Well in terms of mia and her future plans…. I just quit my job yesterday.

I made up my mind last week, deciding that it was about time that I took my life into my own hands as opposed to doing things because I felt pressured to do them. My company at the moment is considering a full time position and I was worried about it. But as time went on, I realised that I didn’t really want it. That I’m miserable there. After spending a couple of weeks in NIDA and by the encouragement of my friends, especially Sharon, I made the decision to quit. So I told my boss yesterday that I didn’t want to be considered for application for second round interviews. It was surprisingly very difficult for me to say it all.

I tried enrolling in TAFE today at Ultimo for a Certificate IV in Clothing Production but alas, considering I had nfi about their enrollment procedures and how fast everything fills up I couldn’t get in and the waiting list was a mile long. Thankfully, Macquarie Fields (yes completely bogan and out in the sticks) wasn’t full and I spoke to the teacher who said she may put me into the class with my 3 days free of Monday, Tuesday and Friday. The classes sound like exactly what I need to do. She will confirm at the end of the week.

I’m going to concentrate 2 university courses to finish my stupid degree, present it to my parents and then say ‘kthxbai’ to them. I’ve enrolled in ACTL3002 – Life Insurance and Superannuation Models and ACCT3563 – Issues in Financial Reporting. Yes, I’m doing an accounting subject because it’s easy and because it fits in nicely with an almost 2 day schedule.

I’m continuing to look after my darling Sam Sam (who by the way is still uber cute despite growing noticably older with every passing week) for at least another 6 months. Maybe if I manage to get enough units in TAFE, then I am considered full time load and can get Youth Allowance.

Kellie, a friend of mine from Revue told me if I managed to get an RSA then she’d be able to get me into Promotional work which would be in the evenings for some spare cash. I think I’ll take her up on that.

I’ve got some fantastic plans for my Thieu Nhi class which also involves me doing more and less work. I’m going to create schedules and stick to them. It’ll involve a lot of preparation work from me in the early weeks of the term, but less week by week. Now that I’ve decided on this path in my life, I need as much time as I can muster for myself.

And in other news, I am now Front of House head for CSE Revue and have been offered Wellbeing head for Med Revue. That’ll eat up lots of my time as well as I also am volunteering at the Bankstown Theatre Group who have rehersals after work on Tuesdays and Thursday.

I’m going to be soo incredibly busy, but at least I’ll be doing things that I love and meet lots of people. =D

Keep smiling! mia

I’ve been out of the house every day for the past 2 weeks. It’s amazing how much stuff gets done!

First of all, I’ve been at NIDA for two whole weeks. I did Costume Design for a week and then Costume Making for another. I really enjoyed myself. It was great!

I drew more in Costume Design than I ever have in my entire life. I didn’t like Design that much, I found it a bit wanky and that I already was able to visualise what I wanted, but drawing as a method to communicate my ideas sucked. A part of it that wasn’t totally explored in my opinion is constraints. We did stuff like ‘be inspired’ by a certain period or fashion statement or designer and did a play study, but there was no ‘this-director-is-a-jerk-and-wants-all-the-costumes-to-be-blah” where blah being some ridiculous constraint. I met some wonderful people.

 I can never forget Claire who is the biggest bogan ever and she was just instant entertainment. Adelash is such a lovely girl – she is Ethiopian and was adopted at the age of 9. Hearing her life story over lunch with her was just amazing. It’s really consolidated my opinion that I would try adoption before putting myself through the pain of IVF. Instead of wasting so much money to create a life simply just because I want a child with my DNA seems ludicrous to me. I’m of the opinion that family is about the relationship, not just the blood. Sure a lot more people are open to things if you are of the same ‘blood’ but in the end, what does blood matter?

In the course of that week, I managed to get to work at Chubb for a day and have dinner with Nicholas. We went to Yai a restuarant on Crown St because Sushi Suma was packed. We had Panang Curry in a coconut which was awesome and some random Asian vegetable covered in yummy sauce. I ate more rice than Nicholas. I highly recommend this resturant giving it a 4 out of 5 star rating. Good food, good open air atmosphere. But it totally helped that I had good company =D.

Speaking of people whose first two names are Nicholas James, on Friday I had lunch with Nick Nack! We at the Dumpling and Noodle House on Anzac Parade. (Lol, I had been to dumplings for lunch 3 times that week cause it is awesome). I was feeling slightly self concious that day because I was wearing so very orange. It was good to catch up.

 On that weekend then I went to Callala Beach with the other Huynh Truong for a holiday. I kept very much to myself and mostly just went off by myself. Some might say it was almost unsociable. But it was a holiday and I needed to be kind of by myself that weekend and so it felt like a holiday. I helped with the kitchen work and did my fair share. I just preferred to be on my own. Maybe because I don’t really feel like a part of their little group. We have different interests. I like one-on-one conversations with them, but as a group, I don’t really feel like getting drunk and playing outrageous betting games.

I tried to catch up on my sleep but they could be really noisy! And in the middle of the night, Anh Trung pulled out my hair in a bet =(. That sure did hurt.

The scenery was beautiful and the water nice and cool at Lake Conjola and Seven Mile Beach that we visited.

The next week was Costume Making at NIDA. Well the course wasn’t as skills based as I thought. It was like design, except you design one costume and make it. Our first project was to take a T-Shirt and a headband as a base, a bag of scraps and a box of random things and go nuts. I made a whole outfit. I used the T-shirt in the back of a corset, the side panels of a handbag and then the decorative motif on the front of the skirt. I had dibs on all pink fabric scraps lol.

Our second project (without Megan as our tutor but with Josh) was to take a word and to ‘conceptualise’ it into a paper based costume – no fabric. Josh didn’t like me very much because I did something that was very ordinary and ‘didn’t think outside the square’ so to speak. But I made something out of paper maiche for the first time in my life which was cool in itself! I made a paper maiche breastplate, a sword and cape in a kind of Xena Warrior Princess kind of thing.

At this point, Emily and Debbie were two girls that I was getting close by all the chit chat we did over our work. So we moved to the back table and sat together gossipping. It was so lovely having people to gossip with, work together and have ideas with. We just worked amazingly well together in the same space. For our third and last project, we had to come up with a character we wanted to portray in costume. From the picture, Debbie picked Bjork, I picked Ariel The Little Mermaid and Emily is the Queen of Hearts from Australia in Wonderland.

We weren’t too happy with our tutor Josh who in my opinion I thought was a horrible teacher. He kept imposing his ideas on us and he totally didn’t help us in the back because I think he probably could sense we didn’t like him. I found him rather egotistical but I did push the limits of my creativity with our limited resouces. I would of really liked if the course was more structured but hey.

I had so much fun with Deb and Em. We went out to see Marie Antoniette at the Dendy Newtown after class on Friday and it was really cool. We had a good laugh because we made Plastic Wings in class and walked around Newtown and Chinatown in them. We made others laugh at us, and gave people a point of conversation. We took sticker photos in the Capitol and have our own trading card! =D

My sister left on Friday morning for Vietnam. I had spent Thursday night packing with her. Surprisingly it didn’t pain me as much as I thought it would because I knew she’d come back someday. She’s already promised to come home next year for Tuyen’s wedding and Dad said something about potentially having a European Tour and visiting her in September. Tim was all for her getting him pressies. heh

I went hiking on the weekend with Alex, Jeremy and Jeb. It was a hard hike considering I haven’t been hiking since I was 15. I didn’t whinge as much as I thought I would and we made good time to Pindar Cave where we stayed at. I had a reallly nice time there with the guys and I regret my almost sedentary and rather lazy lifestyle to date. But it was good to see how I could push myself, and I even saw Dau Duong on the paths! And these ones not made by TNTT HT! ZOMG wow.

I’m now working for a full week to make up time I took off whilst at NIDA. But I’ve thrived in the past 2 weeks being insanely busy. Sam’s off in Adelaide still so I have a little reprieve in the afternoons though I do miss him. It’s been a fantastic summer so far, and I’m going to be sad to see it end in a month’s time.

With holidays almost over, I’ve got to make solid decisions about my future and work and stuff. I have to think everything through. But the year has turned out great so far =D

In a more serious emo post about things. I don’t usually blog about this sort of thing here, but here goes.

I’ve asked myself ‘Why care?’ to many things.

The whole, it-hurts-too-much, why should you be a nervous wreck, unable to function, curled into a foetal position on your bed kind of thing. (Yes I am aware of that previous sentence making little to no grammatical sense.)

The need to numb yourself to certain feelings because of the pain they inflict is a self-preservation thing. You need to function, you need to keep going, so you just block it out.

I’ve never had someone die on me, so I can’t even imagine to understand the loss that people go through. One of my friends lost his younger brother over a year ago and till this day, he still feels so desolate about it. I acknowledge I have never felt as much pain as he has at the loss of his brother.
But I’ve lost people in my time – I lose my relationship with them. My closest friend in high school doesn’t pick up my calls, my best pal from primary school dropped me for no apparent reason, my dearest friend at university has bigger fish to fry, the guy I had hoped to one day marry doesn’t have time for me, the ex boyfriend whom I have had an obsessive weird relationship with (and in some ways continue to do so) ignores my existence whenever I am near him.

It’s a struggle to not care. I’ve finally kind of reached this pinnacle in recent times. To put it out of your mind – let time go by and quash it mercilessly if it gets you down.
The thing about being single is that you tend to become more selfish. Sure you hang out with friends a lot more – but you become more set in your ways, less able to bend over backwards for someone. Mulling the aforementioned relationships has in some ways made me so wary and so bitter. Why give anything any more if all it will eventually amount to is something dead and broken?

I worry about that sometimes. I’m less likely to be ‘close’ to people. I have a couple of mates, but I don’t go out to make new ones. I stay in, preferring the company of hobbies, because they’ll never let me down. I don’t care about people’s opinion as much and I have less patience with people.
The flipside of looking at it is called ‘prioritising’. I prioritise all the things that should be important then and garbage collect the rest. Leave all that baggage behind! You don’t have to carry it all with you.

I used to care a lot more. Sometimes making myself sick with caring. But in the end, who cares about your feelings? It’s just you who cares about your feelings. Everyone else is just a tangent.

I know the weather is of little interest and mainly is a conversation filler, but I absolutely hate the weather right now. Where is my usual Sydney heat wave? It’s just as miserable as winter at the moment and I hate getting out of bed. Of course, the plus side is that we are using less water, but the minus side is despite the rain, not a lot of it is heading to the water catchment.

Weather aside, things that I am doing in January.

• Going on holiday with my TNTT mates over a weekend.
• TNTT organisation frenzy – meetings, new syllabuses, enrollements, uniforms etc
• TNTT major fundraiser – Come to the Bankstown City Council fete and support our stall!
• Get over Alex – he’s a jerk and I shouldn’t let him get to me.
• NIDA – though I’m majorly pissed off because they still haven’t confirmed Costume Design, I have yet to arrange leave and such. But Costume making is definitely on and I’m uber excited
• Enrolling in TAFE for part time certificate IV course in dressmaking (hopefully). I need to sharpen my skills. But this is also largely dependant on the full time job thing.
• Full time job? Either I am successful in my application at my current place or I will be kicked out and have to find a different place, with possible change in career.
• Start doing more exercise.
• Digitise my entire photo collection.
• Clean my room top to bottom and reorganise every box.
• Buy a Panasonic mobile phone charger

Yes, the last one seems kind of prosaic but hey, not everything has to be ‘major’.

I’ve lost 5kg in the past few weeks or so, which makes me pretty happy. I’m no longer bursting at the seams. However, losing another 5kg will take a lot of dedication =(. My mother has been telling me to stop eating junk all the time whilst simultaneously feeding me junk because she’s too lazy to cook and even Dad had a go at me before he left for Viet Nam.

I managed to find a set of old old old negatives whilst cleaning out my photo collection. Not only did I manage to find almost every set of negatives of photos I took from high school (YAY) and a set of negatives of my sister’s 8th and my 4th combined birthday party. It’s fantastic. I’m going to get them put onto digital today and see how they look. It’s sad I couldn’t find any more considering what a pack rat mum is.

I’ve been scanning a whole bunch of photos for my sister and she made this comment which I found funny. I was pointing out the improvements that I was making to the scans
Q: “I don’t care. You’re being rather particular about this ‘cile.”
me:”I’m a particular sort of person”
Q: “Yeah. Bloody Virgos.”

I had no idea she was superstituous. But yeah, I’m finding rather Virgoean traits coming out of me. I hate cleaning my room because when I do, everything has to be in the exact right place or otherwise it’s not worth cleaning. My photos MUST be in chronological order. I am anal retentive in file name conventions of my music collection.

That’s it from me. Take care and I hope your January will be as awesome as mine.

2006 is now officially over – so now is my nostalgic post over what happened in the last year.

I met some wonderful and fantastic people over the internets. Catie, Nick, Penelly, Joel and Chuck, I love you! (And with Chuck, I use the term love very loosely)
Was my first year as Vice Principal at TNTT Bankstown. Some projects I got too lazy to do, but I enjoyed the ride despite letting some of my personal issues cloud my performance. I’ve always loved the kids, and love the job that I do which is organising stuff, and so I’m really pleased with how things went. My kids all performed fantastically (my class came first and so did Bankstown!) and I’m so proud of them. I’ve made better relationships with people from other schools and I’ve improved on my flexibilty and my ability to mix with people of all ages. A special shout out to Thuyen who has always been my mate, ever since high school when I used to fall asleep on his shoulder and everyone teased him calling me his girlfriend.

On the TNTT note, I can’t forget ADELAIDE and Nang Hong which was fantastic. I had loads of fun and loads of tears on that trip – but Adelaide was incredibly beautiful and I’d love to go there again. I can’t say I’ve made long lasting friendships with interstate people, but I did get to meet interesting people and it’ll be cool to see how they change 3 years from now in Perth.

Cute moments with the kids – like Robert saying “Merry Christmas” to me after mass, Nhu Lan always hard at work, Dan Thanh, Thanh Thanh and Chau at their cheeky best. The little Tuoi Tho are always gorgeous like Tu Quyen who’s smile never fails to make me feel happy. I’m looking forward to this new year and the things we’ve got for them. We’ve got the Nghia Si hiking camp (yay!), the Bankstown school camp and maybe this year, I’d like to get our own photo site up. In our 15th anniversary we’ve uncovered some absolutely gold photographs and I want to get them all online. My flick hosts most of mine, but we’ve just got some great shots that I haven’t even seen.

My family. Though I’ve had huge problems with parents, Timmy and Quynh and I are closer than ever. I’ve loved the time my sis has been home and having Anthony over from New Zealand to visit. I’ve gone to so many shopping trips with her and it’s good fun. Tim is mostly over his teen high school angst and I think he understands what I do and why I work so hard at TNTT better. It’s been so good to have that this year.

This year I’ve lost some best friends and I’ve gained some new ones. Jen and Nancy are so good to me. I love you! And though it’s been so sad and so hard to say goodbye to An and David, some things you can’t change. It has been especially hard in the last few months losing David and losing contact with him but I try to think optimistically.

Spending time on MYSELF. I’ve always been obsessed with boys, but I’ve been single for this entire year. And though you do get lonely and a little envious at how happy your friends are with their partners, I’ve needed this time to concentrate on myself. I’ve spent time on my hobbies, gone out with friends. That’s not to say I haven’t experimented with boys, and have kicked myself with my terrible behaviour or dealing with theirs, but they are mistakes that I needed to make. I’m now more sure of myself as a person.

SAM SAM! The Samster and his parents have taught me so much about myself and how to handle very young kids. I feel so much more confident and able to deal with little kids. I’ve fallen in love with Sam and I love spending time with him. I realise that at some point I’m going to have to say good bye to him, this year with Sam has been sensational and I feel so warm inside. I really feel so much part of their family and it has made me feel so loved.

And now, for plans for 2007

• Enjoy myself!
• Take photographs! With more stockings if possible *wink*
• Maintain our school track record at TNTT
• Make this years Revue the best ever
• Do as many shows as I possibly can
• Get a full time job then move out (I know I’ve been saying this for ages….)
• Graduate from university (damn 9 units of credit)

To those who read my blog, though I don’t know who you all are, thanks for letting me share a part of my life with you. Feel free to make comments in the future (not nasty ones!) and link me to yours so I can share your lives too!

With love and a happy new year!

mia