024. Serial Reliquary
A quick note before we get started: I began this letter a few weeks ago and the state of the world is very, very different now. For the sake of our collective sanity and in the spirit of this theme, I've decided to preserve the original draft and save my present reflections for the end of this email.
Hello Friends,
I had first conceived of this letter about the same time last year. Spring is a strange season. The shiny gloss of the new year has passed, maybe you’ve successfully integrated resolutions of health and wellness into your daily regimens (maybe you haven’t). Everything and everyone is settling into themselves, into seasonal cycles, into patterns of work-go home-cook-dinner-sleep, into the same drawn-out conversations with friends and lovers ("how's life?" "you know, the same old, same old"). Maybe it's cold and gray and wintry where you are, maybe it's not but the sun keeps striking down on you with its perpetual, muting heat. Maybe you spent your day passing by a monotony of glass and concrete buildings gridding the sky or blurred tessellations of grass and tree.
We all have a tendency to fall into cycles of behavior, places we like to go, movies we like to re-watch. Routine tends to equate to stability, both of body and mind. The world around us moves in cycles too, from the predictability of winter dreariness and the thaw of spring to the smaller-scale cycles of birth to aging and eventual physical decay, algorithms that push us into digital cycles of information or the formulaic nature of perpetual seasons of reality television shows.
For this particular letter, I want to draw your attention to a multitude of serialities. Some play out across screens, others through physical acts, some take the form of sequences of numbers while others are represented to visual and sonic patterns. As I find myself revisiting a draft I first began working on a little over a year ago, you may also find yourself reflecting on the cycles that bring you joy or a little discomfort.
TOUCH
The New Museum is a place I return to time and time again to gorge myself on contemporary art and all of its fractals of style and experimentation, so I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn't include my meanderings there.
The first artist (actually the very first exhibition) I ever saw at the New Museum when I first moved here) was the collector of peculiar refuse, Jim Shaw. To this day, I will never forget one of the rooms in his survey, The End is Here. Hung up on the walls and kept in glass cases were dozens upon dozens of different types of religious (primarily Christian) ephemera that Shaw has collected from the weirdest corners of America to use as inspiration for his own practice. While many of the symbols are the same—myths of creation, the presence of Jesus, etc—each manifestation has its own mutation: a shirtless Jesus with the physique of a bodybuilder, a hand-painted banner decrying false prophets, images that link U.F.O and lizard people conspiracies to the Rapture, an assortment of superhero comic books. Shaw (who has even created a fictionalized religious as part of a series of artworks) is concerned with the madnesses and comforts of ritualistic beliefs and how they manifest across American's consumerist culture.
Two years later, my friends and I would go see Kaari Upson's show, Good Thing You Are Not Alone. Upson is also fascinated with ritual, but she works on a much more intimate, introspective scale. Upon entering the gallery floor, you would be greeted to giant pieces of industrial Costco shelving overflowing with "Idiot's Guide" how-to books and mannequins modeled after her alter-ego (a figure partially based on her own mother), appropriately called Idiot's Guide Womb Room (you can make the maternal connections yourself). For Upson, the serial is the mundane with this installation as one of the many pieces in her ongoing series, MMDP (My Mother Drinks Pepsi). Upson manifests the daily habits of her mother into sculpture, from her manner of dressing in flannel and denim to her daily drink of Pepsi. It's those Pepsi cans that I can't quite get out of my head. Upson casts them in aluminum and the effect is almost fossil-like, a relic of mass consumption unburied and given new life outside of the homogeny of a grocery store shelf.
Then there's Sarah Lucas's Au Naturel that took over most of the museum last year. Lucas's body of work feels like one continuous act of repetition, with the artist producing all kinds of pieces centered around cigarettes, eggs, pairs of legs disconnected from bodies (appearing as either stuff stockings, casted metal, or combinations of plaster cast legs with cigarettes tastefully poking out of certain orifices), and self-portraits. No motif appears just once. They are piled on, they fill up galleries, they appear again and again across decades of work. Lucas's approach to gender and sexual identity is made manifest through these very literal indicators of biological sex. The use of such blatant "male" and "female" symbology definitely felt a little reductive in a 21st-century context, but each iteration poked critical fun at an outdated Freudian obsession with the phallic, elevating such sentiments surrounding gender to the absurd, making it a superficial thing that rings with hollow power and destruction.
As the title suggests, Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being is deeply rooted in cycles of time. Around 2011, shortly after the tsunami, a writer modeled after the author discovers a diary washed up on the shores of the Pacific Northwest belonging to a Japanese teenager. As the narrative cuts between the two, the lines begin to blur between the writer's present-day life and the teenage diarist's non-linear musings on her family's history in World War II, intergenerational struggles with mental illness and economic aspirations, and the teachings of her Buddhist nun grandmother. A book about migration, both about immigrants back-and-forth between Japan and the Americas, with whisperings of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, both protagonists, separated by time, find themselves experiencing parallel self-realizations.
Christian Bok is forever pushing the boundaries of poetic language to its limits. In his 2003 collection, Crystallography, Bok turns speech and all of its symbolic abstractions into literal manifestations of scientific study. Bok approaches poetry-writing as a researcher views crystalline structures under a microscope. Lattices of sounds create order from the rhythms of biochemical jargon. In one series, single letters take shape into fractals and snowflakes. In another, phrases and complete sentences become fractured and broken up across precise, elaborate structures of repetition. This is a book that is most powerful when read aloud, each word tumbling off our tongue like silly, musical refractions.
When I think about a word like seriality, the first thing that comes to mind is numbers. From binary code to spreadsheets of collected data, we look to numbers for important calculations and patterns to build innovative technologies. We tend to think of these processes as neutral, separate from social issues, but Safiya Umoja Noble's book, Algorithms of Oppression, is a reminder that even raw data can be dangerous. Noble takes a look at how search engines perpetuate gender inequality and racism (for example, searching "white girl" and "black girl" yields two very different results as the latter is hypersexualized). Noble's scope is large, from massive monopolizing corporations like Google to the different facets of paid online advertising, in her determination to expose the many ways that bias and discrimination manifest online. It's a critical reminder that, for all of its praises of being a great equalizer in providing information access to all, the major players of the Internet need to confront the many layers of oppression they perpetuate through their search algorithms.
Back in February, I got the chance to see the Met Museum's exhibition, Making Marvels, which took a look at 200 years of opulent mechanical design, from clockwork to scientific devices to automatons, in the royal courts of Europe. Besides being full of eye-catching pieces of intricate silver and gold metalwork, this exhibit was a great look at early attempts at automation and the elaborate craftsmanship that goes into constructing the tiniest of gears, turning objects of science into things of beauty. One of my favorites was The Draughtsman-Writer from 1800, which was the automaton that inspired The Invention of Hugo Cabret. A simple-looking figure actually contained hundreds of intricate pieces hidden in a cabinet underneath its little writing desk. You can watch this piece in action, writing out poems and drawings here. The gems of this exhibit were definitely the clocks, including one in the shape of an elephant made in Germany in the early 1600s. Its design was based on Ottoman soldiers who were responsible for the care of elephants and acted as a symbol of exotic power in the West. You can watch the clock, with all of its little ornamental figures, in motion here.
Lastly, I've been thinking a lot about Valeria Luiselli's book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Based on the template of questions she shared with undocumented children and families from Latin-America navigating the precariousness of migration and deportation. Certain questions are clinical, "When did you enter the United States?" while others are painfully personal, "Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared you or hurt you?" Her book is an important reminder that there human lives at stake in our state of immigration policy turmoil and that we should do what we can to make sure those most vulnerable aren't lost in the white noise and cruelty of bureaucracy.
LOOK
In the 1980s, Allan McCollum decided to approach painting from the perspective of a factory-like approach to art-making. This monochromatic assortment does not, in fact, contain any real paintings at all, although the way they are hung might recall the crowded walls of 19th-century French art salons. Rather, they are each made from plaster, individually cast in molds and coated in enamel by McCollum and his assistants. At first glance, their homogeny stands out, an emptiness and smoothness of surface that erases any kind of painterly presence. Yet the longer you look at this dense cluster, the more you start to see breaks in the pattern of Surrogates: slight variations of dimension and color despite the near-identical casting processes, revealing the fragility of commercial mass art production. You can watch McCollum discuss his process behind the Surrogates here.
Félix González-Torres was the first artist to come to mind when I began working on this letter. You've probably seen his pieces before, either in museums or on the Internet, of piles of candy, stacks of paper prints, and strings of lightbulbs that we can view and sometimes remove from the installation (I have two sheets hanging in my childhood bedroom from a 1989-1990 work). His 1991 piece Untitled (Perfect Lovers), which is pictured above, is also created out of identical pieces. Torres's synchronized clocks appear to be exactly the same yet this perfect pair succumbs to the passage of time: one will fall out of sync and inevitably stop before the other. His body of work, whether pairs or piles, is deeply connected to the tragic absences and fragile states of living that haunted those affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis throughout the '80s and '90s. Torres's own partner, Ross Laycock, died the year those two clocks were made, and Torres himself would succumb to AIDS-related complications 5 years later. His pieces, despite their apparent simplicity, are intimate markers of grief, oftentimes implicating us as observers and creators of each work's material impermanence.
If the multi-million dollar industry is any indication, many of us find comfort and empowerment through our beauty routines. Yumna Al-Arashi's photo series, Shedding Skin, is a gorgeous example of how those rituals can ground us, soothe us, and create communities. Al-Arashi has made photographing the Arab world’s diaspora the center of her photography practice and this particular series sets out to challenge our expectations of women in the Middle East. For the project, Al-Arashi chose a hammam in Beirut for its tacky, contemporary attempt at antiquity-inspired decor. Over the course of the shoot, the women, from all age groups, from different religious backgrounds, and of different body types with tattoos and piercings, took the time to scrub each other’s arms, threading eyebrows, combing their hair, and quietly resting in the steam of the bathhouse. Looking at these photos is a cleansing, tranquil experience, one that sloughs off stereotypes to reveal gorgeous moments of everyday life underneath. You can learn more about Al-Arashi's process behind these images here.
My first proper introduction to Zoe Leonard's work, besides seeing her 1992 poem "I want a president" all over the Internet, was her survey at the Whitney a few years ago. Leonard's conceptual work focuses on series, either tracking the passage of time (like her collection of suitcases for each day of her life, her photographs of storefronts in gentrifying neighborhoods across New York City, and her installation of sewn-together decaying fruit skins to mourn losses from the AIDS epidemic) or examining the systems of vision that order a particular object. I was really intrigued by her collection of antique postcards of Niagara Falls—a place that's been documented by tourists, from families to newlyweds, visiting from all around the world— that comprise two separate works: Survey (2009-12) and You see I am here after all (2008). Leonard's collection dates back to the early 1900s when postcards became popular mailable souvenirs. Leonard's system of organization emphasizes patterns of homogeny across this tourist destination. Similar perspective shots were grouped together, both on tables and across the gallery walls. The longer you look at these images, the more you can see the power of mass-production in perpetuating idealized images of the world. In an interview with art historian Elisabeth Lebovici, Leonard explains, "I was interested in the image as information, and equally in how that information was unreliable or subjective. Various ideas of classification and systems of interpretation created different versions of reality."
Anya Gallaccio’s preserve ‘beauty’ is a 12-year production of the perishable. Gallacio, who has previously described cut flowers as a “disposable commodity,” constructed the installation out of fruits and flowers. Over time, the fresh red strands of the piece start to decay over time into a sour brown, upending the romantic notions of beauty that are associated with these fragments of the natural world. What I find particularly interesting about this piece is the Tate Modern’s cycle of preservation to maintain the work’s spirit of ephemerality: glass panels suspend the flowers (fresh gerberas, about 1600-2000 of them for each display period) that are adjusted as the petals dry out, and any flowers that fall out are left on the floor until the piece is cleaned up and reconstructed.
Mimi Onuoha's 2016 installation, The Library of Missing Datasets, turns the very notion of a library as a precise archive of history on its head through its attempt to catalog the things we have yet to catalog. Companies find ways to weaponized data, data helps us understand parts of our world, data can be used to self-improve, or to apply controls to our behavior. In her statement about the piece, Onuoha notes that this lapse in data collections, these missing pieces which come about through biases and ambivalence, are catalysts of critique: "That which we ignore reveals more than what we give our attention to." Some items on the list? "LGBT older adults discriminated in housing," "how much Spotify plays each of its artists per play of song," and "sales and prices in the art world (and relationships between artists and gallerists." You can learn more about the piece and the filing cabinet's many voids here.
LISTEN
When it comes to catching up on the news, particularly the more major events happening both in America and around the world, I rely on a trifecta of shows to get me through my mornings: Vox's "Today Explained," The New York Times's "The Daily," and BBC Radio 4's "Beyond Today." Each show has its own strengths in reporting and scope, certain episodes might talk about a breaking story while others talk about an issue that's been circulating for several weeks. I'm not going to tell you which one I prefer over the other. Besides the fact that everyone's tone is different, each brings its own perspective to the table with a combination of interviews with in-house reporters and outside experts in a particular topic. One or two might talk about the same subject on a given day, and its that plurality of voices that I've come to value.
Government bureaucracy is rich with repetition: continuous election cycles, repetitive debates, yearly reports, and budget-making. There's this episode from "The Organist" that I can't stop thinking about this episode that centers on the Texas state legislature's livestream. What should be a stream filled with mundane procedures becomes full of reality show-style drama. Jen Rice, producer and main voice for the show, recaps some great hits. If anything, it's a reminder that we should all tune into local politics even when they seem pretty boring.
Not gonna lie, it's hard to find deep-diving film podcasts that aren't either pretentious or only focus on big-budget new releases. "The Rewatchables" is a fresh approach to the genre, featuring movies new and old that the staff of The Ringer decide to discuss after a second (or even third or fourth) viewing. In the absence of first impressions form seeing a 'great' movie for the first time, the conversations become opportunities for the rotating group of hosts to share how their opinions have changed over the years, a look at how movies and the actors who starred in them age over the years, and deep dives into the film's production for the history buffs out there. It's hard to recommend one particular episode to start with given the variety of movies they've talked about so far, so I'd suggest picking a personal favorite or a movie that's been on your watchlist for ages.
One of the first things I listened to after New Years was Terrance Hayes reading his poem, "American Sonnet for the New Year" for the New Yorker podcast. Sticking to the traditional syllabic form, Hayes paints a somber portrait of a turbulent life in America through a repeating game of adverbs. He writes, "things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly / things got ugly embarrassingly quickly." Hayes's voice picks up on those bouncing, soothing rhythms, making meaning through pattern.
LICK
In the first half of the 20th century, the iconography of the Zigfield Follies would make its way from Broadway to visual feasts on our movie screens. The performances comprised of dozens of nearly identical showgirls moving through elaborate choreographed shapes. While the original showgirl group struggled in later years, the attention to precise homogeny would be recreated again and again across Hollywood soundstages (like the 1941 movie Zigfield Girls pictured above and the 1946 movie based on the original ensemble). The synchronization of bodies, definitely speaks to the period's obsession with modernization through mechanization, although never quite doing away with all of the theatrical fuss and glamour of show business.
If you haven't already seen HBO's reboot of Watchmen, this is your sign to finally do it. In the post Game of Thrones and Westworld rut of dissatisfaction, we probably would've binged the whole thing if we didn't have to wait for new episodes each week. This iteration of Watchmen doesn't try to recreate the original graphic novel rather, like the book's critical look at Cold War anxieties, turns its attention to intergenerational trauma brought on by the brutal history of racism and colonialism in American culture. I don't want to give too much away, but this show is brilliantly written, full of hard truths and doesn't shy away from presenting violence's complex consequences of oppression and resilience.
Choreographer Trisha Brown was a leader in the postmodern dance movement of New York with a style that emphasized the choreographic and improvised gestures that arise from everyday movements, games, and tasks. We tend to think of dance as being, for the most part, mapped out through regimented sequences of steps, but Brown's series of performance-drawings unravel those expectations. It's a Draw, which began in 2002, consisted of Brown holding a writing implement (a pen or brush or piece of chalk) and marking a large piece of paper beneath her feet as she moved. You can watch Brown in action here and, as you watch, take note of how she moves, the looseness of lines and punctuations of gesture. While you're at it, make sure to read Peter Eleey's essay on Brown's full-body illustration based on the Walker Art Center's showcase of her works back in 2008.
If you're looking for a daily taste of poetry in your email inbox each day, besides the classic "Poem-A-Day" newsletter from the Academy of American poets, I highly suggest subscribing to the journal SWWIM Every Day. Created by Supporting Women in Writers in Miami, the marginalized voices reflected in these poems, both from established poets and emerging writers, are given center stage every time you open the latest message.
Phil Cao's 2015 thesis piece Ritual for Empowerment feels like one of those clickbait pop-up ads you get when you try to pirate a show that you can't close out of. With the HTML button tag as a template, you're met with a barrage of "Click me!" "CLICK" "Please click here!" buttons shouting at you from the other side of the screen. Only after you cave in and click are you given your reward.
If there’s anything the past few years on sites like Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube have taught us, it’s that the algorithms designed to keep our attention through recommendations love homogeny. One accidental like of something leads to a whole barrage of images and videos similar in aesthetic, pose, or appearance to the selfie-taker. Not too long ago, an AI researcher noticed patterns of sameness in TikTok recommendations based heavily on gender and race (if you followed the account of a black man, your recommendations would also become black men, similarly if you follow a twenty-something with long hair, the app gives you a slew of lookalikes). I came across an Instagram account that’s documenting this increasing accumulation of visual homogeny in these visual platforms from a piece about the rise of "Instagram Face" through lip fillers and filters. Each post from Insta Repeat is a series of other posts from users doing the same pose, in the same location, sometimes down even to the same filter. There’s something jarring about seeing these repeated images, the beginning to a broader conversation about algorithms and the way we’ve started to alter our own content to meet certain standards in order to further our popularity (from publishing a post at the right time of day for maximum engagement to taking the same photograph of a location because that one photogenic spot can garner a lot of likes).
Prayer is a common ritual for many, but I can’t stop thinking about Diemut Strebe’s unsettling interpretation of the act. Using a silicone, mouth-shaped form, an aluminum frame, and machine learning software, Strebe created a robotic machine that churns out droning “prayers” algorithmically generated by an AI text-to-speech program. I honestly don’t know a lot about the science behind it, but there’s something unsettling about the haunting beauty of the sounds coupled with the robotic mouth. It’s an experience of estrangement, one that leads to questions about the future of religious devotion in the age of machines. You can watch the video of the piece in action here.
CLICK
The generic, minimalist-midcentury modern aesthetic that’s come to dominate both our physical (faux-industrial coffee shops) and digital (smooth, clean website templates) spaces has a name: “AirSpace.” Kyle Chayka’s fascinating article for The Verge addresses the homogenous aesthetic that has emerged from multiplicity. By specifically looking at the “International Airbnb Style,” Chayka examines how these nearly identical-looking spaces create a sense of frictionless movement through the world, giving users a sense of comfort completely devoid of any unique local authenticity. This style has permeated throughout the corporate visual palette of Silicon Valley start-ups, producing “sameness-as-a-service” through apps like Foursquare and Instagram which lead us through algorithmic rabbit-holes of similar recommendations. It’s a great read, so I’ll just end with this: “The connective emotional grid of social media platforms is what drives the impression of AirSpace. If taste is globalized, then the logical endpoint is a world in which aesthetic diversity decreases.”
Lucy Ives’s “Early Poem” is a poem that knows it’s a poem. The single paragraph of text reads as a numerical sequence, rendering visible the structures of poetic language and implicating the reader in this act of word-making. Its clipped sentences only offer the illusion of order, however, and soon we are tumbling into a game of ping pong with Ives’s own erratic thoughts: “I forget exactly how this goes, this being the thirty-third sentence. I sit down beside myself in the thirty-fourth sentence and say to myself, smiling, even small numbers are big.”
Then there’s Louise Glück’s “Landscape”: a poem built through layers of time. Seasons collapse into bodily cycles of aging collapse into years collapse into hours of sunrises and sunsets collapse into seconds-long recollections of distant memories. It becomes unclear where Glück’s body ends and her immediate environment begins. Thoughts of one's existence become earthy textures we pass through as a phantom-like observer. This poem reminds me, oddly enough, of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a 15th-century book of hours that showcases the wealth of patron through twelve calendar-like scenes of rural life. Glück’s poem embeds our fragile bodies in the overlapping timescales of the natural world, leaving us with a taste of something magical: “I can verify / that when the sun sets in winter it is / incomparably beautiful and the memory of it / lasts a long time. I think this means / there was no night. / The night was in my head."
There's this sweet essay from Roxanne Fequiere from (the now-defunct) Lenny Letter about her attempt to replicate the daily routines of famous writers and thinkers. These rituals (whether it's eating something or waking up at a certain hour) promise a sense of stability and creative productivity that make us feel more in control over our lives. Fequiere's chosen luminaries might have churned out ideas through sticking to such regimens, but many of these habits aren't exactly the healthiest. There's Ernest Hemmingway (rising at dawn), Knut Hamsen (working in the middle of the night), and Truman Capote (cycling tea and coffee to sherry and martinis). It's a lighthearted piece that manages to both poke fun at the (noticeably male-centric) idea of 'genius,' but is a reminder that establishing a routine opens up the potential for self-betterment.
W.S. Merwin’s “Thanks” is a meandering poem, one that pulls you out of wherever you are currently quarantining and lets you tag along. The power at the heart of the poem lies in Merwin’s repeated use of “thank you” to punctuate each observation. A phrase like “thank you” can become so loaded in our daily conversations. Merwin himself doesn’t err solely on the side of gratitude. His words of thanks begin to bristle with rage at the injustices and destruction that plague our daily existence. He writes, “we are saying thank you faster and faster / with nobody listening we are saying thank you / we are saying thank you and waving / dark though it is.”
If you were on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram before 2016-2017, you may recall a simpler time when posts appeared on our feeds in chronological order. Over the years, these platforms opted instead for an algorithm-based, ‘ranked’ approach that showed posts based on (in Instagram’s words at least) “the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post.” Now, content from friends or people we follow from hours, days, and, even, months ago pop up on our feed, creating lags in engagement that affect regular users and influencers alike. Siobhan Leddy’s critical analysis of this shift in chronology is a refreshing take, delving deep into the economies of attention in these social networks and the way this loss of linear time opens up space for reflection on how we perceive the pressing issues of our world. Leddy notes, “For most of us, our lived experience of time is more a jumbled rat king of divergent thoughts and conflicting rhythms.” A sentiment I definitely relate to these days.
“Instances of Wasted Ingenuity” is one of those poems that rolls off your tongue as you read it out loud. Dara Weir begins each line with a present participle (falling, talking, eating, etc), giving us a sense of continuous action. One moment of doing colliding into another. Yet, the title of the poem suggests futility, not conflict-resolution. Weir’s intentions of movement are never quite accomplished, left instead to fizzle out with uselessness: “Hiking in an elevator. / Falling into an envelope. / Discussing smuggling with customs officers. / Taking a cat to a dog show.”
Dan Piepenbring’s essay “Stamp this Book” is an ode to the tool that has marked our library books, punctuated our kindergarten craft paper, and legitimized our legal documentation through nearly-perfect identical prints. Our attention is turned to Vincent Sardon, a Paris-based artist who makes absurdist rubber stamps to undermine their inherent bureaucratic power. Inspired by a “TO BE DESTROYED” stamp he used at an insurance company job, Sardon’s own stamps choose playfulness over institutional authority, sometimes to the point of ironic cruelty (“die beating your head on tofu” reads one). This piece will definitely make you think twice about the stamped documents you encounter in your daily life.
// I find solace in acts of repetition. While I'm guilty of repeating the same story over and over again. I have my usual set of podcasts I always listen to when I get ready in the morning. I value the stability that comes with doing my skincare routine every morning. At my current job, I'm at my most relaxed when the library is empty and I can take my time reshelving each call number-marked book in order.
Of course, that's all been put to a stop now. I, like most, am spending most of my days at home, but I'm still trying to recoup what's left of my disrupted routine. I still get up for work, eat breakfast, change into my 'work clothes,' cook dinner with my boyfriend and eat it while watching something, skincare routine, then sleep.
But there are new little bits thrown in: cyclical phone conversations with concerned family members, sporadic video chats with friends near and far, a periodic walk to the grocery store or around our block. There are new protocols for how we behave, from washing our hands to coverings when we leave our house, to not only protect ourselves but our community. We're forming new habits to cope: a workout routine, daily video game-playing or TV show-watching, maybe you're picking up a new skill like sewing to make masks, or making repeated donations to a relief fund that matters to you.
I hope that the next few letters offer a little relief from whatever situation you're stuck in. If you would like to support the human behind these letters, you can buy some stickers I designed! You can also help feed my leopard gecko through Buy Me A Coffee. Or you can show your love by sharing this little project of mine with your friends, lovers, and enemies.
Until next time, and hopefully in better circumstances,
Ellie