Hosted a small new years gathering of friends and watched fireworks from our rooftop (much to the chagrin of the doggo)
Attended my cousin’s wedding and live translated the vows for the attendees 🤍
Got some new ear piercings ✨
Started designing a card game—for fun and not work!
Got surprised on my birthday with a cake delivery from the boyfriend’s parents 🥹
Watched the Goofy Movie because the boyfriend had never watched it before
Co-founded a new game company, Jam & Tea Studios 🍵
Attended reunions for the boyfriend’s undergrad and witnessed the joys of the Triangle theater cult 🧡
Caught up with some old friends in New York (cheers to artichoke pizza and dive bars)
Read some books? For fun?? In this economy???
Attended Sakura-Con! 🌸
Wrote two plays in 48 hours with the ever amazing 14/48 festival
Attended a friend’s Taco Bell wedding in Vegas 🌮
Raised $3.15M in seed funding for our game studio 🎉
Wrote a new 10 minute play commissioned for a local theater company
Had a very nice article written in a local paper about me and said play
Performed as the Cat in the Hat in a production of Seussical the Musical 🐱🎩
Spent time with my parents who flew out to see the show 🥰
Got surprised by my boyfriend who went from zero to fairly conversational in Chinese in TWO MONTHS, all to be able to talk with my parents when they came to visit 🤯
Attended XDS in Vancouver, an outsourcing summit, where I met many wonderful art studios and ate too much* poutine (*jk no such thing)
Attended a deck party hosted by our start up lawyers, which if you told me I would have a start up or lawyers or decks that weren’t Magic ones in January I woulda said you had the wrong guy
Played a LOT of Baldur’s Gate 3
Wrote a short film overnight for a Chicago 48 hour film fest 🎬
Took an improv class with the boyfriend who is doing improv for the first time!
Got more involved with various local theater companies
Played a LOT of Magic with the boyfriend
Guest lectured for several university courses on game design and storytelling across media
Hired some fantastic folks for our game studio✨
Attended my friend’s beautiful wedding in Seattle
Discovered someone took this hilarious photo of me at said wedding
Met with 493 new people over the course of a year for work (!)
Went to Japan for the first time!
Ate the best ramen I’ve ever had in Kanazawa 🍜
Ate a lot of Coco Curry to collect a bunch of gacha cat keychains
Bought so many nerdy souvenirs 😊
Ran our first public playtest for our game company
Accidentally trolled the Keeper of the Holocron with a heinous lore question about the music they played in the cantina
Had a play of mine published in an anthology
Started working on writing a new musical with the fantastically talented composer Jake Hull!
Visited our families in AZ and Virginia Beach
Made a digital version of a family recipe book that we got for Christmas
Just under the wire—finished V2 of the card game to print and playtest in 2024 😎
Tonight we’re hosting 3-4 friends for another chill New Year’s Eve and making a few recipes from said family cookbook. A bit surreal to be closing out another year (and delighted our new years tiny hangout is now officially twice annual).
Honesty? It’s been a year of surprises.
Starting a new company and raising capital was probably the biggest new experience of the year, though “having your boyfriend learn an entire freakin’ language in 2 months to surprise you bc he wanted to lighten your burden of translating, and THEN him spending two weeks translating and speaking Japanese for you while on vacation” was without a doubt the emotional highlight. 💙
At the start of 2023, I wrote down “renew” as my intention for the year: renew passions and hobbies and projects that had fallen by the wayside, and reconnect with friends I haven’t talked to in a while. I’m pretty happy on both those fronts.
I also wrote down several long term professional goals about a job at a place that I left a month later. A real heartbreaker, that one. But such is life!
2024 is an election year and boy howdy does it feel like American Democracy is once again on the brink (while global stability is a wistful memory). On my end, the struggle will be balancing staying engaged without drowning in the overwhelming nature of it all.
Hugs and love to y’all, and see you next year. 💙