Fresh fruits for my smoothies, almond milk, soy milk ❤
Consider this a belated New Year resolution, but I really must evaluate my decisions now and start making healthier and more responsible decisions!
1. Let’s begin by talking about what I am NOT doing anymore:
No more Dunkin Donuts iced mocha lattes. Okay only a few a month, not a few a week.
No more junk food. This includes potato chips, cookies, brownies, muffins, cupcakes, ice cream, etc
No more take-out all the time! Only when necessary. Packed lunches are going to be a thing now
2. Let’s talk about what I AM planning on doing more of:
I’m workin out! At least 3 times a week. Every morning, I’m going to be at the gym 9:30 to 10:30. Then come home, shower, and go about the rest of the day
I’m replacing one meal a day with a meal replacement smoothie. I’ll share some of my recipes in future posts!
I’m drinking at least 8 glasses of water daily
I’m having 3 meals a day, optional light snacks in between of fruits and salads
Replacing my normal dairy milk with soy milk
Running on my treadmill at night for at least 20 minutes. Will up that as my stamina hopefully increases
No more coffee! I woke up today to work out and felt like a ZOMBIE. Then I drank 2 glasses of water, worked out for an hour, and felt so energetic and refreshed afterwards
Week One Price Tally:
$10 – For my gym membership at LA Fitness (I’m a guest to my workout partner’s plan so it’s cheaper). $10/m
$37 spent this week on my “going healthy” plan. I’ve frozen some of the fruits so they will last me longer and my brother and I are both using this stuff for our meal replacement smoothies
Hi guys! I have been very lacking in sticking through with projects and ideas lately. I know.
I need to find some sort of a daily blog project starting February 1st. To occupy myself, to open myself up to my readers, and to make my blog at least remotely interesting again!
If you have suggestions and links to other blog projects you’ve done, please post a comment 🙂
Projects I’ve done in the past are linked on the right sidebar – I did Project Theme, Poetry Paradise, and 30 Days of Blogging Honesty.
Give me ideas! And if you want to do a project with me, we should collaborate and promote something slightly bigger! Blogging Honesty was great because I learned so much about other bloggers along with exposed myself to them and made new friends. I want something like that again. Are there any projects going on? PUT ME IN THE KNOW!
I have been OBSESSED with the show Fringe ever since FOX aired the pilot in 2008. Believe it or not, I have actually been watching this show as it progressed since that time. From the beginning of 11th grade until just after my graduation, Fringe has been a constant in my life! I cannot say that I watched it the day it aired every week these last five years, but I never lagged more than a few episodes behind.
The show had me enthralled. Excellent storyline (Right up my alley), amazing acting, complex and interwoven layers of plot, and not a single boring episode added up to an amazing five years with Fringe. I can say with utmost confidence that it is my favorite TV show. EVER. Shows like Gossip Girl, Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, and even Once Upon A Time had various problems with them – too long, got boring in the middle, dragged on, stupid plot twists, etc etc.
But Fringe was AMAZING.
I say was because the two-hour series finale premiered on January 18, 2013.
It’s over 😦 It’s over and I’m really sad that nothing new will happen. There were so many twists and turns, so many people who died, came back to life, died again, etc. It was a hell of a ride, and I certainly was not ready for it to end so soon.
I am just glad that they were told that this would be the last season with enough time to plan a proper ending. I would have been DEVASTATED if Fringe ended with some sort of a stupid (and this was all a dream) cop-out ending!
Some more articles and interviews from the cast themselves are linked below!! If you want to dive into my obsession, since the series is all over. I love to power-marathon through series once in a while. This one will have you captivated from the first few minutes of the pilot till it’s very end.
THE BELOW LINKS WILL CERTAINLY CONTAIN SPOILERS 🙂 PLEASE CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!
I tried to set up a motivational songs playlist – you can see it on Spotify if you know how to stalk me through those things. I signed up with my name (Pryanka Arora) and main email address (blishful@gmail.com) if that makes things easier. I added the songs Motivation (Kelly Rowland, Lil Wayne), I Believe I Can Fly (R. Kelly), Stronger (Kanye West), We Will Rock You (Queen), and Total Eclipse of the Heart (Queen). Then I played a random song and set to work typing up this post.
But whatever thoughts had been pouring out of me dying to be written suddenly got stage fright and disappeared. So I guess this is just one of those nights that I don’t need music on. It was distracting me! That’s a first.
I wanted to talk about firsts today too. Today is the firsttime I don’t feel like wearing nail polish on my fingers. In fact, I have this strong urge to go downstairs right now and wipe off Sinful Colors, Blue By You, off my nails before I continue writing. I don’t know where this is coming from or why I feel such vehement distaste towards polish on my nails suddenly, but there is no denying that it is there. I have not gone a single day without painted nails once I stumbled across my fascination/addiction/obsession with nail polish in late 2011. It is now January 2013 and this week, I left my nails bare on Wednesday. And after typing this post, I am probably going to remove my polish once more.
I know that people change and it’s nothing to freak out about, but in my typical fashion of overthinking things and drawing out connections, I feel like this week, my passion for nail art is dimming. I am sure it will revitalize or change gradually into a gentler calling.
Passion. I never want to be criticized for not having enough passion. With my career, with my family, with my hobbies – I want to be passionate. I never want to do something I am not passionate about. And it is not until recently that I began to experience so much depression, anxiety, and doubt when it came to law.
Guys, I WANT TO BE A LAWYER. I have wanted to be a lawyer since I can remember. Dreams can change, and it’s okay. But this isn’t even a dream. It is my one goal, ambition, purpose, and passion. My ONE career choice that I felt undying passion and draw to.
Then it came down to it and I underperformed on the LSAT. Maybe not the end of the world, but crushing to my self-esteem and confidence. To my passion.
I feel as though when I lost that passion, I tried to fill in the gaps with things like nail art, beauty blogging, makeup and skincare products, nail polish, and dating. My writing suffered, my academics suffered, and certainly, the law school application process has suffered.
I don’t have a single letter of rec yet, though I brought up the subject with my Professors and Bosses back in November. I just dropped it all. What happened to my passion? WHERE IS IT?
I need it back. I want to be a lawyer. I need to write the BEST essay ever and convince them, in two double-spaced pages, that if they look beyond the numbers, they will see a woman who wants it desperately. Who envisions herself as a lawyer, and who knows she will be a success.
But can I only handle one passion at a time? When I am trying to revitalize my passion for law, why do I find my love of nail polish faltering? Why am I no longer writing creatively? Why have I not done anything in Photoshop in MONTHS???
I still want to be passionate 😦 Help me find my passions. I can’t pick just one.
After I typed up this post, I did actually go down to get my polish remover and open up Youtube to catch up on my subscribed channels. iisuperwomanii posted a new video, and it furthered my melancholy mood 😦 RIP to her grandfather, please watch this extremely moving and emotional and uplifting video though…it has an important message. It felt like she was speaking right to me. Right to my fears and emotions.
I know I am ending this on a serious note, and my heart is just breaking for what she is going through, but I think it’s an important message that I really needed to hear.
What I want to say to you is that in 2013, you will fall. You will get upset, you will get heartbroken, things will go wrong. And what I want to tell you is that you don’t need to wait until the end of the year to decide it’s a new beginning. Every single day, any day you choose can be a new beginning. So in 2013, if something doesn’t go your way, don’t think “Oh, that’s it, the year is done, I can’t do anything.” No! Wake up the next morning, and make it happen. 2013 is your year, I believe in you, follow your dreams. And when I say follow your dreams, that doesn’t mean dream about them. That means wake up and make it happen. Stop wishing, start doing. I believe in you.
The guy I had a crush on for ALL OF HIGH SCHOOL (I mean all of it…started right in that mandatory 7th grade art class and continued till my freshman year of college ended…my god it was pathetic) is now in a relationship. With somebody else.
Okay well since I know at some point he had the address to this blog (Let’s get real, he probably hasn’t been on it in years), I’ll keep personal details to a minimum. Those of my readers who know me ‘in real life’ already know who I’m talking about 😛 And for the rest of you, consider it a general rant!
So yes, he started dating this girl a week ago (I think this is his first…he was all sorts of shy and anti-social with self-esteem issues in HS BUT I tried to be there for him through it all. We were friends and things sort of progressed towards dating the summer after high school ended but he freaked out and disappeared on me for months and well…yeah)
So he has a Facebook now too. He never had one then BAM he starts dating some pretty slim white chick and the same day they start dating, he joins FB. And shows up in my suggested friends list. He’s all hot[ter] now (He lost a lot of weight. Not like that ever bothered me..) and in a relationship.
I’m happy for him 🙂 I hope this chick treats him right, because I know he’s such a sweetheart and he’s so nice and caring and compassionate. I assume that with the weight loss came a much needed boost of confidence and self-esteem, and that time has healed the impact of some of the terrible things he’s endured.
I don’t know. Part of me is sort of wistful because I liked him for so long, you know? But for the most part, I stopped pining away years ago and got a grip on myself (I mean really, as if a white guy would ever date me). So most of me is just happy that things are going right for him and he’s got somebody to talk to about it all! It’s still weird to know that he’s in a relationship. I mean, really? Him?
It’s like seeing all those awkward nerdy people from HS at your 10-year reunion (Dude my HS is so cheap that we don’t even have one of those) and seeing how they transformed into handsome business tycoons with the perfect wives. Some of them do, anyway.
It’s just weird knowing he’s changed so much. And missing out on it. Because for years, we were close and then the past few years of college, I stopped making an effort and he never really made any effort at all and we just drifted back to being mere acquaintances. And now he’s dating.
Hehe. My life is funny.
If he can get a girlfriend, I can get a boyfriend. Like we were both probably just as socially awkward in high school. Okay fine, maybe I had more friends but he definitely wins for having more male friends than I did.
It’s an awkward interim – I have graduated college, but don’t yet have a real job. I am telling myself that this is not because I am lazy and unmotivated, but because I plan on higher education in the form of 3 years of law school to obtain a JD that will hopefully help me get an even better job.
But I am SURE I’m not the only one who’s found out that there’s this lovely gap of several months between graduating college and beginning graduate school. I’m not the ONLY one who graduated early, after all. Right?
Right. Googling for things to do in this break didn’t yield much results beyond “OMG GET A JOB” so here I am blogging about what I think I would rather do in the time between now and September.
What should I do in all this spare time!? I want to go travel – I am planning to travel to India, hopefully. I’m VERY VERY psyched that I’m done with college, but I’m still very reluctant about entering reality and work and law school. It will happen, but it doesn’t need to happen quite yet….
If you guys have had ‘breaks’ in your life like this, what have you done with them?
Here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish before I start law school in September:
Travel to India – probably in March or April? For a month or two.
Finish organizing and decorating my basement room/mini-apartment
Get a proper medical checkup – gynecologist + endocrinologist AND figure out how to regularly obtain birth control without paying out the roof for it
WRITE! I have so many unfinished projects on this blog
Go on a cruise – with friends, not family
Do something adventurous – skiing? Hand-gliding, para-sailing, hot-air-balloon, bungee jumping, skydiving…the options are endless. Pick one and do it!
Find a part-time job as a Paralegal once I’m done traveling
GET INTO LAW SCHOOL – preferably Fordham – and find an affordable apartment in New York City
Save up enough money for a car – long-term goal, don’t really need a car for the next three years while I am studying in the city
Save up enough money for a Euro-trip – long-term goal, this won’t happen until after law school as well.
You can’t start a post about brown girls without referencing this Youtube video, right? iisuperwomanii‘s guide to brown girls is something I watched and laughed over when it came out 2 years ago – January 2011 – but recently revisited on a youtube binge that involved watching every single video released in the last year, and then some, by JusReign, Akamazing, and obviously, iisuperwomanii (These are my 3 favorite desi Youtube celebs…do you know others?).
We’re a little bit needy/clingy/attention-starved. Just a little. I love her references to the whole boy/girl inequality thing (WHICH IS SO TRUE, BY THE WAY. NOT JUST A STEREOTYPING ERROR) but I don’t agree with her logic that this inequality is the reason behind the neediness.
Inequality can lead to self-esteem issues when you’re a girl second-guessing everything you’re doing. Nothing seems to be good enough for the parents, so yeah, you start to wonder sometimes just how good you are. So when you’ve got a guy telling you that you’re beautiful and amazing and he loves spending time with you, you feel like FINALLY, you’re doing something right. And that’s a good feeling. I like that feeling 🙂
Plus, I don’t think that craving attention is necessarily a ‘brown girl’ thing. All girls want attention.
Okay fine. I do like the video (and admiring her hair in the video), but honestly…everything else she says can just apply to all girls. So we’re not going to talk about it anymore, but it was a good intro and it’s still a funny video! I love the way she delivers everything 🙂
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Prysmatique dishing the dirt on what she thinks about brown girls…and about being one –
OKAY so maybe I should talk about myself for a change. I haven’t done that in a while on this blog. Just have a public heart-to-heart-type-post.
Brown girls start drama too easily. All my life (post-7th grade life), I have tried to avoid hordes of brown girls. If you really put more than 2 or 3 of us in a group, it’s only a matter of time before shit goes down. I witnessed that firsthand and maybe I’m not letting go of the past, but that feeling of backtalking traitorous “best friends” is not something I want to relive again. So I’ll abide by my decision, thank you very much.
I’ve learned to avoid the packs of brown people. At NYU, they actually banded together and called themselves BROWNTOWN. They had a NAME. I don’t even know what to say about that…every time I try, I just cough and sputter in disbelief.
My parents need to stop talking about my marriage. I’m not getting married yet. I’m not planning on seeing anybody for anything THAT long-term. I’ve barely even had a boyfriend, barely explored my sexuality (That is to say…I am straight, but haven’t done much, sexually), and barely thought about my future in such a concrete way.
My parents, though, have done all of the thinking for me. As one of the (few remaining) unmarried/single girls in my generation, EVERY SINGLE MEMBER OF MY FAMILY IS AFTER ME. My gosh it’s so bad that I once had a ring on the middle finger of my right hand and my aunt came up to me and gave me a knowing smile before asking, “So you’re practicing already, huh?”
FRUSTRATION. The ring just matched my outfit you silly fools. Just because I am now 21 (Going to be 22 in July zomg), everybody loves nudging, poking, and hinting at marriage when they talk to me. My own mom incessantly elbows me and asks “Oh, do you have a boy in mind?”
My god. They are so clueless, so old-fashioned, and so IRRITATING. Keep in mind that because I’m Brown, I’m not actually allowed to date. But somehow, still, I am supposed to have a boy in mind?
Weirdos.
If I don’t cook and clean, I am a failure and a disappointment. No mother will want her son to marry me…Oh how I laugh. Fine, it’s still a valid point that I should be clean and organized for the sake of having a good-looking house/room, but the fact that I am messier than my OCD mom is somehow cause enough for her to moan in despair about how my future mother-in-law will kick me outta the house if I don’t clean up my act. (Pun intended, and you see, even when she’s lecturing me about being clean, she brings marriage into the mix) And of course, an Indian wife who doesn’t cook and clean and coddle her husband is a useless wife, and I will be useless if I don’t start cooking some nice rajma and daal and chole and gobi aloo soon. [Those were the names of some Indian dishes, if you didn’t gather from context]
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I just wanted to write about how it feels like to be a Brown girl sometimes. It’s frustrating, especially when you’ve got parents that are far too stuck in older times for your own comfort.
Being Brown is difficult. Coming from parents clinging tightly to their roots and the way things were done when they were brought up in India is tough when you are born and raised here.
I would not call myself whitewashed, but I definitely have a different opinion on the strict ideology my parents have about marriage, the ideal husband or wife, and duties assigned by gender.
I want my boy to help me out with the cooking once in a while. I want him to make ME coffee in the morning once in a while. I refuse to be like my mother, who caters to my father’s every need not because she loves him and wants to (Although there is definitely some of that), but because she believes that this attention and coddling is what is expected and becoming of a wife.
That’s what sickens me. That it’s an obligation. That it’s somehow shameful or disgraceful when your husband gets up off the couch to get himself a glass of water when you are sitting next to him. That you feel GUILTY that you didn’t offer water to him earlier or get up to get it for him. And that if you wanted water, you would again feel GUILTY if he got it for you and you could have gotten it for yourself.
I think that’s pretty messed up, and that’s their upbringing, not mine. Why are you guilty? He’s a grown ass adult. If he wants water, he can get it. If you want water, you can get it. If you want to get each other water, do it out of courtesy or love, not duty or obligation.
So yeah…if you managed to read this far into the post, I hope you understand me (and my opinion on being raised as an Indian-American) a little bit better 🙂
Wow, it’s so great to say that. 2013 was going to be a momentous year for me.
It was going to be the year that my brother graduated from High School and I graduated from College.
It was also going to be the year that I started law school and my brother started college.
Now, it is only three of those four things, but that’s okay. Graduating college in 2012 is not such a bad thing 😉
But the best part of 2013, for me, is buying my own domain name! (prysmatique.com)
I finally paid to upgrade my website’s name from prysmatique.wordpress.com to simply prysmatique.com! This means I have my own email address (pryanka@prysmatique.com? I think that’s what it will be…I still have to set that up) and my own domain name!!
Fandango + TrialPay’s two free movie tickets offer tipped the scales in their favor.
THE DEAL WAS – Fandango.com offers 2 free movie tickets (Up to $12 each) if you complete an offer. This has been around for a while but I think they rotate the offers available. I’m not sure how long GoDaddy has been an option, but when I was buying tickets for a movie this weekend, the offer showed up and I’ve been WANTING my own domain name for a while.
So I used TrialPay and spent the requisite $10 minimum on GoDaddy (It cost me $10.17 to buy prysmatique.com for one year) and got my two free tickets!! In theory, this is a good savings, right? Spend $10, get 2 movie tickets AND a domain name! TOO BAD, it’s not quite that cheap either sillies.
You can’t just buy a domain name and have it magically work with an existing blog! It is still a good deal, and with some hosting options as cheap as a couple bucks a month, it’s not too bad. (ie. If you buy HostGator’s cheapest option when it’s on sale you can even pay as little as $5/month, but it adds up so the 2 “free” tickets get you to spend $70 to actually get them. They’re sneaky that way)
Instead of paying for my own hosting, I went the cheaper route. I next paid WordPress.com’s $13 mapping fee (Can be bought here – it took me WAY to long to find out where to actually pay the mapping fee. Ridiculous, really. Don’t they want my money?) to reroute my blog to the new domain name but keep it hosted by them, since I don’t want to buy a monthly hosting plan for this year. If I keep the domain next year though, instead of renewing the mapping, I’ll shell out for monthly hosting and power my blog with WordPress but have all the additional freedoms that come with having your own hosting. That’s in the future…we’ll see what 2014 holds.
Mapping the domain was easy – if you decide you want two free movie tickets and complete the GoDaddy offer + mapping route that I took, here is the tutorial I used yesterday, January 3, 2012, to set everything up. Less than 24 hours later, everything was mapped and prysmatique.com was live!COMPLETE ALL THREE STEPS IN THE TUTORIAL HERE!
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TL;DR –
I paid $10.17 to buy my domain name for one year, and I paid $13.00 for WordPress mapping so that the domain name can be transferred onto my existing blog, still hosted by WP.
I spent $23.17 in total and received two free tickets, redeemable through fandango.com. The 2 tickets are valued at $24.00 (if you spend more, you pay the difference).
So basically, in the amount it would have taken me to purchase two tickets online, I got two tickets PLUS a custom domain name and hosting for one year.
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Now I get to have my own domain name for a year AND treat a friend of my choice to a movie. That’s a pretty sweet deal to me (:
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 8,300 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 14 years to get that many views.
Wow guys! Thank you so much 🙂 Last year in review showed that my blog had a total of about 1,500 views in the year and I remember being ECSTATIC. In 2012, you guys increased that number to 8,300. DAMN.
Really, thank you all for sticking to the blog through all my half-finished projects. I’m going to finish them all, seriously. I’ll make a sincere effort this year to do that!
Controlled Derangement 