2014 In(trospective) Review
Best Books
While I read better books in 2014, I don’t know if any effected me as much as Love Does and (to a lesser degree) Love Wins.
I kicked the year off in 2014 grappling with Bob Goff’s very personalized sketch of what it looks like to live and love radically. I spent the first six months of 2014, in fact, trying to fully digest what exactly that meant for me and where I was. What am I not doing, and how am I squandering and abusing the gifts I’ve been given?
I read Rob Bell’s not-nearly-as-controversial-as-I-expected-it-to-be firestarter, Love Wins at the end of the year. I started on the flight to Texas for Christmas and finished it yesterday, on the flight back. It’s a short read. And while there were few earth-shattering statements in the pages in the actual book (again, I don’t get what the fuss was about), it still stopped me mid-sentence on a throwaway line about faith and my relation to it. One of those, taken-for-granted, you-believe-this-but-do-you-really? sort of moments. I could write a lot more, but definitely not here.
Your mileage may vary, but I got a lot out of both titles.
Best Comics
It’s the kind of comic I’ve been working on for four years but with a stellar execution. Pick up vol. 1 to see two southern artist at the height of their craft.
Runners Up: O’Malley’s Seconds, Dalrymple’s The Wrenchies, and Wilson/Alphona’s Ms. Marvel, Remender/Scalera’s Black Science
The Albums that Ruled My Headphones in 2014
Arcade Fire’s Reflector came out in October of 2013 and I didn’t really fully get how brilliant it was until around March. Totally danceable without a beat of filler, I could play through this album twice a day for months without tiring. There’s a lot of layers to dig into, both musically and lyrically and it pretty easily eclipsed anything else I picked up for the first half of 2014.
Key Tracks: Afterlife (“Oh my god, what an awful word.”), Orpheus and Joan of Arc (“First they love you, then they kill you, then they love you again”).
Nothing could knock Reflektor from it’s high perch until I discovered The Kink’s Lola vs. Powerman through a “Wes Anderson Tribute” piece on The AV Club. I ran that album into the ground and it’s on my short-list of infinitely listenable albums. The way they build around a simple a chorus in This Time Tomorrow (that banjo! that piano!) is glorious. Definitely give it a listen if you haven’t already.
Key Tracks: This Time Tomorrow (“In perpetual motion, the world below me doesn’t matter much to me”), Denmark Street, Strangers (“Strangers on this road we are on, we are not two, we are one.”), all of the other songs too.
Best New Experiences
This designation has to be split between two very different Catholic Masses, staying at my first hostel in Portland, announcing my engagement as a guest on a really neat Wine Podcast, or spending $50 in quarters to beat a TMNT arcade in celebration of Ed becoming an (old) man.
Favorite New-Old Experience
Possibly, Staying up till 4 in the morning playing Super Smash Brothers with my brothers and my new fiancée.
Despite Mia and myself being severely out-played, it was such a surreal and wonderful meshing of old and new pleasures, I couldn’t get over it.
Biggest Life-Changing Moment
Proposing to Amelia Davis. After being thwarted what felt like 10 separate occasions, and at a complete loss at how to construct something worth putting on Youtube, I ended up getting down on one knee in front of my apartment while the snow was falling on a relatively uneventful November evening.
It was the most anticlimactic proposal ever, and I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to her. ☺
The Work I’m Proudest Of
My favorite end-results for 2014 were normalizing and streamlining a pretty chunky design language* around sovrn’s app to something that accounted for a modular design inside a responsive (Foundation) framework. It was an extremely difficult design problem, so much so I gave up halfway through, but ended up circling back and finding a really satisfying solution in the end. I’m glad I could’ve finished up my time there with that last big effort.
Oh! Also, the Mile Heist Club’s key art. I had too much fun making that Christmas present.
*The aforementioned chunkiness? Those were my decisions to own and fix. Casting no aspersions on anyone else’s work.
Missed Opportunities
I climbed exactly zero mountains in 2014, and that was a tragedy. As was the large pile of unfinished projects metaphorically crumpled up and literally abandoned. I learned a lot about focus in 2014. In 2015, I need to learn more about execution and finishing.
What I Want More Of in 2015
- Living Intentionally
- Community
- Travel
- Adventure
- Creative Output
- Learning
- Joking
- Loving Well
- Long-reads and heavy books
- Discipline
What I Want Less Of in 2015
- Knee-jerk reacting
- Social media
- Soundbites and 300-word opinion pieces
- Being an ass to people who don’t deserve it. Note: very, very, very few people deserve it.
- Comparing where I am to where others are. It’s bad motivation and reduces people to a table of checkboxes. A table of checkboxes is terrible for a couple of reasons, chief of which is that it’s terrible survey design.
- A lack of certainty regarding goals: I drift without an end-point really easily, and I need to be more diligent in understanding what my trajectory is.
In (Sort of) Closing…
What did I learn in 2014?
Uhm.
…
Well…
Did I learn anything in 2014? To be honest, no. Not really.
“Learn,” to me, has always translated to “a concept fully and concretely grasped,” and so it’s always carried with it an elusive finality. If “to learn” means to perfectly (or even competently) understand and execute upon concepts like focus, compassion, grace, and discipline, well, no. I don’t feel like I learned much in 2014.
2014 was a good teacher though. Because, while I don’t think I really learned much in an absolute sense, I did get to try at, fail and practice a wide variety of qualities that I regularly aspire to. God has been very, very generous to me like that in 2014. Big surprise. So I’m looking forward to another generous year in 2015.
Projects for 2015!
- Run a marathon
- Start climbing outdoors
- Finish a 4-dot problem at the Spot
- Learn Angular.js, but like, really well, guys. Srsly.
- Start getting the hang of some backend frameworks (I’m leaning towards Node.js)
- Visit another country
- Continue learning French
- Finish some kinda comic. I need to flex that drawing muscle more.
It’s been a big, exhausting, amazing sort of year. Thanks for being a part of it and here’s to a bigger, more exhausting and amazing sort of year for 2015.
