birch roots 0005

Hi friends! Gosh it's been a minute—I got clotheslined by apartment hunting (goodbye Flatbush and the Q train I will not miss you) and some hard-but-necessary-I-will-be-better-for-it-later-ugh work in therapy.

I'm coming up on a year back in New York. I got thrown for such a loop leaving Portland after 8 lonely months that I've kind of been in an existential crouch ever since, all tensed up expecting to pack everything and move 3,000 miles again. It's surreal to sign a lease for another year in Brooklyn, but it feels so good to have built a foundation again—friends, routines, favorite nooks—and realize I can relax. This can be home for as long as I need it to be.

In that spirit of easing in, I bought a beater acoustic guitar a few days ago. I've spent a couple years messing around with my Korg nanoKey, but every time I pull it out I get overwhelmed being able to do anything. So I went simpler to build up basics again: six strings and a fret board. I had largely abandoned playing music after middle school, and I get sad thinking about how I would probably have kept with it if there had been room for it to be less serious. I'm loving just plinking away at it, exploring all the sounds and timbres I can make. I'm taking some small lessons to work on technique and theory, and I'll be real excited to eventually bring that back into my synthy stuff.

I also signed up for another ultramarathon in May! Honestly impressed how easily you can memory-hole how bad the first one sucked.

(There has also been a lot of dumb drawing & animating this week too)

Reading

I read absolutely nothing meaningful the last couple weeks, unless you count a lot of memes about Philadelphia Eagles fans and batteries.

Listening

I'm going back through some sweet weepy folk-y stuff this week, looking for chords and melodies I could learn from (to be fair half of these involve ukeleles or banjos and let me hope—maybe in another life I'd have been a soft crunchy cottagecore music femme).

There's so much sweet finger-picking on Mal Blum's Every Time You Go Somewhere. Both "New Year's Eve" and "San Cristobal" hit that perfect intersection of simple and resonant for me (and a lot of nostalgia for taking the T from Providence to Boston to bump around with some art dorks).

There's a lot of San Francisco memories I read into Madeline's strumming on "Sleeping Dogs"; the fear of being on the cusp of something but you don't know what yet.

Honestly this one's just masochstic; Big Thief will never not destroy me. But Adrianne Lenker stripped down to barest, teariest essentials? Wrecked. (Highly recommend queuing up the full band version of "Masterpiece" to play right after—the tonal shift between the two as the distortion kicks in is pure dopamine)

Watching

I'm resisting the urge to binge but I'm real into Smiling Friends. Just a chef-kiss turn-your-brain-off unhinged good time. It's somewhere between Adventure Time's candy-coated surreality and Rick & Morty, sans the Justin Roiland baggage and edgelord nihilism.

That's all for this week, friends! Hope you get lots of rest, see people you love, and do things that make life wonderful for you this weekend 🖤