Nayla’s Notes on Life

Category: life

  • Exercise One: Don’t Step in Anything

    Exercise One: Don’t Step in Anything

    What are five simple exercises to do at home?

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    No Equipment Needed, Just a Cat and a Lint Roller

    Fitness influencers swear you only need a living room and commitment. They never mention the fringe benefits that come with a cat.

    1. The Cleanup Lunge

    Throw up. Or the classic: pee landing exactly two centimetres outside the litter box, with the precision of someone who measured. You’ll find it the way everyone does, with a sock, at 6:15 a.m.

    Repeat daily, bonus points if you’re barefoot.

    2. The Shouting Match

    Several times a day, your cat will stand in the hallway and yell at a wall (especially if she’s the “geriatric” kind). You, in turn, will yell at her to stop yelling at the wall:

    “MEOWWWRRRRRRR!!!”

    “What is it?”

    “Meowwwwwww?”

    “Are you hungry?”

    “Meow.”

    “You have a full bowl. I watched you ignore it at 9 p.m.”

    “MEOWWWRRR.”

    “Do you need something? Water? Are you cold? Is it the wall again?”

    She looks at the wall. She looks at you. She looks at the wall again, slower this time, like a cat who is done repeating herself to someone who claims to be “adulting.”

    3. Interval Training (6 to 8 p.m.)

    Entertain your feline friend with a feather wand between 6 and 8 p.m. so she’s too tired to wake you between 2 and 4 a.m. Results may vary.*

    *A legal phrase meaning she’ll be standing on your sternum at 2:47 a.m. anyway, having thoroughly enjoyed the wand and moved on.

    4. Furniture Draping

    If you’re allergic to cats, like me (don’t ask) make sure every surface gets a blanket, and then the blankets get blankets. This targets your lats, your traps, and the muscle group known as “why is my back like this?”

    Add the sneezing and you’ve got a full cardio session.

    5. Documentary Photography

    Finally, take approximately 400 photos of her looking angelic: chin on paws, soft window light, the face of a cat who has never once yelled at drywall. Crop out the blankets, the lint roller, and the suspicious spot near the litter box.

    If this ever goes to trial, the evidence will conclusively prove she’s an angel.

    Extra Credit: Call Your Mom

    Call your mom, a lifelong cat hater, and gush about yours. Send photos. Use the word “baby” unironically.

    She will let you finish, sigh, and say, “These are not the grandkids I asked for.”

    Congratulations, you are now frustrated enough to run a 10k. Cardio complete.

  • Mom

    Mom

    Which relationship has taught you the most about yourself?

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    She could win an argument with a parking meter.

    Everyone has that one person who could negotiate a ceasefire and a discount in the same breath. Mine was a 4-foot-9-inch giant.

    I learned who I am by standing next to someone I’m not. Here are three stories about Mom that show it: how she moved, how she laughed, and how she never once apologized for either.

    Move or Be Moved

    Maybe she was born with an independent streak, or maybe life forced her to develop one. Either way, she had a confidence I could never replicate, no matter how many times I practised in the mirror.

    In a past life, Mom was a general. A psychic said so. (And I 1,000% believe it.) Every morning, she put on makeup like she was heading into battle: she called it “war paint.”

    I, on the other hand, was told by my Kindergarten teacher to stop avoiding conflict so much.*

    *I did fix this. I became a mediator, which is what you do when you’d rather not be a general.

    A Little Levity Goes a Long Way

    Of course, good warriors know that not every battle needs a cannon. Sometimes they need a punchline.

    At one of her first jobs in London, a colleague kept sitting at her desk. (It happened to be right in front of the attractive boss’s office.)

    Mom got so fed up that she started telling the desk-stealer to inform him she’d gone home for the day because she had nowhere to sit. This went on for a while… until finally, she marched in to complain directly.

    He was seated behind his desk, but from where she stood, he might as well have been a skyscraper.

    She took a breath.

    “I have a problem,” she began, hesitantly.

    He waited, probably wondering what this tiny woman who’d been skipping out on work wanted to gripe about now.

    “You’re too good looking…”

    Mom was quick witted like that (disarming before you’d even seen her aim). I, on the other hand, am a classic tube-light.

    Let’s Hang in the Shallow End

    Mom’s approach to self-discovery was simple: be yourself, loudly, and let everyone else catch up.

    So when I gave her a copy of The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz, I should have known what to expect. She gave it about seven seconds, then threw it back at me, muttering, “What’s this crap?”

    The book and I both sat there, stunned.

    Unlike Mom, I spend most of my time wallowing in introspection, gobbling up every self-help book I can find with the voracious curiosity of a raccoon at a picnic.

    Mom is slowly making her way out of this realm. She’s taking her time, on her own schedule, as usual.

    In Avengers: Endgame, Frigga says, “Everyone fails at who they’re supposed to be. The measure of a person, of a true hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are.” Mom never needed that lesson, since she was born knowing exactly who she was. I had to fail at being her first.

    I’m not like her. But I know who I am because I got to stand next to someone who knew exactly who she was.

  • The 5-Step, Fail-Proof Method to DIY Your Own Pixie Cut

    The 5-Step, Fail-Proof Method to DIY Your Own Pixie Cut

    A rigorously tested, professionally unqualified method.

    If you identify as a jack of all trades like me, you already know the real secret to a successful DIY project isn’t skill. It’s delusion sustained over several weeks. 

    Here’s my fail-proof, five-step method for DIY’ing your own pixie cut, developed over a lengthy YouTube playlist, a mild identity crisis, and a very expensive drawer of barely-used scissors. 

    Step 1: Tell everyone.

    Not just your partner. Not just your group chat. Everyone. Your coworkers. Your dentist. The guy who delivers your packages. This isn’t for accountability… accountability implies you might back out. This is so that when it goes wrong, it goes as spectacularly wrong as possible. 

    (But whatever you do, don’t tell your family. Friends offer skepticism. Family opens an inquiry.)

    Step 2: Research extensively. Apply nothing.

    Build a DIY pixie cut YouTube playlist so long it starts to feel like a relationship. Watch every video twice. Sit with your popcorn, expertly judging strangers despite the fact that you’ve never held a pair of clippers, let alone filmed a YouTube tutorial. Most importantly, let yourself believe that watching someone confidently cut their hair is basically the same as doing it.

    This belief will not survive contact with actual clippers. Deep down, you already know that. Ignore it.

    Step 3: Buy every tool you could possibly need… plus several you can’t justify.

    Clippers, guards, hairdresser scissors, thinning scissors, texturizing scissors, and sure, why not… a thinning razor you will use exactly zero times. This step isn’t really about hair. It’s about the deep, specific comfort of owning tools that outrank your skill level by several years. 

    None of them will help. All of them will feel like progress. 

    Step 4: Wait until it’s too late to back out.

    Let your hair grow just long enough that it has to be cut, and just short enough that undoing a mistake means starting over from nothing. This is the sweet spot. This is when fear finally shows up… right on schedule, arms crossed in the bathroom mirror, daring you to blink first. Ignore it. Pick up the clippers. Close one eye (for reasons that remain unclear even to you). Let the muscle memory you don’t have take over. 

    Somewhere, a professional stylist will feel a disturbance in the force.

    Step 5: Reveal your results to a deeply unimpressed audience.

    Here’s the part nobody warns you about… after weeks of buildup, the internal spiral, and the one-eyed leap of faith, your friends will not gasp. They will not so much as flinch. One will simply walk past you. Another will look directly at you and ask if you got new earrings.

    Eventually, you will not be able to take it anymore, and you will do the thing you swore you wouldn’t… announce it yourself.

    “I did it! I cut my own hair!!”

    This will be met with the same energy as someone announcing they’ve reorganized their sock drawer. 

    So there you have it. Five easy steps to a pixie cut, tried and tested by me, on me, with no professional supervision whatsoever… a method that will change absolutely nothing about how people see you, and everything about how you see yourself. (Not as someone with a good haircut. As someone who is clearly ready for the next bad idea.)

  • Everyone Else Is Facing That Way. I Have Thoughts.

    Everyone Else Is Facing That Way. I Have Thoughts.

    What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?

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    Making peace with what I’m good at and what I suck at.

    In my fifth decade of this thing we call “being human,”* I’m finally aware of (and more at ease with) where I can deliver and where I will fall short.

    *Being human: a lifelong subscription with no manual, no refunds, and terms and conditions you only get around to reading in your forties.

    I think many of us struggle with this, especially when the parts of us that are outliers don’t match what society treats as “the norm.” The pressure to conform is real, and it’s tough to feel like a typo in a world that loves a clean draft.

    Allow me to present three of my own typos, left in on purpose.

    Introvert (aka the Tubelight)

    I’m a card-carrying introvert. Don’t get me wrong, I can say a few semi-intelligent things in a meeting, but my best and deepest reflections show up later, when I’ve been handed a problem to noodle on. Picture a tubelight warming up. It stutters, it hums, and then it’s the most reliable thing in the room.

    I’ve learned to carve out this space for myself with creative subject lines like “Re: Thoughts on the Meeting (Composed in My Head Since 10:15, Now Available).”

    Initiation Energy When It’s My Idea, Struggle When It’s Not

    When I have an idea, I go from zero to a five-part workshop series in eleven minutes, complete with a title slide and no registered participants. For years I wondered why I was always the one starting projects or organizing get-togethers, until I realized that other people’s ideas just don’t give me the same ignition.

    Follow-through is the other half of this though. I definitely need the energy of others, or else my project moves into a folder called “v2_final_ACTUAL,” where good intentions go to nap. So I’ve learned to enlist people.

    Taking Time to Make Decisions

    Sometimes a decision takes me a while, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise. When a big one shows up, it’ll wait by the door with its coat on while I look for my keys, my shoes, and possibly my feelings.

    Living with that uncertainty used to drive me crazy. Now I understand it’s simply my process, and I’ve learned to sit with it:

    I’m not indecisive. I’m in a due diligence period.

    Future me will have more information and better lighting.

    Nothing is on fire. Probably.

    I think we all have a few things we were taught were wrong. Too slow. Too quiet. Too sensitive. At some point you stop trying to correct them… a typo left alone long enough starts to look like handwriting.

    If you need me, I’ll be reading through the fine print of “being human.” So far I’ve found no clause requiring me to be good at everything. I’ll send my full thoughts in a week. Subject line: “Now Available.”