Routine Chaos: Wrapped, 2024

Here’s the premise for my end of year list: I try to predict the things that I’ll remember when I think back on the year in 5 years time. Is this a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy? It might be.

It’s a little bit of a sense-making exercise for me as well. My life this year was quite peripatetic, so it’s unsurprising that all of these big memories happened away from home. It was also representative of something that I started learning in 2024 about embracing recognizing what I need to be at my best. It’s a very fortunate position to have been in this year and one that was only possible because I have such an incredible web of support around me. My wife was instrumental in encouraging me to make space to indulge my weird interests, and the kids have been constantly egging me on to go bigger. So many of my friends have opened doors to new experiences or gone out and done something cool and let me tag along. If this list was just “cool stuff that happened in 2024” I could double the number of entries in here easily; instead these are the things I suspect I’ll remember when I look back on this year…

Walking in Turin

In February, I met up with two of my best friends for a few days in Turin, Italy. I don’t remember why exactly we chose Turin except that it seemed to have a sufficient concentration of old stuff, and it was a direct flight from Amsterdam for me^[1]. We had no real plans, nothing booked aside from an Airbnb. So we ended up walking around a lot and just stopping in anywhere that looked interesting. Every night, we’d wander down and walk along the river as the sun set with the most beautiful magentas & marigolds. We’d walk & we’d talk while we smoked a couple cigarettes, and we’d stop in somewhere to eat & drink, and then we’d walk & talk some more. Over those few days, we went to a couple of museums, stopped into countless churches, we stood under an arch that had been commissioned by Caesar Augusts, and we even climbed a mountain at one point. But walking along that river with no particular destination and no sense of urgency, watching the sky change colors & seeing it reflected in the waters as we talked about things both frivolous and substantial - that’s what I’ll remember.

Drinking bourbon in Nashville

I spent 2 weeks in Nashville, and to be very candid they were really hard weeks. The project I was working on there took a long time to hit its stride, and it was during a particularly difficult period of transition. Also…I was staying in downtown Nashville, and downtown Nashville is, um, not great. It’s like Las Vegas, except if every casino was blaring poorly amplified honkytonk out its front door.

But Nashville was not a total wash because for a good stretch, I was working with my friend Mike Yates who moonlights as the TikTok creator Cinebourbon…and Nashville is actually a very good city for drinking whisky. The highlight of it all was an afternoon that we spent sampling barrels at Southern Collective Spirit Company. The bourbon itself was excellent, but I’ll remember the afternoon for what I would call the Transitive Property of Niche Communities. Mike has built up an incredible amount of well deserved goodwill within the bourbon world for the same reasons that he is held in such high esteem everywhere: he’s enthusiastic, curious, ready to get hands on, and always going to have an interesting point of view…and I got to see all of that at work in the way that he related with the distillers and the way that respect and appreciation was shared back and forth between them. I learned a ton about the world of craft distilling while sampling some truly excellent bourbon.

The most embarrassing thing I did in public

Sitting in an intimate wine bar in Den Haag with our friends visiting from California, we decided that the occasion called for oysters. When they arrived to the table, one of our friends confided that he’d never had oysters before so he was going to follow our lead on how to actually eat them.

I, being a veteran in consuming oysters on the half shell, decided to demonstrate for him. I picked up an oyster, I spooned a little bit of vinaigrette onto it, brought it up to my mouth, and tipped it back.

At that exact moment and for a reason that remains indiscernible to me, my gag reflex activated. I have eaten dozens of oysters in my life and never had this happen before, but there it is. Gag reflex activated exactly as I the oyster slid down my throat. By some miracle, the oyster itself was already on its way along my gullet to my stomach, but the vinaigrette and all of the other liquid in the oyster shell was not. Thus did I emit a very loud, full body cough that led me to spew liquid across the table and onto the sweater of my friend who was going to follow my lead.

This being an intimate wine bar, every other patron saw exactly what happened and stared at our party aghast.

“And that’s how you do it!” I would have said with a flourish if I had been clever. Instead I rasped out, “I’m OK” as our friends absolutely lost their minds with laughter and Sarah felt the pang of regret that has followed her these last 15 years grow just a little bit deeper.

A not even remotely embarrassing thing I did in public

What does one do when one finds oneself alone in an unfamiliar city for 2 weeks? Sometimes, one finds one’s way to a piano bar where one will participate in a sing-along of the entire Broadway musical Rent.

I am one, and it was absolutely a cathartic experience. I knew no one else in the room^[2], yet I felt completely at home because that’s what happens when you find other people who have a common obsession. Back in my days as a massive high school theater nerd, Rent was THE show. Consequently, even now a quarter century later I still know all the words to all the songs^[3].

3 musicals

In 2024, I saw 3 live performances of musical theater, each exceptional in its own way. In March, Sarah & I sat onstage for the production of Jesus Christ Superstar staged by acclaimed avant garde director Ivo von Hove; in November we found our way into one of the first performances of the new staging of Les Miserables in Paris.

But it was A Strange Loop that affected me in the deepest and most unexpected way. While I was in LA over the summer, I saw that I would be there for the final few performances, so I grabbed a ticket knowing very little about it beyond that it had won both the Tony and Pulitzer prizes. I had heard some of the music before, and I had a vague sense of the plot being kind of meta^[4].

Without spoiling anything, the final line of the show is the title of the show, and as the actor playing the lead role sang it I felt like I had been stabbed in the chest and wandered out of the theater in a bit of a daze. For days afterward, I couldn’t shake the feeling…

OK, minor spoiler below - though it isn’t a particularly plot-driven show, but I’m warning you anyway:

The title is a reference to a concept in Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach about a structure that returns back to its origin point despite always seeming to move in one direction away from it. The resolution of the show involves the character seeing through layers of artifice of his own identity, through the parts of himself that he has felt pressured to repress, and accepting that not only does he not need to change but that change is in fact an illusion.

It is not an exaggeration to say that I returned to counseling because of A Strange Loop and the way it caused me to start reexamining my own identity and experience, wrestling with my own sense of repression and even shame.

So, in some ways, that is the most expensive theater ticket I’ve ever purchased^[5].

Piling on, re: Wicked

And to wrap up a musical theater trifecta for the year, I just want to relate this one anecdote about seeing Wicked brought to life on screen: when Cynthia Erivo flies into the screen with her black cape trailing behind her and belts out the climactic lyric in Defying Gravity, all I could do was whisper under my breath a single word^[6] and start weeping.

The degree of difficulty to nail that specific moment was high because expectations for it were through the roof, and director Jon M. Chu made it so perfectly cinematic whereas the original was so perfectly theatrical.

Tangent: Wicked is the rare example that plays to the strengths of its medium in all 3 of its forms. The novel, the stage production, and the film are all distinct from each other in ways that make the most of their format. And I loved Lincoln Michel’s recent articulation of how textual media and visual media come with different affordances. Well worth a read.

Looking ahead to 2025

I’ll keep this brief: as I’m out & about this year, I want to collect as many excuses as possible to drink a glass of champagne. So if you’re reading this & our paths cross at any time in the next 12 months, expect that I’m going to make you drink a toast with me.