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Here are the last drawings of 2025.

I was able to fit the whole year into this little A6 70 sheet muji notebook, which I drew on with a number of 0.5 dark blue muji pens… I bought them instead of black on accident. Days were skipped (my summer vacation lives in a different sketchbook)! Days were left blank and then I went back to draw them when I had more time! I got rid of the ‘draw one minute per what day it is’ rule very early on. Nothing is perfect, but it exists.

If you have made it through all of these blog posts, thanks for coming along with me on the ride. I will continue journaling, if excavating my childhood bedroom this last week reaffirmed anything, I am an avid documentalist. But I will take a break from the posts and this kind of rigid format.

Back in July the Psychic Chicken at Pike Place Market told me “the month of November will bring luck to you.” 15 days before that prediction I scheduled my first ARE for November 21st, with the intention of starting to study after getting back from vacation. I need deadlines for any semblance of motivation so that is why I scheduled so far in advance. And look, the chicken was right, yay. This is just one exam of many, but I am releasing myself of external pressure. I’m doing it on whatever timeline I feel like. I won’t force myself through them. Taking this one was mostly to demystify the experience.

some miscellaneous thoughts

• can I just say that ARE is a cool acronym, but it makes it inconvenient to google
• you aren’t allowed to have scratch paper. In ‘real life’ you will have scratch paper. Just a pet peeve.
• it is a pretty distracting test environment to be surrounded by a bunch of people taking different exams and opening and closing the door. but I survived. Also survived having the test screen go white with 15 minutes remaining… that spiked my heart rate way up. The proctor was able to resolve it.
• I wish the official testing body had more than one practice test. I ‘failed’ every practice test I took (four… three of which were from external sources), but by the last one I think I only failed by like 2 or 3 questions. Every exam has a different percentage of questions you need to get right so it is hard to estimate. On the real deal I was pretty short on time during the case studies and educated-guessed on several questions but made out ok. I agree with the general online consensus that the real exam feels easier than the practice (better than the other way around).

Anyway. With both the deadline at work and the exam on the same day, the rest of November was smooth sailing with my brother visiting for Thanksgiving.

Looking back, September was pretty long and a bit of a blur. August and September do feel weird now that I am not in school (going on my second year). My mind wants to skip right to October.

Made some buttons to jump to the other months more easily:

Here are my drawings from August. It is a struggle to get back into drawing everyday when the routine is upended but I think I am back into it now.

Went to Boston for the long weekend at the end of the month, it’s only ~3 hours away, I just never got around to visiting it before now. Massachusetts feels like a fictional place. I don’t know how well I can really elaborate on that, but maybe you get what I mean. I had similar feelings visiting Philadelphia but this is more extreme. What do you mean all those things I read for how ever many years in American history class took place here? Oh yeah, there’s one of the “ugliest buildings in America”, Boston City Hall, that’s also here (I actually quite like it, it knows what it is trying to be). What do you mean the Little Women house is real, and all these transcendentalist figures I had to write about for whatever essay lived right here and were in the same social circles? Concord grapes are named after Concord, Massachusetts (and I visited the originator’s grave)?? I haven’t been to Salem or Plymouth yet… Massachusetts is just crammed full of history. So I know I’ll be back.