To be honest, I'm quite a lazy person. If it weren't for other people, I'd completely forget to set some goals for the new year. Luckily there are always some lovely people online to remind me. This year I've teamed up with Shaima from The Mysterious Emirati: we're posting our goals and resolutions for 2017 together (but apart), so if you're done reading this post, head over to The Mysterious Emirati to check out hers as well!

I have a tiny little confession to make though: I'm a bit afraid of 2017. 2016 has been so good to me that I'm afraid I'll have to pay the price for it in 2017. Years ending in odd numbers are usually a little less good to me, but this time I'm determined not to let that happen! I've set some goals for myself that'll hopefully make 2017 at least as amazing as 2016 was for me. So without further ado, here's my gameplan for 2017!

2016 isn't entirely over yet. There are still four days left in which an awful lot could happen. I would not be surprised to hear that some people are currently hiding under their duvet, waiting for those four days to pass. Everyone around me is telling everyone who will listen that 2016 was a terrible, no-good monstrosity of a year. Yet here I am, looking back on the past year thinking: That actually went pretty damn great for me.

I don't think I ever went into a new year with as much optimism as I did in 2016. I set myself 8 goals and wanted to experience as many new things as possible. Did I reach my goals? Well, not all of them. Other goals seem insignificant now. Some goals were reached in ways I'm still proud of. So let's just see how I did, shall we?

A few weeks ago I suddenly found myself slaying the Instagram game. Now I used to think life was uninstagrammable, so I was pretty surprised when some of my less interesting pictures gathered dozens of likes within the hour. I was so happy. I thought I'd finally figured out how to do the Instagram thing. I was foolish. I did some stupid things. I was a complete Instagram idiot.

It all began when I started scrolling through the pictures I'd clicked this summer. Some were actually pretty decent, so I thought I'd give Instagram a shot again.
That was probably my first mistake, because the last time I tried my hand at Instagram I'd thrown my phone across the room in frustration. Anyway, I started posting on my page again.
The first couple of days everything went great. More than great actually, it went pretty much perfect. I got plenty likes and even gained a few followers. Finally I was playing the Instagram game again and I was playing it well. Not that I had any idea what I was doing. In fact, I didn't even know I had been creating an Instagram theme until the sixth day of posting a picture to said theme. Yes, that's the level I was playing the game on.

Despite my incompetence, things kept going great. I posted daily and enjoyed it more than I expected. The numbers kept going up and up, which meant I got more and more excited with every post, like a real Instagram idiot, unsuspecting of her looming downfall. Downfall wasn't in the near future at that moment though. No, I was going for a milestone rather than downfall: the milestone of 100 likes on one picture. I waited patiently. A pic of flowers in Lithuania inched closer and closer to 100. Then one night, I actually did hit 100. You won't believe how happy I was. All my friends needed to know about it. Screenshots were sent all over the place. I was jumping up and down with excitement and barely slept that night. Pure Instagram idiocy right there.

My high didn't last long. As it always goes with Instagram and me, I suddenly started losing followers rapidly without any apparent reason. One moment I reached an all-time high of 140 followers, the next loads of people unfollowed me. Keeping up with my posting schedule didn't work, neither did using a ridiculous amount of hashtags. I was heart-broken.

For a few days I wanted to give up on Instagram again. Then I realized I was being stupid. I'd had fun editing and sharing my pictures. Giving that up just because of some stats? That would make me a real idiot. So I continued posting. I'll never make it big on Instagram, but then again, who does? Almost everyone I know struggle with Instagram except for a lucky few. I try to ignore the numbers as much as possible now. A lot of liked on my post can still make me happy, but a new follower or two doesn't excite me anymore. That way I'll stay an Instagram idiot, but at least I'll be a happy Instagram idiot.

Stay Awesome!

I believe in a thing called balance. If I blog about things I'm good at, I also blog about things I'm bad at. And so balance remains. Now a couple of weeks ago I posted about my favorite superheroes. To keep balance, today I'll tell you about, you guessed it, my least favorite superheroes. Let's get started, shall we?

Yeah, this'll probably come as a nasty surprise to some of you. I liked the new Spider-Man in Civil War a lot, but my dislike comes from a childhood trauma. Okay, trauma is probably too big of a word, but it was trauma-like.
When I was six I had this friends who could watch anything she wanted without her parenst protesting. Back then I had a whole list of cartoons and movies I couldn't watch, I also had nightmares as soon as something remotely scary happened. Naturally I wasn't allowed to watch Spider-Man at six years old, but my friend was. One days her younger brothers (one and three years old at the time) were watching the movie. Dr Octopus terrified me and Spider-Man was completely useless in teh scenes I saw. Of course my feelings for Spider-Man have changed over the years. Toby McGuire stepping down already helped a lot, since his Spider-Man couldn't protect me. But deep down inside, six-year-old Envy still gets uncomfortable when Spider-Man comes along.

Maybe it's because I was brought up by a man who took Nordic myhtology very serious. Maybe it's because I don't like Chris Hemsworth. Either way, I don't like Thor.
I like my Norse gods the way they are in their myths, not running around with a big green guy, a dude in an iron suit and an ancient WWII veteran. That's just not right. I don't like it. I like it even less when Marvel suddenly decides that Thor can be turned into a woman. No. Just no.

My least favorite superhero of all times is the one and only Superman. Why, you ask me? Because he's too good. Most superheroes get their ass kicked from time to time. Superman only loses when there's kryptonite around. Apart from that he's pretty much invincible and has just about every power. This makes him the ultimate superhero to some, but incredibly boring to me. If he's in a fight you can be almost 100% sure he'll win. There's never much of that doubt about the fate of a main character that makes stories so appealing to me. No, Superman can do just about anything. Wake me up when the boring is over.

Now I'm still a newbie to the superhero world, so these may change over time. I'll probably get over my issues with Spider-Man soon enough, while there are some other heroes I'm starting to dislike... It's not a bad dislike though. When I don't like a superhero, I love to hate them if you know what I mean. So tell me, who are your least favorite superheroes?

Stay Awesome!

Over the past few weeks I haven't been myself. Actually, that's not true. I've been a watered-down version of myself. I lost myself in my work. I started working at 8am and didn't stop until 9pm. The scary part is that I didn't even notice I was losing myself, not until I finally had time to sit down and write a blog post. Then I realized that Envy was... pretty much gone.

I'm in my junior year of college now. Three months in I can tell it's going to be a very difficult year. No matter how hard I work and how carefully I plan everything in my life, there are never enough hours in my days. So I started dropping parts of myself that I didn't need. The parts that took up too much of my time, but that didn't benefit my future.
Daydreaming had to go first. I needed those precious minutes to write reports, not to come up with blog post ideas or a chapter for a novel. So with daydreaming, writing also left my life, which was quickly followed by blogging of course. For a week my life felt very dull and empty, but then my workload was doubled and I had to make another sacrifice in order to have enough time for college.
I stopped reading. Not just blogs, but also books and magazines. Some nights I read five pages, then fell asleep. It made me sad that the days of 150+ pages were now over, but I didn't have much time to be sad: more work came my way...

For a few days I didn't know what to do. I tried to think, but didn't have time for that. I had to keep working. I tutor a kid from the other side of the street and also took on a translation job in August. My plan was to save up for a trip to India and Thailand, but those plans and the financial problems that came with them took up quite some time. So I stopped dreaming about travelling. I stopped making plans. I stopped doing everything that made me Envy.

I've lived like this for about eight weeks now. I wake up, go to college or internship, come home to do homework, tutor or translate, then sleep. Most days I'm so busy I skip meals. I lost quite some weight in the first month of junior year. I feel like I'm nothing more than a shadow of my former self. It scares me how I don't do anything anymore, yet I'm exhausted every night. I don't have time for my hobbies anymore. I don't have time for anything...

I never expected junior year to suck the life out of me, but it's doing just that. I feel like there's not much left of me and I'm very afraid to lose myself completely. I was planning on blogging regularly, but I can't. I can't promise when I'll write again, when I'll comment on other blogs again, when I'll be a part of the community again... But if I seem to disappear completely, if you see me lose that last little part of myself, please help me find my way back to who I used to be. Tweet me, mail me, smack me in the face. But please help me not to lose myself tonight, tomorrow night and all the nights after that...

Stay Awesome