Hi, it’s Megan Jamer. You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up on my website (Afterstan / meganjamer.com). Thanks for subscribing!

You can expect this newsletter to be occasional. I’ll send a new edition whenever I have new posts to share.

New posts on Afterstan

This mailing list is brand-new, so you’re here from day one. To get you caught up here’s new writing on my blog since ~July. Explore what seems interesting:

• Life lately: https://afterstan.bearblog.dev/life-lately/

• Memories of taking doxycycline for malaria prevention: https://afterstan.bearblog.dev/memories-of-taking-doxycycline-for-malaria-prevention/

• Zine: seven sounds of Sumatra: https://afterstan.bearblog.dev/zine-seven-sounds-of-sumatra/

• July 2026 in Sumatra, Indonesia: https://afterstan.bearblog.dev/june-2026/

• June 2026 in Taiwan and Indonesia: https://afterstan.bearblog.dev/june-2026/

• May 2026 in Taiwan: https://afterstan.bearblog.dev/may-2026/

• Reading Taihe school’s account of when we stayed the night there https://afterstan.bearblog.dev/reading-the-schools-account-of-when-we-stayed-the-night-there/

My bar bag: Sumatra edition

For the uninitiated, a bar bag is a removable and - ideally - waterproof container that attaches to your bicycle handlebars. It’s the most easily accessible bag on my bike. So it houses the essentials: passports, wallet, phone, but also a rotating ensemble of other items. I periodically take a picture of whatever happens to be inside, because it is a window into where I am.

Selected contents of Sumatra bar bag:

• Powerbank with cables (in a wax print fabric bag, top of picture)

• Wallet (from a thrift store in Hualien, Taiwan) with Indonesian rupiah bills and coins and a few cards

• A bag of pineapple slices bought out of the back of a truck from a man on the roadside. Needs to be eaten within hours, otherwise it will ferment.

• A green microfibre cloth to wipe sweat off face.

• SPF 50 sunscreen in a trendy recycled paper squeeze bottle, purchased in Jakarta

• Sunglasses case

• Dettol wipes, handy for the toilet, for wiping pineapple juice off my hands, and for a “bath” in the tent on camping nights

• Passports in a waterproof sleeve (not pictured)

What’s in a name?

I’ve named this newsletter My Artifact Your Artifact. To celebrate its first edition, I’d like to explain the name.

I’m always collecting or creating things. Through my childhood, adolescence, into middle age. When I’m living in one place, and when I’m travelling too. Receipts, coins, bills, packaging, stamps, postcards, tickets, scrawling another page into whatever journal I’m lugging around.

In my digital life I do this as well. I use the Notes app haphazardly. I send myself WhatsApp messages with ideas. I send myself Slack DMs. I have a personal vault on AnyType with hundreds of pages. My partner and I have a shared Lightroom catalogue of over 35,000 images. The folders on my laptop’s desktop got opened up the other day and this is what the desktop looked like:

Most of those items are screenshots. A lot of these are things I captured because I wanted to remember them, use them for inspiration, or share them with a friend.

In May I sent a number of items back to Canada in a 5 kg box mailed from Taiwan. Wooden stamps. Completed journals. Random pieces of paper. Clothing. Handmade paper. A book or two. Fabric. A keychain with a printed photo that had been made for me. Most of them will sit in a box for years. Like the items from my previous life chapters that sit in boxes and follow me around when I move. I unpack and reconnect with these things. I repack them with ambivalence. I hope they survive moves, floods, fires, forgetfulness, reactive downsizing.

And I ask: Will I ever do something with these things?

I save these paper and digital artifacts because they matter to me. I want to be reminded of their stories by doing something with them, like putting them on a wall or writing about them on my blog. And I’m as interested in these bits of my life as I am in those of others. Let me look at someone’s wall or shelves or blog and I am happy as a clam. My artifacts. Your artifacts. All our artifacts. The objects that tell our life story.

It’s this desire to do more with these things than keep them in a box that inspires me to write on my blog, and to write this newsletter, and to share objects in real life.

If that’s you too, you’re in the right place.

One of a zillion screenshots

Here is a screenshot from my desktop that I am doing something with by sharing it with you. Hurrah!

Reply anytime to say hi, send me a screenshot, or tell me about a piece of paper in your wallet.

Thanks for being here <3

Megan

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