For the last week, I’ve listened to a bunch of year review podcasts. I’ve sat and thought about my “bests” and “worsts” of the year, and told myself “Hey handsome, don’t copy other people, just write something original,” and after much thought I decided two things: 1. I’ll make my own original type of review with lists, memes, gifs, and references that 3.6 of my 8 followers will understand, and 2. I play by nobody else’s rules, not even my own. So this time capsule for the year in which I turned 30 will be an interesting thought experiment and critique of the pop cultural explosion that was 2019.

Best Sports Moment

This was a pretty great sports year. Brady, Belichick, and the Pats dynasty continues to roll as they won a 6th Superbowl in 18 years. The Warriors Dynasty crumbled before our eyes. We had the World Cup in which the United States continued its dominance. Baseball was…played…I think. Basketball dominated my sports brain this year as, Lebron went to the Lakers, Kawhi hit the most dramatic shot I’ve ever seen, NBA Free Agency was insane this summer, and YOUR ORLANDO MAGIC TRADED FOR MARKELLE FULTZ. As much as I would love to be a homer here and go into great detail about why the Fultz trade was the best sports moment of 2019, HIS PER 36 STATS ARE 15PTS, 6AST, and 4REB A GAME, there was no moment I enjoyed more, than the time in which Megan Rapinoe took over the internet.

On her way to winning the these awards, Rapinoe was beyond dominant in her World Cup run. The above picture and this pose took over twitter during every match. Here’s what I remember about the World Cup this summer: The Brits talked shit, the USWNT won, the French talked shit, the USWNT won, our disgusting troll doll gone wrong of a president talked shit, her GF Sue Bird (who is a dominant WNBA player) wrote this masterpiece, and then the USWNT won the whole World Cup and turned down the White House invite. Megan Rapinoe’s soccer performance was amazing, the way she stood up for women and her sexuality was admirable, and her talismanic confidence brought home the gold for America. Rapinoe may have won 2019. Megan Rapinoe is I-CON-IC.

Self-Realization of the Year

Imposter Syndrome. I feel like I have it. As a teacher, I still get nervous every first day of school, which is probably normal for most of us. Every time I’m observed I feel like I’m doing a terrible job, despite what my ratings and my students’ exam scores are. As a basketball coach, I feel like our team wins are either because of my players being great or sheer luck, and our team losses feel like they’re 100% my fault. Logically I know this can’t be the case, but my superego dwarfs its Freudian counterparts so much that the only thing that makes me feel like a good coach is when we have a close loss. Conquering this dumb part of my psyche is my ultimate New Years Resolution, and I hope that I don’t give up on it by February.

Most Satisfying Ending

In 2008, my senior year in high school, I saw Ironman. It was amazing. It changed how I looked at movies, and I became convinced that no one on Earth is cooler than Robert Downey Jr. 11 years, 22 movies, and a bunch of TV shows I didn’t watch later, and we have Avengers: End Game. This movie was great on so many levels in the theater. The effects were great. The story was emotional and the characters had stakes, deaths mattered, and decisions had consequences (unlike in a movie I will talk about later). The way Kevin Feige was able to thread together a story that spanned 20+ movies and 11 years was masterful, and probably will never be done again. What made this the most satisfying ending of the year was the beautiful circular storytelling moment. RDJ’s last line in Ironman in 2008 was “I am Ironman”, it was a killer mic drop moment. His last line as Ironman in End Game was “I am Ironman”, as he snaps his fingers, saves the world and dies. Great writing and better acting. (PS the end of VEEP was amazing)

Least Satisfying Ending

Part of me wanted to be sardonic here and say the Game of Thrones Finale was the best ending just because the letdowns would end. Once the writers moved past the books as source material we as the audience were teased by both greatness and absurdity. The final season was visually spectacular, but the disappointment far outweighed the good. As much as I would like to be personally torn about what the true nadir of the final season is, nothing irks me to the level of Bran becoming king through Tyrion’s speech. “Great kings are great because they have great stories”, or some shit like that. It was the equivalent to “the true kings are the friends we made on the way”. I hated every bit of Tyrion, in chains walking to his death sentence, talking people into freeing him, freeing the Queenslayer Jon Snow, and anointing “Bran the Broken” as King. If you pair that with Dany’s abrupt heel turn to mad-queendom, Jaime and Cersei’s death due to a few rocks they could’ve sidestepped, and Yara Greyjoy not declaring independence right after Sansa declares for an independent North even though Yara had that same deal in place with Dany, the final season of Thrones is maddening, and as much as I’ll miss the monocultural discussions, part of me wishes Brienne of Tarth took me out alongside the one true king, Stannis Baratheon.

Best TV Show(s)

I watch a lot of TV. It’s great. It’s better than most movies. Of my friend group, I think of myself as the guy who pushes shows on everyone else. It’s probably annoying, but I’ve never had a friend tell me something I’ve recommended isn’t good. This could be because I have immaculate taste, or it could be because my friends don’t want to hurt my feelings. Either way, my TV picks are the one thing I do not have imposter syndrome about. Here’s a 5 to 1 countdown:

5. Chernobyl: I almost made this its own category. As a history nerd, I loved learning about more about this tragedy. As a human, my heart broke pretty much every episode watching what this did to the people, animals, and environment. As a TV Connoisseur, I was enthralled. The acting was great, one episode had me on the edge of my seat with anxiety in the same way the best scary movies make me feel. This 5 episode mini-series is worth a watch asap.

4. Fleabag: I binged both seasons in about 3 days. I’m not sure if I’ve seen anything like this. At the surface level, this seems like a debaucherous comedy about a single woman who is more than in touch with her sexuality. That alone was enough to get me to watch as I both love to laugh, and encourage self-confidence in others. If you actually pay attention though, this show deals with BIG topics like: the loss of loved ones, the importance of religion, and familial relationships to just name a few. Brilliant in every way, I HIGHLY recommend this.

3. Years and Years: This was a British mini-series I stumbled upon due to my podcast addiction. This show was pretty cool because every episode had a time jump in which we went into the future years and years. The first episode shows us a near future in which Trump is re-elected and in his final days in office nukes a man-made Chinese Island. The first episode. It was wild. We also saw how advances in technology put millions of people out of work, people identifying as transhuman and merging with computers, a banking collapse, multiple refugee crises, deep fakes, and the Earth’s destruction continuing. I recommend this strongly to everyone with HBO access.

2. Euphoria: We had a few days off of school in the fall due to a hurricane and I binged this series in its entirety. FUCKING WOW. Every episode was great. Zendaya was so unique in her performance. The show was shot so unbelievably and uniquely cool. I can think of 4 distinct moments where it was like nothing else I’ve ever seen on TV or in movies. They are as follows:

1. The carnival episode where the camera would pan to an overhead shot, scan the carnival in its entirety, and drop down to other characters. Masterfully cool and 100% original.
2. The episode where Zendaya’s character Rue is suffering from extreme insomnia and it briefly becomes a black and white detective movie from the 1950’s
3. Cassie popping in her headphones and imagining herself ice skating to distract herself during her abortion. Typing this up and thinking of it gave me the chills again.
4. The ending of the finale where Rue is heartbroken, alone, dies(?), and it becomes a trippy music video.

Seriously, I loved every bit of this television experience. My sister, who had the two most legendary teen shows Beverly Hills 90210 and The OC, loved it. My students loved it. It was a perfect season of TV.

1. Succession: By far the best show on TV right now. It’s somehow the funniest, cringiest, and most dramatic (sorry my lexicon fell short of another word ending with ist) series, and I love every second of it. Family drama, business intrigue, massive amounts of money, and Kieran Culkin with the best lines on Earth are just a few reasons why everyone needs to watch. If you want to know more about it, feel free to peruse this.

Movie(s) of the Year

This was a great movie year. I could have made my own top ten list about 2019 movies alone, but that’s droll and unoriginal. Instead I’m going to do a quick top 3:

Worst Movie

So here’s my first spoiler warning. Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker was the biggest letdown I’ve ever experienced in a movie theater. Now I should probably qualify this with the fact that I not only loved Last Jedi, but I think it is the third best of this movie franchise behind Rogue One and Empire Strikes Back. Now lots of people disagree with me and that’s fine, I mean this is Megan Rapinoe’s America we’re living in. That being said, Rise of Skywalker was a pacing trainwreck comparable to the non-Revenge of the Sith prequels. In Attack of the Clones, we are introduced to the movie’s villain Count Dooku, who I love and plan on writing about in the near future, in the opening crawl. Most people thought this was forced, and that Dooku as the big bad was a flat character. Rise of Skywalker does the same when it stated Emperor Palpatine is back in its opening crawl. Now our guy Sheev was a known commodity, but with no hints or references of him in the previous two movies this was a jarring turn to see in the crawl. A lot of people criticized The Force Awakens for being an almost shot for shot remake of A New Hope. Though there are plenty of similarities, A New Hope was an allusion to the Nazi Germany, their power, and the NEED to resist, and Force Awakens as a remake is an allusion to the rise/return of Neo-Nazi ideals and the NEED to resist. Rise of Skywalker was the Frankenstein version of Return of the Jedi, and it made me identify with the torch wielding townsfolk. The most divisive scene of Last Jedi, The Holdo Maneuver, was visually stunning and unique. Rise takes the time to criticize this directly, while forgetting about the fact that it introduced similarly canonical rule breaking “Lightspeed Skipping”. Rise of Skywalker functioned more as a fan service checklist than it did as an actual story. It had no real stakes, *cough Chewbacca being dead for almost 4 minutes cough*. Whether it was the forced reveal of Rey’s parentage, Lando using Leia’s idea from Last Jedi and it working because he’s a man, the over-reliance on MacGuffins, the lack of explanation of how Palpatine survived the explosion of Death Star 2 and its plummet to one of the moons of Endor and who/what the Sith Eternal were, not showing Keri Russell’s face despite her being nearly perfect, Luke gave up on looking for Ochi and the Sith Wayfinder even though his ship was in the open on a rock, Luke not telling Rey she’s a Palpatine even though he hated not knowing Darth was his dad, or (and this is a long one) Rey using a knife to find a precise spot based on where she was standing while looking at a floating/drifting metal mass, finding a Wayfinder, breaking it, and then finding the only other one ever made in Kylo’s third most used ship. Also why did Kylo remake the helmet? Outside of this gem and Chewie getting his medal, this movie was a travesty.

5 Things I’m Looking Forward to in 2020

5. Attending the graduation of the class of 2020. I taught them when they were 6th graders my first year teaching, it’s surreally special
6. The Orlando Magic winning the NBA Finals.
7. The Election of 2020, I have no idea what it will entail, but it won’t be boring. As a history teacher, all elections are exciting for me
8. It’s a leap year, who isn’t excited about one more day?
9. Trump’s impeachment. This is historic while being soap-operatic. I mean it includes, but not limited to: a porn star, Russia, illegal arms deals, and tax evasion. I can’t wait to see the DBQ’s on his administration.