/reader

To be fair, I do see a smattering of people at the park, mostly retirees and parents of very small children. They look at me quizzically, and I can see the gears in their head trying to work out how old I am and why I'm at the park running drills by myself at 3 PM on a Tuesday. I don't mind. I find it interesting thinking about how we are all in such different points in life. The retirees probably come to the park everyday, and they probably don't share the thrilling novelty I feel at going to a park during working hours. The other day a dad approached me asking me if I'd help keep an eye out for his kid. I shuddered, not envying his task. How do you even find a small gremlin in a park this vast? (Fortunately, they were reunited not long after.)

I go through a simple routine to hone my skills. I warm up, juggling the ball for a few minutes, before weaving through & around cones. Each drill has the same variations: right foot, left foot, both feet. Slowly at first, then picking up speed gradually as I smoothe out snags. I wrap up with finishing and shooting—target practice in realistic game scenarios. Running through these drills in an empty field leaves me breathless. I love this kind of therapy, feeling the wind in my ears, soaking up the midday sun, hearing the ping of the ball ricochet off the crossbar, and (if I'm lucky) watching my shots ripple the back of the net.

I've been thinking about the difference between practicing (by running drills in the park) and playing actual games. I'd certainly get better by just playing more games, but when I do that I naturally play to my strengths and neglect my weaknesses (because who wants to mess up in a game?). Practice is far less fun, because I can't shy away from the discomfort and tedium of doing things I'm not good at over and over again. Playing piano growing up I'd often say I liked performing but not practicing, which always made me wonder: do you need to enjoy the practice to be able to genuinely say you love a certain pastime?

I played a pickup game with some high schoolers over the weekend, and to put it mildly, they were not the best I'd ever seen. Some of them simply never passed the ball. A younger me might have gotten frustrated at this apparent selfishness, but I've learned through the years that people who don't pass often can't in the heat of the game. When you don't dribble well, keeping the ball occupies all of your attention, and it's nearly impossible to pick your head up to find someone to pass to without losing possession. There's even been studies which have shown professional footballers use less cerebral function to execute common footballing tasks compared to amateurs. Besides, I know what it feels like to be in their shoes: sometimes I get called out for not passing too, and almost always I either cannot see said teammate from where I am or, if I have spotted them, cannot get the ball to them. And it can be frustrating trying to explain those reasons to a heated teammate! After all, we judge ourselves by our intentions but others by their actions.

I first remember doing Secret Santa in middle school. One of the girls in our loose friend group of twenty- or thirty-something organized it the old-fashioned way: she'd make a list of everyone that wanted to participate, write names on slips of paper and drop them into a hat, and go around making everyone draw a name and noting the results. And it was always a good time—while many of us weren't super familiar with the others, it was fun to ask around for gifting intel, and most of the gifts ended up being safe bets: chocolate, candy, a handwritten card if you got lucky.

In hindsight, I can't believe she went through all that trouble. These days my friend group uses drawnames, a site which does all the name-drawing for you. All you have to do is register, make a wishlist (which lets you search items directly from Amazon), and view your recipient's wishlist. The whole ordeal, which once took us weeks to do in middle school, is rendered stupidly simple: you can click a link to the listing on Amazon, ship the gift directly to your recipient's house, and be done with your part in less than five minutes.

This convenience is not without downsides. "Good gifts show that you have paid attention," writes Kate Murphy in the New York Times. But when we list out exactly which items on Amazon we want, we cut that attention and empathy out of the equation. Of course, you can technically get your recipient something they haven't explicitly asked for, but in practice, I can count the times it has happened on one hand. I can't blame anyone for this either: after all, if your gamble doesn't pay off, it feels more like a slap in the face than it normally would, because, well—you could have just gotten them something they said they wanted.

At best, our Secret Santa becomes a chain of Amazon Prime purchases with the shipping addresses rearranged, and everyone gets the exact product they could just have bought themselves (except without the ability to return). Yet my friend group still manages to make this difficult. Some friends don't bother checking the website or making a wishlist for weeks, and when they finally do, volunteer painfully little information for those of us trying to put in the extra effort to get a good gift. What we're left with is a bastardized version of Secret Santa with almost none of the serendipity of the original spirit of the exchange and not even all of the conveniences of this modern alternative.

"Bad gifts make you wonder if the giver knows you at all," Murphy continues, as if she were watching us from above. One year, someone wished for a toilet night light. His poor Secret Santa, who had no clue it was a joke, duly bought it for him, and in doing so unwittingly made himself the laughingstock of that year's Christmas. (As far as I know, the light was never used.) As the years go by and we spend less time with each other, it becomes harder and harder to get good gifts, and the annual holiday gift exchange feels more and more like an indictment of an ever-weakening group of friends.

Many of the qualms I have with the exchange are my own. Most years I'm fortunate to receive something I specifically asked for, yet looking back, I can hardly think of a single item I've used more than a few times.¹ And that's nobody's fault but mine: I recognize that it's hard to get me something when I don't even know what I want (and will actually use). My appetite for material goods only shrinks as I become painfully aware of my ever-expanding collection of unused things and the effects of my mindless consumerism, to say nothing of the unnecessary waste generated by those fleeting hits of dopamine. In response, I've been asking for the same things the past few birthdays: a handwritten card, a phone call, or even a text. Heck, at this point even a "happy birthday" wish burdens me less than something I won't use.

Does our annual gift exchange stop here? I wish we could find a better alternative, but it's hard when all of us live in different places and many won't be back in town for Christmas. I do like some of these suggestions though. Maybe we could try to do an escape room together, or play a videogame we all buy together? An unwanted gift swap sounds like an great idea too. What about you and your friends? Do you have any suggestions for us?

Overall Reflections

• Unsurprisingly, Bob Dylan dominated my Wrapped this year. I spent 8,493 minutes listening to him, which is 13.9% of the 61,252 minutes I spent listening to music this year. He also has 25 songs on my 100 most-listened to tracks (27 if you count covers of songs he wrote).
• Mon Laferte is my #2 artist for the second year in a row, after being #1 in 2021. Chopin also makes the top 5 again (for the second or third year running, I can't remember).
• 42 artists were represented in my top 100 tracks. Of them, only 16 had more than 1 track, and 7 had more than 2. They are:
  • Bob Dylan, 25
  • SZA, 9
  • Mon Laferte, 6
  • Omar Apollo, 5
  • aespa, 4
  • Chopin, 4
  • KAROL G, 3
• I'm not sure how Rap managed to come out as my top genre. Only one rap song made my Top 100 (Run for Your Life, at #72).

Bob Dylan

• Blood On The Tracks is the most-represented album with 7 tracks, followed by Highway 61 Revisited with 6; Blonde On Blonde with 5; Planet Waves, Bringing It All Back Home, and Hard Rain (Live) with 2; and The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan with 1. That's about the order I'd say I like them, too.
• My favorite Bob Dylan songs, ranked:

1. Idiot Wind
2. Desolation Row
3. Mr. Tambourine Man
4. You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
5. You're a Big Girl Now

• Two songs in my Top 100 are covers of songs Dylan wrote: Adele's Make You Feel My Love and Nina Simone's Just Like A Woman. I like both better than Bob's originals.

Classical

• I was surprised Sibelius made my top 5: none of his pieces are in my top 100. I did spend a lot of time listening to Håvard Gimse's Sibelius: Piano Music, Vol. 4 though, which is lovely.
• The highest ranked classical piece in my Wrapped came in at 15th, and it was Kissin playing Schumann's Abegg Variations, Op. 1.
• The only other classical pieces in my top 100 were Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 58 (Leif Ove Andsnes) (all 4 movements), and 2 of Rachmaninoff's Opus 23 Preludes, No. 4. Andante cantabile in D Major and No. 2. Maestoso in B-Flat Major (Nikolai Lugansky).
• J.S. Bach, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Robert Schumann, and Sergei Bortkiewicz take places 6, 7, 8, and 10 in my top 10 artists, respectively, followed by Liszt and Mendelssohn.

Languages

• After English, Spanish was the most represented language in my top 100, with 23 songs, followed by Korean with 7. Somehow, a French song makes it too, but it's Mon Laferte singing La Vie En Rose.
• The only two Korean songs not by girl groups in my top 100 are 내 맘을 볼 수 있나요 and 무제(無題) (Untitled, 2014).

Favorites

I picked 10 favorite songs last year, so to keep the trend alive, here we go:

• Oh It's You - babychair (thanks, kayla!)
• Hazel - Bob Dylan
• Dia de Enero - Shakira
• Playing God - Polyphia
• It Started Out So Nice - Rodriguez
• Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels) - Jim Croce
• ¡Corre! - Jesse & Joy
• Just Like A Woman - Nina Simone
• Puccini: Madama Butterfly / Act II - "Un bel dì vedremo" - Anna Netrebko
• Nunca Voy A Olvidarte - LA INDIA