the ocean

What a year it was, huh? Things happened, people did stuff, time passed. Here are some highlights and lowlights for me:

Highlight -- I start the year at EPCOT Center, America's most instantly dated theme park, with my family.

Lowlight -- I get intense motion sickness on Mission:Space, having ignored many highly conspicuous signs warning of same, as well as a video reminder featuring Gina Torres of TV's Suits.

Highlight -- Ian and I successfully watch all of the movies nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Lowlight -- Ian and I watch all of the movies nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Highlight -- We get our cuddly and gorgeous new beagle overlord, Dolly.

Lowlight -- We trade off spending nights at the emergency vet with Dolly for a week, as she has very real surgery for what turns out to be an incredibly imaginary obstruction in her digestive system.

Highlight -- I perform my annual one-man show to a sold out crowd at Davenport's.

Lowlight -- Davenport's cancels all live performances immediately following my show, never sends me my check, and eventually gets closed altogether for (alleged) zoning violations.

Highlight -- Glamorous work travel to Kansas City, San Antonio, and Washington, DC!

Lowlight -- Being stuck on a charter bus with my coworkers for hours while attempting to visit the Alamo during a parade that draws a crowd of millions.

Highlight -- Renovating my home office into a library that approximates my Beauty & the Beast fantasies. (Well, not the dirty ones.)

Lowlight -- Having strangers in my home building and breaking things for over a month.

Highlight -- Discovering the flop Bravo series from nearly two decades ago, Hey, Paula!

Lowlight -- Feeling genuine concern for Paula Abdul's health and well being and realizing that it's probably only gotten worse since 2007.

Highlight -- Attending a bachelor weekend that included both ultimate fighting and Weird Al, although not at the same time.

Lowlight -- Being trapped in a monsoon at the Weird Al concert, alongside Weird Al fans.

Highlight -- Working our way through Summer House.

Lowlight -- Carl and Lindsay. 

I think that should do it. Wholly conclusive as to the year that was. Nothing else not listed here could ever possibly matter.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret, and it’s not the one about Hillary Clinton using Jell-O Pudding Pops to brainwash the stars of High School Musical on Ice into joining her underground puppy-eating cabal. No, this secret is about me, and for once it does not involve Taco Bell and its consequences. You see, I have long hidden from you all the fact that I frequently write my annual holiday letter while my college-aged neighbors two doors down are still homoerotically playing beer pong on their no-longer-up-to-code roof deck and Instagram influencers at $60 pumpkin patches in horrifically oversized hats have blessedly not yet intruded on our consciousnesses. I tend to plan ahead, as anyone who has ever been fortunate enough to experience my fully-sourced and annotated vacation itineraries can attest, and the Holiday Season^TM itself has a tendency to be a bit, you know, packed with unnecessarily reimagined Nutcrackers and surprise visits from cousins who nicknamed you “Raccoon Godzilla” when you were ten. So I would craft this particular missive early, taking great care not to reference, for instance, Lindsay Lohan’s eyebrows in Freakier Friday or the International Left Handers Day rager I just attended.

But not this year! I won’t pretend I was doing anything super glamorous in August; a brief perusal of my Outlook puts me at hot events like “Museum with Mom” and “Get RX and Contact Solution.” But it was enough to keep me from churning out the sub-Claymation Christmas Celebration-level sentiment and humor likely inadvertently plagiarized from mid-‘90s Dilbert comic strips that you all have come to expect. So now I write during the actual holiday season, with the halls fully decked with Target impulse purchases and a festive cup of eggnog filling the bottom of my trashcan with its Salmonella-resplendent mucous. It really is the most wonderful time of the year, isn’t it? People are just a little bit nicer, from the legally blind Lyft driver who nearly runs you over but doesn’t scream curse words at you and give you the finger to the subway pervert who remembers to don his holiday best before “accidentally” grinding into you repeatedly all the way from Edgewater to the Loop. Things move just a little bit slower, particularly if you are talking about the checkout line at Mariano’s where a woman in a sweatshirt that is either made of or covered in cat hair is arguing with the cashier about her expired coupon for canned yams. And there is magic in the air, if also likely sulfur dioxide due to our crushing dependence on fossil fuels. So color me inspired, and also very, very white, since there is only sun in Chicago for approximately three days of the year.

We did start 2025 out in sunny Florida, though, on a family trip to Disney World at what is indisputably the single most crowded point in its already agoraphobia-inducing year. I would compare the Orlando airport to a third world country, but that term is hopelessly outdated and also I have to feel people in Bhutan are much better dressers. Regardless, it was really fun to experience the thrills of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (not a euphemism for a sex act) and Rise of the Resistance with my niece and nephew, as well as the gentle boredom of Spaceship Earth. After that, I had lots of glamorous work travel to places like Newark, New Jersey and Ypsilanti, Michigan, where I housed an appetizer sampler as a meal whilst dining alone in a Buffalo Wild Wings after falling down the embankment that separated it from my hotel. If that doesn’t give people the confidence to entrust their most sensitive white collar matters to me, I don’t know what will.

Anyway, the year flew by, and not because I wrote about when it when it was only 2/3 finished as in previous years. Here’s to enjoying every minute and looking forward to a happy and healthy 2026!

I spent a few days in DC for work this week. It was fine. My predominant reaction was that it was super cold there, which was also true of Chicago at the time, so no real loss there. But it did make it a bad time for me to decide to try to hunt down a CVS so I could buy antacid and candy. 

I attended a conference and hosted an event at my law firm. So there was a lot of mandatory eating and drinking, which I enjoy far less than I used to as a younger man. The unforgiveable fatness I now feel when someone shoves a steak and some potatoes in front of me is quite something. The alcohol does tend to help ease that, but leads to issues of its own, including the aforementioned antacid. That is the thing about circles: they have a tendency towards viciousness.

It seems I've used up all of my travel karma for the year, as I had a couple of hours of delay on my return trip. I suppose there are worse places to be trapped for hours than Reagan National Airport, but I think it's unlikely that I will fall into a pit of vipers or get locked in a recording studio with Kristin Chenoweth any time soon. I had already eaten and completed my Wordle and Quordle for the day, so thank got I had my work to sustain me, as I so often say.

I ended up getting back late and missing the office holiday party, which saddened me somewhat as I actually like most of my co-workers (except Chaundra, she can die in a fire), but I decided it actually would have been a pretty aggressive move to basically drop my luggage at home and head out drinking. (For the 47 year old me; 26 year old me would not have blinked twice.) These days I tend to need an evening of rehydrating and inbox cleansing following a trip of any length. Which makes it seem increasingly unlikely that Glen Powell will ever play me in a movie based on my life.

We've recently discovered that we have a TV channel called Bravo Vault, and it is wild. A true journey into our problematic recent past. You see, they play "old" Bravo reality shows from the early 2000s. And man, were things different then (yet also the same, you know? #philosophy).

First and foremost, The Millionaire Matchmaker. I never watched this shit in the day, but it is so harmful to America. A horse-faced woman with a less than ideal haircut tries for find mates for rich men (and sometimes women), while insulting them and their potential mates with absolute impunity. Frequently she holds recruiting sessions where she tells complete strangers things like "you need dental work" or "you're out of shape, I'm sorry" in the same tone she likely uses to accuse her cleaning lady of stealing her jewelry. She also helps her clients my psychoanalyzing them after knowing them for roughly ten minutes and sometimes setting them up with therapists/reiki masters/personal shoppers to provide quick superficial fixes. There's a "Dr. Nikki" advising a "candle collector" as we speak. All very uplifting.

There's also early Top Chef, back when the contestants hadn't figured out how to be on TV yet and segments appeared to often have been filmed in Radisson conference centers. It was a much shaggier affair and Padma frequently looked like she didn't want to be there (this actually never changed). The contestants seemed unafraid to openly despise and undermine each other. And they did a lot more psychological probing of the chefs during eliminations, seemingly drawing on the enhanced interrogation techniques of the Iraq War era. Lessons to be learned aplenty.

Then there is classic Vanderpump. Do I even need to say anything about that? When they were all still poor and had shitty apartments it was pure gold.

And there are old Housewives. Well, it's the episodes that are old, not the housewives themselves. Though I suppose that depends on your definition of old. I've reached an age where my own definition is basically Aunt Gladys.

Such was the infamous rallying cry of the bartender at the Brass Rail in Champaign, Illinois, after my sister and her friends entered the establishment, used the restroom, and left without buying anything. But it is also an appropriate sentiment for this lovely holiday weekend.

Our holiday started, as so many do, with me ruining a fuck ton of potatoes, as a number of people have now told me they never believed to even be possible. But I found a way. I think the issue was that I didn't boil the potatoes long enough, even though I went twice as long as the recipe said, because they never really became soft. So they didn't mash properly, and even the interventions of (in order of escalation) a hand mixer, a blender, and an immersion blender that we bought at Target after the potatoes killed the first blender could not save them. They had the consistency of oatmeal. Oops.

But on the bright side, I've been wanting to reduce my carb intake, anyway. And everyone else's, I guess?

The rest of the meal was great, and we of course also watched the insanity of the Macy's parade (big ups to the Holland America float celebrating Alaska with well-known Alaskan Jewel singing thirty weird-arranged seconds of "You Were Meant for Me") and the Chicago parade (mostly local folk dancing groups and marching bands). And we decorated, which is now like a 48 hour task involving various beagles charging up and down stairs and in and out of doors. It's actually quite festive, to be honest.

Then we got the massive snowstorm yesterday. I'd say ten to twelve inches? It was wet and cold and terrible, and anyone going on about how it's pretty should be pantsed and thrown into a snowbank. 

Anyway, now it's almost Monday! Funny how that keeps happening.

Because I am incredibly Type A and tend to plans things months in advance, I am already working on writing the show I hope to perform in April 2026. As in, I already have about 3/4 of the songs written. At times, my tendency towards compulsion can be problematic, as when I'm supposed to be writing up-to-the-minute topical parodies, but end up with the Coldplay Kiss Cam warmed over nearly a year later. Fortunately, though, the subject of my April show will be the '90s, and they don't seem likely to change much in the coming months. Still lots of flannels and Seinfeld, I would imagine.

The actual problem I am having is that there is just so much that is interesting to me about the '90s! (And potentially not interesting to anyone else, may I add.) I mean, I could do twenty minutes on the mid-decade swing dancing craze alone. Or the fashions on Supermarket Sweep. Or the devolution of Designing Women. Which is not to say that I should or will do any of these things. But I have some real passion here.

And the music! How could I possibly to justice to Alanis Morissette or the ladies of Lilith Fair? Does anyone actually want to hear me attempt grunge? I can 100% tell you that I should not rap, but I hope no one mistakes that for a lack of enthusiasm for Snoop Dogg (before he became a brand) or Lauryn Hill (before she decided to focus on Facebook rants). What about America's brief flirtation with ska? Or the insidious creep of teen pop late in the decade? So much ground to cover.

And news. Desert Storm, OJ, Oklahoma City, Lewinsky, Columbine all sort of seemed like era-defining events, but haven't better people than me already covered them pretty extensively? And no one wants to hear me share deep thoughts, but should I or anyone really try to mine these events for humor? 

God, it is so difficult to be perhaps the foremost artistic genius of our time. Whatever, I'm getting cheese fries.

Somehow it is already November. I certainly can't say I know where all of that time went, but I can speak for some of it.

Work, of course, is a thing. And it has taken up some of that time. I was up until 1 AM for a case filing a few weeks ago for the first time in years. I am perhaps no longer really equipped for that sort of thing. I reached a point where, as I attempted to read, words no longer made sense to me. There was also a bit of maniacal laughter for no reason. All perfectly normal, I assure you. I've also had work travel, which is not just eating lunch alone at an International House of Pancakes, but also having awkward encounters with all manner of security personnel. And performing unlicensed therapy for clients, of course. It's all a very rich text.

There are also the joys of home ownership, of course. Planting plants, watering plants, murdering plants as the cold season approaches. Staining and caring for wood that seems to have a death wish. Wondering where all the bugs come from and if there is some gentle, ethical way to get them the fuck away from you. Putting up holiday decorations, taking down holiday decorations. Working with contractors who clearly despise you. It takes time to do these things right.

Social engagements. Charcuterie boards, appetizers, dinners in and out. Engagement parties, bachelor parties, weddings. All manner of alcoholic escapades. Seeing friends in shows. Talking about having seen (or not seen) friends in shows. 

Also, of course, family. My niece and nephew now have packed schedules of dance, theater, and sports. I fortunately do not have to drive them to all of these activities, but I do have to show up and appreciate those activities occasionally. I assure you that grade school dance recitals have lost none of their luster.

And then there's the creative stuff. Lots of time spent writing and probably twice as much time spent staring despondently at the screen and not writing. Time performing or meeting about writing or performing. Dreams haunted by weak rhymes or awkward meters. 

Dogs have gotten a lot of time, too. I am less convinced now that they are trying to kill me than I was a few months back, but it's still a distinct possibility.

Anyway, it's all flying by! In a good way. Also a bad way. But regardless in a way we really have no say about.

This weekend, I re-organized not one, not two, but three different closets. 

I'll give you a minute to control the arousal you are naturally feeling upon reading that sentence.

You see, I had to finish converting my primary bedroom closet from summer-fall clothing to fall-winter clothing. (After weeks of denial, of course.) So that involved swapping things to and from the guest bedroom closet. At which point I got inspired to do a full gut rehab of the primary bedroom closet, changing the location of my short sleeved tops and purchasing a bunch of close organization items from Target. At which point I decided to go ahead and clean up the organization of our pantry as well, since I feel like various dog-related items are always falling out of there and causing a frenzy. And before I knew it I was on a stepladder culling our collection of old shopping bags for the recycling.

Obviously, these are very exciting times.

I also cleaned the front patio, ordered new heads for my Sonicare, and called my mother.

Let no one say I am not down to earth and relatable. 

 Here are some photos of recent happenings, just because I can.

My niece started building a fort in our basement and then cried when they had to leave before it was finished. I'm pretty sure Gaudi felt the same way about Sagrada Familia. Regardless, Dolly found it to be a pleasant place to crouch, so we've got that going for us.

Fall is actually not my favorite, but there are plenty of fun ways people can observe it: