Hello!
Apologies for the absence. I hope you still open these emails with curiosity.
I have not had the brain space to write here because of my Masters degree. And, as further proof that I’ve been in the thick of it, for both semesters of First Year I am officially on a High Distinction average. I mention this partly to gloat, but more out of pride and astonishment.
2021 started with welcoming Hugo, the rescue Russian Blue, into the home. Then, a break up. Then, full-time uni started, and then I had to find a new apartment, and then, just as I moved in, Sydney’s four month lockdown started. Navigating emotions at the end of a six-year relationship, the mindset of full-time study, the ‘adulting’ of finding an apartment in Sydney, moving, and setting up a new life, along with the anxious background noise of the pandemic was a lot, but thanks to age, maturity, and anti-depressants, I made it work.
I also worked at my friends’ removals business in customer service, SEO writing, and towards the end of the year, in packing, too. Straddling the two worlds of academia and essential services has been kind of fun, and rewarding to know that whatever I do I can do a good job of it.
My uni placement was the same, and while there were obvious drawbacks to completing it all at home via Microsoft TEAMS and Zoom, I got a lot out of the experience. I joined the Sexual, Family and Domestic Violence Community Health team at ACON (formally known as the AIDS Council of New South Wales, now an umbrella health org for LGBTQ+ peoples). I worked mostly on projects, like writing a response for an audit on the way NSW Police treat LGBTQ+ domestic violence cases (spoiler alert: not well), and creating an FAQ for mainstream DV organisations to access if they want to make their services more inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community. It was a revelation to work in a totally queer workplace, where the big boss is a trans man, and gender fluidity and diverse sexuality are celebrated. Admittedly, it will be difficult to work for non-queer workplaces again.
Now, in the break before it all starts up again (I have one more year of study and another, longer placement), I have time to reflect on the year. On paper it seems like it would have been a struggle, but with the cute, fuzzy support of Hugo and from my actual and chosen families, and a resilience even I didn’t realise I had, 2021 wasn’t half bad.
With that said, I’d like to share my favourite albums that came out this year:
I thoroughly enjoyed Lil Nas X’s Big Gay Pop Album, Montero. While sometimes tracks weren’t as fleshed out as they could have been, it contained enough celebratory and defiant ear worms with something both personal and important to say to make it one of my most listened-to albums of the year.
My indie pick is Twinkids’ latest album, Nobody Likes Me, for lo-fi, Phil Collins meets Jim O’Rourke pop jams.
For Summer, you can’t go past Bomba Estereo’s latest album, Deja, which places you right on the Caribbean beach where the band recorded it all.
For world-expanding, politically-charged, sublime West African guitar folk rock, there’s nothing like Mdou Moctar’s album, Afrique Victime.
And finally, in 2021 Onuka finally released their long-awaited new album, Kolir. You don’t need to understand Ukrainian to fall into the electro-folk-pop world of this band.
Honourable mention: Aurora released one of the most exciting pure pop tracks of the year with Cure For Me. I look forward to the album it will be on.
Please have a listen.
Let me know what pieces of culture made you get through 2021!
Until next time,
Sam xxx
Glad to hear that you survived and grew in 2021 Sam, and congratulations on the exceptional results at uni!
I think a lot of this year for me was about escapism, being in Melbourne and dealing with yet another mammoth lockdown. Thankfully, there was a lot going on in the world of entertainment to escape into, in between navigating a restructure to land into a new job, and working through the unnecessarily arcane processes of council permissions for an upcoming home renovation.
I came across Dimension 20 on tiktok, a live play tabletop gaming show (where improv actors play dungeons and dragons in real time) and got hooked pretty quickly. You can find some of their content on YouTube and Spotify, or subscribe to Dropout for the full catalogue.
Then I got wind of the Wheel of Time series starting on Amazon Prime, so I started reading the books. I managed to get through the first one before the show started, and am halfway through the second now. I can see why the series has been deemed classic; the world building is epic in scale, while the characters and the action are both really engaging.
Musically, I’ve also been enjoying the Lil Nas X album, as well as Leon Bridges’ album earlier in the year, and I belatedly discovered Ryn Weaver, again thanks to tiktok.
It’s been a fairly exhausting year, but I too reflect on the fact that despite all of the challenges, or maybe because of them, I’ve had a lot of opportunity for growth, and I think I’m ending the year a noticeably more grown up human. About time, I guess! 😂