Nayla’s Notes on Life

Tag: life

  • Step One: Don’t Step in Anything

    Step 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.)

  • How to Ruin Your Body With a Paintbrush

    How to Ruin Your Body With a Paintbrush

    Turns out my extinction-level event doesn’t need AI. It has a paintbrush.

    We, as a species, currently seem intent on creating an extinction-level event for ourselves (or letting AI do the job more efficiently). But I want to talk about a much less explored method of self-destruction: art-related injuries.

    Many people stop making art once they’re out of school. I guess I’m an outlier. I missed the memo that said “creativity expires with your student ID.”

    My creative process has always been more like a firehose than a dripping faucet. It comes out fast and furious. Sleep, food, and personal hygiene drop off the radar until I find myself in an exhausted heap on the floor next to some sort of concoction that may or may not make sense to anyone (including me) by morning.

    If I had to explain this in a meme:

    No one: … 

    Me: Here’s a whole set of inner-voices cards nobody asked for, created by vibe-coding non-stop for several days!* 

    No one: … 

    Me: …

    *Vibe-coding: the process of building an app entirely on instinct, hope, and Frappuccinos, wherein you understand roughly 4% of what you just did but it works, so you back away slowly and never touch it again.

    Luckily, my friends know to send out a search party if they haven’t heard from me in a while (or if Find Friends says I’m in the produce section, squeezing mangoes with the confidence of someone who definitely knows what she’s doing).

    Trying to stop the creative firehose when it hits feels like walking past the craft store “just to look.”

    An idea will show up around 7pm and stand there, tapping its foot… just as I’ve closed my iPad and told myself, tonight… I rest! I’ll pretend I have boundaries for about two minutes. Then I’m reopening it, grunting at myself, because apparently the idea knew “tonight I rest” was wishful thinking before I did.

    These days I’m too lazy to get up and work at a proper desk or easel, so I end up hunched over my lap desk on the couch. 

    I wish I could tell you I’ll develop the self-discipline to sit properly when the creative urge strikes. Alas, in those moments my self-discipline has the staying power of a cat who just spotted the red dot of a laser pointer skipping across the floor. 

    So for the last few weeks, my shoulders have been up around my ears and I’ve dug out my Shakti pillow (aka the acupressure pillow). If you’ve been lucky enough to never use one, consider yourself blessed. It’s basically a bed of nails with better branding. 

    The Shakti pillow doesn’t nag. It just sits there… with its spikes pointing viciously in your direction, doing its best “who, me?” impression: Come closer, I won’t hurt you. Maybe just a little, at first. 

    Any creatives out there suffering from art-related injuries, I see you. 

    I’m sure that one day we’ll pass each other in the waiting room of our therapist’s office (when we’re ready to face our refusal to “ergonomically adult”). In the meantime, may your Shakti pillow be gentler than your inner critic, and may your next act of self-destruction end in a half-decent painting.

  • My Cholesterol Is Fine. My Evenings Are Not.

    My Cholesterol Is Fine. My Evenings Are Not.

    The real midlife crisis is realizing you don’t know how to buy a mango.

    But let’s start at the beginning. Before I was personally betrayed by a mango, I visited my doctor for a full check-up. It seemed like a good time to find out whether my original parts were still functioning as advertised.

    My cholesterol was a little high, but not high enough for medication. Instead, I received a beautiful pamphlet called “How to Manage Your Cholesterol.”*

    *How to Manage Your Cholesterol: a 16-page document designed to make you feel personally responsible for every piece of cheesecake you’ve accidentally inhaled.

    What the doctor neglected to mention was that this new regime involves a soul-crushing side hustle called “produce management,” with no unsubscribe button in sight.

    Since starting this plan, my days (and nights) have been filled with chopping, peeling, steaming, and more wistful sighs than I care to admit. I barely have time to make it to work, let alone appear employed when I get there.

    To be clear, I fully recognize that produce management is not a bad deal, health-wise. Many people contend with much more.

    But allow me a quick moment to vent about this past week’s worst offender because mangoes are master gaslighters. 

    They sit there, taunting you with their beautiful colours and the confidence of produce that knows something you don’t. You give them a little squeeze every night, pretending you speak “fruit” and hoping they can’t smell fear.

    Then, when you finally muster up the courage to slice into one, it’s secretly rotting on the inside. What’s worse is you immediately remember this never happened at your parents’ house.

    How did they do it?

    Were they undercover mango whisperers?

    I never called my mom for her secret. Partly because I’m an adult… but mostly because I know how that conversation would end.

    She’d listen to my entire mango crisis, pause, and say, “You’re not buying the right ones.”

    I’d ask what the “right ones” were.

    There’d be another longer pause. Then: “You just know.”

    So here I remain… midlife, mildly hypercholesterolemic, and emotionally invested in more types of produce than I care to admit.

    If you need me, I’ll be in the kitchen, trying to implement page 7 of the pamphlet: “Assume You’re Doing It Wrong.”