Pastimes to pass the time. I too wish something more interesting…
By: Jamie Fu
Tags: Chess, College, Quarantine, Hobbies And Interests, Painting

How Peculiar

Pastimes to pass the time

First and foremost, Medium’s rebranding and new UI is spectacular, except for the fact that it ruins every widget builder for embedding Medium blogs on websites out there. On the other hand, now I can add a kicker and subtitle to my stories, so you can read more nonsense before the actual story even starts.

The last several months have been wholly uneventful, and as such I struggled to come up with anything to talk or even think about at all. In other news, we sort of have a new president and COVID-19 doesn’t look a day older than 21.

I have a plant now. Apparently it’s affectionately called a snake plant, but I looked it up and the more politically correct term is Dracaena trifasciata. It’s not a creepy looking plant at all, though; it’s just called a snake plant because its leaves look like the tongue of a lil’ viper. A less affectionate nickname is the mother-in-law’s tongue, though, so (uh) do with that information what you will. It’s a very low maintenance pet — only needs to be watered twice a month and it just sits there quietly and doesn’t complain a whole lot either :]

It’s very good that there’s at least one thing that’s low effort, because I’ve been losing a lot of steam with guitar. I can half-play the intro to Let Her Go by Passenger, and I’m still working on Location by Khalid. (So yes, half a year and I’ve only learnt two things.) I never thought my hands were especially small before, but every time I watch a guitar tutorial and some dude just arranges all five of his fingers on different strings and frets on the board, I cry a little inside.

I’m on the 9th color of this 22-color painting-by-numbers kit (thank you WBL). Amazon says it looks something like (see below), but look at the brush strokes; I’m going to safely assume I will never achieve anything like it. But you know, while I did experience 70-year-old back pain hunched over this canvas for a good 3 months, working on it is somewhat meditative. For example, I was able to listen to the entire first season of murder podcast Serial while just doing color 7.

Apparently this is called Our Romance Under Umbrella

My reading crusade has been trudging forward, albeit rather half-heartedly. I finished up the Three Body Problem series a couple months ago, and I’ve just mustered up the activation energy to start reading Educated by Tara Westover, a Secret Santa gift from Jianna. I opened up a Goodreads account after Nat stalked Mindy’s and I also realized that it was probably better than keeping a spreadsheet of every book I’d ever read. It now contains an embarrassingly long list of YA fiction in my read-history, and a very idealistic to-read list.

Sometimes, when the weather is a little nicer, I’ll take a walk or drive outside instead of watching TV. I guess if there’s one thing I missed about suburban life, it’s that you get to drive when you want to go somewhere. Unfortunately, because I can’t go anywhere at the moment, I just drive in circles around town. Crank on the radio. Pretend I’m not wasting gas. (Disclaimer, I’m not actually wasting that much gas; I’ve actually only done this twice. Usually I’m too lazy to even change out of my pajamas.)

Saranya and I did a good 4 days of creative writing over the summer. It was supposed to go on for a while, but luckily for me I’m not the only one with mediocre levels of motivation around here. The plan was that we’d write the same prompt every day then compare and see how we’d written it differently. I wrote a lot of depressing realistic fiction, Saranya wrote a lot of fantasy with really artistic world-building. If you find yourself struck with the sudden urge to write intros to really bad stories, feel free to use our four prompts: “They caught me”, “Two strangers chatting”, “Waiting”, “Boy finds an egg/eggs”.

And I’ve started learning chess. And yes, before you ask, I have in fact picked it up because I watched The Queen’s Gambit (what else would it be, honestly?) I’m pretty awful, but I’m convinced that my dignity can suffer no more than it already has. It makes me kind of stressed, and I can’t play anything faster than 30-min games because I’ll just time out, but I’m kind of hoping I’ll have enough conviction to stick with it because it makes me feel big-brained if I do something right. We’ll see.

I figure at some point I should probably stop picking up random new things when I can’t even do the old ones right, but I think I’ve got at least another month of mediocrity before school and other urgent things come back to hit me in the face. And to be fair, there’s a lot of things I should probably do that I never do, so uh, I guess we’ll burn that bridge when we get there :]