Kitchen Floor Picnics, Light House McFlurries, Australian Tinder

Sunday, June 15^th
When you wake up feeling so tight & sore, the great kind of sore, from the previous day’s train. I’ll go it again in a couple of hours & sneak in a Yin Yoga this aft!

Goals for this coming week:

∆      No fast food!
∆      Bikram x5
∆      Hand out all 15 resumes
∆      Meet up with the guy who is going to take me around Aus in the van he lives out of (that sounds horrid, but this is Australia and it is incredibly common and also enticing and also funbun. Salty blonde surfer funbun.)
∆      Wake up early for a FIFA game!
∆      Finish my EasyRead AQ course
∆      Felt hat shop

Shapin’ up to be a good one.

8pm ~ post-yoga (Yin was increeeedible), sitting on our picnic blanket kitchen floor in the dark, 6 candles and our laptops illuminate our laughing faces, Bon Iver sings softly, green tea brews warmly. An excellent Sunday with my housemates. And so through hysterical laughter & careful consideration, we’ve come to a few crucial conclusions…

General Tinder Don’ts:

When your photos contain any of the following:

-       All group shots
-       Jerry Seinfeld
-       Only mirror selfies
-       Excessive females
-       Duplicate photos
-       Blurry photos
-       Artsy silhouettes
-       Lines of cocaine (…)
-       Expensive, imported cars

When your bio says

-       Nothing at all
-       Anything about ‘Aussie sluts’
-       “Works in the porn industry”
-       the c-word … (really??)
-       hashtags

When you start a conversation with

-       “Hey”
-       Starwars references
-       “It’s 2am and we’re 3 kms away…”
-       “;)”
-       “Hey hunny bunny”

Big Solid Tinder Yes’s:

-       Funbuns
-       Pushing the boundaries of appropriate facial hair
-       Photos with your dog (or any dog, or even just a dog. – Krysten)
-       Drake lyrics
-       Surfboards /...bods
-       Well-punctuated bios
-       Just being a firefighter. In general.

Ahhhh Sunday productivity, at it’s finest. A sincerely noteworthy Australian experience, lol. And now it’s after 2am & I wanted to do 8am Bikram! Whoops!

Monday, June 16^th

I woke up feeling bummed, without being able to put my finger on it. I tried practicing NLP’s white-out technique, but I didn’t really know what images to focus on releasing… A few things in my life have just seemed a tad unbalanced lately, and even though they are really very miniscule, they seem amplified because I haven’t felt ‘off’ in weeks (maybe months?). But I got myself out of bed and I stretched and I tried to empty my mind and I reviewed a few of my Buddhist notions I have come to live by,

…we must develop the determination to be free from cyclic existence and to attain liberation. We don’t need to renounce people and things. Rather, we need to give up our clinging attachment to them…

That is definitely my current focus here, recognizing the things and the people I have come to falsely depend on as a source of positivity and happiness, because it is inevitable that those things or those people might disappoint us or disappear, taking that source of happiness with them. People who truly care will make themselves consistent and persistent in your positivity, no matter what. No matter WHAT, they will be selfless and supportive and cheery and constant. Those who are not, are those who are not worth holding onto. But they should be forgiven anyways.

There is no worse feeling than disappointment, and what I’ve come to learn is that I am responsible for that disappointment all by myself, because I let myself get attached. The idea of ‘disappointment’ exists within me because I let it manifest, not because anyone else puts it on me or gives me valid reasons to feel it. It is my choice to feel that way. I let myself become so close to certain notions that I developed expectations, and when those expectations aren’t met, I begin to place blame throughout my search for reasons why they weren’t met. I find reasons why I can ‘rightfully’ blame people for disappointing me, for letting me down, for disappearing with my happiness that they held. And that is wrong. Because all of those negative ideas, those awful notions can only & entirely be controllable by me, if I just learn to let go, to detach, to move forward independently and confidently. I am trying my best to do just that.

I realize this; I accept this.

I proceed to have a similar discussion with my very best blonde back home (thank goodness for her), and THEN I facetimed my daddy for Father’s Day evening and I felt heaps better. A whole world of better. He has this sure-fire way of doing that. Absolutely nothing in the whole world cures me like my father’s smiley face (& Elmer Fudd impressions…) And then my favourite yoga insta girl crush Liked a bunch of my photos and that was just a bonus haha.

8pm, I refocused, I changed my attitude all around, a realized, I re-gathered my emotions, I reset my heart and my mind, I ended up having and awesome day. I made phone calls following job leads, I hit the pavement with resumes, I secured an interview for Friday!! A test-trial-run morning shift :) I rewarded myself with two OpShop dresses & 2 new knits (I must be stopped). Evening Bikram felt SO GOOD again, which just had me beaming on my jog home.

11pm, alright so I’ve already broken goal #1 for this week… So sue me! You wouldn’t know how to say no to lighthouse ocean-side McFlurries either! Such a happy, giggly, smiley evening (despite getting pulled over by the cops, lol whoops).