went to new york because i was craving a gingerbread man

and then i almost burned the house down; and other stories from 2025

• started the year in LA as a mechanical intern at terraform industries. never saw myself as an engineer before this but had cool learnings, made hydrogen and soft launched some new skills

• made my first commissioned art piece, a seven-course dinner spread and a tree of resistors

• told my friend we should go on a walk, took him on a walk to Mexico. we ate tacos, i got some nice earrings and we walked back

• secured official shenanigan partner! easily the best thing that happened this year

• the friend group flew/drove up/down for valentine’s day and my birthday and we had prom at home because turns out all of us either never had it or didn’t like it

• wrapped up terraform and helped set up some secret new things at blueprint

• went to DC-Montreal-Toronto-Waterloo and met a high % of almost everyone i know in the western world. also got to meet my friend’s baby daughter for the first time. she seemed to enjoy my Mexico earrings just as much as me

  

• east coast trip that included SF, North California, Coast Starlight from LA to Seattle and visited my next door neighbours from when I was four. went to the exact chuck-E-cheese I celebrated my fourth birthday in ONE DAY before they closed forever. insane. and also went back to my school, apartment and fav restaurant from then. S found it very surprising how good my memory is from then. i could name streets, navigate routes without a map etc. also tasted every single fish dish in Inchin until we found which one my childhood favorite was. also got to experience a 3D printed bathroom, and needless to say it was an experience. saw the boeing factory and a movie about Chicago (in true west coast spirit cough). also went to a joel sunny concert!

• cooked a very elaborate three hour long shrimp recipe. mostly because i made many mistakes. but S said it was his favorite food of the year so i guess it was not that bad after all

• realised that i had not done any of my LA bucket list items so spedran all of them in two months. this included

  • learning and performing paso doble with zero experience because i thought the skirt was pretty.

  • a bharatanatyam performance, the first once since i was seven i think

  • modelled.

  • got the whole friend group to act in a movie as backgrounds. we had to diy our costumes one night before the shoot day because none of us got the memo that it was a vampire ball scene. turns out curtains make for wonderful capes when sewn right. we all have an IMDBs now and confirmed that i have no hope in acting as a career

  • did a stand up comedy set in downtown burbank

  • got into oil painting

  • continued try new dance styles era. new additions this year were tap (i am very bad at it), contemporary (i am somehow worse at it. it feels like you’re trying to be italicized in real life. lesson: great activity to do with a friend group in the future. never go alone again), heels (somehow was good at it? my friend A and i even got called to the center which was really cool ngl)

  • hosted a potato party. many potatoes were cooked, worshipped and potato opinions questioned. potato bangers were also played

• mostly chennai + some time in bangalore for summer

• SF again + last min trip to Vegas for defcon with new friends. Vegas was cool but tbh I didn’t understand the craze about it. the strip was nice place to walk down but felt like times square of the west in a desert. but the buffets are something everyone REALLY should experience atleast once in life. we had the breakfast one at ceasers palace and holy shit. we ate and ate and ate until we were kicked out. 10/10. worth saving up for and staying hungry for the prev night. it was also kinda jokes that the groups favorite dishes were two specific kinds of butter out of all the intercontinental bougie dishes we were served.

• acquired top tier dragon onesies

• back at uni in North Carolina for sem 3. first time back in over a year so decided to max credits because why not. it def made me fix my health routines a LOT, set off a lot of momentum, spend time on learning for its own sake, started to train dance again, rekindle friendships from before my gap year and made dean’s list unexpectedly. some lessons:

  • i dont believe in work life balance. the probability of a 50-50 split occurring is impossible and you're doomed to lose. I'm more bought into the thought of the average day/few days needs to have enough 'life' in it to sustain you long term. for eg, the 75 hard shouldn't be a challenge, it's kind of a minimum framework for what a healthy day looks like on top of going as full send on work/wtv the main thing is. and all of these are things that can easily be built into your life if you deem it important enough to design it that way, which I think everyone should.

  • this one builds off of the prev idea. ambition shouldn’t be unifaceted. I find it odd when people are very ambitious and capable in one sector of their life but seem completely helpless when it comes to another. it is a little grey to only care about a single facet and completely disregard all other things that give people deeper meaning in life the more seriously they’re taken like health, relationships - romantic and platonic, hobbies that earn you no money or clout. maybe this is just selective agency. but maybe the point is that they all happen, just not all at once. or you should let ambition happen regardless of what the modality is.

  • i still sometimes wonder if i’m not ambitious enough. my friend derek (aka sivers) once told me about someone who flew halfway across the world to ask him: how do you love?

    derek’s response: love what? your mom? your kid? yourself? your work? god?

    love, like ambition, is a verb that doesn’t mean much without an object. and yeah. that one landed.

  • my biggest problem after discovering agency and free will has been to use it to be bored and dwell in lesser things instead of diving down newer rabbit holes. this year has been an effort to get better at this and going against the idea of if i can just do things i should. which as you can tell by this article, is a bit hard. work in progress

  • i got a sense that there were seemingly not many upper bounds on doing literally whatever you wanted in places like SF, with people like those i had met there. but what’s the point of having a genie if you don’t know what to ask for? this was another intention of being back in school. to spend more to time working on things I think are very important to be worked on for their own sake. though sometimes doing things for their own sake seem futile. my friend Aatik said something that helped put this into perspective: if you’re constantly working on things you think are important and actual progress is being made, how will it lead you somewhere that is not meant for you? (paraphrasing but you get the point)

• was back in SF + North Cali. made some cool new friends and raced slugs

• then Connecticut the week after where i met someone who wrote a song from my favorite high school album. i didn’t even know they did that until a few days later. wild

• then was in Tennessee right after. also made some really cool new friends and set the basis for this fun rabbithole

• read this series. historical/mythical fiction is my fav genre so find this banger was such a joy. i esp liked Sita and Raavan’s character development. eventhough it’s supposedly just fiction it made me see the Ramayana differently and also raised a lot of fascinating political/economic questions. easily the best books i’ve read in a hot minute

• SF for thanksgiving. we had turkey and ratatouille. hosted one final kho-kho game of the year

• went to new york because i was craving a gingerbread man. i headed straight to grand central christmas market from LGA which is a horrible route if the goal is to end up uptown. but it was important to get this gingerbread man. and a key lesson from this acquisition: when you take a bite into the cookie after microwaving it, life feels like heaven. literally. very very literally. but when you get greedy and microwave the already microwaved cookie to feel heaven for the second time, ironically it will want to catch on fire. anyways, enjoyed christmas vibes in NYC. hosted this. discovered a new love for camembert through Anna. another cool pair of earrings were acquired.

• R came to Chennai with me for break. speedrunning the whole experience in a week is not for the weak. but he survived. very congratulate

as i write this i realise how much travel, cooking and exploration was a part of the year. very unintentionally so. and funnily enough the internal theme of the year felt like commitment. i read, wrote and learned a lot more. next year will be based in NC which is a big change from not living in the same city for a full year since high school. pretty excited about that!

this gingerbread guy looks like he knew what was going to happen the whole time