beanie baby worm blog

The intern on my team is leaving. With the end of summer comes the start of the school semester. So he’ll go back to the college he attends, out of state. He’s a rising senior, a college athlete. Perhaps I’ll see him in the office again next year, since I heard he got a return offer, but it’s too hard to predict. Maybe he’ll get a better offer elsewhere. When asked how his experience in our office this summer was, he chuckles and says he really enjoyed his time here and other canned polite and corporate phrases. He’s slick, I observe, when I watch his final internship presentation. He dodges potential sticky situations when difficult questions are thrown at him by upper management. The sharp planes of his face shift, I watch the barely perceptible scrunch of his eyebrows before they smooth out back to their usual unbothered state. I idly wonder if I could manage to do the same, as I read the logo of his vest that lays atop his pressed dress shirt while he talks at the front of the conf...

Spoiler free I enjoyed this book a lot. I haven’t read Butter but know a little bit about it. It was more of a slow exploration of the characters than a thriller or anything particularly plot-driven. So going into this book, I didn’t have too many preset notions of what it could contain. I was just along for the ride. And it really did not disappoint. Like I had heard about Butter , this book was an exploration of the two women and their relationship/interactions. As an American reader, I tried to place myself in the shoes of the author or someone culturally assimilated in Japan. So rather than measure these women’s thoughts or actions against my own experiences or whether or not I agreed or empathized with the story or characters, I tried to appreciate it for what it is and its intended audience. So the narrative touches on so many topics: the dynamics and difficulties of female friendships and understanding others, sexism and societal expectations for women, navigating big-pictur...

Spoiler free I really liked this book. It’s a wonderfully executed piece of speculative fiction, imagining how humans will orchestrate the rise of technology, artificial intelligence, and medical research, and in turn, how humankind will have a role in allowing this technology to eventually shape us, and what that might look like. It’s simultaneously a love letter to humanity and a warning of what our world, shaped by violence and greed, could and will likely look like, even if it comes about differently. It’s a deftly written and concisely constructed plot that covers a vast scope of ideas in a very short volume. Fans of VanderMeer and Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle will enjoy this book, but it also stands on its own without comparisons since it’s so unique. I’m intimidated by sci-fi and speculative fiction, but this book doesn’t get bogged down in over-explaining scientific elements. The novel takes the form of a chain of chronological journal entries by subsequent related parties. The tech...

I’ve been reflecting lately on the idea that the people who hurt me probably don’t regret it. I probably don’t even cross their minds. It’s funny how we move through the world and our lives, shaped by those who have affected us emotionally. Whether it’s the pain inflicted by a parent growing up, a friend who abandoned you, a breakup or a person who refused to commit to you, a toxic boss, the list goes on. I spend most of my conscious hours subconsciously replaying those moments and justifying my own actions as a result of those experiences. Sometimes I hurt others to emotionally protect myself, or close myself off. No matter how positive one tries to be, we undeniably spend most of our time thinking negative thoughts. I think of the last time I remembered a negative experience someone gave me, a time someone hurt me, gave me the cold shoulder, the last time I wished a person would apologize. It’s all quite recent. Now I try to think of the last time I thought of a person I hurt. It’s ...

I felt immensely depressed on Tuesday. I was sleepy, but I could sense that the gloom could mostly be attributed to my job. Most days pass calmly, I tap away at my keyboard in my corner cubicle, grab coffee with my office admin who’s twice my age, eat lunch at my desk, and continue tapping away until it’s time for another commute. Then I’m home, and I try to ignore the looming cycle ahead. It was one of the rare days where I’m hit by the crisis triggered by realizing I have decades ahead of me. It’s so painfully lonely at work sometimes, especially because I feel on guard constantly and just take orders all day. I don’t even feel human at times. When work is slow, I’m left with these thoughts that even doom-scrolling social media can’t repress. I get consumed by a fit of melancholy so strong, I feel like I could cry at my cubicle. I ended up taking a nap before dinner. It was some quiet emptiness for a bit. I groggily woke up for dinner and retreated back to bed for some reading befo...

I’ve been feeling gloomy as the year wraps up. This reminder of time passing makes me melancholy, more so than my birthday; maybe it’s the fact that it feels more related to the passage of time for everyone rather than exclusively me. To combat this strange blanket of moodiness, I think about the fact that I have much to be grateful for, and there’s not much logical reason for this feeling. When I reflect on the past year, I feel so grateful for ... everything, really. Firstly, I completed my first full year at my big girl job in 2025. I still have opportunities for growth at this job, and I got switched to a better team. I live at home and have a good relationship with my parents, something that takes conscious effort. Although it’s never too much of a chore since I consider them to be some of my best friends. But of course there’s friction at times. When I think about my relationship with my parents growing up, especially my dad, it was tumultuous and fraught with pain and misund...

Thinking about my life since my last birthday, I’ve concluded that if there’s one thing I’ve come to realize about this life and my own morals, it’s that you need to have peace with yourself and the life you are living above all else. Everything else comes after. My priorities have shifted since that period of my life, which was spent stressing about how my life changing radically after graduating college would change me. I fearfully clung to what I knew about myself, trying to stay grounded in those certainties rather than feeling excited about the prospect of discovering new things about myself. I wasn’t at peace because I didn’t know who I wanted to be, and therefore who I would become. My concern now is that I won’t change enough, that I won’t grow, and that I will stay stagnant in this version of myself for eternity, paralyzed and uncertain, allowing the fear of what others think of me or their expectations to control my decisions in this short life. My mom always told me that I h...