Cabin Notes: a new approach

We're going literal.

Hey, wow, what a ride. 

A huge thank you to this community of paid subscribers for riding out maternity leave. It’s a cruel American joke that I had to spend nearly all our savings to take time to recover and bond, but I could do it, and that is in part thanks to your support. 

If you’re like, “wait a minute, I don’t pay for this newsletter, why am I getting this?” it’s because the paid edition is getting an update. I want you to see what happens behind the paywall so you can decide if you want to, well, pay for it. (Though technically what you’re really doing is sponsoring a free essay every week because you believe art is worth something in the ever increasing fight against AI and our corporate overlords, etc., etc..) 

The subscriber special was typically on Wednesdays, but I hope you’ll be a little lax with me as I figure out how to balance some new responsibilities and realities. Could be Thursday. Could be some other eighth day I concoct out of desperation. Time! 

That said, let’s get on with it.

In the past, the typical structure of this newsletter included these categories:

• Reading

• Watching

• Listening

• Hoping

• Practicing

• Not Buying

• Symptom of the Week

• Unsolicited Opinion

• Tiny Delight

• Tiny Horror

That’s too many categories, especially for a person who has nearly exclusively watched Love Island UK for the past three months. We’re going to restructure a little. Here are the new ones:

• The Log: here you’ll find a mashup of articles, newsletters, TV shows, books, songs, etc. 

• The Chop: a swirl of Hoping, Practicing, and Not Buying. Here I’ll focus on the actions I’m taking behind this intentional mountain life. 

• The Stack: each week I’ll be giving myself a prompt to elicit creativity and to drive more movement in my creative work, both paid and otherwise. My hope is that many of you will also take part in this prompt and we can share our progress in the Substack chat. (Maybe. I’m not entirely sold on that aspect. Could just be comments.) 

I recognize Log, Chop, Stack is… a little on the nose, but I like when things are on the nose. Easy to find. So, let’s begin.

The Log

• What Denali’s road closure means for its wildlife by Ben Goldfarb for High Country News. You can sort of presume what the closure has done for wildlife, as it’s the same as what the first few weeks of Covid did for wildlife: it let them be wild. But it’s still a spectacular opportunity for scientists to see nature at work.

• The Spot by Your Smith gives strong 90s Sheryl Crow vibes

• Like a lot of people lately, I’m reading Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia, MD with Bill Gifford. A friend of mine recently suffered a heart attack on the trail at the age of 50, and he’s been talking about this book since in regard to how it’s changing his life. My best takeaway thus far: work on your grip strength. 

• I subscribed to a few additional newsletters this week including

  Mike Sowden
  ’s Everything Is Amazing,
  Joy Sullivan
  ’s Necessary Salt, and
  Emma Gannon
  ’s The Hyphen

• Speaking of newsletters,

  Anne Helen Petersen
  is back with another incredible thread for paid subs: How did you get your job

• The sad grey floor is everywhere.

• Sonido Cósmico by Hermanos Gutiérrez is great “sitting by the campfire in the moonlight knowing we ride at dawn” music. 

• I used to stack coins as a kid, and I’d regularly go to the bank to exchange those stacks for paper. We should all do this with our pennies and watch the Mint go berserk. 

• Are phone bans in schools good for parents? I’ll read any Kathryn Jezer-Morton piece on parenting, kid or not.

• English Teacher on FX/Hulu/Disney/ABC (lol) is such a delight. 

• I went to college, Ben did not. Does it still serve a person to go?

• Search & Rescue (SAR) are busy around these parts all year long. Do you know what to do out there when things go awry?

• Relevant for the next section: how to buy fewer clothes

The Chop

From about six months pregnant to now, I have not been able to wear any of my pre-pregnancy clothes. My clothes occupy one closet about 3.5 feet wide and one side of the dresser. They were, until recently, jampacked. That is six months of grabbing the same two pairs of leggings and the same three shirts over and over while seeing the countless items I could not wear. So naturally, I got rid of things.

The advice is to not do this — do not try to overhaul your closet when you’re mad and pregnant because you are not thinking clearly. Well, too bad, because when I’m thinking clearly I’m also thinking optimistically, and I needed the ruthlessness of pessimism to get things done. This house isn’t getting bigger, so neither was my closet. It was time to purge the relics of a youth well-spent and start dressing how I really see myself: mountaineering chic. 

While pessimism was helpful, what really enabled my slash and bunt was Alison Bornstein’s Three Word Method. The three words I connected with the most were Western Academic Tomboy. When I really like what I’m wearing, it feels like it typically falls into at least one if not two of these categories. Look:

Aww, she favorites images of herself. Cute.

So I booted anything that didn’t fit into one of those adjectives. I also got rid of anything that didn’t fit my actual body prior to pregnancy. Clothes should only be aspirational in the sense that they allow you to embody a different version of you. When all that’s aspirational is their size, motivation rarely follows. 

But, speaking of size, my body is still in flux from making a human. I will eventually settle into a shape, but the settling is still happening so I cannot buy clothes. Instead, I’m making a personal “lookbook” by saving images into a folder on Instagram. Then, when it comes time to rebuild a wardrobe, I’ll have the inspiration queued. This jacket is in there. So are these boots. Aspirations!

One other trick that I’ve enjoyed: I put some very strong maybes into a box with a date on my calendar of when I can revisit said box. If I really want to keep something, I need to say what it is before I open the box. If I can’t remember an item was in there, I cannot keep it. Out of sight, out of mind, out of closet. 

The Stack

One of my fondest memories of my grandma was how, as a passenger in a car, she would read aloud the signs we passed. Any sign! Yard Sale Next Right. Thanksgiving Break November 23-27. Share The Road. Columbus 140 Miles. 

So this week, I’m taking photos of signs. It will not surprise you to hear that 3-months postpartum I am eager to change many things about my life, but I could not tell you what they are because I do not know. All I know is the urge is bad. It could be hormonal, sure, as it often is when you’re googling things like “edgy haircuts”, but the urge remains. And so I asked the ether for a sign. What should I do? And all I got back was “look for a sign.” 

Feeling uninspired and pedantic, I looked at actual signs. And I’m encouraging you to do the same. What signs do you see all the time but pay little mind? What signs do you think are missing? Which signs are wrong? Delightful? And does paying attention to literal signs get you closer to metaphorical ones? We’ll find out next week!