I don’t even remember if I bothered writing blog entries for past years for end-of-year reflections but now that I’m reaching the end of my summer break from work, I figure it’s worth smashing out a blog entry on various reflections. Because it feels like a LOT has happened and the amount of progress I’ve made is more recogniseable and steady.
My new place!
For those not in the loop, I bought my own place about a year and a half ago, a 2 bedroom apartment/unit thingy in the suburbs. It’s not an apartment like in one of those high rise apartment buildings, but it is a single unit-like place on a plot of land that has like 7 other apartments (admittedly, arranged rather awkwardly).
Having freedom and my own place to take care of, is one heck of a blessing. I can do modifications and adjust my environment to suit myself, and know that anything and everything is my responsibility.
Of course, the amount of cooking and cleaning is no doubt a standard bane of being an adult that I have to face now and it’s been an interesting learning experience figuring out my strategies in doing them.
Cooking
Cooking is fun when I get to experiment. A chore when I’m busy. However as I’ve been learning new recipes and experimenting it’s definitely getting easier now.
I rarely eat out because I mostly do food prep and keep a stash of frozen stuff as well as instant noodles/ramen + add-ons for emergencies or one-off meals, and now that I’ve had time to slowly build up my pantry I’m in a pretty comfortable place.
Eating out is one of those things…where I can only really justify it if it’s convenient. For example if I’m doing errands and it’s lunch time, I might pick up some Maccas/KFC/Hungry Jacks and eat in the car on the way back. If I’m already at work and maybe someone wants to catch up after work for dinner, then I’ll eat out with them. The notion of ‘(only) going out to eat’ only works for me if it’s anywhere within walking distance from my place, of which thankfully I live close to the local strip with plenty of choices. Again, this in itself is pretty rare as well, and at least I’m saving money…I guess? I don’t care much for like, “the dining experience”, or in the least they’re not interesting enough for me to purposefully seek out on my own – so long as the food is good, I’m happy.
Eating healthy, ugh. I’m making positive changes such as switching to low-carb bread, eating more fibre, brown rice, and so on. However I think now the changes I need to make for the positive health benefits: cutting out processed sugar products, eating more veggies, are the ones that’s much harder for me to handle in terms of my current workflow and overall happiness.
- Cutting out processed sugar products will be difficult because I’m definitely guilty of indulging in the occasional chocolate, and I’ve also got ginger beer syrup (because I f@#$ing love ginger beer). It’s like that little burst/perk of happiness that I feel like I need from them, so it’s about finding suitable replacements, I guess.
- My biggest issue with (green) veggies is the sheer amount of bulk that I’d need to feel sufficiently full. Combine that with my current meal prep habits and they have a tendency to rot away in the fridge before I get to them. It seems like relying on frozen veggies is the way to go here rather than buying fresh.
Cleaning
It’s reasonably safe to say that cleanliness is not my strong suit and trying to making cleaning a regular thing is not something I’ve figured out yet.
What works for me for the time being is that when things get ‘bad enough’ (and this is purely a feels thing for me) then my brain will be like ‘Okay, I have to clean this because if it gets worse it’ll irritate me.’ Then I need to wait for a moment where I’m idle/bored enough such that my brain is sufficiently switched off and/or I don’t have the mental energy to focus on anything, and ensure I have enough time and distraction to carry out said cleaning task. These moments usually happen when I’ve given myself too much time before some scheduled event, or in the afternoon/evening when I’ve expended a fair amount of mental energy previously in the day or just woke up from a nap.
Mortgage and Rate Increases
I mean by now I’ve probably had about 4-5 notifications of rate increases since acquiring my mortgage, but it seems that my habits were already frugal enough such that even spending on myself isn’t enough to make me worry about paying off the mortgage.
I’m someone who’s generally quite risk averse, and I can quite comfortably say that my past choices in doing so (e.g. not borrowing the maximum possible amount, frugal habits, relatively inexpensive hobbies, etc.) still currently leaves me in a comfortable enough position to keep doing my own thing.
Just to throw out some ballpark figures: initially my mortgage repayments were about $1000 per month. As of writing, rate increases have basically upped it to about $1500 per month. This is still fundamentally better than renting a 1 bedroom apartment which would usually go for ~$400 per week. I still make enough to put $2000 per month into the offset account, so for my own personal scenario I’m not too worried, and I’ve already saved enough in the offset account to tide me over.
I should add, my scenario shouldn’t be treated like some kind of success story. I was lucky enough to be able to stay in the family home until my early 30s (save for a 1 year stint of having moved out), and I had saved up a large-enough deposit relative to the price of my property to result in a low-enough mortgage repayment. Only now in my early 30s does it feel like I’m ‘living life’ in a way that I feel happy with.
Full time work!
For the past 7-8 years or so I was doing a lot of casual teaching in undergraduate maths, but 2022 was the year that I was now working in an official full time (but fixed-term) capacity at UniMelb. In a nutshell, I’d worked enough such that Fair Work Regulations kicked in and the university was required to promote me and a bunch of other long-timers.
Truthfully not much has changed in terms of what I was doing, but knowing that my job is at least stable for the next three years (as my fixed-term contract states) is no doubt a huge peace of mind, and if for whatever reason things go awry then I actually have ample time and some kind of soft deadline to figure out an exit (safe to say I’ve rustled a few jimmies already, whoops).
It’s actually surprising just how much latent fear I held while I was working casual. Even though I was reasonably trusted and had earned my keep at most places, the sheer notion of being casual to begin with meant that things were unstable enough for me to be reasonably scared of settling down somewhere.
So going into the second year of my contract, I’m hoping to challenge myself a little bit by teaching other subjects, and contributing a bit more to the academic/maths/university community.
Relationships
I mean, I’m still single. Have always been single. There’s a joke in anime that if anyone’s still a virgin by 30 years old they become a wizard, and I’m wondering where the heck my magic powers are now /shakefist
This year I haven’t bothered to seek people out for the purpose of dating. Granted, work + doing stuff around my new place has kept me busy enough, but I definitely was tempted a few times to hop back on the dating apps. Thankfully there were enough past barren experiences to remind me not to bother.
I don’t think this’ll change for 2023, and my overall stance will probably remain the same: I’ve got enough in life to keep myself busy, but if there is a special someone (who also approaches me of their own accord) then I’ll definitely make time for them.
Dad died
In the first half of this year, my father (who’d been spending the last 10+ years in nursing homes) finally caught COVID and recovered, but a month later he passed away. One can reasonably assume that catching COVID on top of his pre-existing conditions no doubt exacerbated things.
I have a post sitting in drafts that I might publish some day, but in short: It seems like I’d done my grieving a long time ago, probably a few years after he was put in a nursing home.
What I’d like to achieve going forwards (and hopefully within 2023)
Setting up a side hustle
In a nutshell, I keep coming up with ideas for stuff I want but actually can’t find it being sold online. It seems like people enjoy enamel pins, washi tape and other little cute decorations so every now and then I’ve been doing a bit of research on how to get them mass produced (and as a result I now understand why some stores charge like $15 per enamel pin), and possibly set up an online store of some kind.
This is not the only idea I have in mind though, but I’m keeping quiet about the others. The general idea here though is to have more than one income stream (hopefully one of them being a passive income stream), even if they fundamentally result in just beer money (not that I drink beer, but you get the idea).
Make more content: blog entries, videos, streams
I feel like now that I’ve had at least a year to settle into my place that I ideally should have some time to eek out in terms of returning back to an old hobby. Suffice to say it’s pretty clear that I want to do far too much in this particular area and given my struggles in being able to do anything down this particular path in 2022 is probably an indicator I won’t be that much more successful in 2023.
Blogging
I mean, I’m pretty terrible at writing/posting regularly because I could just easily go vent it all on social media instead. Other times the thoughts are not really all that comprehensive/long enough to want to flesh it all out in detail in a blog post.
A change of heart I’ve had recently is realising that I could probably use this personal blog to document various parts of my life where I can at least share my thoughts/insights/decisions (one future blog post in mind is sharing my treadmill+TV setup but more detailing the decisions that went into the selection), rather than sticking to reviews and musings and reflections.
Productivity wise I think my issue with blogging is that even a single post can take hours to write because it’s not a constant stream of thoughts from start to end and I’m constantly editing in my head and on the page at the same time. Additionally I won’t have all the thoughts in one place when I write, and other thoughts will come as I write. Coming to terms with acknowledging that not every blog post will be perfect/complete enough is something I’m getting better at, but it’s still a significant mental barrier of mine.
Streams
In general I want to play more games, but these days I dislike playing games on my own and it makes more sense to me to stream at the same time. As of writing I’ve been able to stream on Twitch and Youtube quite comfortably, so now it’s a matter of sitting down and making a regular habit of it. The other intention along this line is to also be deliberate with gaming/relaxation/streaming time and switching off from work, because right now any non-work time for me tends to be pretty unstructured.
Videos
I’ve come back to the idea of doing video essays where I explain my perspective and opinions (don’t worry, nothing controversial!) and now that I’ve bought myself a new PC I’m in pretty good standing software/hardware wise to get going.
Additionally I’d also like to come back to playing the cello, and I’d like to do a bunch of multi-cello arrangements and upload those as videos as well.
Learn ALL the things, skills, as much as I can, but on my own terms
Japanese
I don’t remember how long I’ve been learning Japanese but I’ve bought a subscription to Busuu and have been working through their curriculum, supplementing with Wanikani for kanji learning. While I’m already watching anime and listening to Japanese VTubers, it makes sense to continue my learning of Japanese given how vastly different it is from English. A milestone goal would be to pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) at the lowest level, but I have no clue if this is feasibly achievable – chances are I’ll probably sit it when I’m grossly overprepared! That said, I’m aware of local Japanese classes and the like, so it’ll be nice to reach out to them and hopefully bettering my Japanese once I’m confident enough to speak simple sentences.
Digital drawing
I managed to do about two weeks worth of Inktober in 2022 before I realised I was going too hard on myself and I have to admit one of the more frustrating things for me is trying to figure out how to be conscious about practising rather than being like ‘Oh let’s just pick something to draw’ and wing everything. At some point I’ll find a good enough resource that’ll enable me to just sit down and work through it steadily, because there’s a whole lot of variables and factors in drawing software that makes it difficult for me to figure out in the sense of “Am I using the right settings?” and so on.
A VTuber I watch has pretty much set a standard for what I’d like to be able to do, but essentially he’s really good at speed drawing/painting that he has his own series where he bashes out a live-with-no-preparation-in-advance commission. If you have an hour to spare, or don’t mind watching this in the background, this is one of such examples:
I’m obviously a LONG way away from being able to achieve this level of mastery, but it’s lovely to actually have something to look forward to.
Getting an autism diagnosis
I’ve suspected for a while that I’m mildly autistic, more in the sense that I relate with a lot of other stories about autism that I’ve been reading on the internet, and seem to click best online with others who’re also autistic and/or ADHD.
Something that seems feasibly easy enough to achieve in 2023 is getting some formal diagnosis/affirmation now that I’ve done my research on the process: essentially ~$1000 out-of-pocket, and a few hours of testing/surveys.
Health
Now that I’m in my early 30s all the jokes about lower back pain and having to do healthy habits is starting to ring true. This year I’ve been able to use my treadmill + TV system that enables me to do regular 30+ minutes walks while watching anime (where currently I’m able to do 4.5km in 45 minutes which is about 5000 steps at 6.5km per hour, and this is two anime episodes’ worth)
There’s a family history of fatty liver problems and I’ve been advised to better my diet, of which I’m taking baby steps towards, but find that most of my vices are more on the mental/practical side of things e.g. “Uggh I’m really itching for a sugar hit.” “God why do green veggies go bad so FAST in the fridge?!” In the least having switched to eating more fiber and drinking enough fluids, I’m definitely making progress.
Truthfully I don’t think I feel any different but I can quite confidently say while I have the capacity and control over my diet, it’s something I can at least work towards. Given the number of things that’ve happened out there in the world simply because people didn’t listen to expert advice and took precautions, you bet I’ll be taking those dang precautions to the best of my ability!
In the end it’s still mostly steady self-improvement and aiming to be in an equal-or-better position next year.
Not that I want to lord it over anyone, especially those having shittier times, but given my circumstances 2022 has been a reasonably good year for me. I don’t think I’ve caught COVID (or at least I’ve not suffered any cold nor long-lasting symptoms), I started off on a good note career wise, and I’ve been able to explore hobbies and have a long desired freedom I never felt like I had in the past.
Financial independence would be the next big long-term desired goal but that’s definitely not achievable anytime soon besides winning the lottery, but in the least I know with my current set of goals I’m working towards it.
Anyway, I’m definitely in a better position than I was last year, so I’m looking forward to building on that!
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