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There is a saying that you’ll never be younger than you are today. I guess it’s not just a saying because it’s actually true. Whatever age you are today, tomorrow you will be that age + one day.

I’ve never quite understood the point. Is it that it’s easier to do many things when you’re younger, so if you wait to get things done, you’re making it harder on yourself? Or to not waste today because it’s technically part of your youth, even if you’re 89 years old?

It was in my head because we’ve been talking a lot in our house about whether today is the easiest day to be a human because tomorrow will be that much harder. And then that much harder the day after, and so on.

On one hand, it feels true. It feels like the world was easier in many regards when I was younger. But maybe that’s just because the hard things turned out to be surmountable because we surmounted them. I remember worrying a lot prior to this point. Maybe the media didn’t foment our anxiety to the same degree, but that doesn’t mean the anxiety wasn’t there.

A certain percentage of people have struggled terribly to meet (or failed to meet) their basic needs. A certain percentage of people have not struggled at all to meet their basic needs. And the vast majority of us are in the middle, worrying about how we’ll meet basic needs, sometimes making sacrifices we don’t want to make, but ultimately meeting our basic needs.

Is it harder to be human today? Will tomorrow be that much microscopically harder than today? Or, unlike the original idea about aging, do changes come around in time to help us move forward again?

We had our penultimate wellness visit with the pediatrician. Our doctor will see patients until they leave college, which means next year will be the final time we go to her office.

We secured her as their doctor while they were still in utero, and she saw them when they came home from the hospital in tandem with their neonatologist. She has known them their whole lives, through every stage, every milestone, every vaccine, every ear infection.

It would be easier to go to a GP at this point. The pediatrician’s practice is out-of-network, which creates extra steps for simple things. But I’m finding it hard to say goodbye to someone who has known them their whole lives, and the kids are not eager to start over with someone new.

But very soon, they will need to start going to someone who doesn’t know them at all. It’s such a small relationship; a person we only see once a year at this point. But somehow it feels much bigger than 0.27% of our year.

Because Quentin is super smart — he can find a timothy hay treat in record time — we got him two toys.

The first is a set of stacking cups. He loves to pick up things and throw them, and stacking cups felt like something he could spend hours stacking up and taking apart.

The second is a wooden puzzle with six circular pieces. You can hide a treat under the piece, and the pig has to remove the piece to find it.

We also bought him a new food dish because one of the things he loves to throw is his dry food dish. He flips it upside down immediately after I fill it, sending the food everywhere. He’s pretty good at snuffling around and eating the pieces off the ground, but it creates a mess, so we wanted to remove bowl privileges.

Unfortunately, the new bowl was terrifying. TERRIFYING. He cowered in the corner when I put it in his cage, shaking all over. Even after I removed it, it took him a good hour to return to normal.

The stacking cups last one hot second. I put a treat between each cup to teach him to stack and unstack them. He ate the top treat, then took the rest of the cups and threw the whole stack in the air. This released all of the treats at once, and we made the mistake of laughing when he did this. He ran around, collecting all of his treats.

But the wooden puzzle is a big hit. The first piece or two is difficult to get out, but once he creates some space, he removes them in order of most favourite snack to least favourite. He also cleans it up and puts the pieces back and removes them again, checking to see if something new appears. He can easily play with it for an hour without getting bored.

He’s ready for Guinea Pig Harvard.

I am an information hoarder, squirreling away links with a silent promise that I will absolutely, definitely return to this piece of content in the future. I will need it. I will implement the advice, visit the location, and make the recipe.

I have bookmarks on every social media site in addition to the bookmarks I leave behind on every browser, the “bookmarks” I email myself, and the “bookmarks” I download as a PDF and put in a folder to read later. They’re not really bookmarks, but they’re kind of like bookmarks. Okay, they’re technically bookmarks in non-bookmark form.

This piece resonated with me:

The bookmark is a kind of fantasy: Not just in the sense that we can convince ourselves, while employing it, that we will one day transform an old t-shirt into shorts, but that by using it we’re not merely passive observers of our social feeds, but active participants, explorers, collectors. Gathering resources for a life we’re bound to start living.

Gulp.

If I were going to make myself a resolution this year (which I’m not), I would probably make it to bookmark less and return to bookmarks more. And if, within one month, I cannot actually see a future use for the information, I can unbookmark it.

Luckily, I don’t make resolutions.

I finished a book in the final week of 2025, making me uneven on Goodreads. 65 books instead of 64 books. I probably could have finished one of the other two books I was currently reading, but instead of committing to completing one of the existing books, I decided I had to read The Correspondent. Immediately.

It’s funny because when I first heard about the book, I was interested. But when it came up in the library, it felt like the last thing I wanted to read. Ever. I don’t like epistolary novels. But I suspended the hold rather than canceling it. Every time I saw it in the queue, I thought about canceling it — I was never going to read it — but then I was in the final days of 2025, and I needed a book, and suddenly, that was the only book in the world I wanted to read.

I unsuspended it, and it came in within a few hours.

It’s funny how that happens. Something sounds completely unappetizing (figs), and then it becomes your favourite food, a treat you buy yourself on special occasions. Or a book sounds uninteresting and then becomes the only thing you want to read.

The woman writing most of the letters in the book processes her world via her correspondence. She isn’t the best person at face-to-face relationships, but on paper, she asks probing questions that show how deeply she listens and remembers. But she is going blind, so this favourite activity (handwriting letters) will either need to change or go away as she loses her sight.

Moreover, her second favourite activity — reading — will also change. It’s not that she won’t have access to stories anymore, but she will need to consume them differently. For some people, there is something different about reading the words off the page vs. listening. I’m one of those people who prefer to read the words vs. listen to them.

So she mentions several times during the book that due to her older age and imminent blindness, she selects her books carefully. She re-reads her favourite books, knowing it may be the last time she spends time with those characters in that way, and she is selective about which new books she chooses.

I would probably first work my way through the books I’ve been hoarding; the ones I’ve been holding because I know they’ll make me happy, so I read one when I need one. And then go back to my old favourites because I’d rather consume something I know will be good vs. take a chance. Though if I did that, I would have missed this book, The Correspondent, because until it rose to the top of my TBR, it wasn’t even something I was considering giving a chance.

But this isn’t a hypothetical. One day, I will realize I’m nearing the end of my life (hopefully, I’ll get time to prepare for the end), and I’ll have to choose how I use my final reading choices after a lifetime of books.