Amy Do Nguyet Anh

Time for some movies! Borrowed from the library of course. I watcher Her and The Looper. They were very different haha. Her is very critically acclaimed - so I was curious. Well, it's a hard movie to relate to... It feels like a movie targeted to lonely Silicon Valley nerds.

Why spend money eating out when you can have tons of good food at home: family dinner time!        I also spent the day finishing up my exchange application. It's good to go!

Here's a full proof recipe for the perfect day inside: books, spotify, homemade dinner.   I also spent a good amount of time going through lectures on Soren Kierkegaard on Coursera. Getting some studying done is also the perfect way to not spend any cash. I also spend the day doing some errands like visiting the clinic to do the annual check up, book a dental appointment and visit the bank (not to withdraw money obviously!).  

Spending the holidays in Whistler is the best way to not bring out that credit card, especially when my mom is on the trip with me and pays for all my shopping. No jugding - I won't be mama's girl for much longer so I gotta take advantage while I still can.

I hate cooking but baking with my girlfriends is always fun. We made brownies and macarons - but the macarons turned out bad because we over beat the eggs and it separated :( Oh well we still had the brownies.

Now that I have the time, I've finally sat down to do research on my exchange prospective. There are so many choices, so many courses that I have to look into but it's good to do some important work. It's also cool seeing my plans for next year unfold. I then went out and utilized my gift card to a restaurant - so I didn't have to spend anything!

Do a home renovation/decor project! Well the big ones cost a lot of money but today I helped my mom put up some curtains so I get some privacy in my den. I feel productive and didn't cost anything at all - for me at least. My mom had to pay for the curtains hehe.

IKEA just reopened after a long strike so I decided to give it a visit. IKEA is my inspiration for home decoration and I treat trips there as a day dreaming experience. I must say the stuffed toys are pretty tempting but sticking with my spending ban I didn't buy anything. It was a rainy too so it felt nice being cozy inside a store full of nice furniture.

Cleaning out my closet! Well, bookshelf. I love books so I keep buying them, and now I have nowhere to keep them. So I'm cleaning out this bookshelf and transferring the textbooks (the books that I hate) to storage to make room for new books and books I haven't finished reading. Yes there's a lot! It's a perfect way to stay away from spending and it's fun going through old memories.

After 2 months of using shopping to let off steam, I have come to 63 cents in my bank account. I will be working soon so I'll get more money, but until then I need to teach myself how to get back into that frugal mood so I won't throw away all my money again. This holiday season I'm going to find ways to enjoy life without spending a dime. My goal is to spend 12 days out of 18 days not spending money, and today is the first! What better way to not spend money than to go to work. Yes Day #1 has been spent working a shift at Safewalk with the lovely people who kept me company and away from spending. Not even for a midnight snack.

If it's over, let it go and Come tomorrow it will seem So yesterday, so yesterday  - Hilary Duff Such a bittersweet teenage song. I remember the days I was still lipsyncing to Hilary Duff in my bedroom in Vietnam. I was 13 or 14 then, fantasizing I was a Disney star. So yesterday. As a teenager, I found it hard to understand how I felt about many things. Reading back some of my diary pages, I sounded over-sentimental, whiny, hyper, unstable, confused. Perhaps when I am 30 I will think of myself now the same way. But growing up, particularly for me, the biggest challenge was saying goodbye to the things I am used to. I had to learn how to embrace things as they last and not cry when they were over. Saying goodbye isn't easy, and moving in life isn't a breeze. This summer I felt this odd sensation of wanting time to stop, but at the same time wishing it would past faster. For a good chunk of this year I doubted myself in everything, and pushing myself to move on fr...

Back in January I was scared out of my wits when facing my class 5 driving test. I ended up locking myself out of my car 1 hour before the test so I never made it there to begin with. But I can't forget having nightmares about driving into a ditch, or crashing into a bus, or running over pedestrians. Every time I think about taking that driving test,  I can only imagine disasters. Yet, whenever I take the wheel, I feel completely in control. I almost immediately relax and look ahead on the road with confidence. So why is it that when I think about driving, I freak out, but never have I lost control while actually behind the wheel? Back in my teenage years I wrote about how time seems fast and slow to me at different times in the year. Recently, I've experienced this odd feeling where I feel like time passes by slowly, and I want it to pass by more quickly, but at the same I want to be at this point in time forever. The contradictory feeling of being not completely satisfied...

After this academic term, which I call the worst academic term since I was born (for various reasons), I have come to the conclusion that this is how my teachers give me marks. I have done well in courses I know I am pretty incompetent in, and done badly in courses I know I am pretty competent in. As I move up to more advanced math courses, I start to realize the divergence of 'math' and 'numbers'. In the courses I took this term, statistics is the 'mathy' course most concerned with numbers. There is an entire field dedicated to numbers because it is so mysterious - seriously. “Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.” ―  Aaron Levenstein How do you know when you look at a set of data if there is a pattern or not, and if there is a pattern, if it is significant or not. Even just looking at my marks this term, I cannot compare them to last term, because the two set of data are different in fundamental ...

Last Friday, UBC Improv had their last show of the year. I have been to UBCi shows since first year and witnessed the audience size of their performances grow into a steady crowd even during midterm and final periods. They are definitely the funniest bunch I have ever seen in improv; their charisma trumps even the professional improv groups I been to. At the end of the performance, the new co-presidents introduce themselves and call upon graduating members to step forward. As the audience burst into a thunder of applause to congratulate them and thank them for their amazing performances, I can't help but feel a sense of nostalgia rush through. I am somewhat jealous of the place these graduates are in. Not only are they reaching the finish line of their degrees, they are celebrated by their peers and embraced by teammates from a group of amazing individuals. I am jealous that they seem to belong to a group that have always worked so well together, and will have such life long memo...

I forgot that I used to blog a lot. It's been an exciting 2 months in this year. I got to travel away from the country for the first time since 2009 and I went to New York City. I only had 3 days but I got to visit the places that I've only seen through Gossip Girl: Central park, Upper East Side, Bloomingdales, Chinatown etc. I thought of why I am so attracted to the stories of Gossip Girl. It is, after all, about some immature people who have too much money but too little happiness. But there is something riveting about how glamorous their lives are. In the end, who can admit that they wouldn't want to live in such prosperity if it was given to them at no cost. But just like any big city in a capitalist society, New York has its slums. Two out of the three nights I was there, I witnessed homeless people get on the train and make an announcement to other passengers about their need for money and asking for help. I haven't seen homeless people do this in Vancouver,...