Honking into the Void, June 2025
Welcome to June! I wrote the following posts in May:
2025 Week 21 Notes: Surprise hug-by-proxy
🗓️ // 19 — 25 May 2025
- 🫂 If you are ever having a really bad time of it, I hope you have a friend who texts your partner to synchronize a surprise hug-by-proxy to cheer you up. I have a friend like that, and I'm so lucky.
- 🌹 Another friend and I took a walk in Irvington, where everything is in bloom! It made me miss living in Northeast Portland, with all the sidewalks and restaurants and happy dogs. We walked around and caught up after several months, during which she experienced several major life events all at the same time and yet remains completely uncynical about her circumstances. I have a lot to learn from her.
- 🥘 It's always a pleasure to share a favorite restaurant with someone. This week, FunkyPlaid and I shared Mediterranean Exploration Company with an out-of-town guest. My favorite dish there is hamachi crudo with smoked eggplant. 🤤 When we were too stuffed to order dessert, our server brought a small dish of their tahini ice cream to share. Tahini ice cream! So good.
- 🗒 I fussed over my Forever Notes system a bit before questioning my entire approach to notes. I have ... a lot of notes. Digital and analog. And I don't know that they're doing much except accumulating. Their existence comforts me.
📸 One Photo
My copy of the first issue of Internet Phone Book arrived! I'm chuffed to be included in the Idiosyncratic category.
✍️ Writing
I wrote 11,335 words this week, churning out drafts that I can't bring myself to look at yet. They've been set aside until I'm ready to do something with them.
📚 Reading
Okay, I'm willing to call it now: I am in a full-fledged reading slump. But I will eventually return to these books:
- "Harrow the Ninth" by Tamsin Muir
- "Consider This: Reflections for Finding Peace" by Nedra Glover Tawwab
📺 Watching
We're finishing up "The Rehearsal" and "The Last of Us". I think we'll watch "Andor" next.
🎧 Listening
More fun with Crucial Tracks this week! If you click a link below, you can read the prompt for each day and why I chose it, plus a snippet of the song:
- "The Pretender" by Jackson Browne
- "You're the One That I Want" covered by Lo-Fang
- "Cherry" by Chromatics
- "Bittersweet" by Cliffords
- "Hollywood Ending" by R/R Coseboom
- "Blue Monday" by New Order
- "Stardust" covered by Willie Nelson
All of my Crucial Tracks are in this Apple Music playlist. And don't miss Community Tracks, weekly playlists curated from the Crucial Tracks community.
🔗 Linking
- Focusing on speculative futures by Ben Werdmuller
- 💀 Meditations on Death: Kerri asks, "What if we normalized casual conversations about death?"
- The Who Cares Era by Dan Sinker: In a conversation with friends on Saturday we talked about being in a moment of "who cares" societally, and then later I saw this boosted on Mastodon. It was an odd but affirming coincidence.
2025 Week 20 Notes: Real people who live in a real city
🗓️ // 12 — 18 May 2025
After decades of work tote life, I bought a backpack.
This may not seem noteworthy, but I am exceedingly particular about containers. The only thing I dislike more than changing up what I carry around is the back pain I've been experiencing now that I have a new work laptop to carry around.
So I did some research. Actually a lot of research. (Some might say I self-soothe with research. To those people I say: Obviously.) And I finally bought one this week.
I love my new backpack. Not only is it much more functional than a work tote, my back pain is gone! I'm a bit self-conscious about how it looks when I wear it — someone once told me that I was too short to wear a backpack without looking like a fourth grader — but now I have both hands free to make rude gestures in that person's direction!
📸 One Photo
On Sunday, FunkyPlaid and I chose a café from the Portland Café Passport and visited. We had treats and delicious lattes and even a conversation with a friendly stranger at the next table over who asked about the passport. Like real people who live in a real city!
✍️ Writing
I wrote 9,238 words this week, mostly morning (or evening) pages.
📚 Reading
Still unfocused on long-form reading. I'll come back to these soon:
- "Harrow the Ninth" by Tamsin Muir
- "Consider This: Reflections for Finding Peace" by Nedra Glover Tawwab
📺 Watching
We're watching "The Rehearsal" and "The Last of Us", and I'm not sure we're enjoying either of them.
🎧 Listening
I'm enjoying Crucial Tracks! If you click a link below, you can read the prompt for each day and why I chose it, plus a snippet of the song:
- "Might Not Make It Home" by LPX
- "Man, It's So Loud in Here" by They Might Be Giants
- "You Are Invited" by The Dismemberment Plan
- "Come Along" by Cosmo Sheldrake
- "Ego Death (feat. Steve Vai)" by Polyphia
- "Sleep Sweet" by Home Video
- "Black Ops" by They Might Be Giants
All of my Crucial Tracks are in this Apple Music playlist.
🔗 Linking
- From "An Open Letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Who Thinks My Daughter Is a Tragedy" by Anaïs Godard: "She doesn't write poems. She is one." 😭
- Our beloved Moshu, a red panda at the Oregon Zoo, died on Wednesday. I'll miss the "Moshu Monday" social media posts that FunkyPlaid shared with me.
2025 Week 19 Notes: All the heartbeats are synonyms
🗓️ // 5 — 11 May 2025
All the beings in the steading have settled. All the heartbeats are synonyms; all pieces of the puzzle have fitted together again. The smaller brother, ever a collection of twitches and flutters, hooks his paw atop the faraway-one's leg, receives pets like a petulant prince. The larger brother curls into a contented comma whenever the faraway-one approaches, black lips flashing as if he could smile. (Of course he can.) And the swan, well, she does her best not to crush her own gladness under the certainty she could not possibly deserve it.
📸 One Photo
While creeping through the overgrown garden with FunkyPlaid, we noted the mass of new tendrils on our jasmine. Summertime's scent soundtrack is coming along nicely.
✍️ Writing
Drafting away. Spring energy explodes into so many new drafts! 8,394 words total.
📚 Reading
I've had no focus for long-form reading this week. Still in progress:
- "Harrow the Ninth" by Tamsin Muir
- "Consider This: Reflections for Finding Peace" by Nedra Glover Tawwab
📺 Watching
Now that FunkyPlaid is home, we'll be starting the latest season of "The Last of Us".
🎧 Listening
I had fun choosing this week's Crucial Tracks:
- "Obedear" by Purity Ring
- "Sun in an Empty Room" by The Weakerthans
- "The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead" by Owen Pallett
- "Oceanwide" by Halou
- "Gorecki" by Lamb
- "Dancing on My Own" by Robyn
- "Learn to Live with What You Are" by Ben Folds
All of my choices are in this Apple Music playlist.
🔗 Linking
- From "'Long COVID Mode': Seeing the crisis through games": "Games can be sense-making tools, allowing players to vicariously experience the risks of contracting COVID-19, recognize Long COVID's most challenging symptoms, and connect with others amid an ongoing public health crisis."
- "We've crushed fascism before and we'll crush it again."
- So now we are resurrecting the likeness of people in favor of repackaging them into a "digestible and shareable format." People are people. They cannot give consent to become our AI monstrosities after death. Everything about the Agatha Christie writing course is revolting to me.
- Have a palate-cleanser: this dance company's choreography to Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know" (h/t Melissa).
2025 Week 18 Notes: Megaphones and tin cans
🗓️ // 28 April — 4 May 2025
My friend Sharyn once told me I was the most online person she knew. I don't think it was a compliment, but it wasn't a criticism, either.
Then everyone got online, and Sharyn didn't think of me that way again. I had a bunch of my identity tangled up in my online presence, but I was able to slowly molt it when nobody talked about blogs anymore.
Now people are talking about blogs again! And some excellent essayists are surfacing (or resurfacing). I feel simultaneously experienced and outclassed. And while I'm a little embarrassed of my earlier writing, it's mine. It's how I processed my experiences, before this was all called "content". It's how I lived, and how I survived.
Recently I've pondered a complete retreat from being online, relegating all this to an artifact of a former epoch. Not just departing from social media, but ditching my website altogether.
And then this week happened. I suddenly remembered why I keep doing this, why when so many people are screaming into their megaphones I keep whispering into the tin can at the end of this string. Because occasionally, the line goes taut, and from the tin can I hear, "I'm here, too."
📸 One Photo
Spring slammed into the landscaping at the library. I don't remember planting purple irises, but here they are like they run the place.
✍️ Writing
I was inspired to write this week! I caught up with my weeknotes and started a few drafts of longer posts: 13,246 words total.
📚 Reading
- Slowly, slowly reading "Harrow the Ninth" by Tamsin Muir and if I stretch this out long enough I never have to finish the series.
- I started reading David Brooks' "How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen" before I realized it was that David Brooks. I'll reread "Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close" by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman instead.
📺 Watching
- I finally saw "Past Lives" and it destroyed me. What a remarkably nuanced portrait of relationships, timing, love, and fate. I'll watch it again for sure.
- "Hacks" is back! Which for me means Kayla is back. Megan Stalter is the best.
🎧 Listening
All the music! So much music. Music said, "Hey, remember me?" in the form of Crucial Tracks. And I sure did. Here are the songs I shared this week:
- "Gwen" by Coco O.
- "I Just Don't Think I'll Ever Get Over You" by Colin Hay
- "Five-O" by James
- "This" by Future Ghosts
- "Level Up" by Vienna Teng
- "When Am I Gonna Lose You" by Local Natives
- "Consider Me" by Mark Lanegan
🔗 Linking
- The crab people have spoken: "Biology, like all sciences, should never be taken for granted or assumed to be self-explanatory. Even worse, it should never be used to justify weaponised culture-war issues. This ruling is an abuse of science."
- It's lovely and inspiring to witness Hollie practicing long-form blogging.
- Speaking of long-form writing, do not miss this piece from Keenan about one of their favorite songs.
Read these posts and more on cygnoir.net.