Life // Breathing, in out in out..

 The 11th of November 2024

It's been a while since my last post! I had not really made the conscious effort to not make new entries but it just sort of happened I suppose. Every once in a while it is a good idea to take a little break even if you didn't intend on taking one, especially in the chillier months. The sun is setting so early now and at times this does feel a little demotivating. I think I will personally feel a little warmer when the first Christmas decorations will appear.

I'll admit that I've tried to write out this post a few times now but every single time that I looked back on what I had written I felt like it was so chaotic. Bits and pieces about work being difficult, reflections on loose leaf tea and candles that smelt too sweet. I just think that the last few months have been a little hectic for me and now I feel like my spirit is a bit scrambled which was reflected in my writing.

Maybe writing it out was a little cathartic but I don't feel like any of it was really coherent enough to fling out into the wide open world. I don't really set out to have all of my entries have a specific topic but I'd like it to at least have a certain flow to it all. I guess the flow to this entry will be a little wavy, I don't think it's a bad thing. Life isn't always perfectly pleasant but mine is alright at the moment. The water is just a little harsher than usual.

So I've just been kind to myself lately, I've been planning in my free days for the rest of the year and trying to think on how I can ensure that I'll have a calmer 2025. I'm currently in a project at work that is rewarding but not sustainable for long periods. I'd love to find another project where I can have a deeper insight into certain aspects of the job but one that is less focused on excessive productivity.

I've also been active in trying to make sure that my bedroom is really only filled with the items that make me the happiest. I've gotten some silly little ceramic mushrooms with lights on the inside. They're rather silly looking, little chubby mushrooms but they do look very sweet. I think I'm very much in my forest wandering era at the moment.

To add to the effect I've also gotten some lovely faux greenery for the empty spaces. At a local furniture store I bought some branches that are just lovely. I bought two that mimic the popular Chinese lantern plant, one in a creamy beige and the other in a more orange tinted brown. Another branch seems to be fashioned after the firethorn bush, this one is a lovely orange shade though. It really cheers up the corner of my desk, although currently they're tucked between the desk and the wall as I don't have a proper vase yet. A tiny potted plant and a candle hide the strange placement.

As per usual I am also always listening to music, which is really the best way to soothe my nerves in any type of situation. I've been making an effort to look into listening to new music (At least, new to me) and I've discovered some wonderful artists to add to my library. One of those is Happy Rhodes, I've been having a great time delving into her extensive discography.

She has a marvelous voice, she has been compared to Kate Bush and I can definitely hear this. In a lot of her songs she can sound eerily similar. However they're still very different artists despite both being very rooted in the raw human emotion and our connection to nature. Maybe in a future post I'll delve a little deeper into some of my favorite tracks.

However right now I believe it's time for a cup of warm tea and maybe a little sweet snack. I'll spend the rest of the evening relaxing and trying to get over my rather persistent cold. I may watch a movie if my energy levels can take on the concentration effort, we'll see. 

- Quite unrelated, but I feel like this picture describes the warmth that I'd like to feel from fall -

Life // Wandering Around

The 18th of July 2024

Lately, in the spirit of being healthy, I've been wandering around aimlessly a lot to get my steps in. I feel like only a handful of years ago I used to consider myself such a city person but now I'm really not that sure anymore. I love the convenience of it all but I feel much better surrounded by peace and quiet nowadays. It's a bit weird how much you can change over a short period of time I guess, maybe it will all settle back around and I'll emotionally end up in the city again?

Living in Amsterdam can be really difficult. It's very charming but it's also incredibly busy. Some people refer to it as a theme park these days. There are too many tourist and because of that it seems that slowly all stores that go bankrupt (Due to increasing costs) are being replaced with tourist traps instead. Or in general stores that have no use for people that actually live here...

I didn't notice it all that much until the pandemic hit. In those early days I liked to spend a lot of time outside because it was suddenly very quiet. Walking around in the city center had a totally different feel than before, it was really odd. Places that were always crowded were basically empty now. Before that time, and a little during that time I was still eager to find a house right in the middle of all the hustle and bustle. I wanted to live somewhere where exciting things would happen! 

Which to begin with, is absolutely dumb, because I am definitely the type of person to open a window to see who is making such a terrible noise. I'm much better off watching excitement from far away but not having it on my doorstep. I think it's also amusing how many black metal artists live out in small towns or in the rural countryside. They seem to have a pretty deep connection with nature. Maybe it's all the noise from their productions that make them desire the quiet though? I still like their music though.

In any case, nowadays I like to take my walks through quiet areas of the city or preferably in nature. The issue is that I am a little lazy so I don't always venture too far. There is a park not that far from my house which has a lot of very pleasant areas but I feel like I've seen it too much lately. I think in a previous entry I spoke about wanting to go to the forest but so far I've not been successful in that adventure. 

I should really be going because there are goats there, and just a lot more ground that I have not discovered at all. But I'd have to get my bicycle out as well since don't really want to take the tram there, or something like the bus. I could make a deal with my best friend to go there together since it's marvelous for her dog as well but I'd still have to go all the way to her house. Life is so difficult...

Aside from all of this, I put in a request for a really nice apartment in the east of the city. It's not really my ideal location but it's in a quiet area and there are a lot of stores nearby which would be great for daily life essentials. 

And the apartment itself is really just too cute! It's a one bedroom apartment but it has a sort of split level/loft situation going on. The loft is mentioned as being more for storage but I think the height is roughly 172cm which is a little higher than my height. It sure doesn't look like that on the photos but they might be deceptive. I hope I'll at least get an invite to look at the place because it would be marvelously charming to have all my beautiful furniture in there...

I suppose we will see what will happen. Positive thoughts in any case! In the mean time I'll keep wandering about the trees and the grass.

- This would be my ideal living location at the moment, I can dream a little -

Life // Improvement

The 7th of July 2024

It's another nice and sunny day today. Unfortunately we haven't been having consistently nice weather the past week, it's sunny one day and terribly wet the next so I don't think we've really captured the real summer spirit yet. However it's nothing to complain about because at least the occasional rain storm will cause a good nights sleep, the temperature will drop to a very comfortable level.

The good weather does make me want to change my diet for the better though. As a child I used to associate summer with curly fries and strawberry swirl candies, because that is what you would eat when you went to the outdoor pool! It's this very nostalgic connection. But back in those days for every summer holiday we'd visit Greece and overall the food we had there was quite healthy compared to our pool cuisine. We'd spend a lot of time moving as well, we were not really the type to stay on the beach all day. We had to go out and explore cities, towns, squares, strange valleys and archeological sites!

Now I am still quite active, on my free days I can easily hit 18k steps or above. But I think just like many people my diet has changed a lot. For sure my own diet contains too much salt and too much sugar, which is something I would really like to fix.

I'm not particularly interested in losing weight, not as much as I was when I was a teenager. I'm mostly interested in being healthy and actually feeling healthy. There are quite a lot of overly processed meals that I do enjoy a lot but I don't enjoy the feeling that I have afterwards. There is this feeling of overwhelming greasiness and heaviness in your stomach. Which is especially unpleasant in summer! I feel like a more hearty meal feels like winter.

In any case, I am not attempting to become a fitness guru or a diet influencer. I'm mostly just interested in improving my own health. That definitely includes trying to drink more water and applying some light improvements to my sleeping quality.

I did improve my water intake by buying a water bottle from a local convenience store. It's a simple little pink see through bottle, nothing fancy but it certainly works! I have it next to me during work and I appear to drink at least one bottle a day next to my usual tea intake so that's quite good. I'd like to up it to two bottles this year, small steps are good to arrange things into your daily routine.

My sleeping schedule used to be rather shit to say the least. In the past I worked late shifts at the office and wasn't off until eleven at night. I couldn't go to sleep straight away so I'd just stay up until four in the morning, woke up around eleven and repeated the whole thing by going to work at two thirty! But these days I work a more gentle schedule. Although I do work ten hours a day for four days the majority of the time I start between eight and nine thirty in the morning so I do go to bed around midnight.

But I do feel like improvements can be made to the hours I sleep. According to my fitbit I manage to sleep between six and seven hours which isn't bad but I'd like to extend it a little. The quality also isn't always great so I think I'll have to try and cutdown on screen time before sleep to improve the actual sleep I am getting.

Overall I am just interested in being a little more careful about how I treat my body because I've only got this one available. So for lunch I am interested in having a little bowl of rice with some steamed vegetables and any other lovely things I can find in my fridge.

--

- I'm not sure how it related to this post, but doesn't this kitchen from Howls Moving Castle inspire healthy food? -

Life // Summertime

The 30th of June 2024

The weather is really getting awfully hot at the moment. At least for me, other people seem to be enjoying it but I don't handle the heat very well. It's a shame because I do really love the summer, or at least the concept of summer. Maybe the thoughts of summer holidays in the 90s are hanging over me like some sort of nostalgic childhood dream. It's not really like that anymore though, those days were really pleasant.

As an adult it just leaves me sitting in front of my computer in the heat, typing long messages to people who will not absorb the content, who will stay angry despite having received solutions far beyond what would normally be provided. All whilst I am trying to soothe myself while sitting in the general direction of a very nice vintage blue medium sized fan that I bought from Hema about two or three years ago. It does its job very well, and makes everything more manageable. 

But having all of these responsibilities makes the summer less charming for sure. Recently I re-watched My Neighbor Totoro again, not sure what number the counter is on at the moment. It's a beautiful and charming movie set in the countryside. Watching it is very soothing, it always makes me want to move away to greener pastures where I can lounge around and enjoy the rustling of green leaves. While this does sound marvelous in a fantasy in practice I would probably be hounded by the giant insects of my worst nightmares and there wouldn't be a takeaway place that does delivery for miles...

Not that convenient. I have the spirit of a countryside lady but one that also craves the convenience of having literally everything at my fingertips. Although recently I've been a bit disillusioned by the fact that everything is so easy to get, all of that instant gratification cannot be good for us. 

I live in a nice two bedroom apartment on the third floor of a five story building. The building is right in-between two grocery stores so I'm really spoilt for choice. That's great, but isn't it almost too convenient? After all, it causes me to spend much more money than I'd like simply because it is so convenient. And why would I think too hard about what I want to eat for dinner that evening when I could be back at the store in less than three minutes? 

Obviously the practical solution would be to practice self control but I will not be bothering with any type of self improvement in this weather. The only solution is to remove myself from the problem. If it takes me an hour to reach the nearest grocery store surely I'd think more carefully about my needs and wants. If I forgot something I'd simply have to do without it. It's the same for everything else, as good as everything is very close to me at the moment. Even my parents are right around the corner, I think that is the only thing I'd hate to change.

A while ago I went to visit a marvelous little apartment, it was on a lovely little square behind a very busy shopping street. The apartment was wonderful, it was just too wonderful. Lovely little rounded windows in the living room, a large bedroom looking out onto a (Paved?) garden and the cutest little kitchen ever that would surely prove a proper headache to anyone wanting to decorate it. Plus it had a lovely little murder basement that would be very convenient for storage. Unfortunately it was all not meant to be, which is a shame because my bed would have looked terrific in that bedroom and my little cat would have loved the garden once it was filled with grass instead of terrible tiles. 

Anyhow, let's get back to My Neighbor Totoro. These days I am always thinking about the scene where the father is attempting to work in his lovely little overstuffed office next to the garden, and we can see little Mei playing in the background. It's sweet, and I wish my life could still be that carefree! Not that the movie doesn't have some somber moments as well, but most of those are lost on Mei because she doesn't quite understand yet. 

Although I'm not sure if I want to go back to blissful innocence either. It's nice to be able to somewhat understand the world around you, and recently I've been reading a few books that really illuminate the power of understanding, believing in yourself and being confident. We can pull it back to Ghibli a little bit as I recently read Howls Moving Castle.

Marvelous book, and a lot of food for thought as well. Sophie is young, shy, not confident and overall quite aimless despite being very talented. After she is cursed into becoming an elderly woman she loses her inhibitions and becomes more active, more outspoken and much more confident because she feels quite invisible as an elderly woman. Basically the things that she was afraid of before don't really bother her anymore, or while they do bother her she has the strength to decide to do what she believes is right no matter what.

After I was done with that I moved onto a new book about Joni Mitchell. Next to Kate Bush she might be my favorite singer. Another one isn't it? A woman who seems dainty and quiet but is (Or grows into?) a confident and outspoken woman who knows what she wants with her career and what she desires to say with her music. It's been a lovely read so far. If only I could have maybe 5% of their talent? I am sure a lot of it is talent but some days I also think it's the sheer perseverance to start a craft and to not give up but to keep going until you become better and better. 

Myself, like many others, I am more like the person to start a hobby and give up when I am not excellent at it straight away. Which is silly, almost nobody is talented straight away. For artists, they have to learn their instrument to begin with. And if you look at Kate her demos surely there is talent beginning to develop there but you can also see lyrics that are a bit flimsy, don't really go anywhere or don't sound good sonically. If she had decided that she was untalented then we would have not had those ten amazing albums. So, shouldn't we all try our best?

In any case I am attempting to read more. I had tentatively set a goal of fifteen books for this year but I believe I am almost at twelve now. So just a little bit more! Although in my head this is impressive but in my head it's still March. Unfortunately it will be July tomorrow, I am a little behind. My next read will be about growing up in the sixties, a growing sexual revolution etc. Should be fascinating! 

Overall despite secretly being firmly a convenient city girl I'd like to see if I could head to the forest on Monday or Tuesday. It is very relaxing there. Last time I went with the tram and walked all the way back home. That might be a bit too much if we hit thirty again tomorrow but I think we'll stay lower. 

If I can't manage the forest I will have the park at the very least.

--

- My ideal house -

Music // Wuthering Heights

The 20th of January 2023

Today it is officially 45 years ago that Kate Bush released her very first single; Wuthering Heights! It is in my personal opinion the best debut single of all time, and also my favorite song of all time. It's been my favorite song for such a long time that there isn't a part of my left that doesn't remember knowing this song. It's really just awfully important to me. Every single time I listen to it I am transported somewhere completely different. It's hard to believe that this is the first piece of her art that she presented to the world, and that she was only twenty years old when it was released! 

 

Personally I believe everything about this particular song, and all of the imagery that it conjures up is just perfection. I love the shrill vocals, the dramatic yet gentle instrumentals and the deep intensity in the lyrics. It sounds perfectly haunting, comforting, romantic and also desperate. I could listen to it forever and ever. The fact that the guitar solo slowly fades away to me essentially means that the song does literally, somewhere, goes on forever! 

There were two official music videos released for the song. Both are excellent and while the "Red Dress" version is the most important one for many other fans my personal favorite has to be the 'White Dress" version. There is something absolutely magical about that music video. 

The video just accompanies the song wonderfully, it's equally haunting. Her face is so expressive, her hair is so wild and unruly, the fluid movements that she makes, the choreography and the marvelous video effects really make it a wonderful video. It really had a very profound effect on me as a child, it really affected everything that I love in life. The aesthetics that I enjoy, the way I love dressing, the way I'd love to be able to move to music and many many more things.

In that first year she performed the song a few times on a variety of television shows, some of those versions are quite rare! And quite awful quality as well, hopefully they'll pop up in better shape in the future! She also performed it as the encore to her wildly successful Tour of Life shows. Imagine having the balls to perform such a vocally complicated song at the end of a nearly two hour very active show!

However my favorite performance is the following one;

This beautiful and dramatic performance was filmed in the Efteling amusement park, which is a place I visited a few times as a child. She was invited to perform a selection of songs to promote the opening of Het Spookslot (The Haunted Castle) in a move that can genuinely only be described as the best idea in music promotion history. 

She performed a couple of other songs as well in different areas of the park. She performed Moving, Them Heavy People, The Man With the Child in His Eyes, Strange Phenomena and The Kick Inside. All of which are absolutely a recommended watch as well! It's genuinely a really strong series of videos that really show how well her music marries to the beautiful fantasy of this park. 

However that performance of Wuthering Heights is the true pinnacle of the whole set. Frankly it's ready to go into a museum dedicated to music history. The set is perfect for the song and she performs it incredibly well. It's just a wonderful and very memorable performance of Kate.

To be honest I could go on forever. Kate her music in general is very important to me and very close to my heart. She's an artist unlike any other. Obviously she doesn't need any promotion at this point (Or in general, her music speaks for her) but I do hope to be able to convey some of my love for her music to other people as well. Her full discography is astounding, full of wonderful jewels and a lifetime of new sounds that you hadn't noticed on the last listen just waiting to be discovered! But for me it all begins and ends with this song.

Happy Birthday to Wuthering Heights!

- Kate performing in 1978, likely either at Toppop (NL) or Szene (DE) -