Hello Toad

Hi friend. I am, once again, thinking a lot about social media. This morning, as I did dishes post-breakfast, I listened to the excellent video essay convenience culture is killing our creative impulses by Anna Howard. In it, she argues that art—creating art, consuming art—is inherently inconvenient, sometimes hard, and often unrewarding. The routine of showing up to your art every day is a slog, and in our hyper-gratified, instant-reward culture, we are becoming intolerant to slog. We are...

Hi friend. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be "pretentious." A few months ago, in my quest to find a social platform that isn't evil, I dragged myself to Bluesky, the heralded Twitter replacement. My time on Bluesky ended up not being super long because I very quickly remembered why I hated Twitter even before Musk took it over, but it lasted long enough for me to post a rant about something that makes me want to tear my skin off: historical inaccuracies. Please stick...

Hi, friend. I have complicated feelings about my kitchen. For a couple that consists of someone who is a not-terrible home cook (me) and someone who was quite literally a professional chef for over a decade (Mike), it might be surprising to learn that our kitchen is overall pretty awful. Its layout is nonsensical, there's a disturbing lack of counter space, the stove is pure garbage, and—the absolute most incomprehensible thing of all—there is no hood vent. I live with a man who has a...

Hi, friend. We are now in the long slog of winter, the deepest part of the season. Here in the frozen (but not as frozen as it used to be) north, if you watch nature and the seasons as obsessively as I do, you can start to spot the very first cracks in winter's facade in February. But not so in January. In January, the wind blows just that bit more bitterly. It's a time, I feel, of obscene beauty. I didn't always love the winter. Fifteen years ago, I was a summer girl through and through. I...

Hi, friend. Happy New Year! I am writing this on the first of January as snow falls peacefully outside and I lay in my sick bed (previously known as "my office"). Mike and I both came down with some demon plague (it's probably covid) on Boxing Day and have been housebound and hating it ever since. It feels like life may be slowly returning to my body today, but as I'm still overall disgusting, I will continue to be a hermit until further notice. But! I couldn't let that stop me from sending...

Hi, friend. As a kid, I believed in magic. I thought for sure that there were fairies living in the boughs of trees, that ghosts haunted old houses, or that if we tried hard enough, my cousins and I could move a salt shaker with our minds. I believed with an unquestioning, quiet stubbornness, even though the magic played coy, even though it only showed its face sometimes, in the shadows, when I was half-looking, when I could be convinced that I had just imagined it. I believed, and I sought...

Happy Halloween, friend. 🎃 I love Halloween. I love that we all agree to be spooky together. I like that we put out cheap-looking decorations just for the hell of it (currently in my yard: a scarecrow, skulls, a gravestone with a skeleton, and a row of little witches). I like that kids dress up and eat too much candy and I like that adults do, too. I think we could all do with a little more whimsy in our lives and I think Halloween gives us the avenue to indulge in it, just a bit. But I love...

February 29, 2024 Welcome to Hello Toad Welcome to the first totally independent edition of the Hello Toad newsletter! Thank you so much for subscribing and joining me in this next chapter ❤️ And a very happy Leap Day! As I write this, I'm sitting in my office with the windows open listening to the finches currently swarming my bird feeders. It is bananas warm out, and I'll be going for a hike later when the temperature climbs into the double digits (in February! I'm sure this is fine). The...