Wrapping Up 2025
Another year, another year in review. This past year was a lot of things, but when thinking about 2025 it’s been very hard for me to break past the emotional and temporal discontinuity created by the federal invasion of Chicago that started in September. To help me get around that I’ve broken up this annual review into a few different sections, with my round up of writing about said invasion at the top so it’s easiest to skip if that’s what you need to do.
Table of Contents
Fuck ICE
The last four months or so have been pretty rough for Chicago. Having to live and work while the feds and masked thugs invade your city under the president’s orders, kidnapping and killing people, then lying about it, seemingly with little repercussions, has been, to put it mildly, really fucking hard. The community response has been amazing, though—one of the few things that has given me hope and light during the darkness of the Trump-Bovino fasc-attacks. Much better writers than I have been documenting this as it happened, so here are some of my favorite articles and quotes:
- Dan Sinker’s A Benediction for Chicago on the Eve of Occupation was a soothing balm in the calm before the storm, as well as the days after.
- Another Dan Sinker piece (spoiler warning: this ain’t the last one) Disasters, Invisible and Visible weaves together Chicago history, media savvy, and, as usual, a fuck ton of heart to provide not just recommendations for staying informed on where and what ICE is up to now, but also breaks down how the best journalists and media outlets are doing it so others can follow in their footsteps.
- In The Fog of War Sinker covers one of the times ICE decided to teargas a residential neighborhood for basically no reason. (Is this just a list of my favorite Dan Sinker pieces? No, but maybe only technically.) With his characteristic love and faith in Chicago(ans), he manages to find a nugget of gold buried in this shitpile of a situation and uses it to stiffen our resolve:
But watch the video from Armitage and Central Park again.
You’ll notice something, even as the fog drifts across the screen and the guy shooting the video starts retching: Nobody is cowed by this. Even as the gas thickens, people are screaming obscenities at the agents in the car. The moped directly in front of them, despite having received what must have been a facefull of gas, refuses to move. And then there’s the shrill chorus of whistles that begin to ring out near the end, audible evidence of the successful grassroots campaign to distribute ICE warning whistles in neighborhoods across Chicago.
- From October 24, 2025, a Block Club article with the headline Border Patrol Boss Bovino Tear-Gasses Chicago Crowd, Violating Judge’s Order, Lawyers Say , in case you were wondering whether he was just a “give illegal orders” kind of fascist.
- From a November 6, 2025 Block Club article where U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis also observes that Bovino is regularly lying to her face:
Before announcing her latest order, Ellis read Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” aloud. She described the city as a place “brimming with vitality and hope” as it works to move past a history that includes segregation and violence, with “everyday people standing watch to protect the most vulnerable among us.” “The government would have people believe, instead, that the Chicagoland area is in a vise-hold of violence, ransacked by rioters and attacked by agitators,” Ellis said. “That simply is untrue. And the government’s own evidence in this case belies that assertion. “After reviewing all of the evidence submitted and listening to the testimony, I find the defendants’ evidence simply not credible.”
- Aphyr’s moving I Want You to Understand Chicago does an excellent job of capturing the terror and the love of a city under siege.
- I can’t think of a better way to end this list than with Dan Sinker’s The Pugilist at Rest and this beautiful quote:
“Chicago is a boxer. We rest, and we wipe the blood from our one good eye and we stand, yet again. There’s always another round.”
As predicted in that piece, written when Bovino and his jackbooted goons fled for warmer climes, ICE is back in Chicago. And here we stand, yet again.
Personal
Some much happier notes here!
My younger brother got married this June, and I was his best man. I was incredibly honored and touched that he asked me to do that, and I feel proud of the job I did. I planned his bachelor party, with a LOT of help, especially from my older brother (who officiated the wedding), as well as my wife, and others (you know who you are, and thank you!). I wrote and delivered the closing speech at the reception, a vote of confidence I didn’t know I was getting ahead of time (probably for the best). From the jump I knew one thing I wanted to do was to borrow a tradition that my wife and her best friends have been doing for each other as maids of honor, which is to secretly create a scrapbook out of the bachelorette party shenanigans, complete with goofy pictures and heartfelt letters. We did that, with help and support from everyone at the bachelor party, my wife Deana, and a handful of friends who so generously offered their supplies, skills, and experience. Thank you so much for helping make that a success!
Just before that, in May, my wife and I celebrated our 10th year anniversary. Well. That’s when our actual anniversary was, and when we threw a big party, but it would be more accurate to say that we’ve been having more of a rolling celebration throughout the year. We went on a staycation in July, and I worked on an art project celebrating it for most of the rest of the year, a shadow box we dubbed “Tin Brood”. I’ve got a draft post all about that project in the wings and I’m hoping to have it published in the not too distant future.
This Here Website
Change was afoot! I wrote fewer blog posts last year but I did add a whole new section, my digital garden. Even though I wrote fewer full articles, I wrote some of my favorite writing ever so far, namely my recommended resources for ADHD and CPAP users. These are both pieces I wished I had when I started out on those respective journeys, and it feels good to be able to send those links to friends when they are looking for support. I participated in Blaugust for a second time, and released four updates to the site big enough to merit an entry in the changelog. Perhaps most importantly, I got a lot of joy and satisfaction out of working on it, and at least a few good conversations.
The Year in Numbers
As I have in previous years, I like to pull some numbers and see what they have to say about the year that’s just wrapped up. Lots of websites make that easy for me, which sometimes I even appreciate :)
So! Here’s what they have to say:
- Blog posts: 4
- Site updates: 4
- iNaturalist stats, generated January 11, 2026
- I have quite a few more observations to post from 2025 that I haven’t gotten to, but that’s where I’m at as of today.
- All of these numbers are way up from last year, which I feel quite good about. It also makes sense—I’ve spent a lot of time there! I even got a new camera in October specifically so I could take better pictures for iNat. My phone does a great job most of the time, but anything that’s far enough away that I would need to zoom in starts to look like mud once I make it past 2-4x.
- Books read:
- According to Bookwyrm I only read two books this year. I don’t know if that’s actually true, or if I just did a worse job logging them than last year, but I do think it’s true that 2025 was not a great year for reading books for me. At least part of that was because I started and did not finish several books (no shade on those books, that’s just how it goes sometimes).
- Zines made: I want to say… 5?
- I haven’t kept complete track of all of them, and only two of them have made it to being hosted here, but this feels about right. Almost all of them this year have been collaborations of some sort, which has been intentional and fun. One of the skills I’ve long felt a desire to practice is curation, and working on zines has been one low-cost and low barrier way for me to do that.