Everything starts over again

Things I enjoyed in 2025

Dec 31, 2025

I’ve always loved that we count down from ten while yelling with our friends in fancy outfits and then everything starts over again. Time is a flat circle, or a spiral, or an increasingly absurd cosmic prank, but to keep track of time has for me become increasingly meaningful and educational and I can’t say I recommend this, but during the last days of the year I’ve gotten into the habit of reading my entire journal from the year. This comes with laughter and gagging and unbridled gratitude and Jesus Christ what’s wrong with me, but pattern recognition is unavoidable, for good and bad, and I also keep track of every movie I watch and book I read and every album that makes me listen—maybe it’s all sentimental and self-involved but to catalog the days and things that add texture to the days feels like an attempt to stay organized inside enough to say wow I’m alive and learning and that’s cool, and also just not miss out on life as time falls in on itself or away from itself or whatever it’s doing, but I guess this is just to say here are ten things I enjoyed in 2025.

1. Domesticity. I made a home with my forever girlfriend. It was horrible until it was amazing and right now I’m looking around at objects old, new, and maritally-inherited and each of them appears as a dot in a pointillist web of aesthetic enjoyment and belonging. I love our stuff, I love being in our place, and even though at this point my closet is overflowing and my credit card needs to be restricted by the highest authorities, materialism has proven to be super great.

2. Teaching yoga. Having spent well over fifteen years teaching at other people’s studios and in other people’s trainings, it’s become overtly magnificent and a real source of life is good to be able to exist in the yoga studio in the way I’m afforded at the Castro Room. Speaking at our TT graduation over the summer, I got all weepy because I felt so lucky to be able to share the thing I still cherish so much, and to do so in a space and community that feels so simple and rich.

3. Hedonism. The rise in sleep tracking apps and high-vis studies about what gluten and nicotine and caffeine and alcohol do to your insides, as well as how much sunlight you should get and how little screen time you should get, how much you should exercise and how much you should take time for self-care etc etc—I don’t know but it all feels way more neurotic and dangerous than, like, following the current and staying up too late. Basically I’ve resolved never to listen to anything Andrew Huberman says ever again. Optimizing for health and wellbeing becomes the very thing that stops you from experiencing health and wellbeing?

4. Turning 40. We got a gigantic and opulent hacienda on the Oaxacan beach for a long weekend and a group of twenty people went absolutely hog-wild, that is until a biblical wave of food poisoning swept through and left 70% of our population wondering whether they’d ever move from the bathroom floor again, much less eat a taco again. You win some you lose some, but strangely the ones you lose are the ones that end up feeling like the biggest wins…

5. Failure. Another thing about turning 40 is that you’re compelled from on high to square what you’ve always wanted with what you have, who you’ve always wanted to be with who you are. Alongside all the incredible blessings I’ve found in 2025, it’s also been the hardest year of reckoning with the feeling of failure. Basically I’ve been in a half-dozen will-they-won’t-they toxic relationships… with literary agents. Tastes and macroeconomic trends and also priorities about plot and structure and levels of acceptance for creative insanity did not, as it were, match up in a lawfully wedded commercial relationship this year. Reading my journal back, there were some real dark days of what the hell is the point of all this. But suffice it to say there’s a novel I’ve been working on for nine years and at this point I’ll either throw it in the garbage, try to sell myself all over again so help me God, or bite the ultimate bullet and serialize it on Substack kill me now lol.

6. Fasting. This really flies in the face of #3 above but I learned about the 36-hour fast this year and I must say I’m a complete and total evangelist. It’s true that on my first attempt I only made it to 11am, but then I found out the best thing to do when you’re fasting is read articles about the benefits of fasting. It worked, and it works. Consult your doctor, by which of course I mean ChatGPT.

7. Twitter. Katy Perry became an astronaut, Nathan Fielder became a commercial pilot, “yo banana boy” is a palindrome, Wout Van Aert dropped Tadej Pogacar on Montmartre, AI couldn’t accurately say how many Rs there are in strawberry, Gavin Newsom learned to talk in all caps, Kash Patel didn’t learn how to blink, Mark Zuck remained the biggest loser on the planet, David Lynch’s Friday Forecast ended, Luigi went sock-less, Taylor and Travis chased cringe, Severance became the most overrated TV show ever… more and more always and forever whatever mass culture or tiny subculture you’re into or didn’t even know you were into there’s a place to get a reprieve from the dumpster fire of the world and strangely it happens to be in the front row seat of the theater in which the dumpster burns.

8. Movies. I’ll keep this short because there’s one that rose above all the others. Sorry, Baby. So good. Eva Victor is a hero.

9. Reading. Harper’s and the Paris Review for life, but as for books in no particular order and from all over the map and decades: Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, Vladimir by Julia May Jonas, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno, Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, The Story of My Life by Giacomo Casanova, On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, On Drugs by Justin Smith-Ruiu, and for sure my favorite of the year, The Lives of Cesars by Tom Holland.