2025 in review
Does anyone even like anything anymore? Does anyone even care? Trump, AI, genocide, inflation, brainrot, phones, the fact that Diane Keaton bit the dust before Woody Allen…everything is terrible and cheap and cruel and uncanny and relentless.
I am in grad school and I’m supposed to be writing every day, but it is agonizing because creativity is an act of hope and self-respect and I’m utterly lacking in both right now. What I really need is a thawing. Writing will never be easy, but it would certainly be easier if I felt like myself again.
I used to watch everything, all the “good” shows, and now I just put on the same four seasons of RHONY over and over. My Peacock app has a pop-up screen that routinely asks me, “bitch you live like this?” and I just click it away and hit play once again on Bethenny in the Bezerkshires screaming about how Luann is a slut. It’s cozy and numbing at the same time, like falling asleep inside a snowbank.
This year I decided that if I was going to be depressed I may as well make use of the downtime. I read about the October Revolution and Operation Paperclip and the Dulles brothers and then was once again pissed that we were never taught any of the good shit in school. I got really into Chernobyl, which, it turns out, is not an uncommon interest for a depressed dork to have. There is a dark comfort in gawking at the world’s biggest, endlessly festering wound.
One of my favorite books this year was Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, which is fiction about the real Jeju Massacre in South Korea. Very well-meaning and nice people come into the bookstore where I work and they want to know the best thing I’ve read and I hand it to them knowing full well most of them will absolutely hate it. One of the main reasons I love the book is because there is a bird in it I desperately cared about. Another favorite of mine was Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil, especially a story in there called “An Eye in the Throat,” about a toddler with a tracheostomy. I realize that both the Kang novel and this story concern very fragile beings at the mercy of a profoundly harsh world. There was also One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, a perfectly articulated condemnation of Western complicity in the War on Palestine. On the cover is an illustration of a small girl holding out her hand towards the missile heading straight towards her.
I saw maybe three movies in theaters. I liked Weapons a lot(horror, small children, atrocities, see above). Despite high expectations I despised the new Frankenstein(isn’t the whole fucking POINT that the Creature COULDN’T get a girlfriend?????). I was excited all summer to see Sorry, Baby and then I chickened out and put it off and had to wait until it was streaming. I watched it a couple of weeks ago from the comfort of my own home, in socks and sweats and swaddled in blankets, which, since I’ve seen the movie, feels spiritually right. I didn’t cry at the parts I thought I would cry at. It was not the cruelty but the tenderness in it that destroyed me. Afterwards, I was sad but when I got into bed with my dog and he curled up on the pillow next to me I felt a tremendous, luxurious gratitude for getting to be alive next to him, that he felt safe enough to dream and snore and twitch his little legs against me, and that I could watch Drag Race compilations on YouTube until I got sleepy, and that there was no rush to feel better, that if I was still sad tomorrow it would be ok.
Florence and the Machine released Everybody Scream on Halloween(an intentional rhyme!). Most of its songs were inspired by Florence Welch’s near-fatal ectopic pregnancy, and her research into mysticism and the occult that followed. She talks about this in interviews, but you can hear it all in the songs even without knowing the backstory. There is mist and blood and flowers and rage and sweetness, too. Flo has always had the witch thing down pat and sung about dance circles and mermaids and whatever, but this album is so focused and warm, you want to crawl right into the cauldron. After ten songs about shrieking and potions and krakens she ends the album on “And Love,” a gentle, final prayer for healing, for us all. “Peace is coming,” she sings, serene, almost assured.
I hope so.