- Going to the Korean market with Casey — our anniversary tradition.
- Starting 2020 with spicy Korean soup in my stomach and on my shirt.
- My neck hurting from rocking [12-31-19].
- Reading weightlifting advice on a fitness site for women because the writing on fitness sites for men is so unbearable. And because: who cares?
- The street cleaning vehicle parked in front of the liquor store.
- The emergency siren that climbed in chromatic steps like a synthesizer.
- The used car lot that plays a recording of seagulls in distress to deter them from pooping on the cars.
- A film studio’s floor-to-ceiling rack of carefully organized C-clamps.
- This super haunting song, “Potter’s Field,” by Alice Swoboda.
- The sounds on 3:47 EST by Klaatu (via Dad).
- The study that shows a sample of women’s voices lowered by 23 hertz since 1945, possibly as a result of changing social roles.
- Hearing Mavis (“Ain’t No Doubt About It”) in the grocery store.
- Kyle Chayka’s awesome essay about minimalism, “Being in Nothingness,” in Harper’s Magazine.
- The NYTimes short doc about the Liverbirds, an all-women Liverpudlian rock band from the sixties.
- The elementary school student riding home from school on a hoverboard.
- Feeling pathologically incapable of listening to board game instructions.
- How there’s often graffiti even in fancy restaurants’ bathrooms. (Life finds a way.)
- Casey refusing to dance to “Don’t Stop Believin’” at a holiday party, affirming my love for her.
- Trying to express this idea more clearly: When you consider how many people there are in the world and how much stuff is going on in their heads, it’s amazing that you could ever look out on a night in a city and hear silence.
- A mountain to move: getting everyone to back up their data and switch to persistent file formats [a la 12-17-18].
- The deliciously 1950s type on the cover of Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, a self-help book by Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone.
- Two transcription software error gems: “a squirt for my friends,” “pumpkin hardcore.”
- Alain de Botton’s A Week at the Airport’s awesome middle ground between austere, concise writing and ornate, clever writing.
- Turning into a restaurant’s parking lot and someone — maybe a security guard — shining a green laser into my eyeballs. I was so mad. It felt violent!
- The tall, tropical plant in the window that flailed so wildly in the wind at night I thought it was a peeper.
- Casey’s special ability to name stray lizards on the fly.
- The handwritten set lists, Corvette-shaped pool table, ceiling-mirror bed, sticky pleather pillows, and signature hat display of the Bret Michaels suite at Hard Rock Hotel Riviera Maya.
- Anya Ventura’s Baffler article about the for-profit Cancer Treatment Centers of America.
- Playing at Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky Festival in Riviera Maya, Mexico!
- While sea kayaking, Casey and me scooping up a bug from the ocean surface onto our kayak, letting them hitch a ride to shore. Hoping that they wanted to be on shore, that we hadn’t scooped them away from home.
- Walking around Mexico City.
- The impossibly sad-sounding organ grinders.
- The denimed-out teenagers playing metal guitar to a track.
- The moms with blankets, breastfeeding and changing diapers.
- The blues bands.
- Lots of open making out.
- Burning my tongue on street elotes.
- Ordering horchata at the cafe on the eighth floor of the Sears across the street from the Palace Museum, just to get a view of its golden dome.
- The air trapped between two glass panes in a signage panel at the Palace Museum looking like a Rorschach test.
- The zillions of business-to-business stores selling construction tools, emergency vehicle lights, and restaurant refrigerators in Mexico City.
- The gondolas at Xochimilco.
- Ordering full meals and gallon-sized micheladas from vendor gondolas that sidled up and docked next to ours while they prepared our stuff.
- The pulque bars, serape sellers, mariachi bands, and marimba players on their own floating stores and stages.
- The high school students dancing and drinking mini bottles of SKYY vodka with straws on a party gondola.
- The Venus flytraps and reptile riverside attractions we elected to skip.
- Buying a shirt from the Scouts de México store with Mom. Then, running into a Scout meeting in a park, feeling grateful I wasn’t wearing my new uniform (lest I get mistaken for an eight-year-old Scout).
- The street quesadilla seller making tortillas from scratch with gray putty-like dough dug out of a bucket.
- Doing the accidental-flash-photo thing at a show (a Wilco show!) for maybe the first time ever, and the Hubble Telescope-esque red-hot photo of the inside of my hand I have to show for it.
- How the term “conscious hip-hop” seems super offensive.
- The grocery store employees having a hard time moving a giant potato chip display, bickering like an Abbott and Costello skit.
- How a solar energy company moved into the former Standard Oil building (via NYTimes).
- Tonika Johnson’s Folded Map Project, which shows images of mirror addresses on Chicago’s north-south axis (e.g. 6720 S. Ashland and 6720 N. Ashland) to “reveal the inequity … how Chicago’s legacy of segregation has impacted the neighborhoods.” And her “map twin” portraits, which “introduc[e] people living on different sides of the city and ge[t] them to really talk with each other — that’s how the map becomes ‘folded’ and ‘touches.’”
- Buying a lightbulb, a washboard, and a plunger at CAS Hardware, a neighborhood hardware store going out of business after 41 years.
- The brightly colored packaging and amazing typography on all the new old stock in its aisles.
- Putting a hat on a pile of clothes and worrying that the pile would come alive… because I put a hat on it.
- Starting a whole new skincare regimen under the supervision of Casey, a specialist.
- The joy of using keys made out of high-quality, non-bendy steel (cut by CAS Hardware [1-29-20])
- Another day, another stranger who says I look like Toby McGuire.