Managing "Maycember"

This blog is now old enough to legally drink.  I don't know what that means and, frankly, neither do you, so maybe anthropomorphizing a website wasn't the best idea after all?  Oh well, too late now.  I wonder how Bloggy feels about its own sesquiquattuordecennial?

It's always tough to think of what to write here.  Last year, I noted that May gets "deceptively busy", and this year, it's no exception — but now I know there's a name for the phenomenon: "Maycember".  Even for those who aren't parents, a lot of events line up around the end of the school year and the ramp-up to summer, just like in December, but they're not accompanied by the same "slowdown" in other responsibilities as the winter holidays, so it feels even busier.

Despite busy days, I wish I could say more has happened of note.  There is some positive, to be sure, but a strong undercurrent of malaise, and in recent weeks the accumulated stressors have started causing some physical symptoms I haven't experienced since the worst of grad school.  It's also just unclear how much of that is exacerbated by just the normal seasonal weather changes.  So that's not really any fun.

But I have to find my fun somewhere!  And finding time to find suitable organic bloggy cake mix was its own task, so I guess my goal is to keep the process short and sweet so I can rest.  Thankfully search tools remain reasonably effective when wielded well, so there wasn't a ton of digital slop to wade through.  May that continue to last as long as it can.

2026

Twenty-twenty-six.  Truly a wild number.

There's not really much to be said here that hasn't been said already, to be honest.  Mostly yesterday, but also, in a way, similar to the start of 2025 and 2024 as well.  I have goals, sure, but at this point they're so numerous and multifaceted that, if I even end up achieving a few of them — ideally, from among a key few — I'll be satisfied.

At times, it's a bit overwhelming, though.  Having so many irons in the fire sometimes seems like it may contribute to a lack of direction, but everything kind of interplays into one overarching trend toward the new phase of life I'm building.  So I guess, to the extent I'm inclined to set any sort of renewed intention for the year ahead, it's to stay directional with everything I set out to do… even if there are, in fact, many, many directions at once.  ;)

After all: Things change, and we can only move forward.  Things evolve, and we must evolve with them.

It's the second quarter of the century, after all.

Random tangent: In addition to the traditional Eastern Time countdown and their now-usual Atlantic Time and Central Time countdowns, ABC introduced a live Pacific Time countdown for the first time last night!  And yet… they didn't actually broadcast it live coast-to-coast and still delayed the entire proceedings for western time zones.  Methinks this was a bit of a tiptoe experiment in evolving the broadcast for a more modern age, and I think it went well.

A K-Shaped Year

It's not easy summing up — well, any year, really — but especially a year like 2025 has been in my life.

Since the sine wave that was 2023 and the broadly upward, though far less intense, trendlines of 2024, 2025 has yielded a rather starkly dichotomous path.

And so, much like talk of the ongoing "K-shaped" economic recovery, the line graph of my life feels like it has diverged into two different directions.  A lot of aspects of my life are going quite well right now, arguably better than they've ever been.  Others are truly not great, and arguably have never been worse.  That alone is bittersweet and more than a little frustrating.  But the biggest part of what has me leaving 2025 feeling so adrift is that everything seems flipped on its head.

It's incredibly disorienting, and frankly a bit unnerving, to find myself doing so well in areas where I've historically struggled while simultaneously doing so poorly where I've historically excelled.  Of course, I'm exceedingly grateful at every turn that it's not all bad news.  But the good gets better and the bad gets worse in seemingly equal measure lately.  So it's understandably hard to justify focusing on gratitude when there's still a lot of work to be done in turning half of my life right-side-up again.

And that kind of hints at the details behind the headline: It has been a full and busy year throughout, and nothing has been static for long.  The first quarter of my year was largely directed toward an increased spirit of volunteerism, while the second was about polishing skills for the betterment of community.  The third quarter was about scaffolding sustainability onto those skills while helping a friend through crisis.  And most recently, the fourth quarter has been focused more on equal parts personal and professional growth.

It's certainly not all been roses.  But there have been a lot of bright spots to keep me going.

Who knows what 2026 will bring?  All I know is it's about time to dive right in.

Random tangent: Mom retired on Friday 19 December! And her coworkers bought her an air fryer as a parting gift. She set it up tonight and used it for the first time to make some fries which were deliciously crispy!

Two Decades of Bloggy!

Twenty years ago tonight, I guess I was bored.  You could maybe say the same thing about tonight, just in a radically different context.  There are all sorts of things I could do, but forcing myself to slow down and write a bit, even vaguer-than-usual drivel, isn't a half-bad exercise to engage in from time to time.

I usually save the long-term reflection for New Year's Eve (even if in practice I tend to actually do more of it on New Year's Day), but it's hard not to notice patterns.  With almost any focal distance I choose to look back with, I can see that my life has changed quite a bit recently.  In particular, I've noticed that I've tended to mark this middle part of recent decades with a higher degree of uncertainty and change.  And yet, I've also been reflecting on just how deceptively busy the month of May always seems to get, no matter what else might be happening on a macro level.  Is it something persistent about my social environment, or is it just everyone wanting to do stuff now that the weather's more consistently nicer?

Anyways, I've often complained at this time of year that it's been getting increasingly difficult to find the good-quality, free clipart which is of course the primary ingredient in bloggy cake.  In recent years, it feels like that difficulty curve has spiked.  And this year, it was damn near impossible.  Most anything new worth considering is well behind a paywall, or at least a login.  But I scrappily managed.

It had occurred to me in a textbook "shower thought" yesterday that, nowadays, a bloggy cake could theoretically be baked with a fairly straightforward prompt into a generative image diffusion model.  But there's just no way that the result would taste as good, and besides—all the detailed piping might not even end up being legible.

And yes, despite the em-dash in the last sentence, I've written all of this myself.  It's not at all a sign of outsourcing to a large language model, and if you've been here long enough, you'd know that.

Some things you've just gotta bake yourself.

Happy birthday, Bloggy!