works of wanderlust

Tag: december-ish

  • who cares

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Explain a valuable life lesson you learned in 2025.

    No one cares.

    Hold up. Wait. Listen.  Whoa: I don’t mean that in a sad-sack, pity me kind of way.

    What I mean is that figuring out some perspective on the attention of others is actually, factually something that has taken me decades to put into a simple clear idea and to internalize, nearly half a century of work to break out of the patterns of my youth, and to materialize in my own mind a thought that—tho rational and clear and obvious—will still be something that it will still take me the rest of my life to ever feel comfortable settling into as a firm belief that I live by without constantly reminding myself, really: it is figuring out that no one really actually cares…

    No one is looking.

    No one is actually paying attention.

    No one is paying as much attention to you as you are.

    No one is concerned about the choices you make (inasmuch as long as those choices don’t get in their way and cause them harm or cost them money or whatever.)

    People will judge, sure. People might gossip, of course. But at the end of the day no one really actually cares enough to even think much about those things let alone put in the effort to try to stop each of us from doing and being the things we want to be.

    That can have a net negative result if people get lost down rabbit holes of weird or dangerous pursuits, sure, but the upside is that IF no one actually cares, then hell… we can all be pretty much free to create what we want to create, to draw the thing we want to draw and to sing the songs we want to sing. Anything. No one cares.

    People will pay attention, glance in our direction, leave comments, maybe even talk behind our backs, possibly orbit in our lives for a time and disrupt each of our effort to be our true selves, but no one ACTUALLY cares… at least not as much as we each think everyone does, and not with anything comparable in scale to the focus each of us puts upon our own lives.

    I spent a lot of years hesitating to make or do or say because I was brought up to think that the nattering of external commentary on the things I chose was as valuable—if not of vastly greater value—than the value I put on it for myself. But that’s not true at all.

    The reality is that unless someone has a weird sort of toxic obsession with us, which is probably way more rare than most people assume, the average person out there doesn’t really give a spit about any other average person… or us.

    Our coworkers acknowledge our value. Our friends may even like us. Our family possibly loves us. Whatever. But…

    No. One. Cares.

    Not what you choose to do and not who you choose to be.

    (And anyone who might care a bit too much isn’t worth listening to actually… so in my experience they don’t f-ing count. Micromanaging bosses. Overbearing partners. Terrible governments. Fuck em all. )

    The point being is that it is easy to get hung up wondering what people will think or say or how they will react to a job change or a life choice or the colour of your new car or the fact you stopped at the drive thru for a hamburger after work… but no one cares.

    It’s easy to assume that if you spend your evenings pursuing a hobby that you love or learn a second language or study something wild in school or write weird niche fiction online under a quirky pen name that everyone is out there is just judging and talking and wagging their fingers… but actually: no one cares.

    No one cares.

    No. One. Cares.

    And that’s a good thing. It is freeing. It leaves us to pursue being the people who we want to be.

    A lesson worth caring about. At least little. 

  • kiyomizu-dera

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What adventure from 2025 will be forever etched upon your memory?

    It would be super simple sitting here less than a month after spending most of November in Japan to just write… Japan! with a huge exclamation mark and move on to the next post (heck knows these days leading in the holidays are busy and I have things I should be doing besides writing daily blog posts… whose idea was this blog-every-day thing anyway!?)

    But let me tell you how I spent my birthday. In Kyoto.

    There are almost countless shrines and temples in Japan, but one up on the side of a small mountain in Kyoto called Kiyomizu-dera was a short walk from our new hotel. We had woken up in a traditional-style hotel near the Kyoto train station but had moved to an apartment style hotel a couple klicks away (for cost and location reasons—all booked months ago).

    My birthday was on a Sunday and it just happened to be the weekend that the Kiyomizu-dera temple switched to its autumn hours—counter-intuitively open later in the autumn because their grounds happened to host a large grove of Japanese maple trees which turn a beautiful hue of red. They light them up from multiple angles so that the temple and the grove become a magic place of enchanting lights and shapes and shadows.

    We decided to go up there to have a look after dinner. 

    Every person in Kyoto was also trying to get up there, apparently. 

    There is one narrow street lined with various shops selling souvenirs and foods and often both, and the street being about three meters wide it would comfortably accommodate a good few thousand people an hour walking up to the tempe itself.  Rough guess? At least ten thousand people were up there. 

    It took us nearly an hour to walk—shuffle—the kilometre-ish distance up from our hotel street to the temple gates, and then another hour to slowly make our way through the sea of people towards the grove of trees.

    The sight was worth the effort tho.

    We amazingly found a bench and remember we just sat there in the shadow and glow of a huge maple astride a pond with the pagoda temple looming above, all of it like a fire of reds and oranges, and we just… sat there. Sat there and took it all in, kinda the pinnacle of this vacation we were taking and this quiet moment in a crowd of thousands. And somehow it had taken me exactly forty nine years and millions choices to get to this exact spot.

    And now etched permanently on my memory.

  • forty nine

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe your 2025 in terms of fitness, health, mind and body.

    Healing. 

    There was a time when, privacy be damned, I’d disclose and lament any and all of my personal ailments on a blog like this… but needless to say those days are gone.

    It’s enough for you to know that I am now in the last year of my 40s and what no one tells you when you start your 40s is that hardly anyone escapes their 40s without something on the old bod needing some fine tuning and generally more careful care. Even if you are reasonably active like me, running hundreds or thousands of klicks in a year and regularly hitting the pool and otherwise keeping generally on your feet, well, things start to wear out in this the decade leading to the half century mark… and as the kids be joking lately us “olds” get to tell everyone we’re historic and from the “1900s!” All of which means it has been a year of what I like to think of as evaluation and healing.

    This means that I have pretty much officially cut a few things from my diet.

    This also means that these days I make choices about running that are linked to avoiding injury as much as they are about finding adventure.

    This additionally means that I restarted this blog because I realize that it is part of a suite of writing that I do that contributes to a kind of invaluable mental health exercise.

    This also also means that it gets harder every day to think of myself as anything resembling “young” anymore, despite that I have a lot of friends whose ages start with a 5 or over a 6 who often jest that I’m still a young guy and to stop my complaining!

    So… ugh!

    I had to deal with the resurgence of my knee pain in 2025.

    I have been working through issues that taught me that digestive health can be a holistic experience and symptoms can manifest in ways and places you would not think are linked to your stomach and diet.

    I have had to do the hardest thing of all which is to accept that sometimes I am my own (and only) company and moral champion, and there are those rare times when no one else will have your back, even close family.

    It has been a year of growth and healing and thinking and making and being, which in a year of the world being the opposite of that has often been counter-intuitive… tho pretty rewarding in the end.

  • the cupboard of the real

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What is something you ate 25 years ago that you’d never eat now?

    Saying “never” is always a bit of a tall order. 

    See, I’d like to tell you that I am not a picky eater—and I think I’d be telling the truth writing that—and that depending on the circumstances (and my mood) I’d probably conclude that me in 2025 likely has a wider palate than me from twenty five years ago in 2000.  

    But I guess the vibe in this question-slash-thought experiment is leaning into what kinds of things I might lean into when I actively choose the food and tastes that make up my day-to-day eating habits now versus then… in which case I’d tell you that me in 2025 would probably lean into real ingredients and spices and flavours where me in 2000 would have been reasonably content with powdered mixes and faker foods and ready-to-eat frozen foods.  

    It’s not that I’d never eat those other things now, no. And also this post is not about food snobbism. I eat junk and fast food and convenient ready-to-serve stuff on the regular. 

    It’s just that when I am actively planning meals and prepping to feed myself and the fam in a clear state of mind, and with everything else being equal, I will make my pasta sauces from tomatoes and herbs and onions and garlic… and not from a little red pouch of powder with a picture of spaghetti on the front, as I would have even a decade ago. I would make pizza dough from flour and yeast, and grate my own cheese and slice my own toppings, I wouldn’t pull a square box out of the freezer and heat up the oven.

    Et cetera, et cetera…

    It’s those types of things run amok in my cooking in 2025: choosing to take an extra effort to make “real” meals when I have the time and resources to do so, rather than quicker “faker” options.

  • pano perfect

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe the best picture
    you took in 2025.

    I’ve been trying to take the elusively perfect panorama picture since about a week after I got my first digital camera.

    My success has varied. 

    A few years ago the iPhone added the method that I use to this day, which if you’re sitting there reading this thinking, well duh, panoramic photos are just an option in your photos app dummy, then realize that until about a decade ago making panos was an effort of careful planning and then stitching pics together later in a piece of software and, gah! It really was a chore. 

    But it wasn’t until 2024 that I managed to figure out a better way to display them on a website.

    And in 2025 I actually published a wordpress plugin that lets me put panos onto blogs like this one in a way that sort of looks like this:

    So. The best picture that I took this year? It must have been a panoramic, because among the thousands and thousands of pics I took knowing that I had finally got a bit closer to being able to share the perfect pano was definitely a high point.