Wake me up when September ends
Stardate 202509recap
September usually marks the beginning of winter but looks like this year will be rainy, and winter is pushed forward by another month. This is the last month before my trip to Japan, so this month is all about preparation and shopping. I spent a few days planning the itinerary with friends and then visited the visa office to apply for the Visa. After all the paperwork was done, I moved on to the shopping part, learning from my last visit, I made sure that this time I am gonna pack the as few clothes as possible I can and then fill the bag with all the goodies from Japan. Also Japan Airlines allows me to bring back two 23 KG bags, which made me think of buying a suitcase in Japan and fill that too.
I think I was going to shop a lot in Japan. But to shop a lot in Japan means I needed to Shop a little here in India too. I needed to buy some Dry-Fit clothes from Decathlon or from Uniqlo, clothes which could be easily washed and dried and don’t take much space in your bag. Until now, I had always been a traveler who always packed more than needed sometimes even packing impractical heavy clothes. I often used to come back from trips with at least one pair of clothes which I never wore. I just could not tell myself no. I just used to get the anxiety feeling that what if I needed that many pair of clothes. So this time I tried and reduced the number of clothes and also changed from heavy clothes to Dry-Fit clothes which are known for being light weight and easy to maintain. I ended up picking few from Uniqlo which recently opened in my town. And with that I was ready for the trip.
Movies
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
The Fantastic 4: First Steps
Weapons
It was an underwhelming week for the media I watched. I am stuck in a loop where all I do is sit and refresh my YouTube feed, continuously watching videos that don’t help me in any way. But somehow, I found a little time away from my YouTube procrastination and watched three movies. Weapons was the only good movie I feel I watched this month. Both big-budget movies, Mission Impossible and The Fantastic Four, felt very average. Don’t get me wrong they were both fun to watch, but they didn’t offer anything new. They felt like they were made using the same old formula of action movies. I really hoped Mission Impossible would conclude with a bang, but it was just the same mediocre yet fun action movie as all the other parts before it.
Gym
I am planning to start my winter arc, and to achieve that, I plan to go from 63 kg to 70 kg. The plan is to lift heavy for fewer reps and try to eat around 2600 calories. January 31, 2026, is the target I have set for myself to achieve this goal. I did lose momentum towards the end of the month due to feeling ill and some office travel. But the days I did show up at the gym were super fun. I was proud of what I was able to achieve. Although I feel that since I’m traveling for 15 days next month, I will lose much of the progress I just made this month. I hate going on long breaks from the gym, mostly because when you come back and restart, the sore muscle pain is too much. Hate that feeling.
Professional
I procrastinated less this month. I’ve started using the Hobonichi weekly method digitally in the OneNote app at work and have been trying to track everything I can. The year-end will be here soon, and I hope to record and organise enough in there to save myself the headache of the yearly review. Do you guys also hate sitting down for year-end self reviews? Why is it on me, shouldn’t it be the manager’s job to assess whether I achieved all my goals? Anyway, that’s a tangent for another time (the atrocities of corporate life). On the bright side, I did get to travel for three days and visit a few sites on the company’s budget.
PS : Pets
One of the street cats I’d been taking care of has vanished. I hope he’s alive and has just found a new home. At first, he started coming less frequently for food once every three or four days. He would eat, sleep for an entire day, and then disappear again for a few days. But now it’s been more than ten days, and he hasn’t come back. He also had some issues with other male cats in the area. I just hope he ran off to live somewhere more peaceful and kind to him. I do miss him some days.