the show when she said that, back at her home country, she knew everything that's going to happen.  This is where it's a little nonsense. Any twenty something never says that. If anything, twenty somethings always say, help me? I don't know what I'm doing and most of all, I don't know where I'm going with my life. Either way, the show became increasingly frustrating in the end that even the Parisian dream charm couldn't save it. But enough of the show. As I watched that show, it made me go, oh...

This is about what I feel regarding money. Hence this is going to be a long and rather personal post. Disclaimer, this are just my thoughts. There's no right or wrong when it comes to this kind of things. Money. Let's be real. I have alot of emotions attached to it. I even majored in something related to money because I was just so curious.  Thanks to what I studied, I understood how the financial system work and why it was created. Learning about it gave me the illusion that I understood it. It also made me think that I was rational when it came to money. But the reality wasn't true and it also took time for me to figure that out. When I got my first job and handled my own finances, I took pride in doing it right. I tracked my expenses and I even have a spreadsheet of my bank accounts. I knew where my money was and what I did with it. (Not that I had much. Haha) The thing that mattered was that I was doing all the right things. But despite doing these things, it di...

Yesterday, I made Japanese curry rice and miso soup for dinner. It was pretty good and I was super full from it. Honestly, I don't really cook much because I grew up in a home where the kitchen was my mum's domain and she didn't really want us messing with it. She also didn't want us to get hurt so that's fair. But as I grew older, I realised that I love food. I love eating them and I also would like to create them.  I don't get much opportunity to cook much because well, I'm busy and I'm good at procrastinating. But yesterday, I made these from scratch.  I'll be honest. It wasn't easy. Everything was very unfamiliar to me. Thankfully it was just potatoes and carrots but cutting them was not easy. I was worried about getting cut by the knife pretty often. I'm also not sure if the knife sharpness was an issue, I definitely had difficulty with cutting the carrots. Luckily, it doesn't really matter what shapes the carrots and potatoes are cu...

So I finally went out for the first time since the lockdown, it was definitely an interesting experience. My lockdown experience started later than most people. Since I was essential worker, for the first month of the lockdown, I still had to go to the office. But the whole March - April was such an insane period. I went to office every day. Then the rules changed because my supervisor was trying to keep me safe and it changed to going to the office every alternate day. It changed again when April came because finally, I had all the company system remote access. So from mid April onwards, I begun working from home. So technically, I haven't left my house since April.  It was definitely a weird experience. Did I miss being outside? Did I miss enjoying the cup of matcha latte in a nice cafe? Absolutely. But at the same time, in my head, there's a tiny little alarm that goes, it's not quite safe yet . And that's true. The vaccine isn't here yet.  Luckily the s...

A song popped up in my playlist today. It was a Japanese song and I just vibe with it.  I just felt the song and it just hits me deep.  When I look up the lyrics, it will hit me even harder because the lyrics is always something that will cement the feeling further. As if what I felt when I first heard it, I only got the shallow part of it. So the lyrics will be deeper part and it'll just let me sink into the feelings further. I know people listen to foreign music all the time. Maybe other people feel this way too.  I wouldn't say I vibe with all Japanese songs. But if it's a foreign song and I vibe with it without understanding it, most likely, it'll be a Japanese song. Other than that, every time I find out what the lyrics are and I'll listen to it with the lyrics in hand. For some reason, I find the way the Japanese expression through music quite poetic. I'll like how they say it. I'll also like how they paint a picture or a story wit...

As you can tell from the previous post, I bought a MacBook Pro and it has arrived. I'm actually typing this from it, just to test the typing experience because everyone has mentioned the love for the keyboard. But this is not about that. Maybe I'll do a review once I got to use this laptop more. This is about me being an apple fan. I know that I love apple products but I always thought the love was just for the iPhone. Years ago, Steve Jobs put out the iPhone and I was one of the people who saw that and went wow, I love that. I want that. But of course, I never got an iPhone until quite late. That doesn't really matter though. To be honest, when I really think about it, I'm not quite sure what pushed me into getting the MacBook Pro either.  I was thinking about getting a new laptop anyway because the laptop that I was using was definitely just pissing me off. I mean, it was lagging a lot. The laptop wasn't even that old bu...

To be honest, although I studied Economics as my major, I don't exactly have the best mentality when it comes to money sometimes. It's something that I really struggled with. I know for a fact that money is a tool. It won't give me happiness but at the same time, not having it, I know it will definitely make my life hard because I need to live.  Personally, I flip flop between saving as much as possible to #YOLO and hence spending a fair bit.  The saving as much as possible was good for my bank account. But I have to admit that I felt a little jealous at times when I see people spending and enjoying their life. Because I want that but to keep the saving that I wanted, I couldn't do that. So it did feel restrictive. To be honest, I spent one year, just spending on necessities which was food and rent. It was hard but I managed. But to be fair, my first job salary wasn't exactly the best so even after food and rent, the amount I managed to save was just meh. But it was...

Let's talk about mental health. Alot of people have been in a lockdown and it must affect some of us. Personally, I have always been someone who gets anxious pretty easily. Hence, even before the lockdown, I downloaded some apps to help with my mental health. Initially, I downloaded youper. I even paid for the premium one because the free version was so limiting. You can go the Youper website here to download it. This app is available in both ios and android. Yes, be aware that the free version is very limiting. How is it? I been using it for a while. Some days it's helpful. Other days it isn't. I generally just use it as a place to vent my frustration sometimes because it has the AI chat. However, sometimes it doesn't help because as AI chats go, they aren't very smart. But checking in each day, to rate how I feel has helped me realise that emotions are a very fickle thing. When I was younger, I value emotions very highly. Maybe because I...