Aiden Wrapped by Aiden H. '28

It’s December, which means it is time to (drumroll please)…

🎉🎉HAVE AN MINOR EXISTENTIAL CRISIS BECAUSE SOMEHOW 11 MONTHS HAVE PASSED (cue airhorn noise)🎉🎉

As someone who loves to obsess over random, useless statistics,⁠01 Spotify Wrapped HATES to see me coming. I am naturally the friend that will always send you my top-ten everything of the year completely unsolicited. TierMaker is my best friend, I use a Tumblr Song Sorter after every major album release, and everything in my mind exists in a battle-to-the-death style list of what’s better (kind of like the Challenge Towers from Mortal Kombat). Now that I have a minor platform, I finally have a place to share my awful opinions and create my own war in the comments.

My biggest issue with “end-of-year” rankings, though, is that every major magazine/newspaper always releases them at the beginning of December, so we always forget about everything important that happens in December. But, I refuse to break a trend and naturally will enforce this delusion that December has no important pop culture.

So without further ado,⁠02 Does anyone actually know an exact definition of ado or do we all just use it in this context without ever questioning it? here are my most important rankings of 2024-things.

Movies

I simultaneously love going to the movies and also rarely go. Part of that is the curse of streaming has become as destructive as ever, turning every movie that could be good in the theater into a god-forsaken “Netflix Original”. I just hate streaming movies if it’s my first time watching it, since streaming gives more of a mindless, I’m-just-gonna-put-this-one-while-I-pset kind of vibe, which inevitably leads to me watching the same things over and over and only being exposed to new movies when one reasonably good one comes out every 6 months. This sadly means that of the movies I did go see, I only really liked 4. Nonetheless, here are the best movies I saw in the theater that came out this year.

1. Dune 2 – Life-altering, mind-shattering, transformative, beautiful, perfect, etc. Saw it twice in IMAX, have watched it two or three more times on Max, and I will continue to have this as the best sci-fi/fantasy movie I’ve ever seen. (…also it was Zendaya and Timothee Chalamet so duh).
2. Wicked⁠03 Fun bonus ranking of the Wicked Soundtrack: 1. No One Mourns the Wicked 2. The Wizard and I 3. Popular 4. Defying Gravity 5. What Is This Feeling 6. Dancing Through Life 7. Something Bad 8. I'm Not That Girl 9. One Short Day 10. Dear Old Shiz 11. A Sentimental Man – Yes it has not even been out for two weeks, but I have already seen the movie multiple times in theaters. A lot of people are saying this movie is disappointing?? And to that I say you set your expectations wayyyy too high because I feel like there is nothing else, much less nothing better, that this movie could have done. I don’t think it’s my favorite movie of all time, but it is my current obsession, especially as someone who hasn’t seen Wicked on stage and was largely introduced to it through the movie.
3. Challengers – Zendaya strikes again!!! Naturally, as a Luca Guadagnino movie, I was going to love this, but then he dared to make it about professional tennis (which I am already randomly obsessed with despite never having played). We all heard the soundtrack. We all saw the tennis-ball-as-the-camera shot. We all saw them violate that churro. We all watched the edits to Brat by Charli XCX playing over the final game. Moving on.
4. Fall Guy – I made my friend randomly go see this with me one day after it came out and it was a good time. Nothing crazy spectacular, but I could rewatch it in bed as a comfort movie down the line.

Movies that were bad: Despicable Me 4, Inside Out 2, Mean Girls, A Family Affair

Movies I still need to watch: My Old Ass, Saturday Night, We Live In Time, Blink Twice, Anora

Movies I (probably) won’t watch: Moana 2, Gladiator II, It Ends With Us, Twisters

The hard part with music rankings is always that the length of projects and when they were released in the year affects everything so drastically. Sure, I might have listened to the Taylor Swift album “more”, but that’s because Taylor’s album is 30 songs while Billie’s only has 10. Also, Taylor, Beyonce, Billie, and Charli all came out in the spring, while Chromakopia (or even GNX by Kendrick) came out so recently that I feel like I can’t rank it higher than these other albums I obsessed over, even though I might actually like them more. Finally, the amount of music I listen to that came out before this year would throw off this chart entirely.

Nonetheless, consider these 10 the majority of the music I was listening to.⁠05 I know it looks like it, but I SWEAR I'm not a White woman.

1. Hit Me Hard and Soft – Billie Eilish
2. Brat (including all remixes) – Charli XCX
3. Charm – Clairo
4. Cowboy Carter – Beyonce
5. Eternal Sunshine – Ariana Grande
6. The Tortured Poets Department (including The Anthology)⁠06 If we didn't include the anthology this would notttttt even be close to the top 10. – Taylor Swift
7. Chromakopia – Tyler, the Creator
8. All Born Screaming – St. Vincent
9. Wall of Eyes – The Smile
10. Romance – Fontaines DC

Concerts I went to: Bad Bunny (Denver/Ball Arena), The Head and the Heart (Morrison/Red Rocks), Clairo (Boston/Roadrunner)

Books

I’ve said this for a couple of years now, but I will be reading more in 2025. In middle school and over COVID I was such a huge reader, but then I joined the debate team and AP classes in high school and my leisurely reading never returned.

I used to be so cracked 😭😭😭

I did read more than three books⁠07 ...but less than 10. this year, but these three were the only ones I really liked/read in a normal amount of time/would broadly recommend.

1. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney – Officially the “hot girl autumn” book of the year, this is the only book I’ve read this semester, but wow the amount I fully, publicly cried at the airport speed-reading the ending. I’ve read every Sally Rooney book but only really loved Normal People, but this definitely had a very intense, poetic nature that feels more like ~literature~ than a lot of other books I’ve read in the past few years.
2. The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee – I got this from a Barnes and Noble in Tempe, Arizona (more details to come) and read it on and off throughout the spring. It is a longggg book, but alongside my AP Bio class, it sparked a deeper interest in genetics and bio for me as a career path, so to that I owe it credit. Also the author writes the history of 1600s geneticists as if it’s really intense tea so that makes it more enjoyable than a typical (and tragically boring) science nonfiction book.
3. My Body by Emily Ratajkowski – This is a collection of essays I got a couple years ago when it was published but only started reading it this summer when I was bored at work. A lot of people have come after the book as vapid and glamorizing a lot of modern female issues…but I feel like that’s the point? Not that EmRata wanted to spread any harm, but taking it as a peek into the perspective of a very successful model instead of a book of morals to follow made the essays an interesting insight into how every aspect of popular culture/fashion/beauty standards can be twisted to hurt anyone.

Places

This was a year of some pretty big travel for me as someone who is notably not a millionaire. I got to multiple cities outside of Colorado that I haven’t been to before, albeit mostly for academic reasons. Hopefully leisurely travel is in my future.

1. New York City, New York – Concrete jungle, babyyy. I have wanted to go to New York my entire life, so going as my “senior trip” with my family was pretty perfect. Although doing all the touristy stuff, staying in Times Square, and the July heat wave made the trip pretty exhausting, the whole experience just confirmed my belief that I have to live there at some point. I also saw Aladdin (my favorite Disney movie) on Broadway, which was my first theater experience.
2. Boston, Massachusetts (2nd Time) – Moving to Boston has been a great experience and I continue to enjoy the city despite dropping temperatures. A 9.9/10, but nothing can really beat New York.
3. Washington, DC (Both Times) – I went to visit my girlfriend twice at GW, once in February and once in September. These weren’t my first times visiting DC, so it wasn’t a crazy new experience either time around, but we went to see the Clue musical at the Kennedy Center which was hilarious and a very cutesy vibe.
4. Tempe, Arizona – I came here the first week of 2024 for a debate tournament at ASU with just my friend/debate partner and her mom. It was my second time in the Phoenix area (both times for debate), and I have always kind of liked the vibe? Also escaping Colorado’s winter was a nice getaway. However, the burnout from writing all the college applications⁠08 The MIT applications were actually due on the day we got there, so my friend and I submitted ours in a hotel while eating the best Chinese food of our life on the floor. and senior year made us less than excited to prepare, so we went into the tournament with not a lot of prep and ended up doing verrrrry bad for our standards.
5. Boston, Massachusetts (1st Time) – I hate to say it, but CPW was awful. I stayed in a frat,⁠09 My worst nightmare? was sick the whole time, and met no one I really clicked with. Boston was still peak though, and I got to see the Boston Marathon.
6. Des Moines, Iowa – Hell on earth. I would say no offense to Iowans, but honestly there is some offense because what is going on here. I went for the National Speech and Debate tournament and stayed at a rural college dorm 45 minutes away from the city that was quite literally the most disgusting building I had ever been inside. Plus me and my partner did bad so there’s beef there, too! My team and coaches made up for the lackluster setting, but I’m only ranking places so….

2024 – Final Thoughts

This is the shortest year I feel like we’ve had in a while, probably because it feels like the first real year since COVID. I have felt pretty stuck since the pandemic, which is a common thing for a lot of people but I think especially Gen-Z. A lot of pretty formative years–AKA 13 through 17–were spent locked away in my room and doing nothing. A part of me has always felt like exactly the same person since I was 13 because no major life or personality changes have happened.

2024 feels like the first non-COVID/moving on/actually different year. Part of that is almost definitely moving to college, but also the vibes were just a lot more regular? 2024 definitely gives 2019 in the strongest way. Fortunately, I had no tragic life events or major upsets in my year, and a lot of it was smooth sailing, which allowed for it to feel very fast.

2025 doesn’t even sound like a year, so I have quite literally no idea what it holds (except for probably organic chemistry). We’ll see, I guess.

2024 is a solid 8/10.