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Everyone on the internet has been making these fun little graphics of their favorite things in 2025 and I was like, “Oh, fun!” and tried to do my own but between the horror that we’ve all accepted into our lives at the intersection of I-Guess-I-Have-to-Use-Canva and fuck-Adobe-I’m-not-paying-for-it-monthly and also feeling insanely fidgety and overstimulated I went, “Ah, fuck this,” and tapped out. Then I saw twelve people I think are actually kind of annoying do it, so also felt righteous in deciding to tap out. And then I was like, what the fuck am I doing, why don’t I just do this the way I used to? Words! That’s what I’m about! Thank god!
I watched a lot more stuff than I have in recent years in 2025 and I liked a lot of it, even though not all that much was super new to me. I liked the first episode of The Pitt but haven’t watched anymore because I don’t want to see All That while I’m eating which is when we’re usually watching something. We watched the first season of The Peacemaker which I was really shocked to enjoy as much as I did. We’ve watched five of six episodes of Heated Rivalry, which I’ve already mentioned enjoying. I liked the new Superman (enough to re-watch about half of it on cable when I ran into it at my parents’) and loved Biosphere and What’s Up, Doc? and felt very fondly toward the entire trilogy when I finally watched Lord of the Rings.
I read a decent amount — sixty books, seventeen of which were DNFs — and I really liked to flat out loved Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere (the only book of hers I’ve read, likely to be the last because her plots don’t usually interest me) and Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea and Natalie Sue’s I Hope This Finds You Well and Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles and Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, the last of which I listened to as an audiobook because I finally taught myself how to listen to them this year! Which also meant I was able to listen to and love the Beastie Boys Boook and to also reread both Heated Rivalry (for the third time) and A Deadly Education (for the second) which is particularly lovely because I’m not very good (or generally interested) in rereading things!
I did NOT listen to very much music this year which really pains me. I did make another year of monthly mixtapes (Every month since January 2020! Even amidst all the everything!) and so heard some new stuff in the process and I listened to a lot of the Beastie Boys as and after I read the book, which I do highly recommend, but the only albums I think I listened to in full more than once or twice were Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal, Dev Lemons’ Surface Tension, and Dinosaur Pile-Up’s I’ve Felt Better, which I listened to a lot a lot.
As I have probably already detailed more than enough 2025 was one of the most stressful years of my life, but so far it’s also had the biggest payoff. I’ve never just picked up my life and moved to a new place on nothing but my own volition before and it was really, really hard and tiring and stressful and I had the worst indigestion of my life for basically six months, but I also got to realize how lucky I am to be able to do it at all and now I get to live in probably the second most beautiful place I’ve ever been (I’m sorry, nothing is ever beating California) where I keep meeting nice people and there are interesting things to do and I get to keep doing a job that I like and feel fulfilled doing.
  
In 2026 I want to keep taking care of myself and connect with more people and the world around me. I want to go to a museum a month! And go out in public! And see live music! And maybe even go outdoors where there are bugs and creatures and plants and water! I want to write! I want to partake of many wonderful things other people have created! I want to keep donating money and helping out where I can and in the grand tradition of picking a word of the year, I want to outlast. I want to outlast all my bad thoughts and ill health, mental and otherwise, I want to outlast the people who wish I were dead, I want to outlast my own suffering. I want to outlast my short attention span and my bad attitude. I want to stick it out!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
I hope your 2026 is full of hope and positive change and comfort and joy and laughter. I hope you have your needs met and exceeded. I hope you find ways to share your wonderful self with other people and to make things. I know you’re a good one and we need you around.
When I was a kid, or, I guess a kid right on the edge of adolescence, eleven or twelve, I went to the LA County Fair with my dad and one of my friends — Missy I think.
It wasn’t the kind of outing my dad liked. We weren’t really an outing family, but it was easy for him to wander around looking at dad things and hanging out on a shady lawn while Missy and I rode rides and probably giggled about boys and did whatever you do when you’re a twelve year old girl.
On the way into the fair, there was a big refrigerated truck and for a couple extra bucks, you could go inside and there was a preserved shark suspended in watery blue fluid to look at, something like… A great white, I guess. It was big and daunting. I grew up adjacent to the ocean and I knew a lot about sharks and I wasn’t afraid of them, but up close it was something else, in this strange enclosed little space with just Missy and me and this creature that had been alive and wasn’t any longer but had been suspended as thought it might find life again at any second and I remember feeling something inside me shift a little or crack apart or snap into place.
I knew something I hadn’t known before, I felt something I hadn’t before, and for the first time I was really conscious of it. A lot of adults will talk about a moment they knew their childhood was over because maybe they look back on something and they can identify it later on as having been important, but I think that’s something adults define later, a narrative they create for themselves.
Standing in the cool dark of that space and seeing that creature, I felt something. A kinship. A sense of… change. I knew, right then, that the squirmy and unsettled feelings inside of me, the seeing of the shark, that moment that couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes, was going to stay with me forever. I knew right then at eleven or twelve and every time the memory resurfaces, I know it again.
I felt pain for that shark and loss and fear and disgust. Something primal and free had been made neither and it cost five bucks to step into a trailer and gawk at it, to see it stripped of self and life, a murky embalming in a tideless sea.
My childhood didn’t end there. I think, probably, my childhood had ended a long time before that because sometimes that’s just how things shake out, but the sense that something was wrong about being in that space and seeing that creature stuck in my ribs and I knew that I would think about it again, that it would stick with me forever, a latent emotion I would never understand or be able to articulate.
Melancholy, and fear. Shame. The sense that I was bearing witness to some kind of crime, some kind of gut-deep wrong-doing. A feeling that this dead shark in this glass case was a fundamental wound to the universe.
I think about Damien Hirst’s shark. And I think about Rosie in Australia. And I think about all the things we cage and contain to preserve them and I feel that gut deep squirm. The wrongness. The unsettled sense that I have experienced something I will never recover from even though it doesn’t feel like it requires recovery.
I haven’t seen Missy since I was twelve years old and I married a woman who would go into the shark trailer with me and feel the same inarticulable sense of mourning that I did.
Great Whites live all over the world. They can grow and lose and grow 20,000 teeth in their lifetime. How many more did that shark have to go?
We can’t choose what haunts us, but sometimes we feel it when the teeth catch.
I take great pride in being unembarrassable. Incapable of shame. I think of myself as existing Above and Beyond the mortal realm of humiliation. Some of that’s an act, obviously, because I am still human despite my best efforts. But by committing to the act for so long, it’s become truer and truer as time goes on. I don’t get embarrassed at things that I know other people would and I’m often joyfully and enthusiastically willing to do dumb shit out loud and in public that would likely horrify other people. I just want to be myself. If other people don’t like it, well. That’s not really a me problem, is it?
So, recently, I made a tank top. I had envisioned this shirt — I wanted a floral print tank top, fairly femme, and I wanted big white iron-on letters spelling out GET BENT across the chest. I say and write, “Get bent” a lot. I like that it’s both pretty aggressive and weirdly inoffensive. I like that the delivery can really sell your meaning. I like that it’s kind of old school.
I wanted this shirt in time to go to a concert in Denver and Crystal helped me get it made in a hotel room in Wyoming since we don’t actually own an iron with which to iron-on letters. I got frustrated and wanted to quit, but she made me persist! Because she is a very good wife and carries me through when I try to wimp out on stuff.
So I made this shirt! And it turned out fucking great! And I wore it to the show in Denver for Frank Iero and the Future Violents! And I took a picture with the whole band in it! And I have worn it a couple times since, including to see Ghost in Minneapolis and Ludo in St. Louis and I’ve gotten a bunch of compliments on it! Especially from drunken middle-aged women! Including a couple who have gently grabbbed me in the friendly way that only women can and went, “GET BENT! HA! That is GREAT!” And I get the bonus of getting to watch men look at my chest, read it, then look up at my face as they interpret it as a message for them and that is… Transcendent.
So I have warm feelings for this shirt and I’m happy about its existence. But then, while perusing Tumblr as I am now occasionally wont to do because the whole internet is a wasteland and who needs principles anyway, I came across a picture of the Frank Iero from Frank Iero and the Future Violents playing with his Future Violents about a week before I saw them in Denver. In the photo, he is holding his guitar flipped up against him so the back is showing. (He often puts words on the back of his guitars — numbers, his kids’ initials, whatever — so not unusual to see writing there.) But on this guitar… It says… Get… Bent…
 And. You know. Coincidences, right?! Frank Iero and I have… similar tastes? We are… close in age? It is… Not weird! That we would both! Be partial! To the phrase! Get bent!
But also, Frank Iero was/is (DON’T GET ME STARTED! The last week has been WILD.) a member of My Chemical Romance and has fans who are… Very Devoted! And they sometimes dress up like him and/or his My Chemical Romance bandmates! And then go to his shows! With his new band! And would probably very much make a shirt that said something he had put on one of his guitars!
And… while I love and respect these fans Very Much because they are, let’s face it, the ones who make the gears turn, the machines work, the reunions happen, I am… Just… Not one of them. Which is fine! I am obsessive and devoted in my own way!
But the idea… that Frank Iero might have looked at this shirt I was wearing while I was PAYING TO MEET HIM (An already, admittedly, kind of mortifying thing to do!) and which I had very clearly made myself… And thought I did it… Because he has that same phrase… on one of his guitars… … …
The Retroactive Embarrassment…. My soul left my body… I transmuted briefly into a toad as if cursed by a wizard I had wronged… I curled so deeply into myself that I returned to my fetal form… When what was left of my soul finally returned to my wombless wormy body, I burst outward into Humiliation Fireworks and then slowly returned to the earth as embers and ash… My body reassembling piece by piece… Even now, thinking about it, the molten lava of residual shame is the only glue holding me together.
I’m still gonna keep wearing it though.
I’m 34. I’ve been 34 for a little while and I’ll be 35 fairly soon. I’m an adult. I own a house. I get oil changes when my car tells me to. I get up and go to my job five days a week and work 40 to 50 hours. I help keep two animals and two adult people alive. I pay my bills on time. I successfully use most of the fresh food I buy. I get a flu shot every year. I have a skincare routine. I usually have clean clothes when I need them. I’m never late to things.
I will never, ever, as long as I am alive, make my fucking bed every morning.
First of all, I’m not doing anything because a fucking Navy Admiral tells me to. Second of all, making your bed prevents your sweaty sheets from drying out adequately enough to kill the bacteria and microbes that thrive in them. Third, and most importantly, I. Don’t. Want. To.
And, like always, I am here, not to shame the bed-makers (Do your thing, whatever makes you happy, etc.) but to tell you that you also do not have to make your fucking bed every fucking morning, especially not just because a whole bunch of people say you should.
I do all those ‘adult’ things up there without making my bed in the morning or, actually, ever unless I just changed the sheets and am feeling fussy/fancy/froggy. I do all of those ‘adult’ things despite and in the face of my sometimes debilitating depression and anxiety. I do all those ‘adult’ things to keep myself alive even though sometimes I’d rather not be alive at all.
So many of our conceptual notions of adulthood are based on some Baby Boomer’s idea of what you should be doing at 25 and 30 and 35, but 2019 isn’t 1979 and I have zero desire to base my lifestyle habits on the opinions of people who believe in bootstrap ideology and think c+ping a block of incoherent text somehow protects the intellectual property rights for the Minion memes they share on Facebook.
Life is so, so short. Please stop beating yourself up because you can’t or don’t want to do things that other people say are necessary for success. If you woke up this morning, you’re already ahead. Figure out what feels like success to you, what feels like achievement, like progress, like action, like functioning and define yourself. Everyone’s normal looks different and there is such a good chance that you’re doing just fine in life, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
You ultimately have so little control over the way life plays out, decide what adds value to yours whenever you can and ignore what other people have to say about it. You don’t have to make your bed. You don’t have to define success with other people’s words. You’re doing just fine.
Today, I removed a TV show that I have not finished from the “To Watch” list I keep in my Wunderlist app.
It felt… good. It felt… free. It felt… transcendental.
It doesn’t matter at all what it was — I add like, everything to this list that sounds even remotely interesting when I see somebody talk about it — and it isn’t because I even think it’s “bad” or whatever (I don’t, actually. It’s good!) but just because I didn’t really want to watch anymore episodes. It just wasn’t a thing I needed to see through and for like, one of the first times in my entire dumb life I just… decided not to.
I have always been finicky about Finishing Things. (Well, watching/reading-type things. If only I could produce the same kind of energy for producing things instead of consuming them. The books I could finish writing! The screenplays! The chores!) I’ve only ever really given up on a book TWICE (Both of which were boring and pretty bad. One or the other… I stick those out constantly. I have been ”’reading”’ House of Leaves for fourteen years.) and I am constantly having the incredibly stupid thought, unbidden, that I have to take in an Entire Thing before I’m like, allowed to decide whether I liked it or not.
But the older I get, the more I realize that life is just TOO SHORT to finish every single thing I start. I have no idea how much time I get on this planet, why the hell do I keep wasting it on stuff that I’m not even that into?!
This feels like a real evolutionary moment for me. I can change! I can reclaim my time! And stop wasting it on things I don’t really care about!
And! I walked the talk and doused the stupid little burning need I had to tell everyone about how This Thing Was Just Not For Me because… Who cares? Lots of things aren’t for me! (That’s like, a product of being alive in a time where there is more content being created every day than in the one prior: not all of it can or should be made for everyone. That actually rules, knowing there is SO MUCH media being made, that like, you don’t have to care about kind of a lot of it at all. That’s awesome.)#
(It’s almost like… I can be the person I actually want to be? Sometimes? If I try? Sounds fake, but okay.)
So, in case you need it, I am here to tell you: You Do Not Have to Finish That Thing.
Whatever it is, no matter how good it is or how much you want to be part of the zeitgeist or which one of your amazing friends recommended it, you can just stop reading or watching or following it. And you don’t even have to tell anyone about it. Just Quietly Quit That Thing and On To The Next. Liberate yourself. Bask in that freedom. You deserve it.
#: I hope it is obvious that this doesn’t apply to, like, diversity and representation in media. We always need more and everyone should be able to see themselves in the media they watch. This is a Mob Movies Aren’t For Me, not Movies Should Be For Straight White Cis People Only thing. Fuck white people. Including me.
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