I want to start off this little recap by stressing that I know I am privileged. I have no doubt. I have had a wonderful year, full of friends and adventures. The world felt like it had begun to disintegrate in 2025, and yet I found a universe of hope in it, too.

I had a packed year. In some ways, I look back and wonder how I got anything done at all! I got to visit many amazing cities all over: Anaheim, DC, Miami, New York, (a secret location), Vienna, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and Auckland. 10 big city trips in one year? I’ll probably never top this. And honestly? It was a bit more traveling than I would have wanted. But it was lovely. And Shelby got to tag along for all of these trips, at least in part, except for Miami (which we had both already done together years ago).

But 2025 was good. I think any one of these sections below would have been a highlight of a year, so 2025 was really just dozens of years in one.

The early months: Pure horror (and SIGCSE crushing my soul)

Jan - Apr

I won’t write too much here, but the first two months of 2025 were painful. Trump taking office, the cuts to research, ramping up ICE raids, the overall social chaos that ensued… it was not good. It still isn’t good (and in many ways worse), but it came as a bit of a shock at the time.

And SIGCSE happened in Pittsburgh (that’s the Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education). There was an all-day workshop on accessibility and I got my admission paid for by CMU because I had a short talk accepted. I was starry-eyed to be able to attend. Many people I have looked up to for years were there. These were the people I had hoped to come into community with (transitioning from industry to academia was hard, but transitioning from visualization to accessibility has been even harder).

My talk was okay. I was nervous talking about how I am a practitioner who researchers with practitioners, and how education matters for my work. I am not sure it landed with that crew (again: accessibility folks are lovely, but getting “in” with the academic community is quite hard when you’re not totally aligned with them already). I could tell it didn’t land because not a single person was remotely interested in talking about practitioners learning. My takeaway is that “CS education” is very clearly, culturally speaking, about formal education and not all of the other settings where education takes place (for better or worse). I also won’t unpack my insecurities here, but I had a conversation that filled me with so much impostor syndrome that I was physically depressed for a whole month after.

But the real theme of the day emerged as time went on. The big concerns for everyone were about federal cuts to research and the impending Title II changes for public universities. (So, in some way it really wasn’t a big deal whether or not my talk was informative/helpful/etc. That doesn’t mean my impostor syndrome didn’t flare up, though! I felt very “corporate” and like some kind of non-academic in that space.)

Adobe + Quansight collaborations

Jan - Mar

Good news about the first two months? My collabs with Adobe and Quansight were both going really well. At Adobe, we were working on some neat stuff for their open source library. At Quansight, we had just openly published our 200+ page evaluation of Bokeh’s accessibility. That report is a big deal. Nobody has openly shared something like that before, which is pretty special.

Travel: Anaheim for talks at CSUN, finally good donuts, and some much-needed sun

Mar 10 - 16

CSUN happened. (CSUN is short for the California State University of Northridge’s Assistive Technology Conference.) I gave a talk with the Highsoft folks (with Ted Gies from Elsevier) on our work making visualizations more personalizeable. This was the pre-paper-talk talk on our work I dubbed “softerware.” I think it went well (at the very least we all had fun). I also gave a short talk about my work in a session on making diagrams more accessible.

Stevie Wonder makes an appearance almost every year! I didn't take a photo personally, so credit to this shot goes to Paul Adams over on linkedin.

And Shelby and I finally had good donuts, after years of not being able to enjoy some together. Trust me when I say that Dunkin has destroyed good donut culture everywhere except the west coast. God bless Los Angeles for holding strong against the sloppification of donut culture. (For the record, we got a wide variety from the Donuttery in Huntington Beach. 10/10 donuts.)

Real donuts, not that hog wash garbage they sell at Dunkin or whatever crap seems to be popular at those places that sell over-topped donuts for 6+ USD each. These were *classic* and *utterly flawless*. I hope to go back someday.

Thesis proposal (I passed!)

Apr 18

I passed my thesis proposal! Woo! (5 days before my birthday, a present to myself hehe.)

I had fun, despite having pretty cerebral engagement by my committee (Huge thanks to Dominik Moritz, Patrick Carrington, Ken Holstein, Jen Mankoff, and Tamara Munzner).

One of the best parts was “camping out” and completely unplugging in order to get my thesis proposal written in time. I don’t have pics from this part (because of the unplugging), but it was very nice. I hope to turn this into a tradition for future writing sessions, if I can. Next time, maybe a cabin on the top of a mountain or something would be nice.

Travel: Washington DC for a talk at UMD and a very good day off

Apr 29 - May 1

Joel over at UMD’s HCIL invited me to give a proto job talk, which I very much enjoyed. Everyone was generous with feedback, even critical. I had another bout of impostor syndrome here because I was asked (in regards to my mention of my tech industry funding), “why not just get a job in industry? why work in academia?” It’s a hard question to wrestle with, especially when the temptation to return always exists (and especially with the current state of things right now).

But academia does think a bit too highly of itself. The desire for a “pure” environment where people pursue theory and knowledge unbounded by profit or military incentives is something we would have in a healthy environment. But we don’t have that! And asking someone (whose work is very much not profit-driven, like myself) why they don’t get a job that “makes money” in industry is essentially asking someone why they are doing the work they are doing at all. (Accessibility work is something that many companies want, but few are willing to fully fund for themselves. I cannot do the work that I want to do full-time in an industry role, unless it is explicitly set up for “foundational” and not “product” focused research and innovation.)

Shelby and I also enjoyed a great evening + following day in Washington DC. We did museums and then poked around Georgetown (and went to a really lovely cat cafe!!).

Pycon in Pittsburgh

May 16

Gave a wonderful talk, with Pavithra from Quansight, at Pycon US, which was in Pittsburgh this year. It was great to talk to the Python community about accessibility and visualization, which is something that the Python ecosystem (writ-large) has not really considered.

You can catch our Pycon talk on youtube, if you want.

Travel: Miami for a talk at Outlier, board games, and cuban bakeries

June 9 - 15

I was invited down to Outlier in Miami, both for a talk on Softerware (this time expanding from my CSUN talk which was what we did into why and now what).

Outlier was packed with amazing speakers. I am honored to have been one of the ones who could steal the stage. You can find my Softerware talk on Youtube.

For context: Outlier is the premier, boutique industry conference for data visualization. In the past we had Eyeo and Tapestry, which were both centered on non-corporate explorations of data visualization. For the most part, this allowed the community to really experiment, celebrate, and innovate in beautiful ways. We don’t quite have that anymore, but Outlier is close.

I had a paid trip to fly down to record our course introductions for the Open Visualization Academy (which opens Jan 31st!) the day before Outlier started. Then I stayed 3 extra days after recording, so I could attend Outlier. The Outlier folks paid a small speaker’s fee, so in the end it was basically a free trip (since the fee helped with food and the extra stay).

I played a lot of board games during the in-between moments of sessions, and near the end at Alberto Cairo’s house. This, and the unbelievably cheap and delicious Cuban baked goods, were the highlight of the trip without a doubt. Alan Wilson brought some lovely games that he would pull out between sessions (or when we wanted to skip).

Get this: two sandwiches, an empanada, and a huge tray of curly fries was less than 12 USD after tax. Unreal value. A mountain of food. I would be eating here constantly if I lived in Miami.

I have been playing board games online (on tabletop simulator, mostly) now with Alberto and Alan for several years. It was a delight to play with them for the first time in person.

I won the match, but to be fair nobody new that my faction benefitted the most from a table of people who haven't played before and were nervous to take action. Also: Andy and Alberto here are micro-celebs in visualization, so this was a pretty star-studded cast, if I do say so.

Summer of commissioned art, bbq, making an open course for OVA, Dutch babies, “family stuff,” designing a tabletop game, and Elden Ring co-op

Jun - Aug

The summer was packed. For Shelby’s birthday, I commissioned art of Shishky and Pizzelle. We had a neighborhood pig roast (and a huge storm hit, it was amazingly messy and fun). I put together my course for the Open Visualization Academy. I baked many Dutch babies, for some reason. (You can check out my insta for the deets here, it was all documented.)

Illuminated Icons of Saint Shishky and Blessed Knight Pizzelle.

But the biggest thing that happened was that Shelby had a major surgery (rather unexpected and serious, but it went well). I won’t talk about it here on the blog, but it was pretty much life-altering (in a good way). At the time, it was quite stressful, but the surgeon did a perfect job and her recovery went without a hitch.

For the recovery, I took off 4 weeks to help her with everything you could think of. It was a blast and in some ways, I think I’d be a decent caregiver. But in the meantime (while she was recovering in the early stages especially), I couldn’t get an ounce of work done. At the time, I was still pretty racked with nerves.

So I built a little tabletop game to keep me distracted. We played it, it was a blast (and I even started coding it up for fun too).

My tabletop game prototype for my little project I'm calling "Hero's Wizard" where you play a wizard who is supporting a main character, The Hero. You have to assemble a crew of followers, navigate a 3-Act story along a random path of decision points, and then destroy (or join) the evil forces that threaten the free world. It's based roughly on Slay the Spire's core mechanics (random, rogue-like, deck builder) but there is a light fantasy narrative at play, and it's a spell builder and party builder more than a deck builder, strictly speaking.

And then we installed mods for Elden Ring (that allowed co-op without invasions) and played the entire base game and DLC together. It was stupendous and might go down as one of my favorite memories playing a video game (second to the greatest: showing her Fallout New Vegas during our first Winter Moon in 2013 but beating out our first date together, which was playing FF7).

Shelby started a tradition where we would pose like Ginyu Force characters after defeating a major boss together. I cackled every time (because I was always so focused on the fight that I'd forget she is already posing the moment it dies) before joining her for our victory emote. (This one is after defeating Malenia, which we did on our first try lmaooo.)

Travel: New York City for a talk at Smashing Conf, Broadway, Pizza, and getting an exclusive tour of Barnard College

Oct 6 - 9

I am quite fortunate this year to have a paid trip to New York to speak at Smashing Conf alongside my brilliant former co-worker from Visa, Lilach (also known as Layla). Visa did a big push this year and open-sourced the rest of their design system as well as over-hauled many of the patterns, materials, resources, and approach for the Visa Chart Library.

I believe it was Srini or someone else who posted to Linkedin, which gained traction in the larger design community, and after I posted how proud of everyone I was, eventually the legendary Vitaly Friedman reached out to me to ask if I would be willing to speak about the accessibility work I did for Visa years before. Of course, I said yes but with an important stipulation (since I was no longer at Visa): I then schemed a situation where Layla and I could give a talk together and each get a little trip to New York out of it, too. (We wanted to get Jaime in on it as well, but alas, logistics couldn’t work out!)

Our talk went well. Layla had outrageously good slides and our Q/A after with Vitaly was really thoughtful and well done. The staff were lovely during coordination and the event itself, and it was a wonderful chance to meet many other folks, too. Being able to speak at Smashing was an honor, and I hope that in the future they consider inviting me back for a solo talk on accessibility and visualization (and let me dig deeper!).

There is a tradition where Vitaly jokes with the speakers before you give your talk, and it is almost always improv. Once the recording goes live, I need to recall this moment to see if I was even remotely funny.

I brought Shelby along and we had a blast. We enjoyed a Broadway show, Death Becomes Her (amazing) and had a wide range of good food (including the famous L’Industrie Pizza in Brooklyn). We met with Cindy Bennett for dinner (so great to see her) as well as met up for coffee with Fatima Koli, an aquaintance-turned-immediate-bestie who gave us a little tour of her lab, working space, and the faculty lounge at Barnard College. Note: getting anywhere on Columbia required permission, they have guards posted all over! So we got to “sneak” in (albeit officially in the proper way) and get a tour. I applied for a faculty position there just a couple days before, so it also felt extra special.

Fall of 24 job applications, baking, walks, and co-teaching visualization

Sep - Dec

The Fall was packed, outside of our special trips. I applied to 24 faculty jobs (which is no joke, these things require a non-trivial amount of writing per job when you apply) and co-taught Data Visualization with Dominik.

Shelby and I had some lovely walks while the weather was perfect (in Pittsburgh there are about 2 to 3 weeks in Fall that are perfect weather combined with stunning seasonal beauty). And I also started taking baking more seriously, re-learning all the basics from scratch and working my way through Forkish’s outstanding book on bread baking Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast. In fact, as of writing this blog: it is currently Jan 16th at 4:22 in the morning and I am folding a poolish white bread to take into the DIG Lab.

Some poolish bread I am proud of. The light fermentation smells amazing (too bad you can't smell photos).

Baking bread has been a beautiful way for me to re-connect and re-invent something I’ve been doing for over 20 years. My breads always lacked a certain spark. When I started baking back in 2006 at my second job in high school (I was a doughboy at the French bakery La Vie en Rose in my hometown, Anacortes), the loaves were robust, with a thick crust, and had a hearty maillard darkness to them. My bread at home never looked that good.

But this year, we got a 6.5 qt Dutch oven, which helps immensely. And I’m still only about halfway through Forkish’s book, but I’ve certainly improved my technique far beyond where I’ve ever been because of it. It’s a great book.

Travel: Vienna for a workshop + 2 workshop talks at IEEE VIS, fine dining, and many good friends

Oct 28 - Nov 8

I traveled to Vienna for IEEE VIS and Shelby and I took a pre-conference vacation beforehand. It was an outstanding trip. Vienna is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen and we had pretty great food there (they have a lovely Japanese food scene that speckles the city). We also had a particular pizza (a “carbonara” pizza) in the napoletana style of crust, combined with two amazing desserts (one was a biscoff tiramisu, which felt illegally good). Over the course of the trip, I had that non-traditional pizza and tiramisu 4 times (seriously!) because it was such an easy suggestion when picking a place to meet up with someone.

Lovely pizza, the kind that you can't really get delivered (best eaten fresh). The one furthest in this photo is the "carbonara" which had some cuts of salty ham and a white sauce. It was delicious, with a smokey and deep umami taste.

Probably one of the best desserts I've ever had. I feel like the biscoff on top is cheating, but it was unbelievably good.

We had an impromptu night where we failed to find the location of one of our reservations and instead stumbled on a dead-end cloister of an old monastery with practically no lighting at all. A kindly monk (who I am calling a monk only for the sake of having a more-fitting character in our story at this location), informed us that our destination was a painful 10 minute walk around the block and up a nearby street. Instead, there was a warm glow of light on the other side of the cloister where a small, nice looking restaurant sat. We decided to walk up and see if we could get seats. To our surprise, we saw the Michelin mark as we approached (and I later found out it was, indeed, a Michelin guide restaurant). So, we decided to do fine dining that night, even though it wasn’t on the itinerary for the trip. They had seats (miraculous) because a party had cancelled. We had a lovely time and the serendipity of it felt quite special.

Shelby went home as VIS officially started. And during the conference, seeing friends and colleagues gave me life. Our accessibility workshop was packed, both my talks (a paper and closing “keynote”) were quite fun (and I should probably record the state of the art keynote I did, it was pretty good this year).

Me, giving a short talk about our little paper on LLMS, bias, and visualization descriptions.

A standout conversation I had was seeing Alex Kale and Arvind Satyanarayan both speaking at a little table together and walking up to join them. (I’m sure neither of them know this, but they’re both two of the small handful of people I look up to the most in our community. They’re fiercely curious and generous with their time and ideas; a good combination to have.)

We immediately started on one of my favorite topics: theory. In all my PhD, I had hoped for more conversations like these. And they happened here and there, in our design mini course all of us PhD students took or in some sidebar with Jordan or Cella or Franky. But to have a visualization-focused dive into theory with two people who I look up to? It cured my brain.

All the pent-up impostor syndrome I had gained while applying to jobs, getting CHI rejections, and my two encounters earlier in the year (SIGCSE AND HCIL) washed away. I realized that unless I am horribly mistaken in my ability to talk with people (and horribly mistaken in how I think that conversation went), I’ll probably always have a place in this little slice of academia.

We weren’t pretentious, but in the wrong company any one of us could have come across that way. But it was a cool glass of water to un-pretentiously and freely talk about topics like Alex’s outstanding latest short paper, or what I was calling the “humility” of generative theories of HCI research (building on a thread Arvind first discussed). I genuinely feel like we were all using our brain cells and our neurons were actively growing together. It was lovely.

And after VIS, I thought to myself, “maybe I’ll be able to make it…” I have some really decent friends here in this community now, too. So yeah, I will probably be okay.

Jonathan Zong and I. He's one of my favorite humans in the world and I'm glad we get to work at this little intersection of accessibility and visualization together.

The flu! I caught the flu.

Nov 8 - 12

Just after my trip, lo and behold I didn’t feel well. My flight home felt extra uncomfortable. I took a combined covid + flu rapid test at home and (to my great surprise) tested positive for the flu. I was vaccinated! I thought I would be fine. But, as I later found out, the variant that was going around was especially bad. Good thing I was vaccinated, or it would have been much worse for me. I was a little sick, very groggy, but overall okay. I had it bad for about 4 days and then just a cough for about 10 more. I didn’t test positive again after the first day and never had a temp, so I think it was really mild for me.

But as someone who is immuno-compromised at times, getting sick can be quite scary! Luckily, my first flu since probably 2010 or so, didn’t go badly.

Travel: A job talk and the best smash burgers ever

Nov 18 - 20

Well, I had my first in-person interview for a faculty position later that month. It was so wonderful. I can’t say where, but I think it went well and had a great time. I gave my first official job talk, which I think was alright. I definitely still need work, but it wasn’t bad.

And at about that time, I had found a mythical-tier smashburger joint 2 hours north of Pittsburgh in Erie, PA in a gas station. It’s called Bro Man’s Sammiches and takes the title of best smash I’ve ever had. It was a perfect date, too. It felt totally random and the food and service (at the gas station, lest I remind you) was flawless. That may have been the most American meal I’ve ever had. It ruled.

Look at the paper-thin lace on this! Crispy, juicy, perfection.

Travel: Australia for 4 dev conferences in 3 cities (and making a lifetime of memories)

Dec 1 - 12

Ah, a lifetime has been lived in December alone. YOW! Conferences reached out to me back in the summer (or spring?) to take part in a 12-day, 3 city “tour” across Australia, all expenses paid, with some 20 other speakers, to give talks at their developer conferences.

For context, YOW! is the premier developer conference in Australia and has been running for a couple decades now.

Of course, I had to say “yes.” A paid tour like this is the stuff of legends. So on December 1st, I left home and on the 3rd arrived in Melbourne. We did Brisbane and Sydney after that as a small cohort of the same 20-something speakers. Many of us became good friends, and some folks I really do hope to stay in touch with as the years go by. I connected with the anti-AI radicals, the secret communists and socialists of the group, the not-so-secret D&D player, the micro-celeb podcaster, and all the coffee fanatics among us. It was a beautiful group of humans to travel with.

I have some hilarious, different action shots of me, on stage, talking. This one is probably the best "normal" one though.

I spent time with Larene and Damian (Damian works for YOW as their technical director), who are my overseas besties (we had tons of adventures back when I visited Melbourne in 2023 and I’ve been friends with Larene since 2019 or so). Damian also managed to loop me into doing a closing keynote (aka “locknote”) at DDD Brisbane, which is one of my favorite talks I’ve ever given, “Tool-making, for good and evil,” which you can watch below:

(The talk was a bit raw, but the spirit of what is there I hope to really build out over the years. It was my most-complimented talk ever. People seemed to really love it.)

On the 10th, Shelby arrived in Sydney and the real fun began. She took a day to settle in and then on the next, I played hookie for a day from the conference so we could adventure a bit. We had unreal food and I spoiled her with some really nice shoes. Also (thanks to Sarah from the YOW! crew for inspo), I bought Shelby a nice outfit and had it shipped to our hotel in time for our double date doing fine dining on the Sydney waterfront with Larene and Damian. The clothes, shoes, and a surprise dessert at dinner were all part of my anniversary gift to her. We made it past our 13th year! It’s all good luck from here on out.

Our international besties.

I posted a bit more about this night over on Instagram, but the summary can be thus: it was perfect, in every way.

Travel: Winter-mooning in Auckland, New Zealand

Dec 12 - 18

For context here, Shelby and I have had a tradition since our wedding that we call the “winter moon.” This was, of course, just our “honeymoon” the first time we did it. But when we got married, I actually took the whole month of January off, so we could just enjoy each other. We had our wedding reception some 2 weeks after our ceremony and after our “official” honeymoon trip (we took the train down to Disney and back for Christmas). But that month was perfect - a peek into what life could be like whenever we both retire and decide to just laze about for the rest of our lives (if such a thing happens). My friend, Stephen Van Etten, first told me about this strategy for a honeymoon: you act exactly how you want your “garden of eden” to be: whatever a perfect life with them will look like once you’ve figured it all out.

But we evolved the tradition into “winter-mooning” where we will often spend an extended period of time just enjoying each other, completely. Maybe we take a little trip to my friend Erickson’s family cabin on an icy lake? Maybe we play a new video game from start to finish? Or maybe we go to Auckland, New Zealand!

After Australia, we took a “real” vacation in Auckland for 6 days. It was, of course, far too short. I would have liked another week at least (we didn’t even get to Hobbiton or the south island at all!). 2 other couples from YOW, Katharine and Aaron and Roy and Anouk, both did a south island adventure in camper vans (all 3 of us couples planned these trips separately, which is quite funny to me).

But the highlights of the trip were 2-fold: first, that Auckland has, per capita, probably some of the best food we’ve ever had. We didn’t miss! Every meal we ate was top tier. I had the second-best smash burger I’ve ever had, we had the best fried chicken we’ve ever had (samoan-korean fried chicken), incredible dumplings, the best cocktails we’ve ever had (top 1, 2, and 3 slots all taken by Auckland), and the best pour-over coffee I’ve ever had (we did a tasting at a place with an award winning barista).

The second highlight was our day-trip doing wineries and a dinner date on Waiheke island. That was magical. We concluded that wine tours are massively overrated and probably something that only bored, wealthy boomers do when they need a break from whatever cruise they’re planning next. But it was still a fun thing to try for the first time. And our dinner was utter magic. I frantically tried to find a place for us for dinner a few nights before we arrived. I wanted it to be nice, didn’t have to be fine dining or anything, but the goal was to catch the sun setting over the pacific. I wanted to see the water from wherever we chose to eat. And we got fine dining and a sunset view.

We also got a bonus: the winery (and restaurant) is called Mudbrick and they had a little cat, named “Mud” who was a stray who showed up one day and now occasionally graces the guests while they enjoy their night of fancy food and drinks. Mud was an angel and easily made the already perfect night ascend into the realms of the sublime. I couldn’t have planned that the restaurant’s favorite stray cat would not only show up but then choose to lay near us the whole night!

I was reading elevation maps and checking tide tables and sunset times to get this little sunset meal experience! Worth it.

One of the funniest parts of the whole trip was post-dinner we had ferry tickets to ride back to Auckland on the last reserved ferry for the night, but the cabbies on the little island were unbelievably chaotic. We called a cab, 20 minutes later (no cab), called a different company for a different cab. And then another 20 minutes later our first cab arrived! We barely made the ferry (had to run on full stomachs across the dark docks, while pretty toasty, to catch our little ferry boat at the last minute!). It was a blast.

Final notes

2025, despite being arguably one of the best complete years of our lives, was pretty difficult in many ways. I had some of my biggest doubts about myself and this PhD this year, nearly ready to quit at a few points. I haven’t felt proud of work that I’ve done in quite a long time, possibly since my time at Visa. Baking bread and making a tabletop game, despite being small subjects in this blog post, reminded me that I can make things I’m proud of. I had many paper rejections this year and am filled with immense dread thinking (at this moment, early in the morning on Jan 16th) that not only is there a possibility that I won’t get a job this year in academia, but I might not be able to get an industry job, either. Freelancing would be a hard life. But 2025 did help me with this: at Smashing and YOW I met people whose whole thing has been freelancing, some for 30+ years. And I know with confidence that there is plenty of work out there to be done. So even in the “worst” case scenario, we will probably be okay.

Deciding we wanted to move overseas (fairly confidently, might I add) and then discovering that faculty jobs overseas (especially in Europe) are nearly impossible to get straight out of a PhD, was relatively depressing. There’s a strange lack of faith and trust in people across Europe, compared to America.

Our fine dining in Austria, and our Austria trip in general, was a bit eye-opening. For context, when Shelby and I do fine dining, we like to charm our servers. We want to befriend them by the end of the night. It’s a fun game, which I highly recommend doing whenever you go out to fine dining (by this, I mostly mean where you pick the “chef’s menu and pairing” and get 5-7 courses of anywhere between 7-20 dishes, combined with wine or sake or whatever). But we befriended the server quickly, they were easy going and interested in America. They were born and raised in Vienna and huge into football (the European kind) but also a fan of the Steelers (hilarious) and American football. When we asked why, they said that it was because there weren’t “blood” rivalries, like you find with European football. “In Europe,” they explained, “you can’t hate the Italians or British or whoever, despite atrocities of the past. But you can hate their sports teams. Americans don’t understand this. But here, you might not have your children wear certain colors, because that may represent a team you hate and your whole family has hated. It’s generational.” I pondered if this was why everyone in Europe seems allergic to color in fashion; they’re always just in blacks, greys, or tans.

But that conversation made me recognize something: not that “young” America can’t be full of generational hate, like our Austrian server seemed to believe, but rather that there are advantages to a country with a young story. We aren’t bound to traditions of hate that date back 1000 years, even though hate is here (and boy, is it violently strong right now). But we can beat the hate of our present day in ways that the Viennesse who stop their children from wearing violet or green might not believe in.

Food also reminded me that America is actually awesome. Pittsburgh has a “low” variety and quality of cuisines, in my opinion, and yet utterly smokes most major cities in Europe. Some places in Europe do specific things well, but what I’ve learned is that as you travel, you begin to recognize the genuine beauty of America’s youth as a country and culture. Just as one example: We aren’t afraid of Asian food, like they are in Norway. Believe me, I was shocked to hear from folks at Highsoft (when we were there in 2024) who had never tried the local Thai restaurant, which was one of only 4 restaurants in the small village of Vik (and 1 of those restaurants is a gas station!). “Really? You’ve never tried it?” I thought to myself.

The willingness to break from monocultural “tradition” and explore the beauty of someone else’s culture is deeply engrained in me, as an American. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, we had waves of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean immigration over our short post-settler history. That combined with present-day migrant, seasonal workers from Mexico each year and our food growing up was amazing. The cuisines that immigrant communities brought, adapted, and experimented with pretty much established in my head this assumption that complex cuisines are part of life and the evolution of cuisine is more important than some fantasy about “authentic” or “true” traditional experiences. I simply took for granted how special it is to live somewhere that hasn’t spent hundreds of years doing things the same way. We are constantly remaking cuisine, all the time. Everywhere in the US, it’s our immigrant communities who push the boundaries of “American” food. We are all better off for it, whether our families have been here 100 years or just showed up.

The final thing that made me appreciate the US, and in a way I’ve never done before, was a post on social media of a mundane, but beautiful, picture of New York City during sunrise. (This, of course, was posted in the midst of everything the Federal Government and ICE is doing right now.) The post simply said something along the lines of, “cities always outlast their empires.”

And I thought of Vienna. My family, as far back as I can trace it, left the Austrio-Hungarian empire for the US in the late 1800s, after slavery in the US was abolished and people started heading west. My family were fleeing the mountains of now-Slovakia, when the encroaching pogroms of the east and the weakening of the empire they curently were living under made dashed hopes for a safe and bright future.

And originally, I used to think to myself that perhaps I was pursuing a “family tradition” where we bail on an empire before it falls and seek refuge elsewhere. But Vienna still stands, despite their empires. New York City survived the Dutch and the British, it will absolutely outlive the United States. The cities matter. The people within those cities matter. Empires? Empires don’t matter. Empires come and go.

A well-traveled friend in the PhD program said to me at a going-away party for another friend, “there is fascism everywhere” (or something equivalent). He said this because I told him I was hoping for a research faculty position abroad.

And it fully dawned on me: I shouldn’t keep running because I think fascism is here and will destroy us. This next phase of our lives should be about growing roots and cultivating a garden. I need to move somewhere I want to believe in, rather than always running from something bad. Not from, but towards.

I would rather fight for a community with the fierceness that the Twin Cities are fighting ICE right now than continue to run. The US has wonderful people in it and fantastic cities. The concept of “America” and the utter depravity of our federal government cannot even fathom how to desecrate the sanctity of everyday life. What is beautiful here will endure.

It is probably for this reason (that our beautiful, little diverse pockets all over the US are holy ground) that the federal government, racists, white supremacists, and the worst people among us are so incensed. I’d be mad too, if I knew no love and witnessed an untouchable, beautiful, immortal good whose very existence exposed how necrotized my body had become. Fascists are all wanna-be necromancers, rotting away, worshipping fantasies of bones and flesh they’ve conjured up in their minds.

In any case, here’s to hoping I land somewhere wonderful this coming year. Stay tuned.

My final note is this: I couldn’t have had this year without the PhD. The flexibility it afford me was exactly why I left an industry role. I’m sure I’ll look fondly back on 2025 for many years. I’m glad I survived it.