On the Seashore, by George Elgar Hicks, circa 1879.
I have spent a lot of summers being miserable about being miserable. Florida in June, July, August (and May and September and October and sometimes way into November, too) is brutal, and I have never made my peace with that. I’ve written about it as dread, as folk horror, as a survival problem to be wrangled with the right eerie playlist and robust air conditioning.
Looking back at those posts, I think I was doing what I’ve always done: sending my mind somewhere else. Into books, horror films, art, other people’s landscapes. Anywhere but here, in this body, in this place. Escapism has been my primary coping mechanism for as long as I can remember. It has served me well in many ways. I have read extraordinary books and watched extraordinary films and found my way to extraordinary art because of it. But there is a difference between enriching your inner life and just…not being present in your actual one. I am not sure I have always known where that line was.
I turned fifty last month. My knees are stiff. My lower back has frequent complaints. I keep seeing people shuffling on Instagram (that sort of hypnotic footwork dancing? I don’t know how to describe it?), and I am intrigued, but the jumping involved in the more energetic, athletic versions makes my teeth rattle just thinking about it. I need to find a low-impact place to start because I want to do it, it looks fun and cool, and I still have time left to do things that are fun and cool! But. My body is making itself known in ways it didn’t used to. But. It’s also more than that.
This past weekend, Yvan’s mother came to stay with us. She has ALS and is nonverbal at this point, her right side paralyzed, and she communicates through a talking board that her hands struggle to use (and English is her second language, Icelandic is her first, so even when we can make out what she’s spelled, we’re not always sure we’ve understood correctly.) Most of the time we’re guessing. Her husband, who is elderly himself and exhausted in the way that intense caregiving can exhaust a person, needed the weekend to repaint/redecorate their bedroom for the hospital bed that was being delivered. He needed her not to worry about her, just for a few days. He needed to not be burnt out for forty-eight hours.
So she came to us, and Yvan and I were both dreading it, for various reasons. We had to learn to feed her through a stomach port with a gravity feeding tube. We had to learn to mix her medications and administer them the same way. We had to learn all of this without killing her, which felt like a reasonable bar to clear but also an extremely high-stakes one. I was anxious about the physical intimacy of it – helping her dress, changing her pad, getting her situated. She couldn’t tell us if we were doing it wrong. We just had to try.
The weekend came and went. After the first night, we were both more comfortable. She slept a lot. We had people over; one of Yvan’s brothers came for lunch and a movie, and an Icelandic family friend stopped by for coffee. I stumbled through some feedings and screwed up, but I did not kill anyone. She seemed more relaxed than usual, looser, without the rigid routines her husband runs on. Yvan said it was good to spend time with his mom without his dad hovering, and I think that was true.
At one point, I was sitting with her, and I did the thing I always do when I’m nervous, which is babble, and I started telling her how much she and her family mean to me. She started crying. Which made me start crying, because I am a baby! I apologized and gave her a hug; she gave me a thumbs-up and something that was almost a smile, and I chose to interpret that as a good cry. I think it was.
She is thirty years older than me. Watching her, helping her, fumbling through it, learning the weight and reality of her body and what it needs now … I kept thinking about thirty years from now. What I want those years to look like. How I want to have spent the ones between then and where I am here and now.
I don’t want to spend them escaping into my own head. I have been doing that for so long, and I think maybe it has cost me something I am only just starting to add up. Not the books or the films or the art; I will never give those up, and I don’t think I should. But that Sarah-specific habit of using them to not be here. To not be in this body, in this place, in this heat, in this life that is actually mine.
So this summer, I am trying something different, which is not really a big deal, mostly just small, unspectacular acts of paying attention to the body I actually live in. I have spent the winter eating my morning gruel of oats and hemp and flax and chia, and now I am switching back to breakfast soup. This morning, it was cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, onions, a dashi-soy-mirin broth, and one lone leftover barbecue rib from the weekend that fell apart in the pot and seasoned everything with smoky, sticky fat. Hot soup in the morning feels like tending to something!
Some other things I am doing or acquiring or finally committing to:
Cool baths instead of hot ones. I have been devoted to magnesium soaks, but maybe the point is the soaking, not the temperature. Cool water in the Florida heat sounds obvious, but I am sometimes a moron.
Cold tea from the iced pitcher. I have approximately one million teas on my shelf, and I have been making them hot all winter and ignoring them all summer. No more. Brewing them strong and keeping a cold pitcher in the fridge at all times.
A cooling face mask once a week. I already do gua sha and have a whole routine, but I want to add something purely indulgent and cold to it. The Numbuzin No. 4 Icy Soothing Mask has been on my radar, and this seems like the summer to find out. No alcohol, no menthol, and “clinically tested to lower skin temperature by 8 degrees for up to thirty minutes.” I am sold on the no-menthol part alone. Ugh, menthol. So gross.
Ear seeds. I have been watching a lot of ASMR head spa content on YouTube, and the ear seed application videos (used for pain and stress? I think?) specifically have caught my attention. I want to try them.
Acupressure shoes. I spend a lot of time on my feet in the kitchen on weekends, and by the end of it, my feet ache. I read about these recently and ordered a pair. And come to think of it, maybe I need a whole-ass acupressure mat too.
The resistance bands that have been sitting in their box since I ordered them. Now is the time. My knees need the surrounding muscles to do more work and I need to actually open the box.
Cooling shorts under every dress and skirt. I have been a Thigh Society devotee for a while now, but this summer I am committing fully. I accidentally just ordered two more pairs in beige, not black, and I am trying to convince myself it makes no difference, hehehe)
Breathable pajamas. I get so hot at night! This roundup from The Strategist looks promising. I shall report back.
The paper parasols I own half a dozen of and have never actually used. Lucy requires a midafternoon walk, and that’s when the evil day star is at its most villainous!
Finding a low-impact entry point into shuffle dancing, because I want to, and I am going to figure it out, dangit.
And then there is everything else: the parts of summer that feed the mind rather than just the body, which I refuse to give up, I am just trying to be more present while I do them.
I have been working on two self-directed curricula, one in hauntology and one in Julia Kristeva and abjection, and summer feels like the right time to actually sit with them rather than just add to them.
I also recently wrote about reclaiming artmaking through zentangles and collage, and since then I have moved into watercolors, which feels like a real thing that is happening now rather than just a tentative experiment. I want to spend more time with that this summer!
I will also be deep in the work of promoting The Art of the Unknown, my fourth book, which comes out in September right at the start of spooky season, and quietly, very quietly, I have begun the early research for what comes next, which will take me back into some of the territory I first explored in The Art of the Occult and go somewhere further and deeper with it. That is all I will say about that for now.
My sisters and I binged the Scarpetta series earlier this month and have decided to go back to the beginning of Patricia Cornwell’s books and do a proper sister book club from the start (I have only read the first one, and that was like, thirty years ago.) Also is it just me or does her husband in the series sound like he’s just a humble space chicken from a backwoods asteroid?
I am also taking this opportunity to resurface some older posts. A blog entry goes up, gets its moment, and then sinks into the archive where most people never find it again. That has always felt like a waste to me, because the thinking and the feeling that went into it doesn’t expire just because the publish date is two years ago. Writing isn’t milk. It doesn’t sour and go rotten! (Unless it turns out you’re a predator or a TERF or some other lousy thing, I guess, because that deffo sours the writing.) And there are always people who weren’t here yet when something first went up, who might find it useful or funny or resonant now. An archive isn’t a graveyard. It’s a shelf, and things on shelves deserve to be pulled down and looked at again, especially when you’re standing somewhere new and the light is a little different and you can see them more clearly than you could before.
These posts were written by a version of me that was coping, or raging, or reaching for something beautiful in a season that felt hostile and gross. Looking at them now, from here, I think I can see what I was reaching for. Maybe you can too.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Fifty stars in the night sky is barely a drop in the celestial bucket of universes. Fifty grains of sand wouldn’t even cover the head of a pin (or would it? I have no sense of dimension or spacial awareness.) Fifty dollars is the paltriest of fancy cheese budgets.
But I reckon when it comes to the lifespan of a human person, fifty years is rather a lot. As of today, I have been here for all fifty of them.
How am I me being alive in this world right now? I could have been anybody, anywhere, at any time. But I ended up being me, here, now, in this life. I think about this a lot!
I was scared I was going to die at 49 like a couple of other women writers that I read about. Fuck yeah I didn’t die!! So here’s my annual birthday carousel of faces of undeath to mark the passage of another year. (In this one over on Instagram, I look like my late mother when her eyes would go all crazy, in another my hair looks super good.)
Anyhoodle, it’s my birthday, go buy one of my books, either one of the books I wrote or one in my pango shop. Or write a nice review for one of them! Or whatever, do something nice for someone! There’s lots of birthdays today, I guess!
I didn’t even know this sweet photo existed until recently, and now it is my favorite thing ever. This is from our teensy tiny wedding four years (but many hair colors!) ago.
Gosh. These two. It took these two weirdos quite a while to find each other, but I am so glad that they finally did.
I realize I’ve been posting little tidbits here on the blog lately, not many long-form pieces. Hopefully, I will get back to that soon! I’ve been a bit overwhelmed and am trying to keep it together, and while sometimes it helps to lose myself in an afternoon of writing, sometimes it is quite literally the very last thing I want to do!
Anyway, I am back from my work-related travels, and obviously, I survived, so now I can breathe again. And no doubt, the ideas, the thinking, the brainstorming, and then the writing about all of those thoughts will follow!
Let’s say you and your person have a weekend ritual of spending the mornings slow and soft and easy, sipping coffee, and reading books and listening to records.
(Sometimes, that is. Other weekend mornings, you might be out in the full sun at 10 am, 85 degrees on A FEBRUARY DAY, spending three hours raking up the oak leaves that muck up your yard.) (And yeah! I know raking leaves is not great for all the little bugs and things that like that sort of ecosystem, and I wish I could leave the yard alone to do its thing! But oak leaves are leathery and full of tannins and decompose very slowly and smother the grass, and the HOA here will literally have you thrown in the dungeon if your grass gets all nasty!)
Anyway, we we were listening to records. It’s the early hours, so you don’t want anything too jaunty or jangly, anxious, or aggressive. I love me some Colin Meloy, for example, but I don’t want to hear his nasally voice singing about ghostly Victorian children and maritime vengeance at 9 am on a Sunday. And as much as I adore Florence Welch, I can’t stomach her caterwauling (gorgeous though it may be) that early in the day.
I am having one of those low, gross occasions when I know there is something looming on the horizon that I desperately do not want to do, and so I’ve lost all motivation to do anything productive or useful, or anything good for me in any way in the meantime. And those are actually the things that will bolster me and give me the strength and mental capacity to tackle this thing!
But…that’s not the way my brain works. This is basically an extended version of the “I have an appointment/phone call/whatever at 2pm, so I am paralyzed until it’s over with” scenario, ugh. Except my thing is happening later next week, and it’s a work thing, a conference that I have to travel for, where I will have to mingle and be professional and shit. NO THANKS WE HATES IT.
(Yes, yes, in recent months I know I mentioned I was worried about losing my job, and now I am complaining that ~gasp!~ I have to do my job? Be happy you still have a job, right? Listen, I can both like a paycheck and resent every moment I spend earning that paycheck!)
(This is also why I could never quit my day job to focus solely on writing. Firstly, I just don’t “trust the universe to provide” like that, and secondly, I just like money too much, okay?!)
Anyway, when I get to feeling panicky and overwhelmed like this, I just have to remember that it helps to do one thing. Just one thing. It doesn’t even matter what that one thing is. Just something to focus on for a second; make room in my brain for just one freaking thing, and sit with it until I finish it. Usually, this clears the way for me to do the next thing. And then something else. And in the middle of it all, I start to feel a modicum of normalcy again.
So I took a photo of my new planner! (I never said it had to be a super important thing!) And now I am working on the second pass of edits for my forthcoming book. Sort of wild how it’s listed on Amazon and it’s not even properly finished yet, ha! After that, I plan to write the monthly cards for my Patreon supporters. And no doubt between all of that, I will need to take Lucy for a walk, or several, as she’s an old gal with a tiny bladder. And yes, I am doing this all between tasks for my day job, hehehe.
My brother-in-law (Yvan’s eldest brother) is in the hospital right now; he just had a massive tumor removed from behind his ear. He came out of the surgery okay, and I think they removed most of the mass, but think good thoughts for him, please! No doubt this, too, worrying and fretting about poor Tony’s noggin, is also sending me into a tizzy.
Anyhow, what a useless braindump of a blog post this was, right? But! Typing out a rambling little blog post gave me something to focus on for a few minutes, so maybe not! I guess it is on to the next thing…!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Acquiring a villainous little blanket-stealing gremlin wasn’t on my list of 2026 goals, but the universe is a wily rascal sometimes.
This is Lucy. She is my in-laws’ little guy but they are struggling to care for her, time and attention-wise, as their health continues to decline. She’s been staying with us off and on over the years when they traveled , but as of this morning it has officially become a more permanent situation. Lucy is a grand old dame herself, I think she’s 13-14! Any readers or friends who have elderly puppy knowledge, stories, whatever, I would love to hear about them, please share!
I have never considered myself a “dog person” (but I have also never considered myself a jazz/bath/crafty person, and look what’s happened! More on some of that stuff soon.) So what do I know, anyway?
We’re having our annual (though not always guaranteed) spate of cold weather – some nights dipping into the 20s – and I am luxuriating in the opportunity for coziness. Florida doesn’t give us much chance for proper bundling, for heavy blankets and hot baths that steam up the bathroom, for the kind of evenings where you sink into soft clothes and don’t emerge until morning. I will say, though, that Jacksonville (being a little further north than where we were previously near Daytona) seems to provide a few more chilly days? But anyway, when the cold arrives, I seize it completely.
Here are five things making these chilly nights perfect.
BED LINENS
I finally curated the perfect combination of colors and textures for my bed, and climbing into it every night feels deeply satisfying. Earthy pastels – sage and plum and slate, colors I don’t have a proper name for but that feel grounded and calm without being boring.
The linen sheets have that particular weight and coolness that only gets better with washing, the kind that makes you want to slip between them even in summer. The quilt has pick stitching, tiny running stitches creating geometric patterns across the surface, texture you can feel when you run your hand over it. I’d been looking for something with a sashiko vibe, and this is…kinda it? Another blanket, because I am a bit extra: a paisley handblock-print cotton quilt. and the gauzy duvet on top, light but warm, slightly wrinkled in that French country-house way.
Without trying to sound dramatic, or like I’ve cured cancer or something, it took years to get here, trying different combinations, replacing things one piece at a time until everything coordinated without looking coordinated. Now, when I pull back the covers at night, the whole setup looks exactly right and feels even better, substantial without being heavy, soft without being precious.
LIGHTING
These plug into the wall and look like little candle sconces, flickering LED flames that cast warm shadows up the wall. They’re not just for night; I leave them on during gray afternoons too, that gentle glow making everything feel softer around the edges.
I also have a diffuser/dehumidifier (seen in the featured image for this blog post, on my nightstand) that I’ve pretty much totally repurposed. I never use it for humidity or essential oils; instead, I run the white noise function, a droning, celestial chanting sound that my brain finds deeply soothing, and keep the changing color mood lighting on all day. It cycles through soft glows, lavender fading into pale blue into soft amber, shifting the room’s atmosphere without being too bright or wild.
The sconces give just enough light to move around at night without jarring you awake, and together with the diffuser’s slowly changing colors, the rooms feel like they’re breathing.
COLORING BOOKS
It took me a long time to get into coloring. The idea of it made me stupidly anxious, all that pressure to stay in the lines, to make good color choices, to not mess it up. But I kind of get it now, the appeal of structured creativity where you don’t have to generate ideas from nothing. The Flower Year by Leila Duly is such a treat for the eyes, full of intricate Victorian-style etchings of flowers and birds and butterflies, each page different enough that it never feels repetitive. There are full-page illustrations and double-page spreads, little collections of single flowers with their botanical names, quotes about the seasons scattered throughout.
I work on it in the evenings, a few pages at a time, and it quiets my brain in ways that reading sometimes doesn’t. Although funny enough, I listen to horror novel audiobooks while I am doing it, hehehe!
COMFY EVENING CLOTHES
The softest greige hoodie from the Asheville Botanical Garden, heavy Adidas sweatpants that are two sizes too big, and my favorite socks in the world: the Girlfriend Socks from Le Bon Shoppe. They’re thick and cozy, crew length, perfect for padding around the house, and I think I have every color they sell.
This is not a pretty, glamorous, or sexy evening getup, but I truly do not give a shit. When the temperature drops, I want to disappear into soft fabric and not think about how I look.
HOT BATHS
I wrote about this recently, how I became a bath person seemingly overnight, how the scalding water makes me think of that Russian plumber’s observation about women preparing for Hell. The ritual of it has become essential to my evenings. Candles, magnesium flakes, onsen essential oils, bath milk, water as hot as I can stand it. I emerge red as a lobster, steaming, and immediately into those oversized sweatpants.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I am feeling a little self-conscious about everything I wrote yesterday (although I really appreciate everyone’s comments! It’s both weirdly depressing and heartening to know there’s so many of us in that same boat) but anyhow, I thought I’d share some other stuff real quick so that won’t be the most recent post on this blog for people to see. Silly, I know. But it will make me feel better!
We took a little trip to Asheville this past weekend. My sister was doing a Friendsgiving type thing, and though we hadn’t initially planned on going anywhere for the holiday, plans changed! One thing about me and travel is that I get weirdly excited when I see the stores in our fridge dwindling, and I get to think up creative (though sometimes bizarre) uses for our remaining meals so that we eat everything up and nothing goes bad while we are gone. There were a lot of strange curries on the table before we hit the road! Kidney bean and cabbage curry sounds a little off-putting (and farty), but it worked!
I packed us some snacks in the form of tuna onigiri, roasted Japanese sweet potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and apples because I was trying to ensure that we didn’t eat too much junky stuff while we we traveling. Plus, I have an inner snob who thinks “…am I …BETTER than everyone??” when I eat an apple instead of gas station food. I’m not proud of that. But it’s true.
We stayed in an adorable cottage at the top of a terrifyingly twisty driveway with instructions from the hosts to not leave food in the car with the car doors unlocked…because the local bears have figured out how to open the car doors!
We didn’t really have time to do much of anything, but we were able to spend some time at the Arboretum and find more Thomas Dambo trolls (we saw them on Vashon Island late this past summer, too!) We also sped through the beautiful bonsai garden, and even typing that out feels like a crime. But we really only had about an hour at our disposal, and we had to be brisk and efficient about it!
One thing that was paramount was taking a moment to drop by the Dripolator and get a T-shirt. I’m not much for logos and such, but theirs is so cool, and I’ve been obsessed with the idea of grabbing a t-shirt from them for years. But anytime we are in the area, I always forget. Not this time, though!
I arrived home to a beauteous package! I know it’s a whole six months away, but I needed the floweriest frock for my evening with Florence (and also an audience of several thousand, I guess, but I like to pretend she’s just singing to me.) I will pair it with beads and a velvet choker and my stompiest of boots.
I sobbed to “What the Water Gave Me” when I turned 40, watching her whirl and careen madly across the stage. I plan on screaming this time a decade later, loud enough to break time backwards and forwards, loud enough for every version of myself there ever was to hear.
What am I screaming about? Everything, nothing? Maybe just the fact that I got a really pretty dress?
– I am still watching Alien Earth, albeit very slowly. I think I like it, but I’d love to know the general opinion of the show. Did people love it? Were they mad about it? I don’t really care for how the alien actually kinda looks like a person in an ill-fitting alien suit. It somehow looks too human to me?
…okay, so I guess that’s it. Like I said, just a few tidbits!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have shared, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Many years ago, I wrote on this blog how I loathed bathing (because I hate being wet! Not because I hate being clean!) But a strange thing occurred toward the end of October. I felt myself longing for the tub. And not even a tub filled with bubbles and bath bombs and all of the frou-frou paraphernalia that I sometimes use to trick myself into the whole moist, soggy production, but just a tub full of clean, clear hot water. I’m not sure what I can attribute this to; it’s so unexpected! I eventually added a scoop or two of the bath flakes I had sitting around, and before I knew it, I had emptied the little bag, so I bought a big bulk container! Anyway, for the past three weeks I have been having a little bath every night and it’s really lovely.
Most of our garden died this summer. The eggplants and peppers got infested, the sunflowers were constantly droopy, none of our zennias or dahlias even bloomed! We are still getting a lot of this fuschia/magenta/scarlet flowering vine, though, so I am just madly clipping it every day and sticking it in every vase I own. The woman who used to live in this house (she still lives in the neighborhood, and her sister lives right across the street from us) told us it was called Love-Lies-Bleeding and that she planted it where she buried her cat. So one, there are pet remains in our backyard somewhere, which is fine I guess, but two, I don’t think she is correct, because none of the images look like this plant when I try to google it. Do you recognize it?
Two little guys that did not perish over the summer are Patty and Selma, my pitcher plant and venus flytrap! I got them from the Lowes garden section and they looked pretty awful when I brought them home. Pale and shriveled and sickly. I read that they like it boggy and sunny, and that you shouldn’t repot them in amended soil or give them tap water. They want soil with no nutrients and water with no minerals or extra stuff, so basically rainwater or distilled water. So I just left them in the vessels the came in, put them in a pie plate and left them out in the garden, let them get rained on, and hoped for the best. And six months later, they are doing great! The Selmas insides turned a nice fleshy pink, and Patty’s pitchers are now threaded with veins, and they both continuously sprout new growth. Finally, a plant I have not failed!
When we moved into this house 3.5 years ago, one of the things we knew we were going to have to tackle was the back screened porch, which was old and leaky and falling apart. Late summer we finally got the contractors in to tear the whole thing down, and the rebuilding has been happening in agoninzingly slow increments. First the concrete slab was poured, then the walls and ceiling went up the next month, and finally yesterday we got the glass windows and door. Whew!
We obviously need to do something for the floor (like what? I don’t know. I just know we do!) and get some furniture, but I am really bad at decorating or even envisioning how a space should look, so I need some help! Any ideas for me? All I know for sure is that Yvan wants to put a rowing machine in there somewhere, and that I desperately want a COSMIC EGG CHAIR. So definitely share some inspiration if you’re good at this kind of thing!
I’ve somehow picked up a nasty cold this week. How?! I don’t go anywhere! So I’ve been taking it easy, listening to music (pictured here: A Blessed Unrest from The Parlour Trick) (not pictured but also and of course I’m madly, incessantly listening to Everybody Scream just like all the rest of you are I bet) and reading and drinking lots and lots of tea.
Not actual tea, if we’re being precise; this particular concoction is a combination of dried lemon and orange slices steeped in boiling water with a dollop of the cranberry compote that my father-in-law made, and strained into this marvelous little tea set that a friend surprised me with.
Sometimes a gal’s gotta get herself some ridiculous treats. Sometimes it’s a cursed toy sold at a Mexican grocery store counter, sometimes it’s jams and syrups and chocolates flavored with lavender and rose.
Sometimes it’s a new phone case with a beaded little wrist strap and a strange mantra that your camera won’t even focus on because it’s so silly. “the btack lulips nothing and the charm charmnight queen cama.” Indeed! Indeed.
Other things of note…
– I finally watched Frankenstein! That malachite dress, gosh! I made a cocktail for the occasion, which I’ve named “Strangely Are Our Souls Constructed.” With a Japanese Whiskey, Lillet, Amaro, Maraschino liqueur, and a dash of absinthe, it was appropriately…pretty monstrous.
– I thought I might be brave and buy a cropped top. But I didn’t take into account that being a short-torsoed person just makes this a regular top.
– I made a good soup! With pork belly, white onion, lotus root, and kobocha squash, flavored with dashi, mirin, soy sauce, and miso.
-Have you been hearing about this “personal curriculum” trend? I love the idea of creating your own little structured study plan for topics you’re curious about…like designing your own course with books, videos, and assignments, instead of just randomly reading or scrolling. I’m already putting some ideas together for my winter and spring semester!
– I love hacks and shortcuts, things like “you won’t believe what this 60-second X thing will do for your body/mental health/finances/whatever!” I like doing things that feel good for me, but I don’t want to spend too much time on them because fuck that! So I am definitely going to give this 60-second jumping routine a try. What are your quickie good things?
-I sold a whopping 20 bottles of perfume from my perfume collection! Many thanks to everyone who reached out and helped me pare down. I am trying not to fill those empty spaces back in too soon, or at all…but…there is a perfume I have my eye on. I sniffed a sample of Nightchild from Epichron, and it smells like a Finnish heavy metal song. Seriously, it’s the olfactory equivalent of these sounds.
Anyhoodle! I am sick and snotty, and I hear the bathtub calling my name, so that’s it for now!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I watched one random video about some Japanese stationery awards and became immensely and immediately influenced. You know how it goes – thirty minutes later I’m adding things to online shopping carts like I’m preparing for the apocalypse and the only currency will be perfect gel pens and washi tape.
The haul arrived, all pristine and beautiful in its carefully designed packaging. Kire-Na highlighters in sweet colors that made my heart do a fluttering thing. An adorable letter set so aesthetically pleasing I wanted to frame it instead of use it.
And then came the familiar paralysis!
I become scared to use the nice things I buy. It’s all so pretty and I start fretting about doing it wrong or stupid or placing a sticker in a not-exactly-perfect spot. The Japanese stationery sits there looking at me accusingly while I continue using my beat-up old pens because what if I waste the good stuff on something crappy and dumb?
This is, objectively, insane behavior. I could get hit by a truck or fall off a craggy cliff or get kidnapped and stuffed into a hyperbaric chamber for four years, and I’d have so many regrets about not using those cool highlighters. (Also, yes, we just finished watching Department Q, which explains the oddly specific kidnapping scenario.)
Anyway, I’d written about this exact tendency before in a post called “Do The Fucking Thing, Little Sarah” that I never actually shared because it was over the summer and I wasn’t posting to social media, but …also because I was scared it wasn’t perfect enough. The irony was not lost on me!
So last weekend I decided to break the pattern. Sort of.
I bought a big ass water bottle specifically to showcase my Rebecca Chaperon sticker collection – accumulated over months of backing her Patreon – because hydration shmydration, this was always about the stickers. But instead of letting them languish in their pristine sheets forever, I enlisted Yvan to help place them. This way I got the satisfaction of actually using them without the anxiety of potentially messing up the placement myself.
Hey, baby steps count too!
I also grabbed one of those beautiful green highlighters and marked a passage in Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, a bit about how “futuristic” music has become just another retro style, how we’re stuck thinking Kraftwerk still sounds like the future even though it’s as dated now as big band jazz was in the ’70s. Fisher’s pointing out how cultural time has “folded back on itself” instead of moving forward, how we’ve lost that sense of linear progression and ended up in this weird simultaneity where decades blur together. Which sort of felt profound? Something about being trapped in aesthetic loops, about how innovation calcifies into nostalgia. The world did not end. The highlighter did not judge my choice. The book survived the interaction.
These are small victories, but they are good and they matter! Every time I choose to use something instead of hoarding it “for later” or “when I deserve it” or “when the moment is perfect,” I’m practicing a different way of being in the world. One where I get to enjoy the things I bought to enjoy, where the pleasure is in the using rather than the having.
The stickers look excellent on the water bottle. The highlighted sentence glows warmly and weirdly on the page. And somewhere in my brain, little Sarah is doing a tiny victory boogie (a real small one because Sarah doesn’t actually dance) because she finally did a fucking thing.
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