Sure was a year, huh?

[corpsebrigadier]

Welp. I made it through 2025, and it was--within the narrow scope of my personal life and outside of the realm of the present political moment--a pretty good year.


Looking back, in 2025, I:

• Ran 26.2 miles in one go and spent about two months prior enjoying the weirdness of waking up before dawn on the regular and watching the animals and morning mist scatter and the sun rise as I strove to run shorter distances.


• Started killing my lawn to turn it into a permaculture garden, and ended up getting my gooseberries, honeyberries, and paw-paws planted before winter.


• Went on an impromptu early spring romantic date to watch the salamanders migrate to their vernal pools and fuck.


• Went vegan sort of unintentionally and used said veganism as an excuse to do a variety of crimes to food (See: the parsnip goat head).


• Became an abortion clinic escort and helped members of my community get to their medical appointments while protestors told us how we were "feeding the evil within ourselves."


• Started pulling invasive weeds at the local park, and eventually learned enough about them to host a small party with friends where we all dyed textiles with the component parts of the buckthorn I'd spent the summer slaughtering.


• Quit the bulk of social media platforms upon which I formerly posted, limiting myself to this barely used Dreamwidth and a personal website.


• Read a bunch of books and watched a bunch of movies--with the exact counts being uncertain because I also quit Storygraph and Letterboxd in the midst of the social media purge.


• Went to a former pig farm with my alma mater's radio club and learned to set up antennae before completely acing my technicians exam.

• Marched in the local memorial day parade with the LWV to encourage voter registration/pitch progressive ballot initiatives and then, a few weeks later, stood on the sidelines of the local pride parade with my clinic escort crew and a cowbell to create a block to keep people from having to see/hear the creeps yowling about Sodom and Gomorrah.


• Picked enough dandelions to make wine again.


• Learned some of the basics of fitting copper pipes with my local gift culture plumbing company.


• Helped win gay trivia at the local leather bar with my team twice (They asked a question about Bram Stoker marrying Oscar Wilde's college girlfriend! I felt so useful!).

• Helped with the operations of the candidate forums for local elected officials during election season, so voters could make informed decisions about who is addressing their concerns re: street repair and tree lawn plants.

• Went to numerous local festivals, parties, book clubs, drag shows, folk punk concerts, poetry readings, art exhibits, anarchist tarot workshops, parties, and potlucks.

I'm opting to make 2026 a year where I largely just keep up with the cool stuff in which I'm entangled in, with my two big resolutions being to try to work on flexibility/mobility (to help keep up with the running and to potentially make me into the sort of person who can comfortably lift weights) and to double down on studying Japanese again so I can be slightly less of a disappointment to my ancestors and potentially engage more deeply with Japanese media I've enjoyed. I expect if I keep up with the steady trickle of electoral activism I'm presently committed too, I may have other stuff I add to my plate as the US midterms approach, but I largely just hope to keep doing what I've been doing and enjoy doing it.

Comments

[shinon]

Hot damn, I need to step up my invasive-plant game. Time to look up whether there's anything fun to do with bags and bags of clematis seeds.

This is all cool as hell. Here's to more cool activities in 2026.