january haze

I feel it floating over me

2024 is (was?) a year that refuses a neat bow; at least, that’s what I am telling myself, because it's a week into 2025 and I find myself resisting reflecting and setting goals. Usually I have my planner all written out, my goals inked, habits tracked before the ball drops - not so this year. And I am weirdly okay with that?

January feels especially murky this year, but not in a swampy way - more like winter twilight where the sun bursts out right as it sets, or the liminal breath between sleeping and waking. Perhaps misty is a better word, or hazy. I feel this literally on long pitch-black wanders through the foggy neighborhood hills, floating along the marine layer with the glowing street lights, anything beyond the next block obscured in sparkling mist. It’s not a bad feeling, to be drifting gently through haze. It’s cozy once you embrace the dreaminess, the slow pace. Rather than trying to force clarity, I am trusting that the good bits will rise to the surface, a slow fade in, materializing before me when the time is right, a benevolent Florida fog phantom.

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good things on the internet

• this week’s long read - Will Tavlin on the demise of non-casual viewing 🎥

• this 🕺

  

  @b_daddy_dancerIn the summer of 1981 we were listening to this #RnB

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currently reading

• Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin: I am loving this foray into fantastical interplanetary travel, a spiritual sequel to Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin is an anthropologist of her imagination armed with an absurdist sensibility and rich writing, and I am here for it.

• Grand Union by Zadie Smith: Short stories are perfect reading material for short days.

• Mad Wife by Kate Hamilton:

Perhaps women are beginning to wake from the trance of male entitlement, which our culture encodes as romantic love and experts accept as integral to healthy marriages. Waking up can be slow and disorienting. I spent much of my fifteen - year marriage bound to my husband by our shared conviction that his entitlement to female caretaking mattered more than my own happiness, desires, or pain.

this week’s jam

photo of my cats

Image description: Muir’s head & front paws and Kerouac’s tail stick out of the ends of a shark tunnel toy, so it looks like one realllllyyyyyyy long cat but it’s not.