The Patreon Letter - 29th December, 2018 (Patreon)

Hi everyone. It's the last patreon letter of 2018 and y'all got stuck with me, who woke up today very introspective as everyone and their dog is posting year in review stuff which is the prelude to new year's resolutions which is always a strange vision of a world where we collectively pretend to do better at once when doing better is, at best, a process from hell. 

I decided I should join in and talk about a thing I've been working on and will continue working on in 2019. You see, I'm a hater.

Or a snob. Or a misanthrope. Or a hipster. Or poisoned by online. Whatever the word you want to use for this phenomenon, I accept it can be applied to me. I'm speaking, of course, of that infectious and insufferable dual sense of the world where the more I hear about something the more I reflexively dislike it, and when I think I know the measure of a thing I will leap to judge it even if I have not considered it firsthand. You know, being a judgey bore. 

That thing. That's me. But! I am trying to get better about it.

I've always been this way, or at least I don't remember a time when I wasn't, so it is hard to chart the progress of the disease. Is this conditioning of a boyhood I haven't unpacked yet, where an appropriate response to things that didn't immediately cater to your interests was open derision? Is this the dregs of being a child in 'gifted' programs where they literally cloistered us in a special room to have fun because they knew school was too boring for us special children and we deserved specific stimulation? Is this a byproduct of too much media in our entertainment-glutted world, where sorting interest and not-interest is a survival tactic you can over-hone in the name of refining your taste and surviving the constant onslaught of new things? It's very easy to counter FOMO with affected apathy (or hostility, even), but it's not a great way to live.

I've been trying to undo this passively for a while now but with my life thrown so in tumult over the past year I found myself willing to just give up my resistances and embrace the new more than usual. It has been really positive, which is why I'm going to try to continue this trend into the new year with enough focus I guess I'll call it a resolution. I'm going to try not to be such a hater in anno domini twenty nineteen. 

I could list some of the things that I got over myself with in this year, but many of them litter my top ten that was in the free VoIP Life you can listen to right now. Before this year I was barely watching TV and this year it made up a huge portion of my list and I feel guilty I took forever to come around on the idea of 'oh a show can be good' because that's a ridiculous thing to have to realize about the world in your thirties. For a more to-hand example, I recently got the first three volumes of Land of the Lustrous for Christmas, and am now reading that and watching the anime in tandem I like it so much. I was against watching it because 'lol Steven Universe anime' or 'ugh CG show' or simply 'ah three people talked about the same thing close enough to each other I think everyone's on about some new thing' or whatever other bad faith reasoning I used, you'd think eventually I'd recognize thoughts like that are actively unhelpful to engaging with media or the world in general.

I know part of this is self-protective. I am regularly dancing at the edge of burnout, and try to keep myself at least partially informed, but that means that I feel like a lot of things are obligation media. I watched every Marvel movie up until this year, and only liked maybe two of them? But also learning that 'I don't have the interest or bandwidth for something' isn't a foundation for critique is important. I still barely know what a Black Mirror is, outside of all my friends hate it, but I'll probably never know so I'll keep my mouth shut. You'd think this would be self-evident, but here I am telling you this was hard fought, but I admit I suffer from this sort of ambient arrogance more than many people I know. It's miserable and miserly.

In reality I've found that getting over this inclination is an act of self-honesty more than anything. Am I really mad at Riverdale for turning very good Archie comics into another CW show with CW show things happening? No. I'm just like 9 seasons behind on the 5 Arrowverse shows and the Archie/Grundy thing really sets my teeth on edge for personal reasons. It isn't that deep. It doesn't have to be for me. I'll still probably watch Sabrina someday, though. Also CW adapt Life with Archie: The Married Life, it's amazing, it's literally a slice of life story about Archie living in two alternate universes where he should have happy endings and sucking in both of them!

There are so many other examples of this I could fill the letter to bursting, but I'll stop there. It's been a really long, difficult year on the personal front, but it has definitely nudged me towards letting go of some of the ideas I was holding onto that did nothing other than soothe hurt or sadness with anger. It's bad medicine. If I accomplish nothing else in 2019, I'd like to continue down this road even further, and embrace a lack of judgment towards things that are not obstructing my life. It seems like a small thing, but it's going to take a lot of work to get out of these habits! 

See you next year, space cowboys. 

Em