So I moved from Missoula, Montana to Brooklyn, New York about six months ago. Six months is long enough to no longer feel like I’m on a vacation during which I happen to be acquiring furniture but short enough that I’m still occasionally surprised that I’m actually doing this thing I’ve been contemplating for six years.
Early on, there was an afternoon I went for a walk and did not get lost but did have a minor location issue, mostly because not far from where I live, the grid changes orientation relative to an arterial that borders my neighborhood and the next one over. A mounting sense of “which way is home” clenched somewhere near my sternum and despair started to wash over me: where are the mountains? where is the river? with all these buildings obstructing the horizon, where even is the sun?
All of which is to say that living in Montana did something to me, and though my leaving-the-house stamina has certainly improved since said walk, in New York I keep noticing the outline and contours of that something.
On Earth Day I picked up some garbage with friends on a beach in Massachusetts—we divided what we found into bags of plastic to put in the Dumpster and bags of “cool trash, possibly for art,” pictured above
I navigate the city with a patchy mental map of gyms and cafés (normal) and a smartphone (new.) After muddling through a couple weeks here with my beloved flip phone (the Kyocera DuraXV, for those of you in the esoteric know), I gave up and ordered a refurbished (purple!) Samsung Flip 3 from Back Market so I could use Google maps.
Getting a previously owned device alleviated some of my anxiety about rare earth metal mining and a general sense that it was way too soon for a new phone. I like to keep phones until they stop making calls. Most any other decline in function, I withstand, because my tolerance for this kind of difficulty is very high, in a way that tends to produce needless misery.
I cannot fully explain this stubbornness, which sometimes even I find irrational, but it did facilitate the joy I used to take in my flip phone. If you’re pursuing friction over seamlessness, it helps to be a little bullheaded.
psychedelic spring colors, by photographer Thandiwe Muriu
Nowadays it’s sunny in the evening. I no longer have to take two coats when I go outside. Majestic neighborhood trees are in bloom, the sole plant in my bedroom died in January but I feel ready to try again with some cuttings, and the city installed a food-waste collection bin on our street corner. There was a sauna of a day at the gym because someone had misguidedly turned on the heat, and the weather is such that I all I want to do is drop everything and go play beach volleyball even though I have a little collection of bruises and floor and sand burns from all the other volleyball I’ve been playing.
A perennial favorite of mine for this season is the BUST witchy guide to spring cleaning, although this time I’d like to add a fervent recommendation that you listen to this episode of Ten Percent Happier with KC Davis called “Messiness Is Not a Moral Failing.”
Davis says that all messes consist of five types of objects:
Dishes/utensils
Trash/recycling/compost
Clothes, clean, dirty, or otherwise
Things that have a place
Things that don’t have a place
She recommends tackling a mess by category, in order, so that by the time you reach number 5, you can then potentially choose spots for those things, thereby making the whole process easier next time. This little list has been downright revolutionary for me. It’s useful, and it isn’t motivated by shame.
At the Manhattan vintage market this booth called The Falls left me starry-eyed. They collect old clothing, equipment, and furniture and repair and then embellish the pieces with embroidery and buttons at workshops in India. Who knew a beaded tracksuit could inspire such awe? More importantly, who knew a tracksuit would even benefit from being beaded?
I take similar delight in hearing master darners Celia Pym, Hikaru Noguchi, and Rachel Matthews in conversation, recording here, particularly a story one of them tells about repairing a garment that moths started eating away at, such that before she even finished mending there was more work to do, and one of the other darners quipped, “it’s a collaboration with moths!”
“Daughters of Dreamtime” by Christina Rothe, photographed here by Dean Davis
I am obsessed with three albums right now:
This is not a hot take or a timely one, but Christina Aguilera released a Spanish-language album called Aguilera last year and it is excellent. Her voice is undeniable and unmistakeable.
Demi Lovato’s 2022 mostly rock album Holy FVCK is angry and I like it. The writing varies a bit in quality, but at some point in every song Lovato belts and sounds so good that it compensates for most everything else.
Before All the Magic’s Gone by Ashleigh Ball—the Spotify algorithm got me good, for once, and recommended something I cannot stop dancing to in the kitchen. The best songs on the album are definitely “Love It” (very Marian Hill) and “Lavender.”
(I would be remiss, given my love for Miley Cyrus, not to mention that she released a new album last month, though per usual there are some real clunkers in there, amid other evocative and enjoyable tracks.)
This edition’s music video is “Chicken Noodle Soup” by j-hope of BTS & Becky G.
One of my poems was published in Camas in December(!)
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“En Garde” by quilter Bisa Butler
I’ve been either working on or avoiding a certain essay for more than a year, so it is with great pride I say that I’ve got an anti-diet book review forthcoming at Mangoprism. To get yourself in the headspace for the piece, check out my all-time favorite podcast, Maintenance Phase by Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes, who are excellent researchers but also very funny, which you need when the topics are so serious. I feel as if they are my friends even though we have never met. Or, consider starting with their excellent debunking of our cultural ideas about sugar.
Before we part ways in this once-again too long newsletter: seasoned storyteller and skillful teacher Beatrice Alder (who, full disclosure, is my good friend, so I am a little biased) is instructing a very affordable (only $70!) short-term remote fiction-writing course next month. Even if you don’t consider yourself a writer, you will likely enjoy this class.
I was browsing the comments on a photo from a block party and noticed a beautiful little typo: instead of “it was an extravaganza,” someone wrote, I was an extravaganza. Would that we all get to be the extravaganza, not just once but over and over again, throughout our lives. As Echkart Tolle says, “you are the universe / expressing itself as a human for a little while.”
Til next time,
Abby