I cant remember the last time I wrote an essay.

Monday, December 22, 2025 – 6:36 PM

Hi, I’m Autumn. Most people call me AJ. If you know anything about me, you’d know that I’m really into trying new things. In 2025 I tried rock climbing, river paddle boarding, learning Japanese (seriously), chess, discovered I’m autistic, and my favourite of all… fostering cats and helping them find their forever homes!

What a lot of people don’t know, however, is that I am a really nostalgic person. I am constantly looking back at old memories, wishing I could just jump back in time into those pictures or Instagram posts, and wishing that I had spent more time really capturing the feeling of what I was getting up to in those memories. So I decided a blog would be the best way to capture (in detail) the different kinds of things I get up to. An Instagram post can only take me so far, and I will only be in my 20s for a finite amount of time. I want to have something I can share with my future family, even if that just means reading my blog posts to my future foster cats. So shall we jump right in?

This week I have been feeling really motivated about my Japanese learning. My motivation tends to come in waves, but this week I have been waking up early, having a coffee and some oatmeal, and enjoying my morning, then immediately jumping into my Japanese studies. I think I’ve been getting pretty good, and my main goal for 2026 is to pass the JLPT N5 test. That is the least difficult test that most people take if they want to work or live in Japan; I just like to keep track of my progress in my Japanese learning journey. Most people have to study hard for a full year, so I should have enough time to get to the level that I would like to be before the test next December.

My favourite Japanese word of the week is 時々 pronounced - tokidoki. I just think it sounds really cute. It means "sometimes"! I learned a lot about occasional adverbs this week. So now instead of being able to say "i take Cosmo to the park" I can say "sometimes I take Cosmo to the park." That's an improvement. :)

This new year I am making a bingo card. I am planning on treating it a bit like a vision board for 2026, but with less pressure and overall less collaging effort. I want to see just how many things I can actually achieve, and passing my JLPT N5 test was the first thing I thought to write down when I was thinking of my 24 ideas. I will attach an image of my bingo card to hopefully strike inspiration in you!

This week I have also broken out of my reading slump and I read 3 books. I have noticed I really enjoy books that make me feel physically disgusted: psychological horror, feminist horror, body gore. The best out of the 3 books I read was called Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. Surprise, surprise, it takes place in Japan. It’s about a young girl named Natsuki. She lives with her mom, dad, and her sister. Every summer the three of them go to Natsuki’s grandmother’s house in the mountains to celebrate Obon, a holiday about acknowledging one’s ancestors.

She finds herself growing very close with her cousin Yuu, who believes he is an alien from a planet called Popinbopopia. Natsuki grows very fond of her cousin, to the point that she also believes she is from this planet, and they both desire to go back to their home via spaceship. They end up doing something that splits her family apart, and they are unable to see each other again. Natsuki goes through some really hard things, and all she wants is to just feel heard and understood like Yuu had heard and understood her when they were kids.

I can’t go into much more detail without spoiling the book, but if you like really fucked up books, Earthlings is for you! (TW: child abuse, cannibalism, gore, SA, pedophilia.) Not for the faint of heart, but wow, it was engaging. I feel like I need to read a light-hearted story to get over what my mind’s eye saw.

Have you been reading, do you have any books you'd like to recommend? I would also love to hear about what kinds of things you might put on your bingo card! Okay, merry Christmas, happy holidays, see you next week! (or earlier if I end up having something I am really excited about!)