Dear friends and family,
Happy Holidays! We hope this letter finds you happy, healthy, and holding space for Defying Gravity.1If you don’t understand that reference, congratulations: you survived 2024 relatively unscathed by Internet brain rot!
What a year 2024 has been! We went skiing and camping. We went to Cabo. Jess went to Japan. Brendan went to roughly 837 concerts. We saw a total solar eclipse in Illinois, and the aurora borealis in Aurora. Becky helped her hospital run a mass-casualty simulation (fine-tuning its processes for handling a true emergency), and even dragged the family along to serve as crisis actors.2Don’t tell Alex Jones, lol. Anyway, here are some photos of us with fake blood and fake burns after we got all “moulaged” up. Not to be outdone, Brendan dragged the family to lesbian church, a.k.a. Brandi Carlile at Red Rocks, then drove the kids to Iowa for a Chappell Roan show, where our $39 GA tickets somehow landed us in the second row — and we got to watch 2024’s breakout pop star and gay icon stare directly into our souls.
Flipping the usual oldest-to-youngest script, let’s start with Samantha, our wry, enchanting, affectionate 8th-grader. Sam turned 13 this year, inaugurating the Loys’ long-awaited “three teen daughters” phase. (Don’t believe society’s anti-teenager propaganda. They’re pretty great!) Following unwittingly in her late Papa Loy’s footsteps as “the mole,” Sam spends the bulk of her free time in the basement, preferably with all the lights off, and gleefully monopolizes our 70-inch TV with YouTube videos of grown men screaming about horror video games. While there, she subsists on a snack diet well-balanced among the four major food groups: (1) raw onions dipped in ranch dressing; (2) Costco microwave popcorn; (3) avocados; and (4) seaweed. A rare hybrid of couch potato and gym rat, Sam also takes twice-weekly workout classes with one of her besties. She enjoys anime, manga, shooter games, Family Guy, hilariously roasting her dad for his musical obsessions, cuddling with our five furry pets,3The furry quintet is: Bailey, age 12, our anxious octogenarian dog; Todoroki, our lovable-asshole pandemic pup (now 4½), who is certain he will leap our 6-foot fence and eviscerate the neighbor’s dog someday; Keefe, our new kitten (more on him below); Truffles, who is obsessed with Keefe and may be in love with him (#loveislove🏳️🌈); and Puffles, who keeps her dignified distance from the chaos. In a devastating loss, we bid farewell in February to Scruffles, who died in Brendan’s arms at the vet after a brief illness caused rapid multiorgan failure. RIP Scruffles 🙁 and creating endless graveyards of dirty dishes and half-finished cans of flavored seltzer water. She starts high school in 2025. Wut.
Carrie, 15, is a sophomore at Denver School of the Arts who continues to live the Gen Z teen dream: her monetized “gacha life reactions” YouTube channel earns hundreds of dollars a month, almost all of which she squirrels away in savings because she is her mother’s daughter. Somehow our most mercenary and ourmost progressive kid, Carrie is often heard contemplating how best to win capitalism and/or dismantle the patriarchy. She delights in bemoaning how much homework she has in chemistry and AP US History; thank goodness for the Hamilton soundtrack, a.k.a. the best APUSH study guide ever. Speaking of which, although college applications are still a couple years off, Carrie is not throwing away her shot at buffing up those extracurriculars: she joined DSA’s Speech and Debate team this year, and will get her first taste of competitive speechifying in early 2025. Carrie also got her learner’s permit this year, and when she gets nervous behind the wheel, she copes by vocalizing (in a southern accent) a running commentary on her driving, in which she calls herself a “diva.” Very cutesy, very demure. Sadly, Carrie was unable to talk Brendan into a father-daughter trip to Stockholm for Eras Tour 2.0 over the summer, but they did fly to San Francisco this fall for a Frances Whitney concert and some sightseeing, capped off by a Waymo driverless-car ride to the Golden Gate Bridge that was cool (per Brendan) and terrifying (per Carrie). When not gaming on her PC, watching Arcane, or editing her next viral video, Carrie can be found counseling her friends on their relationship dramas, discussing anime ’ships with her siblings, listening to…Frank Sinatra(?!), eating Annie’s white cheddar shells, or lamenting the existence of men.
Jess, a.k.a. Jinx, is a high-school senior (OMGWTFWHY) who turns 17 on New Year’s Eve, which means they’ll turn 18 next year, which is definitely fake news made up by so-called “experts” in such bogus subjects as “arithmetic” and “the inexorable passage of time.” Not unrelatedly, Jinx will start college(!!) in the fall. Where they’ll go is TBD, but they’ve already gotten into several excellent schools, including CU-Boulder, a strong contender to be their college choice (Sko Buffs!). 2024 was an eventful year for Jinx, from getting their license (and taking over Dad’s old car), to reprising the role of George Weasley working at Hogwarts summer camp, to hyperfixating (again) on My Hero Academia. Also, Haikaveh.4Attempting to explain this reference would take the rest of the letter, but suffice to say, Jinx will audibly squeal with joy when they read it. Most memorably, Jinx spent nine days this summer on a school trip to Japan, which was by all accounts a fun and meaningful cultural experience, even if roughly half their photos are of Pokémon. Jinx has a vibrant group of awesome friends (who sometimes just show up at our house, because teenagers), and is celebrating two years dating their delightful boyfriend, Jaxon, who Carrie still occasionally calls “Jason” just to annoy Jinx. #siblinglove
Brendan is, yes, still gainfully employed as a lawyer — six years at his current firm, sixteen years(!) practicing law — and is not actually in the music industry, despite what his social media footprint might seem to imply. Still, for Brendan, this was surely the Year of Concerts (a.k.a. the Year of Distracting Himself from Politics with Musical Hyperfixations). Besides Chappell, he saw, among others: Olivia Rodrigo, Mitski, Indigo Girls, Amos Lee, Tish Melton, Samantha Osani, Mon Rovîa, the Piano Guys, two consecutive nights of Brandi Carlile at Red Rocks, and three concerts in three different cities (L.A., Chicago, S.F.) by a rising indie-label singer-songwriter named Frances Whitney, who very suddenly emerged this spring as Brendan’s new co-favorite artist, tied with Brandi (sorry, Taylor). If you get him started — please don’t — Brendan will talk literally forever about how shockingly talented Frances Whitney is, how she’ll totally be a household name someday, how you simply MUST go see her live, yada yada yada. It’s all slightly exhausting, and if she does blow up, he’s going to be absolutely insufferable. But she is quite good, and we might be able to get backstage passes to Red Rocks if she plays there someday, so there’s that. [Stream “Old Hobbies”!!! -Brendan] [ 🙄-Becky]
Becky can’t compete with her faux-music-promoter hubby in the midlife-crisis department, but she did decide it was time to buy a bougie cat in 2024, because YOLO. And so, [redacted] dollars later, we welcomed home the newest furry member of our family, Keefe, on Becky’s birthday in June. An enormous orange Maine Coon kitten who loves being gorgeous, sleeping, and wrestling with his boyfriend(?) Truffles, Keefe is Becky’s new favorite ginger, and Brendan can’t even be mad about it: I mean, just look at those ears! Becky’s other prized addition to the milieu was a batch of bindweed mites that she got from the Colorado Department of Agriculture after 2 years on the waitlist, setting up the epic war now raging in our lawn between the forces of order and chaotic weedy anarchy. At work, Becky accepted a promotion to Permanent Charge Nurse in the Emergency Department (thus earning the blessed responsibility of explaining to ornery patients why they really do need to remove their tongue ring for the MRI); established herself as a workplace wellness champion; and was just generally a total girlboss.
Happy New Year! 🥳
Love,
Brendan, Becky, Jinx, Carrie, Sam, Bailey, Todoroki, Puffles, Truffles, Keefe & Spike 🙂