Remember how excited I was last week when I mentioned I’ll apply for a course under the EU’s prestigious Erasmus Mundus scholarship? Well, earlier this week, I ended up exploring almost all the 200+ courses in the catalogue and to my horror, ended up realizing that I’m not even eligible for most of them due to my low GPA in college! I was being naive in assuming that a program like this will not give this great an emphasis to how well you performed in college. Most students go for their Masters right after bachelors, and their college GPA is usually a good indicator of their merit. It’s just not in my case. I’ve been mostly self-taught in my journey, and my academic transcripts will never do justice to the Humanities-Commerce-IT path I chose for myself. Anyway, my reason for pursuing an education in Europe was always 2 fold — I want to study, yes, but I also want exposure to a different continent and culture — and the latter has always been more important to me. There are other ways to go about this, and I will now shift my focus to those avenues.

I finally dabbled with cooking this week! When I was reading Chhaunk a couple weeks back, some of the dishes mentioned seemed approachable to me, so I thought why not pick one day of the week where I will experiment with cooking, in the hopes that it becomes natural over time and I find myself wanting to cook on that day. I was excited by another discovery, a website called recipetables, which reinvents the way we look at recipes by structuring them as tables. I decided to explore a few dishes on the website and thought hoisin garlic noodles would be a great candidate for my first dish! I was finally pushed to act on this idea on Saturday, when I was supposed to go to a picnic-style art meetup hosted by the Arttopia community on Misfits. Although the meetup couldn’t happen due to insufficient registrations, I still ended up making the noodles for the 4 people that would now be missing out on the most scrumptious batch of noodles. I’ll describe the taste later, but have a look at the outcome yourselves:

I wouldn’t call the taste disappointing, but there was definitely something missing. The noodles were quite dry and garlic noodles having a dominantly sweet taste (I used honey instead of maple syrup) wasn’t great. I’ve never tasted Hoisin sauce in my life and only later realized that it’s a bit sweet. If I knew, I probably wouldn’t have added the honey. Honestly, I was just happy that they weren’t raw lol. I had a decent portion of it myself and gave the rest to my brother, whose appetite was apparently satiated after just one bite! Lastly, I must confess that I was also motivated by the fact that I will have some content for my blog this way, even though my analytics dashboard tells me that I get exactly 1 visitor on most days, at exactly 7:00 AM each day — either a devoted consumer of my ever-growing digital anthology, or much more likely, a bot.

On Saturday, I will be getting my passport stamped for the first time finally and I’m pretty excited about it! I’m going to Thailand for a bachelor trip with an old friend. Jas will also accompany me. Although I promised my trek mates at the NUS that I will be coming to Singapore as well, I don’t have the financial cushion to make that trip comfortably. I’m still thinking about it, and I might just end up YOLOing on this call. The only thing that has prevented me from doing this already is that I would love to come to Malaysia for the F1 race in the future, and I keep telling myself that the Singapore trip might make more sense at that time.

Exhalation is turning out to be quite the read! Some of the short stories leave me yearning for (much) longer versions of them, and a book like this has rekindled my love for science fiction again. My favorite short story so far is “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” and the future it discusses is one which humanity might find themselves in a few hundred years from now! Before picking up this one, I tried reading One Hundred Years of Solitude for the third time but just wasn’t able to find any momentum. I only tried this much because it is a book that Sarang is obsessed with and I knew I had to persist. Not any more, though.

I keep making improvements to the website. This week, I’ve mostly worked on internal utilities, with the game showcase being the only public feature, but one I’ve loved making. I enjoy developing the website and have been sometimes guilty of prioritizing its development over work, something that I should avoid doing a lot of.

I’ve gotten more work done this week, and frequenting third spaces more has definitely contributed to it. I’ve found a great Third Wave outlet near my place and also realized that I was exaggerating when I assumed that all of these places are just too expensive, although more often than not, this has been my experience at Blue Tokai. At the time I visit (around 9:00AM), Third Wave runs offers on breakfast combos and paying less than ₹200 for a light breakfast isn’t all too bad. I don’t know if I want to do this daily, but I know I work best with consistent routines, and being out always feels better than working from a store room.

Now that the coughing has largely stopped, I plan to resume cult classes as well. I did play Badminton a couple times this week, and I’m slowly falling back in love with the sport. My shoulder, although not 100% perfect, is at a point where I don’t have persistent pain after a session. Naturally, I want to be in my best possible shape before Thailand lol.

Since I’m traveling next Sunday, I’m not sure if I’ll be posting to the blog. Maybe I’ll write one on Saturday, just before I leave. As I finish writing this entry, I realize I’ve come to deeply cherish this weekly activity where I just sit with my own thoughts without any distractions. The best thing is that I just get to write a lot more, and producing output feels much better than consuming input, something I used to start most of my Sundays with.

A decent week, one with a lot of hours of both procrastination and deep work, and I now look forward to be outside India for the first time in my life! I am Raspreet, and this was the third edition of Perfectly Imperfect.

Recommendations

• (Website) RecipeTables: A different way of looking at recipes
• (App) MisFits (Apple | Android): Explore fun communities around you
• (App) PuzzleParty (Apple | Android): Share puzzle results with friends and compete! You can also compete with yours truly! (update 10/10/26: deleted the app because it felt like too much work to upload the results)