• I feel like I am still trying to figure out who I am. I feel like I can get along with anybody, but in order to do so, I have to contort myself into the shape I think is most acceptable to the other person. There aren't very many places where I feel like I don't need to contort. The internet promises to be that place, but now that the internet effectively has an infinite memory, I feel like any minor mistake I make will haunt me forever, which has a depressingly chilling effect on me.

• My brand for the past few years was "neurotic, scared nerd." My brand going forward is "kind, confident, and fair nerd."

• I wore my Windows 95 ugly sweater through the skyway and six different people told me how much they loved it. I think a big part of my purpose in life is to find ways to spread joy, even if it's by doing something as dumb as wearing the most bad ass Christmas sweater ever.

• I got my son to try eating pizza. This is huge; he does not like pizza and refuses to even try. This is completely my fault, I've been horrible at encouraging my kids to be brave and adventurous with trying new foods. I, admittedly, am not exactly adventurous in that department either. My son told me he needed strength to be brave to try it, so I helped him bring all of his stuffed animals and cars downstairs into the kitchen, and we blased Sara Bareilles's Brave over the HomePod. And guess what? He put a piece of pizza in his mouth and kept it in there for a few seconds! Later that night, to much less fanfare, I bravely tried an Airhead. I didn't like it, but I tried it. It's cool to face scary situations together, even if that fear comes in various forms of high fructose corn syrup.

• I have this idea to build a mini website which functions as my music library. I have a very specific vibe for a design (bad ass 70s-looking lounge area but with 2025 technology). There would be this record table console with records mounted on the wall such that you could see their faces¹, and flanked on either side are the spines of records with the names of the albums on there. Clicking on a record would put it in the record player (maybe having it display some streaming widget dingus in view) along with why I like this record (interesting stories I learned about the production of the record, meaningful memories associated with it, vibes I get from it, recommended similar albums, etm.)

• There's a fun AI project that I'm working on right now, but I am finding it so difficult to drum up the motivation to work on it. You know why? Because getting computers to do anything useful is so, so, so painful.

• I watched this video called Why creating is crucial to human existence and it highlights the fact that what we do everyday is who we are. So in that spirit, I started a 100 day sit up challenge this month, because I wanna be the kind of guy who does stuff like that. I'm only a month into this challenge and I'm already able to knock out 100 sit ups without stopping in a little under 3 minutes.

• The formula for discipline is (1) Create rules and standards for yourself; (2) Never break these promises to yourself; (3) Keep these promises at all costs (so start small!); (4) Build up slowly to a disciplined lifestyle; (5) Be on guard for at least a year.

• For years now, I've had this recurring nightmare where I am being ushered out on stage in front of a huge crowd for a theatrical performance. I do not know the lines or the blocking or the choreography, and I feel this massive wave of embarassment and shame. This past month, I went to see a musical at my wife’s school, and I was unexpectedly asked to go on stage as a character. I had exactly zero idea what the show was, nor did I know the lines or blocking or choreography.² Sometimes, life literally presents an opportunity to directly face your nightmares head on, and that rules.³

• Direct passage from my journal from a year ago: "It's hard to write publicly about the things I am suffering with because it always seems like I look back on it in a couple of years and realize how silly it was to be stressed out about it."

• I tend to avoid the trance style of EDM. It amplifies my anxiety because of how logical it is; I find myself hyperfocused on the technical aspects of the music, completely ignoring how it makes me feel.

• The first big snowfall of the year rules when you have kids. The road coming back from the small sledding hill in our neighborhood was still covered in ice and snow, so I put the kids in their sleds and pulled them behind me. It was hard. My heart was pounding. My legs kept slipping on the slick road. But it was easy to continue, because I kept thinking: "why do you work out, if not for this?"

• Running is more meaningful to me lately. I've been using it more as a meditative period in my day, a moment to disconnect from technology and notice as much as I can in my neighborhood.⁴ Ten years ago, I would've been mortified if I didn't push my hardest every single time. Now, I will often stop in the middle of a run and stare at the fog traveling across the pond, or watch the color of the sky subtly change as the sun comes up.

• “Finns det hjärterum, så finns det stjärterum” is Swedish for "If there’s heart room, there’s butt room."

• I love learning new slang. This month, I learned two new phrases: sksksksk and ijbol.

• Christmas Eve felt particularly bittersweet for me this year. It feels like my parents are getting closer to downsizing their home, so I tried my hardest to soak up the ambiance. And when you're in a "soak up this moment" mindset, it seems like there's never enough time to do it.

• "It's time to stop researching and start living."

• Before the sermon on Christmas Eve, my pastor said his words don't matter. What matters is what you hear. Sometimes, the thing you take away from a story is not what the artist intended, but that is okay.

• The most nutritional part of a potato is its peel. Apple peels are also nutritionally important. Nothing of note is lost in a carrot peel.

Movies I watched:

Knocked Up (2007)

• Glad I watched it? Yeah. I got 30% of the way through it and decided “I’m good here.” It's okay for your tastes to change as you do.
• Will I watch it again? Nah.

Enough Said (2013)

• Glad I watched it? Yeah. I heard Julia Louis-Dreyfus say on a podcast that she loved working with James Gandolfini, and it was cute to watch them interact on the big screen.
• Will I watch it again? Nah. I didn't even finish it.

Yes Man (2008)

• Glad I watched it? Yeah. I remember watching it in college and thinking it was a nice sentiment. It definitely hits harder at 37.
• Will I watch it again? Nah. Wait, am I supposed to say "yes"?

That Christmas (2024)

• Glad I watched it? Yeah. It was a cute movie, the kids loved it. It's nice to see some traditional ideas playing out in our modern time.
• Will I watch it again? Yeah, I'd watch this again next year.

Mallrats (1995)

• Glad I watched it? Meh. It was cool to see Eden Prairie Center in the 90s, but if I'm being honest, I've never "got" most of Kevin Smith's movies. I thought maybe I would now that I'm in my late 30s, but I think it's that I'm not a Gen-Xer.
• Will I watch it again? Nah.

Youth in Revolt (2009)

• Glad I watched it? Yeah. I'm a little embarassed to admit that I identify with Michael Cera in most of the movies that he is in. I like how he created a character to embody when he wants to feel confident.
• Will I watch it again? Nah.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)

• Glad I watched it? Yeah. I don't think I've ever watched the whole thing from start to end.
• Will I watch it again? Begrudgingly, I'm sure I will. This wasn't my favorite claymation Christmas movie.

Dear Santa (2024)

• Glad I watched it? Yeah, this movie ruled. The kid actors were quite talented, and obviously Jack Black killed it.
• Will I watch it again? Absolutely.

Arthur Christmas (2011)

• Glad I watched it? Yeah. I snuggled and watched it with my kid on Christmas Day. It's an adorable Christmas movie.
• Will I watch it again? Absolutely.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)

• Glad I watched it? Yeah. I forget how much slapstick is in that movie.
• Will I watch it again? Probably? I feel like that movie is slightly before my time, and because it wasn't on repeat at my house growing up, I don't have the same nostalgic feelings I get from other Christmas movies like Home Alone or Muppet Christmas Carol.

Home Alone (1990)

• Glad I watched it? Obviously.
• Will I watch it again? Obviously.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

• Glad I watched it? Yes. It made me want to watch Muppet Treasure Island again, too.
• Will I watch it again? Obviously.

• Is part of my problem with focus due to my brain's constant reevaluation of priorities? Like, if my immediate priority is to fix the foam gravestones that broke last Halloween, then my next step is to go to Menards... which feels like way too much effort compared to the payoff. So I decide it makes more sense to build up a list of things I need from Menards and wait until that list becomes high value enough to execute on it. Meanwhile, the foam gravestones sit in my garage, losing value every day that Halloween approaches. Instead, what if I just finished the task without trying to get the maximal payoff?

• One of our most important evolutionarily significant traits is our ability to recognize patterns. Here's my question: do we overindex on the importance of pattern matching simply because we're good at it?

• One of the coolest parts of mindfulness and awareness is seeing it manifest in everyday occurrences. For example: the other day, I was out on a walk and decided to listen carefully to the noises I heard. As a car drove past me, it felt like I could hear the pistons firing inside the engine.

• My Anxiety Attack Mitigation playlist was assembled as a way to... well, mitigate anxiety attacks.¹ I realized while listening to it this month that the way this works is to induce joy and confidence. Are anxiety and joy two sides of the same coin?

• A growth mindset is easy to achieve when I'm surrounded by people who give me energy, and a scarcity mindset is easy to achieve when I'm left alone with my thoughts for too long.

• There's something magical about watching grown men play a game of football in the misty rain. We're meant to be outside on a rainy day. It's rejuvenating.

• When I make statements like "I want to solve problems that are worth solving," I think what I actually mean is "I want to contribute to solving problems which are only solvable through collective action."

• There's so much to be afraid of. There's so much to celebrate. All you can do is keep your chin up and keep pushing forward.

• I have a simple litmus test for the efficacy of Siri: "Hey Siri, shuffle playlist 'pump up'." In the initial launch of Voice Control on iOS 4, this started the music app and began playback within a second or two. Anecdotally, over the last 15 years, it feels like this test has gotten progressively slower. This latest Apple Intelligence-powered release of Siri is roughly 1.5x slower than the previous iteration of Siri.²

• I came home from an early chilly walk to write this post and saw my son awake in the living room chair watching his tablet. I told him he shouldn't be on screens so much today (we've been on screens a lot this Thanksgiving weekend), and he responds by turning on the TV, starting a YouTube video, and dancing along with it. I love this little guy.

• I had a Czech lager the other day that was incredible, and it made me wonder if my Czech relatives would have enjoyed it as well. I bet they'd be proud of me right now. I think I'll be pretty proud of my descendants, too.

• The common theme of my journal entries from November are issues with confidence and focus. If anyone has any tips on improving either of those general areas of my life, I'm all ears.

• A major roadblock to fully enjoying life is a vague fear that I'm constantly being taken advantage of. I'll spend $40 less on a concert ticket because it feels like I'm rebelling against Ticketmaster, but all that act of rebellion gets me is a subpar artistic experience. I should start factoring in that $40 as the cost of maximizing joy and being more fully present.³

• A video I watched about blindfolded speed runs of Super Mario 64 introduced me to the concept of "beat counting." Basically, you listen along to the beat of the song in the level, and then you time out your movements according to the beat. Wild!⁴

• Another video I watched explained the point of poetry, which is to drop you into a certain experience made for you to contemplate and reflect. It's a simple concept and immediately transferable to any art form... but again, it's my predilection for trying to understand the rules of any given system which hamstrings me from fully appreciating art.

• This Marcus Aurelius quote resonated with me this month: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your estimate of it. And this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” Maybe this quote can help me with confidence?

• I spend too much time stressing about whether I'd be able to survive in any era prior to the one I'm living in. Like, would I have survived in the colonial era? Or in the pharaoh times? Or in the Paleolithic era?⁵

• I know I'm only able to focus on one thing at a time, but it's rare that I'm able to choose what that one thing is. If my wife asks me to bring the Christmas decorations out from under the house, I'll come across my box of cables that's on the opposite side of the crawl space from the Christmas decorations. 45 minutes later, I'm sitting buried in a bunch of piles of cables, none of which are any more "sorted through", and I still haven't gotten the Christmas decorations out.

• When I was a younger, I remember learning about the concept of a golden birthday and wondering what I would do for mine (which was 30). I thought maybe a grown-up gift to get was a new car. I can't believe that at age 37, I bought myself a new car for my birthday. As much as "adulting" and "growing up" sucks, it also unequivocally rules.⁶

• I've been playing around with a new mantra this past week: "win this moment." Whenever it's popped into my head, it's worked for me. Struggling at mile 3 of a cold jog? Win this moment. The boy wants to explain something to you about Rainbow Friends? Win this moment. A unit test keeps failing with an inscrutable error message? Win this moment. Walking through the kitchen and tempted by a cookie? Win this moment.

• I've decided I'm going to watch through all of the movies in my movie collection. I did this with my music collection and it took me 5 years to complete it, so I'm not sure how long this is gonna take lol. My rating system consists of two binary questions: "am I glad I watched this?" and "will I ever watch this again?". I'm thinking I might build a sub webpage here to track the movies I'm watching with this system.

• I never understood the concept of expressing love through cooking until I watched my mother-in-law make an entire Thanksgiving dinner this year. I've always viewed cooking as a utilitarian pursuit with a goal of filling bellies. I get now that you can put in an insane amount of effort into something simply for the satisfaction of smiling faces, as well as the joy you get from providing a space to assemble your loved ones in a single room in the midst of our chaotic lives.

• It's amazing how fast my mental health torpedoes when I get a terrible night of sleep.

• One parenting tip that's helped me cope with big emotions: reframe the situation from "you versus me" to "us versus the problem." It's not "why did you clog the toilet and let poop water overflow over the edge," it's "how can we make it so our toilet doesn't get clogged with an entire roll of toilet paper anymore?" Ask me how I came up with that specific scenario!

• Focus remains a challenge for me. I would love nothing more than to be able to set a schedule and stick to it, but when I go to sit down and honor the schedule, my body does everything in its power to stop me in my tracks. I can't tell why... maybe there's something more wrong with me, maybe I'm not disciplined enough. Maybe it's something else.

• Much of my 2024 experience involved adding a new entry to the list of questions that cycle in my inner monologue: "are these feelings just a part of the human experience, or is there a way to better way to process and cope with these feelings?"

• There's a quote by Yohji Yamamoto that goes, "Start copying what you love. Copy, copy, copy, copy. And at the end of the copy, you will find yourself." I wrote that down nearly two decades ago, and it's only in the last few months that I've started to understand what it means.

• My inability to manage tasks is what likely led to me getting sick going into my anniversary trip to New York. Everything is a choice, and sometimes, you gotta be okay with the consequences of the choices you make. I decided to spend an entire afternoon shopping and playing pull tabs at our old neighborhood bar with my wife instead of building graphics for a show I worked on. Then I had to stay up until 11pm building those graphics. Was it worth it? ...absolutely.

• If you ever want to see a masterclass in problem solving, go sit in the booth during a live television broadcast.

• Of all the terrifying places on earth, the one which still frightens me the most is sleeping in an unfamiliar bed.

• I'd like to further explore the intersection of fear and confidence.

• I spent a few days in New York, and it was fascinating to see the role that selfishness plays in that culture. In the midwest, cooperativeness is a necessity... if you were a dick to your neighbor in the summer, he might not wanna lend you firewood when you're freezing to death in the winter. In New York, everyone's selfishness stands in as a proxy for respect. People are curt not out of hostility, but as if to say "I won't take up any more of your time than I need to."

• I've known my wife for nearly 14 years now, and it took all this time to feel like I understand her. And now that I do, I love her even more, and I'm so lucky to have been married to her for a decade.

• I watched the entire "Mr. McMahon" docu-series on Netflix in a couple days (thanks Covid lol), and there was a moment in there where Shawn Michaels was talking about the kickback they were receiving from parents in the late 90s. His philosophy at the time was "if you don't like it, be a parent and ban your kids from watching it." Now that he has kids, he's realizing that you can't exactly do that. We can't shelter our kids from the realities of our society. There's so much good and so much bad that we are exposed to in our lives, and it's our job as parents not to shelter our kids from it, but help them learn how to navigate it.

• That being said: I loved the attitude era. I loved the campy stories of irreverent punks beating up their bosses, sticking up for themselves, meting out their own brand of vigilante justice. It is (and was) also super messed up. It can be both of those things.

• In the past, starting something new meant I should make huge, sweeping changes to my entire life. New job? That must also mean new exercise routine, new meal habits, and new hobbies. 36 year old Tim realizes that I can only bite off so much, and it would be more sustainable to focus on doing well at my new job, and then taking on new challenges once I am settled in.

• I like to think that if the famous writers throughout history had the same tech as us, they'd have their own RSS feeds and publish their own thoughts frequently on their blogs.

• There was a moment last week where I was grilling wings and watching my wife try to get our new moped running, my son argue about being outside (it was gorgeous out and I made him get off of Minecraft to enjoy it lol), and my daughter raise hell with the neighbor kids. I was listening to a new album, and reflecting on how much fun I had at work learning new stuff all week. That's when it dawned on me: "I've made it."

• I don't think my parents and teachers growing up were wrong to focus on teaching us skills we need to survive in this world. I just wish they'd also have taught us how to enjoy things, too.

• Dreamworks is more than capable of serving as stiff competition to the Disney empire. The Wild Robot was really good! I wish there were more studios cranking out enjoyable, emotionally-charged stories catered toward a family audience in animated form.

• RuPaul often says, "if you can't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love someone else?" I find it difficult to love myself. All the techniques I've used to address my debilitating impostor syndrome involve some variant of tough love, and believe it or not: that never really helped me much. What's working for me currently is talking to myself the way I talk to my kids. Be positive. Focus on what you can change. Be humble and admit when you need help. And be there for others when they need you, too.

• I've struggled most of my life with feeling art. I look at a painting and can only see it at a purely technical level, as if knowing why an artist used a specific brand of acrylic paint explains the motivation behind the work. I've typically been more fascinated with how people do things rather than what message they're trying to convey. All this to say: I watched Jumanji again for the first time in years last week. I've seen that movie at least two dozen times, and I was legitimately spooked by it. Mid-20s Tim would watch that movie and think "I wonder how they pulled off that stampede shot inside the house?" Early-30s Tim would watch that movie and think, "were people in the 60s so into themselves that they didn't notice a child wandering into an active construction site and retrieving a treasure chest that was there in plain sight?" This time, I just felt myself as each of the characters. How it would feel to lose my parents in a car accident. How it would feel as a busy aunt who suddenly has to deal with two children. How it would feel to be a hunter whose only motivation is to murder the person who rolled the dice.

• I was raised to understand that love is showing someone how to avoid mistakes. As I reflect on that, I'd amend that belief to say that love is helping someone learn from their own mistakes and being there for them with firm support when they do screw up.

• Alexi Pappas once said, "Whenever you’re chasing a big dream, you’re supposed to feel good a third of the time, okay a third of the time, and crappy or not great a third of the time, and if you feel roughly in those ratios, it means you are in fact chasing a dream." I've been slowly working my way back into running shape, and I can confirm that I feel that way in those ratios.

• Running at 5:30a means I get to wander through my neighborhood and see everyone’s festive and spooky Halloween decorations instead of everyone’s political signs.

• One of the hardest aspects of being a software engineer is that the implementation details of your job change all the time. Did you know that in Ruby, if you pass variables into a method with the same name as the method is expecting (like a_method(property_1: property_1, foo: foo)), you can shorthand it to be like a_method(property_1:, foo:)? I learned that this week!

• If art is finding a way to express what is rattling around in your head to others, then maybe writing code is actually my artistic expression.

• When it comes to empathy, I've never struggled with the "getting into someone's mind" part. What I've struggle with is accepting that the other person's point of view is valid. And I'm still working on that.