Sunday Comics

Big Month February

February is a big month. It’s Lunar New Year! The year of the wood dragon.

pen doodle --> scanned and coloured in Procreate

front door, bearing marks of former decals

Also, Valentine’s Day.

Last year’s Daily Cartoon for the New Yorker - based on an actual text message my sister got from her husband

Also, the start of half marathon training.

I signed up for another half marathon in May and because I have the knees of someone much older, this also means i signed up for a monotonous daily physio routine that makes me feel like tearing off all my limbs on low-energy days. Today was one of those days.

Really feeling this post and poetic comment on said post. How truly awful to be present sometimes but I GUESS IT'S WHY I KEEP RUNNING

For more content in the New Yorker about me (and all of us!) and running, see here, here, here.

running in La Napoule during a month of wonderfully high-energy days

Today’s run culminated in a visit to the new neighbourhood bakery, so, all ended happily.

What else is new….

I think it’s safe to say that pottery is a nascent new hobby and not just a passing phase. It became official when I re-installed Pinterest (which I had immediately and triumphantly deleted after my wedding) to access pottery inspiration.

I’m still really, really bad at it but I’m trying to do the thing where I accept that not every single thing I create has to be good.

Currently listening:

• Some beautiful things/food for thought from an old episode of the Longform podcast (an interview of Hanif Abdurraqib) that brought me great comfort while driving out to do a relatively faraway errand. The whole episode is lovely but these stuck out for me:

  • On how he decides what to write about day-to-day, when putting together an essay (starting 29:00) -
    “Taking on the role of an evangelist beyond being simply an essayist has been important for me, because i don’t have to spent a lot of time thinking through the argument that i’m going to make - instead, I realize that I spend a significant amount of time thinking about how to properly find the language to ascribe beauty to something i’ve witnessed. […] How can I bring you close enough and how can I find the adequate language to describe to you what I am holding, even though you can’t see it? What can I do to describe it in a way that makes you want to see it, hold it, find it for yourself?”

  • On the early phases of writing a book (45:00) -
    “The map is gonna reveal itself the more I write. I have to trust that there is a map that will show itself to me the more attention I pay to what the story is telling me. […] There’s a type of fearlessness I feel when I’m in the early stages of a book … I can make this anything I want in a draft phase. […] I get to be unafraid here. I get to make mistakes. I get to stumble my way towards something. I get to seek out one good sentence in a fog of 10 bad sentences. I get to do that. There’s a real pleasure in digging into the mud of language and unearthing a good sentence. […] I am my most unafraid self when I get to revel in the draft phase and get to slowly uncover those maps.”

• “Severance” by Ling Ma on audiobook has gotten me through a few runs now.

Thanks for reading as always.

some parting Pinterest wisdom

Zoe

Bonus content: I finally updated my headshot because lots has changed since 2020. Which cartoon avatar would win in a fight? Cast your vote in the comments!