Let's Talk Life! October Canon Events! (10/10/2026)

 Let's do a quick catch up on where I am with my life right now! I do these every so often whenever I feel overwhelmed, and life has indeed been quite a lot to handle recently. But, I somehow manage to live my life in a way where I never really get a break, and I just gotta keep moving forward. Sink or swim type shit.

So let's start with the big one. I got dumped this Sunday. Or maybe dumped isn't even the right word because we never made the official jump to bf/gf. Some typical situationship type bullshit honestly, something that I thought I would never be dumb enough to fall for. Anyways, I had been seeing a girl from Hinge for seven weeks, and I thought it had been going amazingly! We were going out on multiple dates each week, usually scheduling some sort of bigger date for each weekend as well. Actually, the breakup even happened after we had just spent the night in SF after this clubbing event that we went to with some of my friends. All of this is to say, it came as tremendous shock to me and I was a huge mess for a couple days. Perhaps I still am. There's a lot to talk about here, but I'm still processing and honestly I don't even know how much I want to tell people at this moment. So to anyone that reads this and is close to me, I'm sorry but please don't ask me about this for the time being.

Second! I'm starting therapy online, meeting once a week for now. Yes, this was heavily influenced by getting dumped, but it had also been something that I had been thinking about for months. Scheduling a therapist was actually the top item in my to do list for a while, and I had been doing a very good job of ignoring it. But I guess now is as good as a time to start, and sometimes you need some sort of big shove to help you get over that inertia. Like a catalyst or something.

To be honest, I had a pretty big mental stigma against therapy. I always had the mentality that I would be able to just talk things out with my friends and loved ones, but I admit talking to a trained professional probably does have some great benefits. I also feel like I've had some questions that I've been deliberating over for a long time, maybe even a couple of years, and I don't know if anyone besides a therapist would be qualified to help me find the answers. All of this is to say, I think it's time to do it and that it would help me a lot, but that isn't to say that I don't feel scared or maybe even a bit of shame or something talking about it. That's why I'm writing about it on a blog instead of actually talking to humans about it. 🤪

With the high stress that comes from being dumped, my skin has also been taking a huge hit. My eczema has been flaring up a ton, and it honestly has been feeling like I've been living through a constant mild allergic attack for the past few days. I can tell that certain parts of my body are inflamed or swollen and rashed up, and there's this constant itch in all the normal places that my eczema manifests, including but not limited to my forehead, neck, elbowpits, hands, kneepits, groin, etc. I've been waking up with my hands all fucked up from night time scratching, and taking showers hurts immensely because of all the cuts on my skin. I'm not sure if it's been this bad for months, maybe even years, but I'm hoping that it gets better soon, especially since I'm going to Japan next week. I am also still able to function in my normal life mostly, so it could also get much worse. It probably won't though because I'm thinking that it will naturally get better as time goes on and I start to feel better mentally as well. Just gotta work on lowering my cortisol or something. Maybe I'll try some breathing exercises or meditation who knows!

Next, let's talk career and my masters program. Work has been getting more busy lately, but the biggest difference is just that I'm not really able to be watching lectures at work because technically there is a big project that I should be working on. Admittedly, I've been doing a pretty bad job at work this week due to some personal distress, and I had extra confirmation because I ended up having my first actual argument with one of the other engineers on my team. Usually I just suck things up and do whatever people tell me to do, but I guess I had no patience in this specific instance. I got my boss and the lead engineer to come back me up so I know I wasn't wrong, but I know that the argument was over something really small that didn't matter and that the right thing to would have been to suck it up and make the little change. 

There has been good news within the company, however. A couple of days ago, our CEO sent us an email with a bunch of corpospeak, but he mentioned that there were some articles coming out and that we shouldn't worry because we are on the cusp of a once in a lifetime opportunity. That sounded pretty grandiose so I went and did some research, and as it turns out my company may be getting bought out for a couple billion by some big players in the industry. In addition to this, I'll probably be getting a bonus in a few weeks. I should feel pretty happy by these news, but honestly I felt a bit indifferent. I guess the breakup was really hitting me hard. I know this may be biased because my mood has been bad recently, but I've been feeling a bit more like I should switch jobs. Or, perhaps what I actually desire is a break. Anyhow, I'll probably be meeting up with one of my parents friends soon and asking for some advice regarding the matter, because her job is literally to analyze the industry, and I think she might have some good insight to give.

So I've been taking care of my friend's family cat over the last week (I promise this is on topic, keep reading), and his parents came home yesterday. When returning their house keys, I found the opportunity to ask his dad for some advice, especially since he works at a company that I was looking into working for in the future. We talked for a bit, but some big takeaways were that no matter what job you want, your background has to very much match what each company is looking for, or else they won't hire you (no shit I guess). I guess this was something I already knew, but what sucked was that I got extra confirmation that these past two years of work might not mean too much because I haven't learned much that can be transferred to another job. Something that he mentioned was that once I get my masters degree, I would probably be comparable to a new grad masters student in my next job, because of the likelihood of my work experience not transfering well.

Feeling kinda discouraged, I went home and talked to my parents, where my dad suggested trying to think about things in a different way. This job still has taught me a lot and given me a lot in regards to my career, and he suggested thinking about the job like it's a high paying part time job, where my masters is actually my full time thing. This way, it shouldn't feel like I'm wasting my time with my current job, and I'll still be making progress in my career because I'm working on this masters program! This was already sort of the way I had been approaching things mentally to be honest, but it did make me feel better. I still think that there is a best possible option for me, where I manage to find a relevant job at the beginning of next year, but first I gotta make sure I survive this quarter.

I'm taking two courses: Science of Electronic Materials, and Design of VLSI Circuits and Systems. For context, these two courses might be some of the most important courses I'll take in this program, and they are courses that I specifically wanted to pursue a masters program in order to take. Science of Electronic Materials has felt a bit like a normal class so far (decently managable), but man VLSI has been a trip. This is a topic that I have essentially no background in besides the circuits course I took at the community college early this year, and I'm really feeling the ramifications. I'm missing maybe one or two or three upper division courses worth of foundational knowledge, and I understand like basically no terms at all. Perhaps this is a normal feeling for VLSI, because almost everyone I talked to has complained about how hard it is, but I've already fully adjusted my expectations to expect to fail this class. On the bright side, if I get an A in SoEM and B- (the lowest passing grade possible for masters students, I think) in VLSI, then I'll still be able to have a 3.5 gpa, which is sort of decent right? :)

In an ironic sort of way, I think focusing on my work for my masters has been helpful for my mental. If I'm feeling sad, I just put on one of my lectures and focus hard to stop the voices in my head. I even feel like I'm being productive while I'm doing it, which is a great bonus. The hardest part has been finding a few hours each day to do some work, with me still wanting to go to the gym and also be a moderately social human being. I've also been finding myself mindlessly scrolling reels and YouTube shorts as a procrastination tactic, which I'm trying to stop.

And finally, let's talk about my hobbies. I uninstalled Valorant this week, which was good. I don't really have the desire to play video games currently, and Valorant was starting to get extremely unfun also. I've still been trying to keep up with the gym, which has been easier because I've peer pressured my mother to let me install a pull up/dip station in the living room. Pair these with some adjustable dumbbells I just bought on Prime day, and it should be pretty easy to get some quick home upper workouts going. I am also still on THP, and I think I'm on the hardest cycle I've ever done for it right now. I had to cut my workout short for the second time ever like last week, after I did three sets of 15 reps of deep squats. I felt pretty terrible after doing them, but I was still able to squeeze out two sets of calf raises before I gave out. I could tell I was cooked because I kept wanting to throw up and I also was feeling like I could black out at any moment. I barely stumbled to my car after the calf raises, where I lied down and kinda blacked out for like five minutes. I then drove home and lied on the ground for another hour not moving at all, so yeah it was pretty brutal.

I'm a bit smarter now and I'm not pushing it as hard, but I think my body has also been adapting more to these workouts as they feel possibly completeable now. I want to stay on THP at least until the end of this year still, but I've been having very conflicting thoughts about continuing. I still know that I'm far from my potential, and I also want to not just have a 40 inch vertical peak, but to be able to have a 40 inch vertical on most days. I also still want to be able to touch over 11 feet, which I know is possible for me and would just be a 41.5 inch vert (not that far from 40!). The problem is, I would have to dedicate much of my life to training like I do now, and with this I think it's pretty hard to do other things like playing volleyball multiple times a week, or even going back to breaking. So I guess I have some big decisions to make around the end of this year.

I have cleared out most of my schedule for the next couple months, but October is looking pretty busy still. I am still going to Japan next week, which I'm hoping will be fun, albeit maybe bad for my main hustle as a student. As for volleyball, I've said no to a ton of people asking me to play in IVL which was hard, but I have agreed to sub for some teams in October. Besides that, I'm also going to be playing in a tournament in November with a team called Bananas, which I have been attending some practice nights for. I really want to do well at this tournament, but I think a lot of it will come down to how well physically I feel then, because I think I have most of the skills already. Hopefully these don't take up too much time, and I'll still be able to focus on my masters program.

If you couldn't tell, I'm pretty worried about this whole masters program thing. Guess we'll just have to wait and see. I kinda want to fast forward to 2027 already, but that's cope because I should enjoy every step of the process and also experience every part of my life! 💪 But yeah I guess I haven't been feeling amazing recently and writing is something that I find therapeutic and I do think that writing this post has helped me. Thanks for reading if you've made it this far. 🥰