Something To Be Proud Of
What to do when you find yourself proud of a real nothing-burger of an accomplishment? Why, you publicize it and risk ridicule and mockery, of course. And if the shame of it isn’t too much, you try to communicate, however feebly, the complicated set of factors that would lead you to feel pride over such a non-event.
Despite a relatively mild winter thus far, it’s turned cold recently. I’ve been trying to keep an eye on not just my car battery, but Courtney’s as well since she’s been back home in the southern hemisphere and enjoying the heat of summer.
I split the day’s vehicle use on Friday in two: In the morning, I drove mine, and when I came home for lunch, I switched out the keys and drove hers. That afternoon was when the cold front arrived, and thus, my problems started.
After arriving home for the evening, I took the fast-dropping temperature and spitting snow as a sign: There is nothing for me out there. Home has everything I could possibly need, and I won’t be straying from its cozy confines unless it catches fire.
The next day, I needed to run an errand, making me a liar in just barely more than 12 hours. I went out to crank my vehicle, let it warm up in preparation for its trek across town. And while I was at it, I thought of Courtney’s battery and reasoned I should do the same for hers.
But guess what?
Yep, you already know what I’m going to say: My piddly-ass drive to the office the day before had not been enough to charge that battery in any meaningful way, and when I tried to crank it, I was met with a deafening silence.
Annoying, but not a day-ruiner. Once back from my errand, I set to work to remedy this problem.
NB: If this sounds vaguely familiar, well then you, dear reader, must have been reading about a year ago, because apparently this is just something that’s going to befall me in January. Same basic setup: Courtney was abroad, I (lamely) was not, and a car battery succumbed to the cold.
Last year, it was a pain times two because of my weird downward-angled driveway, with its retaining walls that basically place me below ground level of my yard. No room for another car in there, and Courtney’s wouldn’t even be able to clear the massive curb required to enter it in the first place.
So I bought a little miracle-worker: the Everstart Maxx. Worked like a charm, and it was my first thought to solve this problem a year later.
Hooked it up, easy peasy, andddddddd — nothing. I mean, not entirely nothing, but mostly. I did manage to bring the instrument panel to life, with its array of warning lights that said, if it were to be believed, that everything on the car is wrong. All the lights were on. Some you haven’t ever seen, guaranteed. I was like, “Oooh, I didn’t know it had them in that color. Wonder what it means?”
Never fear: She parks on the street, not in some near-inaccessible subterranean tunnel like I do. Which meant I had options. Bingo bango, before you know it, my car is nose to nose with hers, and I’m about to Tim Taylor this thing: It just needed more power.
Working car. Normal jumper cables. What could go wrong? Well, nothing, actually. Except for the part where these efforts were enough to start her car. Yeah, that thing was still not budging.
By this point, I’m a popsicle. I give up. You win, nature. I know the weather was to be slightly warmer on Sunday, and you know, her car definitely wasn’t going anywhere. So I said, “That’s a tomorrow problem.”
Then tomorrow arrived. It was slightly warmer, and I again needed to leave the house, going against everything I believe. I go out to my vehicle to warm it up, and I’ll have you know that it would not crank. Mine! Like it had come down with the same bug that Courtney’s had, probably from that little nose-boop of a kiss the day before. I was infected — back in my inaccessible driveway.
So I go back to my good buddy, the Everstart Maxx, and she doesn’t disappoint this time. A few seconds of connection to my battery and vroom-vroom; your guy’s alive again.
Bolstered by that stellar comeback performance after letting me down the day before, I tried it on Courtney’s again. Re-attach everything to her battery, and I was genuinely so proud of my Everstart Maxx that I had total faith it was just a bad game the day before.
Alas. No.
Wasn’t meant to be, apparently. Mine was over there, purring like a kitten with its newly juiced-up battery, and here I was, unable to get it to work yet again for hers.
So, by this point, maybe you, dear reader, are thinking back to the introduction, where I bragged about taking pride in a nothing-burger accomplishment. And maybe you, being not just a dear reader but an astute one as well, have noticed that, to put it plainly, I haven’t accomplished shit yet. Not a damn thing.
Too true. So I’ll go ahead and spoil the ending for you: I bought and changed a car battery.
I know. I know. Please hold your applause. I’m just as surprised as you, but let me tell you why I’m counting it as a win.
It felt like a bittersweet victory because it’s precisely the kind of thing about which I would have called my dad to pick his brain. Which is fraught for any son who’s still grieving his father’s death, even almost three years later.
But it was extra fraught for me. Too often, these types of life’s little curveballs were the reason for my calls to him. But, if your life looks anything like mine, these moments are usually as rare as they are random. Which, in my case, meant that I simply didn’t call that often.
This stands in sharp contrast to my calls to my mom. I was a latchkey kid, and it was my responsibility to call with daily updates that I and the siblings were alive and well. That became pretty much habit, and one that persists to this day.
I always knew all about my dad’s life, but not because I heard it directly from him. I learned it secondhand, through mom, just as I’m sure he learned all about my life through her as well. Because of that, I don’t think we ever felt totally in the dark about what or how the other was doing.
So here’s what I learned too late, through a silence that wasn’t simply by choice or indifference but literally couldn’t be filled anymore: It wasn’t the same. I should have called for more than updates I didn’t need; I should have called without some kind of mechanical malfunction making it necessary.
He made that part so easy though, that second kind of call. Here’s the thing: He would have laughed his ass off — big, hearty belly laughs that got surprisingly high in pitch, the ones I miss so much — at me for saying I was proud of changing a car battery. But he would never have laughed on the other end of the phone, in one of those moments where I was forced to confess how little I knew and how useless I was at differentiating wrench sizes.
Remembering that, that simple truth, was enough to put the thought in my head, “Oh, just call dad,” before it was overridden milliseconds later by remembering reality. It was the subtle change from the “I would give anything to talk to my dad again” I feel on any given day to “I need my dad” that got me.
In that moment, I stopped to feel a fraction of what my brother must feel. Back home, his hobbies and interactions are such a mirror image of how my dad lived his life, and I know there must be so many more times when he has a thought of “I need my dad” and there simply isn’t a call to make.
I think I’m grappling with what it means to be a man, what masculinity can look like. As a man who’s more comfortable behind this keyboard than under a hood, I struggle with my dad’s absence. Not because he was like me; in fact, quite the opposite. My brother’s the one who is like him, smart and talented and resourceful in so many of the same ways he was.
I’m the one who needed to call for something as relatively routine as changing a car batter. But in a weird way, those moments — though they only served to highlight all the differences that existed between me and my dad — were some of the most freeing for me, because while he knew the differences, he never dwelled on them when I called. In a way, it was one of the most natural dynamics in the world: a boy just needed his dad, no expectations being unmet, no shame for all I didn’t know that he did.
And he always picked up. Would troubleshoot me through whatever it was. And I always felt better afterwards. The uncomfortable truth is this: I simply should have called more.
The simple victory of navigating a small issue like this one is twofold, then: It’s a reminder of how great my dad was in times like those, and it’s the painful but necessary reminder that life does go on and you can do it, even when you feel alone.
Oh. And I changed a car battery. So I can do that now. Threefold. The victory was actually threefold.
Ten Worth Your Time
- You’re probably wondering: Just how cold was it? The answer: I don’t know, but probably Antarctic. That’s what it felt like, at least. Then I remember the obvious: I couldn’t handle the actual Antarctic. But I want to. The ongoing project at The New York Times that will see a reporting team spend eight weeks on a research trip to the seventh continent. In addition to the updates from the reporter, I thoroughly enjoyed this deep dive into the history of the Times’ reporting on and from Antarctica (free gift link).The fact that the paper started reporting from the continent in 1928 is simply remarkable to me.
- I like when Paige Williams tells stores, full stop. But I especially enjoy when she turns her eye to the South in The New Yorker, so I was tickled pink to see her writing about the Great Smoky Mountains and the search-and-rescue teams that patrol it. These mountains were my first big national park, and that trip was also one of the last time my family went on vacations when my siblings and I were younger. It’s not surprising: One of her very first lines in the story is about how it’s the most popular park by number of visitors, due to its accessibility to much of the East Coast, Midwest, and South.
- Speaking of the South, I enjoyed this exploration by The Atlantic(free gift link) of the Southern accent and the risks to it dying out. The concept of wanting to do away with a Southern accent to avoid ridicule is a common trope in the South (though it’s contingent on knowing enough people who want to actually leave for the anecdote to resonate). I think of Stephen Colbert, who’s got a pretty perfect accent from nowhere; he said he didn’t want to sound like his fellow native South Carolinians. On the other end of the spectrum, I think of my former boss, this wildly intelligent attorney who was more than happy to let opponents think he was an idiot simply because he couldn’t help but whistling when he form -s sounds. I thought the author’s personal experience might have slightly warped her view of things (Not that there’s one right way to talk about this topic, but this line — “Like many people my age, I checked my southern accent at the door of my northeastern adult life.” — feels like it both overstates how common that move is and belies exactly who she’s writing to (the people in that northeastern adult life), but I respected her doing the work to shine a light on what I think is a beautiful sound. Jason Isbell said it best: “Don’t worry about losing your accent/ ‘cause a southern man tells better jokes.” That goes for stories and general shit-shootin’ of all sorts: It just sounds better. I’m reminded of my accent occasionally, and they always make me think of home and smile in appreciation.
- Well, here was a story I hated. I mean, it’s well done and all (it is the MIT Technology Review), but I hate the conclusion the writer comes to, summed up by the article’s title: “How I learned to stop worry and love AI slop.” Despite how I disliked the conclusion, I did appreciate this part: “For many people, AI slop is simply everything they already resent about the internet, turned up: ugly, noisy, and crowding out human work. It’s only possible because it’s been trained to take all creative work and make it fodder, stripped of origin, aura, or credit, and blended into something engineered to be mathematically average—arguably perfectly mediocre, by design. Charles Pulliam-Moore, a writer for The Verge, calls this the “formulaic derivativeness” that already defines so much internet culture: unimaginative, unoriginal, and uninteresting.”
- Part of what I disliked so much in the previous story was the earnest treatment of the notion of “I write good prompts for AI” somehow being treated as or equated to art. I wholeheartedly reject that. And I felt buoyed in that opinion when I read this short piece in The Comics Journal (h/t to LitHub’s newsletter for turning me onto this). It was an interesting look at the heyday and the decline of comics (or as we called them “the funny pages”) in newspapers.
- I found this Vulture piece on a professor’s unorthodox classes and attempts to get college students to read to be a story that sums up so much of higher education right now. At an institution as prestigious as Penn, we’re worried about students not being able to read a book without these extreme interventions by a professor. (To be fair, they seem like really cool classes, and I’d love to take them.) We have other professors throwing shade at the innovator as selling himself as the solution to the reading crisis. And we have students who literally ask for their phones to be taken away — “I need the physical space,” one says. These two things remain true: I think it’s admirable that this guy has set up his class in this manner, to encourage reading, and I think it’s a mighty shame that he has to in the first place.
- Reading, for those of us doing it in our spare time, looks to be in for a good year in 2026 when it comes to new releases. Check out this Book Riot podcast episode on some of the most-anticipated titles of the upcoming year.
- One of those titles, Vigil by George Saunders, which led to this appearance on The Interview, a podcast by The New York Times. Saunders is just such a thoughtful man that I encourage you to listen to this interview regardless of whether you have any interest in his previous books or his newest. It’s just worth listening to, no matter who you are.
- I loved this video from Texas Monthly as a supplemental bit to a story it published more than a year ago now. It’s about one man’s effort to bring film culture to a sleepy Texas town, and I especially enjoyed how it gave a behind-the-scenes look at the writer of the original story and his obvious passion for the subject of film.
- I loved this short write-up by Ryan Holiday of the reasons he keeps a one-line-a-day diary. I bought one of these for 2026 as well, but I’m using it more like Austin Kleon does (check his version out here), as a sort of day-inspired commonplace book. I like the way Holiday describes the value of the looking back, and I hope to incorporate some of that quality into my logbook (again, h/t to Austin Kleon for this model) entries for 2026.
More From Me
Over on my blog, I’ve been writing about various topics of interest to me.
Making Sense of a Year of Culture: Stats
Culture Diary
Here’s a collection of what I’ve been consuming in the past week.
The legend for my list was stolen from Steven Soderbergh, where ALL CAPS represents a movie, Sentence Case is a TV show, ALL CAPS ITALICS is a short film, Italics is a book, and bold is a live performance or show. A number in parentheses after a TV show highlights how many episodes I watched. An asterisk after an entry means it’s a rewatch. The source of the movie or show, whether streaming service, physical media, or in theaters, is shown in parentheses as well.
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