I’m 26 now.

And uninsured. I’m not sure if there’s any sort of grace period once you pass out of your parents' bosom and into the pock-marked and kleptomaniacal arms of Aetna, but if there isn’t then I desperately need my HR lady to get back to me. Apparently, turning 26 counts as a “qualifying event”, which means that I can switch to my employer's health insurance mid year. Other such events are a permanent crossing of the eyes, a slipped disc, and the first and last time you lose a tooth. 

Being that my main goal for this year is to become the healthiest version of myself I can be, getting this insurance updated is a major need. I have doctors appointments I need to begin lining up, pokings, proddings, practices, and surgeries. I need my ears examined for Batman and my nostrils canvassed for Robin. I need knees hammered, spine straightened, and eyebrows plucked. My elbows need a break from tennis and my guts are turning primary growth.

The reason for the goal, simple as it is, is that this past year has been one of my worst in terms of health. In essence, I’ve been burning the candle at both ends and snorting the leftover wax. Brain fried, bones ache, and my livers out on PTO. Bamboozled, star struck and that ain’t the least of the things that plagues me. If you’ve got a cure for what ails friend, I would be buying if it were not that my financial health took the bulk of the damage.

Let’s see- I ended my last post with some writing about having just received a new job in Texas. That was true. I ended up moving back into my parents, a fun thing to do at 25 years old when your girlfriend lives in a college town across the country. The job is with a manufacturing firm in Carrollton, Texas, a major producer of sunscreens, lotions, oils, and other rub-on-your-bodies. I went to the first two days in person and haven’t been back since, though I was told that I need to be in the Dallas area just in case; That is, until six months later, just before my girlfriend was moved back, when I was informed that supposedly I could’ve been working from up there with her this whole time. I can’t write much else about my job, as in my third interview with them they revealed to me that they actually found this website. They can’t have looked through it too thoroughly, as my second blog post is little more than a lamentation of what I do on a daily basis, but they did seem quite concerned that I would be making Tik Tok videos on the side. I let them know that those glory days were well behind me and surprisingly, it worked. Maybe they thought I was really funny.

The first few weeks after I moved back were all good fun. I joined my old soccer team, happy to have a new home after rejecting my Morgantown one. I realized I was 25 and so decided that I should enjoy “going out”, which is a lot of wandering from bar to bar, dangerously inebriated on the streets of Dallas, spending money I don’t have and watching other people try to hook up with one another. Cold, underdressed, and overly intoxicated. The bars have names like Skellig, Chelsea’s Corner, River Pig; Truck Yard, Tequila Social, Old Monk. They’re attended by attractive men and women wearing the same uniform and not minding the noise. I drank hot toddys, espresso martinis, and most of the beer. I celebrated my friend's birthday in his Dallas house smothered in the smoke from his twin fog machines and squirted a bouncer with a test tube shot at KSP, which he didn’t seem to like. I spent dozens of mornings bleary eyed and hungover in exchange for a memory or two. 

I took Finn on a few hikes around Dallas but after a while I found I just couldn’t muster up the energy or will. The sights were so mundane, the weather so foul, and I didn’t have a car, which can be a real deterrent when it comes to transporting your dog. For all my time in Morgantown, I was able to bum off of Cassidy, but now that we were separated and she had selfishly decided to keep her Subaru with her, this put me in a tough position. My first day of work, I had to tell a few weaselly lies in order to keep my coworkers from realizing that I didn’t have an actual mode of transportation (My dad both dropped me off and picked me up, similar to my first day of middle school).

 First, my uncle loaned me his car, a Ford Escape he had lying around for some reason. That was excellent, and I used it for a few weeks before he remembered that his son wanted it and I had to give it back. Then, my grandparents let me borrow their car, a cherry red Ford Expedition older than I am. I had to keep the gas half full or it wouldn’t start. I had to take the keys out of the ignition a certain way or it would keep running and eventually die (This happened more than once). There was no radio and the AC worked only in theory. When my grandma came to reclaim it, I was hardly upset (though remarkably grateful).

 Now that I had well and truly run out of relatives to borrow cars from, I realized that maybe I should get some wheels of my own. I spent a few days perusing Facebook Marketplace before my parents told me buying a new car would be smarter. They didn’t really explain why, but they seemed sure about it and I liked the idea of having something shiny in the driveway. In the end, I got a 2022 Toyota Tacoma from a dealership that had parked it on the corner of the lot on a concrete slab a few inches above the rest of the ground, as though they knew it was their premier vehicle. The man who sold it to me told me he had several other interested parties, but when I offered to buy it then and there he agreed right away. I still feel sorry for those poor suckers who missed out.

I spent far more of the year than I would’ve liked or anticipated working on a side hustle- Reselling things on Amazon. My little brother has an entrepreneurial streak nearly the size of his ego, and he spoonfed me instructions every step of the way. And to be fair, although this leech based business feels like the furthest thing from fun, it does feel productive. The little bits of money trickling in manage to fool me into thinking that I’m working on something. I suspect that that is a major reason as to why my writing fell off so badly. I was spending all my free time running to the Nike store, searching for things online, updating my prices. I was ungating and printing labels, destickering and packing boxes, taping and sourcing items. I bought subscription after subscription, all of which kept telling me I was making a profit while my bank account seemed to think otherwise. Meanwhile, my brother and my parents were making money hand over fist; Finally, I decided to do something about it. 

I purchased some products from Walmart.com with less than stellar reviews to resell them on Amazon. This was a risky play, as the Walmart marketplace is set up exactly the same as the Amazon one, and so likely I had just shipped the products from one teenager's garage to my own. A few weeks later, a court ruled that Amazon could be held liable for products sold on their marketplace and Amazon decided they had better get serious. My account was immediately flagged, suspended, appealed, and has since been deactivated. A long year, with many long nights, wasted thanks to my own stupidity. In the end, I believe I probably lost money and to toss some salt on that injury,  I spent so long away from what I really like to do: Writing. And look. See how bad I am now. I don’t know halfway here know now how long sentences should be. I hardly really even understand what they are.  

In February, I headed off to New Orleans for my best friend's bachelor party. The Airbnb we got was one of two gentrified houses in an otherwise wholly un-gentrified area. We hit Bourbon Street and Frenchman Street, watching jazz acts, eating dozens of different kinds of fried fish, and trying to avoid stepping in anything especially rancid. We went on an airboat tour and saw a bunch of alligators, though my friends almost caused us to miss it. Rousing thirteen horribly hungover people at 8 in the morning with the promise that they’ll soon be on a loud fan boat in the middle of a swamp was as difficult as it sounds. I like to think that they believe it was worth it. After the tour, we ate food at an Irish place, being that it was St Patrick's Day, then headed home for some rest. Seth changed into the leprechaun outfit I’d bought him and we headed back out to the casino for the third time in that short weekend (I probably should’ve listened when he told me he wanted to go to Vegas). When I finally managed to drag them from the craps table to the dinner I had booked that I swear looked much fancier online, I was coming to the realization that I had spent a considerable amount of time and money planning a trip that for the most part could’ve been handled by a spacious backyard and a rented blackjack dealer. After dinner, we went out to the bars again and found one with a band doing oldies. I can’t remember the name of it but watching Seth shamelessly dance with a crowd three times his age made the whole trip worth it to me. And isn’t that what his bachelor party is all about? 

Directly after this trip, I took my SIE, the second latest in a long series of financial exams which have so far resulted in no change whatsoever to my income. I spent about a month studying for it, which was probably overkill, and in a strange way was my route to avoiding studying for the much harder, much more important CFA. I passed the exam easily and the only sense of relief I felt was that I could now get back to focusing on my less than burgeoning Amazon business. 

I flew to West Virginia for Cassidy’s graduation. We tore apart chicken at El Pollon and poured white wine into plastic cups with her family that had flown up to celebrate with us in our cozy apartment. Cassidy was stunning in her graduation gown, beautiful and accomplished and a little intimidating. I’d hardly have had the gall to speak to her had we not been dating for four years. I felt immensely proud of her. The day after, my mother called and told me that my uncle had died and I would need to fly home early. 

My Uncle Marc was the oldest child of my mothers parents. He was born severely mentally handicapped and given only a few years to live. Thankfully, doctors are mostly just guessing and Marc lived well into middle age. He was enthusiastic, loud, and a hugger. He loved to be read to. My mother told me a story about a time when she was babysitting him. She looked away for a moment and suddenly Marc was taking an out-of-control cruise on a tricycle down a long, declining street in nothing but his underwear. He wound up literally crashing a wedding that was taking place on the front lawn of a house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Despite the oath she had taken as a babysitter, my mother let the wedding guests enjoy Marc for a good long while before my grandma arrived home to collect him.

My grandma told me another story about Marc’s graduation. Marc’s favorite word was “Hi”; He couldn’t say a lot, but he had that one nailed down. When it came time for him to walk across his graduation stage, he took the diploma from the principal and turned to face the crowd. With one great big wave he called out, “Hi!” loud enough for them to hear him in the rafters, to thunderous applause. My grandma called it one of the most spiritual things she had ever seen.

A week before he died, I went to visit him at my grandparents house in Honey Grove. All of the energy I was used to seeing from him had been drained by pneumonia and cancer. He was always small and on the skinny side, but there was a surprising strength to him that had clearly gone away. I read to him one more time, a short book about trucks, and said goodbye. 

The Friday following Marc’s funeral was Seth’s wedding. I approached it the same way I had approached everything around being his best man- Nervously, and at the last minute. I didn’t have a best man speech written until two days before, and I was certainly less than satisfied with it. The thing was, hard as I might’ve tried to remember, I couldn’t actually think of any real memories with Seth. He was always just there, same as I probably was to him. What better reason for two people to be best friends than proximity? 

Their wedding was absolutely gorgeous, and really took a lot of the pressure off planning my own future wedding, as it would be near impossible to one-up. It was held in an old mansion with a dying vineyard out front and a spacious courtyard of white stone. I was nervous the entire day- Nervous for my speech, for holding the rings, for sitting at the table. Similar to the bachelor party, the most important thing was that the day went well for me. My friends told me that the key to nailing my speech was to get super drunk, and the longer the day wore on the more I started to believe them. 

Finally, the big moment came; My speech, not their marriage. I realized, as I was sitting at the table with my dinner in my throat and desperately short of wine, that I was going to have to read it from my phone. Despite the time I had spent trying to memorize it,  I knew for a fact that standing there in front of all those people would have the words flee from my head like so many hairs. And so, when the microphone passed from the maid of honor to me, I swallowed my nerves and opened my notes app.

The speech went pretty well, though I hardly remember it. The only pictures I have from it are of me looking at my phone. I would advise anyone who is writing a speech to do better at memorizing it than I did. I had many people come up to me afterwards to compliment it, including some of the staff working the wedding, which made me feel much better about the whole thing. Afterwards, I decided to take my friend's advice and quickly drank as many whiskey cokes as I could stomach.

The following week, I flew back up to West Virginia to move Cassidy back home. I was, of course, extraordinarily tired. Throughout all of this I had been working, doing Amazon, and studying. There was so little time or energy for reading or writing that whatever little I did get done hasn’t seen the light of day since. In West Virginia, when I wasn’t working, I was taking things apart, packing them away, labeling them. Amazon had prepared me well. We spent time at all of our favorite restaurants and bars. At the Apothecary, I tipped my favorite bartender some amount and he ran out after me to thank me. I told him we were moving away and that he was my favorite bartender and it was all rather heartwarming, until we showed up there again three days later. He gave me quite a strange look.

The move back was a multiday process, first assisted by my dad in stowing everything away in our Uhaul and then alone together, trundling down the road in our convoy of two. I drove the UHaul. She had the car with the cats. We stopped in the worst state in the Union, suffering through a night in a Kentucky hotel before making it back home late the next day. There was still so much unpacking, organizing, reorganizing. Storage units to be bought, art to be hung. I still couldn’t afford to take any days off. My brain and body both felt as though they were melting or maybe that they had already melted and someone was playing in the puddle.

After we had moved in, I realized that I had only two months until my third CFA exam and I had really hardly studied at all. For the next two months, I did little outside of work, studying, and unpacking. I was irritable and exhausted. My Amazon account got banned. My dog went practically feral on a groomer. I had next to no money and several trips to pay for. 

The next of which was a trip to Port Aransas during the summer with Cassidy’s family.  Her extended family, which made it feel much more serious for some reason. The beach was beautiful, if crowded, and the weather was wonderfully warm. I saw Cassidy look at another man, which is probably the second biggest driver behind my newfound health goal. I listened to her mother and aunt drunkenly scream along to songs I didn’t recognize that were clearly classics in their family. It felt strange being a guest at a different family reunion. It was nice. 

I went to FC Dallas games and wondered why I don’t go to more. I went to my first and only WWE event in box seats provided by a friend's girlfriend who was wealthier than the two of us combined. I visited my brother in Houston, where I bought a $130 NASA jacket I have yet to wear. I was treated to fancy dinner parties, barbecues, and a solar eclipse. I celebrated my friends in a Broken Bow cabin, standing waist deep in murky lake water, faces red and bloated from beer and sun. And a few weeks before my birthday, I took my third CFA. Sitting in the waiting room outside the testing center, the man in front of me turned around and smiled at me. “What’re you in for?”

“CFA.”

“Oh yeah? What level?”

“3.”

“Oh no way! Me too.”

“Really?” I asked, offering a weak grin. “You as nervous as I am?”

“Nope”, the man said, turning back around.

As unconfident as I was going in, I felt that it went okay. Perhaps this will age poorly- I still won’t know for another month. 

I went to Door County the week after my CFA exam. As much as I love it up there, I found myself wanting to be home. I didn’t have any PTO to take, and so I spent most of my days indoors, working as I would at home but without the comfort of my pets or my girlfriend. The hikes were just as beautiful, the people just as pleasant, but I was simply too exhausted to enjoy it all, which was certainly in theme with the rest of my time as a twenty-five year old.

This whole year has felt busy, but it hasn’t been a pleasant sort of busy. It’s an obligatory sort. Obligatory despite so much of it being things I volunteered for, things I signed myself up for. I guess that is sort of what I want to be healthier about too. I want to say no to things, not everything, and maybe not even most everything, but at least some everything. I want to have time for what makes me feel like life is worth living: My girlfriend, my family, my friends, my writing. I want to get smarter and grow as a person. I don’t think I can do another side hustle. I don’t know if I am cut out for it. It doesn't feel right to have a job after my job when all day all I think about is being finished working. My younger brother keeps urging me to appeal to Amazon again and in the practical sense, I know that he is right but I just don’t think that is what I want to spend my time on. I want time to reflect, to think about where my life is going and where I would like it to go. I want to focus on the few things I like to do and do them intensely. I want to feel better when I wake in the morning. 

I have a whiteboard that hangs beside my desk. It lists things that I need to do- Truck lock, shave Finn, joint account- Along with dates I need to remember- Oct 4, A&M vs Mizzou, Nov 29, Atlantis. In the rightmost corner of this board is the number 372. This number represents the number of hours I am behind my goal of writing 2 hours everyday this year. There was a point, around a third of the way through the year, where this was a manageable number. Now, even if I wrote for three hours a day everyday for the next year, I would still be seven hours behind where I wanted to be. I don’t know what it says about me that I have kept up with that number, diligently adding to it every day while failing to curtail the damage. Perhaps that I am a glutton for punishment. Perhaps that I am really good at counting. But I think that there is also a part of me that is hoping that having now moved, changed jobs, taken my last exam, done my best man duties, reunited with my girlfriend, started a failed business, and partied far more than I ever intended to, I can now, finally, sit down and get to work.

I’m 26 now.

I'm 25 now. 

There goes a third of my life, assuming modern medicine comes up with a cure for my terminal case of the sillies. If 24 felt bad, 25 is surprisingly painless. I think maybe 24 was the age at which I first felt truly old, and from here until 30 I can pretty much settle into the idea of being pre-middle age, having already accepted my failure in terms of having any sort of precocious success. This is, of course, if we choose to ignore my top 5 finish in the fourth grade spelling bee, that one TikTok I posted that got a lot of likes, and how well I taught my dog to play dead.

The YOY results are in and the story the data tells is one of unfortunate stagnation. I still went to BJJ, for a period, which also forced me into physical therapy. My physical therapist turned out to be another member of my BJJ class and I have a sneaking suspicion that he failed to heal my shoulder in an effort to reaffirm the class pecking order. Sadly, I was forced back to the dry world of Texas before I could get my hands on that elusive blue belt, not that I was even close. As it turns out, I am pretty terrible at jiu-jitsu. They want you to think and move at the same time, two things I’m already quite poor at when attempting them separately. Even when I managed to win one of my many bouts, I would inevitably have to endure my opponent breathlessly remarking: “Wow, you’re strong.” BJJ is one of the only sports in the world where this is meant as an insult. 

In terms of something resembling progress, I finally quit my much hated job. It took about two months to muster up the courage and one thirty minute phone call to my manager in which I watched her go from faux-cheerful, to crestfallen, to indifferent in a matter of minutes. I spent the next two weeks paradoxically working harder than I ever had before in an attempt to teach the post-teens who would be taking over my workload everything that they needed to know. Hopefully, when they watched back the recordings we made of those Zoom calls, they laughed a lot more at the few jokes I cracked than they did the first time around.

I tried to join the Morgantown City Council, only to be rejected for “not knowing what I want”. Of course I don’t know what I want Ixya- That’s why I’m sitting in a sterile and abandoned waiting room in the town hall with my shirt inside out, trying to join some random city council. I’d been hoping my youth and Excel skills would make me an attractive candidate for doing mind numbing governmental work in exchange for a few morsels of friendship, but instead all I got was one follow up Zoom meeting where I learned why nothing ever happens in government (No one is trying). 

I took a writing class that my parents gifted me, and the encouragement I received there is probably the only reason I am still writing at all a year later. The timing though- Late night Tuesdays- Unfortunately coincided with the only soccer connection I had managed to make in Morgantown, which led to my participation in the league fizzling out and me once again meandering through the college streets in search of friends. This is a lot more pathetic to do at 25 than it is at 18.

I went to New Orleans for a week with the same friends I’d ventured to Miami with. We were flush with live jazz, breaded fish, and more alcohol than any one man could want or need. I met a mysterious stranger at the Pittsburgh airport bar, a retired army veteran named Lionel, who as it turned out was also heading to New Orleans. He asked the woman sitting beside me on the plane to switch seats with him and proceeded to ply me with vodka sprites the entire flight while he demonstrated his expertise around army radio equipment and later invited me to a crawfish boil that weekend, which my friends very rudely were not interested in. I hope he’s having an excellent time on whatever flight he’s taking now. 

I got another cat, Juni, who I treasure. I spent many afternoons reading in our small patio with Jones and Juni mewling in the catio and Finn panting at my feet. Many more were lazed away stretched out on our living room couch, Juni’s labored breaths a sort of comforting white noise as she rested her calico mass on my chest. I would die for her.

My older brother moved to Pittsburgh and quickly became my only friend for several states in every direction. We hiked and ate and explored a small portion of the city together. He lived in a large high rise apartment along the Monongahela river with tall ceilings and floors of cold stone. When someone on his floor or above tossed something down the garbage chute it sounded as though the building were in a fight with another building. It took several months for his cat Harpo to warm up to me, just in time for Tanner to decide that Pittsburgh sucks and move back to Texas. 

I went ziplining, visited Maryland for the first time, and was named my best friend's best man. I flew back to celebrate and plan the bachelor party, but ended up mostly drinking and riding jet skis. We decided on New Orleans as the destination for the bachelor party, where with any luck I’ll manage to run into Lionel again.

I started running a little bit, though you wouldn’t know it from my recent soccer performances, and I got a sort of a mullet from my wonderful haircut lady Destinee, who is probably my favorite part of Pittsburgh. I visited Washington DC for the first time and was blown away by how open everything is. Although I’m sure there are countless security measures in place that I don’t have the expertise to spot, it was a little jarring to be able to walk right up to the White House lawn and peer through the perforated fence. I even caught a glimpse of Joe Biden being very intimately shaved by one of the Secret Service agents. Cassidy and I went moonlight kayaking. Tanner and I went to the arboretum. 

My family visited West Virginia for the holidays and absolutely hated it. It didn’t help that they came during the coldest week of the year, when we couldn’t drive anywhere and didn’t want to. I’m sure they felt a little silly, flying all that way just to get absolutely thrashed in Bananagrams the same as they would've in Texas, but hopefully they enjoyed it regardless.

My parents bought a vacation home in Door County, Wisconsin, which is one of the richest things I’ve ever gotten to say. Door County, featured heavily in this year's trail reviews, is a beautiful area within the peninsula of Wisconsin that doesn’t allow chain restaurants and seems to pivot mostly around drinking and hiking, two of my favorite activities. There’s also a pickleball court in the complex, so I was able to keep up with that nationwide trend. 

I visited a lavender farm, got my bitters card, and read a terrible book loaned to me by a terribly kind woman. We watched the sunset over Sister Bay and gawked at the goats grazing atop Al Johnsons. We partied in Husby’s and needed two hands to count the number of bachelorette parties that swung through town every Friday and Saturday night. When I got back to Morgantown, I'd been unemployed for several months and was desperately in need of a job. I applied anywhere and everywhere and was rejected hundreds, if not thousands, of times, before finally landing a job at a company back in Dallas. The job is largely remote but they “want me to be around” so I was forced to move back to Texas after accepting. Suddenly I find myself once again living at my parents, with my girlfriend halfway across the country, and little prospects for reconciling either of these things and I have to wonder- What have I been doing for the past year?

When I first wrote this, I wasn’t really sure if I should mention some of the sadder things that have happened this year. In some ways it feels to me like stolen valor; These things hurt me deeply but I wasn’t the “main” recipient of the sadness, and that has made me feel like a bit of a fraud for presuming to approach the subject. It also worries me that it might look as though I’m cheapening the magnitude of these events by writing about them on my shitty little website, but part of what these blog posts are, the annual ones at least, is a way of keeping an ongoing, big picture look at my life and what was/is going on in it. So I feel that it would be untruthful to leave out how either end of my year seemed to be colored by death. 

My uncle Brandon killed himself in September. I remember him for being a perfect bridge to the world of adulthood for my siblings and I when we were younger. He showed Tanner and I video games and probably significantly hurt our personal development by introducing us to Reddit. He was great at cards, the only cigarette smoker I spent any significant time around as a kid, and served in Afghanistan. He had brown, curly hair and wore rectangular, IT guy glasses. His beard was only just starting to go gray. He had one son, Sean,  who he loved more than anything in the world. He was my dads only brother. 

This was my second funeral for a suicide. It was also my second funeral, period. I'd never been to a military burial before. At the gravesite we were met with an honor guard, I can’t remember how many- Anywhere from six to ten people, maybe. It was very difficult to speak. The day was gray, bleak, and hinting of rain. The honor guard turned their guns toward the road, upon which cars were actively racing by, and shot. I couldn’t help but to think how horribly that would’ve scared me, had I been one of those in the street. 

The funeral was held in Wisconsin, only a few weeks after I had made the cross country trip to move to West Virginia. I drove eighteen hours to Mukwanago. Cousins I hadn’t seen in years were there, all getting torn up by mosquitoes. People were laughing, joking; It felt somehow wrong, even if it was the only thing that brought any sort of comfort. I don’t actually remember at all where I slept. After one day there, I turned and drove back to West Virginia. On the final left into Cassidy and I’s driveway, I scratched her car. 

The second death of the year came over the summer as yet another gut punch to my father. His best friend Eric, who he has known since childhood, was riding one of the mopeds they had loaned my dad and I only two weeks before along the side of one of the flat and long Door County roads when he got into an accident that sent him into a roadside culvert. I’d met Eric before but we’d never really spent any significant amount of time together. That changed in the summer of 2023 when I went up to Door County with my dad. Eric alternated between living in Milwaukee, where he worked as an art teacher, and the Door County condo that had been his father’s before his. He had long brown hair he wore pushed back from his friendly face and one of the worst cases of a Wisconsin accent I’ve ever heard. He seemed to know and welcome conversation with every person within a 50 mile radius. You couldn’t meet him and not want to talk to him. He was funny and knowledgeable and had an energy about him that told you this was how life was meant to be lived. I liked Eric a lot. I saw a lot of my dad in him.

My dad had drifted apart from Eric when they went to different colleges after highschool. In a coincidence that invokes something divine, both of our families happened to be taking separate trips to Disney World fifteen years ago. He spotted one of us, me or another of my siblings, and asked if we happened to be Sieverts, which would've been a very strange thing to do had he been wrong. Whoever it was led him back to my parents and reignited a childhood friendship that was long since thought snuffed.

When I heard from my mom what had happened I was once again across the country. I called my dad and said a few empty, pointless things, platitudes that I was always certain I would be too sharp for when the time came. The phone clicked dead and I sat there for a long time, staring into space. 

I’m not sure how my dad made it through the past year and I don’t want to speculate. I already feel I’ve somehow overstepped my bounds writing about this, though I am happy to have known both of these men. It feels hollow and vaguely senseless that I’ll never talk to them again. In his eulogy for Eric, my dad mentioned that there are no silver linings and it’s true. There aren’t. 

Over the next year, I’ll try to listen to my friends a little more closely. I’ll laugh a little more loudly at how funny my sister is and cherish the authenticity of both my brothers. I’ll urge my mom to tell me more stories and hug her a little harder. I’ll ask my dad for more help and I'll always be there when he needs mine. After all, there’s only so many years left. 

I’m 25 now.

It’s 5 PM and for some reason I haven’t eaten. 

4 PM in work hours, being that I live in EST and work in CST but my body doesn’t know that. My stomach is quiet, hunger pangs having been successfully staved off by caffeine over and over again, though with each battle coffee loses more ground. My head feels incredibly light and my body is supernaturally heavy. I am not glued to my chair; I simply weigh too much to rise.

My day started at 7 AM, an hour later than it usually tends to. I let myself sleep in, moving my gym rest day from next Sunday to this Monday with the idea that I would be able to log on early and begin to work. I spent the weekend dreading waking up this morning and now that it’s here, I try to put off reality for as long as I can. I walk my dog. I make my coffee. I allow myself thirty minutes of reading. And then it begins.

My job is not ‘hard’ in the way that medical school is hard. It’s not hard like roofing, or creating a hit song, or like customer service. My job is hard in the way that working in a factory assembly line, taping boxes of wet wipes shut and letting them glide down the belt to my coworker, again and again and again, is hard. My job is hard like the post office, like a tollbooth, like the concrete wall you slam your head against.

I settle into my chair at 8 AM my time. I already have several messages from coworkers who, like me, have to pretend our work is urgent. I lower my work desk down from standing height. On slow days, of which there are many, I stand but today there is too much to do to do it healthily. Beside my work computer is a spiral with a list of my to-dos along with their status. Top of the list is taking one report I do in Tableau and moving it over to Power BI. Usually, I will download data from some government website that looks as though its creation may have predated the Internet before dumping it into my previously made excel model. I update the date to this week. I publish the dashboard the data feeds. I email the distribution list. Six months ago, I tacked an extra question onto this email- Hello, does anyone use this dashboard and if so for what purpose? We are trying to rationalize as many reports as possible in the interest of efficiency, thanks! I got three replies, all asking to be taken off the distribution list. This information did not impress my boss.

Then, a week ago, I was charged with transferring the same dashboard from Tableau, a dashboarding service, to Power BI, a dashboarding service. The reasons are not clear, probably because they do not exist. It is not my place to question but to google- “Power BI Query Editor equivalent to Tableau measure”. “Power BI Table Formatting Guide”. “Power BI world's fastest speed run GONE SEXUAL.” It doesn’t actually matter what I google. The answers are never there but hidden somewhere within the hours I will spend clicking around my screen in a way that isn’t quite random until something finally works. 

That is what I spend my morning doing. I click, I click, I refill my coffee, I click. The Power BI dashboard is beginning to look like the Tableau dashboard. This is progress. There is a meeting at 10 AM in which we discuss the many ways in which finance is modernizing. I’m 1300 miles away but I still need to tear myself away from the computer and throw on a polo. During the meeting instead of listening I study the faces of my colleagues in their tiny little boxes. The metaverse has already arrived and its barrels of fun.

The meeting ends and it’s back to the real work. I have a few other dashboard updates and reports that need to be sent out as well and I do them on my second monitor in thirty second increments while Power BI is refreshing the query, refreshing the query, refreshing the query. Data populates. The time I have left to live dwindles and dwindles. Eventually, Power BI is ready for me once again.

I have another meeting at 1 PM. It’s now 12:55 and I’m not sure what I have accomplished. My focus has been absolute, my goal clear, the way there relatively simple and yet somehow I have not managed to scratch the first item off my to do list. I throw the polo back on in about twice the time it took me to tear it off and review what I have to present in the meeting. It’s a small meeting, just one other participant. I am going to show her the solution I have come up with to automate the credit for different revenues to different people based upon the timing of these revenues. I do this in Alteryx, a ‘workflow’ tool; Programming for dummies. I have completed the solution and I demonstrate it and wait for questions. None are forthcoming. She tells me to put a hold on implementing it and to have a nice day. The meeting lasts eight minutes. The workflow took me four hours last Friday. The polo comes off again.

I haven’t had a manager for about three months now, maybe longer. I still have a ‘team’, technically, though the only member of it I regularly speak to is a woman older and smarter than me who, as far as I can tell, has been manager in all respects other than title and compensation in the time we’ve spent without one. It’s not clear when we will get a replacement manager but it is clear that we will get one and I await the day impatiently. The last few months there has been a hole in my heart the size of a biweekly one on one that I am eager to fill.

It’s been plain to me for about a year and a half that the concept of working hard to get ahead, at least at the company I work at, has diminishing returns at best. Much more relevant to moving up the corporate ladder is the length of time you have spent at your current position. I’ve just been promoted, so it will be quite a while before my name bubbles to the top of any lists. Despite this and despite the lack of a manager to note any extra work I do, I have privately decided that after completing the Power BI dashboard (which I manage to do just after my 1 PM meeting) I will then automate the weekly process in Alteryx. I’m not sure why this is. It could be for myself, so I don’t have to spend fifteen minutes every Monday monotonously copying and pasting, verifying, publishing. It could be so that when I send the dashboard over to the manager of the adjacent team I have a reason for having taken a week to build it. It could just be that I know that the work is fit only for a robot and so decided to build a robot fit for the work. Regardless, and with multiple other, more pressing items on my to do list, I set to task. 

The process is ridiculous. There are four, maybe five steps to updating the data before it is ready for the dashboard and at each and every one of them I run into problems. A data type has transformed for no discernible reason. Tableau crashes. An excel file is corrupted. I google an error message and this time I do find a response- “Sometimes it just does that.” My dog, lying on his bed behind me, stares at the back of my silhouette with accusing eyes.

It’s 4 PM now. My girlfriend has gone to two different classes, the gym, and has just left for some sort of local cultural event but its 3 PM CST and I have a lot of work to do. My phone lights up and I see I have been rejected from yet another job. My to do list stands strong, the workflow sits in front of me unfinished. My head feels tenuously attached to my body at best and my neck lolls to the side dramatically. I notice my hands are shaking. That is when I realize that I haven’t eaten. 

My job is not easy like a laugh with friends. It’s not easy like floating a river, or reading a book or taking a walk. It’s not easy like falling into bed, feeling the breeze or singing along. My job is easy like sitting in traffic, like getting older, forgetting to eat. It’s easy like skipping the gym, like holding your tongue, drinking too much. My job is easy like drowning and every day I feel the water close over my head.

I’m 24 now.

I wish I wasn’t. 24 is basically 25 which is basically 30 by which point you might as well get used to sniffing dirt. It won’t be long now before a doctor asks if he can stick his hand where the sun don’t shine and give my sphincter a squeeze. It feels so very strange to be 24. At the age of 20, Alexander the Great had been tutored for several years by Aristotle and ascended to the throne. By age 24 he probably also had a stand up special and a couple novels published. I believe these are the most apt comparisons I can make to myself- Ancient noblemen, groomed for greatness, mythologized throughout history to the point of inhumanity. The greatest accomplishment I can point to in my own life thus far is perhaps winning Most Valuable Defensive Player my senior year of high school(not Most Valuable Player mind you- That’s far too high a bar).

I’m being dramatic of course, both about my lacking list of accomplishments and the lack of potential for furthering that list, but even still. Twenty-four years old. Just look at all the SPACE it takes to type that age of antiquity. Compare that to: Two. Now there’s an age!

I was worried, when I was younger, that I would keep pushing back the age I wanted to be successful at, constantly shifting the goalposts so that whatever age I was at the time would still be ‘young’ enough for any accomplishments to be impressive. The last time I truly thought this, I was 22. Now that I am 24, I can see that I was worried about nothing: The goalposts remain firmly in my past.

With all of this though I am still happy. Day to day, with a belly full of food, a job that pays me for sitting on my ass, a clean bill of health, and an overwhelmingly wonderful girlfriend, I somehow manage to find happiness. Hey, if I can do it, anyone can; Chin up, beautiful. But then, what is this emptiness that plagues me? And will the lack of accomplishment that seems to hang off my form like a shadow forever prevent me from feeling fulfilled? Is there a way to circumvent this? Should I even try to?

It is hard to consider whether or not you have the potential for anything great; Harder still when you’re not really sure how to define what ‘great’ is. These are the questions I ponder fervently as I talk to my cat in a baby voice and play my daily six hours of video games- Am I great? I dare not shake the Magic 8 ball and receive my four word answer(Here’s a hint: It starts with ‘Outlook’ and ends tragically).

Wisdom! This is my great trade off for the toll the years have taken on me and my weathered face. Let’s see, what wisdom have I been granted for my storied time on this earth… Hmm… That’s… Hmm…

Well, anyhoot, there have been some exciting changes over the past couple of years since I graduated from college. I somehow survived the deadly coronavirus, as well as roughly 600 different car rides and countless lower back injuries from lifting with someone stronger than me. I got a tattoo, had it removed, and lied about both those things just now. I got my first real job and found it to be simultaneously much more stressful and much more simple than my previous fake jobs. I’ve spent too much, saved too little, drank too much, and laughed just the right amount. I’ve tried and failed at writing and at comedy, at least in a half-assed way. I’ve read voraciously and remember almost none of it. No lessons for me please- Just words and the passage of time! My best friend and I moved in together and then moved our girlfriends in as well to keep up appearances. I’ve gone on hundreds of walks and spent more time than I would’ve liked to at the dog park. A truly strange place, the dog park- It’s like fight club for people’s children.

I’ve had a number of therapists who have succeeded in bestowing upon me the knowledge that men do not make good therapists. But I’ll be damned before I pay one penny to the pink pocketbook. I decided to take a little break from therapy after one of my therapists told me that he thought excessive drinking was actually good for me, and then recommended I try ayahuasca. Another stuck needles in my ears. He was actually the best.

I’ve gotten weaker, skinnier, and started to bald. I also tried to grow a beard; I failed, but it was nice to not have to look at my face for a while. I was drinking tuna smoothies for a time, in the hopes that a healthy dose of Omega-3 would be the kicker I needed to turn this franchise around. It doesn’t taste as bad as it sounds. Still pretty bad though.

Outside of that, my already meager cooking skills have taken a hit, but the quality of my meals has gone up. I have only my girlfriend to blame for this discrepancy. I fell out of love with music, though we have since started up an on again, off again relationship. I played on a few soccer teams, tried my hand at a particularly exclusive volleyball league and even took part in a DnD campaign in which my character, Grumble the Dwarf, died quickly of leukemia.

The only celebrity I unequivocally enjoyed, Norm Macdonald, passed away. It should’ve been someone else, perhaps Jimmy Fallon. I would’ve killed Stone-Faced Fallon myself if it meant the old chunk of coal lived, wrangled his pencil thin neck with my bare hands and felt his stomach churn beneath the solid knee I had planted in his gut until his skull turned blood and his breath became air. I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but I would’ve done it.

I went to the Ren Festival and learned two things but forgot them both because I spent the entire two days awake and intoxicated. I saw fights and plays and castles and had a wonderful time. I guzzled mead and gobbled turkey legs but didn’t quite feel like a medieval peasant despite getting gouged just as badly. I also bought my girlfriend three separate gifts, each more horrendous than the last(One was a surprisingly expensive, metal, artistic portrayal of a ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ scene, a movie that has no meaning to either of us whatsoever). It’s possible she would’ve preferred flowers.

I lost three rather excellent friends and grew apart from several others. I still naively hope to find them again one day.

I moved across the country- Almost 1300 miles!- but then I remembered I had a job, so I had to fly back. I have been turned down on the labor marketplace more times than I can count, though I’m sure Indeed and LinkedIn are keeping active tallies and are both impressed and depressed by my perseverance. My dog turned 2 and got slightly dumber and much fatter(he takes after his father) and I went to Miami. My favorite part of Miami was the people I hung out with, who had come with me from Dallas. My second favorite part was the plane ride home. I can’t recommend the place enough to anyone who has too much money.

I decided I wasn’t failing enough and so got into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and chess. No one can get the shit beat out of them both physically and mentally like I can; I’m a regular Everlast. It is remarkable to me how welcoming the BJJ community is. The same can’t be said for the chess community, but social skills are difficult to learn when you’re trying to memorize the King’s Indian to a depth of 30.

I passed the CFA Level 1 exam with flying colors, if those flying colors were skywritten into the word ‘BARELY’. (What clever writing- Who the fuck is this guy?) Studying for the test was a long and arduous process and I am proud of the accomplishment, which is rather backwards considering it is within a career path that I wish I’d never gotten into in the first place. Nonetheless, maybe I can parley this into a successful career and then die.

I’ve had my opinions change so many times on so many different topics that I have opted out of having them at all. Think of me as an amorphous sponge with a weak stomach, vomiting up the beliefs of whoever I heard speak last. Or don’t think of me at all. Most people prefer not to.

All of this is to say- I’m 24 years old. I have a million cherished memories and wish I had millions more. Perhaps all of this dissatisfaction and uneasiness is borne out of a love for life that runs so deep it threatens to cut all the way through. I’m happy, I think and I’m working on being happier and better, which is the important part. I like that I can look back on the life I’ve lived so far and say one thing for certain- I sure am trying my darndest.

I’m 24 now.