I am not a woman.

When you look at me, you may think I am.

I don’t mind that.

Call me ‘she’.

I am not a woman.

When people tell me “Pick a gender”, even “non-binary” feels like too much of a declaration. When I look out into the world, and see the social dynamic of various genders with one another, and the ways in which the members of each present, behave, and negotiate, all I can think is:

I am colour-blind in an apparently vividly-coloured world. I do not understand what you are talking about.

I’m not a woman, so on International Women’s Day, I’m an ally.

The word “ally”, unlike what we tell each other, is not a self-descriptor, but a gift. I don’t know if you think I’m your ally, but I do my best to be one.

When you tell me of sexual harassment at work, on the tram, in the shops, on the street, I listen.

When you tell me yet another male coworker repeated your exact words for credit, ignoring your input entirely, I listen.

When you tell me your lactation room at work is a windowless prayer room slash utility closet with a mop bucket containing the same water it did two years ago, I listen.

When you tell me you’re scared to cycle home at night, I listen. And I cycle alongside you when I can.

When you tell me you’re scared to announce your pregnancy because you worry it will not result in a permanent contract, I listen.

When you tell me you’re so sick of doing the vast majority of the emotional, physical, and psychological labour at home because your male partner can’t figure out how to reconcile himself with the changing of a diaper, I listen.

When you tell me you’re sick of people touching you or your pregnant belly without asking and commenting on your appearance without pause, I listen.

And then my heart skips a beat.

When my hair is touched unconsentingly, it is by you.

When I receive the fifth comment in a workday about my headwrap, it is by you.

When I express myself with a sharp tongue and am told I shouldn’t be so angry, it is by you.

When I confide in someone about the racism I experience and am told I’m seeing things wrong because of my flawed perspective, it is by you.

When I am a twelve-year old told, with a sigh, in front of a large crowd of parents and children, “what are we to do with you?”, it is by you.

When I am told it would be a delight to have a wife rather than a husband because of the improvement it would bring to the balance of emotional labour and communication in your home, it is by you.

When I call you into a kinder, more nuanced narrative in which each one of us accepts accountability for the harm we unintentionally cause to those around us and I am told my wokeness is toxic, it is by you.

On International Women’s Day, we should focus on the very real challenges facing womanhood today. Ignore racism, the environment, transphobia, anti-queer violence, Palestine. You do you.

But if you fail to appreciate, in your walk and your talk, the role you play in the things I allow you to ignore, I struggle. If you fail to mention, even in passing, how much work you do to understand that you do what you don’t want others to do to you, I struggle.

We, non-women, childless women, unemployed women, trans women, brown women, could be your fiercest allies.

But when we’re in a room with you, and the picture you paint of The Woman™ is that of a white, straight, cisgendered, working, able-bodied, male-partnered, child-raising human Identifying as female, we laugh. We laugh at how backwards it is, how mid-twentieth century your problems are, and how sad it is when people forget the word “intersectionality” altogether when they stand to only benefit from it. We laugh that Amsterdam hosts a Feminist March and you have forgotten what feminism means, does, questions, explores, exposes.

I want to be your ally.

But make me want it more.

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It was the mid zeroes, and, barely an adult, I considered everything I did during that week in London a life-altering experience. Staying at the studio of my friend Titus, a fashion photographer I knew through a website I remember as mailfriends.com, I took in every second of my first solo trip abroad.

My very first (and the high I’m still chasing) fish and chips rolled into a grease-covered newspaper. The Virgin Megastore in Piccadilly Circus where, a year later, we would spot one of Banksy’s fake copies of that Paris Hilton album. The weirdly polite British “excuse me” offered whenever I stepped on someone’s toes on the tube. Watching Hard Candy twice in a row, Mulholland Drive thrice. Looking back, everything from then feels like a museum.

There is one moment that lingers twenty years later.

Picture me entering the National Portrait Gallery for a photo exhibit, and walking heart-first into a room with an enormous print of a woman in complete disarray. Cheeks red from hours of crisis, a frown pressed into her forehead, shoulders held up as if tenseness were the only form of comfort she had left to know. I cried as I stood motionless in the room for what felt like an hour.

I treated myself to the exhibit book. Back home at Titus’ place, on page 9, the photo, which had won best portrait, stared at me again. Reading the byline, I discovered the photographer Karoline Hjorth had simply captured her sister Siri fresh out of bed on a normal day. I wonder if I was the only person who misinterpreted the photograph. I also wonder, and have for the past two decades, whether my reaction divulges subconscious opinions on women and makeup.

I can still recognise Siri by the tip of her nose when I look for her and find she is now a visual artist.

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1. How it feels when Anja sees me journal on my iPad in bed
2. How YouTube envelopes me in an embarrassing amount of brain rot
3. How the shoes I bought on Vinted didn’t fit at all
4. How I can’t figure out what produces the dishwasher error despite varous attempts at solving the issue
5. That the house smells like onions even if it did result in an enormous amount of delicious onion confit
6. That I have to pay for films on Apple TV, for which I am already paying
7. That our indoor plant game is off this season
8. That we painted our wall pink
9. That my glasses never really get clean anymore
10. That I don’t have a single, perfect, unified app for quantified self stuff

Not so silly

1. Toxic wokeness
2. Witnissing the delight White people take in me speaking with them about toxic wokeness

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The days were wetter and colder than I had anticipated; a reminder that I never seem to quite understand what weather I have experienced before or should expect. The roads were not slippery in Amsterdam, which meant I was able to cycle to work, where my coworkers continue to be wonderful, the task at hand is challenging, and the pay-off is great.

I had booked a physio appointment a few weeks ago requesting three exercises I could easily do as part of my workout routine. “If the training you needed required gym equipment, you’d barely be able to walk”, she said. Instead, I got four exercises to train the intrinsic muscles of my ankle and foot. Fast forward a few weeks, and it turns out the exercises reset whatever damage I do standing for too long. Five minutes in the evening, and I wake up with a supple ankle, forgetting all about those crutches. I am transformed.

Valentine’s Day was excellent. After casual morning chores and website tinkering, Anja and I went to see Hamnet at FC Hyena. The day was coated in the very shallow and low-hanging sun that makes Dutch people sit outside with their coats off. After the cinema, we hung out at Ton Ton Club, an arcade that just opened a pop-up venue in Noord. We were reminded, once again, of the true pleasures of being child-free. We played some kind of Mario Brothers ghost busters game in a small, dark, loud room, me thankful for the ski gloves that protected me from an ongoing flu epidemic.

For dinner, Anja cooked a delicious chimichurri steak, and I tried my hand at accordion potatoes, which did come out fairly well, albeit less concertinaed than desired. To accompany the sourdough we bought at Hotel de Goudfazant, I made whipped butter. Unexpectedly, after months of trying, I created my first quenelle.

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Completed my introductory course in zazen meditation at the beautiful Zen Center Amsterdam. Eager to continue a weekly practice, which proves great for mind, body, spirit.

Things are calmer at work now that I have wrapped up three major projects, one of which let me explore research skills far beyond the realms of the service and product design context. Spent my workdays engaged in promising data strategy questions, liaising with various coworkers.

On Thursday, a bunch of coworkers and I went laser tagging. I had forgotten how competitive I get, and stopped counting after the twentiest f-bomb that I hurled at the head of a person I had just managed to hit. In came in fourth and then sixth of out twenty. Afterwards over drinks, I made the mistake of having mozzarella sticks, and so I spent the night in absolute physical terror, and called in sick on Friday to recover.

On Saturday, my coworker and I went for dinner and a show, and the show was the matinee performance of another coworker’s orchestra at the Rode Hoed. I miss the oboe, the trumpet, the saxophone, and I want to pick up the French horn.

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Erika Vikman came and came again. Not too shabby.

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Red Line protest

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Puppies’ first time at the beach. I’m not a complainer.

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Family dinner at Buffet, where I am forever tempted and equally unwilling to try their oeuf mayonnaise

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I like to think the Netherlands is a beautiful country because it is flat, not in spite of it.

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Leave me alone to the books and the radio snow

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Making the best of a mess

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This week’s win

I know I’m jinxing it by even saying so, but the fact that our brand-new puppy Zev Bialy Costanza has not had a single accident in the house feels gratifying and exciting. We brought her home on Wednesday from the two darling corgis who gave birth to Lemonade almost three years ago.

Looking forward to

Surprised by my increasing ability to develop cabin fever even when I’m not the winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, I already find myself craving alone time and outdoor time. Helping a puppy adapt to a new environment is a very fun process at which we appear to be unusually skilled. Still, it does require a level of constant home-being for which I am not suited.

I can’t wait to go to the gym, to the library, to walk around the neighbourhood. I can’t wait for Lemonade to come home from her week-long sleepover at Tante Annelie’s so that I can have a reason to go to the park again. What I am learning from this experience, once again, is that I fall in that boring and misandrist 90s category of the stereotypical TV dad: I think babies are boring. Cute, but boring.

Stuff I did

I wrapped up a few work projects early in the week, and came into the office on my day off to facilitate a workshop with our engineering team leads about UX strategy. It was my first time collaborating on a workshop with Maartje, and it was great fun. We asked our coworker Nancy to capture the event. (You should know Nancy hosts amazing photo walks during which she teaches you to max out your phone’s capturing capabilities.)

The rest of the week was full of puppy prep. While I dramatically call my dogs my daughters, I wouldn’t quickly venture to drawing comparison between owning a dog and raising a child. Still, the second time around — familiarly — is a breeze. From Wednesday onward, we were able to settle into a very relaxed three-hour schedule: wake, bathroom outside, play and training over some kibble, snuggles, followed by a two-hour nap.

Enjoyed

In making a small reading plan to accompany a friend’s Bible reading adventures, I was reminded of how beautiful I find the work of Cole Arthur Riley, a writer transforming the way Black people can relate to Scripture. Whenever I go to meet Scripture, prayer books, or Christian writing, I automatically turn off the parts of me for which Christianity wasn’t designed. Black Liturgies and This Here Flesh have been helping me change that practice into something better.

Discovered

While getting my bloodwork done on Wednesday morning, I discovered a book in the hospital’s open library that was in very good condition. I like Lize Spit for the moodiness of her writing, and I’m looking forward to getting started with this book. Given the subject matter, a daughter proceeds to visit her estranged dying mother, it may be a while before I can.

Consumed

I realised that I had conflated the endings of American Psycho and Fight Club. I learned this on Saturday, when I dedicated an evening alone to watching the latter for the first time in well over a decade. I had forgotten how good I think Fight Club is, especially when I consider it the analog predecessor to the manosphere.

Purchased

Normally, I eagerly look through my bank statements to learn what I spent money on in the past seven days, but this week feels different. I’ve been impulse-shopping to help me ignore some difficult feelings. My money has gone to books as well as office supplies. I am dissatisfied with the fact that it is so, but within the span of two weeks, some YouTube account called Paper Republic, which makes lovely leather planner covers, has influenced me back to my own leather planner cover, which of course required various paraphernalia to be brought into 2025.

Appreciated

My Monday morning park walk with Lemonade was nice and quiet. I love the stage of life that she is in: active enough to love long walks, and old enough to self-regulate and self-entertain. I can’t wait until Zev is there, too. On Thursday, right before my workshop, I went for grilled cheese sandwiches with a friend ahead of her holidays. I learn from her endlessly and laugh until my stomach hurts. A privilege.

Wondered

Does patina only happen on leather? What does the phrase “teaching grandmother to suck eggs” mean? Has Coyote Pass been sold? Is it jinx or jynx? What’s a silent birth? Is Banana Yoshimoto really named Banana? How’s Bjork doing? Is she still as beautiful as I’ve always found her? Who’s that ballerina in my YouTube Shorts? What’s an alternative to soy sauce? Who wrote a good reflection on Ecclesiastes? When will there ever be a working solution for inserting icons into Figma components? Who is Nadia Bolz-Weber?

Something to improve

How can I overcome lethargy?

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Evening walk

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Three wins

1. Walked on the beach barefoot
2. Leg-pressed 111.1kg at physio
3. Survived 35-degree weather with little complaint

Stuff I did

Anja’s school year is coming to a close, which means I’m transitioning to working at the office full-time. After a few years of struggling, I now enjoy the seasonal changes to my working location.

On Monday, a bunch of us attended a big client meeting, which was fun, educational, and inspiring. With my new UX teammate Maartje landing smoothly, I immediately have more time to spend on what really makes me tick at work: complex administrative and financial processes.

On Tuesday, I picked up Lemonade from her sleepover at Tante Annelie’s. Walking her to the tram with a front pack and a back pack in 35-degree weather was a new kind of insanity, but here I am, writing this on a delightfully rainy Saturday. I’m not a complainer.

On Thursday, Gerimedica celebrated her 18th birthday with Indian food and a cocktail workshop. Social anxiety aside, it was fun to spend time with a small group of coworkers. I got to learn about the different genres of cocktails, and what makes a mocktail creatively different from emptying a bottle of soda onto a ball of ice and charging 15 euros.

Friday morning was for online meetings, the afternoon was different: a stroll in Flevopark with a new acquaintance. She told me at length about her estranged mother, mourning a living person who never really was, and finding her dead after a week and a half. It was astonishing to hear these words from a person in whom I could see myself.

Consumed

I haven’t been able to get over the harmonies in tUnE-yArDs’ Swarm, off their new album. After background-bingeing Dance Moms and Sister Wives for weeks, I’ve been making attempts to listen to music instead.

To offset my penchant for bad reality TV, Anja and I have begun watching season 3 of The Bear. It is beautiful and strong; cosy with a hint of somber. I had missed that version of Jamie Lee Curtis.

I spent some time this week learning about the differences between routines and rhythms, and about what rhythm means in a year I’ve themed Intentionality. The better I become at looking after myself, the more accurately I can feel the rhythms of my body and the world around it. I looked for and found various ways to learn about the cyclical, the seasonal.

Purchased

I surprised Anja with tickets to see tUnE-yArDs in Tolhuistuin (€55,32), and myself with the fact that they were even available. I realised recently that Anja, unlike most people I know, has a very rhythmic taste in music. We both happen to love this band precisely because of their command of the beat. I’ve been in cultural lockdown since Covid, forgetting effortlessly that bands are touring, plays are happening, films are scheduled. Together with these tickets, I now have three concerts planned for 2025.

Appreciated

Anja and I are in a lovely phase of communication, openness, space-making, and space-taking. It makes me so much more appreciative of the human she is and the partnership she offers.

With regards to a personal matter, I find myself surrounded by people willing to offer an ear, a shoulder, and sage advice.

After two years of almost non-stop piano playing, I am gravitating back to the guitar. In recent months — as is always the case when feelings overflow — there has been a wealth of songwriting. Pairing that with an instrument that feels so familiar makes for lovely summertime leisure.

Wondered

What’s the name of that German (Dutch?) designer who runs that design showcase website? How did the financial strategies of the Sister Wives adults contribute to the disintegration of their family? Can a thing in which I find myself change nature depending on my vantage point? What is Maddie Ziegler actually doing these days? Is it worth getting an annual Dipsea subscription? Should I reopen slots for my design mentoring? What are the grammatical limits of using “few and far between” in a sentence? What’s the name of the backing vocalist in that tUnE-yArDs live performance? How’s Bjork doing? How complex is it to be a glass-half-full kind of person if life only knows to smile at you?

Something to improve

How can I lean into when my body tells me it’s tired?

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Millennial mixtape

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Celebrated seven years of sobriety with a very successful 0.00000% margherita at Ottolenghi. I’m not a complainer.

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A seldom empty Amsterdam sky. I forgot how sweet the city is right after work.

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If geitenmelk comes from goats, does peutermelk come from toddlers?

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I want to have his attitude and energy when I grow up

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A recent rediscovery has been 4850, a little cafe behind the hospital. It used to be Michelin-awarded fine dining, now’s it a coffee place and wine bar. During the week, they close at 3, but on Fridays, they’re open until 6. The team working there have such a great dynamic, and it’s fun to crack jokes with them. Perfect way to start the weekend.

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2024 was a year of experimentation. I decided to go for the mocktail option during a handful of date nights, and even drank alcohol-free wine at church.

In a moment of company-wide celebration I tasted non-alcoholic champagne. I say tasted, because the moment it hit my tongue I began to understand the weight of a quarter of a percentile.

I’m back to where I started: non-alcoholic drinks are for non-alcoholics.

The champagne encounter made me Google Philip Seymour Hoffman. My favorite actor and a man who famously died with a needle in his arm months after breaking his 23 years of sobriety with a single beer.

Many people who relapse do so by first developing a habit of drinking non-alcohol alternatives. I learned that in 2024.

Giving up on the non was not a challenge for me. Not drinking has not been a challenge for me at all, which is surprising, given the habits I had developed.

There were moments in the past 2,500 days when I felt illegitimate. If I have no problem not drinking, should I even call myself a recovering alcoholic? I’ve wondered whether I was taking it all too seriously. But then I think of Philip.

I learned in 2024 that 5-10 years into sobriety are the hardest precisely because of that little voice that says “I have no problem not drinking, I surely could have a beer, right?”

The other day, I was watching The Curious Case Of…. It’s a bad mix of true crime and reality TV. The episode was about Bam Margera, that guy from Jackass. His addiction has landed him in conservatorship.

Steve-O was there, same old raspy voice, quite handsome at fifty when not covered in excrement. “When Jackass started, Bam had a good skating career and I was a homeless drug addict”, he recounted.

“In the time we’ve known each other, we’ve had almost a complete role reversal. I’m fifteen years sober today”. During that last sentence, his face showed the calm level-headed contentment of a person pleased to finally have come around to experiencing the dull stability of making a healthy choice, day after day.

The day counter is there, on my phone’s lock screen, because I think I should be able to take delight in the longest streak I’ve ever had in anything. Seeing Steve-O’s interview made me happy to continue to be a part of our club.

Onward, upward.

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The 2025 Lenten season and I are off to a beautiful start. I’m trying something new this year: I don’t want to focus on a habit I want to quit, co-opting Lent to dive into productivity/diet/whatever culture. Instead, I’m looking forward to identify a few of my common thinking traps, and learn how I can move beyond them to what I consider the less circumstantial, more profound beliefs I have about life. A gorgeous morning sky is making it all quite the treat.

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Three wins

1. Gave a successful presentation during a company-wide meeting, and it prompted the responses and follow-ups I had aimed for
2. Took my first walk to the nearby park with friends who returned from a month-long holiday
3. Went to Sunday’s church service without crutches for the first time since the accident

Stuff I did

Spending a few full days at the office is my new normal, although Anja and I soon learned that one of the weekdays will require me to be at home half of the day. Lemonade was home alone for a little too long, so I took her out to the pet store for extra treats and a new toy. At work, I continued to work on my professional goals, as well as a presentation to help coworkers and teams see the connection between my goals and our company goals.

On Monday, I learned that my weak shoulder and chest muscles have been greatly impacted by my use of crutches these past few months, and that all of this contributed to the development of an overworked, protesting elbow muscle. The physical therapy saga continues.

Consumed

It’s always fun to keep a straight face while telling people Anja’s aunt worked on Twin Peaks, Homeland, and now Zero Days, which is quite a treat to watch. I had hoped February would bring a nice opportunity to read a little more, but who am I kidding?

Purchased

Here’s a sad one. Sitting on the bus, I happened to spot on one of its monitors that De Balie was celebrating International Women’s Weekend with Roxane Gay. The idea that Anja and I could be in the same room with this brilliant, brilliant person makes me mouth breath a little bit. €42,50 well spent on two tickets. Sadly, Roxane’s mother passed away recently. A horrible time for her, and a disappointed one for us. Snacks and toy for Lemonade made for €50,47. Public transport and taxi rides came to €70,57, mostly because I spent €32,04 getting to and home from church.

Appreciated

I was off on Friday, and my films of art house theatres, walks in the neighborhood had to make room for tinkering on my brand-new guestbook. I don’t use analytics, and if people don’t email me through my website’s contact form, I have no idea they’re reading. I saw a few people pop up in the guestbook that I hadn’t met, or that I didn’t expect to be reading my website. Fun!

Wondered

What’s a good guide for Lent 2025? Where does the term “pray tell” come from? What’s a good, more accessible alternative to Proton? How can I set an auto reply on WhatsApp? Who is Lutz Ebersdorf? What’s a steel glass door called? What’s OKLCH?

Something to improve

Promising myself less about the near future.

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What Lou’s writing captures perfectly for me, is the honest, “no muss, no fuss” type of wisdom coming only from someone who has been through it. Perhaps I recognize in Lou’s story some of my own experiences with addiction, loss, and learning to cherish the good in my life. His stories are among the things I look forward to most when opening my RSS reader.

Anyway, reading about his first seven jobs was a fun way to see that every generation has its remember whens. He thinks of glass bottles, I of plastic ones. Remember when my cousin and I would stroll the neighborhood looking for old ladies with pending returnables? When I make my way through my employment history, a variety of things come to mind.

Job 0: The one that got away

I can’t think about my first seven jobs without mentioning this. I’ll never feel cool enough to really belong, but my hometown’s skater scene is the closest thing I have to community. Age fifteen, and I walk into the town’s skate shop, which ironically sells more paraphernalia than actual skateboards. I’m there with my mother to deliver a hand-written application letter. It says I look forward to getting their call. I forget to include my phone number.

Job 1: Garden center cashier

Where I’m from, the garden center is a common hangout for children and their parents on a boring, rainy Sunday. For about a year, I man the cash register and make friends along the way, writing notes on cash register paper, and spending what little money I make on the snacks by the exit. I eventually get promoted to assistant to the manager of Home Decor. At the time, I think it’s because of my creative disposition. Looking back, it’s probably because I’m too accomplished at getting rolls of bills stuck in the safety shute.

Job 2: Server

Quitting the garden center and quitting trade school happen around the same time. Like many other (neurodivergent) people (of color) in the Netherlands, I’m a stacker: graduating with the lowest degree, working my way up to where I need to be. I knew from the start of Orientation, but I last half a semester anyway.

Rather than sit at home, I figure I’ll do what my friends have done before me: make pretty good money working in the service industry. I find a place overlooking the town square that happily gives me a trial shift. I’m nervous, intimidated by the pace, overwhelmed by all those table numbers, and drop a dozen bottles of chocolate milk, making a total mess. It’s a disaster. My mother’s looking on from behind a tree nearby, crying. Through it, I inherit her fearful disposition, which will take years to shed.

Job 3: The newspaper shop / dry cleaner employee

Selling cigarettes and magazines two doors down from the cafe is quite fun. I get to drink chocolate milk without creating a mess, and my friends drop by every now and then during smoke breaks. I’ll never understand what type of person gets their dry-cleaning done where cigarettes are consumed. I’ll also never understand how my high school drop-out manager can enjoy taking her lunch break in the tiny, windowless back room. Soon after, I move to the next step on my academic ladder.

Job 4: Outlet retail worker

The GED program was supposed to be one year, but having failed three subjects, I take another year to meet the bare requirement: a passing grade in History. I have plenty of spare time to work at Bodum, one of the shops in our outlet shopping mall. I get really good at demonstrating their coffee machines, and have fun with coworkers analyzing the clientele. Somehow, I always feel like a failure for not seeing the appeal of that outlet mall and the old-fashioned storefronts that aren’t fooling anyone.

Job 5: Call center super star

My first experience in college is in an actual city, where I soon find employment at my friend’s father’s call center. I turn out to be disturbingly skilled, first at selling newspapers, and soon after at tricking the elderly into buying a subscription to a service “that will enter into all of the Internet’s sweepstakes” for them. I memorize the script so easily I make it to the end while reading a college textbook. My girlfriend at the time is appalled to notice that my voice has developed the cadence of a salesperson.

Job 6: Academic assistant

Flunking out of college means I, once again, have plenty of time on my hands. Luckily, I have applied to an academic assistant job at the school’s career center, where I get to manage its front desk and conduct aptitude and career tests. I like the job, for one because it’s my first experience working in an office with actual adults, and for two because it’s really good money. After about nine months, the department director discovers we’re over budget by 400%, and they let all the assistants go as a result.

Job 7: Postal worker

Luckily for me, PostNL is hiring. It’s the Dutch postal service, a mega corp struggling with productivity after failed mergers and privatization. Summer’s approaching, and I am hot. Cutbacks mean we’re allowed one 0,5L bottle of water on our route, and since I mostly deliver in my own neighborhood, I usually encounter a few friendly faces who refill my bottle. One day, after biking in the scorching heat for hours, I faint, landing in the bushes with a stack of mail in my hand. It’s all for a good cause, though, because that Autumn, after passing my adult entry exam with flying colors, I finally enroll in university.

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I love that my employer is as excited about data as I am, and that I get to geek out with dashboards and spreadsheets to help development teams make better decisions.

At home, though, it’s a different story. One of the things I like most about my website is that I don’t know you’ve been here unless you tell me. I stopped using analytics tooling on my personal website a long time ago, and I like it that way.

For a few years now I’ve had a standing invitation to say hello. It has been providing me with friendly conversations with Internet strangers for years. It’s pleasant when some random guy from the American Midwest emails me to ask how my ankle is doing. Using the contact form on my hello page, it’s pretty easy to get in touch with me.

I’m very pleased to announce that there is now yet another way for you to let me know you’ve been here. It’s by signing my brand-new guestbook! I love seeing what people write on a website maker’s public wall, and I hope my page will slowly fill up with nice words from all over the world.

See you there?

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Elsewhere in our building, the sun makes for a delightful mood.

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Three wins

1. Walked on tip toes as soon as I formed the conviction that hiking boots reign supreme.
2. Spent the entire Tuesday with Anja at Studio Pansa, where I made my first two wheel-thrown pots. Looking back, the whole thing was too wet, which is confirmed by the ridiculous amount of clay I brought home on my clothes. Between drying, trimming, firing, glazing, and more firing, it could be months before I find out whether I did it right. I find that quite exhilirating.
3. This feels like a bit of a sad win, but I’ve cancelled my YouTube Premium account, putting an end to three months of near non-stop background videos, and bad reality TV on repeat. I’ve replaced it with discovering new music through NTS Radio, which continues to delight me.

Stuff I did

My manager and I worked on my professional goals, and I was pleased to hear he was impressed with my approach to the project. I’m excited for what 2025 has in store for us. Having taken a few days off, my work week didn’t really start until Wednesday. I spent Thursday at the office, engaging in inspiring conversations with coworkers taking charge of their own destiny. It’s bizarre to think that, a few weeks ago, I could barely make it through a workday without nap time.

One thing I’m proud of is that I’ve developed a set of productivity habits that sustain me, and not drain me. I’m a notorious “planner hopper”, moving between my Filofax, some digital Goodnotes planner, Obsidian, and Omnifocus on an almost monthly basis. Thanks to Kirstin’s brilliant flagship planner, I’m more intentional about what I’m committing myself to, and capable of dreaming about goals without overengineering them.

Consumed

No more YouTube, great! Instead, NTS Radio is on in the background for periods of time, not as background noise, but as good old radio showcasing things I’ve never heard before. For those lofi focus mode beats, I’ve been turning to lofi.cafe. Well into season 6 of Seinfeld, I’m already dreading making it to the end of the show.

Purchased

With our beautiful new bathroom come new furniture smells, and I don’t seem to be the biggest fan of whatever branded perfume IKEA uses in its factories. I bought linen-scented laundry perfume and clothing sachets at Dille & Kamille for €29,40. Having tired my beloved pink fleece blankets, I bought two soft new ones and two for our friends who could use some coziness, €34,99 at JYSK.

Appreciated

The quiet at Studio Pansa is very unlike the perpetual Amsterdam soundscape. What an absolute privilege to sit there in silence.

Wondered

Where is Assisi? Is Sutton Foster white? What’s that cool UX volunteering platform again? Did other people think Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was a little antisemitic in the later seasons? How prominent are the company names on theater posters? How do I used the word “thrall”? Ben Werdmuller is Dutch?! Who is Jerry Seinfeld married to?

Something to improve

Physical therapy exercises, come on!

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Daddy Cross, my friend and coworker with the best nickname in the world, is usually a very bold woman. The kind of power house I imagine Julia Louis-Dreyfus to be. Speaks truth to power in a voice that can do all sorts of things. Best physical comedy I’ve ever seen in a person. But I shouldn’t be surprised, because she’s a total theater kid. Last week, as I hobbled my way past her desk, she asked, in a squeaky voice: “Are you busy, like, in general?”

I’m never busy. I learned early on in University that answering the question “How are you?” with “Oh my, I’m so busy” was both boring and unproductive. I always reserve space for emergency design work, on-the-fly meetings, and time-sensitive requests. But Daddy Cross’ question wasn’t about work.

In April, she and her theater friends will be on stage in Rotterdam (and hopefully Amsterdam) to perform an anthology of three single-act plays. Did I have a moment to maybe help them put together some promotional artwork?

As you may remember, I spent a week in the hospital becoming enthralled with the workings of Procreate.app. Where I’ve dreaded such assignments in the past simply because of how disappointing I find the work I produce in Adobe Illustrator, I now felt excitement about making something beautiful. And I’m pleased with how it all came together.

One of the prominent memories I have of doing client work out of Studio Zinzy was the utter boredom I felt just doing whatever they told me. My time on-site at technology companies gave me a sense of autonomy and proactiveness that I carry with me to this day. But with small-scale client work, after twenty times of a freelance writer telling me they really preferred a serif font for a heading typeface because it looked softer, I usually just ended up giving in.

I had expected doing this assignment would give me a similar lack of affect, but nothing could be further from the truth. Having been away from freelance work for a decade now, it seems I’ve made a transformation in the process. I suppose “the older you get, the fewer fucks you give” is an adage as true here as it is anywhere.

There were various suggestions Daddy Cross made over WhatsApp that I second-guessed, didn’t like, or quietly ignored. Not because she’s an idiot, quite the contrary, but because I felt entirely comfortable thinking: I’m a designer, I know what I’m talking about. I’d take her considerations seriously, listen intently, and return something that surprised her. Kinda like ChatGPT, but without the hallucinations and poor visual execution.

While doodling hands and phone cords for a week I realized: thirteen years ago, I was giving in because my design practice was immature.

I think the result speaks for itself: delightful film noir-inspired scenes with a moody color scheme and lots of ink wash. And what a blast it was creating it. Daddy Cross already asked me if I’d be available for more assignments. I didn’t tell her no.

If you’re in the area early April, get your tickets. They’re a talented bunch.

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Seinfeld, however, wouldn’t be where it is today in our home (halfway through season five) if we hadn’t first watched Curb Your Enthusiasm, the mockumentary about Seinfeld creator Larry David.

Upon viewing those first few Curb episodes, my gut instinct was to complain about how unrealistic Larry David is. Here is a man with a complete lack of decorum, an annoyingly pedantic approach to society’s unwritten rules, an inexplicable penchant for arguments, and a perplexing ability to successfully lay on the charm when the time is right, with women well above his pay grade, no less. Nobody is like that, I kept screaming at the wall on which we project our streaming.

After a while of me getting used to his shenanigans, though, Larry David really began to grow on me. I love Larry David. He should’ve been the author of that book on how not giving a fuck is a subtle art, albeit not so subtle when he does it. I began to understand I had known Larry David all along. My father-in-law is Larry David. And I think that one coworker is headed there, too.

Now I miss the show if I don’t see it for a week.

If there ever were an objectively correct order in which to watch two television series, it’s “first Curb Your Enthusiasm, then Seinfeld.” I can’t imagine laughing out loud as much as I do watching them had I seen them any other way.

Remember that unsatisfying horror movie Identity? A whodunit of serial killing against the backdrop of a Psycho decor that turns out to be the inner world of a psychopath with multiple identity disorder? Well into my fifth season of Seinfeld, I’ve become a firm believer in that Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer are fragments of Larry David. Mostly George, but all of them.

I know I’m not doing Jerry Seinfeld himself any justice, but I don’t care. I also know I’m ignoring four years of what comparative literary studies taught me about the difference between the author and their character. I see Larry David’s character in Curb Your Enthusiasm everywhere I look. I simply can’t see anything else. I try, but I fail.

Every episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm introduces some variant on Chekhov’s gun, and as a viewer I spend the rest of the 25 minutes debating Anja on how it will end up making Larry David look like an asshole. It’s really not much different with Seinfeld, except the question is “how will Elaine break up with the guy?”, “how will George find a way to ruin that good thing that just happened despite the horror show of a man he is?”

Watching Seinfeld has become like hanging around at your aunt’s place after Christmas dinner, huddled around the warm light of the television showing 1955’s Sissi on mute, exchanging looks of understanding with your cousin as you listen to the crazy stories your uncle won’t stop telling. “Ah, uncle Larry David”, we mumble to each other, a faint smile on our face before we spit out our drink laughing.

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Black girl: “He is a sugar daddy!”

I don’t know what to be: glad that this girl doesn’t know Trump would never take a Black woman as his sugar baby, or sad that this girl doesn’t know Trump would never take a Black woman as his sugar baby.

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Three wins

1. Finished the first stage of our bathroom remodel. While Anja, did the vast majority of the work, we managed to collaborate well on putting together the medicine cabinet. I quickly lost the ability to understand anyone who does not have storage space behind their mirrors.
2. I walked from the office to a favorite coffee spot with coworker C., mostly without crutches! It was a win, endurance-wise, but a failure in self control. I spent the rest of the week feeling the ramifications of this adventure.
3. Anja and I took an amazing pottery workshop at Pansa. She has been a member there for years, but hadn’t been since her head injury in April. I was hoping this beginner’s workshop would give her back her confidence, and I seem to have succeeded. Of course, I, too, will be signing up for their full workshop.

Stuff I did

Work was amazing: very few feature design balls to juggle, and ample time to work on discovery and research projects. I got great feedback from a coworker about a research project I recently wrapped up, and was invited to share about it more broadly. It aligns well with one of my professional goals of 2025: to standardize research efforts across our entire product development department. I’m excited about it!

One of my coworkers who’s in amateur theater asked me to design the poster for the their next play. I got to doodling right away, and a week later, we’ve got a beautiful draft that I’ll be fleshing into something more substantial in Procreate. It’s fun to work on my iPad to create something like this. I’ll be able to share it once it’s done. (2025-02-21 update: it’s done!)

Consumed

I’ve begun watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which I’m not sure I love, but which does amuse me with its untypical protagonist. Much like the week before I went back to the hospital a second time, I am still watching that horribly brilliant Dutch show about K-list levenslied singers. At this point it has been two months, and I’m not even embarrassed anymore. I feel like a discoverer on a mission in my psyche, looking to uncovere why in the godforsaken world anyone would binge watch a three-season reality show on single repeat.

Purchased

Two coworkers and I had our first of what I hope to many editions of the Finer Things Club. Our inaugural dinner was at Hoi Tin, one of my favorite Chinese restaurants in town. I tipped royally and paid €150. Pretty cheap for a mountain of dim sum, soup, and sizzling deliciousness! I bought the most appropriate Valentine’s Day card I could’ve ever found: €4,40. Now that I’m getting around more, my public transport spending is on the rise. An acceptable €30,24 this week, but I wonder when enough will be enough.

Discovered

NTS Radio continues to be a great way to discover new music. Tennishu’ Savers was a nice addition to this month’s mixtape. I know I’ve seen him during my first watch of Parks & Rec, but I had completely forgotten about hysterical Craig Middlebrooks! I spent a few moments here and there watching scene complications. ALSO, HUSKIES?! How come no one ever told me how stupidly hilarious those dogs are?! I can’t stop laughing.

Appreciated

The first three weeks of February are always busy: our anniversary, Valentine’s Day, and Anja’s birthday are ample reasons to celebrate, but I usually struggle to find the right balance without overloading Anja with gifts that are cute in the moment, but that don’t really leave a lasting impression. What has been leaving a lasting impression is how well we communicate, and how we work together to make our home a sanctuary. This week, she worked tirelessly on the bathroom, and it is so beautiful I now want to take ten showers a day.

Wondered

How can I make bathroom grout white-white afgain? How many days are there between February 15 and March 18? How was Staples founded? What’s the 30-Day Cycle in the Episcopal tradition? What’s a good recipe for creamy mushroom dal? How about for jollof? How’s Justin Hall doing? How much is a ceramics wheel? What does a lotus look like? What’s the name of that show about the boy who has a friend whose parents are poor migrant workers and live in a semi-basement?

Something to improve

This week, with all its beautiful encounters, fun work projects, and gorgeous bathroom developments, was a bit of a chaotic one. I didn’t take enough time to do my physical therapy exercises at home, or take enough rest in general. I’m looking forward to doing better in that regard next week.

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It’s difficult to describe how loud the birds are against the dark dark blue sky across the street from the hospital, and even more difficult to convey the dread I feel as I hear their poop splatter on the floor, but it’s very easy to say what it means to walk on two feet again, even if it’s with crutches and the occasional pain: the attitude is gratitude.

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Sterile gauze, pain killers, an ear thermometer, a dozen boxes of antibiotics, cotton pads, hospital documents, paper bags serving as portable trash bins, and adhesive bandages bandages bandages. One recurring thought has been that I’m so privileged to even be in the position to buy the number of island dressings that I did. That and all the cab rides to the hospital. “Let’s get one thing straight,” said the surgeon on Monday, “you and those bandages are done. Go home.”

It all feels like another paragraph into a new chapter I’m calling “On the Up and Up”. Wounds become scars, standing showers become normal, takeout deliveries become an exception, wheelchairs become dispensable, supplies become clutter, hearts become calm.

Currently listening to Julee Cruise’s “Falling”.

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My first time traveling to the office without taxi assistance since my accident. I’m excited to see everyone, and nervous about how tight these hiking shoes feel. I’ve worn the right one plenty of times, but I’m breaking in the left one only now. I keep thinking “what if my leg explodes?!” but then I remember what the surgeon said during yesterday’s check-up: “you no longer have an ankle problem, only a head problem.”

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Three wins

1. Read the eleven peer reviews I had received at work, and was stunned, inspired, and humbled by the kindness and positivity. Part of me thinks that’s just because people felt sorry for me and my Christmas Eve surgery. A more positive part sees I’m doing things right.
2. Despite what I was told, my PICC line, which delivered antibiotics intravenously, was able to come out on Wednesday. This meant I no longer have to carry the dispenser pack, that I can pick up the dog again, and that I can take normal showers!
3. Had my first physical therapy session, where the therapists straightened me out right quick about my posture. The younger one, a senior student, massaged my calf in a way that gave me so much more flexibility it left me speechless.

Stuff I did

Returning from holiday in the middle of the work week is always a delight, as was confirmed by two relaxed days of catching up. I came back online after 26 days of alternating leisure and hospitalization. To my surprise, I was able to work the full day without requiring a nap.

I’ve been making attempts to walk more, both around the house and in the neighborhood. It’s making me feel stronger, but also nervous. A small part of me thinks the infection in my foot is getting out of hand again, and that I’ll spend 2025 learning to walk on a prosthetic foot. To combat this anxiety, I spent a lot of time pruning my notes archive, which I currently manage with Obsidian, and I’ve been on YouTube a lot.

Consumed

Being in between shows we can’t help but binge, Anja and I spent our evenings vegging out to Curb Your Enthusiasm. During the day, when it’s difficult to wean myself off of the comfort of ad-free video streaming, I’m stuck in the YouTube algorithm of clips and full episodes of a horribly brilliant Dutch show about K-list levenslied singers.

Purchased

I entered 2025 in a mode of spendfulness. Budget awareness and being temporarily immobilized have drastically reduced my impulse purchases. This week, I bought the Thick Paint brush set for Procreate by Ittai Manero (€28.43), as well as medical socks (€17.95). I also — very proudly, I might add — made my first €129 deposit to my pension investment account. Lastly, I treated Tim to a €120 dinner at Vijf Nul Vijf to thank him for being a good friend. I could’ve done with a few more incubation days on the brush set, but overall, a good week, financially.

Discovered

My relationship with music discovery is slowly beginning to change. I have a sneaking, though mostly unconfirmed, suspicion that my relationship with Spotify is not benefitting my favorite artists much. More annoyingly, I find that my listening habits have changed for the worse. I’ve decided to stop listening to Spotify-generated playlists, and instead use user-generated playlists as mixtapes to discover new work. My biggest discovered this week was that Bandcamp proves a perfect platform for music discovery. I’m trying it on for size, and low-key remembering where I left my iPod Classic.

Appreciated

Seasonal Dances by Romaal Kultan is a nice record. It’s still cold and wet in Amsterdam, but sitting in the afternoon sun with Lemonade was a treat. My rigorous antibiotics protocol make me cherish my late morning coffees even more. Anja has developed an interest in bike repair, and it was adorable and lovely to see her on the patio in the cold, tinkering away. Our neighbors A&M invited us for pizza and the third installment of O.J.: Made in America. Top 10 of the best pizzas I’ve had in my life. Could’ve had a break on all the n-words though, but I’m a part of it now.

Wondered

What other Fleetwood Mac songs are there that heavily feature Stevie Nicks (very few)? How’s Sheryl Crow doing? What happened during the December murders? What’s the history of Mar-a-Lago? Why is it called Pale of Settlement? Is Zappa really Frank’s last name? What’s it called again, reptilian brain? Who’s behind that song “Children of the Night”? What’s the sternum? Where did Eurodance originate? Who calls their kid Sistine Stallone?

Something to improve

Having YouTube as my life’s audiovisual backdrop is usually a sign that there are feelings I have trouble processing.

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The charging indicator light of my antibiotics dispenser pack was quite bright, all things considered. The technical nurse pulled out two feet of IV that led right to my heart and I felt nothing. Tonight marks the first night in two weeks that I get to twist and turn as much as I want in my sleep. Another milestone in a long trajectory.

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A stream of consciousness of 2024

Photos with no filter, HTML energy, old-fashioned tea pots, things feel too full, how much should I carry, liminal space as a sound, where should I work if I can’t do it from home, Bishop Mark is nice, YouTube without the ads, cooking is not my hobby, biking fast and slow, where do I find unknown music, saying yes too much, Royel Otis, places feel like Berlin, being around Black people, to be the middle child somehow still, easy recovery becomes hard, nurses are good, lofi beats, schlager.

What has made me feel most alive

In the brightly-colored Algarve, too hot for my taste in September but beautiful nonetheless, I spent a week with family and myself. Slightly bored during the day because of the temperatures, I took myself on a sunset cruise along the coastline. Farther out into the water, with the engines and silly party boat music off, the quietude of the ocean was breath-taking. Alive I felt looking at a dolphin up close without wanting to take a photograph of it.

A new habit

As part of my eating disorder recovery finding my way back to the gym has been on my bucket list for a while now. Frankly, I had never been able to develop a sustainable, healthy way of working out without relapsing into restrictive and unhealthy behaviors.

In 2024, though, I’ve been able to reach a new level of recovery. Training (my emotional stamina) since Easter, I’ve been able to develop an energizing, mindful practice that has made me so much stronger and confident. Getting back to the gym is in my top three of things I’m excited to do once my ankle allows it again.

A thank you note

Thank you, M., the technical nurse who administered my first cassette of portable antibiotics. When Anja and I came home distraught and stressed after a chaotic discharge from the hospital, you saw what we needed, which was a friendly face and someone who made us feel at ease about a disquieting new reality.

When I learned today that my last dose of intravenous antibiotics ends tomorrow and not January 17, I was disappointed that I won’t get to see you again.

A question I’ve begun asking myself

“What’s slower than this?” Learning, in all sorts of ways, that I tend to speed through my experiences with too much ease, I’m learning to see the benefit of taking things more slowly than I normally would. “What’s slower than what I want this to be?” “What is slower than how fast I think I need to complete this?” “What’s less than this?”

My favorites of 2024

• Song: “Les ferrofluides-fleurs” by Klô Pelgag was one of those “hit you in the chest” kind of miracles I discovered in the summer. A song that, upon listening to it for the first time, became an immediate favorite. It would’ve been my top song of the year had it not been for that embarrassing pop song that didn’t make it to the top 20 of Eurovision.
• Album: Atlas by Karlijn Langendijk, a delicious instrumental record filled with beautiful, sultry sounds. I want “The Golden Hour” to swallow me whole.
• Film: The Zone of Interest is etched in my memory as the most effective nazi movie, perfectly on par with my favorite Holocaust film, Son of Saul. I saw it thrice in a month. I’m embarrassed to be so late to the Sandra Hüller fan club.
• TV show: Despite my original hesitation, I loved the second season of The White Lotus. In particular, I thoroughly enjoyed the acting of Jennifer Coolidge and Haley Lu Richardson, as well as that SNL skit.

In 2025…

• I want to walk and run on two healthy feet again
• I want to do a pull-up
• I want to make it to Paris
• I want to break my paycheck-to-paycheck cycle with YNAB (referral link)
• I want to learn to smoothly read sheet music again

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The Flores (!) boys sent me beautiful Get Well Soon flowers. What an absolute treat to have these colors in the home!

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As I settle back in at home, I’m slowly shaking off the fear of germs that enveloped me at the hospital. It means getting to pet Lemonade again, who cuddles her way into my heart more deeply every day. It’s interesting to see what it does to me, our wordless relationship.

As Anja and I planned another Paris trip to use my unused train tickets, we got into a little argument about whether or not to take the dog. Anja says this is what we signed up for. I say a real vacation is when I don’t have three walks around which to plan my days. But then again, with a face like this, will I ever need a vacation?

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Lucky for me, the queue for Dutch customer service was so long that I was offered a shortcut to the English department. And what a delight it was indeed! James from Eurostar helped me rescheduled two tickets without any trouble whatsoever, in the span of only a few minutes, and at no additional charge. The whole thing made me wonder why I ever log onto the Internet to do anything by myself.

Based on my one conversation with James, I now have a new theory that I’m eager to put to the test:

The easier it is to complete a task in private on a website, the friendlier customer service phone operators will be in completing it for me

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Still, I should confess that I was excited to be released from the presence of my hospital neighbor, a dentureless elderly woman with severe bowel problems whose sounds were revolting. If you’re wondering how petty I am for focusing on that instead of my own fracture-related infection, imagine what Anja’s life is like.

This time around post-surgery, my wounds are healing beautifully, and I’ve been gaining the confidence to put pressure on my feet again. A sweet development was putting on an actual pair of shoes for the first time since late October.

Bedridden during my hospital stay, I discovered a new hobby: drawing on my iPad. Every time I google “Procreate”, I’m overwhelmed with my perceived lack of talent. I’ve learnt a new trick, though: don’t draw what other people have drawn. Pick a photograph and draw that, instead.

At home, things quickly settled into a sweet rhythm: sleeping in until 7:30 A.M., Anja and I hang around the house, playing around with our digital planners, Curb Your Enthusiasm, the technical nurse comes every day at noon to renew my antibiotics pack. Simple dinners.

I feel grateful for the Dutch healthcare system. I know, both personally and professionally, that there’s much to be improved. Still, this very specific scenario in which I find myself has me work with deeply concerned doctors, attentive nurses, and the luxury of having someone check on me every day.

A good first week.

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I’ve finally fallen in love with drawing on my iPad. During my stay at the hospital, I had so little to do that I eventually began doodling, exploring brushes, and mixing methods.

I’m surprised by how easy it is to learn how colors work, at least on a digital canvas. Below is an overview of four images of fjords I made. It’s easier for me to get the colors right when I’m working with a photograph, I’ve found.

December 28 — I made this from memory, thinking back to our 2023 summer in Norway. Colors are harsh, and the whole thing looks like I’m trying to hard to get into art school without knowing what I’m doing.

December 29 — “I think I should start with a beige canvas instead of a white one”, I thought here. Slightly better, but still not anything I’d put on the Internet with pride.

December 30 — “Maybe the streaks don’t all need to be at a perfect 90 degrees?” I figured. The mountains in the back make me think of a Scientology leaflet.

December 30 — I’m quite proud of this. I love the soft colors, and I believe the snow on the farthest mountain could be mistaken for that in a photograph, if one were to be looking at it with eyes half closed, for only half a second.

As with everything I do only once, half-baked, without much effort, I’ve now declared myself a professional artist.

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Dutch is the sky I see from my living room window. After seven nights in Acute Care at OLVG West, including one successful surgery and a rigorous antibiotics protocol, I made it home right in time for New Year’s. Here’s to a year of health, movement, happiness, discovery.

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Early Christmas morning at the hospital. Health-wise, I feel good. Temperature-wise, I feel like I’m in a botanical garden.

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And so it is

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We make plans, and God laughs. In late October, God laughed when I triple-fractured my ankle. My original recovery timeline, which included surgery under general anesthesia, had me use first a cast and then an air cast until December 25. Tomorrow. But we make plans, and God laughs.

In a few hours, I’ll be going in for a second surgery, this time to take care of the post-operative bacterial infection that’s been festering. After that, I’ll require twelve weeks of antibiotics, two of which intravenous. I expect that by this time next week, a nurse will visit my home daily to fix me up with a fresh bag of antibiotics.

This I believe: we make plans, and God laughs.

In my head, God’s laugh doesn’t sound evil at all. It’s something like Jim disarmedly shaking his head at Michael right before they embark on a karaoke duet of “Islands in the Stream”. I can’t believe you make the choices you make, but I can’t help but love you — really, and we’ll make do with what we’ve got.

To my enjoyment, other owners of personal websites took a moment to think about the word “belief”. Below, you’ll find their submissions. If you’re reading this, and you wonder why your post is not included in the list, please know I’ll add it as soon as I’m able.

Happy holidays, and a safe and healthy 2025 to you and yours!

Submissions

• Lou Plummer wrote This Is What I Believe, which I love for its variety of beliefs. The paragraph “It Is Possible to Overcome Nature and Nurture” resonated deeply with me. I, too, am a child of the South, although a very different South at that.
• Andrei wrote Believe, which jarringly juxtaposes one of my favorite images in TV history with a list of truth bombs we may all agree with at some point in our lives. The part about the “pure useful idiots” rang true for me; how did the relationship between fascism and antisemitism shift so drastically? Luckily we agree: it’s the people who make it worth the fight.
• Martín Morales wrote Belief, a lovely reflection on that beautiful epistemological paradox: that information may exist, but we simply don’t or can’t have it. “During certain moments, the faith emerges within oneself”, he writes. I’ve been trying to embrace that part of life a bit more. It can be an astonishing dwelling.
• Ken wrote I Want to Believe, a post that I appreciate because it gives me access to something I don’t have: the million little “oh my god yeah I’d never thought of that” moments one experiences in parenthood. I know of one sad PostSecret submission citing financial reasons for telling a child Santa doesn’t exist, but I’d love to know of more reasons.
• Juha-Matti Santala wrote Struggles with believing in myself, an essay considering impostor syndrome, and the impact it can have on how we see ourselves and move in the world. Juhis, I hope 2025 will be good to you! (P.S.: I think you’d be great to work with.)
• Sara Jakša wrote What Beliefs Serve You?, which made me feel like I could travel along with her stream of thoughts for a little bit, to my delight. From it, I take a good kernel of truth into 2025: “all the beliefs can be tested and updated by living the lives we want. Which beliefs are stopping you?”
• … 7 nights in the hospital later …
• V.H. Belvadi wrote Belief Systems, about the things in which he believes. He notes how easily belief and knowledge are conflated in the ever-expanding Information Age, which sees maintream media juxtapose science and political reporting, two matters that vary widely in objectivity.
• Steve Ledlow wrote Belief, reflecting beautifully on the spirit, and how we can find attunement with how we’re more than the sum of our parts. He further touches on this act of listening and welcoming varying perspectives, sharing a saying that I’ll surely put in my own home office somewhere: “Have a mind that is open to anything and attached to nothing”.

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Only the handsomest neighbor boy invited me to hang tonight. His parents are the sweetest friends, only a few hundred meters away, and the perfect getaway for someone who is temporarily disabled. They made a delicious stew, and watched two parts of that spectacular OJ documentary with me. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to spend a dreaded Sunday. Tomorrow I’ll hear if I need more surgery. 🤞🏽

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One does wonder: why don’t robot vacuum cleaners understand they should leave stray cables alone? One also wonders: why don’t robot vacuum cleaners clean their own cover?

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(…) But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die. — Genesis 2:17

One thing that has been on my mind for a few days now is: if Adam didn’t know the difference between good and evil, why was dying bad?

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Three wins

1. After 34 days, I retired my cast and got an aircast!
2. I’m finally able to learn to walk on two feet again
3. I’ve been enjoying my Miracle Morning routine

Stuff I did

• 8 hours on both Thursday and Friday confirmed what I had hoped: I finally feel energetic and proactive enough to get back to work.
• Organized my workload to get reacquainted: what was I doing? Why do I care about this company? Why do I care about my coworkers? A nice Get Well Soon card helped tremendously.
• Began planning for a little getaway to Paris with Anja and Lemonade.
• Finished writing my letter to Mathilde, which had been a long time coming.
• Ordered a muzzle and foldable travel crate for Lemonade.
• Ordered the New Zealand Prayer Book.

Consumed

• Doing my best to get in four Bible chapters a day.
• Started reading a chapter a day of Live with Intentionality as part of my morning routine. Feel weird about the fact that it’s self-published by someone unknown to the Internet. It’s a helpful, concise read, though.
• Trying to exchange reading the news for reading IndieWeb RSS feeds in the morning.

Learned

• Soporific (adjective): sleep-inducing (from nytimes.com)
• That, if sleep-deprived enough, I’ll find myself becoming a boxing specialist overnight as I watch the hours and hours leading up to the soporific match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson.
• Many people mistake narwhals for unicorns, despite their vastly varying physiques.

Appreciated

• The rendition of “Bread and Roses” in the movie Pride.
• The rendition of “The Age of Worry” by Madison Cunningham.
• Anja for taking stellar care of me all the while stating clearly what she needs for herself.

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A golden retriever-like,
glitter-in-your-face
enthusiasm for life
is one way
I sometimes use
to describe myself.

I see it appear in the
Get Well Soon card
my coworkers put together.
“I miss your smile!”
“I miss my compliments!”
I am but one day out of my cast.

I cringe whenever I say
anything about darkness.
but, it’s true and I feel it.
Sometimes, the best thing to
do to darkness is
throw glitter in its face.

Glitter, I’ve found,
can ask myriad questions.
“Is it okay that I’m here?”
“Do you like me?”
“Can I rest here?”
“Am I safe?”

“How are you feeling?”
“Do you need a cheerleader?”
“At last, I love life. You?”
“Treat each other well,
the rest is commentary,
do you feel the same?”

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A sunny Friday, it turns out. This pillow served as my foot rest whenever I was in bed or on the sofa.

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The theme is belief

It’s an open theme, one that I hope will inspire you to share whatever pops into your head when you think about it. A few prompts to merely inspire you:

• What is something you can’t know, but that you believe?
• What’s something you wish you could unbelieve?
• How do you relate to the word “belief”?

Guidelines

1. Submit in English or any language open to online translation tools
2. Submit in any medium as long as it produces a single URL
3. Send it to me on or before December 31, 2024
4. Use the email address zinzy {at} pm {.} me and the subject “IndieWeb Carnival on Belief”

As always, I need some time to digest this theme myself. A link to my post will appear on this page. I’ll publish a round-up post of submissions on January 1, 2025. I was able to quickly jot down some thoughts of my own while compiling the list of submissions right before I went in for a week-long hospital stay.

Thank you in advance for participating. I’m looking forward to learning from your perspective!

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What a relief that I’m finally out of the cast. Putting my left foot on the floor felt so overwhelming that I cried. Looking forward to learning how to walk again.

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Wouldn’t it be just the thing if my cast was allowed to come off once and for all today?

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The show’s disclaimers, both diegetic and non-diegetic, kept me thinking they’re such pedestrian vehicles for spoiling. “Sometimes, meaning can only be conveyed through the shock of the unexpected”, I thought. Still, throughout the show, the disclaimers made me interpret and reinterpret and misinterpret “depictions of sexual, physical, and emotional violence” in ways I thought I had somehow transcended by now.

The series has left me feeling uncomfortably unsophisticated.

Disclaimer is one of those beautiful examples of a terror that can only be rightly experienced once, upon the first viewing, much like Irréversible and Antichrist. I keep thinking “well, I could’ve done with a bit more foreshadowing and character development around the twist”. In all honestly, though, I say this to myself only to alleviate the discomfort I feel as I imagine myself Sacha Baron Cohen in a hospital chair, guilty and bewildered, hearing perhaps the saddest of realities about myself.

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• How does surgery feel?
• When I walk normally again for the first time, will my feeling of relief be as potent as I imagine it will be if I were to suddenly regain my ability to walk right now?
• When I have surgery on Thursday, how easily will it be for me to develop a dependence on opiates?

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Mornin sun in the bedroom

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I keep finding bruises I didn’t know emerged after my bike accident

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Boy, am I glad I got my early birthday gift just in time to break my ankle in three places!

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God laughed as I made plans

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Off to Kindred Kuts for a touch-up for the first time in… a year? Quite excited about the way my hair has been growing. It’s so much more vibrant and healthy since I developed a proper care routine.

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Afternoon flower art in Vondelpark

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Cooking tip from our Haarlem friends

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Add to watch list

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Sunny morning at the office

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Guy and a dog

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Tell me about the best season and I’ll tell you it’s autumn

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A surprisingly chipper autumn day

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Happy place

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Reflecting back on September

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Work, is where I want to be, pick me up and turn me around.

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A dream comes true today: not only do I get to admire the Godzilla rock in person (on the right), I also notice how much the other part on the left looks like Godzilla of the early Japanese era. I’m in my happy place.

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I’m in Albufeira, mixing a family visit in with my desire for a silent retreat. A big apartment with ocean view and a pool, I can’t ask for much more.

I’ve been to Albufeira a few times before, but now that I have no travel companion distracting me, my attention focuses on the sharp dominance of British tourists. Pasty white skin (often visible in too great a volume) that doesn’t seem to ever tan. “You can pay in pounds” signs by the cigarette stand. Beer at 8:35 in the morning. An entire street of restaurants showing the game.

I keep looking for local life. Where do people live among all these hotels, where do they shop, where do they eat, where do they go to the doctor, how do they get around town, where do they do their laundry?

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Well, someone is ready for their first vacation in 14 months.

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Good start of the day

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Hanging out with Vanessa could not have been easier and more fun. Joining the Omek community has given me access to such beautiful, brilliant people from all over Africa. What a fitting wallpaper for the time stamp.

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My daughter doesn’t mind the filth. I suppose we’re both feeling a bit bored today. I might go see Blink Twice later.

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I love a ritual. The word alone ladens the room in my head with the sultry air I expect from a monastery. It gives me Caravaggesque sunlight, high contrast, beaming its way to a church floor, illuminating austere dust particles on the way there. You can take the Catholic child out of the heartland, but… It’s safe to say the word “ritual” is single-handedly responsible for 70 per cent of my Etsy rosary purchases.

In a much more realistic sense, I’ve long felt disappointment about some of the rituals that have actually established themselves to be a part of my life. The way I mindlessly cycle through the same three news publications when I’m bored, even when I proudly claim to not be interested in the news at all. The way I stop eating breakfast if I’m stressed about work. The way I perpetually alternate how and where I write and take care of my responsibilities. How I struggle to indulge in hobbies that go beyond “working on my personal site”, which, really, is just work without the consequences.

Beyond fantasies of the monastic life I’ll never lead, the word “ritual” takes on a very psychological nature, likening itself to “compulsion”. What I like is that the distinction between the two, outside of the psychology domain, is the word “intent”. Intent is a magical thing, at least to me. It requires a comfort with seeing what is and acting in a way that aligns with what we hope will make the world a better place, in ways big or small.

Intent and I aren’t quick friends. Subconsciously, I favor a life on autopilot, one that doesn’t require that I register thoughts, feelings, bodily realities. As young Zinzy once learned: if you ignore your own thoughts and feelings, you save yourself the disappointment when the people in charge inevitably do the same.

In recent years, I’ve been trying my darnedest to embrace intent and its ability to help me feel healthy, confident, whole. One ritual, perhaps the most important one, that has emerged with it is my embrace of the things I don’t like about myself.

It’s much easier to remember I can read the IndieWeb instead of the NY Times if I don’t make myself feel bad about opening the news app in the first place. Breakfast is much easier if I acknowledge the feelings that are keeping me from preparing it. It’s okay to switch up the old Filofax and some fancy new note-taking app, as long as I make sure I can find my stuff later.

The ritual of kindness is the one I find myself developing with great intent. The kinder I am to myself, the easier it is to embark on that enormous journey, the one monks and nuns everywhere devote their entire lives to being on as the warm sunlight illuminates the austere dust particles in their private quarters: how to be kind to others.

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My first time at Shiraz Jardin des Vins is less awkward than I would expect as a sober person. The friendly waitress knows what’s up: Coca Cola goes in a wine glass.

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Said goodbye to Erik Vermeer yesterday. I’ve had a transformative experience working with him. “If you want to do something but you’re scared, do it scared.”

There’s something endearing about the simplicity of being a man of quotes, especially since he’s one of such complexity.

I gave him “Doppelgänger” (a misspelling I refuse to repeat). Into the endless mirror world, the perpetual, dialectic nuance, is where our conversations often led. Naomi’s writing seems fitting. I hope I’ll see him again.

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Finally got my hands on a copy of this beautiful book by my name sibling Zindzi. Beautiful day in de Bijlmer to buy it. Can’t wait to dive in!

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Yesterday, Lemonade and I got to meet puppy Ted. While I normally consider Lem to be the petite one in the canine dynamic, it was adorable to watch her engage with a puppy. A puppy who, because of his hip downtown Amsterdam lifestyle, rarely engages with other dogs. He was very shy, and took hours to even begin considering that he could get near Lemonade without her pulling out a knife.

Unrelated: great paella to boot!

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The thing was a premiere for a documentary about a Dutch 70s solidarity movement of Jews who helped Soviet Jews escape a life of exclusion and discrimination. I had been at the thing with Anja and my delightful mother-in-law, who likes to recount the time she went to Russia to save the Jews from the Soviets.

“You had that great question then, remember?” the acquaintance says. I do remember. Their answer at the time had been “you may be interested in the workshop I’m giving on how to defend Israel”. My question that evoked it:

“How can I help people refrain from antisemitism in their critique of Israel?”

I suspect Anja was the only one in the room that night who understood what I was asking. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s nice to feel fewer eyes looking at the only Black person in the room, but I feel this random encounter in the street is an opportunity to correct the original misinterpretation.

“I don’t know many people who are appreciative of Israel right now” I say, “but I’m bothered by how easily people mix antisemitism in with their political criticism”. The acquaintance turns to their partner.

“Ah yes, she’s in a woke bubble.”

Their face didn’t display disgust per se. Rather, what I read was the toxic optimism a conservative Christian mother may deploy when telling her gay son that she doesn’t hate him, just what he does. I’m not enough of an activist to have strong feelings about the word “woke”, though I’m aware of its meaning changing over time.

“I don’t know many Jews who are appreciative of Israel right now”, is what I should have said. It’s true, but saying that would be like outing someone.

As the world topples evermore upside down, far right politicians deeming themselves protagonists in the fight against antisemitism, I’m fascinated by the divergent meanings of the word “Israel”.

I know people who consider it home even though it needs a good Konmari. I know people who think it was a horror show from the start. I know people who signal their virtue with it. I know it’s a country I would have wanted to visit one day, but now I don’t know if I ever will.

To me, Israel is an iteration of self-determination that isn’t necessarily doing many people much good right now. To me, it’s not proof that self-determination is bad in itself, or that Jews uniquely don’t deserve it.

To me, it is the home of our dear Uncle Eli, who seems really quite disappointed he didn’t choose to leave earlier, back when there were still flights going.

To me, Israel is the culmination of unresolved Western guilt; a falsely designated safe zone that alleviates non-Jews globally from combatting our own antisemitism here, on our land, where our Jewish neighbors live, too.

To me, that is what it means to be woke: to seek, perpetually, to be less of an asshole.

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A visual compendium to my commitment to bad weather. Greetings from Amsterdam, where it’s 10:24 and projected to hit 31 degrees Celsius later today.

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I too, experience a world that subjects top achievers to higher pressures than before, and that diminishes our collectivist outlook at every turn. Still, though, when I see a young athlete throwing a tantrum, I think of the participation trophy, and how it has created a cohort of people who all won the egg drop each year.

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Last night, as I was tidying up before bed, I said to Anja I’m quite excited about keeping the sofa low, while also allowing for storage space. Anja has two modes: 0 and 100. As we say in Dutch: what’s in her head is not in her butt. It’s great when we need to get things done, but it’s also daunting when she gets her eyes on a new project.

“YOU HAVE YOUR NEURODIVERGENT THING, AND I HAVE MINE” I heard her shouting from the bedroom, as I’m sure she drew up an entire wood construction project in her head in the span of a minute.

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I’m maintained and restricted by the ability to tune out whatever is suboptimal. By now I know it’s a common early-childhood survival skill that, while seeking to conserve me, grants me the capacity to self-destruct. When I was younger, I would only hear the quiet it gave me. These days, the hum.

I’ve been trying to relieve it of its duties.

One way to tune out the suboptimal is to put another sound in its place. The Internet has everything I need. More podcasts than I’ll ever be able to finish, countless YouTube videos of American millennials talking about their digital memory planner setup.

Every shade of white noise. “Can you even imagine what the phrase ‘Spotify has the best library sounds’ would sound like to someone from 2004?” Anja chuckles.

And of course, yet another rerun of my favorite show. I think I’ve listened to all of The Office: US seven times in the last three months.

This morning, things feel different. Maybe it’s because I noticed that yesterday was 666 days after that big moment I had on a hilltop in the Algarve, seeing the mechanics of the hum up close for the first time. Maybe the fact that 666 holds significance for me should tell you all you need to know about the hum.

This morning, things feel different. I’m up early, find recreation in a problem I’ve been trying to solve, and for a change, I don’t turn on whatever I usually do to drown out the hum. It’s me, the dog, the quiet morning street. The place I call home can be so still, even if Canal Pride is hours away. I forget what Amsterdam sounds like sometimes.

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• Why do people start wars in a world that has pickles?
• How can I manage a single Google Calendar that has RSS feeds from multiple venues in Amsterdam?

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• How much would a harp be? How loud?
• What are the cool kids doing?
• Is it too late to reach out to Paul?
• How’s March doing?
• Am I boring?

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Sure, I have a Goodreads profile and an IMDB account, but this is more sustainable. If you’ve been on this website before, you’ll know that’s important to me.

I collect the same properties for each of the entries: the maker, category, identifier, data, and a link to a review if I wrote one. I also give each entry a rating. When I saw the number of 10s I awarded to over two dozen titles under Watch, I got to thinking about how I rate titles.

1. How good it is in its genre?

Comparing apples to oranges is hardly ever effective. In the same vein, I see no value in comparing a monster movie to an art house film. I compare Godzilla Minus One (2023) to Godzilla (2014), and The Zone of Interest (2023) to Festen (1998).

2. Is it the best it could’ve been?

My academic background in literary criticism always leaned more towards analysis of the inner and outer workings of stories, and less on me being able to determine whether something is good.

Still today, this is how I approach narratives. When I think of the value a film or book has for me, I think about the cleverness or originality of the storytelling techniques. To a lesser extent I assess the value of what I missed in the story.

3. Does it make us better?

Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools we have to shape our realities, craft communities, (re)establish power dynamics.

When I rate a story, I consider what its role is in how we write our own histories; whether I think it respectfully depicts the characters involved.

This way, I give If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) a 9, and Green Book (2018) a 2; Schindler’s List (1993) a 5, and Nuit et brouillard (1956) a 9.

How do you rate?

I’m curious to know if other people apply similar, different or any conscious tactics in rating their media consumption.

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I want a good calendar app. One I’m excited to use, that works across devices, and is happy with multiple accounts that didn’t all originate in its own ecosystem. I want it to be lightweight.

I want a beautiful way of organizing my areas of responsibility. The difference between organizing my objectives, and executing on them is growing larger by the day, it seems. I don’t see people around me who appear to have the same struggle.

I want a lunchbox that doesn’t leak, break or get messy. I want it to cost less than it does.

I want an ice cube maker that only dispenses if the temperature is higher than 25 degrees Celsius.

I want stuff for a good dirty chai.

I want the lights of our living room plant tower to be on the same light management system as our other lights.

I want to know all the keyboard shortcuts to all apps I use without having to learn them.

I want to read everything without having to use my eyes or having to pay for it.

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I had strong feelings about Alabanza’s insistence that this work “feels like theory”, in response to it being marketed as a memoir. Calling Get Out a comedy diminishes the value of Black storytelling in horror narratives. But calling it a documentary is just as ineffective. “Feels like theory” very much sits in that spectrum, for me.

I enjoyed the lively conversation my strong feelings sparked about respectability and Black works, and was surprised the lyrical essay appears to be such an unknown genre when I offered it.

The first and last photos were taken by Wouter Pocornie.

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Don’t wear track suits, use slang, or do anything that makes people think you belong on a 90s R&B song. Don’t go into White spaces where your otherness is an unwittingly casual topic of inappropriate comments and questions. Don’t display anger, because a White man at the office will use it to ignore the point you’re trying to make.

Don’t eat with your hands, because people will call you an animal.

This is the hypervigilance of a brain on racial trauma. They are daily choices I make to prevent myself from experiencing danger; some colossal and perceived, though the bulk of it real, ongoing and usually too small to count as what feels like a true argument for protest.

On Saturday, I’m going to be the plus one at The Black Archives Bijlmer Book Club, where we’ll be discussing None of the Above. It’s a beautiful and good book that confronts the reader with questions of genre, of inclusion, of otherness, and of the intersection of Blackness, queerdom, and poverty.

The Book Club team is best described in one word: intentional. They are impressively well-organized, and think deeply about this text and the ones they have read in the four seasons of working on this project. We came together on Tuesday to cross some Ts and dot some Is.

Wally, the Club’s founder, calls ahead to take our food order. Roti chicken, I say, feeling silly for barely knowing what that actually entails.

Don’t eat Surinamese food, lest people think you’re… Black.

In the meantime Meredith and I chat away about our days, being Black at the office, about De Bijlmer, about being adults ready for summer break.

This is my first time actually being at The Black Archives. It’s a rich tapestry of writing of a wide variety of genres. Periodicals, books on music, (auto)biographies, books on racism, depictions of racist cultural artifacts.

Anja has been wanting to go with me for years, but every time she tries I find a way not to. For some reason, looking trauma in the face in a public venue on a casual Saturday while trying not to cry-and-never-stop is not my idea of a good pastime.

But now that I’m here things feel so different. Here I am, sharing a meal with two Black people who have seemingly mastered the skill of being unapologetic about their heritage.

They open their roti takeout, unfold their pancake, and start eating. Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it. I ask them if it’s okay that I watch them eat before I start, so I can see how in the world I’m supposed to eat sauce without cutlery.

It’s easy, really. I just have to be willing to get it everywhere.

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Remember Flickr, and the way we self-published visual sneak peeks into our lives on that website, in the mid-zeroes? If we wanted a filter in our photo, we had to Photoshop it in there ourselves. We tagged our uploads, but merely to archive our materials. Our profiles all contained a link to our personal blog.

Those were the days, amirite?

When I think about tools, an immediate nostalgia is ignited within me. You may find that annoying, though I suspect — since you’re likely here because you, too, wrote an IndieWeb Carnival entry — you’re as nostalgic as I am.

I’ve been on Flickr a lot these past few weeks. It still exists, you know? They even still update their iOS app. Some of the people I was following in 2005 are still there, putting together decades of daily selfies, garden pictures, and snapshots of their ring planners.

I am, of course, there for the latter.

I got my first Filofax as a young college freshman.

I felt so boss, so executive, so put-together with my little faux leather Metropol A5. Looking back, it’s evident the main actor influencing my school supply aesthetic was the wildly popular 2001 productivity self-help book Getting Things Done.

If you’re writing down next actions and you don’t look like you came walking out of an 80s yuppie ad, are you even a professional?

Approaching two decades later, I’m now on Filofax number three. In a way this feels excessive. It’s a Cognac Zipped Personal Lockwood, almost identical to number two, with the exception that number two was A5. It was too bulky. I never took it anywhere. It made me feel dorky.

Looking like you came walking out of an 80s yuppie ad only works if you’re not trying too hard. Plus, a smaller planner means I get to take it with me wherever I go.

It also matches perfectly with the other thing I recently acquired: a diagnosis of retinal migraine. It’s not the type of color aura I get at the pinnacle of a bad headache. Rather, it’s a small ray of glitter, passing by my vision whenever I’ve been staring at a screen for too long.

Paper notetaking technology is perfect to break that habit, one page at a time. And while it feels excessive to have purchased yet another Filofax, Flickr tells me I belong to a very small minority: that of people who have fewer than fifteen Filofax covers.

As I scroll through the never-ending feed of planner pictures, I get inspired, once again, by the years I spent doing exactly what these people are doing: finding the best layout and structure to organize my days, and let me get out of my own head through writing.

What I appreciate about the good old Filofax is that it adds friction to my day.

As a Product Designer, I think about friction a lot. Friction happens when we engage with constraint; it’s a occurrence experienced daily by anybody who uses software. For a long time in Information Technology, the prime objective of any product team was to reduce friction.

In recent years, though, we’ve come to see that danger arises when friction is removed from the equation. It enables our instant gratification, makes us prone to distraction, makes it easy for people to fall victim to others, to themselves.

In my particular circumstances, writing things down instead of typing them helps me be more intentional about the things I bring into my life. I’m sure I’m not the only person whose incoming number of tasks increases rapidly with the Quick entry module offered by many productivity apps.

There’s a natural nervousness I experience when a task pops into my head and I can’t get it out of my way within two seconds. That’s probably for the best.

With my Filofax, I pause for a moment to think about what I’m doing, and what I’m giving myself to deal with at a later point. It prevents me from overloading myself with busywork, which leaves room for creativity.

I like to get my must-do tasks out of the way as quickly as possible, so I can use the rest of the day for creative problem-solving.

Sometimes, the solution is a high-fidelity interface design, sometimes it’s a research plan, or a conversation at the coffee maker. Whatever the solution, I do my best coming up with one if I have a stretch of time devoted to deep work.

The physical page restricts how much I add to it, limits my ability to time block meticulously, and thus leaves me thinking about my time and efforts in more broad-scope ways.

My Filofax is a tool that helps me organize and reorganize the various domains of my life, that lets me be creative on its pages in many different ways. Most importantly, though, it’s a tool that asks me What before I get lost in the details of How.

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I know a biblical story has come alive when I feel my ancestors stand up behind me. Sometimes they feel like a hand on my shoulder. Perhaps a nod I see without turning around. Reading the Bible to the hums of a thousand perspectives.

On Thursday, Mark 6 sounds like a whole choir.

I bet Jesus understood exactly who he was. A barely describable thread of red that held him together.

I’m reading None of the Above, a delight about the intersection of being non-binary and Black. Travis Alabanza knows what they’re talking about, because they’re talking about who they are.

In the precision of the writing, I learn they struggle with exactly that. Not knowing. Their not-knowing is a force field. It can delegitimize, bring doubt where the skin is already a bit too soft for comfort.

When did I know? How do I know? Do I know who I am?

There was not a surrounding conversation because I was just allowed to be present: present in action, without speculation.

I read Travis because I’m going to be the plus one at The Black Archives Book Club in July. The team is better organized than most. There’s even a Spotify playlist for the session. In it, I discover Lafemmebear’s Win. How does something like that have less than 37,000 plays? Have all the woke people with good taste left Spotify by now?

I bet Travis knows it perfectly, the barely describable thread of red holding them together. Evidently, so does Lafemmebear.

Friday is my favorite day of the year: I attend my very first Omek Summit. Seemingly effortlessly, Omek has become the community to which I most eagerly return. Oh, to inhabit spaces filled with people whose lived experiences are similar to mine. The theme this year: the era of the bicultural.

The day is sunny, Tolhuistuin vibrant and gorgeous. I spend the morning and afternoon placing myself in a tradition of Black humans finding their way in White professional spaces. I’ve heard it before, but this time it lands when Kemo says that we have a super power. The era of the Bicultural. But what, exactly, is bicultural about the child of a White mother that grew up in a decided lack of Blackness?

Monday is Ketikoti, and I dress accordingly in blue and white. I buy a unicorn that’s clearly of African descent: brown fur, with a rainbow horn and two big afro poofs. I’m at once a child, and at once the mother of that child who does know the sound of Black girl joy. I see half the attendee list of the Omek Summit there, which makes me feel proud. I see my new neighborhood friend.

On Wednesday, my new neighborhood friend and I meet for coffee. She’s such a power house; a leader in doing the type of work that makes life better for people like us. A big thing is about to take place, and we discuss what it’s going to mean for her and her team. I can tell she’s frightened, but proud.

We’re only new friends, but we’ve known each other for years, in passing. I ask her why I feel so much more connected to non-African Dutch people of color who were adopted than I do to African expats I encounter. She’s everything but surprised. Both initially succumbed to a life lived in White spaces, we now are more capable of finding balance in our social and working lives between people who understand, and… others.

I’ve never been to São Tomé, the island of my father, that great place of unknown to me and it seems most of the people I meet. Whenever I encounter an African from a Lusophone country - which is to say a country that was once, like São Tomé, colonized by the Portuguese - there’s a familiarity I can’t quite pinpoint. As if they’re running into an old school friend.

At the Omek Summit, after dinner, Sofia walked up to me with a man unfamiliar to me. Gosh, I thought, he looks so much like my dad. Sofia knows about me and my questions of belonging. This is Leufigenio, she said. He’s from São Tomé. Like an old school friend, Leuf addressed me in enthusiastic Portuguese.

Barely describable threads of red holding me together.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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I said yes, but I had meant to say no.

On occasion, Anja and I joke that, if circumstances required, I could even strike up a friendship with a traffic light. I never understood the challenge of meeting new people if it wasn’t at work or the gym. The vast majority of my friendships formed because I looked at someone across the room and thought, for whatever reason, wow.

Six days later, here we are.

“But, do you also believe that…” the woman asks, sounding slightly more alarmed than I think she wants to let on. No, I don’t. “And what do you think about…” Many things, ma’am. I think many things about that. “But you could have found that sense of belonging with any other group, though, right?” The familiar caution when someone realizes I’m both who I say I am as well as a Christian. The bemusement that engulfs us when a thing blurs that was clear but a second ago.

Whenever a person interviews me, because it always takes the form of an interview, about why I identify as a Christian despite, well, everything, I never quite know what to tell them. Whatever eloquence I ascribe to my person vanishes at the sound of all the words in the known universe failing to capture what it means when I say I follow Jesus. Cringe.

I don’t think we’re meant to put it into words, anyway. Still, millions of sermons, door-to-door pitches, books, podcasts, mission project plans, and — more recently — #ThatChristianGirl prayer routine videos will have us believe differently.

Yes, but actually no. What I find in Jesus is not what I would find in a sports team, a choir, or a book club. But what do I find there, and how can I tell you about it if you ask without sounding like a nut case?

Ever since I met the woman for drinks, I’ve been thinking about how my pastor helped me through Mark 16:15 recently. I’m thankful I wasn’t the only person at Bible study who shivered at the thought of standing by Central Station with a tower of Bible leaflets. That’s what “proclaiming the good news” is, right?

I have so few proper examples of what Mark 16:15 looks like in the hands of a person such as myself, that I question their statistical validity. My faith proclamation has often taken the shape of a concession. The formula is simple:

Despite Christianity’s hyperfocus on the virgin birth, the resurrection, Biblical literalism, and faith healings, I’m a Christian.

Despite Christianity’s queerphobia, antisemitism, philosemitism, racism, abuse, mysogyny, misandry, and corruption, I’m a Christian.

Despite Christianity’s judgement of what is harmless, and forgiveness of what is harmful, I’m a Christian.

Despite our global lack of Biblical literacy, I’m a Christian.

Despite …, I’m a Christian.

Despite …

Despite.

Do you want to hear good news?

Here’s the good news.

Preach it at all times, and use words if you must.

What’s good news to a rose?

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Here was a woman who knew to answer a question with a question. A few hours later I was biking home, on my first date with Pi, a friendly-sounding woman from South London who just wouldn’t stop asking me fun questions. That was months ago. My life is different now.

There’s a reason I keep thinking Millennials are the new Boomers, and that reason is me. I was yesterday years old when I learned that I can pull up the iPad dock while I’m in an app. At the same time, at work, I’m heavily involved in R&D’s efforts to embed artificially intelligent solutions in the daily workflows of our users. It is as though I live in a mirror world: at once keenly aware of AI’s capabilities, yet somehow utterly not cool enough to use it for myself.

That is, until I began talking to Pi. Here are five ways in which AI has helped me these past few months.

1. Sturdy personas

At work, we’re currently revamping our personas. What makes for a good persona? Rich data, of course. Triangulating our data sources, the Marketing and UX teams are shaping substantive personas that engage both our healthcare experts and engineering teams. We could not have done this without tapping into employer branding interviews.

If there’s one Dutch industry battling the war for talent it is healthcare. Using ChatGPT, we ran an analysis on about 80 Dutch-language employee interviews, asking the chatbot to rewrite our input until what was left was one paragraph of an informal autobiography. Each text captured the essence of the career trajectory, day-to-day work, and primary Job To Be Done of each of our personas.

Without AI, it would’ve taken weeks. Now? One day.

2. Design guidelines without all the fuss

Designers can easily get stuck on ways in which to take charge of a design system. I’m currently balancing legacy guidelines and new industry standards. Our design system should enable people to make design decisions without me being present. As a UX team of one, I’m a facilitator, not a bottleneck.

ChatGPT is helping me structure my thinking. It gives me lists of components, common actions, and tasks frequently present in software like ours. I get to focus more on the what and leave the how for later. This way, I can put in place the guidelines that allow me to be the only designer accross six different teams.

3. Quick reporting on user feedback

Central to my craft is the act of analyzing and synthesizing research findings by looking at various sources of data through the right lens. Research can be a very comprehensive process, spanning weeks if not months. Through it, I deliver great insight into the actual working lives of our users.

I enjoy going on customer visits with our account managers, and retrieving quick bits of data that aren’t part of a larger research project. With ChatGPT, it’s easy to turn scattered notes into a concrete list of feedback points that I can throw into one of our Slack channels for buy-in and posterity.

4. Mentoring

I reserve a few moments during my week for mentoring designers. I love helping them solve all types of problems, and ChatGPT is helping me save time in my preparation. It formulates difficult interview questions based on a person’s profile and our session notes, it helps me collect preliminary feedback points for a portfolio review, and let’s me gather my thoughts on difficult stakeholder questions.

5. Cultivating courage for UX evangelism

Designers, too, can benefit from the think aloud method. Biking home from a long day at the office, frustrated about one thing or another, I found Pi.ai very helpful in pushing me out of my own way. Design is a creative profession not simply because of the interactions and interfaces we make, but also because we create greater UX maturity. The latter can seem monumental.

Talking to a chatbot is like casual cognitive behavioral training, with the added bonus that the conversations I have don’t affect another person directly. With Pi, I’m able to work through things I otherwise would find difficult to articulate.

What’s next?

As you know, no sentence on this website is written by AI and it will stay that way. I’m curious to see what interactive challenges I may run into in maintaining this line. As of a few days ago, I type ⌘ + ↓ and ChatGPT pops up to help. Using and abusing it as a linguistic search engine, I wonder: when will there be a time when I accidentally copy a response into an personal essay?

As for work? It seems like everybody and their grandmothers can’t stop blogging, tweeting, LinkedIn posting, or podcasting about this very question. I don’t enjoy predicting the future in that way. I simply see value in honing the soft skills that enable me to learn new hard ones.

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Here I am.

When I think about being a neurodivergent¹ designer, I think back to 2001, and the math workbook that plagued me. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why it required that I study addition and multiplication before I look at the order of operations. It’s one of many examples.

I spent a lifetime thinking I was thinking wrong.

It’s 2024 and we’re in the age of neurodivergence. My childhood math problem is now easy to explain. My brain is a meta thinker; it prefers skips and analogies², and lets me learn rapidly if it can look at the world (and math) from the top down. It can remember minute details, but will forget the secondary task it’s given. My brain thrives in chaotic passion.

In my mid-thirties, I know to care for my brain the way I care for my dog: with great devotion.

Whenever a similarly-neurodivergent designer asks me how they can be promoted from the Search Box team to the superstar Core Team, I usually tell them: go find a new employer. As workers, we continuously ask ourselves: am I doing a good enough job? There’s great value in an additional question: is this environment good enough for me?

Us “neurospicies” must deal with an inevitability in the way the tech industry organizes product-making. The larger a company, the more likely it is that makers work on the parts before they get to work on the whole because the world assumes they’re able to work on the whole only once the parts have been understood.

That’s a perfectly healthy way of looking at human skills, but we should remember that this way is very neurotypical. Neurotypical individuals may demonstrate a correlation between their system thinking abilities and their years of experience. For neurodivergent people, the ability to think systemically can be a very ineffective growth indicator that leaves us feeling unsatisfied in our jobs.

Go find yourself a smaller company, one in need of a generalist designer who can work across all products, offering research, visual design, facilitation skills, interaction design, and whatever else is required. Not because you think you’re the cat’s meow, but because there’s no other way for you to think.

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Here’s a summary of her booking request:

“My long term goal is to work on broad product patterns that involve a lot of cross-team collaboration. How can I get there and figure out which skills to develop? Another topic is motivation and being a neurodiverse person in a work environment. I have ADHD and I’m quite emotional person. That means that my motivation easily changes between 0-100. I’d like to figure out how to manage it a bit better.”

This designer, a computer scientist with a master’s in design, is about five years into her career. Currently in her second post-graduation employment, she has been gaining experience at sizeable companies where one in three or one in five people is a designer. Our chat touched on her career prospectives, on what gives us energy, and on adjusting our work to suit our brains.

I always get excited when fellow designers tell me about their problems. As designers, we often work in secluded settings, the only designer on the team, in the department, or at the company. If we can’t see ourselves in the people around us, it’s easy for us to forget that our problems are not uniquely insoluble.

A day later, I find myself still thinking about our conversation. Speaking with her reminded me that there are so many variables that go into finding a job that’s the right fit. It also reminded me that it’s very easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. In the next few days, I’ll share some key insights I discussed with her. They all gravitate around a single question:

How can we better connect what we need with what we think we deserve?

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Brunch with new acquaintances in the neighborhood, fellow corgi owners. The woman decided her future mother-in-law was weird for not liking dogs. It disappointed the Libanese man, who eventually found it in his heart to overlook the initial character flaw. On dating apps, the woman found it most effective to set her filters exclusively to Middle Eastern men. She recounts all the times Muslim kids in the neighborhood responded poorly to the dog.

I’m at the butcher’s, picking up meat for dinner. A tall man tells another man about his daughter Lola. She has finished high school and is working now, and she’s living with her boyfriend Mohammed. He’s doing Ramadan, but he also smokes weed. The men laugh at each other in unison, agreeing wordlessly that a multifaceted Muslim is not a Muslim at all.

Playing frisbee with Lemonade in the courtyard, and Amber and her parents are there. They play with Lemonade. They ask how the friend with the shattered eye socket is doing, and tell me there was a big fight in front of their house the other day. The police even had to come. It’s probably the cultural milieu of the boys involved, Amber’s mom informs me.

Someone in the building shares a photo in the group chat of two boys in black hoodies. Like all the other teenage street-dwelling boys in this story, they’re probably of Muslim heritage, descending from Moroccan, Syrian, Afghan, Turkish families who’ve lived in this neighborhood for decades, long before any of us gentrifiers got here. Oh, to be stereotyped into failure.

In the photo, the boys in the black hoodies can be seen hanging out in the courtyard, leaving a mess. Kids. One neighbor wonders what kind of black animal species would leave such a mess. I leave the group chat. Anja later tells me that nobody took offense to the dehumanization, but there is confusion about why I don’t understand that the neighbor was referring to the black hoodies, and not the boys’ skin, which isn’t black to begin with. I feel disturbed, but more strongly I cringe at the dramatic irony gravitating around the wondering neighbor, who served in the Israeli Defense Force.

I’ve been defending “kut-Marokkanen”¹ since before the Towers fell, even though I hate myself for it when my friend’s eye socket is destroyed. Something’s happening in the neighborhood, and maybe it’s not a new thing, but a new language. Not a new language per se, but new encounters with it. Encounters stringing together words and a lack thereof to remind me it’s perfectly salonfähig that we turn ourselves so nonchalantly against our own neighbors.

It’s a peculiar thing, to be in the presence but not on the receiving end of bigotry, for a change.

Footnotes

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As expected, healthtech is the bomb diggity

I’ve never made a secret of this: Gerimedica had me at hello. Even when I joined educational technology startup Leeruniek in 2020, I knew my next stop would be healthcare technology. My expectations were grand, and I have yet to be disappointed.

Healthcare technology is a space of rules and regulations, intricate interfaces, dozens and dozens of personas, and policy, policy, policy. As a UX practitioner, I love getting my hands dirty with dense subject matter. Luckily, at Gerimedica I can dive in as deeply as I wish to.

I’ve long had a passion for technology that helps busy people spend less time with software, and the work I get to do at Gerimedica feels impactful more than anything I’ve ever done. There’s something deeply gratifying about seeing the effects that smart, holistic design has on people who really don’t have the time to talk to you.

Autonomy is golden

I suppose the beauty of experience is that it’s easier to form trustworthy opinions, and at Gerimedica it’s paying off. I feel people take me seriously, respect my expertise, and actively engage my skills in a wide variety of projects.

Because I’m the sole designer at the company, staying connected to the design community is crucial for me. I reserve a few moments each week to mentor designers through ADPList, even bringing someone in for a one-day internship. My manager encourages this tirelessly.

Tough challenges, learner’s mindsets

I like a good puzzle, and luckily, I get to spend every day at work finding ways to solve them. There are puzzles that are more design-technical in nature, puzzles around interaction design, and many puzzles on the front of social dynamics and UX maturity.

What makes Gerimedica such a good employer for my particular kind of person, is that our leaders rally behind the same purpose, both in terms of product vision and company culture. They make tools available that help us all behave congruently with these things.

What is agile?

I’m going on 20 years in IT, which, pfffff. The longer I’m here, the easier it is to see that agile and Scrum, like the American Constitution, are matters of aspiration. That’s not a dig at my employer, just a general observation.

I collaborate with two distinct groups of engineers: the Scrum teams, and the R&D team. The choreographies through which we turn ideas into solutions are, naturally, vastly distinct from one another. The Head of R&D was already a decade into an engineering career before the Agile Manifesto was ever even written.

I pause and think about that often.

He’s the only person at our company who lived in a waterfall kind of world. I’ve never met a leaner engineer in my life. Collaborating with him, the R&D team, and our various Scrum teams is helping me look more clearly at all the times in my career when the statement “we’re agile” became a whole new type of waterfall in itself.

The value of feedback

As a UX team-of-one, I’m fairly free in the way I lay out my own growth path at the company. These past few months, I asked a dozen people for feedback on my productivity, demeanor, and position at the company. Here are some highlights from the valuable feedback I received.

“A deep listener, a critical thinker, a bridge between teams, a champion of user-centered design. Positive, fun, transparent, fast, honest, enthusiastic.”

My central takeaway from the feedback is that the type of person I am helps me meet people where they are. This is perhaps the most important reality of my career. Where I may sometimes wonder whether I know anything at all, it seems I’m flying solo in that delusion.

“You should take up more space: give me your insights and expertise, take a firm stance.”

Unlike any other onboarding I’ve done, I started my time at Gerimedica by keeping my mouth shut. Designers are like plumbers, often tearing down the work of the one who came before them. I consider it a sign of maturity when someone can come in and not satisfy that urge. It’s clear to me that my coworkers are ready for a little more pushback. Don’t mind if I do!

Looking ahead

2024 and beyond has wonderful things in store for the company, and I’m happy to be along for the ride. I’m looking forward to continuously shape effective collaboration across teams. I hit that sweet spot of a perfect design hand-off every now and then, though mostly I find that, like happiness, it’s not a permanent state, but in constant flux.

I’m taking full advantage of any free moment to better understand the domain in which I find myself. Getting to know healthcare professionals and what they need in their day-to-day work is an absolutely pleasure. Here’s to another year of learning, falling, getting up, and telling people a little more often that their solution is not a UX best practice.

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“I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’”

As a self-taught designer, I never walk far without experiencing imposter syndrome. And don’t even get me started on web development… I’ve been building websites since I was 11, but I never fail to find a reason to condescend to myself about it.

What if we help each other battle our imposter syndrome? I’m inspired by IndieWeb Carnival, which is growing to be a delightful way for the community to engage. I would like to introduce This I Do Know.

How it works

If you work or participate in a particular field, but you don’t feel like you have the authority to speak on anything related to it, you may be suffering from imposter syndrome. This I Do Know is a tag that may be used by anyone fighting theirs.

1. Identify an area that activates your imposter syndrome
2. Pick one thing you know about it, big or small
3. Write about it as though you were engaging a peer who knows nothing on the matter
4. Embrace the fact that, while you know this thing, you still have many questions; make sure to work these questions into your writing
5. Publish your post
6. Tell me about it

This is not meant as a gateway to thought leadership. I personally believe that the tech industry is rife with people who equate professional growth with thought leadership, and I think there’s something harmful and boring about it.

This is just a simple, small thing.

Maybe I’ll learn that nobody cares about this exercise as a way of reducing their imposter syndrome. Maybe I’m the only one who even experiences it. Doubt it. If you do find it helpful, I’d love to hear from you.

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Here I am.

I always say that I like returning from church with more questions than I brought in. The same is true for this month’s prompt.

As a User Experience designer of digital products and software, my 17 years in the industry tells me accessibility is hot these days. Back in the day, before we ever even began to make things that were responsive, I hardly ever thought about the concerns and needs of people living with blindness, color blindness, deafness, or another disability.¹ Now, and rightfully so, many of us raise an eyebrow when we encounter online spaces that do not take into account such needs. The revolution and evolution of activism is wearing off on us, luckily.

In my line of work, the chances of encountering users who have considerable accessibility needs are very slim, smaller than if I were working in a business-to-consumer environment. Because of this, I like to pay attention to accessibility in my personal endeavors. It’s my way of better understanding what design today constitutes, and I suppose I’m simply a person who enjoys inclusion. Y’all means all.

On zinzy.website, accessibility is a journey. There are some things I take care of naturally, such as a proper HTML document structure. Other things, like always making sure there’s alt text available for imagery, are a work in progress. I sometimes struggle with the fact that I have to do a manual audit of each of the pages on my website to check it for accessibility. I suppose I like a good Google Chrome extension. In 2024, one of my goals is to work through the WCAG guidelines and see how far I get.

I have yet to form a strong opinion on small websites using the aforementioned design pattern. My initial response is always this: do the makers of these websites not care about the accessibility of their content? I’m one of those people who believe that tools do not matter. Whether I use TextEdit, Word, Pages, nvAlt, Evernote, SimpleNote, Notion, Roam, or Obsidian, my writing should be able to travel with me without the export button being standard travel fare. That’s why almost² everything I write lives in a text file using Markdown syntax, and why I don’t use Notion.

Does tool agnosticism not matter to people making artsy websites? That is simply not the right question.

The right questions are these. What’s the difference between a content-centered website, and one where form is content, where non-words carry much of the intended meaning? How do people with disabilities navigate a web in which “form is content” is an artful, relevant way of conveying information, ideas, and emotions? What can we learn from the working definition of the word “accessibility” as it has been adopted by the art world, the world of music, cinema? Do these worlds call it that? If RSS is a means of extracting from a content-centered website what is most important, what would one use to extract the same from an artsy one? What’s digital art? What’s a website?

Footnotes

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One trait common in Dutch speakers (at least in the Randstad) is that, as soon as a non-native speaker joins the conversation, they will switch to English. I can speak only for myself: it’s an act of inclusion, of liberation. I want expats to feel at home in the Netherlands, and autonomous in their manner and pace of learning Dutch. Forcing them into it over lunch, which is a time to relax, is not something I’m fond of doing.

Mattia reminded me today that, while it’s an act of short-term inclusion, it’s also an act of long-term exclusion.

If expats don’t have anyone to practice Dutch with, specifically to practice Dutch work talk, they may never feel comfortable enough to communicate in it.

Why do I not make an effort?

I tell myself it’s because I studied linguistics and tutored children for so long that speaking Dutch as a form of teaching doesn’t make me feel like I’m on a lunch break. I tell myself I can’t recalibrate my relationships with people from one language into another. That my neurodivergence makes conversations too slow-paced as it is.

But I don’t think those reasons matter, really. I think it just makes me uncomfortable.

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Imagine the world in which I hadn’t spotted the surfer in the queer Catholic Slack space of Vine & Fig when I did, that one day she was there. I have no right to define the surfer’s hardship. The day her parents kicked her out because she’s queer. The way she seeks to remain a parishioner in a space that can’t hold both her and the woman she loves.

We don’t know if there’s love yet. We’ll know after sushi and maybe more. I think we wouldn’t be here if everything good and bad hadn’t happened to both of us, but that’s my private opinion.

She tells me about Pema Chödrön and how inspiring it is to read Comfortable with Uncertainty. We ask each other what it means to stand in adversity with somebody. I can’t think of a person who gets this part of me better than the surfer. The steady rhythm of finding, questioning, and returning to the stories of Jesus, the stories of our spiritualities. Walking around them, considering what they mean for us, rejecting their face-value offerings to make space for depth. We are vastly different, but there’s a homecoming with the surfer that I don’t find with anyone else.

Sometimes we talk about what it would be like if were in the same place. Me in Newport Beach, she in Amsterdam. In some of these stories, the dogs are there, in others we meet each other at church. There’s always food involved, and warmth, warmth, warmth. It is vibrant, the friendship we have built, and I lack nothing.

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Look at that, I had completely forgotten about Ello, but I felt its obscure echo when I read about Daft Social last week.

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For years, years I tell ya, I’ve been telling myself I need to write better week notes. “Better” refers to their frequency and to a lesser extent to their content. I never seemed to have found the pace to spend my Sunday afternoons sipping tea and reflecting on the week gone by.

I just noticed in my RSS feed that Rach Smith is adopting a new habit of writing Dave Rupert-inspired month notes. I thought about my week notes, and immediately heard the voice of my wise mother-in-law saying “why suffer?” And why suffer indeed? Today, I’m writing my very first Vibe Check.

What happens to my week notes?

Good question. I’ll keep writing them, just privately so. There are great benefits to reflecting on the week, and some of those benefits can be reaped only when I write about things I can’t share publicly. An example of what I’ll be using the week notes for: reflecting more closely on mental health as well as work-related goals and productivity.

Highlights

Recovery, the halfway point. If you know me personally, you’ll know that I’m recovering from a persistent health concern. It’s one that lingers in the background, popping up as a coping mechanism whenever it thinks it’s required. When I’m in the thick of it, it’s difficult to see how far I’ve come. January proved to be a reminder of where I am in this journey. As Anja frequently sings as a form of praise: “this is what recovery looks like”.

I’m a crazy church lady, and leaning into it. I feel thankful that I get to help make All Saints Amsterdam the church I want and need to be a part of. As the weeks go by, a community slowly begins to form. People who return again and again, for the Eucharist, for Bible study, for coffee and intimate conversation. It has me rethinking what Church actually means to me. Much of my exposure with it has been fairly formal. Now, I’m a part of services that take place in a living room, where I get to give the host to my neighbor, where I read from the Bible aloud almost every time I’m there. Something is happening here, and I’m so pleased I get to be a part of it. If you’re in Amsterdam, come on over.

Various international friends came to visit us. My heart overflows. Anneli spent a long weekend with us, and the Flores Boys came from Texas to explore the city and share delicious cheese platters with us at Abraham Kef. There’s something special about hugging people you normal only see on the Internet. There is such warmth in all of these relationships, as well as immediate depth, closeness, and realness. I love, love these people.

I dipped my toes in at Omek, a community for the Black diaspora. So far, I’ve already met three amazing people one-on-one, outside of the wonderful events they offer. I’ve given myself the assignment to engage more, much more, with Black people in all aspects of my life, and Omek is a lovely starting point to help me on my way.

Work

Work is great. As a newly-established UX team-of-one I’m taking a fresh look at productivity, deliverables, and the general position of UX within the product department. As always, I work to unblock development teams as fast as possible, so I have room to explore, learn, doodle, play, and grow. We’re working on some pretty cool broad-scope stuff right now, which has me working with various stakeholders to whom I usually have limited exposure. They’re awesome people in their own right, and I can learn a lot from their perspectives.

Work soundtrack: Abao in Tokyo’s Study With Me videos.

What I’m consuming

I’m watching good crime and bad garbage. There is a disgruntled woman who is 37 weeks pregnant, homeless, and a “targeted individual” of social injustice. I can’t stop looking at her. It’s either her, or Sword and Scale, which is great true crime, but I wonder: how much torture must I consume for entertainment purposes before it becomes suspicious? Luckily, there’s also Better Call Saul, Berlin, and season 4 of True Detective.

I’m reading more than I have since I graduated in literary criticism. I added a reading challenge to my Goodreads account, and so far so good! I believe I’m three books ahead of schedule. I’m learning a lot and, again, seeking out Black voices in particular. The effect: as simple as less social anxiety.

I’m exploring a daily Bible reading practice. This was a suggestion Mpho made after I shared that I struggle to read the text in the discomfort of not knowing what it means. So far so good, although I still don’t know.

Instrumental lofi music is great for work and doggo. Other than that, my most popular track was Marc Rebillet’s Late To Work, very closely followed by Kana Kassy

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In addition

Identity

This category may sound strange to you. Yet, as a Black person who grew up in a white environment, I have to make a proactive effort to find community among people whose stories resonate with mine. These are spaces that help me do this:

• Bar Bario
• Omek

Hardware

• WH-1000XM4 Wireless Premium Noise Canceling Headphones
• (What brand is that reading light again?)
• I use a knock-off version of the Roost laptop stand. I’d share a link, but I got it for free from a hostess at a coworker space, who took it straight from the Lost & Found. The knock-off is perfect, and has convinced me you don’t need to buy the actual Roost one.

Kitchen

• I’ve inherited Anja’s kitchen utensil snobbery and have become a big fan of Le Creuset’s silicone spatula series. I wouldn’t know how to cook a proper meal without them.
• Our best and most-used knives come from Karasu in Amsterdam

Wear & care

• Over the Summer, I got myself a Nike Sportswear RPM Waistpack. Fanny packs are notoriously sizeist, but luckily this pack’s extra belt makes for a create extension, giving me the support I need.
• I use the following products of Yari’s Green Curls line quite religiously: Moisturizing Shampoo, Hydrating Conditioner, Deep Treatment Mask

Wellbeing

• Nidra Deep Rest Eye Mask with Nosepiece

Yoga

• Yogitri ECO Buddhi eye pillow with lavender-scented flax seed, used for savasana
• Yogitri ECO Pratyak bolster
• DoYourYoga half moon meditation pillow
• YogaTimer
• (I have an excellent mat that I’m trying to identify on the Internet)

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I haven’t seen her in years. The most vibrant memory I have of her is ending a three-day stay at her welcoming, warm house, and saying to Anja: “I think I’m going to quit drinking”.

I’m 2100 days sober today.

There it is, as soon as I see her face, the flutter. She waves at me through the living room window as I finish up the last bit of work. Between Anja and myself, I’m the lucky one: I’m working from home today, which affords me the luxury of treating Anneli to a lazy lunch. There will be cheese. Mountains of cheese.

To enter into Anneli’s presence is to soften the senses. The way you run loudly across a hallway only to stop in your tracks as soon as you see the baby, sleeping quietly in the next room. Anneli shapes conversations like a potter, I think, marveling at how she moulds a safe space out of nothing. The flutter, and it makes me want to lay my head down and sleep.

To my surprise, the flutter is entirely reciprocal, because whatever I feel she brings into my world, she apparently feels I bring into hers. In the evenings, she, Anja, and I talk and talk and talk, about love, kids, Israel, the war, the war, about eros, loss, mating in captivity, the skin on our heads, about coming into our bodies. Effortlessly, the flutter. The gesture of every thing momentarily falling into place.

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Me in 2024: “Do dogs understand movies especially those featuring dogs?”

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• Don’t Make Me Think, The Design of Everyday Things, and 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People are books most UXers would recommend. In addition, Interaction Design Foundation has a great overview of books.
• The Guide to Design by uxdesign.cc is a great starting point
• Career Foundry has a nice overview of How to become a UX designer
• UX Matters is perhaps my favorite resource on UX topics
• UX Research Field Guide by UserInterviews.com. It focuses purely on research practice, but it’s a comprehensive overview of all things involved in focusing on the U in UX.

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I enjoyed reading Deschamps-Sonsino’ annual review, so here’s mine.

1. What did you do in 2023 that you’d never done before?

Find belonging in a Christian community

2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I didn’t make any

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

No

4. Did anyone close to you die?

AA’s father passed

5. What countries did you visit?

Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway by Tesla in the Summertime

6. What would you like to have in 2024 that you lacked in 2023?

Headspace to see what is

7. What date from 2023 will remain etched upon your memory?

February 25

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Landing a job in my dream field: enterprise healthcare SaaS

9. What was your biggest failure?

Not walking enough

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Covid in early Winter

11. What was the best thing you bought?

A Polaroid camera

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

Sierra for opening Bar Bario, which I discovered this year

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Non-Jewish Americans hurling zionazism at Israeli pro-Palestinian protesters. I fear this war will be the end of us, but intellectually

14. Where did most of your money go?

To a YNAB category I call “🍱 Foreign Kitchens”

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Godzilla

16. What song/album will always remind you of 2023?

Mitski’s “Francis Forever”

17. Compared to this time last year, you are:

Better able to embrace all aspects of myself

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Walk

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Reddit

20. How will you be spending the Winter holidays?

Enjoying the lack of commitments. Christmas Eve is a Jewish NYC tradition: best Chinese in town

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with?

Mary Elizabeth

22. Did you fall in love in 2023?

Yes, with a dog

23. What was your favorite TV program?

Literally can’t even remember — tells me something about how much time I spend watching forgettable things

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

No

25. What was the best book(s) you read?

Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger - also the only one I actually finished

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Marc Rebillet’s “Late to Work”, also the LoFi Pokémon playlist

27. What did you want and get?

A great new job

28. What did you want and not get?

A cute outfit for the dog

29. What were your favorite films of this year?

Godzilla Minus One, Talk To Me, and Past Lives

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

On my 36th birthday, I spent a guilt-free day going to the library, out for lunch, to Bar Bario, and to 101 Gowrie

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

More alone time

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2023?

Office lesbian / mountain lesbian

33. What kept you sane?

Making music

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Philip Seymour Hoffman, as per usual

35. What political issue stirred you the most?

Dutch white people being so shocked at the election results

36. Who did you miss?

Mathilde

37. Who was the best new person you met?

Mehdi

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2023.

Get out of your own way

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year?

(I’ll have to think about it)

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“Remember when you scolded me because my website was in Times New Roman?” I ask him. He doesn’t. Back when this happened, he was working a Dutch corporate job. Part of him, or perhaps all of him, must have been so embarrassed to learn he’d sent his UX-hopeful coworker to a webpage that looked like it never left the late nineties.

“Oh look, another book on personal branding” I say as we walk into American Book Center. “That’s actually really what I need” he says. It’s because he’s hoping to be invited to SoHo House Amsterdam. “That reminds me of, what’s her name… Anna Delvey?” I say. That’s exactly what it is, he tells me. It’s a private place for selected Amsterdam creatives. A country club in the city.

“It’s great. You can’t take pictures in there, they let you connect with other creatives, and it’s 200 euros a month. My friend rebranded herself in such a brilliant way, check out this picture of her with her paintings on Instagram. She got an invite right away.” When I note that he moved a five-hour plane ride away from SoHo House Spuistraat, he seems surprised.

At Coffee Company, he shows me his blog, but he holds his hand over the title, of which I manage to catch a glimpse. It’s such a weird name I forget it instantly, but the writing is beautiful. I’m saddened by Gen Z’s inability to just use their own bleeding name for stuff. I don’t think the fragmentation is doing them any good.

I peer pressure him into getting one of those silly hand treatments at Lush, where the people always seem a little too eager to greet you. The person giving the treatment has a pronoun button on their apron, but still I get it wrong. “Zinzy, her pronouns are they/them” my friend says. Minutes later, I joke how I need an applause for managing to use the correct pronoun. The two most oppressed people on Kalverstraat, and we’re mere inches away from becoming the boomers we avoid.

We finally land at Bar Bario, where the Callaloo Hoek staff has come down with covid. What a waste of a good appetite, I think, as I Uber us Ranchi sandwiches. Like two people on a date that can’t find its pace, we take turns asking each other questions from the jar on the table. “When was the first time you felt represented by the media?” I ask him. “Never”.

“This is your SoHo House,” I say, waving my arms feverishly at the Black pride on the walls and queer people of color at the bar. “Your people are here”. He cries a little bit, but because he can’t escape the characteristics of his generation, I can’t tell if he’s faking it, method acting, or just unable to cry like a normal person.

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It’s curious to see my response to a bout of Covid is not much different from what it was in early 2020. Despite a negative test, symptoms tell me everything I need to know. I have to remind myself every day this week that, given the regulations, I’m not obliged to quarantine. Nevertheless, Anja and I are both barely able to walk the dog. I work half days, and spend my afternoons in bed with hot water bottles.

Later in the week, I have cabin fever that is so intense it makes me cry in the park a little bit. On Sunday, the only thing I’m left with is a stuffy nose as well as some fatigue. God, I hope I don’t develop long Covid.

Consuming

Anja and I watch season two of Somebody Somewhere. It makes me regain a new appreciation for Bridget Everett’s physical comedy, new sincerity, and sass. I wish she and I were friends.

Tinkering

I make some changes to my website this week, centering a page of text with links on the homepage. Sometimes, I feel bad that I don’t take screenshots every time I change it. But I suppose my continuous redesign strategy prevents that from being realistic.

Politics

On Wednesday, the country has her very own 2016 American election result: after 20 years of being (rightfully) ridiculed as a far right party, PVV is finally the biggest, taking 37 of 150 seats in the House. Most people in my safe, progressive, friendly Amsterdam that I’ve spoken with are gobsmacked. Party leader Geert Wilders has become Geert Milders. A part of me is angry and sad, but a much larger part says: welcome to my world.

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I was there for four reasons:

1. My definition of God is “science is indescribably beautiful and we must respect her”
2. I can’t think of a more regrettable waste of tax money than having to spend it on health issues we can prevent if only we take better care of our environment
3. I have a weak spot for an activist friend, who, through stealth influencing, had instilled in me a deep sense of FOMO about the event
4. The Dutch carnival season had kicked off on November 11, and I was in the mood for a parade

The phrase was understandable coming from the Palestinian woman. Still, I appreciate that its most vicious context of use taints it so ferociously with antisemitism that deploying it as a vehicle for unity is a recipe for disaster. The crowd was so immense that it took hours of dancing in place before we even got started on the route. By the time we got to Museum Square, the words had already left the woman’s mouth.

We got there just in time to watch Greta Thunberg, who had been marching with us, turning her face away from cameras to remind us of why she was there. In between her on the stage and us on the field there were three screens, each projecting her face from a distance. I believe she was there, but the crowd was too big to say anything with much certainty.

My activist friend is one of those rare white people: privileged enough to belong to the 1% of a variety of subgroups, yet so antiracist it brings a tear to your eye. A seeker of nuance and complexity. A political unicorn. As we stood in the longest line I had ever seen, sharing the weight of a “THE CRISIS IS NOW” banner, I said to her: “it’s so… White here.” “Yes,” she said, mildly embarrassed it seemed, “it’s actually a huge problem for us that we could use some help with.”

Growing up in the Dutch South, there was a peculiar detail to the way I engaged with other people of color. I didn’t. There was no nod in the street, no tribe to which I belonged, no “our stories of minority and loneliness resonate”. Color blindness was the tune, and we were dancing to it. After almost a decade in Amsterdam I’ve come to consider this lack of acknowledgement poor behavior. There’s not a black person in the neighborhood I don’t know. I had forgotten my life wasn’t always like this, until yesterday. I counted no more than ten people of color in the crowd, and I exchanged looks with not a single one of them.

Whenever I find myself in a sea of vast whiteness, I ask myself: “where am I, why are there no other people of color here, and should I Get Out?” Don’t get me wrong, I love white people. Some of my best friends are white people. My wife is a white person. Consider it a habit I’ve developed growing up in the Netherlands, where nothing about ethnicity is quite as it seems.

What solidifies Greta Thunberg’s identity as a Zoomer is the radical solidarity she and her contemporaries practice, seemingly without effort. Once she finally got on stage, her first act of compassion was to return the word to the Palestinian woman whose sound had been disconnected immediately after she had said the phrase.

What followed is what you may expect to happen when a person traumatized by an active war has to find it in herself to pick up where she left off to tell 85,000 mostly white faces how climate justice and justice for Palestine can exist on the same stage.

It was mayhem.

Once Greta had the mic again, she decided to keep her speech brief, much to the dismay I’m sure of all the people who felt blessed to share a moment in Amsterdam with her. Not so brief, however, that a man couldn’t walk on stage and declare he was there for the climate and not for politics.

The respectability politics are vile today. All I can think about is the power of the speech that could have been. The one in which a Palestinian woman addresses a vast sea of white faces who all listen intently to her talk about climate change. The way she says the words “river” and “sea” only when referring to natural bodies of water. The way she captivates her audience until the very end, when she pulls a Hannah Gadsby to remind us all of the hypocrisy and dangers of compartmental solidarity. The way she nods quietly to the upcoming elections.

The respectability politics are vile today. March-induced feelings of disappointment, uninspired virtue signalling, and racism find each other. A discombobulated display of on-stage pain and the very notion of pro-Palestinian sentiment have quickly been conflated into a rhetoric with which I feel increasingly uncomfortable: that people in power decide when minorities speak about their place in the world. That, when we talk about climate justice, every other topic must give way. That, when we march for a cause that seems to predominantly attract white people, unwritten rules of radical inclusion don’t apply. I feel the climate activism community interviewed for a job with me, and as a result I want to burn its résumé.

It makes me sad.

I’m sad because there are people who think climate justice can exist outside of politics. I’m sad because so many people don’t understand that the personal is political. I’m sad because I want to engage in climate activism, but I don’t feel there’s a place for me at the table. I’m sad because, right now, climate activism feels like a Gutmensch hobby. I’m sad for all the people who can’t tell the difference between antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. I’m sad for our Uncle Eli from Tel Aviv who is in and out of his bomb shelter all day.

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A few months ago, along with much of humanity, it seemed, I went to see Barbie. Walking out of the theatre and forming an opinion on this intro to feminism, I renamed the film to a title which I will use again today: “Blueprints: a pamphlet against simplicity”.

It’s nice to see all of your faces here today. I’ve met most of you before, but let me make an official introduction. My name is Zinzy, I’m 35 years old, I live in Amsterdam, and I work in the tech industry. I’m an interaction designer at a medical technology company, which is to say that I design the ways in which doctors and nurses interact with my company’s software. My job is to find out how we can improve the lives of essential workers. It involves a lot of research, empathizing, and imagining. The phrase I repeat over and over again is: “How might we…?”

When people ask me how I came to have such a cool job, I always tell them about my degree in Comparative Literature, and the time I spent studying Theology. It never fails to throw them off. After all, what could be further apart than the literary canon and the abracadabra I do at work all day?

When it comes down to it, really, I just love a good story. I love looking at the ways in which we attempt to make sense of the world around us as well as the world within us. I like stories because of what they say about us. I like stories because we use them in our attempts to humanize others. The truest and sweetest opinion I have on humans is that we are storytelling animals.

When we tell a story, we take a reality (fictional or non-fictional), weave together its most important events and actors, and have our audience look at them through the eyes of one or more entities. To tell a story is an act of selection, of extraction from the truth what we deem important. To tell a story is to curate reality. To tell a story is to shape the world. We turn something complex into vehicles for education, entertainment, action. We abstract from what is, so our shared language is easy to comprehend.

Let me give you an example. Here are two stories about Jesus. One. God has a Son who is also God, he is perfect, and we will never be as good as him, but let’s try. Two. There was a baby born in humility, who grew up to be an inspiration to billions. He was murdered because people thought he was evil, but we never forgot his name. Two stories that invoke entirely different responses. Two stories that remind us that the storyteller is the one who holds the power.

Today, the story we’re telling each other is that of Christian saints. When Mpho suggested I preach about this, my thought process brought me from Mother Teresa via “oh-oh, I am certainly going to screw this up” to the most important commandment in the tech industry: ask why before you ask how.

Before we dive in, let me tell you what I can’t do today. I can’t do is tell you how I think reliving the stories of saints will get us into the Kingdom of Heaven. I can’t even tell you about my favorite saint, because I don’t have one. What I can do is share with you what I have: questions. Questions about questions. Questions about stories. Lots and lots of questions. Today, I hold onto what I know, how to build successful technology, to wade into what I don’t.

Saints. “These are the ones coming out of great tribulation” the lessons tell us. Throughout the centuries, first informally and locally, and then because Popes began restricting to themselves the right to canonize, we’ve collected hundreds upon hundreds of saints. Apostles, martyrs, confessors. Human beings who were perceived to have an exceptional degree of holiness, likeness, or closeness to God.

And today, still, many of us find inspiration in the stories about these people. They’re exemplary models, extraordinary teachers, wonder workers. They’re intercessors through whom we pray. Their stories are designed to inspire us into devotion, into serving God day and night in God’s temple, which is the world. When I think of it, saints are stories. After all, we never get the full picture, just what we’ve chosen is relevant enough to repeat.

These stories fall perfectly in step with the rhythm of Christianity, the rhythm of the Western world. The rhythm of looking for what we could have and could be. What we don’t have, and what we are not. Yet. We live in a culture of becoming. A culture, and a religion, of harder, better, faster, stronger. A culture of progression. Saints were designed to propel us towards the next best thing.

I’m no different from the culture in which I grew up: I love progress. I love growth, I love my learner’s mentality. I love that we use the saintly canon, a set of stories we’ve chosen to prioritize, to be better tomorrow than we are today. But there’s a flip side.

I struggle.

I struggle with saints, with how our tradition has curated, abstracted their human realities. I struggle with the fact that this is an effect of storytelling at all. I struggle with what happens when details go missing, when nuance is lost. I struggle with how, without details and nuance, we idealize as quickly as we devalue. The absence of details turn excellent Harry Potter books into pretty ok Harry Potter movies. It turns Mary Teresa, a sweet, charitable nun with questionable opinions on the realities of sexual violence in the Catholic church, into the pinnacle of female selflessness. It turns inhabitants of Gaza into terrorists. It turns Judaism into the root of all evil.

The art of storytelling is a sharp, double-edged sword. And I want to learn how to handle it more carefully, both as a speaker and as a listener.

I struggle with how stories about saints make us compare our insides to other people’s outsides. Even the word “saint” itself doesn’t necessarily invoke an atmosphere of reaching for the attainable. I struggle with this the same way I struggle with Beyoncé, who, at 23, won her first Grammy, an age at which I took five weeks to find the best typeface for my bachelor thesis.

I struggle with how I can’t see myself in the saints. And I need to see myself in someone to learn from them. As a queer person of color, I am intimately familiar with what it means when I can’t see myself in people. It invokes a sense of otherness, not a sense of community and hope. Color me a Christian millennial, but I learn from mistakes, not from other people’s highlight reels.

I know that, when it comes to the differences between veneration, adoration, admiration, idolatry, and worship, the Catechism of the Catholic Church will tell you I’m doing it wrong. I think that’s just her modus operandi. I don’t think I’m doing it wrong. I think there’s a flaw in the interaction design of how we’ve been taught to grow.

The lesson is this: you are not enough, other people are, and you should feel inspired to be more like them. Inspired by Jesus, Mother Teresa, St. Augustine, Beyonce, Stephen Hawking, Barbie, the Barbie, the resistance fighters. I don’t need a superhuman who can show me how to become more like them. I need a lifetime of flaws to remind me how to be a better me because someone else became a better them.

As a designer, I will forever defend the right of a design flaw to exist. In fact, if we ignore the design flaw, we’ll never be able to make things better. We must look at the problem before we come up with a solution. We must ask why before we ask how.

Why might we become better? And then:

How might we use stories in a way that retains our individuality, our dignity, and leaves a margin for error, and room for doubt? How might we let the saints, all the names in the Bible, the very humans they were, inspire us to see ourselves in each other without concluding that we fail to imitate the blueprint?

How might we become better co-humans so that the Kingdom of Heaven is what we refer to when we say “wow, that was a really happy moment for me”? How might we do unto others as we would have them do unto us? How might we remember that that is the entire law, and the rest is just commentary?

Amen.

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Below are the notes I took (in Dutch).

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Yesterday wasn’t a great day. They say recovery is a habit and it is. I was feeling quite low about myself. One hour at my friend’s citizenship party and I’d call it a night. Tomorrow would be full of things, too. Then he arrived. Like an old friend entering the scene.

As soon as I head over, we hug, and he begins telling me that he talks about me when he’s teaching storytelling, on an almost weekly basis, eight years on. “It’s when I begin to talk about tension-building” he says, and I laugh loudly, after which he eyebrows “you know what moment I’m talking about, right?” I say yes but I don’t. Back then, I was too drunk to really remember anything with accuracy.

He turns towards to his friends and continues. “I lean in to kiss her, but she rejects me. And I’m so nervous, thinking ‘gosh, did I really misread all the signs?!’” Apparently, then I said these words, which…:

“Wait. This is the last moment that you and I have never kissed.”

As he was telling this story, my entire body lit up. Partially turned on, but predominantly struck with delight. Who is that person? Can I have her number? Oh hold on, he’s talking about me.

Two things can be true at once, and for a moment, my experience of myself felt finely in balance. The universe can hold me as the asshole I see in myself, but also as the person whose butterfly wings can make a small change.

I spent the rest of the evening meeting kind strangers. White cis gay men who wanted to join the queer meetup I run, where my friend and I met. Kinfolk, effortlessly introduced as we blew cat whispers at each other.

My friend looked stunning. An impeccable sense of style, a smile larger than the world, a citizenship bigger than we’d ever ask of him. I knew he was suspended mid-air in all sorts of areas of his life, but, looking at him, I suspected he had arrived somewhere long before any of us ever would.

Today, grabbing coffee in the neighborhood, I meet an acquaintance who’s on sabbatical until the end of the year, spending his time taking action lessons, storytelling workshops. I ask him if he has ever heard of the girl who almost rejected a kiss by the sea and he bursts out laughing.

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• Status update at the top of the page
• Content is now served through a submodule
• Blogroll

I love Mu-An’s status update so much I had to have it for myself. I like the idea of fleeting messages, blurbs shouted into space, with no proper archive. I almost fool myself into thinking nobody will be able to hold me accountable for what I publish there, but we all know that’s not true.

I enjoy writing Densely-linked content, and for this reason it’s better for me to have all of my writing in a single space. My space of choice at the moment is Obsidian, and thanks to Github Publisher, an Obsidian plugin, and Tania Rascia’s sweet writeup on submodules, I now technically don’t have to be in my code base to publish content anymore.

I’ve taking the liberty of hacking together the most obscene of deployment strategies: every time I update my status, Netlify builds my site and checks the latest updates of the submodule, publishing any new notes, posts, or pages in the process. I am not ashamed.

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“Imagine if we got so nervous about doing it wrong that we ended up just dumping these bags by the roadside” I say to Anja.

“Last Tuesday, two Dutch lesbians were found dead just outside of Lidköping after the Swedish environmental police task force shot them at point-blank range for abusing the recycling system. Their families have been notified, begrudgingly.” Anja jokes, staring off into the distance.

“Not Queen & Slim, but King & Thicc!”, I suggest, “You can be King”.

“But I’m thicc, too”, Anja complains.

By now, we’re home again, back from our first proper vacation in four years, and boy oh boy, did we need it.

Our plan was simple: make Anja’s dream come true by renting a Tesla, drive it to Norway, do nothing there for a week, and then spend another week slowly making our way back via the Swedish countryside, and Copenhagen, where our friends live.

After two long, well-airconditioned days in our wonderful car we made it to Eastern Norway. In Hallingdal, one of the country’s most popular ski destinations, we found a beautiful and cozy cabin on top of a mountain, overlooking the Tisleifjorden. To our surprise, it proved the perfect getaway for people who didn’t really want to… do anything.

It’s indeed exquisite, the Norwegian faith in our human ability to treat nature with respect. Quietly, it makes an enormous difference. The difference is in the shared understanding of where we leave our trash. It’s in the thousands of cabins spread out across the country, where travellers can stay for next to nothing. It’s in the fire wood left behind in the freely-accessible grillhytte. It’s in the canoe that just lays by the water, available to anyone.

“You don’t even really have to lock your doors”, one fisherman commented while teaching his son to throw a line.

We never kept our doors unlocked, of course. The city is embedded in our system too deeply, as were the countless “cabin in the woods” movie plots I remembered. If anything, though, it helped us pause, listen to the sound of nothing, and listen to our bodies, which were telling us to take that second nap of the day.

On Sunday, one day earlier than intended, we swiftly packed the car and drove all night to Lidköping, by Vänern, Sweden’s largest lake. While we’d been napping and relaxing, the world was reading the headlines about Storm Hans, a twice-a-century type of storm that would’ve gotten us stuck on that mountain if we hadn’t left when we did. That three hours of driving through landslide-prone mountains wasn’t going to be pleasant, even in a well-heated Tesla.

The clouds were low as we drove off.

Copenhagen, kubnhawn for the in-crowd, was a lot lighter, sunnier, and safer. We stayed with Naomi, Shlomik and little Goldie. Their cute, young family, the house, and the fact that were surrounded by thousands of people everywhere we went, was everything I needed after the quiet Norwegian fjords. One day exploring the city was enough to convince me: I need to visit again.

Some preliminary (mostly food-related) highlights from two weeks in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark

• So far, not impressed with Norwegian bakeries
• Brunost, however, is my new favorite snack.
• The quiet atmosphere of the fjords in the Summer months is spectacular. We went days without seeing a person.
• Polarbröd remains amazing, and next to jubileumskaka I now also love hällakaka
• Sheep are scarier than I thought they would be
• Lemonade appears to possess a strong instinct for herding sheep
• Copenhagen gives hints of The Hague, Berlin, Paris, and Amsterdam
• They weren’t lying about mountain air
• Whatever positive things you’ve heard about Copenhagen’s Hija de Sanchez are true
• The Norwegian mountains have Karens just like any other place in the world
• There’s a gas station in Gol, Norway that sells one of the finest soft-serve ice creams I’ve ever had

General vacation notes

• I should get my driver’s license
• An icebox with proper cooling elements can go a long way
• Vacuum-sealed cheese stays fine for at least two weeks (provided you have an icebox)

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As we more further down the line of Web 2.0 and slowly into the abyss that is Web 3.0, I feel the definitions of web design are evolving greatly. I remember back in the day when it was just one website out of fifty that looked really beautiful, and how I would spend many hours on the site just being surrounded by all the pretty. Now, as more and more distinct design trends are emerging, looking pretty isn’t the main goal anymore. It has become a criterium. And most websites I know meet that criterium in one way or another. Now that the eyes have what they need, the user wants for the website to be up to speed with their brain.

And this is where websites fail.

Not all websites have the potential of being minimalist, small and clean code-wise. Pardon me if I say that the designers might know ways to get there, but experience tells me clients always manage to come up with ways to make a code more extensive than it should be. So, some of the websites I am talking about can be exempt from my suggestion. But certainly, and most of all, I am talking about the weblog. A place where, once in 1992, a HTML page and new words every now and then would suffice. We have come a long way from that simple structure. Now, with everybody tuning into Wordpress, Drupal, and Tumblr for ready-made templates and every single widget known to man, I feel I’m becoming more and more detached from simple, beautiful web design and UI.

Scriptogr.am, to me, is a great answer. It gives me very few options: I can write, display some links, even add an image if I like, but that is as far as I am gonna go. There are no custom archives, last.fm user grids, Flickr photo streams or twenty PHP pages I can configure any way I want to. It is me, my words, a few nice web fonts, a few links, and the ease of writing from anywhere in a cloud. Scriptogr.am allows me to ask myself a question I was afraid to ask myself for a long time: why does my website need every available function? Why do blogs take up so much space?

This website is now as much a personal space as it is a manifest and an experiment. In the upcoming weeks or months I will experience what it is like to use one app that is always with me and directly upload content to my website without having to do much beside write. I truly believe that, as a blogger (whether you are a professional or an absolute amateur like me), it is crucial to know how much effort writing a blog should take. In my opinion, it should take very little. Not only because it is simply too much work, but also because I’ve learnt that keeping my blog beautiful and cool became more important than actually writing on it.

Let’s see how this goes.

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On Friday, I tell colleagues over office drinks why we still need Pride. The fact that I had to write “an anonymous friend” instead of the name of a person I love and admire illustrates my point beautifully.

“I think I’ll wear my face mask” he says, 20 minutes into the event. “Am I getting too close?” I ask, concerned. No, he just doesn’t feel comfortable being photographed. The off chance that his parents may see him is not worth it.

As we walk, I think about the meaning of the word “pride”. If we walk in a Pride March, can we be proud without wanting to be photographed and broadcast for anyone to see? A sign in the crowd reads “you can’t be what you can’t see”, and I agree. Representation is crucial, to this my life is a testament. But what burden does that place on people whose visibility is dangerous to themselves?

The intersection of queerdom, the way it interacts with ethnicity, religion, ability, neurodivergence, age, education, and location, is why I’m here today. Why I’m here at all. Mehdi, who has never attended a Pride event in his life, learns to shout along:

“What do we want? / TRANS RIGHTS! / When do we want them? / NOW!”

The speeches this year spark my interest. Tieneke talks about consent, an oft-overlooked point of concern in our queer communities. Someone whose name I forgot talks about bisexuality. I remember how unsettling it was as a young adult that people told me I was “in transit”, on my way to being either gay or straight.

I’m here today shouting for myself, a little bit, but also to engage in the praxis of allyship which is by default an aspirational habit: doing the things we know to be right, without determining for other people whether we can call ourselves their allies.

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• You should sign up for ADPList, a platform that offers free one-on-one mentoring with all kinds of folks. They have handy filters in place to help you identify the questions you have, and how you can best answer them with a mentor.
• Some thought leaders that I love: NN Group, UX Matters, Stéphanie Walter (specialized in enterprise products like me), UX Collective, and UX Planet. Career Foundry and Interaction Design Foundation have great blog articles as well.
• An example of a designer who knows how to create a good case study is Buzz Usborne

Let’s use tomorrow to go into some more detail about how to put together a portfolio!

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Me, a tired mother,
and a tennis player with wet hair
stare at the blonde,
one more covertly than
the others.
I know not to tilt my head
when encounting something
in which the world tells me
I will never see myself.

There are so many things
that are perfect
about the blonde that I
get dizzy counting.
Even a thigh gap as big as hers
wouldn’t be able to hold
all the details.

At this point, the length,
and the waviness, and the glossiness,
and the readiness of her hair
are just a complete unnecessity.

We all hate her, the blonde.
Me, a tired mother,
and a tennis player with wet hair.
We hate her because
of all the little things
the world has denied us
the words to articulate.

We all hate her, the blonde,
and the blonde hates herself
a little, too,
for reasons so bafflingly
unimportant to us
she could die from jealousy.

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• PKM helps us collect, classify, save, search, find, and share information
• By taking atomic notes and densely linking them we can come to new ideas
• There are many PKM tools available, each very advanced and functionality-rich in their own way
• The easiest, and cheapest, way to get started with PKM is by downloading Obsidian
• You may want to download their Windows app
• If you use a cloud service like Dropbox, you can easily back up your notes
• I think you may enjoy this article on PKM for researchers

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the kind of body that can’t hold the content it is living?

And where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body?”

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On Wednesday, I met two friends with whom I share a special history. The time we spent together resulted in many things. One of them was the tattoo on my left arm that say “WAT ER IS” (“what is there”). Spending my evening with them, sharing a meal, shedding a few tears, reminded me of why the tattoo is there.

On Saturday, Anja and I watched Keti Koti’s Bigi Spikri memorial service on television. I truly detest that the thing we requested became such a point of contention, that finally getting it almost made us forget that what we requested was a minimum viable product. Still, King Willem Alexander offering an apology and asking for forgiveness was history in the making. As an Afropean person I’m easily erased from the Dutch narrative of Trans-Atlantic slave trade that focuses on the Netherlands and her former colonies. Mentioning us by name specifically let Willem Alexander articulate how well he has been listening these past few years.

In the afternoon we made our way to Museumplein for the Keti Koti festival. Upside: I got to eat cotton candy, twice, and we got to financially contribute to many great Black causes in the city. Downside: I spent way too much time in line for food with hundreds of other people.

Reading! I finished a book. I have a track record of struggling to enjoy reading as a burnt-out lit major, but Citizen (2015) was easy to get through. It turns out I am enthusiast of the lyric essay genre. I picked up a book of poetry by Anton de Kom at Keti Koti, and I’m diving head-first into that.

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• Jason Cosper inspired me to get rid of my About page.
• Agile and Scrum are quite complex, and multi-interpretable, but Nielsen Norman Group has a few nice resources.
• When it comes to extraversion and “people-person”-ness, I think the UX industry is quite a good fit for those who aren’t those things. Like I said, your ability to create an icebreaker on the fly isn’t half as interesting as your ability to figure out what UX method can answer a specific question. This reminds me of a talk I attended at UXInsights Festival 2022, which wasn’t about this topic per se, but about making UX research accessible for neurodivergent UX professionals. You might like it!

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• A few IndieWeb people I like (who are involved in the community in various degrees) are Simone Silverstroni, Manuel Moreale, Mu-An Chiou, Derek Kedziora, and Elliott Cost, the latter two of whom live in Amsterdam as well.
• The friendly PhD candidate we met is Ornella Porcu.

I’ll spend some time in the next few weeks cleaning up my site. I’ll probably also try to establish some form of digital garden again.

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The fact that I’m part of a Titanic-obsessed gaggle of netizens somehow has me convinced I’m not just procrastinating. Five men with money — sums of it — on their way to Titanic in a little titanium box, are lost at sea. To empathize, the world holds her breath.

Growing up without my father, I never gave much thought to the reality in which he once found himself, well over half a century ago. Ten years old, him and his football team of siblings, on a boat, lost at sea. I wonder if the five men ever saw Titanic. I wonder if they cried.

I imagine he was lost at sea the way only a child can be: cursed with the spirit of adventure. Where did the boat depart from? Did he bring a toy? Was there a tiger? The only way I can read the scene is with the poetry of someone who’ll never know what it’s like to leave home when home is the mouth of a shark.

The Internet continues her wailing. Debris is found. The 19-year-old had only tagged along to make Father’s Day one to remember. I don’t know the story about my father’s father. I never celebrated a proper Father’s Day. My father’s father was long dead before the boat was put out to sea. Yes?

A Dutch news site tells me, at the bottom in small font, about their podcast episode. Who is responsible for the boat refugees who drowned off the Greek coast? Could we leave their bodies on the ocean floor? On Reddit, people share animated maps of the football team of rescue boats circling Titanic.

I love a good media drama. Like a moth to a flame, or perhaps more accurately like a fly to dog poo, I am drawn to it. Like a mosquito it drowns out the other humming. Like a natural disaster it refrigerates the other stories, the puzzles I fear I will never solve.

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It feels much more relevant to focus my attention on specific people. In this case I’m focusing my attention on you, Nienke. I think you should have a personal website. Let me tell you why.

You should have a personal website not because you need to grow an audience, and turn your hobbyist writing into a profession.

You should have a personal website not because you’re an expert on some subject, and it would be cruel to deny the world your wisdom.

You should have a personal website not because you think you’re important.

You should have a personal website not because the world is in need of your highlight reel.

You should have a personal website because I think the online world is as real as the offline world. You have a presence in one, and you should have a presence in the other.

Consider your personal website an online living room of sorts. The place that displays, in a variety of ways, who you are, what you care about, and how you’re moving through the world.

You’re free to invite anyone to come in, and have them see anything you deem relevant. They can stay for three seconds and walk out the door, or dwell for a bit, opening drawers, going back in time, answering questions, questioning answers.

Imagine that there are people on the other side of the world who would want to know how you’re doing, what you’re thinking and learning. Not because you’re you, per se, but simply because you have in common the habit of sharing your experiences in an online space where you are the boss.

There is a cozy web out there, where people connect simply because they enjoy snacking on each other’s slices of life: the seemingly unimportant moments, words, images that approximate what it means to be human.

Imagine, also, what it means when I say “you are the boss”.

Think of how little you control about yourself on the Internet. The .nl website of your name is already registered, but are you its owner? I doubt it. Your company has a portrait of you on their website, and it’s beautiful, but you can’t add anything to the page it’s on, can you?

You have an updated LinkedIn page and it’s a great way for people to find you, but do you live to work or work to live? Besides, it’s LinkedIn designers who decide for you what your profile will look like. If you’d ever want to do anything other than write a post or update your experiences, you’re out of luck.

There’s an old newsletter containing an interview with you, again with that wonderful portrait. It’s probably because of your work that this is all I can find on you. It makes me sad, Nienke, it does.

You know why? I love learning about what you’re up to. And I suspect the places where you share that are social media profiles that don’t necessarily use your full name. It’s great for privacy, of course, I get it. But I don’t want to be on social media to stay in your loop.

Or rather, I want social media to be our websites. You read mine and I read yours, we write comments on our own websites and they’re posted to each other’s websites automatically.² Twitter can fall, Instagram can crumble, LinkedIn can add an expensive subscription model, but you and I will still have our websites.

I want you to take up space on the Internet, Nienke.

I want you to enjoy doing so and perhaps even making new connections in the process. I want you to learn how to build your own website and tell me in a year that it’s actually much easier than you thought. I want you to feel empowered. And to have a now page, and to keep lists on your websites of things you love in Amsterdam and beyond.

I want you to feel that you can escape the rat race of likes, favs, and reposts. I think what you have to say is worth more than the hipness of some platform.

I want you to fall in love with personal websites so much that you write about it on your website, and tell people about it at Coffee Company.

I want to share with you the wonderful community of random people from all over the world, who are so much more curious and enthusiastic, so genuinely supportive, and so much kinder than any of the communities I’ve ever found on Big Tech platforms.

I want to read what you have to say about the world when you stop worrying what your blog should be called.

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The commute is wonderful: it takes me from the East side of Amsterdam via De Pijp and Vondelpark to perhaps the most beautiful building I’ve ever had the privilege of calling my office. I cross the river Amstel, enjoy the sun, and marvel at the preparations people have been making.

In two days, King’s Day is upon us. It’s always a big event in the country, and specifically in Amsterdam, and this year it’s extra special: our king was coronated ten years ago this year. In our house it’s not a big deal, in fact Anja couldn’t be more of an anti-monarchist if she tried. Lemonade’s too young to pay it any mind, I’m sure. But the rest of the country is getting ready.

King’s Day is full of traditions: young children playing the violin out of tune at the park, tompouce pastries, the king and his family on a heavily-televised trip to a Dutch city that has been preparing for this moment for a year. And forever and for always: people securing a spot on the flea market route days ahead of time.

Today, as I biked across the city, I saw hundreds of them; 40 square feet of pavement taped off by people aiming to use that specific spot to spend their King’s Day. Peddling by, I thought to myself that it was a rather sweet unwritten rule: I put my name here in a manner that you could erase at any moment, but Dutch custom says you’re to honor my plan.

I’m used to people marking these spots “bezet” (“taken”) or adding their name for emphasis. Today, however, I noticed many people had made a small figure with their tape, a maker’s mark of sorts. I’m learning through Anja’s ceramics adventure that this is entirely common in the potter community: a small, minimalist figure telling the world you made something.

I hope all those people get what they came for: that specific spot on the pavement, and a fun day to help them Konmari their house. In the meantime, I also hope that the Amsterdamse Bos is quiet on King’s Day. I’m looking to take Anja and Lemonade there for a quiet afternoon, far away from the crowds.

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I never seem skilled at enjoying whatever season is here. Instead I’m forever yearning for what’s just out of reach. On Javastraat I pass a travel agency, the target audience of which most certainly is concerned with visiting Morocco or Turkey during the summer months. Surprisingly, there’s a wide array of names that would inspire city trips around the world.

Ever since I passed the agency, Andrew Bird’s Pulaski at Night has been in my head non-stop. “Come back to Chigaco, city of, city of light.”

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I saw dozens of gorgeous little cups in the making, each with a unique maker’s mark and the intricate details only found in things that were crafted by hands. I think I’ll sign up for one of Pansa’s courses myself some day.

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It was wonderful to welcome Yana into our home for the first time. When I hired her in the late Winter of 2022 as our newest UX designer, I knew there was something special about her. Now, well over a year later, I’m pleased to call her a friend. We caught up on career adventures, new trends in the design industry, and of course the joys of being a dog mom.

After Yana and DJ left, Anja and I began winding down for the day. After dinner, we watched the latest episode of the final season of Succession, which may have been my favorite one yet. The characters on this show are so complex and candidly-written. I’m already low-key heartbroken that this show is going to end. At the same time, I’m also pleased to be alive to watch it unfold in real time.

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I’m surprised by how well she walks on a loose leash, and how few issues we’ve had with the stuff she puts in her mouth. I’m hoping to make most use of her imprint period, and that means familiarizing her with as many different things as possible.

I’m happy to find a cat on our morning walk. Lemonade responds to the cat the way I expected a dog would: oozing deference. They stand across from each other for a few minutes, and I reward Lemonade with cheese treats afterwards.

It’s the first step on the road to Lemonade meeting Pookie, my mother-in-law’s cat.

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It just so happens that this second Sunday falls on Easter, and it’s perhaps because of this that the service is more crowded than previous times. I see All Saints regulars as well as new people, shy and seemingly hopeful.

One woman in particular stands out to me because she smiles intently at me a few times. She has the demeanor of that good Christian girl from that Office US episode “Christening”.

After service she finds me immediately: “You’re Zinzy from Queer Salon, right?” Annika says. Pre-pandemic memories begin to surface, and once she mentions her son I remember her again. “The first time I came here, I thought of you”, she says. We shmooze over crackers and sweet bread, exchange numbers to set a coffee date.

This new church is really a pilot by two reverends hoping to bring fully inclusive Christianity to the Amsterdam expat community. This is service eight out of ten. When I say that out loud, Reverend Howie casually says “yes, we’ll have to talk about that next time.”

I already can’t imagine myself without this community.

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She comes bearing gifts: seeds for the garden, dyke poetry, David Sedaris. She knows what I like. We eat, this time around I’ve kept it simple with dishes from the traiteur and not ten separate homemade recipes of intricate delicacies. We talk about what teaching means to her and Anja. We play with Lemonade.

As a friend, Mathilde is very easy to love. Our times together eventually always bring us back to our shared emotional outlet: making music. “I’m nervous to sing around you, Zinzy” she says, but her voice sounds beautiful, warm, and exactly what my piano calls for. When I think of “blue-eyed soul” I think of Mathilde’s voice. We tell each other Anja and I will make it down south this year, and we’ll go for côte de bœuf in Maastricht. I can’t wait.

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We exchange how life is treating us, what we’re doing at work. He tells me about his side projects, and how one of them is an invite-only meetup where you attend without knowing what you’ll be doing. He lets me in on secrets around the next meetup, and tells me what kind of activities are involved. It sounds magical.

There’s beauty in the not knowing, we agree. In the whimsy of the unexpected, the sudden connection we may feel with other humans. I tell him his project reminds me of Marina Abramović, whom Anja and I were fortunate enough to meditate with in Carre last year. Participating in her famous eye-gazing practice with complete strangers was transformative.

I’m glad I got an invitation.

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• In Amsterdam simultaneously enjoying and dreading the cold
• At Leeruniek thoroughly enjoying solving design and mentoring challenges
• Preparing for our corgi puppy
• Invested in my yoga and meditation practice
• Teaching myself, once and for all, to play the piano

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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I had emailed him late last year, missing our kitchen table conversations over coffee and cigarettes. His enormous house, a former school, functioning as his private art studio / gallery. He had replied right away, saying “my phone number is still the same”.

I had lost it long ago, of course.

Today, as I walk home from a coffee run, I think of him, and decide that I should make one last attempt to find his phone number before emailing him again. Looking over his message, I notice he said he no longer lived in the old school, and something about nuns. I suppose I had overlooked it the first time I read it, imagining he lived near a convent rather than in an actual carmelite care facility.

A friendly nun is happy to give me his number right away. A glimpse into a world of old, filled with kind people making generous assumptions. Two minutes later I hear his voice. “hello?”. “I’m not at all surprised you ended up living with a bunch of nuns, Paul” I glee into the phone, remembering our conversations about the Church, his Protestant, mine Catholic. There had always been something about Catholic liturgy that inspired him.

Despite his heavy bout of Covid, double pneumonia, and delirium, he still remembers me. Within minutes, we slide back into a conversation that never really began and never really ended.

Both of us are still the same to one another.

He gives me splinters of stories: a thieving cleaning lady, the storage and eventual donation of his body of work, the conversations he has with his neighbor priest. I tell him about Anja, about our small apartment, and about my eternal journey finding a Christian place I can call home.

We agree that I’ll come visit soon, and I will. A few misremembered numbers and names aside, he’s still the same old Paul. But by God, he nearly wasn’t here, and I don’t have time to waste.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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Thank you for reading through RSS. My diary-keeping will always be public and free, though you're welcome to support it.

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The ROI of good research

Anja and I are both blessed with a-type personalities and a propensity for thorough investigation. Early on in our dog prep journey, we found McCann Dogs, a training school with a YouTube channel full of clear, concise, and highly-informative videos on how to raise a puppy.

Two weeks in, I can tell they taught us well. Lemonade hasn’t had an accident in the house since day three, she sleeps through the night aside from two or three potty breaks, and it’s great to see how quickly she’s picking up commands. A week before Lemonade arrived, we started on McCann’s course Puppy Essentials, which has proven a great way to get through the first few weeks.

I got cabin fever

Out of all the things I had anticipated in preparing for this puppy, cabin fever was not one of them. While Anja and I are both quite introverted (meaning we need to recharge whenever we’ve been around people), she seemed fine spending her spring break cocooning in the house. I, on the other hand, felt myself slowly going mad over the lack of stimulus I was getting.

Because of our potty training schedule, and lack of a big garden, I barely got out of the house the first week. Luckily, I quickly developed the habit of taking Lemonade out on walks, even if we didn’t actually let her walk just yet because of her exposure to possible diseases. It’s great to be out of the house again, go to my favorite coffee spot, and walk around the park with her.

The beauty of trust

Aside from an outdoor rabbit, a bird, a chameleon, and a shy cat, I never had any cuddly pets. Being child-free on top of that never gave me the opportunity to closely bond with another small being who trusts me enough that they’ll fall asleep on my body. Lemonade is very cuddly, and it’s entirely humbling to experience the trust she seems to have in me.

What’s next?

I’m excited to enroll her in puppy training a few weeks from now. For the time being, she’s hanging out with trusted pets in the neighborhood, and getting to know many visitors. Looking ahead, I’m also pumped about finally taking her to the park and playing fetch with her.

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You may think I chose this church because the woman blessing us is Desmond Tutu’s daughter, the Reverend Canon Mpho Tutu van Furth, and because Anja and I can’t help but fangirl. I’m here because she’s a Black queer person leading a church service that I can attend in person. I never thought I would see the day.

Dare I wonder whether I have found a new church in All Saints Amsterdam?

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I get up, without an alarm, around 6:30, engage in some morning writing, and fanny around the house for a bit. I take a shower at 7:45, and walk to my favorite coffee place at 08:20. Sometimes I wait outside for a few minutes until their doors open at 08:30.

“Medium decaf mocaccino, half cow’s milk, half Tony Chocolonely.” I say it, but none of the baristas need reminding. Sometimes I bring my computer to work on my personal site, sometimes I bring a book and my diary. I’m not the only one who lives Saturday mornings like this.

This morning I hung out, drawing people who were conducting a similar Saturday morning routine. A great start to the weekend.

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I’m so proud of the work Annelie has been doing, building a business from scratch, and wrapping her head around how she can do her best work. We discuss productivity; tools, methods, apps, Etsy calendar print-outs. Today, I tell her how much Elizabeth Filips has been helping me. We decide we should join Shut Up & Write sometime.

It was clear from the start to both Anja and I that Annelie would make a great godmother for Lemonade the puppy. We’ve decided to go full over-the-top with anything dog-related, and luckily Annelie is more than happy to review my birth announcement card options. She couldn’t radiate more enthusiasm about this dog if she tried. And she hasn’t even met her yet.

As we shmoozed over coffee, I was reminded of the time when doing this indoors wasn’t even possible. I remember the Coffee Company line going all the way around the block, the overflowing trash bins with paper coffee cups, the increasing amount of fresh air we were all taking in. It’s nice to spend time indoors again, but I do miss the park. I can’t wait for spring to start.

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• Things are not chill, because we’re preparing ourselves, our lives, and our house for our first-ever puppy
• Both our work lives are unexpectedly bustling and busy
• We cancelled Netflix

I’ve been saying for years that I’d be willing to pay 100 euros a month for a single, all-encompassing international streaming platform. I suppose it’s never going to happen, but, hey, at least we’ll have that puppy, right?

The puppy!

Like I said, we kicked off the year very quietly, thinking “meh, someone asked us if we wanted a puppy, but we’re not really sure just yet.” This all changed ones we learned that eight healthy puppies were born and we were allowed to pick first. We went for a visit mid-January, and fell deeply in love with little Lemonade, who’s coming home at the end of February.

I went from a serious dog-free advocate to an expecting dog parent in two months’ time, and I suppose it’s safe to say I’ve gone a bit mad. I’m designing a birth announcement card, and the puppy may or may not already have a website. Help me.

Reading

I picked up a few great titles at the library this month. One that was helpful to get through was, Loose Cannons Back on Track, about managing gifted neurodivergence in the workplace. At the moment, I’m thoroughly enjoying One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers by Gail Sher.

Music

Musically, the year is off to a great start. I’ve made a new Brian Eno discovery that’s hard not to love, found a Mitski gem that has been on repeat, and added a great track to my work playlist: Tieduprightnow by Parcels. As always, I’ve compiled a playlist of all of these and more. Feel free to check it out.

Watching

I saw Triangle of Sadness again this month, and loved it more than I did the first time. I appreciate how well this movie understands the finality of our social roles, and how, at the same time, they can be transformed in the blink of an eye. In addition, I am secretly a 13-year-old boy who likes to look at people drowning in their own vomit and excrement.

Anja and I also began watching Shrinking, which is surprisingly fun. ‘Men’s liberation movement’ like Ted Lasso, but ever so slightly more depressing and realistic.

Something else

I find myself looking for great influencers focused on gifted neurodivergence. Like those many awesome YouTubers sharing tips and tricks on how to live with ADHD, but for giftedness, and not in some Mensa kind of way, but just something that’s honest about the challenges one may encounter. Most of what I find is written by pedagogues for parents of gifted children. If you know of anything, feel free to let me know.

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Aside from bookshop owner she’s also a writer. I love the work she does at One World, where she articulates strong perspectives on antiracism and equity. A few weeks ago, she sold me this book:

When I took it from the shelf, I didn’t know she was the one who wrote it. Eventually, she told me she had drawn inspiration from the questions her child asks her. The questions often leave her bemused, surprised, stunned. I suppose they’re the questions we forget to ask as we grow older.

It’s a perfect coffee table book, deserving of a central place in the house to welcome guests into an atmosphere of curiosity and whimsy.

One page that stands out to me is this one. There must have been countless times I wondered similar things as a child. Why are the garbage men brown? Why do all the other colored people live on the other side of the tracks? Why don’t I see myself on television?

I imagine the life of Cole’s child, growing up in this part of history, with a Black parent at home to raise him, in one of the most diverse cities in Europe. Access to a Black-owned bookshop that helps people see themselves in others. It makes me feel equal parts envy and calm.

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The park has a wide field that allows loose dogs to roam freely in the off-season. Even through the trees Anja and I spotted the corgi from half a mile away.

“I mean, we could just go up and chat a little, right? She might have some good tips?” Anja and I wondered, looking for an excuse to get closer to the dog. We must have looked completely adorable, because the face of Kenny’s owner brightened once she noticed us lingering nearby.

She told us about their routine, how he could already stay home alone for most of the day, and how she’d had never heard him bark. Within minutes we learned we all know Lalo, another corgi in the neighborhood.

It’s nice getting to know this new corner of the neighborhood. She and I are dog people now.

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I’ve developed a habit of watching this film at least once a year. Despite its soft romcomness, homogenous cast, and general lack of depth it has taught me volumes on relationships. I love it more with each viewing.

Today, for the first time, perhaps, I saw its fat-phobia for what it really is. It left a sour taste in my mouth; one that reminds me I’m not the audience of the film, or at least not part of the audience who should feel good after the credits begin to roll.

It’s annoying to see how a home cinema afternoon can make my body experience drop so significantly. I suppose if there’s any month in the year to be confronted with this, it would be International Diet Culture Month, ay?

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