I read a lot last week, because my parents generously gave me three deeply engrossing books for Christmas.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering The Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat is not a cook book. You can’t really read a cookbook, can you? You have to approach it as a reference book to hunt for specific recipes when you want them.

This, though, is a read. I sat on my parents’ couch and read straight through Nosrat’s explanations of how salt, fat, acid, and heat work in cooking followed by her instructions for how to layer them. I’ve been practicing salting by finger wag ever since and asking, “How can I get some acid into this?” about everything I’ve made this week (hint: mustard in mashed potatoes is goooood).

Nosrat did the “I Think You’re Interesting” podcast back in November. Listening to that is a fun point of entry into her book.

Dinner in an Instant: 75 Modern Recipes for Your Pressure Cooker, Multicooker, and Instant Pot by Melissa Clark is a book I coveted the moment I learned of its existence. I’ve subscribed to the New York Times cooking website for over a year now, and Clark’s contributions there have taught me a ton. I prepared Thanksgiving dinner for 20 people last year using her stuff exclusively.

Also, I have an Instant Pot and it is amazing. So when I heard Clark on The Upgrade talking about this book I started dropping hints for the holidays.

I said before that you can’t really read a cookbook. But I read this. At least I turned every single page and scanned every single recipe (there’s barely an introductory material). Every recipe has a pressure cooker and slow cooker option, and the images are gorgeous. I made the chili recipe from it right away when I got home, and it’s going to be my entry in this weekend’s chili cookoff for sure.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer is another book I’d been eager to get my hands on that my parents gave me for Christmas. I finished it on the plane ride home. It’s not a cookbook.

Foer wrote one of my favorite books of the past decade, How Soccer Explains The World, so when The Washington Post published an excerpt of this book and Jeff Jarvis pummeled it I was deeply intrigued.

There is nothing new to Foer’s anxiety about how digital technology is affecting us, its users. This kind of writing is a genre all its own. But World Without Mind is valuable for its focus on the companies driving most of that tech: Amazon, Facebook, and Google (Apple escapes the most serious charges of spying and monopolizing Foer levels at the other three).

Amazon has destroyed publishing just because it could. Facebook has ruined journalism without a care. Google is deploying all the things it knows about you in increasingly non-search engine ways.

What did I do after reading this? I switched my default search engine to Duckduckgo, put Firefox back on my phone, restarted three paper magazine subscriptions, decided not to replace the Kindle I left in Dallas last month, and started free trials of Fastmail and Zoho Docs, alternatives to Google services on which I am quite dependent.

Reading: one of the best things about vacation.

“Saudi Aurora” is an offensive dis of my hometown that I’d completely forgotten about. I heard it all the time growing up from relatives who lived in more remote suburbs of Denver than the one where my parents bought a brand new house in 1978. They still live in that house, and those same relatives are still dissing Aurora.

I heard it again from one of those relatives on Christmas day, just last week. It kind of jolted me. He’s a police officer. Last month he participated in a training exercise at my old middle school. Recounting the exercise over apple pie provided the occasion for the disparaging moniker.

He elaborated on it: Aurora is full of crime. Cops want to work there for the challenge of it.

That’s not the Aurora I remember, and it’s not the impression I get of it when I visit. “Saudi Aurora” exposes a distance between my youth and my adulthood that is more than geographic.

I have a sympathetic reflex toward protests of police brutality. I’m horrified by the stories of Eric Garner and Laquan McDonald and Tamir Rice and Philando Castille and all the other mounting incidents of mostly unarmed African American men being shot by police. My instinct is outrage. When football players kneel during the national anthem to bring attention to the problem, I’m encouraged, not offended.

That’s me: a politically progressive 41 year old white guy.

That’s not where I’m from, though. Where I’m from shines a blue porch light in support of the police. Where I’m from is the police. Where I’m from was perilously close to a horrifying attack on police officers just days after offending me over Christmas pie. Where I’m from wore the same uniform as the deputy who died in that attack. Where I’m from sees things and risks things I have the luxury of reading about later.

Where you’re from shapes where you go even long after you’ve left it.

I accompanied my dad to the park by my parents’ house to walk their Greyhound, Lady, and on the way he jokingly threatened to turn on Rush Limbaugh. “I wouldn’t have stopped you,” I said. I pressed into the opening; we rarely speak of politics, and we’ve never spoken about Trump or last year’s election.

“You voted for Trump. So what is it about him that you like so much?” He answer was swift and clear.

“I like that he’s not a politician and that if says he’s going to do something he does it, like with cutting our taxes. I like that he’s standing up to Kim Jong-un. And I like that he’s going after those football players who are kneeling during the national anthem.”

Everything my dad likes about the president is an opening for an argument. Every  virtue he sees looks to me like a vice, or at least a deception: he is a politician; he lies reflexively; he is intensifying a potentially catastrophic conflict for the sake of his ego; his opposition to NFL protesters is overtly racist.

But I kept those arguments to myself. Instead, I let curiosity lead. He remarked that, given all the terrible things he said during the campaign, his electoral win was a “miracle,” so I asked: what could the president say or do to lose your support? This answer was less swift but just as clear:

“Nothing.”

I’m listening.

Mouse Books is my favorite thing of 2017.

I learned about it from Kickstarter last spring and became a backer immediately. David, one of the project’s founders, lives in Chicago, and he emailed me within a day of me backing the project, offering to send me an early preview. The catch? He wanted my feedback.

Talk about engagement. I was hooked. I burned through the little yellow edition of James Joyce’s The Dead in a few short train rides. After that it was a few months of email updates before the project actually shipped, and when it did I made quick work of it: Melville, Austin, and Dostoyevskey on paper in your pocket is kind of thrilling.

I gave them as gifts. I signed up for the Drip service that launched on Kickstarter in November. I had coffee with David, the founder. I received a special bonus collection of speeches by Pope Francis. I listened to David’s interviews with literature professors on Soundcloud. I backed their special holiday “Giving” collection.

I kind of went all in on this.

The very attractive “Giving” volumes arrived yesterday. “The Happy Prince” and “Miscellaneous Aphorisms” by Oscar Wilde; “The Gift of The Magi” by O. Henry; “Russian Christmas Stories” by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov. David asked me over coffee last month for titles to include in this collection, and I had nothing. That’s fine, because this is perfect.

I read “The Happy Prince” to Laura last night as she lay in her makeshift bed in the living room, lit by the Christmas tree (I tried “The Gift of The Magi” first, but “the silent imputation of parsimony” in the first paragraph indicated that the vocabulary is a bit advanced for a fourth grader).

It was a delight. I may just read it again tonight.

What discovery did you make this year that most delighted you?

I’m trying to be bored and brilliant on the train, but I made this playlist I called, “The Albums: A Life,” and ever since I never don’t want to be listening to it. It’s full of surprises, which is a delightful quality in something you made yourself. I made it by porting all of my best-of album lists from the past five years to a new playlist and then adding individual albums that I have played to death during some season of my past. Every song that pops up on it can immediately be identified, not only by the album it belongs to, but immediate visual associations connected to where and with whom I used to listen to it. I’m still adding albums to it every day.

Let me demonstrate by shuffling it right now and listing the first five songs.

“Lump Street” from Frightened Rabbit’s Painting of A Panic Attack. I’m walking down Chicago Avenue to my still-new job at Fourth Presbyterian Church, texting Marci and Landon about the band we all love.

“My Name Is Liar” from Highasakite’s Camp Echo. Early summer in Chicago, strolling the Gold Coast, where I’m living for the final two months before Meredith and Laura join me to begin the next chapter of our life.

“Note To Self” from Modern Baseball’s Holy Ghost. The commute to Fourth again, but this time past the Starbucks on State and Pearson on an unseasonably warm Autumn day, nodding again to the guy on the corner with a cardboard sign.

“Trouble” from Hey Marseilles’ self-titled 2016 album that came out in March, right after I moved here. I’m in two places with this one: the empty Rogers Park condo where I’m spending my first Windy City winter alone. There’s an empty Giordano’s box on the counter. I’m also on the 147 bus turning onto Lakeshore Drive on a grey, rainy morning, anticipating the view of the lake from my warm perch in the back corner.

“Rabid Animal” from Lake Street Dive’s Bad Self Portrait. Finally something from California. I’m listening to this in the sunny living room of our Pomona condo while Laura plays upstairs. Meredith is at work. I’m texting Landon about it, who can’t get into the “Bonnie Raitt” feel of it, as I Google video of the band’s appearance on Colbert. 

I wish something older would have come up in the shuffle, like one of the tracks from Erasure’s Pop! that makes me think of Jared Hamilton and Andy Patterson’s basement dorm room at Sterling College or Day At The Beach by Sonia Dada, which takes me back to the streets of Aurora the first summer home from college, driving around with Chip, trying to outdo one another with music we’ve discovered since we both moved away. He’s claiming Sonia Dada, but I was into their first album while we were still in high school. It’s such a Chip move.

Can you see now why I can’t just sit on the train and not listen to my new/old compilation? It’s a nostalgic season, for some reason.

I spend a lot of time worrying that I’m a bureaucrat. Sending emails, making schedules, reserving rooms, ordering food and materials: these tasks activate a voice in my head that says, “This isn’t effective. You’re pushing pencils. This isn’t even ministry.”

It’s garbage, I know. Bureaucracy is critical. How many ministry initiatives have I kneecapped before they could even start by failing to attend to these sorts of details? Too many to count. This stuff is important.

Where does that voice come from, though? I think it’s simply a cultural devaluation of work that is concerned with details and process. Nobody ever says “Bureaucrat” as a compliment, not in government or church or school or anywhere else. The implication is that the real work is done by other people, not the bureaucrats.

A friend who serves as a regional church executive listened to me on this last week and replied simply and forcefully: feed the bureaucrat.

I fiddled with the clock app on my phone Saturday night, thinking that it would be cool if I could set it to wake me up with the Stranger Things theme, but it didn’t work and my alarm never went off. I woke up a full three hours and 19 minutes later than I’d intended.

I leapt from bed and sprinted into clothes and out the door for a frantic beginning to a full day during which a mental chorus of “irresponsible!” and “unprofessional!” and “fraud!” would bellow through the morning and coo all afternoon. I never got my head right. Everything I looked at disintegrated and everything I touched crumbled.

But a small evening gathering of youth leaders literally saved the day. To break bread with the church folk who care the most about accompanying young people in all the ways we try to do that set me right. My off-the-cuff expression of gratitude to them was nearly choked off by emotion mere seconds after it had begun. It’s the part of that day I will cling to.

Some of us need the company of our people to feel right. I’m learning that the best way to get out of my head is to get in a room with people who care about the things I care about.