I had promised myself I was going to restore my habit of doing end-of-year media lists for 2019. This is one of what was supposed to be four posts in the series but became only two: movies, music, television, and games. Spoilers ahead.
When I think back on the movies of 2019, here are the moments that stand out:
This is the latest in the continuing series of me saying goodbye to things I love.
This morning, I had to say goodbye to the cat who changed my life.
It’s hard to know what to say, here, because none of it beyond “thank you and goodbye” is necessary. One of the painful things that comes with hearing your own voice for a living—in your head as you write and edit, on podcasts, in little videos that start playing on a website either with or without your consent—is that you wind up editing yourself very harshly even when you are not really editing. Thoughts or feelings that you have, very much for real, scan as mawkish or hackish or unworthy, which in point of fact they would be were they to appear in a blog post or some conversational bit, but which also doesn’t matter, because those things are what you are thinking or feeling. I am doing a lot of that. It’s exhausting. It is tough to hear myself over the noise of it.
– David Roth