Author: V Donovan

An average Canadian girl with nerdy tendencies, a fascination for pop-culture and storytelling, and a burning desire to write, especially in blog form!

6 Things I Didn’t Miss In This Pandemic

V Donovan4 Comments

We’ve been in this pandemic for over a year, and it has certainly been an adjustment in nearly all aspects of life. But not all those adjustments have been bad (for me at least)! In fact, there are some that are good. As people get vaccinated and things start opening up again (I went downtown and saw friends for the first time in over a year!), I think we’re all really thinking twice about the last year and deciding what new behaviours to keep. Here are some things that I really did not miss whilst in this pandemic:

I Don't Need You GIF.

  1. Having to drive my brother places – my brother has a far better social life than I do, and everyone once in a while, he’d ask me for a ride to some restaurant or pub or buddy’s house so he could have a few drinks. It was never a far drive and obviously I’m going to do it so there’s no drinking and driving, but sometimes he’d ask when I was in the middle of a movie, which was annoying.
  2. Eating onions and having to brush my teeth – I love raw onions, and probably munch on them several dinners a week via salads or just whole chunks, and it was very nice to talk to friends over video calls right afterwards and not worry about my breath being gross.
  3. Spending money on drinks – I am not a big drinker at all, but at a party or after curling, I’ll have one or two. In the pandemic, though, those events took a hit, and my wallet benefited. At curling, it’s usually customary to buy your opponent a drink if you beat them, but that tradition was removed during the pandemic in an effort to limit socialization and contact. So just having to buy one drink for myself was great, though I did miss the socializing a lot.
    Drinking Alone GIF.
  4. Seeing friends only once in a while – when the pandemic started, there was a big push to reach out to friends, chat via video calls, and stay in touch. Over a year later, and I still do interact with people a lot online, and it’s been great. As much as it’d be fun to interact in person more, we’re able to still play games, watch movies, and chat at no cost.
  5. Disagreeing about restaurants – to give my mother a break from cooking and to support local businesses during the pandemic, my family and I ordered in every week or two, and that was fun. Ordering in to eat has been wonderful because there’s no need to argue about where we eat. If I don’t want food from the same place my parents want, there’s probably a McDonalds or Burger King on the way that’ll work for me. It’s simple.
  6. Early in-person interviews – in 2020 when I was job hunting, it was really great to have video interviews. I could sit in my room, in my element, and not have to take public transit for two hours just to chat with someone for fifteen minutes. For first-round/preliminary interviews, I think it should stay that way.
    Job Interview GIFs | Tenor

Finding good things in what is otherwise a pretty hellish and complicated year and a half is always great. What do/did you not miss from the pandemic? I’d love to hear.

That’s all for now!

 

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It’s Time To Get Rid Of Introverted And Extroverted Labels

V Donovan5 Comments

I said what I said.

We as a society love to label everything, but lately I’ve just not been feeling the introverted and extroverted ones. For a while, they were a binary. You were either one or the other, and it was literally on some job applications, so it was something you had to know about yourself and really be. And then, at some point, we went a step further and started saying “oh, I’m an introverted extrovert” or vice versa, which is just kind of dumb in my opinion. I’d rather ambivert, but honestly, just say that you’re a normal human capable of more than one emotion and have different comfort levels in different settings. It’s normal.

it's really common gif.

I’ve been to parties or events where people are constantly asking if I’m okay because I’ll be sitting very quiet and out of the main group. I don’t think these people would believe that at home my parents often tell me I’m too loud or that I have other friends who think of me as a talkative leader. I’m just not comfortable or secure in some of those parties, so I’m quieter. Maybe we like to see others as one-dimensional and understandable, so we tend to lean into these binaries when considering others.

Don’t get me wrong, I do it too. There was this one kid in my elementary school who would literally not talk. He’d say maybe 100 quiet words the whole year. He’d just sit quietly and read whenever he could and not really engage with anyone who tried to talk to him. We all just accepted it. But then one time my friend said he saw this kid playing road hockey with a neighbour on a Saturday. He was laughing and talking and participating. I didn’t believe it, but my friend insisted. To us at school, he was very introverted, but I guess classmates were never who he connected with, and he was more comfortable with this neighbour.

Ok Shrug GIF.

The thing about introversion and extroversion is that it’s only slightly about personality and more about mental and physical preferences. A lot of people think that ‘shy’ and ‘outgoing’ are synonyms for introverted and extroverted, respectively (and because of this, introversion was seen as less than), but this is not entirely true. It’s more about if you feed off others in groups and if you need alone time either to reset or as a preference.

And I can respect that some people really value alone time more and that some people need that mental break, but I feel like the need for solo time to oneself is true for basically everyone. We all need moments alone and we all need time to calm down, whether you enjoy wild parties or not. So why bother with these labels then? Why make it so we feel like we have to pick one when we do personality quizzes or, as I mentioned, job applications?

why do we keep doing this to ourselves? gif.

I feel like even the ideas of being ‘shy’ or ‘outgoing’ aren’t understood to be as encompassing or full-time, but as soon as we slap a psychology term on it, it’s an unwavering life sentence.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this? Do you feel like the terms introvert or extrovert perfectly capture your essence? Do you value alone time more than others? Do you think we should stop using these terms?

 

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The Good Stuff: Silly Inventions Online

V Donovan5 Comments

The other week, a friend and I found a Twitter account of a guy who purposely makes silly, dumb inventions. We spent an hour scrolling back through two years of Tweets to see what he’s made. Obviously, we were very amused. This guy also reminded me of a few people I had seen on YouTube who do similar things. As someone who has literally no machine/building skills and nowhere near as good of an imagination, I find this all to be very cool. Like, to have an idea and then have the tools and brains to make it happen, even if it’s a silly idea, is fun to watch. So here I am, sharing some of my favourite silly inventions from my favourite silly inventors.

Also, sorry if these embeds are aggressively large. It was the WordPress default and I was too lazy to change them all.

Matty Benedetto proudly invents things that do not need to exist and then does professional photoshoots for them as if they were real products one could buy.

Simone Giertz is a Swedish inventor who has survived a brain tumor. She lives in LA now and calls herself “the queen of shitty robots” as a lot of her inventions involve robots and moving pieces. Check out some classics from her YouTube channel:

William Osman is an engineer of sorts who has very chaotic energy, which makes his videos and inventions very fun to watch. But he has a good time giving things a shot and getting others involved in the madness.

Michael Reeves, the youngest of the bunch, is similar to William. In fact, they lived together for a while. He also is incredibly chaotic and good with programming to solve problems that no one had.

I’ve never gone out of my way to find these people, they’ve just stumbled into my view through YouTube recommendations or being sent a silly Instagram post, but it’s cool that I can be so amused by them. And it’s neat that there are people who have careers from making such fun but unnecessary things. These are just the ones I know of, but I’m sure there are many more out there, so link me to any you know of! I hope you enjoyed what I’ve shared here because rewatching them all in preparation for this blog post was very fun.

That’s all for now!

 

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Working From Home: A 6 Month Update

V Donovan2 Comments

When the pandemic started I was unemployed, but I saw and read about people having to adjust to working from home. For some, it was an easy transition, but many others struggled or felt burn out soon after. In those uncertain times (I say as if we in Canada are not still in them…) there was a lot of discussion as to the future of workplaces. So I wrote this blog post talking about how I did not want to work from home and how I thought young people would suffer in the long run if working from home was to truly be the new societal norm even past the pandemic.

But then I got a job.

I started in right away in January, and it’s completely work from home. I’ve never met my boss in person. I’ve never been to the office building listed on our website. I don’t know when I ever will. But it’s been six months now, and I actually don’t hate working from home at all.

Maybe it's not the worst idea gif.

In fact, I like it a lot more than I thought I would. That’s not to say that I don’t stand by what I wrote last year, because I absolutely still do, but I’ve had a slight change of heart and am proud of myself for dealing with this new work situation so well.

I like not having a commute. I like that I can use a stove at lunch rather than just a microwave. I like being able to sit on my bed with my laptop sometimes rather than only sitting at a desk. I like that I can play music out loud if I want. There are a lot of pros to working from home, and I’m sure if you’ve experienced it, you know this all to be true.

What also has hugely helped me manage this lifestyle is the fact that I have a decent social life set up for myself. I spend more nights on Google Hangouts with friends than not, so I’m able to get regular human interaction, and it doesn’t feel transactional like it sometimes can at work. That work-life balance is real and important.

Work Life balance gif.

In Canada, basically everyone should be double vaccinated by the fall, so there’s some light talk about returning to normal, returning to offices. While I was totally against working from home before I had to do it, I think I’m more in the split party now. I think I’d like to only go in a few days, and ideally those few days be for meetings or something. For people established in their role and good with technology, perhaps being in the office every day isn’t necessary. I know for me in a marketing role, I really don’t interact with people outside of the department too often and a lot of my work is solo, so it’d be more of a social thing for me, which is fine because building relationships with coworkers is valuable. I still think starting a new job remotely isn’t ideal for either party, and I still think that the younger generation could suffer without the mentorship or connections in the long run, but when you balance the pros and cons, I think in general, it’s fairly even. Hopefully workplaces understand this and are able to nicely adjust for it so that everyone can work in their ideal way and get what they need out of it.

I’m learning a lot at my job and I like my coworkers and I’m glad I have the chance to work and figure out myself from home. The fact that I’ve had a change of heart regarding this is cool and I think it makes me a better person and a better employee.

I work well on my own and am not someone antsy, so spending basically 22 of 24 hours in my room/office and 14 of those on a computer isn’t hard for me, especially once I got set up with a proper desk. My room for years was just a place to sleep, so changing it up a bit to suit work was weird, but needed. Not all of it has been changed though…I guess this is now technically my office door.

I did this in grade 6 or 7 and I love it. Click to enhance.

If working from home is my life now and will be the trend for employment going forward, I’d still like to not have ‘home’ be at my parents’ house especially because I am now officially closer to 30 than I am 20 (ew), but one step at a time. This concludes my update!

That’s all for now!

 

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Monthly Look Ahead: July 2021

V Donovan4 Comments

And just like that, 2021 is half over! I think this year has gone by fast so far, and I’m sure July will fly by just like previous months. Here’s what I’ve got to look forward to though, and as always, I’d love to hear what you’ve got going on too!

monthly look ahead logo

  • Ted Lasso season 2 comes out on the 23rd, and I am so, so excited for this. I binged S1 in March and enjoyed it so damn much. It’s such a pure show and Ted is such a pure character, so I’m looking forward to the good times this show will bring.
  • Black Widow is FINALLY coming out on the 9th after being delayed and pushed back many times. Early reviews are apparently positive, and I like Natasha, so I’m looking forward to seeing this. Plus it’s been a hot minute since we’ve got a new Marvel movie.
    Black Widow still.
  • The Olympics start at the end of the month, and they’re always fun to watch. I hope everything runs smoothly and there are no COVID issues. My favourite sport in these summer games is synchronized diving. Go Canada!
  • I get my second vaccine shot! It’s wild to think that by the end of the month, I’ll be able to hug people again. My original second shot date was early September, but Canada got a lot more doses so things moved up a lot. I really thought this summer was going to be a write-off, but things are looking up!

 

I hope there’s good weather so I have reasons to go outside on weekends. And I hope you have a good July too!

That’s all for now!

 

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