And Finally

February is the worst month and everybody knows it. The awkward number of days, the wretched weather. Even the way it’s spelled is irritating. Yet just when you think your raging Seasonal Affective Disorder will get the best of you, February, of all months, offers a break in the bleakness that’s been indomitable since New Year’s. It’s absurd, hokey and best of all, like the Pennsylvania Dutch who invented it, immune to politics. Which is why Groundhog Day should be a national holiday instead of just a regional one. Groundhog Day seemed like a big deal when I was a kid.

As we enter 2024 with trepidation, let us take comfort in the fact that this year’s “Colors of the Year” are actual colors. I’m an interior-design enthusiast who takes color very seriously. Over the course of seven years, I agonized over narrowing down dozens of saved paint samples to just five shades with which to paint the walls of a hypothetical cabin. Monet and I are simpatico — color is our “day-long obsession, joy and torment.” The online algorithms are well aware of my interest in interior decorating ideas, which may explain my impression that paint manufacturers put out a new “Color of the Year” every couple of months.

You think the Christmas season starts when the Christmas decorations entirely take over Hobby Lobby at the first of November. Or the night of Thanksgiving when, full of turkey, you make your first gift purchase on Amazon. Or for us Christians, the first Sunday in December when kids bug us for that piece of chocolate and we begin reading about the birth of Christ. But we all know Christmas started earlier, perhaps back in October, when your wife began to turn her heart toward the Hallmark channel. Here is some advice from a happily married man of more than two decades: you won’t defeat Hallmark this year. You can only hope to contain it.

Have you heard “mid?” The very-online no longer call something “bad” or “dumb” or “crap” or “a shit-festooned barnacle attached to the culture.” They call it “mid.” As in “middling.” In one of the nontroversies that regularly grip Twitter, TMZ reported that someone had said “Jennifer Connelly (in the Nineties) was way more attractive than Zendaya is today — and she was considered pretty mid on the hotness scale.” Legions rose to defend the obviously defensible Nineties hotness of Ms. Connelly: A stupid person is no longer a nitwit, but a “midwit”; the undiscerning eye says Jennifer Connelly’s looks are “mid.” Unlike traditional English slang, which comes from letters to Winston Churchill (“OMG!

Lately, Lord Queso von Taco has been really into Barn Hunt. Lord Queso von Taco is a Boston Terrier who lives in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, with two other Boston Terriers and their owner, a graphic designer named Ashley Peterson. I know about Queso’s existence because I own his mother, Briar, a retired and celebrated show dog in her own right. So we follow Queso’s athletic exploits quite closely. He’s been a champion “dock diver” for a few years now, which brought him to a talent scout’s attention, which led to several TV commercials, including, most prominently, a recent Christmas advert for Takis. Nothing will keep LQ off the docks. But he loves Barn Hunt, too.

You are stranded in the middle of an unforgiving desert, and must take refuge from a sandstorm before your Hit Points deplete any further. You find a rock outcropping — after a successful Perception check, a false wall reveals a sprawling cavern. Inside is a long-lost tomb. There are markings: could this be the dreaded Dark Speech of that necromancy cult the innkeeper kept warning you about? You have no idea, sadly. You spent your downtime trying to seduce the elven serving wench instead of reading the innkeeper’s copy of Desert Cults: Their Languages. Trying and failing, mind you — as a dwarven paladin, your Charisma score just wasn’t up to the job. No idea what I’m going on about? Count yourself among an ever-shrinking minority.

On Christmas Eve it began to snow. No one believed it at first; Christmas snow is very rare here and usually the hot air from our nation’s capital a few miles away keeps it too warm. But it was Christmas Eve and it was snowing, late in the afternoon before all the light was gone, a snowglobe snow that stopped us in our bustlings and meltdowns and general atmosphere of excited dread. It was just magical. The children were old enough not to count on snow and young enough to think of it as entirely fitting. And they were old enough to know some songs and young enough not to be embarrassed all that much by their parents. “Let’s go caroling,” I said. We’d unpacked the Santa hats; they and various wreaths of those silver sleigh bells were already lost around the house.

I’ve never been one for doing what I’m told. My first cigarette came soon after a family member voiced his disgust at “cancer sticks.” I have a DIY tattoo on my finger, which came after giving one to my friend with the same needle. In high school, the uniform code included “natural hair,” so obviously I dyed mine blue. My defense — “it’s the color of the sky!” — only led to harsher punishment. So, naturally, after being told not to get a nose job, that’s exactly what I did. I’ve never understood why those who have had nose jobs are so shy about it. They’re noticeable, painful, life-changing and fairly expensive.

There exists a magical place where not only are you free to identify as who or whatever you wish, but you’re also encouraged to adopt a persona that defies reality. You aren’t restricted to the narrow LGBQTIA+ choices our unimaginative liberal elites have imposed, either. Nay, in this ultra-diverse, inclusive land, you’re expected to dream beyond this century — this planet even — and transition uninhibited into whatever strikes your fantasy. No, not the “metaverse”; I’m referring to the time-honored American tradition of the Renaissance Faire, where history buffs, fantasy nerds, down-and-out actors, and normal suburban families converge to create a giant freakshow that is innocent fun at its best.

How many of you know a baby called Margot? I’ve encountered three in the last couple of months. They all looked more or less the same too. Presumably it’s twenty years too late to blame The Royal Tenenbaums — so perhaps Ms. Robbie is responsible? There’s a lot I love about America, and in many respects this country has improved on the systems and traditions of my own — but one adjustment I cannot get behind is the frequency with which you guys deploy last names as first names. Many want to show appreciation for their favorite president, hence the number of kids called Reagan and Jefferson — and the lack of ones called Biden and Trump. But there’s something bleakly corporate about the result.

There is a property on the outskirts of my little Central Pennsylvania town that I’ve always thought was a junkyard. At last month’s township supervisors’ meeting, I learned the couple of acres bestrewn with broken-down old vehicles, rusting tractor trailers, an off-kilter mobile home, some dilapidated campers, scattered mechanical accessories, a dumpster and a trampoline is actually someone’s home. “It used to be a beautiful neighborhood ’til those rat-nest people started living up there,” a neighbor told the board. “This is bullshit!” Meanwhile, in a neighboring township, a newly elected board of supervisors has made it their mission to crack down on junk.

East Austin is a Proust’s madeleine of a neighborhood: picture a zombified resurrection of Brooklyn’s 2000s Peak Hipster moment with a veneer of Instagrammable gloss on top. If an aging millennial cast a spell that encased just under ten square miles of Texas in a bubble made up of his happiest memories, this would be the result. Williamsburg, NYC circa 2008 was, as the zoomers now say, a whole vibe. Except that the zoomers did not say this, not then, because they were still in diapers. This was a millennial moment: we were still in our twenties then, clad in American Apparel-brand basics made of cotton so thin it was practically transparent, not yet cursed with middle-aged pudge. The millennial infestation was thickest on the ground in gentrifying Brooklyn.

When I heard that long lines had begun forming to get into Veselka after Russia invaded Ukraine, I almost rolled my eyes. I’ve been patronizing the restaurant, in the heart of New York City’s Ukrainian Village, for years, and there’s often a queue — at the height of brunch, the line can stretch for a block. But there’s no denying it’s seen an uptick in traffic as New Yorkers aware of the brutal images from Bucha and Mariupol want to feel they’re doing something to help. “Eat borscht, stand with Ukraine” reads a sign; the restaurant is donating all proceeds from sales of its hearty beet soup to Razom for Ukraine, a nonprofit. The Ukrainian Village, or Little Ukraine, is an enclave of Manhattan’s East Village.

I used to think I knew my hometown pretty well, after living here on and off for thirty years. And then I encountered my boyfriend, a third-year resident in the Emergency Department of the local hospital. It turns out, you only know a place as well as you know its emergencies. We met around July 4, when his days were filled with fireworks mishaps: burns, the occasional missing finger. “If I ever have children,” he said, with the tactical reserve of an early date, “no fireworks.” Fair enough! “And no ATVs,” he added. The four-wheelers and jury-rigged motorbikes that proliferate in the streets around my apartment every summer, annoying me with their noisy revving and curiously powerful stereo systems, also keep the ER busy with head traumas.

For most Latin Americans, who are themselves no strangers to sporting eccentricity, cricket remains a baffling proposition. The game is dismissed as being far too English and is often confused with croquet. Ignorance, however, does not preclude peculiar theories on how the game is played. I remember a Uruguayan diplomat attempting to explain the rules to a colleague who had recently arrived in London. “It’s very simple, che. All you need to know about el críquet is that when the ball hits those three little sticks, it’s a goal.” In the nineteenth century, cricket was played across Latin America. Matches were sometimes held in fantastic surroundings: Emperor Maximilian I donned his white flannels in the grounds of Mexico City’s neoclassical Chapultepec Castle.

Driving home through Kent the other day, I was struck by how much the topography has changed. When I was growing up there in the 1970s, first in Rolvenden and then in Hawkhurst, there were hop gardens. Today there are vineyards. I’m not sure Alfred Jingle would recognize the county about which he stated in Pickwick Papers: “Kent, sir — everybody knows Kent — apples, cherries, hops and women.” The apple and cherry orchards are not nearly as numerous as they were in either his day or mine, and the hop gardens have largely, although not entirely, disappeared. As for the women, I can’t vouch for their numbers, but I’m delighted to report they remain very easy on the eye. I loved picking hops.

The woman on the path has come to a dead stop. She’d been shuffling along in that bunched-up posture we all developed when we bought smartphones, a two-fingered salute to the millennia of evolution that managed to pull humans into an upright position. Now she’s staring, open-mouthed, at her surroundings. I rather enjoy the shocked faces of passersby who catch sight of us swimmers at the Serpentine Pond in Hyde Park in our flimsy suits as we lower ourselves into the cold water each morning. I look still more shocking when I get out. My skin turns from its normal skimmed-milk color to bright neon, as though it has been slapped. And it has in a way: when you first enter water thats barely above freezing, you do get a shock.