Happy

What positive emotion do you feel most often?

Saying that happiness is the most often emotion or more like positive emotion that I have may seem like a lie.

As a person who is living with depression, most days, I wake up weak and tired and just frustrated with life. However, when I see my mother gaze fondly at her grandchildren in that moment, I am happy. She had to leave my sister and me back in our hometown with our grandparents when we were babies because she couldn’t afford to take us along with her. She missed our childhood, but I’m glad that she gets to see the childhood of her grandchildren at least.

When I see the joy in my sisters eye, every time she shares with us, her achievement, her individual achievement, it makes me happy. She has gone through a lot to finally find something of a room and that she found it. It makes me feel like she can start to be happy for herself.

When I see my father bring back a fruit or a vegetable from his home garden and I see the pride with which she brings it. It makes me happy. He loves agriculture, and when he was healthier and younger, I think she dreamt of going back home and having a land filled with beautiful trees and plants. He gave it up because he had to provide for his family. It may not be a lot, but the small area in which he has planted the few household vegetables and fruits is cherished as a testament to his passion.

I think no matter how sad I am as long as my family is happy. That is a good memory for me. That is happiness for me. I wish I could be the reason for that happiness. Just like they are for me.

So to conclude, I stop focusing on myself, the emotion that I feel the most is happy.

Price Tag Taste

While I am not a stranger to having a costly meal at times, the second part of the prompt leaves me dumbfounded.

Daily writing prompt
What’s the most money you’ve ever spent on a meal? Was it worth it?

I have come to realize the cost of the meal does not really define the worth of the meal. Yes, I would choose a fancy place, but only to make memories with someone I care about. I took my best family on my first salary and since my parents made so many sacrifices to get me to the stage where I could earn the salary the bill did not matter to me.

On the other hand, I enjoy the food that we make at home. I love the craziness, the messy kitchen, the dirty clothes and the fun conversations during the cooking process. After all the hassle, we may end up with burnt food sometimes, but when we sit to eat together, the food always tastes better.

So in conclusion, maybe money is a factor but the memory behind it always will matter more.

Happiness

Not to be to philosophical, but I feel we misunderstand what is “true” happiness.

For instance, I love stationery and discovering (and owning)new stationery. I feel happy with I look at my stationery collections and I use it as sort of therapy when I am not having a good day. Just going through them and reorganizing them helps me calm the waves in my mind.

I also love watching K-Dramas with their mostly happy fairytale like ending and of course actual fairytales too. They make me happy too, and some of the comic scenes in them are truly iconic. When I want to disconnect from reality I always turn to my Watch list on Netflix for that much needed break.

Spending time with my family makes me happy too. Just seeing them happy makes all the troubles of life worth it. On the other hand, being an introvert, spending time alone makes me happy too. I love delving into my world of imagination, I am essentially doing noting, but I am still happy.

If you ask me which of these is true happiness I would claim all of it are. It just depends on the time and the reason why you are down to truly understand what you need to be happy again.

Daily writing prompt
What’s something most people don’t understand?

Recollections of the Past

When we are kids we always are busy. Always doing something or the other.

As a kid I loved collecting stamps and coins but with the relocating I lost some so I has to let it go. I loved writing down the lyrics to my favorite songs. I also made activity books by cutting up the crossword puzzles and comic strips from the newspaper. Oh and makeup! I think all kids at some put loved being a make up artist.

But there are some that I have continued doing or restarted recently. I still enjoying making small drawings once in a while or painting or some sort of art. The one consistent thing over the years has been writing and I am so glad I never let that go.

Daily writing prompt
Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?

Sweet Tooth

I believe with all my heart that I like most kids loved all kinds of candy. As I grew up though I started to loose my interest of most kind of candies.

There are however a few of them that have continued to hold a place in my heart. Kit Kat is my forever favorite! I simply love the Hazelnut chocolate flavor. I know there are other chocolates with the same taste but those wafer covered chocolates will always be my first choice.

I also love the Heartbeat candies.. Especially the purple colored ones. I have not eaten them in a long time but I still have the memory of the taste and it is just amazing.

I am not sure it would be considered as a candy. But when talking about my favorite sweet food item, Loacker cube wafers cannot be excluded. I could eat a whole bag of it at one go. Even though now I don’t prefer having a lot of candies, I still I could binge eat them today.

All these are stuff I have been having since my childhood so I guess they are part of my core memories. I can just close my eyes and imagine their taste.

Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite candy?

Brewing Recipes

I really love watching cooking shows and food shows on TV. I enjoy listening to the innovative food recipes the people on these shows come up with. However, I do not have a good taste palate.

I may not understand the different taste profiles but I love cooking food though. I think prefer cooking anything non-vegetarian. I love trying new recipes and making food that my wants.

But the meal that I love making the most is “Fried chicken”. It’s what Minny Jackson said on The Help – “Frying chicken make you tend to feel better about life”.

It took time.. trying many recipes from online. To finally figure out the recipes that made the chicken skin crispy while being cooked all the way through and mostly importantly without it getting it burnt.

With the fried chicken I also love to make potato cheese balls and toasted garlic bread. The combination it just heavenly. It’s my description of comfort food. And when I make them everyone in the family eats them with relish. The family that usually runs in different directions when it comes to favorite cuisine always comes together to enjoy it.

I also love baking. I bake cookies, cakes, biscuits anything with chocolate in it. Yet again, though I love only dark chocolate I love making chocolate goodies for my nephews.

Hopefully, in the future I can learn to appreciate all kinds of cuisine and also learn to make it.

Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite thing to cook?

Seems Ages Ago

Computers were a luxury once upon a time. A magic machine that did things that were so so unimaginable.

My father bought the first computer home when I was 12 years old. I remember him carrying all the way from the store back home. When he reached home he was all sweaty and exhausted. I remember seeing the smile on his face. My sister and I never asked for it but that he got it for us made is even more special.

My father connected it and switched it on. It took quite sometime to boot. The screen opened to Windows 2000 which at that time was a big leap from the earlier Windows 98. I remember the Viewsonic monitor with the little birds logo at the corner of the screen. Always thought it was lovebirds guess they were actually something else.

The computer was so bulky back then. The CPU was a huge box of metal and the heat it emitted was something else. The monitor took up half the study table. We bought a computer table because there was no space for the keyboard and the mouse. All of which was wired to the back of the CPU. Oh and the mouse! there was a trackball for the mouse. We had to regularly open the mouse up and clean the dust off for the mouse to keep scrolling properly. The keyboard was so hard each key was like a stone against the fingers.

I remember the time it took to download a single music file. Watching a video was out of the question I doubt that Youtube was even launched. They are such vague memories. I really can’t believe it those memories have become so insignificant but for my child heart they were so important.

We were so mesmerized by the machine. We did have computers at our school but to have one at home was absolutely the best. My father may not have provide the luxuries in life but he give me everything I need sometimes at the cost of his own happiness. My mother loved watching her children adore their father.

I don’t remember much about the computer as such but I remember the memories associated with it. At that age I may not have appreciated what was done for me but I am glad that I realize it now. I am extremely grateful to my parents for teaching me the value of hard work. It has allowed me to truly understand the sacrifice they have made for me over the years.

Daily writing prompt
Write about your first computer.

Together everything is better

With working parents we didn’t always have the whole family together. But the one thing that we always did together was putting up the Christmas tree. We stayed up on December 1st every year and decorated the whole house for Christmas. Both my parents no matter how tired we they were from their long hours of work they stayed up with us.

Every year we tried changing up the way we decorated and came up with new ideas on how to do it. We have made a nativity set out of clay, decorations for the tree using eggshells of the Christmas Cake, stars out of thermocol… and so many other things. It was not always aesthetically pleasing but my parents appreciated with so much love.

True, we may not have had a lot of time with the whole family around but we did not miss out on anything. And I guess though not a family tradition when all of us were together we had happy times and that was what mattered.

Bloganuary writing prompt
Write about a few of your favorite family traditions.