hannah.ananas

And another thing…

Continuing on last night’s thoughts, I remember this morning another awesome quality about me:

I ride a Vespa.

And I ride a powerful Vespa.

And it is bright red.

And I ride it because I like it and because it helps save the planet and because it is cost efficient and quite inexpensive when compared to a car – actually, it is quite inexpensive period… even my insurance is about eight US dollars a month – and because I am a user of public transportation and used to use my bicycle to get around town, so it was a semi-natural step for me to have a Vespa…

Just another simple thing for the list of my super awesome qualities…

Just saying…

😉

Post-a-day 2020

By golly

I don’t know what it is that has me always pining after some gorgeously awesome guy, and always wishing hat somehow, someday could he possibly ever be interested in me, want me?

I mean… grow up, right?

When am I going to let go of this little girl nonsense and be a woman about it all?

I don’t necessarily behave like a little girl out in the world – though I occasionally do – but I definitely do in my head.

If I had been being the woman I want to be way back when, I would have told him hen and there: Whenever and if ever you get over your breakup, let me know – I’d love to go out with you… no pressure intended.

But I didn’t do that.

I sopped around feeling unwanted and undesirable – thereby making me les want-able and less desirable – and depressed myself slightly by constantly considering all the ways I knew I was inadequate for him and which made it make perfect sense that he wouldn’t be interested in me.

And so here I am, months and months later, a whole new calendar year later, and he is in a relationship with someone else, and I keep having the same thoughts of inadequacy about myself, still wondering if, even in an alternate situation, he ever possibly could want to be with me, of all people…

I mean… Seriously(!), banana…. wt??

I am amazing as a human being.

People love learning just about anything from me, and I have a plethora of worldwide knowledge and experiences and oddities and silliness and wisdom… I am gorgeous both physically and on the inside – and I’m healthy and enjoy silly jokes – and am an all-round wonderful human being whose main goal is to share her talents with the world as an expression of her God-given love for Creation… I have silly quirks and I love wholly and truly and intensely; I am a natural teacher and communicator; I love myself and am grateful for my life; I take care of people, and have recently learned to start taking care of myself, too… I will not settle in life, and I aim to empower others to go for their own dreams and goals and what works for them in life… I have been through total bull and have come out clean in the other side, ready to use my experiences to help others in the world around me… and I am very smart and rather highly educated, and I am a genius dancer (not joking either)… I accept people for who they are while simultaneously hoping for and helping empower them to be the best possible versions of themselves… I tell the truth…

I am darn lovely as a human being and as a woman.

I need to get over this nonsense of always semi-subconsciously considering myself not good enough.

It isn’t like I actually say to myself, “You aren’t good enough for him,” or anything like that.

I just have all the other comments that show that I think I’m not good enough for him.

But I am good enough.

And for anyone.

I think being our highest and best selves means to be who we are meant to be…

Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.

Teresa of Avila

And I am doing a very good job, especially in this past year or two, at being that person… and my world keeps lighting up more and more…

I have minimal money to my name right now, yet I had someone tell me tonight that I am “lit up”… and I know that I am.

I am terrified at the risk and the newness of a lot of this stuff, and also at the extreme potential I have to be my best and most beautiful and most powerful self in this current world around me… and I am lit up by it.

I don’t know right now what else I want to say about the sulky pining situation… perhaps I just needed to express that I am acknowledging its existence… for now, anyway.

Maybe, just my naming it and calling it what it is, it will disappear… that is kind of a thing in life already…

Yes, perhaps…

For now, though, I shall go to sleep, for I need to sleep and I want to start going to the gym again starting tomorrow (I only just got back home over the weekend and have been sick since then)…

So, goodnight fair world.

May we all recognize fully the beauty that we are and the love that we each bring to the world by our own individual existences…

Post-a-day 2020

Oh, dear…

I overhear a girl complaining… I look up.

It is to her friends that she complains… it seems she went to the cafeteria to get food for all of them.

She is complaining that she is hot and tired… a girl commented at her in the cafeteria, “That looks like a lot of food…”

“Yeah…,” she responded, slightly ironically, but in agreement.

It seems she did not say it was for multiple people… for three people…, and she felt extreme embarrassment at being considered someone who would be eating it all herself…

“Can you imagine what it must be like… standing there with all this food?.. like…”

I reevaluate what she holds in her hand, as she fans her face with the free hand.

She holds three small paper trays, each with two medium-sized egg rolls and a sweet and sour sauce container in it – any pair of the egg rolls could fit in the palm of my hand at once, with no concern of being dropped.

I probably could hold all six in one hand, if I curled my fingers upward only slightly.

It is not a lot of food.

It is three servings of an appetizer.

And it is to be lunch for three high school girls.

I guess the sauce has loads of calories, but how can they possibly survive on such a meal?

I am hungry just watching them, and I already had lunch.

The worst part for me, though, is how they are embarrassed at the amount of food – all three were embarrassed for the one who bought it all and was seen carrying them solo – and that they consider it to be “a lot” of food for one person.

It makes me gag just thinking about the eating disorder tendency…

::sigh

😦

And then, what’s worse, they didn’t even finish eating all of it…

Post-a-day 2020

Living in the now?

People keep asking me how my trip was… and I keep having to pause to think about it, realizing that I’m not sure what to say, and then I end up just kind of shrugging saying generally that it was good… and not entirely convincingly.

Thinking about it now, I find it to be a lot like Mondays.

People ask me how my weekend was, and I have no idea… That was last week… I’ve already reset for the new week, and last week is all the way I’m the past now.

Being back in Houston again, living in my own house again…, I can help but feel I am right back to where I left off from here.

Second week of December, Christmas is coming, then New Year’s… more cold weather for a while…

Not the third week of January, Christmas over and Nee Year’s over and the weather likely to be ok the warmer side more and more already…

I felt the cool air this evening – love 20s and low 70s – blowing a perfect temperature over my leather jacket while riding, and I realized I expected it to grow colder over the next several days…, and also that it would do no such thing.

This is Houston – it gets warmer from here.

And so, as I look back on my past month, I feel almost that it never happened… not recently, anyway.

It feels miles away (which it actually is) and so long ago…

Just like my weekends feel on Monday mornings.

Looking at photos and telling my cousin this afternoon about part of our trip, I know that t was an absolutely spectacular trip.

But it just doesn’t feel so much like it, and I think that is mostly due to the fact that I have moved onward and am focused on what I have to do here and now, not on what happened last week or the two weeks before that, or even further back than that…

Yeah…

P.S. I keep writing 2019, though…, so maybe I’m not too much in the now, but in a fairyland dreamscape instead… haha 😛

Post-a-day 2020

Dreams

Last night, I dreamed that I was in a live-in minimester course at UT (Austin) with the temporary professor Johnny Depp.

The class began beautifully (though a couple people almost got hit by cars in the road), and was about learning to pinpoint pieces of perfection within one’s artistic expression in various aspects of art and life.

He was a very good teacher and quite a silly, introvert-esque guy who really didn’t seem to be too bothered by anything negative, and who was a good teacher naturally, without really trying or having to think things through too much.

It was a great class and very non-professional-like in terms of traditional school, but the activities and approaches were spectacular from a learning standpoint – he really got us getting in touch with everything within our inner core, and challenged us beautifully.

He commented multiple times about how he doesn’t really have many/any friends, and that it mostly because 1) he was weird and 2) he was busy working on stuff and being silly, and most people had normal jobs and weren’t interested enough in doing something like a paint swimming day with trampolines and dogs instead of going to the office.

They aren’t too interested in hooky…

Thus began my brief time of befriending Johnny Depp…

And then the dream ended, and I awoke wanting donuts…

I still want those donuts…

… hmm…

Post-a-day 2020

Maybe it’s just for me

I don’t know what it is, but there is something about riding my bike on the highway through the cold, winter evening weather that makes me want to arrive home to my husband, have a little romp fest with him, and then snuggle up to a movie and hot cocoa by the fire together.

And, I mean, it isn’t exactly a sexual thing – riding my bike through the cold isn’t an erotic experience or anything.

It is kind of like how a cold winter day just kind of makes you want to snuggle close to a warm mug of hot chocolate or apple cider… only, when riding my bike on these days, I just want to have the little romp fest first, and then snuggle up under blankets with the warm mug.

Just as the hot chocolate just sounds like the perfect next step to the day, so does this little grouping of events sound for me.

Granted, this is Houston, Texas, so we won’t often have fires going anyway, and, besides that, I don’t exactly have a husband at the moment (or anything like one), so my scenario isn’t exactly plausible…, however, the cold weather and wind just somehow make it seem like the perfect way to continue on in the day.

Perhaps, somewhere down the road, that will be the way I end each chilly day of winter.

For now, though, I just smile at the slight irony of the situation and utter oddness about its existence in the first place, and then I feel the chill start to sink into my skin under my ski suit, and suddenly feel slightly sick, my stomach ebbing toward forcing out whatever might be at that moment within its uncomfortable, tightening confines…

Anyway, so that was my afternoon, eh?

How was yours? 😛

Post-a-day 2020

Naturally…

True to form, it is after three in the morning and I am only just getting into my bedtime routine.

Sure, I showered before 9pm.

But then I kind of fiddled around with photos from my past month’s trips, before starting the movie I had planned out to watch while unpacking.

Since I had already turned on the computer for the movie, I didn’t want to put it off another night, even though it was almost midnight by the time I actually got to being ready to watch the movie, and I totally was tired enough to go to sleep then and there.

And, of course, the movie I selected was not one great for unpacking, because I hadn’t seen it in a while, and it is one of my favorites…, so I inevitably ended up sitting down to watch, instead of unpacking.

Oops…

Nothing new there, really, though.

Oh, well…

So, I find myself at 3:17am with probably another ten to twenty minutes of bedtime routine to do before I actually get to sleep.

And I am getting up by ten in the morning, so woohoo…

Good thing I haven’t been sick or anything lately…

…

… oops.

Anyway, goodnight!

Post-a-day 2020

Welcome Home

It is rainy and humid and warm (but will be cold by morning!), and the house was humid and miserable when I first arrived, and the shower was standing, and my towel was (is?) big and fluffy, and I wrapped it all around my body and then my head, and it still isn’t soaked through…, and my bed is soft and big enough for me and not on the floor, and it is finally cool in my room and the hallway and all, but it is still humid in a good way, and so my nose insides aren’t hurting anymore…

Yes, I am back to Houston, Texas, and its winter weather and wonderful beds and towels…

And it feels delightful to be here.

But I’m hungry… hmm…

I guess I kind of did miss a meal somewhere along this past 39-hour day that was my January tenth of 2020… hmm…

Post-a-day 2020

Jet-setting oven

Well, here we go…

It has been an interesting day so far, and continues to be so now…

I currently am very annoyed with Air Canada, but I am hoping that they will remedy the nasty problem when they open the counter (as soon as this ANA flight finishes at the same gate, and someone shows up for my flight).

Also, what to do?

Buy the filthy expensive whisky for my dad, a whisky that you kind of can’t get anywhere else anyway?

I think so.

But I have to wait for them to open the counter to remedy the situation with my flight first…, then walk all the way back to the duty free place that had it (because the one here doesn’t have it).

Huff……

God, help me heal through this next bit of traveling (because I also happen to have a fever right now, naturally).

😛

P.S. They did not remedy the situation, and it was not a very comfortable flight arrangement… however, my seat companion and I commiserated and laughed about it a bit, and had some great conversation besides, so it ended up being tolerable (fortunately!).

Post-a-day 2020

Snuggle bug

The final night has arrived: I return to Texas tomorrow.

It is weird; I don’t feel like saying, “I’m going home…” it just doesn’t feel quite right.

For at least part of me, this is home – I am at home in Japan… in a way.

No, I do not want to stay permanently.

In dinner conversation, the idea came up of my working at an international school or special private school in Japan… and I almost felt a need to quell a rising panic…

But I reminded myself that I am safe and okay, and that I am perfect as I am, and I was able to remain calm easily and communicate nicely – aka I didn’t shout like a five-year-old, “Dame!” (No way!), but instead moved the conversation forward with a different route, so as not to offend.

(Because who wants to be told, “I kind of hate living full-time in your culture, thanks,”?)

Japan is a place for me to visit, that is for sure.

I even could see myself coming for slightly-extended-stays in the future, maybe for photography or something of the sort.

But not living here again.

I am sad to leave, but I am relieved to be going home to Houston, a place that always will hold a spirit of home for me.

I am nervous to go back to my low-budget life as a graduate student slash tutor slash up-and-coming photographer.

However, I actually am quite excited at the terror of what is to come next with all of it – classes and thesis, lots of graduation announcement photos, developing my editing skills, creating my kimono art show, teaching art & yoga (bilingually at that!), tutoring and teaching French and Spanish And Japanese, studying Japanese… maybe even watching some Olympic Games (I did buy some temporary tattoos and nail art to be a Japan fan during them…)…

Yes, I am looking forward to the next steps.

Especially getting even more fit… the gym has been something crazy for me this past month.

I have been totally fine without it, and even eating anything and everything delicious-tasting… and I have grown accustomed to being comfortable with myself more fully…

I am excited to return to the gym as my more-developed self that I now am… more true to myself than before (which was already purty darn good and true).

I am excited to see and to interact with my semi-crush-ish guy, and to be totally comfortable and okay with our being friends forever…

And to have that place be cleared up for something new and a bagillion times better to come into my life… I am ready to take on this life…

Thank you, Japan.

Thank you, Sara, my once-again snuggle buddy (now aged nine years).

Thank you, God.

Thank you, Texas – here I come. 😉

Post-a-day 2020