What’s so guilty about guilty pleasures?

The only thing wrong about a “guilty” pleasure is feeling ashamed of something that genuinely brings you joy. 

We aren’t talking about criminal or miscreant behavior here, but I ardently believe that you shouldn’t harbor guilt over hobbies, passions, and entertainment. 

For a long time, I kept facets of my self strictly to myself, or shared just a sliver of my interests with only the group of people that I thought would enjoy it. 

I would cringe if die-hard sports pals found out I loved reading science fiction and fantasy novels. Likewise, I’ve been out with hipster and poet pals that are derisive of the tribalism and violence of an NFL game, and I’ve feigned indifference to games when out with them. 

Over the years, I worked hard to stamp that out, and for better or worse, the folks I engage with, personally and professionally, get a version of my whole self. 

There’s certainly value in understanding your audience. I’m not going to argue the merits of football with friends who have no interest in the game, nor will I go into details about my D&D session with my colleagues at work. 

But I’m not ashamed of these things and don’t shy away from the topic if they come up in general conversation. 

A small selection of things I enjoy that I could ascribe as “guilty” pleasures:

  • reading genre fiction

  • watching and attending professional wrestling

  • tabletop games and dungeons and dragons

  • learning spreadsheet macros (for fun!)

  • reading comics

  • drawing

  • blogging

  • loving Boston sports

  • collecting bags

  • writing fiction and poetry

  • 3d printing

  • knolling

Those are a dozen off the top of my head, with dozens more that orbit my daily existence. 

In the past, these things have all been hobbies or curios that would require contextualization, or if they came up, I needed to ascribe clear value as to why I enjoy them. Now, I find value in all of the above, sometimes with practical applications, but often not. 

But they’re essential. They indelibly help shape who I am as a person; fundamentally, I don’t think anything is wrong with that. 

Love and enjoy the things that interest you. Don’t shame yourself just to get a headstart on somebody else from doing it. 

Hella Bitters makes me (hella) happy

5-10 calories. No sugar. No alcohol. But it kind of tastes like a cocktail? Or maybe potpourri?

Welcome to the lightning review of Hella Cocktail Co’s canned beverage: Bitters & Soda

Wrapping 2022, I knew I would take a break from alcohol. Not because I felt too heavily doused in hops and whiskey through the holidays, but more as an easy way to cut out excess calories and to experiment with its effects on my sleep.  

I don’t drink soda or juice more than a handful of times a year, but I wanted to include a bit of variety into my day-to-day hydration routine. I tested a handful of non-alcoholic concoctions but found them to be either too sweet, or too needless complex in attempting to recreate a cocktail. Greg from How to Drink has a great rundown of these here.  

But Hella’s offering hit differently. Each flavored can is heavily carbonated, and despite the different labels, the core taste is consistently aromatic bitters.  

This dry, tart flavor carries an unexpected depth that I’ve found to be the perfect replacement for my usual alcohol-consuming activities. Specifically over dinner, when playing D&D, and before bed. The cumulative nothingness in their nutritional value has had me grabbing one from the fridge far more often than I did for an actual beer or Post-Meridian old-fashioned (my favorite canned cocktail). 

The cost is a bit prohibitive at roughly $3 per can, so it still fills that spot as an occasional treat versus traditional beverages. 

Aside from the far too sweet and sugary “spritz” flavor, I have to give the Bitters and Soda a big thumbs up. Five out of five stars for indulgent refreshment.  

  

Workout of the week

165 days. After today, I’ll have worked out 165 days in a row. Last year I put physical fitness on the back burner (I mean, pilot light out, gas line disconnected, but still technically on a burner). So I decided to fill the Activity and Move rings on my Apple Watch the last five months of 2022. 

It began slowly, lifting weights in the garage on a beginner linear progression three times a week and taking walks on off days. Things escalated from there. My garage is 2/3rd covered in horse stall mats, with enough equipment to make my partner nervously review our bank statements. 

Yesterday was a “rest” day, and I kept it simple, with possibly my favorite short workout to date. 

I did a quick warmup with a landmine attachment, running through three sets of goblet squats, overhead presses, oblique twists, Romanian deadlifts, and rows. The goal was to never place the barbell down in the process, so I awkwardly danced around it for each maneuver. 

This warmup was followed by a simple as many reps as possible (AMRAP) circuit for 15 minutes. The circuit looked like this:

  • 15-calorie row

  • 10 push-ups

  • 10 sit-ups 

  • 5 neutral grip pull-ups

I finished my 5th set with 3-seconds left on the timer. My heart did its best to evacuate my chest. Lungs equally eager to flee. After a few minutes, it felt incredible. 

Today, two of my best pals in the world are coming over, predominantly for D&D night with our gaming group but also to work out with me. Today's agenda is heavy lifting, with back squats, bench press, lat pulldowns, and more on the menu. 

I look forward to the workout as much as the game. I’m shocked too. 

Then on to day 166.

2023 Goals

Happily stolen from Matthew Dicks, this is a sprawling list of goals I hope to bring to fruition in 2023. His annual success rate is typically below 60%, but by throwing them into the ether, there is a level of accountability that may otherwise be lacking. I usually focus my work and career on building systems that drive outcomes. Similarly, while there are a few outcome-focused goals here, many are the root system or habit I’d build to generate various outcomes or goals. 

On that, all outcome-based goals are things within my control. One goal is to publish my D&D group’s podcast 20 times this year. However, I’m not goaling around a total number of listeners. If my goal were to build a system of advertising and promoting the content, gaining listeners would be an expected outcome, but I want to publish for fun and don’t plan to spend any time marketing it.

Likewise, I plan to submit new poems to ten publications this year. I would love for someone to publish these poems, but that’s not an outcome I can control. 

Fitness and Wellness

  1. Exercise every day. Since August 1st, I’ve exercised every day, rain or shine. I have more specific goals, but ultimately, I want to complete a workout, even something as modest as a 20-minute walk, for all of 2023. 

  2. Daily progress photo. I’m working to be in better shape. What does that look like? Let’s capture it over time. 

  3. Weigh in daily. See above. But an ever-fluctuating number. 

  4. Track sleep and recovery through Whoop for the year. I ordered a year-long Whoop subscription and the accompanying fitness band over Black Friday as a birthday present to myself. In the back half of my 30s, I want to facilitate the habits and systems to stay in decent health for as long as possible, and I am moderately obsessed with these quantifiable insights.

  5. Log meals + eat at a moderate deficit for 3-4 months. I’m still a novice weightlifter and would ideally like to lose 12-20 lbs before I exhaust all the “newbie gains” of linear progression and easily accumulated strength. Ideally, if I lose weight now, I can avoid the frustration later of diminishing strength and weight lifted by being in a better position to eat at maintenance or add some weight back. 

  6. Run GZCLP until it stops working. I’ve run this linear progression weightlifting program Since September 20th. And I ran Stronglifts 5x5 for a few months before then. I’m now at the point where I’m resetting weights for the first time in GZCLP and would like to run the program for a few more cycles to maximize possible strength gains before shifting to an intermediate program. 

  7. Begin an intermediate weightlifting program. Unless things go awry, I should eventually stall on GZCLP, likely in the first 3-6 months of the year. From there, I plan to run a full round of Jacked and Tan 2.0, a diabolical and intense lifting program, before deciding on a more long-term and sustainable workout program for the rest of 2023. 

  8. Continue to challenge myself on “off days.” So days when I’m not weightlifting, I’ve been slowly building up cardio and endurance with a mixture of HIIT workouts and Peloton rides. I plan to continue this 3 - 4 days a week to balance the 3-4 longer lifting days. 

    Personal Growth

  9. Meditation. A habit I built in 2019 and served me well until late 2020. I plan to be mindful for at least 5 minutes a day, five days a week. Meditations will be logged and facilitated through the Headspace App. 

  10. Journal daily. Nothing crazy. But a few minutes of scribbling, or bulleting, what the previous day looked like and aspirations for what’s ahead. I built a few templates in the journaling software Day One, but I’m not planning to force adherence to any specific structure. 

  11. Take a photograph a day. I hit a mental block while working as a photographer. Making a photograph was worthwhile. Taking a photograph was lazy and of little interest. Now I’d like to take photographs and print them as a personal and family record. Does the photograph have to contain kids or cats? No. Will that be the bulk of the photos? Most likely. 

  12. Read more: For the past three years, I’ve tracked my reading in GoodReads. After grad school, I realized I needed an accountability tool to help structure my reading goals. The annual reading challenge is a great way to do this. In 2020 - Goal of 52. Read 52. 2021 - Goal of 24. Read 30. In 2022 - Goal of 20. Read 9. No wonder I felt like garbage. The one constant escape valve I’ve relied on since childhood was almost entirely ignored for the year. Worse yet, virtually all those completed books were at the top of the year. I started a few other books in 2022 but didn’t get close to finishing them. Why? Work, Reddit, Youtube. 

  13. Minimize Infinity Pools: Taken from the writers of Make time, I’ve fallen too readily into the infinity pool traps in 2022. Specifically, I would mindlessly throw on a YouTube video or endlessly scroll through Reddit. I quit traditional social media years ago but have way more trouble abandoning these sites. The challenge is that I believe these sites and mediums have real value, but burning hours a week (or day) on them is a waste of time. 

    • <2 hours on Reddit per week Tracked in iOS app + chrome. 

    • <2 hours of Youtube view time a week. 

  14. Listen to 200 new albums: I’m using the site 1001 Albums to listen to before you die, to spur on this endeavor. I won’t listen every weekday, but most, and if it’s an album I don’t enjoy, I’ll quit after a few songs rather than complete it. 200 seems like a reasonable target. 

    Creative

  15. Write something weekly. Hello, blog that has been untouched since 2021. I went from one of my most productive years of writing and creative output in 2021 to doing functionally nothing in 2022. This left me depressed and burned out with little end in sight. A short blog post weekly seems realistic, with no pressure to do anything more. 

  16. Work on a creative project every week: I want to do a dozen different things. Edit audio for my D&D group’s session recordings. Make videos. Fly drones. Work on new portrait photography. Draw. Write poems. Write fiction. Redesign our house interiors in Sketchup. 3d print and do stationary projects. Paint minis. Build more of our D&D campaign. Build Legos. Build FPV drones. But trying to squeeze even a handful of those activities in regularly will not happen with my life. Instead, I plan to focus on a weekly creative project with at least some output. That could be printing a ton of minis for a week or two or working on a novel for 6-8 months. But rather than dilute my interest in doing too much at once, spend the time I have on something I enjoy. 

  17. Win Nanowrimo. I’ve participated in several Nanowrimo events over the past 15 years. With a handful of winners. I will once more commit to winning Nanowrimo by writing 50,000 words of a novel in November of this year.

  18. Publish at least 18 episodes of Basement Lore: These are sessions of the D&D campaign I’ve been running for my pals. This campaign started at the end of 2020, though we’d been playing a previous campaign for three years before that. The pandemic, life, and kids have made it tougher to get together, but we still play 15-20 times a year, and since we’ve miked up every session, the audio recordings will be an excellent way to look back on it. 

  19. Submit poems to at least ten publications: I’ve written and continue to write reams of poetry. I’ve been published a few times and would like to publish more, but haven’t submitted anything for consideration in the past two years. I plan to submit poems for consideration at different publications at least ten times this year. A 

    Career

  20. Maintain the workday morning routine: I’ve found that I’m most successful if I can do the following once the office door is closed and I transition to dad and partner to tech worker in a full-time WFH situation. Drink a cup of coffee. Handwrite a rapid log of all tasks and meetings for the day, ideally with unfinished tasks from yesterday already migrated over at the end of the workday. Listen to Up First while finishing breakfast and coffee. Bring my work and personal inboxes to 0. If I’m loading a 3d printer project, get it started, so I can check in on lunch or the end of the day and then put on the album or playlist for the day. All in - this takes 15-25 minutes, but life can easily disrupt it. Specifically, if we don’t have childcare for one reason or another, but when I take these steps, I’m more successful throughout the working day. I plan to follow this routine at least 220 times this year successfully. 

  21. Reserve a minimum of a 1.5-hour block a day for deep work, as described in Cal Newport’s book of the same name. I’ve found that 1-3 blocks of about 90 minutes are the sweet spot for me to be fully productive on various experiments and tactics I build and deploy at work. Reserving at least one slot of this per workday will ensure that I remain effective and successful. I plan to have at least one, but preferably more, of these blocks every working day. 

    Family & Friends

  22. Get the kids involved in more activities. Laura and I do a lot of fun activities as a family, but, likely due to the whole pandemic-ness of the past few years, we haven’t gotten involved in organized activities. This year, we want to ensure the boys can try new things. They can do team sports, swimming, and other non-school activities with their peers. 

  23. Focus on putting the kids first: What does this mean? A whole bunch. But the baseline is to be the person to get up with them in the morning and put them to bed for at least half the week. 

  24. Have dinner with family 95% of the time: We almost always eat dinner together and will continue doing so. This was an impossibility when commuting to Boston daily and one of the most significant benefits of working from home—targeting 340 dinners together.

  25. Date nights and Days: Commit to 1-2 date nights per month with Laura. Because while the little dudes are rad, it’s nice to spend time together without the kids, and it is impossible without scheduling it. 

  26. Family vacations: Schedule 1x week-long family vacation, along with 2-3 long weekend trips

  27. Couple vacations: Schedule 2-3 couples weekends for the year

  28. Pal trip: Attend PAX East with my pals

  29. Play D&D 18+ times this year. Because it’s fun, and my group thinks it’s fun too, despite being ever challenging to schedule.

  30. Connect with Pals (at least virtually) once a month: We’re all basically hermits working from home, so I want to schedule an individual monthly hangout with three of my pals.