entry 38

so i just had a talk with the parents today about finances and i'll try to summarise it here:

- basically I had to tell them what I assumed/calculated it would be each year to go and live there in japan and that amounted up to 20,000 dollars
- my dad said if it were around 10,000/12,000 he would be able to support me but this 20,000 will be really difficult
- he asked that if he paid the enrolment fees would we be able to get a refund
- and I was like yeah they do but it's not the full amount and he was like I see
- as you know I am a crybaby so when he mentioned the prospect of cancelling I got teary but luckily held it in as I think my dad would hate it if I were to cry/be emotional so I was really trying to keep that logical air
- I know how much i'm pressuring them and what i'm asking for and just the thought of all these finances and figures makes me dizzy lol and the dad said he would try asking his sister for money and think about renting the house
- and I was like oh.. ;;;; i'll try to get jobs and do as much as I can to help out and dad was like :/ and it's so hard
we're literally on the EDGE and this whole thing just doesn't feel good at all
my mum says for me not to worry and that we'll find a way and I know I should just take things step by step and focus on getting those jobs after I come back from the week schoolies trip but,, honestly I've been losing sleep over thinking about this

later today I went to the grocery store with mum and she made my cry in the car omg ;;;

but basically she was like "we know you're a good girl and you've been trying very hard and we're proud of you"

(sorry I stopped writing for like a few minutes because seriously just that ;;;; means so much to me and it hurts so much

and she was like "we'll find a way, you'll achieve your dreams" but in the same convo she was also like "I just want you to understand that we don't want you to struggle when you're over there, like not being able to buy food or things you want to buy" because they had intense childhoods as well, as I described in the last post. and I was like ";;;; I know ;;;; I just;;;  I would honestly,, rather that struggle than regretting not being able to go" but at the same time I say that, I have to reinforce, I know i'm putting so much pressure on them. and my mum was again like, 'yeah, but just try to understand from our pov because your dad is concerned with that as well, we don't want you to suffer like we did' and at that time I thought 'I think I understand so much to the point it hurts'

i'm so grateful to my parents and my mum reassured me that if anything we still have the house a.k.a the idea of renting the house to people and having those 'rent payments only go towards you' ;;;;; I just ;;;; feel so ;;;; bad that they have to struggle and think about this ;;;;; y'know ;;;;

it's just that I've set up myself to going on this path so much that I don't want to go down without a fight so at the same time as I am sorry I just have this like determination to get where I want to be, I just want things to go right and I want to work to make it happen

I don't even want to think about not being able to go because i'm so keen and I feel like my efforts really have been in order to be able to go, that's my dream y'know but obviously like yeah I have backup plans in mind and will probably have to think about them in December when atar results come out

then I got an email from a person who works at the uni i want to go to, and I've been messaging them for like two-ish years and they were really nice and actually said they thought i'd get a better scholarship but the competition must have been really intense this time around, but also said they knew there were lots of external scholarships that I could achieve once I was there ;;;

and that hit me with the feels again which is why i'm venting it out here instead of reaching out endlessly to my friends who have supported me more than enough ;;;

the fact that there are external scholarships I could potentially get over there fills me with hope because dear god I will really try my hardest to alleviate both my parents worries and my own, like I want to work so hard and really earn them

at the same time I just feel so sorry that I've accidentally thought stuff like 'i'm sorry I didn't get a better scholarship' to my parents but I know that I really did try my best and I don't have anything to regret and that the only way forward is taking things step by step and focusing on what I can do now in order to ensure a secure education and good future lifestyle.

yeah

ok

it's been an emotional day today and it's only 4 lol

my nose is running like a TAP it's so wild and my eyes are probably so swollen from all the crying I've been doing omg

ok

I just

gotta work hard

take it slow

do chores around the house and be as much help as I can be to my parents

yeah

ok.

well this has been my rant today

and i'm sorry it wasn't a more happier entry!!!

in any case thank you for reading and I hope you're healthy, happy and safe!

let me list a few moments of today that were actually nice and funny

- I've been thinking about getting a penpal and there's this site called interpal that I've found! I made a profile and told my mum about it today and she was like 'are there cute guys' and I was like 'um,,,, yes' and she was like 'oMgGG you GOOO girl you Talk to THEM DO it while you're YOUNG!!!!' and I was like omg' and she was like 'set me up,, a profile...' and I was like ... 'are you... going to talk to Korean people' (because she's a lover of Korean culture/kdrama) and she was like ':))))) better find pictures of when I was skinny and young'

- yuri on ice is actually an awesome anime dude like yuri and victor the affection they show each other is UNDENIABLY ROMANTIC AND HOMO WHICH IS LIKE AMAZING ????? it better not be queerbaiting because honestly the characters are all so precious and I love !!! the character development with yuri and him finding fun in ice skating again and he also practically confessed his love for victor in the episode i'm up to it is actually so amazing and beautiful of an anime

- my friends are so supportive of everything I do and I can't be more grateful to have them here by my side and cheering them on. actually snay today ;;;; I was talking to her and it was just ;;; let me quote:

"You know what
I admire you so much
Like
If I was faced with this situation I would just be 'burrito mode' and then give up
But you
You just go full "Hinata promising to beat Shiratorizawa mode" and you do everything in your power to achieve that goal
And I know that that analogy/metaphor is pretty chidish
But honestly that's the only one that fits in my head
Because you are my Hinata"

and this honestly made me cry and be really happy ;;; to be compared to my son hinata ;;;;; but honestly i love snay so much and i think although we have different ways of handling things, we'll always get to where we want to be because we have each other

in the same vein if any of my friends are reading this thank you for being here for me. i honestly can't stress that enough (look how many times I've said honestly in this blog post omg), because i'm seriously only here and who i am because of you guys and you being here for me

ok

i'll be back with another blog post probs after schoolies :D

see u!!!! :D
btw my eyes are so SQUINTY now i gotta drink water to rehydrate them ahhh

entry 37

it's 9:57am and i will start studying in half an hour! promise!

so it's been quite some time! i think it's very interesting to see how i've begun making entries less and less while becoming more and more preoccupied with life and the interesting/amazing/sometimes stressful things that are going, such as the HSC, i've literally only made one previous entry this year and that's crazy!

firstly... let me just list a bunch of things that i should talk about in terms of where my current mental state + ambitions are at --

1 > family
2 > dreams for life // views on studying? university? the changes to come?
3 > school life
4 > poetry
5 > little goals that may or may not be achieved

---

ok idk when I started that draft but let's see if I can continue where I left out lolol it's 2:38pm right now and the date is hopefully the date I will publish this draft on :)))

my buddy, how life has changed.

firstly, this leads into #4 listed up there but I did eng ext 2 as part of my HSC course (which now I can legit say it is OVER and I made it through and everyone else who did should feel proud of themselves and give themselves a good, wholesome rest!), and my major work was a suite of poems. i'm not sure if I wrote about this in a past entry but those poems were detailing the actions of those around me and how they impacted on the person I am today. if I can still recall correctly there were 5 poems, centring on family, friends, my brother, my teacher and myself. i'd kind of like to post the poems here but they're really long! but anyway the first was the heaviest because it was a mixture of my feelings at the time of the previous blog posts about the whole situation with my parents and their impact on me. but as such, everything passes and it's only natural that you either come to terms with experiences or at least learn things from them and I think i'm able to say that I've done both, perhaps.

my conclusions from the past entries have been this:

1. it's not like I've forgiven my dad for the things he did. I don't respect what he did nor how he fails to apologise for it. but I respect him because a lot of my opportunities and pleasures in life could have been lost if he had decided to leave my mum and my brother back when I wasn't yet born. because of my dad I've been able to make memories I wouldn't have, I have been able to go to places and do things I wouldn't have been able to do without his support. and unlike the figure I portray in the poetry with a "mouth cured by salt", the lone fisherman that spends too much time on a screen rather than addressing those real life issues-- dad is unmistakably human and although mistakes hurt, people can still heal and people can come to make do with what their circumstances have given them. I kind of feel like I'm rambling but my main point is, is that if I had a longer time period to finish that suite of poems the first poem about family would not be ending with this:

"By now the pain is long gone,
and so is that daughter.
She has grown different now,
though she used to be mine,
and by extension yours,
she is different now.

No longer a princess,
still spoiled a lot,
but with a sword in her hand
she knows what she's got.

And what she doesn't."

Or maybe it would end the same, at least with that conclusive tone. But I think the portrayal of the people in that poem would be different and more fleshed out. It's weird, y'know? For all the struggles and moments of spite, I love all of my family pretty much beyond words. I find it very easy to communicate my affection for my friends, SO easily, because I know that we only have a limited time together, but I find that with my family it can be so hard for some reason. I think it's probably because there is that part of my that takes them for granted and therefore it's very easy to see all the faults in one another. But I guess, thanks to my dream of wanting to go to Japan and all the experiences I've had this year with realisations of impermanence, I want to say that I've become more perceptive to the things that I should be grateful towards. I actually really love my mum and dad and seeing them happy makes me so happy I could cry (i'm a crybaby after all). It's because I know how hard they work to support me and I know I'm asking a lot from them and that I'm really lucky to be living like I am. I really treasure seeing them happy, so it kind of hurts me to think that in my journey towards achieving my dream, I am impacting on them and how they can live in the future. I want to be able to provide for myself, so I am hoping to get a job very soon (since it's the end of HSC).

To give more info, I got a 65% scholarship to go study in Japan next year and that's always been my dream. 65% because it's a tuition reduction scholarship covering the years I'll be studying there e.g 4, and while obviously the higher the better, it's actually fair enough considering how I am from a developed country and that's honestly quite a bit of money anyway to be reduced from all the fees. btw sorry if my writing is weird and there's caps and suddenly no caps and no grammar, it's because I usually write without proper grammar usage but i'm on my laptop so it automatically corrects things lol.

ANYWAY TO QUICKLY SUM UP EVERYTHING I WANTED TO GO THRU W/ #1 on the list: only recently it's struck me how important family can be. actually i'll tell u an anecdote. so basically the other day I was making pork floss with my dad because he was like 'u should see how much time this takes' and I was like 'well ok I'm finished with exams now so I can help :D' and so my eyes were opened actually to how much effort and time it took! and you know, I've always found it hard to talk with my dad. or I guess not really hard so to say but I never really made much of an effort to talk to him much because I was always afraid it would spiral into the direction of him saying something i'd disagree with and then both of us ending up in a bad mood. but the other day I asked him about his childhood because i'd heard from mum that his family used to own a restaurant. so dad told me about his father and how his father owned a restaurant but died due to a mosquito bite when dad was really young, and so his mum and the rest of his siblings had to work really hard in order to make money. so his mum made pork floss often and dad helped and they sold food to make a living. it makes sense because pork floss is dried meat and essentially should last for a long time.

you know a similar story is my mum's childhood. mum sometimes gets into a nostalgic mood and ends up telling me stories and she told me about how living in poverty was for her as a kid with her family, and how her mother often went around to the neighbours to ask for rice but the neighbours shut them out because they had to think about their own families. she told me how her mother used to buy one fish and they had to share it between I think 6 kids? and how more often than not they simply ate rice with diluted coffee to flavour it.

it struck me how different lives can be, how really, really different they can be. and although there's the saying money can't buy happiness, it really can. it's SO important in this world, so SO important in giving opportunities and paving way for happiness. but also, it's because money is so important that we should savour the things we already have such as the people around us.

so yeah. sum of point #1 is i'm grateful for family and I really want to be able to give back to my parents when I have a job later on in life. I want them to experience the beauty of japan as I have. I want to do them proud.

as for #2 I feel like I don't have much to say on that right now except now that I've gotten the scholarship I have a basis to work off for paying for the rest of the fees such as living costs/the 35% tuition/etc. and that there's a lot of prep to do in order to officially enrol such as submitting heaps of documents and getting a student visa and all and honestly that process is so intimidating haha I admittedly lost sleep last night thinking about it and how i'm scared and anxious about the things that could go wrong such as missing deadlines and ending up losing the scholarship. i'm scared to be happy because I still need to take steps in order to ensure that the dream that is so close can fully be achieved. so i'll save my happiness for the day I meet the deadlines. that means i'll make another post in February 2017 which is the last deadline for document submission/enrolment fees. wish me luck? haha

#3 (school life) has ended,,, uhh not much to say about that too except I know i'll miss high school. and thank you for the memories.

#4!!! so I've gotten into poetry thanks to ext eng 2!!! :D I think it's been quite an eye opener to me as a person and to the things I like about other people and random things in life. well firstly i feel things so intensely lol and i like to be able to write about the feelings i get from my experiences because it sort of immortalises that in writing and acts as a reminder. i love that. i also like other people who can feel things intensely, as in, people who are passionate. i love people who can  find such beauty in small things. i love people who get lost talking about the things they love. it's so beautiful to feel things intensely and to be passionate. yeah! so sometimes when i'm listening to Claire play the piano or just meditating at home or just listening to music or just day to day things, i get into this poetry mood and it feels really good when that happens. i don't know how to explain 'good' but maybe one day i'll write a poem about that :) I've been compiling docs of draft poems so maybe when i refine some of them or maybe if i just get the time, i'll post them on here :) :D

aaaand as for #5... i have a lot of little goals !!!!

long term is:
> get REALLY fit and get good at dancing
> get good at cooking and compile a recipe book of home recipes to bring to japan
> learn the ukulele/practice
> learn how to do make-up!
> keep learning Japanese
> learn korean

short term is:
- get a mini telescope for STAR GAZING !!!!!! !!!!
- get more clothes if possible??
- do vlogging!!! get a camera in time for japan!!

and i may add to these goals over time!! :D

so yeah!!!

here is my update which also signals the end of high school and the beginning of my future and awesome things (i hope).

as always, thank you for reading :D it's weird to look back on all my past entries and i'm fearful that i will one day and that everything will be cringe worthy lol but at least know that i won't change a thing about them lol,,,

stay safe, healthy and happy readers :DD <3

- jesse