The last couple of years, I’ve been making these pop cultural year summaries and posted on the blog every New Year’s Eve. This year, I was sitting with my Scenario Analysis instead, trying to make a prophecy about what is going to happen to the armed conflict in Sudan two years from now.
And this Christmas has been strange. Christmas Eve was a mess and Christmas Day I went to Hanna, tried out a recipe for buttered apple cider with calvados, which made gravity seem to slightly loose its iron grip on the world for a couple of hours. We were meant to go to a club, but after an hour in the line they said that they were full and that it was one in-one out. I felt that the 200 kronor entrance wasn’t worth the time it would take to get in, so I took the subway home, still feeling like the pavement wasn’t entirely solid. On New Year’s, I went to a big dinner with at my mom’s friend’s house, as I usually do, and then I was supposed to continue to a party at a friends house – but I ended up spending the first hours of the new year crawled up in a ball on my bed, feeling like cutting my womb out of my body with my own bare hands. This is what I get, for not giving birth to a baby once a year. If how we spend the first hours of the new year are supposed to say something about the year to come, 2013 will be a year of anguish and pain. Not a very uplifting thought.
But I guess I should write something about the year that passed, even though my pop cultur consumption in 2012 was somewhat onesided. So, let me make it short.
The best song was Emmylou by First Aid Kit. I listened to it all the way from Edmonton to Phoenix. You and I by Ingrid Michaelson comes in at a close second.
I refuse to make anything by R. R. Martin into the best book of 2012. I’m frustrated with him. He kills people and lets the wrong people live and he doesn’t give enough chapters to Arya. And, frankly, I don’t really get this lust for a crown, that being king or queen is an end in itself, to whatever cost. No. I’m annoyed, and halfway through A Dance with Dragons. So, if I’m not to choose Martin, there isn’t really anything else to choose than Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Which actually is a really really great book. I feel good about the choice. But, excepting Martin, Anna Karenina, three Sherlock Holmes novels, a couple of guide books to North America and the course litterature, I’ve barely read at all this year. I doubt I even reached above 20. Which is less than any other year since I started keeping score back in 2001. Is this a new trend? A less book wormy period of my life? I don’t know.
When it comes to movies, I can’t remember anything really sticking out. I rymden finns inga känslor was cute. I saw The Avengers at the theater on Vancouver Island with Lori. That was cool. But I think that, just to honor the nerd in me, I’ll choose The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Hannes took me to the movies as a kind of Christmast gift, despite the fact that he himself hasn’t got any kind of special relationship to Tolkien. It was too long and they’ve changed it a lot from the book – but I like Bilbo and Gandalf and it was cool and beautiful. The Hobbit.
I’ve taken many photos this year. Most of them in North America. Trees and horses and amazing vistas. Houses, street art and farm sceneries. Birds. But still, there is something about this photo that pulls me in.
It was taken at the Monterey Aquarium. It is beautiful, but deadly. Best photo of the year.
There. I managed to do something this year too.
Katja Malmborg 