I'll never forget 2016—the year I met the love of my life, welcomed my twin boys into this world, climbed Mt. Rainier, bought my first house, built an engine from scratch, opened a Cuban food truck, beat pneumonia, paid off my parking tickets, went back to night school, trained my dog to fetch me beer, got my fishing license, was elected the secretary and treasurer of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., tried crab, couch-surfed through Venezuela, parachuted out of a moving plane, threw out the opening pitch at a Dodgers game, filed a patent, quit drinking, sold my family peanut-butter recipe to Whole Foods, filed for a recount in Wisconsin, opened a Roth I.R.A., reached five hundred thousand Periscope followers, rode a camel across the Gobi, reprogrammed Pinterest in Java, made partner, got really into fermenting, fixed a cracked iPad screen for my former linguistics professor, finished “Infinite Jest,” churned my own butter, invented a new type of hat, hacked the D.N.C., watched every Woody Allen movie with the director’s commentary on, lucid-dreamed, relearned metalworking, became fluent in Portuguese, tampered with the smoke detector on a Delta flight, informed the attendant of my misconduct, creamed corn, deserted my station in Afghanistan, timed cargo trains between Texas and Oklahoma with a stopwatch, bled less, blew glass, relaunched Chris Pratt’s career as an action star, declared rubella eradicated in the Americas, picked up the accordion, got over my fear of water snakes, met an Irishman I wasn’t related to, umpired every Little League game in Pasadena for an entire summer, rallied for higher tariffs on Gulf exports, organized a surprise Mumford & Sons concert, inherited a controlling stake in Netflix, cultivated yams, opened a vegan-leather shoe boutique in SoHo, directed “La La Land,” reupholstered all the chairs in my sister’s home, devastated a fishing community in Malaysia, opened a nonprofit to distribute universal remotes, changed the star settings on my Yahoo Mail inbox, sold a narrative remake of “March of the Penguins,” redesigned the American yield sign, adopted an angsty tween named Mel, gave up grapes, edited a bimonthly “Men’s Health” column, negotiated an alternative to Obamacare and signed up twelve million uninsured millennials, broke up with Adele...
by Zack Bornstein , New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Anne Rippy/Getty
