Floral Necklaces & Hexes

I love flowers. Flowers are perhaps the most sweet thing on this planet, although I'm also a fan of water (there's a lot of it) and sparkling jewels of all kinds. Fortunately, we humans are good at adorning ourselves with the brightest and most magical delights that planet Earth has to offer, and so we have made necklaces with the trapped bodies and souls of flowers that we may use as our talismans. Nice.

These ones are from Accessorize:

Aren't they nice? I think they might be cursed. It's fine.

Diary: Brionne & Juice

My diary has been getting exceptionally colourful recently, and also full of stuff about Pokémon, naturally. What can I say, I love Popplio and I will protect him forever.

I've been drinking a lot of delicious and exciting fruit juice (I'm considering going into a new career as a fruit juice surveyor) and that has truly brightened up my life. I've got a bottle of grape and beetroot juice, and lots of apple juice. Only the best things in life. I love and respect juice, as we all should.

I've been doing a bit of painting, which has been nice, and I've put a little bit of that in my diary. I definitely think it's more fun when I stick a few extra things in, so I want to continue putting a few more paintings and miscellaneous things into my diary. Mind you, there's not much of 2016 left now, so there are only so many diary pages to fill up! Maybe I'll start putting some samples of fruit juice in here, just to share the beauty of their hues. A good idea?

Long Hair ☆ Short Hair

I posted just four days ago about how I love having long hair partly because it has some symbolism for me that I sort of use to encourage myself, and now I'm going to write a post about how I keep thinking about how cute short hair is, and about how I'd also really like to cut my hair short again right now, and ultimately about how I have a lot of conflicting thoughts and ideas in my head all the time.

So I've been missing short hair for a while, mostly because it's just inevitable for me to do so after having long hair for a while, but also in large part because my hair is at the point where it gets immensely tangled very quickly. Sometimes it makes me feel like I'm wearing a big rug on my head. I notice suddenly that I feel too hot and I scramble to scoop up all of my hair to give my neck and face some breathing space. I can't put my hair in a bun for too long because if I do it will get straight up matted and will be a pain to brush back to normal. And it's fine, I can deal with all of these things. Any hair requires some kind of maintenance, and long hair has it's advantages too, but I remember all the advantages of shorter hair, and I see cute pictures of short-haired people, and I get that dreamy look in my eyes as I look upon sepia-toned memories of lovely short hair of times gone by.

To go back to symbolism - hair cuts are of course often symbolic for us. Lots of people cut or otherwise change their hair to mark a change or a transition into something new. It can be like becoming a new person. As much as I am fond of my long hair right now as a symbol of different kinds of growth, I'd probably love cutting my hair just as much as a symbol of reinvention and freshness. And there are so many things like this, where I have strong positive feelings towards two conflicting options. It's kind of brilliant though, because it means there is so much opportunity. It means if you focus on certain aspects of a decision and its outcomes then something great can be happening no matter what.

Uncertainty, changeability, and confusion can be useful. Like a personal toolbox you're equipped with that can let you do anything. So I guess, make the best of all your decisions and everything you change your mind about. Meanwhile, maybe I'll cut my hair really short on one side and keep it long on the other in order to represent a perpetual indecisiveness.

5 Favourite Recent Anime

I have been watching all the anime lately and I thought I'd do a round up of my favourites in all their glory. Keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times as I take you on my anime tour. There will be saxophones, dogs, and some terror, as can only be expected.

1. Hibike! Euphonium

This sweet, orchestral wonder is a nice show about how cool trumpets are, and of course, the titular euphonium. It's very pretty and a good watch for those of us that like emotional instrument-playing. I really like the mascot/gatcha characters that make an appearance every so often too (oh Tuba-kun, we love you so). Another nice thing is that the show keeps telling me new things about instruments, and I appreciate that.

2. Madoka Magica

This is a cute magical girl anime with a really sweet and slightly chibi-like art style and everything is very nice until the rock music kicks in. It's best to watch this with little preconception or context, I think, so I'm not going to say much about it, but one of my favourite things about it is how it cycles through some art style changes for effect during battle sequences. It works really well. Madoka Magica has this nice feel of psychological unease that creeps in under the door as you're watching. It's great.

3. Magical Girl Raising Project

This is a very nice anime about a smartphone app and some magical girls. It's really cute and the pacing is good. I've noticed I really enjoy concepts that utilise some kind of alternate game world or something similar. Maybe that just stems from a deep and ingrained love of Digimon, but regardless, I really enjoy the way the smartphone/game 'reality' is meshed with the real world in this one.

4. Pokémon Sun and Moon

Pokémon has gone for a softer and doughier art style with this incarnation and it makes the series feel really lovingly crafted and expressive. The writing is also great for this series and it brings out all the particular humour and spook of the very first series. Mimikyu is everything. It all feels like a nice departure from the style and tone of previous series, and to me represents the perfect harmony between making Pokémon fresh and new whilst retaining nods to the fond memories of older Pokémon fans like me.

5. Yuri!!! on Ice

Of course, I had to include this anime of the moment. Like many people, I fell in love with this series and its quirks. My favourite thing is our delightful poodle, Maccachin, but Yuri!!! on Ice has so much charm within its pacing, over the top but self-aware emotional pulls, and flawless art. It also has possibly the most uplifting theme song of any anime (my previous holder of this title would have probably been the theme from Revolutionary Girl Utena). I'm hoping for a Maccachin spin-off, because surely we deserve that.

I'm New

I like to come up with little mottos and symbols and motifs all the time to cheer myself on and encourage myself. I find that they really help me to steer myself in the right direction, even if they're very small and very meaningless things. I guess part of it is just the act of focusing on something in itself, but it also feels special to have something you made up for yourself at a specific kind of time or to combat a particular obstacle. It's a bit like having a memento from a friend that you can always look at when you need a boost.

My new little motto for now is simply, "I'm new".

A problem I have sometimes is that I can dwell too much on things. Sometimes when I try to go to sleep I find myself unable to stop myself from cycling through a thousand worries about the stupidest things. Sometimes I can still get bothered by memories I have from being a little kid and making some kind of a mistake or having something go wrong, and whilst I know what I'm thinking about really isn't important or worth worrying about, it can be easy to get stuck there. So I thought up "I'm new" to be something I could whisper to myself if I can't pull myself out of those types of memories or thoughts. Because it's all okay if I'm new. A new person separated from those things. Like the first page of a shiny new sketchbook.

I'm not sure exactly why it works for me, but it does. It's my chant for right now. I'm new, I'm new, I'm new. Ready to be clean and fresh like a springtime meadow full of dewdrops. A sequence of emerging flower buds. The first tentative chirps at sunrise. Something like that.

Journal: D W A Y N E

I've gotten some good journaling done. A good record of all the most important images from the forefront of my mind (culminating in the unmatched Dwayne Johnson collage below, which came after making some pin drawings - I've included a video of this process at the tail end of this post).

It's been really nice reflecting on transient thoughts with a bit more freedom, and I guess I forgot how much doing so can encourage me to be a more joyful and grateful person, so I'm really thankful for that. It's funny, I wonder if there are a lot of moments I forget about because I don't write about them. Maybe I collect memories inefficiently. Who knows.

I read somewhere recently that historians need people to write about mundane things, because sometimes no one writes about those things and then they get lost in history, and I like that. Every little thing can be so important and meaningful and relevant in unpredictable ways. Everything about our lives is worth something. Most especially all these Dwaynes:

Hair Tree Forever

I've been growing my hair for quite a while now and I keep seeing cute short haircuts that I envy, but I guess my hair has become symbolic for me in some ways. I still want to see how long it can grow, because it's like growing a tree for hundreds of years and seeing the magnitude of its development. I want to see myself reach an extreme, so my hair becomes a symbol of strength and determination. It's a reminder that everything takes time and that things can change a lot. It's also meaningful to me because for a long time I couldn't accept some things about myself, including physical things, so it's like a tribute to that kind of acceptance as well. It has a lot of significance to me. It's like a blanket of progression in that it literally grows and that growth in length is representative of all kinds of other spiritual and emotional growth. So as much as I miss the less tangled world of short hair, I still want to see my hair grow more and more.

I don't know how much hair I can handle, but in my dreams it gets all the way down to my ankles. That would take a rough estimate of eight years from now, though, assuming it's even possible for my hair to grow that long, but I should be able to get to tailbone length in about one year from now, so I guess I'll look forward to that instead.