Category: Uncategorized

For someone who loves love as much as I do — as much as I, ironically, hates the “Oh, I love love!” declaration that seems to have become popular in pop culture in recent years; I am a walking contradiction — I’m struggling to think of a Valentine’s Day that’s ever felt particularly special to me in all of my years.

That’s not to say that I haven’t tried throughout the years, or that I’ve not had nice Valentine’s Day or even good ones; I’m not claiming that I’ve never had a good date on one, or anything like that. (I’m lucky enough to have had many, in all my years, something that I think would have surprised the teenage me who always felt a little abandoned and alone on the day itself, getting no cards and feeling unloved by the world at large. Oh, to be able to go back in time and tell him that wouldn’t always be the case…!) It’s just that they’ve been just that, nice and good, and never these big romantic overwhelming events that pop culture stores show on the regular basis that overwhelm and redefine our lives.

For a long time, that bothered me. Well, perhaps bothered is putting it far too strongly, but it left me wanting and feeling as if I was missing out: What was I missing, what was I doing wrong, that Valentine’s Day would come and go and there would be a good date but no massive emotional revelation? Never mind the fact that I couldn’t actually imagine what that would look like — something that, all things being equal, should have made me think, oh, am I falling for a sales pitch for something that doesn’t really exist — I felt as if I was missing out on something that would make me supernaturally happy and fulfilled emotionally like in all the movies, and throughout my teens and my 20s, I’d end the day just that little bit let down.

I can’t remember at what point I realized that the nice and the good was the point, that those were the Valentine’s Days (and dates) that I’d remember and were meaningful, but I do remember talking to Chloe at one point early in our relationship when we couldn’t get a reservation at a specific restaurant on February 14th and her gently suggesting that I was still putting too much effort into a random day and date when any other day would be just as good to show and celebrate love. And probably with more success with restaurant reservations. Old habits die hard, no matter what we tell ourselves.

Still, good luck tomorrow to everyone, anyway.

And then I ground to a halt, reluctantly.

The way I put it in a message to my boss was, “I’ve been fighting a cold all week, and the cold’s winning.” That’s maybe a little too cute, but it wasn’t untrue; by the time I called out sick last week, I’d been feeling sluggish and tired and dealing with a persistent headache for four days, and my traditional approach of What if I just ignore it and then it’ll go away, because that’s certainly how you’re supposed to deal with illness wasn’t paying off this time.

The problem — well, the problem that wasn’t the fact that I had a cold and I didn’t want to have a cold, which was also the problem — was that it was one of those weeks that just felt as if it didn’t end; everything kept happening, and almost all of it demanded my attention in one way or another. I felt as if I was constantly “on” from waking up to falling asleep, and then sleeping badly because of the cold, just to make matters worse. Every evening, I’d find myself thinking some variation on the thought of, “I wish I could just hit pause, just for a little bit, to regain some strength.”

To any regular person, that sounds like the ideal time to call out sick from work and give yourself a day to recover, but friends: I am a workaholic and that’s not how my brain works. I knew it was the right idea and something I should do, yet I kept finding reasons not to call out — there’s stuff that needs to be done, I’ve had a couple of four-day work weeks in a row and I should work a full week, it’s not that bad when it comes down to it — all the way up until actually calling out at 7 in the morning.

What pushed me to finally do the obvious thing was receiving a text from my sister at 5:30 that morning — to be fair, she’s in the UK and time zone math is hard — telling me about a family thing that just made me think, Oh, there’s another thing, of course, before realizing I really should just be kinder to myself and take the damn day off.

The day was spent, instead, on a couch and in a bed, relaxing and suggesting to the animals that maybe they too should calm down and let me rest. All things considered, it was the day I needed: the temporary stop that let me keep going. Maybe next time I’ll get there without being sick and/or trying to convince myself that pausing is a luxury on the way.

I mentioned the other day in passing to a friend about my increasing awareness of a need to spend time by myself. I didn’t mean that in a generic sense — there are plenty of times every week where I’m “by myself” as I work, for example, or moments when I’m the only one watching a TV show or whatever as other people are elsewhere in the house, but that’s not the kind of thing that I mean. Instead, I’m talking about… finding time to intentionally alone, for want of a better way to put it.

For me, it’s going for walks and listening to music. I’ve written before, I’m sure, about my love of the Situationist dérive, the act of wandering with no intent or destination in mind and seeing where you go, and that’s become something akin to a weekly act of self-care to me as I plug myself into my phone and listen to whatever I’ve been obsessing over lately. Occasionally, I tell myself that there’s something about it that’s an exercise routine of sorts, and sure enough I’m getting some exercise, but the true appeal is the space it gives my brain to just… free associate and work through whatever has been lying there ill-considered and needing some time to marinate.

There is always something, somewhere, to take your time and attention if you let it, I’ve come to realize; there’s always a deadline or an obligation or reason to pay attention to something that someone else wants. (I’m speaking not just of work obligations, of which I have so many, you understand, but also family and just, you know, making sure you’re paying the bills and have food and everything else.) Sometimes it feels as if there’s no space to just… be selfish enough to let your mind wander, for want of a better way to put it.

Something I’ve heard a bunch of different people talk about in the last month or so, in a bunch of different circumstances and a bunch of different situations is their desire for “whimsy,” and when I’ve asked them about it, it’s translated into variations on the idea of “I wish I had time and space to be silly and joyful but I don’t.” That’s what these walks are for me; finding that time and space, surrounded by people but still very much for myself and by myself.

A thing that I always promise myself that I’ll do during the holiday break is “tidy up.” Not in terms of the house, because I do that on a regular basis anyway — I get amusingly upset if the kitchen or living room in particular are left in too much of a state for too long; it’s amusing to me, at least, albeit in retrospect — but tidy up my workspace and my laptop, which by the end of each year tends to be crying out in desperation for attention and a little care.

The problem isn’t that I use it basically every day for hours on end; that’s what laptops are kind of meant for, after all, and I’m happy to report that Apple hasn’t let me down on that front yet. No, the problem is that I don’t empty my digital trash can. This is, in part, by design — more than once in my life, I’ve accidentally deleted a file that I wasn’t actually finished with because I like to try to free up my desktop at the end of each day, and sometimes get a little overzealous in doing so, only to then empty trash and discover the next morning that I’ve deleted something I was 90% done with and needed to complete in the shortest possible time that day. (Yes, I’ve done this more than once. You don’t need to judge me that harshly.)

My solution, I decided the last time I found myself gesturing silently in frustration to the heavens, wasn’t to simply be more careful in what I put into the trash bin. Instead, I decided, what I really needed to do was not empty trash until I could feel confident that I didn’t need anything in there. In theory, this means that I’d check the bin at the end of a week, say, and then empty it after saving anything that had been placed there by accident.

Note that I said, “in theory.” In practice, I went through my trash bin the Monday between Christmas and New Year and realized with no small amount of horror that I hadn’t actually emptied my digital trash since June. The past six-and-a-bit-months of my digital life were remaindered there, from old work stories and images to PDF review copies of things, screenshots of any number of random things I’d sent to friends or family and hundreds of other files. I’m being literal when I say that; there were more than a thousand files in the trash, waiting patiently for me to do something, anything, with them.

When I hit “empty trash,” you could almost hear my laptop breathe a sigh of relief; the available space on my machine went from something like 8GB to 131GB immediately. Maybe I need to get a little better about paying attention to this stuff in the future.

The first couple of weeks of 2026 have followed a similar rhythm that, I can only hope, will not be repeated throughout the rest of the year.

If I had to define this rhythm, it’s be that Monday is a day of low dread — a day where what needs to be done for the rest of the week slowly becomes clear and it’s more than I expected, with at least one surprise waiting for me that comes entirely out of left field and leaves me trying to work out what I need to do with it. Tuesday is then a day of feeling of feeling overwhelmed by the weight of expectation and/or deadlines and/or things that simply need to be done, and then Wednesday is that but more so, and with a side order of resentment that it’s quite so much. As I’ve said for the past two weeks, Tuesday evening feels like a Thursday, and Wednesday feels like a Friday is never going to arrive.

Then, on both weeks, Thursday proved to be surprisingly easy — a through line in whatever is lying ahead of me appears, or I figure out a solution to whatever the biggest problem facing me, or something similar. Thursday turned out to be a respite, this odd moment where everything feels better than the last three days and I have a moment at one point of thinking to myself, wow, I can’t believe tomorrow’s Friday, that’s so great, I’m so close to the weekend with no small sense of relief.

Where the two weeks did differ was the Friday. The first week, the Friday followed through on the easy feeling of the day before, and I just slid into the weekend was gratitude and relief. And last week, it was just the opposite: Friday was a fight, and I struggled through the entire day like it was quicksand, wondering if there was something worse waiting for me that I couldn’t see just yet. All things being equal, I preferred the week before.

And yet, the two weeks felt the same, by the time the weekend arrived. The shape of them, the to-and-fro of it all. It felt like something, somewhere, had decided this was the calendar of events and I was just learning about my new schedule. The second week had a surreal Groundhog Day feel to it that made me nervous. Surely, I thought, this isn’t what it’s going to be like the entire time. This can’t be right.

I said something similar at this time last year, that I hoped January didn’t set the tone of the year to follow; in the year’s defense, it didn’t. It was arguably far worse. Here’s hoping that doesn’t repeat itself, either. We’ll see. 50 weeks to go.

It struck me the other day that we were collectively at the 10 year mark of ending a year/starting a new one by going, “Well, the last 12 months have been fucking rough, here’s hoping the next year is going to be better.”

By that, I don’t mean that everything has been getting progressively worse since 2016 — thankfully not; just imagine! — but that, by the time the end of the year eventually rolled around each and every year for the last decade, I found myself thinking what so many people in my social circle were saying out loud: the last year has felt like it’s been trying to grind me into paste, and I just want the next year to be a little easier.

It felt like everything was on a downhill slope from, what, 2016 through 2020, 2021, perhaps…? Perhaps that whole “global pandemic that up-ends life as we knew it” was enough of a downer to leave us in such a space that almost anything would have seemed like an improvement, but sure enough, 2022 felt a little better than what came before, and every year since then has had highlights as well as crushing disappointments and difficult moments. (Those last two have seemed to be a permanent fixture for the past decade, at least.; maybe it’s getting older, maybe it’s just that things really did seem to turn to shit at some point.)

That said, 2025 felt like one of the rougher years I’ve had for awhile, and I found myself glad to leave it when January 1 rolled around, as much as I continually tell myself that New Year doesn’t really mean anything and it’s all entirely arbitrary. The placebo effect of thinking I could package that period away in my memory as “another of the shit ones” and move on is a permanently attractive one even if I know better, and I’ll grab onto any straws in the hopes of things turning around soon.

All of which is to say: 2026, I might be asking a lot, but let’s try to not metaphorically kick me in the balls as much as 2025 did. I know that history and experience haven’t particularly demonstrated such a request will be successful, but if there’s one thing the last 10 years of new years have taught us, it’s that hope springs eternal. After all, what’s the alternative?

“Hey, man!” yelled the dude standing outside the various restaurants on Mississippi Avenue. “Hey, man!”

Look, I’m not one to randomly start conversations with strangers yelling at me on streets as I try to walk past, especially when I’m visibly listening to music on my phone. (For reference, it was “Night Vision” by Super Furry Animals.) It’s not that this guy looked like he was about to start a fight or cause trouble or anything; if anything, he looked like The Dude from The Big Lebowski if he’s started working out a little bit and was trying to take care of himself more these days, but had also gotten really into buying his entire wardrobe from the local military supply store. Still, he was yelling to get my attention and for some reason, I figured that I should probably see what’s up before things got out of hand.

I took my earphones out, and the dude happily — gleefully! — announced, “If it wasn’t for your beard, you’d look like the twin of Telly Savalas, man.”

I’ll be honest; I had no idea how to take this. On the one hand, I didn’t think I look anything like Telly Savalas, for any number of reasons, not least of which the fact that I rarely think of the man who was once Kojak because, really, who does these days? On the other, Telly Savalas was a sex symbol back in the day, so perhaps the comparison was a good thing and a sign that I should pick up a lollipop habit as quickly as possible, just in case it helps my appeal. (On a third hand, Telly Savalas was a sex symbol in the 1970s. That was a decade when plenty of not-entirely-attractive people were considered sex symbols for some inexplicable reason. Did I really want to be likened to a man beloved by a decade with questionable taste?)

I laughed, nervously, and replied, “I’ll take that as a compliment” as I hurried away, hoping that would be the end of the discussion, feeling other people watching the two of us. “Who loves ya, baby!” yelled the man as I walked away, seeming affirming that it was, in fact, meant to be a comparison that worked in my favor. A woman smiled at me in sympathy as she walked past me: “I think you look great,” she said.

It was an unusual start to the afternoon, at least.

Reading about the business of Christmas TV movies the other day, the thought occurred to me: I watch enough of these to probably be able to pitch some, right? I know the formula: a title that refers to a Christmas song everyone knows, some actors you’ve seen in other things, and a plot that won’t surprise or threaten anyone but entertain just enough to make those 90-120 minutes go down as easily as the egg nog everyone is likely drinking as they watch. So, with literally zero minutes forethought, I came up with the following:

I’m Tellin’ You Why: Opposites attract at Christmas when two leading social media content makers — what we used to call “influencers” before that term went out of fashion, which was round around when people started using the term “slop” freely — find themselves fighting to be the face of their hometown’s holiday parade! Are holiday parades a real thing? Would social media people care about them? Who cares?!? Let’s have whoever played Archie Andrews in Riverdale as the male lead, some kind of Joe Rogan with a heart, and Nancy from Stranger Things as the female lead doing some PG-13 twist on the Call Her Daddy kind of podcast thing.

I’ll Be Home for Christmas: There almost certainly has to be multiple movies with this title already, right? Well, this can be another one, but it’s just a rip-off of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles that works in some gags about self-driving cars and Ubers because the gig economy is a cheap punchline, am I right? Nicola Coughlan can take on the Steve Martin role and she’s paired with Aidy Bryant in place of John Candy, and the whole thing can be a slow motion version of America Ferrera’s monologue at the end of Barbie about how difficult it is to live up to multiple warring expectations at once, but with all the edges softened and a finale that lets everyone have a happy ending, because let’s not upset people too much at the holidays, everyone. Let’s get these viewing figures up.

With Your Nose So Bright, Won’t You Guide My Slay Tonight?: A drag-themed retelling of the Rudolph story that’s also a cautionary tale about cocaine addiction, and — okay, maybe this one is a bit of a stretch. I’m sorry. (I will rethink this if someone offers an option, however.)

Netflix, call me.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really use my Apple Notes app for anything other than random thoughts that aren’t particularly important but feel like passing fancies in the moment that I might want to remember. I’ve got multiple notes for everything from my room number when I check into hotels — I’m always worried I’ll forget, but I never have; I also rarely remember to delete said notes until months after whatever trip I was one — to contact details for work people that I’ve never actually used. (I still have people’s numbers on there from when I went to the UK two years ago, in case I couldn’t check into my hotel or get my show pass afterwards.) It’s not the home for anything that would be considered especially necessary.

Amongst those unnecessary things: random sentences that are either observations, or prompts for things that I might one day want to write about here. I started doing it on a trip earlier this year, because something was looping around in my head and I thought, I’ll just put it here and it can get out and I can get on with work and then moved on with my life. (I did, in fact, write it up for here later that night.) The thing is, in many (most) cases, I end up writing things that I don’t remember the context for later, or that aren’t as interesting as I first think when I return to them. For example, currently in notes and pulled at random:

“Everyone wears black”

“The archaeology of my digestive system”

“Sense memory: eating donuts with a fork in the Bee’s Knees”

“Technology changing the shape of the minds eye, landscape of feature films becoming vertical of phones”

The one about the changing shape of the mind’s eye, there’s still something in that, to be unpicked and considered, I feel… But for now, let’s pretend we all know what these meant at the time, and that I wrote about them appropriately. The notes can stand as some nod to unfinished thoughts, like a Beatles Anthology for something far less important.

“It’s normally around this time of year you get sick. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet already.”

As much as I wanted to disagree with the observation, I had to agree that I was actually feeling a little bit under the weather. It was a realization I had probably subconsciously made a couple of days earlier, but searched for multiple get out clauses from. I’d been feeling not-quite-right for a few days, but tried to explain it away with any number of potential explanations that didn’t really hold any water: I’d slept poorly the night before or I’d been paying too much attention to one particular thing at work and couldn’t quite concentrate on anything else as a result or whatever. I knew the truth, but I simply didn’t want to actually admit that’s what was actually happening.

I was denying it in part because, bluntly, I do always tend to get sick at this time of the year and I’m bored with that tradition. It’s not that I get sick sick as much as I get very run down because work always gets crazy in December — it’s the most wonderful time of the year to try and get everything off your plate before the holidays, after all — and the weather here in Portland likes to yo-yo in terms of temperature and wetness, which creates the perfect conditions for a headcold, at least in my case. It’s something that I can try to avoid, but it catches up with me nonetheless. Take this year, for example.

Denying it, however, doesn’t do any good; I just end up feeling worse, because I don’t do anything to feel better and so I just exhaust myself further. That’s what happened this year, until I had to finally ‘fess up to myself and admit that, all things considered, I needed to just lie on the couch for awhile and watch some shitty television and try to switch my brain off. Which, in my defense, is what I try to do with my time off anyway. It’s just that, this time, I can pretend that I’m doing it for medicinal purposes. Perhaps there’s one good thing about getting sick, after all.