2021 Annual Letter

It doesn't seem that long ago that I was writing my 2020 letter! 2021 must have flown by, though in looking back, I am reminded of all the wonderful things that happened.

This letter is longer than usual, so feel free to skim it or just look through the pictures. There is no expectation of finishing it and no guilt for not doing so! I'm grateful that you have read this far. As I have journaled more regularly this year, I better appreciate how past, present, and future Dustin is one of my intended audiences with these letters, and so I am sharing a bit more of my inner world, perhaps, at the expense of my non-Dustin audience. ;)

2021 started for me at my parent's house in North Dakota. I was swimming a lot and taking a course on Algorithms and Data Structures, which was a dream! I gradually built up to swimming 6 miles over 4 hours, which was a bizarre experience in time travel. I started my 2020 holiday letter with some musings about swimming around Manhattan, and unfortunately, 2021 wasn't overly generous to me in swimming towards that ambition. 

In early 2021, I watched the Crash Course Mythology videos where I learned about the stories different cultures tell to explain their world. And at some point in 2021, I decided to create my own pantheon to explain and illustrate my world with Gong Gong (共工),  a Chinese water god, as my first diety.

A picture of what Gong Gong may look like. What a doof.

Gong Gong is responsible for cosmic calamities and (in my telling) schemes to thwart my swimming efforts. I won't describe in too much detail all of the ways Gong Gong has got in my way this year, but I have definitely hurled my fair share of curses his way.

In late January, I was filled with such joy to attend the wedding of my older brother Dylan and his wife Ness. They had a really lovely ceremony in Hebron, ND.

It was so great to see some of my family and celebrate Dylan and Ness's nuptial!

Soon after Dylan and Ness's wedding, I moved to Queens, NY to live with my close friend Curtis and his cousin Kaitlyn. Moving to New York in the middle of winter during a pandemic has its challenges, but, as with most things, it all worked out.

It wasn't that long after moving to New York that my mind started wandering to the East River, where the water was a balmy 39 F in March. I kind of figured/hoped that I would give it a few months to warm up before taking a dip, but as things go, I lasted a month before hopping in the river. 

Part of the joy of swimming in really cold water was figuring out all the gear and tricks to maintain my body heat. And, I was pleasantly surprised by how well all my tricks worked! I wore two layers of wetsuits, a thermal cap, gloves, and booties. I would carry a thermos of warm water that I would dump into my layers of wetsuits right before going in. I started very gradually by only spending 10-15 minutes in the water and was able to eventually swim for about 45 minutes. One tip I consistently used was that if you can no longer touch your thumb and pinky together, it's time to get out of the water!

A post-swim pic sporting my dryrobe and gloves. I was happy for the sunshine!

I made numerous trips to my close friend Jon's father's house in Connecticut. He lives on a lake so I tried to take advantage of those visits to swim in warmer/cleaner/more accessible water. 

In full swim getup.

One of the funnier stories to come out of this year was when I accidentally poured boiling water into my wetsuit before a swim in CT. I didn't realize until writing this letter that this picture was taken right before I did that fateful pouring. See the silver kettle over my right shoulder?

One afternoon before a swim in CT, I heated the water to the appropriate, sub-boiling temperature. I had thought about transferring the water into a different container but decided it would be easier to keep the hot water in the kettle. I "quickly" ran upstairs to put on my wetsuits. In the meantime, Kat, Jon's wife, decided to make a cup of tea.

Upon getting on my layers of wetsuits (it is a bit of an ordeal), I came downstairs, grabbed the kettle from the stove assuming it was the temperature I had left it and walked outside. Kat saw me take the recently-boiled kettle outside but didn't think much of it. After my kodak moment shown above, I commenced pouring what I thought was lukewarm into my wet suit. I have an inner neoprene vest underneath the outer wetsuit, so I didn't feel the heat of the water until it started pooling in my crotch.

The... Utter... Horror... As the temperature increased,  I quickly realized the situation I had put myself in. These wetsuits are very tight and for a moment, I really thought I was cooked. Instinctively, I pulled the outer wetsuit away from my body, and fortunately, I was able to pull it far enough away for the water/heat to slowly dissipate down my legs, and the crisis was averted. Ho. Ly. Cow. 

A related, random fact I learned from swimming this year is that your tongue can handle higher temperatures than your skin. I would initially test the water temp using my tongue (as I wanted it as hot as possible) only to later find along the riverbank that it was a bit too warm. I learned to test the water temp on the back of my hand instead of my mouth.

Onward. 

As winter gave way to spring, my activities shifted. I stopped swimming in the river as much. Swimming in the river was at least a 5-hour ordeal from start to finish, and I eventually realized there was covid in the river (covid in sewage, sewage in the river... gross...). Instead of swimming, I started biking around the city and especially visiting Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s version of Central Park. Around that time I started taking a Reinforcement Learning course with my friend Ollie, and I spent a fair amount of time slowly walking through the park reading my reinforcement learning textbook. Pretty idyllic, right?

One of the prettier days in Prospect Park.

Being able to live under the same roof as my close friend Curtis was one of the best parts of 2021. We got up to plenty of shenanigans. The picture below is from an escapade to Coney Island. That was the day after I got my second covid shot. I was sick that morning, but the Popeye's chicken sandwich we had before visiting the Coney Island aquarium was the turning point in my recovery. 

Such a lovely day!

Since I was spending less time in the river, I had to come up with another hobby. I had never skateboarded before, but I have done many other boarding activities. Skateboarding seemed like a cool urban activity, and I was excited to try my hand at being a skateboard hooligan. Unfortunately, on my second visit to the skatepark, I re-sprained my ankle (the 3rd time in the previous 12 months). I can't blame Gong Gong, as he is only responsible for swimming calamities, but I did take this as a sign from the universe that I should probably stop skateboarding.

During my brief time skating, I did learn to ollie and, luckily, captured my first ollie on video! The video was at an abandoned parking lot that I would swim next to along the East River. And you're not a hooligan without a little trespassing...

On the job front, I continued to work remotely on a contracting project in speech recognition that started in late 2019 where I was building a machine learning model sort of similar to how Siri works (though much less good). That project ended in late April, which coincided well with me getting fully vaccinated. 

In early May, I took advantage of being down one job and up two vaccines to visit my long-lost friend Jake in Guatemala. He had been on my case to visit him for years, so I relieved myself of the friend guilt with a visit. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I sprained my ankle skateboarding a few days before heading down to Guatemala, which put the kibosh on our planned hiking trip. 

All the same, it was wonderful to see Jake!

And we got to celebrate his young neighbor Juan's birthday!

I don't speak hardly any Spanish, but his neighbor friends taught me the word "ESCOBA" which means broom in Spanish. I would chase Juan and his brother around Jake's house with a broom shouting "ESCOBA!". We had a great time, and they were sad to see me go :) 

While in Guatemala, I couldn't waste an opportunity to swim in a huge lake! Turns out you can still swim with a hurt ankle (another reason to love swimming), and I was delighted to take daily swims in Lake Atitlan while visiting Jake. The video above is one of my longer swims (1.5 miles) of the year. A few days afterward, I went a bit farther to the resort mentioned in the video, which was 2 miles total. Later that summer, I would swim 3 miles in CT, which is the longest open-water swim I have done thus far.

After visiting Jake in Guatemala, Jon and I met in Belize to spend a week scuba diving. In college, Jon and I took a scuba class and were one dive away from getting scuba certified, so we decided to get fully certified all over again at a dive shop in Belize and spent a few more days diving. It was a super fun experience, and the picture below shows us with our instructors and newly earned certificates!

Scuba boys!

While in Belize, I started feeling a little unwell. I thought I was just tired, but immediately upon arriving back at my apartment in New York, I started getting rather sick. After being sick for several days, I saw the doctor and soon learned I had come home with a few extra friends in my gut!

Protozoan parasites are great and all, but you don't want them to hang around for too long. The trouble was I couldn't exactly pinpoint how I had gotten the parasites while in Guatemala. My friend Jake had parasites a day or two after I arrived, so I could have somehow gotten them from him. I also accidentally drank three glasses of tap water while partying, which I like to think is the most probable route. Or, I could have gotten the parasites by swimming in the lake, which I want to be the least likely way.

As I have learned, most cities/towns like to dump raw sewage into their surrounding bodies of water, and the town Jake lives in is no exception. And, even without the sewage, the protozoans likely would have been chilling in the lake anyway. I wish I hadn't drunk all that tap water because I would like to know if I got the parasites from swimming in the lake. I guess I'll just have to try it again and see what happens??

After a round of antibiotics and a few weeks time, my protozoan friends left me. I shed about 7 pounds through the experience and was looking pretty trim afterward 😏

Without swimming (because all of the indoor pools were closed, all the outdoor pools were filled with people and didn't allow lap swimming, and the East River was far away and gross (see what I'm saying about Gong Gong?)) or skateboarding, I had to find a new way to exercise. And I was lucky to have a mixed martial arts gym a few minutes walk from my apartment.

I don't have many pictures of my time at the gym, but I frequented Showtime Marital Arts most days of the week for several months during the summer. It was a great second home for me, and I miss all the friends I made there. The video above shows the gym and various people playing around after classes one evening. I mostly kickboxed but did start doing a bit of Brazillian JuJitsu, which is what the people wrestling in the foreground are doing. 

For years, Jon’s grandmother Joyce has been encouraging me to move to New York, so once I did, I took full advantage of frequent dinners and drinks with her!

Joyce hosting me one evening :)

Gong Gong wasn’t the only diety I added to my pantheon in 2021. I got the postcard below a few years back from a museum in Vietnam. It shows an 18th-century wood painting of five tigers. These tigers in addition to the lion on my rashguard (shown one picture below) make up my Celestial Lions. 

The Celestial Lions ward off evil spirits and bad energy, though they don’t seem to be particularly effective at warding off Gong Gong… More tangibly, I started recording the days that I didn’t consume any alcohol or drugs as tick marks on the back of this postcard.  My longest continuous streak in 2021 was 78 days, and I’m shooting for a 100-day streak in 2022! Drawing the tick marks every night and bowing to my Celestial Lions is part of my evening routine before doing yoga. 

One activity that I enjoyed most about journalling was writing down 5 things I was grateful for that day. I don't journal as often, so I have started saying those gratitudes in my head while paying my respects to the Celestial Lions. During kickboxing, we would bow in at the start of every class, and I like the idea of bowing as a demonstration of respect. I have even started bowing to some of my rock climbing routes… lol

Toward the end of July, I made a trip home for a family reunion on my dad's side and to take a biking trip with my family.

Roar.... Now you can see my lion rashguard (and matching shorts) in full glory.

I bought the rashguard as a form of easy sunscreen for when I was biking in the city. But, it also doubled as great sun protection when I was swimming in warmer water in Guatemala and in Connecticut. I love the pattern and figured it would be visible to cars when I am biking. And eventually, I couldn't resist getting the matching shorts for when I kickboxed. I got another set of matchy rashguard and shorts in black-and-white with a dragon on it. Pretty sweet.... 😏 

My reign of terror with the hose during a water fight with my younger brother Davis and his girlfriend Sophie while in North Dakota.

 

Mama and I rocking the day away in Spearfish, SD near where we had our bike trip.

My little brother Davis and my Dad had biked the Mickelson Trail in South Dakota twice in the last few years. And I finally was able to join them! We covered about 110 miles over 3 days. The trail is a repurposed railroad track so is generally smooth but the hills sometimes seemed never-ending. 

It was a lovely 3 days! Who's the dude on the right with the sweet rashguard?

I returned to New York in August for what would be my last month in the city for 2021. Curtis and his cousin Katilyn’s lease ended at the beginning of September. At the time, I was still job searching, and I thought it best to wait until I had a job before finding a place to live. 

And thus began another nomadic stint, as I have done so many times before, with my hiking backpack on the back and my small backpack in the front.

As I mentioned before, I was very grateful to make several trips to stay with Jon's dad and stepmom, Evan and Kris, in Connecticut. I spent several weeks with Evan and Kris while bopping around the east coast during September and October. The photo below is of Evan and me about to take a swim in the lake!

I wish I looked less dorky in my swim goggles, lol.

During September/October, I popped down to Charlottesville, VA to visit my friend Wes and his wife Malavika. I took the train from NYC to Charlottesville, which was a really fun experience. I, then, flew up to Boston to see my friend Anthony. Next, it was a brief stop in downtown Boston to see Jon’s brother Liam, and back to Evan and Kris's house. 

Around this time I started working as a machine learning engineer at the bank Capital One. I work on their chatbot, which I still find kind of strange and funny. When a customer opens the chatbot, a machine learning model will try to predict what the customer wants to do like “check their balance” or “make a transfer”. I work on the team that trains and deploys this recommendation model. It’s been a great experience thus far and is a good balance of challenge and comfort.

After another stay in CT with Evan and Kris, I flew to Reno to visit my friend Garrett and then spent a long weekend in Yosemite with some close friends for my friend Max’s birthday. Our birthdays are only 4 days apart, so I suspect some future joint birthdays may be in the offing. 

The Yosemite valley

I then came back to New York to watch Curtis’ debut on BROADWAY!! It was amazing to see someone I care dearly about realize a lifelong dream! Curtis’s mom Angela flew up from New Orleans for the performance, and we had a nice Italian dinner before Curtis's performance. 

What a magical night!

From New York, I started moving westward again. I stayed in Lincoln, NE for a week where brother Davis moved to in August where his girlfriend Sophie is finishing her undergrad at Univerity of Nebraska.

Sophie is inventing some new bowling moves!

From Lincoln, I flew back to North Dakota to help my dad move a bunch of stuff from our house in North Dakota to their house in Bozeman, MT. 

And in Bozeman, I stayed!… for a few months. 

A+ movers.

Having easy access to a variety of activities is one way in which I feel full as a person, and having my kickboxing shorts (which have been repurposed as rock climbing shorts), swim jammers, and my yoga shorts all hung up in a line and in use felt very special to me.

Remember the white dragon shorts/rashgaurd I mentioned above? Roar...

My sister Denise and her family have lived in Bozeman for around 6 years now, so I enjoyed getting to spend more time with my three nieces!

One Friday, I invited the two twins over for pizza and an NBA game. We inevitably started playing hide-and-seek. I couldn’t quite fit in the (turned-off) freezer (which is an IRRESPONSIBLE place to hide for all kids reading this, right mom? Don’t hide in the freezer! Bad Uncle.)

Taking my nieces rocking climbing became a Sunday tradition. Megan, my 15-year old niece, didn’t make it the Sunday we took the picture below.

Rock climbing became my main form of daily exercise while in Bozeman. I would swim a couple hours on Saturday, but climb every other day because the pool hours are kind of late during the weekdays, and I like exercising right after work.

My siblings all converged on Bozeman for Christmas, and I was grateful to have everyone together! After our zoom-covid-christmas last year, it was really special to have the time together. We managed to get a family picture right at the last minute!

For New Year's, I headed to Big Sur in California for some friends and festivities. Jon, Kat, and a group of friends bought a house in Big Sur, and they invited a group of us out for the holiday.

New Year's Eve was “House of Gucci” themed. Max, Jon, and I all saw the same Adam Driver picture, hence, the matching sweaters.

What a fancy gang!

Ollie’s mustache still sends shivers down my spine.

And that's a wrap! You get three gold stars for reading all the way through 🌟🌟🌟

It was a lovely 2021. Despite trying to be more "settled", I ended up moving around a decent amount this year. I really enjoyed seeing family and friends I hadn't seen during the peak of the pandemic.

I'll save any 2022 updates for next year's letter, though I will eventually be moving back to NYC. If you are ever in NYC, I would love to see you!

With care,

-Dustin