it’s that time of year again, folks. another 366 (leap year, yay.) days have gone marching on and here we stand, looking back upon the seconds, minutes, and hours that have made up the year of our lord 2024.
so, before we begin, i should mention that i spent most of the year on what i’ve taken to describing as a sojourn in an exotic land (i’m a city boy, anything that’s not the city is exotic). if you wanna see all that, click here. this is gonna be for the stuff i didn’t touch on there and extras. so, to quote a jon bellion song, let’s begin.
gonna start off by saying the house i left was not the house i came back to, which is to be expected after almost 10 months away. after all, change is the only constant and all that. but i’ve been back for about 2 months now and while my incredible powers of adaptability means it’s never hard to slot into a place, i do wish i was slotting back to where i left.
normally, i make a big thing about not wanting to split this into good news bad news right before i make like prof. farnsworth. this year is weird because i really only have the one big piece of news (and that’s in the piece i linked in the 2nd para). i guess that’s what happens when your entire year is dominated by the one extra-long event. not a lot of space for other things to happen. not that i was ever the kind of guy that other things happened to, but still. would have been nice to have something to share with the 12 people that’ll see this.
every year i send my future self a letter. i got the idea from my cousin and it’s been one of the many weird ways (including this) to mark the end of the year, and, to put it simply, it’s horribly depressing. and i can tell. the first couple of letters were optimistic and full of hope about what we’d have done in a year, but recently, it’s been a bit more of the “are you still alive” variety. needless to say, the last couple of years have not been great for me, and part of me is dreading seeing that email on january 1. on the one hand, it is kinda fun to get the letter; on the other, it’s gonna suck when none of the things i thought would happen happened. such is the nature of the beast, i guess.
for as long as i can remember, i have always hated decembers. the seasonal depression always hits me like a 2x4 to the ribs, the impending new year sinks in the realization that i’ve accomplished little to nothing of note over the past 365-ish days, and terrible things tend to happen to me. i’ve been without my phone since the 6th and as things stand, i probably won’t get it back before the year runs out. i’ve run the gamut of emotions and settled on a kind of nihilistic acceptance: my life is hell, and this is merely the latest in a never-ending conga line of troubles.
the last ~6 months have been the most reproductively frustrated i’ve been in my entire life. 2024 as a whole has also been perhaps the loneliest year of my life. “but archer”, you say, not understanding how medium works, “you lived alone for months, of course you’re lonely.” but you see, knowing why a thing happens doesn’t always help in fixing it. i’ve taken to doomscrolling on instagram reels and watching an outsized amount of romcoms (for me, a guy who fucking hates romcoms).
not to make it seem like this year has been nothing but a constant rollercoaster of crap (close tho), i learned a new skill: video editing. so far, i have made three videos, all of the character tribute variety, and i really like them. if you feel like burning a couple minutes and a bit of data, you can check them out.
as a sort of final summary bucket, i got obsessed with the roman empire, i have (as at the time of writing this) seen 167 movies (though that number can and will change), read more books, at least two of which were not percy jackson related, took up running, stopped running, did a pushup thing with the boys, and now i am looking forward to performing my duties as a groomsman at my cousin’s wedding (am i happy for him? absolutely. am i salty i didn’t get picked for best man? yes.)
and with that, we say goodbye to an absolute humdinger of a year. may the next be better.
see you in the funny pages.
hasta luego ✌🏿
