The Last Word On Nothing

Finally, we’re nearing the year’s end — a time to rest, reset, and reflect. Even the apps on my phone are eager to review my year, feeding my own data back to me: Strava tells me how many miles I’ve biked, Reddit shows me the number of posts I’ve read, and Spotify feeds me a nonsensical noun pile to describe the music I tend to listen to in the morning (if anyone can tell me which artists comprise “gothic happycore film noir,” please comment below).

That inspired me to spend a half hour compiling a personal 2022 review. I started by tallying professional achievements: the number of pieces I wrote and edited, the events I spoke at, awards and recognition. Then I thought about obvious personal highlights: the places I visited, the concerts I went to, the books I read, the new hobbies I picked up. What a fun and easy way to feel like stuff happened this year, that I did things!

The most difficult part of the process, but perhaps most important, was recalling the less tangible or exciting moments that have taken up my time over the last year — the instances that were essential to my year, but that the outside world will never celebrate.

Navajo legends speak of angry mountains that must be calmed with tobacco offerings. It’s one of the most ancient examples of intergenerational trauma in a people who have experienced plenty more since. The memories of the angry mountain in question have been lost, but a cultural nervousness around the harmless ranges of Arizona and New Mexico persists.

Visiting nearby Apache communities, Navajo speakers can understand their neighbors. Both languages are in the Athapaskan language family, after all. But the rest of the Athapaskan speakers are more than 2,000 miles away to the North, in Alaska and sub-Arctic Canada. Navajo visiting Yukon or Northwest Territories have to listen a lot harder, but still they recognize the words spoken a world away from their homeland. Word differences cluster around subject areas like European settler culture and technology.

When you’re exceedingly tiny, you can live almost anywhere – in an eyelash follicle, between grains of sand, or on an insect’s wing. You can probably find food and plenty of it, whether you prefer dead skin cells, blood, sap, or rotting vegetation. You can also get away with almost anything, like the male, deep sea-dwelling anglerfish Photocorynus spiniceps. 

If you think the big ugly fish in this picture is male for some reason, look again. The big pinkish blob is the female. That little thing dangling off her back is not a sexual organ – it is the male. His quarter-inch-long body is made up pretty much exclusively of nostrils, to sniff out females, and testicles.