First Catch Up of 2026: It's always ending somehow

Hello friends!

So this is slightly later than I originally intended it to be but late is better than nothing. I think Wednesday might be a good day for the Catch Up, it’ll be a nice midweek treat perhaps. Ideally, Friday might be posting about book(s) day. That is assuming I can escape the slump I’ve been in recently. However, maybe I need a change in tactics to defeat the inner saboteur that is playing the same old (bad) song about how I’m annoying or I’m not good at stringing words along or even where do I even get off thinking that I could be qualified to write about things in public, you know? Maybe it’s time to learn some new chords, so I can learn a new song. Or at least embrace the full nihilist ouroboros of if nothing matters, then I don’t matter, I’m insignificant then nothing I write about could matters, so I’m insignificant and nothing matters, so writing about stuff doesn’t matter in any meaningful way, why the fuck not?

Birthday Brain Worms Portion

It is roughly half way through my birthday month. Next year is a significant birthday number. This year is a bookend of a different significant number. I don’t understand where the intervening time went. Time doesn’t feel real because it feels like yesterday was both the intensely horrifying and weirdly hopeful beginning of the pandemic but that was six years ago. So in reminiscing about my life, which is what I do during my birthday month, I think the thing I miss the most about six years ago is how for a moment it felt like things could have been different. It didn’t have to be some capitalist, hellscape, dystopia bent on reminding people they are individuals. All of those manifest destiny, intensely imperial statements about rugged individualism, only being able to depend on yourself, no one is coming to save you so you have to save yourself are everywhere. Which isn’t true. Broadly speaking, one of humanity’s greatest strengths is our capacity to take care of each other. It’s human nature. Individualism isn’t so much so. Which is incredibly frustrating as I get older and I find myself repeating, I don’t know to explain to you that you should care about other people when I read new stories or see new policies put forth by governments who do not understand their job (hey there Alberta.)

It’s strange to feel nostalgia for the beginning of a pandemic. I think the best metaphor for this odd feeling has been the tried and true it’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Wishing for one disaster over another is truly a bewildering idea actually. No one wants the disasters but maybe it was the sense of hope or curiosity that I miss. Maybe I miss that when it came down to it, that was one of the only times I felt like I’d be caught if I fell by my friends. Doing grocery runs for my friends who were unable to, having other friends step up when we were sick and dropping off groceries on our stoop, or the complete madness of animal crossing islands. Twenty twenty sucked an unbelievable amount for me personally, don’t get me wrong, that year is one of the worst on record for me but. For a few months it didn’t feel like everything was going to be terrible in the same way forever. Change felt possible.

I guess that’s what I miss. And that’s what I’ve been reflecting on. Is that something that could be replicated?-it has to be because I refuse to admit that so many people don’t care about other people. That a better future isn’t possible and the best it is ever going to be already happened.

Anyways, there’s more petitions to be signed, books to be read, art to be shared, outings to go on with people who bring some joy to my rather small existence to be done. The smallest degree of resistance is caring about something.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these, here’s the Catch Up!

What I've Been Watching

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Season Two Monarch: Legacy of Monsters started again, and wow. I fucking love Kaiju. I love messy not cannon polyamory representation (there’s no way the past Lee, Keiko, and Bill weren’t some kind of power couple). I love a beautifully lit show, where you can see what the fuck is happening, and vibrant, lush colour instead of an emotionally stunted ‘rust colour scheme’. It is so much fun in 2026 to have a show written by people who draw on source material, let characters be messy, and it be visually stunning. So far I’m enjoying this season.

Paradise

Another second season of a show I’ve been watching is Paradise. Sterling K. Brown as Xavier continues to eat, Julianne Nicholson as Sinatra is as conflicting as ever, and I love flashbacks with James Marsden’s Cal who only ever wanted to be an English teacher but wound up as an unwilling pawn president is equal parts fuckboy and sad. I am enjoying how life outside the bunker went on for people after the event, and the worldbuilding there isn’t quite Fallout levels of dystopia which is nice. The women are complicated, and dangerous and written in a really interesting way, whoever is the person in charge of picking songs for the episodes is still doing an amazing job and should get a raise.

Shrinking

Shrinking season three started back in January. This season is more bittersweet than the previous two, with faking out one character death (so far), and the progression of Paul’s Parkinson’s disease. There’s a really neat contrast between the relationships of Brian, Charlie and Sutton, Jimmy and Alice, and Paul and Meg in terms of child/parent relationships and the relentless movement of time. There’s been so many fun little sound bites/short form video clips from this season too (like bisexuality/mmf threesomes in the 80s, The Confrontation from Les Mis done by Jimmy and Brian, and the absolutely terrible date with the nurse.)

What I've Been Reading

This particular container — the one underpinning or co-constituting eurocolonial law and governance and society — is falling apart. As it should. It was and is built on the worst excesses of patriarchy, white supremacy, extraction, and violence. We deserve a better container. Or, actually, to remember that there is no container. We are working within one entangled whole. How we choose to act, or intra-act, as Barad teaches us, and how we choose to inter-be as Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us, within the whole matters far more than who we think we are inside the container.

Dr. Zoe Todd is an amazing scholar and has written some banger blog posts lately. Her post on being a bad scholar (and making new containers or no containers at all) is an intriguing and thorough mediation on entanglement, colonialism, health, and no longer being able to mirror back what is to be expected (a la a xerox of xerox of a xerox). There are some parts of academia I miss intensely like scholarship or bothering how you understand a concept or a way of being through the intersections of methodologies, theories, concepts, and bringing it together in an interdisciplinary way that looks so easy (it's not). However, I am enough of a realist to know academia eats itself, and feeds off marginalized scholars that I don't think I'd ever be able to go back. But, in Dr. Todd's post there's such a sense of play (maybe ease) in how she brings it all together in a refusal because the whole (interconnection) is greater than the individual part, it makes me miss the scholarship aspect I think. Anyways, agential realism is wild, and it's always fun when I see someone else writing about it.

What I've Been Working On

I have decided to start working on the novel I let fall to the wayside last year again. It is not going particularly quickly but that’s part of the deal when I stopped writing for a year. Coming back to it takes patience, and an acknowledgement that it’s going to be slow going until I build up some kind of endurance again. It is frustrating and it isn’t and both of those things can be true. Maybe next Catch Up I can share more about it.

Something I've Been Listening to And You Might Like

Noah Kahan has a new album coming out soon. I am stoked for it.