HIATUS: Ghostbusters, Iceland, New Job, and More!

Okay chickadees, it's official. After months of job-hunting and looking for the absolute perfect fit, after getting rejected from all of the universities I applied to and having to deal with the ensuing mild depressive state, and after a whole hell of a lot of "what on earth do I actually want to be doing with my life/time?" searching in the past six months, I would like to announce that I, your fearless leader, have a job. And I'm really excited about it.

It's not, as I thought it would be, a writing job, but instead a more practical office management-y job working for a non-profit here in Boston. I'm really glad to have it and I can't wait to get to work and feel like I'm helping save the world just a little. But. There are some downsides to suddenly having full-time employment again.

You might have noticed that the blog hasn't been updating as much as usual for the past few months. That's nothing against any of you, but rather a reflection of my life. It's been busy around here. Insanely busy. Between my job search and all my freelance gigs, as well as caring for my family and a few fun little crises that came up, I just haven't had the time to consume much media, let alone write about it. I haven't been posting because, by and large, I haven't had anything to say.

All of this (and the fact that I leave this afternoon for a long-in-the-works trip to Iceland) means that I'm putting Kiss My Wonder Woman on hiatus until September. I want to give myself time to enjoy this vacation then time to really settle in at work. I'll be moving around then too, so I want to be able to focus on the real-life problems in front of me without worrying that I'm not updating enough.

I will, however, be back.

I wondered about this for a long time, actually, if maybe it was time to hang up my hat and give KMWW a break. If not getting into grad school wasn't a sign that I ought to do something else with my time. But having really considered it and thought it through, I've realized that, no, I like it here. I want to stay.

This is thanks in no small part to all of you - your comments (the nice ones), your funny emails, your genuine interest in the topics we discuss. You've made this site a place I want to come back to, so thank you. 

It's also, though, because I saw Ghostbusters this weekend and I realized that as much as I sometimes get tired or feel like I've said everything that I could possibly say about media and pop culture, there's a reason we do this. It's to make movies like Ghostbusters.

I'm not going to do a full review here (maybe I will when I come back in the fall), but suffice to say that Ghostbusters was great and it reminded me why what we do here on KMWW is important. A movie like this couldn't have happened ten years ago, maybe not even five years ago, but now it can and that's awesome. Like the franchise or not, this is a movie about four brilliant women working together to save the world, not a romantic subplot or sexualizing comment in sight. Three of them are in their 40s. Two are plus-sized. One is African-American. One is (probably) gay. Together they save the city because the city needs to be saved.

And all along the way they get to be funny and gross and stupid and ugly and insecure and angry and violent and obnoxious. They don't have to be hot for the movie to work, in fact their hotness is in no way relevant to the plot. Their story is about women fighting to be taken seriously in a world that wants to discredit them, and I genuinely got swept up in it.

(So if you're wondering if you want to see Ghostbusters, please do.)

Watching Ghostbusters reminded me that the entire reason we talk about movies on here, the reason we talk about any pop culture, is to make stories like this possible. By drawing attention to the gaps in our cultural consciousness, we make room for stories like this to be made and to succeed. I'm not saying that KMWW was responsible for Ghostbusters, because I am not filled with delusions of grandeur, but I am saying that what we do is important and worth doing.

Anyway. All of this is to say that for a variety of reasons, KMWW and I are going on hiatus. But we'll be back. I've already started collecting things to talk about again, from Jillian Tamaki's Super Mutant Magic Academy to this awesome French spy show called Au Service de la France to Ghostbusters and Star Trek and Suicide Squad. I'm going to miss all of you, and I appreciate you sticking with me through the crazy.

See you on the other side.