• I forgot how the COVID booster can make you feel as though, temporarily, the world may well be ending. I got it earlier this week, and it left me with a sore arm and that dreadful, ridiculous sensation that accompanies a flu that lasts a week too long. I mimic my late stepfather, who used to wimper like a puppy whenever he got a cold.
• I still do well to limit my hours of screen time. Before I know it, I’m stuck with a headache and dizzy spell.
• Spotify’s Discover Weekly was on point this week. Aside from lovely “beards and log cabin” tunes, as I call 70s soft rock, I’ve fallen hard for the hyper pop track “Notice” by Moe Shop and Toriena.
• We raced through another season of The Crown, this time with the excellent Elizabeth Debicki as Diana. I love how she manages to capture Diana so well despite and because of her camp-adjacent interpretation of her. I wonder if she ever got a sore neck during taping.
• After protesting for weeks, I’ve finally let Anja turn on the heating. So far, I haven’t had much up-close experience with the energy crisis the world is currently facing, and I don’t want that to change. It’s great to feel my toes, though.

In many ways, 2015 was a transformative year for me.

Much of my soundtrack of 2015 is made up of party songs that played at the bars I used to frequent while I was living in Haarlem. The feelings invoked by some of these songs are entirely devoted to a particular crush I would have had at the time.

Each song has the capacity to bring me back precisely to that period of time, in such a way that my body feels it. When everything seemed uncertain, rollercoaster-scary, and every fiber in me was yearning yearning yearning for whatever was perpetually out of reach.