Packed couple of months, here's what's up: 

Learn how to iron: Which I needed to do for my sewing class. Learn how to sew: I made this adorable pillow case, pictured below! I really enjoyed this as a hobby, and every so often I have perused available intermediate classes I could take. The problem is, well, um, uh, I’m doing a lot of other things right now, as longtime readers may be aware. Write 52 poems: As I'd written 26 poems in 2024, I wanted to double that. Go to a burlesque. Echo Park Swan Boats: I did this with my mom, and how delightful how delightful, our rudder fell off halfway through the excursion and we had to be towed back to shore. Write 50 pieces of flash fiction. Make a guerilla art installation: I mentioned this in my previous update, but I have been working on a project I call Social Skulls where I make skulls out of tin foil upon which I decoupage newspaper clippings. I've been leaving them around town. Below you will find the first set, and I just procured the necessary newspaper to make set number three. Get an improv team. Learn puppetry: The adorable little puppet I made shall be found below.  Read a book in Afrikaans and learn a 13th language: Gedigte by Toon van den Heever, a poetry collection. I cannot really recommend it, or much Afrikaans literature in the public domain. Think lots of long pastoral scenes of a vast and “empty” continent. I only picked this one up because if you're trying to read books in fifteen languages, you need to rely on close linguistic relatives, and, as I had already read a book in Dutch, Afrikaans made sense as my next language. Read a book in Galician and learn a 14th language: Novelas Follas by Rosalia Castro de Murguia. I liked this one. It's considered the foundational text in modern Galician literature and the themes were very spiritual and romantic. Visit Europe: I went to Italy to see Bologna, Rome, and Pompeii. Take high speed rail. Have a beach day: At a beautiful spot on the Amalfi coast. Visit Africa: I went to Cairo to see the pyramids. Ride a camel: I did not enjoy this! Big lumbering beast! Ride ATVs: I did not enjoy this! It went way too fast! But me on the ATV with the pyramids in the background is on all of my dating profiles. Take a cruise: A relaxing, short river cruise down the Nile. Win a game of solitaire. Rewatch Texhnolyze: This is the other show by the creator of Serial Experiments Lain, which is my favorite tv show. Texhnolyze is strange in that I'm always struck by the last two episodes, but dislike the twenty episodes that precede it. Whenever I rewatch it, I hope that I might find something new to appreciate in the preceding, and I never do. Visit five capitals: Mexico City, Bogota, Rome, Cairo, and Phoenix (if you don’t count the last of these, I’ll be in Bangkok late November). Make a taxidermy: I flew into Phoenix for a one-day jackalope course. It was really fun. I got to skin a rabbit for the first time in my life, treat it with borax, and pin it to the foam form. I've done a lot of things this year, many of which I was not good at, and so there is a little bit of tension in the fact that the thing for which I showed the most instant aptitude was skinning a rabbit, whose intestines I never pierced and whose hide sustained only the most easily hidden punctures. Go to a Dodgers Game: Shohei Ohtani is the best to ever do it and I got real Dodgers-fever after this. We’re going to beat the Jays! Get good at pinball: You are looking at the holder of the 2nd place high score for the Hollywood Lucky Strike Mandalorian Pinball machine. Make a candle. Take a spontaneous trip: I woke up Labor day knowing I would take the train somewhere—I imagined San Clemente, Oceanside, or Long Beach—and ended up going to Long Beach. See the Queen Mary: A perfect tourist trap; sublime, well-preserved, with a great bar. Do a viral trend: I think I had the most authentic experience of Labubu-mania: I won two from a claw machine, both of which turned out to be fakes, and then purchased a real one from the Popmart vending machine in the Ovation Mall. Take a woodworking class. Get all the Duolingo achievements: As part of Duolingo's gamification approach, there are a number of “achievements” that you can unlock. As with other Duolingo goals this year, the point is not to get trophies on Duolingo but to trick myself into learning a new language through obsessive pursuit of virtual bling. Do a week of cold showers: Uhhh…. Uhhh this is the health lifehack that everyone on my feed tells me to do and it is the most unpleasant thing that one can do in life. Plant a tree: I volunteered with Tree People, a volunteer org, to plant two trees in South Central. Go skydiving: You should do this because you want to face death. You have to face death. I felt great once we had actually jumped from the plane, but while working through the release forms (all of which told me that my death was imminent and I would not be allowed to sue) and as we ascended, I kept thinking about how if I died my Duolingo streak would be permanently frozen at 2140. I thought about my mom, too, but I thought about her less than I did my Duolingo streak, and that’s why you have to face death, because it exists so outside of oneself that any consideration of it must necessarily be irrational. Go to a concert: I saw The Who's farewell tour at the Hollywood Bowl and man are they still rocking! Daltrey's voice still has it. Oh, and Aerosmith was there. Do a studio tour: I went to Universal Studios for Horror Nights and the studio tour is super fun. I had done the WB tour about a decade ago, and had wanted to go on another one. Ride a big rollercoaster: The Mummy ride at Universal is kind of a perfect indoor roller coaster, and the one in Harry Potter land is pretty fun too. Go to Super Nintendo World: You know, since they built this out a few years ago, I had always wanted to go and man, it's great! Just so much attention to detail! Take a surfing class: I liked it so much that I signed up for a second one later this week. See 30 improv shows. Make a signature scent: I took a perfume making workshop and made this really wonderful scent. The top notes are blood orange and ginger, with middle notes of black tea and rose and base notes of sandalwood. Take a Waymo. See a fortune teller. Go foraging. Carve a wooden sculpture. Do an escape room. The Vesalasavay Panorama: This is LA's best kept secret. This had been an extra credit assignment for an art history class I took at USC, but I hadn't taken up the offer and so it had been on my mind for a decade. It's serene. You can get lost in the details of the painting, and the soundscape soothes. There's a little garden in the back worth lounging in.Work with stained glass. Go to the Magic Castle and have a Great 30th Birthday: This was one of the final items on my LA bucket list. I live right down the street, but since I don't know any members, the only way to get in was for my mother and I to stay at the Magic Castle Hotel, which is maybe a thousand feet from my house. I'm still thinking about some of those tricks. This was my grandfather's present to me, and I'm very grateful. See the Venice Canals. Do a Balisong combo. Go to the City Hall Observation Deck. Finish the chess Duolingo course: And most tragically for my screentime habits, Instagram has learned that it can serve me as many chess puzzles as it would like and I will dutifully sit there for ten minutes trying to solve them. 

As the tower of text expresses, the pace of this year has left little time for concerted reflection, though, in a way, the goal list itself serves as a form of reflection and each goal completed is a thought expressed outward rather than inward. The action of skinning a rabbit is itself an instantiated reflection on the action of skinning a rabbit. The texture of the fur, the smell of borax, each of these actions preserve thought. Doing is a form of thought.

Housekeeping: Finishing out the Duolingo chess course put me at 180 goals completed. If you include partial credit, things like trips I have booked, reading goals that I have made progress on but not completed etc., I think I'd estimate that I'm closer to 190 goals. As stated before, I have 300 goals and I am looking to complete at least 70% of them, which would make 210 the goal number I'm trying to reach in order to win this challenge. That leaves me with two months to complete about 20-30 goals. This is doable. I am on schedule. 

And uh… For real, I’m not going to get any kind of trophy for this if I make that magic number. I think 90% of scenarios leave me with 200+ goals completed, with enough of them bringing the requisite beef to make this challenge feel substantial. If I make a neon sign, skydive, visit every continent, and go to the Magic Castle, I will thoroughly forgive myself for not completing five more arbitrary things needed to make that 210. 

A Tableau: Weeks get packed when you're pursuing 300 goals in a year, and I think one week in September exemplifies the variety and blur of my year. On Saturday, I planted a tree in South Central. The next day, I took a train down to Oceanside to go skydiving. That Wednesday I saw The Who at the Hollywood Bowl. Then on Friday I went to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal. Thrills, entertainment, and planting a literal living legacy—the varied textures of human flourishing!

More In A Year Than Most People Do In A Lifetime: Starting in April, in order to safeguard my willpower through the magic of clever marketing, I began to tell myself that the aim of this challenge was to do more in a year than most people do in a lifetime. It's a marketing gimmick! There exists too much variety in life to accomplish such a feat. But, you know, it works well as a structuring force for this challenge and I think it buttresses the tower of experiences sketched in this blog. It makes things coherent. It makes this something other than a slapdash banquet of human experiences. While one's life has detours and unpredictabilities which cannot be expressed well in a goal list, if you asked someone what they wanted to accomplish in their life they would likely say something like this:

1. A local bucket list: Most people have a list of activities in their hometown, though often inchoate and unexpressed, that they would like to experience at some point. Last year, I visited Watts Tower, which had been a longstanding feature of my bucket list, and this year I really did want to complete what remained outstanding. The Magic Castle was the top get, as I have had a childhood fondness for magic, but other items like the Venice Canals, hiking to the Hollywood Sign, the Huntington Gardens, Universal Studios, and dining at Yamashiro were on there too. At this point, I have completed that bucket list—well, I will in December when I see Stereophonic at the Pantages, a place where I've given blood but where I've never seen a show. There are even a few items, like visiting the Bronson Caves and the abandoned zoo, which I had the chance to do but which I felt didn't warrant inclusion on my challenge list. Over the past few weeks I have started to review LA bucket lists posted online and the truth is that most of the items I'm missing are trivial or strain the definition, in my mind, of what counts as Los Angeles. I'd like to visit Catalina and see a Lancaster super bloom, and visiting Palm Springs sounds fun, but all of these are just a little too far flung from Los Angeles to really count.

2. A travel bucket list: For most people, I think their travel bucket list looks something like this. They want to visit every continent. They may have two to three specific manmade wonders and two to three specific natural wonders. And they might have certain festivals and timed events that they would like to see. An upcoming trip to Australia and Thailand will cover the remaining continents (I'm not counting Antarctica as I have real reservations about tourism down there). My manmade wonders list really was Pompeii, the Colosseum, and the Pyramids. Other manmade wonders appeal: I'd really like to see the Great Wall of China, the Hagia Sofia, and the Mona Lisa before I die, but none of these captured the childhood imagination like the aforementioned. In addition, there are plenty of manmade wonders I'd the pleasure of seeing this year that might belong on someone's bucket list if not necessarily mine: Teotihuacan, the Salt Cathedral in Bogota, Old Cairo, the Sistine Chapel. As far as natural wonders, my core list of natural wonders would be The Nile and The Great Barrier Reef, which will be covered when I go to Australia. Other natural wonders I've seen, like the Amalfi Coast and the Andes in Colombia, similarly don't have the same personal relevance as The Nile and The Great Barrier Reef but are easily imagined as entries on a hypothetical bucket list. And next week I will be in Mexico City for the Day of the Dead, a cultural tradition I've wanted to take part in for years. If someone with a prognosis of one year were to present the above travels to you, you'd call it a rich bucket list indeed.

3. Creative and intellectual fulfillment: Most people have a few intellectual and creative goals that they would like to achieve, and having presented my visual art in guerilla installations, performed in over twenty improv shows, and having written a real corpus of poetry, I think that I've pulled that off. Right now I am about halfway through a novel I started in June, and I have the inkling that I might be able to code a short video game in the upcoming months, but I wouldn't count on finishing either of these, because I will be traveling for three out of the upcoming ten weeks and because I have a few other goals I would like to get out of the way. As far as intellectual fulfillment: most people want to be able to read something in a foreign language. The intellectual provenance of “doing more in a year than most people do in a lifetime” comes from a joke I texted my mom last year about how most people, when they retire, want to write a novel and learn French but I had already done both, so what would I do? Watch television? Well, there are some foreign languages I had yet to learn, Esperanto being a childhood interest of mine, and a number of languages where I had expended some serious study time but in which I hadn't read anything serious, and I have corrected that this year. Throw in chess and competitive Pokemon for good measure and you have a year abounding in creative and intellectual fulfillment.

4. Fitness Goals: I would say that this is a skimpier entry on this list, but I think that most people have some kind of fitness goal. I think that I have always wanted to hike more, which I did this year. I have gone on twenty-five hikes this year. And during my brief and passionate Dance Dance Revolution phase I had completed the goal of completing a dance on difficulty level 10, which is legitimately impressive. My hope is to round this off by taking a few more surfing classes. If I can get decent at surfing, at least good enough to do it on my own, I think that I would have accomplished something real there.

That is to say that on a number of vectors relevant to most people, I have accomplished a breadth and depth of goals that I think covers well what the average person might see as their bucket list. Adding in a few items that aren't necessarily bucket list goals but which most people may entertain, briefly, as an interesting thing to do, such as taxidermy, donating blood, and getting 100 items from claw machines—and then adding in a few items that most people do at least once, like beating a game of solitaire or going axe-throwing or walking barefoot in the rain, and you do in fact have a lifetime's worth of accomplishments that fit snugly into a year.

What’s Next: As for what I aim for next, well, I don't know. Part of me thinks that if I can do this four more times, that is, complete 200 goals in a single year, then I could have an interesting “Road To 1000” arc. I’ve drafted up a list of another 400 goals to see if this is a viable path, but my feeling right now is that most of the things that I want to do would take influencer / permanent travel blogger levels of freetime and money, and that at 400 I already find myself running out of prospective goals that actually interest me. Getting to 1000+ seems unviable. To even get to 400 I had to pad my list with a number of travel goals that I just can’t imagine I’d have the time to accomplish in five years’ time. 

The truth of my goals list this year is that it was quite right-sized and that it covered the interests that I have had in life. It’s an omnibus of everything that I have ever glanced at and thought “oh, that would be neat.” I have wanted to learn fermentation. I have wanted to skydive. Looking over what I have done, I think the reasons that I stopped after I found 300 goals for myself are twofold. First, the expectation that I might achieve more than 200 goals in a year strains credulity. There would simply not be enough time. In this framework, I must complete my goals at a rate of one every two days. And I have done this! It just requires a lot of time management and a willingness to spend a bit of money, plus a good mix of easily accomplished goals alongside more long-term ones. No further efficiencies exist. But also, once I had gotten to 300 goals I had gotten to a point where my goal list contained many goals that I didn't necessarily feel passion for: some of the duds on my list, which remain there as pursuits I might try if I get to the end of the year and find I'm shy of the magic 210, include learning ventriloquism, learning shorthand like court stenographers use, going golfing, visiting a presidential library, and completing 10 Sunday NYT Crosswords. Some of these sound kind of fun, but I was never interested in them as much as I was interested in making neon art or visiting every continent.

So maybe next year I will have a smaller list of more in-depth goals, hoping to build on the current foundation I have by focusing on doing better at the accomplished goals that I actually enjoyed. Chess. Surfing. Fermentation. Putting out more skulls. Graduate from pillow cases to garments.

Or maybe I focus on a quiet year without much of any overarching theme. Maybe a year of rest would provide deeper reflection. Maybe my goal will be something simple, like making the best vegan chicken known to man or doubling the number of species on earth.