This one is so much longer than any of the others! I’m sorry?

The Most Important Thing in the World

It’s the end of the year, which is exciting but not exactly notable in any sort of round-number way because decades go from 1 to 10, not 0 to 9. If you’re worried about closing the 2010s on a high note, don’t worry; you’ve got all of 2020 to do what you need to do. (Yes, I allow this to bother me every time we turn over a new decade; yes, I know it’s useless and yet I can’t stop myself from caring.)

Time's Inexorable March

These are things, I remember liking over the last year, I guess

Books

• For reasons I will get to later in this letter, I’ve begun reading a lot more books recently. Once I figured out that my local library had an app and I could get ebooks automatically checked out once they became available, it was inevitable that I’d get myself into a situation where, say, I had nineteen books checked out at once and they were all due in two weeks. Just hypothetically. Anyway, my borrowing history only goes back six months on Libby, so here’s the best stuff I read from June onward:
• Red, White, & Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston – What if the son of the US President and a British prince fell in love? If there was any justice in this world, this would already be set for an early spring release as a high-production-value rom-com.
• Basically, anything by N.K. Jemisin – The Broken Earth trilogy, and especially the first book, The Fifth Season, totally ruined my ability to enjoy other books for a solid month. Jemisin is one of the most confident authors I’ve ever read. Her books are dense, and they generally take me an uncharacteristically long time to settle into, but once I’m there, I never want to leave. If I had to make a bingo card for a Jemisin book it would have squares for ritualized beverage consumption, traditional heteronormative sex as horrifying social punishment, and queer people ending up in unbalanced but satisfying poly triads. This makes her books sound hornier than they generally are, when they’re mostly about the human condition in all its monstrosity and self-created fatalism.
• The Divine Cities Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett – I read this trilogy and then went on a tear and read just about everything else Bennett has written. I don’t recommend doing this only because he becomes a much stronger writer with every book, and The Divine Cities is some of his most recent work. These books are cinematic in a good way, and while the third gets a little self-indulgent, the first two are nearly perfect. My bingo card for Bennett would have squares for missing fathers (who are also terrible), magic that is both mundane and difficult, and women who have never heard the phrase “traditional gender roles”.
• Everything Rose Lerner has ever written – If I could press a button once a month that made Rose Lerner publish another novella, I would live in bliss for the rest of my days. I recommended her to a friend recently, and her take was, “Why aren’t all of her books BBC miniseries by now?”, a question that now burns in my heart as well. If I had to pick a favorite, Listen to the Moon, about a valet and a maid-of-all-work entering into a marriage of convenience so they can both get better jobs, would edge ahead a little. But truly, if you like Regency romance and yet also like books that aren’t about rich cishets wandering around being oblivious to the working class, she’s the one for you.
• The Black Count, Tom Reiss – Yes, amidst all the genre and romance novels, I managed to read a Pulitzer-winning historical biography (and enjoy it). This book is about author Alexander Dumas’ father, Alex Dumas, who was a Black man and French general during the Revolution in that window when France was like, “Hey, let’s abolish slavery and integrate every level of government, education, and the military!” For about a decade, it was great, then Napoleon figured out he could get a bunch of the angry former plantation owners on his side by undoing all that and kicking Black people out of France. It’s a very 2019 book.
• The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison – Sometimes someone will make something, and I come away from it mostly thinking, “I have no idea why they were burning to make that particular thing, but gosh was it well done.” I don’t know why the world needed an intricate court drama with elves and goblins, but we have one now, and it’s exceedingly fine. I find myself thinking about bits of this book off and on at least once a week. It was just a pleasure from beginning to end! Sometimes I forget books can, and one might even argue should, be like that.
• Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian –This is the first in a 21-book series, begun in the 1970s, and every single one of them has a multi-week wait at my library. Occasionally, popular things are good. I figure there’s one of two reasons this book would appeal to you; either you’re just really revved up about masted ships and battles at sea, in which case you probably already know about and have read this series. It seems like the Platonic ideal of that kind of thing, not that I’m familiar with the genre (unless playing the first couple hours of Return of the Obra Dinn three times counts for something). The other reason to show up to this particular party is, hmm, how shall I put this. Well, the overall name of the series is The Aubrey/Maturin Series. That’s what they put on the covers, it’s what it’s called in Wikipedia, etc. I’m sure there are several undergraduate papers out in the world discussing the slash, how it was used starting with Kirk/Spock, and what it signifies in popular culture to this day (eg, it’s why gay fanfic is/was called “slash” in the first place). Needless to say, O’Brian was obviously On One with this series, and it’s extraordinarily gay in the way that a lot of media is gay (in that if it was a hetero couple, everyone would read it as romantic, but since it’s two men, unless there’s a four-page diagram of a human penis entering a human asshole, it must be platonic, what, what do you have against healthy loving male friendships, just let straight men show emotion, Not Everything Is Gay, etc etc etc etc death). Also, one of the main characters spends a lot of time thinking out loud about, eg, how he’s so burned out on revolutions and nationalism he just doesn’t give a fuck anymore about any crowd and is only interested in helping people as individuals in his immediate life. Another extremely 2019 book.

Movies

• This was originally going to be a “stuff I liked over the last 10 years” list and so the first thing that popped into my head was ANNIHILATION. And you know what, even though it came out last year, it’s still my favorite movie of this year. It’s my favorite movie of probably the last 40 years, and I only draw the line there because THE CONVERSATION came out in the 1970s. 
• I had an undergrad professor who grouped films into revivalist or revisionist works to talk about the changes in sentiment from the late 1960s through the then-present 2000s in movies. Revivalist films earnestly like traditional film and genre tropes and seek to celebrate them, whereas revisionist films understand those tropes but try to subvert them as a form of critique. I like this framing because it’s a quick way for me to understand why I can sit next to someone watching a trailer for a Disney “live action” remake of another Disney film everyone has already seen and hear them mutter, “We’re gonna have to see that!” to their seatmate. We seem trapped in revivalist amber for the time being, which means I find all (?) popular movies at least mildly nausea-inducing. It’s a bleak cultural landscape when something like THE LAST JEDI is considered too critical of its own world, not even ours. (I found it uneven and depressingly heteronormative, but you can assume I thought that about literally everything playing at your local theater.)
• For real though, I just had to type “movies 2019” into the search bar to figure out what happened, and the list of things I saw in the theater is bumming me out. I paid money for AVENGERS: ENDGAME? Past-Courtney...why? (I know why: so I could understand the fanfic.) And then I didn’t see anything else until KNIVES OUT??
• KNIVES OUT was pretty great, though. The conversation in my relationship was my spouse texting me, “I want to see the new Rian Johnson movie,” and me replying, “You mean the Chris Evans Wears A Sweater movie?” The two genders, etc. KNIVES OUT left me feeling the same way The Goblin Emperor did - I don’t understand the burning drive to tell that particular story, but hey, it was a fun story! Glad it’s there! Also, please, please, an entire series of mystery movies starring Daniel Craig as that character; the people demand it. (The twist of KNIVES OUT is actually that I could watch Daniel Craig smirk at something off-screen until my brain gets so absorbed that my parasympathetic nervous system forgets to make my lungs work, and I suffocate and die, happily.)
• My actual favorite movie I watched this year came out in 2014, but that was right in the middle of my “my life is hard and dramatic enough, no Serious Films, cartoons only” phase, which I am only recently out of. THE LOBSTER, hoo boy. It probably says more about me than the movie that I think this is maybe the perfect romantic comedy. I like being allowed to laugh at the sickness that is modern, romantic, heterosexual behavior. What can I say.
• My other favorite movie, released this year, was PROMARE, but it’s an anime, so either you’re never going to watch it, or you’ve probably already seen it because it was extremely popular for an anime in the US. Some of the best-directed action sequences I’ve seen since the first JOHN WICK. (All I ask is to know where the characters and physical objects are in relation to each other while I’m watching. This is too high a bar for everyone directing action films.) PROMARE is about a himbo firefighter versus the twink leader of a renegade group of people who have a mutation that makes them literally flaming. It’s also 100% ~aesthetic and beautifully designed, so if nothing else, I’d recommend it if you like extremely pretty visuals.

TV

• I can’t figure out what I’ve watched on TV as far as I can tell, unless there’s a level of psychic communication with Netflix I’m just not accessing. 
• (What even is “television”? What does that word connote now? Why do we still call phones “phones”? Is the color blue I see the same as the color blue you see? /stoned-14-year-old)
• Anyway, I think the only thing I watched that was maybe any good was Schitt’s Creek, which is so much sweeter than it has any right to be. I normally latch onto at least one anime series, but I think the only new thing I kept up with was the latest season of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and it was not something I would push on anyone not already deep into JJBA. 
• I realize it’s the Golden Age of TV, but I’m also not about to pay for all the streaming services required to watch The Thing Everyone Insists Is The Best This Month. Especially when The Thing is usually not that great, it’s just that compared to the latest Disney/Marvel regurgitated hairball, it shines. Russian Doll was a 90-minute movie bloated into 8 episodes, and I’m pretty sure I can never watch Fleabag because once I do, I’ll have to talk about it with all the people who seem to want to talk about nothing else, and I’ll never do that to myself. I don’t find shitty cis white women to be as charming as everyone else I guess? 
• Seriously, what was even on TV in 2019? What did I do on the couch for all those hours?

Music

• This is both easier and harder because of Spotify, but also because of Spotify’s algorithm that doesn’t understand that sometimes I have people over to hang out and need background music. But no, Spotify thinks half of my favorite songs of 2019 come from the album “Chill Hip Hop Instrumentals”, and in the sense that I was in the room while those songs were playing and didn’t change the track...it’s right? But in the slice of reality where my attention and cognition matter, not just my physical adjacency, my favorite songs were:
• Ariana Grande, break up with your girlfriend, im bored –This song’s bridge is from Makes Me Ill by ‘NSync, so I’m obligated by bond and blood to love it forever. 
• The Blow, Think About Me – If I ever write a scene with characters in a club, the random singer on stage will be singing this song while dressed as Dio Brando from season 1 of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
• Boney M., Rasputin (7” Version) – I have a whole playlist called “fanvids I will never make,” and this is on it because, in a corner of my heart, all I want is a vid about the Marvelverse version of Loki set to this song. Thor can be the Moscow chicks.
• Brown Eyed Girls, Warm Hole – This is also on that playlist because the world needs a vid about Steve Rogers set to this, the most accidentally hilarious horned-up song ever.
• Bruckner, Take You To The Bronx – Spotify never understands the difference between actually gay house music (which is what I like) and just...shitty mostly-instrumental stuff. 
• Chase Ceglie, Thank God I Found You – idk it’s just romantic?
• Connie Converse, I Have Considered The Lilies – If you’re getting the sense that a lot of times when I’m listening to music, I’m thinking about how they’d work as a fanvid, good yes correct. Anyway, this would be the most depressing Harry Potter fanvid ever.
• dodie, Monster – I have another playlist called “For when you have inevitably been CALLED OUT for being PROBLEMATIC” and this absolutely got added to it this year
• EXID, Up & Down – I don’t listen to a lot of Kpop, but I listen to enough to know I like EXID
• Fiona Apple, Dull Tool – I’m not sure I understand what, “you don’t kiss when you kiss/you don’t fuck when you fuck” means, but I feel it.
• Jon Bapp and Anna Wise, Stevie – This is the ideal song to put on when doing something else around the house, idk
• LOONA, Girl Front – STAN LOONA (lol not really)
• Miss Benny, Every Boy – Seriously, Spotify, just like...a thousand songs based on this song. Stop trying to make me listen to EDM because I can’t lay off gay dance tracks.
• Mitski, A Pearl – Do I relate way too much to this song? Yes. Do I think it’d be an amazing Steve/Bucky fanvid? Also yes.
• The Pom Poms, Pass Her The Aux – yet another “idk it’s good, good music is healthy for you” song
• Roman GianArthur and Janelle Monae, No Surprises – The soundtrack to the “Tony Stark has a death wish that he finally fulfills” fanvid that I’ll never make
• Stevie Wonder, As – more romantic stuff, how you gonna pass on Stevie
• Tami T, I Never Loved (remix) – more love songs need to have the word “cock” in them
• Thed Jewel, Fuchsia – Soundtrack for the “Eric Killmonger Was Right” fanvid I’ll never make. I’ve listened to this song at least once a week for two years now, I might never stop.

Games

• Confession: I started writing this like, two weeks ago, but then I ran out of energy, and also, ugh, games. I don’t know anything about anything, but I don’t know anything about games.
• All I want is for the company that makes The Room series to ship another installment of The Room at least once a year. There’s just nothing even close. The only thing I’ve found to kind of hit that same feeling is the Rusty Lake/Cube Escape series, but you need a wiki to figure out what order to play them all in. But that’s it, game of the year, every year: The Room. If you have a mobile phone that plays games, go play it.
• I played, like, half a lifetime of The Sims 4 this year. Am I almost burned out again? Maybe? Every few years, I uninstall it, wipe all my mods, and then eventually, they release an expansion that drags me back into it again. I also do this with Skyrim, and that’s how I know I’m maybe ready to switch again – I’ve been contemplating another Skyrim playthrough.
• I also played a lot of Disco Elysium, which I super-duper enjoyed. It’s the right balance of cynical and funny, and it manages to pull off a lot of “edgy” shit that I usually find tedious and juvenile. I don’t know how much the game branches on a given playthrough, so it’s kind of difficult to talk about it. But I was impressed with the number of ways it seemed like I could progress through the story, not just doing things the “right” way (which is what I always like to do on a first playthrough), but also letting you go deep in the “embarassingly failed alcoholic detective” role playing, if that’s your thing.
• The other computer game I spent a good chunk of time with was Eliza, which again, I don’t know how much to talk about in re: plot because, y’know. It’s a video game, those things branch all over sometimes. But generally, if you’re uh, a ~tech person, especially in re: the intersection of tech and humans, it’s probably your jam. My main feedback to the writer (who is a friend of mine, brag brag brag) was that I’m extremely thirsty for one of the bad guys, but I’m sure he was expecting that since he knows me.
• We ended our many years of being a console-less household this year, which I’m still kind of making Marge Simpson noises about. (It’s opening a portal into your wallet that will burn $60 from your savings at random! Why! Why even have that in your life!) However, there were a whole lot of Fire Emblem school children out there needing to be taught and also trained for battle, and they weren’t going to do it themselves. So yes, we got a Switch just to play Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and I have no regrets about that. (I will have even fewer regrets once the new Animal Crossing comes out, I’m sure.) We also ended up with a PS4 for reasons I don’t claim to understand, but I’ve barely touched the thing as there’s...not much on the PS4 I care about, apparently. Who knew. 

These are things, I remember happening to me over the last year or so

Self

• In the last couple of years (basically since transitioning, *definitely* since starting medical transition), I feel like I’ve become the most basic-ass possible person. This is probably because after years and years of digging through lots of heavy trauma shit, I...stopped doing that? It turns out that once you’re done excavating through all the worst things that ever happened to you, pretty much all of which happened before you started high school, it frees up a lot of spare time. At this point, a lot of my focus is on what I can do in the present and immediate future to live well and in a way that lines up with what I believe politically/ethically/morally/etc. This usually results in me feeling like I’m not doing much at all, which I’m told is not accurate, and so I guess that’s a thing to figure out. But all in all, things are pretty chill.
• Essentially, I took a long look at the things that I spend my time on, the ways I pay my bills, and the things that get my energy and attention, and tried to think of things I could change that felt like moves in the right direction. Basically: I'm setting myself up in situations where I’m probably going to have to grow and become the kind of person who can do the sorts of things I’d like to be doing. If that makes sense at all.

Life

• Over 2019 (and I guess the first bit of 2020), Darius and I have been getting trained and certified as therapeutic foster parents. We’d been looking at adoption and fostering for a while because we haven’t been planning on biological kids for years and years (my migraine meds (which I don’t need anymore?? Thanks, testosterone) cause birth defects and no way was I ever going 9 months with a constant migraine). Everyone is free to do what works for them, but for me (and Darius), I was not interested in buying a baby. That’s what adoption is, especially international adoption – you just go buy a little person, usually for the cost of a Lexus (unless the baby isn’t white, and then it’s much less, because, y’know, racism). So I did a little research on fostering, which is its own complicated mess, since you’re dealing with the state separating kids from biological families, so that rubs right up against the racist carceral system. (Eg: arrest one parent, then hold the other parent responsible for not being able to succeed as a caregiver while their partner is in jail/prison.) 
• Therapeutic fostering is slightly different, or I suppose more focused, because it’s specifically to provide short-term, stabilizing care for kids who are not doing well in the foster system. “Not doing well” can translate to all kinds of things, but usually, it means acting out in ways that are clearly coping behaviors from abusive environments. Kids can get bounced around a dozen times or more in a month. And so if that’s happening, they come to us! It’s a lot more structure and oversight and training, but I find all of that reassuring tbh. 
• Also, realest talk: a lot of foster care providers come out of religious communities, especially evangelical and Mormon homes. I think it’s great that people are willing to be of service, but what this translates to is a lot of queer and trans kids getting mistreated and kicked out of foster homes, over and over again. It’s the hardest population to place, especially once the kids are a little older (aka: TEENS...everyone’s out here terrified of teenage girls, apparently). So once our training is done, that’s probably who we’ll specialize in taking in, because a stable queer trans house probably can’t *hurt*.
• All of this boils down to me no longer being the center of attention, caregiving-wise, in my household. Which is great because I don’t need to be that (anymore). But it is also kind of awful because I hate change and am a brat.

Work

• I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I’ve run out of energy for bullshit made-up jobs. Which is troubling, because I’ve had one bullshit made-up job or another for many years now! I feel like my main skill in a corporate environment is “sends good emails quickly”, and at the end of the day, that’s just not enough for me. Who does that help? And what kind of help even is that?
• So yeah, anyway, after doing local volunteer training for neighborhood disaster response, and many people involved in that being like, “Wow you’re good at this have you done this before?” I decided to do a trial balloon of a career change in 2019. Over the spring/summer, I got trained and certified as an EMT, and I’m currently working with one of the ambulance companies here in the wider Portland area. I am not, however, certified to do ambulance rides yet, so it’s all medical transfers and hospital discharges for people who aren’t ambulatory. It’s much less exciting than it maybe sounds if your job is in an office, and it is also why I’ve been reading so damn much the past few months. I’m not one for downtime between calls because it makes the day drag – honestly, longer term I think I’d like to work in a hospital emergency department specifically to avoid the “it’s been 90 minutes and nothing is happening” parts of my current job.
• All that said, if you have an ergonomic chair at your desk, love and cherish it, and send a tiny prayer out for my almost middle-aged body sitting in a crappy van seat for 12 hours at a time.
• Also, I can say with some confidence that everything marketed towards a “healthy” lifestyle is a scam (which I know you knew already). If your blood pressure, pulse, heart, and lungs are all decent, then trust me: you’re golden. If you’re comfortable walking, even better. Seriously, just take care of that shit, and you’ll be doing so much better than a lot of the population by the time you’re 70. (Also, don’t smoke. Not even weed. Leave your poor lungs alone, you’re going to need them later. That’s it, that’s the hill I’ll die on.)

That’s everything I can bring myself to type out in this, the evening of January 3, 2020.

Gentle reminder that no matter how you vote, the electoral college ensures that Donald Trump is getting a second term as US President, and the senate ensures that he won’t be impeached for any of the wildly illegal shit he’s pulled or will pull in the next four (?) years. I will continue to hope that he actually leaves office in 2024. That’s where my bar is now - it’ll be cool if there’s a peaceful transition of power, and we aren’t stuck with him until he dies and one of his sons is installed in his place. Maybe that sounds bleak, but I just cannot spend any more time feeling like I’ve been slapped in the face by the news. I’d rather live in certain dread.

And on that note: tiddies