Everything Is Fine

Latest Posts

  • You probably won’t reach “the top”, but it’s fine.

    I just got back from a weekend at a couple of concerts. On the drive home, I was hit with a few musings about the music and the overall experience, so I’m going to vomit out a couple of posts right here before I go back about my regular life and habits again. If you don’t see any others yet, check back; I’m writing them all at once but scheduling them to publish over the next day or so.

    One of the bands that played was Beartooth, and they played a song called Doubt Me. It’s a “fuck the haters” song about doing things people told you that you weren’t capable of doing. That’s basically a genre – sitting here and thinking about it, so many bands have at least one song in that category. (Several just from the two shows in Baltimore this weekend.)

    It makes sense – it’s probably a good analogue of being in the music industry. Lots of bands and artists come along and most of them don’t “make it,” so odds are, you aren’t going to, either. When you start out playing local venues and submitting demos, you probably hear “it’s not gonna happen” a lot.

    I really enjoy those sorts of songs; it’s fun to throw your success back in the face of the people who tried to stand in your way. But do most of us have those people?

    Personally, I think I might be the opposite. I was told that if I just put my mind to it, I could do anything. (At least by anyone whose opinion mattered – there are always just shitty people.) I just never really aspired to that level. I never dreamed of being the president, or a rock star, or an astronaut or anything like that.

    I don’t really know where I’m going (or where I’m even really trying to go) with this – I just had the though of like “yeah, fuck the haters… wait, who even are my haters?”

    I guess what’s really important, haters or not, is to make sure you have a grounded definition of success. If nothing short of being the best in the world will satisfy you, then regardless of people supporting you or not, you’re almost certainly going to fall short. If you treat each step along the way as another step up, though, then all of the efforts you put in will be validated.

    I’ll celebrate my accomplishments, and I (or someone who actually knows you) will also celebrate yours. To end on another Beartooth line, “come join me at the top.”

    It’ll be fine.

  • “Weird” is fine; “normal” is also fine.

    I just got back from a weekend at a couple of concerts. On the drive home, I was hit with a few musings about the music and the overall experience, so I’m going to vomit out a couple of posts right here before I go back about my regular life and habits again. If you don’t see any others yet, check back; I’m writing them all at once but scheduling them to publish over the next day or so.

    The first of the two concerts featured The Funeral Portrait, and they played a song of theirs called Stay Weird. It’s an anthem for the “weird” (read: emo/goth/punk/whatever) kids to not change and keep being their true selves. Now, in general, that’s a great message, and I’m all for music containing messages like this that people need to hear.

    (There’s a whole slew of what I’m sort of calling “mental health-core” about dealing with depression or addiction or self-harm; I’m glad these topics are out there in ways that aren’t as preachy or “after-school special-y”. Thinking about it, I think at least three out of four bands on Friday and two out of three on Saturday have at least some material like that.)

    But here’s one thing – when you’re playing an arena in downtown Baltimore with a capacity of 13,000 people, is anyone there “weird”? Sure, 13,000 isn’t a football or baseball game, but it’s also still a pretty good-sized crowd.

    I’m not weird. I work in an office at a consulting company. I have a 401(k) and a mortgage. I don’t dress all in black. (Except at concerts – note to bands: sell more t-shirts that aren’t black. At Summer of Loud, I got a Parkway Drive shirt that’s blue. At a Nothing More show, I got their tour shirt that’s red. There were cool Beartooth shirts, but I’m not that huge of a fan of theirs, but both of their live sets I’ve seen have been great. I expected Bad Omens to have something maybe red, but nope.)

    But then again, I’m into curling. Is that weird? I play board games, which feels like the normie-est shit out there, what with 70,000 people at Gen Con every year, but even other gamers often think my games are weird. Is professional wrestling weird? Conceptually, I think it’s mainstream, but it doesn’t draw the crowds it used to (although that could be mostly due to ticket prices).

    I’m reminded of the tagline (or one of the taglines) for the YouTube channel Wrestling With Wregret – “Like what you like, just don’t be a dick.” You should “stay weird,” not by specifically trying to be a non-conformist, but by just finding your lane. Find your style, your music, your hobbies. Enjoy things unashamedly. Don’t “be weird”, but don’t be afraid of being called weird.

    Because weird is normal, and normal is weird.

    And they’re both fine.

  • Formula One’s 2026 season is going to be fine

    Last weekend, we finally saw the first race featuring the new 2026 F1 cars that people have been complaining about since pre-season testing began. The cars are too slow! (Granted, they are I guess a few seconds a lap slower than recent years under the old regs.) They’re not as powerful! (They still put out about 1000 horsepower.) They’re too hard to drive! They’re too easy to drive! (Yes, generally, driving them requires more attention to more things, like the battery and when to brake versus lift and coast, and they do have a little less downforce, but some drivers have said that the actual racing is easier since the cars aren’t as fast as they’re used to.)

    But you know what? We had multiple lead changes in the opening laps. We had virtual safety cars due to reliability issues (and not collisions or cars in the barriers – at least during the race. Oscar Piastri binned his McLaren during the reconnaissance lap and Kimi Antonelli smashed his Mercedes up during FP3 and (due to a lucky red flag in Q1) managed to have it put back together to run qualifying.) letting teams make decisions around pit strategy. (And Ferrari appears to have made the wrong ones, per usual.)

    Mercedes looks like they’re back. Ferrari looks… competitive? There’s less of a gap between Red Bull and junior team Racing Bulls. The rebranded Saubers (now Audi) did ok with the one car that started the race. The new team, Cadillac, was there!

    We’ll see how it goes – right now, there’s basically one team in front and the rest battling for the podium, which isn’t great, but that’s F1. Last year, it was McLaren, before that it was Red Bull, and before that, it was Mercedes. Now it’s Mercedes again, but with McLaren using their power units, we’ll see if they catch up. We’ll also see if any in-season upgrades close the gaps, or if there are any driver shakeups.

    As I’ve said before, the “drama” in F1 isn’t who wins each race, but all the other nonsense up and down the field and between the races. It’s fine.

  • Marathon is fine

    Several posts ago, I mentioned Arc Raiders as a game I might get into. I played their Server Slam (or whatever they called their demo weekend) and had a decent time, but then I never picked up the game. As I read more about it, it seemed fine, but people were progressing through it quickly, so jumping in later seemed like a bad time. Now it has (basically) dedicated PvP or PvE queues, which sounds nice, but also kind of boring. The world of the game was nice. It’s very distinct; everything really does feel cobbled together out of scraps. The enemies come in pretty distinct forms. It’s all-in-all a nice time. I just never felt “grabbed,” you know?

    A couple of weeks ago, I played the Marathon Server Slam. Visually, it’s incredible. The sounds in the game are immersive to the point of being almost a downside. (Was that lightning or some sort of energy weapon? Is that robot I hear a UESC guard, another runner, or my squadmate? (Or me?) Is that banging in the next room someone looting, someone shooting, or just a machine running?) Overall, it went ok. I had some good runs, and I had some terrible runs. However, each terrible run made me say “damn, wanna try one more?” Maybe it’s just because I found people to play with (some via online communities, and some just organically in the game), but even everything falling apart and losing a pile of gear doesn’t make me want to quit, like it kind of did with Arc. I’ve basically put my other games aside for the time, so my last week or so has been work, curling, watching wrestling, and playing Marathon. Time I would spend in the evening idly searching YouTube for things to watch is now doing terrible runs on Tau Ceti IV.

    The rest of the player base is progressing much faster. The parts I want/need to do for missions, everyone is already past. That’s a little bit of a pain. Luckily, I think some new people are still joining the game, so there are still people early in the progression. Or maybe people are just not playing as frequently. I hope I don’t just end up hopelessly behind until the season resets. (And I hope whatever I miss due to not being ready for it before season reset isn’t just gone forever.)

    Is Sony going to kill off Bungie because the game isn’t selling billions? I hope not! Is the game going to last as long as Escape From Tarkov? Probably not. (Although technically, Tarkov just released in November, despite being in alpha/beta/whatever early versions since like 2016.)

    It’s frustrating. It’s exciting. It’s incomprehensible. It’s beautiful. It’s weird. It’s fun.

    It’s fine.

  • Not Having Anything to Say is Fine

    Hey, look, it’s been a month and there’s nothing new here! I had such high hopes coming into 2026. (Said nobody, right?)

    Anyway, I think I was hoping for this to mostly be longer “essay” type posts (not like “long form” but in the 1000-ish word range), and then I just sort of ran out of ideas in my immediate queue. I do still think I want to have those, but I don’t want to just post about That Fuckin’ Guy all the time. That’s the job of everybody else. I also don’t have any other weird niche content to write about like subway trains or weird maps or fake video games like some of the content creators I’m into. I’m just a content consumer posting into the void.

    But I guess that’s okay. Creators wouldn’t create without people watching/reading/playing their stuff, and while I hate that some days, I just sit and watch random things in my YouTube recommendations, I guess I at least like “educational” stuff? (Oh, and people gambling – I watch a bunch of that, too. I don’t know why.)

    So going forward, I think I’ll try to post more frequently, but less seriously (about games, food/drink, media… whatever is occupying my brain at a given moment), with occasional “essays” on bigger topics that have drawn my attention, and then for those quick one-liners that I have to vomit out into the void, I’ll put those on Bluesky, where my username is the URL for this site, so that’s convenient. Branding! (By the way, I’m still salty that I couldn’t get vice.rocks as a domain name. Who owns it?)

    I can only confirm one thing. Whatever state this site continues to exist in – it’ll be fine.

  • Gambling is fine

    In the year 2026, everything is gambling now. I don’t just mean how there are more casinos everywhere (although there are) or how sports betting has pervaded everything (although it has), but now we have prop bets, “prediction markets” (that are basically just sports betting, but also about other things), online gambling that lets you access things like blackjack and poker on your phone, online gambling that lets you play things like high stakes plinko or bet on how high a number goes before it crashes.

    And then there’s cryptocurrency, which is less a currency and more just a way to speculate on other people being hopefully dumber and/or greedier than you. Especially when you move away from Bitcoin (which is basically an asset now – still not really a currency because it’s not useful, but no worse an “investment” than incredibly volatile stock) and into the world of “memecoins” where the idea is basically to mint, hype your trash token to a bunch of rubes, and then liquidate and pocket all the money. (Or in other words, bet some money, and then watch the line go up and sell before it crashes, just like that game at the end of the last paragraph.)

    It’s not just that these things exist (which is mildly problematic on its own), but they’ve become even more accessible than ever. You used to have to go to a casino or sportsbook (or a guy at the bar or whatever) but now you just install an app or go to a website, type in your credit card info (or buy some “sweepstakes coins” – more on that later), and you’re ready to start betting. On sports, it’s just an endless scroll of games and buttons to tap to immediately place a bet. Click “See More” or whatever it is in your app of choice and suddenly instead of just picking winners, you’re picking who’s going to score, what the first play is going to be, or longer-term bets like which teams are going to win the championship. I even like sports betting and have had some minor success at it, but the day it launched in my home state, I remember thinking both “Sweet, gonna do this all the time now” but also “Uh, maybe this is a little too easy.”

    But if you want to bet on things like elections (or be even more of a ghoul and bet on things like wars and assassinations) there’s “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket. The CEO of Kalshi says his goal is to financialize every difference in opinion, and that’s basically what these “markets” do. (I don’t see any markets specifically open about murders; maybe they don’t allow that, but there are some on Polymarket now about if/when the US will launch a strike on Iran or Russia capturing particular Ukrainian cities.) If you think something will happen, you can find that market and buy the “shares” in the outcome. The price of a share is based on the calculated odds (every “winning” share pays out $1, and you can find shares for sale from anywhere from $0.003 up to $0.998 depending on the market), but then you can also sell that share to some other sucker along the way. It’s like betting on your bets! (Or like options trading for people who are even less informed about how trading works!)

    How is this legal? For sports betting, it’s legal because sports. (Even before sports betting was allowed to be legalized nationwide, there was a special exception for horse racing – gambling has always been ok when it supports a particular industry.) For “prediction markets” it’s legal because you’re buying tradable contracts, which is totally not betting. For sites like Stake, you buy fake money in bundles (and they inflate the fake money, so for like $50, you get 500,000 Gold Coins (that have no cash value and aren’t redeemable in any way) but then you also get a FREE BONUS of 50 sweepstakes coins (or whatever any given site calls them) that you can also play with, and those sweepstakes coins are redeemable for cash and prizes! You’re not gambling with money, you’re buying tokens and then you can win more tokens and trade your tokens for money! (Yes, that’s how it works in a casino, but generally, casino games online are not legal, barring a few jurisdictions where they are, like Pennsylvania, where I have managed to lose tens of dollars like a quarter at a time playing blackjack on my phone. Even I’m not immune to this nonsense.)

    Look, I like to gamble. I think it’s fun. I bet on sports; I go to casinos; I play the lottery; I play poker. Do I sometimes win? Yes. Do I usually lose? At some of those, yes. (I think I’m profitable over my lifetime at poker and sports betting; I have definitely never won the lottery.) Would it be better for my finances if I just never did any of it? Obviously. I would also have more money if I never bought board games or went on vacation or ate at restaurants, and I’m never going to stop doing those things, either.

    Is it destructive? Not for me personally(other than having lost money), but in general, probably. States with legalized sports gambling have overall lower credit scores, more bankruptcies, and more debts in collections. And that’s just the regulated sportsbooks that are licensed by gaming commissions and required to provide things like self-limiting, self-exclusion, and information to assist with gambling addictions. Kalshi at least has a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that trading incurs risk (although no links or phone numbers for addiction) and Polymarket not only doesn’t have anything like that at the bottom of the page, but it doesn’t even have a bottom of the page! If you keep holding Page Down or spinning your scroll wheel, you just keep getting more markets forever! (Okay, one, it’s probably not “forever” but I’m not gonna find the bottom and two, there is page footer with links, but those also don’t provide any help getting your out of your downward spiral of betting on the over/under on the number of views on the next Mr. Beast video or whether there will be a Magnitude 10 earthquake this year.) Despite being sketchy as hell, Stake does have a big section of their website about responsible gaming, so that’s cool. (They also have leaderboards where you can rank up by betting more, so that’s not great.)

    It’s obnoxious. It used to be that gambling was weird and sketchy, but now ESPN not only talks about the lines in the pregame coverage, but also now runs their own sportsbook. And everything is sponsored by sportsbooks now. Your game gets interrupted constantly by reminders that you could be betting right now! You can bet mid-game! How are your bets doing?! You know that parody from Family Guy where the “subliminal message” about smoking was just a guy yelling “SMOKE”? It’s basically that. (Oh god, can you imagine the advertising for weed if that gets fully legalized?)

    So yeah, it’s a way to squeeze more money out of people who don’t have any. It’s addictive, and it’s everywhere. It’s kinda fun. It’s probably fine. Probably. Not the downfall of society at all.

  • “Artificial Intelligence” is fine

    Hey, look! The first post of 2026, and it almost got posted within the first week. That’s a good start! I’ve been thinking about some of the talking points I wanted to put in here for a while now, and while I haven’t really “drafted” anything yet, I wanted to get it out here, so here’s what I’ve got.

    First, we all know that “AI” as it’s being marketed excruciatingly and shoved into everything is a big pile of shit. Most “AI” integrations aren’t anything more than chatbots or algorithms or what would have been basic automations a few years ago, but now we call it “AI” so venture capitalists will throw all their money at it. The “AI” built into Microsoft Word is just the spelling checker turned up to 1000% such that, instead of just realizing you’ve typed something that isn’t a word, it sees that you’ve typed a word and starts suggesting what words normally come after that. Hell, that’s what Clippit (the actual name of the paperclip) was doing back in Office 97. (“It looks like you’re writing a letter!”) It’s not “new,” and it’s not “intelligent,” and honestly, it’s not even all that helpful.

    Next, we have what people are actually doing with these things. We have people “writing music” and filling Spotify and YouTube with it, and people “making art” that’s terrible, with people with the wrong number of fingers and legs that bend the wrong way, and people “writing” text that doesn’t make any sense and isn’t coherent at all. It’s all trash, where people with no desire to “make something” but the desire to “have made something” can babble out some prompts and copy/paste output into the platform of their choice and say they did it. They don’t get any of the satisfaction of creation, but that’s not what they wanted, anyway. When someone wants to make art, they can just do it. Maybe it’ll be bad (and it always is your first time, because creation is a skill that takes practice and training) but that’s ok, because it’s still yours. Hell, I think you would get more satisfaction commissioning someone to make art for you than you would just getting a bot to do it, because then at least you can think “they made this for me.”

    And then we have the heinous shit people are doing, most recently getting Grok to make CSAM and post it on Twitter. Like, just literally being like “hey chatbot, take this picture of a child and make them nude” and the bot’s all “here you go!” As if the internet wasn’t enough of a pedo hellscape (that exact phrase being used in a report about Roblox) but now one of the largest social media platforms owned by the richest person in the world is helping!

    But ok, my gimmick here is that everything is “fine.” That everything that’s critically acclaimed actually is just whatever, and everything that sucks also has something wonderful and worthwhile. So what’s the positive to all of this garbage?

    Honestly, at the moment, not much. I mean, there’s the abstract positive that a lot of really stupid people with way too much money are spending all that money on nothing and we all continue to not like it and not buy it. That’s at least worth some entertainment value.

    There’s also that some of this nonsense is actually almost useful. Right now, all the air in the room is taken up by LLMs, basically prediction engines that can look at a “token” (basically, a snippet of text, or a piece of an image, or something) and have some knowledge of what tokens are usually found around it and reproduce something that sounds like natural language, or looks like a picture, or whatever. That’s where we get all this “AI” slop filling everything, but for things where reproducing what came before is all you need, like writing simple code (or interpreting existing code), it can help people to make those little tools we wish we had, so we can get back to the stuff that’s actually productive.

    Nobody really talks about machine learning or neural networks anymore (because being able to deepfake your dead grandma is apparently more marketable) but things like speech recognition and handwriting recognition (that were impossibly futuristic at one point, then cutting edge, and now for the most part they just kinda work) are based on that stuff. (My understanding is that generally, these are just algorithms, and not really “AI,” but those algorithms are trained using a lot of the same types of systems that train ChatGPT and other LLMs.

    And then there’s using the same sort of training on things like financial data, that could potentially change the way things like forensic accounting or actuarial work is done. (Of course, they could lead to things like the model that ended up being trained to “spot cancer” based on images of moles and “learned” that moles with rulers in the picture were cancerous, so the principle of “garbage in, garbage out” still applies.)

    Basically, there are a lot of solutions out there just looking for problems. (And right now, companies like OpenAI are betting trillions of dollars that the problem you have is that you really want a chatbot to tell you to kill yourself or post crap to social media to be read by other chatbots so that even more chatbots can post comments about Obama.)

    It could go the way of cryptocurrency, where a lot of money and time will be spent telling us it’s “the future” when ultimately it goes nowhere except for a small community of diehards and a very large network of grifters. (Really, “blockchain” in terms of the technical aspects of a trustless public ledger is a neat concept. There still isn’t a use for it that wouldn’t be better of to just use a database, but it’s still a neat concept.)

    Or it could go the way of something like digital cameras, where some people play around with it but people who really care don’t use it, until suddenly it just sort of becomes the way it’s done. (“AI generation” will hopefully never become the “way it’s done” but there must be some middle ground between “I made this by hand” and “a chatbot made this for me.”)

    So yeah, “Artificial Intelligence” is stupid. If someone wants you to use it, they’re probably also stupid. If you’re thinking “I don’t know; I think there might be something to this…” you might not be completely stupid. Basically, if you don’t buy it, and don’t use it to replace actual human thought or creativity, then it’s fine.

    Naturally, no content on this site is generated by any sort of AI. You can tell, because it’s stupid, but in a sincere and human way!

  • 2026 is going to be fine

    Just as it was “important” to put out some words about the year that’s ending, it’s equally important to then provide some additional words about the year to come.

    Is 2026 going to be “better” than 2025? Well, I certainly hope so, but also, that’s sort of the point of New Year’s, right? The changing of the calendar lets us set new baselines for ourselves. All the things we know we should have been doing for a long time get a little bit easier to do at the beginning of the year. Sure, that’s because of “New Year’s Resolutions” but there’s something else that always feels hopeful about a new year. I’m going to lose weight (even if I don’t put effort into it); I’m going to meet someone (even if I don’t go looking); I’m going to post more on that website I set up last year (No, really, I’m going to do that. Probably.).

    Given that, it’s easy to think 2026 is looking up. I mean, all the terrible garbage from 2025 is still going to be there, but also, all the good people out here helping deal with them are, too, and those people should have even more resolve, considering they got us this far.

    As for me, I’m still going to play games. I’m still going to play poker (including, probably, right on January 1st). I’m going to keep going to concerts, and I’m going to keep on curling (far less than I used to, but still roughly once a week and maybe a weekend or two away). I expect that wrestling will keep being good (and hopefully will come back to the DC metro area – specifically that AEW will come back to the DC area – WWE just did for John Cena’s retirement).

    At some point, we (probably) get GTA 6. We’re all waiting for that, right? And some movies? (I honestly don’t follow movies anymore; I’m sure there are some people are waiting for. Dune 3?)

    So keep your head up – a new year means new opportunities for self-improvement, or just to do those things you’ve been putting off, like getting back to the doctor, or calling your old friend. Or if you’re already perfect, then you can just keep doing that.

    So yeah… what am I doing in 2026? I guess what I did in 2025. If your 2025 was good, then I hope your 2026 is the same. If your 2025 was crap, then I hope your 2026 is better. Looking forward from here, I can only assume it’ll be fine.

    And, you know, maybe IT will happen. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Maybe thinking about that will get you through the year.

  • 2025 was fine

    Like all good (and most mediocre to bad) content creators, it’s time for a year-end wrap up.

    In 2025, we saw the beginning of what has been described as the “American century of humiliation.” First of all, that captures the vibe pretty well. I remember in the early 2000s when people would say they were embarrassed to be American (and the group that would become known as The Chicks basically got cancelled for saying they were embarrassed to be from the same state as the President), but I really do feel like we’re at a point where, if you aren’t American, and you meet someone who is, your first reaction would be “That’s rough, buddy” or maybe just “Oof”. (Yeah, everyone in this interaction communicates primarily in memes. What of it?)

    So yeah, we had tariffs, then we didn’t, then we did, but nobody knew how much, and then we had roving kidnapping squads around the country and people who don’t believe in medicine in charge of funding medicine… the United States is no longer “a shining city on a hill” but instead a glowing dumpster fire in a dark alley.

    And elsewhere in the world, we have wars, multiple countries undertaking what could be called genocides, climate change, more billionaires doing even less for anyone else… things aren’t great.

    But you know what, people are still fighting. People are marching about those genocides, some places are doing at least something to try to alleviate (or live with) climate change, and the courts are frequently putting the big wet dipshit president in his place. (I know back at the beginning I said I wasn’t going to do political posts, and I think I’ll still stick to that, but come on, there was really one big thing sort of hovering over us all this year.)

    And we’re all getting through it. If you’re reading this, you’re still here. Your friends are here, and you’re helping each other get through it. You might be thinking “actually, I’m not really helping” but you probably are. If you hang out with your friends and talk about things that aren’t the overall collapse of our society, then you’re helping to cope with it. If you’re still finding joy out there, then you’re helping others to do that, too.

    For me, I decided to start going to concerts in 2025, and went to… [checks calendar] six? I think that’s right. And I went to Gen Con! And curling in Canada! I got my friends to start watching wrestling with me, and I played in an actual RPG campaign. I made the largest cash I’ve ever had so far in a poker tournament. More recently, my sister got engaged, and asked me to walk her down the aisle at her wedding, so that’s cool.

    So there you have it – there was a lot of garbage in 2025, but there was good stuff, too. My 2025 was fine. I hope yours was fine, too.

    EDIT: Looking back at my social media, I forgot there was an Anglican schism! That reminds me of all the tangential history we got to see. A new Pope. (From America!) A woman Archbishop of Canterbury (that a bunch of churches don’t recognize). A lot of trivia books are going to have a lot of notes about 2025!

  • The holidays are fine; I’m fine.

    Just banging out a “quick” post to provide some updates to the <checks analytics> zero people who visit the site. Cool cool cool. Anyway, I set this up as, I guess, a sort of New Year’s Resolution last year to “make something”. I don’t (at least yet) aspire to be any sort of “content creator” so I’m not getting in to streaming (although I’ve done it) or making YouTube videos (although I’ve done it and will likely do it again when the “my friends will probably want to watch this” feeling strikes me again) or even writing longform essays (although that’s closer, I’m not about to start a newsletter or anything). However, I do still have all these dumb ideas floating inside my dumb head, and I’m still going to vomit them onto this site, and hopefully even more frequently! (Stay tuned for that!)

    Anyway, things are fine. Thanksgiving was fun; I went back “home” and saw family (including the small portion of my family inurned in the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies, which is beautiful) and ate and had a nice weekend. And then immediately after Thanksgiving is over (or really, even before it’s over), “Christmas” starts, and that comes with its own big pile of stressors.

    For me, it’s not a big deal – the stressors aren’t things like “oh my god I’m so lonely and I can’t handle it” – I get why some people experience that, and if that’s you, I’m sorry. Especially in this day and age, not only are there people out there with nobody close to them, but there are possibly even more people who do have people, but for whatever reason can’t turn to those people. (Parents who have fallen down conspiracy rabbit holes, communities who have decided you’re no longer acceptable company, or friends who, maybe just through the ceaseless march of time, have drifted away and started entirely separate lives.) It can be overwhelming to be surrounded by a world that keeps hammering you with “it’s a time for celebration, and togetherness, and magic” while also providing you with nothing to celebrate, nobody to be with, and nothing at all magical.

    If that’s you; I don’t know what to tell you, other than… I get it, I think. I can’t say that I’m really “celebrating” anything right now, and the family I’m visiting this week for Christmas are mostly working all week, so I’ll still be mostly occupying an empty house, just someone else’s house (which might be worse?). I could never understand the magnitude of what you’re feeling, but I think I can at least comprehend why you’re feeling it, and I hope you make it through the season. If it’s because you’re lonely, try to find the other lonely people and help each other hold it together. If it’s because you’re just “over it” – that’s ok. You have no real obligations other than the ones you place on yourself. (You might think other people are placing them on you, but you can tell them to shove it. Hell, maybe you’ve already done that, which might have been what led to the loneliness. If that’s the case, then you still probably did the right thing for yourself because boundaries are important.)

    My holiday stressors are much more mundane – as soon as Thanksgiving is over, the “Christmas to-do list” starts. I have to buy all the gifts. I have to buy, write, and mail the cards. (I didn’t do that this year.) I have to get stuff for the work holiday party. I have to get stuff for my friends’ party. I have to have the money to do all of these things. I have to have the time to do all of these things, while still otherwise maintaining a day-to-day life. (As an aside, I feel like everyone else “does” more stuff than I do, but they also still have more free time, too? I don’t know how that works, and it’s probably just either my perception or they’re spending more time and effort on looking like they have it together…)

    But the gifts are purchased, and the work party has happened, and the friends’ party is in a couple of hours, and I have just one more work day (at least before Christmas; I don’t take off the week between Christmas and New Year’s), and so the stressful part of the holiday is in the past. On Thursday, the gifts will be exchanged, and then the “oh, I guess that’s it, then” feelings will hit, and then it’s right back to… whatever it is. Back to jobs we don’t like that don’t pay enough. Back to a world that gives you something to be outraged about every single day, but doesn’t give you any time to really feel that outrage, both because of the aforementioned job(s) and because the next day brings something new.

    It does feel like this year is possibly the least “Christmassy” it’s felt in a long time. I don’t know if it’s the political atmosphere (which blows) or the economy (which certainly makes spending a bunch of money on other people feel less good than it usually does), or just getting older (and everyone in my family getting older) making us all just want to spend less time on this stuff. Another theory I have is that, with “Christmas season” expanding more and more into the rest of the year, all the cheer and whatnot kind of gets diluted and there isn’t any left when the actual holiday rolls around.

    But with all that said… it’s fine? There’s still something “nice” about the holidays, sort of capping off the year and letting us all reflect and reset and prepare for another one. I’ll make another post soon sort of “wrapping up” 2025 and then another laying out 2026. (Spoiler alert: just as setting up this page was a sort of “resolution” for 2025, I’ll have another for 2026 to actually use it more. Maybe as frequently as weekly? Weekly is tough, because I don’t know that I really have that much to talk about. We’ll see.)