I would be remiss if I failed to recount just how much effort went into simply making this blog. I have been working on this post for over a year, and not to be dramatic about it, but I lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of Miley Cyrus.

I wanted to write a pop culture blog. I wanted to start it with something that I was familiar with, something that guaranteed spectacle, and MTV’s Video Music Awards were just around the corner. I’ve been watching the VMAs since 1997. I’ve seen the hilarious, live-televised equivalent of actual celebrities at a tractor pull. I’ve seen Katy Perry try to out-weird Lady Gaga by putting a cheese cube on her head, only to be one-upped by Lady Gaga playing Jo Calderone, asking Cher to hold her meat purse, and then jauntily singing a few bars from her new album. There was absolutely no conceivable way that I would have nothing to say about the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards.

Suffice it to say, I was proven wrong. Not that there is per se nothing to be said about the 2013 MTV Music Awards. It permanently broke Wikipedia. But that’s not content any more than the next GMO-free antioxidant superfood ad.

Since then, I was looking for a fresh start. Something inspiring. I tried. As a proud book!fan of The Hunger Games series, I went to go see Mockingjay, Part 1, which is thus far the best installment in the series, but bittersweet in the massive collateral damage to the entire crew of the first turkey of a film and the promising but nonetheless clunky and uninspired second iteration – not to speak of the continued reminder of the great loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman. I saw Big Eyes on Christmas Eve, and it’s indeed a delightful project from the surprisingly untwisted mind of Tim Burton supported by solid performances by a coupling of two veteran actors of a new era. I later had a fairly similar reaction to Wild, though Lord help me if Reese Witherspoon wins any awards for that phoned in performance – Laura Dern was lovely as ever, as was the scenery, but a few days of missed showers and avoiding mirrors shouldn’t be afforded an Oscar. Netflix provided nothing of interest – after watching a few minutes of Snowpiercer, I closed the tab, left wondering if there existed a main character that wasn’t also an antihero in the whole wide world of storytelling In These Troubled Times™.

Of all things to impossibly cheer me up, the long-ailing Glee came lumbering back into my life like a bizarrely-written Eeyore in a musical Hundred-Acre Wood. Jeff Jensen at Entertainment Weekly makes a serviceable argument for the final season (Why a humbled ‘Glee’ is a ‘Glee’ worth watching) but strangely loses something in his account: this is not on purpose, and serendipitously so. The New Directions freshmen and sophomores of 2009 couldn’t have won Sectionals in the exact same way 2015’s New Directions couldn’t be Finn’s enduring teaching legacy that a Broadway-weary Rachel could come home to, but that’s not what Ryan Murphy intended. For all its stumbles, falls, lost story lines, and ultimately its central actor’s tragic death, Glee legitimately has persisted in allowing cracks to poke into life, allowing joy to seep in despite the odds, and despite reality. Reality, however, still persists in being indifferent. The real New Directions are kids in Ohio who sing in the shower, don’t have a show choir at their school, and will go to community college for medical billing without ever meeting each other. The great thing about this new globalization is that reality is being graffitied – adults are forming glee clubs, performers do break into song in the middle of the subway, potato salads are funded from across the country to the tune of thousands of dollars through computers. There are still things to be excited about, there is still happiness to be had, and it’s not just despite the cynics and the despair, but because of them.

I implore you to not just exalt illegitimi non carborundum (“don’t let the bastards grind you down”), but also to take to heart the words of the late, great Lillian Adler and open yourself to joy.