Volume 6, Entry 1: Glad Habits

The simple, fast, free thing that changed my life in '24

Every morning begins the same way for me.

First, I open a Google Sheet to record my previous day’s meals. When that’s completed, I tap on Pokémon Go, catch anything spawned near my house, and feed whatever creature I’ve selected as that month’s buddy. From there, I skim the articles on MLB Trade Rumors and The Athletic, I peek at my email and saved eBay searches, and then I do a sequence of Sporcle quizzes. When that’s complete, I begin my day’s work or writing in earnest.

As the 346 Clif Bars and 301 quesadillas on my spreadsheet betray, I am a creature of habit. This has always been the case, but I’ve only recorded unambiguous evidence during the last five years. When the pandemic struck, COVID-19 canceled classes and transformed my life overnight. I felt lost for several weeks, struggling to find my bearings without a bell managing my day. Unsurprisingly, 2020 delivered the first flickers of an intense adherence to routine. Repeated tasks became my bell schedule.

That’s only partially true, though. Yes, the routine that helped me maintain structure and discipline gradually morphed into what I do now, but there’s more to it than I’m letting on. I walk the entire morning—during and after those four tasks—and that movement engineers my transformed health. I’ve maintained that program for five years because of routine. Exercise and movement needed to be so automatic that I couldn’t nope out of them; I needed to effectively fall out of bed and into a brisk walking pace to overcome my tendency toward sloth. Inertia means that both objects in motion and at rest stay that way; by being instantly in motion every day, I let inertia do the rest.

I took 28,157,463 steps in 2024, a new record. Call me an inertial success story.

But don’t call inertia a flawless strategy—there are costs to taking 76,933 daily steps. I’ve talked about the impact of that walking before, and 2024 brought proof that tying my shoes can salve but not solve the wounds wrought by friction and extreme use.

Likewise, there’s an ultra-fine line between routine and compulsion that I know I straddle. There were six days in 2024 when I failed to exceed 70,000 daily steps, and…well, I probably shouldn’t know that number off the top of my head, right? It’s one thing to set aside what my body demands from me when I’m in a different city with Matt or meandering through MOMA with Morgann, but those days when a glut of professional commitments cramp my motion, I tend to feel flustered. Without compromising anything else, I want to hit my goal. Anything less, to my brain, foments failure.

And yet, that fixation still doesn’t mark the truest downside of my routine. Inertia has introduced a steady sense of security into my life, but it has never gained traction emotionally. Despite controlling for nearly every variable I can and establishing mostly healthful behaviors to govern my waking hours, I remain prone to misery. I crash and crater constantly; I boil and roil with regularity. Whereas my breakfasts are as unsurprising as gravity, how I feel on a given day might as well be quantum: predictability is a myth. I (of course) sleep on the same side of the bed every night, but whether that side is the right or wrong one depends on cruel RNG.

Unlike exercise, food, and creativity, I entered 2024 having never found a way to make emotional inertia routine. Harpooning health in the psychological sector remained my white whale. No matter what I did, wrote, or ate, who I spent time with or what I listened to, I still faltered. The cockroach continued creeping; the slug sustained its slithering.

Before I risk broadcasting a false promise, let me say: I didn’t make those things disappear last year. Those demons—my demons—are in my DNA. Short of Hannibal Lecter relieving me of them with a pan of browned butter and a sprig of rosemary, they’ll be in my brain for as long as I’m alive. I didn’t “fix” that in 2024.

Nonetheless, for the first time, I integrated emotional wellness into my daily routine. As of writing, it still hasn’t achieved the automaticity of cataloging Clif Bar consumption, feeding a friendly Flygon, or typing Acevedo-Acton-Aguilar on Sporcle, but it did happen every single morning¹ of the year without exception.

The result was a dose of intentional, undeniable positivity I hadn’t engineered before. When it was a good morning, the act invigorated me, nourishing me with gratitude and flecks of leftover joy, but when it was a bad morning, the deed disrupted my usual deterioration, providing a potent counter to any encroaching darkness. Even when I cynically and bitterly did the task, it was simple enough to be completed anyway, and the injection of reluctant good undercut my misery every time. Every single time.

I’m loathe to give advice. When a YouTuber or friend tells me, unsolicited, “This is what you should do”, I resist. If I’m not discovering or rationalizing the truth for myself, I scoff; my brain works overtime to disprove the claim. Gullible people like me must take Defense Against the Dubious Farts or risk submitting to every conniving cult, predatory Ponzi scheme, and greedy guru we encounter.

This is all to say: please don’t take this as advice. I’m not telling you to adopt what I did. I’m not selling it to you or promising any outcome for anybody. What I am saying is that, for the first time, I established and maintained a behavior that short-circuited those stretches of spiraling self-immolation that used to regularly overwhelm me. It made me emotionally healthier every one of the 366 times I did it. Moreover, what I did is simple to explain, it’s exceedingly easy to do, and a person can start it immediately—yes, immediately—because it’s hardly revolutionary. It’s the best change I made in 2024, yet it was also the most straightforward to begin and maintain.

Do it or don’t—that’s your call. But it would be wrong of me not to use my meager platform to share what I did with you in case it can add something to your daily experience.

Let me explain.

*****

Late in 2023, I became a paid subscriber to The Small Bow on Substack.

Written by former Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio and illustrated by Edith Zimmerman, The Small Bow is a newsletter for people challenged by sobriety. While such a resource might seem odd for a guy who doesn’t drink, smoke, or use drugs, I read Deadspin religiously during college and still garner affection for all those involved. When Daulerio’s name appeared in an automated recommendation next to the publication’s title, I sampled several pieces he’d written.

Daulerio’s a funny guy who can elicit a biting laugh and warm tears from the same sentence. His essays are brutally self-deprecating because he resists hiding from his actions and malicious thoughts; that is, he writes with a profound honesty I instantly admired. Despite radical differences between our lives, I found something resonant in everything he wrote and shared.

Of course, The Small Bow includes more than personal essays. For one, the illustrations by Zimmerman are phenomenal additions; her distinctive style complements Daulerio’s tone and elevates every piece—they’re why I invited Michelle to illustrate occasionally for me. Content-wise, Daulerio mixes things up, too. Some weeks, he cross-posts interviews; during others, he shares cathartic reader submissions, champions guest authors, or revisits pieces from the blog’s first incarnation that newbies like me would have otherwise missed.

There’s also an addendum to whatever he’s chosen for each piece’s anchor. Here, Daulerio includes several components: a Zoom link to a weekly, open-to-everyone check-in he runs, a recount of his meditation progress, links to a relevant old piece or two, and a poem that’s recently stirred him. It’s a lengthy tome to scroll to the bottom of, but it’s rich with generously shared nuggets of wisdom in many forms.

While each section surely has fans, none of what I’ve mentioned specifically inspired me. What did was the other component of his weekly newsletter for paid subscribers. On Sundays, Daulerio tacks on a journaling section. Here, he bullets out items across two lists: “Notable fears this week” and a “Notable daily Gratitude List”.

The first time this caught my eye, my jaw dropped. His notable fears list had everything from widely broad worries—“Being unprepared”—to wildly specific dread—“Dreams about jaw cancer, creeping death by a lightning bolt”. The thing feels haphazard and unfiltered; it’s always raw and conflicted and gloriously, beautifully human. Some weeks, reading felt like being handed the key to his diary. His fears were out there sometimes, but…so are mine. I’d bet some of yours are, too.

The second list didn’t stand out to me quite as much—not initially, at least. Every item from his Notable daily Gratitude List completes the sentence frame “I am grateful for…” but I always read through that stem. To my eyes, he populates the entire list with quick, dashed-off bullet points. Sometimes, he mentions his wife or a moment with his kids; other times, he lists the name of an athlete, movie, or behavior. This list’s haphazard, too, but it has this incredible non-rhythm that just feels real. Most likely, that’s because his list accumulates across the week: what appears in the Sunday newsletter crunches all of those jotted-down phrases into one list.

As you might expect if you read what I write, I’m not a jotter. I don’t express ideas in bullet points, and I don’t throw out phrases. With no hyperbole whatsoever, my brain thinks in complete sentences; my internal monologue practices syntactical variety. Even if I start with snippets of an idea, before long, I’m pleasing my tenth-grade English teacher. Nothing about his presentation of those bullet points resembled any part of me.

I think that’s what drew me in, though. Much as I admired the vulnerability of Daulerio’s Notable fears, it was how perfunctory and nonchalant he made his diverse moments of joy look on the screen that hooked me. On October 27th, for instance, he mentions all of the following:

* Staying in my chair even though I wanted to run away.

* Building Chompy’s grave with Ozzy.

* Back on the mats.

* Wednesday morning book-writing time.

* Freddie Freeman.

* Yearning to stay positive no matter what.

Each item hints toward a story, several of which I recognized. Allusions to the fallen family fish, a return to his Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes, and an upcoming book project all referenced topics he’d written about recently. Each speaks to something significant to his life, but the bullets celebrate them for the granular details that comprise the larger tale. There’s also a mention of the Dodgers’ star who powered them against the Yankees in the World Series. This reminds me that while joy can take forms others might deem trivial, happiness counts in all cases. Finally, he slips in personal trials that should be drenched in shadow but that he redefines as good. These are tiny victories, hardly remarkable at all from the outside, but Daulerio presents them as triumphs for a man who has worked his ass off to grow, stay sober, and spread generosity throughout his community. This one list I picked randomly as an example is an incredible, inspiring document, but so are all the others.

Reading his list lit a fire under me one Sunday. I decided to make my own daily gratitude list when the new year began. Without much thought, I created a file in the Notes app where I write and manage my work and pinned it at the top of my most-used folder. I remixed his form slightly, titling mine “Daily Positivity 2024” and eschewing his sentence frame; I’d merely be jotting down snippets with each date. Unlike most of what I write, I had no plan to post it anywhere, share it with anyone, or preserve it in any way. I was merely experimenting with a tool practiced by a man I admired. Only I would see it.

Initially, I wanted to mimic Daulerio’s process exactly, adding to my Daily Gratitude list any time some sliver of good cropped up. Catch a smile from someone? Watch a cool video? Pop over to Notes and jot it down. That was my verb for it. Daily Positivity 2024 was not for writing but jotting. It was simple, clean, and quick.

Alas, it took not even a day to realize that approach wasn’t viable. The first of January already saw me flailing: I kept forgetting to pull out my phone and record the good stuff. Instead of jotting down highlights as they played out, I scrambled the next morning to choose the best moment from the day before to hastily punch something into the file. It wasn’t great, and my feeble contributions embarrassed me for those first few days. With one or two items each day, Daily Positivity looked to be snuffed out like so many previous New Year's resolutions.

Pivoting slightly granted me passage through the first week. Instead of trying—and failing!—to transcribe moments in real-time, I decided to embrace what kept happening and record the previous day’s wins the following morning. I set an ongoing iPhone reminder for right after my daily wake-up time, intending to integrate the task into my routine.

I found my first signs of a successful adaptation on January 7th:

1/7: A long walk with Julia full of introspection and affirmation. Megan back and dessert with almost everyone that included consent to be eaten and valuable discussion about prions and kuru. Watching Wicker Park was a time machine.

Something about this entry felt like Daulerio’s. Maybe it was the randomness and goofy morbidity, or perhaps it was the unfussy delivery—whatever it was, I liked it. The collection of jots also marked a different type of artifact: I had photos and amusing videos from that meal, for instance, but my words here captured what we’d talked about. I hadn’t written a journal entry about our discussion of magnanimous cannibalism, but that one line instantly resurrected it, not to mention the uplifting walk. I enjoyed typing it out and reading it back equally.

Ten days later, I caught the first glimmers of the thing actively adjusting my perspective:

1/17: The IEP meeting ended early and was super positive and optimistic for a great kid. Audry’s frustrations validated mine at the staff meeting. Optimism for the new pass system abounds. Michael Edward’s piece about skateboarding and writing inspired. Lots of responses to the PIQ class meeting.

January 17th had been a trying, long day, full of rigid formal events, but I emerged from it upbeat. My comments recontextualized work-related obligations, celebrating their silver linings instead of bemoaning their aggravations, and I found encouragement in a piece of writing while expressing optimism—actual optimism—regarding a lingering uncertainty.

By the time Valentine’s Day rolled around, I’d found a rhythm. My recollections expanded, featuring more and more moments, gestures, and people:

2/14: There was reward in putting my take on the ending of Past Lives into words and seeing it just flow out of me. Great conversation with Raf after school. A fun, if fake, Valentine’s Day story. The cookies from Natalie and Yumilka were awesome. I finished the artwork for the next newsletter and it was exactly what I wanted it to be. Green Dot Day let me see Sarah in action and learn Ben’s rocket ship-submarine description, which is fun.

Valentine’s Day is a vector for intrusive thoughts, hearts and held hands ripe with the potential to send me down an introspective spiral pitting my former and future selves against one another, but I evaded all that. My Daily Positivity addressed writing, cookies, and informal observations. Typing that out provided respite from threatening woe.

By March, a cool thing began to happen: these jot sessions resembled less daily highlight reels than comprehensive recaps.

3/18: Braden read into chapter one of The Gray Valley when Raf left it out; he liked what he read, and it prompted a conversation about Barnes & Noble Press. Nic convinced me to watch some of the baseball game, and I caught one crisp inning and one miserable ten-run inning—but Cole had two hits in it, so there you go. Solid first day back with a familiar comfort in each class. Super productive day that included digitizing six Quick Quizzes and adding to the first series convergence problem set. Positive conversation with Raf and Alvin after school.

By construction, what I recorded in Daily Positivity 2024 was exclusively positive; only the best moments made the cut. When nearly every beat of the day merits mention, there’s this subtle subtext of Things are good that’s impossible to miss. It forced me to not only look on the bright side but document it, transcribe it, and celebrate it. Pleasures that might have been fleeting became permanent. Their glow lasted longer.

And that cheerful, backward-gazing revelation lent momentum to the day ahead. Instead of dreading busy days of grinding through labor, I discovered optimism for what lay in front of me. Finishing up my jots for yesterday, I’d find myself curious about what I’d record tomorrow. I’d think not about the tedious meeting or uninspiring lecture on the docket but the possibility of something or someone special wriggling into my itinerary and landing in the next Daily Positivity. Recording these moments softened my dread toward the near future.

Granted, my days weren’t uniformly rosy. When I cratered in July, right before writing “Shoelaces”, I ignored my soul being Samara’d at the bottom of a well. Unlike Daulerio, who celebrates those wins of perseverance where he overcomes something eating at him, I jotted right past the issue:

7/1: The piece went in a wild direction, but I think it was a productive one. Doing the full walk at 6:00 was really nice. Ultra productive meeting with Susan. The new Quiet Place movie was fantastic. Got the artwork done for the Midpoint Report.

I could’ve written, “The piece went in a wild direction, and I think Nanny-God might have saved me from myself”, but instead, I was defiant, almost as though Daily Positivity overwhelmed the internal catastrophizing.

In December, though, I acknowledged another low period with increased directness, adopting a curt and cursory tone:

12/2: Breakfast. Talk about home with Sarah. Leaving. Chow mein. Writing about doughnuts and combinatorics.

12/3: The food. People did the doughnut problem. The day ended.

That last line betrays my state of mind more than any other: The day ended screams, “Get this stupid thing over with” pretty loudly. But still…I wrote it. I wrote something down. I wrote three things down; one of them ended up on my best moments list!

Finding something to savor in even my worst and lowest days was automatic by December. I had trained myself; I had formed a new habit. Just as I get up and walk twenty miles every morning regardless of how I feel, so too do I jot down some highlights from the day before.

And I swear it made a difference. Just look at what chased my humbuggy tone one day later:

12/4: Writing about whiffle ball is cathartic. The Wildcat Breakfast vibes. Breakfast goes well. Printing Alburn’s corrected certificate. Food at night. The Winter concert. K and M saying hi, plus K’s gift box for N. T is incredible. Hearing N and J quite clearly. “Mary Did You Know” and “Jingle Bells”. Listening from backstage. “Carol of the Bells” and the hug on-stage from Hogge. Photos and conversation afterward. Newsletter ideas.

Form informs meaning, and placing these consecutive entries alongside one another creates a world of meaning under the surface. Unlike December third, when I squeezed good out of a miserable day like the final agonizing puff of toothpaste from a defiant tube, I gushed about the show and the people in it on the fourth. I even looked ahead to writing about them.

Did the dark cloud evaporate? Not exactly—I’m not Daisy Edgar-Jones in Twisters. But I burned off a dangerous hydra head to leave me with a singularly-necked dragon to battle. Negativity didn’t sweep me up and hold me hostage; it slowed me, poisoning my tone for two days, but then I was back on track.

My greatest sales pitch for following this process lies in that observation: I’ve never been able to buy into sustainable positivity before. Sure, I can arrive at optimism after 4,200 words of thoughtful creative non-fiction, zip-lining along my narrative thread en route to warm safety, but that’s hours of work that aren’t always feasible. Sometimes, I need a deep session of self-administered literary therapy, but most days, I have too full of a plate to schedule an appointment; piling on one more obligation threatens to exacerbate rather than alleviate my discomfort.

Adding to Daily Positivity 2024, on the other hand, was quick. My commitment was a few minutes each day at most. I typed it into a free app on my existing phone. With neither stringent rules nor a demanding audience, my jots were whatever I wanted them to be. I was free to evolve or scale back as I saw fit. For everything profound it did for me, it demanded a minuscule investment and integrated seamlessly into my existing routines.

Again, let me reiterate: this task that disrupted depression and amplified optimism took next to no time and cost zero dollars even after inflation. Jotting a few phrases into Daily Positivity worked wonders for me and, specifically, my mental health.

I’m not selling it to you, remember. But maybe I should be.

*****

During a midyear call with Bria, I first spoke about Daily Positivity.

We were talking about habit-stacking—the reason why there’s dental floss on my kitchen table—and I mentioned what I had undertaken. Ten minutes later, we were still gushing about Daulerio’s simple habit and the profound mark it had already left on my outlook.

At the end of our discussion, I promised to write about Daily Positivity to kick off the following year. Clearly, this tiny component of The Small Bow had become a vital, time-efficient tool. Jotting down good things was a simple force that accelerated me when things were going great and lurched me back into motion when they were not.

For the first time, I generated optimistic inertia independently, and with a method that didn’t require Diamond Day’s large crowds or Therapy Thursday’s outsider eyes. All people can scribble out a few positive moments every day. I’m pretty sure it can benefit almost anybody.

Although I’ve outlined my specific approach—notes app, timing, etc.—I’ve withheld a few components thus far. Assuming many readers would skim, I didn’t want to clutter Daily Positivity with rigidity. Not every person craves routine or works from their phone like I do, so I want to emphasize that the process I adapted from Daulerio is flexible. Could it be done from a desk on a yellow Steno Pad or a roll of receipt tape? Of course! Would it work in the evening or after every meal? Absolutely! Might it be even more potent if rendered as a vlog or podcast? Probably! Don't let me cramp your style if you’re intrigued but less obsessive about the Notes app. I adapted my method from The Small Bow’s; if it helps you try the thing, make me your Daulerio and riff to your heart’s content.

Still, I’d like to speak to the power of my specific implementation before I wrap this piece up. Truly, I’m confident Daily Positivity has benefits in any form (so long as it’s every day²). But it wasn’t just the act of recording that won me over and made this habit transformative for me.

When I began this process on January 2, 2024—recall that I failed to record along the way on the 1st—I initially treated my file as a chronological feed: at the top sat the most recent entry. The next morning, I jotted the new stuff in at the top, pushing the previous day’s good things down and out of sight. It was convenient; it streamlined the process.

Around day twenty, I made a switch: I reversed the chronology. That is, I painstakingly cut and re-pasted each day’s observations so that January 1st led off the file, followed by the second, the third, and so on. I don’t remember what motivated this switch, but I did switch. From then on, each morning when I opened the file, I had to scroll past all of the previous things I’d written throughout the year.

Now, I will confess: this made the whole process less efficient. It wasn’t an issue in February or March, but by mid-summer, there was a lot of scrolling to do. The Notes app has a Sonic the Hedgehog-approved super-scroll that speeds things up, but even then, it took a while to get through.

That “a while” is the key.

Some mornings, I scrolled languorously. With the right flick of my thumb, the file would race past dozens of entries but then slow to a stop on a random day. Instead of flicking again, I’d browse that window into my life ten months, weeks, or days earlier and marvel. Staring back at me were nuggets of joy and markers of progress. I’d find mentions of breakthroughs with pieces and victories at school. I’d leaf through delicious meals and feats of athletic excellence. Several names—Raf, Bria, Susan, AD, Ethan, Elio, R’lyeh, Jaelyn, Michael Edward, Jayla—appeared repeatedly, lending me a sense of community that warmed me where I stood. Writing this newsletter is therapeutic for me, but Daily Positivity sidestepped the difficult introspection that characterizes my formal writing. This file featured purely positive memories and moments; they didn’t erase the gristle, but they reminded me of the glorious, seasoned steak that surrounded it. It left me remembering the year with an effusive affection that usually rode shotgun to a sobering perspective. That changed me.

On other mornings, I’d race past all predecessors to reach the spot for the present. When I did, I’d hastily get my jots in and slip back out into a world of work and writing as quickly as possible. Unsurprisingly, those days tended to be more stressful and hectic; those days threatened to overwhelm me with the negativity of deadlines, demands, and darkness.

But because I had to scroll increasingly further as the year progressed, Daily Positivity implicitly undercut my typical blues. I’ve spent most of this decade asking myself, "What is the point of being alive?” and struggling to answer. So often, I cited secondhand good gifted to others as my reason, but my answer, the whys that would fill me up, remained elusive. I needed proof that living was worthwhile.

Daily Positivity provided it. The file’s chronology confronted my blues directly. I exclusively entered moments that brought me joy, which meant the endless stream of words and names scrolling past me was proof of not just good in the world but bountiful good. These jots weren’t the newsletter where I magnify microscopic moments into thoughtful, truth-pursuing prose but a big ol’ batch of bullet points celebrating somethings I’d deemed meaningful.

There was so much there. I jotted down so, so many things. By the end, I had nearly 20,000 words. Think about that: 20,000??! It does a number on your brain when every single day you have to stare down proof that a harrowing world is full of joy—that every day you wake up means accumulating more and more instances. It rewires something psychologically to repeatedly stare at proof that life is beautiful.

Every day, the accumulation of tiny little chunks of goodness confronted me. Like the rectangles in a Riemann Sum, nothing I recorded was itself a world-beater. These were flimsy little jots; each pointed to an ephemeral, incidental, minuscule next-to-nothing. But their accumulation? The accumulation overwhelmed me.

Maybe my method wouldn’t register like that with you. Certainly, it didn’t overcome my every demon, but it helped. Daily Positivity steeled me to remain in (or rejoin) the fight day after day after day. I stopped braving the storm on principle and began looking forward to arriving someplace safe and warm.

I swear by this process, folks.

*****

Late in December, I updated the operating system on my iPhone. Usually, I wait several weeks to update, afraid iOS “improvements” will render vital apps obsolete or change mechanics I’ve already internalized, but I was tired that night. I pushed it through.

The following day, all 4,400 notes in iCloud vanished. If you know my process, that’s…everything. Fortunately, they returned, but something about the latest patch made specific notes load differently. Overall, things became…sluggish.

The worst offenders were my longest notes. Mind you, I wrote Sweet Appeal and The Gray Valley in the Notes app; I write really, really long notes!

But I had no cause to access those notes on a random Thursday in December. As my day began, I had another note I needed to open—one I access at least once every day. When I tapped on its name and opened it up, I started to scroll toward the bottom, but my screen refused to cooperate. The note remained unchanged. My phone was non-responsive.

It took six full (and terrifying) minutes to finally see movement. Even when it did, lethargy reigned; my phone labored to reach the bottom. When I typed, the letters appeared only after a noticeable delay, like the app needed to catch its breath.

The note in question burdened my phone. It was an ordeal to navigate. It overwhelmed the humble app’s processing power post-update. It continued to lag for the rest of the year.

Full of disappointment, distance, and treading water, 2024 wasn’t a great year. Out of all my years on earth, it was unremarkably one of them.

Yet 2024 is also the year so packed full of memorable moments that it threatened to brick my iPhone every morning. We should all shudder under the weight of the good in our lives as I did in December.

With any luck, that lag will arrive in Daily Positivity 2025 by Thanksgiving.

---

This piece actually felt uncomfortable to write. I really don’t like giving explicit advice, probably because I’m so afraid of someone coming back and telling me the thing that has so helped me is stupid. But I had to share this—unrevolutionary though it is—just in case it actually might help someone else.

I’ll be back to a normal essay (for me) next week.

Happy New Year, everybody.

PS: I posted my first two (public) movie reviews since 2022 over at www.filmsofsteele.com this week. I don’t expect this will be a regular thing, as each piece took over an hour, but I enjoyed chewing on both films despite my responses to each being wildly different. The two films were Nightbitch and Here (but not the Tom Hanks one). If you’re interested, please consider checking them out.

1. Technically, it did not happen on January 1, 2024, as my jotting took place the next day, but you get my drift.

2. Cue the Jogging Baboon from BoJack Horseman.