I’m not Lazy!

 I think it’s finally safe to say that the Ted Talk about Procrastination changed my life. 

All my life, I had thought of myself as lazy. My mom told me I was lazy.  My teachers told me I was lazy. 

And maybe I was. 

At least in the physical sense...

As Iain pointed out, I was a good student. 

But when it came to anything involving physical expenditure I was definitely at a loss.

I honestly don’t know what’s happening to me but it’s as if I had become the exact opposite. I can’t hold still. I can’t just relax like I used to. 

Perhaps it’s just a phase.

But perhaps, I’ve finally understood the secret of combining physical activity with everything else...

And

As we already knew

The more I have to do

The more I want to do

The more I can do

Then again, if I always want  more stuff to do, I can’t be all that lazy...can I?

It Never Will

I said I’d write here once a week.

But honestly, I can’t think of anything to write about. 

This week: 

I bought a watch

I returned it

And then bought another one

I felt fat

Then I felt thin

I went hiking

I had 2 tacos

I had an over-the-phone doctor’s appointment

I got a hefty discount for birth control pills

I got a library card

I got a new book to read (Things fall apart) that I didn’t get at the library

I played terraria

I continued reading about racism

I tried recording my song. Many times.

I talked to my mom. She wasn’t doing ok. 

I talked to my dad. He was doing ok.

 And I discovered that the world is changing faster than ever, yet, it’s not changing as fast as we want it to.  

It

never

will.

My Second Tattoo

This weekend I got a tattoo of Kira. The best dog anyone has ever had. Although I could say many good things about Kira, that is not what I came here for. I came to write about a couple of  things I learned this weekend by getting this tattoo.

So, this wasn’t like a “heat of the moment” things or anything. I had been thinking about getting this tattoo since last year. I inquired here and there about good tattoo artists because I felt it takes real skill to be able to capture a photo and transform it into a tattoo.

Like... I didn’t wanna end up with something like this:

So I had thought that to stay safe I would just go for the super small and simple style. Something like this, you know?

But then I wasn’t convinced either because that could be ANY dog in the world. 

And Kira wasn’t just any dog. Ah... I promised myself I wasn’t going to start talking about Kira’s traits because then I’ll end up crying, but I guess it can’t be helped: how she seemed to have a watch so you always had to feed her and walk her exactly at the same time everyday. How she made that “hhhhhhhhmmmmmmpphhh” noise whenever you petted her... how she loved going in the back of the car and drooling all over the place. But mostly, how she looked at you. She looked and you straight in the eye and just blinked time after time. I always found it hilarious (and cute, of course, but mostly hilarious). 

So... when it finally happened... (In fact, I wanted to get this tattoo before it happened. I’m not sure what for, it’s not like I was gonna show it to her and she’d be all like “Oh Wow that’s me!” But still...)

Anyway, when it finally happened, I tried making some simple designed based off her photos, and I liked them ...ok... but they felt incomplete, so I asked the tattoo artist (Joe Jay) to help me with the design. Something kind of in-between, not like a photo but not just the outline I had made. 

The thing is, Kira had a lot of hair (it went everywhere). And that’s very hard to draw if you’re limited to hard lines. Joe Jay came up with a design that struck me as “ a little too intense” at first, but ...

And here’s where our real blog post begins, for now I will talk about the lessons I learned from getting this tattoo. 

1. I take pride in myself for being very “forward” and yet...I’m not!. I could have asked Joe Jay to re-do the whole thing from the very beginning. Or to stick to something more traditional (like in the second picture). I don’t know why I do this thing when I’m afraid to tell people if I don’t like something. 

I did ask him to modify some things and I did like the outcome, but I wasn’t jumping up and down about how much I loved it and I couldn’t understand why. It was in my power to make this thing look exactly like I wanted but I didn’t do it and I was angry at myself about it... 

and then it struck me. 

I didn’t do it because I myself didn’t know what I wanted. 

This brings me to ...

2. Why do I care so much about what other people think? At some point I panicked because I started thinking that my mom and my dad would eventually see it, and what would they think? What would they say? And it got even worse! I started thinking  “what if I have to wear a skirt? What will I do then?” 

Even that sentence doesn’t make sense! Under what kind of circumstances does one “have to wear a skirt” ? I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to anymore! (Eh...Almost) I also worried that people would like it. People would tell me 

It’s too big, you should have gotten a smaller one

It’s too bold, you should have chosen a more discrete place

It’s to hairy, you should have chosen the outline option

And then all of this, made me feel like I disliked my own tattoo because I kept thinking that other people wouldn’t like it, wouldn’t approve of it...

Perhaps that’s exactly why I didn’t know what I wanted in the first place...

I guess sometimes I don’t think of what I want. At least not independently. I can’t think of what I want without also thinking of what would be appropriate for the people around me, what would be approved and even praised by them, what would be acceptable for the society we live in. In fact, you know? This morning I woke up, I saw it and I thought “ Ah... I see the problem now, it’s a good tattoo but its a MALE tattoo... I should have looked for a female tattoo artist, then she would have given me a FEMALE tattoo”. 

Since when are there male and female tattoos? What even is that? 

Good thing I started thinking of all this ‘cuz  this tattoo damn straight represents Kira, and I may be writing this whole spiel just to convince myself that I like it well enough to be happy with it...

But also

I’m writing this to remember...

Sometimes we don’t know what we want, and we won’t know that what we got wasn’t what we wanted until AFTER we’ve gotten it. And we won’t like it at first, but we can choose to see the good in it and we’ll like it eventually.

Sometimes we don’t know what we want because we’ve been too busy worrying about what others want for us, what others think would be best for us, what other think we should do, what other think we should think.

And these things... I won’t just change them overnight. I won’t be able to just stop caring entirely from one day to the next. Perhaps I’ll never even get to the point of not caring at all what people think of me, but I’m still proud of myself for having taken the time to analyze what was going on inside me, and why I was feeling so conflicted. 

In any case, this is the tattoo (perhaps pointless to put it here since I’m the only one who will read this blog and I can already see my own tattoo since it’s my own ankle it’s on haha). 

And this is the reference picture it came from.

I will miss you Kira. And tattoo or not, I will never forget you.