A few weeks ago, I started going to a climbing gym after work. I was pretty agnostic about the actual climbing part, but the facility offers tons of yoga and strength training classes, and so I decided to ditch the YMCA and try something new. I figured that if I was getting a membership, I should at least give this climbing thing a try, especially because they offer an Intro to Bouldering class. Maybe with the proper tutelage, I would fall in love with the sport! Even though I do find bouldering culture slightly cultish, it does seem like a great, full-body workout and a good way to meet people. And so even though I don’t particularly like falling (does anyone?), I decided to give it a try.

The first step was getting the right shoes. Bouldering requires these very specific, ballet-slipperesque shoes made out of silicone. They are tiny and squish your toes together. Like a bowling alley or skating rink, climbing gyms have loaner shoes, and you don’t really want to think too hard about how many people have worn them before you. I got a pair and glanced around at the other people donning their slippers. It seemed that people were decidedly NOT wearing socks with them, so I followed suit, even though that seemed kind of gross. Immediately after deciding to go sockless, I started noticing that actually a lot of people WERE wearing socks, in fact, it seemed like all the sockless people I had been noticing before were gone, and now every single person I looked at was wearing socks. A guy next to me even struck up a conversation with me to ask if his striped socks were cringy. It was like he KNEW I wasn’t wearing socks and was taunting me. But I had strapped the shoes on my bare feet already and was trying to play it cool, so I decided to just stay sockless and face the consequences later.

Next, I gathered with the other people attending the beginner class. Turns out, many of them had climbed before and therefore, were not beginners. Our instructor, a kind man named Logan, led us to our first route.

I guess in climbing, red is the easiest. Seems backwards, since red generally equals danger, but what do I know? Our instructor demoed the route (are they even called routes?) and a few people tried it. It seemed straightforward enough, so after a few others had gone, I approached the wall.

I happen to have baby soft hands that get sweaty when I am under pressure, so I made sure to get a TON of chalk on my hands, probably too much. Then I placed my powdery hands on the starting hold and began to climb.

I made it about halfway up before I froze. It seemed like the only place to go next was down, so I let go. Logan told me I was “thinking too much” about where to go next, which was crazy to hear because it all happened so fast and I don’t really remember thinking. He also said I needed to point my toes near the wall, try to create triangles with my body, and “trust myself.”

We tried a few more routes, and to my shock and dismay I wasn’t able complete any of them. One of them I got really close to completing, and then somehow, I just kind of freaked out and found myself falling. I genuinely do not know what happened. Meanwhile, everyone else in this “beginners” class was catching on quickly, and all around me there were all of these incredible climbers scaling the walls like gravity doesn’t exist and they have never been afraid of hurting themselves. Incredible. Aspirational.

This entire experience was a little reminiscent of the time I joined ski club in the 6th grade. To this day, I am not sure what compelled me to join ski club — none of my friends were doing it, and I didn’t know anything about skiing. On the first day of ski club, after school on a Tuesday at Swiss Valley Ski Resort, I participated in “ski school,” which was probably one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. Afraid of hurting myself, I never wanted to do anything other than “pizza” my way down the hill. “Pizza-ing” for those unfamiliar, is generally how you stop. But even when pizza-ing, I felt like I was going WAY too fast.

I had loaned my gloves to a popular girl to try and curry her favor, but then I found myself gloveless at the bottom of the bunny hill, staring at the thick rope that pulls you up. I grasped it with my baby soft hands and made it a third of the way up before the friction between the rope and my hands was too much. I let go and tumbled down the hill, my limbs mangling with the skis, the rope whizzing above me. They had the shut down the entire rope operation to rescue me. At the end of the night, another pupil asked if ski school was always so boring, and the instructor looked pointedly at me and said, “usually people catch on faster.” The popular girl gave me back my gloves and our budding friendship died there.

After that, I was WAY too afraid of that evil bunny hill rope, so after carefully pizza-ing down the hill, I would take off my skis and walk up the hill in my clunky rental ski boots. Eventually I advanced to a few more complicated hills, but I still hated going fast down them, which I think is supposed to be the appeal of skiing. If I started going too fast, I felt like I was going to lose control. Feeling like I was going to lose control led to panic, which then caused me to lose control. Still, I was making gradual progress, until one night I got a little too comfortable (aka I was no longer just pizza-ing) and I completely bulldozed a child. I took of my skis and frantically (slowly) walked back up the hill to try and make sure he was okay, but his mom got to him first and gave me a nasty mother-bear glare, so I backed off. There was too much snow stuck to the bottom of my boots, so I couldn’t get my skis back on, plus, I had just bulldozed a child, so it didn’t really feel like I deserved to have any more fun. And so I did the one thing I knew I was good at: I walked up the hill. Someone yelled at me from the ski lift “Do you even know how to ski?”

Intro to Bouldering was not nearly as bad as ski school, to be clear. I actually made a super cool friend (hey Lalia!) who invited me to hang out the next evening! I think I’ll probably go back to Intro to Bouldering next week, and I am going to try and be a little more reckless with my body, because I guess that is what it takes to get to the top. I doubt I will never become one of these obsessive rock climber types though, and I will probably continue to loan shoes — although next time I will wear socks.

April is usually a good month. It kicks off with April Fool’s Day, which is my favorite holiday. It’s also the start of spring, which means the Earth wakes up in ways that remind you why you love the world so much anyway. But last April I was still floundering.

I was worried I had lost all the professional momentum I had built by not staying in DC and choosing instead to teach English in Spain. I had virtually no savings. I had been rejected by my dream grad school for creative writing for the second time, and I had lost writing momentum and inspiration. I was embarrassed to be living with my parents and to be working in food service again. Hadn’t I just been a glamorous1 young writer with promise? I was sad that an almost-relationship had failed, especially one that had seemed promising. The only thing that seemed to be going well in my life was my skin — my acne, which had been plaguing me for years, had miraculously cleared up!

I’m happy to say that many of the concerns I had last April are no longer at the top of my mind, and my skin is still looking pretty good. Please take these embarrassingly revealing haikus, some of which have been redacted for privacy, with a grain of salt. Also, I apologize to men for any unfair sweeping generalizations I may have made while upset.

April 1 
Happy April Fools! 
Another successful prank 
Went to therapy 

April 2 
Working at the Brew 
And browsing the antique mall 
Tornado warning!

April 3 
A Rott lunch with Duane 
A lovely date with ████
████ is so nice 

April 4 
Made a cheese touch cake 
It took all day, but was fun 
Wimpy Kid Party! 

April 5 
Slept in late and cleaned 
A road trip to Virginia 
To see Gussie sing! 

April 6 
Two breakfasts with friends 
Old and new, and opera 
Hey Harrisonburg! 

April 7 
I'm in the South now! 
Confederate flags and frats 
Oh, Shenandoah 

April 8 
Breakfast at Magpie 
And a drive to the district 
Here is also home 

April 9 
Time with Allison 
And throwing a big party! 
Smoked a cigarette 

April 10 
Long day of driving 
Reinitiation to 
Vast America 

April 11 
Slept in, and made pancakes 
Mid-day walk with Naomi 
Speaker from Hebron 

April 12 
Beautiful day out 
Reading and running, oh my! 
Earthtones with ████

April 13 
Men are f*cking dumb 
Why are they so unwell? 
Not your therapist!! 

April 14 
Five stages of grief 
Rage through me like a wildfire 
I saw this coming 

April 15 
Therapy and grief 
For ████ and ████ too 
Love is a cruel game. 

April 16 
Sick to my stomach 
Was it kale or just lost love? 
████████

April 17
Time with my best friends 
Caroline and Elena! 
Diarrea. Sad. 

April 18 
Windy bonfire night 
A hodge podge of friends, dancing 
Big bed sleepover!

April 19 
Brunch at Lux Cafe 
Goodwill and diarrea 
Saw some student plays 

April 20 
Up from the grave he 
Arose - Easter hymns go hard 
Made rolls for dinner. 

April 21 
Slow start to my day 
It's always good to go out 
Cleaning my old home 

April 22 
Olympia toast 
Of the French variety 
Pizza night and cake 

April 23 
Deep cleaned my old house 
Listened to podcasts, what else? 
Painted my nails pink 

April 24 
Painted our door red 
Went on a walk with Sasha 
GBCO with Dale 

April 25 
Warts were injected 
Killed some time at The Depot 
Watched No Other Land 

April 26 
Breakfast with the fam 
Printing presses and a show 
An amazing date 

April 27 
Being bold pays off 
But you also risk heartbreak 
I'm both bold and scared 

April 28 
Oops, slept in until noon 
Made an amazing sandwich 
Talked to friends, walked, scrolled 

April 29  
Read by the Dam pond 
And helped Naomi move home 
We have so much stuff! 

April 30 
Sent Naomi off 
To London with all her friends 
Ate dinner with mine

In preparation for this month’s blog, I spent a lot of time reflecting on everything that happened in March of 2025, and what I can learn from it now. The short version of what happened is that while in Palestine, I had a mental health crisis and decided to come home a few weeks early. The long version is something I am still figuring out — what exactly did happen in my mind that diminished my usual resilience?

One factor was certainly that I had been rationing the SSRI1 medication I have taken since I was 17. I left the US with a 6-month supply, and by the time I was in Paris in February, I was running low. I cut all my pills in half with a kitchen knife and ran a few calculations: Even if I only took half my regular dose, I was still a few weeks short and would need to skip days here and there. Because I was feeling good, I decided that the two-week solidarity tour in Palestine would be a good time to skip my meds entirely (LOL) so that I could take them consistently during the three weeks I would be volunteering alone at Tent of Nations, a farm in the West Bank. In theory, it was a good plan, but I was forgetting that SSRIs take approximately two weeks to build up in your system. So, by the time I got to Tent of Nations, I was primed for collapse.

Tent of Nations is a family farm in the West Bank, just outside of Bethlehem, that has been cared for by the Nassar family for generations. Israeli settlements surround their land, and the settlers are constantly creeping closer and closer with new construction projects. The roads they use are constantly being blocked, forcing them to take longer and longer detours on less developed roads, and they are in constant court battles in an effort to protect their property. In order to keep settlers out, they have developed a system of constantly having international protective presence on the farm. Volunteers come to live and work, but the most important thing they can do is just exist on the farm, because the settlers are far less likely to try and take land by force if there are foreigners watching — especially white foreigners. My time there was sponsored by the German Mennonite Peace Committee, where my cousin David Lapp Jost works — If anyone reading this is interested in going on a solidarity tour to Palestine or volunteering at Tent of Nations, please let me know and I can connect you with David!

In essence, my job was to just be there, and any farming accomplished in the meantime was a bonus. It shouldn’t have been so hard — the land was beautiful, I had plenty of blankets to keep me warm at night, and there was a nice group of Dutch senior citizen volunteers to keep me company. But on the first night, panic took over. When I was able to keep busy with farm work, I was more or else able to hold it together, but the second I was still, panic took over. I was crying uncontrollably and deeply afraid of something. But what? Logically, I knew that I was safe and that I could handle three weeks at Tent of Nations. I was not afraid of being harmed or getting sick. I’ve done harder (or at least equally hard) things in my life, so why was my brain spiraling?

For years now, I’ve suspected that I have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The descriptions of OCD describe the way my mind works better than generalized anxiety, which is usually focused on real things rather than invented fears and specific rituals that are used to neutralize them. And so, as I was reflecting on this moment of rock bottom one year ago, I decided to get an answer. I booked a consultation with an OCD therapist.

When I scheduled the initial call, I hadn’t thought beyond getting the diagnosis. I hadn’t thought about what it would actually look like to do Exposure and Response Therapy (ERP), the gold standard treatment for OCD, and I hadn’t thought about what would happen if one professional telling me I had OCD didn’t feel like enough. The therapist told me that I have OCD, but instead of feeling like I had an answer, I realized that I was opening up an entirely new can of worms.

Since getting this diagnosis, I have felt simultaneously relieved and distressed. I’ve had the urge to ask other people, who usually don’t know anything about OCD, to confirm and validate my diagnosis. I’m worried that I am being dramatic or have tricked the therapist (and myself) into believing I have OCD. I feel guilty for having the resources to go to a specialist, and reluctant to participate in what I’ve dubbed in my head as “diagnosis culture.”2 I’ve even wondered if OCD is even real3 or if it is all just made up and a big conspiracy to…..I’m not sure exactly what this conspiracy would be aiming to do, but probably something deeply sinister!

But I am allowing these questions and doubts to go unresolved and accept that they might be true. That is an important skill I must learn with my Exposure and Response Therapy. Endlessly analyzing something doesn’t actually resolve it, believe it or not. They call OCD the doubting disorder for good reason.

I still feel a lot of shame for what happened when I was in Palestine. Instead of being able to focus on and support on the Nassar family at Tent of Nations, I was preoccupied with my own problems. I wish that hadn’t been the case. I am still trying to make peace with it.

The destabilizing experience of feeling completely out of control of my mind in an intense environment combined with the shame I felt for having failed at what I set out to do affected me deeply. When I returned to Goshen, I was depressed and aimless. I stopped writing fiction, something that used to come to me as easily as breathing, and I didn’t know what my next steps were. These feelings (and a day-long spurt of religious conviction!) are reflected in my haikus for the month of March. Enjoy, and stay tuned for April!

March 1 
Walked along the wall 
Church of the Nativity 
Textiles and a mosque 

March 2 
Found Jesus at church 
Started to cry and now I'm sure 
The way, the truth, the light 

March 3 
East Jerusalem 
Second class citizenry 
Good food and ice cream 

March 4 
Tale as old as time 
Hurt people often hurt back 
How to end cycles? 

March 5
At Tent of Nations 
My whole body is so cold 
I want to go home 

March 6 
Day one completed 
Can I do this for three weeks? 
Not really a choice 

March 7 
Rainy start today 
Building, trimming and coffee 
I am strong enough! 

March 8
American guests 
Olive trees and rosemary 
TV is a balm!

March 9
Way too much coffee 
And I didn't take my meds 
An epic breakdown 

March 10
Crying and anxious 
Why was I rationing meds?
Left the farm to think 

March 11 
Mostly stayed in bed 
Watching TV and my phone 
Going home so soon

March 12 
Pulling weeds ain't hard 
When you've got gloves and an axe 
A nice hot shower 

March 13 
Went to see Hebron 
Glass, ceramics, kufiyas 
Settlements abound 

March 14
Returned to the farm 
Did some weeding and panicked 
Decided to leave

March 15 
Escaped from the farm 
Chance encounter with old lady 
Bookshop interview

March 16 
Old City Ramparts 
A Jerusalem bagel 
Writing, reading talk 

March 17
Took five different trains 
And got in two different planes 
Back in Germany 

March 18
Got some Timmy time 
And got to see Eva too 
Family medicine 

March 19 
Three trains and two planes 
A layover in Iceland 
Finally back home 

March 20 
Goshen's gray greats me 
But so do lots of loved ones
What to say to them? 

March 21
Organizing stuff 
My thoughts, my things, my feelings 
Saw Rent, fell asleep 

March 22
Uncle Dave's in town 
Chilly walk with Caroline 
Rent, night two - Better! 

March 23 
Baked oatmeal days 
Went to Goodwill, it was sad 
Looking for small joys 

March 24 
Doctor's appointment 
Talked meds, birth control and warts 
A job interview! 

March 25
Learned drywall mudding 
Finished up my article 
Dinner with my friends! 

March 26 
Munther Isaac Talk 
Coffee date with Naomi 
Reconciliation? 

March 27 
Reading and panckaes 
Drywall mud in the garage 
Cooking and swimming 

March 28 
Chocolate croissants 
Grocery stores and volleyball 
So good to see friends! 

March 29 
Olympia brunch 
Walking around with my friends 
Makes me so happy

March 30 
Pancakes for breakfast 
Roller skating with Nathan 
Slowly opening 

March 31
Reorganized life 
And made cinnamon bagels 
Taxes are scary 

I had gotten so good at traveling solo and being independent that I started taking some of my support systems for granted, specifically the SSRI medication I’ve taken since I was 18 that helps me be the fullest version of myself. I had left the United States with a 6-month supply, but by February I was running low, so I started to ration my medication. Some days I took half a dose, and other days I took none. I didn’t feel any impact on my mental health — which makes sense because the medication I take needs two weeks build up in your system — but in March, it all started to come crashing down. Tune in next month to read all about that!

But before the crash out, I was having an amazing time, meeting so many wonderful people and experiencing so much generosity from strangers. You can read some of reflections about my time in Palestine here and here. For now, enjoy these 28 haikus!

February 1 

Used clothing and books 
In communion with the dead 
Forgotten, not gone

February 2 

Contemporary 
Art is mostly an absurd 
Joke. But so is life! 

February 3 

You can send a day 
Fiddling around with words 
And washing dishes 

February 4

Babysitting time 
Insomnia strikes again 
Kids who can't sleep, squirm 

February 5 

Finalized all plans 
Went to one final museum 
Ate crepes with new friends 

February 6 

Pain au chocolat
Writing and collaging too 
What art will I make? 

February 7 

Yard work and French meals 
A great last day in Paris 
Pizza, cookies, beer 

February 8 

Started in Paris 
Pancakes, with all the fixins' 
Now, Barcelona 

February 9 

Twenty three thousand steps 
Warm air and architecture 
Have bewitched my soul 

February 10 

Time warping bookstore 
Sagrada Familia 
Feeling inspired! 

February 11 

Fast train to Madrid 
The Book of Mormon ticket 
Got lost. Like, actually. 

February 12 

Museo Prado 
Painting in it's highest form 
Park, panic, porras*

February 13 

Wrote a short story 
Went to a cozy cafe 
Reina Sofia! 

February 14 

Valentine's alone, 
Traveling across Europe 
Madrid to Paris! 

February 15 

Bus to Germany 
Being with family feels good 
*private thoughts Greta doesn't want to share online*

February 16 

Woke up to fresh snow 
A German Mennonite church 
Cool new German friends 

February 17 

Bitter cold outside 
Looking around Heidelberg 
Thai food and gummies 

February 18 

Went for a long walk 
Helped process ****'s breakup 
Naomi's speech win! 

February 19 
 
Slept in way too late 
Assessed my body in harsh 
Fitting room lighting 

February 20 

Went to Heidelberg 
Wrote my Sojo article 
Ethiopian!

February 21 

Greta and Timmy 
Played outside in the the wet mud 
It's now or never! 

February 22 

Trains, planes and more trains 
Made it to Jerusalem 
My soul is on fire 

February 23 

Lots of bread and wind 
Jerusalem winds and bends 
How to fathom it? 

February 24 

Kind Nazarene folks 
Show us their work and their food 
Wow I love hummus 

February 25

Tour of Haifa 
Mediterranean Sea 
*private thoughts Greta doesn't want to share online*

February 26 

West Bank welcomes us 
With a hearty lunch and tea 
Sage, chicken and rice 

February 27 

Met with peace leaders
Saw the wall, covered in art 
Bought some lovely goods 

February 28 

Saw Tent of Nations 
Can't wait to spend more time there 
Planted almond trees! 

2025 was a year of finding my way in the dark. Up until November, I had no concept of where I might be two months in the future. I started the new year in an overnight train going from Vienna to Amsterdam and I ended it in an drag bar in Belfast. In the 12 months between, I traveled to eight countries, worked as a bartender, freelance journalist, store associate, and pet sitter. I got a full time job as a paralegal at the National Immigrant Justice Center and I moved to a new city where I’m planning on staying put for a while.

I learned a lot in 2025, and I also learned how much I still have to learn. I’ve realized that I am still prone to getting stuck in the rut of not trusting myself. Just this week, I told myself I was overreacting when I felt like my lungs were tight and I couldn’t breath properly after two weeks of coughing. I had to call my mom to ask her if I was overreacting by wanting to go to the doctor. Turned out I had bronchitis.

It seems that despite it all, I still need regular assurance that I’m not too much and that I don’t need to apologize for being who I am. One way I’ve validated my own existence over the years is through journaling, and in 2025 I decided to challenge myself to write a brief summary of each day using the syllable structure of a haiku: 5-7-5. Many of the haikus I wrote this year are not good, but they exist, which is really all I was going for, and I figure I might as well share them with my fans. So for each month of 2026, I’ll post a month’s worth of haikus from 2025 and you can reflect on my life right along with me, if you so choose.

And with that, please enjoy January 2025: Haiku edition.

January 1

Came to Amsterdam 

it’s full of rain, weed, and sex. 

All I need is rest. 

January 2

It’s hard to believe 

I haven’t seen you for months. 

Friendship is magic

January 3

Wandering around, 

our destination unclear. 

Amsterdam engulfs. 

January 4

Warehouse flea market 

a boat ride across the river 

train ride and dim sum

January 5

Goodbye Rotterdam 

hello Utrecht, a cozy home 

Michel and Marjo 

January 6

These strangers feed us 

pumpkin soup and dutch pancakes 

suddenly, it’s home. 

January 7 

Last day in Utrecht 

trying to ignore the cold. 

More tea? Yes please! 

January 8

Two gothic church spires 

Cologne is gritty and wet

soft pretzels and song

January 9

Five trains in a day

German countryside through glass 

coffee costs more here

January 10

Three weary bodies 

plagued by illness and price tags 

Switzerland offends

January 11

Made it to Basel 

scamming trains, fighting fever 

thankful for fondue 

January 12 

Naomi’s birthday 

and I’m across the ocean 

hiking with strangers 

January 13 

Swiss alps and snow banks 

a cable car carries us up 

my soul is happy 

January 14 

Leaving Switzerland 

France has better prices, thank God 

gingerbread houses 

January 15 

Goodbye to Gussie 

one day left with Olivia 

cocktails and weird men 

January 16 

Last day in Strasbourg 

modern art and a park walk 

inspired by print 

January 17 

Made it to Paris 

empty time looms and invites 

how will I use it? 

January 18 

Had a lazy day 

took some calls, cooked some lentils 

feels so good to rest 

January 19 

American church 

in Paris? An art museum 

with Benoit, new friend

January 20 

Finally writing! 

Three pages, fried eggs, a walk 

solitude is kind

January 21

To hear French in France 

is to see an elephant 

outside of a zoo 

January 22 

Finally saw the Louvre 

fame and beauty are constructs:  

Mona Lisa knows 

January 23 

Catholicism

has inspired so much good art.

Come on, Mennonites!

January 24 

I love a slow day 

slow food, slow art, slow learning 

no desire to leave 

January 25 

Left alone, I make 

I consume stories and snack 

on my solitude 

January 26 

French Mennonite church 

a lesson in not knowing 

Rodin’s hands reach out 

January 27 

Writing and making 

microwave macaroni 

not so haute cuisine 

January 28 

Boulangerie walk 

a playdate with sweet Ludo 

and calling Lexi 

January 29 

Didn’t leave the house 

and I blamed it on the rain. 

Don’t I have free will? 

January 30 

A day of phone calls 

panicking, crying, laughing 

babysitting, too

January 31 

Picasso transforms 

and so I romanticize 

rain into magic

Happy New Year from Ballycastle, Northern Ireland! I’ve spent the past week or so exploring Ireland and Northern Ireland with my family, and it has been a perfect balance of museum wandering, cozy nights by a fire, history learning, cliff-hiking, and pub-hopping. I also found myself in the awkward situation of having read 691 books as of midnight on December 30th, instead of my goal of 70 — but never one to back down from a challenge, I managed to read the entirety of “Farenheight 451” in the car on New Year’s Eve. 70 books in a year is a new record for me!

“Farenheight 451,” while definitely a young adult book, was a good little read to end the year with as I reflect on my reading habits and goals. Here are a few quotes from the book about books that I found poignant.

Professor Faber on the importance of quality:

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway.”

Guy Montag on being bothered

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while.”

These two quotes speak to a few reasons I read: to enrich the depth of my thinking, to expand my worldview, and to challenge my assumptions about the world. Both fiction and non-fiction do this, and I think it’s important to read a variety of genres. So without further ado, here are quick summaries for my top ten books of the year, followed by lists of every book I read this year, divided by genre.

MY TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2025!!

I simply cannot rank my top ten because they are all so different, but when I look back on what I read this year and ask myself which books had the most texture and which bothered me the most (in a good way), it is these ten. I would recommend most of these without hesitation.

“The Bee Sting,” Paul Murray: This book bewitched me, body and soul. This novel is set in rural Ireland in 2008 and follows a family of four as they work through the collapse of the family car dealership, an unhappy marriage with a curious origin, high school drama, and middle school growing pains. The book moves from perspective to perspective and travels back in time, revealing important details about the past. I found this book both deeply insightful and funny. It is 650 pages long though. So buckle up.

“Flashlight,” Susan Choi: I loved “Trust Exercise” by Choi and was curious to see how she might mess with her readers’ heads in “Flashlight.” In the tradition of “Trust Exercise,” “Flashlight” plays with ideas of memory as fluid, maleable, and deceptive. It tells the story of Serk, a Korean man who was raised in Japan during World War II, who makes his way to America and gets married to Anne. When their daughter Louisa is nine, they move to Japan for a few years. One night, when walking along the coast with Louisa, Serk falls and disappears, presumed to be dead. The book follows these three characters and more across the decades as the truth of what really happened is revealed. North Korea is also involved, which adds intrigue.

“Intermezzo,” Sally Rooney: Call me basic, but I love Sally Rooney, and “Intermezzo” was excellent. This is a book about two brothers who are extremely different and don’t know how to talk to each other in the wake of their father’s death. They are also both involved in unusual romantic situations, and their relationship with each other is competitive and calculated, like a game of chess. This book was unputdownable and almost made me cry, which pretty much never happens, so good job Sally Rooney! Keep ‘em coming!

“Orbital,” Samantha Harvey: My dear friend Ezra had been singing this novel’s praises for months and months, so when I found myself at the cozy Llibreria Finestres bookstore in Barcelona for an afternoon last February, I decided to just get comfy in an armchair and read the whole thing. This book was just lovely, and I understand why it won the Booker Prize. It follows astronauts from many different countries in the International Space Station as they reflect on Earth, their families, humanity, beauty, and hope. I recommend it for anyone who has ever had an astronaut/outer space phase as a child, or anyone who happens to find themselves living on Planet Earth and needs a little perspective.

“The Blue Mountains of China,” Rudy Wiebe: How did I not know about Rudy Wiebe, the great Canadian Mennonite novelist? This book was deeply fascinating and moving — it follows various members of a Mennonite community in Russia who fled Stalin and found themselves in Paraguay, Canada, and even eastward, towards the titular blue mountains of China. Reading this book, I realized that there is a lack of Mennonite novels that tackle themes of migration and faith head-on. My ancestors left Russia a few decades before Stalin, so this isn’t exactly my story, but it felt adjacent in a way, and it was cathartic to read an explicitly Mennonite story written in such a literary way. Even though I loved this book, part of why I kept reading was my personal interest and connection with Mennonite history, so I’m not sure it would be universally appealing.

“Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” Kerry Howley: Non-fiction time! Another Ezra recommendation. This book, with the subtitle “A journey through the deep state,” is an essential read for anyone trying to understand how digital surveillance works post-9/11, and it is so well-written that it almost reads like a novel. It follows the story of Reality Winner, who was a linguist for the Air Force and later a contractor for the NSA. Winner leaked information to the press about Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election and was harshly sentenced, due to her highly scrutinized digital trail. Winner is the thread throughout Howley’s investigation of the surveillance state, which, left unchecked, has grown exponentially since 9/11, collecting and selling our data.

“Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis,” Jonathan Blitzer: Another essential read for anyone trying to understand the state of immigration from Central America to the United States. Blitzer systematically takes the reader through the histories of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, starting in the 1950s. You see how the United States has meddled in each of these countries and how that has led to migration north, with compelling personal stories woven throughout. It is clear that Blitzer has done his homework and formed real relationships with many of his sources, and this will 100% teach you something new.

“The Shock Doctrine,” Naomi Klein: Okay, one more essential read, I’m sorry. This is an older book, from 2007, but that only makes it more powerful because you see how prescient Klein was. The subtitle of the book is “the rise of disaster capitalism” and she talks about Milton Friedman and his philosophy that everything should be privatized (healthcare, education, the mail), that the government should protect businesses first and foremost, and that one of the best ways to privatize things is to swoop in after a disaster when people are desperate, distracted, and disoriented. She traces examples of this philosophy, from the overthrowing of governments to the destruction of the New Orleans public school system after Hurricane Katrina. This is another long book but just read it pleaseeeeee.

“We Were Eight Years in Power,” Ta-Nehisi Coates: This is the book that really made me understand the Ta-Nehisi Coates hype. It is structured around President Obama’s eight years in office and features one essay per year, written by Coates for The Atlantic. Before each essay, he includes a new essay, looking back on that year and the ideas he was having at the time. He considers the election of Donald Trump to be, at its core, a racist backlash to Obama, which he compares to the racist backlash after Reconstruction in the South, and concludes that a Trump figure was almost inevitable in America after Obama. This collection includes his most famous essay, “The Case for Reparations,” and other essays that will stick with me on redlining, the civil war, and President Obama’s unique Black identity. After reading this, I recommend listening to his most recent interview with Ezra Klein because it just confirms everything he is saying about white America.

“A Field Companion for Wandering,” Conner Bouchard-Roberts: I bought this small book at an airport bookstore and was so pleasantly surprised! A collection of poetry, quotes, essays, and short stories about the internal experience of travel and the personal transformation you undergo at each stage. I’m probably recommending this due to recency bias, but I did genuinely think this book was unique and chock full of insight.

Okay so that’s my top ten! Here are ALL the books I read this year if you’re curious!

Highly Recommending (stayed with me for a while)

• “The Bee Sting,” Paul Murray

• “Flashlight,” Susan Choi

• “Intermezzo,” Sally Rooney

• “Orbital,” Samantha Harvey

• “Endling,” Maria Reva

• “Theft,” Abdulrazak Gurnah

• “The Blue Mountains of China,” Rudy Wiebe

• “The Empty Nestors,” Brenton Pham2

• “Brooklyn,” Colm Toibin

• “Creation Lake,” Rachel Kushner

• “Minas Matchboxes,” Yoko Ogawa

• “The Vegetarian,” Han Kang

• “Giovanni’s Room,” James Baldwin

• “Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson

• “Animal Farm,” George Orwell

Recommending Casually (enjoyed it but it hasn’t stuck with me at all)

• “The Book of Love,” Kelly Link

• “Bright Young Women,” Jessica Knoll

• “The Shell Collector,” Anthony Doerr

• “Of Mice and Men,” John Steinbeck

• “Rental House,” Weike Wang

• “Harriet Tubman Live in Concert,” Bob the Drag Queen

• “The Best American Short Stories 2024,” Edited by Lauren Groff

• “Tender is the Flesh,” Agustina Bazterrica

• “Book Lovers,” Emily Henry

• “Great Big Beautiful Life,” Emily Henry

• “Shanghailanders,” Juli Min

• “The Anthropologists,” Ayegul Savas

• “Albion,” Anna Hope

• “Mothers and Sons,” Adam Haslett

• “The Guest List,” Lucy Foley

• “The Houseguest and Other Short Stories,” Amparo Davila

• “Farenheight 451,” Ray Bradbury

Not recommending (could barely finish or was glad to be done)

• “Katabasis,” R.F. Kuang3

• “Death of the Author,” Nnedi Okorafor

• “The Sirens,” Emilia Hart

• “Camilla,” Madeleine L’Engle

• “Blob,” Maggie Su

• “Butter,” Asako Yuzuki

• “People Pieces,” Merle Good

• “These People Mine,” Merle Good

• “Palestine,” Joe Sacco

• “Shelterbelts,” Jonathan Dyck

• “Oak Flat,” Lauren Redniss

• “Sweet Time and Other Stories,” Weng Pixin

• “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” Nora Ephron

• “The Hollow Half,” Sarah Aziza

• “Kitchen Confidential,” Anthony Bourdain

• “Grace (Eventually),” Anne Lamott

• “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” Wendell Berry

• “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates

• “Ten Myths about Israel,” Ilan Pappe

• “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” Kerry Howley

• “Recognizing the Stranger - on Palestine and Narrative,” Isabella Hammad

• “American Nations,” Colin Woodard

• “Original Sins,” Eve Ewing

• “Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis,” Jonathan Blitzer

• “The Food Explorer,” Daniel Stone

• “The Jakarta Method,” Vincent Bevin

• The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein

• “K Blows Top,” Peter Carlson

• “We Were Eight Years in Power,” Ta-Nehisi Coates

• “Low Anthropology,” David Zahl

• “High Conflict,” Amanda Ripley

• “Ways of Being,” James Bridle

• “The Origin of Others,” Toni Morrison

• “The Anthropocene Reviewed,” John Green

• “Living More with Less,” Doris Janzen Longacre

Poetry

• “Sleeping Preacher,” Julia Kasdorf

Genre-flexy

• “A Field Companion for Wandering,” Conner Bouchard-Roberts

That’s all I have to say for my reading roundup of 2025! Thanks for reading and happy 2026!

Another good example is any Americanized version of non-American cuisines: American Chinese restaurants, with their fortune cookies and crab rangoons, or American Mexican restaurants with their chimichangas and fajitas, are simulacrums of Chinese and Mexican food. In an interesting turn of events, a simulacrum becomes a new reality, and a very delicious one at that.

All this to say, I made some pumpkin chocolate chip cookies last week that called for a whole can of pureed pumpkin. Simulacrum who? I did find the recipe on Instagram, though, and Instagram is the Mother of All Simulacrums. It offers us visions of life — our own and others — that aren’t real, and even though we know that those morning routines can’t be real (because didn’t they have to set up their camera to film themselves “waking up?”), it requires deliberate effort not to fall for it. If I see someone post about doing something that I do, like hosting a gathering, I get this creeping feeling that my version is less “real” because I didn’t document it. Once I almost gave up on a run, two miles in, when I realized that I never started my Strava — even though the benefits to my body and mind have literally nothing to do with Strava.

“Pics or it didn’t happen” is not a new idea. It speaks to one of the fundamental qualities of our humanity: Human beings have always sought to leave proof of our existence. But in the digital era, we have endless ways to do so. You could literally livestream your entire life if you wanted to, inviting in the presence of a perpetual voyeur and demanding that other people waste their lives watching yours. But you already know this, because you live in this world too. So back to the cookies — where I’m going with all of this is that I was proud of myself for moving past the mindless watching of a recipe video towards the actual making of it.

But my joy in this cozy activity was quickly thwarted by the demon commonly known as “pop-up ads.” As I referenced the recipe on easygayoven.com, I was jump-scared by two ads recruiting me for ICE. Was I being targeted specifically because the cookies of the internet know I spend ungodly amounts of time looking for a job on LinkedIn, or are they advertising indiscriminately? The latter option, which is more likely, is definitely worse

One of the advertisements features Kristi Noem wearing a baseball cap, looking over her shoulder as she drives what the viewer is invited to imagine is an unmarked ICE vehicle, or maybe a bus full of immigrants on their way to be deported. It says “Defend the Homeland / Join ICE Today.” The other ad features American propaganda icon, Uncle Sam. He is pointing at you and staring deep into your soul with his furrowed brow, saying “Join ICE Today / $50,000 signing bonus.”

The pop-up ads disappeared, in the sneaky way they tend to do, but not before I took a screenshot. Later that week, when I was bartending, the football game on TV went to ads, and JOIN ICE TODAY was splayed across the big screen. The sanitary, navy blue ad boasted student loan forgiveness and a $50,000 sign-on bonus without any college degree or prior experience necessary.

There are many layers of messed-up-ness going on here. For one, the United States Government is using the same visual language to recruit for ICE as they used to recruit for the military for World War 1. Their message is clear: This is war, and ICE is an army — except unlike real war, you won’t have to fight anyone or risk your life. You just get to racially profile and kidnap innocent people, ripping them of their dignity, due process, and human rights. In World War 1, you might have died in a trench. If you join ICE, you won’t face a physical threat, but your conscience will be under attack. Secondly, they are shamelessly preying on people in tough financial situations, whether that be student loans or just general financial insecurity. Third, they are advertising on a GAY BAKING WEBSITE! Is nothing sacred?

I want to be clear that I have no sympathy for someone who chooses to join ICE, even if they are making that decision out of financial need. But I also want to point out how incredibly fucked up it is that of all the solutions the government could offer to people in financial distress, the one they are choosing to shove down people’s throats is joining a paramilitary force which will probably be considered a great source of national shame by future generations. The anti-immigrant ideologues behind the whole operation, like Stephen Miller, would never join ICE. They’ll have other people do their dirty work for them, like they always do. And ICE’s widespread marketing campaign will work, because ads work. Many people will join ICE without really understanding what they are getting into, and maybe they’ll eventually realize that it was never about defending our homeland from dangerous criminals, or maybe they won’t, but either way, it will be too late. The damage will be done.

NPR had a great story on Monday about Folkston, Georgia, a town with less than 3,000 people, which will soon be home to the country’s largest ICE processing facility, once the detention center reaches capacity. According to NPR’s reporting, the detention center has added almost 200 jobs, and the private company that runs the detention center, GEO Group, has a $96 million dollar contract with the federal government over the next two years for expansion of the site. This detention center recently made the news because it is where hundreds of South Koreans were detained after a raid on the Hyundai factory where they worked. The people in Folkston do not have many options for how to make their living — NPR reports that the two largest employers in the town are the landfill and now, the ICE facility. It’s a perfect location for ICE to set up shop.

An immigration lawyer named Samantha Hamilton was interviewed for the piece, and she put it best: “It is endemic to this capitalist system that holds these rural communities hostage to make them feel like there is nothing else that they can do but accept this ‘gift,’ quote-unquote, that is presented to them.”

Moral clarity — that black and white understanding of right and wrong— is so easy to have in theory. It’s much harder to have when your entire community has been the target of an intense, decades-long propaganda campaign that tells you that the reason you aren’t able to make a living, the reason you are suffering, is because of immigrants, not because of exploitative economic systems that have left you in the dust. And then, after all this propaganda, they give you a chance to join the fight for the soul of the greatest nation on earth, with a laundry list of benefits to boot! And so thousands, maybe millions, of Americans are going to join ICE and rip families apart and perpetuate cruelty and they might not feel great about it, but most of them will justify it, because humans are incredibly good at justifying their actions, especially when they are desperate.

One of my favorite TV series, Mo, has a plot line where the Palestinian-American main character, Mo, ends up in ICE detention through a series of very unfortunate events. Mo develops a frenemy sort of relationship with one of the ICE guards, who is mostly horrible to him but occasionally does him a solid. When Mo leaves ICE detention, they have one final conversion.

Mo: Where’s your heart in all this?

Guard: You’ve been here what, two to three days? I’m here every f*cking day.

Mo: At least you have a choice.

Guard: No, what I have is a family, I’ve got two special-needs kids, I’ve got a mother-in-law living in my f*cking house, I’ve got a leak I cannot pay for, okay? The choice that I have is do I go home at night and blow my f*cking brains out, or do I get up in the morning and come back here and deal with shit like you, again and again and again.”

In the NPR article, the county administrator in Folkston says “I hate to say it, but if it’s not here, it’s somewhere else. So you take advantage of the stuff that you have on your table. And I hate to simplify it to that because these are people’s lives and families, but that’s the reality of it.”

The reality of it. That brings us back to simulacrums. OpenAI just launched a new social media platform dedicated solely to AI content. You will be able to make video content using people’s likenesses, and that content will spread and the majority of us won’t be able to tell that it is fake. It is already easy to create an AI video of someone committing a crime, as has already been done with OpenAI founder Sam Altman. The difference is that Altman is a billionaire and the CEO of OpenAI and has the resources to refute the content. Most of us do not. And in June, the Department of Defense signed a $200 million contract with OpenAI. AI companies’ involvement with the federal government will only continue to grow, and the technology will only continue to improve.

After 9/11, we allowed the government to access massive swaths of our data in the name of national security, and now we’ve grown so accustomed to it that we practically give our data out for free (highly recommending that everyone read “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” by Kerry Howley). And now AI technology can turn that data into fake versions of whoever they want. Simulacrums, that will be hard to refute and can be used to further anti-immigrant, anti-trans, anti-Black, anti-anything-you-want sentiment, will become the soup we swim in. It’s a recipe for disaster in a country that is so polarized and that is already seeing increased political violence.

How we define reality will change in the coming months and years. Photos, videos and audio recordings will no longer be irrefutable evidence. I don’t really know what we should do about it, other than get offline and ground ourselves in our communities. Take time for yourself, make some pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. But maybe use a recipe from a physical cookbook — ICE can’t reach you there. At least not yet.

I recently started working part-time at Ten Thousand Villages1, a fair trade store that sells artisan made goods from around the world. Fair trade, for those who are unfamiliar, is not a winning business model under capitalism, since the emphasis is on paying workers fairly and not on maximizing profit. One way Ten Thousand Villages has managed to make this business model work for 79 years is that the stores are almost entirely run by committed volunteers, often retired people. I went from spending very little time with senior citizens to daily, high-concentrated doses, practically overnight.

Now I spend five days a week listening to vaguely international sounding music, smelling soaps, commenting on different woven baskets and batik tablecloths, and chatting with senior citizens as we sip Equal Exchange coffee out of small paper cups. It’s completely 180 from my other job as a bartender.

On my first day at Ten Thousand Villages, the big drama was an accidental shipment of bulk chocolate chips: We had received six 11-pound bags that we hadn’t ordered and that had a retail price of over $100. Even worse was that these chocolate chips were going to expire soon! Should we try to sell the bags in bulk? Who would want 11 pounds of chocolate chips? Should we repackage them in “cellophane bags with a decorative ribbon?” (The phrase “cellophane bags with a decorative ribbon” was uttered at least 10 times.) This chocolate chip debacle lasted for twenty minutes, and I was amazed that something so minor could take up so much time. It felt like a stretching out of every small decision that gets made at the bar, where it’s nothing but running to the basement to get more ice, drink tickets shooting out of the printer, used cocktail shakers lined up to be rinsed, and heavy trash bags to be carried out to the dumpster at 1 am. I attributed this change in pace to the presence of senior citizens, who must know better than to rush. Or maybe once you get older, you have fewer decisions to make, and so every decision merits more consideration.2

In addition to the chocolate chips fiasco, there were some bulk bags of expired hot chocolate mix that needed to be dealt with. One of the volunteers considered taking some home, but looked at the nutritional facts and decided that 160 calories per serving was far too many. I was startled by her upfront admission of this — I had forgotten how some women, especially older women, could be so frank about their fear of gaining weight. On one hand, at least it’s honest. So many people shroud their fears in the language of health, or simply “not liking” foods with calories. On the other hand, it is sad to me that even retired women feel the pressure to maintain a certain body shape. Haven’t they earned the right to sag and wrinkle and fold? I’m of the opinion that a body that has done the hard work of staying alive for decades deserves to look the part, but I digress.

Shortly after the hot chocolate conversation, a new set of volunteers came in for the afternoon shift. I was immediately drawn to a short, sparkling-eyed volunteer wearing a blue scarf and maneuvering a cane like a third leg. She poked her head in the door and said that she was going to pop into the chocolate shop next door to redeem her punch card. Minutes later, she returned triumphantly with a small box of chocolate covered cherries, which she offered to all of us in the shop.

All the volunteers refused, one by saying that she “didn’t like the number on the scale this morning.” Fed up by the second diet culture comment of the day, I eagerly accepted one, even though I dislike maraschino cherries. I had just touched the chocolate when she exclaimed “Oh no, they gave me milk chocolate instead of dark!” I withdrew my hand and encouraged her to go back and trade them out. She agreed and started to make her way back to the door.

“Wait,” I said, “but I touched one.” She looked back at me from the door and winked. “You touched the paper,” she said conspiratorially, and then she was gone.

All of this happened before I even knew her name, which I later learned was Linda. Once she came back, we chatted for a while. I learned that she had been a teacher, that she had just celebrated her 60th wedding anniversary with her husband, and that she loved to play Wii Bowling with her friends at the retirement community. I commented that retirement communities seemed like a second chance at college to me, and she agreed, saying how fun it had been to reconnect with old friends. She had recently had a heart surgery and needed to be careful with her activity level, but she didn’t let that stop her from playing Wii Bowling from the couch.

I was so struck by Linda, and told my family all about her later that night. I loved that she was irreverent about the rules, turning in a chocolate that we both knew had been touched by my fingers. I loved that she embraced something as indulgent as a chocolate covered cherry in an environment where every decision seemed to be dictated by caloric value and scale readings. She talked to you like you were an old friend, and seemed genuinely interested in you. She was exactly the kind of retired woman I would like to be someday.

On my second day at Ten Thousand Villages, one of the volunteers didn’t come in. She called later to explain why — A close friend of hers had suddenly died that morning. That friend had been Linda.

Linda, who just the day before had told me how lucky she felt that both her and her husband were still alive, who had finally redeemed her chocolate punch card and gotten a free box of chocolate covered cherries. Linda, who was still clocking in to volunteer at Ten Thousand Villages every week, even when she had just undergone a heart surgery. Linda, here one day, gone the next.3

The news of her death hit me hard. Death always does, but Linda’s death was so shocking because unlike people I’ve known who were sick and deteriorating for a while before they died, or the people I’ve known killed in vehicle accidents, Linda’s body had betrayed her, when hours before it had been filled with life. The fact that this happens, and so suddenly, is a horrible reality that I don’t like to think about. Maybe we think that our lives have some secret plan to them, that we won’t die before we’ve completed all that we were meant to do, but that isn’t true. I think that’s why I often feel a sense of impending urgency to make something of my life. Death could creep up at any moment, and what if I haven’t even written a single novel?? What if nobody has my Google Drive password and all my writing is lost?

It sounds so selfish, to worry about death because of what I won’t accomplish. Especially because I’m no Alexander Hamilton, writing like he’s running out of time. If I was really afraid of dying, wouldn’t I wake up at 5 am every day and just write? Would I care so much about getting a job with benefits? I don’t know! Because despite my fear of death, I am still young and healthy, and with that comes a certain undeserved faith that my body will keep working as it should for many more years. And that belief, combined with an irrational fear of spontaneous death, somehow leads to me taking risks, because it will probably be okay, but also, if I were to die soon, wouldn’t I regret not taking more risks?

This trust in my own vitality and fear of losing it helps me get out of bed each day, even though I know that I am more likely to die outside of my bed than in it. I still drive (although I do have a variety of protective talismans in my car to keep me safe), get on planes, spend time in public, eat food prepared by strangers, and post my opinions online, all things that could result in my untimely death. Because what other choice do I have?

I think the best thing death can offer those of us still living is to periodically remind us to look up, to take in the world around us and be grateful that we are able to witness it, with other people by our side. Death makes life more real, and I think it can be easy to forget, sometimes, that life is real.

I’m so glad I got to meet Linda, and I’m glad she got her cherries. Hopefully they have chocolate shops up in heaven, but I’m in no rush to find out.

Preamble

That clip of Oprah asking Meghan Markle if she was “silent or silenced” has been bouncing around my skull lately. I came home from my time abroad without a Next Big Thing, and I am the type of person who always has a Next Big Thing. Without one, life feels a little aimless. Especially when I’m living in my parents’ basement and working as a “barmaid,” to quote my mother. The combination of no Next Big Thing and a lot to process from time spent in the West Bank culminated in a sort of creative paralysis fueled by mental and physical exhaustion. I told myself it was okay not to be writing much because I wasn’t in the right head space, and that I’d bounce back eventually.

Then summer got busy and now it’s September. I’ve pretty much bounced back, but apart from my journal, I’ve written very little. This makes the insecure part of me feel like maybe I was never meant1 to be a writer in the first place, which induces a new paralysis: The paralysis of having taken such a long break from something that now you aren’t sure if that thing is even a part of you any more.

So I find my inner Oprah asking my inner Meghan Markel, “Were you silent, or were you silenced?” Did I have nothing to say or was I avoiding doing the work of articulating my thoughts and feelings?

The answer is probably the latter. It’s easier to consume than create, and I’ve really been leaning into consuming ideas to make myself feel better about not writing them. I’ve already read 53 books this year, and for once I’m not trying to brag — Every time I pick up a book (or scroll on Instagram reels) instead doing the writing I want to do, I feel a little bit like I’m betraying myself.

So now, in order to stop silencing myself, I am going to try and write regularly on here, publishing a short personal essay each week as an exercise in routine and vulnerability, two necessary ingredients for good writing. What follows is my first essay about fishing. I hope you enjoy!

Wishing I liked fishing

I held my first fishing pole in fifth grade, on a school trip to Camp Amigo in Michigan. A group of motley 10 year olds stood around a pond with our poles, dangling hooks skewered with worms that we had squeamishly pulled out of a bucket minutes before into the water. We were waiting for something to bite, although it didn’t seem very likely given our level of expertise. After a few minutes of nothing, I felt something tug at my rod. I didn’t trust the feeling at first, but it kept tugging, and so I tugged back. With some help, I hoisted the flopping fish out of the water. I wish I remembered literally anything about the fish or what happened next, but I don’t. I offloaded the work of touching the fish and removing the hook to my dad, who was a chaperone on the field trip. All I really remember is a feeling of smug, fifth-grade superiority and thinking that I must be a fishing prodigy or something. Very shortly after my victory, the sky opened up and it began to pour — Nobody else had the chance to catch a fish that day. I left that experience with a neutral opinion about fishing: It wasn’t the most thrilling, and I didn’t really get the appeal, but it had been exciting to succeed at something without having to try.

My second time fishing was my junior year in high school, on a marine biology trip in Florida. I believed, at this point in my life, that I would go on to study environmental science or marine biology. I had signed up for the two-week spring break session in the Florida Keys, eager to scuba dive in coral reefs and swim with dolphins or do whatever else I imagined marine biologists do. Instead, we spent hours cooped up in a humid classroom learning about algae. Turns out, there are about a million different types of algae, and it is important to learn about them. I pretty much decided during those weeks that I no longer wanted to be a marine biologist.

A much anticipated highlight of the trip each year was a night fishing expedition, for which you paid an extra fee: You boarded a fishing boat late at night and were carried into the vast, dark expanse of the ocean where you would fish for hours, supposedly reeling in fish at an impressive pace. It sounded cool enough, and I was excited to be in the same group as a cute boy from another school who turned out to be gay. The water was very choppy that night, but nobody seemed too concerned. A teacher had mentioned that for anyone really prone to motion sickness it might be smart to take some dramamine, but it didn’t seem necessary for most of us.

We secured our life jackets and sped off into the void, the ocean breeze whipping my hair away from my face in what I hoped was a romantic way. We traveled for what felt like miles before the boat came to stop. Despite no longer moving forward, the boat was still in motion, rocking back and forth so dramatically that it was hard to walk in a straight line. I gripped the railing at the edge of the boat, right next to cute gay boy from another school, and dangled my line into the dark water. I felt euphoric in the way that only seems to happen right before everything comes crashing down.

After just a few minutes, something tugged on my line — It was fifth grade all over again! I reeled in my catch, and the employees on the boat helped me take the slimy fish off my hook. I gave it a look over and then unceremoniously threw it back in the water. Others around me were catching fish too, but I noticed that for every student who caught a fish, there seemed to be a student leaning over the edge of the boat, vomiting. I was slightly queasy, but I was confident that my strong stomach would win the day. It seemed to me, in that moment, that we were being sorted into two groups: the fishers and the pukers, which was another way of saying the winners and the losers. I was obviously a fisher, having already caught my first. I cast my line again and said something clever to the cute gay boy, and then fiery bile was climbing up my throat and I was folded over the edge of the boat, hurling up my dinner. Mid yak, I heard cute gay boy start vomiting next to me — it felt like a strange sort of solidarity, maybe even flirting? Soon the girl on the other side of me had joined in. All three of us were spraying the partially digested contents of our stomachs into the churning ocean, which was spraying cold salt water right back at us

If there were 20 of us on the boat, 17 of us got violently ill. Those who didn’t happily fished for hours while the rest of us sat on the floor, trying to hold it together. I remember asking one of the employees why we weren’t going back, considering that so many of us were sick. He told me that we hadn’t finished our allotted time yet: We’d paid for three hours, so we’d get three hours, plain and simple. When we finally did get to dry land again around midnight, we silently stumbled off the boat and into the bus. It was one of those experiences you know nobody else will understand. We would go back and tell the rest of our classmates, but they wouldn’t get it. What we had experienced, collectively vomiting on that boat in the middle of the dark ocean, would be ours, and only ours, for the rest of time.

Or maybe it wasn’t only ours. Maybe this is how the night fishing operation has been so successful over the years: people vomit, tempting the fish with an interesting new type of chum, and then those who were wise enough to take dramamine beforehand reap the benefits. I’m not willing to go back and find out if our experience was an anomaly or not.

All this to say, my relationship with fishing has always been less about the act of fishing than it has been about the situations in which I experienced fishing. To me fishing has never been about the fish, which makes the actual sport (it’s a sport, right?) even more fascinating to me.

My parents moved to a new house along a river this year. The river is actually a man-made canal that parallels a real river, the Elkhart River, which flows all the way into Lake Michigan. The man-made canal begins at a man-made dam which is just a few minutes from my house. I go for a lot of walks, starting at the dam and making my way down the canal path, and one thing that always shocks me is the sheer number of people fishing. There are always multiple people fishing, and there is no single demographic that these people come from. They are young and old, of every race, male and female. They are in boats, they are sitting in lawn chairs, they are standing, they are walking along the canal. They are just fishing, rain or shine.

There are a number of hobbies that I don’t do but that I can imagine the appeal of. I don’t play video games, or do taekwondo, or go rock climbing, but I can understand why someone might be interested in those things. Fishing has always been harder for me to understand. Why would you spend hours essentially doing nothing, just for the chance to catch a fish that you’ve probably caught before and that you’ll throw back in the water?

The desire to fish feels almost like belief in God to me: those who have it, have it and the rest of us are baffled and frustrated because it isn’t something we can convince ourselves to believe in.

I once told my pastor that I wasn’t sure if I could be baptized because despite believing in all the teachings of Jesus, I wasn’t sure if I really believed in the whole “Son of God” thing. She told me that that wasn’t necessary, I could still get baptized if I wanted to. I politely told her that I felt like it actually was pretty necessary — or at least I’d like it to be necessary for me.

So I didn’t get baptized, and I haven’t picked up a fishing pole since 2017. Maybe the day I learn to love fishing will be the day I get baptized. Jesus did, after all, encouraged his disciples to be “fishers of men.” Maybe the first step is simply learning how to be a fisher of fish. But until that day, I’ll keep wondering what it is I’m missing when I’m not fishing.

As someone who is stubbornly anti-Goodreads, it can be kind of demoralizing to have no way to show off how much I read. As a solution, I post these silly little recaps in order to prove to anyone who reads my blog that I READ A LOT, SO THERE!

So far, 2025 has been a year of reading whatever I can get my hands on during my travels (Can you tell when I was at the Paris Mennonite Center? lol) and non-fiction! Fiction definitely still has my heart as a genre, but now that I’m not in school and don’t have any assigned reading, I’ve been itching for some sort of ✨curriculum✨ to continue my learning about history and society and whatnot. Turns out, there are all sorts of educational books available at your local library and you can design your own curriculum! How cool is that? Expect even more non-fiction in the future. I’m viewing this era of my life as a period of digestion and re-digestion of ideas; I am like a cow chewing on its cud. Eventually, I hope to excrete everything I have digested into a interesting and beautiful cow pie.

Anyway, here is the roundup. Rated out of five stars and with a five word description. I put my five star titles in bold, and genuinely recommend them to anyone!

The Vegetarian, Han Kang ⭐⭐⭐: Mental illness, romanticizing sickness, interiority

People Pieces, Merle Good, editor ⭐⭐: Mennonite and Amish stories, outdated

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner ⭐⭐⭐⭐: Solitude, society, dirty work, compartmentalization

The Blue Mountains of China, Rudy Wiebe ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Masterful, Mennonite, diaspora, faith, immigration

These People Mine, Merle Good ⭐⭐: Mennonite identity, adapted musical, quick

Sleeping Preacher, Julia Kasdorf ⭐⭐ Poetry, Anabaptist, growing up, family

The Bee Sting, Paul Murray ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Perfection!! Family, choices, inner lives

The Book of Love, Kelly Link ⭐⭐⭐⭐: Fantasy-ish, second chances, power, love

Sweet Time and other stories, Weng Pixin ⭐⭐⭐: Graphic novel, love, grief, humanity

Orbital, Samantha Harvey ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Stunning, space, earth, humanity, love

Intermezzo, Sally Rooney ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Amazing! Forgiveness, family, relationships, self-esteem

Animal Farm, George Orwell ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Allegory, corruption, narrative, belief, fascism

Bright Young Women, Jessica Knoll ⭐⭐⭐: Commentary on true crime, suspenseful

I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron ⭐⭐⭐: Essays, womanhood, memoir, aging, life-lessons

The Shell Collector, Anthony Doerr ⭐⭐⭐⭐: Short stories, humanity

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck ⭐⭐⭐: Value of a life, mercy

Ten Myths about Israel, Ilan Pappé ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Great primer on Israel/Palestine

Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín ⭐⭐⭐⭐: Leaving home, fractured self, coming-of-age

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson ⭐⭐⭐⭐: Reread, faith, forgiveness, dying, beauty

Palestine, Joe Sacco ⭐⭐⭐⭐: graphic journalism, occupation of Palestine

Low Anthropology, David Zahl ⭐⭐⭐⭐: philosophy, human nature, faith, grace

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, persistence

Rental House, Weike Wang ⭐⭐⭐: marriage, family dynamics, reconciliation, humor

Butter, Asako Yuzuki ⭐⭐: food, body image, way too long

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, Kerry Howley ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: state surveillance, whistleblowing, digital era

High Conflict, Amanda Ripley ⭐⭐⭐: handling conflicts, large and small

Harriet Tubman Live in Concert, Bob the Drag Queen ⭐⭐⭐⭐:Harriet Tubman, American history, funny

The Best American Short Stories 2024, Edited by Lauren Groff ⭐⭐⭐: short stories, some I liked

Ways of Being, James Bridle ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: nuanced AI discussion, philosophy, science

Recognizing the Stranger - on Palestine and Narrative, Isabella Hammad ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Adapted lecture, narrative, turning points

Tender is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica ⭐⭐⭐: Dystopia, cannibalism, dehumanization, using others

Lmk if you’ve read any of these books and what you thought! Especially if you’ve read Butter….That book is my literary arch nemesis right now but I’m curious to hear from someone who loved it.

I returned to the United States a little over a month ago, after 178 days abroad. I flew from Frankfurt to Reykjavik, and then from Reykjavik to Chicago. (Iceland Air, for anyone curious, doesn’t give you a single complimentary snack, even on 6 hour, transatlantic flight.) We flew into O’Hare from the north, crossing Lake Michigan on a diagonal and doing some circles in the sky for thirty minutes due to stormy conditions on the ground. When the wheels of the plane finally made contact with the runway and the plane slowed down in that haltering, heart-leaping-out-of-your-chest type way, I felt like I could finally take a deep breath for the first time in a while. I had made it home. No more flights, no more new countries, and no more foreign languages to fumble through. I was back in America. Safe and sound.

Just days before, I had been crammed in the front seat of a white truck in the West Bank, driving from Bethlehem to Tent of Nations, a Palestinian family farm owned by the Nasser family for more than 100 years. The drive, I had been told, used to take no more than 10 minutes — but as more and more roads are annexed by Israelis, the commute has gotten longer and more difficult. Now, the only roads Palestinians can take to the farm are in bad condition, thin, and too steep for tour buses or other large vehicles. I was in the truck with two of the Nasser siblings who work on the farm — Amal and Daher. They had picked me up from where I was staying in Bethlehem, and after making a pit stop at their brother’s house for a cup of Arabic coffee, some dried apricots and a few random items for the farm (a large wall clock, an old coffee table, multiple empty water jugs, and some logs), we made our way out of Area A, controlled by the Palestinian Authority, into Area C, where the farm is. Area C is controlled by the Israeli government, meaning that Palestinians are unable to build anything without permission (which is never granted) and are also not able to access ground water or electrical grids, both of which are available to Israeli settlers, who have built their settlements so close to the Nasser farm that the light from their street lights provides nighttime illumination at the farm, and the sounds from the Yeshiva school just down the hill from the farm are the soundtrack of daily life. It’s a strange reality, and it’s even stranger how quickly it starts to feel normal.

So far, I hadn’t experienced any Israel checkpoints on the drive from Bethlehem to the farm, although there was evidence of the places checkpoints did occasionally pop up. But on this day, we came upon a flying checkpoint. There were three soldiers, all women, in a concrete booth. They had placed a pink, spiky metal roadblock on half of the road to prevent people from driving past, and their armored Jeep was parked at an angle on the other half of the road, meaning that any car trying to get past would have to navigate around it. The soldiers, younger than me, indicated for Daher to pull the truck up to the booth. They spoke in Hebrew, asking for ID, which he handed them. They approved it and waved him through. He backed up, navigated around the pink spikes (#girlbosscheckpoint), and they waved the next car over.

A few days later, I took a public bus from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. A few stops after I had gotten on, an American father-son duo hopped on the bus. I struck up a conversation with them and learned they were Quakers from Virginia. They told me that their plan for the day was to rent a car and drive to the Dead Sea. The dad had just invited me to go along with them when we came upon a permanent checkpoint, the kind that looks like the border crossings I’m familiar with between the US and Canada. We all had to leave the bus and line up to have our documents checked. They opened the stowage space under the bus and asked about my bags. I opened them to show them that they mostly contained clothes. When it was the American father’s turn to have his passport checked, the soldier noticed something: a “Free Gaza” black rubber bracelet on his wrist.

“What is this?” she said aggressively, in broken English. “Falastin? Why you have this?”

The man acted surprised, as if he hadn’t noticed the bracelet, as if it had been placed there by someone else. The soldier was angry at him, but he wasn’t catching on quickly enough. The bus driver, who was Palestinian, came over, took it off his wrist and threw it on the ground. The soldier searched his backpack before eventually letting him go. I wanted to tell the soldier that I didn’t know these guys, that she shouldn’t group me with them, and then I felt guilty about how quickly I was willing to separate myself from these nice men who were, in all honesty, the closest allies I probably had in that moment. But thankfully, I didn’t need to abandon my new, naive American friends — She checked my passport and let me go without any drama.

My time in Palestine was beautiful and unsettling and heartbreaking. The occupation is so obviously unjust, and it seems like it would be impossible for anyone on the ground in the Holy Land to ignore it. But it is possible to ignore. It’s very possible —even easy — to ignore. Massive swaths of people ignore it all the time, even settlers who are living right up against Palestinians. One thing I have learned is that just because you see an injustice with your own eyes doesn’t mean you will do anything to confront it or your own complicity in it — Think about every time you see an unhoused person sleeping on the street or asking for money. Think about every time you ignore them and keep walking. Sure, maybe you give them some money sometimes, or buy them a meal at the convenience store, but if you’re like me, the vast majority of unhoused people you walk by get nothing from you. You tell yourself you don’t have cash, you’re in a rush, you gave someone a dollar just yesterday. We all have experienced how remarkably easy it is to ignore injustices, even when they are right under our noses.

Which brings me back to O’Hare international airport. I cruised through customs with three questions: Where were you coming from? Did you buy anything while you were there? Did you buy any meat?

Frankfurt, some souvenirs, no meat. And I was officially allowed back into the country. Welcome home.

As I walked to the baggage claim, I found myself almost thinking whispers of ignorant and borderline patriotic thoughts along the lines of: “The United States doesn’t harass people coming into the country in the same way Israel does.” I had to laugh at myself, because I knew, before I even had the almost-thought, just how wrong that was.

I was comparing my experience as a white American entering the United States with an American passport to my experience leaving entering and leaving Israel as a non-citizen, albeit, still a privileged one.

In fact, I had been reading all about recent incidents in which people with Green Cards were deported and people having their phones searched for anti-Trump rhetoric. I know that the United States is no better than Israel, and that in fact, they are two sides of the same coin. They are like pigeons and doves. We differentiate between them with our words, and we associate different qualities with them, but they are the same species. The only different between them is the color of their feathers. And our language is so powerful that I literally didn’t know that they were the same species until I was told that in German they don’t differentiate between the two, and that in fact, many languages don’t. When I think of the story of Noah’s Arc, I imagine a snow white dove flying with an olive branch in it’s beak. For many people, that same story is illustrated by a pigeon. Words have the power to distort our realities, which we view as facts. We’re so easily fooled by semantics, it’s scary.

It’s strange to feel safe in the United States when I know so many people aren’t safe here, and that my own sense of security, afforded to me by my various privileges, is hanging in a delicate balance. It’s strange to know that the only place I feel a sense of true belonging is stolen land too. How do we work for justice when we sit in positions of privilege that make it hard for us to see, or acknowledge, the injustices? I think we need to start with semantics, to call things what they are.

Pigeons and doves are the same. Let’s stop pretending they’re different.

As luck would have it, I’ve never been in a relationship on Valentine’s Day. Any romantic entanglement I’ve had has miraculously managed to end before February 14th. There was one relationship I thought would cross the Valentine’s Day finish line, but we broke up on February 7th. Cruel sense of the humor, the universe has.

Despite my perpetual Single-on-Valentine’s-Day status, I still love the holiday. It is one of my favorites, and for the past few years, I have used Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to be creative and celebrate all my friends.

If your elementary school experience was anything like mine, then you remember the magic of Valentine’s Day: Decorating a mailbox however you liked, getting a list of all your classmates, diligently making sure you had a valentine for each person, distributing all your valentines, opening up your mailboxes at school and delighting at all the treasures within.

Homemade valentines, store-bought valentines, they were all great. Some valentines included candy, temporary tattoos, or some other type of cheap toy. And even though you got a valentine from everyone in your class, and you had to give one to everyone, it was still special to open up each card and see your name, written by your classmate. You knew that for at least a split second, they had thought about you — Not in a romantic way, but just a “hey, that person exists in my life” way. And your close friends, or even your crush, might put a little extra attention into your valentine, and you would do the same for theirs. Your tongue would be dyed red from all the red heart lollipops and those strangely addictive Lofthouse cookies. It was great.

Why does this Valentine’s Day magic stop? I’ll tell you why. Middle school. Hormones. Dating. The second the dating starts, the wholesome Valentine’s Day magic stops. Suddenly, you only get to participate in Valentine’s Day if you are in a relationship, and even then, the stakes are ridiculously high. No more cheap grocery store valentines, or red hearts cut out of construction paper. Valentine’s Day becomes a competition between boyfriends; Who would give their girlfriend the biggest teddy bear, or the most roses? The rest of us sit on the sidelines and observe how the chosen few celebrate a holiday that is no longer accessible to us.

But what if it IS accessible to us? What if we just need to change our Valentine’s Day framework? The “Valentine’s Day is for romance” framework assumes that you only love one person, and that is your significant other. But I’m sure most people would say that they love lots of different people, not just their partner. The book “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center” by Rhaina Cohen really helped form my thinking about relationships and friendships, and by extension, my Valentine’s Day philosophy.

In the book, Cohen explains how when marriage transitioned from a business arrangement into a love arrangement (generally a very good change), the expectations we put on romantic relationships became exponentially higher. Back when marriage was just a business agreement, nobody expected that your partner would fulfill you completely. They were your partner when it came to some things, but you would look elsewhere for emotional support, entertainment, or even romance. But eventually, due to the combined forces of industrialization and romanticization, marriage became all about love and only love. It became an unspoken belief that love is all you need for a successful relationship, even though logically, we all know that isn’t true. Relationships are never just a matter of the heart; There are tangible things that we do for each other, things that exist outside of the realm of feelings: It doesn’t matter if you say you love me more than anything in the world, will you do the dishes? Somehow we’ve landed ourselves in a situation where we require romantic relationships to fulfill us entirely, in every way, and that is a lot of pressure. And when our partners inevitably fail us, because they are human and humans aren’t perfect, the fallout can be pretty bad.

Still, we strive for his impossible, magical, all-encompassing, yin-yang, soulmate, missing piece relationship. And some people say they’ve found it, that they don’t need friends. Maybe they really do feel that way. But most of us need friends, and not just casual friends, but friends who do life with us, in a serious and deep way. Friends who are there for us in the same way we expect a romantic partner to be there for us. And if we have friendships like this, deep meaningful friendships, why shouldn’t we celebrate them on the day of love?

So this year, I think we should all give all of our friends valentines. Make your own, or use some of mine! Deliver them in person, or send them to your people digitally. It’s a small way to resist despair, and we need as much protection against despair as possible at the moment!

Thanks for reading, tell your friends you love them, and happy Valentine’s Day!

My favorite game to play when traveling alone is called Try To Blend In™. The goal is invisibility. If you enter someone’s field of vision, they shouldn’t pause and wonder about you. You want to be as much a part of the scenery as a tree, or a bench, or a trash can.

If you want to succeed in the game, you need to be confident, silent, and neutral-looking. Try not to look confused. Walk with purpose, but don’t look frantic. Even if you need to check your phone for directions, do so with a sense of casual purpose. If you accidentally go the wrong way, walk a little further, and do a lap around the block before turning around.

It’s best not to speak if you’re playing the game. People are very adept at knowing whether someone is a local or not after just a word or two. Being silent is very easy when you’re on your own, which is why this game is perfect for solo travel. And don’t wear anything too noticeable. Stick with your own clothes — no need to buy a whole new wardrobe for your travels — but do avoid dead giveaways. Obvious things might include a Stanley cup, or an NFL jersey (although those have infiltrated the international style scene in some places. Still, better to be safe than sorry). If you’re going to wear branded things, make them universal brands, like Adidas or Reebok. But in general, neutral is good. Neutral is camouflage. It’s also good to look a little disinterested and unimpressed, even if internally you are very interested and impressed. And if you find yourself in a city, definitely don’t make eye contact and smile at people in the street.

Of course, depending on your physical appearance, certain places will be impossible for you to blend into. I never tried to play this game in China, or India, or Morocco. If you know you’ll stick out like a sore thumb somewhere, just embrace being a tourist. Buy yourself one of those anti-theft cross-body bags, a selfie-stick and some comfy walking shoes. Being a tourist is freeing in many ways that being a local isn’t. Tourists can take pictures of anything that tickles their fancy — pigeons, a road sign, a really red brick, a can of carrots in the supermarket, the wheels on the bus — it’s all fair game. Locals don’t usually take pictures of random things, and especially not tourist attractions, like the Eiffel Tower. Tourists also have the luxury of being able to commit faux pas without the consequences. For example, ordering a cappuccino in Italy after noon; If nobody thinks you’re an Italian in the first place, why not go the extra mile and just be the tourist that you are?

In the United States and Canada, playing the game is easy. You’ll be so close to winning, and then something minuscule gives you away: an out-of-state ID at a bar, or your license plate. If you’re in Canada, you might innocently ask the waiter where the “bathroom” is, instead of the “washroom,” and BAM, cover blown. Or, you commit what many consider a cardinal sin: calling yourself an American as a way of saying that you are from the United States in front of people who are also Americans, given that Canada is famously part of America1. (For the purpose of this essay I will be using the term “American” to refer to people from the United States. I’m sorry.)

When traveling beyond English-speaking North America however, the game gets much more challenging. I’ve spent the past month in the part of Europe where my Mennonite ancestors were from, and at first, I was simply delighted when people would speak to me in Dutch or German. I blended in! Nobody could tell by the way I was dressed or acting that I was an American! But soon, blending in physically wasn’t enough. My competitive side emerged — I wanted to blend in even more. And so the game commenced.

I imagined that France, my next stop, would be a worthy playing field. I’ve been studying French and was confident that I could get through basic interactions without using English. And while I am able to order a pain au chocolate or pay for my groceries, the truth is that things break down linguistically the minute things get even an ounce more complex.

Yesterday, the cashier at the grocery store said something to me about the oranges I was trying to buy. My brain panicked and I made a sound that was supposed to be the French “quoi,” but I mixed it with the Spanish “qué,” resulting in something like “kweah?” The cashier immediately switched to English, and just like that, game over. I had lost2.

Playing the game, being a chameleon — it can be intoxicating. It indulges my life-long desire to be mysterious. When I’m confident, silent and neutral-looking, I could be anyone. But the moment I open my mouth, I’m categorizable. I know this because another game I like to play is called Categorizing People™. When I worked weddings, I would often spend my entire shift profiling the crowd: Catholic, protestant, not Christian, or not religious at all? Rich or middle class? If rich, new money or old? Conservative or liberal? Good taste or bad? Will the marriage last, or are these two headed towards divorce? Who here is an alcoholic? Which men are likely to watch sports on their phone during dinner? It’s easy to categorize people when you are a server, because people act like you don’t exist and they don’t censor themselves at all when you are clearing away their plates of unfinished food. And when you have six hours to observe them? You’ll win the game for sure.3 Of course, this game is also fun in shorter time spans, like when you’re on the metro or at a cafe, but some people are masters at evading categorization, which is another way of saying they are good at the game of blending in. Even if I ponder them for a while and try to make meaning out of the smallest things, like their fingernails or their shoelaces, eventually I will forget them. It is this forgettable-ness that I often crave. Being forgettable reminds me that the world does not, in fact, orbit around me. It’s a practice in getting out of my head.

But blending in can also be intoxicating for egotistical reasons: it makes me feel like I am supremely self-aware. Aren’t Americans abroad usually obnoxious, loud, entitled, and the furthest thing from self-aware? By being good at blending in, I am distancing myself from all the American stereotypes that make us a laughing stock to the rest of the world, especially Europe. I might be an American, but I am adaptable, and that makes me different and better. Avoiding American stereotypes feels really good. Until it doesn’t.

Today, I was enjoying a piece of carrot cake and a cappuccino in a cafe when I overheard two British people talking about Americans. It was hard to make out exactly what was being said, but basically, it was a variation of not understanding why Americans are the way we are. I wanted nothing more, in that moment, than to turn around and say “What was that you were saying about Americans?” but they were obviously on a date, and also, I was playing the game! I was supposed to be part of the cafe scenery, just another anonymous patron taking a break from the cold.

After this cafe incident, I went to a thrift store. The store was blasting American pop hits from the aughts, and when “Party in the U.S.A.” came on, I felt ridiculously patriotic. I sang along under my breath as I browsed through Levi’s jeans (a great American product) and found myself thinking how glad I was to be an American. Yes, you heard me right, I was proud to be an American because of pop music. Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold”4 and Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” made me feel the most patriotic I’ve felt in ages.

Unfortunately, pop music cannot heal the world, much less the United States. And after I finished at the thrift shop, I checked my phone and was bombarded by the latest deluge of horror from the land of the free. Things — which were already not going great before — are going quite badly now.

I’m always left feeling both defensive and helpless whenever someone from another country grills me about the United States. They want to know about school shootings, or healthcare, or our diet (“Don’t you miss American food? Like In-N-Out? Or McDonalds?”) or Donald Trump. What can I say? Yes, we have school shootings and they are terrible and shouldn’t happen. Yes, our healthcare system is predatory and dysfunctional. Yes, we do love hamburgers and french fries, although most people do not eat them every day, and actually, I’ve never even been to In-N-Out. And yes, we did re-elect Donald Trump, for some incomprehensible reason.

How can I justify, then, the affection and loyalty I feel towards the United States? Sure, there are plenty of cultural things to be proud of, but overall, the story of the United States of America is a racist and violent one. It’s like justifying a toxic relationship by saying that once your abusive partner (who is a really good artist and sometimes does nice things for you) changes fundamentally, you’ll finally be able to have a happy relationship.

And so, when I am pretending to be a part of the French scenery, or Swiss, or German, it’s easy to imagine how easily I could just leave it all. Grad school abroad. A spouse with a different nationality. A job, children, a house. I could stop “playing the game” and actually become a local somewhere else. Sure, I might have an accent and a passport and an American childhood, but that was so long ago, and who could blame me for getting out when I did?

I would blame me. Because despite all the villainous things going on in the halls of power, people live in the United States of America. And not just any people, my people. I am an American and I am stuck in this mess with over 330 million other people. Don’t I have a responsibility to help clean it up?

Besides, if I were ever to leave, I would just end up playing the game in reverse. I would go visit home and try to blend right back in, but I’d give myself away somehow. My new ID card, my strange new turns-of-phrase, my memory loss about tipping. The truth is that the game can never be won — If you buckle down and just commit to winning it somewhere, then your old home becomes your new arena.

At the end of the day, these games of blending in and categorizing people are just games. They’re a fun way to pass the time when you’re alone, and they encourage you to observe the people around you in a deeper way. Nowhere in the rulebooks for either game does it say that you must reflect on your national identity and what we owe each other, but that’s often where I find myself. I’m an American, and a Hoosier. I want to wear those titles with pride. I want to be proud of how my communities take care of people and find creative new ways of solving problems. We can’t give up on places just because they seem too far gone. Not to get all Biblical here at the end, but isn’t that the whole point of Jonah and the Whale?

Maybe it’s time to play a new game, a game that is actually a very old — arguably the oldest game known to humanity. It has been played by people all over the world, and there are no set rules. It’s called Stubbornly Trying To Make Your Communities Better Even When It Feels Impossible™. It’s a little wordy, but it is what it is. Unlike Try to Blend In™, this game doesn’t reward being a chameleon. We need to be peacocks, or some other vibrant, loud, unapologetic animal — I guess simply being human is good enough — and we can’t give into the urge to be silent, at least not forever. Blending in can be fun, but it stops being fun when you’re so focused on blending in that you bite your tongue and don’t speak up against lies and greed and hate.

The game isn’t called Stubbornly Trying To Make The Entire World Better Even When It Feels Impossible,™ it’s called Stubbornly Trying To Make Your Communities Better Even When It Feels Impossible™. When everything is overwhelming, the best thing we can do is start with what is reasonably within our control. One of my wonderful art professors in college, Merrill Krabill, once told my class that “If you want to be famous, focus on being known within a five-mile radius.” I remember thinking at the time that if I really wanted to be famous, I probably wouldn’t be satisfied with just a five-mile radius, but I think he was right. And this principal applies to politics and social justice too. As it turns out, a lot can fit in any given five-mile radius!

Right now, I don’t find myself rooted in any fixed location, and I don’t know where I’ll land in the long term. But throughout my travels, I’ve been amazed at how easily micro-communities can be formed. For example, I took an overnight train from Austria to the Netherlands on New Year’s Eve, and the four German-speaking people in my train car were nice enough to reach out to me in English, breaking the language barrier. We ended up playing games, talking politics, popping champagne at midnight, and laughing a lot. When we all eventually tried to sleep on our reclining seats, our bodies within inches of each other, and I found myself marveling at how much I trusted these strangers. I’ll probably never see them again — I don’t even remember their names — but during that train ride, they had my back and I had theirs. We had formed a mini train car community, traveling across Europe while the calendar switched from 2024 to 2025. And at midnight, the dark void rolling by outside transformed into a never-ending corridor of fireworks. It was the most magical New Year’s Eve I had ever had, but if I had been determined to blend in that night, if I had stayed silent, I would have spent New Year’s Eve alone.

So cheers to communities, both micro and macro. From a train car, to the United States, to the world, we’re all in this together.

Maybe, with practice, it is possible to be both the seer and the seen. I guess it’s time to find out.

Hello faithful blog readers! I am back, wrapping up a year of reading with a final roundup of the last 19 books I read this year. I read a total of 59 books in 2024! That’s more than any year since I started tracking in 2020, as demonstrated by the helpful graph below. (My secret weapon this year has been audiobooks 😎)

If you subscribed to this blog expecting life updates and reflections from my time away from the United States, I am so sorry I haven’t followed up on that promise. I find it hard to share my thoughts in a blog format these days — it was easier when I was 18 and doing my gap year in Bolivia, because I wasn’t as aware of all my intellectual limitations and the ramifications of posting your thoughts online. Now I’m more self-conscious, worried about my digital footprint, and wary of being overly sincere. Sincerity can so easily be picked apart and made fun of, especially online, where it will live forever and can be seen by complete strangers. Being sincere in writing is deeply vulnerable, and sometimes I prefer to evade vulnerability with humor or silence.

I don’t think my impulse to be judicious about my online vulnerability is a bad thing. It’s always good to discern the purpose to which the vulnerability serves; Am I being vulnerable online instead of being vulnerable in real life? Or am I being vulnerable online as an extension of the vulnerability I am trying to practice in the real world?

But maybe I’ve been a little too judicious about what I choose to share online, meaning that I haven’t been keeping the people who care about me in the loop about my life. To make up for it, I will include a life update after these book rankings. But I will force you to read (or at least scroll past) the literary part of this blog post before you get to the juicy details of my life. Enjoy!

James, Percival Everett ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Huckleberry Finn retold, dignity, slavery

Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt ⭐⭐⭐: Found family, octopus, grief, mystery

The Divorcées, Rowan Beaird ⭐⭐⭐: Nevada, gambling, women’s rights, community

The Blueprint, Rae Giana Rashad ⭐⭐⭐: Dystopia, white supremacy, Stockholm syndrome

God of the Woods, Liz Moore ⭐⭐⭐⭐: Summer camp mystery, New England

Dogs of Summer, Andrea Abreu ⭐⭐⭐: Canary Islands, adolescence, girlhood, sexuality

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf ⭐⭐⭐: Feminism, writing, liberation through knowledge

Why We Swim, Bonnie Tsui ⭐⭐⭐⭐: memoir, non-fiction, swimming, human body

The Point of Vanishing, Howard Axelrod ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Memoir, vulnerability, solitude, grief, healing

The Coin, Yasmin Zaher ⭐⭐⭐: Palestine, American empire, capitalism, complicity

The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: one life chronicled, stunning prose

Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott ⭐⭐⭐⭐: Writing, advice, memoir, life-lessons, encouragement

The City of Ember, Jeanee DuPrau ⭐⭐⭐: Throwback, dystopia, YA, finding hope

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro ⭐⭐⭐: Defining humanity, agency, memory, dystopia

The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai ⭐⭐⭐: AIDS epidemic, community, forgiveness, family

East of Eden, John Steinbeck ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Family epic, love, American identity

I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman ⭐⭐⭐⭐: dystopia, meaning of being human

Foster, Claire Keegan ⭐⭐⭐: Novella, foster care, childhood, loss

La Suma de Los Dias, Isabel Allende ⭐⭐⭐: Memoir, Isabel meddles a lot!!

Invisible Cities, Ítalo Calvino ⭐⭐⭐⭐: Marco Polo, traveling, Venice, cities

Okay, now for the as-promised life update. You find me in Paris, where I am staying for about three weeks at the Paris Mennonite Center. I am spending my time writing, reading, learning some French, and exploring the endless museums Paris has to offer. I arrived in Paris after three weeks of traveling with various friends throughout Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and France. All of this travel was possible because I made the decision in not to stay in the Canary Islands until May as I had originally planned; I was not finding the work as a conversation assistant very fulfilling, and I decided it would be better to use this time in my life to travel rather than stay in a job I didn’t like.

After Paris, I’m hoping to spend a week in mainland Spain, which I still haven’t been to. After that, I’ll head to Germany, to meet up with my second cousins, Sophie and David Lapp Jost. I’ll be going with them to Israel and the West Bank with to help with childcare for their son while they lead a solidarity tour with the German Mennonite Peace Committee. That tour will last two weeks, and then I will stay near Bethlehem for almost a month, volunteering at Tent of Nations, a family farm and global peace project. Then I’ll head back to Germany for a few days before eventually making my way back to the US in April!

This period of my life has been very transitory, with lots of moving parts and new experiences. I am so grateful that I have the freedom to do this, but it is also hard to be away from my loved ones and my various communities during this scary time in the US. But being away from the United States during the beginning of this second Trump era and talking to people from all over the world has allowed me to gain some perspective about our political situation. It is clear that fascism and xenophobia are on the rise everywhere, not just in the US. I feel a strange mix of horrified and slightly comforted by this knowledge; comforted because at least the United States isn’t uniquely depraved, and horrified for all the obvious reasons.

Everywhere I have gone — from the Canary Islands, to the Netherlands, to France — people are up in arms about immigration. I’ve spoken with Spaniards and Austrians and Germans and Dutch folks who are all lamenting the rise of the right wing politicians in their countries. At the school I was working at in Spain, many of the boys idolized Franco and even Hitler, and they spewed ignorant antisemitic and Islamophobic rhetoric, probably because that is what they are being fed online. I often need to force myself to get off my phone and stop looking at ridiculous discourse taking place in the comment section of an Instagram post. It’s clear that the billionaires who control the media and communication industries are only loyal to the highest bidder, and right now that is Donald Trump. It’s a scary time, but it is also such an important time, and we must pay attention to what is happening. We need to invest in community and hospitality and truth and beauty. That will look different for everyone, but I hope everyone can find ways to take care of themselves and others, in both big and small ways.

I could say more I suppose, but I think I’ll wrap it up here. This is already a long post, and a little bit all over the place. If you stuck with me until the end, thank you. I should write on here more often so that I don’t have to do these blog marathons!

Stay strong out there everyone, and until next time!

Back by popular demand (nobody asked for this except for Laura Miller. Thanks, Laura) here are 20 more book reviews from 2024! Audiobooks have really elevated by reading game lately, and I will definitely reach my goal of 50 books this year!

Also, I am aware that this is what Goodreads is for, but I refuse to get Goodreads for some stubborn reason that I can’t really articulate. I defy expectation and elude definition, I guess

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride: ⭐⭐⭐, rescue mission, found family, Pennsylvania

Big Swiss, Jen Beagin ⭐⭐⭐: sex therapy, fake identity, depression

Martyr! Kaveh Akbar ⭐⭐⭐⭐: poetry, writing, family mythology, purpose

You Dreamed of Empires, Álvaro Enrigue ⭐⭐: aztecs, conquistadors, empires, language, boring

Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami ⭐⭐⭐: reread, conversational, honest, fatphobic?, helpful

The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead ⭐⭐⭐⭐: historical fantasy, slavery, tenacity, brutality

Bunny, Mona Awad ⭐⭐⭐: witchy, cult, imaginary friends, writing

So Late in the Day, Claire Keegan ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: MASTERFUL stories, Ireland, feminism, relationships

Fat Church, Anastasia Kidd ⭐⭐⭐⭐: enlightening, comforting, educational, validating, aspirational

Babel, R.F. Kuang ⭐⭐⭐⭐: Immersive, colonization, linguistics, revolution, coming-of-age

Lo Fi, Liz Riggs ⭐⭐⭐: Nashville, substance abuse, twenties, music, romance

Multiple Choice, Alejandro Zambra, ⭐⭐⭐⭐: Alternative, Dirty War, Constriction, loopholes

All Fours, Miranda July ⭐⭐⭐: Marriage, dissatisfaction, desire, motherhood, self-discovery

The Other Significant Others, Rhaina Cohen ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: eye-opening, friendships, rethinking societal structures

The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: gang violence, boyhood, brotherhood, poverty

Less, Andrew Sean Greer ⭐⭐⭐⭐: World travels, heartbreak, discovery, middle-age

Erasure, Percival Everett ⭐⭐⭐⭐: stereotypes, book industry commentary, grief

Rasquache, Mariela Esparza ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: interdisciplinary, funny, zine, inner monologue

In The Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: unputdownable, domestic abuse, LGBTQ+, memoir

Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Deep End, Jeff Kinney ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Hilarious, quick, awesome, comic, timeless

Commonwealth, Ann Patchett ⭐⭐⭐ : Secrets, book within book, Virginia

Astray, Emma Donoghue ⭐⭐ : Short stories, immigration, Americas, elephant

Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus ⭐⭐: Feminist chemistry, rowing, dog, empowerment

Yellowface, R.F. Kuang ⭐⭐⭐⭐: Suspenseful literary drama, revenge, implosion

White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi ⭐⭐: Ethereal, eating chalk, ghosts, ancestors

Monstrillio, Gerardo Sámano Córdova ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Grief, Frankenstein, found family, gore

Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros ⭐: Annoyingly addictive, predictable, dragons, military

I Have Some Questions For You, Rebecca Makkai ⭐⭐⭐⭐: True crime, boarding school, femicide

Interesting Facts About Space, Emily Austin ⭐⭐⭐: Anxiety, healing, bald men, paranoia

Land of Milk and Honey, C Pam Zhang ⭐⭐: Obscene wealth, self-preservation, indulgence, unsatisfying

Minor Detail, Adania Shibli ⭐⭐⭐: Palestine, uncovering history, distrust, fear

Good Material, Dolly Alderton ⭐⭐⭐⭐: Relationships, heterosexuality, break ups, friendship

If You See Them, Vicki Sokolik ⭐: self-aggrandizing, teen homelessness, personal stories

Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Masterpiece!!, Appalachia, opioids, foster care

Red White and Royal Blue, Casey Mcquintson ⭐⭐⭐: Gay political fanfic, optimistic, corny

The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne ⭐⭐⭐: Colonial America, puritans, witches, sex-shaming

The Idiot, Elif Batuman ⭐⭐⭐⭐: College, linguistics, dry humor, situationship

Wellness, Nathan Hill ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Chicago, dissatisfaction, wellness culture, marriage

The Secret History, Donna Tartt ⭐⭐⭐: Dark academia, murder,

classics, Vermont

The Boyfriend List, E. Lockhart ⭐⭐: YA, high school, therapy, diary