Bored Blog 6: When You Live In A New Place

7/16/2021

Sorry, I didn't post yesterday. I'm taking a dance class once a week now. It's in the evenings when I usually write.

It's dancing on roller skates, which is something new to me. I noticed if you fall while the teacher is instructing the group, it takes a while to get back up. Thus you can miss something or you'll have to find a way to catch up with everyone else. In the middle of the lesson I thought maybe "This is too advanced for me. "

I'm confident in moving forward down the rink, but spins and whatnot is something else. It's a real test of balance. Besides balance I feel like whatever else I learn in this class could be useful for me in the future. Just a hunch.

I didn't have anything planned to write this morning. When I woke up I remembered I never responded to a text my friend sent me. She's currently living in Texas. I think it's her first time living by herself where it isn't a study abroad program.

I was really happy for her when she moved. It's financially tough to live on your own. Choosing Texas was a good idea. Things are cheaper there.

My friend and I were catching up and she said she's planning to move back to the city. She said she misses her friends and family. I was telling her that what she's doing is awesome and making a new life somewhere else takes time. She pointed out that making friends as an adult is difficult. Which is very true.

I didn't make many friends in college because I kept moving around. After graduating I only made seven new friends? Two of them live in a different country, two of them live in different states, another one I'm questioning our friendship at the moment, and the other two are usually busy. So, most of the time I'm alone.

It's tough because people are less open to making new friends, they're more picky than when they were a kid, and everyone has their own life. There are also times when you think someone can be your friend, but maybe you're actually just acquaintances, or that person only talks to you when they want something from you.

But that doesn't mean you should give up trying. Honestly a majority of the people you meet won't be a good fit, but the few you do find are like happy surprises (depending how the friendship goes lol).

I don't think my friend should give up and return home. She should stick it out longer.

When I was living in Turkey for six months and it was really tough.

I had a hard time meeting people my age and finding someone who was free to meet up and explore Istanbul. So there was a lot of stuff I did by myself.

It took a long time until I made two friends from my Turkish class.

Please ignore my hat. It was a gift ＼| ￣ヘ￣|／

We would hang out a lot. During Ramazan we broke our fast together, we talked about how hard it is to find a boyfriend, we tried new foods together, and we complained about the summer heat together. It was great.

And then it was time for me to go back home. =^._.^= ∫

I told my friend that's now in Texas, I saw her Tik Tok and knew she was taking a dancing class. So, I asked if she's talked to the people there? After that she stopped texting me. It's a dance class that would make your grandma blush, so I'm guessing she got embarrassed and didn't want to talk about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I really hope she stays longer. She hasn't been there for a full year yet. There's still a lot of opportunities for her.

Some advice for when you go live somewhere new, is it's going to take some time. Use your curiosity of a new place to your advantage. Start meeting people when you get there and ask about the area. Take classes to learn something new or the next level of what you already know. Also, if someone invites you to an event that's an opportunity to meet more people!

If you're an introvert, go to events that have things that are interactive such as games, interactive art, or plane old art that you can look at. You don't have to talk to everyone. Just talk to at least one person. Just one!

It doesn't even have to be a conversation. I count asking someone for the time is talking to someone. Easy right?!

Best,

Emel

Bored Blog 5: Practice What You Learn

7/14/2021

I changed the website a bit! I hope this looks better. Things may or may not change later on. We'll see.

This is a photo I took after watching one of Sorelle Amore's videos. She was talking about using the space around you and to play around with different poses.

Last night I got more into how to take better self portraits with an iphone. I first watched this video.

I later made a few changes on my phone and then tested it out.

I wasn't really satisfied so I watched this video.

The guy is a little annoying but he had a good point on how to use the lighting with your phone. After some adjustments I took these photos.

I took out my contact lenses so my left eye turned red.

To me, these photos looked kind of moody and looked a little more professional. In a way I was trying out Sorelle's style of dark-ish photos. Such as this.

Her photos are usually with natural light. And I noticed she takes photos during the day, so maybe that's what I need to try to do lol. I shared my photos on my instagram story only to my friends. I wanted to take some small steps first before letting my other followers see them. It was already kind of embarrassing to show my close friends.

I checked my phone this morning and none of them said anything...well one friend liked the photo of me sitting in front of the desk. But yeah. There wasn't much feedback. Maybe my face was too close to the camera? Or the photos themselves aren't that interesting.

Whatever it is I will keep trying.

From doing all this I hope I learn more about marketing. One big thing about marketing are the visuals. If it doesn't look good then people won't be interested. It's also, very hard to get anyone's attention when everyone is advertising their product or services.

I wish I majored in marketing in college. It would have helped me so much.

Oh, I gave it one more go since it's the afternoon right now. Plus mah sis is out (°∀°)b

A little update on the things I decided to change in my life. I have been watching less Netflix now. I'm trying to edit some more footage so I don't watch as many Youtube videos as before. Maybe the videos I look up for help or info are okay, but I should spend less time watching videos to kill time.

I can either keep this blog somewhat short or keep talking.

....

It's probably best I get more editing done.

Thanks for reading!

Best,

Emel

Bored Blog 4: Always Ask Questions!

Aw maaaaan, day 4! ^_^

7/13/2021

Psssss...guess what? Yes, I now know how to make my photos smaller, but that's not it!

I got my first subscriber yesterday! ＼(^▽^)ノ＼(^▽^)ノ (this is us all happy and whatnot).

Welcome to Bored Blogs! A website I'm still working on to make it look like a legit blog. Wix has all these things to add and do that it might take me a while to figure it all out.

Yesterday I was curious how other blogs look. What is the general format? Do they use lots of photos? Do they sometimes add videos? What in the world do they write about? Google wasn't much help because it kept showing sites to build a blog, but not anyone who writes them. Luckily I just so happen to have a Twitter focusing on the writing community.

Usually when I write a question and send it out to the Twitter universe I get no responses or likes (even with tags). I tried it anyway by writing "Do you have a blog? I would like to follow you." Then I added #writingrcommunity #writer #writerslift. I honestly thought people would ignore me like usual. Then I opened up twitter and saw 20+ notifications. I thought "So they [ in notifications] have it go up to 20...Wow...this must be what popular twitter accounts look like!"

I received likes, comments and what's this? Retweets?! It was overwhelming. I had a lot of blogs to look through (I still do). I looked at the first few and noticed the format of their blogs. They definitely looked legit. You should see their "continue reading" button for each blog! I thought, "I need that! How do I make that??" It's something I found some answers on but I need to figure out the steps and if I need to re-work my website from scratch.

Another thing on Twitter is that I got followers. In the beginning I had 23 or so followers? You know, most people do the follow for follows thing and I told my self, "No. I'm only going to follow people I actually want to follow." If that means not having many followers then so be it. It makes me feel less cluttered in a way.

The first time I checked I had 85 followers in total! Then it got to 100! and now it's 106! It's really cool, but I know soon enough they're all going to unfollow me either because I'm not following them or they like to follow people and then unfollow them. I'm not going to sweat this part of Twitter. I'm curious if by a few days I'll get back to 23 people. We'll see (*^▽^*)

Ah, so back to my new subscriber! After seeing that, I was trying to see if they received those "Thank you for subscribing" emails. I tested it out with another email I have and I got nothing! I was freaking out. "Nooooooooooooo. The unprofessionalism!" I kept looking on how to fix this, but the only thing I found so far is if I send them a message, they get an email saying "Thank you..." and they can click on the photo of an envelope but they can't see the message I sent them. So I'm going to have to keep working on this (-_-)ゞ゛

Oh! I just checked Twitter. I lost a follower already. Here we go!

It's already starting to drop!

Yesterday I also talked to one of my two followers on Wattpad. She seems like a nice person and somehow has a lot of views on two of her books. I read her first book and I could tell she's a teenager by the way she wrote (I used to write like that (ᗒᗨᗕ)). She said she's writing as a hobby. Since she's a beginner she has a long way to go (if she wants to make it her profession). With practice she'll get there. Same to you if you want to be a successful writer.

I messaged her asking how she received all these views? To my surprise she was happy to tell me. She said she's in a Wattpad group chat on Discord. She did a read for read type of thing and did not know how she got that many views of her book either lol. She kindly sent me a link and I joined the Discord. I asked the guy running it how many people are in the group. He said over 1,000! I have no idea how people run these chat groups with that many people.

We'll see how this works out. I also posted on this writers Reddit page how to get more readers. It was also a surprise people were responding to my question. I told them about the book I'm writing on Wattpad. Some people said "Social media!" -_-

This one guy said his girl friend used to write stuff on there. She dealt with the same thing. Not many people were reading her stuff. It's a place a lot of teens go to read romance stories and *cough* lots of inappropriate stuff between guys and gals. He suggested I find some other place to post my work. Though the platforms he's seen aren't that great if you want people to review your work.

On my way home from working with the producer, the guy's message was going through my mind. I felt down and fed up. I thought, "Then I'll turn it into an ebook! I need to keep putting my work out there! It can be free on Wattpad, but I'll put it on Amazon or something anyway." So, that's another thing I need to do.

On Wattpad my book only has 4 chapters anyway. If anyone wants to read the whole thing they can buy it. It's not going to be that expensive anyway. Maybe a dollar or so.

I guess the moral of all this is to keep asking questions even if you might not get answers. Go for it!

Best,

Emel