I didn’t really plan ahead for 2026. If I am to write about it, and I suppose I ought to, then I shall try to piece together the plan for this year. 

For a start, going to Year 3 is a must, so is continuing in Journalism. Come to think of it, I think the theme of this year is “maintaining my options”.  At the very least, I aim to not make a mistake that closes a door to me. I’ll admit that it seems a rather low bar, but I wouldn’t put it past myself. 

For some secondary goals, I’d like to be more productive. If I can do work without being distracted for a couple of hours, I will consider it a victory. Then, I’d also put some work into improving my writing. I do think that this may become arbitrary when AI dominates the field, but before that happens, this will be quite useful in English and Journalism. On the topic of AI, it would be nice to get a basic understanding of how it functions. This concludes my Christmas list to the universe, or at least the part that I am willing to see published. You can infer how the rest looks from my unwillingness to share.   

Now that my demands to fate have been made, I now shall share the 2026 story from the 19 days between the start of this year and the session of Journalism I am currently typing this article in. 

I remember playing several board games and winning none of them, not to mention the Year 2 camp (the noise-induced insomnia seems to have erased my memory save a small section where our classes took turns ridiculing each other over our respective tastes in music next to a large bonfire). I remember rushing a Chinese book review only to find that it wasn’t due yet, and that I had forgotten to bring to class the only thing that the teacher had requested: the textbook. 

In this span of time, I discovered that the lines “to err is human” and “to forgive is divine” were part of the same idiom. To think, all that time I had seen them separately without putting two and two together. I also spent time debating with myself over the abbreviated version of “I have not”, eventually settling on the somewhat clumsy “I’ven’t”, which, I’m pleased to say, contains enough apostrophes to unintentionally form a string within my quotation marks.   

In fact, when zooming in to this level, anyone can infinitely prolong their story. Just as I was writing this article, I came to realise the issue with the phrase “staying up for the new year this year”. The time 00.00.00 belongs to the new year. But is the act of staying up done in the previous year? Or does that refer instead to a state of being awake during what would normally considered hours reserved for sleep? 

As you can see, if I had thought of something else in the period I was writing the past few sentences, I would have something else to think of, and hence there would be no stopping my endless stream of half-baked notions. However, due to my sobering lack of imagination, this is where the current story ends. I can’t quite say that this would constitute interesting reading, but it’s as personal a message I can give about 2026 as I can muster. What a start to the year.