April 2026: Change is the ONLY constant.

Week 1:

April started somewhere in the middle of the week… and with it came a piece of unexpected news that quietly sent my anxiety spiraling.

For the last one year, I had been relying on shuttle services (AC buses with pre-booked rides) for commuting to work. There are technically other ways to reach office from my home… but none of them are direct. You can keep hopping between buses and somehow make it there eventually — cheaper, yes, but also significantly more exhausting. So I chose convenience over saving money. I paid more so that I could travel peacefully and comfortably every day.

But suddenly, the shuttle service shut down after months of running at a loss.

I still had a few rides left in my account, which thankfully got refunded. And I guess sometimes when one door closes, another one really does open. By the weekend, I found another shuttle service that had just started operating from the first week of April itself. Like many other stranded commuters, I immediately rushed to book rides there.

During the weekend, I took a few interviews, though most candidates weren’t really the right fit for the openings.

And after spending weeks baking cakes — both from box mixes and from scratch — I finally attempted cookies for the first time. ChatGPT came to my rescue with a few beginner-friendly, fool-proof recipes. And despite being warned multiple times, I lacked the patience to freeze the dough properly… so the cookies spread into little rotis inside the oven. Taste-wise, they somehow managed to be both overly sweet and salty. But visually? They definitely had some charm.

I also finished watching Snowdrop on Disney+ (Jio Hotstar in India), which pretty much concluded my ongoing Jung Hae-in watchlist for now. There are probably still one or two movies left that I could track down if I really wanted to… but honestly, I didn’t feel like putting in the effort for films that didn’t even have particularly good ratings.

Week 2:

On the surface, I still had a shuttle to get to work… but realistically, a lot had changed.

I was now paying even more for the commute, and my options had narrowed down to just two buses in the morning and two in the evening. Which basically meant spending nearly 11–12 hours outside every office day, including travel and work. And the fun part? After coming home, I would still need to sit through meetings with my team in the US.

Work-wise, I was making solid progress. But physically, I was becoming more and more sleep-deprived with each passing day. And naturally, my capstone project for coursework kept getting pushed aside in the process.

I somehow powered through the exhausting first half of the week by keeping my eyes fixed on the holidays ahead. That weekend felt like an actual break for the first time in a while. No interviews to take. Three extra days off thanks to combined leave and holidays. I started going for evening walks again, woke up late without guilt, and returned to baking experiments.

The last two chocolate cakes I baked tasted really good… but the texture had been too soft and crumbly. So this time, for Bengali New Year, I modified the recipe a little to improve the structure.

And well… the texture improved significantly.

The taste, unfortunately, did not.

So now I had a giant box of chocolate cake sitting at home that looked perfectly decent… but tasted aggressively average.

I also binged Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-joo during this week — which honestly felt like the exact kind of comforting watch my exhausted brain needed.

Week 3:

After an unexpectedly long stretch of holidays, I returned to work feeling strangely motivated to move things forward again.

And almost immediately, chaos arrived.

There was suddenly a proposal to reshuffle ownership of some work. Another team wanted to take over the exact feature I had been sweating over for the last one-and-a-half months. Even though the ownership and implementation approach had already been decided last year, they now wanted to jump in with a completely different direction — supposedly to support an extra feature.

So technically, if the work moved to them, all my effort from the past several weeks would become irrelevant overnight. Though at the same time… I also wouldn’t have to worry about finishing it anymore.

From a technical standpoint, I genuinely believed my approach was objectively stronger — not because I built it, but because of how much research and groundwork had gone into reaching this stage. But from my supervisor’s perspective, shifting ownership elsewhere probably sounded a lot more convenient.

The weekend itself was fairly slow and uneventful.

Our capstone project also wasn’t progressing much because of delays and miscommunication between teams, and our professor was furious. Honestly, almost everyone in the batch was struggling in some way — balancing demanding jobs, personal lives, deadlines, coursework… and somehow still trying to stay afloat through all of it.

Around this time, I also started watching Resident Playbook.

Week 4:

By the last week of April, my primary goal was honestly just surviving my mandatory office punch-in days.

Those office days were brutal.

I would spend 11–12 hours outside between commuting and work, only to return home and attend meetings for a few more hours afterward. The new shuttle system made office-going especially exhausting because the rides were limited strictly to morning and evening slots — no flexibility whatsoever.

Work itself was… alright, I guess.

After the initial discussions, management decided both teams would continue working on their respective approaches, and eventually one solution would be selected. At this point, though, I found myself weirdly detached from the outcome. My previous two projects had already been tossed aside due to organizational decisions and shifting priorities — none of it because the products themselves were bad.

So I tried consoling myself with a simpler thought:

I enjoyed building those things.
I learned a lot from them.
And my paychecks still arrived on time.

So why exactly was I panicking so much?

Meanwhile, our capstone project finally started gaining momentum after weeks of waiting around for dependencies and inputs. Our team itself was an interesting mix — full-time master’s students, PhD scholars, online master’s students juggling full-time jobs, interns, and senior developers from startups. Most of the delays happened because communication kept slipping between different members and teams.

After our professor’s callout on miscommunication, we suddenly had mandatory sync meetings every single day from Monday to Saturday so that blockers and progress could be communicated daily.

We also got a day off because of elections.

I always knew employers are supposed to provide leave so employees can exercise their voting rights… but somehow, elections almost always ended up falling on Saturdays anyway. So this was actually the first time I properly experienced an election holiday.

The day itself was surprisingly peaceful.

I woke up early, had breakfast, cast my vote before 8 AM, and while walking back home, I kept thinking to myself:

“How did I, the early bird, manage to get all the early worms?”

And despite already having an embarrassing pile of shows waiting to be reviewed… I somehow still ended up binging two more ongoing dramas.

So yes… stay tuned for May’s update blog to find out how that turned out.

The Food Chronicles of April 2026:

The vanilla sugar cookies:
The biggest proof of them being average is the fact that I still have one cookie left at the time of publishing this blog. And honestly, if a sweet treat survives this long in my room, that alone says enough about the final result.
The sturdy average chocolate cake:
Usually, homemade cakes disappear within two days in this house. Realistically speaking, I could probably finish the entire thing within two hours of taking it out of the oven if left unsupervised. But I’ve made a rule for myself — homemade desserts need to be shared with family and stretched over at least two days. Mostly because even the “easy” recipes take me around 30–45 minutes of prep time, and since I can only bake during weekends, I need to maximize the emotional return on investment.
This cake looked good. The texture improved. Structurally, it was probably my best one yet.
Taste-wise though… aggressively average.
The viral mango ice cream:
I usually don’t give in to virality, but this particular ice cream made me genuinely curious. After being out of stock for weeks, I finally got it. It definitely looked the part — like a perfect little mango.
The taste, unfortunately, did not justify the drama.
Finally trying Mochi:
I had wanted to taste mochi for a really long time, and April finally became the month that happened. My conclusion? My taste buds and my wallet clearly belong to very different economic classes because I absolutely cannot justify buying those regularly.
Homemade wraps instead of risky takeout:
One evening, we made wraps at home with pan-fried oyster mushrooms, grated carrots, cabbage leaves, and tandoori mayo. At this point, our collective trust in takeout food has become fragile enough that homemade experiments somehow feel both safer and more satisfying.
The “healthy” snacks haul:
Bought myself a bunch of supposedly healthy snacks this month. Except the two orange-flavored ones — which tasted like punishment disguised as wellness — the rest were actually pretty good.
My first attempt at eggless French toast:
I made the batter using chickpea flour, a splash of milk, heavy cream, sugar, cinnamon powder, and vanilla essence. I genuinely didn’t expect much while making it, but somehow… it turned out really nice. Which honestly felt like a small personal victory after all the aggressively average desserts April kept throwing at me.