2025 in rearview

we are gathered here today, as we so gather at the close of every year, to bury the bitch.

it is challenging to balance the wonder and beauty of the things that went right this year against the massive, staggering weight of having been alive through it all. on this most auspicious and arbitrary of occasions, we shall endeavour together to reach a consensus on the quality and market value of the bygone year. gold stars will be awarded. demerits will be harshly delivered. vonnegutian "so it goes"-es will be shrugged out like parking tickets from a simultaneously inattentive and self-important traffic cop. sentences will run on. reader, there will be swears.

are we sitting comfortably? & cetera & cetera.

well, where to start? i got married! so that's something. justin and i did not think we would do for about the first five years of our relationship, on account of financial circumstances. we got some more information on the transitive property of school and medical debts and around the middle of the year, which suddenly made the whole thing seem a possibility, though we still held our own ideas on the ethics and politics of marriage as an institution. then november rolled around, and our ability to marry seemed to be at risk again at the same time as my ability to pay for my health insurance was yoinked away. fuck you, fascist republican hatemongers! fuck you, feckless liberal collaborators! and thank you both for making us get married.

i love my husband, and for the last month i've been enjoying thinking up powerful sentences i could say that would have been way less effective before we were married. things like "put it on my husband's card," or "my husband was on that plane!" i think the best one i've come up with is still "don't you know my husband is unwell!?" but we'll have plenty of time to think of more, weather permitting. in 2026 we intend to have a less governmental and more familial ceremony, with friends and vows and tall cakes and all that, but for the moment it's just pleasant to be together. ten gold stars for being married, eight demerits for the circumstances which made us get married. so it goes.

it has been a very mixed bag on the work front, which is a diplomatic way of saying that i was unemployed and burning savings like the little match girl until september, and the part-time library job i finally got hold of at that time has been the source of just enough money to scrape by and some genuine distress (alongside, on balance, some lovely work acquaintances and a relative sense of consistency) in the months since. i have never been the type to find great meaning or identity in work, but it is a good change of pace to have things to do and places to go.

i spent most of my joblessness (which i am deciding to refer to as The Wilderness Months) doing laundry and cleaning up around the apartment in a way we had definitely been neglecting the last couple years. i poured most of my creative juice into the dungeons and dragons campaign i run, with very occasional splashes into cups labeled "polymer clay time!" and "perhaps a painting? maybe?" and i'm sure i spilled a bit onto the carpet somewhere. most of my energy this year has been focused on surviving. attached herein are the two paintings i actually finished in 2025, as well as some wallace and gromit figurines i made because i will hang on to childhood whimsy and wonder with my teeth if i have to (and i do have to, i'm still teething).

the library i would broadly consider a return to form for a day job, if not for the massive push for censorship that library leadership has recently capitulated to. it has been generally unfun enough being a nonbinary person in texas, usa in hell-year 2025 without your employer deciding that your specific identity is a threat enough to their community that all related information should be segregated to the furthest corner of the building lest a child stumble upon it and be irreparably harmed. it is deeply painful to see the mission of a library compromised, particularly in response to a person running for a political office which does not hold editorial power or influence over the collection, and it is frustrating and frightening to feel that my job is at risk because at any moment someone might believe that i am a danger to children and "polite society." i need not get into it further here. one gold star for relative financial stability, and i suppose one more for having had the opportunity to broadly recover from the burnout of last year. ten fucking demerits for the rest of it.

shit, i dunno. music has been pretty good this year! lots of great new albums, and justin and i were able to see way more live music in 2025 than i have basically any other year of my life. the kooks were fun, even though my sister got sick and had to miss them. PUP kicked ass, wolf alice was incredible, quinnie was beautiful and intimate, and marina put on a hell of a show even though her last album was really not for me. i hadn't listened to a ton of purity ring before, but i was really impressed by them too. and the openers were all quite good too! one gold star for each of those; what is that, six? cool!

my grandmother died two weeks ago. she lived just around the corner throughout my childhood and i can't remember the last time i really talked to her. probably just before i moved away from idaho. i feel like a terrible grandchild. so it goes. my niece and nephew are six and almost four now, and i have barely been a part of their life since we moved. i don't know how i could possibly quantify those things in demerits. so it goes.

as i type this, my cat charlie has just scratched the back of my hand and drawn blood. maybe he thought i was being a bit melodramatic, or more likely he just wanted attention. point taken, chuck! one gold star for he is cute, one demerit for he is a terrible bully sometimes. one bandage applied.

i did get to see family a couple of times this year, and in some really beautiful places. i have been known to wax poetic about the sea, and as such i will do my best not to spend too much time doing that here, but our summer trips out to the oregon coast and the sf bay area kept me going. i never realise how much i have missed mountains and pine needles and the slow crawl of fog until i am back with them. it's always wonderful to be back in oregon, and it was really lovely to finally meet justin's extended family in marin and explore san francisco for the first time (even if i did get a pretty dreadful sunburn on the beach). the city itself i found sort of sedated in a way i wasn't expecting, but the pockets of history and culture that still poked out through the closing fist of the tech industry were exciting and enriching. it's been noticed many times before, but the light in california has a very specific quality that is hard to describe.

i feel like i can breathe easier when i'm away from texas, and only partially because of the difference in temperature and humidity. i felt good, and i did not take enough photos. i try to live in the moment as fully as i can when i am on vacation or at an event, which is the half-sufficient excuse i give to myself for never taking enough photos. when we weren't eating or exploring or telling stories i spent a lot of time watching the wind rustle through the branches of trees, or the swell and gleam of the waves, the way passing cloud cover seems to flatten their grey-green surface into a silken sheet.

okay. that's enough about the ocean. we will let the poeticism wane, now. five gold stars. one quarter demerit for the sunburn.

let's see, let's see... surely there was more good. i did read several great books this year! i went to a renaissance faire for the first time! i shopped at ikea three or maybe four times! andor season 2! blue prince! tillamook cheese! i even occasionally had a nice time on the internet! are there gold stars there? probably! but damn, things have been heavy. that's demerits galore.

i do not know quite what to expect from next year, but then i think i still haven't wrapped my mind around everything that happened in 2025. i can't truly measure the good against the bad, even with my flawlessly developed and thoroughly play-tested system of gold stars and demerits. there was an awful lot of bad. the good shone in brilliant flashes through the murk. so it goes. it feels foolish of me to expect things to get better, but then it also feels foolish to think it could only get worse.

on to goals, then. in 2026, we intend to move out of texas, weather permitting! there are many potential paths ahead of us, the brightest of which go by way of surprise multimillion dollar inheritances and/or technical/medical/artistic breakthroughs, the darkest by legal exile and/or hopping freight trains with our worldly belongings in gunny sacks tied on sticks. it is sensible, i think, to expect a path somewhere in the middle.

my love to all of you in the new year, and a massive thank you to the people whose presence and support and effort have kept me afloat. onward ho!

FINAL COUNT

gold stars: innumerable

demerits: somehow even less numerable? (does that mean more or less?)

market value (used, decent condition): roughly three standard months, or best offer