the last post i started writing for this newsletter was a few days after matthew perry died. i called it “from: 15 yemen road, yemen” with the subtitle “a dispatch on dying, and grieving, in public,” but i only got a few paragraphs in before i stopped. i had a lot to say about how people talk about death and grieving, especially when it comes to celebrities, but i couldn’t seem to get it out of my head and on to the page. so it sat there, waiting for me to come back to it, and then i never wrote anything.
sometimes, when i am writing, i have to pull the sentences out, piece by piece. usually that is an indication to me that i’m not ready to write about whatever i’m trying to write about. so when i couldn’t get out what i wanted, i decided to wait until i knew what i wanted to say. and now, here i am.
because what i really want to say isn’t about matthew perry, or about how people harassed the cast of friends by asking them over and over when they were going to say something about him instead of letting them grieve. it’s about how we treat each other, how that has changed in the last several years, and how it has not changed at all (people’s eyes have just been opened).
as we head towards the end of 2023, i find myself still a little baffled at how quickly we abandon each other in the name of “comfort” and “normalcy.” how people stopped wearing masks and trying to prevent themselves from getting sick once the government said covid was over (it’s not) so that they could go back to their “normal” lives and so that the economy could “do better” (please do not get me started on how little i care about the economy right now). how easy some people find it to ignore what is happening in palestine because they don’t understand (or don’t want to understand) the difference between criticizing israel’s military and government and hating jewish people.
i don’t have a fix for those things (i wish i did, trust me). i just know we need to keep talking about them. we need to keep evaluating how we love and care for one another and how we show that, so that we can call out the moments where that love and care is missing.
this daily newsletter will be about a lot of things—the holiday music and movies i’m consuming, some of the best pop culture moments from this year, things we can look forward to next year—but mostly it will be about the things we can learn from this year and what we can both leave behind and take with us into 2024.
my greatest hope is that we can take a better understanding of how to love one another into next year, so that things can start to look different. i suppose only time will tell.
a quick note: the remainder of this post is for paid subscribers, but it’s easy to become one! you can either subscribe below for $8/month, or you can buy one-time 31-day access to my countdown to the new year at this link.
if you don’t want a daily email, another way to support my work is by “buying me a coffee” on ko-fi.com.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to pop culture pedagogy to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.