|
|
In a bout of homesickness and youthful nostalgia, I got super into dousing my cut up fruit (mostly pineapple, but also cantaloupe) with chamoy (Forritos Pulpa at this time because it’s what the Mexican grocery had) and Tajin and it is sooooooooooooooooooooooooo good. A lot of the chamoy and Tajin and Lucas type candies and stuff were too spicy for baby me (though I would absolutely house one of those Lucas spaghetti things when passed to me or the watermelon suckers covered in chamoy and Tajin on occasion even tho they killed me afterward) but my college commons had the kind of classic fruit salad mix pre-condiment-ed and ready to eat so the nostalgia has been pleasant anyway. You really gotta get the ratio just right but even when it’s wrong it’s sooooooooooooooooooooooo good.
We watched Fallout on Amazon like everyone else (in line with the zeitgeist for once!) and I really liked it a lot. I don’t play video games, so my entire experience of Fallout prior to the show was guys in college hearing the old-ass music I was listening to and going, “Is this from Fallout?” and me going, “What the fuck is Fallout?” I thought the worldbuilding was really well done without like, totally infodumping everything all at once the Ghoul is EXACTLY the kind of character I love (and is so hot lmao) and I think Lucy is such a good character to follow through the story. I thought the first seven episodes were really well-paced, but I did spend the eighth screaming for them to get the fuck on with it already, so I don’t know what that’s about really, except that canon onscreen romance always A-L-W-A-Y-S slows shit down and sucks all the energy out of it, so that sucked, since both those characters had been so good and interesting and exciting up to that point. ANYWAY, I will watch season two when it comes around I think and that’s about as good as it gets recommendation wise from me.
We also watched the first three(?) episodes of Hacks which I really like but find difficult to make myself put on for some reason? The episodes are actually sitcom length, which should in fact make them very easy to put on, but here we are. We’ll get there tho, I believe.
My attention span and ability to focus are still absolutely in the toilet but I read Zan Romanoff’s Look and really and truly loved it. Maybe, emotionally, the closest I have ever felt to having my own high school experienced rendered. Great writing, an engaging narrator, and a story that just felt very real and relatable, even when it was a bit much because being a teenager is a bit much tbqh.
Okay that’s it for now! Perhaps soon my brain will step off my own neck and I’ll be able to, like, intake information again! Dream big!
Some books: I’m not having good luck with books this year! But I read some alright ones! Kiel Phegley, Strikers and Stephanie Hoyt, Prove It and Cat Sebastian, We Could Be So Good.
Some tunes: Games We Play, “Girl Shaped Crater” which i have been listening to on repeat like an insane person. Oh and Kittie’s “We Are Shadows,” which is SO good and also it’s great that while I am experiencing a personal metal revival via this playlist for the 13yo in my heart, so many bands I liked at that age are coming back. And The Decemberists in general, but specifically I’ll Be Your Girl, this time around. 2024! The year I become a Decemberists guy! As I have already said! A lot!
Some eyeball stuff: I am still watching a movie a week and I rewatched The Social Network which is still just phenomenal. Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher, absolute TITANS of film, coming together to make a movie about something as stupid as Facebook lawsuits and every second of it is perfect. Sorkin’s a prick, but that man can write dialogue, babey. And everyone’s just acting the hell out of it. Andrew Garfield’s beautiful face haunted with emotion, Jesse Eisenberg’s blank disinterest that you somehow know is because he’s too busy thinking about something else to be present… Fantastic.
I also watched Poor Things which was so much weirder (POSITIVE!) than I was expecting and while the story was fine to good, the sets and costuming are going to be what really stick for me, just absolutely beautiful and stylized and fun to look at for the whole runtime. Also, Emma Stone was GREAT. I don’t care about awards, but for sure she deserved whichever one of those things she won.
Alright, that’s it! See you next month! Love you!
Rereading the Captive Prince series – These were a great time the first time around and even without a family emergency making me desperate for a distraction, they were great the second time around as well. These books understand the beats they need to hit and they hit the absolute shit out of them.
Tunes: The Last Dinner Party’s Prelude to Ecstasy, The Decemberists’ Hazards of Love, Momzer’s “Coyotes and Snakes” (this is an old grad school professor’s band! lmao), Green Day’s Saviors, Kim Petras’ “Head Head Honcho”, “16 Carriages” (duh), French 79, and an ever growing playlist of stuff I listened to in my youth.
Also as inspired by a longtime internet friend, I have been listening to a new song every day and a lot of those have been winners.
The 2024 NHL All Star Festivities, my annual love, but in particular the Skills Competition.
Okay, that’s all I got for today! Love you!
It really seemed like things were getting better there for a minute, didn’t it?
Anyway! In the spaces between my brain going, “We :) are :) living :) through :) a :) plague :),” I have tried to compile some of the stuff I loved best this year! I did a lot of music listening and a lot of reading and not a lot of much else, so let’s see where 2021 shook out!
  I didn’t read my first KJ Charles this year, but I did get very into Spectred Isle and Slippery Creatures which I did read in 2021. Charles has a masterful way with both worldbuilding — something I don’t usually care about since I’m not a supernatural/historical/scifi/fantasy person! — and romantic tension, but also manages dialogue that’s fun and snappy without feeling forced between characters that are likable and interesting.
  My most listened to artist according to Spotify this year was The Tragically Hip which is absolutely true, and I got into quite a few other artists this year — Goat Girl, Deaf Poets, Father John Misty, Shakey Graves, Tyler Childers, Meg Myers — but I think the album I listened to most — and often started over from the beginning as soon as it ended — was Miya Folick’s Premonitions. Every song is great and the album as a whole works incredibly well and I couldn’t be more grateful to the algorithm serving it to me, even if it was a couple years late. I’d be remiss not to shoutout the live version of “Thingamajig” which puts me through an emotional blender every. single. time.
 My favorite book this year was Elif Batuman’s The Idiot which took me almost two years to finish, but only due to a mix of personal problems and the whole world going to hell. It’s an exceptional book, somehow about nothing and everything simultaneously, funny and really heartfelt, thoughtful about the experiences of a young adulthood that looked nothing like mine and yet still managed to be incredibly relatable. As previously noted on Twitter, I cannot properly express how hard or how many times I’ve laughed at, “Dracula had a totally different experience at the zoo from that of other people.” 
I read a ton of queer sports romances this year, both while on my Unlimited Summer 2021 journey and not, and though most of them were fine to very bad, I did read quite a few that were great.
    
Rachel Reid’s books are all very solid, but I was particularly fond of Heated Rivalry and Role Model and I think Ilya Rozanov is going to go down as one of my favorite characters in the last five years, easily. A.L. Heard’s Hockey Bois was the best book with a bad title I read this year, charming and sweet and very much about the romance of adult domesticity. Ashlyn Kane and Morgan James’ Winging It was also really charming with a fun cast and some good hockey cameos. Cait Nary’s Season’s Change was a dream, one of my favorite reads this year, full of characters I loved and cared about and with sharp writing better than basically everything else I’ve seen in the genre. Sorry you have to wait ’til February to read it!
Some other stuff I’ve loved this year, both new and more deeply: this vertical mouse, All or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs, these maxi dresses, sitting the fuck down whenever humanly possible, these food storage containers, Flipped, this goofy light, baseball — particularly the Dodgers and the Padres, Kringle Cream, Fear Street: 1994, these reusable water bottles, Walking Alice on YouTube, sleeping under this weighted blanket, laying down on the floor in a pile of pillows, Paramount+, these sweaters and these cropped hoodies from Target, and the Minnesota Wild.
Happy almost New Year! Here’s to high hopes and low expectations for 2022! I hope this year treats you kinder than the last and I hope you’re kinder to yourself than you ever have been before. I love you! Be safe! ♥
You ever spend at least five or six minutes a day staring into the middle distance and trying to process that we’re all living through like, three to five global catastrophes simultaneously? And then get up and put your clothes on and go to work anyway? Oh yeah of course you have that’s what 2020 was all about.
I know that, functionally and realistically, absolutely nothing is going to change between December 31, 2020 and January 1, 2021, but holy shit am I be glad to close the door on this shitshow of a year regardless.
My attention span went to hell this year, amongst other attributes, and I pretty much ceased watching or reading anything after about… August? I did continue to listen to new music as without it I die, but everything else was just a barren field of nothingness. My Goodreads year-end roundup felt particularly pointed this year, but what can you do, right?
ANYWAY, here’s my top five for the year. Just the one list, categories be damned.
 Orville Peck was my most listened-to artist this year. Crystal gave me Pony at the start of the year when she did her annual comb-through of all the year-end lists; I was hooked from the jump and I stand by everything I said about it in January. Peck’s voice is so easy to listen to even though it’s deeply emotional and there’s something really magical about his arrangements. I’ve loved everything he’s done this year as well — the cover of “Smalltown Boy” is one of my favorite pieces of music from 2020 and “No Glory in the West” just absolutely kicked my ass across the prairie — and I also have to blame and thank him for really opening me up to country music this year. I had, obviously, moved away from my youthful “everything but country” attitude to music, but the algorithm responded to my listening habits and offered up a ton of new music I wouldn’t have necessarily been interested in before because it was country or country adjacent including some new legit favorites like Colter Wall and Evil and Sunny War.
 Sarah Henstra’s We Contain Multitudes is still really the only piece of media I consumed this year that really fucked me up emotionally in exactly the way I like to be fucked up emotionally. My Goodreads review is still right on and what I said in May here still stands as well. This is just a really lovely story with characters it’s easy to care about and get invested in with complex life experiences that complicate how they relate to one another. I’ve bought, I think, almost ten copies of this book for other people since I finished reading it and if that’s not a ringing recommendation, I don’t know what possibly could be.
 I joked earlier this year that since Crystal had decided to attempt to claim her Canadian citizenship, I was going to try to get into The Tragically Hip so that I could be adequately prepared for whatever it meant to live with a Canadian, but it turns out that they’re great and I was just missing out all these years. (Not that I necessarily assumed they weren’t good but like, you know… Canadians, right?) I would start listing the favorites I’ve accumulated here, but there are just too many to be honest. I do have a favorites playlist but it is incomplete, so tread with that in mind. Truly, RIP Gord Downie, and thanks for the boss tunes.
 Letterkenny ended up being one of the only media experiences we had this year and I still stand by every word I said about it in March. Just thinking about it can make me laugh and we’ve held off on watching the new episodes specifically because we want to have something to look forward to. Crystal and I had a long conversation the other day that meandered over a bunch of media and it ultimately came down to the idea that not enough weird shit is getting made. Everything is a remake or re-adaptation or a sequel and I know we’ve all been screaming about that for more than a decade at this point, but it’s nice to watch something like Letterkenny that is weird and funny and has a big heart too.
As previously discussed at length (kinda), I watch hockey now! Again! Regularly for the first time since I was a youth. This was an exceptionally weird season in which to get invested in sports of any kind and by the end of it I had attached myself to thirteen teams (seven “primaries and six “auxiliaries” because I certainly cannot do anything normally) and several of those teams went to the playoffs, some of them deep, and one of them all the way to the Cup final! Which was rad, but also sucked because they lost, though it was tempered by my enthusiasm for the finals being between teams from non-traditional hockey markets! Anyway, I think cishet men should be banned from talking about sports where other people can see it, but otherwise I’ve been having a spectacular time and can’t wait for the new season even though having it happen under the current conditions of the world also terrifies me. The grueling mechanism of capitalism, etc etc.
  
Happy New Year! Here’s to high hopes and low expectations for 2021! I hope this year treats you kinder than the last and I hope you’re kinder to yourself than you ever have been before. I love you! Be safe!
|
|
