21. 2025: The Year of the In-Person Person
The one resolution you need to survive this year.
Welcome to the Great Job Nat™ Monthly Newsletter! The freebie thinkpiecething I send out every month. If you want access to an upcoming Monthly Zoom where we talk about all things creative, consider leveling up here. All of you paid subscribers help keep the lights on and I love ya xoxo <3
Every day, life passes you by at breakneck speed.
Look at you, pedaling a tricycle around the whooshing hellcircle of the Daytona 500—every news story, meme, job listing, grocery order, and unmade decision is a souped-up race car designed, detailed, destined to obliterate you, to throw your pigtails forward with violent, centrifugal force.
What is life, after all, but a hydra-heading beast of oh-no’s and to-do’s that sprout new do’s with every to-do that’s to-done? And (sweet tragedy!) and many of the do’s feel like they’ll NEVER be done because you’re too distracted by hypothetical to-do’s for a life you’re not even living. Zillowing homes in the Bay Area when you live in Los Angeles. Airbnbing homes in Italy or Japan because you need to escape further. Watching videos of people eating food at restaurants you’ll never visit. Looking for jobs—no, looking at the salaries for jobs on LinkedIn—jobs that you’re not even qualified for, jobs that you don’t even care about but, oh! Look at those stock options! Pff! Ball those up and shove ‘em between your legs, yes, yes, YES.
Your brain is a humming, frozen television. A confused salad of opened email tabs, amateur food reviews, LUiGi MAngIONE thiRST TRaPS, disappointing news stories, and infuriating half-baked thoughts. Maybe that’s the problem: everything is half-baked. Rushed. Thrust into the zeitgeist without too much thought, and yet? Every day, you buy a ticket to this race. Every day, you lose. Absolutely nothing can remove you from this fruitless chaos until—
You stumble upon a caption, a freaking caption that dares you take pause. Written apparently, by the chef of one of your favorite restaurants in L.A. (Anajak Thai, baybee. Go to Resy and book right tf now and thank me later.)
The caption reads like something Anthony Bourdain would’ve written, in your humble know-nothing opinion. It’s always food writing that grounds you to Earth, taking you from thought to taste, reminding you of your own tongue. It says:
“Calibrating the palate. A crucial moment of learning for a chef, and everyone does it differently. At Anajak, at 3:30pm each station fires off tasters for lineup. Chef Ori taught me to taste several times during the night because the fire on the grill changes. Bobby Stuckey doesn’t trust his cooks to taste in a hot sweaty environment, so he actually had his cooks take blood tests during service to test the amount of salt that cooks may lose over the course of a service, preventing the over seasoning of a dish because we as cooks are low on sodium. The legend Evan Kleiman told me she appreciated that we weren’t a salty restaurant. Some chefs know how to make something “aggressively balanced” like Nancy Silverton. Other chefs live in the world of calm and precise flavor like at Hayato restaurant and The Harbor House Inn. I found it so interesting that Eric Ripert uses Velveeta cheese as a palate balance because since it’s a manufactured product, it stays consistent, therefore if the velveeta taste weird it’s probably because our palate is not calibrated. Ferran Adrià famously ate the entire 50 course everyday at El Bulli. Many cooks dull their palate by smoking, so they can season their food better. I try to keep it sensitive, but who knows what all this coffee is doing to the palate. I’d love to hear the sages Kenji Lopez, Harold McGee, David Zilber, David Chang. I would love to know how Rene Redzepi learned to taste new dishes with a cuisine that’s being made in the moment.”
When did you last recalibrate your palate?
You know that saying that goes “If you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen?” Well, maybe you used to be able to handle the heat but god damn, you’ve been inside that kitchen sweating for years, electrolytes imbalanced, and now you’re oversalting every dish. Somebody, dear god: get you a stick of Velveeta and a cigarette, stat.
It’s not slowing down, exactly — it’s focus. It’s tuning. It’s pacing. It’s servicing your tricycle mid-race.
Happy New Year, Time to Give Up!
It’s 2025 and I have one resolution: I’m giving up on everything.
Not everything as in everything. Everything as in everything at the same time.
Look, I’ve known myself for too long, okay? I know my vices. Have a coffee with me and I’ll describe to you a bouquet of new ideas that I had just that morning: a script! a book! a political campaign that will save us all! Spiritually, I am that coked-up guy who corners you at a party to screamsplain at 5x speed every detail of his unicorn startup because oh wow is it gonna be HUGE.
I hold all of my ambitions and worries and thoughts in my mouth at once like marbles, shifting and clicking and straining against the backs of my teeth. Precarious withheld avalanche, impossible to speak around. I walk around all day like that. Uncomfortable and overwhelmed. Why? Because I’m scared.
Fear propels me like a clumsy helicopter, curlicuing around the sky. Afraid I’m focusing on the wrong thing(s), afraid it’s already “too late” because I’m “too old” and/or the world is “too far gone,” afraid I’m overthinking this whole human experience, especially considering that people who don’t think so much are CRUSHING IT right now.
If I so much as open CNN, the day is dwarfed by the Everything I’m Not Doing Enough Of to put out the (sometimes literal) fires happening all over the world. Speaking of: My power just went out because the Los Angeles fire-winds are currently raging. How can you focus on one thing when everything is always happening?
Your friend Jason tells you: “A chair can only have so many legs.” The metaphor is: you’re the chair and the things that you’re focusing on in your life are the legs. You and Jason laugh because your chairself has 1000 legs. Faulty millipede chair.
Jason says: “Actually, a chair only needs three solid legs to stand. One can be wobbly. So, what are your three solid legs? One is the short film you just got a grant to make. The others ideas you have are uncertain.”
I say, “Okay fine, the short film is one of the legs and and then my… feature? And then a job. And the wobbly is stand-up. Shit, and drawing comics—”
Jason says: “Just focus on the film.”
Parting New Year’s Advice
If a chair metaphor isn’t enough to convince you to find focus in 2025 and/or if you’re still struggling to think of a way that you might get past your own sense of personal and existential overwhelm, I have one sure-fire way to simplify your mind and that is to: be fucking for real.
As in: be where you are. As in: look around the room you’re literally standing in and decide what’s possible for you that day.
If you’re having trouble being fucking for real, you can learn how to be fucking for real by going to a place that you know is fucking for real, like a grandma’s house. Doesn’t even have to be your grandma. Rarely have I been to a grandma’s house that is not fucking for real. Being at a grandma’s house will remind you that sometimes a day is just a day and you are just some guy.
When I’m at my abuela’s house, it feels like the only place. Nothing exists outside of the mumbling coffeemaker, the cabinets of trinkets, the ceramic bowl of mints from Olive Garden. She has eight million plants, I think, and they’re all so happy. I have one small cactus that I sometimes remember exists because I am not being fucking for real enough to be a good plant owner.
If you’re like me and you need more help being fucking for real, it also helps to crack your phone in half and throw it in to the sea. Or—just use it less. Live more of your life in the real world with real friends and stop distracting yourself with the bajillions of somethings and nothings that are happening on your scary little devices. (Some of those things are important to know and trust you will know enough about those things. Most of those things are nothings, stop kidding yourself.)
Yes, wow, I know, what a concept: get off your phone. We all say it and then we don’t do it. It’s almost like these things are designed to hypnotize us, addict us, killing us slowly and silently. Haha, crazy talk.
But be fucking for real: every minute spent on Instagram, imagine you’re staring into Mark Zuckerberg’s stone-blank eyes while he face-to-face spoons you and pulls money out of your pockets with his clammy alien hands. Because that’s almost literally what’s happening.
Admittedly, that’s not horrifying enough to make me delete the app, but it’s enough to make me put it away for the evening.
Ok, that’s enough Nat / Plans for Substack (Read to the end for a fun opportunity!!)
Ok that last part unspooled a little bit, shut up. I mean, maybe it didn’t. Maybe this was coherent. I dunno.
Quick, some housekeeping / logistics / FUN NEW THINGS!
Clearly, I am not the most consistent writer on here. Again: shut up. BUT! I do love the community we’ve created here and so I want to try something fun to keep the ball rolling when I don’t always have time to write.
I’m safely committing to an essay a month (plus whatever flippant little things I may or may not be inspired to post) but ALSO— I want to try a Great Job Community Zoom where we talk about writing and creative endeavors. For those of you new here: I’m a stand up comic and a screenwriter and a cartoonist so I love talking about all forms of storytelling. Based on the first couple Zooms, I either want to make it into a more structured storytelling class (where we talk about finding your story and how to get it to the right producers, festivals, etc.) or f*k it, keep it a casual fun convo amongst the community.
If you’re interested, enter your info here. This first Zoom will be free, then future monthly zooms will be under the paywalled part of the Substack because that seems like a fun tier perk. If we even like the Zooms. Which, who knows. Let’s try it.
OK THAT’S IT. LOVE YOU.
N
I so so so so so feel ya on this.