2023 Christmas Letter

The year is 2023 and I’m going back to school… to learn Dungeons and Dragons! After watching three and a half episodes of a popular Netflix original series I decided to Stranger-Things-ify my life with this classic ultra nerd role playing game that, for some reason, had yet to be added to my gaming skill set.

While UPS has a generous tuition reimbursement program for full-time employees, a rather awkward meeting with my center manager and a regional Human resources representative concluded that money spent learning this new skill is not eligible for reimbursement. Sorry monster figurines, you are going to be financed from my personal checking account from here on out.

After the hustle and bustle of the holiday season died down I wrangled Austin, the guy who loads my truck in the morning, and Jenny, the gal who helped me deliver packages in December, to help me realize this new goal. My character was a lovely one-eyed cleric who, many years ago, accidentally fell asleep next to his newly sharpened mace. Honestly, that could happen to anyone. Despite this being our first time, Jenny and I stumbled our way through the experience and successfully managed to kill a large frog type monster which was rather inconveniently eating the crops belonging to a local farmer. I need to exercise caution to keep my character from losing his other eye as everything I’ve experienced in this world seems to be in no way ADA compliant.

The year is 2023 and I’m going back to school… to learn Spanish! I suppose a more accurate description of this situation is that I downloaded Duolingo on my phone. Katherine has a thousand day streak going on the app so if I spend 15 minutes a day learning new vocabulary instead of advancing on levels in Candy Crush I should catch up to her… literally never, but at least I’ll have reached my goal of knowing as much Spanish as Señor Chang from the television series “Community”. 

So how exactly does one go about learning a new language? Here are a few pointers I’ve found useful so far: 

1. “Volunteer” (or as I like to say, “volun-tell”) family members to interact with you in Spanish in spite of (or because of) their clear objections. A good start is to play “Lo Siento Para no lo siento” which is our version of “Sorry” but everyone has to count in Spanish. The only upside for my children is they can mock me until the end of time because I keep skipping over seven when I count in a language other than English.
2. Set up a Netflix user where the default language is Spanish and watch children’s cartoons for hours on end. Honestly, I’m not sure which of the first two options is less popular in my house.
3. If you really, and I mean really, want to learn Spanish, commit the “twelve months of the year” song to memory and sing it to Oscar the maintenance worker at the mall when you pass him at work. 

In July I packed up my favorite “lounging on the beach” shirt and my three closest family members and flew off to an all inclusive resort in Cancun, Mexico. The amenities were all first rate and we I fell into the following routine at the buffet dining area: 

1. Tell the waitress my cat joke in Spanish. “Qual es el dia favorita del gato?” “Meow-coles!”
2. Halfheartedly glare at the kids for choosing non-vegan food from the buffet.
3. Creating elaborate backstories for the half racoon half marsupial animals that were constantly sneaking into the dining area to steal food from unattended tables.

We spent the better part of a week engaging in several water-centric activities such as swimming in the ocean, hanging out in the pool, and breathing the air (which, according to my phone, somehow achieved 105 percent humidity.) 

In technology news, Artificial Intelligence is a trending topic these days, so I thought I would make up some predictions about what this means for humanity in the near future.

In the very near future, say this Tuesday, it will be impossible to differentiate between human recorded voices and computer generated speech on Youtube videos. Sorry Stephen Hawking’s voice software, but you are to be relegated to novelty historical use only from here on out.

To simplify the world of online dating, massively parallel chatbots are going to digest all of the world’s online personal information and start interacting with each other. If your chatbot really hits it off with another chatbot after a few months both human parties can exercise the option of meeting in real life. “Are you seeing anyone?” “No, but my bot has several promising leads that I’m keeping an eye on.”

I’ll soon be able to submit my “Archer” movie script to the interweb and, after an hour or so of processing, watch a 90 minute video complete with animation and character voices. Boy, they really nailed Sterling yelling “LANA!”. Any skeptics of this should realize the previous version of this software has been, without any human intervention whatsoever, responsible for the past seven seasons of “The Simpsons.”

For some reason it seems like every year 1.2 percent of the population just goes out and dies of this or that, and this year was no exception. I’m sure that everyone will agree the biggest loss of 2023 has to be Angela Landbury best known as the star of “Murder, She Wrote.” For some time I’ve known a little secret about this woman that I felt was prudent to keep to myself until after her passing. SHE MURDERED ALL THOSE PEOPLE ON THE SHOW!!! What are the odds of a novelist stumbling across more than 200 murders over the course of a decade? I ran some calculations and I say zero. And not just on the show, she killed all the people in real life! (or IRL, as the kids like to type on their phones) That explains perfectly why appearing on the show was known to literally kill an actor’s career. I really feel better having gotten that off my chest.

Remember this, folks: you can spend life going all in on your most grandiose visions or sitting on the couch doing nothing of note. Either way the universe will reach a point where your existence has no effect on the present: you, your evil goatee-clad twin, and that one guy you are never going to like at work’s accomplishments will all be eroded by the sands of time. Having said that, look deep inside and figure out what you can do with your next billion heartbeats