Good morning. Hello. How are you? #797
A year-end wrap-up meme I've been doing for, like, a decade.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Happy new year. I am still positive. Still in my cave in the basement. I haven’t been able to hug my wife or daughter for… eleven days now. It sucks. I am so tired of this. And now I have to go back to work.
I do this list every year, I’ve been doing it for more than a decade. I guess I’m doing it in email form this year. I used to do it in LiveJournal. Maybe I will still post it there too.
1. What did you do in 2022 that you’d never done before?
Get covid. Install a fantastic toilet seat pedal. Grow 200 cucumbers. Grow a luffa sponge.
2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Last year’s resolutions and their results:
Lose weight: Check. Forty pounds.
Be a good dad. Be a good husband: Aside from this irresponsible Covid case, I think I did a good job on this one this year.
Get work into a better place than it was the year before: I guess this is TBD but lord knows I tried and am still trying.
Give away your excess wealth: Well I wouldn’t say I have any excess yet, but we set a number that we’ll give away everything above that, and also we gave a good chunk away this year.
Save as much as you can: I give myself a B.
Continue to be careful during this pandemic even as the entire quarantine crumbes around me and I’m filled with more FOMO than I thought humanly possible: I’m gonna go ahead and give myself an F on this one.
Try and be here for my friends: I am good at the staying in touch, and good at the texting little hellows and whatnot, but I could be better. C.
This year: Do I have resolutions? Take care of your health. Deal with your health issues, get them fixed.
3. How will you be spending New Year’s Eve?
For the third year in a row, I spent it on Zoom. It’s kind of nice, really. I mean, a real-world New Year’s would be fun, but I have enjoyed these Zooms with friends, even if I drank too much on this one. Again.
4. Did anyone close to you give birth?
People having kids all the time these days.
5. Did anyone close to you die?
Mike Gill passed away this year suddenly and unexpectedly and it fucking sucked and was vey, very sad. The memorial was cathartic, though, and it meant the world to see so many people there.
6. What countries did you visit?
Lol.
7. What would you like to have in 2023 that you lacked in 2022?
A day without worry. One day where I don’t worry about work, politics, family, health. One day without headaches.
8. What date from 2022 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Mike’s memorial.
Our days in Salem, MA with Annie.
This quarantine.
The Spiritualized show at Cat’s Cradle was just phenomenal.
9. What was your biggest achievement(s) of the year?
I am not sure anything I did this year could be called an achievement. It was a year of hard work and incremental progress, from work to family to health to art.
10. What was your biggest failure?
Getting Covid from that trip that I knew was a bad idea.
11. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I will say that that weird trigger finger issue in 2021 just… went away. Emma brought it up yesterday and I had totally forgotten about it. Yay me for getting the appropriate medical attention on that, and yay modern medicine for fixing it.
I got Covid, but it’s pretty mild. The suffering is more emotional from the missing my family.
I weirdly burned myself on Thanksgiving, this minor burn on my arm from the roasting pan. It barely hurt. But man, it is leaving a 4-inch big red scar on my arm that looks shockingly terrible. I am kind of stunned.
12. What was the best thing you bought?
A 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning electric pick-up truck and it is so, so amazing I love it so much.
13. Where did most of your money go?
Savings. I spent too much on records. I bought that truck that was a lot of money.
Oh, I guess the real answer is “it disappeared completely as the markets tanked.”
14. What song will always remind you of 2022?
“Mad at Me” by Samia. “Billions” by Caroline Polacheck. “Mainline Song” by Spiritualized. The entirety of Tears for Fears’ The Tipping Point.
15. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Same as every year: See friends, travel, go to rock shows, go to movie theaters, spend QT with my family
16. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Last year I said: deal with Apple and other evil oligopolistic megacorporations who don’t give a shit about small companies. See Tweets by VCs on Twitter. Clean the kitchen. I am so sick of cleaning the kitchen. But I like a clean kitchen. The only solution is to use it less, which means go out for dinner once again.
I did not success in any of these. Well, I followed fewer VCs on Twitter, since, you know, Twitter. Jesus. God.
This year: Umm… I actually don’t mind cleaning the kitchen these days. It’s fun. I guess I would like to do less quarantining. I would like to do less busywork. I would like to stress less about work.
17. What was your favorite TV program?
Andor.
18. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
I do not.
19. What was the best book you read?
I’m gonna go with Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal. Phenomenally readable, enlightening, and makes you feel like you’re not crazy. A masterpiece.
20. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Samia. Holy Fawn. 40 Watt Sun. Skullcrusher. Rachika Nayar.
21. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Jane, Emma. The Jan 6 committee. Matt Levine. WITI slack. My friend text groups.
22. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Elon, of course. Trump, of course. Kevin McCarthy. Rick Santorum. SBF. Gawd. I am getting worked up. I will stop.
23. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
My truck. The mid-terms. Georgia.
24. Compared to last year, are you:
Happier or sadder? For the course of the year, I’d say happier. But this quarantine and December were hard. At the moment, sadder.
Thinner or fatter? Thinner. But not near as much as I liked.
Richer or poorer? I was a lot richer at the beginning of the year and then watched it go down, down, down, despite me continuing to save, as all the markets tanked. That was depressing.
25. How did you spend Christmas?
We haven’t actually had Christmas yet because I spent Dec 25th and every day since alone in quarantine.
26. Did you fall in love in 2022?
I did not.
27. How many one night stands?
None!
28. What was your favorite film of this year?
Hrm. Lotta good films but nothing truly mind-blowingly great. I guess The Banshees of Inisherin.
29. What did you do on your birthday?
Mike had died the day before my birthday and we did a zoom and I drank. Then I went and got my booster on my birthday and treated myself to Wendy’s, and the combination of the hangover, booster and Wendy’s made me violently ill so I just went back to bed and slept all day.
30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Not being stupid and getting Covid.
31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2020?
Been saying this since 2015: None more black, except when I’m lazy then typical aging old navy sci fi geek
32. What kept you sane?
My wife, my daughter and this: GMHHAY. You guys are amazing, thank you so much for keeping me sane. Yes
33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Anna Kendrick.
34. What political issue stirred you the most?
I mean last year’s answer is still the same:
The radicalization of the Republican party, the Supreme court, immigration, the election, the attempt to steal the election, the Georgia senate races, Jan 6 and the aftermath, the Impeachment, the botching of the vaccination rollout, the botching of the pandemic guidelines,
I said this last year, too: This list could go on and on I am rattling these off without even trying I could add fifty more it is absolutely insane how much of my brain this shit has taken up this year. And there is no going back.
35. Who did you miss?
I miss my dad.
I miss Andy Shea. I miss Mike.
In terms of the living, I miss Abigail, Rachel, Liisa, Friendly Beth, Beth, Katherine, my mother and sister, Heather, Kelly, Jen, Jenna, Jamie. Drinking with Doug Pfeffer I miss that so much, though I did get to do it once this year, the first time in, like, three years.
36. Who was the best new person you met?
I literally don’t think I met a single new person this year. Oh, duh I met my new coworkers. I like them. My new coworkers are great.
37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2023.
Hope and Optimism are different things.
The below paragraph is now five years old but it’s still the best I’ve come up with.
Progress isn’t linear. Hard things are hard and things aren’t black and white. The world might be getting better all the time but it was getting better all the time in the dark ages too and that doesn’t mean your life is going to necessarily be in a period where things get better all the time or even at all. People who saw progress their whole lives died with Donald Trump in power and fascism on the rise. You always will need to do more. You can’t do as much as you should but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Guilt is both useful and useless. Most opposites aren’t opposites. Two opposites can be true at the same time. We try and simplify things but we lose the truth when we do. We almost never know what is really going on and we should stop pretending we do. Bobby Kennedy was an asshole but he did good things. LBJ was an asshole but he did good things. Nixon was an asshole but he did good things. The Bushes were assholes but they did good things. Obama was a good guy but he did bad things. Even Trump occasionally did good things. Parenting changes you but doesn’t. Life is fragile. Stop and smell the roses isn’t just a cliche. Health matters. Don’t take it for granted. I knew many of these things before this year but I am slowly merging them all. I have a new respect for those weird Jewish Rabbis who never take a stand but also take a stand. Ambition is good but poisonous. Slow and steady wins the race. Or it doesn’t win the race but it makes the race a victory on its own. Not winning the race is okay and probably even better. You can be special and not special simultaneously. The best skill is to know when to hold to conflicting views simultaneously and to know when that is wrong and they need to be resolved.