"Good evening, good morning, and hello! It's the brand-new star of the net world, Tesa, also known as A-set, you bet!"

Welcome to my blog, where I'll share my thoughts on random things!

This year I want to develop better mindset habits. The high school cycle has ingrained a routine in myself that has made me feel stressed many times, including very recently. But, there's nothing I can do to change that. My school obviously won't change the way it's been running for the past three years that I've been here, so the only thing I can change is myself. More specifically, I can change my mindset. Better late than never, right?

With everything coming right at me right now, it's important to stay healthy while grounding myself in what I need to do right now. Right now, I'm too focused on the latter. In fact, I'm so grounded, I might have well reached Earth's core… Anyways, my point is that I'm just blindly doing stuff like assignments and studying without any sort of concern for my own health, mentally and physically.

To help dig me up back to the surface of Earth, here's some things that I'll try to start doing.

Take after-school naps.

Many days, I find myself battling the urge to doze off in my english class in the afternoon. It's really not that I don't get enough sleep, it's just that I easily get drained after half a day of school. However, usually once I get home, I get straight to working on assignments. I think this is slowly killing me. Maybe about 30 minutes to an hour in my bed before working would benefit me, since it'll refresh my brain. Plus, it fulfills the desires of sleepy fifth period Q.

Thinking more positively.

It's really tempting to let out a big sigh when something like fifty problems of math homework gets assigned on top of the monstrous workload I already have from other classes. But I can see it as an opportunity to practice the new lesson. Fifty questions may be a lot, but perhaps they're all very short? It's also likely that they repeat the same concepts over and over, so I'd get a good training session for that topic. That was just an example. If I approached other things in this way, I would definitely feel more motivated to get stuff done.

Being more grateful.

It's easy to focus on the negative parts of life. If I get a 99% score on a hundred-question quiz, I'm not focusing on the ninety-nine questions I got right, I'm looking for the one question I got wrong. While it's crucial that you acknowledge that life isn't perfect and there's lots of bad things, there's lots of beautiful things in life that I often take for granted. I'm grateful for the people in my life. My relationships all took a long time to build, and I am constantly building old and new ones every day. Even today's date, 9/9/2025 is special. There are two 9s in a row, but if you take the digital root of 2025, 2 + 0 + 2 + 5 = 9, you get 9/9/9! Isn't that so cool?

That's it. I would love it if more people became more open-minded and positive. I hope reading this encourages you to make a change in your own life. Little things can really go a long way being stacked over time, so don't think any small improvement is too insignificant to pursue.

Hello! Unfortunately, I couldn't meet the deadline for Week 9 of the 999qrcodes project.

Lots of stuff started to happen, and I just got too busy to work on it. This website is more of a personal project, so though I am sad to see it there, it goes at the bottom of my hierarchy of priorities.

I've managed to squeeze this in because my Thanksgiving break recently started, but I'm afraid not much here will get done since there's still a ton of schoolwork for me to do in the upcoming days (so much for a break, right?)

But I promise Week 9 will come soon, and I'll finally complete the 999 project. You may have noticed that the 999 blog posts are gone… Don't worry, this is all according to plan! In the meantime, use these links!

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7

Week 8

My senior year has been an overwhelming mixture of emotions, but recently I've been feeling the "sadness” dial being turned up each day. The second half of the semester is coming up very soon, and indicators of graduation are starting to pile up and suffocate me. College decisions, scholarships, caps and gowns... This is really it.

I don't walk the stage until about a few months from now, but March has been nothing but a downwards slope. Sliding down this hill hasn't been the easiest. I often feel torn between getting out of here as soon as humanly possible and wanting to savor every last thing I have in high school before it all drastically changes forever. As a result, I've constantly been alternating between reminiscing on my years as a highschooler and blissfully imagining myself at the colleges I've applied to, and for some, already been accepted to.

Between all of that static, there lies a certain melancholy. It's what I feel after a hangout I'm never going to experience again, with senior friends who are all going their separate ways. It's what I feel when an underclassman mentions "next year”. It's what I feel when my parents talk about tuition. Torn between past and future, it's the present. And it's really kicking my butt right now.

So until the time is right, I'll be diligent to not be fully engulfed by this sadbait. There's still a lot to do to make sure my journey from graduation to college just goes as smoothly as possible. These tasks include making the most of my time at school, tending to my relationships, and coming to terms with leaving everything behind... Hopefully, this will all go well. My heart goes out to anyone experiencing something similar, wherever you are. I'm sure we'll all figure this out.

Four months have passed since my last entry, and I'm happy to share that I've successfully graduated! I've actually had my diploma for over a month now, but it's only now that I've decided to update this site. Sorry about that.

By graduation, I was thankfully able to come to terms with most of the melancholy I was feeling in March. Since then, I committed to a college I really like, and I figured out a general idea of what I want to study and do there. For now, I've been thoroughly enjoying the school-free life. I've been hanging out with a lot of my friends, I've been playing video games for unhealthy amounts of time, I've been tending to hobbies that I haven't gotten to touch in ages, and I've gotten so much more sleep than I was getting a couple months ago. Despite already being out of high school, I still believe that I haven't completely confronted the burdens I mentioned in my previous entry, but that's something I have to wait a bit for.

That final step to letting go would be the act of physically moving out. Only then would it be a true goodbye to all of my friends and family, a true goodbye to my life as I know it now. How melodramatic! But it's true. As summer passes and I start finalizing stuff like my dorm junk and class schedule, I've started looking at my worries from months ago in a different way.

I'm the type of person who needs to be prepared. The type of person who looks at a restaurant's menu online on the way there. So looking back to a time where I didn't even know most of my college acceptances, I can definitely see why I was freaking out a bit. Now that I'm in a very content state of mind, I realize the problem.

Sometimes I just need to be okay with not knowing.

In college, aka for me, a new school in an entirely new town, with an entirely new demographic of people, with a new climate, etc., I'm not going to survive by being scared of the unknown. That's not to say I should party every night, but I should definitely rethink the way I handle new experiences.

So instead of being scared, I'm excited. I'm excited to say bye to my friends and family. Not because I hate them or anything like that. Because I know by saying bye to them, I'm entering and accepting a new part of life that I am (proudly) less than 100% prepared for. I'm ready to be unready!

Hope to see you again by then!