Tag: new year

2017 in Books

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My books resolution last year was 15 books, and I used Goodreads to track my progress with that resolution as I have the past few years. I was reading very long and hefty books this year, which was sometimes very frustrating with hitting a certain number of books (versus pages, I guess) because the 14th book I started reading this year was super dense and fairly technical. I loved the book but it was frustrating to read for hours and only have progressed 2% further than when I started that day. If I hadn’t started other books before finishing it, I would never have hit my goal of 15. I also read most of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, aka the Game of Thrones books, which are very, very long. The longest book I read this year, according to my Goodreads Year in Books, was A Storm of Swords at 1,177 pages. For reference, the average number of pages of the books I read this year was less than 500.

Without further ado, here are the books I read this year:

2017 in Books

  • In Other Words – Jhumpa Lahiri
  • A Storm of Swords – George R. R. Martin
  • Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby – Sandi Metz
  • The Inkblots – Damion Searls
  • A Feast of Crows – George R. R. Martin
  • A Dance with Dragons – George R. R. Martin
  • China Rich Girlfriend – Kevin Kwan
  • Ready Player One – Ernest Cline
  • The New York Times: Footsteps
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – Mark Manson
  • Rich People Problems – Kevin Kwan
  • Modern Lovers – Emma Straub
  • Spark Joy – Marie Kondo
  • Sharp Objects – Gillian Flynn
  • everyone’s an aliebn when ur a aliebn too – jomny sun
  • The Comic Book Story of Video Games – Jonathan Hennessey & Jack McGowan (review coming soon!)
  • Turtles All the Way Down – John Green
  • The Pragmatic Programmer – Andrew Hunt & David Thomas
  • The Gene – Siddhartha Mukherjee

I already have some titles loaded on my Kindle Paperwhite and I’m very excited to get reading this year! Here’s hoping I can make good progress with some easier to manage books and avoid pedantic fictions that make me so nervous about checking out new fiction titles…

Do you have any book recommendations for me going into 2018? Read anything good last year that you’d suggest? New titles, classics? Fiction, non-fiction?

What’s your reading look like? What are your 2018 reading goals?

Previous years: 2016

Ready for the Year of the Rooster?

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Depending on where you are, tomorrow, January 28, marks the first day of the Lunar New Year! And according to the Chinese zodiac, this will be the year of the Rooster.

Image result for lunar new year 2017

I’m going home to my parents’ tonight for 年夜饭 nianyefan, New Year’s Eve dinner, sometimes known as the Reunion dinner. It’s one of the biggest parts of every Chinese New Year celebration, as it is when the whole family gathers and eats a lot of delicious foods. While talking with my boyfriend about how our families celebrate Chinese New Year, I thought about all the little traditions that make this time of year special. Sometimes, I feel very at odds with my cultural traditions if only because I am unfamiliar with them. When I go back to China, everyone grows up doing these things year after year to the point where it is no longer something that has to be explained. Things are just known among Chinese people. (Thanks in small part to how viral articles can get on WeChat!)

My family isn’t actually very traditional, as far as Chinese families go, so many traditions I have picked up along the way outside of my own home, whether from other people’s families or through reading about celebrations in other homes. So to brief you (and myself!) for the upcoming new year and the year of the rooster, here are just a few ways I am prepping for Chinese New Year:

  • 腊八 – While I was in China, we were able to celebrate Laba, which is the 8th day of the last month of the lunar year. You eat laba congee, which is full of lots of goodies, notably cured meats or larou, in Chinese. I believe it has something to do with saving fresh meat for the new year and using up any cured meats before the start of the year? But I actually have no idea.
  • Family time – My mom works full time in China and is guaranteed 2 holidays every year to take a week off to come home: National Day (the anniversary of the first day of the People’s Republic of China) and Chinese New Year. I make sure that I am home during this time and have extra hours put in at work so that I can spend more time at home with her, my dad, and my brother, as well as any extended family we may be able to see.
  • Cleaning – I first learned this on Mister Rogers, funnily enough, but while you are supposed to do a big clean-up before the new year to cleanse the home of last year’s bad luck and make room for new, good luck, you are not supposed to clean on the day of the new year. If you do, you risk cleaning out all the fresh good luck that just arrived! For this reason, you also can’t sweep outwards or throw anything away.
  • Haircuts – My dad clearly didn’t know this when he searched for an open salon in China 2 years ago for me to get a haircut, but you are not supposed to cut your hair on the new year. Many Chinese traditions (and jokes) revolve around wordplay, and the Chinese word for hair sounds like the word for prosperity. Therefore, you don’t want to cut off any of the fresh new year prosperity!
  • Red, red, everywhere – If you are unsure what to wear on Chinese New Year, wear red. A lot of it. Fresh duds are a good idea, too, so if you have a new red sweater, there is no better time to bust it out than on the Lunar New Year. Red is a lucky color and you’ll be seeing it everywhere, from the lanterns to the papercut patterns to the red envelopes. Speaking of which…
  • Red envelopes! – 红包 hongbao are one of the hallmarks of Chinese New Year for children because they get to collect money from their elders! As an adult with a job, I no longer expect to receive little red envelopes with super crisp $20 bills in them anymore. (The bills are always crisp because people get fresh bills from the bank for this purpose. You’ll see that this freshness is one of the themes of Chinese New Year traditions.) Although people will still give me 红包 despite my age and employment status, I think I may actually be responsible for giving out red envelopes now? Last year, we purchased a pack of envelopes to prepare for stuffing, so if you will be attending festivities with children, I’d prepare by picking up some red envelopes and popping over to the bank to get some crisp bills.
  • Foods to include – As with any holiday anywhere, there are a lot of traditional foods that go with Chinese New Year, including:
    • Dumplings: Popular in northern China because their shape resembles old Chinese money
    • 年糕 Rice cakes: Literally niangao is year cakes, but I like to think it’s another play on words because they are very sticky and the word for sticky in Chinese sounds like the word for year. These are almost always prepared in a savory dish. It has a second wordplay meaning in that the word for cake sounds like the word for increasing, so the phrase sounds like increasing [prosperity] by the year.
    • Fish: Another play on words, the Chinese adage 年年有余 means “may there be a surplus every year” and sounds like “may there be fish every year”. I learned last year that my boyfriend’s family will prepare fish but they tend to leave it so as to have as much of a surplus of the fish (surplus) as possible. (Oops sorry for eating it, it looked so yummy!) Fish is, to me, a mandatory Chinese New Year food. All other things you can have one or the other, but this one you gotta have.
  • Firecrackers + fireworks – Depending on where you are, these may not factor into your celebration, but a large Chinese community (think Chinatowns) will definitely see some firecrackers and there’s a good chance you’ll see fireworks somewhere, regardless of how legal they are where you live. These are super dangerous and have caused an incredible amount of damage in China, but you know, they scare off demons trying to sneak in with all the fresh good luck while you sealeup your house to keep them the heck outta there. Bring ear plugs if you suspect explosions to occur; tinnitus does not bring good luck with it.
  • Lantern festival – Very traditionally, in some places, you celebrate the Lunar New Year, aka the Spring Festival, over 15 days. FIFTEEN. Each day, with it’s own traditions! The 15th day of the new year is the Lantern Festival, 元宵节 yuanxiaojie. On this day, you eat little glutinous rice balls called 汤圆 tangyuan or 元宵 yuanxiao, named for the 15th day holiday that you eat them on! And yes, there be lanterns.

Also, the year of the Rooster is the 本命年 benmingnian for people born in other years of the Rooster. It is actually a tricky time if it’s your 本命年, which I learned during my own 本命年 2 years ago, because essentially a lot of luck becomes focused on you – good and bad. This is the reason why my mother became very obsessed with buying me a red belt, and I heard a lot of talk about red belts for our family Roosters when I went back home to China as well. HOWEVER you can’t buy it for yourself? My mom was very firm about this, she wouldn’t leave without getting me something red and wouldn’t let me find something later on. So if you are turning a multiple of 12 (12, 24, 36, 48 60, etc.) this year, be mindful! You may find a lot of luck coming your way, so try to make sure it’s all good luck by wearing a lot of red and maybe some jade jewelry.

Overwhelmed? Don’t be! There are a lot of traditions but the most important thing is family and friends. You are trying to start the year off on the right foot by welcoming prosperity and fortune into your life with open arms.

And we do this by eating a lot of delicious food!

新年快乐！恭喜发财！Happy New Year, everyone!

Do you celebrate the Lunar New Year?
What are your favorite New Year foods/traditions?

2017 Resolutions

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It is that time of year again. Time to reflect on what kind of person I want to be and what I can do to become that person.

2016 was one of the best years yet with regards to achieving personal goals and growth. I made more time for friends, I got and kept a great new job in a brand new career, I have been reading, and I have been blogging on a regular schedule since I actually committed to doing so in February! (With the brief exception of the change in schedule that I made and then immediately realized was a huge mistake.)

So what can I do in 2017 to continue with my self-improvement? With my personal stake in world-improvement? Here are my CONCRETE RESOLUTIONS that I will resolve to have achieved by December 31, 2017…Read More »

2016 Resolutions

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Even though it seems contrived to repeat myself year after year after year, my resolutions posts are easily the most important blog posts I write. I could write nothing else but resolution posts and they would validate the existence of my blog, personally. It’s important for me to have them bookmarked so that I can look back on them. Yes, most of the time, most of my resolutions go unkept by December 31, but it’s still important for me to set these goals for myself. I like the promise of a fresh Gregorian calendar year ahead of me to taking more steps towards becoming the person I want to be.

This year, I’m going to do what I’ve been futzing about and not doing in past years: I’m going to schedule time for these resolutions every day, every week, every month. After not achieving certain resolutions year after year after year (see #1 and #2), I really understand the value of me making time for myself and the goals I am setting for myself. Even though my schedule has been — and will remain for some time — painfully uncertain, I can still make sure to make time for goals that are important to me. I’ll denote things I need to schedule with an asterisk(*).

2016 Resolutions
Here we go!

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2015 Resolutions – Abstract

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Ah… the tough list. The one that gnaws at me every day of the new year. The one that has more to do with who I am rather than simply what I do. If you thought concrete resolutions were hard to keep, you should see how much harder it is to modify thoughts over behaviors. But I studied psychology – I know it can be done.

Here’s what I’d like to do in 2015:

  1. Spend fewer weekend evenings alone. I spent a lot of time this past year just sitting by myself. As an extrovert, this bothered me a lot. I’m not comfortable spending that much time with myself and only myself. It would get extra difficult on the weekends, because I am so used to reserving my weekends as time to be spent with other people. Spending those Friday and Saturday nights alone was not good for me, so I just have to resolve not to do that anymore.
  2. In fact, learn how to be alone, full stop. The most frustrating thing I learned about my extroversion was that I could never pull a Thoreau and run off into the woods to live alone. The fact of the matter is that I cannot 100% control if I am alone or not; that depends on other people’s cooperation. So, I have to learn not to fall apart if I am alone.
  3. Ask for what I want. I don’t know where I got this idea that dropping hints about what I wanted and then pretending I’d be surprised if I somehow did get it was a better idea than just asking for what I want. It’s not. 2015 is the year when I start being frank and direct about what I would like to see from myself and my life.
  4. Practice my languages. I definitely dropped the ball with my goals here last year, but I need to work on this skillset that I once had. I’ll definitely be trying to dust off my Chinese and French. Will I be able to read a book in a different language by December? Ehhh who knows! This is why this resolution has been moved off the concrete list 😛
  5. Make time for fitness. AKA the most common and cliché resolution of all time? What I need to do is find something that will keep me on track, whether it’s a class or an event. (Another 5K? Ugh… maybe…) I’d love to find a fitness class that I feel obligated to keep up with, so that’s probably my best bet. This could be a concrete resolution, but in general, I just want to carve out more time for being active.
  6. Spend more time outside. Sometime in the past 10 years, I went from being a really outdoorsy girl to being an awfully indoorsy girl. It’s probably a combination of my new fear of the sun, aversion to extreme temperatures, and general sexist suggestions that I stay indoors rather than exerting myself outside. I miss being outside. I miss breathing in fresh air. I miss the warmth of the sun on my (SPFed) face without a window interrupting. There is just this alive energy that you can feel when you’re outside and I miss it. Maybe I’ll start hiking this year, who knows!
  7. Trim the fat. Not only with regards to the above fitness-related resolution. I find that there is a lot of dead weight in my life, in the form of people, attitudes, etc. etc. etc. It’s time to just get rid of all of that, even though it won’t be easy.
  8. Create schedules and stick to them. I shied away from the idea of writing down an hour-by-hour itinerary for my days but maybe I need that. I know that I am the kind of person who needs a lot of structure to work effectively, and maybe knowing that my 11-12 block is for blogging and not for YouTube is important. On a similar note:
  9. Have plans every week. This goes with my concrete resolution of keeping up with my planner; it’s hard to make sure there’s something written every week if I don’t have anything planned. It doesn’t have to be going out or meeting up with people but having things to look forward to in the week is really important for my mental health. I used to joke that having really small rewards like whatever I wanted for dessert on a Friday was all that got me through the week. But it was true. Sometimes the only thing that kept me going was knowing I could get an eclair AND chocolate cake AND mango mousse at dinner in just a few days, so I need to make sure I have similar little rewards for just surviving.
  10. Discipline, discipline, discipline. This will always be one of my biggest struggles but I think the key is creating a system where I have no choice but to do what I need to do. Again, structure reigns supreme in my life, and if I create a sturdy frame for my life, everything else should fall into place.

 

:)

This year feels different. I ended 2014 feeling a bit down, but last night, I struggled to sleep because I was riding this momentum swelling within me. I was so excited about the things I wanted to do and the person I wanted to be that I couldn’t sleep. What was almost as energizing as this feeling was the fact that I was feeling it at all. Just days ago, I was feeling stuck, not sure where I was or where I was going, more than happy to just sleep all of my days away to escape that feeling.

It’s a great way for me to start the year and I feel optimistic that I can change for the better and get closer to becoming the person I want to be.