Blog

Blog, Brain Food

The Talk Beneath the Talk

A nice thing: attended my first Journal Club last week to hear Ezra give a talk about credit card points and airline travel (MORE FUN THAN IT SOUNDS). Journal Club launched in 2011 when a group of Cambridge-based grad students wanted a place to come together and discuss their research. They’ve now been running bi-weekly events for 14(!) years and expanded their purview to include talks like:

  • The Politics of the Hat
  • Inca Bureaucracy
  • The Jack-O’-Lantern: History, Culture, Practice
  • PCR Tests
  • Vexillology and YOU!
  • Sea Chanteys: work songs of sailors, dockworkers, and fishers
  • Consider the Owl
  • Horse Theft
  • Using Shadow Puppetry in Environmental Education

And, of course:

  • spoooooooooooky nature

Where have these people been all my life?

In the half-hour before Ezra started his talk we had a bit of a meet and greet, and I mentioned something about making books and one of the organizers got excited about having that talk on the roster. I can do a self-publishing talk in my sleep at this point, but I still felt a bit of the old rush. I do love to get up in front of a crowd and wave my hands.

As I listened to Ezra wax rhapsodic about aviation history, however, I started to think of something else.

In 2017 I attended PWL Camp at the Kickstarter offices in Brooklyn. It was an un-conference, which is basically a roll-your-own event where folks propose panels and workshops throughout the weekend and mash together a schedule in real time. I learned about people’s favorite kitchen implements (THE FISH SPATULA), third culture kids (giving me language I’d never had before to discuss my upbringing), and fine press printing, but the talk I’ve never forgotten was “Are you worried about your parents? Me too” by Libby Brittain.

Libby was 25 when she started caring for her mom, who had early-onset Alzheimer’s and was too feisty to stay in a memory care facility. I had never met another person in their 20s who was so open about the experience of caring for a parent. PWL took place a few months before the fateful Thomas Fire Evacuation Debacle, which triggered my dad’s official dementia diagnosis, but I’d already been worrying about him for years.

I accepted my role as a caregiver in fits and starts, but I know that talk was a turning point. The room was packed. It was the first time I’d really grappled with the idea that everyone will face these questions sooner or later. Even if you don’t have biological parents in your life, you’ll have elders. If you don’t have elders, you’ll have your own aging and mortality to contend with. In disability justice the term temporarily able-bodied or TAB encompasses this truth.1

I remember less about the contents of Libby’s talk than I do the feeling of being in the room. It turns out she went on to run a newsletter during the early pandemic called Our Parents, Ourselves, which I can’t believe I missed at the time.2 I’m trying to pace myself going through the archives today, but wow there’s gold in there. (This review of a book on dementia I’d never heard of about erasure and darkness and rewriting the narrative of memory loss as loss of self? GIVE IT TO ME.)

All these threads came to the surface during Ezra’s talk and I realized that what I really want to get into in public these days is care work and grief and coping with a universal human experience that people want to talk about, but often can’t. (I scratched a similar itch talking about money in 2016 and imposter syndrome in 2018. Turns out I’m always trying to illuminate the thing that feels big but unspoken at any given moment in my life.)

This led to a poll on Patreon (you can vote in it! I hope you do!) about what elements of caregiving people might most want to explore. For all my jawboning about the ubiquity of this experience, I’ll admit I was still startled by the number of comments. People are always already doing this work in their own lives—that’s what makes this such an electric thread of curiosity.

Anyway: Journal Club was fun. The next one’s about rockets. And I’m betting sooner or later you’ll see me on the roster getting ready to talk about the ins and outs of care work. As I read this morning in my friend Kat’s newsletter (quoting Douglas Rushkoff, via a tipoff from Rosie Spinks):

When you can’t be an agent of change, aim to be an agent of care.

  1. A good elaboration/complication of the phrase via Laurie Toby Edison’s blog. ↩︎
  2. For someone writing a newsletter from the current trenches, Roger Mckeever’s is a great choice. ↩︎
Activism, Brain Food

Powerful > Perfect

The mushy middle can be too welcoming to the right, but the puritanical part of the left has a perpetual unwelcoming committee for people who are not in perfect agreement or all up on the terminology and stuff. If organizing consists of building movements through finding common ground and motivating people with a sense of confidence and possibility, this is pretty much a tactic of disorganizing, of coalition prevention and driving people away by making them fearful of getting anything even slightly wrong. It can be a conscious technique of sabotage, but I believe it’s most often an unconscious technique by people who think the assignment is to be perfect rather than to be powerful. By powerful I mean achieving your goals, realizing your hopes, and that’s most often done incrementally, imperfectly, and by working with people who don’t agree with you about everything. Maybe getting them to agree with you through an exercise of skill and even compassion.

Rebecca Solnit bringing the perfect coda to yesterday’s post via her newsletter, Meditations in an Emergency. Makes me think of Mariame Kaba talking about “the Lefts” during that For the People call I attended back in December. It was such a small shift in language but it did so much to embody the kind of thinking Solnit calls for here.

You don’t have to join people but maybe you have to be ready to welcome them when they’re ready to join you.

Activism, Brain Food, Ojai

Hopscotch

Every day when I sign out of our company slack, I post a moon emoji to signal ‘goodnight’. I’m careful to choose the actual correct moon emoji for the time: 🌑 🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘, as is appropriate to the day. I don’t know why, except I like the idea of incepting my coworkers with some kind of moon-sense. But for my site, I wanted something more specific to my spot in the world – and the moon is a global phenomenon.

Let’s start here with a jaunty one-footed hop: Matt Kirkland, quoted above, has addressed this desire for a localized website feature by building an automatically-rotating playlist of bird calls and songs based on current migration patterns in his region. To this I say: !!!

I have never loved anything more. (Also his reading blog? Swoon.)

A moody egret at the OVLC meadows preserve a couple weeks ago. The Cedar Waxwings have yet to show up this season, but I'm holding out hope.

Next hop, all in: I’m a big fan of the moon.

I’ve been running a space via Patreon for the past year and change called Nü Mün Creative Club, which helps folks carve out two hours of dedicated monthly time to attend to what truly matters to them. Wherever you fall on lunar wooga wooga stuff, the fact remains: new moon time is DARK. It’s secret and quiet and a good time to focus on things I care about that need to be just for me. But doing that together? It rules. We get to have our secrets in concert.

Funny, then, that it felt so much harder to launch a similar Community Hour (also via Patreon, but free) for people to gather on Zoom at the other end of the lunar cycle. Launching something full moon-adjacent is scarier because it’s light. You gotta be visible.

One of the cards from "What She Knows," the deck I drew for myself in secret during the Pandemic. The words "This is who you are” drawn around an illustration of a lit lantern.

I’m trying to illuminate the people who spend time in this online space I’ve created—to rest a little more weight on the ties that hold us to each other. It’s important work, but the kind of thing that’s taken a back seat during a season when I need people who are close enough to hang out with my dad of an evening so he doesn’t fall over.

Sideways hop on a tenuous single foot: Matt’s post also introduced me to Low-tech Magazine‘s SOLAR-POWERED WEBSITE.

Because our load (the server) has a rather constant power use, during the day our battery meter reflects the local solar conditions. If the panel receives full sun, the voltage will raise above 13V, coloring the whole website in yellow. However, if it gets cloudy, the battery meter will decrease and the blue background is revealed. During the night, the battery meter reflects the storage capacity of the battery accurately.

When the voltage of the battery drops below 12V, and the whole page is coloured in blue, the solar charge controller shuts down the system and the website goes offline. It will come back when the panel receives full sun again.

I’ve been on the hunt for something as clear and useful as their explainer on building small solar power systems for ages. Instant bookmark.

A further hop-skip in this direction: I totally forgot that I wrote an essay for the inaugural issue of The Disconnect, a magazine you have to turn your wi-fi off in order to read.

Returning to the main business with both feet on the next square: I’m feeling the tension Matt names between global and local phenomena in my online habits these days. Ojai and its surrounding unincorporated areas are home to a little over 10,000 people. That’s about the number of folks who follow me on Instagram or (RIP) Twitter, and realistically a very small percentage of those people live anywhere nearby.

But I care a lot about what happens here! I wish I could bring all my cool internet pals down to my studio for a drawing night, or meet up at the newly-reopened Ojai Playhouse for a free screening, or have a community picnic at the park. This is something living in Portland was pretty good for—I could throw a wide invite net onto social media and reliably have a crew gather for An Event.

The Ojai Playhouse, a Spanish-style building whose marquee says "Every day, once a day, give yourself a present." There's a pride flag in one of the poster windows.

I’m working on building that network here, and it’s coming along, but it’s different. It’s always different everywhere you go.

(Maybe come get your portrait drawn for free next month at Night Bart’s?)

A one-footed leap to the next tenuous link in this thought cloud: I’ve seen a handful of links to Elise Granata‘s newsletter in the past week and finally clicked through this morning and oh wow, what a crush-worthy human. This one about “7 ideas to jumpstart community practice” is riffing on the local web-weaving theme. I’m grinning and nodding along to bulletin boards and email lists and all the ways beyond social media we can find out what’s going on around us. (I have yet, however, to find a good substitute for Pete‘s rainfall gauge reportage on Instagram.)

Her essay on Becoming a High Agency Person is singing in harmony with Marge and I love it:

For the purpose of this piece, I’m thinking about agency on the (seemingly) smallest scale. I experience agency when I sew a button back onto my sweater that has been dangling for months. When I tidy up my clothes chair that I have been meaning to tidy for months. When I mail a friend a letter…that I have been meaning to mail for months. (There is a theme and the theme is “for months”.)

It is desiring something and acting on that desire so that it leaves your consciousness and now exists alongside you in the real world.

Agency occurs when: the gap between the idea and the realization of the idea is as small as possible.

A sketch of Lucy in the window to her studio with some illustrated characters and a sign saying "The cartoonist is in"
A photo of Lucy's actual studio window with a real sign saying "The cartoonist is in." There's also a drawing of her saying "Come say hello!"

^ That’s the mock-up and realization of my studio window display, which has only grown more elaborate as time’s gone by.

Another hop, more certain now, nearing the end of the line: A link in Elisa’s newsletter leads me to Garrett Bucks and the Barnraisers Project and this list of “Thirty lonely but beautiful actions you can take right now which probably won’t magically catalyze a mass movement against Trump but that are still wildly important.”

I get halfway through before I realize these things are the sign I need to make the thing I want to make for my neighbors—a little zine introducing myself and trying to build out my map of who lives where in my immediate surroundings. Our street has no sidewalks. Traffic is fast, and most places are set back from the road. Hence: no trick-or-treating when I was a kid, no cul-de-sac games of basketball in the road. But I’ve met a couple people while dog-sitting (a dog walk is the perfect opportunity to strike up a conversation with a neighbor) and I’m curious. I want to know who else calls this road home.

A page of notes on creating a zine for the neighborhood.

The questions that kept stopping me were things like “What if nobody writes back?” “How can I be sure I’m reaching out to people who are aligned with me?” “Should I use a burner number?” “Do I need to make an online component?” “What if I just end up reinventing NextDoor with all the NIMBY racism that entails?”

Mailing a zine doesn’t require answers to any of those things. Not really. It’s an excuse to do something that might spark surprise and delight in the people around me. It’s laying groundwork for something to come. I want to trust that the right people will find each other; will find me.

Last square, both feet: My new friend asks “So…what are your dreams?” as we sit under the awning at Rainbow Bridge with a tumultuous downpour flooding the streets.

I take a deep breath

and begin.

A scrub jay perched in a bush against a cloudy sky.
Brain Food

More Words Than I Thought I’d Write About Email on a Wednesday

Chris writes a blog about email. I like it because it’s generally brief and thoughtful and often highlights the ways email stands out from the current batch of hijacked startup hellscapes. He also poses good questions.

His recent post on lingering emails had me looking at my inbox with renewed attention, because I am absolutely in this picture and I do not like it. My email service, Hey, has a couple handy containers for messages like these. There’s a Set Aside stack and a Reply Later stack and a Bubble Up stack, but they all tend to become graveyards for lingering emails over time.1

After conducting a brief and harrowing survey, here are the four main kinds of emails that linger in my inbox:

  1. Someone has taken the time to write me a kind and thoughtful email and I believe writing a worthy reply is going to involve significant time and emotional energy so I must hang onto it until those ideal conditions present themselves (otherwise known as “never”)
  2. Someone has emailed asking me for something that I know I need to say no to, but I hate disappointing people so I will solve the problem by saying nothing and feeling guilty about it until enough time has elapsed that the opportunity/obligation becomes irrelevant (feel a lot of shame about this one)
  3. Someone has sent me something I want to read/listen to/watch later (email-as-bookmark)
  4. Someone has made the mistake of including “How are you?” in their email which brings the chance of a reply down to zero because how can I possibly encapsulate what it’s like to be cleaning up literal human feces on a daily basis while also noticing birds and organizing mutual aid efforts and petting cats and kissing my dad on the head and growing wildflowers and trying, oh lord how I’m trying, to finish my graphic novel?

The oldest email currently sitting in my Set Aside pile is from December 17th 2020 (Matt’s lovely year-end recap. Given that I attended his actual IRL wedding last year, maybe the time for a reply has passed). The oldest one in the Reply Later pile is from September 3rd, 2020 (Tara recapping a rambling phone conversation we had about potential collaborations. Again, we have published not one, but two books together since then, so I think the intention of that email became reality with no help from my correspondence habits.).2

Looking at these feels a bit like revisiting old to-do lists and finding that somehow, magically, various items that felt looming at the time have just Gotten Done. I’m also struck by what a lovely feed it makes. Here are people who wrote replies to blog posts or newsletters or Patreon updates or comics. People who asked me whether I’d ever be reprinting my sparkly nautical temporary tattoos. People who offered their own caregiving stories. People who sent memories of my dad.

Are these really the messages I cast aside so I can pounce on contracts from shipping companies?

The latter are certainly more straightforward. They have urgency—an end point—whereas correspondence is just…ongoing. (How many times have I complained about finding replies-to-my-replies springing up like weeds the day after answering a bunch of old messages?) But I didn’t remember there being quite so many Emails from Humans in the lingering pile. That startled me.

My avoidance meant I hadn’t taken advantage of Chris’s idea that “maybe letting it sit there and having my brain re-visit it periodically is what it needs.” The stack of emails remained unopened. I became intimately familiar with the first two subject lines, but even they faded into blank mental space over time. I wasn’t giving myself a chance to ruminate.

Actually opening the stack and skimming its contents has generated a song: there are other humans out there. You’re all connected. You have found, and will continue to find each other.

And suddenly I’m thinking about a discussion point in Jocelyn’s course, CHANNEL, where she brought up an interview between Ezra Klein and Annie Murphy Paul. Paul is, in turn, talking about Andy Clark and the Extended Mind Theory and his belief that we are “intrinsically loopy creatures.”

Something about our biological intelligence benefits from being rotated in and out of internal and external modes of cognition, from being passed among brain, body, and world.

This is a loop! I’m looping back through my email and resurfacing things from long ago. How valuable! Remember what you cared about in 2020? There were so many threads floating through the air during that season. What do you notice, looking at them now, four years down the line?

This practice is definitely going in the “Synthesis” corner of this poster I made for myself back in 2023:

A hand-drawn poster of Lucy's practices for Ritual, Connection, Collection, and Synthesis.

Thanks, Chris.

  1. Okay, actually the Bubble Up one is pretty good because it resurfaces emails when I need them and means they aren’t cluttering up the joint in the interim. ↩︎
  2. I only switched to using Hey in 2020. If this were my Gmail account the oldest messages would be even more ancient. I certainly didn’t start this habit during the Pandemic. ↩︎
Blog

Supplemental Video

Uploading this time-lapse video here because somehow it didn’t show up correctly on a recent Patreon post about small gifts from invested parties and how much they keep me motivated to work on the book.

Still thinking a lot about how Patreon and my site (and my newsletter!) all relate to one another. My online ecosystem is smaller than it once was, and certainly a lot more under my own control, but that also means I’m operating without the feedback mechanism of social media. When there are no likes, replies, or reposts, it can feel liberating, but also a bit like everything is just waving in the wind. The quality of contact I get now is much higher (a longer conversation over Zoom with a Patron, or a postcard in the PO box from a reader), but it doesn’t always help me understand where to focus my attention.

Quite likely this is good. We’ve seen what happens when people chase those kinds of metrics—how platforms shape our behavior and encourage a certain flavor of posting. But that brain circuitry is also pretty hard to escape. We all want to be patted on the head. We all want to know we are part of the tribe.

On a more practical level, Patreon is the cornerstone of my livelihood. Its growth enables my creative exploration and financial stability, but I always feel best when I’m not focused on growing it from a place of need. Pulling back from Twitter and Instagram (and not replacing them with any of the other platforms cropping up like mushrooms after rain) has absolutely impacted the number of new people finding and joining Patreon. Those avenues functioned as advertising for The Thing I Was Trying to Do. There was a pipeline. But it’s the sour tang of advertising (both as a creator and a consumer) that has led so many people to get off these platforms in the first place.

I had to write my first CV for an application this past week, having previously relied on a résumé for most professional opportunities. It’s a funny thing being both too artistic for an academic CV and too Adventure Cartoonist-y for an artistic CV. You gotta mash a lot of stuff together. When I was Googling around trying to find links to past interviews or news articles or other items that might be a good fit for sections of the document, I kept getting stymied by my own SEO. Page after page of results from my own blog. The sort of thing that I companies are probably training specialists in as we speak. I’ve never taken a class on SEO optimization or made it a deliberate part of my “strategy” (there is no strategy on the site, I love that about it), but I do love tags and I do love linking to things betwixt and between my own thoughts and it turns out that behavior is a cornerstone of taking over your own search rankings.

So where is that thing for Patreon? Where is the behavior I already enjoy that will help me build a stable financial future?

Ojai

What’s That Sound

Showing a friend around town always gives me a chance to survey the current bulletin board ecosystem. The Land Conservancy is back to hosting volunteer restoration days on Wednesdays and Saturdays! Kids can go practice reading aloud to a dog named Radiant at the library! But the one that really caught my eye on this circuit announced the start of Ojai’s very own radio station.

Ojai Community Radio Logo 99.3 FM

Ojai Community Radio held their first fundraising event last weekend and are currently looking for donations of equipment, nonprofit expertise, and construction. I’ve got their web stream playing over the speakers right now. Someone named Gabe is queuing up a series of songs about railroads. There are no ads.

I’ve never been so happy to have cancelled my Spotify subscription.

Experiments

❧ Prompt Update: Haunting

I’ve just pushed a new prompt out to The Right Number, the confessional voicemail box I’ve been running through my phone since 2020. People are still calling and leaving lovely responses to my last prompt update from June of 2024, but it felt time for a change. This month I’m reflecting on a variation of the following:

What might happen if we remember this house has two doors, and that if we throw wide the front one, the thoughts that come will very often exit through the back of their own accord?

Dial 1-503-673-6267 to hear the prompt and leave an answer. Messages don’t go anywhere aside from into my ears. Think of it as a very personal social media post with an audience of one.

If you’d like to be notified reliably when new prompts appear, you can subscribe to the newsletter or RSS feed.

Blog

Clean Sweep

I’m watching in awe as this tool (a Chrome-based browser add-on) downloads all tagged photos of me ever posted to Facebook so I can archive them on my own external hard drives. Been putting this off for years because a huge chunk of my life documentation from 2007-2013ish only existed in photos taken by other people and it felt daunting to get them all in one place that I could own and access, but NO MORE. If you’re also in the process of trying to get your digital shit in order, give it a whirl.

(n.b. the plugin will download all tagged images without date information attached, due to how Facebook handles image exports. Tom Cleveland, who built it, offers a one-time paid service that connects the correct metadata to your photos for seven bucks, which will then work for all future image downloads as well. I’m a fan of paying creators for tools I find useful, so I’m opting into that, but it also feels like a good thing to be aware of on the way in so you can make an informed choice.)

Anyway here I am at the dog Bellwood park eleven years ago.

Lucy panting like a dog beside a sign that reads “Trinity-Bellwoods Park. Designated area for unleashed Bellwoods.”
(Thanks for taking this photo and also fixing tag displays on the website, Dave.)
Rambles

Ramble #35

We got owls! We got frogs! We got THE MOON.

Yes, it’s another Ramble, coming to you live from the Meadows Preserve in Ojai, California.

For those of you new to the practice: I record these walk-and-talks every so often as a way to keep track of where my head’s at. If you’d rather read the dispatch, there’s a transcript attached to the end of this Patreon post, but Ramble #35 has particularly nice ambient noises, so I recommend popping on your headphones and maybe taking a walk of your own while you tune in.

Discussed in this Ramble:

Visual addenda:

Two tote bags full of sketchbooks

My sketchbook hoard! Twenty-two years of drawing!

A pencil sketch of a woman with dragon wings and a vaguely medieval tunic

The girl with dragon wings that Sadie requested. (Lord it has been too long since I thought about how to draw dragon wings.)

Two creatures sitting across the table from each other. One is saying "We can" and the other is saying "go."

I asked Sadie’s younger sister if she’d draw me a tiny book about two squirrels named Nutty and Chewy, who were the frequent subject of improvised stories between me and my mum on long drives. I LOVE this drawing because Zina and I play a game where one person starts by saying “What if” and the other says “we” and the first person says another word and you keep going back and forth until you’ve devised a plan. GITA DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THIS, but these squirrels are absolutely us.

A single line running down a sketchbook page with a tiny figure drawn below it

My other favorite thing was this page from Sadie’s sketchbook, which baffled me until I realized that this is AN ACTUAL HAIR from her friend Abby, which she GLUED INTO HER SKETCHBOOK and then embellished with a portrait. Absolute genius. 10/10. Love it.

Many sincere thanks to my Patrons who keep me honest with this practice. A lot of this walk was about building momentum, a head of steam, a runway. I can feel it in my bones today. I sat down and wrote a twenty-page letter to an old shipmate who reached out from the mists of time to say hello!! To be clear: I have mail on my desk from 2022. This letter arrived Monday. No idea what’s gotten into me.

But we surf the wave when it comes around.

Brain Food

The Principle of the Thing

Really digging this illustrated list of values on the Worx Printing website, inspired by Spain’s Mondragon Co-ops. Gotta make this stuff sexy!

Inter-Cooperation Just as workers benefit from working cooperatively in a business, so too can co-ops benefit from working cooperatively with other co-ops. Such an interdependent system of co-ops allows each co-op to create and share common resources such as financing, research and development, and training, to support each other through cross-training, job placement, and capital infusions during down-turns and up-turns in local and global markets.

(And while I’m here, may I recommend Brick City Stickers if you’re looking for a Union shop to replace the wretched Sticker Mule? I also use—and love—Sticker Giant for my various boat-y designs.)