Year Theme

My theme for 2026 is the Year of Books. The general gist is that I want to devote more time and attention to books. Reading books, writing books, discussing and sharing books with others. This is not a resolution to "read 100 books this year" or anything like that, but rather a North Star to guide me towards a more intentional and mindful use of my time on things I believe will make me happier and smarter.

To this end, I have made an effort to read more books—as contrasted with social media posts, blog posts, news articles, etc. I just finished the fourth and final book of the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer. These books are interesting but very hard to recommend—you probably have to be exactly the kind of interdisciplinary sci-fi and humanities sicko that I happen to be to be willing to slog through all 3,000-odd pages of this series. But if you are that kind of sicko, you may find the investment well worth it.

In the spirit of the Year of Books, I consider things to be books that aren't literally books. For instance, music albums (as contrasted with individual songs) are books. To this end I have listened to the entire Beatles discography available on Spotify, and now moved on to the post-Beatles albums of the various Beatles members. I'm enjoying it and learning a lot. One thing I've concluded is that the Beatles were definitely greater than the sum of their parts. Once I finish the Beatles maybe I'll do the Rolling Stones. And then maybe Eminem.

By the same token, movies are books. I have gotten a lot of flak from people over the years for being movie-illiterate and am now undertaking to rectify that. I watched three movies in January—Parasite, Sinners, and The Platform. The first two were truly great and the third was almost great but didn't stick the landing.

A Vintage Winter

It is cold as all get out here in Somerville, Massachusetts. We got almost two feet of snow in a storm the other week, which has piled up everywhere and hardly melted at all due to ongoing sub-freezing temperatures. I have a general policy of leaving the house every day no matter what, and I've found this rule to be even more important when the weather is adverse. It has been fun and interesting to re-learn how to navigate familiar sidewalks where my usual desire paths and shortcuts are walled off by five-foot snowbanks.

Grad School

In December I applied for a bunch of MFA programs in creative fiction writing. Results will be out by mid-March. Barring rejection across the board I plan to leave Somerville and move somewhere for grad school in the fall.

Cooking

The last few months have seen an unexpected breakthrough in cooking for myself. As a single person I have historically found "meal planning" difficult and uneconomical, but dumbing it way down and honing in on a few basic meals I'm happy to eat on repeat has made things way easier. One such breakthrough came via a friend, who turned me onto his "one-pan meal" concept—basically like you put a salmon filet and vegetables on a pan in the oven at 400º for 20 minutes and then you get a full delicious healthy meal with potential for exactly one serving of leftovers; this can be done with a huge variety of vegetables as well as certain other proteins, though salmon seems to get the best results. A different, more winter-coded food solution has been chili. I make a bomb turkey chili and one chili cooking event can solve lunch for like two weeks easy. Serve with a dollop of fat-free Greek yogurt to balance the salt and acid.

Health

I kept waking up at like 3:00 AM in a cold sweat any time I ate ice cream, and in an effort to figure out why I wore a Lingo blood glucose monitor for two weeks. I learned basically nothing—or, rather, learned that my blood glucose does not seem to be my problem. It goes up a lot when I eat fruits and sweets, a little when I exercise, and otherwise hovers around low-normal, including when I sleep. The experience has been very reminiscent of going to my doctor with various complaints and being told that I'm in perfect health. I suppose the solution is just to eat less ice cream and not worry about trying to understand stuff.

In an effort to stop general overeating I started taking semaglutide courtesy of the Hims corporation. My results so far have been fairly mid. Maybe it's because I'm using a compounded product instead of the genuine article, but this stuff does not strike me as the miracle drug pop culture makes it out to be. It definitely has an effect on digestion and appetite. But I have not experienced anything resembling a cessation of "food noise," or the widely-advertised "effortless" weight loss. Nevertheless, I still have a bunch left to take, check back in three months, maybe things will change.

Conversely on the overeating/weight loss front, I have found that intermittent fasting works much better for my brain than any sort of portion control or elimination diet (or injectable drug). It seems that my issues with overeating are primarily mental—once I start eating, I can't really make myself stop until I'm totally full. But once I'm totally full and do stop, I can stay stopped pretty much indefinitely; moreover, using a specific schedule to manage that has been promising for helping reduce how much I eat overall. More saliently, IF hugely reduces how much stress and guilt I feel about overeating, since I have taken decisions about food out of my own hands—it's not that I have to somehow have a smaller, healthier dinner; it's just that I have to stop eating entirely after dinner is done (which should be before like 6:00 PM). Also, fasting somehow leaves me feeling way better physically, which seems notable.

Exercise

I've been doing hella yoga since September. There's a studio five minutes up the street from me and going there 3-4 mornings per week (and always on Sundays) has become integral to my life rhythm. No one who knows me would tell you that I'm super flexible, but I've been improving a lot, and also getting way better at balance. I actually just did my first-ever successful bird of paradise yesterday—I couldn't quite extend the leg straight but I got the bind and stood up which was a crazy new sensation. High key a big part of the fun of yoga for me is experiencing new sensations and body positions; it makes me feel like a little kid again when the whole world was new.

I also started going to personal training because I want to get back into weight lifting. We're focusing on legs because yoga doesn't do much for them and I tend to neglect them when training on my own due to an old knee injury. I think the weather has been a much bigger obstacle to my weight lifting consistency than anything else, so hopefully as spring comes I can get to the gym more.

Mental Health

In late November 2025 I started taking vilazodone, a new-ish SSRI that has completely cured my depression and social anxiety with no perceptible side effects. This is something I hope to write about more in the future as my thoughts on it are not fully formed, but to put it briefly, the experience of suddenly having the biggest problems in my life that I feel have been holding me back forever suddenly just go away has led to a weird feeling of shock and grief—that I didn't do this sooner, that others who are suffering cannot also experience such a seemingly simple and perfect solution to their problem. I hope that everyone who struggles with their mental health will hang in there and continue to work on different treatments and solutions. It took me years and years to find this one, and now aged 34 I feel like I'm starting my life anew. Better late than never.

Dungeons & Dragons

I am having a blast DMing my Wild West 5E campaign. We had our first character death during probably the best combat encounter I've ever run, while a second character got a new body following some hijinks with a mummy, and a third has fallen thrall to an ancient magma kraken. After spending six IRL months on two in-game days, we've moved on from a major settlement to a new, wilder part of the overworld—most recently a Grand Canyon-type biome. In the background, a potentially apocalyptic Plague of Silence is spreading, and the players keep collecting more and more clues about an unseen war ongoing between the giants who built the world. To find out if these two things are related, they continue to pursue an infamous outlaw, who seems to have been the Plague's patient zero.