April Littrell
Kalalau
Here’s a photo of me at Kalalau Beach. I was going to write about the hike, but instead ended up recapping past goals in honor of New Year’s Eve.
Fuck me, it’s been a while. A whole year, really. A busy year. That’s my excuse for not filling these pages for months. I need to stay busy, though. You can reasonably expect that if there are a good amount of subsequent posts here, I’ve had time to sit around and write them. Which is why we’re here now, at Vesuvio in North Beach, feeling self conscious in a corner booth with all my tech out, trying to think a post into existence. I’m too worried that other patrons think I’m a tech bro with my iPad and wireless keyboard and AirPods in to drown out the much-too-loud music in this otherwise cozy bar. Why do all bars need to play loud, shitty music? Music and lighting account for a large part of atmosphere, and few places in San Francisco seem to get it right.
I’d hoped to write something other than a mind dump, something of its own distinct category, but at the risk of not writing anything else at all this year, I’m doing another end-of-year recap. Unfortunately this site has become more of a voyeur’s magazine where one might wander into the mind of a stranger like me than the amalgam of more serious musings I’d hoped it would be. Guess it’s never too late to try and circumvent nihilism.
Why is this titled Kalalau? I hiked the Kalalau Trail earlier this year with my brother and a few of his friends and wanted to write about what it meant to me. It was a placeholder title for something I intended to write, and now I’m using it as a springboard for thinking back on the year. Wish I felt like getting into it with you, the hike, but I don’t. Maybe later. I pasted some old goals of mine in this draft a few lines down and I want to discuss them a bit.
These are near verbatim from a little black journal I keep in a cart near my desk at home. Every year, I try to come up with just three succinct bullet points to guide my thinking for the year ahead. And every year it gets more difficult as I trade faith in the future for the inevitable wisdom gained by going to bed each night and waking up each successive morning.1 Check the footnote—it’s hard to edit on an iPad and I think I’ll be too lazy later to better organize these thoughts.
Let’s get a little personal, shall we?
Goals 2018 and beyond…
- Be more authentic
- Write more, type less
- Read before adding
Starting back six years ago, here’s a snippet of what I wanted to improve upon. Let me try to guess what these meant back then.
Authenticity… this might not have anything to do with gender, but at t-minus four years until minus-t,2 maybe I didn’t feel myself and wanted to feel more myself but didn’t know quite how.
Writing more? I wanted to make more of an effort to write in ink vs keystrokes. A romantic thought. And I do still pen thoughts sometimes, but then it just takes more time to put them here. Not that everything has to end up here, but I like being vulnerable with you. We’re all so aloof nowadays, at least I think so, in some sense, in this post-digital era.3 I love reading into people’s minds, so it’s only fair I offer a portion of mine to you. Besides, when my skin suit expires and I can’t talk or type, maybe these electrons4 will be around to communicate for me.
Finally, “Read before adding”: It means I should burn through my read-it-later library before saving more articles.
Goals 2019 and beyond…
- Replace social media
- Focus on your book
- Become more flexible
Social media has fucked off from my life, thank god. I fucking hate privacy pirates. Instagram only occasionally, temporarily makes it back onto my phone when my brothers send a slew of reels and want to talk about them. And I guess I got Bluesky when someone who worked there sent me an invite and I was curious if someone could build a more user-friendly federated network than Mastodon.5
Focus on my book? Hah… hahaha. Nice try, younger me. I had as little to say then as I do now. Everything’s already been written. I’ve tried and tried and tried, albeit not very well, to blast past the formative stages of novel writing, and I always give up. Someday maybe something will be worth writing about—just gotta keep living until it shows itself.
And flexibility… I definitely wasn’t doing yoga back then. Maybe I wanted to be less stuck in certain ways? Flexibility sounds like a cop-out goal. I have let myself get a bit stiff, though. Huh.
Goals 2020 and beyond…
- Post consistently
- See beauty in imperfection
- Take more time to breathe
Here I am posting! Consistently? Well, we’re not dead yet. More useless posts to come.
Beauty in imperfection… I sound like a monk. I think I might’ve gotten this thought after a friend in Kyiv showed me a wabi-sabi style vase with gilded cracks. It’s a good reminder in general, to invert dissatisfaction. I’ve started to like scratches on things.
More time to breathe? Again, good in theory, but god are these terrible goals. I got more creative in 2024 with the threesome idea—let’s keep more of those comin’.
Goals 2021 and beyond…
- Learn and apply something technical
- Try for 250 words per day in book
- Meditate for 1 minute daily
I’d have to think hard about something technical I learned and applied that year, but this has definitely been a focus of mine recently: Scuba, sailing, climbing, motorcycling… learning feels good, man.
More book shit, another failed attempt.
And the meditation bit is just an iteration of the previous year’s breathing goal. We get it, you’ve been a little removed from the present. I don’t think I’ll ever strike a balance between contentedness and thirst for what could be. I’m perpetually parched.
Goals 2022 and beyond…
- Daily self-compassion
- 30 minute weekly creative session
- Do a photoshoot
The compassion idea most likely arose from early days of therapy. I got a therapist in 2022 to help me figure out girl stuff. I can definitely be hard on myself. The idea of self-compassion feels simple and intuitive, but for me it’s not. I’m not sure I’ll ever fully figure it out.
The weekly creative session was yet another iteration of the book goal made even more abstract so that I might work in small bursts of inspiration and eventually create something, anything, of substance. Needless to say I did not follow through on this one.
What’s the photoshoot about? Would I be the one taking the photos or have photos taken of me? I’m guessing the latter, but the beginning of 2022 was still pre-transition, so I can’t imagine really fully feeling myself enough to want to document that particular corporeal state. Maybe I knew that I’d start altering my physicality soon and wanted to create a before for the impending after. I don’t recall if this was exactly the case, but I think I was prescribed and held onto my first batch of hormones for some time before gaining the confidence to actually pop one. Or I was waiting for some arbitrary but meaningful-to-me date and time.6
Goals 2023 and beyond…
- Grow massive titties
- Be a hydration queen
- Run a fuckin’ marathon
The first one is pretty obvious. There are familial indicators as to your personal potential, but no one can ever be quite sure. Time and fat do the trick. Goal in progress.
Hydration… I wanted to be more moisturized inside and out. Still do. It’s a healthy way to be.
The marathon goal has been a bit aggravating. Sure I could work up to and run a marathon distance at any time, but I want to do a sanctioned race. The most notable one near me, the San Francisco Marathon, has evaded me for the past two years. The first year I’d lost my toenails climbing Mount Shasta and the second year I injured my ribcage slipping on the Kalalau. Entry deferred to 2025.
Goals 2024 and beyond…
- Get a girlie voice
- Have a threesome
- Discover a new place
We’ve arrived at this past year. My voice sounds like a dude still and I fucking hate it, but I’m too embarrassed and lazy to put in the work. There’s also some sense of pride in being a hot girl with a deep voice—the deliberate diversion from an impossible path toward maximum femme. I have a similar rebellious attitude towards keeping my dick.7
The threesome, ah yes. There has been more than one. I’m a fan.8
And as for new places, there have been many: Taipei, Tokyo, Kyoto, Lima, Medellín, Mexico City, not to mention countless spots within the states. I’m a really lucky girl.
…
Where does this leave us going forward? I’ll be honest—I had a rough holiday break. Some inexplicable sense of dread set in and cast a shadow over days reserved for rejuvenation. I’m not sure I need rejuvenation right now. I need inspiration, a real goal, and a team of people to accomplish it with. Community, challenge, learning, growth. I often tell my friends, but more oft lovers who already understand this of me, that I feel an intense energy within and simply don’t know where to direct it. I’m seething with desire to desire. I desperately want to care. And that’s all these yearly goals have ever been—an attempt to assign something to give a fuck about.
Maybe this is the year to stop with the bullets and just see where life takes me. Not that I ever heeded them too closely. 2025 is a good number—a quarter century. And I’ll be thirty next year. I think at this point in life I have a pretty good idea of how things work in general. I’m damn lucky and happy overall. Writing this piece has sure lightened my spirits after days of endless spiraling. If you’re also experiencing a moment of dismay, maybe this is your call to do something expressive. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
I wanted to share what I’ve accomplished this year like I did last year around this time, but the prospect of that is overwhelming right now. It’s my second day typing this out and I’m at a brewery with Maciej in Sebastopol.
The looming political situation has been a festering concern, considering my identity and Katya’s nationality. I think we’ll be okay, or more okay than others. But I’m worried, as many are, about the others. A lot is outside of our control. I think what I can do, at least, is to continue to share my perspective, because shared perspective invites empathy.
These are loose thoughts for now. My thoughts never feel tightened up, which is neither welcome nor unwelcome. It’s just how they are. I’m not sure if that makes me a bad writer, a lazy writer,9 or just a person trying their best and moving on with the day. I at least hope there are some word truffles in here for you, and that you’ve been able to sniff them out among the dirt.
That’s not entirely true. I’m a hopeful, optimistic person. I don’t lose faith in what’s possible going forward, what I should say is that wisdom with age and experience narrows my focus on paths to positive outcomes. I know how to do what I want to do within the realm of plausibility. And can better factor in environmental variables because I’ve sailed in all sorts of conditions and can tighten the sheets accordingly.↩︎
I started to medically transition in 2022.↩︎
I won’t pretend to know what this means—I just heard it somewhere. There are probably academic papers about it and I’m bastardizing some theory poor college kids have to bullshit about, feeding cheap beers to ChatGPT.↩︎
Is it true to say data is stored in its most basic form as electrons? Fuck if I know. I could look it up, but I don’t want to get distracted. Update: I looked it up. “Electrons are part of the mechanisms used to store and manipulate data, but the concept of data itself is abstract and tied to patterns and states, not the electrons themselves.” (Source)↩︎
Turns out they could. And now I flick through Bluesky for a quick fix of illustrated smut. Good stuff.↩︎
I’m superstitious about dates and times. There’s no particular set of rules around which numbers matter—it’s just a matter of them feeling good, feeling right.↩︎
A topic for another time. I love and loathe these incongruous parts of me. Am I constantly convincing myself it’s worth it to hold onto the most difficult parts to change?↩︎
I’m afraid I’ve been spoiled. More adults should have more adult fun together more often.↩︎
My third self-accusation of laziness. Be more kind to yourself! You do a lot.↩︎