Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

An incomplete list

1. Eat at a restaurant whose name starts with the first letter of your last name
2. Read a book
3. Play a musical instrument
4. Write poetry
5. Update your Obsidian vault
6. Paint a flower
7. Meditate/pray in a hammock
8. Take your dog for a walk and leave the phone at home
9. Touch grass, also phone-free
10. Learn to do needlepoint
11. Take a nap
12. Go to a music show
13. Birdwatch
14. Pet a pet
15. Sit by water and watch it move (try rivers, lakes, oceans, storm drains)
16. Play a board game, solo or with others
17. Have sex
18. Organize your pantry
19. Learn to roast coffee
20. Write your novel
21. Repot your houseplants
22. Plant a flower garden
23. Change the oil in your car
24. Go for a mountain bike ride
25. Volunteer at the food bank
26. Browse the entire shelf dedicated to one of your interests at a local bookstore
27. Let your niece/nephew/kids/neighbors paint your nails
28. Color your sidewalk with chalk art
29. Bake bread
30. Explore your neighborhood and observe all the number ‘4’ s
31. insert your own idea here

Doomscrolling or doomsurfing is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of news, particularly negative news, on the web and social media. The concept was coined around 2020, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Doomscrolling can also be defined as the excessive consumption of short-form videos or social media content for an excessive period of time without stopping.

via Doomscrolling – Wikipedia

Excellent and powerful. Reading the Preface already had me feeling all the feelings, and reading slowly, and making notes and highlights and talking with my therapist and family. 

hooks writes with clarity and power about the destructive impacts of patriarchy on both women and men. She knows that identifying the problems of violence, dehumanization, shame and anger isn’t the end of the work; that the hard work of men becoming more whole and healed is on men, but also needs women’s participation. And the work of dismantling patriarchy’s influence on the family isn’t just on fathers, but on mothers as well. She writes clearly about the promise and limitations of feminism, as well as some of the blind spots of early feminism.

There were a few places where I disagreed with hooks, or where I think we’ve made some progress since she wrote what she wrote, but it’s not my place to measure that.  I appreciated hearing from a voice of strength and pragmatism about feminism, and from that same voice challenging men and culture to be better.

It’s a bit dated in places – the chapters on media (understandably) and work feel especially so. The work chapter is not inaccurate, but the stark unacceptance of women in workplaces which hooks describes appears to have given way, while full inclusion is still to come.

I highly recommend this book to everybody. Men, women, anyone who wants to understand and improve the effects of patriarchy on men and, well, everyone.

At the end of the book, what impressed me was the depth to which I felt challenged, but also hopeful. That’s a tough and rewarding balancing act by hooks.

I’m a bit late getting this together, but here it is! I love using the https://1se.co/ app, One Second Every Day, to reflect upon what each day brings.

When I first used this app on my mobile device, I was always looking for the big moments, the life memories.. but after doing this for a while, I realize now that the more memorable moments are the quiet ones – seeing the kids grow up, cuddling with the dog, clouds in the sky.

See also 1 Second Every Day – 2023; 1 Second Every Day 2017.

Another successful visit to Powell’s City of Books:

• 6 more books for my “Read something from each of the 32 counties of Ireland” project
• a few nature books
• a book about the history/anthropology of notebooks
• a surprising book by a guy whose name is very similar to my late dad’s.

And a second trip the next day:

I went to grab the Becky Chambers novella and then got to ask the bookseller where they usually shelve a couple of texts I love about ritual, and then I looked through all of the books nearby.

I was so happy with the books I found here that on the walk back to the hotel, book bag in hand, I was thinking about how much I was looking forward to reading that anthropology of time book and didn’t notice that I was stepping off a curb, tripped, fell, tucked, rolled, and recovered. But I’m sore

But that has invited more conversation about how we deal with art created by problematic artists.

This short response from actor Wil Wheaton speaking to the issue is helpful.

I can’t speak for the other actors, even the ones I know. But I will tell you, as an abuse survivor myself who never wanted to be in front of the camera when he was a kid: it’s really okay for you to enjoy the work. The work is good and meaningful, and if nobody is going to watch it because of what one piece of shit did two decades ago, what was it all for?

…

If it feels right to you to put it away and never look at it again, that’s totally valid. But if it brings you comfort, or joy, or healing, or just warm familiarity to bring it out and spend some time with it, that’s totally valid, too.

But I think there’s a difference between continuing to support the art of some relatively individual artist like an author (e.g. Gaiman) and somebody who’s part of an ensemble, like a filmmaker (like Joss Whedon, who is the subject of Wheaton’s response).

A coworker recommended this excellent video, which digs more deeply into the idea of fandom and parasocial relationships. It’s a long video but well worth watching.

The video talks spends a few minutes talking this academic paper: Resolving identity ambiguity through transcending fandom by Anastasia Seregina and John Schouten. It also talks about Americans’ unique obsession with cultural celebrity and celebrities, and spends some time with Roland Barthes’ article about author and art, The Death of the Author.

Here’s a summary of the video:

This video examines the emotional conflict of admiring a celebrity like Neil Gaiman, despite serious allegations against them. It discusses parasocial relationships, where fans struggle to reconcile their attachment to a celebrity with their wrongdoing, and critiques the celebrity culture that allows powerful figures to evade accountability. We contrast mainstream celebrity culture with small creator communities, emphasizing authentic engagement, ethical creator economies, and a critique of capitalism’s influence on media and power dynamics.

For another perspective, I still have on my to-read list the book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, which discusses this conundrum more completely.

Of course, there is no one single, widely accepted response to what we do when we find out something terrible about an artist or creator whose work we’ve enjoyed. It’s worth thinking about what our responses might be.

In a similar vein, this novel is an interesting and engaging magical realism that begins with the event of all white people walking into the nearest body of water and drowning. From there, we see an exploration of Blackness in America as a variety of characters adapt to this new world. 

As I was reading, I heard echoes of 

 Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Percival Everett’s James. 

I don’t think this book is as good as any of those three – each of those is more deft and complex. There are some awkward plot points, a few themes raised that would be very intriguing to follow up on, but go nowhere, and at least one caricature-y character. 

But the whole thing is challenging, and should discomfort white folks.  In this, it’s not perfect, but it is good art.

I read this via audiobook. It’s well narrated, with multiple voices for multiple POV’s. 

• Read 1 pg/day, tracked in The StoryGraph. This goal / use of TSG has been an easy one in the last year and a half of so, and has led me to read and consider things way outside my norm.
• Increase active days tracked in Strava by 25% over 2024. Heck, let’s just say 150. Overall, I want to be at the gym 3x/week, and have two days of mountain biking or hiking or paddleboarding or canoeing or …, depending on season. This should be easy – 2024 only had 116 total activities, owing to lots of stuff.. but previous years were less active.
• Sketch 3x/week and paint 1x/week. Anything counts. A few years ago I mentioned to a friend that I knew I had enough margin for life when I was painting some of what I sketched. That’s been a reliable indicator ever since, and in recent months, it’s empty. So I’m starting a new sketchbook with the new year.
• Write 2x/week, including blog and newsletters and whatever else that may turn into. Social media posts don’t count.

• Visit 4 national parks and 8 state parks. Shannon bought Brogan and I these cool National Park sticker water bottles for Christmas – visit a Park and put the corresponding sticker on the bottle – so we have to start that project. I wish there was something similar for state parks, which are even more fun to visit.

• Camp 10 times. We did a lot of car/truck camping the last couple years after being out of the habit and loved it. For “times” I’m thinking of separate locations, or times I have to set up our massive tent
• Read 40 books and 10,000 pages. I’m keeping this goal well below what I’ve read recently, because I’ve learned that if I set that goal too high, I read stuff I didn’t want to read, just to check off the list. There are some Reading Challenges on The StoryGraph that I want to make good headway on.. it’d be cool to finish out the Read Around Ireland challenge, for which I read one book from each of the 32 counties.
• Increase my music listening to 30,000 minutes (from 25,183) and 10,000 tracks scrobbled (from 8,655). That probably means less podcast listening time, and more music just around the house. So far it’s meant more music in the background while
• Propose a paper/presentation and attend the Symposium for Pilgrimage Studies again this year

My tendency would be to crank all these up, but I’m trying to be realistic here.

More broadly and less measurable, some other things I want to do:

• Avoid any hospital trips, whether for mountain biking injuries or surgery due to aging or whatever. That really messes with life (written while still recovering from an aging-related surgery).
• Read a bit less, summarize and write up what I’m learning more. (create learning exhaust; also write a blog post up about that idea)
• Learn how to fly the 2-line sport parafoil kite I bought in Ocean Shores
• Learn how to fly fish from my canoe
• Spend a week on the Oregon coast for my birthday. We used to go every year and have gotten out of the habit.
• Spend a week in British Columbia.
• Broaden out the content on this blog to better represent what I’m up to these days. Include sketch/watercolor stuff, trip recaps, etc.

I’m looking forward to this year and enjoying life. I’m also looking forward to reviewing this in a year as part of my Practices of Review – the year behind, the year ahead.

2024 was a really hard year for us in many ways, and a sweet year in others.

Shannon, my wife of 31 years, has had challenging health issues for the past several years. This gradually escalated into daily episodes of physical paralysis, more than half a dozen Emergency Room visits, literally dozens of doctor visits, and finally a diagnosis of an autoimmune condition, dermatomyositis, in the late spring.

While she’s being treated for this condition now, her day to day energy levels and ability to move or walk around really varies. Some days, she’s mostly napping or working from bed; other days she can walk a mile, albeit slowly, and go watch the ducks at the river.

Here are some of our hard-won Tips and Tricks for living with complex health issues. Your mileage may vary, but perhaps they’ll help you. And crucially, every single one of these will help you whether or not you’re dealing with complex health issues; they’re just good life tips.

Rule #1: A Doctor’s Visit is Always Followed by a Date

We’ve been to somewhere under 50 doctor visits in the last year or so. I don’t really want to count, but I can count more than 23 separate medical professionals that we visited.

We decided early on that, rather than letting these visits drive our feelings, we’d have to treat doctor visits as an invitation to a date. Every single one – sometimes afterwards we just get drive-through coffee on the way home; sometimes we grab food (and have made a lot of visits to what has become our favorite Mexican food truck in Bellevue, WA – La Chingona Taqueria at 148th Ave SE & Main St. Sometimes we dress up a bit. Sometimes we go for a walk, often with me pushing my wife in her wheelchair so that we can just get some sunshine and fresh air. Sometimes we go see local live music, or visit the bookstore. We have to be flexible, but we always do something, so that the mood of the doctor visit doesn’t dominate the day.

Rule #2: Do What You Can, Not What You Can’t

If you know or have experienced any form of chronic illness, you’re probably aware of the Spoon Theory illustration of limited resources. The basic idea is that our resources – energy – are limited, and finite. Sometimes we can guess how much energy (how many spoons) we’ll begin a day with; often we can’t know that. So we have to carefully ration our spoons for the day ahead. Sometimes, we have enough spoons for a shower and to walk the dog and to go to work and out to dinner after. Sometimes, we have enough spoons to take a shower and we’re done for the day.

As someone who has chronic migraine and experiences at least twenty migraine attacks per month, I’m familiar with the experience of not knowing whether today will be a good day or a bad day. And while I can manage some of the things that trigger my migraine attacks, often I can’t.

In that vein, we’ve learned to take each day as it comes. Some days, we can be active – go to a show, or go for a walk, visit friends, go out to dinner, etc. Sometimes we can’t. We plan, but we plan loosely.

We’ve learned to buy trip insurance when we book hotels, for example – occasionally, we cancel a getaway for medical reasons and are able to recoup some losses.

But even when she’s not feeling well, Shannon generally wants to get out and do something. To get some feeling of sunshine (sometimes we just walk around the block, me pushing the chair), or as she says, “I can lay in bed feeling like crap, or we can go to a concert feeling like crap, but at least we went to a concert.”

Because of Rule #1, we’ve seen a lot of live music recently, including quite a few festivals (it’s so nice just to set up a comfy camp chair and sit for hours listening to music).

Our favorite event this year combined Rule #1 and Rule #2. Shannon found a little local music festival called Hoodstock on Washington’s Hood Canal. The most unique feature of this event was that they had a second stage for one day of music that was only accessible from the water. Bands set up on outside of a waterfront home, facing the salt water, and fans just had to show up somehow. There were sailboats, yachts, powerboats, kayaks, inflatable rafts, paddleboards. While we have sit-on-top kayaks and and a paddleboard, we also knew that we couldn’t cont on Shannon’s health for a full day of watching music, so I scoured Craigslist and found a nice used canoe in Portland. We drove from Seattle to Portland to buy it, then back up to Hood Canal, and we attended the water shows the next day in a canoe. Shannon set up a small lounge chair on the canoe’s floor so that she could rest (and sleep/rest as needed), while I paddled us. It was a gorgeous location and fun idea. The bands seemed to really enjoy the setting – here’s a clip of The Olson Brothers using their wireless setups to run down the dock. It was a highlight of our year.

Rule #3: Feel What You Feel

When you’re surrounded by unknowns and have medical professional after medical professional say “I have no idea what is happening to you” and “I have no idea how to treat this”, things get stressful. And scary.

We commit wholeheartedly to feeling what we feel. Sometimes we’re scared, or frustrated, or feeling swamped or overwhelmed. Sometimes hopeful.

In some of the streams of the faith traditions we grew up in, only positive thinking is allowed or encouraged; everything else was “not having enough faith”.

Let me say this clearly: That’s bullshit. It’s inhuman.

We’ve had lots of folks tell us their tips or tricks including how we should most properly feel and pray, but we remain committed to this. If we feel nervous or angry, OK. That’s real. Both of us have counselors, family and friends to talk to, and a commitment to living in reality. If we don’t give ourselves permission to feel what we feel, we’re not living in reality.

It’s also been necessary for us to know that we hear and feel thing differently – especially after a doctor visit. We have to compare notes on what was said and implied, and at times agree to disagree.

Rule #4: Set and Keep Boundaries

This may have been the hardest one for us to learn. Because of those limited resources, it’s been important for us to focus on what is best for us. That’s meant that we’re traveling differently, visiting family and friends differently, doing holidays differently. We’ve streamlined our community memberships and volunteer work. We’re disappointing people, but we’re doing what we believe is best for us.

Saying “that sounds good, but no thanks”, or even just “no” – it’s a powerful and honest response to an invitation. It’s not easy, but it’s good.

Rule #5: Find and Use Your Team and Resources

Use Your Network

It’s not easy to ask for help, but it helps. Our little church put us on a meals list for a good chunk of time, which was incredibly kind. Neighbors and friends have helped us around the house or with meals or with driving to doctor appointments or with extra flexibility.

Both of us have therapists, who help us process through all of life – and the ongoing challenges of chronic illness.

ADA parking and seating

Sometime early in the year, we worked with our primary care doctor to get the paperwork together for a temporary ADA hang tag for our vehicle. Some days, it takes Shannon a lot of energy just to get from the vehicle into a wheelchair, so the shorter distance we have to travel after that, the better.

We’ve also learned how to take advantage of ADA seating possibilites at events. Sometimes, ADA seating is fantastic; other times it’s in the back of the venue. Special shout-outs to our favorite little concert venue, Miller’s – A Gathering Place in Carnation, WA – where we’ve seen some outstanding local and regional acts – and we get cushy chairs right next to the stage. And thanks to Seattle Theatre Group Club, who goes out of their way to provide accessibility for events at the Neptune, Moore, Paramount threatres in Seattle, as well as shows at Remlinger Farms.

Washington Paid Family Medical Leave

In Oct and Nov of 2023, it was clear to us that I wasn’t able to do my work and also care for Shannon, including take her to several doctor visits a week. It was very difficult to keep up at my day job and to care for her and get us to those visits.

Fortunately for us, Washington state provides a Paid Family Medical Leave benefit, which paid me a surprising incoming for 12 weeks of care for my spouse while we took care of urgent issues and went to doctor visits and generally tried to cope with life. My job went on hold; a peer stepped in to lead my team in my absence, and I was able to walk away and not think much about work, let alone go to it and show up to meetings while I was mentally focused elsewhere.

Even though it was difficult to return to work in the midst of our struggles, I am grateful for the break and the ability to focus on the important things during that medical leave.

Use Every Bit of Your Insurance

I’m privileged to have a stable job (knock wood) that pays OK and provides good benefits, most notably health insurance that covers my family. Let’s just say that we easily hit out out-of-pocket maximum early last year.

We also had really great help accessing the Health Care Advocate that our insurance provides. While we’ve heard lots of terrible stories of these Advocates acting on behalf of the insurance company, ours has been very helpful to open up access to new doctors, to advocate for things like expensive immunotherapy treatment on one end, or a wheelchair rental on the other end of the financial spectrum.

I’d love for medical insurance to not be a massive challenge, but we live in the USA, where the healthcare system isn’t like the rest of the developed world.

Summary

These Rules are things we’ve discovered and held to over the past months. They change, we update them, and until this post they weren’t ever written down anyway. But the idea and the values behind them have helped us get through a challenging year.

I don’t think any of these are specific to dealing with illness, so I encourage you to think about what you need and want, and go after it. And if you ARE dealing with health issues, I hope these help – and that you’ll share with us what you’ve learned along the way yourself.

On top is a Franklin-Christoph 03 inked with Robert Oster Tranquility.

Underneath is Ken Cavers Emerald mini-cigar, inked with Robert Oster Jade.

Eagle eyed readers may notice this is the first appearance of this year’s Hobonichi Techo. I’ll write more about my notebook plans later.

For the last few New Year’s Eves, we’ve gone to a hotel in Everett that sits on the marina and hosts a NYE party with a live band playing soul music. We enjoy the music and dancing, then head upstairs to our room and go to sleep.

On New Year’s Day, I break out my notebooks and go through the Practices of Review at the End of the Year. I always travel with a book or two, and a sketchbook, and this Jan 1 I also had a couple of books I’d read but still need to recap for the blog. Oh, and I need coffee and a breakfast pastry to help me get started..

So as you can see, the work surface gets full pretty quickly.

This is a good view into my brain

I got a good start on this year’s Annual Review, but this one will take some more time. A LOT has happened this year that I want to revisit, and some that I don’t want to revisit but need to anyway.

Anyway, I thought readers here may enjoy that tabletop view of how I begin my Annual Review.