I hadn’t seen her because my mom had called me back. My phone was doing this thing where it would go into SOS mode if I even went remotely near a subway, which is, of course, annoying. But on Delancey Street, when you wait at the opposite end of the platform where the tunnel is, there is service. I don’t live in Williamsburg, and in that regard, the other end of the platform is a bit outside my comfort zone, even though it's where I always begin my journey home. I was answering the phone to say goodbye to my mom from a longer conversation that had begun as I cried and walked down 4th Ave. My mom had not known right away that I was crying. It was business as usual. We talked about her couch, which she had put in my old room so she had a little oasis to sit in in the mornings. Away from television and a computer. We talked about how tired we were. My mom was none the wiser to my anxieties because I didn’t want to call her and burst into tears right away. A courtesy five minutes before my freak-out.

I had gotten off the subway in Union Square because I was so overwhelmed that I could not bear to be underground. I had gone all of two stops. I had not gotten any sleep really and was sick. I had spent my morning ushering from an early Amtrak train to a subway to a walk to a large building for a job I was starting to dislike, which made me sad. I did not want to dislike it, but I was. I went to dinner with my friend, which was the highlight of my day, only to discover I was sick. Not crazy sick, but don’t feel like yourself sick. I would need antibiotics, which meant I had to wait until the morning to get them. Which would be a long twelve hours. I felt off and bad at dinner, like I'd ruined it, and I kept assuring my friend Marin that I wasn’t sick to try and save the night, even though I was clearly going through something.

I hate nights like this; I really do. As I was walking, I could not in any way rationalize the present. It was not just that it was not a good moment for me; it was that I felt the weight of my actions. The passivity in which I am most often meeting everyone where they are. My therapist said I am a fawner. Alleviating anyone’s discomfort by succumbing to my own. When an issue needs solving, I will do anything to make it my problem rather than someone else’s. I hate nights where I am distracted by my own spiral, especially nights where walking does not solve the problem.

Walking in New York City has always grounded me in some way. Shocking, given the chaos, the tourists, the noise, but that’s only something if you make it something. You are passing places and things you wish to do, and places and things you’ve already done. A literal walk down memory lane. A walk unbeknownst to you, towards the future even. It’s a great distraction, if you pay attention to it. It is my Plan C therapy. There is this sense that, in looking back, you cannot see what is coming towards you. I do think this is true. If you spend so much time thinking about what you have lost, you cannot see what you have also gained. Sometimes in looking back, I find it easier to remember all the things I have carried with me into the present. I know people talk about not thinking about the bad times to help get out of bad times. But I do think about the bad times because I think about how they ended. I think especially about the bad times ending on my walks. They ended because of the people who were there with me.

A walk is a cure. It is my best medicine. Though the other night it wasn’t really curing anything. That was my fault, I will admit. I was crying so much I couldn’t see anything. I mean, I very much was not paying attention. I was a mess. Despite how normal it is to cry on the streets of New York, it was just another thing that was not pleasing to me. I walked down Fourth, then over some, then down some more, until I got to Essex Street, where I still felt bad. Shocking given I didn’t stop to smell any roses, or look at the people, all proof that life keeps going. What would be the cure? I wondered because nothing was working. I mean, I brought out the big guns: a walk on a summer night after sushi with Marin. That’s the elixir of life. But again, the elixir was there, but I wasn’t taking it.

I walked down the subway steps slightly more composed than an hour earlier when I walked up the steps at Union Square. I tapped my card and walked through the ugly new turnstiles and down the stairs into the hot underground and up the flight of stairs toward the M train. I texted my sister who had been in McCarren Park.

“Are you home?”

I expected a picture of our cat to make me feel better. I desperately needed her to answer because I needed her, because I always need my sister. But I was of course, on SOS. Before I had called my mom, I called my sister. Exploding with the overwhelmed anxiety of my current life. If it is my Saturn return or some astrological thing going on, I wanted it over. Of course she listened. She listened, as she always does, because what are sisters if not the dumping ground for all your anxieties? Similar to a diary. One that gets frustrated at times when you repeat, of course, your worries, but who listens when you need to repeat them the most. I hung up because I wanted to call my mom. I needed my mom. I needed both of them at the same time. I needed my loved ones all at once. Friends, family, everyone. I was miserable in a situation that probably doesn’t warrant it. I was refusing to feel better because sometimes we need a little longer to feel bad. My sister had said goodbye, and I had continued walking and crying on the phone with my mom until I got to the subway. I made my way to the end of the platform; the M train was 4 minutes away. When I looked towards the tunnel, where the light would be as desperate as Jay Gatsby, it was dark. But a little farther up the platform, running towards me was my sister. Sweaty because it was humid out and she had not gone home, but instead had run across Williamsburg to catch the train that took her to me, in platform clogs, her purse hanging barely on her shoulder.

“I’m here,” she said, which made me start crying again. My sister was here. Life was okay. I was okay because my sister was here.

On walks where I inconvenience myself, I mean walks that delay my arrival home, I use the moment to take a breath. I have walked this path many times, for many different reasons, both good and bad. Often on the cusp of something else unbeknownst to me. Though I’m not holding my breath, in the light of day I release the anxiety and sadness of my modern misfortune, which now seems not so bad at all. I was just overwhelmed because my calendar was full, and I had spent the better first half of the year traveling nonstop, and I was sick, and I had to work tomorrow. While I think that I am allowed to feel as terrible as I did, I do know that come the morning, I knew I would survive it. Had I of had this outlook, had I spent the night looking as I usually do, I might have noticed a little bit more. I might have turned to my right and seen my sister on the J train pulling in next to me across the platform, banging on the window to let me know someone was meeting me where I was; I was not on this journey alone. There was a cure, and she was right there with me.

Thank you to my sister who ran all that way just so I wouldn’t have to take the M train alone. is excellent proof of what loving looks like. Not just in loving me but in loving anyone. I don’t really know what I do to deserve you, but I do know I spend a lot of time telling my therapist I don’t want to die, because I like this life where I see you every day. Maybe, in a stroke of crazy luck, if we play our cards just right, we can have this in the next life too.

I got a notebook which I use to log every question I type into Google. I am someone obsessed with questions, both hypothetical and regular fact-type curiosities. I ask questions, and I expect answers. It’s why, way back when, my favorite subject was math; there always seemed to be an answer to what was being asked. I just had to know how to find it. Which is why people tend to think I am tech-savvy. Not because my best subject was math, but because if there is a question about any system, I know how to find it. Typically, I turn to Google.

“Why is my layer coming up as “index” in Photoshop? -ai”

This is a real question I logged into my notebook. I know my way around Photoshop, but that knowledge is a growing database for problem solving, not expansive in the way people think it is. Like I spend my time reading Photoshop updates about features I have no use for. That question, however, is now in my notebook, with an answer. Forever in my mind, hopefully. It’s always useless information until it’s put to use. The notebook itself is an analog search history minus the recipes and shopping tabs. I could easily see it as useless information, but as always, I am interested in looking at what I am searching for.

In some ways, I think it gives insight into what often bothers, inspires, or calls to me. It’s a mood board in its own right. It may not always be obvious, but oftentimes it eventually reveals itself. Similar to when I have made work in the past, unknowingly finding a common thread in my work that subconsciously was placed there. It may not look like it now, but the search

“Did people in the 1800s swim? -ai”

Could have some potential.

The longer I look at it, though, the more I realize how connected my life and interests are to my art and everything I put out into the world, including this newsletter. Of course, that is obvious, but I used to think my life had two separate sides. The artist and the influencer (for lack of a better word). But most of the time, what I put out on one social media was art that I was too afraid to legitimize. Too afraid to say I was interested in. There was a reason one of my profiles thrived while the other suffered. It’s because I was separating what I believed to be two different people, but they were both, in their own ways, 100 percent me.

The search log just reminded me that my interests are tied to everything. It’s impossible to separate. The more I search, the more I see the answers woven into my life. I am interested in exploring what it feels like to be almost every single age I have ever been. I am interested in what connects everyone. The experiences of life that make us understand a feeling. The grander look at what being in your twenties, a teenager, or just flat-out young (though maybe, to some, Gen Z, I am only youngish now) really feels like. What it all means. Oftentimes, only understanding in hindsight, but having the forethought to remember how it feels so that I can talk about it when I can see the bigger picture. The search for swimming is really something. I am trying to understand a life I didn’t live, connect with people I never will meet.

The notebook was an experiment, but it became enlightening when I stopped categorizing my life as highbrow or lowbrow. When I saw my curiosities all laid out. It is (not surprisingly) all coming back to the same things. Interests have a way of doing that, a part of a puzzle you didn’t even know you were doing. If you were to keep your own log, which I recommend doing if you’re an artist or just anyone, you would likely not be surprised by the findings but only after you saw it all laid out. I think of it similarly to a dream journal: a callback to a version of yourself you often leave behind, yet one you visit regularly.

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I was 14 years old the first time someone suggested that I might be gay. I had a friend that I had deep feelings for that I couldn’t understand, much less label. My dad had just come home from five months in the hospital, wheelchair bound, a completely different person than he was five months before. The suggestion that I was gay wasn’t so much a suggestion as an accusation. The implications felt worse than everything going on—worse than a sick dad, worse than starting at a new school; it was something unspeakable. It was a secret I knew I’d keep forever, a version of me that could never exist.

From that day forward, I knew who I was, but I also knew it would ruin my life. I tried to hide it, I buried my feelings in sports, in school, in caring for my dad. I strived to be outwardly perfect so nobody would know the secret I was carefully hiding. I had friends, I had family, I had hobbies, and yet, there was a part of me that I didn’t share with anyone.

Every subtle message, every not-so-subtle slur that I heard was the constant reminder that no matter what I did to control it, there was always going to be a part of me that some people hated. Over time, I began to believe that I was better off dead than gay, so I vowed never to be my true self. I would be who people needed me to be, who people expected me to be.

The problem was that as time went on, it became harder and harder to maintain the ‘perfect’ persona. Hiding secret relationships was hard, but harder still was hearing homophobic comments from those around me. Once, I heard people claiming that all LGBTQ+ people were pedophiles, and I couldn’t stay quiet anymore. I didn’t even explicitly say that I was a lesbian; I just tried to put a stop to the hateful comments. But it didn’t matter; I was still confronted and accused of being a lesbian. The denial rolled off my tongue so easily; I’d been telling the same lie for years, but this time, something shifted, and it felt wrong coming out of my mouth. That was the last time I lied because at that moment, I knew I had to ruin my life, realizing it was my only chance to save it.

Making the conscious decision to come out and actually coming out were two very different things. The day I took the leap, I couldn’t stop crying. The tears weren’t because I regretted telling people, and it wasn’t because I doubted who I was. I simply knew that I was destroying the persona I had fought so hard to maintain, and in doing so, I would inevitably change my life forever. I was right—friendships were lost, relationships permanently altered. It was devastating, and it felt like it was my fault for trying to live more authentically.

Online, I saw the freedom and joy people had coming out, but that wasn’t my experience. For me, coming out didn’t feel like a new lease on life; it didn’t feel like a new beginning. It felt like I ruined my life, it felt like I lost everyone, and I didn’t know where I could possibly go from there. I thought hiding was hard, but being out was its own type of agony.

However, my life wasn’t ruined even when it felt like it was. When I began studying queer history, I suddenly felt like I was part of something larger than myself. I realized that even though I felt wholly alone, LGBTQ+ folks had existed for centuries upon centuries; it wasn’t something new or scary; it was just another way to exist in the world.

Growing up in a small town, it was easy for me to assume that my experiences with queerness, with homophobia, and with coming out were universal. However, when I finally had the opportunity to move to a big city, it opened my eyes to a society that largely didn’t care if I was a lesbian or not. Sure, there were homophobic people here and there, but the way I had become accustomed to constantly feeling suffocated simply by being myself wasn’t the reality anymore. I no longer made friends despite my being a lesbian; people actually wanted to be my friend and loved all of me, even the queerness.

The truth is that progress was slow; it wasn’t something that happened overnight. It took years of bravery and unlearning. But recently, I looked at my life with awe and wonder. I was scared and broken for so long; I never could have imagined how full my life is now—full of friends, full of hope, full of joy.

As someone who hid behind lies and secrecy and an ocean of fear for so many years, I can scarcely believe that I run an LGBTQ+ publication dedicated to queer history and LGBTQ+ artists. I write about queerness, my life, queer history, and LGBTQ+ artists. I write about the history that was my first lifeline, the first indication that maybe things could get better. I created what I needed growing up, and I will always be deeply proud of that.

Often, I hear jokes surrounding Pride Month about rainbow capitalism, or I hear jeers about why this month shouldn’t exist. Maybe it’s well-meaning, maybe it’s malicious. I sometimes hear people talk about how “easy it is to come out nowadays.” The thought process being that maybe Pride Month isn’t needed anymore, maybe we have enough pride. While it’s true that some progress has been made, there is also much work to be done. And, it’s also true that coming out is easier for some, but it’s important to remember that it is still devastating for others; I’m an example of that.

For me, pride is a month of hope and promise, a month that is necessary. It reminds me that I was brave enough to destroy my life in the hope I could rebuild it as my authentic self. It connects me to the queer leaders throughout history, who, without ever knowing me, saved my life time after time. I think about Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who existed loudly and made me think I could too. I remember the AIDS activists who didn’t back down in the face of fear, loss, and death, who taught me I could be brave. I remember Magnus Hirschfeld, who was ahead of his time, believing that science proved homosexuality was natural and normal. I think about the countless queer people whose lives were taken too soon, who made me pause and save my own life; I could live for them until it felt safe enough to live for me. None of these people knew me, few of them are alive anymore, yet they changed my life, they saved my life, and now I get to share their stories with people every day.

Maybe parts of Pride Month are cheesy, maybe companies with crazy rainbow merch are a bit tacky, but this month isn’t about that. It’s for us to remember, it’s for us to hope, and it’s a time for us to remind those who are scared and in the closet that their lives aren’t over even when they feel like they are.

A special thank you to Rebecca, my old roommate who made this snail mail dispatch possible! I am grateful for her vulnerability in sharing so that perhaps others feel seen and unafraid. This month, snail mail belonged to her. This month I had trouble with the post office so my dispatch went out later than intended so be on the look out still for yours!

PSA: The next three months of snail mail will be zines designed by me! It will mostly be my work and photography so if you don’t like that or want that I understand :)

Anyway! Here is what went out this month!

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That’s all for this month! See you in July

I have spent every waking moment since I watched the first episode of Widow’s Bay, trying to get my loved ones on the train with me. If you haven’t heard of this show, it’s likely because Apple TV uses word-of-mouth marketing. The season one finale was released last week. I grabbed my iPad mini and watched at the earliest possible moment. I am always trying to predict what is unfolding even half a second before it unfolds, so the plot twist anyone would likely see coming and the more realistic prediction came true, and despite this I think it’s really great TV. Described on Google as “A New England mayor trying to boost tourism on his island must navigate strange events suggesting it might be cursed.”

Historically true, I very rarely watch TV shows. I have a laundry list of shows I haven’t seen that I am told daily are a must-watch. I am sure they are, just not for me. I remain hooked on the culture of these TV shows. I haven’t seen The Sopranos, Sex in the City, Breaking Bad, or Girls (I am sorry, Lena, it’s not you, it’s TV!). I do know the plot arcs and the references. I know the heavy-hitter scenes that made their way into the pop culture zeitgeist. I don’t watch TV because of all the annoying reasons, but most importantly, I enjoy movies more. Though I will admit I hate being out of the loop. While many TV shows have escaped me, Widow’s Bay has not.

If this newsletter is about everything my search bar is finding, what I promise you is that my keyboard is typing Widow’s Bay into Google, texts, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram as much as possible. By the time this actually goes out, I am certain that everyone will have already started it, or at the very least heard me talk about it. But I mean it when I say it’s become my own personal obsession, and it should be yours too.

I love it so much not only because it’s good but because of the comedy horror hybrid. It feels like real life. When the horrors of living meet up with the reality of facing them. When the only way to react is to run, or perhaps, do anything to keep the chaos at bay (sorry). In a way, it feels like Twitter in a TV show (complimentary). The way the feed reacts to the wonders and trials of life. Like the Don’t Worry Darling press tour, or the Oscar slap. When horror meets humor, which makes you happy to be on the inside of well, hell, at times. If we’re all dying on this island, someone is going to make it worthwhile, one unordered cappuccino at a time. As a result, the characters feel human.

I want to protect Patricia (Katie O’Flynn), the right-hand woman to Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), in a way that feels akin to a mother protecting a child. Episode 7 is my favorite. While Packaging snail mail I rewatched just to get to that episode.
“Are you mad at something I said?” and
“Sorry forgot my purse” have been, for lack of better description, vocal stims. I text them, I Slack them. The episode only gets better post Vienna sausage with
“If I made it to 60 I’d be more than happy” and well, the Kubrick Stare of a 200-year-old (give or take).

All I am saying, all I am asking is that someone here talk to me about it. I feel like I am in Mean Girls. If Widow’s Bay were Regina George I too would be talking about it half the time, and thinking of ways to bring it up the other half. If I were to watch one TV show for the rest of my life, I am sorry to Don Draper, but Tom Loftis takes the throne. Widow’s Bay has taken over my mind, and I’m fine with that. As long as everyone I know is watching too.

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“The glasses go in here?”

And then, like nothing, my dream was gone. I turned, the party where I’d left it in the other room. Summer was doing the thing it tends to before it arrives, sending a wave of heat that pushes the whole city into a prolonged stagnation. Nothing moved, not wind or time. And nothing changed; everything had come to a halt. We seemed stuck at this dinner, in this night, skin tacky with the heat.

I nodded and pulled my hand back from outside the window.

There had been no difference between the air in the kitchen and the air outside. Even he was stuck, waiting there in a lag in time. The gesture, however, reached him eventually, and his limbs moved from the hall into the kitchen, like he was wading through water.

He did not look at me, though I watched him. Embarrassed, maybe, sheepish, to add to the pile of dishes I was going to do. His approach to everything that night had been rather reserved; it might just be his temper. Though I could not say that, having gone to a stranger’s apartment, I’d have been any different.

He broke the silence again briefly. Passing me to place his cup down with a quiet hum. The sleeve of his shirt rolled, his watch reading 2:14 am. My own hands, soapy, had a moonlike quality beside his own. The suds running down into the silver sink pooled on the flat edge of it, wrapping around the bottom of his glass.

The party had been happening only in two places, the dining room table, and then, occasionally, the bathroom, where someone might talk while walking toward. So the solitude of the kitchen had not seemed easily broken, thick like the heat, and out of bounds. I had come in with the impression of complete privacy, as if I were in my own apartment, and had settled as such. His presence had caused an internal wrinkle. A body open that quickly had to close and thus had done so imperfectly. Trying to regain speech, those tedious manners I had abandoned once alone. Hoping he would leave before they were needed.

But whatever movement gained was quickly lost. He stopped beside me at the counter, watching the window where my hand had been.

“You’re friends with Harper.”

“A little.”

In the other room, laughter came in fluttering chorus. The pristine joy from earlier in the night had subtly broken. You could hear it if you knew the sound. My friends were tired. And their tired was starting to seep into everything. A sign that, despite all indications to the contrary, the night and the world were moving—time included. I turned over my shoulder, the hall empty, the wall flicking with light from the other room, and when I turned back, he let me catch him staring.

“From?”

“I know her old roommate.”

I nodded, resumed my washing, pressing my thumb into a kiss of lipstick on a wine glass. She had told us nothing about him. Which I supposed was the whole idea, really. But she had not said even that he was handsome. Something she would certainly do, especially when it was so obvious that he was.

“I think she’s interested in your date more,” he said.

“That’s good,” I said and put aside the cup I was working on. Watched from the corner of my eye to be sure that the cloth of the drying rack caught the water that slipped out. “It was kinda the point of my bringing him here.”

“Really?”

I nodded, “Did she tell you? It’s mean if she didn’t tell you.”

“She told me.”

“So why’d you come?”

He shrugged his shoulders, “Why not?”

It was nearing, now, 2:30 in the morning, and he remained just about as planted in his inner world as he had been when we arrived. I felt sorry for him. Stuck here, this many hours, and couldn’t even count on conversation.

“I can wash this,” I said. “If you’re heading out, I can wash your cup.”

“I’m not leaving. Or...” He turned over his shoulder, leaned back, but the table was too far around the corner to be seen. “I don’t think so, at least.”

“We haven’t bored you away yet?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

He didn’t laugh, but he also didn’t leave, and I sucked at my teeth.

“Why aren’t you out there?”

I took a long breath in, “I don’t know.”

Quietly, but with a little more emotion, more playfulness, he said, “I think that’s a lie.”

The withdrawn gentleman who’d sat diagonally from me quietly and unobtrusively all night, at once, was gone. The water ran, and a small gust blew in the window, and we stared at each other, and I knew I could have whatever I wanted, if only I figured out what that was.

It always seems like that. The start of any season will set the tone, so it is better to make choices immediately, when certain untouchable things become touchable. Thinking and waiting might only close this small window where everything might change.

“Alright,” I said. “It’s a lie.”

He hummed, nodding, “You don’t really seem like the type to do dishes before bed.”

“I was running late, so I didn’t bring anything with me. Doing the dishes is how I’m repenting.”

“But that’s not the reason you came in here.”

“No.”

I took his cup and washed it anyway. Whether or not he was bored or having a good time, it seemed the thing to do. Not being able to tell was enough of an answer. Even if it didn’t make much a difference, this favor, life could, at times, be so simple. It could be as easy as anything for him to leave here with a better impression than before. From the corner of my eye he leaned against the fridge behind us, watching my hand sweep the glass into it, and licked his lips.

“I brought wine,” He said finally. “We could give it to her together and go back to the party right now.”

“Well, the point of the party was that you were meant to bring someone no one else knew, so it would be a bit strange if we went in on a gift together, having not met before.”

“We could lie.”

“Or we could stay right here.”

“Why?”

The water behaved beautifully, washing away lipstick with one swipe of my thumb. I recalled, briefly, the summer Gwen lived in Far Rockaway, and the weekends we spent living there. Running into a cold now found only in sinks, and how the waves, when coming out of the water, would surprise us sometimes, toss us over. The sensation in those days of precipice, of a life which was surely beginning, and the subtle way since then this feeling had gone away.

“I think we live in the same neighborhood.”

“Really?” He said, and though I was relieved by it, I knew I was getting away with nothing.

“Yeah. You mentioned living a few blocks from BiBi. Well, I live right above it.”

“I’m on 7th. Across from the park.”

I smiled, “Park view! You should’ve given Gwen the bottle before the party began. We could’ve opened it and had rich people wine.”

“I mean,” He said, shifting, licking his lips again, “It’s just wine.”

“Sorry, very gauche of me thinking you’re rich. I see now you’re wealthy, which means you don’t like to talk about it.”

I took the glass I had just washed and ran it under the cold tap before sliding it down the counter to him. Guessing blindly, but he said nothing about it, just raised the cup to his mouth and took one long drink, all the water slipping down his throat. His thank you was breathy like wind, so full with relief.

“Nice of you to know the difference between the two. It can be so tedious most days to have to explain.”

If there had been any true discomfort, he no longer showed it. But the unease of before, no matter how slight, revealed the ease of what had been happening all this time before the possible wealth got in the way. In every other sense, it seemed, he was living with some profound openness toward me.

“If I were in my right mind, I think I’d be a bit intimidated by you.”

“You don’t strike me as someone who could be intimidated.”

“Well, every assumption I’ve made about you tonight was wrong, so I guess it’s your turn to be mistaken.”

He hummed, “What else did you assume about me?”

I turned over to look at him, raising a brow, “Nice try.”

He smiled, but it was small, almost nonexistent.

“You should talk more.”

“I’m glad I didn’t,” He said, voice even. “Earlier, you seemed to think highly of me for it.”

I knew what he was referring to. I lifted a pot overflowing with water, slowly turning it onto its side, my arms flexing then relaxing as the weight lessened. Inside, forks and spoons rattled around, knives. Life’s little dangers, rules that were broken that maybe no one knew were rules, aside from Harper, who had, in fact, worked in a restaurant.

If you knew to speak as little as he does, I’d actually like you.

I had said it to Siena’s boyfriend, after a round of Pitch. He had been the one, a couple years ago, in that house in Rockaway, who’d taught us to play. Of all of us, it was he who knew what he was doing. He’d set us three points into the negative.

Aiden had laughed, but I could tell as the words echoed in the corners of the apartment and everyone’s eyes turned to one another, that their understanding of me was less generous. The words had not come across as playfully competitive or insincere, but rather suggested something else about me. And their silence probed a truth we prefer to leave alone. There was no need for them to say anything or laugh awkwardly—the quiet shuffle of cards—because between them it had already been shared. And so formed the barrier between us. Within the new space, my apology began to take shape, filled with a quiet helplessness of something that knows it cannot be acknowledged or said until later.

The empty pot rested in my limp arms. I glanced back at him quickly. The stoicism returned, and he became again the person he’d been when he walked into the kitchen. When I had said it, he’d said nothing, only stared down at his cards, so I suppose in my head it felt like he hadn’t heard it at all.

“Does my opinion matter so much?” I asked.

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“Because if you said you liked that I didn’t talk,” I said, lifting the pot upright again, “I’d say every word I knew.” Soap smell mixed with tomato and oil and I began to run the sponge along the bottom. The bubbles turned orange, which, in another context, on a wall or in a painting, would not disgust me. “I mean, it doesn’t really matter to me what you think of me.”

He didn’t even blink. It surprised me to feel I was expecting him to. The words I realized were a little callous. This strange night, so barren of movement, so lacking the certain reliability of life. To count on your own rising heart rate, embarrassment, modesty, to make you think better of something, to withhold the things that may be best not to say.

“But you didn’t say that.”

“What did I say then?”

“That it might do him some good if he spoke with a little discretion.”

I huffed a laugh, “That’s how you speak? With discretion?”

“At least I think so.”

I nodded, slowly. Like I was thinking, but I wasn’t really. “Sorry,” I said. But I also wasn’t really that sorry. Just knew that I should be. That, tomorrow, I would be, and by then he’d be gone, and he wasn’t like the people out there who I could delay those kinds of things. Who probably expected my call in the morning anyway, and felt the premonition of it growing the moment I had been sharp, just as I had.

“For what?”

“It feels impolite to tell a stranger you don’t care what they think. I assure you, I have some manners.”

He shrugged, “I don’t.”

“Well,” I said, and shook the water from my hands and wiped at my forehead, and found moisture to renew what had been dried away. “Since it matters, I don’t think I have a real opinion of you.”

He hummed, nodded, but I could tell that he was actually thinking as opposed to my own vapidness. Some finer wrinkle there, at his brow or something, that was teeming with all his thoughts. Turning, I slipped my hands between the counter and the small of my back to avoid the bite and leaned back.

“Or I probably do. It just isn’t overwhelming.”

Everything went quiet, and the evening tilted toward its end, and I waited in the low pit of the silence for that particular sigh from him or the other room that meant everything was over.

“That’s a nice place to be.”

“Really?”

He nodded, “You’re willing to admit you had the wrong idea of me, and you wished I spoke more. That feels like something I can manage.”

“I’m a lot nicer than I sound.”

A chair scraped in the other room, and a voice, Tilda’s, fluttered through the apartment. The beat of her steps got quieter and quieter, her voice remained consistently airy until it was muffled by the bathroom door. I could feel and hear the tiredness. Most notably in her melodic laughter, which was now interwoven and weighed by some near-invisible force. The stressed syllables of her words seemed to drag. Tired always comes for happiness first and sadness last.

“This guy you brought,” He said. “What’s his deal?”

“Sam,” I sighed, “I don’t know. Harper came to pick me up at work once and saw him. They both asked about each other a few times.”

“They know each other then.”

“Not really. They spoke for maybe less than a minute.”

“But they’re not strangers.”

“What counts as strangers?”

“You and I.”

Hopefully you are reading this! If you are a new subscriber please make sure to fill out the form in the welcome email so I can get your address!! I had a few new paid subscribers and I can’t keep track totally of everyone who signs up and fills the form out. Email me if you need help :)

Another piece of business! I decided I would do a summer of zines for snail mail. I thought it would be a nice way to challenge myself and do something I really love. Starting in July and going until September, I will be sending zines! Hopefully also with stickers and the good stuff. It will be three months of zines that you get for a much cheaper rate because you subscribe here which I am grateful for. All of them will likely be the same size but certainly the same quality as the Trick Candle zine I sent out for March mail. I hope you’ll join me but understand if you are not into it. Each will be themed so I hope you enjoy as much as I do.
Thank you!!

Now for the Snail Mail PDFs!

This month featured the newsletter above, and a sticker of the star card! I couldn’t have done this without Chloé who, just recently I was talking to as we walked to our friends apartment. We decided that this lifetime together was the best one, because we are certain it’s the one were we spend the most time together. I hope you enjoyed her work as much as I did.

See you next month

The first thing we ever lost, I am sure, was our attention spans. That was the first time I ever saw a universal call out that something amongst everyone had shifted out of our possession. Lucky for us, everyone now has a way to fix that. It seems it’s been going on so long that it’s like the common cold, something we will somehow get through. Or something we can try to cure. We found a way to cure this lost art of paying attention. But the cure came too late, because along with a waning ability to focus, slowly but surely, everything else went with it. Before we could find our brains again, we lost the art of boredom and, apparently, the capability to read and even write on our own. Then we lost the art of authenticity. We’ve lost the art of everything, I mean, there are giant chunks of people who refuse to socialize and become part of the community they are so adamant they want to benefit from. There are people who are even physically becoming lost. Shrinking before us. We’re lost. As a species in some way.

I agree too that we were lost. There was something about this future that was slipping away from us. A wrong turn that had slightly bigger consequences than we imagined. I am certain we all felt it. Something as simple as downloading TikTok in 2020.

“How bad could this be?!” Bad, apparently. It’s always the stuff in hindsight that gives us 20/20 vision. I see now that we did lose, and began losing much earlier than I thought. It felt terrible to recount everything that used to be, that no longer is. But in some ways, it pointed me, at the very least, in the direction I longed to go.

We have lost so many of the most mundane acts of living. So typical, we never imagined them gone at all. Suddenly, life is empty. We know it’s happening. Every other think piece becomes another thing we have lost to the internet, or billionaires, or celebrities. So much so that I even considered describing our things as stolen, but the act of losing, of participating in the losing, and of being subjected to the losing feels too close too touch-and-go to accurately say it is one or the other. It’s simply lost to me. Lost because someone took it, or lost because we let something take it, or, worst of all, lost because we decided it was easier to lose than it was to hold onto. I was robbed of my attention span, of course, and when I was on social media, I was like anyone else on social media— wasting away. Both physically and metaphorically. I am now tasked with getting it all back. I am walking into the lost and found and taking what is mine. My attention span, my physical media, my life outside of the algorithm. Slowly but surely, I am coming back to life.

We had lost so much that I can’t even make a list; it would be so much easier to just tell you what we hadn’t. We hadn’t lost our self-interest, or so it seems. But was there ever a time when our own experiences were not of some importance to us? I doubt it. In coming back to life myself, I looked for the signs that other people were too. I was not shocked to find that so much of the world was starting to revive the lost art of almost everything. The best part of something lost is something found. I am enjoying seeing the revival of it all. If you take the time, you might see it too.

I see the revival of physical media and a commitment to not relying on a single device to guide us into the future. Which is to say, iPods, physical magazines, books, dumbphones, and calendars seem to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind. It’s an easy place to start. It rebuilds the muscles we lost. These things that rob us of convenience in the best way possible. I never went digital when it came to a calendar, but I most certainly started finding what was mine when I got an iPod. I listen to full CDs now. I even collect DVDs. All of this prevented me from looking at my phone and seeing notifications, texts, and whatever else I was doing. I deleted apps that didn’t serve me. Goodbye to Twitter! I am even on the cusp of receiving the newspaper. This is a long-term goal of sorting out a budget that forgoes push notification news.

I have always received magazines, but I deleted the apps of the magazines and now delete the emails of the articles I plan to read so I can fully appreciate what it means to have the print. That is so I don’t throw the magazine into a pile of other magazines I already read before they arrived. In college, I had an alarm clock that my professor made fun of me for. I just put the batteries in an Ikea alarm clock that also tells me the temperature. My phone charges at night, far away from me. In acquiring more things for myself that keep me away from the phone I have come to hate, I am beginning to feel lighter. Despite having more essentials, more things to keep track of. Believe it or not, a heavy bag feels more like a privilege than a burden now.

There is this doomsday idea that we are lost, we continue to lose ourselves, and the basic parts of life that offer us an anchor to living. But I believe, like anything, that we are closer to getting it back than we are to slipping away forever. It’s not that most people see it that way, likely. We’ve lost so much it’s hard to wrap our heads around getting it all back. I am in the habit of always finding the positive, which is to say, at the very least, we now know what we really don’t want to live without. There is a sense that we won’t lose it again.

Part of the reason we allowed our lives to come to this point is that we were told there was no other way to live. That it was already happening, that we should let it happen, or be so far in the past we could never catch up with our future. But I believe we now see that there has always been a choice about how we live and continue to live. I guess what I mean to come here and say is that while so much has been lost to a modern life that we have been told is inevitable, the truth is we can always go back the way we came. Find what has been lost, and reject the idea that it is gone for good. While I may still hear of all this losing, I know myself to be finding it all again. I am picking up the pieces of my life, and I know that so many other people are too. Through scrapbooking, and snail mail, prints, physical media, reading, dumbing down our phones, being present in a moment, and a million other things we didn’t even realize had been swept away. It’s nice to see all these pieces again.

I was getting my tarot read at an event the other night, and the woman who did the reading asked me to describe my current moment the best I could. I said it was like the ending of Chiquitita, the ABBA classic. What I meant was the moment right before the piano plays them out, when you’re holding your breath a little because you know it’s coming. I have a sense that the world is there too, though maybe not as right on the cusp as I feel. There is a sense that the sadness in what has been lost is waning, and new hopes and dreams are rising somewhere in the distance. I am sure of this because I see it, like a small glimmer of light in the sky, telling you a new day is on the horizon.

I had a very wonderful weekend, and then on Monday I went to work. It wasn’t the job itself, but the work I was making, it was terrible. Not a great feeling. To make myself feel better, I went on Instagram (my first mistake), and everyone was doing good work, but I was not. I wanted on that Monday to be taking photos, but I was retouching. I wished I were creating something, not retouching something. I wished I were an artist instead of a retoucher (which is a craft, not an art to me). I went to bed; the feeling would pass. Tuesday, I woke up, and like Groundhog Day, it started over again. I felt like I was failing.

I kept asking myself: Am I failing? I am. Which is a sort of relief in it’s on way. The pressure of success is alleviated with the relief of failing. As I write this, I am sitting at my desk failing. It’s not so bad, actually, when I really let it be. At the onset of this failure, the idea that it was all happening felt fatal. But like a flu shot at the doctor’s, it’s worse to think about than it is to actually participate in.

When we succeed in one place, we often fail somewhere else. I finished a book yesterday, but didn’t read the article I saved from New York Magazine. Failure! It’s not a revelation that is new or profound; it’s just one we sometimes come to. It’s one we forget over and over again, and relearn constantly. Maybe not you, but me and many other people are in a constant state of learning this lesson.

I don’t want to see failure at this moment, as glass half empty or full, either. The way we learn not to associate what is sometimes out of our control with negativity. The way we stopped using phrases like you lost weight as praise or gaining weight as negative, no matter the circumstances. I am learning to associate failure with nothing. Just something that is. I am not in school anymore, and I’m not being punished for failing.

What I was failing at is not as important as the failure. Though if you’re so curious, I was just at a crossroads with what I dream of doing with my life, and where I currently am. I felt a separation from those two versions of myself, and they felt farther away from each other than ever. Everything else that happened this week, the other things I considered as failures as well, just piled onto the feeling. I could have won the lottery this week, or even had a new job offer, and still, there would be this sense of failure in the air. Which is to say, most times it is just that it is April, and for some reason I always have this big freak-out in April. It’s the changing of a season, and the final stretch before I feel like I am free of the chill of winter, I suppose.

The good thing is I survived the failure. That’s what is important to me. The failure came and went, and nothing really changed other than my perception of what was to be. The failures were small in many ways. I don’t have the money for a new camera that I suddenly feel I so desperately need. That was a failure. Not realizing until now that I probably should have upgraded my camera instead of spending my money on god knows what, another failure. I wasn’t cooking a real dinner a lot, failure. I haven’t been taking enough photos. Failure. I should call my parents more because we should always call our loved ones more; that’s failure. It is a fate I regularly meet. But is it really all that bad? No, it isn’t at all. This is what I was so worked up over? The truth is yes. I became overwhelmed with a lot of accumulating failure. At the time, it felt like so much. Like an endless stream of it. But I lived to tell the tale.

I will always be failing at something, and I refuse to make myself feel better by healing the wound with my wins. My wins are great and numbered this month! But I need to be more comfortable with these failures. I need to be clear too that from the other side of the freak out, these failures aren’t very big. They are just the things that happen when life gets in the way. We get a frozen pizza, we spend money to go somewhere with friends, we mean to call our parents, but we’re playing phone tag. We are still working out how to be the person we are dreaming of being. It’s not a moral failing on my part; it’s just the cards I was dealt this week. But it felt disastrous.

When you read this, I don’t think anyone is thinking I am, as a person, a failure. I believe you’re probably thinking, I’ve been there. What I am now thinking about this failure is so what?

Life is still going! This is not the same coping mechanism as healing the wound by placing another success over it. This is acknowledging that life continues to happen. Babies are born, music still plays, the world turns. I can exist in the world with my failure, and still find beautiful things. Failure is a blip in a life full of many things. So what if one moment is a failure? The next moment is breathing. The one after that is blinking, the one after that is trying again.

My failure this week, while all-consuming, was not as big as I imagined. I wish I hadn’t let it become so much bigger than it was. I wish I could have shaken it off, but I couldn’t. That is the way it is sometimes. Regardless of whether this failure turns into something good or not, I am okay with the fact that I was, for a small blip in time, failing at a handful of things. If I could in any way hold them in my hands and see them, it wouldn’t be much of anything. Like grains of sand in the cosmic universe of my life. I only mean to tell you this because I have spent so much time thinking of failure as an orbiting being, or a stain on a white t-shirt, but it’s really just something else entirely. It’s just there, and then it is gone. A fleeting moment in a laundry list of things that happen every day. While it’s good to acknowledge it, I think next time, I might not take it so personally.

In an effort to keep snail mail not exclusive, here are some digital files of what was sent out to everyone who pays for a tangible version of my newsletter! It was written before I went to Italy which was causing me some grief so it is slightly outside of my typical writing in some way which is always a good thing.

See you next month, but hopefully sooner.

I want to share again because I am finding myself at a similar crossroads as when I started this. I am trying to figure out what kinds of things excite me. It’s not the same segment as it was on Instagram, but it’s a version of it. I don’t want to over-explain what I intend to do with this style of newsletter, though I likely already have. Do me a favor and just roll with it. So, in an attempt to make the internet what I need it to be, here is everything I went looking for this week.

1. I keep thinking of this gallery installation where the walls are filled with postcards that people can take. I would love to do something like this, where people can take their favorite piece. It’s not meant to be some big comment like, well, we can only get the whole exhibition back together if we all meet up at the same time. Nothing like that. I mean it more as, I want my world to stay tangible, I want to live in a world where I can hold the things I love.

2. My whole Pinterest feed is full of journaling because I'm constantly looking at stationery. I am not a very aesthetically pleasing journaler because I am not an aesthetically pleasing person. I have always loved Octavia Butler’s journals from the perspective of their certainty. This is what I am going to do. It’s inspiring to me.

3. I read this book, The Hounding, this week and loved it. I spent most of the week trying to find books like it. It has a virgin suicides like quality to it. My favorite thing about The Virgin Suicides is that the story is told by a choir of nameless boys who know the girls. It’s perhaps my favorite point of view. In some way, this book is similar but not quite that, but it’s better that way. Tons of outside perspective on a group of sisters. What’s not to love?

4. I re-watched Chicago and cannot get enough of John C. Riley’s Mr. Cellophane. He’s dressed as a clown (I believe). Which got me down a rabbit hole of clown photoshoots. I love the theatrics of it and find the costuming so visually interesting. I feel like I would like to see people not take themselves so seriously in images. Everything is for the purpose of authenticity lately, and we’re losing the fun of free will. Anyway, clown photography is hard to find! If anyone in the greater NYC area wants to participate in such a shoot, don’t be afraid to contact me. Especially if you have the clothes for it.

5. I think every artist I know dreams of a studio of their own. So when I dream, I look up flat files. I become entranced with the idea of an archive. Something you can’t have right away, something that comes with time. In an instantaneous world, there’s nothing better than that. It’s the ultimate studio purchase in my opinion. If you ever see me with a flat file, just know I believe wholeheartedly that I have made it.

6. I started re-watching Mad Men. I love a 60s style reference. Specifically, shift dresses and the makeup. I don’t wear a ton of makeup, but if I ever had the chance to do a green or powder blue eye shadow, I would in a heartbeat. I believe that the simple pop of color really elevates a very classic look.

7. I keep thinking about this interview, along with Ethan Hawke’s

   “The one who loves always wins,”
   because it flips the perspective on something that is so often uncomfortable with people. Thursday, I was trying to sit better with my personal failures of the week. I was searching for these feelings that I often see as embarrassing or hard to deal with, and make peace with their existence.

8. I am, in some ways, always looking at Polaroids. Much like the archive, I dream of one day having a giant collection. I love looking at Polaroid art, I love Polaroid. My favorite sort of photography is a singular instance that captures the energy of the moment. I find the relaxed nature of Polaroids allows people to be themselves. If I could just shoot Polaroid, I likely would.

9. I am working on something that requires me to revisit Mike Mills. I think most people assumed I knew him already because our work can be aligned (which is not to say I am as good as Mike Mills, but that our style requires immense sentimentality). I was only shown his work two years ago, and now I feel like I look to his work for a lifeline. I love the images he took of the things he found in his nieces' rooms. The documentation of owned objects is very beautiful to me. The everyday trinkets that make up a person.

See you soon.

This month’s snail mail is close to my heart. It’s a zine I’ve put together of birthday parties I have attended, thrown, and photographed in my twenties. As I send this post, I am actually likely out celebrating or recovering from my own birthday, the last of my twenties. I am edging towards thirty, which makes me very pleased. It’s not that being a twenty-something was particularly bad; this zine is proof of all its good. It was just an experience. There is no generalization to be made other than that every day, every year, felt brand new. Neither a bad thing nor a great thing, just the truth.

I know the zine is being made before I am 30, so I technically have another year of birthdays to share and document. But some of my friends are turning 30 or did turn 30 this year, and there is a sense that we are on two different sides of something. We are not old vs. young or anything like that. It just has a different ring to it. I wanted to remember a time when we were all in this crazy, unglamorous decade. There is something about that which I enjoy. It’s like a conclusion or some sort of line I am drawing that only I can see.

Luckily for my friends, their exiting this decade into something new will not keep me from photographing them; this zine is more about keeping track of the times. To celebrate an era which I had more fun than I could imagine, because I spent it with people I love. I wrote an intro to this zine which I will share below.

Trick Candle: A6 size, 24 pages, 100lb uncoated paper, full color print. Photography by Ava Williams

I bought extra zines, if anyone would like one please view them on my website here.

Intro:

Birthdays are a sore subject for some, but not for me. Not because I am particularly in love with the idea of a birthday, but more so in love with the excuse to get together. If there is any secret motive behind anything I do, it is likely stemming from a desire to see the people I love. Though I can’t say that’s a hidden quality of my personality. I know from my calendar that I am always on the way to see someone. That’s the way I like it.

Of course, by the time you read this, I will likely be twenty-nine. The last year of my twenties. Despite everything I am told about aging, I have no qualms about this.

This zine is made to commemorate the birthdays we celebrated in this long, unglamorous decade. Although it’s not quite finished, it feels like the perfect moment. Despite the unsettled nature of being twenty-somethings, we had some good times. I would even go so far as to say we made the most of every moment we could. Despite Covid, and weddings, and kids, and every other thing that reshapes and reforms our realities and our friendships, our ages never gave way to a ticking time bomb. One that told us everything was over. It’s easy not to be deterred when you’re twenty-one, but by the time you’re twenty-eight, people make it out to be that life is almost over. I have rarely given in to the propaganda. Hopefully you haven’t either. Regardless, we will all cross that bridge when we get there. There’s no use worrying; we might as well celebrate. What the celebration will look like is beyond me, but that’s the fun part.

At the end of every day, what I desired most was to touch. It really began at the end of last year, a few months before I started my snail mail club. I would come home from work, collapse on the couch, and find myself looking at my Instagram explore page chock-full of people making zines, postcards, and stickers. The longer I looked, the more overwhelmed I felt in the desire to hold the things I have made. Though this is not an abnormal thought for an artist. That is always the case, to make your work exist beyond the concept. To engage with it more than with your eyes and to make choices. The paper, the finish, the display.

I believe no one, except maybe a few tech people, want everything on their phone. The concepts that tech provide have become too synonymous with living life. Social media is not very social, the cloud is just some other computer somewhere else, and the universe of knowledge in your pocket is really stuck behind paywalls and imprisoned by venture capitalism. It is not fun out there in the great known phone. I have argued that we can always find the good in the things that connect us, but I am less inclined to believe that the hollow place of the internet is the best answer.

What I still believe in is the connection of life to the tangible objects that remind us of what it means to live. Life should take up space. I believed this to be true when I made it my new years resolution to live more tangibly. What I mean is that I’d like to do my best to separate the whole of my life from my cell phone. I want to leave a trace, and I don’t want it to be solely a digital footprint. Part of that manifestation meant starting my snail mail club. Beyond that, though, it meant slowing down and giving myself the tools to enjoy more fully the things I find to make life full. Like music. I bought an iPod, not because I wanted people to know I had it, not because it was a status symbol, but because it meant I was more likely to spend money on CDs, and to listen to albums in full, and spend less time on the subway scrolling for the perfect song. It meant I was engaging with the songs I made a point to own, really listening to what the artist was saying. That’s the tangible life I desire. One where the things I want are right where I can see them, and I am paying attention to them.

What is tangible anyway? I don’t believe I do a great job of explaining what I mean. There is a sense in the concept. I define it loosely, and mostly I think of that spaceship sent out into the universe that holds our humanity. The Voyager Golden record, a recording of the sounds of Earth, and a letter from Jimmy Carter. Here it is: our life in a track list. Please come find us. There is a sense that all the beauty of the world can be played right there, and we know why it’s beautiful. We know it is beautiful because we have seen it. We have felt the ocean on our skin, have watched trees blow before a storm. We see it, and we feel it. When we watch movies or see art, we know why we resonate with it. We know it’s because we are connecting through a life lived in tandem. A person from across the globe finds beauty in the same setting sun thousands of miles away. We know it’s beautiful because we have been there, we’ve seen it not on a screen, but it exists as a memory. Would we find beauty in the world if the only way we have seen it is through our phone? Or is the beauty of everything marked into our hearts forever because we can attribute all our senses to the very being of life? In my heart, I know it’s the latter.

Of course, I have seen the way analog life has become aestheticized on social media, but I am not talking about the fantasy of a completely offline life promoted, of all places, online. I am talking about the rise of junk journaling, journaling, and stationery in general, the love of movie theaters, DVDs, and CDs, photo printers, and snail mail. In each case, there is a sense that everyone, not just artists, wants to engage with their experiences instead of just Instagramming them. Their memories no longer live in a digital world but a tangible one that we can revisit without first subjecting ourselves to sharing it with an audience. Our lives become our own.

I see the way we are shifting, or at least I am becoming more aware of the objects that make me feel fulfilled. It is easy to see tangible life as a way to promote buying new things, but that is exactly the opposite of the point. While I am aware that printing out photos and owning records or CDs is, of course, a transactional process, tangibility is really an emphasis on engaging with life instead of sweeping through it. A tangible life can start very simply. It can be as simple as taking the postcard from the bar you’re in and sending it off or taping it into the notebook or journal you already have. Throwing it into a box of keepsakes. It’s the conscious choice to remember the moment and to have proof it existed. To really look, to take it in. I believe these actions slow us down. It can be as simple as going to a gallery or a museum and really looking. We can’t always keep the tangible things in life, such as a masterpiece, but engaging with the beauty of it has a way of solidifying in our minds our existence in the real world.

Jerry Saltz said he knew an artist was in a gallery by the way they looked at a piece, often times very close up. I believe the point is that an artist wants to see every brushstroke, every grain of paint. Proof that it’s real, that we are seeing it. That’s how we live, that’s how I want to live. This is what I mean when I say life takes up space. I want to see life on a wall somewhere. This is how we truly engage with our consumption. Silencing anything else in the world and existing with it one-on-one, with no other distractions. We look at the piece and see proof of the existence of the memory of the artists; we see something that exists in this 3D world. By being there, we are more inclined to dig deeper. There is no caption or like feature; there is only your eyes and time spent with what we are looking at. There should be a conscious moment where we leave it, where we feel the absence.

This is, however, the good thing about the Internet: there are resources to help make this possible for everyone. There are people who help others find budget journals, free zine printouts, and maps to guide you to your local library. Websites with museums and galleries to visit. Ways to find where life is. It’s not only this barren landscape of nothingness. At the very least, it can give you a chance to try and live a tangible life. It can guide you to the places where all your senses engage. That’s what a true masterpiece is anyway. Something that moves you not just with your sight but how it takes up space in the world, how it takes up space in your mind. Those are the things we should invest our time in.

If someday someone finds my things, I hope they see that, for what it’s worth, all the bad and good in the world, there was someone who lived. I hope they hold my photographs, read my diary, and connect with me through the common experience that is life. Much like Jimmy Carter’s letter to the universe, I hope they see the good will of my heart in this vast and awesome universe. I hope they see my life.

In an effort to keep snail mail non-exclusive, here are some digital files of what was sent to everyone who pays for a tangible version of my newsletter! I have also finally begun hosting the PDF versions of the newsletters only online. You can view them here:

Dispatch 1
Dispatch 2
Dispatch 3
Dispatch 4
Dispatch 5

If you ever wish to look in the future, they are now linked on my website it would be nice if someday it can be it’s own website but small steps!

Here is what everyone got in their snail mail package this month!

That’s all this month! Thanks for subscribing always! If you’d like to sign up for my snail mail club, see here!

Subscribe now

I went to see Lady Bird in November 2017 at a small theater near where I live. One that mostly premieres indie films and was the only local place playing Gerwig’s solo directional debut. I was forever changed by the time the credits rolled. It was a pivotal time in my life; I would soon be graduating from community college and needed to decide what to major in at my next school. I knew I loved writing, but it was Greta Gerwig who gave me the confidence to major in film. Lady Bird awakened something in me as it did so many young women at the time. It was the start of a new era of female-centric films, a femininomenon if you will.

Gerwig was not the first female director; that accomplishment was credited to Alice Guy-Blaché back in 1896. She’s not the only female director of her generation either; the Coppolas, Kathryn Bigelow, Patty Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, and Coralie Fargeat are all gifted in their work. However, Gerwig is the one who resonated with me from the get-go because she’s so vulnerable and authentic in her directing. She speaks to the inner girl who has been cast out from society, and she makes her feel safe.

I have a deep appreciation for natural lighting, and this is something Gerwig works with a lot. There’s a scene in Lady Bird that stands out from all the others in the film, and it comes at the very end. Gerwig takes us on a tour through Sacramento. The camera is shaky, there are lens flares, and there are parts where the sun is so bright it leads to overexposure, but it’s the most beautiful sequence in the film because it’s raw. That’s Gerwig’s specialty: raw honesty. So much of the storytelling in Lady Bird is told through visuals, and she uses this sequence to build the bond between Christine and her mother. This is the part in the film when Christine realizes how much she’s taken her mother for granted. As Saoirse Ronan narrates a phone call her character is making to her mother, Gerwig cuts back and forth between Christine and her mother driving through Sacramento, both appreciating the neighborhood seemingly for the first time. It’s the age-old revelation: despite their differences, they’re actually quite similar after all.

Two years after Lady Bird’s release, I went to see Gerwig’s new adaptation of Little Women. While each adaptation stands on its own, the 2019 release is my personal favorite, with Laurie’s monologue being a top moment. I often see it flooding my TikTok for you page, sometimes edited to Taylor Swift’s “champagne problems,” a song about turning down a proposal. There are so many interpretations of Louisa May Alcott’s scene, but Gerwig’s seemed to touch this generation more than the others. For a generation of women raised on the importance of consent, Laurie’s confession felt more appropriate than the 1994 Little Women, when Christian Bale’s Laurie forces himself on Winona Ryder’s Jo. There’s also an added line in Laurie’s famous dialogue. Laurie tells Jo he tried to show her he loved her, but she wouldn’t let him before adding, “which is fine.” These three quick words represent how much respect Laurie has for Jo. After all, what is love if you can’t respect the person you claim to be in love with? These were great choices, but to me, it was Gerwig’s directing that made all the other renditions of Laurie’s monologue a bit lackluster.

In 1933, Douglass Montgomery finds Katherine Hepburn seated by a tree. He sits down with her, grabs her hand, and kisses it before telling her how he’s loved her as long as he’s known her. He’s a little demanding, she’s a little submissive, and when she turns him down, she holds his head in her arms, comforting him like a mother figure. Throughout the whole scene, the camera remains close up on their faces. In 1949, Mervyn LeRoy made mostly the same creative choices, only in color film this time. Peter Lawford was just as pushy, but Elizabeth Taylor was much sadder, tears streaming down her face as she told Laurie she didn’t want to be with him. 1994’s Laurie aggressively kisses Jo in the woods to reveal his feelings for her, and in a 2017 television adaptation, Jonah Hauer-King chases Maya Hawke through a field; the first version I saw where the characters actually move through their environment. Also, the first where Laurie breaks down crying. All versions dull in comparison to what Gerwig was able to accomplish.

In Gerwig’s adaptation, Timothée Chalamet doesn’t have to say a word. With a wide shot of Chalamet, Laurie tilts his head, his mouth slightly ajar, and then it cuts to a wide shot of Saoirse Ronan realizing what he’s going to say. Anyone can tell someone how they feel, but only best friends can give each other one look and communicate their deepest feelings. He then stumbles through the same confession as the previous films but with so much more passion. Gerwig doesn’t keep the camera in one place. Instead, the scene is made up of tracking shots, creating a chaotic environment that matches the frantic energy of a man desperately trying to convince the woman he loves to marry him. Much of the magic is due to Chalamet and Ronan’s acting, but Gerwig’s directing takes the audience into the scene with them. We’re not watching two childhood best friends quarrel from afar; we’re there on the hill with them.

There’s also the brilliant shot of Jo running from Laurie as he trails behind her, begging for her to listen to him. Though Ronan is closer to the camera, Chalamet is in focus because he’s the one stealing our attention. The camera continues to follow them as they move around their environment, the first time in a theatrical adaptation that the scene doesn’t feel confined and suffocating. It’s also the only one where Laurie seems truly devastated that Jo has turned him down, and Jo seems genuinely frustrated that her best friend doesn’t understand her. Greta Gerwig also chose to film the scene at sunset, which makes a major difference. To me, sunsets have always represented endings, and here we are, seeing the end of Laurie and Jo as they once knew each other. For Laurie, it is the end of his dream of marrying Jo. It’s also the first adaptation where Laurie doesn’t storm off after his conversation with Jo. Instead, he sadly drifts away as Jo falls to the ground. She lost her childhood, and she lost her best friend. In Gerwig’s adaptation, she gave Laurie and Jo heart.

Four more years passed before the same woman whose film played in a small theater in my hometown made a billion-dollar box office hit. Barbie was the pinkest movie since the Pinky Benson scenes in 1964’s What A Way To Go. Gerwig created a little girl’s dream world with her female-dominated, saturated Barbieland backdrop. It was fun, it was campy, and it was a complete 180 from the natural environments that Gerwig had created in her previous films. However, when Barbie entered the real world, we saw Gerwig’s soul shine through again. My favorite scene was the one the director called the heart of the film.

Barbie sees visions of a young girl and her mother playing with her as she tries to identify who is causing her to malfunction. “That felt achy but good,” Barbie says during a closeup of her face as she opens her eyes, and the first tear she’s ever shed streams down her cheek. This is the only line of dialogue Barbie has for now. The rest of this sequence is told through images. The camera moves from a young couple arguing to children playing, then up into the trees and back down to two men laughing, which, in return, makes Barbie laugh, too. With no words from Barbie and minimal dialogue from the people she’s watching, Greta Gerwig encapsulates the human experience. Remember, dolls don’t have tears, and Barbieland doesn’t have real nature.

Since everyone and everything is perfect and plastic, there are no real emotions in Barbieland outside of happiness. The human experience is messy and stressful, but it’s beautiful. In this scene, Gerwig doesn’t tell us but shows us exactly what it would be like for someone who has only ever experienced perfection to see a world of complexity. Next, a wide shot reveals an older woman sitting next to Barbie on the bench. A closeup of Barbie’s face reveals she is in awe of this woman. Barbieland is a lot like Hollywood; everyone looks young forever. For the first time, Barbie sees someone who has aged, and given she hasn’t been brought up in a world with preconceived notions about aging, she sees it as beautiful. When Ken comes to retrieve her, as she follows him, she turns to look back at the woman. Through this visual, we know that from one quick interaction, that woman has altered Barbie’s perception of the world.

Unsurprisingly, Warner Bros executives didn’t exactly get the scene. They thought it didn’t move the story forward and could easily be cut from the film. Gerwig argued that without the scene with the older woman, she didn’t know what the movie was about. We often look to older women with more life experience for reassurance, and this was a moment in the film when Barbie felt very lost and confused. With just a few words and a laugh, the old woman reassured her that everything was going to be okay.

I write a lot of analyses on movies, but I mostly focus on the storytelling through dialogue and character development. I don’t think the average film watcher necessarily understands how much of the storytelling is done through directing. I don’t think I always understood it either, but Greta Gerwig is the prime example of how stylistic choices in directing contribute to the story itself. Imagine Barbie without those visuals in the park? Or Little Women without Laurie and Jo frantically moving around on the hill; it’d be a lot like the earlier adaptations that I found mundane. Gerwig uses directing to give her stories humanity, and boy, has that been a game changer for Hollywood.

For more of Gina’s work check out her website

In an effort to keep snail mail not exclusive, here are some digital files of what was sent out to everyone who pays for a tangible version of my newsletter! This dispatch could not have been done without Gina, who always sends the last thing I could ever guess in a group chat, and who I love with my whole being. Gina is my last featured writer for a little while. I am excited to write for you again. Sometimes, I wonder if once a month is too little, but I'm not getting over my head just yet.

Feel free to buy leftover pieces here, everything is always 2 dollars but if that’s too much you should let me know. And if you’re still reading, if anyone feels they want to be featured in some way with this snail mail club always shoot me an email. I love collaboration.

That’s all this month! Thanks for subscribing always! If you’d like to sign up for my snail mail club, see here!

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Anyway, it was a bad time for me a few years ago. I was in a terrible, heartbroken position and flat broke. I got a job at Everlane in Soho so I could continue to pursue my dreams as an artist. I was devastated to have to do this. I felt cursed. At that first shift, after I got up at 4 am and cried the whole way to work, I met Nessie.

The friendship was instantaneous, at least to me. Nessie has that personality where you could admit anything right away. In my life, she is something like a soulmate. If you met Nessie, you might get it, but I don’t think that, without knowing her, you could fully understand how she makes those around her feel at their very best. She is understanding, compassionate, and caring in ways most people never really can be. She is perhaps the best of us.

She is always there to make someone laugh, and it's always at the very moment someone needs it. It is healing in a way that a hug from your mom or dad can be. It makes you feel more than safe; it makes you feel seen, heard, and understood. She is talented and smart, and for that reason, she is one of the people I turned to when I began planning all this because I knew I could count on her. She is one of a kind. The type of person you always want to make laugh. The type of person who makes you feel like the world is yours, you can do anything as long as you’re together. The type of person who has you wishing for just one more shift in a retail stock room. I am, for whatever reason, often dreaming on Saturday nights of clocking into a shift so we could spend one more 8-hour stretch together. It’s really then that I think, although I got many things out of Everlane, many friends, and many laughs, that early morning when I met Nessie was proof that I wasn’t so cursed at all.

My roommates and I started what we call Videofest after our basement flooded September of 2023. We woke up to the glug-glugs of biblical-grade waves of water coming up through the floor and through the hole where our washing machine meets the wall. We all had to call out of work. The water was ankle deep and that was before we finally got it contained. And instead of going to work, we spent eight hours vacuuming water out of our basement with our newly purchased shop-vac, mopping, bleaching, and airing out the space. That night, we were exhausted. Naturally! We all ordered takeout from our favorite Thai place a couple blocks away and finally settled in and sat down. And as we sat, laughing at just how crazy of a day we ended up having, reveling in our overwhelming feeling of luck that we came out of these floods relatively unscathed, someone posed a question to the group–

“Should we watch something?” And thus, Videofest was born.

Mind you, we’d all been living together for maybe one week. And while an event like that could’ve easily over-stressed, overburdened, and overworked us all, it actually did exactly the opposite. After successfully defeating the flood, we felt an almost instant bond, one that completely skipped over the awkward “I’m living with brand new people in a brand new space that doesn’t quite yet feel like mine but I’m working on it” phase. We felt like real friends. And we were– we still are!

I’m pretty sure for that very first Videofest we binged an almost entire season of Love is Blind. Wild choice, I know, but what can I say other than we were tired and slap happy and wanted something that felt as mindless, fun, and giddy as we all were feeling. I still have videos in my camera roll that are zoomed-in shots of our TV, the actual audio of the show barely audible above our collective cackling. We were having what can only be described as the time of our lives.

The next night, we all got home from work, laughed about how weird it felt to return so quickly to a semblance of normalcy and mundanity after the day we all shared just a day before. After more chit-chat and the sharing of work stories and what we heard about other people’s flood experiences, we found ourselves in the same spot as the night before– we were all home together, ready to eat dinner, and honestly just looking to hang out again. And once again, we found ourselves asking the group “should we watch something?” This second night, the second official Videofest, I don’t really remember what we watched. I know for certain it was a series of Youtube videos and if I had to make an educated guess, it was more than likely a string of various Hot Ones, Architectural Digest, and Vanity Fair’s What’s in My 60 Questions Blah Blah Blah videos.

Ok, hold on a sec. Let’s rewind a touch and take a moment to clarify. What exactly is Videofest? Merriam-Webster defines Videofest as such:

Videofest, noun & verb: the coming together of you and your friends, loved ones, roommates, or maybe even your family, to watch something on TV. You can watch a movie, the season finale of a TV show, an entire season of Succession, a Youtube video, every interview of Bad Bunny to exist on the internet, or even a projection of someone’s phone to help in their Hinge swiping endeavors. The list is infinite. Videofest is whatever you want it to be, as long as you’re together, laughing, and enjoying each other’s company.

Yes, you guessed it. That is in fact how Merriam-Webster defines Videofest. Go look it up if you don’t believe me!

As we continued to Videofest (double check the dictionary entry, it is both a noun and a verb), it started to feel less and less important what we ended up watching, seeing as 90% of the time we were mostly chit-chatting and laughing. Looking back, this progression of what Videofest turned into is wholeheartedly endearing. We continued to ask each other what we felt like watching and continued to plan our dinners around one another, all so we could just be together. To this day, that is how our house operates.

And, it stands to note that posing the question “should we watch something?” as a way to ask if we wanted to hang out together wasn’t us being too embarrassed to just plain ask it or that it was too vulnerable of an ask. I think we just liked knowing that when we did ask “Videofest later?” or “do you want to watch Notting Hill?” or “have you seen David Harbor’s Architectural Digest tour of his East Village apartment?” we knew we were in for nothing but warmth and comfort. Plus, I think we liked having our own little language.

Videofests are where we learn about what happened in each of our days, what everyone’s got cooking for the weekend, about work dramas that have nothing to do with us. But more importantly, Videofest was, and continues to be, a celebration for us. A celebration of all of our schedules aligning and us being home at the same time, a celebration of good food on the table, and something fun to watch on the TV with people we love. And above all else, Videofest is a celebration of getting to slow down together and remind ourselves just how lucky we are.

In an effort to keep snail mail not exclusive, here are some digital files of what was sent out to everyone who pays for a tangible version of my newsletter! This dispatch could not have been done without Nessie, the light at the end of that tough time, who made this whole substack and snail-mail club possible even before she knew me at all.

I accidentally ordered double the amount of postcards I needed, so please feel free to check out my website and order one or 10!

see you next month, and well next year! and sign up for snail mail here if you so wish!

Thank you for a great year, a great time, and a great life. Enjoy the holiday, have compassion for what you may not have done this year, and celebrate all that you did. There’s a fresh start on the other side; in my eyes, there’s nothing sad about that.

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In the days of iTunes and LimeWire, when my music taste was developing into whatever the fuck it is now, I made a playlist. It still exists, albeit on a streaming platform, but it’s there – and it’s called this week.

There were probably about fifty or so songs on it initially; I added a little cloud icon next to the name and put my favorite songs from that week on it. I wish I could remember what they were – probably stuff from the likes of bad pop punk bands and 2000’s one-hit wonders. That music still has a time and place, like long drives or drunk karaoke with friends and strangers, or whenever else.

Now, this week has become a theme of sorts in my life. I update the playlist on Mondays (for the most part) and it usually has anywhere from 90 to 150 songs on it. It’s pretty much the only thing I listen to, a true disservice to myself since I end up neglecting so many other playlists, albums and artists. But to be frank, nothing hits quite like listening to my favorite songs over and over again until I hate them.

Eventually this week became more than just a playlist. In 2019, I started making art for what felt like the first time ever. Bad art, but still art. I got a film camera for Christmas, compliments of my ex-girlfriend, and as soon as the new year hit I developed my greatest vice: buying film. Shooting film was an expensive hobby but one that brought me joy. I took that camera everywhere. Sometimes, I still do.

Soon, my bad art endeavors expanded. The pandemic hit and I became a self-proclaimed hobbyist. I started collaging, I carved stamps. I wrote bad prose in my journal, picked up the bass, sang like my life depended on it and tried just about every medium under the sun. Many of them stuck, others didn’t, but bad art in general has remained a constant side quest of mine for the better part of my 20s.

I tried to take it places; I shot for brands and influencers when my inquiries got responses. I participated in pop-up markets, made prints, cards and calendars for anyone who’d accept. I gave my last partner an oyster stamp for their 30th birthday. Regretfully so, but I made sure to snatch it back in the breakup. I just couldn’t bear the thought of it going unused. It was one of my best! But actually pretty bad. A good kind of bad, my kind of bad.

Though ultimately, my bad art was just a hobby. And I was okay with that. I still wanted to put it out there, even if it was going into the ether. I made an Instagram account called this week, to no one’s surprise, where I shared most of my projects (and still do). The playlist, an endless rotation of songs I daydreamt to, had grown to become the grand theme of my art and creativity. It represented my music taste, first and foremost, but also my eagerness to make things and my undying commitment to bad art. It was an embodiment of my earnestness. Who I was, who I’d be next. I liked that it followed me from high school – a mostly forgotten time, but one that was a catalyst for becoming who I wanted to be – to now.

But long before this week was ever conceptualized, I made analog playlists, which is just a fancy way of saying mixtapes. We didn’t really have aux cords or Bluetooth to use on long car rides, and the radio never played exactly what you wanted to hear. When your iPod died, the next-best-thing was the CD player. Once in every vehicle but now a delicacy, the always-there device was often the only option and the reason I went through the trouble of burning mixtapes. That and the sentiment, of course.

I wish I kept them from all those years ago. My parents are moving out of the only house I ever lived in until college, and I hope the packing will unearth some of those precious unmarked CDs.

Thankfully, I went back to my roots a few years ago and started collecting physical media. So even if I never see the mixtapes again, I have over 150 marked CDs to fill the void.

Somehow, it all goes back to the silly playlist I made in my bedroom sometime between the years of 2010 and 2014. All the art making, album listening, media collecting, and more. I even tattooed this week on one of my good friends. Probably the first and last tattoo I’ll ever give.

Some of my favorites from my CD collection:

Loner - Caroline Rose

One of the Boys - Katy Perry

Household Name - Momma

Fly - The Chicks

Siamese Dream - The Smashing Pumpkins

Is This It - The Strokes

Third Eye Blind self-titled

Rat Saw God - Wednesday

Twin Plagues - Wednesday

& many, many more

In an effort to keep snail mail not exclusive, here are some digital files of what was sent out to everyone who pays for a tangible version of my newsletter! This dispatch could not have been done without the help of my brother, Keil, for the stickers and Emily for the essay!

I have leftovers of a lot of the stuff I print. Please email me if you would like to buy a single edition of a snail mail package, or even just the postcard or sticker! I would hate for them to go to waste. My email is:

avawillyums@gmail.com

I am sharing the digital files in an archive on my website here

I am still learning and testing paper, so the postcard is a little thinner. This is not my favorite update. I also printed this myself, and so I am doing my best to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Sending it to print is quite expensive, so bear with me as I explore text-based printing. Something I am not used to!

Until next time!

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In the morning, I wake up around 6 AM. I shower and I make tea for me and my sister, or she makes tea for us,and I feed our cat. I sit down at my computer and I do a quick journal entry if I can manage one. Sometimes the entry is simply “I don’t have time to write about anything today, and I don’t want to.” I then work on personal things like this letter I am writing, for a few hours. I get dressed, blow dry my hair, walk to my favorite coffee shop, and up to the counter and get another tea.

At work, I edit something for Instagram, or write a newsletter, edit photos, put together puzzles, and then I go home. I walk back, but sometimes if it’s frigid or I am running late for any of the things I do after work, I admittedly will take the subway one stop. I go to the grocery store near my apartment, figure out what to cook, and then clean up or do whatever there might be to do in my apartment before the evening really begins. Or sometimes I play cards to rid my mind of the anxieties of the day that I now must leave behind. I make dinner.

I don’t always want to do all of this, but on any given day, this is what usually happens. I would say that most of the time, there is one mundane task that gives me a little grief because I am tired, or the line is long. Sometimes it’s hard for no reason, and as terrible as that is, I think that’s how it’s supposed to be. I probably wouldn’t have thought much about life being too easy in any other year before this one. But lately, I can’t help but feel we’re entering a state of isolation that encourages us to lose our sense of community and experience.

I am, of course, talking in part about AI and how much it has taken over our lives. But the lead-up to this shift wasn’t conjured out of thin air. Most of the apps or websites or start-ups we’ve seen in recent years have led to this moment. Things like online shopping and Seamless showed developers and tech bros exactly what we wanted: a streamlined process for just about everything. But what I am worried about isn’t just the ease with which a response to a simple email can be conjured; it’s also buying food and groceries through an app, ordering coffee ahead so you don’t have to talk to someone (god forbid) or wait in line. It’s the filters that make iPhone photos look like film, book summaries to replace actually reading, and prepackaged junk for junk journals. All of these services have casually robbed us of our lives.

When I say robbed, I mean it too. If we’re not reading books, then we aren’t learning. If we aren’t going out into the world, we aren’t meeting new people. There is likely a service for anything you could ever need. If we stay as we are, we are docile and incompetent to the realities of the world. Reports are we’re partying less, doing less, and by default experiencing less. It comes at no shock. My issue is not that these services exist per se, but that we quickly fall victim to the appeal of ease. One which leads to an inability to hold our own. The more we make others do for us, the less we want for ourselves. We frame it as optimizing our time, but all we are optimizing is our time to feed the algorithm.

I understand the benefit these services give to people who cannot easily go to the grocery store, can’t afford to shoot film, and have compromised immune systems. It must be noted that I am not here to critique these individuals. I am referring to the individuals who possess all the capabilities to participate in life but don’t. In the end, these are the type who use this extra time to rot on their phones, forgoing any true enrichment at all. I am beginning to wonder just how much the world is willing to give up for two extra minutes of nothingness. How much lower will the threshold of what we are willing to handle go?

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The mundanity of our day-to-day, I would argue, is where life happens. There’s a certain beauty to going to the post office, cooking a meal, even failing at something is more alluring than forgoing the experience altogether. We have to sacrifice to gain. I am not talking about sacrificing our firstborn here. I am talking about sacrificing the comfort of your home to get out into the real world, to put yourself out there and meet people. Try something new, try something for yourself, learn something, do something instead of having someone do it for you. By sacrificing our comfort, we gain a community and endless experience which in turn make up the life we live.

Listen, it’s not like I am immune to ordering takeout with Seamless, and I most certainly have avoided talking to my neighbors from time to time. But my life feels full when I cook a new recipe for my friends. It feels even fuller when we laugh at how bad it is. If I had to round up all my best stories, if I were to look back on my life now, the most thrilling and often rewarding experiences were brought about by opting into life. The moments where I was an active participant in what I wanted. It seems a bit foolish, maybe, to imagine life happening at the grocery store or your local cafe, but it’s true. Am I going to tell my grandchildren about one very specific trip to my favorite cafe? No. But I will talk about the amazing tea and scone I had there every day, as well as the day I finally became a regular. When the barista told me she had already started my order before I made it to the counter. A reward of a routine that told me I am here. I am seen. Those daily choices become the mark you leave on the world. See no one, do nothing, and see where it takes you all you want. But I can guarantee going out and experiencing what is often viewed as daily annoyances, you will see how enriched your life becomes, maybe not all at once, but over time.

I will end it with this story, which I have told a few times. One night after a very bad day, I begrudgingly went to an event in an apartment in SoHo during NYFW with my friend Maria. When we arrived at the front door of the apartment, we buzzed up no less than 20 times, only to never be let in. For whatever reason, we had been locked out. Down on our luck, we walked up Avenue A to a bar called St. Dymphnas, only to see a party happening on the inside. We joined in the fun because we had nowhere else to go. While there, we befriended a few strangers while sitting at a large table outside. We texted my sister Chloe to join us because she happened to be in the area. After she arrived, her old manager just happened to arrive at the same party, and then my friend Kelvin saw us through the glass door, listening to a band play. We all sat there together laughing like we’d known each other for life.

Before leaving, I discovered the party was for a zine launch. I followed the publication on Instagram, later submitted to an issue, and got in. The man who ran the zine had produced a book by two twins, and I told him I had made my own twin-themed photo book. At the New York Art Book Fai,r we traded our books. While the day itself was bad, I hardly talk about the misfortune anymore. Instead, opting for all the things that came after. There was nothing truly extraordinary about it either. Yet within the ordinary happenings, there was something to see, something to do. Hard as it was to go, how easy it became to stay. I am still reaping the rewards of a life I decided to live that day.

This newsletter was part of my snail mail club, which came with a postcard and a sticker. I vowed to make this snail mail club accessible, which means no pay wall, which is why you are also reading this newsletter. The only thing behind a paywall will be the chat feature of Substack, which I will use to just update people on snail mail being sent out and to use as a help center of sorts! To fully show what was made here is this month’s snail mail digitally:

That’s all for this month, thank you!! Sign up for my snail mail if you wish or keep getting the free version!

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This year, I was walking on the street right at the tail end of spring, and I saw a postcard on the ground with a note. I assumed it was from a guy dating a girl based on the names signed. It said something like
“You’re long overdue for some flowers from me,” and I thought it was very sweet. In art school, one of the big things you had to design was a postcard. There was always promotional material that needed to be created for final projects. Business cards and logos and portfolios, but I always liked the postcards best. Likely because of the idea of sending it to someone. A small expense for a piece of art, a memory. Photographic proof you went somewhere, you did something, you thought of someone.

There is also this lingering feeling as an artist, a desire for everything I do to be physical and not just digital. To have prints and tear sheets and proof of my art. In some ways, it solidifies that feeling of being an artist. Even though, regardless of what we do, an artist is an artist as long as they believe they are one. But to hold someone’s work that means something to me. I like the connection that is forged because of this act.

I want to create those connections, and at my current state, I am not doing so even a little. I want to send postcards, letters, and things to hold. I have become a little disenchanted with the internet. It’s a tough era, isn’t it? I want to connect both online and outside. I want to share my photos, create art, hold it physically, to craft and write. I never deny myself a dream. Why should I? This is just a long-winded way to say, I am creating that connection I so desire with my very own snail mail club.

Before I continue, let me answer some questions:

What is a snail Mail club?

A snail mail club is a monthly subscription service in which one artist (in this case, me) sends a letter and some original art, often a postcard or print, and some stickers in the actual mail to those who subscribe. It’s really that simple. You get an actual physical piece of art in your mailbox. To hold to hang up to cut out to tape in journals to send to other people.

you can view examples on tiktok but here’s one that shows the gist

Here’s how you join mine:

1. sign up for my paid newsletter (more on this later PLEASE READ THIS WHOLE NEWSLETTER IF YOU MADE IT THIS FAR!)

2. In the welcome email, there will be a link to a Google form to input your address

3. First mail will be sent out after October 15th!

What are the rules of snail mail club?

None really! Just sign up before the 15th of any month and you’re on the list to get your mail! If there are any issues, send me an email, DM, whatever works!

What you’ll get

Typically, it will be: a newsletter, a postcard, and a sticker designed by me.
But the actual content may vary. The newsletter page may be designed in a special layout. I might have two postcards without stickers, or I could have guest artists design a postcard. We’re starting simple.

Now this is the part I wanted everyone to keep reading for. This paid service is not a sneaky way for me to put my work behind a paywall. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s less about exclusivity for the people who can afford this club and more about the physical elements of the art. To hold something. That means anything I send out in my snail mail club will still be available right here on Substack for everyone to read. It’s important for me to make that clear. I believe in the accessibility of art. It is the hill I die on. When I began this newsletter, I was flat broke, and for that reason, I never wanted anyone to feel locked out of this space. There’s no fun in that. I think of this snail mail club as the gift shop of From My Search Bar. You've made it through the museum; you can take something home if you want. If that deters you from signing up, that’s okay.

The good news is I am not a cynical person; if no one signs up, I will just use the postcards and stickers and do what I can every month, which doesn’t bother me. I can hand-deliver it to my friends in the city. Send one to my mom and dad, my aunts and uncles. That is to say, this isn’t my livelihood. Don’t feel any pressure to sign up or not. I want to do it, so I will. Support is not a green light; it’s a bonus.

I am really excited about this, and have a lot of things I want to do. But that takes time. I hope you’ll join me there.

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When I think back on it, the idea first started ten years ago at freshman orientation. Here, my college roommates and I were told people “become” New Yorkers after they’ve lived in the city for a decade. Of course, we will never be New Yorkers in the real sense, but it is nice to dream a little. To be one step down from heaven. At the time, in 2015, the milestone felt big to us because 28 seemed old, the city was new, and we didn’t know anything about New York. The idea of being in the city that long felt so massive, we decided to celebrate it when the time came. To celebrate not only 10 years in the city, but 10 years as friends. I don’t believe we fully understood which milestone would mean more to us when we made the plans. However, I believe it became clearer than anything else over the weekend it arrived.

This is not in any way an informative “28-things-I-learned-about-New-York ” thing. But it is cheesy, and fortunately enough for me, I’m allowed to be cheesy about my life and the people I’ve met here. New York can be a cynical place at times, but I won’t be.

At the start of this weekend, I had been running late. I knew the subway from Essex Street Station sometimes stalls when it’s pulling into Broadway Lafayette. It seemed the moment I stepped on the train that I knew this train would stop between those stations (and it did). I have lived here long enough to develop a sort of minor intuition. In the tunnel between stations, all I could think about was the first time I went to Soho. In the winter or fall of that first year in New York, my roommates and I made our way to get lunch. It felt like what I can only describe as lightyears (two miles) away from our dorm. It felt like I was stepping into uncharted territory. I had no idea which direction was home.

That was sort of what moving to New York felt like at the time. We didn’t know it, of course, but when we look back on those moments, it’s both funny and sad all at once. To experience a new New York that is now lost to time. It’s a gift and a curse. Making it to New Yorker status meant so many first glances and experiences of New York are long behind us. Now I can be almost anywhere and get almost anywhere else. I don’t need a map, except occasionally to find the exact street where something is located. I’ve walked this place more than enough times to know where I need to go. That walk in 2015 put my very first city restaurant on the map for me. One place I would never not know how to get to again.

The 10-year anniversary weekend felt like a mirage; we were walking through our past. Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s the fact that I photograph everything, but as we walked through that mirage, I felt I could look at any street corner and see younger versions of ourselves going about their days. This might be a habit formed out of friendship and my deep longing to remember every moment I've spent with the people I love. If I look hard enough, I will see them everywhere. It doesn’t take much for me. Even passing the Shake Shack I once lied through my teeth to use in 2020 because I had too many to-go drinks evokes a potent nostalgia in my heart. Don’t forget me, is all my brain knows about anything.

After getting off the train after the minor stop between stations, I sprinted like Harry does for Sally on New Year’s Eve to meet my friends at a new restaurant in SoHo. Ten years later, I know my way around. We went to Wayan, which, since that weekend, I have passed many times. My brain is already filled with “remember when…” for it. After dinner, we walked to our first apartment. We stood outside, looking up, and talked about all the things that had happened there.

I, for one, turned 20. Kelly knocked Maddie’s new Costco size tub of Tide Pods out of an open window. Jenny, our other roommate, moved out of this apartment and out of New York. We still try to convince her to come back. We all woke up to mice in our rooms one night. Maddie and Kelly squeezed into bed with Jenny. The three of them were practically 6 feet in the air because Jenny had a lofted bed made for warehouse ceilings. Chloe climbed into my bed. Maddie was always setting the fire alarm off in the mornings for boiling water. I remember with fondness, crying in the living room at 5 in the morning before work, exhausted from the holiday season and full-time classes. Chloe woke up with me and made me pancakes to cheer me up. She also left the window open twice, letting two pigeons into our room while we slept.

We finished the night waiting for the M home as always. There was nothing so different about the night at all, which made it pretty special in the first place. Aside from having cards and gifts for each other, we fell into the same groove we have always fallen into.

I knew long before we reached this weekend that this milestone was not really about New York, but about the people who made it possible to stay. We celebrate a lot of things in life, birthdays, weddings, and work promotions. I don’t know if we celebrate friendship quite as much as I’d like. I am not suggesting we throw an anniversary dinner every year, but perhaps a moment of gratitude every now and then to acknowledge the generosity of your friends in deciding to stay. To see you through the best of times and the worst of times, with no romantic benefit, just the pure hope that you will do the same for them.

Friendship is important, despite what pop culture has decided for the world. Building a community for yourself, seeing people regularly. Being nice to strangers and building something from that is important to make a point of. I mean to say that we do owe the world something; we owe people something. I feel fortunate to be surrounded by people who recognize the importance of building relationships in this way. It’s how we become better people. It’s how we learn new things and see different viewpoints. We talk with real people who experienced vastly different lives. It gives us a bit of humanity. There has been an epidemic of this lately. Not by lack of friendship, perhaps, but an unwillingness to be friendly and to meet new people. To put ourselves out there. When we build friendships, I believe we learn the importance of these skills. We see what it means to people, to be there, to be kind.

That platonic everyday kindness is what makes so many scenes in so many films and TV shows feel so big. Despite never watching Sex and the City, I know all the hits. I love the scene of Miranda finding Steve on the Brooklyn Bridge as much as anyone. But I love that she walks right behind Charlotte all the way home after Charlotte discovers she can’t have children. I love when Carrie turns to Samantha,
“Don’t you wanna judge me, just a little?” to which Samantha responds
“Not my style.” Or Charlotte’s
“Maybe we could be each other’s soulmates, and we could let men be these great, nice guys to have fun with.” Beyond that series, when Michelle tells James he’s a Derry Girl. When Donna and the Dynamos get up on stage and sing Super Trouper for old times’ sake. When Michael races across town to go to Pam’s art show. When Woodstock lies on Snoopy.
“And I’m not alone, I’m with Muriel.” The First Wives Club dancing down the street. Legally Blonde, Francis Ha, Dead Poets Society, Goodwill Hunting, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, The Way Way Back. All of them say what is sometimes so hard to say. It reminds you all that you can hope for.

These scenes in media helped me see what I should pay closer attention to. It all leads up to those moments. It is about standing in a New York dive bar, hearing New York, New York play after the ball drops, and hugging your friends because we had no one to kiss. It’s ten years later, smashing ourselves into a photobooth to say thank you for staying. It’s after work drinks to rant about our terrible jobs and dance to The Lion Sleeps Tonight. It’s watching someone split her pants right open on Halloween and dropping to the floor in painful laughter. Cooking dinner, squeezing onto a love seat to watch A Streetcar Named Desire, and talking through the whole thing. Counting down and pressing play on a movie at exactly the same time so we can pretend we aren’t thousands of miles apart. Meeting for 24 hours in London because neither of us can get to where the other lives. Taking a 1.5-hour train to Rockaway after work, and then Ubering another friend later so they don’t miss out on the fun. Jumping in the waves together and talking about the rest of our lives. These are the people who see you with the love of your life and say “I love who you are with them.” They have seen the worst of you, and still remember the best of you.

Ten years later, it’s safe to say New Yorker status is second best. I saw the truth this weekend, and many times before. As I ran to meet my friends for dinner, I felt like I was in all those TV shows set in this city. Which is to say there’s a life here, and it’s mine. There are people waiting for me, and in the best way possible, I’d wait my whole life for them too.

I have a New York magazine subscription, I get the print version too, perhaps my favorite subscription to date. To the point where I make sure I have the money each year to renew. My one splurge. With the subscription, you get all sorts of newsletters you can sign up for. There is one segment that changes constantly, called Night School. Here, there are courses on how to do or be something. One was how to be a New Yorker, or how to be a writer. I usually sign up to read them, out of pure enjoyment, and I like to learn. The most recent installment was How to Look at Art, by Jerry Saltz.

The course was great, but it prompted me to read his book How to Be an Artist. It was a great book, encouraging, and likely an important read for anyone who wants to be an artist. Who believes in their own ability to make it. If I were to suggest one chapter, though, it would be the one titled Define Success. Here, Saltz challenges the notion of what success is for artists. Saltz says that oftentimes when asking an artist what success is to them, they say it's money, freedom, or happiness, which he rejects.

I put the whole quote because I think it's important. The truth is that art is not always made on the schedule we desire, but we can work towards it. In order to get to this point, there must be a conscious act where you make the time for yourself. Art is a conscious act of doing; the creation is not always conscious, but the creating is.

I used to spend most of my workday imagining, with great passion, all the things I could work on when I got home. It's inspiring, the restriction of doing your job, practically more than anything else. By the time I got home, I was always too tired, my room too messy, dinner needing to be made, movie nights to attend, bags to pack or unpack. Which is not an excuse or method of procrastination, simply put, life can often get in the way. I had no real stretch of time to do my work. The small pockets of time in between work and other things would be spent doing nothing of consequence. I was never doing anything for myself. I was always dreaming, never making.

I don't remember totally what prompted it, maybe I was just at my wits’ end about a lot of things. But Chloe and I got to talking about all the things we wished we had time to do. I needed to have some time to work, so I was going to get up early to work on some stuff the following morning, but I was going to miss our tea time together. Maybe she could join me, she said. She could also get up early and work on something. Slowly, as the conversation went on, it developed into a thing where we would get up early for a few days and try to do the things we wanted to do. Maybe we would do it every day, hold each other accountable. Maybe it could be something like a two-man club, the 6AM club.

The next day, at 6 AM, tired as can be, I clawed my way out of bed, and Chloé did too, and we worked. We made the time for ourselves. It can feel obvious when you read it, the morning feels like an expanse of creativity. It is, but it's also hard to capitalize on. It's tough when you have to go against the most human desire to sleep and begin your day hours ahead of schedule. But every afternoon after working all morning writing, or journaling, or editing photos. Planning Instagram posts, redoing websites, working on zines, writing anti-vlogs, submitting to contests, reading articles, and learning something new. There would always be a text from Chloe or me to the other, talking about how hard it was to get out of bed, but how rewarding it was to work on the things we loved. To carve out the time for ourselves, not just other people.

Now, I don't know if I'm here to tell you that the 6 AM Club is the only way. I know from trying to discover my own routine this past year, before the 6 AM club became a thing, that we can find time in many places. At night, during a lunch break, on weekends, and on holidays. I read Joan Didion's routine, and Delia Ephron and every other artist who ever divulged the secret to their craft, which was, of course, their time. It exists for most people. But I am saying you do indeed need to carve out time for yourself. The morning, unfortunately, seems to have the freshest thoughts when you have other places to be and things to do. It's worth trying. Similar to working out and eating right, there is something to the thing that is hardest to do.

The underlying piece of the puzzle that makes the whole 6 AM club thing possible is the belief that it's going to something worthwhile. That's an optimistic outlook, it seems, but it also seems to be the only real outlook someone should have in my book. A belief that what we are doing is not all for nothing. As an artist, that's one of the most important bets you'll ever make. I am still making that bet, I haven't gotten out of the woods yet, right? Even if I do, even if I skyrocket to stardom tomorrow, I will bet that my creative practice is worth something. But I am still working my way up. I am not the same person I was when I began my career as an artist, and I am not in the same spot. When I turn around and look back at everything I have done, I am quite a way away from where I started in 2019, or even in 2015 when I moved to New York. It doesn't always feel that way, it doesn't always feel like I am making progress, but every time I recount all the things I've done and lived through and survived and thrived doing, I think, well, the list isn't very long, but it's there. That's something to celebrate.

I bet, given everything that's probably happened in your life, and the disadvantages and poorly timed parts, you're farther along than you think.

Optimism is not saying you deserve the time to work for yourself. It’s saying the time isn't wasted, and it's going somewhere. Even if just to a few newsletter subscribers. Even to just a few Instagram followers. Maybe that's nothing to some, but it's something to you, and that's what matters. Each morning, I sit at my desk and journal to start my day about the life and thoughts I am living and having. That's not really important to anyone, but it's important to me, so I do it. Maybe some day I will look back and see the thread of all that happened to me, that made this possible. At the very core, there will be a true belief that I am making something worthwhile because I want to make it. The 6 AM club is a manifestation of that belief. To show up, to say what I need to say, make what I need to make.

You deserve that time too; you deserve to have a belief that this isn't all for nothing. Optimism is sometimes viewed as naive and dumb. To constantly be greeted with disappointment. However, I don't think that's true; I actually believe that hope is the most important part of anything you do. Your life, your career, whatever it may be, there really is something to believe in and something to hope for. Sure, it's great if people believe in you, but everything feels a little better when you yourself believe that your art or your hobby or whatever you do, is important to you.

If you do anything with that time you carve out for yourself, I hope it sets in motion the belief that you are deserving of the life and career you desire. I hope you feel good after, the way my sister and I do. Maybe you have a roommate who will be your accountability partner. I hope your version of success is this: the time to do what you dream of doing. The 6 AM club isn't something like a running club or an actual club, but it's nice when someone else is doing it with you. If you set your alarm for 6 AM tomorrow, you'll know mine's set for it too. We can do it together. The time will be worth it, even if it doesn't feel like it yet.

I hope you understand the point that I am making. I would love it if the 6 AM club were for everyone, but not everyone has that time. However, there is likely a time when you can do or create, and I hope you take the chance for yourself, rather than, like me, dreaming of the chance arriving. It's not easy, this road, but it becomes easier when you make the opportunity for yourself. It can be life-changing for your career, but that's also not the point of setting that time. The point is doing it for your own sanity, to feel like the artist you are for a few hours before your day job. Being an artist sometimes feels like we are constantly working. A lot of the time, for someone else, but this chunk of time is for you and you only. I want everyone to have that, and to believe in those few hours when you are released from the expectations of becoming something and making something marketable or practical. I just want you to make something, anything. It often won't be a masterpiece, but that's not really the point either.

Whenever I start the 6 AM club, the first thing I listen to is The Winner Is, from the Little Miss Sunshine soundtrack. The song makes me feel like I am doing it, even if there are no tangible rewards at the moment for whatever I am making. The title is funny because in my head, there are no winners or losers in life, but in that moment, right as I begin, I do feel like I won something.

In the middle of filming the video above, I had a phone call with my mom, who told me I am “go go go” all the time. She says this all the time, and every other time, it just felt like something a mom tells you. I didn’t think it was true at the time she said it, this time around. As my work life unfolded on camera over this weekend I filmed, I realized that maybe I am in a constant cycle of adding to a never-ending to-do list.

I don’t know what people’s perceptions of me are, but I do try to keep from complaining about the pressure to create because I put it on myself. It’s also my dream job to be an artist, so this to-do list is often exciting for me, but exhausting. I know, world’s smallest violin. However, over the past year, more people have commented on that constant cycle I have put myself in. I felt myself spiraling over the number of things I signed myself up for in the hope of personal growth. In hopes of saying I was trying. Trying to make my dreams as an artist a reality. Sometimes in my own world, I feel like if I am doing nothing, then I am letting my career slip from my fingers.

In order to change this mindset, in an attempt to listen to my mom, I made a creative to-do list. I cannot add anything to the list until everything is checked off and done. I wanted to say this to acknowledge the absence of newsletters, yet a post on YouTube. Also, maybe encourage people to make their own. I am good at finishing projects, but I want to encourage others to finish theirs. This was one of the things I had to finish, which makes me one step closer to finishing the zine. I wanted to send it because it’s an anti-vlog but more vlog than anti. It’s not perfect, but it’s something, which is better than nothing at all.

I woke up this morning to a new cover story by New York Magazine, all about the West Village girl. I saw the cover story posted first on Instagram the moment I opened my eyes this morning. I levitated out of bed and read it on my computer first thing. I wanted to read it in print, but I couldn’t wait that long. I spent the morning snarkily laughing at the digs and angle, uncertain how any young woman could have participated in that story and not see what was so clearly happening. They were the punching bag of an entire city, and will be until two weeks from now, when New York Magazine writes about something else. I think I both love and hate the piece.

Let me remind everyone that I am not a native New Yorker. There is no but after that sentence, “but I’ve lived here ten years,” is a statistic that means nothing to most people. What matters at this moment is that I knew the city before and after the pandemic. I am in no position to really take a stand, after all, I could be seen just like these people.

I have a lot of conflicting feelings about the piece itself. Of the two paths I go down, I sympathize with the people who are putting themselves out there in a city that often will not be kind. I don’t want to hate the youth, or even people my own age, trying to figure out who they are. Often, New York can speed up that process. Exposing a person to all sorts of different backgrounds, ideas, and paths that they never knew existed. Not to mention the tendency to forget we have also been part of an annoying demographic at some point in our lives, only to later shake our heads at the very same people. I, for one, was an annoying art student, teenager, and am likely an annoying 20-something-year-old who lives in New York.

The other path I go down is rooted in a distaste for influencers in general and people unable to make up their own minds about who they want to be. Who latch onto the trendiest things and then scapegoat their overconsumption by claiming they are basic. Hiding behind a self-deprecating term to seem more down-to-earth, to avoid the issue at hand. They are an array of different identities conforming to fit in. Creating a world more closely related to a High School ecosystem. Where owning certain things, participating in certain activities, and looking a certain way to come across a certain way create some social currency that says I am better and more worthy than you. It’s easy for us readers, and especially myself, to turn my nose up at them, say I am better than you because I’m not like you at all, but I refuse to do so. Not to mention, while the article focuses on the women of the West Village, I think the men are also to blame.

It irks me that these types of people are one of the reasons New York is so inaccessible. To create exclusivity in a city already so hard to move to. Especially when it seems they have no desire to learn anything about the city they now live in. At least not past what they see on social media. They refuse to think for themselves, open their eyes, or go to other neighborhoods to see what is there to offer. They seem to be proud to live their whole 20s on one street, in one neighborhood. I find it, admittedly, a little embarrassing to close your eyes to possibilities, and even worse, to be ignorant that they exist at all. Reading the article was all the more infuriating because these occupants of the West Village, seemingly never dreamed of New York; they simply heard about it.

There are a lot of traits this type of person brings to the city that I don’t love, but I think the resentment is deeply rooted in the social media age and the bubble of influence. I am ready for it to burst. In modern New York, I feel the line between social media and real life blurring. There used to be an escape from that world and the real world. Step outside onto the streets of New York and be wowed by the people who made New York a city I love living in. I mostly now walk down the street and feel as though I am walking down the length of my for you page. Trends have always been fast, but at this moment, they have never been faster. As much as I avoid influence and the fast-paced cycle that now consumes the fashion world, everywhere I look, I am reminded of its existence. Which doesn’t help as we navigate how storefronts are looking to be Instagramable, and lines are forming everywhere. Everything is a story; everything can be viral. It’s overstimulating. The West Village girls are reminders of a larger issue I wish to escape.

It is not every West Village girl to blame for such a thing, but I would struggle to find a lot of them innocent, at least from the perspective of that article. Moving to a city, and even worse, a highly coveted neighborhood, to prove something to other people is nothing to be proud of. The age of influenceing is one where no one thinks for themselves at all. There is no longer such a thing as a hidden gem. Nothing is sacred; everything is on the cusp of discovery. I would like it if it stayed undiscovered. In the article, everyone is supposedly moving to New York for experiences, but these experiences seem highly curated by the influencers who came before them. I am starting to believe that influencing ruined everything. I’d like to escape social media, but New York has locked me in.

In a substack post put out by New York Magazine, Choire Sicha and New York Magazine discuss the cover story, and both reveal that they believe these West Village girls are a bit endearing. I don’t know if perhaps it’s because these people are my age, or maybe that I have a disdain for the bubble these people created, or maybe because I never met the people being discussed, but I found there was very little to be endeared to when I read it.

It is a very easy article, however, to lose yourself in. To become the worst version of yourself, much like I did. I really don’t want to be a hater at all, or discourage all who wish to move here. I’d love it if we could all have a normal reaction to the West Village. But that era seems long gone. I do not believe these people are ruining New York. Few people have that much influence. It is easy to flatten these people when reading the article. To see the worst versions of them, and not give them the same sympathy I might give myself. This is what makes it hard to form an opinion on the article, I think. Never wanting to appear holier than thou, but I also have a little Fran Lebowitz in me. This is to say that I have many opinions, though they are often not voiced. I am not, perhaps, the person who is deserving of an opinion. I never lived in the West Village past or present. I dislike the status it holds, and maybe the distaste with influencing is causing me to blind myself to sympathy for these faceless people.

I am sure a similar article could have been written about me. I could be a New York punching bag. I don’t want to dislike them, or be annoyed, or be exhausted by social media in the real world. Still, as I write this newsletter, I am wondering what to feel. I keep reading the article over and over. I am slightly happy that these people are out doing what they want to do, meeting in real life, spreading the joys of living in a wonderful city. But also annoyed at their idea of what the city is, how materialistic it all seems, how they have created an inescapable influencing bubble. I have typically been completely fine with people living life as they wish, so long as it is not rooted in hate or bigotry. Perhaps I am simply resentful of these people because they remind me of all the things I despise about the modern era, everything I hoped to escape from by being here. Not in who they are, but in what they do.

I hope you understand what I mean. I can only get it out this way, and I have so many other things I could say. I’d like this opinion to be less chaotic, but if I think about this any longer, I might just melt my brain. I can’t spend too much time grappling with something so trivial. It is likely a larger issue in someone else’s life. If I find that I am being too hard on them, I will let you know. The only thing I really know is that I might just have to live with it, and so I ask that you forgive me if you don’t see me in the West Village for quite some time.

PS. There will be a pause in newsletters as I work on some other creative things, though most notably a zine surrounding this newsletter. I will see you when it’s over!