2022 was an interesting year for me. And by interesting I mean it was horrifying and transformative in ways you don’t really expect events to be that seem innocuous, promising, and cheery on the surface. Here are some highlights (or lowlights, depending on your own template and frame of observation), mostly personal observations and realisations. I learnt that:

• That regardless of the travel class, I really hate air travel. That I hate being stuck inside what’s essentially a cranky bus in the sky without any halfway decent views, with the food essentially being a projection of the line cook’s self hatred served on a creaky plastic mould. That even though I’m usually calm and collected, I lose my mind after hearing infants cry relentlessly on longer flights. That I will never not hate long immigration queues.
  • That I un-ironically prefer trains and find the long, peaceful journeys incredibly cathartic and for this I’m incredibly grateful to the UK’s massive railway network.
• That try as I might but I’ll never get why people like Marlboro Advanced¹ and I have a creeping suspicion that at this point it’s just one of those peer pressure things (as smoking itself kind of is).
• That even though it may seem obvious but travel can be decompressing, especially after a few intensive weeks at work. That you could pop up in some corner of Turkey and not care at all about exploring or whatever it is people do on foreign vacations. That sometimes spending entire days and nights on the beach with some beers and cigarettes can be the exact opposite of depressing.
  • That Antalya is beautiful and underrated and super cheap. And the food’s amazing, if you like breads and meats conspiring together in various shapes and forms. That that’s what great food is to me - cheap and comfortable.
• That it can in fact be more cost effective to buy a cheap bass manufactured in China/Indonesia and spend a few hundred pounds to upgrade the electronics and get a proper setup done instead of spending 2000+ pounds on an American made one.
• That Louise Glück remains my favorite poet.
  • That I also have a newfound love for Hindi poetry. That I no longer remember why I stopped reading Hindi fiction/poetry. That it could also be one of those peer culture things.
• That bench pressing close to your body weight feels simultaneously scary and thrilling.
• That shaving my head was the best thing I have done for myself, to myself.
• That I continue to struggle with the question of God, and I think that’s a good thing.
• That after spending time in good-but-not-great engineering teams over the years, it can actually feel both affirming and scary to work with people who express both love and curiosity towards you.
  • That great teams maybe have this in common - a perfect balance between empathy and professionalism. Along with incredible amounts of talent and intelligence.
• That terraform more than gets in the way sometimes, especially when I’m trying to run some quick experiments/dirty solutions.
• That Rust is lovely.
• That bass players happen to be a strange combination of weird, calm, hopeless, and confident. All at the same time.
  • Thank you, The Bass Gallery.
• That abandonment trauma rooted in childhood or adolescence can in fact fuck up your ability to properly trust and connect with yourself, let alone others. That this requires so much effort to undo that I do see the appeal of medicating yourself numb, one way or the other.
• That defining yourself by your suffering is an effective way to keep suffering forever.
• That I really cannot bring myself to appreciate old cathedrals and churches from the inside. That they all look alike to me, so the novelty is lost rather quickly.
• That I like taking photos, and would eventually want to learn how to be better at this. Maybe this year.
• That that damned MBTI test I took during my early 20s that classified me as an INFJ set me up for years of unwarranted pain because personalities really aren’t something that can be crucified on a cross of a psychiatrist’s design. That labels like these can get artificially + subconsciously limiting.
• That vulnerability, for all that it’s made out to be in online culture, is exceptionally hard to perform. Because it’s the diametric opposite - it’s anti-performance.
• That K-dramas² can actually be pretty nice.
• That I’ll never fully understand why my dishes turn out better when I’m cooking for someone I like/love - even though my recipes never really change.
• That I continue to get credit card kiosks wrong.
• That I continue to get chopsticks wrong, too.
• That the question of unconditional love remains unanswered for me.
• That Punjabi music has an uncanny and inexplicable power to lift me out of despairing moods. Maybe it appeals to my inner child. At the very least it gets me to dance and loosen up a bit, mostly while showering.
• That I’m actively apolitical, and my core belief now is to love and care for people who love and care about me, despite whatever they choose to be/identify as. That any attempts by anyone to force me into any groupthink or adopt any -ist or ally label would be met with a punch in the face.
• That I don’t like hard liquor anymore. I can still enjoy a good beer or a nice cocktail (or two, ahem) but sometime mid 2022 I started hating the feeling of being drunk. I don’t miss the hazy decision making while being inebriated and the throbbing headache that follows the day after.
• That it is perhaps wiser to cancel a trip even if you’ve paid the full amount for it in advanced and spend time recuperating post-surgery. That tugging along while also recovering from surgical scarring in New York is not at all ideal, and at this point I should learn to prioritize my health over other commitments.
• That the UK is overwhelmingly beautiful, and a trip through the Lake District is perhaps all that’s required to ascertain one of this fact.
• That dinosaurs really were fucking huge. That I’ll always have that childlike astonishment whenever I come across a preserved skeleton of one in some museum.
• That the New York Subway can be incredibly and appallingly disgusting at times. That Delhi Metro is un-ironically better, and I’m willing to fight anyone who says otherwise.
• That NYC is basically London blown up in all proportions (and made vastly dirtier), and even though that may seem like an overly simplistic observation, it really does make for an impressive skyline.
• That pastrami-on-rye is fantastic. Thank you, Anthony Bourdain, and rest in peace.
• That I love René Magritte and Edward Hopper.³
• That Jack’s Wife Freda is one of the best bistros in NYC. Highly recommend.
• That buying my first nice watch didn’t feel as empty of a thing as hedonistic consumption of luxury often feels like - it felt nice. Perhaps because everyone else disapproved of my choice anyway.
• That Infinite Jest is, as pretty much everyone else who’s actually read the damn book can tell you, amazing, insightful, and scarily prescient.
• That most of my nightmares tend to be about not being around my dog during his final few years. That videos of him still being a totally unhinged idiot at 9 years old never fail to put a smile on my face.
• That getting a tattoo doesn’t have to be some impulsive fuck-you to society and/or parents. That it can also be done slowly and thoughtfully to mark a life-changing occasion while also being a fuck-you.
  • That as far as fuck-yous go, this is (quite literally) one of the more painful ones.
• That the iPod Classic will always be Apple’s best product to date.
• That it’s surprising how enjoyable and addictive creating a bass groove can get.
• That a year spent away from familial problems and the mental health issues of others helped me reassess and understand myself better, and was (in hindsight) the best decision for everyone involved.
• That my love language is (rather boringly) fun, intimate communication. Everything else is the proverbial cherry on top.
• That Continuum is a great album to both cry and smile to. Thank you, John Mayer. Please continue being this perfect.
• That more than 2 years after its release, I have finally decided that Ode To The Mets is the best song on The New Abnormal.
• That writing by myself on a bench on warm, pleasant afternoons turned out to be both pleasurable and intensely cathartic.⁴
• That P-basses are actually fucking awesome and versatile, despite having a single pickup with barely any EQ settings.
• That self expression can be tricky and people will always misconstrue and/or misunderstand most of the things you want to convey to them. That you should still try. Language is funny.
• That I continue to suck at texting.
• That I really don’t think Instagram or any form of online social media is for me. That creating an account and scrolling through the feed convinced me even more of this fact.
• That revisiting research papers in computer security I used to breeze through back when I was 20-ish has made me realize that I actually used to be halfway intelligent at some point in my life.
• That I don’t think I’ll be able to get back to ink-sketching again for the next few years. Limited time, all that.
• That Central Park in NYC is actually picturesque. And huge.
• That anxiety is a biological trigger for survival behavior and is therefore all-consuming. At times this can make it difficult to do the right thing, whatever “right” may be.
• That, like most things, I’m not as good at Tekken as I had initially placed myself to be.
• That The London Library is exactly the kind of archaic maze my infantile brain likes wandering through.
• That even though I love taking some quiet walks in nature every now and then, I do think I prefer living in a city more.
• That Marcus Miller is a humble God and a beast of a bass player. Thank you for signing my CD and calling me cool. I don’t think any amount of self love I can muster would be able to compete with that.
• That a walk I took by myself on a cold and crowded winter evening around Covent Garden felt incredibly life-affirming and made me realize the profound difference between being lonely versus being alone.
• That I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving Delhi⁵. And the great, cheap food.
• That Hugh Jackman can fucking sing and look incredibly fit at 50+, which has easily shot him up in my list of man-crushes.⁶
• That it is entirely possible to have the worst fucking burrito of your life in a Mexican ghetto in some corner of Upper Manhattan.
• That I don’t think I can have sex with someone I’ve not cultivated some intimacy and trust with beforehand.
  • That this realization is both scary, and in an odd sort of way, liberating.
• That the French embassy is full of stuck-up assholes who will, in the most French way perhaps, reject your passport during a visa application for a minor binding issue.⁷
• That I really do love dancing through the streets of London with some friends.
  • That this is usually done without the aid of alcohol or other intoxicants, which surprises me more than anyone else.
• That I can actually do pull-ups.
• That basketball shoes are so damn comfortable for everyday wear - they just look ridiculous enough which prevents me from doing so.⁸
• That I still remain, to absolutely no one’s surprise, intensely immature and confused.

And so I welcome 2023.

Footnotes