December 2024 Month In Review.

Hello. Hello again.

I was going to call this “Sick, Sick, Sick” and because wordplay! But nobody wants to end their year wading through thick puddles of my half-baked cleverness. So let’s just get on with it.

I am ready to ball December 2024 up like a fitted sheet and shove it in my linen closet. Because I’m not a heathen, I’ll toss a nice sachet in there so if I ever have to pull it out for guests, wrinkled and snarling (the month, not the guests, but maybe the guests also?) it will smell like lavender.

Electric blankets are more my thing, anyway. Wrap me up. Keep me warm. Make me the human equivalent of a Pop Tart.

So, do I need to wrap up the year?

No.

Will I though?

Also no.

But if you need closure, here’s 2024 in five syllables:

Howlers
Abounded

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Moving on.

End of December. We rest. We winter (Katherine May knows what’s up). We stretch through this dead time between Christmas and New Year’s when no one knows what day it is and our diet is mainly appetizers.

The lead-up to this moment was, of course, chaos: finals, concerts, snow, mourning, trying to be in all the places we had to be, or maybe needed to be, and probably (definitely) didn’t want to be. Getting there prepared and on time on top of it all.

Which is to say: I’m tired.
Which is to say: I got very sick this month.

Because, in this urgency culture we glorify (seriously, stop doing that), guess who was so busy her flu vaccine fell through the cracks? STOP GUESSING, IT WAS ME. Enter: Influenza A. Cue misery and disruption. The flu invited a friend to crash the party. (Seriously, stop doing that).

New, terrifying eye floaters.

Google searches. Dreaded warning: CALL A DOCTOR OR GO TO THE ER. RETINAL DETACHMENT! OR MAYBE TINY COYOTES EATING YOUR EYE GOO LIKE PUDDING. ONE OF THOSE.

I called the eye doctor. He told me — using a lot more words than I needed after he told me he couldn’t help — to go directly to a retinal specialist, who tested me in part by shining bright lines into my dilated eyeballs. He then gave me another very wordy explanation for my ocular migraine.

The flu probably triggered the migraine.

Also triggered? My face eczema. Because clearly, what I needed during all this was to feel EVEN PRETTIER. Cue lotions, ointments, and salves. I felt like Neo emerging from the Matrix — only without Keanu Reeves or any cinematic allure whatsoever.

It passed.

(This isn’t the kind of story I want attached to my legacy, but we don’t always get to choose these things. To paraphrase someone wiser than me: I don’t want you to think I’m an idiot, but I keep giving you reasons to consider it.)

(Also, why are my eye doctors so verbose?)

Anyway, this now-healthy, slow, delicious time is a symphony of sugar and flour and fats and savory brown foods reminding us who we are when the world isn’t trying to set us on fire.

We turn NOW into NO and take the W.

Sorry. I just shoved you into a thick puddle of my half-baked cleverness. Grab my hand, I’ll get you out of there.

Wonderlands don’t need to cover acres. They don’t need castles or white rabbits or maps with riddles layered in mystery. They just need time to stop. Done. Wonderland achieved.

And while I’m here and not living in a panicky immediate, let’s take a second and talk 2025.

Goals:

1. Let my inner weirdo become my outer weirdo.
2. Find more wonderlands: Big cushions, warm chairs, fireplaces, and someone patting the seat next to them like, “Come. Sit. Stay a while.”
3. Work the phrase “Everything went tits up” into more conversations.
4. Be like my dog: Long walks, bursts of speed toward nothing, naps in the sun, and flappies (scientific term) to clear my head.
5. Read more. Write more. Read better. Write better.
6. I used to tell stories here. Real ones. Small ones. Messy, absurd ones. Somewhere along the way, I got stuck in broad magician-off-the-strip tellings. No more. Back to real ones with all tits-up moments.
7. Schedule my damn flu shot. (No more tiny coyotes eating my eye goo.)
8. Play. Please join in. And if you don’t feel like playing? That’s okay. There are lots of cozy seats ‘round these parts. Feel free to plop down and exhale. Save me a spot.

Here are some splashes of marvelous from December, 2024

• Tylenol & Ibuprofen, my MVPs of December.
• This makes me want to stomp around the living room like a goblin with excellent rhythm.
• These things:

• Conclave. Power struggles? Stanley Tucci in a Vatican drama? Twist ending? I say yes, yes, and yes again.
• I am not timely nor do I care. Sometimes, you just need a high-functioning sociopath with a penchant for good deeds to remind you that bad guys can be outsmarted. Do your research!
• Cross. If this doesn’t catapult Aldis Hodge, Samantha Walkes, and Isaiah Mustafa into super-DUPER-stardom, I will personally riot.
• Once a year, we dress up fancy and go out for steak and gruyere scalloped potatoes, measuring time by how few leftovers we bring home. (This year, practically none.) We laughed, we ate, and we unraveled the mysteries of life — like why a bread basket feels like pure magic, whether the Bears will ever resemble even adulterated magic, and boring things like the stock market. The evening offered glimpses through the veil of time — tiny windows into the future and brilliant flashes of the past. I hope we do this forever. How lucky I am. 
• “We’ll float between two worlds…until everyone we love is safe.”
• Here’s some perfection for you. 
• Grace Paley is an author I keep promising to revisit. Coming across this gem reminds me to get to it. Life is short. 
• The Only Emperor is a grand poem if only because author David Shapiro speaks directly to me in the first line.
• I appreciate the NYT giving me a head start on my “what do I read next” anxiety. These looked interesting. (Here’s a link for you to make your own list.)

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Thank you for being here with me. I hope 2025 is the love story you need: warm, weird, and wonderfully uncatastrophic.