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The other day I did one of the most stupidly nerveracking things in the world and went to the DMV. This is a normal activity that my brain has decided is as dangerous as being near hungry, unsecured wildlife, and I had to take a Xanax the night before to be able to sleep and one morning of in order to handle going through the appointments (S! Plural! Multiple!) without experiencing complete and total mental collapse, which is stupid and embarrassing, but for which I am grateful anyway. I used to have to rawdog these experiences and it would be so stressful to me that I would be sick to my stomach. Not because I have any issue with these kind of bureaucratic processes — I think these kind of machinations are what the state should actually be doing versus alternating between killing its citizens domestically and sending them into pointless and evil wars to die — and not because I don’t like people or can’t handle small talk — I love single serving exchanges! I love to talk about the weather! I love to be an easygoing and compliant customer! — but because I have a gene-deep fear of anyone with any kind of authority over me — Yes! That includes the rude woman at the DMV intake counter! — and a well-honed fear of Fucking Something Up despite carefully and repeatedly making sure I had everything I needed.
Despite all of my dread and anxiety, both my license appointment and the vehicle registration went fine! I made two different DMV employees laugh and no one got mad at me for fumbling my papers or wearing a mask or having shaky hands. I got sweaty and uncomfortable and my license picture is an all time bad one — Have you seen a partially melted stick of butter with a mullet? Well the good people of the Minnesota Department of Safety sure have! — but the whole experience was fine. I won’t necessarily learn anything useful from this — Okay so what it went okay this one time! That means nothing about next time! — but it was nice to like, go through a bureaucratic process — one I believe in wholeheartedly! I think drivers should be licensed! And vehicles insured and registered! I think it’s good that these are part of the concept of public safety in Minnesota! — and have it work out fine, to make the appointment and have what I was supposed to and get it all done in basically about an hour. Did I feel bad for the people waiting the 3-4 hours to get served without an appointment? I did! But i also know that those agencies are perpetually underfunded and understaffed and they can’t serve the public perfectly from an empty cup, but they were all trying, even the rude, wrong gatekeeping front desk person was trying to make sure we were doing the right thing even though the thing she was telling us to do was not actually that.
Anyway, the actual point of all of this is that one of the services this particularly agency also offers — right there at the walk-up window next to the camera that took my melted butter photo — is marriage and while I finished paying the fifty bucks for my driver license, Tom Petty’s “Freefallin'” playing at a pleasant volume in the background, a couple next to me stood there and got married. After the ceremony was done all of us who were in hearing range cheered and clapped and the couple looked bashful and happy, standing there with their paperwork and their parents and it was both a little absurd — I had just listened to two guys in their late teens/early 20s have a detailed conversation about Minnesota sports while waiting to have my number called while Crystal was standing elsewhere listening to a man say that he was surprised there weren’t more mass shootings at DMVs — and also genuinely wonderful because life happens everywhere all the time when you’re expecting it and when you’re not and I really don’t know what else could be more magical.
ETA: I wrote this at the end of December and I edited and scheduled it on January 5th and then an agent of the federal government shot and killed a woman very nearby for daring to care about her neighbors being harassed and abducted. She wasn’t the first and I’m not naive enough to believe she’ll be the last.
I don’t have anything astute to say, I’m not sure that there is anything astute to be said about it, but I believe the people are stronger. I believe community is stronger. I believe we are capable of better things and I believe those better things are possible. I wish so many people didn’t have to suffer in the meantime. I wish the federal government wasn’t test driving military occupation.
If you’re able, please donate to MIRAC and food pantries that serve the Twin Cities area.
*: AI can pry the (poorly and regularly incorrectly used) em-dashes from my ass. They were mine first. Get fucked.
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 am missing Disneyland today.*
Well, to be fair, I am never not missing Disneyland, but today is wielding a particularly powerful ache for it around my ribs. Sort of haunting and cold and sad.
 
This is partially because I spent a couple of hours last night reading posts about Disney projects that never came to fruition in their original forms — Port Disney, WESTCOT Center, Disney’s America, and The SS Disney — and partially because I am just a person who is subject to flights of whimsy, nostalgia, and misery.
» more: an overlong ode to disneyland
On the eve of the momentous day that marks exactly one year since we arrived in North Dakota, let me explain you a thing, friends.
North Dakota is very small.
 
Physically, this isn’t true. It’s 19th in the country with almost 71,000 square miles. That’s, on a technical level, like, pretty big. I mean, it’s not Alaska or anything, but it’s big. But population wise? It’s a whole other story.
Even though there are 16,000 people here† there aren’t more people nearby. There are almost 50,000 people in my hometown, but the adjacent suburbs have even larger populations — like 50,000 and 100,000 and 149,000 — and then eventually just turn into Los Angeles. Here, we have to drive two hours to reach a city with a greater population than ours and that’s a whopping 40,000 residents.
Most of the space between what passes as a city here looks a lot like this:
 
Hell, even the area just beyond our neighborhood¤ starts to look like that.
Anyway, what this means is that North Dakota is devoid of things to do. I recognize, accept, and openly admit that I am spoiled to here and back for activities. I grew up in LA; I spent 2009-2012 going to Disneyland at least twice a month; I grew up a half a mile from the largest movie theater in Los Angeles County. I did not want for things to do. We drive two hours to go to the movies here‡ and if we’re not seeing something opening week, we’re seeing it in a dumpy closet theater from hell.
There’s nowhere to eat here. Nowhere particularly good at least and there is very, very little variety. There’re steak places and “bar and grill” places, a good fast-ish non-chain burger place, and one decent Chinese place (What up, Rice and Spice!) but even after a year of being here, most of the food options feel like a punishment. And it’s all crazy expensive. Everything is here. The cost of living is bananas and the grocery stores’ idea of fresh chicken is defrosted chicken. It blows. A lot.
But even without Disneyland and without Thai food (It’s been more than a year since I had Thai food. Or good Mexican. Or decent pizza.) and with little to do here but dick around on the internet and look at clouds. day to day life seems not so bad.
People make do with very little all over the world all the time. And I don’t say that in a “Oh perspective will fix things” kind of way but in a “Humans are amazing” way. And they do more than just make do, they live full, happy lives. And maybe I’m not happy here and can’t wait to get back to California, but I’m okay and for now, okay is, well, it’s okay.
*: The first two times I did it, I did not account for the translation to a square, so I at least feel okay about this even though I had to do it four more times after I did start accounting for the square. Sorry if it’s wrong. Sorry I’m not sorrier. Sorry I am terrible at math. Sorry it’s what kept me from going into astronomy. Sorry you have to tolerate my second choice.#
#: Writing.
†: This is in theory actually closer to 25,000 currently because of the oil boom, but there are no current, accurate figures on the internet as far as I can tell.
¤: When we tell people where we live — a new development on top of what is considered a “hill” here which is actually, like, a twenty foot rise in elevation just outside of the city limits — they often go, “Oh, you live in The Hills” as though it’s Hills, Beverly or some shit. 9021NODAK.
‡: We do, very technically, have a theater. Unfortunately it has not been updated in some time and thus has no moveable armrests. I am not going to jam my fat ass into a seat and be miserable for two hours of the only experience I treat as reverently as faithful people treat church. I’d rather drive two hours. Plus there’s a Target there.
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