January was mostly planning, rearranging, thinking about planning, and occasionally mistaking all of this for progress. February, by comparison, has begun to acquire actual furniture.

I finally settled on the apartment I’m moving into, I’m getting my hair cut tomorrow, and little by little I seem to be dissolving into Michigan rather than merely residing in it. This winter has been absurdly snowy. I clear the car in the morning, go outside at lunch and find it covered again, then leave work to discover that winter has refreshed the installation for a third time. Turning lanes are slippery, braking occasionally becomes more philosophical than mechanical, and there have been several moments when I thought, hehe, this may genuinely be how I die.

One reassuring thing, though, is that I don’t seem to be exploding internally as much as I did when I first moved here.

I was never particularly impulsive. Looking back, it feels more like I spent a long period quietly accumulating things I didn’t know what to do with, followed by another period in which they exited at high velocity. Now the needle seems to be drifting back toward zero. Not enlightenment. Closer to the factory setting.

I would very much like spring to arrive. Michigan spring and summer are the versions of this state I actually love—the bright green, the lakes, the little towns, the weather that makes you believe you have made excellent life choices. This year I am determined to make it to the cherry festival, which I somehow missed last year despite organising an entire trip around it. I would also like a proper lake life: sunlight, water, perhaps a chair, ideally no immediate danger of black ice.

We have survived the frozen chapter. Surely only happiness remains now.

This is not meteorologically guaranteed, but I prefer the sentence.

Meanwhile, I have been watching the same penguin reel almost every night before bed.

You know the genre. You’re lying there, flicking through reels with one finger, expecting nothing from anyone, when suddenly a penguin forces you to reconsider your metaphysical commitments.

The clip recounts that famous image of a lone penguin leaving its colony and walking toward the mountains—not toward food, not toward another penguin, not apparently toward anything particularly sensible. It simply turns and walks away. The reel asks, But why? and, because this is Instagram and an animal can no longer behave strangely without becoming an allegory for individuation, explains that perhaps comfort can become more painful than uncertainty. Perhaps walking alone is frightening, but remaining somewhere that feels like slow death is worse.

Unfortunately effective that you begin with a bird and end up auditing your life.

Lately Instagram comments have become suspiciously educated. One moment you are watching someone cut fruit; the next, the comments section has convened an unsupervised graduate seminar in ontology.

Someone had posted a question along the lines of:

Are you a fundamental being?

The replies immediately abandoned ordinary human proportion.

One person argued that they were fundamental because they were self-sufficient, except that the moment they declared themselves fundamental to another person, the declaration itself constituted a relation and therefore compromised the self-sufficiency on which the claim depended. By articulating the category, they had already exceeded it.

I read it twice.

My interpretation was:

yes, but in a manner that has created paperwork.

Another commenter went Heideggerian and observed that even if one exists inauthentically, the fact that one can take one’s own Being as a question makes one Dasein.

Then somebody wrote:

A being who gets irritable when hungry.

At last, phenomenology with empirical support.

Someone else simply noted that the question was “so philosophy-major coded,” which was perhaps the most rigorous contribution in the thread.

Then came the long answer.

The writer argued that first-person and third-person existence can never be perceived in exactly the same way, making any attempt to prove that the self is “fundamental” structurally suspicious. To say I am fundamental is already to make the perceiving self the condition through which the rest of the world appears; to say I am not fundamental reduces that self to matter, processes, and relations without explaining how any of those become consciousness. Either the self founds the world it knows, or it is merely one event within that world, and neither position escapes using the self as evidence for itself.

The conclusion, after considerable philosophical machinery, was essentially:

I cannot answer the question.

For a brief moment, however, I existed as the person answering it.

Honestly?

Good ending.

Other responses included “the solitary individual before God,” “a sophont,” and one ambitious description of existence as an event that conceals itself within ordinary embodiment only to reappear through repeated acts of disclosure.

And then:

Can someone recommend a place for eyebrow microblading?

Civilisation restored.

I need to get off my phone.

At work, I have to walk between Building 1 and Building 2 almost every day and still arrive breathing as though I have completed a polar expedition. I avoid the stairs, take the elevator, then waddle around pretending none of this says anything about my fitness level.

Healthy life begins soon.

Probably after I move.

I also won’t have internet at home for about two weeks before the move, which is either going to be completely fine or result in me discovering what nineteenth-century evenings felt like.

Mostly, I just want to move already.

And when I feel like the penguin—when some part of me wants to walk away from the familiar for reasons I can’t fully explain—maybe I don’t need to panic immediately.

At least see what the mountain is.

—

And then somehow February ended.

We are already halfway through the first quarter, which sounds alarming until I remember that February is a suspiciously short month, so none of this is really my fault.

The biggest improvement is that I’m no longer in the outsourcing-management part, which means I can finally stay put in Michigan instead of being dispatched around the country like company luggage. My new teammates are all very distinct little characters—bouncy, strange in their own ways, fun to work with.

And I moved.

I HAVE MY OWN PLACE.

Which means I no longer have to share living space with the thump-thump-thumping white lady from the condo.

Freedom.

Unfortunately, while packing, I somehow transported her dog’s leash into my new apartment.

So now I have to see her again solely to return a dog leash.

Life refuses clean endings.

Since moving to Michigan—and especially since last year’s era of endless business travel ended—my life has become almost aggressively uneventful.

Work, home.

Work, home.

A hobby here.

A little romance there.

Exactly what I wanted.

Once the weather warms up, I can go back to the lakes. The new place has a terrace, so I’m already imagining putting up a hammock and hanging there for twenty minutes at a time, absorbing sunlight like a large, salaried houseplant.

Even lunch at work has improved. The cafeteria used to have Korean food, Western food, and boxed meals; now they’ve added kimbap and ramyeon, which has significantly expanded the emotional possibilities of noon.

I have, however, spent the winter eating with such commitment that I occasionally imagine my arteries preparing a memorandum, so lately I have begun choosing salad every now and then.

Fortunately I’m not picky about vegetables.

I will chew leaves quite happily.

There aren’t many Korean restaurants or supermarkets around here, but my standard for a sufficiently developed American town is modest. If there is a Chipotle nearby, civilisation has arrived.

No complaints.

Except the snow.

It still seems to snow every other day, and I’m beginning to suspect Michigan has developed an ideological commitment to winter.

I cut my hair short again, and the hairstylist happened to be Korean.

There was a TV documentary playing about some Russian people studying Korean and speaking it impressively well, and she kept turning to me saying, “Isn’t that amazing?” so we sat there clapping together at the television.

A very warm, very small-town Korean-community moment.

I also find it interesting that, despite being somewhere comparatively rural, so many young people come here for work. I entered corporate life relatively late, so even at my old company I was never part of the youngest group. Back then, interns felt like younger siblings. Now I look at some new hires and they seem like literal chicks.

Tiny corporate chicks.

Grow well in this cruel world.

At the beginning of the year, I designated this month as the month of execution, and if I assess the actual level of execution—

This matters because my personal process for beginning anything is generally not to begin it.

First I buy equipment.

Then I clean the room.

Then I organise the equipment.

Then I emotionally prepare to use the equipment.

Then I reconsider the system.

Eventually, action may occur.

This is simply project mobilisation.

So perhaps March can be the month when the actual work begins.

There is also a concert in April that I already want to fast-forward time to, but perhaps that defeats the point.

For now, this is enough.

The new apartment is mine. Work has settled into a rhythm. I am travelling less. I know where I’m going in the morning and where I’m coming back to at night. I have a terrace waiting for spring, lakes waiting beyond the snow, salads occasionally interrupting my Korean lunch, and a dog leash belonging to a woman I thought I had successfully left behind.

It is a remarkably ordinary life.

Which may be exactly why it feels so good.

Maybe the penguin does not always have to walk toward the mountain.

Sometimes it gets there, looks around, and stays.

But why?