the ocean

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.