2020 Vibes

A new year has started, 8 days passed. I wrote 2020 first time today on a PowerPoint slide and realized how years are moving apart from the year I was born. There is a lot of energy, dreams and goals to accomplish, some which failed miserably last year.

Lame picture, I couldn't find anything better but because this is where I can show my little bit of creativity I chose to add some picture because I like putting pictures.

I feel like there’s a lot of things I want to do and something or the other is stopping me or there are delays. I want to go to a chocolate making class, there’s a huge chunk of chocolate bar which looks like a brick, I got it to modify some existing chocolates I have, they are too sweet and all I wanted to do was melt some 80% of cocoa and add to it, to reduce the sweetness, then I started searching if there are chocolate making classes, there were some and all the classes are booked until March. The classes are offered by a Pakistani lady who incorporates spices and nuts in her creations, I saw that she also has some of her chocolates at Starbucks, so I got excited and I definitely want to attend her class. So, that’s goal one – maybe delayed till march, but then I feel in March I will be madly house hunting as my lease expires in April and I am done living in my current house, I am bored of the neighborhood, there’s no one to talk around, even after being diverse, I feel it’s not diverse. I can keep writing about it..but I dont want to..because I think I can’t stay at one place for more than 2 years at a time, sometimes I feel I want to move somewhere else the day after I move into a new place. That’s also why I don’t think I can buy a house, because the fear of not being able to explore and sticking to one choice, I feel it is too much to commit.

Another thing I wanted to do was a certification and again, the exam for certification is in March and after coming from India and taking up a challenge, anything right now is looking like a big thing to take up. I wanted to start my MBA again but again, I couldn’t because 2 marriages in the house in the first quarter of 2020. So, I am aiming to begin it in summer, if its in my hands I might just take all the 5 classes at a time and finish them off. Trust me! Not that the degree will take me places, but I see it as a thing that’s been postponed for too long and something incomplete, so I want to finish it soon.

So, a lot of goals have been set personally. I hope to finish atleast one or two by the end of the year.

One of the things that I have been trying to get out of but couldn’t because I had good intentions in doing it, was me trying to volunteer out of volunteering. Sounds funny? Yes, sometimes I volunteer for things and it almost turns out to be involuntary volunteering after two or three sessions of volunteering.

After moving to Chicago, I volunteered at different places, sometimes I thought why am I doing this? And sometimes I felt why am I so incompetent? Why do I have to shy away for things as simple as selling tickets for a Polish cultural show? Yes, I did that. Volunteered to help sell tickets for a polish cultural show, on a random Friday I stood in between strangers saying ‘Hi/Hello, do you have tickets?’ one of the things I don’t like when I do these volunteering sessions are that sometimes there are a lot of volunteers and you are just standing there like a stupid smiling and greeting everyone, I don’t want to smile and greet people on a Friday night! I stood in that theater that day for one or two hours thinking about everything I am missing on that day and what else I could have done in that time, but it was a bad time, I was going through something and I wanted to just get out of the house and see some people. So, I decided I would go to this random theater. It was an absolute waste of time, it did not have a cause and it did not need any volunteers. Anyways, I learnt that I will not take those volunteer emails seriously.

Some events are fun, but people who host those events just use you. I remember for one of the events, the organizer promised us lunch and didn’t give us anything, the volunteers were standing there for hours and the organizer for sure made a lot of money out of that event, but didn’t care for the volunteers. I have totally digressed from my original topic of this blog, but anyways I was going to write that I volunteered out of the Syrian refugee after school program, the program changed a lot in the last six months, people changed and because I volunteered only for a day I didn’t feel that I completely belong to that place, others volunteered there almost daily because they got paid or they got credits from school to volunteer. My intention was to help and educate, but there was a new girl who took over the program and only put me with the kids in the garden area where I have to stand and watch the students play or play with them, I didn’t feel like I was contributing much, maybe I was but I don’t know. As the program became famous the number of teachers increased, for 25 students there were almost 8-10 teachers which I felt was unnecessary, when the program was started it used to be 4 teachers and I felt I was contributing. Though it got less chaotic with more teachers, I felt not needed. It used to be 2 hrs  of driving for this..but I enjoyed my time seeing the kids. So, I have to find another activity to replace this, I am thinking I will go to gym more often this year and read more.

So, there’s a lot that is going to happen, at least for the first four months I will be super occupied which I always want to be..