Merryneum
a vocab word that describes the state of this past week.
I’m actually counting this liminal week as more like two weeks, for me at least. My ongoing illness, which I’ve successfully shared with my now-equally-gelatinous partner, combined with the strange timing of kid and parent visits, make this year’s merryneum that long in my world. Today being Friday, and this Monday the 6th being the first day back at school and work for us, I can safely surmise that this year’s merryneum will be over today. Or, maybe by Sunday. But that’s not why I’m here!
Zuko’s Musings in Review
I wasn’t going to helm yet one more publication that does an end-of-the-year summary, but colsarnit if I haven’t been inspired by reading all y’all’s. I literally snuggled up in my in-laws’ guest room under my blankets this morning and read so many interesting little scrapbook-like collections over my coffee and it was so much fun. So I changed my mind. But I’m not going to go by Most Popular posts or My Personal Favorites. I’ll share a pair of essays for each of three categories that I feel are most important, some of my best work, or in some way strange and unusual, from 2024. The three categories I’ve decided on are: Popinations, Weirdnesses, and Guest Posts (essays that appeared elsewhere than Zuko’s Musings). It’ll be hard to choose only two per, but. Here we go.
Popinations
Mondays on this publication have been reserved for Popinations for quite some time now. So that means there’s quite a lot of them. Do I pick a favorite pub? Or a favorite personal tale? Let’s see…
Popination Explanation
I’m hitting the pause button today for a few reasons, the first of which being that, regardless of a robust bevy of vaccinations populating my system, I have come down with a case of The Winter Crud (™) and so am incapable of writing much brilliant fresh prose for you today (as much as it can be argued I do when I’m well).
Why not begin with an explanation of what the whole Popination phenomenon is all about? And as for the other, well I would be remiss if I didn’t honor the recently-canceled Moon Under Water podcast, and their enjoyment of some of my Popination writings in their show. (Maybe that counts more as a Guest Post? Ehhh…)
Popination Representation
I’m hereby the Denver Metro Area correspondent for the Moon Under Water podcast! Let me tell you about it:
Weirdnesses
I mean, this pretty much just means, like, everything I write, but. Okay, two particular weirdnesses from this past year? Oh well one of them has to be this one:
Mycelium
I feel like this essay is going to be a bit of a mess, but honestly I think that’s actually okay. I’ve been mulling over this idea for the past couple weeks, ever since we read through the Tom Bombadil scenes in the Personal Canon Formation readalong of
Tom Bombadil is weird enough just as he is, but this kooky idea of him being a sentient mushroom is one of those fun theories that are so weird they’re kind of wonderful.
This piece is very weird for me in that I don’t normally write fiction, especially not here. But here’s this odd little duck of a noir flash that came out of a 4-way vocab word tie.
Guest Posts
This one’s easy to pick two for, as the two most recent guest posts I composed are the coolest (and pretty decent withal, if I do say so myself). One was for
’s LOTR readalong, and the other was for ’s study of the concept of lifelong learning.
Honorable Mention: GLOSS
This is another thing I have been working on and with muchly through 2024: my memoir, Next Time, which is all serialized here under Saturday Morning Serial. After I was done putting up the chapters themselves, I began a secondary series of GLOSSes on each chapter in turn. When I explored the concept of the academic gloss, I actually discovered some really cool details I’d never known about, even in my long life as an academic. So this glossing glossarizing has been a real treat, for me.
There you have it, folx & friends! Let me know which Zuko’s Musing from 2024 stood out most to you, and I hope you had a happy new year’s celebration! 🥂