Staring at walls at the end of the year

On necessary and restorative boredom

There is only one line worth mentioning from the clunky and rambling blog I tried to write earlier this week, which I’d called Notes on Christmas: Last week on TikTok I heard a woman say that good gift giving is mostly good listening. Like how good writing is mostly good thinking.

Good writing is mostly good thinking. Somehow that was my segue from one messy section on Die Hard as a reflection on timeliness versus timelessness, to another section on the balance of Christmas between religious seriousness and consumerist frivolity, which was equally as vague. (A Charlie Brown Christmas did it better anyway.) That blog had nuggets of ideas perhaps worth refining later, but that one sober thought—that good writing is mostly good thinking—both properly described why Notes on Christmas was not working and, ultimately, did not save it. I was not doing good thinking over the holiday, and I am not doing good thinking now. I have so much free time this week, but every time I go to entertain myself with my phone or a video game or even a book, a feeling of unbearable heaviness overwhelms me and I have to put it down. It’s like I’m painfully full after a gigantic meal, and I need to fast or I’ll explode. At the moment all I can do is bumble along, make my last remaining appointments, tidy up the house, go for walks. Anything requiring high emotional or mental effort is unavailable to me now. My intellectual capacities are maxed out. So no notes on Christmas.

Instead of thinking, I’ve been staring at walls. I’ve written and processed and thought hard all year, and now I must rest. No more stories. No more analysis. No more learning new things. Only walls. The dead week between Christmas and New Years is ripe for staring at walls, which, I’ve discovered, like meditating, requires a mental effort all its own. A few times I even had to light a few candles just to give my eyes something to rest on. There are other cheats for staring at walls, like staring at the sky, which moves, or watching birds hop around in trees, but there’s nothing quite as dull and restorative as staring at a wall for a good long while.

Trying to recover from what feels like a pivotal year—perhaps not in any official way but surely in a fateful way, the way the plot that pulls one along through life takes a smooth but noticeable turn—feels much like trying to fall asleep after an eventful day. In elementary school, I once heard our principal once say that if we’re having trouble falling asleep, if we can’t stop thinking about what we’ll have for breakfast the next morning or which friends we’ll see tomorrow in class, try instead to recount the day that’s already passed. So you might recall, first, I woke up…then I got out of bed and brushed my teeth…then I walked to the kitchen and made oatmeal… and as soon as you know it, it’s the next morning, and you’re stretching yourself awake. I still do this when I can’t fall asleep. It’s a very boring and effective practice.

The same practice should work as I’m trying to achieve some deep, essential rest, a kind of walking slumber, that will carry me into next year and rejuvenate me to do this all again. If not, at least I’ll have done my month-by-month record-keeping for this year of my life, which is, in the end, a large fraction of my reason for writing in the first place. So that’s what follows. It’s both all I can muster and all that I need.

It rained over San Francisco straight from December to March, except on the first day of January, when it was sunny all day. The night before, Johny had left his phone on the train from North Beach to the Mission when we tried to get late-night burritos. It was closed when we arrived, so we’d gone for nothing after all that. The next morning, New Year’s Day, we took the same train to Daly City, the end of the line, where the station attendant was holding it for him. We spent the rest of the day at Fort Funston, sitting on sandy cliffs and picnicking in the wind.

On a clear day in February I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time.

In early March, right after her birthday, my older sister, my only sibling, moved to San Francisco after ten years in New York. It was necessary to get reacquainted with each other as adults. Now I’m very glad we live in the same city. No one will ever understand a girl like her sister.

In April I seriously considered quitting my corporate copywriting job and going back into journalism. I talked to a lot of reporters in the Bay Area, who mostly told me the same thing: You certainly could get a newspaper job if you really tried but you’d have to start back at the bottom, and taking such a pay cut is something to be taken seriously. I ultimately decided to keep my job and just start a blog. I got my hair cut and dyed it dark and came home and cried afterwards. Eventually I came around on the color, and eventually the dye faded anyway.

In May I spent a long weekend in Sedona and came back so blissed out that I sincerely did not care when I got denied a promotion the following week. Instead I started writing the first long essay I’d post on Discussion Candy, and started to unlearn a lot of things I learned in journalism school about how to put together an essay.

In June I started eating lots of apricots and cherries and peaches. Stone fruit season. I also drove five hours north to meet Johny at a hotel in the foothills of Mt. Shasta, where he was the best man at a wedding. I watched him give the most insane and breathtaking speech I’d ever seen given at a wedding. I cried. Everyone cried. The next day we hiked along a river to a clear pool under a waterfall, took off our clothes, and swam in the cold water.

In early July I spent my birthday in Tangier. I wore a long purple dress, drank a lot of orange juice and hot mint tea, and saw Asteroid City at a theater called Cinema Rif, where the film was screened with light pink French subtitles. In the evening I smoked hashish in Café Baba and looked out over the city as the sun went down to the west of us. I have never had a better birthday.

On a dreary day in August I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge for the second time.

In September I did the zine fest, camped through a thunderstorm in the eastern Sierras, threw up in the bathroom of Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown at a drunken birthday dinner, and said goodbye to two of my dearest friends when they moved away to New York.

In October I started, in my opinion, to hit my stride with the blog. I stopped eating stone fruit. I went to a terrible tech party on Halloween weekend, and it reminded me how it’s all hype and how glad I am to not work at a startup anymore.

On his birthday in early November, Johny and I both had depressing days at work, but we dragged ourselves out to Korean barbecue, both wearing little paper party hats, and we cheered up. That weekend I stayed up all night to write the elite capture article on a flight to New York. I wore a dark green dress and white opera gloves to see La Bohème at Lincoln Center. I laughed at the gold plaque in the lobby that says Thank you, Chevron-Texaco for its generous donation. I spent Thanksgiving in the South Bay with my sister and brother-in-law and Johny’s family, and the elite capture article blew up.

Here at the end of December I can feel myself digesting the year. I started to understand, theoretically, the virtue of gift giving—I even managed to give a few memorable gifts—although it is still something I need to work on. I rediscovered my favorite holiday aesthetic, sinister-cozy (see: Eyes Wide Shut, A Christmas Carol, the concept of Krampus, the song “Mele Kalikimaka,” which is all bloody colonialism when you really consider it). I hung orange slices and rainbow Christmas lights in our apartment. I started eating a lot of oranges. Winter citrus season. Johny and I cooked a lot of Russian food and told our families we’re engaged. I stared at walls as much as I could. I tried to give my head a break. I saw Poor Things alone. I cut my hair again. I liked how it came out.

December, a poem: Half asleep over here. / Bangs, I fear. / Things anew I sense are near. / See you in the morning, early next year.