Quick Update

I hope all the mothers and mother figures had a great Mother’s Day. It’s the hardest job in the world, no doubt about that. I’ve been trying to eat a lot more healthy recently (minus this weekend, horrible Mother’s Day dinner and party temptations), and I’ve started to go back to the gym too. It’s a nice addition to my regular yoga. My legs are unbelievably sore though, but that’s a great feeling! Here are some of the snacks and meals I’ve been incorporating. I’m not a chef or creative with food, so this is the best I can do. I also don’t believe in cutting things completely out of your life. Live the life you love. That includes eating the things you love, just in moderation and smaller quantities.

Peace & Love,
M.

15 Things You Can Do To Be Your Best Self Today

By: Nico Lang

1. Try to have conversations with people you casually meet in everyday life. Find out the name of the woman you see all the time at the grocery store and engage her. You can have small talk or unexpectedly talk about the big things. I once ended up having a three-hour conversation with the girl who worked the cashier at the thrift store I went to all the time. Not only did I fill my afternoon in an unexpected way, but I also made a friend out of it.

2. Remind people in your life how much they love you and mean to you. You don’t have to get super gushy all the time or reenact a James L. Brooks screenplay. Just give back to the people who give to you.

3. Text people back right away. I know we all like to pretend we’re so cool and busy, but who doesn’t love to know, in a small way, that the person on the other end of the phone is fully engaging with you?

4. Ask yourself how you can be a better friend to people or better support them. Work on making yourself a little more accountable to the people around you. Sometimes this starts by talking less and listening more or being our more authentic selves with those around us.

5. Get up early. It’s a whole lot easier to take the day by storm if you grab it by the circadian cojones.

6. Smile more and laugh more. You don’t have to smile all the time — because that’s called “When I Was on Lithium” — but you should always seek more opportunities for humor and laughter in your life. Be aware of the joy that’s already around you, and if all you see is pain, transform it into laughter. Transcend it.

7. Do something you didn’t think you could or always wanted to do. When I was a kid, I always wanted to be an artist, but I found out the hard way I couldn’t paint or draw. (My human hands look like mashed potato flowers.) But over the grad school break, I found something art-related I could do with my downtime: cut stuff out. I decorated my house in crossword puzzle collages, dirty Mad Libs and made pages from a beat-up John Updike book into wallpaper. It wasn’t the greatest art that’s ever been art-ed, but it was fun and my DIY saved me a whole lot on decoration.

8. Learn how to apologize. I think there’s nothing that makes us more beautifully human than making mistakes and owning up to them, whether it’s not being the best friend you can be or accidentally bumping into someone on the train. But we should be more aware of our effects on other people and hold ourselves more accountable to being a force for good in the world.

9. Let go of our anger, envy and hatred. This is a hard one for me. I have this certain Facebook friend of mine (who I unfortunately can’t delete) that I loathe with the fire of a thousand suns, and it used to kill me whenever something good happened for him. I would transform from the gorgeous, hyper-literate vixen you see before you into a swear-spouting mean girl. But you know what I did? Blocked him from my news feed. Ain’t nobody got time to obsess over other people’s accomplishments. Go out and accomplish your own crap instead.

10. Don’t use your iPod all the time. I think there might be an automatic genetic reflex that leads us to plug into our headphones as soon as we leave our houses, and while music is great (and my boyfriend), we sometimes lack awareness when we’re so focused on Frank Ocean. We lose one of our senses and become less present to the world around us. Next time you go for a walk or ride the train, let Frank rest for a second and listen to the soundtrack of the world around you. The world makes such beautiful music.

11. Complain less and make fewer excuses for yourself. Learn to enjoy your life and not always focus on what is bad, what is wrong and why you can’t or didn’t do something. Have you seen Parks and Recreation? Chris Traeger is kind of my life model, except for that part where he got weird and sad. You don’t have to ignore the dark side of life, which (as Chris shows) might make things worse in the long run. You just don’t have to live there either.

12. Do something nice for someone else — the kind of favor you might not see returned. One of my resolutions this year was to try to do Random Acts of Kindness for people every day — to let people sit down before me on the train, actually give the homeless guy a quarter rather than lying (not because I think it’ll make a difference, but because he’s a person whose humanity deserves recognition), hold doors open for people and a lot of cliché things that aren’t that interesting. It might not affect others’ lives, but these things are a daily reminder to me that I’m not the most important person in the world, and I should continually try to be of service to others, even if that’s just letting them go first.

13. Give someone a completely unsolicited compliment. During my sophomore year of college, I sat next to a girl who scared the crap out of me. She was beautiful, confident and one of the smartest people I’d ever met, one of those people who walks into class like they mean business. She didn’t talk to anyone, really, because she came to learn; she didn’t come here to make friends. But she was so interesting, and I knew I wanted to get to know this girl. So I made sure to compliment or say something nice every chance I could, knowing that one of those could lead to a real conversation and the intellectual pickle jar being opened. And wouldn’t you know it? We were close friends by the end of the year.

14. Do something completely unexpected or spontaneous, even if it’s as simple as getting a new haircut. To use an extreme example, I recently found out that my friend’s mom went skydiving a couple years ago — because she had a Groupon for it and why not? I couldn’t picture this tiny den mother of love (who looks like the mom in That 70’s Show) throwing herself toward the earth like a meteor. But more than being concerned for her safety, I was immediately jealous. Who knew she was such a badass?

15. Try something new — just for the experience. Whenever I go out to a restaurant, I try to get the bizarrest thing on the menu. I decided to start doing this four years ago, when I realized that I was only eating bland foods. I wasn’t challenging my palate. So, now when I eat out, I always pick something that sounds gross or interesting — like tripe, lengua, chitlins, pork skin, eel or squid. Sometimes this works out — like when I found out alligator tastes like chicken, but better — or not so much — like when I found out chicken gizzard tastes like chicken, except that it doesn’t at all. It’s like chewing on an eraser. As Mom said, you’ll never know if you like something until you try it.

[Source: Thought Catalog]

Opportunities

Happy May! I hope the weather is treating all of you beautifully. 

I may potentially have an amazing opportunity coming my way. I won’t know for sure until tomorrow or a couple days after tomorrow, but when I do, I will surely share it. I just feel extremely blessed for the opportunities that come my way. Hard work definitely pays off and good karma as well. I feel as though my life has been extraordinarily beautiful since last summer. Despite having experienced loss (rest in paradise thatha), everything has been nothing short of a blessing and achieved through dedication, hard work, and good karma passed along from good people.

Peace & Love,
M.

Love is All You Need?

Imagine you lived in a world where heterosexuality was considered a sin. This video, Love is All You Need, speaks the truth on so many levels. I don’t need to say much about it, this short film speaks for itself. Please watch the entire video and share!

Peace & Love,
M.

French

Day 2 of French lessons today. I am currently in the process of relearning French. It’s such a beautiful language. I hope by this time next year, I will be able to have a full conversation in French.

Peace & Love,
M.

25 Things You Don’t Have To Justify To Anyone

By: Chelsea Fagan via Thought Catalog 

1. Your job. Yes, even if you’re working something that other people condescendingly term “not a real job,” such as retail or service. If you have a job of any kind in this economy, you’ve already won.

2. Whether or not you have debt. If you managed to get out of your education debt-free, that doesn’t mean that your life is a financial walk in the park that you constantly have to be apologizing for. If you are in debt, it doesn’t mean you got a “worthless” degree and now deserve to be shamed for struggling to find work after you were convinced by your school that you were making a good decision.

3. The kind of food you enjoy eating, or why you enjoy eating. (No matter how “uncultured” or “boring” or “gross” someone else might deem your favorite food.)

4. Your decision to have children, or not have them, or to not be sure if you even want them.

5. Your dislike for marriage as an institution — and even if this one day changes, you don’t have to justify having grown as a person and moved into a new point of view. No one should be telling you “I told you so” over something as enormous as your decision to commit for life to another person.

6. Your sexuality, or your desire to experiment with it. You are allowed to have “phases” or “try things out” or be “confused,” and can take as much time as you want figuring it out.

7. Your gender presentation.

8. Your income level, and what you can and cannot afford. If you are having trouble keeping up with friends because you are not able to spend as much as them, there is no reason to risk financial ruin to try and keep up appearances.

9. Your body. The only person whom you need to talk to about with it is your doctor; everyone else can else can go kick rocks.

10. Whether or not you want to go out on a weekend night, or ten weekend nights in a row. The amount of time you spend in a bar or at a club does not directly correlate with how cool or worthy a person you are.

11. Your relationship status. If you’re single and happy, that’s great. If you’re in a relationship and happy, that’s great. If you’re either of those and not happy, you are more than allowed to be, and it’s no one’s business how you should “fix” it unless you ask them for their advice.

12. How many friends you have. One is enough. A hundred is enough. And there is no need to falsely upgrade acquaintances to “friend” status in your mind simply to fill out the ranks. A true friend is rare, and we don’t need to make it a competition for who has the most.

13. How much you drink when you go out, or if you drink at all, or why you choose not to drink if you do.

14. What kind of music you enjoy listening to.

15. What kind of an education you have or don’t have, or if you intend to go back and finish what you’ve started. If continuing your studies is something you want to do, good, but don’t be forced into saying that you want it just because it’s what people expect of you.

16. What you happen to be turned on by. If you like slash fiction, you like slash fiction. If you like people recording videos of themselves popping balloons, that’s awesome for you. It’s all good, and as long as you’re not hurting anyone, have at it.

17. Whether or not you know to cook, even if you’re a woman who “should” know how to do those things.

18. If you stay at home to raise your children, or if you hire someone to help you do so because you have a full-time career. Neither of those choices are more or less feminist, no matter what Elizabeth Wurtzel tells you.

19. How many people you have had sex with.

20. Whether or not you are a virgin, and whether or not you want to wait for marriage to lose said virginity.

21. Whether or not you believe in God, and what you think God actually is. (As long as you’re not imposing any of your beliefs on others, in which case we’d have a bit of a problem. But I trust that you’re cool and wouldn’t do that.)

22. Who you voted for and why. If you want to talk about it, you’re free to. But no one should ever make you feel like you have to tell them.

23. If you have sex on a first date, if you kiss on a first date, or if you won’t even hold hands on a first date. You’re allowed to do whatever you like when you’ve just met a new potential suitor.

24. Whether or not you choose to use dating websites.

25. Not knowing exactly what you want to be when you grow up, even if many people would already put you in the category of “grown up.” If you are considering going back to school, or changing careers, or moving, or starting a family, or doing charity work — it’s all good. And none of it has to be followed up with a longwinded explanation about why it’s a good idea and they should believe in you. If you need to justify what makes you happy to someone in your life, perhaps you should ask yourself why you even care about their opinion in the first place.

[Source: Thought Catalog]

Superwoman

Honestly, this video was amazing. She went to my high school (she’s a couple years older) and I ‘know’ about her but don’t ‘know’ her. It’s great to hear someone’s story. It puts a lot of things in perspective and I feel as though her journey is similar to a hundred other South Asian children out there growing up with divorced parents, going through depression and so forth. Her video really touched me so I thought I’d share. Enjoy!

Peace & Love,
M.

The Life of a PR and Journalism Student

Reblogged from apeakintothemindofaweldon:

The normal routine for most college students is: roll out of bed, get to class, go to work, do an hour of homework, go out, sleep and do it all over again. For a mass media major, it's a little bit different.

In order to be successful in this area, one must always go after what they want. It is a competitive and ever-expanding field.

Read more… 334 more words

Could not have said it better myself!

What is Public Relations?

Reblogged from David R. Jolly:

I was searching YouTube and came across this video.... What is Public Relations?

As defined by PRSA: "Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics."

How do you define Public Relations?

Fashion PR Confidential

Hello Lovers,

I was recently contacted by Brianna from Danika Daly PR about their 2-day fashion PR workshop happening in LA from June 1-2, 2013.

Here’s what it’s about:

“Fashion PR Confidential is an intensive 2-day workshop, which unlocks the secrets of the Fashion PR industry and give our students secrets and skills that will take their work to the next level.

The course is taught by Danika Daly, founder of Fashion PR Confidential and Danika Daly PR, and Crosby Noricks, founder of PR Couture . Students can expect a hands-on learning experience from Fashion PR Confidential in a small class of 25. We will touch on basics, and also dive into intermediate and advanced topics. A glimpse of what to expect:

·      How to create the perfect media list

·      Pitches versus press releases and how to tailor them

·      Cracking the blogger code

·      Branding yourself

·      Breakout sessions

·      Goodie bags, prizes & much more!

People with little experience in Public Relations will leave the course with a much better understanding of the field and will be able to fall right into an internship or job position and know where to start.

Registration for our LA workshop is now live! There are only 25 spots available and as they say, “the early bird gets the worm” and with early bird special of $50 off, we expect the class to fill up quickly! We are also offering a free spot in the course for the most creative entry. More details on our scholarship can be found here.”

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I have not personally attending their workshops. I do advise you do your own homework beforehand — make sure it’s the right fit for you. I can tell you that workshops are a great way of learning and networking. I attended another workshop in New York City last May and I took away more information than I thought I would. You can never be ‘done’ learning so make sure you check it out!

Fashion PR Confidential: http://fashionprconfidential.com/
Danika Dayl PR: http://www.danikadalypr.com/

Peace & Love,
M.