The older I get, the more sentimental I become. The free app Timehop has become my chief enabler, giving me a daily dose of nostalgia via a late-morning push notification. Each day I get to see my pictures, tweets, Facebook statuses, and Foursquare check-ins from one, two, and three years ago. It's mindless fun, but I love the way it helps me keep in touch with the recent past.

This year I made a New Year's resolution to get to the gym at least three times a week. To my own surprise, I've stuck with it — and the TRX has been a big reason why. On one hand, it's just a pair of straps suspended from the ceiling at the gym. But from those straps come an endless variety of exercises. You can work out just about every part of your body with TRX, using your own weight against you in ways that are exhausting but effective. And somehow it’s fun!

Last month I decided not to upgrade to the latest iPhone, and suddenly $300 was burning a hole in my pocket. I chose to invest in my first pair of high-quality headphones, and since they arrived I've been wearing the (atrociously named) PSBs for hours each day. There is much to be said for re-listening to every album you ever loved in the hopes of discovering something you had always missed. And it turns out I'd been missing a ton.

San Francisco's off-putting obsession with burritos has obscured the fact that it is also a very good town in which to get a sandwich. The best of these sandwiches can be found in the Castro at Ike's Place, home of a $9.99 gut bomb called "We're Just Friends," which I like to eat whenever I'm in the neighborhood. The sandwich's star is the halal chicken, glazed in a sweet orange sauce, and it's accompanied by lettuce, tomato, avocado, pepper jack cheese, and a slathering of Ike’s Dirty Secret Sauce. Choose your own bread if you must, but know that only a fool gets anything other than the Dutch crunch, which is baked fresh in the back.

I am congenitally predisposed to enjoying the music of self-loathing miserablists, and Matt Berninger has been one of my go-to sad sacks ever since The National released Boxer. Like Boxer, this year's Trouble Will Find Me is a wonderfully sad and lacerating record, sharing its knife-stab lyrics and intimate, almost overheard quality. The chief knock against The National is that they're boring, but this record is angry. Start with "Graceless."