21 Short Paragraphs On 2025
Finishing the year by finishing a piece of writing
“About 1600 words or so and abandoned” best describes the vast majority of my writing this year. To fight this trend, I will give you a maximum of 5 sentences about 21 topics related to this year, going until I run out of ideas:
2025
2025 was the hardest, best, and 30th year of my life, in rough order. I am somewhere between fulfilled, simply filled, simply full, and far too fully filled. I have experienced 2025 as if from a car traveling ~90 miles per hour, though whether I’ve been at the wheel, riding shotgun, or tied up in the trunk has wavered.
Music in 2025
My favorite song from this year was “To the Grave” by Public Circuit. My favorite album from this year was Welcome to My Blue Sky by Momma. The songs that I listened to the most were “Revelation” by the Pianoman and “Choose” by Color Me Badd, as they are anchor tracks on the playlist I listen to when I take showers. Apple Music told me that my most listened-to artist this year, at 43 minutes total, was Moby. This is non-coincidentally the length of his Ambient album, which I listened to once at work during the summer.
Sporting Kansas City
This was an ennui-laden year for my preferred sports team. By finally cutting ties with Peter Vermes, Sporting Kansas City has at least chosen uncharted waters over the highly-charted, swampy, miserable waters we’ve come to know too well in the 2020s. I feel this sort of dormant pressure within me yearning to explode out; I want to love this team to death again so, so badly, but they are just hopeless. In the meantime, I retreat to streams of Comets games on YouTube.
Sudoku
One of my coworkers accidentally printed too many sudoku pages for her students and handed one to me one afternoon back in February. This began a sort of half-minded obsession. Living out one of the scant few masculine traits I was fortunate enough to be gifted, I immediately opted for books full of puzzles well outside of my skill-range, which require the knowledge of advanced tactics that I know I will not be taking the time to learn. I know this because I found a kindly old man on YouTube willing to teach them for free in a 50+ video-long playlist that I balked at. I now possess a copy of “Absolutely Nasty Sudoku Volume 3” with about a third of the puzzles completed.
Concerts in 2025
The two concerts I most enjoyed attending evoked the most embarassingly saccharine emotions from me, which is why I stashed this after the self-effacing Sudoku paragraph. In November, I saw The Beths for the fourth time, though the first time in Kansas City, and found myself sobbing through most of it, basically any time that I remembered the fact that I was nearing the end of 2025, primarily through Expert In a Dying Field. In August, I saw Oasis in Chicago for the first and probably only time, feeling the incredible power of sharing a voice with 70,000-odd other people during Champagne Supernova.
The 2025 Kansas Jayhawks of Intercollegiate American Football
In an earlier time, my enjoyment of low brass instruments and other people had me obligated to spend 60 football minutes watching games that were lost in about 10 football minutes. I now voluntarily spend 60 football minutes watching games that are lost in about 58. The current moment feels worse, but I can’t tell if its the fact that I do it willingly, the fact that the team spends ~48 football minutes more to arrive at the same conclusion that they used to find so much more efficiently, the lack of low brass instruments, or the fact that I am 30 now and was 20 back then that makes it worse.
Places I Went in 2025
Brooklyn Park, Minnesota in March for a writing centers conference, which had some of the most genuinely friendly and intelligent people I have ever met, along with a disturbingly large HyVee. Buffalo, New York, which is really quite a nice town, even if I left my Lemuria album in the trunk of my friend’s car. St. Paul, MN, the downtown of which was under construction, prompting me to take rail replacement to a soccer match, something I used to dream about when reading that Chuck Culpepper book about becoming a Portsmouth FC fan. Chicago, Illinois, which I recommend experiencing from our vantage point in a hotel next to a Hooters by the airport. Cincinnati, Ohio, whose huge downtown fountain was not spraying water but instead getting sprayed with water from a power-washer as I ate Chipotle with a very nice person from Arizona, who a TV reporter tried to interview about the upcoming Sheriff election.
Writing
I hit several personal writing peaks this year that you either could not have seen or were shown inadequately, dear readerI’ll have an article published in an academic journal early next year, I had a story published in print in a literary journal, I completed a 2000+ page editing project for my job, and received very positive feedback on two very personal essays in a writing class at my local arts center. My favorite piece that I published online received something like five total views, because I barely promoted it, but if you’d like to read the fruits of a fugue-state reached on a Southwest Airlines flight in May, it is here. I intend to publish a zine in 2026 with my writing, as I’m more interested in physical/printed dissemination than web dissemination now.
What I am Proud Of
I was able to stop a sink in the bathroom at my office building from flooding. I hacked a coaxial cable and an unused TV antenna into an FM antenna for a Hi-FI system with a pair of scissors. I have about 30 people or so show up to the trivia show I host every other week. Several people at conferences that I’ve attended have complimented my work.
Trivia
I took over the reins of the bar trivia after my friend Nick suddenly died in the Spring. It is an incredible privilege to do this, and it’s a lot of fun. Above all else, I hope I’m doing well by him. The laughter we share in that room is like nothing else, and I’m so fortunate to be able to carry that along.
Literature
My favorite book that I read in 2025 was Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, whose work I turn to during down times because she puts her protagonists through such pale and unique sadnesses, making my standard “romantic loneliness” sadness seem fairly minor in comparison. My favorite book published this year was The Mind Reels by Fredrik Deboer, which is maybe the best literary depiction of a psychotic episode that I have ever encountered. I also enjoyed Forward Progress by Bill Connelly, Ghosting by Dominic Pettman, One of the Boys by Victoria Zeller, Hell is a World Without You by Jason Kirk, and the Minesweeper retrospective that Kyle Orland wrote for Boss Fight Books.
The Lows
Panic attack in a warehouse discount store in Alexandria, MN in late July. Hyperventilating from panic to the point of a full-body cramp in a rainstorm at a Southern Illinois rest stop in October. Sleepless and anxious at the prospect of crossing the Canadian border again in March, ultimately deciding to stay behind while my friends went out to Niagara Falls. Being unable to blunt the effect of this here in December because I can’t think of a funny one to end on.
Tics
In early June, during the 2000+ page editing project aforementioned, I started exhibiting tics in the form of eyelid twitching more frequently, more violently, and over a longer sustained period of time than ever before. I ticced incessantly throughout June and July, the worst fits of which left me with deep purple circles and root systems of wrinkle-lines beneath them. Ticcing itself is not unknown to me, I’ve done some form of ticcing, normally in the form of abdominal flexing or tensing that tendon between the clavicle and jaw, the name of which I forget, since youth, but this degree of facially-centered ticcing was abnormal and really fucking annoying, to put it bluntly. They slowed down in early November, finally. I sincerely appreciate the lack of ridicule I received for it from friends, family, and even strangers alike.
Two Quotes by my friend Susie
“We live our lives” - My friend Susie
“You have to take the good times with you” - My friend Susie
Soccer, Generally
As much as I didn’t want for Inter Miami to win the MLS Cup final while watching the final, during the week leading up to the final, during their demolition of New York City, during their demolition of Cincinnati, during their demolition of Nashville, or at any point during the regular season, I softened to the prospect of it while watching the emotional outpouring from Jordi Alba and Sergio Busquets after the match finished. Nothing makes a man in his thirties feel low like watching some men, those he’d apparently let himself mentally flatten into joyless mercenaries with all of the depth of Captain Planet villains, break into tears at the prospect of winning a trophy that most soccer fans around the globe sneer at. I would like to be more plugged into MLS next year, I fell off of it a little bit this year due to the fact that my team was so bad.
Minor External Annoyances
That the road construction in my town is now actively happening on the streets that I use on a daily basis where it used to only be on the roads out west that I don’t use on a daily basis. Incessant sports gambling ads on TV and incessant AI-generated images and videos online. The husks of years-stale internet meme terms and phrases that still get used as if they’re as novel and clever as they were six years ago. The use of the word “deeply” when “very” or “really” would serve just as well, and in most cases would serve better when the speaker intends to convey intensity and not complexity.
Minor Internal Annoyances
How when I’m speaking, I start sentences with a definitive statement and follow it with “especially because...” way too often. That I overbook myself and then complain about how I’m overbooked. How little I write for fun now. That I keep buying books and not reading them, knowing fully well that I will be moving out of my house later this year.
The Film
The new year’s resolution that I set for myself in 2025 was to complete a documentary film of some kind, and I’m on track to do so! It’s entitled “25 for 2025” and it comes in two versions: The short version, which is 25 minutes in length, consists of 4.1 seconds from each day of the year. The long version, which is around two and a half hours in length, consists of 25 seconds from each day of the year. I’ll upload the short version online in early January and will screen it for friends at my house, in all likelihood. It’s nothing world-shattering, but it will be completed, which is more than I can say for most of the films I set out to create.
Five Clips Used in the Film
The Wind, the Sun
I play through Castlevania: Symphony of the Night as a sort of bookmark at the end of each year, and try to adapt something about the experience to my understanding of my life (I wrote about last year’s experience here). This year’s playthrough was astonishingly easy, given that I sort of broke the progression system early on by purchasing the Damascus Sword from the Librarian only about an hour and a half in (which is something like the fifth strongest sword in the entire game), then grinding my way through the Underground Caverns and Catacombs because I forgot I could buy the relic that unseals the blue doors first, which left me over-leveled and abnormally powerful in attack for basically the entire game. These aspects left the whole playthrough atypically easy, and the fact that I’d spent the month prior wrestling with SOTN’s frustrating (and far less charming) sequel, Circle of the Moon, left the whole playthrough to feel very smooth (every time that I died felt fair and reasonable). The questions that I pose myself for 2026 is this: What is my Damascus Sword and where are my catacombs? What decisions can I make early in my processes that leave them to feel easier and smoother in the late-going?
Next Year
I spent too much of 2025 feeling half-in and half-out of life. I want to engross myself in more of it. I intend to do this through deep reading, seeing movies in theaters, attending sporting events, and going to plays. I know this will sound twee for a thirty year-old man to say, but I want to be moved to tears more often.