I know I don’t do these kinds of posts but with all that’s happened and been happening, I thought it’d be fun to write about it! It’s mainly just a sort of update on life since I’ve grown so much from the 15-year-old that started this blog, haha!
Here’s a breakdown of everything I talk about here if you’d like to read about a specific part!
- To begin with…
- Academically speaking,
- During the hiatus,
- Coming to monthly wrap-ups,
- The path ahead is long.
- The fate of this blog …
To begin with…
I’m done with school! We don’t have official graduation ceremonies (had a farewell program though – talking about experiences and such) but I’m done with terminal exams and high school in general! High school was definitely an interesting experience. There are things I would do differently if I had to go through it again, but overall, I suppose it’s all part of the ‘growing‘ experience.
On a more exciting note, I’m off to college! I’m still looking at colleges, evaluating my grades and choices and just doing a lot of thinking.
Academically speaking,
This might come as a surprise as most of you know me from just this blog and I don’t talk about my academic interests often. I intend to pursue engineering in college, preferably majoring in Mechanical engineering. As I said, as much as I would love that, my fate depends on what grades colleges find appealing and whether mine fall under that.
Update: Thankfully, colleges did! I have gotten into my second choice of college and will be majoring in Mechanical Engineering!
During the hiatus,
During my hiatus, apart from exam prep, I was also working on building an academic portfolio, one that represented me as a collection of my interests, if that makes sense, haha! So part of that process included branching out, seeking internships, job experience and networking – so I lived inside LinkedIn for a majority of the hiatus.
If any of you would like to connect on LinkedIn, here’s my profile!
It was uncomfortable at first, but then I started enjoying it, not necessarily having fun but looking forward to it all the same. I built my portfolio website on WordPress as I was familiar with it and uploaded academic articles mostly on STEM topics. But I didn’t want it to be very formal, I think?
So I named it…..the contemplative elf. And customised it to look like something a child would do? I’m having a hard time describing what I was thinking at the time, haha! And I’m also maintaining a blog page there where I post life updates and experiences and the like! For now, I’m just sticking to my experience with the few exams I wrote and the companies I worked at.
While I want it to be a professional portfolio, I still want the representation to be…human.
Knowing me, I figured I’d find it very weird later on in life, so I made my name the website URL since that’s pretty constant. But for now, the contemplative elf is serving its purpose of being a portfolio I can use in applications or as a record of whatever I’m doing on a more academic level.
Here’s the link to my portfolio website, if you’d like to check it out!
I also got rid of my Instagram account and started a new one with the handle @the_contemplative_elf to include both art and science!
Coming to monthly wrap-ups,
June was a pretty long month for me. I basically had exams throughout June, with a few days’ break in between each of them. I returned from my hiatus during June too because I was missing writing. I wrote a couple of poems, random pieces of fiction and short, weird notes. I read basically 0 books and drew absolutely nothing. I got back into art sometime in the middle of July after over 7 months’ break. I did, however, explore tons of new music and got to know new artists and found that I enjoyed indie music quite a bit.
I was also busy with a couple of internships and courses I’d taken up. The courses were all flexible so I could watch them whenever I got time. They were fun while they lasted! I was and am working at a couple student-run organisations as a STEM content writer and while writing articles on science topics can be incredibly time-consuming (because I have no idea about what I’m writing, so I have to learn and then write), I also enjoyed them, the research especially immensely. And getting to work with like-minded teens and make new friends was amazing as well!
July was equally long, haha! But it was so much better than June because I finally got back into both reading and drawing and it felt so good after not having done anything for months. I also did more writing than I had in the past year and I feel like I have a hold over my thoughts, now? It’s tricky to explain. I used to feel absolutely all over the place with my thoughts and what I was speaking but I feel like my thoughts are more or less in sync with what I say now.
I also returned from hiatus at my book blog, Paper Hearts. Unlike the hiatus here, the one there spanned over a year, haha! So it felt good to write about books again and re-evaluate where I wanted to go with it. I’ll be adding those posts at the end of every post here if you guys would like to check those out!
And August was both nerve-wracking and fun at the same time. I’ve been trying to learn how to draw portraits and experimenting with different forms and styles of writing. I’ve been waiting on exam results and looking into colleges, reading more about subjects I’ll hopefully be studying and just growing in general. I’ve also signed up for driving classes so I should hopefully have my driving license in a month or two. I think August has been my best month since March of 2020, haha!
September will be a fun sort of busy month if things go to plan. But even if they don’t, I don’t think I’d mind. I’m still ecstatic over the fact I don’t have to go back to school, again. Don’t get me wrong – I love learning and feel grateful to have access to education but school wasn’t the best experience for me and I’m glad I don’t have to go there every day. There was nothing wrong with the students or teachers or the management – I think maybe, I was too weird for everyone? Anyhow, I’m done and it’s vanished into memory, so it’s all good, haha!
The path ahead is long.
Now that I’m done with everything i.e exams (yay!), I intend to spend the remainder of whatever time I have left until I have to leave for college doing the following things:
- Meet new bloggers – blogging in general!
- Maybe start a literature-oriented newsletter
- Write more. I have several stories that I left halfway through that I’d like to continue.
- Take a couple of introductory courses (on subjects that I’ll need in college)
- Read more books ( I have a year’s worth of TBR to catch up on haha!)
- DRAW
- Work on myself (social interactions are still tricky and I’m camera shy and well, they need to be tackled – I can’t go the other way every time I see someone I know!)
The fate of this blog …
As for the future of this blog, I intend to expand my categories. I don’t intend to switch up the content per see, I’ll still be doing creative writing or tags but I’d like to branch out into other writing genres and see where that goes!
I’d also like to get more involved with prompts. I’ve been noticing all these amazing prompts and how they help in learning more about writing as a craft and I’d love to try it out! Also I’ve found that prompts do a very good job of getting me out of writing slumps (thank you summer of stories!).
I also have this idea where I write about people I’ve met in real life – like character sketches, I think? It’s not completely polished out yet, but it’s something I’m excited about! I also wrote something of a trial – The Skeletal House in July. I think I’m going to call it ‘Characters in Hindsight’ most probably.
Well, I guess that’s all about what’s been going on lately!
Let me know how you’ve been doing! I’d love to get to hear about what you’ve been up to and any funny experiences you’ve had!
I’ll go first – there was this one time when I had to send a thank you email to a person for answering my query. I’d addressed her as ‘ma’am’ throughout the entirety of the mail. But what I didn’t realise was that the last ‘Thank you, ma’am!’ had been autocorrected to ‘Thank you, mama!’. Of course, I saw it as soon as I hit send but I didn’t think I could do anything. Until I saw that it was still in the outbox, so I was able to delete it and rewrite and send the corrected version, fortunately! Who knew slow networks could be helpful, haha!
Thoughtfully yours,
D
Previously on Random Specific Thoughts:
links in this post:
- linkedin profile
- the contemplative elf (portfolio website)
- paper hearts (my book blog)
Random Specific Thoughts 
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