🌵 Pay Attention. Be Astonished. Tell About It. 🌵
My memory works in a particular way. Mostly, it forgets things. I’m constantly forgetting names, important details, whole conversations, entire months of my life. I travel around the world leaving piles of important things in my wake. At any given time, I have a running list in my head of the things I’ve misplaced (currently: keys, a scarf, three sheets of postage stamps, a Ziploc bag of 250 Mexican pesos), keeping an eye out in case they happen to pop up again.
I’m also one of the happiest people I know. In a month of 30 days, I feel pretty good for probably 29 of them. As I’ve gotten older and met more and more people, I’ve realized how extremely rare this is. I have an atypically chill and upbeat brain. I think these two things are related. Bad memories and embarrassing moments quickly fade into a fuzzy soft-focus. Regret very swiftly becomes a practical lesson learned, rather than a miserable memory that roils through my brain over and over. My brain closes chapters of my life, then lets the ink fade. I don’t hold grudges and I don’t burn with blame. I literally forgive and forget.
On the flip side, paying attention to the world in the moment brings me immense joy. I think it’s part of why I float back up to happiness so quickly. Whenever I’m low, it’s only a matter of time before I see a patch of moss, nice winter light, or a wagging dog butt and I find myself smiling again. I remember that after Donald Trump was elected, the first time I felt okay again was when I saw a bright purple Santa Rita cactus. I stopped and examined its vibrant, spiny paddles. What an amazing world, where we have purple cacti!
Mary Oliver, who passed away this month, wrote these directions in her poem “Sometimes”:
“Instructions for life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
This is why I somewhat obsessively document the world around me. I’m always drawing and writing because it’s my way of paying attention to the small joys of the world. Paging through years-old sketchbooks, I find I’ve forgotten pretty much everything that I documented. I don’t remember funny birds I saw, unusual buildings, great roadside signs, and special jokes my grandpa made. It has vanished from my mind. But it’s there on the page. I paid attention, I was astonished, and I made sure to tell myself about it.
Stuff I Made
Magazine Column - Portland Monthly adapted a version of my newsletter about an impromptu protest at Trump Tower into a column on “How to Get in the Way.”
25 Zines - I’m almost a month into my plan to make a zine every day of 2019! On track so far.
Fortune Cookie Comic - When I thought it would be great to have a comic about the history of the fortune cookie, the dream-team that immediately came to mind was writer Soleil Ho and artist Blue Delliquanti. They signed onto the project and the resulting comic is A++.
Comic Editing - I also edited a string of really powerful comics that were published this month. Each of these came out really wonderfully:
Dismissed: As a Sexual Assault Survivor, I Was Seen As Too “Biased” to Serve on a Jury
Who Gets Called an Unfit Mother?
How Pick-Up Artists Morphed Into the Alt-Right
This Week's Comic
Stuff I Love
Sex Education - This British show on Netflix is what I would write for teens if anyone hired me to write TV shows for teens. The cast of young actors is wonderful (especially Ncuti Gatwa!) and a bonus is that much of the soundtrack is by one of my favorite artists, Ezra Furman.
Celery Root - Definitely the most overlooked and underappreciated vegetable. I fell in love with celeriac in Germany, where people cook with the ugly root all the time—it brings a cheesy, delicious MSG-type flavor to soups. I’ve made a version of this soup four times so far this winter.
You’re Wrong About - I usually don’t like podcasts that are just “two funny friends talking about a topic” because they are usually not funny and the hosts waste a lot of time with in-joke diatribes. But You’re Wrong About, hosted by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes, is an exception. The pair bring thoughtful, genuinely funny insights to questioning cultural myths and media-made scandals.
Correspondence - In 2018, Swedish song-writers Jans Lekman and Annika Norlin wrote a new song-letter to each other every month. The resulting album is really great for listening to on a rainy morning. Feminist sci-fi nerds will get a kick out of the song “On the Edge of Time.”
Boy Erased - This memoir of a fundamentalist Arkansan boy realizing he’s gay and going through conversion therapy inspired a movie and a podcast series. I listened to the audiobook and was drawn in immediately.
The Nib Family Issue - I spent way too much time this month writing names on envelopes, mailing out batches of The Nib’s print magazine to people all over the world. The Family Issue debuts this month and is full of comics I love. Sign up for a subscription to get it!
Someone to Know
I started following Colleen after I worked with her on a comic about female rage. I quickly came to love her “fight everyone” anti-capitalist aesthetic and general scrappy style. This month, she published a widely shared essay “Design is Not Neutral” that you should read. I’m excited to see whatever she makes next.
Something to Do
Donate Your Old Phones
The upside of planned obsolescence: Do you have an old cell phone stashed in a drawer somewhere? Put it to some good use and donate it to a domestic violence shelter. Call to Safety in Portland collects used phones. They give working phones to domestic violence survivors and sell broken ones for parts and puts the money toward their 24-hour help hotline. Mail in your moldering phones!
I’ll write again soon! In the meantime, you can keep in touch on Instagram or Twitter. Is this your first time receiving this newsletter? You can see the archive here.