48

a shameless request

Hi friends! This is a quick pause in our irregularly scheduled broadcast to make a request.

Today is my birthday. I am 48 years old which is honestly wild, because 1. that’s so many years and 2. when my parents were 48 I was in college. All I have is a deadbeat cat who sleeps all day and won’t even get a part time job.

Anyway, the request: As I write more of these things, will you please share and recommend this newsletter? I want to keep at it and turn it into something for real. To do so it will help to have more subscribers, especially of the paid variety. (No pressure if you opted for free! Although eventually I may need to make more things for the paid folks, since I am not currently employed and it is nice to get paid for one’s work.)

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And now, here is a selfie I took in June last year, because I want to say to one-year-ago me: You will get through this next incredibly difficult 12 months! There is actual joy on the other side! You will learn a lot and it will be worth it! Your body will not always hurt every day forever! You will also realize you hold yourself and everyone else to unrealistic, even impossible standards, and you will want to change that! Apologies to anyone you have done that to, but most of all apologies to you! Also you look great! Even with that crumb on your lip you forgot to wipe off!

Lxx

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Three recommendations from me, if recommendations are your thing:

1. A few years back I decided I wanted to work on showing up more for the people in my life in small but still meaningful ways. Birthdays don’t mean the same thing to everyone but they are a sort of built-in low-hanging-fruit way to send someone a message and let them know you’re thinking of them. The only problem for me was that I am not great at things like being organized or maintaining calendars. Luckily, my phone is. I figured out an easy way to help remind me. I put people’s birthdays in their contact info in my phone – like with their phone numbers and addresses, there’s a field for birthday. That way it automatically comes up on the calendar. Then, I added the Google calendar widget to the upper left corner on my phone’s home screen. This is useful for appointment reminders too (shoutout to my fellow neurodivergent and otherwise space cadet-y pals). Every time you open your phone, which is probably a lot more often than you should if we’re being honest (you being me), you’ll see the calendar – and from there it’s an easy quick text to let someone know you remembered and are thinking of them.

   

2. In my last letter I recommended Somebody Somewhere, which is still a very good show, but then I learned that one of the major plot points in season 2 involves a design that was clearly ripped off from one of my long-time favorite illustrators: Mimi Pond. So I’m recommending you buy her books and cool stuff too.

3. The absolute most delicious pear butter I have ever eaten in my life (shoutout Bucks County, PA!). It’s not officially listed on the site, so what you do is put the apple butter box, case of 6, in your cart, and then in the note section ask them to send you six jars of pear butter instead. I mean get the apple if you want, but the pear is so superior it’s not even funny.