✥ I do the majority of my reading on my tablet now, and I end up highlighting and annotating a lot of stuff in the Kindle app. I always struggled to find all the things I wanted to remember in the app itself, and I just found out you can go to this link to find all your notes and highlights there?! I bet a lot of you already knew that, but it was news to me! I am passing it along in case someone else might find it helpful: https://read.amazon.com/notebook
✥ Similarly, I saw someone post this on Threads, and I just tried it! Good to know. Here is an incredible Gmail tip to quickly unsubscribe from all the companies you may have unknowingly subscribed to. Open Gmail in a web browser. Delete everything in the URL after /mail/ and replace it with /mail/#sub
This will open a list of all the companies you are subscribed to for emails, together with an unsubscribe button for each one.
✥ When I was a little girl, I knew there were three things that I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a “good cooker” just like my Mawga, write books that people could find in their libraries, and draw flowers. At almost 50, I am confident and capable and more than competent in the kitchen. I have three books you can check out from the library (with a fourth on the way)! But the drawing flowers …I never got around to.
Last month, I mentioned that a friend gifted me some crafty things, stamps, stickers, inks, and various tools. For most of my life, I've been terribly anxious about making any sort of artsy attempts--which is wild, because up until I was about 8-9 years old, I used to draw all the time! I guess this is something we've all experienced to some extent, though? The dawning self-awareness, self-consciousness, comparisons, and pressures, and then all of a sudden the fun thing is just…not…fun anymore? Well, some sort of internal switch has flipped, and I am back to having fun again and trying all the things! For the past month, I've been trying my hand at a little something every day. Here's my first-ever Zentangle attempt! And I also founda little flower drawing workbookthat has been super helpful.I am finally making my childhood dream happen, wooooo!
✥ I have been seeing a lot of talk about seaweed/kelp noodles, so I thought I might give them a try. I am not a huge pasta fan (I mean it's fine but I would rather have rice or bread) so I don't mind trying different vehicles for the sauce and stuff you might pair with the pasta. These noodles come out of the bag hard and crunchy, but the trick is to soak it in warm water with some lemon juice and baking soda for about 10-15 minutes or so, and give them a little massage. It loosens up, becomes slippery and velvety, and a bit like glass noodles. Rinse them in cold water and throw them into soups, stir-fries, or whatever. I want to try them next with one of my favorite recipes from Rabbit & Wolves, the creamy miso pasta with caramelized mushrooms. (Some folks compare these to shiratake noodles, and I don't agree with that; my every encounter with those awful smelly wigglers has been comprised of heartache and horror.)
✥ One of my brothers-in-law recently turned us onto this afternoon treat: this Juan Valdez vanilla cinnamon coffee with a packet of this Abuelita Mexican hot chocolate. His wife is from Mexico and they spend a lot of time visiting her family there, so I imagine he must have first found it there…but we have a little Mexican grocery store nearby, and they stock both of these things! And it is SO GOOD, it tastes as good as something you might pay $9 at a coffee shop.
✥A perfume I loved this month: Pigmentarium Murmur is a perfume of Lynchian vacuum and void, the kind where silence and absence are loaded with meaning, even if you have no freaking way to articulate what that meaning is. In 1993, my sister and I cut school one day, unplanned, out of the blue. We drove around the tiny downtown of Daytona Beach (we lived locally) and browsed used bookstores and record shops. Eventually, we got brave enough to peek into Wig Villa, an establishment we'd always been curious about. Disembodied plastic heads lined the walls. The silence was absolute and inexplicably dreadful. Not a soul in the store. Just us and the heads and that weird, empty air. We later arrived home to find several packages on the porch. Our mother had ordered oversized plaster statues of Jesus and Mary from Fingerhut. This felt like a bizarre inevitability. We were not fazed. This day and these moments live in my memory as surreal, dreamlike, slightly nightmarish... but somehow...not bad? Just deeply, impossibly weird. Pigmentarium Murmur smells like my memories of these moments, a little freaky, a little odd, but strangely very dear to my heart. A hollow plastic note (imagine "vanilla doll head" minus the vanilla), a rose that's pale and powdery, almost like makeup dust on porcelain, muted and earnest and lurking but endearing rather than sinister, and a sandalwood that's soft and creaky like old wood, dreamy and worn. All existing together, but also separately, dreamlit portraits at suspended intervals, vacant vignettes, in that teeming emptiness.
✥ Two books I read and enjoyed this month…
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer uses the serviceberry tree—a tree that produces abundant fruit for birds, bears, and humans without asking for anything in return—as a meditation on gift economies versus market economies. The essay explores how Indigenous worldviews understand resources not as commodities to be owned and hoarded, but as gifts that create relationships and demand reciprocity. Gratitude and generosity become the currency, and wealth is measured not by what you accumulate but by what you give away. It's short, really just an extended essay, but it works. Kimmerer doesn't pretend gift economies can replace our current system entirely, but she argues for them to coexist with it. In public libraries, in Little Free Libraries, in neighbors sharing tomatoes from their gardens. The whole thing hinges on a simple shift: if you see the serviceberry's fruit as a gift instead of a resource, your relationship to it changes. She writes that assigning a market value to a gift destroys it. You can't sell manna without spiritual jeopardy. It's aspirational, maybe naive, but sitting with it feels good anyway. Because in a gift economy, wealth comes from what you give and the relationships you build. Joy is what you get from that. And as she writes somewhat cheekily (but I am 100% here for it), the ones who have more joy win.
Murder Bimbo by Rebecca NovackMurder Bimbo wants you to know she's capable of great love and connection, that she matters, that you won't forget her. She's a sex worker in her early thirties who gets tangled up in a plot to assassinate a right-wing politician, and she tells the story three different ways—to a podcaster, to her ex-girlfriend, to herself—reshaping it each time to be the version that makes her look best. The thing is, every version circles back to the same person: her. Her needs, her desires, her desperation to be seen as someone worth remembering. Novack structures the book around this circular logic, each retelling revealing a little more about how she actually thinks. It's a fun ride watching someone reshape their story depending on who's listening, each version tailored to land exactly right with that particular person. Don't we all catch ourselves doing this? Minus the political intrigue, maybe. She's not trying to deceive so much as she's constantly negotiating who she needs to be in order to matter. The repetition of the three tellings drags in places, but you understand why she's doing it—each version is a performance, and the only audience that really matters is the one in front of her at that moment.
Some things I have been writing about on my Unquiet Things blog…
