tarobun

It's been a while since I've written anything on here (seems like two months!). I lose track of what I've already mentioned, so forgive me if I repeat details.

We moved. We had the option of picking between a cheap one bedroom in Nob Hill, around 2000/mo, and a nicer apartment in an apartment complex along Embarcadero, for roughly a thousand more. We ended up picking the nicer apartment for a few reasons, but most of all that we just wanted to live somewhere nice for once. I don't regret it; I'm pretty satisfied with where we ended up.

I left my old enterprise company working on storage software to go to a little start-up in SOMA that has a little raw and early-stage platform for people to make arts/crafts and DIY videos on their mobile devices; their mission is to connect creators on their platform to brands willing to pay for their content to advertise their products, and enable those creators to make a little hustle from their hobbies. I'm not in love with the whole short-form content creation and brand stuff, since it doesn't feel 100% authentic to me (I guess I prefer the long-form format of youtube videos), but overall I've been feeling relieved and liberated since starting my new job.

The process of leaving my previous company felt pretty drawn-out and difficult. I had a lot of 1:1s with people on my management chain, from my tech lead, manager, CTO to the CEO to explain why I was leaving. At the time, it was hard to put in words. Now, I feel the best way to put it, bluntly, was that it felt stifling and stuffy at my old company. It was a decent enough workplace, but all the French people, the men, the fact that we were working on an enterprise product, made me feel like I was suppressing myself at work. The French-influenced culture felt pretentious and ego-centric, with all its emphasis on "meritocracy" and impressing the customer. Besides, there was a fair bit of drama, though managed, and I didn't like some of the people I was working with.

To put it simply, I wanted to work somewhere more casual, where I would feel at ease interacting with my co-workers, and work with people I genuinely liked and enjoyed working with. The culture, while tolerable, felt subtly masculine and French/European and white, due both to the people who worked there and the cultural values. None of these were such pronounced factors in and of themselves, which made it difficult for me to articulate to others, but given the chance to work somewhere where I had a gut feeling I had a better chance of being happier, I gladly left. That said, it wasn't all bad, work-wise and even with respect to the culture and people, and I gave up a lot in terms of material comfort, perks and stability. I was not happy, but I was comfortable. But I did not want to be complacent, either. It just goes to show what matters to people and their happiness--in other words, whether they will stay at a company, in the end, are often not factors which are so tangible, but in fact the soft factors that are harder to manage: things about culture, people.

Enough about work. I'm satisfied with my decision and looking forward to see how it pans out, despite the occasional doubts and shocks of cold water (most recently hearing our recent revenue performance :P).

In the last year, I didn't date much, because I didn't really want to. You know, yours truly, your local clam-like introvert who seeks refuge in her hermit shell. :P But since I just turned 24, I wonder if I need to put in a little more effort to seek someone to date, despite feeling so busy in the rush of the last few months. There's the semi-crush I still have on my previous co-worker. I'm thinking a few months down the line, I'll watch a movie he mentioned and use it as a pretext to message him and see if anything comes of it. (How calculated and evasively indirect! Worth cackling at myself.) In the meantime, I shouldn't limit my horizons, but the effort it takes is so much... Maybe it's futile to think about at the moment. :P

Despite the move and change in workplace, and my hope that those two factors could result in a change in my own disposition, I've still been struggling to muster drive and will to do much outside of work. Hobbies like watercolor and crochet are difficult to feel motivated to do, and I never get around to studying even though I have a lot of new things to ramp up on at work. Lately I've just been reading a fantasy book that I've been working through slowly, at a plodding pace. Reading a bit was a welcome change from the general book starvation I had been undergoing, but it was also an easy cop-out for me to resort to, along with Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. When I spend most of my free time doing either of those two things, or lying in bed, instead of taking care of my manifold errands or doing something self-improvement related, I start to feel feeble and futile, like my life is devoid of much meaning, or productivity (thanks capitalism for that mentality), and most of my life is going to pass me by in this manner.

So it's a good thing, that I just wrapped up that book (a decent one, by the way, called Spirit Gate, by Kate Elliot). Hopefully now I'll have more space to spend on more mindful activities. I want this year to be a mindful year, ideally. Here are some things I jotted down:

- I'd like to toy with starting another physical journal, this time with a painted cover and using the gel pens I got for Christmas/my birthday, to just jot down little snippets since I don't always have access to this blog. Maybe I can also blog a little bit more, on my cell phone, once I've gotten the data to work on it. If I can write more frequently here, then my posts can be about more daily mundane stuff instead of heavy, long ruminations about all the stuff that happens in a span of time.
- Daily evening rituals: handwashing clothes, brushing teeth, picking clothes; hobbies like watercolor & crochet or sewing (sewing little animals or embroidery)
- Other errands I could do in the evening: sorting paperwork, organizing the place, studying, little web projects
- (One day: like the idea of making soaps and candles, or doing small batik projects. Call it a stretch goal, esp. since I'd need to spend a little money on that kind of hobby.)
- Morning rituals: sometimes swimming (or at night if I'm feeling distraught enough), eating breakfast, making tea, making the bed