For those of you who can't read Chinese, the writing translates to "happy/happiness." I must admit, this ring is so Chinese I don't think I can even figure out how to incorporate it into an outfit.
This ring, on the other hand (PUN!), I'd be wearing all the time if I weren't so afraid of scratching it (and if it were small enough for my ring finger).
Here's some Hugo.
W1L 012: Write one leaf about something you can't live without.
This is an unedited version of my original response to this prompt, written in March 2010.
Ten years ago, if you asked me what I couldn’t live without, I would’ve told you I couldn’t live without books, because the girls I hung out with spent a lot of their time and effort making me feel out of place and like an oddity, and my family life had been drastically upset fairly recently by the death of my father, and, well, there wasn’t a lot else to think about when I was nine, and books didn’t judge you, books made you part of a secret society that you could use to exclude other people instead of excluding you because you didn’t fucking want to buy anything pink or sparkly, words were magic magic, and they were the only way to get completely toxic feelings out of my body. So toxic that when I went back to my oldest diary earlier this year, I started reading but felt the paralysis of those familiar preteen feelings of My life is awful, nobody understands what the hell I’m thinking, I hate people and want to do violent things to them, and I ripped all the pages out, ran them through a shredder, and threw the cover in the garbage disposal.
Five years ago, if you asked me what I couldn’t live without, I would’ve said clothes, because they were the first thing you saw and the most direct way to leave a first impression. They were also practical. I wasn’t. At the age of fourteen, I was researching fashion design schools and spending more time in my closet planning out how I would look to the world tomorrow than with my brother, whom I had already lost touch with half my lifetime ago, and I probably would have eaten clothes if they had any nutritional value before I would have had lunch with my brother.
Three years ago, if you asked me what I couldn’t live without, I would’ve told you theater, because it was the only thing that consistently challenged me and made me uncomfortable and in awe, and the only thing I looked forward to some days, and the thing I decided was more important than doing volunteer work for my transcript, and a place where I had total control over what I wanted to create. I would’ve told you it was the most important thing that I had ever had the fortune of stumbling my way into, and that it had changed who I was and what I thought my limits were and my conception of what friendship was and was where I did my best work because nobody told me what to do.
Two years ago, if you asked me what I couldn’t live without, I would’ve bet the rest of my life on my friends, even if I always said that I never knew what was going to happen to us in the future, because I thought they were the forces that had shaped me and let me grow into a golden college applicant, and a girl, a confident one, and they were the support system I had chosen and we had gone through the ugliest parts of our lives so far together, and they still liked me despite everything and all the ways we had hurt each other.
A year ago I would’ve told you that I couldn’t live without my family, because my decision to attend Cal undeclared over UCLA for theater was about practicality, and sensibility, and not screwing us over when I graduated, and maybe for fear of not being able to see my safety net if I wandered too far from home, even if I knew it was there.
If you asked me today what I couldn’t live without, I couldn’t tell you. Lately I’ve been entertaining the idea that the only person you can rely on is yourself; you just have to find your own way to work the system. I don’t know. There’s not a lot that I think I know anymore. So I’m just going to go with what I’d actually still need if things fell apart: oxygen.
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