you can't plan on the heart

reading stuff & chatting shit

[leafshadowss]

decided to stop creating problems in my head around my romantic entanglements and instead try to have quite a nice week .. It will be possible!

I have some beautiful ranaculus in my bedroom. I saw my family yesterday and had fun! A friend has just moved in 5 minutes away from me! I'm going to try and find wild garlic at some point this week and make scones. I will also make peanut butter granola. I will eat tasty delicious food that I cook in my clean kitchen, and I will try to drink more water this week and eat a bit more fruit and hopefully go twice to pilates.

I also have a good library book to finish, I have a sewing project to work on. I have two evening work events and a few important things to do this week, but I am taking Friday off work and seeing a friend!

[leafshadowss]

also ok I'm not going to create problems, however I am going to recognise: I felt weird and sad; I communicated this to the guy I'm seeing; he responded promptly (literally within minutes) apologising for making me feel that way and explaining his feelings. no matter what happens, I think it's quite important that I'm remembering I can clearly express what I want and how I feel, especially after the challenges of the last 18 months.

[leafshadowss]

decided to stop creating problems in my head around my romantic entanglements and instead try to have quite a nice week .. It will be possible!

I have some beautiful ranaculus in my bedroom. I saw my family yesterday and had fun! A friend has just moved in 5 minutes away from me! I'm going to try and find wild garlic at some point this week and make scones. I will also make peanut butter granola. I will eat tasty delicious food that I cook in my clean kitchen, and I will try to drink more water this week and eat a bit more fruit and hopefully go twice to pilates.

I also have a good library book to finish, I have a sewing project to work on. I have two evening work events and a few important things to do this week, but I am taking Friday off work and seeing a friend!

[leafshadowss]

just spent 1 hour of my precious friday night cutting out fabric to make a toile of the trousers i'm trying to make ... very humbling but also magical to realise this pile of fabric might be a half-finished pair of almost wearable trousers by the end of the week!

I have so much annual leave so I'm taking next Friday off and I think I'm just going to sew most of the day (and maybe go to the sauna or something)

although I am also going to have to start getting massages because this kills my back

[leafshadowss]

i'm so close to finishing my masters thesis ... it's 87 pages ! written in French, a language that I only started learning at uni ! it's technically sociology, a field I had to learn about completely in French since it's nothing to do with my undergrand ! AND I wrote whilst working full time ! (my work is connected to the topic of my masters so IDK if that's necessarily a flex though)

i think it's quite shit in the overall scheme of things but personally i'm PROUD for a few minutes that I did it

[anxeious]

[wonderstruck]

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

[leafshadowss]

it's a beautiful sunny day and my plans for after work just got cancelled. I really wanted to have a drink in the sunshine with this cute guy but ALAS it was not meant to be today ...

but I REFUSE to wallow about cancelled plans, and I refuse to spend this evening working on my thesis when I was meant to be having fun.

Instead I'm putting on the skirt (that I finished sewing in my lunch break!!) and going to sit in the park for a couple of hours, soak up the sun, and read my book.

[leafshadowss]

I have written only 45 pages of my 80 page minimum dissertation that needs to be finished in 3 weeks so obviously I'm going on 3 dates and 2 nights out with friends this week AND borrowing a sewing pattern for the weekend AND volunteering all Sunday afternoon

[ohcorny]

it really is crazy how quickly people were willing to just let chatgpt do everything for them. i have never even tried it. brother i don't even know if it's just a website you go to or what. i do not know where chatgpt actually lives, because i can decide my own grocery list.

[leafshadowss]

its just after noon on a sunny saturday in north london and i have ... yet to do anything other than drink coffee and lounge around. but i have so much to do?? realising i should be like ... 2,5 months away from finishing my masters and i have been aggressively procrasinating (read: literally got a full time job and moved back to the UK this winter, whilst still thinking i could finish my fulltime masters taught in French). also found out UK masters diss are usually shorter than French ones so that explains why none of my friends are freaking out when I say I've only written 35 pages of my diss

anyway things to do:

finish draft of politics of migration essay

organise bibliography

1 hour on dissertation

email I., B., R.

clean bathroom

tidy room

oat milk, bananas

[leafshadowss]

deciding I need to have more fun and immediately scheduling the fun into my google calendar ... we are SO back baby.

refusing to let a full time job/full time masters/running an asso combo stop me from having a nice life.

January fun includes : Walthamstow Wetlands walk & a 2 hour yoga class on New Year's Day, a Wednesday night wheel throwing pottery class, calisthenics on Sundays, finding a very long walk to do next weekend too, going to my brother's for homemade pasta ...

I also have like 8 days of annual leave to use in the next 3 months so I'm going to have midweek random days off; my plans for my day off in early Jan are: long-ish run, sauna, pastry. Maybe an exhibition too!

[leafshadowss]

I know it's not the end of the year but I have so much uni work to finish before the end of the year that I doubt I'll finish another book so ... 2024 readS

Apparently I read 42 books but I feel like a lot of them were quite mediocre.

Books I actually enjoyed a lot:

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, as good as everyone says. Very beautiful, very tender, good for having some hope in humanity

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, I had no idea about the historical context of this novel so I was genuinely engrossed (and I guess quite dumb for not knowing!)

Monumenta by Lara Haworth, because I love contemporary fiction set in the Balkans and I especially loved reading something contemporary from Belgrade (I weirdly miss living there a lot at the moment!)

Things I didn't like:

Evenings and Weekends is weirdly overhypyed and strangely omnipresent; don't bother. Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World were creepy and thought provoking. IDK if there's an English translation forthcoming but Pour une ecologie pirate was underwhelming, as was 2066

I also read approximately 30 trashy romance novels, untracked, but a heavy weight on my brain nonetheless.

Next year... I want to read less but 'better' (as in: slower, more attentive). Crooked Plow is top of the list for book club in January, plus all the books I bought back from Paris that I haven't read yet.

Also I signed up for my new library card last week : so here is a solemn promise that, for the first 3 months of 2025, I will not buy a single book and I will only read books I already own and physical library books <3

Also I think I need to finally read George Eliot (read half of Silas Marner this year before I moved and had to return it to the library). Maybe ... I tentatively ban myself from anything published before 2015 ... apart from Crooked Plow (but I love book club because it does force me to be more attentive, reflective ,and form coherent thoughts to discuss the book for 1.5 hours

[leafshadowss]

i finished the jumper i've been working on since July this weekend. I wore it to work yesterday though and no one cared ... anyway, I think it's cute! I have a pair of colourwork socks to work on and a top that I've also been knitting since June. But still thinking about future projects ...

There's so many socks from 52 weeks of socks that I want to make!

But for my next sweater I want to make a dupe of this Toast sweater on the left with this pattern on the right; knit with a more more ease and a slightly longer neck I think it will be almost spot on. Colour undecided. Maybe green though?

And then I really want to make a mini scout shawl; this is going to take forever to knit but I think it will be such a fun challenge. Probably will knit it in sock yarn (maybe Onion's nettle sock yarn, maybe lang jawoll, maybe filcolana arwetta) so that if I end up not really working on it much or messing it up, I can just make socks instead hehe

also hyped to make some christmas decorations as little gifts ... some little socks and some stars I think!

[leafshadowss]

I had my heart broken approx. 3 months ago, everything I imagined for my immediate future had to be reimagined, and now I've left Paris and I'm back in my childhood bedroom and I ... haven't cried yet?

I don't know if I'm making the right choice but at least I'm making a choice.

Although I still feel hurt by what happened, I can also see how our relationship could have been becoming something that wasn't what either of us wanted; I still think there could have been ways to work on it that weren't breaking up, but I am trying at least to work on those parts of myself I don't like.

The physical distance makes it feel more over than it has so far and that's probably for the best (I saw him three times in the week before I left)

I start my new job at the beginning of November, I might have a sublet for a few weeks too so I can be in London instead of this village, and hopefully that gives me time to find my own place. And I'm finding ceramics classes and a yoga studio and ways to volunteer so I don't spend all my evenings on my phone in my bed (read: working on the parts of myself I don't like).

[leafshadowss]

next weekend i have to go and spend ... 28 hours approximately with my ex boyfriend doing something mildly stressful in a series of locations that are very important to our relationship and I think I might puke thinking about it

[leafshadowss]

I've been just ... Sad, so much, this summer.

Getting dumped by the man you thought you were going to spend many more years with will do that to a gal !

But finally this weekend I: mentioned the breakup without crying, kind of had a fun time with some friends and at work, abstractedly considering the concept of flirting without wanting to vomit ...

[leafshadowss]

it does feel like every aspect of my life became suddenly deeply sad and bad around mid-july (breakup, bad internship, no friends in Paris, multiple sick family members, visa issues, caniculeeee) but I am choosing to believe that this means that things can only get incredibly beautiful come September ... fingers? crossed?