Phthursday Musings: 2024 Happenings, 2025 Auguries

I was remarkably busy in 2024 - as I pulled together quantitative data, I was surprised by what all I had done. And in the act of pulling this data together, it got me thinking about where I would like some of my 2025 priorities to be. Don’t worry, this isn’t just a long list - there are actual musings in here!

A couple quick definitions:

Happenings are the sum total of five categories: Spiels, Books, Concerts, Contests, Races.

Auguries are something between goals and predictions. The word more precisely means omens or portents, and, well, maybe there’s some of that too.

And up front, a couple of things I’m not explicitly categorizing as happenings: number of out of town trips and number of nights spent away from home. The last time I counted I think I came up with something like 48 nights away. A lot of that was for work. At different times last year I spent the night in British Columbia, California, Georgia, Missouri, New Hampshire, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin. I think this might have seemed thrilling 15 years ago, but today, maybe not so much. And yet I seem to constantly connive to find somewhere else to go as a family…

So that’s sort of a background theme to everything which follows: a lot of travel, but how consequential was it?

Spiels

• 2024: 27 spiels

• 2023: 45 spiels

• 2022: 59 spiels

It turns out that I wrote quite a bit more often in 2023, and averaged more than one per week in 2022! In large part this reflects difficulty coming up with weekly material, but perhaps as much as anything, it reflects how much more often I was in bed at 10:00 on a Thursday night, especially at the end of a work trip.

I think though there is also this: last year it felt like more of a struggle to actually be connecting with people through writing. I suspect that the breakdown of social media is involved here.

Also, we didn’t do any Pizza Across Illinois installments in 2024, and I think those were actually some of the more popular pieces from 2023. I kind of lost track of how to do these and keep these interesting. If people want to see more of this, even if the locations are less exotic (ahem Clarendon Hills), I’d love to hear it.

One thing I do get requests for though is the Vonnegut book club. So, yes, one way or another, some time early this year, we’re going to do Player Piano. It’s going to happen. If you have thoughts on how you’d like to participate, aside from just reading the book on your own, please let me know - it’s the uncertainty of how to do something collaborative which has really kept me frozen here.

I’m also kicking around the idea of - dare I say it - brevity. I think part of what has made Phthursday Musings difficult to write is that I feel like I need to write a lot, and maybe some weeks I don’t. But would people want to get a “newsletter” that’s just 4-5 paragraphs long? You all tell me!

Books

• 2024: 34 books completed

• 2023: 8 books completed

• 2022: 32 books completed

This category is really the other side of the coin: I wrote less, but I read a lot more. Guess what? Reading on a plane is easy, and writing on a plane is not. But how does that explain the year before? I think we just did not travel that much in 2022… and I must have been in a real rut in 2023.

Six of the 34 were anthologies of Midwest cities from Belt Publishing (in order: Milwaukee, Flint, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Detroit, Akron). I like these a lot, but perhaps here more so than anything else, it’s disappointing to read and move on without engaging anyone about them. I wish there was more of a “scene” around Belt, I think if they’d put effort into that it would pay them a lot of dividends.

Five of these were baseball books, mostly early in the year. There were a couple of other sports books as well. A fair number might be considered “essays” or “collections of essays” and it seems I do stumble into these every so often.

Only five of the books would be categorized as fiction. Should that change?

The book that’s sticking with me right now - though admittedly this may reflect recency bias as I finished it about two weeks ago - is Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. (Thanks to Carruthers for recommending this in response to a spiel!) The entire idea of assessing what I’ve done quantitatively would be anathema to the point Burkeman is getting at: stop thinking about productivity and box-checking and all of the anxiety that comes with it. So many of the little examples in the book felt like I was being personally called out.

Books are actually a great example of what Burkeman was getting at. I have a silly long list of books I’m intending to read, and then there are also various books that have worked their way into the house. But as the sagacious Carlos Howser once put it: You’ll NEVER read all of the books you want to read. This is central to Burkeman’s point: trying to read every book on the list is impossible and therefore destined to end in pitiful failure. Plus, it will probably undermine the power of each individual book you do manage to read.

So I’ve been trying to internalize Burkeman’s lessons. And, inevitably, I come up with odd conclusions, including this:

One thing which stands out about my list of 34 books this year is how almost none of them exceeded 300 pages. So, perhaps quixotically - indeed, perhaps literally quixotically - I’m setting a target of reading at least 5 books this year which exceed 500 pages, at least 2 of which exceed 1000 pages. I’m thinking here of books which have been put off because of their sheer size. My leading candidates right now are Infinite Jest and The Power Broker.

One book of 1000 pages will take as long to read as 4 books of 250 pages, right? Or maybe it will take longer, and maybe that’s all the better.

I have a little to say also about the last book I finished, at about 10:00 on December 31, Nature in Chicagoland by Andrew Morkes. But I’ll write about that more toward the bottom of these musings.

Concerts

• 2024: 16 concerts

• 2023: 22 concerts

• 2022: 7 concerts

The first show I went to this past year was Jonathan Richman, on February 24. But the previous year I saw my fifth show of the year on February 24. There was something weird about early 2023 where I just needed to get out, and that probably had to do with 2022 being so low.

In 2023, 6 of the shows I went to on my own. In 2024, it was 5. I’m surprised to find that, as I had it in my mind that I was solo most of the time.

The last two shows of the year were perhaps the biggest outliers relative to all of the rest: Iron Maiden, and three weeks later Amythyst Kiah. They kind of represent alternate visions of how my core tastes might have gone! It’s not hard to imagine having gone deeper into metal when I was younger and having stayed that course, and it’s also not hard to imagine having gotten exposed a different subset of singer-songwriters early on and having gone some sort of Southern gothic route.

What I’m trying to do in 2025 is be more self-insistent about putting music on, anywhere, anytime. I’ve found especially mornings I tend to eschew music for no particular reason, and I’ve been wondering if this hasn’t just done me poorly in setting the stage for the day.

The other thing I’d like to do this year which I haven’t in a while is see something classical that’s not at Ravinia. Symphony, string quartet, whatever. It’s been a while.

Contests

• 2024: 23 sporting events

• 2023: 15 sporting events

• 2022: 10 sporting events

My trusty sidekick Doofus Face was with me for 21 of 23 this year, which is a much higher percentage than the 2 out of 16 concerts he was present for. That seems very notable.

12 of the 23 were baseball games - 10 major league, 2 minor league. That’s more live baseball than I’ve seen since the Rockford Expos existed, maybe more than ever before. I really leaned into baseball this past year.

10 of the 23 were soccer matches, and that’s a high water mark too, and yet it didn’t feel like we saw as much soccer. Part of that is that the games were weirdly front-loaded - 4 of them in February or March. But I think as much as anything it’s that his interest in going to these really plummeted this year. The crowd experience at Chicago Fire and Chicago Red Stars matches has not been that awesome the last couple of years, and although he hasn’t exactly leaned in like I have, this was the year he really flipped to being more interested in baseball than soccer.

The 23rd event was the annual school event at a Chicago Wolves game, and the thing about that is, he actually says the thing we haven’t done which he’s most interested in is a Blackhawks game. The Blackhawks are pretty bad this year, but what he’s interested in is the crowd experience, and even in a down year, those are rowdier crowds, and he wants to feed off the energy. So I’ve been thinking about where we could go where there’s real energy, and these are my ideas:

• Chicago Sky - I’ve never been, and the time is ripe with the huge upsurge of interest in the WNBA

• Illinois basketball - It’s the flagship university in our state, he’s never been to Champaign-Urbana, he’s 11, this seems like a nice seed to plant

• Kentucky basketball - But if it’s a hot crowd experience, at least for college basketball, they don’t get much hotter than Kentucky, do they?

• European footy - A friend of his about a year ago had an opportunity to see Fulham host Arsenal, and I think it was a mind-shifting experience, and if somehow we could get to Leicester, or frankly almost anywhere in Europe, we’d have to take advantage of that

Personally, I’d really like to do something entirely new, and I’m intrigued by hearing that Athletes Unlimited, the professional softball entity, is expecting to have a more proper league this year, and they’ll almost certainly have a team based in Rosemont. Beyond that, I’ve already told him my goal is to take him to two new baseball stadiums this year. But I think the total number of contests might go down.

Races

• 2024: 12 races

• 2023: 9 races

• 2022: 8 races

I still have one more piece to write about running in 2024, and as it so happens, I’ve already gotten in a race in 2025, which went very poorly!

My perpetual goal is to once again complete a 5K in 25 minutes. I think this is doable, but I acknowledge that while I’ve been pushing in the right direction, I’m not quite trending to where it’s feeling super likely. But having that as a goal - a difficult but I think achievable goal - keeps me focused. And I find visiting unusual places can be oddly therapeutic. I’m up to 10 counties now and my modest goal for 2025 is to get to at least 2 new ones.

I’ll have more about races in an upcoming post. Here’s something I found at the end of the last race of the year though:

Happenings

• 2024: 112 total happenings (61 books + spiels, 51 concerts + contests + races)

• 2023: 99 total happenings (53 books + spiels, 46 concerts + contests + races)

• 2022: 116 total happenings (91 books + spiels, 25 concerts + contests + races)

Seeing the numbers broken down like that, and then factoring in having been out of town so much more, it’s interesting to see just how much more I was out of the house in 2024, and… I think I have been worn out from it, but a different kind of worn out than “feeling tired”. Among the 51 concerts / contests / races, 45 were in Illinois, 5 in Milwaukee, and 1 in St. Louis, so all of the other places I went to aren’t showing up in “happenings” (except as reading time on planes).

I’ve got a buddy Gaston who actually went to over 100 concerts in 2024, so, you know, numbers can be sort of relative. I know people who traveled a lot more than I did. But it still seems like I’ve got evidence here of how awful I was at relaxing for most of the year. I’ll take it a step further and say that I can see in here a quantitative manifestation of what anxiety can look like.

Four Thousand Weeks was one of the last books I finished in the year, and the timing turned out to be very good, because I knew anxiety was swirling a lot and it was a sort of balm for a lot of what I’d been experiencing but maybe didn’t appreciate. Along the way, I had also been slowly reading Nature in Chicagoland. This book is a writeup of 120+ nature destinations, some in Chicago proper, some in surrounding Cook County, and some as you get farther out, from the Mississippi River all the way to the upper peninsula of Michigan. As so often seems to be the case, the confluence of two unrelated things can create a very different kind of thinking, and that’s what happened here.

There is a dissonance in my mind around nature, and it’s difficult to explain, but a lot of it is rooted in this: nature can’t meaningfully be experienced quantitatively. You can try - you could set out to visit every single national park, say - but even I can’t quite bring myself to rationalize the idea of trying to make a checklist out of every single forest preserve in Cook County or anything bizarre like that. In other words, a trip to the forest isn’t a happening according to the conditions of this post. It’s not a notch. It’s just there. And to go there means being there.

I don’t mean to say that the function of going to a concert or a baseball game is to add it to a list, that’s not it at all. The distinction I’m getting at is that I wouldn’t keep track of certain “happenings” the way I do these other things. And I’m ridiculous enough that I keep track of every single time I get gas!

I don’t do a good job of wandering, but when I do wander, it’s affirming: replenishing. When I speak of being “worn out”, wandering can be an act of recharge. I’ve been able to do this after a couple of races and I found the experience very clarifying. I spent a wonderful couple hours in Oswego, for example. I also sometimes manage to do this while on a work trip, even if for just a little bit.

I snuck in an hour at Odiorne Point State Park in New Hampshire:

I found history in downtown Nashville (yes, I’m just as shocked as you are):

I even had an all-too-short visit to Joshua Tree:

I need more of that. But I don’t need to be in far-flung states for that. Burkeman and Morkes in tandem are telling me: Just get out to the Arie Crown Forest. For a bigger adventure get to McHenry County. Just go. Wander. Absorb.

So that’s the main thing I’m going to try to do in 2025: Go. Wander. Absorb. Yeah, I have some other goals which I’ve mentioned. But it’s important that this goal not have any quantification behind it. Go. Wander. Absorb.

I’m not sure that quite qualifies as an augury, but I’m going with it anyway.

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one other happening, something which can only possibly fit into a category unto itself: We partied with a sloth.

I left out anything about politics or most current events from this… that’d be an entirely different kind of 2024 recap and probably not a very fun one to write.

Instead, how about if you all join me in making this our mantra for 2025?

Go. Wander. Absorb.