What Did You Almost Not Write Down?

The journal started on March 6, 2025. Monday, October 26, 2026, is day 600. Most of it was typed on the way home.

The blog came nine months later. Its first post promised, among other things, to take on “societal shifts, and the larger questions they pose.” I was seventeen.

The journal had been asking smaller questions. These days it ends each page with one. On Wednesday it asked the one in the title, and I answered with two sentences that both stop halfway.

Below are things from 37 of the 600 days that I nearly didn’t write down, in the order they happened.

March 2025

Mar 6. I had been craving pho for a long time. My dad left the house to get it at 19:15.

April 2025

Apr 6. On the drive down from Jiufen, we stopped and walked out to a rock shaped like a fist. I didn't see the resemblance. Felt kind of robbed.

Apr 9. A school hike. The earthquake alarm went off, and the alarm was more frightening than the actual earthquake.

May 2025

May 25. Pistachio gelato for dessert, made by Italians who can't even speak Chinese. I ordered in English, mostly by pointing.

June 2025

Jun 8. At a mala hot pot place in Zhongshan, dessert was vanilla ice cream with spicy oil and salt.

Jun 20. The traffic was bad enough that I waited an extra 20 minutes for my dad to pick me up, and then we sat in it together. At 18:42 we were still on the road. The sun had started setting late, so it was basically all golden hour on the way home. I was still very hungry, though.

July 2025

Jul 6. I was biking home from breakfast when a lens fell out of my glasses, in the middle of a wide intersection under a bridge. I got off the bike and picked it up.

Jul 21. My mom asked about a 1,530 NTD charge from Apple. I was sure it wasn't mine. It was Duolingo.

August 2025

Aug 27. An earthquake hit at about 21:00, just as I sat down to write the day's entry.

October 2025

Oct 31. Seats in class were picked with arrows: toy bows, suction cups on the tips. I got a good seat on the first try.

December 2025

Dec 1. We played volleyball. The ball rolled under the bus.

Dec 17. The school network went down. That day's English writing test had asked us to write about losing connection.

January 2026

Jan 31. Our apartment in Rome was close to Termini, and the host told us not to go to the station at night. We didn't. It was never on the way to anything.

February 2026

Feb 2. After a surprisingly decent pho at a local market, we walked into a pizza shop mainly because we needed a restroom. The square slices were cheap and very good. My mom stood outside the door for my sister. The bathroom has no locks.

Feb 4. Our first ride on the Rome metro, after a week of worrying about pickpockets. A man started singing, and for a while we thought the train itself was playing music.

Feb 10. New glasses, finally. The old lenses kept falling out, and split colors near the edges. The shop owner still recognized me, and told me he'd stopped doing photography. I didn't mention the camera.

April 2026

Apr 3. On the flight to Newark, a kid kicked the back of my seat so often I could only respect the hustle and terrible parenting. My mom said I was never one of them.

Apr 5. We had almost no cash, so a cash-only shop in Williamsburg came down to one sugar raised donut: $2.25. The one by the temple in Sanchong is 10 NTD and arguably better.

May 2026

May 21. The school guard came out to ask where I was going. I said we needed ice for our class's graduation party. He let me through. I came back with two lemon sparkling waters and two rice balls.

June 2026

Jun 27. A clerk at a glasses shop in Mong Kok offered to wash our glasses. We assumed he was the owner.

That night, at a bing sutt, I ordered mango pomelo sago and the durian came first. The four of us tried it anyway. None of us liked it. Then the mango came.

July 2026

Jul 13. Typing on the 14 bus, where the driver made each word a hedge against car sickness.

August 2026

Aug 18. A morning driving lesson. Rain was falling while the sun still cast shadows over the field, and I enjoyed the odd beauty of learning to drive in front of a highway.

Back home, I slept for another hour, though by the timer it was more like 40 minutes + 10 + 5 + 5.

That night: soba, with five times the included portion of pickled seaweed. I had wanted to eat alone. My grandma came down anyway and watched me eat. For the first minute, I minded.

Aug 26. In Yilan, a friend asked the table whether anyone didn't eat lamb, and waited for the hands to go up. Then he ordered bitter melon instead, and finished most of it himself.

September 2026

Sep 3. Rain all day. My umbrella was stolen from the pile outside the Social Sciences Library. It was the replacement a friend had bought me after losing the first one.

Sep 10. Outside the classroom for "Learning Love Through Film", a crowd sang to get added to the course.

Sep 12. Waiting at a red light on Dihua Street, I was standing a little too close to the road. A stranger pulled me back toward the wall and said one sentence about it. I thanked him.

Sep 14. The umbrella was back, in the same spot outside the library.

Sep 27. Pho, Sunday morning. Lately a family has been getting there before us: a mother, a son, a daughter. That morning the boy drew on the menu, and his mother threatened to leave. She stayed.

The owner asked how old I was. Her son had just started high school, she said, and seemed to want to be independent. My mom told her, "Show up when you're needed."

The owner said, "How do I know when that is?"

October 2026

Oct 2. I ordered a sparkling Sicilian coffee at 7-Eleven. From the sound of the only clerk pressing the buttons, I could hear the accusation: this guy is a jerk.

Oct 3. I recommended a German place to a German. 關公面前耍大刀: swinging a blade in front of the god of war.

Oct 16. At dinner my mom talked about the sweetfish, which was full of eggs. She called it "a very hardworking fish mom."

Oct 20. Up at 6:15 for a 9:30 physics homework discussion, so my mom drove me in ahead of the traffic. The 7-Eleven near campus had two clerks. When I ordered, one told the other, "you finally get to do what you're best at". He put the ingredients in the wrong order. It foamed up, and he made it again.

I was still early, so I sat with the coffee by 醉月湖. One duck kept circling. It kept checking up on me.

Oct 21. At Ximen, exit 6, the sun came through the two side escalators and made two shades of tasteful grey. I didn't have my camera.

That night my dad kindly peeled me the last pomelo.

Oct 22. Gongguan night market, with my mom and sister: 460 NTD of braised snacks, the first time something is worth that much. We waited 15 minutes while the owner finished dinner. My sister, on the phone with a friend, slipped into FamilyMart for the chocolate pork floss sandwich, which she and I agree is the best one they make.

Oct 23. My mom wants the robot duck from the Nvidia event. She said it doesn’t need to do anything. It just has to follow her around.

Oct 25. Pho, Sunday morning. Orange bins stacked outside. At 11:30 a car pulls up to drop off the meat. Four fans in a row overhead, never stopping. The balloon man wasn’t there today.

Oct 26. At 樂天羊肉, the clerk who usually takes the orders wasn’t there, and the line was long. I was glad the place was busy enough to miss him.

On Saturday my mom had bought a tea at 101, mostly for the plastic insert that keeps the leaves from getting out. There was no way to get the filter out either. My dad ordered pots from Coupang and brewed two of them.

While physics and calculus were cooking me, he heated up my bitter melon.

Tonight the journal asks where I waited today, and what I noticed while waiting.

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Acknowledgments

• Title image: Cabinet of Curiosities (Lo Scarabattolo) by Domenico Remps, 1690s, Museo dell'Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence, Public Domain, Link. Remps painted a cupboard of small, unrelated things so exactly that you reach for the latch. None of them is labeled.