A Chaotic End to 2025

It's been a truly wild couple of weeks. Normally when I say that, I mean that I've been busy enough that my apartment is a bit of a mess and I haven't been to the gym in a few days. Both of those things are currently true AND some incredibly hilarious things have happened. Let's see...

I spent the final two weeks of November in Panama, where I shared a room with my mother, who has the unique gift of making my own legendary snoring seem like white noise. My headphones and I have never been closer.

I sadly didn't get the chance to see much of Panama because I had jaw surgery my first week there and spent the rest of the time hiding my face girdle* from the sun and other people. You really haven't lived until you're slumped and drooling in a wheelchair wearing a loosely tied babushka that isn't concealing anything as an orderly half your height labors to push you from the hospital recovery ward through a school field trip eating lunch at the mall food court (attached to the hospital) and then through a business convention of modeling and talent agency executives (hand to god) waiting for their uber blacks in the hotel lobby (also attached to the hospital) to deliver you to your hotel room like you're a low-rent version of the Plaza Home Alone sundae.

*This is the password I'll be using with my future children to protect them from kidnappers, btw, because nobody can stomach the phrase "face girdle" unless they really mean it. 

I spent the rest of my time in Panama icing my face, working off camera, going to daily PT sessions, and taking my bandages off for the first time to attend a hotel Thanksgiving buffet where the mac n cheese had jerk shrimp in it and the turkey was made out of salmon ceviche (both delish). 

The makeup that made me think should I get lashes?

The week I returned from Panama, still bandaged, I presented at an academic conference (!), taught my final yoga classes of the semester, did a special photoshoot in snowy D.C. (freshly un-bandaged, cleared by the surgeon, and professionally dolled up), and went Christmas bar hopping with the new person I'm seeing (!!), their sister, and their brother-in-law. I knew I'd get along well with New Person's sister when she leaned over furtively at the first bar to ask if I'd be okay with her taking her shoes off so she could sit cross-legged and then at the end of the night when she whispered "I love you very much" in my ear as we hugged goodbye. I started laughing and she immediately turned away with a pouting face to announce to her husband and New Person, "Kate doesn't like me! Let's go home so I can cry." 10/10 commitment to the bit.

Around this time, Gravy & I also moved into my mother's guest room to care for her after her own (non-jaw related) surgery. While I was there, Tessa came to stay for the most Christmas-y weekend ever, featuring a Saturday double-header at the Richmond Ballet's production of The Nutcracker—always phenomenal, the audience outfit-spotting is unmatched—and the Byrd's annual showing of White Christmas. Before the show, we joined in the Christmas singalong led by the theater's massive Wurlitzer organ that ends with (can you guess?) when the most dedicated Byrd employee runs along the balcony, holding the 1988 snow machine out like a relay baton. Ah, a holiday just like mom used to make. 

On Sunday, Tessa helped me host my Christmas Cookie Open House! The shindig met several of my "good party" criteria: 

• Hot chocolate was on tap 
• Nobody shit their pants (to my knowledge)
• 2 of the 3 former lovers that I invited came
• Other people also ate the crab dip 
• There was a Taco Bell delivery
• Everyone went home with leftovers!

I cherry-on-top'd the joyous events of my Christmas weekend with a long, luxurious bubble bath, the perfect end to a perfect weekend! In theory. In actuality, my bath triggered a long series of events that began at least 10 years ago when the previous owners of my mother's house decided to do some DIY home renovation and came to a head when my bathwater started raining out of the kitchen ceiling (someone page Emerald Fennell).

I have no photos related to the flood, so please enjoy Gravel in her rightful place under the tree

Around the time shea butter-scented bubbles were cascading down the hood of the stove, I began coughing. Turns out, my friend, we'll call her Patient Zero, was coughed on in the confessional line. Ever the good Catholic, she efficiently spread the gospel (influenza A) to the three of us that stayed the latest at Cookie Party, now officially a superspreader event. 

My week after that slowly deteriorated into utter madness, not that it wasn't already in the running. There was my mother, recovering from surgery and unable to do much for herself, working from home, navigating 4 different work crews coming in and out of the house, and, somehow, still finding the time to enter an online auction for an abandoned hotel in Greece despite never having seen Mamma Mia. 

Then there's me, experiencing a fever that reached 102.8 at its highest point, also working from home, also driving back and forth between my mother's house and my apartment so I could pack my suitcase for our impending trip to Florida. Turns out, I packed like an utter imbecile (bc fever). No bottoms of any kind ended up in the suitcase, which precipitated my wearing of the grody sweatpants I'd been wearing to rot in bed all week + a quarter zip stolen from my mother's drawer + heeled boots with too-short socks to my hair appointment, also featuring the sweat of a recently-broken fever and very little will to live.

And of course, there was Gravel, hissing and bopping at Aggi, my mother's elderly Shih Tzu, as the dog tried (and failed) to hop onto my bed for approximately 11 hours a day. 

For added ambiance, let us not forget the five (5!) industrial fans blowing at full power 24 hours a day for 4 days straight in the Hannibal set that was our plastic tarp-covered kitchen.

Meanwhile, my hairdresser—who has become a friend over the past few months, so this isn't a read—repaid my favor of coughing incessantly in their chair by giving me the Lord Farquaad special just in time for Caroline's rainbow fish birthday party, where both Patient Zero and I had to excuse ourselves a few times for the kind of body-wracking, hacking (and yet, critically, non-contagious (no fever)) coughs that precipitate bloody handkerchiefs in period movies. If anyone has a tip on where I can buy a hat that can help me channel the mom in the Santa Clause having a breakdown at her son's soccer game when her ex-husband begins to fully turn into Santa and kids are lining up to sit on his lap (is this too niche?), HMU.

Saturday night, I clipped half my newly chopped hairs back because New Person and I decided to go out for one final date of 2025 before the menagerie that is my household all piled into the car to drive to Florida (where I sit, slumped, barefoot, a little tipsy typing this). We were leaving at 5:15am because, as Mom explained it to me from the doorframe, "Starbucks opens at 5am, which means employees don't really want to see anyone there yet. But if we leave the house at 5:15, we can get to Starbucks at just the right time for them to be ready to serve customers but not yet backed up with other people, and then we can get on the road!" Who am I to begrudge a (wo)man with a plan?

Well, I decided at the end of our date that I wasn't quite ready to bid adieu to New Person yet—who is still new enough that they have yet to meet my mother. I persuaded them to spend the night cuddled up in the guest room with me and my drugged up cat (bc car ride) and leave after our early morning family departure. The timing was perfect for their work schedule! 

It was also perfect for the universe to continue f*cking with me. My mother—still unable to lift anything more than her Starbucks cup—apparently got bored of watching me fill her CRV with two suitcases, a full laundry basket, two backpacks, a litter box, car snacks, leftovers from the Cheesecake Factory (invaluable), three bags of gifts, an ancient dog in her smelly carrier, a four-foot tall pelican statue, and a cat that, by this point, was high off her ass.

Mom—who, in all fairness, learned how to knock approximately 5 minutes ago and is still rusty at it under the best of circumstances—decided to perform one final sweep of the house to ensure we weren't forgetting anything, including my room. I now regret for the first time in my entire life that we are an anti-surveillance state family and thus have no Ring cameras or hallway monitors or always-on Alexas to capture the faces of both New Person and Mom when she walked in on them, topless, in her guest bed.

"So, I'm guessing I just met New Person?" My mother peered at me from the fingers still pressed to her face as I walked sweaty and coughing away from the conquered CRV. My laughter only inspired her shaking head and my own new coughing fit, which was probably the universe's best form of poetic justice short of my pants pooling around my ankles in the Wawa. I finally calmed down enough to go upstairs, where I found New Person with the sheets pulled entirely over their head. "I'm never coming out, just so you know."

For the record, I wasn't trying to hide New Person! (And Mom clearly knew about them....) I defy you to introduce me to a person in their right mind that thinks meeting their new girlfriend's mother for the very first time at 4:30am is a good choice! #NoRegrets #ExtremelyReadyfor2026