30 thoughts on my 30th birthday

have you heard? it's my birthday.

today i turn 30 (sounds fake, but ok) (i did check my calendar before publishing this, just in case, i guess, that i forgot what day it was) so in observance of that, here’s 30 musings from this past year that are more observations or life details than “advice.” once again, i would never advise anyone to do anything the way i’ve done it.

1. it’s easy to be a jerk but it’s even easier to be nice. people will remember both!

2. if you are determined enough, and you have just enough budget for it, and you write the most insane mac writing chase utley a fan letter email to a man on long island who owns an ice sculpture company, you too could have a shrimp cocktail luge at your 30th birthday party for $400.

3. your identity and sense of self-worth exist outside of the tangible stuff with your name on it that gets published. i wish someone had told me this sooner.

4. sometimes you get the mr. softee cone before you make dinner. you can’t control when the mr. softee truck arrives, you can only control your response to its arrival.

5. always: hold the door, smile and say hi to your neighbors, tip your mail carrier and super at the end of the year. everything else is optional.

6. i would be lost without my group chats, which have become some of my closest friendships and biggest champions. when i got laid off my group chats sprang into action and brought me flowers and fancy chocolates and tinned fish SO fast, like before i could even update everyone about the news fast.

7. my grandpa always says "sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do," and unfortunately, he’s right. i think of this whenever i floss my teeth or pay my rent.

8. starting over or starting anything for the first time (a new career, a new hobby) is humbling but sometimes necessary. 

9. you’ll probably never regret taking 25 minutes to make even the most mediocre dinner for yourself at home but odds are very good you’ll regret a mediocre dinner you seamlessed and paid $30 for. 

10. the hardest part of lifting weights isn’t the weight, it’s tricking your brain into feeling confident that you can lift the weight.

11. i was trying to think of the best restaurant meal i had this year but i couldn’t think of just one so i made a list. i know it’s counterintuitive that the best two meals i had in copenhagen were mexican and latin american cuisine but it’s true:
    

    

12. the best restaurant-adjacent meal i had this year was two street cart hot dogs, eaten outside the news corp building after a very long saturday at moma in february with chase.

13. the best show i saw this year was probably the every time i die holiday show in buffalo, which is both a) almost certainly where chase and i got covid and b) probably the first/last time i will ever see that band perform together. a close second: jawbreaker’s 25th anniversary dear you show.

14. i managed a team at work for the first time this year. i think the best way to be a manager is to think of the worst manager you’ve ever had and just do everything the opposite of the way that they did things. also, to ~lead with empathy~ and just be kind.

15. this year max and i started taking each other out for dinner occasionally, which is how i learned that there is a plateau you reach in nice restaurants where the price no longer matches the quality of the food and instead vastly outweighs it. this applies to a lot of places but in particular a lauded southern italian restaurant in the west village where we spent an absurd amount of money on a dinner that was disappointingly Just Okay and whose name rhymes with sling.

16. this year i learned that oysters almost always make me sick (until now i had deluded myself into thinking that perhaps every other time i had eaten oysters and gotten sick it was merely a coincidence or a bad oyster), a tragic discovery for a lifelong seafood eater.

17. i got laid off for the first time this year (kind of crazy, considering i survived years in media without succumbing to this fate), but when i told people that i got laid off, the way everyone in my communities and networks rushed to support me and offer me gigs and jobs was so helpful, generous, kind and enthusiastic that it made me cry multiple times (lol! i am a baby! if you sent me a message or an email i almost certainly cried while reading it!). i was appreciatively digging myself out of my inbox full of supportive messages for days afterwards.  

18. when i'm having a bad day something that makes me feel better is taking a walk to the store and buying one treat for myself (like, a fancy probiotic soda or something equally weird and novel) and a bunch of stuff that the community fridge at the end of my block needs.

19. the sheet cakes from costco are better than any much more expensive cakes you could have bought from a nice bakery. trust me on this one.

20. i don’t harbor the delusion that composting my veggie and fruit scraps is like, saving the planet, but it does make me good to drop them off at the community compost bins at the farmers market anyway. (new 2022 habit unlocked)

21. chase says i have a tendency to give too much of myself away to other people, which is true and which is what wears me down so much, and is also why i have started saying no to things a lot more than i ever used to. it feels really luxurious to just have time for myself now.

22. being in the supportive, stable and healthy relationship you always deserved to have feels really good. highly recommend being with someone who makes you laugh and feel great basically all the time while still challenging and pushing you.

23. living by myself is the best thing i can finally sort of afford to do in new york city and it feels so crazy that i decided to start doing it right at the beginning of the nyc rental market death spiral (and months before i got laid off, lol). but i did do it! 

24. i only freelance reported a little bit this past year, which would have bothered me a few years ago (see #3) but feels good now. i have time to do stuff i like doing that isn’t work, and when i do freelance reporting now, i know it’s something i actually want to work on, not something i feel obligated or compelled to do, and i don’t resent myself for taking it on. my goal for this year is quality over quantity.

25. i got really strong this year (see #10) and for my 30th year my wish for myself is to stop idly worrying about what would happen if you picked up the barbell and it suddenly crushed you or otherwise overpowered you because that isn’t going to happen.

26. that i have ended up where i am, with the career trajectory i have had, very much feels like it’s in spite of everything i have done, and not because of it. maybe everyone just feels like this, though.

27. i have to tell myself repeatedly that you can’t control anything bigger than yourself in this world (see #4), but you can control your responses to those bigger things.

28. i also have to remind myself that progress is not linear. i wish you could consistently impress everyone with how good you always are at things the first time you do them, but you just can’t! them’s the breaks.

29. having my sister live in the same city as me is one of the best things about living here.

30. i was worried about introducing merle and carmichael but now they’re friends.

thank you as always for reading and for leaving me kind comments and replies to these little newsletter posts! i always mean to respond and then i don’t, which is my bad and i promise to do better in this, my 30th year.