When I set out to do this quarterly life updates, I realized I didn’t really think about how the final — and therefore, annual — recap was going to look like. Do I only mention the stuff in the last quarter? Do I do an overall recap of the year? I’ve decided, as I’m writing this, that I’ll just do a combination of both, depending on how fitting it would be on the respective sections. So here we go.

Life lately

After a busy September travelling and knowing full well the holidays is going to be busy for everyone, I had decided to have a rather chill October and November.

It was not chill at all.

If you weren’t aware, Cebu faced twin disasters throughout October and November. A magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck the northern part of the island, with thousands of aftershocks felt for weeks. Less than a month later, Typhoon Kalmaegi (local name Tino) passed by the island and triggered massive floods across the central area of Cebu. It was a stressful and sorrowful period for many people.

We were very fortunate to not have been greatly affected by both disasters, and we constantly checked in with everyone we know. I was also able to witness the compassion of Cebuanos during these times of crisis. There were people from all over the island driving to the most affected areas to bring relief goods and donations. Conversations around the corruption cases related to the numerous flood control projects are still had to this day. You can’t really blame the people, though, when huge disasters like these starkly reveal the consequences of inadequate governance.

At a personal level, I’ve been thinking a lot about desirability and being perceived by others. (Although, if you’ve been around for a while, the latter certainly isn’t new lol). I also made new friends this last quarter by joining in a Stardew Valley coop and I met up with my groups of friends for Christmas before my family and I went home to my grandparents’ house for the holidays. December had me reflecting on my relationships with people — the recent ones and those I’ve maintained and nurtured for years. About how I can act selfishly around people in many ways and that I want to change that part of myself. About also self-advocating at times when I feel like I am being ridiculed or given backhanded comments. About people I genuinely feel comfortable with as opposed to those that are simply around because we’re in the same circle.

Media lately

Now that I think about it, I feel like this is the only section of the recap that really warrants an overall wrap-up.

Music

This was one thing I totally forgot to add to my quarterly wrap-ups but throughout 2025 I maintained playlists for each quarter with songs I absolutely loved listening at the time. Each playlist have more than eight songs each so here are some of the songs that I feel best represents each respective quarter:

First Quarter

• Orlando in Love by Japanese Breakfast – wasn’t a huge fan of the album but I loved this single release!
• Love Me Not by Ravyn Lenae – never assume I don’t fall into Tiktok hype, sometimes the music that goes viral is simply too good! And I’m so glad I checked her out too — Bird’s Eye was one of my top albums of 2025.
• Don’t Know Why by Norah Jones
• Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie

Second Quarter (or, in essence, my jazz fusion quarter)

• I Want You Around by Snoh Aalegra – I have three songs this quarter each from Snoh Aalegra’s studio albums and this is my favorite of them all.
• Intergalactic Janet by Ley Soul
• Didn’t Cha Know by Erykah Badu – A classic and now I know why.

Third Quarter

• Balloon by Crumb
• Run Your Mouth by The Marias
• Summerboy by Lady Gaga
• This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads

I don’t really have much to say with the music of this quarter. I love them, they’re all groovy in their own way.

Fourth Quarter

• GALA by XG – One of their best songs to date, honestly.
• Fleeting by Sarah Kinsley – My top song of 2025, which makes it the antithesis of what I said about Sawayama’s Hold The Girl album in 2022 seeing as how both were released in September xD. Listening to this track was emotionally cathartic. I love this song so so much and it’s such a clear evolution of Kinsley’s style as an artist. I’m so excited for where her music is headed next.
• Image by Magdalena Bay – I have no doubt this song and the album will be on my top five for years to come. It’s so so good and I’m so glad I got into MagBae.
• 天使 (rom.: Tiānshǐ) or Angel by Faye Wong – I absolutely love the music production of this. Faye Wong’s angelic voice really lends well to it too, I feel like I’m ascending every time I listen to this.
• I’ll Believe in Anything by Wolf Parade – IF YOU KNOW YOU KNOW.

For this year, I’m only curating one playlist for the entire year and then I’ll be relying on Spotify’s Date Added meta to share the songs for each quarter.

Anime and TV Series

I’m condensing these two as I didn’t really watch a lot of anime in 2025 and while I watched more TV series, there’s really only a few standouts. The only anime I finished last year that stood out to me is The Twelve Kingdoms which I have already showered praises in my last wrap-up.

For TV series, here are my favorites of the last quarter and then, in order of when I watched them, I’ve listed below my standouts for the entire year since I already wrote about them in their respective recaps.

• All Creatures Great & Small (seasons 1 and 2) – Very cozy!! I love how funny and heartwarming the overall vibe of the show was and the wide shots of the Yorkshire landscape never fails to take my breath away.
• Decameron – So funny and witty and those costumes, especially the ladies’ headpieces, were absolute eye-candy!! (There were so many things – and people – in that show that were eye candies too.)
• Heated Rivalry – Of course, I watched this. Of course I did. It was beautifully made and all the hype and celebration the show and its cast and crew have all been getting is so so deserved. They made an absolutely brilliant, earnest show with a fraction of the budget of your average Netflix hit. And no matter what Netflix does or attempts to release in the future, I genuinely do not believe they — or any big studio in Hollywood — could have done what Jacob Tierney and Crave did.

Standouts of the year:

• Dimension 20: Burrow’s End
• The Pitt (season 1)
• Dimension 20: A Court of Fey and Flowers – also in second quarter. I love it OK
• Dimension 20: Cloudward Ho! – started in the second quarter but finished it in the third.
• Heated Rivalry

Yeah, I very likely opened my Dropout app the most in all the streaming platforms I’m subscribed to. Go figure.

Movies

Following the same format as the TV shows, I’m sharing my favorites of the last quarter and then a brief mention of my overall standouts of the year.

• Mitski: The Land (2025) – watched this at the cinema, only one of two people, and I’m blown away by how wonderful the concert was. I was so excited when she announced the new album – the medieval cats added SOOO much personal hype – and now she’s hinted at going here in the Philippines!! AAAAA
• Uptown Girls (2003) – this was such an amazing introspection into girlhood. Brittany Murphy and dakota Fanning’s on-screen chemistry is truly the driving force of this film.
• Frankenstein (2025) – ouughhhhh this was the best. Unsurprising for a Del Toro film, the visuals and cinematography is excellent but I truly did not expect the overarching themes of self-identity and forgiveness to resonate as much as it did.
• Wake Up Dead Man (2025) – oughhhhh another one. The lighting in this film was a character on its own! Absolutely beautiful. Each major character’s relationship to religion felt too close to home in more ways than one, even Benoit Blanc’s.

Standouts of the year:

• Persuasion (2007) – supposedly for the first quarter but let’s be real here, this is my comfort movie of 2025. i watched this three times, once every quarter except the second.
• Sinners (2025) – this better win all its Oscar noms.
• The Green Knight (2021)
• Frankenstein (2025)

Books and Manga

After reaching my 2025 reading goal in the third quarter, I was… honestly very chill with reading. I finished two books from Katee Robert’s A Deal with a Demon series and… that’s about it.

Sometime in January last year, I imported my data from Goodreads to StoryGraph… and then realized I actually want a mostly fresh start so I had to manually remove them from StoryGraph. 2025 is the first time I’ve tracked my reading in years and I honestly love StoryGraph’s wrap-up format.

I read 18 books (including audiobooks and manga) in 2025, which is amazing considering it’s the most I’ve read in a year since 2020. I’m still keeping what I did in the past couple years: reading more than I did the year before. So my goal for 2026 is reading 19 books. 🙂

Creating lately

• Art projects – A little update on my Bad Kids fanart series: I finally finished Kristen’s portrait!!! This completes all the Bad Kids and I’m so happy I decided to finish it before the year ended. It’s so interesting to see what little changes on my painting process I can notice from the first illustration of Adaine to Kristen’s.
• Memory keeping – I also finished my first memory keeping art journal and an incredibly old sketchbook from 2017!! Woohoo!!! As someone who goes through sketchbooks at an incredibly slow pace, I think of this as a big achievement. Outside the regular art journal, I also keep two other books regularly: a commonplace book (mostly for quotes and various references) and a good ol’ sketchbook which is really just a more classic kind of sketchbook — general, less organized or composition-minded. Just skritches really.
• Art supplies – Ever since I got into maintaining a regular art journal, I did inadvertently fell into the rabbit hole of fountain pens and inks. So far, I’ve bought two beginner friendly pens and three different inks. I’m trying to keep it to those for now until one of the inks runs out. I don’t want this to immediately head into overconsumption territory. On the other hand, I have given myself permission to buy Tombow markers anytime I’m at the one place I could buy them here in Cebu. Since it’s a mall far away from where I live, it’s not going to be a regular thing. My cheap market set I got from a department store in 2016/17 is slowly drying out so doing this allows me to gradually add new colors as each marker inevitably goes out of commission.

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• Cooking – I’ve cooked a ton of new dishes this year! One of my favorites is definitely this Chinese-style cabbage and meatball soup by @xiensscran’s mom. A few dishes I learned in 2025 that have also been officially included in our household’s rotation are: miso soup, miso tomato egg and miso glazed chicken. (… I bought a big one-kilo pack of miso paste so-) My biggest achievement, though, is making Hainanese chicken rice. It’s such an effortful dish in that there are multiple elements to prepare for the full plate but I’m so so proud that I was able to cook it. I wasn’t able to do a lot of baking since we’ve had the oven in the box ever since we moved but I’m hoping to do more of that in 2026!

Looking ahead

A lot happened in 2025 and it’s been, quite honestly, a lot. I look to this upcoming year with a bit more optimism and a bit more conviction of the things and people and principles I continue to value more and more as I get a year older. Looking ahead into 2026, I did write up some reflections on my journal of things I want to prioritize this year. Very briefly, here are my intentions for this year.

Leave behind:

• parasitic relationships (time to let go)
• can’t-do attitude (to try something at least once)
• retail therapy (overconsumption is OUT)

Carry forward:

• reading goal (read more than I did last year, aka 19 books)
• daily art journal
• create more than last year while mindlessly consuming less than last year (I realize now it sounds contradictory with my reading goal but books are not mindless consumption and I stand by that!!)

Invite:

• more empathy towards others
• an improved “soft” skill (as it’s called in workplace setting but I think they’re just as important as technical skills)
• discernment

In honor of leaving that can’t-do attitude, I’m also trying out a few new things this year but I’ll talk about them more as they go. Blog-wise, I’m quite happy with maintaining quarterly recaps while also allowing space to write more blogs outside of that. My hope is that keeping a physical journal will in effect allow me to write more blogs too.

Here’s to a wonderful year for us ahead and I hope you’re keeping well, wherever you are! ♡