#digidiary

basic rules

go with people!! makes you 100% less suspicious and your friends can always help you conceal your things and distract employees

that being said… NEVER pressure others into doing it with you if they don’t want to

remember: large chain = free rein, small shop = full stop.

tips for makeup

remember to ALWAYS peel off the tags if possible

an: tags can just be scratched at and then disabled

tags can always be hidden inside the box, which is why it’s best to take the product out of the box first (also makes it easier to hide)

if you’re in a large drug store, i recommend going to aisles with diapers, miscellaneous items, and etc. for when you’re going to hide your stuff, these areas usually have the least employees.

if you find yourself in makeup stores like sephora or ulta, try wearing more layers and hide them there

an: in sephora, alarms don’t usually go off, but they do watch you through cameras and watch your car/where you’re going so that they can fine you later. i recommend lifting from sephora when you’re abroad, or when you use public transport like buses, trains, or subways.

tips for clothing

ok so now we’ve entered more risky waters.. bear with me here

go when the store is more busy, everyone’s overstimulated and not paying attention to you

go into the dressing room take a TON of clothes to the point where the ones you’re planning to lift aren’t visible, and the employees won’t care for the item limit

look for clothes without the plastic security tag thing

bring scissors or an eyebrow razor with you to cut off the tags (there are tags on the inside of the clothes sometimes too!)

when you cut off the tags .. DONT HIDE IT IN THE DRESSING ROOM… i can’t stress this enough

i’ve literally almost gotten caught for shoving the tags under the little stool (rookie mistake) and didn’t realize the employee LIFTED IT UP and checked it..!!!

i’ve ripped up the tags and wedged it inside the mirror but this can also be a little risky, it’s better to rip the tags and put them in the pockets of one of your items that you’re “trying on” (more optimal if you hide it in cargo pants)

when you take your clothes (specifically tops), it’s best to actually wear them under a tshirt, sweater, jacket, or coat (or all of the above lol)

for pants or bottoms, wear it underneath really baggy jeans or sweatpants

i’d avoid hiding it in bags because employees or mall security can always check those, they don’t always, but it’s a possibility.

if you REALLY don’t want to get caught, buy something and then walk out, makes you less suspicious

if when you walk out, the alarms end up going off, KEEP GOING!!! don’t even acknowledge it and KEEP WALKING

if you’re really scared, go into the nearest bathroom or another store and pretend to look at/buy something

an: wear headphones/earphones as you’re walking out, so that if anyone tries calling you it won’t seem suspicious that you’re ignoring them.

what 2 wear

LOTS of layers, baggy clothes, jackets, sweaters, coats.

baggy (cargo) jeans are your lifesaver

leggings underneath jeans so you can easily shove things into your waistband

if you’re putting things into your pockets, i’d avoid putting it into the pockets of your first layer of clothing (like your coat), instead, put it into your jacket or hoodie pockets and then zip up your coat to conceal it

MAKE SURE YOUR POCKETS ARE CLOSED! it’d so embarrassing if all of your shit would just fall out of your pockets.. could never be me.. cough.. cough..

that’s all for now, good luck angels nd don’t get caught <3

I’m not sure why, but now that I’m in the position to reflect a little, maybe it was cringe, to repeat and cement the idea that I sucked at something. Maybe it was frustrating, not seeing immediate improvement. Frankly, practice was boring, and I rather watch imaginary scenarios inside my head than sit at any table or in front of any keys.

Of course, you would conclude my grades for piano exams were never very high. But once upon a time, I had gotten quite the solid A — just once, but an A notheless.

You can’t fluke success.

At least, that’s what I think. Getting something wrong when you knew the correct answer sometimes is possible and very very common. But how could someone get something right if they never knew anything of its correctness? My logic follows that to get an accidental good-anything that normally involves work means said person at least knew something, anything, to have been able to reach the correct answer.

Anyways, I digress. Back to this A.

This one teacher — who 9 year old me concluded must be not only a spawn of hell but Satans very right hand woman — wrung that honors from me somehow. She had to have been doing something right — (from cracking a conductors wand at me to actually letting me go, firing me because my A managed to stain her perfect record of A+’s) — and I conclude now, nearly a decade later that it must have been her attitude towards practice.

Everybody knows practice makes perfect. Everyone. There’s even a saying for it, it’s “practice makes perfect.”

But what is practice? What counts?

I still practiced before exams after her, with other teachers. Which hidden cranny of my abilities did the demon-teacher claw out that A?

Practice does make perfect eventually, of course. But all those years back, she was trying to drive home another message:

Real practice doesn’t end once perfect is reached. ‘Practice until perfection’ doesn’t mean much in the long run. What matters is the secret hidden step of ‘practicing perfection.’

I guess I didn’t understand her at the time.

You gotta lock that perfection in, yknow??

So. 100 days of productivity… any skipped day for me means I start counting again at zero. If I get it all in one go — unlikely but if — then that’s great. If I don’t — well eventually I will, and that’s even better. That’s where the practice lies, after all.

One.

- signed, a desperate schoolgirl

In primary (K-6), I was always a crappy student. In my memory, I often got C's, though now my parents tell me I got a few B's and A's too - but their word cannot be completely trusted. I remember the dread of reports coming back in their A4 yellow envelopes, and how I never wanted to open them because my parents, my family, my extended family even, thought grades were god. And to that line of successful, responsible thrivers of high stress, letting anybody besides intermediate relatives even have an inkling that you were supposedly stupid would mean that they would be less inclined to waste time lending you a helping hand in the future. I suppose, they had no reason to believe otherwise - all values are borne from foul truths somewhere, somehow.

Then, when I reached highschool (Yr7-12), I had the luck to manage making it into a decently academically-prestigious school, filled wih those who all shared in some degree the same sentiment.

The ugly duckling surrounded by swans all it's life had no doubt in its mind that it had the capability to fly.

This is not simply that case where the monkey, fish and bird were examined on how fast they could scale a tree. It is in human nature to wish to excel - a person who has never wanted to better themselves is firstly:

not a happy person

and secondly:

To not want better of yourself is a person with no dream, and a person who says they have no dream is a liar.

And what is this dream? Where did it come from, and how did it form? Surely such intangible impressions are sprung from fragments of what you have seen, heard, of those around you?

The monkey, the fish and the bird do not value climbing the same way as the animal that came respectively before them - but surely they too seek to excel in what matters to them, like the carp to the marlin, the monkey to the ape?

Anyways, in my classic case, maybe I'm meant for something different, something not academic. But I want to be...! "Find what you're meant for" doesn't take into account what I want to be made for. It's not common, but what happens when I put passion into something, and find out that I'm still not enough?

And anyways, even if I'm meant for something else, discovering that can come later, after this year, after my final exams, and during this time, I will continue to hold on to the belief that grades are god until I actually somehow manifest an academic comeback.

In high school, it was revealed to me that my primary school had some messed up way of marking and grading, and those poor scores finally shot up to where I wanted them to be. Where I wanted to be.

And maybe, thats where I got cocky.

Of course, theres a certain pride that comes with passing an exam with flying colours when everybody knows you hadn't been paying attention in class, or studied majorly for. It was my defining trait for a few years, how did I forget all my efforts from primary school? It was an evil sort of pride, one that brought me to the state I am now. Sure, I'm still passing, but from high 90-somethings to straight up 50% is not a good look. In fact, it's something that brings out that sickly cold in my gut, and maybe a sense of sea sickness despite sitting on my bed, on land.

... hubris. That was my hubris, what am I, a character in a play? Why am I going through hamartia??? Someone tell whoever's writing my life story to put the pen down and stop being a wannabe Aristotle, it's lame, and it's not fun.

So, I now see where I went majorly wrong. And of course, I wouldn't spend my time lamenting. And I recognise that I need to actually lock in hard, and theres still a chance for me. As much as school sucks, learning is fun, and honestly, in proper adult life, not many people have time to purely dedicate hours to master new crafts and knowledge.

But here's the problem. I'm so used to doing absolutely nothing, that I keep procrastinating, and probably a bunch more mental blocks keeping me from picking up my pen to study. It kinda physically hurts to switch from doomscrolling to focusing - which is also a warning of sorts, I guess. Doomscrolling actually kills your brain, I swear. My dopamine receptors are utterly fucked. I visited Instagram reels and Youtube shorts maybe a total of 7 times while writing this? It's insane.

I don't actually have any clue on how to run a study blog, so maybe I'm just going to put my to do list's and progress checks here, and maybe some sappy motivational quotes. Anything to keep me going.