The meaning of urunimi

On a summer day in 2004, I was thinking and playing with words, as usual, when I noticed that the letters u-r-u-n-i-m-i sounded like the phrase "you are you and I am I." I was 18 at the time, so I thought that was very clever—admittedly, I still do now but to not as great of an extent. The phrase appealed to me because my mom would often say the she doesn't do certain things, or dress a certain way, so why should I? I would answer "you are you, and I am I." Unfortunately, that didn't change her mindset that I should be like her, and I was discouraged from individuating.

All of my friends from high school had already been on Xanga for some time then, but since my family didn't have Internet access at home, I spent very little time online, so there was no time for a blog. Still, that summer, over our free dial-up, I finally decided to create a Xanga site. Instead of my usual handle, I wanted to use urunimi. To my disappointment, when I came around to create an account, someone else had already took urunimi, and they beat me by just four days! (There was no activity on the site ever.) I had already thought of "urunimi" about a month earlier, so if I had acted then, I would have gotten it. I had to resort to using underscores in some way that made sense, hence uru_n_imi.

In Fall of 2006, I was taking a course on the psychology of dreams. One of the articles in the reader introduced Fritz Perls's Gestalt approach to dream interpretation. (Now, I always thought Gestalt therapy was rather weird, with its role playing and all, but if you find it helpful, that's great.) On the first page there was a footnote mentioning the Gestalt prayer:

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.

Note: the Gestalt prayer is more of Perls's personal belief than Gestalt therapy.

At the time I saw "You are you, and I am I" and thought, Oh wow, someone else also came up with this and has given meaning to it. It's not just me being weird! After that, I kind of forgot about it.

It wasn't until last summer that I came across the Gestalt prayer again. I was facing the decision of moving across the country to pursue a degree that I didn't care about, because it would help prepare me for a career I didn't want, so its meaning was more significant to me than ever. Unfortunately, I succumbed to my father's pressure.

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Last week I read that the Hebrew transliteration úru means "wake up." I thought that was an ironic coincidence, since a few people and I sometimes refer to this site as "uru," and I'm usually sleepy. Nimi better not mean sleep, I thought. When I ran into a friend who knows Hebrew, and asked him about the meaning of uru. He said it is the plural command form of "wake up." The male command would be urah, and the female uri.

I asked "nimi doesn't happen to mean anything, does it?" It doesn't, but to my surprise, he said numi is the female command to go to sleep. (He mentioned the lullaby Numi Numi. A translation of it can be found here.)

Then he proceeded to switch some of the letters of urunimi to urinumi, which would then sound like telling a female to "wake up go to sleep." We both thought it was funny. So I guess the next time the username urunimi has already been taken on a site, I could use urinumi?

Originally posted on Xanga 7/6/2013 at 8:38 PM

Important lessons

Quite a few things have happened these past four days, and I am still trying to sort out my thoughts. Here is what I have been trying to internalize so far.

1. I don't have to apologize for being myself. I don't have to explain why I chose to wear one shirt and not another.
2. I have the right to ask for what I want. Whether or not it will be granted is not under my control, so I don't need to worry about that. I can go ahead and make my needs known, regardless of the outcome.
3. I am allowed to choose what I want to do, without fear of being judged by others. I'm not talking about doing whatever I want without regard to consequences and propriety. I'm referring to simple things like how I want to spend my time, whom I want to be friends with, what to wear, what to eat, etc. Even if other people will disapprove, it really shouldn't matter what they think.

If you take these beliefs for granted, please try to understand that they're not obvious for people who have been emotionally abused for a significant portion of their life.

Understanding what's behind my jealousy

I am jealous of people who can do what they want to do. I'm not talking about wanting to indulge in reckless abandon. I'm talking about simple things, such as styling one's appearance the way one wishes, or engaging in an activity because that is what interests you. In my case, I would want to have private classical voice lessons to improve my singing, go to glass bead making classes, and attend latex clothing crafting workshops. Somehow, most likely due to all the restrictions I had from my parents, I feel as though I'm not allowed to do such things. I'm not allowed to go out and meet people (and I have little interest to), I'm not allowed to have fun because that's a waste of time that could be spent studying or working.

Sure, doing all those things require money, and I am currently lacking in money. But even when my parents were willing to provide for me while I was younger, they restricted what I was allowed to do. I suppose they provided necessities. Dyeing my hair pink was not a necessity. Wearing a halter top was forbidden because it was too revealing and my mom would say "it will show your fat." (She believes fat girls should keep their fat covered. However, I wasn't even fat. Yeah, I may have had a bulge or fold here or there, but at the time when I was in high school, I was 5'4" and 126 lbs. That definitely is not fat. Currently I'm 5'5" and 125 lbs, so I'm happy with my weight. It is a healthy weight for my height, and that's all I care.)

I Googled "overcoming jealousy" and read several sites on it. One that stood out to me was what Steve Pavlina wrote, which is jealousy comes from a scarcity mindset. That made me realize that I often thought of things that way. It was an "either or" scenario. If she could have it, that meant I couldn't have it too. Jacob and Esau come to mind; there was only one blessing. If my boyfriend thought another woman was attractive, then I'd interpret it to mean that he no longer thought I was attractive, when he really could be thinking that we're both attractive. (It is possible that he finds her more attractive than me, which would be a problem.)

My parents often compared me with other kids, whether it was my sister, our cousins, classmates and neighbors. I was constantly ranked, and told that others were better than me, which was true, but also hurtful. Meanwhile, the things that I had a natural talent for were not valued by my parents. I'm not fueled by competition. If you tell me someone else is better than me, it's not going to motivate me to prove otherwise. Instead, I'll just feel sad and quit. I'm not asking for false praise, but I'm the kind of person that needs encouragement, whether it's something as simple as being told that I can keep putting in more effort (but not in the way that my parents do, which is "that other kid put in more effort than you, that's why she's so good at it, but you've been lazy.") I'm talking about something as simple as "if you put in more effort, you will improve." I don't need to hear about or compare myself to anyone else. It's about self improvement, becoming a better person than I was the day before.

I know that it will still take a lot of work before I can feel as though I am deserving to get what I want, before I can become more secure, before I will become less jealous.

I am on WordPress!

A Quiet Place to Rest

I am starting here again, for reals. While all the recent traffic on Xanga has been quite exciting, it is also a bit overwhelming, especially if I get discouraging comments. I don't need someone to tell me why it won't work because I already tell myself that all the time.

I hope I don't get into the trap of doing nothing, except spending all day online, these next two weeks. I'll need to force myself to go outside and explore my surroundings, and try to apply for jobs. I'm just feeling so overwhelmed I don't know where to begin, especially since I still have my thesis lingering back there.

These are some things I have been and will need to continue repeating to myself:

• It's my life!
• No Risk = No Reward

I discovered another voice mail on my phone this morning. Once again it was my mom. She was asking me to finish up my thesis because that would be the way to save money. This year I can do what I want. Then next year she will go with me to Ohio and stay with me for all four years. I think she wants to get away from my dad.

It makes me sad that I can't communicate with her. I'm afraid of calling because if my dad is there, he might listen in. My mom doesn't have her own email address. Even writing a letter won't work because my dad opens other people's mail without their permission. I was afraid that she would still be siding with my dad, but it seems like she might not be, or at least she is feeling conflicted.

Still, I think for the time being, it's better for me to not get in touch with my parents unless I have good news, unless I can show them that I have accomplished something on my own.

Starting here again

Welcome to the site of the girl behind both uru_n_imi and naughty_virgin at Xanga. Yes, we're the same person, even if the persona and topics seem quite different. I created this account back in 2006, when I went on a rampage to stake out my desired username in as many places as possible, regardless of whether or not I will actually use the site. Since it seems as though Xanga will no longer be a viable option (even if it survives, I won't pay to blog if I can do it for free elsewhere), it's time for me to actually start using this account.

From what people have been posting on Xanga, it looks as though most of them are migrating to WordPress. That is not a problem for me, since I need three blogs, with three different levels of openness. One of those sites, most likely this one, will serve a similar purpose as uru_n_imi did. It will be my personal site, where I write about my day to day life as well as essays on topics that more people can relate to. My old LiveJournal, which I didn't use much because I didn't like the user interface as much as I liked Xanga's, can act as my venting blog, where I put my ugliest thoughts, and only a small group of people who actually choose to read them can find them there.

I'm thinking of creating I have created a WordPress blog, for a wider audience. There I will showcase only my best writing, leaving out the mundane and personal. That site will be analogous to naughty_virgin, except it isn't confined to romantic relationships. It will be a site that I'll feel comfortable sharing with my Facebook friends (if I do ever decide to return to Facebook).

Then again, I might not even have time to blog anymore, if I do indeed end up in medical school, which is quite likely.

What are people willing to buy?

My dad says that just because people like my jewelry, it doesn't mean that they will actually buy it. He seems to think that no one wants to buy my jewelry because it's "cheap lousy" stuff, since it's not made of precious materials (and also because I made it. You can decide for yourself by seeing a picture of a necklace that I made many years ago here. My other work is quite different, but about as complicated.) He always emphasizes that the market is most important: You need to make what people are willing to dish out money for, not whatever you want to make.

His perspective is from an electronics engineering one. People conduct marketing research, to find out what people want. As soon as a new product comes out, other companies scramble to make their own. If they don't do it within a certain time frame, or if they don't keep making improvements to the already existing product, then the competitors will have beat them to it. By then, it won't be worth as much if every company is capable of producing it. The consumers don't want last season's model. That's why constant innovation on a tight schedule is necessary for survival, and the product must be functional or no one will buy it.

My guess is that the market for jewelry is quite different from that for consumer electronics. However, I am aware that it's necessary for fashion designers to go with trends, which is not something that I would want to do. My designs come to me on a whim; they are original and unique.

I was thinking about this, and here are my thoughts. Correct me if I'm mistaken. When selling something, the important question isn't so much whether or not someone actually wants to buy it, as it is how to get enough people to know about it. Out of a large enough number of people, there will be someone who is willing to buy.

People buy all sorts of crazy things, though some are more popular than others. If you've seen some things that are for sale during Woot-Offs, you'll know what I mean. Admittedly, some are heavily discounted and still take a very long time to sell out, such as the USB-powered pencil sharpener. There was something more bizarre, but I can't remember it because I wasn't even sure what it was. (My only experience with Woot! was during summer 2008, when my housemate was waiting all day and night for a computer mouse to appear for sale. I was just a spectator. Things probably have changed since then.)

Going back to jewelry, I'll be blunt and say that the vast majority of the pieces I've seen on Etsy are boring and I would definitely not buy them. Granted, I haven't spent much time browsing Etsy, but I've only found three jewelry shops that actually impress me. The boring jewelry still sells, however, so is that what people really want? I'm sure pricing matters, too. Such sales, whether of impressive or boring jewelry, aren't enough to make a living with. My dad says that all the seller feedback and stats are fake; that they got their relatives to do it for them. Is he being overly skeptical?

Just because you don't like something doesn't mean other people don't like it, either. Heck, there are plenty of people who like rap "music" when I can't stand it. I'm sure you can come up with your own examples.

The problem is, just getting one or two people to buy isn't sufficient.