2024: By The Numbers

Here we are, again. January. Although I’m not a big resolution girl I think it’s always a good idea to have a mini moment of reflection, if only to review your stats.

0: The number of times I logged in to the dating apps this year.

Let me be clear. I’m mostly thrilled about this. I couldn’t be more excited at the prospect of never going on another first date again. I never loved a first date, and since I stopped drinking 7 years ago they took on a tortuous vibe.

There are moments, however, when I miss dating apps, not because they were particularly fun or successful for me, but because a tiny, twisted part of me got off on the gamification of evaluating potential partners based on my own tenuous understanding of what the “right” person for me is.

The dating apps have been a cultural disruption on a great scale. As a product manager I can’t help but marvel at most of their sophisticated simplicity. 

The idea for Tinder alone could only be created by horrible people but at face value, it’s an excellently done product. They defined the now effortlessly understood and widely adopted UX mechanic of swiping left or right in order to pass almost instant judgement on someone. I’m pretty sure whatever feeling you get after a swiping sesh is in the area of the brain usually reserved for cocaine.

One thing I do wish more people understood with the apps is that the underlying algorithm does not have your best interests at heart. How could it? Once people actually meet someone and they both drop off the app, they’re not paying anymore. It would only be fiscal sense to dial in the model to give you just enough candidates it knows you’ll like to keep you interested but not so many that you might actually find love and become an inactive user from whom they won’t be able to extract any more money.

Use with caution, my friends, but use away and let me live vicariously through you.

45: Angle of the streets in Lisbon (in degrees.)

When I first moved to Seattle, after never having been there and knowing what turned out to be nothing about it (I know) I was greeted with a somewhat unpleasant realization very shortly after deplaning at SeaTac. It turns out that Seattle, the city, is built on a remarkable incline. It’s plopped atop a big ole hill. The city is being positively poured into Puget Sound.

I was similarly caught off guard a couple of months ago, when I arrived in Lisbon. The suspiciously cheap Uber from the airport bounced along the cobblestones beneath us. We barreled down extremely steep, roughly hewn streets, careening around hairpin corners. At no point was I sure that I would make it there alive as the driver drove absolutely wreckless stick but, as is evidenced by this account, survive I did.

I’m glad I did. Lisbon is postcard-pretty and charming af. It’s old, the kind of old that makes you feel silly for being an American, a citizen of a tweenage country built on other people’s land. 

The streets, for their steepness, are picturesque, and dotted with gelato stores and places to buy an endless parade of pasteis de nata.

The ninja-warrior terrain was ultimately something I grew to find charming and was honestly grateful to have built into my experience because of the ubiquity of the previously mentioned gelato shops and custard tarts. I, ever the Pastry Bitch™, had not one but two slices of a chocolate cake so damn good that I have had dreams about it since returning home. And before you ask, yes, they were sexual

The cafe that sells it has an unmissably large decal of a quotation on the door singing the praises of said cake by the cake editor of the NY Times (not a real position but a girl can dream.) The cafe was cave-like and peaceful, with art on the stone walls and a couple of well-worn comfy chairs against the wall. There was a menu at the counter with a single food item (“Slice of chocolate cake”) followed below by a long column of text that contained what must have been an extremely comprehensive coffee and tea offering. Utopia, basically, and a great setting for resting my blistered feet as I made a mental note to return to Lisbon with less fashionable but properly functional sneakers in the near future

2: Seasons of Love Is Blind watched with my partner.

Do you all know about Love Is Blind? It’s this wonderfully terrible reality show on Netflix and they’re really churning it out right now. Each “season” costs them what appears to be about $500 to make, most of which is spent on alcohol, and the absolutely preposterous conceit of the show is that people date each other without ever being able to see each other IRL. It’s billed, loudly and incessantly, as an experiment to see if “love is really blind.” 

At the end of the first half of the show, after “dating” for two weeks, multiple couples confoundingly propose through the wall, which tbh really takes the steam out of the whole visual of getting down on a knee in front of your partner. The back half of the season is just observing each pair of strangers for a month while what they did to get on TV sinks in.

It’s absolutely absurd to call it an experiment in anything. There is no control group, no formal hypothesis. The only papers written about this “experiment” will be in anthropological history books about how humans invented dating shows to fill any errant silences and distract ourselves from anything that means anything.

But even if you admit that it’s an experiment, it’s not the one it purports to be: the real experiment is whether or not you can really fall in love without once seeing a person interact with the outside world.

Hypothesis: Absolutely not.

I find it fully unfathomable, feeling confident in committing to spending eternity with someone without going to a 7-11 with them at 2AM and seeing what they buy. Without being on a flight with them that gets delayed. Without seeing how they talk to my friends. To their mothers. To baristas. That’s the real experiment Love is Blind is conducting. What happens when two people who are a perfect match on paper are sealed in two climate controlled, identical rooms, fully cut off from the outside world? The answer is that they sell a curated, greatest-hits version of themselves to each other and fall into what they believe is love only to be fully shocked when they emerge into the sunlight and one of them sees how the other reacts when they’re reminded about doing the dishes.

Quickfire round:

36: number of reusable bins we rented to move. I have moved twice now in two years, which has been a significant mental trial for me. I will die in this apartment.

23: bags of coffee purchased (note that this does NOT include the many $8 cappuccinos I shamefully purchased to supplement)

13: number of NYC-area bakeries I tried for the first time (to the best of my recollection): Hani’s, Petit Chou, Salswee, Tall Poppy, Ceremonia, Radio Bakery, Laurel Bakery, La Cabra, Mille-feuille, Lady Wong, Simple Loaf Bakehouse, Patisserie Fouet, Bread and Butter

10: percent of my original student loan balance that I have remaining (mark your calendars for a blow out party in 2026 when I put predatory debt in my rear view 4eva)(I will be paying for said party with the ca$h I now keep under my mattress)

3: number of nephews I now have (my saint of a sister in law had her third boy in September)

Congrats on completing another year folks, it’s wild out there. Be good to yourselves in 2025.