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Favorites of the Decade

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HAPPY NEW YEAR! 🎉

Here are a few of my favorite albums, shows, movies, and events—both personal and public—from the last decade. I’m surely missing a lot, but everything I’ve listed below certainly had an impact on shaping the last decade of my life. And while I think it’s important to acknowledge the many bad, strange, and horrifying things that happened (or were made) between 2010 and 2020, I’d rather celebrate the positive. What are some of your favorites from the past 10 years?

I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (2019)

When marriage equality passed in the U.S.!

Days – Real Estate (2011)

20th Century Women (2016)

Making it through college and having some of the most fun and exciting experiences of my life. I cherish that time with my friends (and the lack of responsibilities) dearly.

Moonlight (2016)

Every Beach House album.

My time with Hayley—a quirky and loyal rescue dog who I was lucky to have in my life for a number of years.

They Came Together (2014)

The Tree of Life (2011)

Attending the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and exploring the south of France and northern Italy. And at times I was traveling solo, which opened my eyes to how independent and self-reliant I can be.

Fleabag (2016, 2019)

LIVE.LOVE.A$AP – A$AP Rocky (2011)

Echo in the Canyon (2019)

Moving to Los Angeles in 2015.

Difficult People (2015 – 2017)

Roma (2018)

Basement Seance – Dirty Art Club (2017)

Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp (2015) and 10 Years Later (2017)

Lady Bird (2017)

Making it through graduate school and all of the cool opportunities I had there.

Having the first woman ever become the democratic nominee for president—no matter how terribly that turned out.

To Pimp a Butterfly – Kendrick Lamar (2015)

Attending the Los Angeles premiere of Amy (2015)

The Place Beyond the Pines (2012)

Big Mouth (2017 – 2019)

Going to the first LA Women’s March after the election, along with over 750K hopeful, angry, and like-minded folks.

Contra – Vampire Weekend (2010)

Spending the entire decade with David, who I’m now married to.

Birdman (2014)

Seeing Paul Simon at the Hollywood Bowl.

Calico Review – Allah-Las (2016)

Youth (2015)

Cosmogramma – Flying Lotus (2010)

When my sister found two little strays roaming the streets of Tucson and no one claimed them. Now they’re our little buddies and I love them so much ❤

Is Adulthood Just Being Busy All the Time?

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I can’t tell you how much I want to have the time to work on this blog. To draw, travel, take photos, try new things—but I’m just too damn busy. Always.

I keep thinking that soon I’ll have more time to do some of the stuff that makes me happy (and maybe even relax?) but with each new day comes another task to add to my seemingly endless to-do list.

I’m mostly to blame for being constantly overwhelmed. I take on far too many things, but life’s just getting in the way too. Too much work, too many appointments, getting sick at inopportune times, and the infinite red-tape that makes everything more difficult.

Is this what being an adult is like forever?

David always tells me, “One thing at a time.” And when I have the time, this way of thinking is great. But usually, I don’t.

And I feel guilty for complaining. Most people are this busy (and many are much more so), but I needed to get this off my chest.

Maybe some day this blog will be more than a random dumping ground for my rants or fleeting feelings. Maybe some day I’ll write about movies and TV again, post photos from trips, and ideas about politics or social movements—but for now this is all I have the energy for.

Do you have a method for relaxing when you feel so unbelievably overwhelmed? If so let me know. I need some guidance ❤

Fundraising in Honor of My Dad

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Join me & my family in our efforts to support the Liver Life Walk in honor of Kit Van Valkenburg.

My dad died from complications due to his liver transplant in August, 2018. He had been diagnosed with liver disease over a decade earlier, but his doctor believed he had likely been suffering from the disease many years before then. According to the American Liver Foundation, millions of Americans have liver disease but don’t know it.

As participants in the Liver Life Walk, my family and I are hoping to help in the fight against liver disease in honor of my dad, and raise funds to support the ALF’s mission to “promote education, advocacy, support services and research for the prevention, treatment and cure of liver disease.”

Every dollar we raise will make a difference in the lives of the millions of Americans living with liver disease. By making a donation in honor of Kit Van Valkenburg, you will be helping the American Liver Foundation provide critical funding for public education, patient support services, and research.

Even just $1 is greatly appreciated, but if you can’t donate at this time, feel free to share our donation page instead! And be sure to give your loved ones an extra big hug.

As always, thanks so much for reading! Until next time ❤
Julia

A Few of My Favorite Things

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  • the sound of a diesel engine
  • warm towels
  • laying on the living room floor at my parents’ home
  • waking up early before traveling
  • eating vegan banh mi’s
  • when the sun’s setting – anywhere, but especially in the desert
  • the feeling on your skin when you get into a hot car
  • the joy of discovery that travel brings
  • the sense of anonymity when you’re walking down a street in a crowded city
  • the smell after it rains in the desert
  • eating popcorn
  • listening to a song I love, but haven’t heard in years
  • the smell of an old dog’s breath
  • a good cup of coffee in the morning
  • being moved to tears by a movie
  • doodling
  • when an idea just “clicks”
  • the early stages of planning something fun
  • the smell of gasoline
  • when a plane finally lands & you’re safely on the ground again
  • finding a cool object at a secondhand store
  • when it’s chilly enough to wear a long sleeved shirt, but not so cold that you can’t still wear shorts
  • driving in LA with my sunroof open when the traffic isn’t bad  
  • looking at old photos
  • giving a piece of furniture a fresh coat of paint
  • the smell of lavender cleaning products
  • the opening themes of Twin Peaks, Golden Girls, & Portlandia
  • feeling productive
  • industrial districts
  • the sound of waves & cool feeling of an ocean breeze
  • the smell of sunscreen
  • midcentury modern furniture
  • how excited my dogs are when I get home

These are a few of my favorite things—what are yours?

I’m Not a Brand

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When I started my blog around six years ago, this world of writing and putting my thoughts out onto the internet was so new and exhilarating. Around the same time I also joined Twitter, which continues to be my favorite social media platform because, at its best, Twitter fosters creativity and authenticity. In my mind, Twitter is the cool girl who’s into politics and memes and sometimes makes mistakes, while Instagram is the so-perfect-they’re-unreal prom queen valedictorian star athlete who’s also really great at taking photos. Maybe I’m just jealous of the Instagram chick, but I also don’t want to have to look at her perfect pictures all the time.

Excuse that tangent, but I was just at a social media conference so these things are on my mind. Now, back to the point…

This blog was born out of my boredom and unsureness post-college-but-pre-job (I’m clearly really into using dashes-like-this lately) during the summer of 2013 when the high in Tucson reached 111 degrees Fahrenheit. At that time I wasn’t so sure where the next few years would take me, but I knew I enjoyed writing little blog posts in my downtime. My unsureness remains the same, but in the past six years so much else has changed. I moved to Los Angeles and got my master’s degree. Donald Trump became president. I lost my dad. I got married. And while those are major changes—little things have changed too.

I remember that when I started this blog, I wanted to focus mainly on film and TV, but also tidbits on marketing. I’m still interested in all of those things (my current day job is in the marketing realm) but my priorities and approach to those subjects has shifted substantially. So here’s where branding comes in…

One of my first blog posts (which I must have deleted, because I can’t seem to find) was about branding, but more specifically, personal branding. I bought into the “marketing for creatives” concept that individuals, especially artists, were brands. David Lynch? A brand. Sofia Coppola? A brand! And I thought that if I wanted to be successful, I had to be a brand too.

I now recognize artists like Lynch and Coppola as creatives with a very specific and unrelenting voice and aesthetic. They are human beings, not brands. I’m embarrassed I ever took the time to write an entire blog post about personal branding, because again, PEOPLE AREN’T BRANDS. 

I guess that’s what 22 years of living in a hyper-capitalist country led me to believe? How could I be so simple-minded as to think that my value as an individual relied on the essence of my “brand” or my ability to brand myself? To make every bit of my existence digestible for insatiable consumers? Maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but I’m ashamed not only that I was educated to feel this way, but that I accepted it as my fate and even took it upon myself to advocate for why others should think of themselves that way too.

But I am not a brand—and neither are you.

Media Consumption Histories

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Sometimes I write blog posts and forget to post them! This is one of those posts. I started writing this in early 2017, completely forgot about it and never finished it, but decided to share it now without making any updates. A lot has changed since I wrote this, but I still think it’s kind of fun to share. Enjoy—or don’t!

This past semester I was a graduate teaching assistant for the Introduction to Television lecture at USC, which required that I ran my own weekly hour-long class. Although the topic each week varied, many of our class discussions returned to the future of TV, and the ways in which digital technology has uprooted and transformed the traditional television landscape. As a result, I began thinking about my own consumption history and that of my closest friends and family.

Living in the information age, technology seems to be propelling us ahead faster and faster, into seemingly complex and unpredictable times. Despite my anxiousness regarding our presumably hyper-tech futures, my approach to technology is not deterministic, meaning that I acknowledge that advancements are impacted by policy, culture, and economics too. Take smartphones as an example; it’s not as though the emergence of these devices suddenly made us isolated beings who stare at screens all day. Historically, we’ve been adjusting to screens for decades, and our isolationism is also a result of social trends. Consider the 1950’s & 60’s, when portions of the population moved to the suburbs in order to literally separate themselves from larger communities. Long story short, cellphones didn’t suddenly make us anti-social.

But enough on technological determinism…

When I think about what has changed technologically since I was born in 1991, it’s astonishing. My parents and grandparents have seen a lot, but the sheer speed of technological change in my relatively short lifetime has been significant. When I was born my family didn’t own a computer. We eventually got one, but used dial-up for several years until upgrading to high-speed internet when I was in 8th grade. I can still remember how amazed I was to access the internet without a dial tone, and it was so fast compared to what I was used to. At that time I was working on a paper for my eighth grade science class on the behavior of dogs, and I felt like I was able to search the internet for information at lightening speed.

I was given my first cellphone my freshman year of high school. In middle school, I used a walkie-talkie to communicate with my dad while I walked home from the school bus. With my first phone I didn’t have any data for texting, and later I could only send and receive 10 texts per month. Either my junior or senior year of high school I was upgraded to a touch screen phone (not yet a smart phone) and one of the “games” it featured was a pair of dice that you could roll by shaking it. I was so impressed.

My family has never been the type that instantly upgraded our household technologies, just because they were available. Our living room TV was a massive, cumbersome box until just a few years ago. I guess our family MO is, if it gets the job done, why change it? But despite the fact that our TV set remained old, my parents still moved forward quickly with my mom streaming Netflix on an iPad for a few years now and my dad asking Siri questions constantly.

What surprises me the most is the way that my dad uses technology. He doesn’t have an email and needs help using Google, but he’ll send emojis in most of his texts to me and my sister. And not just any random emojis, but ones that make sense within the context of our conversation. If you knew my dad, you’d understand how shocking that is. My mom has always been tech-savvy, but even receiving Snapchats from her or texts filled with gifs impresses me. Times are changing, fast.

So where does TV fit into this?

A few weeks ago my internet wasn’t working, so I couldn’t watch “TV.” Like many millennials, I don’t have cable, so I depend on the internet to access Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Now, YouTube, iTunes, and the various other internet-based ways I retrieve media. My only other option would be to walk a few blocks down to my local library and pick up a DVD (which believe me, I do!) but the fact that I watch TV exclusively online is significant.

There are plenty of people who still have cable, but what happens when millennials get older? How will cable survive if most of us are used to subscription video on demand services such as Netflix and Hulu?

When I go back home to my parent’s house, I get a brief reminder of what TV watching used to be like for me. My mom still receives DVD’s in the mail from Netflix (only a little over 4 million Americans use their DVD service) and even that’s considered old school, despite the fact that Netflix started streaming online only ten years ago. House of Cards, Netflix’s first original series, is about to debut its fifth season, but I feel like we’ve been talking about SVOD originals forever.

See, I told you I didn’t finish it! What was my point going to be? I have an idea, but we’ll never really know. Anyways, with technology (and life itself) evolving all the damn time, it’s somewhat interesting to look back and be reminded that my mom STILL got Netflix DVDs in 2017. 

Until next time,

Julia ❤ 

Dogs, Doodles, & Other Things

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It’s been a few months since my last post, and I finally felt like checking in again. After losing my dad, I didn’t have the energy or desire to work on Catch-all, so I posted a few times and took another much-needed break. But as time has passed, and I’m finding joy in things like blogging again, I’ve decided to give Catch-all another shot.

Since my last blog post, a couple of major things have happened. I married the love of my life in a small ceremony at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, and we entered a new chapter together in this ever-changing and always unpredictable book that is life. Towards the end of December we adopted two adorable little dogs, who were found as strays together and never claimed by a guardian. They’ve both brought so much joy into my life and I like to think of them as gifts from my dad.

Here’s Joni and Murphy healing after being spayed ❤

Last February I wrote about Lady Bird and how that film reminded me of “the sloppy hopefulness of the spirit I once had.” I wanted to be excited again about the uncertainty of life and the joy of doing the things I love, but instead of making time for my hobbies, I let things get in the way again. Losing my dad was a sudden and painful reminder of the briefness of life, and after some time had passed I reminded myself that it was time to focus on the things I enjoy doing again.

Drawing is something I did for fun and to relax, especially in high school. After college I slowly let it slip away until I didn’t draw anymore. I used to spend hours discovering new bands and listening to music, but music steadily became less of a part of my life. Interior design was a love of mine since childhood, and I would read design magazines and decoupage furniture and paint the walls of every apartment I moved into. That stopped too. Going to the movies and watching old films was something I always made time for, but this past year I felt like a barely watched anything. And working on this blog was enjoyable and rewarding for a number of years, but that changed as well.

Because I’ve lost my dad, someone I thought would always be there, I look at and experience everything a bit differently now. I always knew life was short as a general concept, but now I feel the reality of its shortness, and the pain of it, deeply. I understand that everything really could change or be over tomorrow—even in the next minute. So I plan to cherish each moment and actually spend time doing what I love, rather than just thinking about doing it. In the coming months I hope to be posting on Catch-all more often, and writing about what I’ve been watching or listening to. And I hope you spend time doing the things you enjoy too.

Until next time,

❤ Julia

Screens and the Time We Spend Staring at Them

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As I’m writing this I’m in front of a screen, and since you’re reading this you’re in front of a screen, and screens, screens, screens, screens.

…

Lately I’ve been spending too much time on Instagram. Being on the app is a part of my job, and I certainly don’t mind getting paid to look at my phone—but recently I’ve felt consumed by it. Even after work, I come home and succumb to the endless scroll. It relaxes me, and I escape into it. My physicality dissipates and it’s just me and my eyes and my brain and my finger, scrolling though images, liking some, sharing memes, watching videos. My eyes, my brain, my finger, and my phone.

In this world of scrolls, time doesn’t exist. Nor do responsibilities, or consequences, or the pain of the present. Just dog videos, pretty photography, and my friends’ babies.

…

During my last semester of graduate school I was a teaching assistant for an introduction to television course, and I spent time talking to undergraduates about what they watch and how they watch it. I had been thinking about Twin Peaks (as I usually do) and the fact that I fell in love with a show from the early 90’s that existed before I did, only because Netflix made it available to me. Without Netflix, I likely would have never seen the show (my favorite show of all time), simply because it wasn’t a part of my small universe.

In one discussion section I asked the students to think about how much TV they watch and on what platforms. I also wanted them to include web shows, because what qualifies as “television” nowadays is up for debate. Through this exercise, I began to think of my own relationship with “watching things.” I say “watching things” because I slowly realized that the “shows” I watched were on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, but also Snapchat, YouTube, and Instagram. Are the three-minute long clips of my boyfriend’s cousin’s kids playing together a show? Maybe?

…

I went down a weird spiral a few months ago when I started to think about what it means to be human, day-to-day. And I thought about my days, and what they look and feel like, and soon realized just how unnatural—how inhuman—my human life is. I spend most of my day in front of screens. I bet you do too.

…

Take a moment and really think about the screens we spend time in front of, and just how much of our time. TVs, computers, tablets, phones, and more. All these fucking screens everywhere and they’re so ubiquitous that I almost forget they’re there.

…

So what’s my point? Damn, I think I may just need to spend less time on Instagram.

Vote Like Our Future Depends on It (Because It Does)

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If you’re reading this and you’re a U.S. citizen, then you should know that the midterm elections are tomorrow. And if you know that the elections are tomorrow then you should be registered to vote and you should be voting.

So you’re voting right? Or even better—you voted early?

I’m still not quite in the right frame of mind to write lengthy, well-crafted blog posts, so instead I’ll link you to a few really great articles I think are worth reading and some election gifs to post tomorrow, because why not?

Articles to read, digest, & share:

Roxane Gay’s piece for The New York Times, “You’re Disillusioned. That’s fine. Vote Anyway.“
  • “If you remain disillusioned or apathetic in this climate, you are complicit. You think your disillusionment is more important than the very real dangers marginalized people in this country live with.” – Roxane Gay
s.e. smith’s article for Bitch Media, “The Intimidation Game: Donald Trump and the GOP’s History of Voter Suppression.”
Jeff Wise’s essay on Medium, “The Midterm Stakes: A Brief Primer“

VOTE, then Tweet:Â