It’s frustrating that a year that was reasonably good personally was such a shit show civically.
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So much is appalling: the influence of the weaselly xenophobe Stephen Miller over American public policy, from mass kidnappings to murder at sea; Congress’s abject cowardice, enabled by a blatantly corrupt Supreme Court; the medical violence of RFK, Jr. and his snake-oil TV-personality Surgeon General…. The list could go on — indeed, it barely scratches the surface — but that’s not the point of this post.
So here’s a relatively unorganized sampling of my life in 2025, as I experienced it.
The Biggest Deal
This year I retired from teaching after twenty years at Yuba College (not to mention a few itinerant years prior). It’s a big change, and it suits me well.
People ask if I miss it. The answer to that is an emphatic “No.” Just a couple years ago, I’d have been surprised to learn just how emphatic that “no” really is; for the longest time, I figured I’d be one of those professors who outstays his welcome and usefulness. I liked teaching. I liked the students at Yuba. I liked my colleagues.
But community college work is challenging, at the best of times. As a baseline, it’s a pretty heavy workload (especially for English classes), and community colleges are the most regulated of all the post-secondary schools.
And the state (and, to a lesser extent, the feds) have recently been increasing their mandates, often with no additional funding. COVID changed things, too: high schoolers often came to college even less prepared, and students demanded face-to-face classes but signed up for online classes.
On top of that, there’s A.I. Far too many students had A.I. write discussion posts (sometimes a whole discussion thread would be ChatGPT talking to itself) or, worse, essays — and then they lied through their teeth about it. It got exhausting. I am not anti-A.I., but too many students used it to replace themselves.
So when I hit the twenty year mark, I was glad to be done.
And to answer the other oft-asked question: no, I’m not at all bored. Well, I mean, sometimes I do things that bore me; I fall too easily into YouTube rabbit holes, for example, but that’s my fault. For the most part I’m making music, which is both fun and challenging; and I’m reading a lot more.
It’s good.
First (and Best) Book I Read upon Retiring
I wrote about this already, so I won’t say much about it here, but I started my retirement with James Joyce’s Ulysses, and it was brilliant.
I mean that in two ways: the work itself is a work of genius. But it was also a revelation about my ability to read. I’d been afraid I’d lost it — that I’d lost the ability to pay attention for a long period, to follow a long thread, even to understand complex texts.
And while it took me a while to get my poetry-reading chops together, starting with Ulysses, and enjoying it so much, kick-started my post-retirement reading journey.
My Goodreads Year in Books tells me I read only 26 books this year. That’s pretty low for me; since I started keeping track in 2021 [Correction: 2012], I’ve only had three years when I read fewer than that (and two of those were at the beginning of my Goodreads journey, which means it’s possible I didn’t record everything I read yet). But of the 26, I read the majority of them (22) after I retired. We’ll see how I do moving forward.
Best (and Most Troubling) Graphic Memoir I Read
I’m not sure why it took me so long to get to Art Spiegelman’s Maus, but I finally picked up a copy using retirement gift money I received from my colleagues.
Actually, I only bought Maus I at first, but I had to get the second volume immediately after I finished the first — it was that compelling.
For those who haven’t heard of Maus: it’s a genre-busting comic book (?) or graphic novel (?) depicting the story of Spiegelman’s father’s survival of the Holocaust, blended with more mundane personal issues between father and son.
It’s hard to describe what it is, exactly. On the one hand, it’s not really a novel, as it tells the true story. Though we know that comics can be serious, the idea that Maus is a “comic book” makes it sound frivolous. It’s not really a novel, either, in that the blended stories are both true — yet it depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats (other nationalities appear as different species, as well). Graphic memoir? Graphic biography?
It’s impossible to overstate the depth of emotion captured and created by these black-and-white images, especially those of the suffering mice. Devastating.
Back in grad school, in the late 90s, the Holocaust was still fairly front and center in some of our studies, but once I left school it seemed to recede a bit, at least for myself (probably because I’m not Jewish). It breaks into the cultural consciousness from time to time, especially around news of genocides — most recently and complexly around Gaza — usually with a surprising and troubling dose of Holocaust denialism.
And, unfortunately, Maus resonates today as we see the cruelty and brutality of “mass deportation.”
Best Culinary Failure
I tried making Scotchmallows (chocolate-covered marshmallow and caramel candies) from scratch and failed beautifully.
The most obvious problem was that I didn’t own a mixer and tried to beat whatever it is that makes marshmallow by hand. Yeah, no…. There were several other points of failure, as well, creating a sticky (if tasty) mess.
I’ll give it another shot, probably in the next few days, now that I know a few things (and now that I have a mixer). I’m sure I’ll discover other ways to fail, but I had fun and expect to do so again.
Favorite TV Character
I don’t watch much new TV, so this character is a bit of a blast from the past: Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman) from Doctor Who.
Something about her felt familiar. It wasn’t so much her look as her attitude. But I didn’t figure it out until Season 7‘s “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS,” when I finally realized what was resonating: she reminds me of Mrs. Peel from my favorite-ever TV show, The Avengers.
In The Avengers, Emma Peel (Dame Diana Rigg) is the talented amateur colleague of the suave and impeccable superspy John Steed. (“Mrs. Peel, we’re needed.”) She’s game for every adventure, and approaches pretty much everything with an ironic pleasure.
Clara shares that. She’s always eager to accompany the Doctor on a new adventure, despite its constant danger. That, of course, is a characteristic of most of the Doctor’s companions (at least, that I’ve seen so far).
But there’s a scene in “Journey” that feels to me like quintessential Mrs. Peel: Clara is stuck alone on the severely damaged TARDIS. Soon enough, she finds herself being chased by some kind of monster — and as she runs, she passes a couple open doors in the TARDIS. Through one door, we see something that looks like a telescope (or weapon); through another, we see an enormous swimming pool.
In both cases, despite her danger, she pauses to express wonder, punctuated with a little giggle, before hurrying off again.
That attitude is pure Mrs. Peel.
[Note: If you want to see the scene, it appears in the first few seconds of this YouTube short. It’s pretty small, jammed into a portrait-oriented window, but you might get an idea of what I’m talking about.]
[Also: I just learned that the following episode, “Crimson Horror,” actually starred Dame Diana Rigg as the baddie and had a kind of tonal nod to the old Avengers show. I didn’t recognize her, and didn’t catch the allusions, but I think it will be fun to watch it again.]
Best Musical (Re)Acquisition
For many years, my favorite musical artist was Bruce Cockburn, one of Canada’s many brilliant artists.
From 1983-86, he released three albums that I’ve always considered a trilogy: The Trouble with Normal, Stealing Fire, and World of Wonders.
This sense that the albums are a sort of unit isn’t really defensible. They do have a sound that, I think, is different than what came before and after, largely around his bass player’s use of the Chapman Stick — but that continued after World of Wonders. And his creative use of violin (in Trouble) and trumpet (in World) doesn’t appear in Stealing Fire.
I want to say that there was a unified theme, specifically around Reagan-era Central America, but he didn’t travel there, and write about it, until Stealing Fire — and he’s been socially conscious pretty much his whole career.
Still, the connections exist in my mind.
I dropped by our local record store, Clock Tower Records, with a couple generous gift certificates and stumbled across Stealing Fire (and a couple others of his that I didn’t know existed). I figured I might as well order the other two while I was there.
They’re every bit as good as I remember, and they still hold together as a trilogy, even if that’s only in my own mind.
Best Purchase
When I was visiting friends this summer, I asked them about the bidet attachment in their guest bathroom. They both called it “life changing” — in unison, if I remember correctly.
I’d never considered it, mainly because I thought a bidet would be a whole fixture, that I’d have to replace my whole toilet.
But my friends’ version was an attachment. I was impressed enough that I installed something like it. It should have been a simple process, but I had an old, brittle connection and had to go full plumber on it. I did manage to get it to work, though.
I won’t go into detail, of course, but I can confirm “life changing.”
My Favorite Song that I’ve Recorded
I’ve managed to record and roughly mix five songs this year. (This actually surprises me, given how long it feels like it’s taken to finish each one.)
I have three more to go to finish the album I’m envisioning. One song is from years back, but two will be brand new. I also plan to record three snippets — variations on a very short snippet that a friend and I had started playing around with before he passed away unexpectedly (RIP, Dan). I’ll drop them in among the full songs as “Interstices,” which is also the tentative title of the album.
I’ve learned a lot with each subsequent song, which means that (a) each sounds better than the previous (at least in my estimation); and (b) I will need to remix them all, a process which I’m sure will involve replacing some parts.
I like them all (something I’m grateful for; creators don’t always like their creations). But my favorite so far — the one that makes me smile the widest — is the spy-ish instrumental, Lies.
Most Read Blog Post This Year
This year, my old band finished a project we’d started 35 years ago, and the post announcing its impending release turns out to have been the most read from this year.
I’m not sure how revelatory that is, though, as it’s also one of the earliest that I posted, giving it a somewhat unfair advantage; my review of my colleague’s recently published poetry collection is off to a good start, for example, but it’s only been up for a week or so.
More generally, my post about my slow, burgeoning understanding of trans issues remains my most read post of the blog for this year, with more views than the second- and third-place posts combined. I’m not sure how people find the post, but I’m glad they do.
Looking Forward
Considering we’re only one year into a four-year hell, it feels naive — perhaps downright delusional — to wish everyone a better year. At the same time, there’s no use succumbing to despair.
Love and look out for each other. Love and protect yourselves.
Each year, I post a retrospective (we’ll pass lightly over 2021, which I somehow missed…). Here are links to all the entries:
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