My 2019 Year in Review: Mind Games

Spent much of this year with some sort of brain booster zapping my head, for journalism!

What a time to be alive. The House just impeached the US president. Brexit really is going to happen. Big Tech has finally revealed itself to be far more nefarious than nice; and some of its darling companies (cough WeWork cough) laid bare as just giant Ponzi schemes that fuel capitalism’s excesses while promising “community.”

I am still living in the sunshine and swimming in the sea — spending my first full year back in America in the freaky paradise that is Southern California, where there’s no real winter or hot summer. Reality interrupts sometimes — we felt the long, rolling earthquake on July 4 and much of California’s brush and forests caught fire in the fall. A reminder that this state, like the rest of Planet Earth, is increasingly unsustainable.

This year felt like my real re-entry, a transitional period in which I had to learn how to live a more quotidian and (literally) domestic life after all the nonstop absurdity and madness of living abroad. My intention at the outset of 2019 was to be still and look inward, and I’m one for two — lots of looking inward, but not so much stillness.

I learned constantly, mainly in the service of my central creative project and raison d’etre at NPR for the past year — Future You.  It explored how emerging technologies are changing what it means to be human. We asked philosophical questions but packaged them in lightweight videos, playing with the long game in mind. In all, I had some 124 electrodes gelled to my head in all this year, plus an untold amount of wattage sent to my brain to show a future of mind-machine melding. I also learned how to extend my life, thanks to the Harvard geneticist David Sinclair, one of the world’s leading experts on aging. We became fast friends.

External circumstances interrupted during the back half of 2019 to force me to think more deeply and weigh what matters most. I’m reflecting now after an autumn of tumult. Everything felt triumphant and purpose-driven the first half of the year, then my shoulder dislocated at the end of June and I was down an arm, homebound and feeling crippled and useless. Then, to all of our surprise, my team got laid off in August. This meant the cancelation of the show, without consultation. I struggled for a few months with what I wanted to make — and be — next.

I’m finally out of my malaise, though. New things abound! Can’t wait for 2020, a chance for a buoyant new beginning.

Culture That Made 2019 Bearable: Fleabag, Lizzo, Parasite, Succession, the cringeworthy L to the O-G rap on Succession, Deadwood: The Movie, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, the writing of Rebecca Traister, The Cut on Tuesdays, the newsletter Ask Molly

Drink of the Year: Black Sugar Iced Milk Tea, or Tiger Boba Tea — same thing, different names, delicious whatever you want to call it

Noteworthy Food Discovery: Trader Joe’s Coffee Ice Cream

Live Shows I Was Glad To See: Amanda Seales, John Mulaney, the countertenor John Holliday, Pod Save America, mainly for Jon Lovett

Memorable Interviews: Noho HANK, aka Anthony Carrigan, whose character Hank really makes Barry shine. Jenny Odell, on how she finds meaning while wandering. Alicia Menendez, with whom I really could relate on the topic of likeability. Tristan Harris, for video and separately for the pod, about our attention-fracked media culture.

New Practices: Epictetus said, “Progress is not achieved by luck or accident, but by working on yourself daily.” So to lean into my 2019 goal of looking inward, I kept a daily, hand-drawn checklist to make sure I did (or tried to do) the following — meditate, journal, take a vitamin and exercise. The visual representation really shows consistency and lack thereof. Sometimes I just ran out of vitamins, okay? I do most things last minute.

I just colored in a square if I did the thing and over time, I had my own handmade data viz.

The Year’s Firsts: A night at the Magic Castle. Giving a commencement speech at the Missouri School of Journalism, my alma mater. Shoulder dislocation. Irish hospital treatment. Opioids. Drag racing with a professional stunt driver. Brain stimulation. Being monitored in a sleep lab while getting brain stimulation. Getting all three daughters to introduce one of my podcast episodes. The tedious experience of lice removal for my older girls.

New Places: Albuquerque, NM. A few Hawaiian islands I’d never visited before — Kauai and the Big Island. Ireland, where folks kept telling my fair-skinned baby Luna, “Welcome Home” and whose National Ambulance Service I am eternally grateful for. Never did get to visit the Blasket, though.

MVP New Friend: David Sinclair, aforementioned

MVP Old Friend: Harper Reed, who, while helping me through my doldrums randomly introduced me to his friend Michael, with whom he was developing a TV pilot. Serendipitously, Michael goes, “Oh hey do you have a reel?” A week later, I was on a set, shooting a real life commercial, the first since I was a teenager and appeared in commercials for places like Sonic Drive-Ins. This entire sentence just sounded ridiculous when I read it back.

MVP New Sandwich: Popeyes lives up to the hype

Disappointments: The short-sightedness of the newsroom “reorganization” this August and the way it happened. The current era at NPR. Not keeping up with my newsletter. My poor posture, in general — Dr. Raj, my PT, says I had shoulder impingement a long time before my injury.

Also this year, in no particular order, and an admittedly incomplete list:

Talked about my Dad’s epic freedom swim in public
Took the OJ Simpson tour
Lost the door to the minivan after my husband nearly got hit by the Santa Monica Big Blue Bus
Hired a garage organizer and got organized
Received a message from another person’s brain with computer-assisted telepathy
Moved a robot with my mind
Increased my vertical jump by 11 percent
Went under the care of a celebrity longevity doctor; he told me to stop eating so much orange dust
Lowered by biological age by five years
Got my long term memory boosted in a sleep lab
Appeared on The Today Show as B-roll
Shot a commercial
Saw Idris Elba in real life
Partied at Lawrence Welk’s former house
Inadvertently became a Flonase “influencer”
Saw Adam Driver on Broadway, he was riveting
Saw an otter feeding at the Monterey Bay Aquarium
Stayed at an entirely wolf-themed lodge
Breathed the same air as Beyonce
Ate breakfast back-to-Harrison Ford’s back, and no one told me for most of this time
Became an Annenberg Innovation Lab fellow
Potty-trained Luna, my last baby
Spent more time with mom and dad, who moved to Orange County for part of the year
Reunited our fellow Asia expat travel squad when the Wan Yau‘s returned to the states
Went to Palm Springs, twice
Went back to Seoul, twice
Went to DC 4X
Went to San Francisco 4X
Went to New York 4X
Wrote and hosted a bunch of podcast episodes on how to travel better
Nearly went broke after having to cough up a bunch in capital gains taxes (thanks, selling the Austin house)
Took a morphined-out Irish ambulance ride with medics named Owen and Paddy, natch
Spent a month in a sling
Spent a month without eating sugar
Spent six months in physical therapy
Watched members of my team get laid off in a parking lot while on the job, and on vacation
Decided to leave NPR after that happened
Took part in a little non-violent resistance
Celebrated my parents 40th anniversary in Hawaii on an epic trip with 20 other family members
Started a new small business with my girlfriends
Fit in reading 52 books, barely
Flew 180,846 miles to 28 cities, three countries and spent 99 days away from home. Next year I’m getting carbon offsets and undertaking an effort to cut this down significantly, because it’s so terrible for the planet to fly this much. Like everything else about my 2019, it’s been a year of reckoning.

Previous Years in Review

20182017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004

International SOS

We were somewhere near the town of Dingle, taking in these breathtaking sites and letting the girls slide down steep grass-covered boulders at a prehistoric fort on the edge of the land jutting into the Atlantic when I slipped, my right arm overextending back behind my head. I heard two cracks in my shoulder before ending my slide and losing my vision briefly because of the excruciating pain.

There was not a prettier place I could have dramatically dislocated my shoulder, requiring an ambulance ride and copious amounts of morphine. Eventually an x-ray revealed a full dislocation but not fracture, sparing me surgery and allowing the doctor, Tricia, to pop my shoulder back in while I was breathing in huge gulps of some sort of gas to “take the edge off.”

Before and after.

My right arm spent hours out of socket so I’m going to be recovering for several weeks. The health care I received was nothing but caring and thorough and considerate. The doctor even got me tea and toast after popping my arm back. Thank you, Ireland.

A limerick:

To Dingle town we herded the crew
To take in spectacular views
I slipped down a grass boulder
Dislocating my shoulder
Now it’s opiates for the black and blues

Day Two In the Ring of Kerry

The roads here and suuuuper narrow but we had to rent SUVs to fit all the humans. So I’m constantly driving too close to the curb on one side and oncoming traffic on the other. Throw in the harrowingly narrow alleys in town and it’s a wonder we are all in one piece.

Limerick:

Pet sheep and goats and rabbits
Driving though, still not a habit
Squeezed trucks through an alley
Almost entered death’s valley
Perhaps next trip we’ll all just cab it

My big highlight of the day was a farm in which you could really get up close and personal with pigs, goats, sheep, cattle, birds and so much more. An old barn was converted into an indoor playground and outside, as if the animals weren’t enough, there were playgrounds for kids everywhere.

Obligatory sheep selfie

Limericking in Ireland

A momma duck and her ducklings at Ross Castle.

Hello from an estate in Killarney, Ireland, on the island’s Eastern coast. Our family friends the Wan-Yau’s met up with us in Dublin as one of their stops during their epic monthlong traveling adventure around the world. Like us, they are repatriating after living in Asia for several years (Seoul then Singapore) and decided to travel as their furniture and belongings are shipped back to San Francisco.

This is our NINTH squad trip together since we met in 2015. Together our two families have traveled to Jeju Island, Cebu, Osaka, Okinawa, Sydney, Taipei, Bangkok, Danang/Hoi An and now, an Ireland road trip. Eva and their oldest, Jonah, met as toddlers in swim class and through those two we grownups became friends. Amazingly, Eva and Jonah are still super close and love spending time together. “I’m surprised they play together so well since they are both obviously Alphas,” Sarah remarked.

I’m going to try and remember each day with a limerick. Here’s yesterday’s (which was an epic travel day from LAX to DUB then caravaning to this lush farm in Ireland, where we are surrounded by rolling green hills, cows and sheep grazing, and clouds resting atop mountains in the distance. It is as green as you imagine.

Ten hours by plane, four by car
To Killarney we traveled far
The girls made a fuss,
Matt tried not to cuss,
Luna threw up, her forehead is marred.

And for today:

After jet leg and traveler’s rest
Yesterdays’s spirits we tried to best
In the town we explored a castle
The children were not too much hassle
Dined at home to avoid any stress.

I’ll try to keep going!