Now

This is a now page inspired by Derek Sivers and others. I made it so that instead of reading my posts on social media you can read this page instead.

Last updated Mar 7, 2025.

Life

I continue to reside in America’s most pleasant and cheerful walkable community in beautiful Somerville, Massachusetts (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️). The neighborhood is steadily gentrifying and rents are going up, but I intend to hang on here for as long as I can because it’s just so danged nice. We even have off-street parking!

The theme of the past few months has been simplifying and streamlining my life.

My hair was down to shoulders but I cut it in October. I also shaved my beard. The reduction in hair and beard care labor has been a huge relief, a literal weight lifted from my face that has just made me feel so much better.

I have been getting rid of clutter from my house (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) and documenting the project on my Substack. You can follow my progress here.

I had been lifting weights 3x weekly for much of the past year but my results were pretty disappointing. Then, in January, I noticed that my mood was way better on days I worked out. I also noticed that the fittest guys I know all work out daily (or at least every weekday), so I decided to do that, too. My results have improved significantly since making this change. Mentally, my mood is more stable with consistent exercise, while as someone with ADHD I benefit psychologically from my schedule being the same each weekday. Physically, I’m seeing better results in terms of strength, balance, energy, and physique, though I still have a long way to go to reach my goals. Relatedly, I recently started using my gym’s sauna post-workout (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️).

Last month I started taking buspirone (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️), a non-SSRI medication for generalized anxiety disorder. I’ve tried various psychiatric drugs for anxiety before but nothing ever helped. Buspirone, in contrast, works. Pretty much immediately, I felt as if a wall of static that has stood between me and my own thoughts and feelings for my entire life just crumbled, and suddenly I am in touch with an entirely new world where everything makes so much more sense. It is profound in a way that defies brief summary. I don’t wish to overshare, but I did want to post about this here just to tell anyone reading: if you having mental health difficulties, and haven’t found a treatment that works for you, don’t give up. I was living with this frankly debilitating issue for my entire life without even realizing it and just got my first effective treatment for it at age 33. It’s never too late to try and improve your mental health.

Work

In October we completely finished the manuscript of the China memoir (which is why I finally allowed myself to cut my hair). We spent some time after that cold querying agents who represent memoir authors, but frankly found that process pretty painful. We then narrowed our focus just to the agents who represented our comps, and the process started to make a lot more sense. Most notably, one agent we corresponded with gave us some really useful feedback that helped us better understand the shape of the market and led us to revise our proposal quite substantially. I remain hopeful that we can get this book published and bring it to an appreciative audience. However, I have paused actively working on it while we wait for agent responses, which has been a huge relief (see above point about simplification and streamlining).

Since stepping back from the memoir query process, I have been editing my fantasy novel. I am trying to work consistently and quickly because otherwise the story slides out of my brain and I become less efficient at fixing it. I queried an agent I met at Boskone (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) last month and received a really detailed rejection. This threw me off a bit, but after reflecting at length, I concluded that some of the feedback is legit and useful and the rest is just a matter of taste. For example, he told me he doesn’t like prologues and I should just drop mine entirely. That’s just silly and would make my overall story way less satisfying. He wouldn’t know that, becauase he only read the first 30 pages. Anyway, my conclusion is that I just need to see my artistic vision through, and then it will just be a matter of finding an agent who appreciates what my book is trying to do.

I continue my part-time work with students from China. The college app season was busy, but now that it’s over we’re in a bit of a lull where the projects are fewer and smaller and more individualized. I’m grateful to have this gig because it lets me spend most of my time focused on my writing and my health, although meetings that run until 9 or 10pm on weeknights are not entirely in keeping with my efforts to simplify and streamline.

Reading

I recently finished 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. This book defies my star rating system. It is, simply put, the best novel I have ever read. It has redefined what I think contemporary “literary fiction” is all about (granted this book came out 20 years ago). Everyone should read this book.

Inspired by my experience reading 2666, I am currently reading The Savage Detectives. It absolutely sings in its own wonderful way, but you can definitely feel that it’s by a younger and slightly less masterful Bolaño. I would actually say it is very reminiscent of Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling, which I read and praised highly last year. Discovering more literary fiction I enjoy over the past two years has really heightened my appetite for writing stories about the real world, in addition to fantasy.

Watching

I don’t watch many movies but I saw Wicked in theaters and it was truly, truly great.

I am getting extremely hype for baseball season. I feel strongly that the Red Sox were better than their record showed last year and they got MUCH better this offseason.

Dune: Prophecy was fine. Extremely into the worldbuilding, less thrilled about the story. The climactic confrontation between Valya and Desmond Hart was the killer Dune shit I came for, though.

Andor season 2 is coming and you can bet your ass I will be watching that.

I have cut myself off from YouTube because I find that I cannot limit my consumption and it tends to take over my life. This is a pity but I think ultimately the correct choice for my health and wellbeing.

Listening

I got back into audiobooks and listened to some good ones in the past 6 months. I can strongly recommend Red Plenty (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) and The Body Keeps The Score (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️). I’m currently listening to Capital in the Twenty-first Century.

I added some good new podcasts since my last update: Batting Around, If Books Could Kill, and Election Profit Makers. All of these shows are ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. I was listening to Ezra Klein religiously for months leading up to the election but haven’t been able to stomach it since.

The very best podcast out there continues to be A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, which everyone in the world should be listening to.

I am saddened to report that Book Fight, the podcast I have been continuously listening to for the longest (since 2015!), is ending. They are currently doing their final season, focusing—fittingly—on endings.

Playing

I joined a poker night with some friends in December and found that I REALLY enjoy Texas Hold ‘Em (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️). The stakes are super low, $10 buy-in, but I’m enamored by the gameplay and have been taking time outside our monthly game to learn basic strategy and improve my play.

I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I started playing Slay the Spire (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) again in December and became hopelessly addicted. I have now enlisted a friend to manage the parental controls on my Switch so I can only play one hour a day, because otherwise Spire is all I would do and my bladder would burst and I’d starve. Unsurprisingly (because this also happened for Elden Ring), the thing that really elevated the experience of this game for me was watching pros play on YouTube and learning how the game works and how to actually play well myself. Now that I’m capable of winning more than 10% of my runs (closer to 40% if I actually take my time and do math), I’m climbing the ascensions with Ironclad (currently A9) and aim to keep going at least until I unlock A20 for all characters.

I continue to run two D&D campaigns. My longer-running game is a homebrew 5E campaign called Castle Zania which is just a straight-ahead “Solve the mystery of this cursed castle” adventure. This campaign is expected to wrap up in just a couple more sessions, which is extremely hype, if bittersweet. Next sesh the PCs are going to fight a literal storm, and if they survive that, the BBEG awaits.

My other campaign, Cascadia Trail, has a pioneer/Western theme with an open-ended story in a vast world. We all wear cowboy hats while playing. The accents are immaculate. The PCs are currently on the trail of an outlaw gang whose leader may or may not be infected with a world-ending virus. The most recent quest involved the PCs racing against time to return some books to a library in a ghost town (that is, a literal town of ghosts), lest they forfeit their souls.