the ocean

How will 2022 be remembered?  There are some years that immediately conjure up memories for people, like 2001 with the twin tragedies of September 11 and Mariah Carey’s Glitter, or 1995 with the O.J. Simpson trial and my indelible performance in Anything Goes.  2008 was of course the year that a certain skinny junior senator from Illinois started his meteoric rise towards becoming the groundbreaking Netflix producer we all know today.  And 2020 will no doubt always be known for COVID-19, as much as I’m still rooting for those lovable murder hornets to get their due.  But 2022 frankly lacked focus, much like one of J.K. Rowling’s books for adults or Amanda Bynes back in 2013 when she “cabbed it” from New York to Los Angeles and set a stranger’s driveway on fire.  2022 had an Olympics, a war, an election (actually several, if you count other countries, which of course the U.S. does not), and whatever the hell was going on between Olivia Wilde and Florence Pugh.  Will no one take pity on the year-end trend piece columnists?  They would very much like to get back to accepting dinner invitations from fascists and publicly shaming plagarists.

I certainly won’t be so bold as to suggest that I can make sense of 2022, because I think the last time a year really made sense to me I was accidentally melting my Transformers in the Easy Bake Oven while caught up in an episode of Snorks.  (This was 2017.)  But I can tell you that I personally will probably remember this year as a wholehearted return to the places and traditions we enjoyed pre-pandemic.  (Also those that we did not so much enjoy, like standing in a stranger’s armpit on packed public transit.)  We visited restaurants and bars as though charcuterie isn’t just $26 cold cuts and toast.  We traded Zooms for actual conference rooms, where we quickly realized we were always cold.  And we returned to the kind of family reunions at Hilton Garden Inns, gender blind productions of Annie, and career-destroying fraternity theme parties that have so long been the backbone of the antidepressant industry.  It was weird, but in a mildly pleasant Tilda Swinton kind of way.

And speaking of weird, the Schleppingtons’ big event of 2022 was moving a single block to a new house in Old Town; as it turns out, moving companies generally do not offer a proximity discount, although they will laugh at you.  The new place has gorgeous outdoor spaces for entertaining in the roughly four months that Chicago’s climate is habitable each year and a huge kitchen perfect for realizing you forgot that you had a Blue Apron coming again.  We are excited to gradually furnish it for the rest of our lives before it becomes our tomb.  In other news, we had a great trip to Park City with friends, although we did not ski or suck up to Robert Redford, and a fun winter weekend in Tampa, which we agreed to refer to as Clearwater to give it slightly more cachet.  Ian went to Ireland for work while I spent months drafting a massive investigation report that I was repeatedly cautioned not to style as a Choose Your Own Adventure.  I wrote and performed a cabaret show despite having not a single reality television credit to my name.  And Aubrey, our sassy beagle mix, graduated with a Ph.D. in history from Brown.  The good news is that now she is fully qualified to lie on the couch all day and lick herself.

So that was 2022.  We’re looking forward to spending quiet holidays with our families, although that will almost certainly not come to pass with four and seven year olds around getting hopped up on Fruit by the Foot and jamming those Operation tweezers into the funny bone cavity repeatedly.  But that’s okay, because quiet we already had during the pandemic.  Now is the time to live out loud like the early days of the Oxygen network.  So let that be your vibe for joyous holidays and an amazing 2023!