Management¹ (which, around here, is a ruthless little martinet also known as “my conscience”) said I wasn’t allowed to post any more depressing stuff until I proved myself capable of experiencing joy. So, here goes.

Almost an entire career ago, when we lived across the street from my workplace and our biggest financial worries were my student loans, I decided for some reason that I wanted to bake my then-cohabitrix-now-wife a cranberry pie.

If you’re familiar with my culinary skillset, I’d wager you feel some optimism about this project. Fruit fillings are absolutely in my wheelhouse, I was a skillful baker even using apartment ovens with Jeb-Bushesque thermal output, and I am generally quite successful when following recipes.

What you are forgetting is that this was over a decade ago. What you do not know yet is that, because I wanted to impress my then-cohabitrix-now-wife, I chose to make the pie crust from scratch. What you are feeling now is called foreboding.

As I recall, the recipe used the trick of grating cold butter, which (lacking a grater at the time) I attempted to do with a cheap food processor. This was not advisable. Nor was the whole project, really: I had neither the patience (or perhaps the time) to put in a real effort, nor the practice to know what pie crust feels like when you’ve made it properly. The result, as you might expect, was an overworked glutinous mess, somewhere between the densest drop biscuit you’ve ever eaten and unevenly-laid road tar.²

That was my singular foray into pie crust making. I’ll bake biscuits, cookies, brownies, blondies, bread puddings, whatever you want—but I won’t do that.³

If the point was to share a joyful story, why did I begin with such an abject failure? Well, believe it or not, that’s the point.

There is a degree of stubbornness that becomes foolish, and while I typically only recognize that I’ve passed that degree in hindsight, everything about the Tectonic Kitchen Disaster⁴ made it clear that I had zero desire to repeat the experience.

It wasn’t just that I had failed. I fail at cooking projects all the time, then as now, and find myself only encouraged to summon up the blood. What broke me of any desire to try again was that I had derived nothing from the failure: there had been no joy in the effort, even when I thought of the look on my then-cohabitrix-now-wife’s face when I presented her with a homemade cranberry pie. None of my skills had been improved by failing to bake something.

All I had learned, as I lost a mental and physical battle against churned dairy, was that I had hated every step of the process. It had been zero fun.

You know what made me remember that story? Unbelievably, watching its complete opposite: Alysa Liu not only wrecking choreographic shop on ice at the 2026 Winter Olympics, but to all appearances having the kind of fun it’s impossible not to feel in your bones.

Liu’s routine here might be, with zero exaggeration, the coolest performance I’ve ever seen in my life. Like Bob Burnquist’s 2001 Vert Finals run, I don’t even know where to begin choosing a favorite moment: The triple lutz to triple toe loop? The choreographic sequence? The flying camel spin? The moment it goes from Donna Summer belting about sweet green icing flowing down to Donna “Queen of Disco” summer? (Fun fact: my dad and I are both big Donna Summer fans.) The fact that we’re allowed to witness this aristeia with minimal interference from commentators?

I hadn’t watched this routine in maybe a month, until I finally sat down to write this article, and I am glad to report that it resonated just as deeply as it did then. It’s one thing to have competency porn; it’s another entirely to watch someone find joy in doing such fantastic work.

Liu is an absurdly charismatic performer here, and watching this, for a second or two, enough of that emanates through the screen that I can imagine, if only for that second or two, what it must feel like to leap into the air, above foreign ice, with both feet strapped to sharp blades, and have the confidence to know I’ll land back on them not only perfectly, but in time to do a fun little flourish.

Believe it or not, that is also not the joy I’m talking about.

Liu’s routine did remind me of the cranberry pie story, but much more importantly, it also reminded me of something that I do and continue to do, even though it is often downright agonizing.

You see, I don’t think of myself as much of a writer. Plenty of my friends would disagree, and they’re being very kind to do so.

I do not disclaim that status just because I’ve never gotten around to finishing a single real writing project—my notebooks and legal pads are littered with abortive attempts at every sort of speculative fiction, all of which manage to hold my interest for exactly as long as it takes me to run into a plotting issue—but also because I never quite got the way other writers talked about the act of writing itself.

To me, or at least me after the age of eighteen, writing had never been an inherently joyous act. I thought of a “real” writer as someone who, like Faulkner, listened to the voices, rather than someone who agonized over every speck of diction and punctuation choice. Partly that’s because, as I’ve said before, I think I put a lot more effort into interpreting other people than they do for me, and I tend to like writing in a somewhat understated, elliptical style that leaves the reader all the details but asks them to make some of the connections.

Partly it’s because I needed to justify my jealousy of people who could come home from full-time work and weren’t so exhausted they couldn’t think straight.

Partly, though (maybe even mostly) it was an excuse to never finish anything. I had good reason to want an out: so often I would write entire paragraphs and essays in my head, convinced of their luminous beauty, and yet, on contact with the keyboard, they invariably oxidized into leaden, cold prose. When you spend all day trying to maintain a baseline level of self-control, you need the occasional win, and writing very rarely gave me that. The pandemic, which finished turning my job into a cross between an obliging babysitter and a professional liar to colleges, further robbed me of the time or inclination needed to patiently rework sentences, restructure paragraphs, or maybe even just dump thoughts on a piece of paper and come back to it later.

Lately (in no small part because of what I’ve been writing for Forsan et Haec) I’ve begun to notice that the process of putting together a text is starting to be fun. When a new concept for an article comes to mind, I find myself genuinely excited to work on it, rather than afraid of how badly it’ll go.⁵

At work, when I either have no grading to do or I’m falling asleep doing what I’m supposed to be doing, I find myself reaching more often for my legal pad and scribbling whatever comes to mind, knowing it’s a lot of shapeless garbage from which I might extract one or two actual pearls of wisdom.

In all likelihood, I’ll never be as good a writer as Alysa Liu is at figure skating, and even if I ever become that proficient, I’ll certainly never make it look that easy. That’s fine: for the first time in my adult life, I know how to enjoy the craft I chose as mine before I even moved to the United States.

Plus, if joy is something we can discover over the course of our lives, who knows? Maybe, one day, I’ll even roll up my sleeves and try making another pie crust.