Photos from São Paulo, Brazil, Dec. 6, 2019.
January 3, 2020
January 2, 2020
May We All Have A Vision Now and Then
Somewhere around September or October, I realized that 2019 has been a year I was writing off as transitory in a lot of ways. It was the year the divorce became final, and I rebuilt my life in a better way, with me actually able to control things that felt out of control before — of course, there’s still a lot I can’t, and never will be able to, control, but that’s just fine — and in a far happier place and healthy relationship. 2019 was the year, I told myself, where I’d figure things out, even if it’s just what not to do.
(Money; I need to be better about money, for one thing. There was a point mid-year where I suddenly thought, “Wait, am I going to wipe out my savings when I pay taxes next year?” and had this massive chill run through my body. Still, at least I have savings, which was better than the worry I had earlier in the year when I didn’t think I’d be able to make rent because a paycheck was delayed.)
But if that’s what 2019 was — and now, I still think that I was right in that characterization of the year, perhaps feeling even more convinced — then what is 2020 going to be? What happens after the transition?
I have no idea.
And the more I think about that, the more I’m okay with it. There was a point where not knowing was terrifying, where I knew that I’d be expected to have an answer and a plan and that the plan would need to pass muster, and… that was unnatural to me, really. For better or worse — and really, it’s probably worse — I’m not one with longterm plans, one who has everything mapped out in advance. It always felt like a struggle to have those answers when they were asked of me, and it took me too long to realize that that, really, was a sign of something being wrong on an important level.
So, 2020 is going to be what it’s going to be, and I’ll probably only realize what kind of a year it is midway through it again. That’s kind of exciting to me, to be honest. When I was doing my Masters, I remember talking to someone in the school’s PhD program as they explained the idea behind their work method. Basically, she said, she followed what seemed interesting and exciting and right in some indefinable manner, and trusted that she’d realize what the connections between all those things were after the fact. It was called “emergent research,” she said.
If my life is emergent research now, that doesn’t seem like a bad thing at all.
January 1, 2020
Not The Best, But My Favorite, TV of 2019
I am, I admit, not a fan of Best Of lists — or, at least, not a fan of writing them, because someone will always come along to tell you that you’re wrong because you forgot [Thing X] and you’ll go, “Ah, shit, I did.” And yet, here I am writing a Best of TV list for myself, even if it’s going under the more honest terminology of “Favorite.”
What gives? Nothing, really; I found myself wanting to keep a record of what made me happy this year on television, in part because it’s been a good year for TV, and in part because I feel like I’ve been watching more/better television this year and making more choices for myself about what I watch, so… it seemed like a good idea…?
That sounds like a segue, right?
Years and Years
I remember reading about this in The Guardian before it started in the U.S. and being suspicious of the hype; I thought about Russell T. Davies’ tendency towards cheap coincidence and tackiness as his Doctor Who went on and decided it might be worth checking out, but it probably wouldn’t be my thing. I was utterly wrong, and completely caught up in what ended up being essentially future horror porn for news junkies, right up until the admittedly overly sentimental last episode.
Watchmen
It shouldn’t have worked, but it really did. (I know more than one person who thinks that it shouldn’t even have existed, but it did.) As much a response to the failures of the comic as a sequel to it, every episode felt like a revelation, as well as the most contemporary take on superheroes seen in a long, long time. I can’t work out if I want more, or want this to remain as complete and perfect as it is. (Still: “Nothing ever ends,” after all.)
Doom Patrol
The other comics-to-TV triumph of the year, even if so few people saw it because of its platform. Maybe it’s because the Grant Morrison/Richard Case run that this is based on is so central to my teenage experience, or maybe it’s because of the gleeful messiness of the show itself, but this was appointment viewing very quickly, and became a surprisingly emotional experience before the season was done. I’m looking forward to the second year.
Fleabag
Talking about perfection, I can’t say enough good things about the second and final season of one of the most heartbreaking, funny, romantic and honest shows I’ve ever seen. Absolutely everything felt noteworthy, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s writing shining out with kindness and warmth that overcame the awkwardness and pain that surrounded everyone in the show. God, I loved it.
This Way Up
I called this Fleabag Lite to a friend, which was unkind, even though I didn’t mean it as an insult, just shorthand to explain its appeal. But it’s telling a different story altogether, despite the similarities. It’s perhaps sillier — the Cranberries’ “Zombie” bit may be my favorite stupid joke of the year — but also more… flawed…? in a way that feels as if it’s easier to dip into without potential emotional trauma. Between this and the ultimately unsatisfying Living with Yourself, Aisling Bea’s had quite a year.
The Good Place
Yes, the final year felt more piecemeal than what came before, as if it had too much to try to do and didn’t know how to get to where it needed to be for the first few episodes of the season, but I don’t care; it’s still smarter, funnier and more heartwarming than almost anything else around these days. (Kindness is an important component for everything I’ve truly loved this year, thinking about it.) Plus, you know, all the Chidi/Eleanor stuff kind of killed me, I have to admit.
Project Runway Season 17/Top Chef Season 16
And we return to the subject of kindness. I’m a fan of these kinds of shows, as I’ve said before, but these two seasons marked what I’ve called a post-Great British Bake-Off era, where contestants dropped the traditional “I’m not here to make friends!” posturing and instead… got along? Helped each other? Supported one another…? It was an unexpected, but welcome, surprise that was helped by both shows having more pleasant, charming contestants than has been the case for years, and in Project Runway‘s case, a rebooted host/mentor/judging panel that made it seem like a whole new (better, and yes, kinder) show. Both were guilty pleasures that were also just… good. More of this in 2020, please.
Let Me Tell You Something Else
The final look at my graphics for THR‘s weekly Heat Vision newsletter is a weird one — instead of six or seven graphics consisting of two weeks’ worth of newsletters, this is six graphics from one week, and, like the graphics from the San Diego Comic-Con edition, six graphics created while I was a convention, in this case, Brazil’s Comic Con Experience. Because, you know, I wasn’t busy enough as it was, doing convention stuff. (Actually, I wasn’t, as it happened.)
These three images were created the night I arrived in Brazil, based on an email request from my editor Aaron; as I’ve said elsewhere, that was the end of 18 hours of travel, and was actually followed by more work, because of course it was. When you factor in the time difference, I think it was 38 hours of being awake more or less, with just a mild restless nap or two in between, all told.
Which explains why, two days later, I looked at that “SCOOP!” — intended as a placeholder for when there’s an exclusive and I’m not available to create a graphic for it, which looked like it may be a possibility at that point for that very week — and thought, “That looks illegible.” (I literally was having trouble focusing my eyes when I handed it in. Secrets from Behind The Scenes!) So, I fixed it.
The same day I fixed that, I got two more last-minute requests. Thankfully, it was the one day of the Brazil trip that I wasn’t at the convention.
At this point, I’ve been doing these newsletter graphics for a little over a year, and 2019 was the first calendar year where they were a constant. We only missed two weeks of the entire year. It’s been a pleasure, really, to do them. I feel like they scratched an itch I didn’t know I had, and I feel more… awake, creatively, as a result. I’m really grateful for the chance to do them, this far in.
Season’s Greetings
For the name of this post to make sense, I guess you have to know that crying in Scotland is called greeting. (I feel as if I should spell it “greetin’,” because that last g is never pronounced.) Which is to say: This is as much about sadness as anything else. How festive.
Every Christmas, I feel like I should write something about the death of my father. And every Christmas, I realize that I don’t know what to say, beyond, “It happened, and it broke my heart.”
It’s colored every Christmas since it happened in 2007, for obvious reasons. One of those reasons is that it happened on Christmas Eve, capping off a month of staying by his bedside and having what will hopefully be the most emotionally turbulent holiday season of my life; I have extremely vivid memories of staying overnight at the hospital in his room, half-watching a nativity play on television quietly next to his comatose body, not knowing what emotion I was feeling at the time.
It was decided by my family not to actually tell my nieces and nephews that their grandfather was dead until the day after Christmas, so as to not ruin the day for them. A kindness, definitely, but one that made everything surreal and difficult for the two days we were trying to be jolly and seasonal for them before the truth came out. Even more surreal and difficult when giving them gifts that came from their grandfather, and pretending he was still in hospital. Everything was grief and pretending to feel joy.
For the first few years afterwards, Christmas was a muted holiday on Christmas Eve, at the very least. I’d try — and often manage! — to get into the season earlier in the month, because I’ve always loved Christmas and all the trappings, all the lights and the music and the schmaltz and the everything, but come December 24, my mood would get colder and darker. How could I celebrate, after all?
That’s faded now, thankfully. Over the last few years, my feelings about the holiday have changed for a number of reasons — not permanently, always shifting, it felt like — as reality intruded and got in the way of what I’d want the season to be. (There were a couple of years where I barely got a Christmas at all, because of who I was with the circumstances of that; I look back on that now in disbelief, at what I allowed to be okay.)
Now, this year, I feel this has been the Christmas that I’ve longed for for years, despite the delayed start to the season because of the Brazil trip, and despite getting sick this morning. Yesterday was a good day, relaxing and in the company of people who love me, and whom I love; today will be the same. Really, it’s the only present I could need from the whole thing: Joy to the world, joy from the world, joy of being in this particular world right now. Merry Christmas, for those who celebrate.
Since We’ve No Place To Go
As we head into the final stretch of the pre-Christmas holiday season, I have to admit: I’m very, very tired.
The last week or so has been extraordinarily busy, as if the holiday gods looked down and thought that, if I was to enjoy some time off around Christmas Day proper, I should pay for it ahead of time. And so, it became a marathon of work and crash-relaxation, each evening seeing me trying desperately to unwind even though my brain was quietly spinning, thinking you still have all these stories to write and all these presents to buy and don’t you need to read these things for work and it’s the holiday season shouldn’t you be doing holiday stuff more?
Well, the evenings I wasn’t at the movies, that is; I did that twice in the past week. (Once was for work; there was a Star Wars, after all.)
At the heart of it all was an impressively Herculean workload, which saw a confluence of different elements come together to deliver a collection of deadlines that was utterly overwhelming. To give a sense of just how overwhelming, think of it this way: on average, I traditionally have one and a half stories I file to Wired each week; on a particularly heavy week, it’s gone to three. This last week, I filed five.
THR, too, saw an uptick in workload — there was a new Star Wars, after all, and it’s heading to the end of the year, so Best Of lists and the like need to be done — so I found myself doing things like getting up at 5am to start work and just… keep working until either I was done or, more likely, I couldn’t work anymore for whatever reason: Something else needed to be done (Mailing Christmas cards, going to the movie theater), or I simply couldn’t concentrate enough to get it done.
Suffice to say, it’s been a time. Thankfully, a time that’s more or less over as I write — I’m wrapping up final commitments now, soon to be followed by wrapping presents and then allowing myself to try and get in a holiday mood, or at least a mood that doesn’t see me chasing my own tail so much. The weather outside is frightful, they say; I’m looking forward to the chance to be able to look outside the window and see for myself.
