2020 Reading Plan

I don't like strict goals or feel like I'm forcing myself to read certain books (although I do like the Reading Women Challenge and may use it for inspiration). The fact that people have TBR (To Be Read) lists and plan out what they read for an ENTIRE YEAR! blows my mind.

HOWEVER, I do like to have goals. Not far-reaching goals; these are things I'm sure I can easily complete. I think of these goals as "bare minimum guidelines".

Each month in 2020, I will read:

1. 1 book from my home bookshelf
2. 1 translated work. In the same way you're missing out if you only listen to English songs, you're missing out if you only read English and Western-centered literature. My focus will be on authors from South Korea because of course.
3. 1 book from the library. I love supporting the library! Use it or lose it!
4. 1 audiobook. I get all my audiobooks from my library through the Libby app, so it's all free! (Also fuck Audible.)

I like this plan because it gives me guidance without feeling structured. I mainly read women anyways, but having a translation rule will make me read more diversely. Just look at these books from Korea that will be released in English in 2020, they all sound metal as fuck.

What do you want to read in 2020?

goals before 2019 ends

I can't remember my 2019 new year's resolution and at this point I don't care.

BUT! I'm going to end 2019 with a small bang! I know no one cares about other people's goals (lol) and no one reads this blog anyways, but I need to put this in writing so I feel accountable to myself.

All of my hobbies suffered during NaNoWriMo so I need to hop back on the horse and remember what it feels like to be a well-rounded human being.

SO HERE YA GO! GOALS!

• Read 70 books. My yearly goal is 50 but I'm at 65 right now and it'd be satisfying to hit the next number level.
• Finish My First 500 Korean Words. THEORETICALLY this book should take 50 days and I'm halfway through and it's taken me so much longer. I need to finish this damn vocab book! So I can move on and study more Korean! Speaking of studying Korean...
• Find a Korean tutor on Italki. I've lived here 10 months but my Korean progress is moving painfully slow. I know I need to invest money in it to hold myself accountable. I'm going to try the trial classes of a few teachers and then commit to one or two so I can take regular classes in 2020.

And that's that! I hope you end 2019 doing what you love. :)

2019 Goals

Resolutions are fun but do you know what's even better? Attainable goals!!!

Like every other human in the world, I've made the mistake of setting lofty goals and then forgetting all about them and/or giving up before the Christmas tree has even had the chance to die.

Here are the 5 things I know I can achieve in 2019!

1. read 52 books
1. 40 physical books
2. 12 audiobooks
2. quit biting my nails for once and for all
3. get a manicure
4. quit reading reviews on Goodreads! You don't agree with most people's opinions and tastes quit fooling yourself! I HATE going into a new book with other people's opinions swirling around in my brain, so I'm only going to use Goodreads for tracking my reading progress in 2019. 
5. post on my blog at least once every 2 weeks. Not even for me to feel ~pressured~ but enough to force me to share little bits of my life and travels with y'all! As I talked about in my blogging in a bubble post, I want to 

I'm hanging out at my grandma's house a lot!

I can't really think of anything else! Who knows where I'll go in 2019, so all of my goals have to be location-independent. I'm honestly really happy with how I'm living my life and the direction I'm going in. Sorry if this sounds like a self-brag, but I spent so many years not being happy or content so I'm not going to be quiet about it now! I'm doing well with getting consistent exercise (20 minutes a day, no matter what!) and eating lots of fruit and vegetables (smoothies are key) and reading a lot and refusing to be ignorant about topics that I think are important (retirement, the stock market, global women's health, feminism, et al.). As long as I continue doing what I'm already doing in 2019, I'll be one fulfilled gal!

Cheers to 2019, y'all. Let's make it one filled with friends, books, and laughter. 

Posting While Sedentary (Also, Where I'm Going This Summer)

Alternative title: should I post if I have nothing to say? If I'm not traveling?

I hate having my time wasted and I hate wasting other people's time.  But I feel like everything I read by (most) travel bloggers these days is just fluff.  Meaningless #hashtag content.  Like everyone is trying to fulfill their requirement of one Instagram post a day and two blog posts a week, nevermind if they even have new pictures or new stories to tell or new thoughts to share.

What bores me most about travel blogs is that people feel compelled to have a "point" for every single post.  A long layover in the Netherlands turns into "How to Spend 24 Hours in Amsterdam".  Visting a few cafes after a week in Paris turns into "The Best Cafes in Paris" as if they've had time to sit and contemplate them all.  I'm tired of everyone trying to have an angle. 

Just tell me about your day!

I want to see hastily taken pictures in a museum before security tells you to stop, shots of a flower that you thought was pretty.  What book did you read in that park you sat in for hours since your feet hurt and you couldn't bear the thought of walking one more kilometer to the metro? Were you having a nice day at a cool museum then, once you connected to the free Wifi, accidentally got into a text-argument with your best friend and now your thoughts of that museum and the artists you saw are tainted?

Believe it or not, I don't read travel blogs for useful information. Sounds ridiculous, but I'm sure most people relate.  If I want information, I use a guidebook or a tourism website. If I read a blog, I want to hear about your day. I'm sure I've retained information through osmosis of all I've read, but in my four-ish years of reading a few blogs a week, I've never actually, consciously used any of it while traveling.

WHAT I'M TRYING TO SAY IS that I don't want to post just for the sake of it.

Because I don't want to bore you.  Because you don't deserve to have your time wasted since everyone and their mother is trying to waste your time on the internet.

I've said all of that ^^^^ to preface this new information (although this info isn't new if you follow me on Twitter or Instagram):  I'm traveling again! Starting June 6th!

I will (hopefully) travel until late August or early September and I really don't have much planned.

The only definite is that I will be in Slovakia for a month, back at the hostel in the mountains that I ran back to last July when I needed a break. (I really need to update y'all on that story. I only wrote one post about it and never followed up with a part II. Oops!)

After Slovakia, there's a strong possibility that I'm going to China (Beijing, specifically) with my school for two weeks because my school is paying for it, even though I graduated!, and over my dead body will I ever turn down a free trip.

From there, who knows! I might have a long layover in Dubai on the way back from China. I was wary of the idea at first, but now that I looked into fun and reasonably priced desert tours I'm extremely excited at the thought. 

Once I'm back in Europe, I have no plans for a full month. I'm considering Moldova, Romania, and Bulgaria, but August in those countries might be too hot for me. That sounds like a dumb excuse, but last summer when I was in other south-ish eastern European countries, like Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia, I was so miserably hot I couldn't fully appreciate my days. Hence my exodus to the High Tatras in Slovakia.  So I'm not going to let myself be miserable again if push comes to shove.  Maybe I'll go to Slovenia and do some chill hiking, or Latvia and Estonia. Who knows! I'll probably let Ryanair decide my next move.

Near the end of August, I'm heading to London to meet Poppy, an Australian friend that I met last summer in Slovakia. From there we'll take a night bus to Scotland and do some hiking.  I didn't expect to go back to Scotland this soon after leaving last year, but Poppy has never been and suggested we go. Similar to free trips to China, I will also never turn down an excuse to go back to Scotland.

From there, I'll (hopefully) follow her to Sweden where she's starting her master's degree and just chill for a bit.  For some reason, there are insanely cheap flights back to the US from Sweden compared to other places in Europe. How convenient!

That's my ~general plan~ but who knows how the next three months will unfold!  I had a plan for last summer too and I set fire to that only one month in.

Whatever happens, I'm going to blog about it.  In the most genuine, unselfconscious way possible. No forced angles to any of my stories. Not trying to pretend I'm an expert in anything, much less a city I've only spent a few days in.

I'm just a girl with a blog, standing in front of a Europe/China/UAE, asking them to love her.

how a snow storm turned me into a traveler

Photo by Donna 

This is my first time participating in the Travel Link Up!  July's topic is to share your travel story.

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I never planned on traveling extensively.  As a kid, I never dreamed of laying on beaches in Thailand or going on safaris in Africa. I always thought hostels were scary and adults without traditional careers were making a HUGE mistake.  I had dreams of graduating college, getting a good job, and eventually owning a house on a huge plot of land somewhere in a southern state.  Basically, I wanted to live in a country song.

Then Freshman Year Spring Break happened.  My school calls it "spring break", but in reality, it was the last week of February and a huge snow storm made us evacuate the school early, so my week break turned into almost two.  This sounds lucky, but my school and home are only one hour apart so the snow storm also hit my house, but even harder.

So there I was, Spring Break 2015, unable to leave my house at all because of the piles of snow. I had nothing to do but toot around on the internet and read.

In my boredom, I read a really cheesy love story about these two solo travelers meeting on a beach in Spain and then traveling around together for a few months, and of course, they happened to be from the same town so they fell in love and yadda yadda yadda. The implausible love story isn't what made me want to travel, but all of the descriptions of the places the two characters visited. It put the idea in my head that people actually CAN travel for an extended period of time, that people CAN travel by themselves, and that traveling really isn't a "big deal".  Almost anyone can do it with a little bit of luck and a little bit of money.

 

This led me to google "two month Europe trip itinerary". Europe because nowhere else in the world interested me (yet). Two months because I was deadset on going to medical school, and two months is all I would have in between undergrad ending and medical school starting. That's all the traveling I could allow myself until I one day became a supercool neurologist or OBGYN and worked for Doctors Without Borders.

That innocent google search led me down the rabbit hole of travel blogs.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that I spent almost every second of that spring break reading people's blogs, consuming everything I could.

The decision had already been made.  I need to go travel.  But after more and more reading, I quickly learn that just two months in Europe won't even scratch the surface of what the world has to offer.

 

I need to go EVERYWHERE.

 

So I start looking into alternatives.  I could take a gap year in between college and medical school, but with the way the MCAT falls and the application process, I really wouldn't have that much time to travel.  Also, med schools like it when you do something "productive" with your gap year.  Flaking off to southeast Asia for a year is sadly not seen as productive by the corporate world.  I found a medical school program where I could do two years in Brisbane, Australia and the other two years in America.  But I couldn't put all of my eggs in one basket and only apply to one medical school, and even then two years in Australia didn't feel like enough.

Eventually, I had to face my own priorities that I tried so hard to suppress: I don't want to be a doctor.  I want to travel.  I could always go to medical school later in life, plenty of people do it, if I still felt that calling.

It wasn't a sudden realization.  It was almost exactly a full year between my initial google search and the breakdown during my Sophomore year that forced me to quit bullshitting myself and accept what I actually wanted out of life.

I'm still at the very beginning of my travel story.  I spent five months in Glasgow, Scotland and I'm currently a little over a month into my central/eastern Europe trip.  I have a few ideas for my post-college life and all of them include me moving out of Virginia, if not out of the country.

Lucky for me, my travel journey is just getting started.

 

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What was your tipping point that turned you into a traveler?

I love New Year's resolutions. alternatively titled: we all need to be a little more positive

It's that time of year again.  The time of year when people say:

"The New Year isn't a fresh start, it's just another day."

"Time is an allusion."

"New Year resolutions are bound to fail."

"Only 8% of people achieve their resolutions." (Which I'm not sure how they measure; I saw another source citing that 39% of people succeed.)

"Your personality won't change just because the date did."

When did we all become so jaded?

What's so wrong with wanting a better life?  To improve yourself?  Why is self-improvement accepted any other day of the year, but is suddenly uncool on January 1st?

I'm in love with New Year resolutions.  I love the hope it gives people.  Next year really can be different!  It might not be, but it could be!  That's beautiful, isn't it?  After a year that feels so dark, it's nice to have something to look forward.

I quit doing the typical New Year resolutions when I turned 18.  I would lose the list, or never write it down, or turn the page in my journal and never look back. They were usually resolutions I had no intention of keeping.

For those types of goals, the quantifiable ones, I put on my "20 Under 20" list (which I mostly completed), and my currently on-going "25 Under 25" list.  Now my resolutions are more like a big to-do list that I have five years to complete AND I can alter it if some of the goals just aren't applicable or realistic to my life.  This is a good system for me.

But back to New Year's resolutions.

For resolutions, I do what all the experts on the internet tell you not to do.

I make big, lofty, unquantifiable goals. 

I pick some big, touchy-feely goal and write it in the beginning of my journal, and in the front of my agenda, and everywhere else.

For 2016, my goal was "to be more honest".  I didn't define what that meant in January 2016, but left it up for future-me to decide how to live my most honest life in any given moment.

In 2016, being honest meant:

• Not holding back in my journal.  I needed to be honest with myself and write down those hard words.
• Telling friends that they weren't treating me well, that they took advantage of my loyalty, and losing them in the process.
• Telling my dad that I don't want to be a doctor and haven't wanted to be one for awhile.
• Becoming an English major, in addition to my Neuroscience.
• Dramatically admitting a secret to 100 of my closest friends, my sorority sisters.
• Unapologetically letting my ultra-conservative family know that #ImWithHer.
• Making sure everyone knows that #ImStillWithHer.
• I started this blog.  Every single word you read on here is therapeutic for me, an exercise in honesty.
• These are big steps for me.  And even though many of them were scary, I feel better.  I feel closer to myself.

My grandiose goal for 2017 is to say 'yes'. 

In the fashion of Shonda Rhimes of course, with her famous Year of Yes book.  I'm going abroad long-term for the first time.  If I'm not careful, I will let the anxiety get the best of me.  I'll miss out on opportunities, because I tend to shut down in new situations.  Newsflash to myself: everything will be new.  I'll be living in a city for the first time ever.  Being in a city long-term will probably be a bigger culture shock than being in a new country.

I can't afford to say no.  I can't shutdown.  If I say no, (we're excluding the dangerous, creepy men situations here. Those no's are a given), then I'll miss out on experiences.

So here's to resolutions.  Here's to not letting people on the internet make you feel bad about making resolutions.  Here's to positivity and being honest and saying yes. 

Happy New Year, everyone.  Let's make it a good one.

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Are you making resolutions? Care to share?