Best of 2025
I guess
This has been a year of reflection (Mulan much?) and I don’t really want to reflect anymore. I don’t want to write a yearly think piece of what I learned and how even in hard times I was happy or how I grew like my garden. I don’t want to write in metaphors or glean meaning from my experiences. I want to be afraid of depth. I want to wade in the shallows. I want to perform small talk.
I want to write a best of list.
Typically, I hate this. Perhaps it’s the contrarian in me. Or because I have superior taste. Brooks calls me a force multiplier which, when I google, a lot of stuff about war comes up but how I interpret it is that when I do or wear something, people are inspired.
Which I guess is kind of militant. To think wearing Crocs could enact change. To desire my Instagram followers to blindly follow my lead.
(And hey, speaking of Instagram…the bots generously bought and gifted for my birthday by Margaret 2 have, and this is tough to write, unfollowed me. I am 45 followers away from 1,000 and the ability to go live. If you love this free “newsletter” I send out at random that gets around 450 average views, please hit follow on @amley90 and tell your friends. I promise I’m posting things you’re never going to see anywhere else (my dog licking a Lamby chew toy while crying for 20 seconds.) What I lack in quantity, I make up in quality.)
In November, I wore a beaded belt around my neck and literally two weeks later I saw a Free People ad featuring a belt you could and should wear around your neck. What I’m saying is, I have great taste.
Two of my favorite pop culture writers (Hunter Harris and Fran Hoepfner) asked their followers to comment their best of lists. I was crushed by the loneliness of a Sunday, mixed with being violently hungover when I found myself reading the comments to see what others had enjoyed this year as a way to outsource serotonin. I felt like the Grinch, my heart swelling two sizes. It brought me unexpected joy to look up pajamas people bought, their favorite movies, smells. I liked how someone specified the podcast episode they loved the most. It made me happy and I notes app’d many of the recs. I also found myself inspired. Writing a best of list feels like a safe way to reflect on the year without drowning in nostalgia.
So, without further ado, MY BEST OF 2025:
Best podcast: Specifically, the Jo Firestone episode of Straighteolab. I’ve listened to this episode no less than 4x. It’s hilarious. Editor’s note: I am NOT someone who relistens to podcasts, respectfully. If you do, I think that’s awesome! But not for me. And yet, here I am with this episode which I’m smiling while writing about. I don’t think you need to be a listener to Straighteolab (although you should) or even know who Jo Firestone is, btw. You’ll laugh no matter what.
Runner ups: Every voice memo a friend sent over three minutes. Those podcasts got me through some of the longest 3:00 pm afternoons. And the friends that sent ones over six minutes: I cherish you and love you the most.
I also got into the Amy Poehler podcast Good Hang. I famously don’t like Amy Poehler because I didn’t like her memoir but man, I love this podcast! It’s fun! Wholesome! Feels genuine and not contrived for media training.
And of course, my subscription podcast Bitch Sesh. If you watch anything on Bravo, highly recommend, worth every penny.
Best song: A Bar Song (Tipsy) by Shaboozey tied with Never Lie by Zach Top tied with Love Takes Miles by Cameron Winter. These songs are my church (Maren Morris).
Best album: Who’s the Clown by Audrey Hobert. Ugh, so smart, so funny, so sad. I love her lyrics, I relate to them deeply which makes me feel like a teenager and an old loser! Both Gabe and I were in her like, 0.02% listeners which embarrassed me but I won’t speak for him. My favorites on the album:
Sex and the City - yeah, “nobody knows of my column”. This substack is emailed into a void! Chris texted me the lyric, “He’s off his meds, And he’s an artist”. I know! It’s every man I’ve ever dated! I miss them all.
Wet hair - what if I told you he reached out and I met him out and I had wet hair and I listened to this song while I got ready and then he said this was one of his favorite songs on the album? Kinda crazy, huh?
Sue Me - this was her first single and the one Gabe and I really sunk our teeth into. I had a whole idea for a music video but I settled for just Gabe and I mouthing the words in the Third Coast greenroom.
Best playlist: One of my spiritual gifts is making playlists. My high school physics teacher said I’d make a great disc jockey and I’d love to one day be a music supervisor for television shows (life is long.) But the past several years, I’d fallen out of making them. While most of my resolutions didn’t stick this year (smiling with teeth in photographs) I did stick to my guns and make a playlist for each month. May was particularly good. I used to also make playlists built around a single word, which I only did once this year for “train”. I think that one is pretty good too.
Best poem: Luckily, I am best friends with my favorite poet and poem reader, Caroline Stevens (more famously known as Poet Caroline.) Often I’ll wake up to a text of the poem she read that morning, setting the tone for the day. I also love following Daniel Handler (more famously known as Lemony Snicket) on Instagram who posts his favorite poems of the day. There’s always some collection at my bedside I fumble through but they are my savants.
Meredith sent me this poem in July. I want to waste my love on everything.
Best book: Heart the Lover by Lily King; I cannot recommend this book enough. It’s so beautiful and emotional, capturing love and grief and heartache and what if so well. On a dreary and cold Sunday morning I cried harder than I’ve ever cried in my life. Both Poet Caroline and Margaret 1 cried as well but quickly assured me not as hard as I did. Which wasn’t necessary but appreciated.
Poet Caroline and I sent voice memos this week on how novels are no longer character driven but rather plot heavy. When I looked back on my goodreads reviews I was surprised by how often I droned on about this. What happened to character growth? I saw my ex for the first time in three years this October and my whole body reverberated wondering how much he had changed. He later sent me an email that confirmed there’s been no character development at all. We’ve bottomed out on story!
Anyway...
I read a third more this year because it became the only effective way for me to sleep. Whoda thunk that after so much time and money I spent on sleep aids and holistic health I just needed at least 30 minutes of a book to lull me into slumber.
People tend to get weird when I tell them how many books I’ve read and most people think I’m already weird enough so just know that out of many, here are my runner ups:
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (everything is Lonesome Dove)
Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
What I consider my straight white men of a certain age memoir trifecta: I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally, They All Came to Barneys by Gene Pressman, and When the Going was Good by Graydon Carter
My Friends by Fredrik Backman
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld
Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
You can see everything I read here on my goodreads.
Best audiobook: Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green. Firstly, John Green has a great voice. Secondly, I love him. Thirdly, this book is so fascinating with incredible information given in such a digestible way. I wish everything kinda hard to understand was written by John Green.
Best sunset: I walked the air park last month to watch the full moon rise. It was remarkable. Unearthly. But is a moon rise the same as a sunset? It was a cotton candy sky and I wanted to eat it.
John Green (everything is John Green) has an essay about sunsets in his book The Anthropocene Reviewed. This is an audiobook I return to often (along with Casey Wilson’s The Wreckage of my Presence and every audiobook by David Sedaris which I lovingly refer to as my lullabies). This specific essay has one of my favorite passages about his dog, that I can’t reiterate into my own words but that I have condensed:
he would roll over onto his back, and present his soft belly. I always marveled at the courage of that, his ability to be so absolutely vulnerable to us, to offer us the place that ribs don’t protect, and trust…It’s hard to trust the world like that, to show it your belly. I don’t know exactly how to describe this, but there’s something deep within me, something intensely fragile, that is terrified of turning itself to the world. Maybe it feels like loving the beauty that surrounds us somehow disrespects the many horrors that also surround us. Or maybe I’m just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it, through the Claude Glass. But I want to be earnest, even if it’s embarrassing…And so I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out, and I tell myself: This doesn’t look like a picture. And it doesn’t look like a God. It is a sunset, and it is wildly beautiful, and this whole thing you’ve been doing where almost nothing gets five stars because almost nothing is perfect? That’s b.s. So much is perfect. Starting with this.
I try to watch the sunset every night, timing my evening walking route to see it over my favorite field or leaving my house to drive perfectly alongside the setting sun. I can admit, they’re not always “beautiful”, some nights just grey clouds bleeding into a cerulean sky. But in the same breath, it’s beautiful that each night offers up a clean slate or a moment of awe; a presentation of deep gratitude. Every sunset I’ve seen this year has been my favorite; each a reminder that so much is perfect.
Best walk: On January 1st I crashed out so hard (I wrote about it here) waking up sobbing crying in the house I was dogsitting, my favorite velvet furred chihuahua snuggled in the crook of my neck. Carly and I walked the neighborhood in the freezing cold while tears stung at my cheeks and each step got me further from the pain in my heart and closer to resolve. We still had fun! Look how happy we look! It was the first of the year so I was still doing amazing with my resolution to smile with my teeth!
Every walk I took this year allowed me to arrive, again, and again... I think about the walks I took this year with men I liked, men I loved, my best friends, my mom, my sister, who I recently walked with when she was in such a terrible mood that I had to say, “you’re energy is upsetting me” and by the next mile the walk melted her icy heart enough to look over and say, “I feel better now” in the silly infantilize voice we speak when we’re happy. Walks with my dad, especially one where he said to a group of teens, “hey fellas” and then rolled his ankle. It was a sitcom. I think about all the walks I’ve taken at Shelby where the pasture changed radically with the seasons. I think about all my evening neighborhood walks where the deers have stopped to stare at me in private comfort. I think about all the songs about walking, lyrically professing a secret we all know. Like sunsets, every walk I’ve taken this year has been my favorite. Even the one I walked from my house to the brake shop in the rain when they told me they wouldn’t be able to fix my car :)
Best TV : I don’t really watch much TV because I feel guilty if I’m not outside while the sun is out and I don’t like to watch TV before bed because it makes me hyper but now that daylight savings has happened and it’s cold, I can watch TV at 4:30 and not feel bad about it.
But…
I love Stranger Things! I texted Taylor and said, “stranger things is my favorite show” and then he told someone at a party I said that and I felt embarrassed. And yet, it hasn’t stopped me from talking about it nonstop. I’ve woven it into almost every conversation since Thanksgiving.
Runner up: The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. I want all of these women to EGOT. No one is doing it like them.
Best movie: I can’t stop thinking about Sorry, Baby. I went here in Nashville at the same time Margaret 2 and Ben went in Sarasota. Cute. My virtual dream date. And you know that. I don’t think Margaret 2 liked it as much as me, but we appreciated the same moments and both of us agreed that it lingered a while, moments ruminating over the month.
Runner up:
Weapons. Taylor and I promised each other we would watch it together and were both very antsy to do with our busy schedules. This meant neither of us could read reviews or think pieces which also made us antsy. We finally watched together with Chris, who really didn’t want to but we coerced. It’s a perfect horror movie.
Twinless, which I saw with Gabe at 9 pm, his favorite time of day and my least favorite (I love 9 am.) I thought the switch at the beginning of the movie was brilliant.
Best pop culture moment: I loved the monoculture of the Coldplay cheating scandal! We need more monoculture! We’re desperate for it.
Best text: Taylor texted in our group chat a screenshot of Chris’ photography calendar for “Paul Simon”. Chris responded that he had to sign an NDA. This coincided with singer/songwriter/God Paul Simon’s Ryman concert. I freaked out with excitement. The prank was that the client was just a regular man named Paul Simon and the NDA part was made up. It was a very good prank. I had already texted the guy I was seeing about it and then quickly had to text him my disappointment. He responded:
Runner up:
Best concert: Margaret 1 and I went to The Grand Ole Opry with Cal and Dakotah to see Sabrina Carpenter’s Grand Ole Opry debut. Margaret 1 and Cal got this for my birthday and for some reason, despite Cal working for The Ryman, I thought they had their information wrong and Sabrina wasn’t actually performing. Turns out they were right and she was amazing and Margaret 1 cried. I had no idea Sabrina meant that much to her. Ernest also played and Margaret 1 and I were ironically obsessed. The following week I got an email from The Ryman asking, “ready for Ernest?” We asked Sister Caroline to go with us, who is unironically obsessed with Ernest and I’ve actually never seen my sister so joyful in my entire life.
Runner up: MJ Lenderman at The Ryman, of course. Carly and I sat three rows from the stage eating cardboard box peanut MnMs for supper and it felt good to be with our fellow brethren. And truly brethren for it was all bros worshipping at his altar. I also bought a hoodie from the merch line that I’ve worn every day since. I love becoming hyper fixated on an item of clothing!
Best thing saved to my phone: In August, I texted Taylor “do I read?” and he texted back,”imagining my gf got amnesia and has to ask me things about her past and I can either tell the truth or lie to create the perfect girl”. A text like this isn’t uncommon for us. Imagined scenarios, bits waiting to be played out. But what was uncommon is that Taylor typed that into chat gpt. At first this was very upsetting to me because I hate chat gpt. The only AI I use is Andrea’s Imagination. (I am stealing this joke from Alex.) And of course chat gpt sent a terrible first chapter of a book from Taylor’s prompt where one of the lines read, “will you tell me about me?” which lead Taylor to send a video performance of the line. I think I have watched this video 300 times at least. I wish that was an exaggeration.
Best vanity plate: Obviously, mine! After years of having an almost spectrum like love for vanity plates, I got my own.
Runner up: I saw two license plates, two months apart, that spelled “BIRDS”. One in Tennessee, one in Utah. I hope one day they meet <3
Best meal cooked: This tomato, fennel, lentil soup by Alison Roman from her new cookbook Something from Nothing, a perfect cookbook! I got it in November and I’ve already made around 15 recipes.
Best cocktail: Groceries, the new bar in East that opened this fall, kinda has cursed energy and has spun at least one person in our group out every time we’ve gone, most recently me :) Regardless, they have a paper plane made with mezcal and it tastes like gold. If I’m not careful, I can drink three in under an hour. I was not careful most recently :)
And now for a bonus to getting this far, Andrea’s Favorite Things:
Favorite perfume: Glossier You. I’ve worn this for nearly a decade. The number one thing that is said to me is, “you smell so good.” Second, “your instagram is everything to me.” (@amley90) I wish it was, “you’re so pretty”. Smelling nice is a good runner up though.
Favorite Deodorant: Guess what guys? Another reason I smell so good? I also wear Glossier You deodorant. It works and I do pilates in it every day.
Favorite shoe: Jasper Keens. It’s crazy I haven’t been sponsored yet. I know of at least three people who have bought this shoe without saying anything to me. And three people who are my best friends in the world and have! And three people who are my best friends in the world and keep asking me to stop wearing them. These shoes are not for everybody! And that’s okay! But they are for me and I think they look good with a dress. Sue me (Audrey Hobert)
Favorite snack: I’m addicted to eating dates with peanut butter or chocolate chips. It feels high brow and tastes better than almost any other dessert I’d buy at a store. (Other than cardboard box peanut MnMs bought at The Ryman; I don’t know why, but they’re superior.)
Favorite thing I bought over and over: My mouthtape!!!!!!!!! I’ve actually gotten a lot of questions about my mouthtape. Sometimes in a straight to camera instagram story (@amley90) I’ll say the phrase, “I’ve actually gotten a lot of questions,” and then shake my head no (one of the many things you’ll see if you follow me that you won’t see anywhere else) but this is real.
Last December, I thought, “wow my neck is looking very turkey and I am getting old and I am noticing that and I am getting sad about it.” Fundamentally, I currently don’t believe in botox for myself. I say currently because this could change at any moment because every time I do think wow that girl is beautiful I quickly find out she’s had botox :) And also, I’m broke. So I turned to an inexpensive solution: mouthtape. And boy oh boy has it changed my life. I love being vain! My jawline is more defined from it. As an added bonus, it has enhanced my immune system in ways I didn’t even consider. I’d liken my health to a Victorian child. Almost every year of my entire life I’ve gotten a cold at the change of every season and then some. But not this year! I, of course, haven’t looked up the science behind it but it’s probably something about my mouth not being open every night for germs to get cozy. And you can quote me on that for I am a woman in STEM who changed her own car key fob battery this week.
There are a lot of bad brands out there and unfortunately the one I love gets repackaged and discontinued often on Amazon and I have to look at photos to distinguish which one I like. Look for the rounded edges and blue crosses on the back to ensure you’re getting the best of the best (it’s also the cheapest one on the market! I’ve tried the expensive ones too! Trust me!)
Wow, that was a lot. Was it even interesting? Why’d I do this? I still feel oddly nostalgic and melancholic, noooo! What did I miss? What were your favorites? Who knows when I’ll want to know again! Tell me, swiftly! Surely this feeling is fading and I’ll once again be deep in the catacombs of my mind where circles, and crushes, and invisible strings live.
I can’t believe my intimate performance is now so public