The exact shape of your words

January round-up of lists, books, good things, and moar

Jan 10, 2025

2024 was the year I learned the pleasure of the ocean, having generally avoided it my entire life due to the closest one (the Pacific) being entirely too cold for my desert-rat constitution, but also reverence masquerading as fear.

Turns out, there are other oceans. WHO KNEW. (Everyone.) We took an impromptu trip to the Cayman Islands, where even a bagel somehow costs $40 but damn that bathwater-warm ocean. So clear I could see the bubbles hitching a ride on my leg hair. (But also still too cold for me, as evidenced by me trying to emulate Instagram-hotness in this video.)

I learned how the simplest forms of pleasure are almost always available to us—food, drink, air, sun, touch. How satisfying it can be—in the right context—to turn an exhale into an inhale.

How almost sexual it can feel when a pomegranate aril bursts on your tongue.

I learned the outrageous joy of iced salt coffee on a sweltering day in Hue, Vietnam and how satisfying to sip pho straight from the bowl while dunking a savory Chinese donut in a grandmother’s living room. How surprising the solidity of thousands-year-old ruins in Cambodia’s Angkor Wat.

I went for walks most days and craved resolutions to things that didn’t require them.

I sat with uncertainty until it began to change in my hands. How you can look at something so long that up becomes down, the future becomes the past, and still these hands ache to write it all down.

How all the words I wrote were trying to give shape to what has been misplaced.

I read a book a week, which felt impressive, including a lot of fantasy (new to me), romance, and books about marketing. My faves were:

The Fetishist by Katherine Min (gorgeously written, weird, and a really surprising love story)

Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn (funny, snarky, lesbian anti-hero with a penchant for destruction and an age-gap lover)

Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott (took about 100 pages to get going, but, oh man, once it did… and told in a kind of dreamy, late-night campfire style)

The Fifth Season N.K. Jemison (slow to start, as a lot of sci-fi is, frankly, but one of the most inventive ways to tell a story I’ve ever read)

Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow by Steve Almond (nonfiction, a writing guide that felt as encouraging as instructive. I also appreciated that Almond shared his many failures and missteps along the way)

I tried to make plans that mostly fell through.

I watched the news play out nightmare after nightmare in real-time. I took breaks. I played pickleball and made tamales because my mom no longer can.

I learned that all grief is unique but no grief is solitary.

We took the kids snow tubing and peach picking and to see the poppies bloom, that opium orange rutting against the dry hills like a bruise in reverse.

I bought dumbbells and started lifting them. I went to my first swingers party and watched vacation dads dance to early-aughts Nelly and several women get flogged while making polite chitchat with each other. I tried a new hearing aid, then sent it back.

I took Vika to prom—her first! I lost friends to geography and children and politics and reconnected with a few from high school.

I finally started learning ASL in earnest. (Your local library might have free virtual ways to learn a variety of languages. Ours is through Mango and it’s great.)

I often felt unpunctuated.

I considered the ways I’m complicit in my own erasure, and how to be more forgiving.

I went to two writing retreats and took photos of weird wooden boob sculptures and smiled at a lake house named Pier Pressure.

I didn’t read enough poetry but I did discover Kim Addonizio and the joy of buying strawberries from a woman in a parking lot and sifting through the rot to find the best parts of being alive and how surprising and not surprising that the answer is still—always—you.