some 2024 faves

the miso zone

i'm thankful for the last book i read in 2024, the anthropologists by ayşegül savaş, which i hadn't heard about when it came out but saw on a bunch of year end best lists and turned out to be one of my favorite books in a year of many favorite books. it's the story of a young couple living in a city in a different country and trying to figure out how to live there. the marriage in the book is a happy one and it but contra tolstoy that doesn't make the book boring—it's just about other things (but (spoiler alert) doesn't result in the obvious marriage plot stuff of pregnancy or divorce). there are resonances with one of this newsletter's favorite novels, paris trance by geoff dyer, but it's better. the writing is wise and rich and surprising without being difficult or tryhard or MFA-coded and it has a structure i love of short digressive vignettes which each get their own intertitle. i highlighted too many parts to include, but this section, native tongues where the narrator describes their private language with her partner—

We spoke differently to each other when there was no one around. Something like a high-pitched mumble. There were years of inside jokes, accumulated personas, and mispronunciations. We had nicknames for each other, words with no meaning in any dictionary. That was how we came to claim our own language, a native union, rather than two people speaking to each other in a foreign tongue.

We would've been self-conscious if anyone heard us speaking like this, like characters in a cartoon. But we weren't embarrassed of each other

—reminded me of a breakthrough that deborah had in therapy where her therapist had her try to schematize different "zones" of feeling and she described her happiest safest place as the place where she and i are silly enough with each other that we ventriloquize our dog in a high-pitched voice (with a huge amount of deep lore defining miso's character and preoccupations), a location we now call "the miso zone". i'm thankful that we are very often every day in the miso zone and i'm thankful that, when we're not, it provides this very simple rubric for checking in the health of our vibes and, when the vibes are bad, for trying to find a way back to better ones.

mental switch

i'm thankful i did a big acid trip to end the year. there is always a point doing acid for the first time in a while where as the brain chemical rollercoaster climbs toward one of the first peaks i go "fuckkkk this is the way life is supposed to be why am i not doing acid all the time?!?!" and then [spongebob meme 12 hours later] every cell in my body is sore from sparking and fizzing all day and all i want is to go to sleep and wake up and be normal again but that is seemingly physically impossible because my skull is still filled with bright light. i'm thankful that hours later sleep eventually took me as it always eventually does.

i'm thankful my drug of the year (other than the iron that miraculously cured me of my debilitating anemia and weed, which is always and forever my drug of the year) is microdosed ketamine, which i got a real prescription (this is not spon, though i would spon) for a few months ago after doing a zoom call with a nurse. it comes in these little "meltaway" tablets you hold under your tongue and while it tastes horrible (so bitter), spiritually the feeling it gives me is a little melting away of wherever my stress lives in the body at that moment, which my nervous system seems to benefit from greatly. emily witt, who wrote one of my favorite books in a year of many favorite books (i started writing a bespoke post about it when it came out but lost the thread), wrote about LSD

It’s just an enhancement of what’s around you. Music sounds good on it, but not in a stupid way. I feel like it raises the standard. The stuff around me, the music, the lights, the people, whatever it is, has to meet the standard of the LSD, rather than me taking a drug to make life easier or more fun.

in the recent past i (unintentionally) had too macro a dose of street ketamine and experienced the mythic k-hole, which is not easy or fun or something i particularly want to repeat but was a fascinating experience of my consciousness, different than any other drug i've taken (i was sitting next to deborah on the couch but it felt like i was in a different universe, only able to communicate through the thick barrier between the two with great effort). when microdosed, ketamine isn't at all like that and isn't like acid either—it "just" softens the edges to make life easier and more fun, but like, while i appreciate the rigor and principles with which witt approaches her theory and practice of drug taking...i kinda do just want life to be easier and more fun?! always?! (this is also my take on the way sobriety in general continued to trend in 2024). i don't know how long i'll stick with it, but i really like it for now (as a bonus it has been helpful for curbing overeating because the one side effect (as with macrodose ketamine) is that i get hella nauseous if i take it on too full a stomach).

i'm thankful that after a break caused by [redacted] we returned to doing our scheduled quarterly spousal molly trip and i am still open to offers to write a self-help book about this practice and how good and meaningful it is for our marriage.

roasted garlic

i'm thankful that we were having korean barbecue for our dinners one week and deborah had bought one of those containers of pre-peeled garlic cloves and on a whim roasted some of them in foil and olive oil in the air fryer so we could put them in our ssam. putting garlic in ssam is not a new thing but i think roasted is approx 1000 times better than the traditional grilled in terms of both flavor and texture. i yes-and-ed this great idea later by making some more and putting them in tacos (the ssam of mexico) and burritos. i look forward to finding the next thing we will put roasted garlic cloves in.

this has been the year of deborah taking a much more prominent role in the kitchen and it has been so wonderful to share that work and see her become more skilled and confident and to get to eat the fruits of that growth. i'm thankful that she has become a bread nerd and has made us beautiful loaves of sourdough as well as various treats from the discard of her starter (and i'm also thankful that she understands there are limits on how much bread i can eat). i'm thankful that our grocery store of choice now sells a very good large bag of soft bright dried mango. i'm thankful for ruby jewel ice cream sandwiches.

i'm thankful that, after stopping eating breakfast cereal for a year because of trying to reduce carbs/sugar, when i was in the "no appetite but i need to force myself to consume some calories" trough of my anemia i got myself a box of the cheerios oat crunch and berries and rediscovered how much joy a morning bowl of cereal brings me vis a vis other breakfasts and have returned to that. i'm thankful to know that i need to do better about reducing the carbs/sugar in my diet after backsliding in a number of dimensions reveling in the joy of not being anemic anymore and that i need to go back to the doctor and get some bloodwork soon to check on that and my iron levels but i'm also thankful to know that if my doctor is still concerned ozempic is now a thing.

year in reading

thanks to my sabbatical (where, like every break from work including the holiday one i am on the last day of, i did not get many of the projects done that i had planned) i read more books this year than i have in other recent ones, which made me really happy. i continue to struggle with the fact that historically my favorite time to read a book (in the evening and at night), reading is very powerful unintended sleep aid.

books i've read and loved since i last wrote about books i've read and loved:

not exhaustive (or exhausting) list of the newsletters i read regularly and loved this year: dinner party, sweater weather, lena moses-schmitt, book gossip, max read, garbage day, edith zimmerman, it's my stupid, capitulate now, everything happened, (engineering subsection: the pragmatic engineer, bytes, web weekly, frontend at scale)

i'm thankful that i also read a lot more magazines more regularly this year. i am not big on resolutions but i just fucking have to get my phone use under control in 2024, not for some moral or personal growth reason but just because i can low key feel myself basically getting ADHD based on my phone pickup and usage amount but stimulants are not a category of drug that works well for me (i always want to slow down, not speed up) and i need my brain to not live like this anymore (but also i will never like go totally amish or cold turkey i need to be a part of the culture but just not to )

soundtrack of my lives

i'm thankful for my favorite album of the end of the year which was ultimate love songs by DORIS, which is loose and free and intimate and overstuffed, a gen-z version of the headphone masterpiece which is to say extremely my shit (i'm thankful that though it got taken down from streaming briefly, probably for sample clearance issues, it's back for now). i'm thankful that my official favorite album of the year was of course charm by clairo (i'm thankful that my favorite musician made an album that's so suffused with joy and love and i'm thankful that d and i, not big concert-goers, were able to see the tour twice). my "grower" favorite album of the year was short and sweet by sabrina carpenter (bonus: my favorite tiktok meme was the juno "college girls in loungewear act silly and sexy" one). my favorite instrumental album was continuum by nala sinephro, which is ambient music that incorporates jazz musicians and as a result doesn't sound as samey (here's a long pad! here's some minimal piano) as most ambient music. my favorite rap album was chromokopia by tyler the creator. i hate that the zeitgeist popular music seems to be going in the direction of country music but i'm thankful for the opportunity to be alienated and force myself to either look harder for new artists or (re)discover old ones (or start liking country music but nah i'm good).

eiween

i'm thankful for my friend e, who i saw irl for the first time in a few years when she visited portland a few months ago. i'm thankful for her and our friendship always but i was most recently specifically thankful that after she sent me a lovely cover of "birthday boy" by ween that she'd done on baritone ukulele and i asked her to make me an intro playlist to ween, a band i feel like i would like but never really listened to, she made me a playlist with a pun in the title and [subtitle] "ween songs justin might like" and i not only liked them but loved them (my first favorite was "slow down boy", a beautiful melody which sounds like bowie singing a wham song, and now i have too many to list).

fire walk with me

i somehow had never watched twin peaks despite it being extremely my shit. cooper and harry are the only #notallcops exceptions to ACAB.

work

i'm thankful that i was productive (1964 commits in GitHub) but i never had a minor breakdown from overwork and work stress, which i cannot say of most years! i'm thankful that i got to work on projects that were interesting and impactful with smart coworkers i like personally. i'm thankful that the person i disliked most got a new job and quit. i'm thankful that. i'm thankful for cursor, which was a fundamentally transformative tool for how i build software. i'm thankful for how the experience of working with it and other tools feels like sculpting or like being a very technical product manager yes and-ing with a thoughtful if imperfect robotic engineer. i'm thankful i learned to code before AI but i'm also thankful for how AI has so improved both my output and my experience of doing my job.

play

my favorite video game of the year was balatro, which is available on mobile and every system now and which i can't recommend enough. my favorite is stalker 2

tiktok

i only truly got into tiktok this year—the algorithm. it may be gone soon

hands-free leash

i'm thankful for the short hands-free leash that deborah got for miso, which i was skeptical about but which is. d