hlog

2025 year in review

since i've left school, the feeling that the years blur together has gotten stronger and stronger. i think part of this is the lack of "landmarks"--in school, I would get a new teacher or professors or students, and therein a new group of groupings of people I was around all the time. it's easier to differentiate what happened in a certain year, because my memories are attached to these people and places and specific rooms even.

though i've also moved around a lot and changed jobs (mostly once a year lol), 2020-2025, the last half of my twenties, feels like one big long year in a lot of ways. i think because of covid, yes. and probably also because i got sick a lot. and also probably because it's more difficult to have "new" experiences when you "settle down" with your partner and "solidify" your friend groups, etc. but I also think it's because of the isolating nature of having/keeping a job and my impulse and efforts to keep all of that separate from my personal life/achievements. i think because of that i find it difficult to say i accomplished or did anything in a particular year.

at the same time, my family gets pretty intense about new year's resolutions. every year, we gather around our table with fresh paper and pens and come up with a few goals. a while ago, my father started giving out "grades" for our previous year's list (this has stopped since we asked him to also participate instead of just being the one doling out Ds and Fs).

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clearly, i usually go for the same sort of categories. and also love to double down. e.g. 1 push up to 10 push ups hah.

that said, i do think my dad's impulse to look back on the year before moving on to the next one is right. i hope that it might help me feel like i wrote and read and watched and listened and ate and lived instead of just came home from work dead tired and sat on my couch. And i hope that feeling will make me appreciate my life a little more and resent work a little less. also, I love lists and rankings and data collection. it just scratches that itch in my brain.

movies

i do all my movie tracking on letterboxd. as an ex-film major, i try my best to watch movies and not tv. also because when i get into the tv hole i can't come out until it's done and so i figure it's best for my brain to not even start. i only watched one or two shows this year i think and one of them was the second season of culinary class wars.

my fave films i watched this year:

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i know usually people do a top five or top ten, but i really felt the need to include that last row because i did think they were all good movies and for different reasons.

this was tough because I wasn't sure what "deserved" the number one spot. I watched a lot of movies i really liked but none that i absolutely fell in love with (which, sadly, i think is pretty typical in a year of about 150-200 movies).

I watched Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress very early in the year, on january 20th. but honestly i remember some scenes so vividly. I do think it may be my favorite of his films (paprika and perfect blue, while excellent didn't resonate with me as much). i think it combines so many things i love: a true appreciation and love for cinema, elements of the surreal only possible through animation, a zany quest, and of course, a love story.

food we cooked

A and I did a lot of our own cooking this year, partly to save money, partly because it's something we both enjoy very much.

some highlights: breakfast burritos, niçoise salad, pan con tomate, shrimp and quinoa bowls with snap peas, and banh mis complete with a pate paste that A seasoned.

homefoods

A got super good at cooking breakfast (which he was already good at) and i remembered how much i love cooking with local in-season food with our CSA.

restaurants

we of course continued to eat out. i need to get better about tracking on beli, but their rating system and many parts of the app make me feel a little pressured to try new places all the time instead of like, just going to places i know i like. sometimes it feels way too clout-chasing and also i don't like to give public negative reviews of restaurants because it's subjective most of the time and reviews directly impact the lives and livelihoods of so many people.

anyways, my favorites are (l to r, top to bottom): pho we had in hanoi, choco chip cookie from second daughter that my friends visiting from philly brought us, com hen in hue, concord grape soft serve from yellow (not) pizza, cheese danish from panorama bakery, soft shell crab from wild country seafood, assorted baked goods from ho yuen bakery in boston, cacio e pepe fries from your only friend, focaccia's from radio bakery in Brooklyn, kani ankake from raku, gravlax from le comptoir du vin, and the crab dip bagel from cafe dear leon.

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poems/reading

i tracked books on storygraph but only fiction because i don't like how it categorizes poetry as fiction or sometimes even non-fiction. so this year i'm switching to fable and though it doesn't fix the issue i have with poetry tracking, i figured it would be nice to try something new.

I read 7 fiction books in 2025 and only one of them was a book of short stories. I think my favorite prose book i read was Kim Un-su's The Cabinet. My favorite poetry book was being able to revisit Natalie Shapero's "No Object." My favorite poem is the first one.

Shapero

misc

resolutions and goals from 2025

if my dad were still giving out grades I would have failed this year pretty hard. I feel like many of these things were very ambitious. I think the one I did most successfully was create something I'm proud of every month. I did go hard into hobbies and crafting in 2025, which I'll detail some of below.

gardening

i finally started growing things on our roof in 2025 after talking about it for the past two years. i picked up some plants from the ace hardware nearby to get it started. i also got a few free plants from the csa and also work randomly and started a few things from seed indoors as well.

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the greens did really well early in the season, so I'm hoping to plant more as soon as I can. planning on some more mizuna and bok choy for sure and expanding to other asian greens as well. hopefully I will not kill my perilla this year. I'm not even sure how that happened. everyone says it's so hard to kill and yet i managed it so easily.

music

this is usually a bigger category for people but i think i have very 대중적인 taste in music. i would love to be one of those creative people who knows all about jazz or composers, but that's just not me. i listen to mostly kpop and top 40s women in pop...

my top artist this year was laufey, my top genre was kpop, and most listened to album was an album of lofi zelda tunes. below is a screenshot of my top artists per month.

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writing

i made some progress on the manuscript and am inching towards finishing. i think i started maybe 20 poems and i finished maybe 5-6 of them. one of them was a ghazal, an aubade, two poems about the korean brother and sister folk tale, worked on a sonnet crown.

i also published some poems in January (I got the acceptance in november of 2024 so I'm not sure it counts as a 2025 achievement exactly). and I visited my friend JD's class on hybridity. i got nominated by that publication for best of the net. and started this blog!

ceramics

i took my first ceramics workshop and made a few things i am proud of (re: that resolution).

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tattoos

i got three tattoos this year (sorry to my wallet)! and my first stick and poke, which hurt like hell.

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other misc. life events

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2026 goals

instead of a goals list, i wanted to mix it up with a bingo board.

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