Fractal

On turning 32, lists and tallies, and not giving into doom

Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, some of my recent writing, then some thoughts on the media that I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. 

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FRACTAL

On the first day of December, I go get a haircut. It’s a gloomy, rainy day and I am in a stupor induced by working from home by myself all day, so I am running late. Fortunately, my barber is also running late. Plopping down in the chair, I am relieved, but also sorry, that I am not the only one who had overfilled their agenda for the day.

Because I live in New York and am somewhat financially secure, I can be a regular at a barbershop where everyone is queer. This changes both the tenor of conversations and the quality of haircuts. I don’t have to call my haircut male in order for my barber to get it right, and I worry very little about the assumptions they are making about me as they work the scissors and the clippers. 

We always chat about the same things like salads you can pack for lunch, that one vegan fine dining restaurant we’ve both gone to on special occasions, the 1995 movie Hackers, and navigating family gatherings without giving in too much into either grief or nostalgia. When the conversation falls quiet, the sound of clippers very close to my ear fills the silence, coloring the blank absence of voices white, pink or brown. The constant monotone buzz-buzz-buzzing starts unraveling the coils that had kept my brow furrowed all day and I briefly sink into an unthinking oblivion, the day falling away from me, just like the hair around my ears. 

“Oh, I should tell you about a funny thing that happened,” my barber says, breaking the tinny drone. It’s not exactly a funny story, it’s more absurd than anything else, but we both acknowledge it in the same way we used to dryly acknowledge the absurdist humor in one of those can-you-believe-how-messed-up-the-world-really-is TV shows that dominated our 20s. It gets us talking about the weirdness of living in New York and being exposed to people whose lives will never in any way resemble ours. When you encounter remarkable wealth or remarkably ignorant politics coupled with an utter lack of self-awareness, you do sort of have to laugh, I guess. 

Did I ever tell you that in college I watched half a dozen seasons of Saturday Night Live to learn what Americans find funny? In fact, SNL was not the end of that project so I also put in my time with Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, a slew of Seth MacFarlane animated shows and a fair amount of stand-up authored and performed by people who have since been deeply disgraced. 

Thinking back on it, much of what we were meant to laugh at at that time, in 2010 or 2005 or 2001, was sort of grim, be it systemic failures of the state, the corporatization of media, or personal flaws and failures. In a way, it may have set me up for conversations where the funny thing is not actually funny but laughter is still the most benevolent way to react to them. I’ve consumed very little comedy in recent years, because it’s become harder and harder to laugh like that, or at least more emotionally draining.

Because it was the first day of December, officially so close to the end of the year, and the first day of my birthday month, that trip to the barbershop interrupted an almost involuntary instinct I have to start summarizing, reflecting, and enumerating my year as soon as the calendar hints at that being appropriate. Making my way home, feeling more myself like I always do after a good haircut, I started to think that the whole year had not been too dissimilar from that evening - lots of noise, lots of absurdity, lots of commiserating, a lot of jokes to cover up how grim the current moment is, and a lot of that grimness still coming through.

***

Certainly, I could tally up my year here and list some rough numbers for how many articles I reported (over a 100), how many researchers I interviewed (over 200), how many conferences I attended (3), how many miles I ran (at least 800), how many minutes I spent boxing (over 2000), or how many cakes I baked (pushing 30). Putting all these numbers together would capture something about my life in the past year, a sort of zoomed-out, rough shape of who I have been since the clock struck midnight in a small Italian town where I had found myself celebrating the end of 2023. 

They are not necessarily bad numbers in the same way that most numbers are not good or bad until we imbue them with meaning or put them in context. Without being attached to myself, my history and my place in the world, they just are. It’s a bit like if you found the scoresheet from a past card game that strangers played in a bar - just looking at the tally would tell you very little about the game. Knowing who the winners and losers are does not convey feelings as much as it invites assumptions. You don’t know that the game was raucous and filled with laughter but you may be tempted to assume that the losers left it feeling low. Even in a world obsessed with trading in data and using it as the ultimate trump card in so many arguments, a number only gets you so far.

Converting a year’s worth of experiences and living into a checklist or a dataset also comes dangerously close to equating those things to the notion of productivity. My rough list from above includes activities that are not work that someone pays me for, but are still a type of labor, even if it is conducted in what I have been taught to call “free time”. 

Of course, I could chose to enumerate some activities that are conventionally thought of as unproductive: hours spent with friends, movie-and-sandwich outings with my best friend, the number of those little iPhone heart reactions on text messages, laughs and chuckles I elicited with silly jokes in the office, lunch dates at that one corporate vegan spot in Midtown, dinner dates where we order nearly everything on the menu, nights when I skipped the gym to grab a drink, play a game, or see a show, coy smiles from a partner, less coy ones too. Those would fill out the portrait of my year, maybe extend it to another dimension so I am not just a flat outline of someone who gets stuff done. 

At the same time, attaching numbers to these things would take away some of their magic because it is an attempt to count joy instead of letting it envelop you in some too-big-to-count, otherworldly manner. It would bring them down to Earth, even open the door for making them competitive, giving me a chance to try and outdo my past selves, to beat their happiness metrics and max out their joy macros. 

***

The simplest numbers in mathematics, called natural numbers, are also sometimes referred to as counting numbers. These are the numbers that children learn first, and they almost always learn them exactly by counting, like enumerating the fingers on their hands. Mathematics also allows for uncountable quantities. Most strikingly, sets of infinitely many objects can be divided into countable and uncountable. 

For instance, there are infinitely many natural numbers but we would know how to keep labeling them forever so they are countable. Infinity does not stop at bajillion, but you would know that bajillion and one comes next, and then bajillion and two and so on, so even if you cannot fully define it, you can keep naming its constituents. Any other infinitely large set where each item could be named by some natural number or a version of it, is by definition also countably infinite. 

There is an apocryphal story about the 1800s mathematician Georg Cantor that math majors sometimes repeat when the moment seems right for grim humor, maybe during late night study sessions, or after an exhausting exam season. The story goes that studying types of infinity drove Cantor clinically mad. In reality, his mental health struggles seemed to have a lot more to do with the backlash to his work and some personal tragedies, and a possible bipolar disorder diagnosis, but that may hit a little too close to home when you are a college student who is overworked and unsure of their future. 

Cantor was a religious man who thought that his work in mathematics and especially his study of different types of infinities was of both philosophical importance and communicated to him by none other than the god that he prayed to. In fact, he wrote to Pope Leo XIII about his ideas concerning the concept of the infinite, even after some theologians equated his claim that there is more than one kind of infinity with claiming that there can be more than one infinitely powerful deity. In a letter, he once wrote: “I have examined all objections that have ever been made against the infinite numbers, and above all because I have followed its roots, so to speak, to the first infallible cause of all created things,” betraying a kind of esoteric underpinning to a work that is now taught in college analysis classes as a dry fact with very little backstory.

I am not religious nor do I believe in magic much, but the story of Cantor who felt a spiritual conviction and a fervor for his work that came from outside of himself resonates with me more than the story of Cantor who was driven mad by trying to understand something challenging. 

A year’s worth of time can be chopped up into more and more brief moments, all the way until there are infinitely many of them. Some of Cantor’s ideas actually make it possible to formally prove that something that feels much smaller, the interval of real numbers, or numbers that include not just integers and fractions but also oddities like the never repeating digits of pi, between 0 and 1 is uncountable large, exactly because you can keep finding them between any two points that you have demarcated already. There is something aspirational in this mathematical fact, almost like a reminder that in the past year I likely did so much, and felt so much, and so not linearly or so not simply that the infinity it all amounts to is not even countable. The list that would correctly, fully capture my year would have to be so infinitely rich that it would transcend what can be enumerated on the page, spoken into words, or packaged as content.

***

Some lists of numbers, however, pack such a powerful punch that it is nearly impossible to dismiss them.

Over 20,000 dead in Gaza. 589 bills proposed in legislatures across the United States in 2023 that would “block trans people from receiving basic healthcare, education, legal recognition, and the right to publicly exist,” as compared to 174 such bills in 2022 and 144 of them in 2021. 14 states with total abortion bans, and 7 more with strict time limits including places like Salt Lake City where the nearest provider is 300 miles away, or 19 hours worth of bus and train transit. Over 10 million people who lost healthcare under Medicaid since the COVID-19 public emergency ended, many of them children, most of them for procedural errors. The 1000 or more people who died from COVID-19 every week since at least August of this year, with a more precise number of total deaths completely obscured by all relevant institutions barely tracking anything about the disease anymore. Over 3,000 books banned during this past school year, most targeting works that center race, history, gender or sexual orientation. Over 60 journalists killed in Gaza since October.

This is a  tally that does feel incomprehensible.

A number still cannot fully convey the depth of a feeling or the complexity of an experience, especially when it comes to pain and fear, but even scratching the surface here is horrifying. Since I have written it from a place of my own biases and blind spots, there are certainly numbers, and the darkness they stand for, that are missing from it. Those missing numbers are among the scariest to me as they exemplify how easy it is to miss pain and suffering when it is not directly connected to you, or when you have decided that it does not overlap with your values enough to rise above the noise of constant breaking news and small personal crises alike. 

When the bombing and destruction of Gaza first started, some commentators on social media took it upon themselves to give their followers permission to look away, to ignore the news for the sake of their own comfort, let it become the kind of background buzz that tickles your brain but you do not actually have to do the work to comprehend it. However, at least within the bubble that Internet algorithms have placed me in, different voices prevailed, voices that kept repeating that not looking away because we are uncomfortable is part of the work of creating a more just history by being a witness. I’m proud of my friends and loved ones who have spoken up, stayed engaged on the Internet and participated in protests, but I also understand, and fear, the appeal of letting it all become background noise to the myriad challenges of having to be a person every single day. It is often so much easier to be overwhelmed, to be knocked down by the waves of bad news noise, than to try and hold your head above the water and yell about how those who are suffering the most really don’t want us to succumb to despair just yet. 

The attitude is prevalent across disasters of our time, like the ‘climate doomism” that some researchers say is more dangerous than outright denials of climate change. Here, it is so much easier for polluters to win when everyone has just taken it as a given that there is no plausible scenario where something else happens. It’s like that famous Ursula K. Le Guin quote “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings” with the power of capitalism manifesting itself as war, as abandonment of the sick and also those who may be sick in the future, as demoting whole swaths of the population to a lesser way of existing in society, as a destruction of the commons and of the environment. 

***

This past year was another where we all took it as a given that we are “more divided” and “more polarized” than ever, and where whoever could benefit from that definitely tried. If you could start a moral outrage, seed a deep fear, or trigger a strong sense of defensiveness in 2023, and you were a person in power, you almost certainly did so, every time. Retail chains lied to us about thefts, mayors cut community programs like composting and libraries to put more police officers in subways, presidential candidates dehumanized everyone from trans people to immigrants so that their base could have some enemy to unite against. This too made for the kind of enraging, righteous noise that you can give into, that you can let permeate your body like actual sound waves, until you are frothing at the mouth against strawpeople that do not, and never will, exist. 

Ironically, I am writing this on a platform that has in recent weeks gotten in hot water over allowing some of those people to not just spread their anger and hate, but also monetize it. We co-exist here, as we do in physical space, people overwhelmed by anger, by despair and those still imagining new worlds and practicing hope.

Again, you could try and enumerate the situation here. You could tally up people in each group and see what number comes out the largest. Numbers seem to offer this utility, a service as objective score-keepers with clear rules on what it means for something to be less or more. While that arithmetic may work for inanimate objects, for systems where a change only happens after some hard, nonnegotiable threshold, like having enough electrons to form a current, it holds up less in the messy world of living people. Sometimes a few people with lots of conviction, or a spread out network of a few very strong connections, can make a world of difference against seemingly overwhelming numbers.

I’ve been reading Practicing New Worlds by Andrea J. Ritchie, a book about organizing for abolition based on ideas about emergence, or the possibility of small parts combining into bigger systems with unanticipated properties. Many of these ideas derive from nature, from how birds flock together, how mushrooms network or the shape of exotic mathematical objects called fractals which have the same structures at all scales, looking similarly whether you zoom in or zoom out. 

Ritchie not only advocates for emergent strategies, but lays out the evidence in favor of the argument that successful organizing had always relied on emergence as a tool. Beneath so much change and work towards the good, according to Ritchie, has been the fact that strong connections between small groups can have ripple effects, that learning and implementing lessons on the small scale can help us transform the world on the largest scales, that acting locally but in conversation with our neighbors can build in resilience. 

“The work of emergence scholars suggests that the most effective way to impact complex systems - societies, economies, ecologies - is at the level of critical connections, networks, and communities of practice, rather than focusing exclusively on top-down interventions that target singular components of the system by force. We effect systems change through relationship and experimentation, not by blueprint,” writes Ritchie.

Practicing New Worlds seems to say that even when you’re in the minority, even when your voice cannot rise over all the noise, practicing your values, and practicing them intentionally, on the small scale can be the beginning of something bigger. The argument negates a lot of the disarming doomism which starts by saying that you will always be too small for your actions to matter. Ritchie reaffirms that living for the world you want, practicing what you can imagine, is not useless even when it feels like so many others would rather embrace the numbing buzz of the status quo. 

Implicitly, she is saying that the math that goes into making change is richer than simply counting, tallying and comparing. I was struck by there being a whole chapter on fractals in a book that is so far from popular science and mathematics books where I first learned the word, or the academic papers where it would have come up during my time as a researcher and student. Ritchie opens the chapter on how abolition is fractal with a quote from a fellow organizer that states that “abolition starts with how you talk to yourself” the goes on to move from the self to larger structures, just like you could start with one tiny triangle on the Koch snowflake then keep zooming out to reveal its intricate structure that similar triangles build up pattern by repeating pattern.

Later in the chapter, Ritchie writes about how one of the big lessons of fractals is that all scales matter so working at only one will never be sufficient to build out the whole shape. She writes: ”Just as it’s not enough for individuals to recycle or make different choices around driving or flying when industrial capitalism is devastating the planet at a massive scale, it’s not enough for us to simply work to meet each other’s needs or find ways to address harm beyond policing and punishment in our everyday lives without an intention to shift larger systems. We need to do both, replicating fractals at all scales.”

I found this encouraging, as both an endorsement of practicing your beliefs in the most personal and most immediate ways until they become second nature, especially if they are not values you have been socialized with, and a challenge to see past your own self and ask how those values may invite you to do something more brave and uncomfortable. Ritchie quotes the lawyer and activist Dean Spade to say that “we are both building the world we want and becoming the kind of people who could live in such a world together,” and that feels fractal too as we, people, are like the infinitely many dots that make up the repeating pattern of the world. The insistence on working on both small and large scales is what makes the task feel possible and also like we are unlikely to run out of options for how to argue, advocate and practice. 

It is the both of eating kindly and sustainably in your own life and calling for accountability for factory farms, private jets and food inequity. It is the both of wearing a mask in crowded indoor spaces and on public transit, and calling for changes in legislation surrounding preventative measures in healthcare settings, accessibility of drugs and funding for research into long term disease. It is the both of boycotting business that support genocide and marching on the streets and calling your representatives. It is the both of trusting queer people in your lives that they know who they are and pushing against politicians that would outlaw all queer culture and civil liberties. 

Admittedly, 2023 has not found me doing everything on this list. As a person who cannot vote and whose legal status feels on the edge of peril (I’m merely a year into what will likely be a three year green card renewal process) I have felt afraid more than I have felt empowered. In 2024, I want to push myself to find ways to engage with building the world that I am trying to live for at larger scales, with more hope and more courage. 

***

I cut my hair short in my last year of college while I was dating a man who always wanted me to be more plain. My big curly hair, at the time dyed a fiery red, did not always sit well with him. I didn’t necessarily cut my hair for the sake of a mostly unloving boyfriend, but knowing that he would approve of it made the decision feel less risky. When I came back to our shared apartment after that first cut, he called it hot, a rare moment of genuine, passionate praise in a dying relationship where sex had become a bargaining chip rather than a way to be close or have fun. It feels odd to think about it now, with almost ten years of emotional distance, and the haircut feeling so much like a part of me that is truly for me as well. 

Later that summer, a Croatian hairstylist touched it up and essentially left me with a pixie. It will take me a few years to learn how to describe the side part and the swoop and the taper that my barber now shapes up without me having to explain anything at all, so I spent that summer looking like an off-brand Jean Seberg and trying to figure out what the lightness of my face not being hidden behind all that fluff should mean to me. 

When I met my husband years later, he essentially had the haircut I wanted. We bonded over it in a sort of inversion of traditional gender roles - instead of me teaching him, the man, how to take care of himself, he took me to his New York barber so we could share something that he knew already worked. On our third date, in a movie theater, he offered me a small comb because the snow had messed up my hair on the way there, and I’ve always taken special note of how he didn’t assume that he would be the one to fix it, just the one to offer tools and support. He has since grown his hair long and I have slowly been returning the favor by trying to recall what I used to do with my own untamed curls. 

I’m turning 32 today, and today my hair is short and swoopy and full of pomade, just how I’ve liked it for a while now. I used to joke that I have the same haircut as every other nonbinary person in Brooklyn, but then I learned that most people in my social circle who identify that way really do frequent two or three of the same barbershops. This changed the valence of the joke. In some settings it could have been seen as malicious, as unkindly calling out a stereotype. In others it would just ring true, and understandably so  - hair can be such a strong marker of gender that you don’t want to put it in the hands of someone who doesn’t share your understanding of who you are. 

At one of my haircuts earlier in the year, buzz-buzz-buzzing clippers close to my ears again, my barber told me about how in their ideal world they’d work in a co-op where all barbers own part of the business, set their own hours, and give out free haircuts to folks who need them. As the year comes to the end, and I step into my 32nd, even with all the mounting atrocities and pain worldwide I am trying to not lose sight of small moments like that where visioning a better world is just something we do normally, moments where there’s a spark of what could be instead of noise that often soothes without being meaningful. 

I don’t have illusions about what next year will bring for me, my community, or anyone else. It will certainly be challenging, probably unkind and scary too. But I’m going into it with a resolve to not let myself feel outnumbered or hopeless, drowned in the noise of those who are hateful or those who have fully given into doom, and to use things that feel right at the size of one or two as an invitation to go bigger and do better.

Best,

Karmela

P. S. Thank you for reading my work this year - your support, especially in this space, means an awful lot.

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ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

My last full day of work for the year was December 21st, and I worked on reporting, filing and editing stories until the last minute of it. December is a bit of an odd time in a newsroom as some stories get finished but held back for times when everyone will be on vacation, some stories are written way in advance and get featured in various end-of-the-year specials, and everyone is, whether they be sources or PR professionals, unusually slow to pick up the phone. I battled some with all of these phenomena in my last week or two of work, and luckily did not get fully defeated - my holiday feature on physics and cocktails and my recap of the superconductor story that had dominated my work earlier in the year both ran in one of the print issue of New Scientist, I made an appearance on a special episode of the magazine’s podcast, and I even got to report two stories about fascinating updates on fundamental ideas in quantum physics, one being the double slit experiment and one the ever infamous Heisenberg uncertainty principle. I’ve done a lot of journalism this year so it feels fitting to have gone out busy - and I already know there will be at least one great story for me to report on once I’m back at my desk in January.

READING

I’m a few years late to the hype, but I read Ocean Vuong’s beautiful novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous after impulsively buying it at a pop up. This was probably the only way I could have bought it, as I have long avoided ordering it because I had a strong suspicion that it would be a devastatingly sad read. I was not completely wrong. There is an awful lot of pain and grief and trauma packed into Vuong’s book and it all comes through even more strongly exactly because his poetic, propulsive style is simultaneously both very visceral and very ethereal. Large swaths of the novel feel like a dream that is not quite a nightmare but just rotten and fried enough at the edges to not be the fairy tale that as a reader I sometimes really wanted. No matter how beautiful, this is a story about queer pain and struggle and that adds heaviness to it. But Vuong is also writing about writing and creation and what the power and responsibility of making art is. His wrestling with those ideas is as potent, and often a very successful counterweight, to the nakedly personal that drips from the rest of his words. I would have wanted this novel to be just a little more short and just a little more sunny, but I still could not put it down, choking down tears, and feeding a small fire at the pit of my stomach, for days on the early morning M train.

This David Graeber essay on why animals play was recommended to me after I shouted-out one too many New Scientist stories about bees playing with balls or fruit flies riding carousels on social media, and it is really fantastic. He manages to fold everything from free will to the probabilistic nature of electrons in quantum systems into a skilled and accessible argument. He conjectures that at some point we use our most complex faculties, we the people but also we the fruit flies, just because we can, just so we can have fun, and not necessarily because the universe has hardwired us to always be achieving some end. I found this really compelling.

LISTENING

As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more and more fond of a musical genre that could be described as a soundtrack in search of a movie. At first it was sci fi opera appropriate thrash metal pieces like Vektor’s last record, but as I’ve opened up to more genres, I’ve found that this kind of extremely evocative music-making exists very broadly. The British electronic music act Pye Corner Audio is the latest rabbit hole I’ve gone down along these lines and though there’s quite a bit of variation among their records, none of them disappoint. This is immersive, propelling music that feels satisfying even if you don’t make the extra step of imagining a story it could be paired with.

I’ve also been listening to Chelsea Wolfe’s project Mrs Piss which is, as the name suggests, more raw, more gory and sounds a lot more angry than her slower, doomy solo output. Together with Jess Gowrie, she makes some real noise here and the vibes are harsh and stinging in the best way possible.

Finally, the self-titled 2011 record by Blouse made quite a few spins in my work rotation, their somewhat retro shoegaze sound making me daydream about 1980s parties soundtracked by unabashed synths and a good amount of corniness. This is an indulgence and nostalgia for a time that you did not actually experience only gets you so far, but songs like Into Black or They Always Fly Away are also just bops worth throwing on whenever you want to feel the tiniest bit upbeat.

WATCHING

Though I had never been more than a causal consumer of Terry Pratchett and had historically been more suspicious of Neil Gaiman than anything else, my husband and I spent a few late weeknights recently watching the first season of the TV adaptation of Good Omens and I found it both endearing and touching. Much of my understanding of Practchett, Gaiman and this property in particular is tied to having once been a heavy user of mid-2010s Tumblr where its fans were pretty ubiquitous. True to that memory and the aesthetic it calls to mind, everything about this show is a little over the top and hokey. In a winking way, every scene is filled with jokes and bits that you may not actually be supposed to laugh at and just knowingly acknowledge instead. Before we started watching, my best friend told me to ignore most of that and focus on the relationship at the center of the show, the one between its enemies-turned-friends protagonists. Even had I not taken their opinion to heart, it would have been impossible to not end up watching the show from that vantage point as this relationship is really what propels the series and makes it hard to quit. It may also help that David Tennant has never looked both more dirty and more good and that all other casting choices are just right for this flavor of kooky but deep character work. Somewhat unexpectedly, I’m excited to dig into season two soon.

We saw the latest Hayao Miyazaki movie The Boy and the Heron in a movie theater and I’m really glad we opted for the big screen because this film was so trippy and immersive that any way of watching it at home quite likely would have not done it justice. Presumably Miyazaki’s last film, certainly a film that cost a tremendous amount of money and time, The Boy and the Heron feels very singular. It blends portal stories like Alice and Wonderland with a wealth of allegories for how people create, share and steal power and strong themes of grief and destruction, all wrapped in brightly colored layers of equal parts cuteness and body horror. Watching this film left me wanting to read a 200 page thesis about it - I have not yet decided whether it is good per se, but it is so rich that it almost doesn’t matter.

EATING

So far, what the holiday season has meant for me has been lots and lots of baking. 

After a break of many years, I got back into making sourdough bread and had really been enjoying having a chewy, crusty bread in my rotation, thanks to the starter from a great Bushwick bakery and this very accessible recipe from Maurizio Leo.

I was commissioned to make an emerald and gold vanilla cake for one birthday party, and a strawberries-and-cream inspired cake for another. And for my own very early birthday party I took a gamble and converted the iconic Italian-American rainbow cookie into a cake, three colored layers, jam, strong almond flavor and all. I breathed a real sigh of relief when that one was received well. And then there was this vanilla cinnamon crunch cake with plum butter, plum butter frosting and gingerbread frosting that was so good that I made it twice, once for a belated Friendsgiving and once for sale. 

For sure, we are also still eating vegetables and I have found myself massaging kale in various kitchens this past month, as well as fawning over watermelon radishes in our CSA box or serving cabbage in spicy tomato sauce to house guests as if there is nothing more party-worth than a hearty green. Having a chance to eat both locally-grown, seasonal produce and to be as indulgent of a baker as my friends want me to be has been making me really happy this December.