Hi Friends,

Here are some things I started and already abandoned in 2025:

• Dry January

• Wearing my retainer again

• The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

  • My tolerance for bad shit happening to children is at an all-time low. I made it about halfway through The Bee Sting before realizing absolutely nothing good was coming for any of these characters and the plot synopsis I read online afterwards (needed to quench my curiosity somehow!) confirmed my fear.

• A kids book about a smelly dinosaur. My brother and I decided to try writing a kids book just for fun….weirdly he didn’t like my first draft even though it’s literally perfect…….???

  • Once there was a dino
    Whose scent was so severe
    That knowledge of his stinky ways
    Was known from there to here

    
    His mother had tried everything
    Begging and bribing every hour
    But no matter what she did or said
    Little dino refused to shower

    
    At first it seemed like all was lost
    The smell could not be rid
    Until one day a carcharodontosaurus
    Took pity on the kid

    
    Carchy, as she was known by friends
    Had quite the flair for style
    She drove up in an ‘85 LeBaron
    And said, get in, kid! It’ll be worth your while!

    
    Swampy spino looked suspiciously
    At this dino - totally bizarre
    At 46 feet long, for one,
    How the hell did she fit inside that car?

    
    “Stop dillying!” Carch shouted,
    “we’ve got no time to waste!”
    “First stop’s car wash then the pool
    We’re gonna clean you up post-haste!”

• Taking Iron supplements

• Meditating

• Being responsible with my news consumption

  • I’ve been trying to limit my doomscrolling but when Elon Musk did two Sieg Heils at Trump’s inauguration I couldn’t help but get sucked into the reaction online. Are they really arguing he didn’t just do what we all saw him do with our own two eyes??? After drowning myself in theories I only felt worse - depleted, exhausted, etc. Then it dawned on me. That was the whole point and I fell for it AGAIN. These fucked up stunts are intentional — Trump and his cronies know that our attention is a finite resource and they are tapping it out by keeping us in a spiral of unwinnable, pointless debates — why are we still arguing when one side abandoned logic and reasoning years ago? We know who Elon Musk is. We know who Donald Trump is. We have to start treating our attention spans like newborn babies — vulnerable to the elements.

  • Let’s make a pact, shall we? Limit our news consumption to ~20 minutes a day on the Associated Press / PBS? No more hot takes? No more doomscrolling? Then we’ll use all our free time to exercise and bake bread and community organize?