July 6th:
It's been a while since I had an excuse to bake something for someone, and I learned that a wonderful new friend of mine (who I met at dancing class yay dancing class) loves strawberry shortcake, and I do too of course. So before my trip, I got to see her at the park and we ate the whole thing 😵💫♥️
And then after that, I had another hangout with another lovely person. Here was my outfit, what do y'all think?
July 8th:
About to head to the airport! First though, here's a new Beans video teehee
Something very interesting happened on the plane to NYC today - I made a friend who l'm going to hang out with once I'm home 🤯! She and I were sitting next to each other and we talked the entire flight, and we exchanged numbers! She's gonna teach me to play pool.
I think this is the universe telling me to keep chatting it up with strangers. And to also remember that when there's chemistry, it's effortless to connect. When chatting with people and it feels like it's difficult to connect, I tend to reflexively blame myself. Instead, I want to just chalk it up to a lack of chemistry that isn't anyone's fault and move on to other interactions.
Oh, that reminds me, I also chatted up the two pretty girls behind me in line for security and asked one of them if they'd be interested in exchanging numbers. Another no, but that's okay. My understanding is that it's going to take many many nos before there's a yes no matter who you are.
And then we went to a sexy restaurant called Spicy Moon Bowery that was all hot pink colored. And the food holy moly
July 9th:
We're on the boat! Also rainbow
We ate some yummy food, I taught mom how to country swing to some live music (this nice lady came up to us and asked if we are professional dancers 🥺), and we walked up and down the stairs many times. I feel very lucky to be here.
Also l'm not shitting you - you can get unlimited impossible burgers here wtf ❤️🔥
Meanwhile at home...
July 10th:
Sea day - not much to report.
there's this painting in the ship stairwell and it is amazing it's the talk of the town. I dare you to spot a cute ass birdo.
At home...
July 11th:
Halifax is cool for school.
Apparently it's very expensive to live here. The people we met were so nice 😊 there was this summer art market thing going on and there were a ton of local artists selling their stuff on the street. I bought a crochet gift for a friend back home, and we stopped in some cool shops.
Hunting for gifts in a witch shop...
Followed by lunch...
Burger, poutine, salad, almond butter cup, and three kinds of cookies at Real Fake Meats hot dam
(Notice the ornately-framed painting of a piggy made of vegetables)
Beans cam!!
Once more
July 12th:
Sydney, Nova Scotia! The town has something to do violins or something I don't know why there's probably a reason
Our tour guide was this lovely human being dressed in a ye old outfit and spoke a bit of sass. She even drove us to the thrift store we wanted to go to after the tour was done!!
That thrift store turned out to be a Value Village - dear lord it's an awesome thrift store. Next time I hope to have more time there.
At the art market next to the pier, we met such a lovely human selling necklaces and jewelry made from scavenged things from the beaches. I bought a necklace made from a piece of porcelain with a flower on it. He was another one of those people who I just felt an instant connection to. I forgot to take a pic with him 😭
I would really like to visit him and Sydney one day. I could definitely see myself living in Halifax one day - perhaps Sydney as well!
Meanwhile, in a poorer-quality country:
July 13th:
French place next to Newfoundland called Saint Pierre and Miquelon:
I found the people to be a bit snobby unfortunately, but the place itself was incredibly beautiful.
We took a boat out to Île-aux-Marins, which is a little cute island with colorful houses and a lighthouse and a guy who lives on the island with a Bob Marley tattoo who has a Bob Marley flag flying in front of his house (not pictured).
The lighthouse:
Also I miss Beans 🥺 here is his linkedin prof pic
July 14th:
We were supposed to stop at St. John's, Newfoundland today, but the weather was nonbalmy and we couldn't dock safely. So today and next three days will be sea days. Hooray for boat. I will return St. John's to the bucket list.
We saw amazing shirts worn by this power couple:
They say "it's always 5 o'clock"
Oh my gosh my beautiful friend came over to see Beans today!
She has such a beautiful smile. I'm sure he appreciated her being there. He's not made for being by himself!! Whoever his parent is is a real shite
I will call her Johnck. Thank you Johnck 💕
July 15th:
Another day, another boat for mom and me 😮 I am so lucky to be here omg
We've been dancing pretty much every night :)
July 16th:
Here's where we are in the ocean wowee
I'd be so curious to visit Greenland one day - there might not be much going on, but for some reason, I love the idea of just being there and seeing what it feels like, what the people there are like, etc.
More dancing! It's nice to be appreciated here - at home, I get the occasional comment about my dancing, but here, everyone keeps complementing me 🥰
July 17th:
Throw back Thursday to four months ago, a very important day for you and me.
This Taoism newsletter email is so relevant to me and probs to most of us:
A Blinding Brightness
It is strange to find such a clear description of our condition in a book written centuries before the first screen was lit. Yet in the twelfth chapter of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu writes:
The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
There is something almost impossible in that first line. Color is supposed to help us see. How could it blind us?
Lao Tzu understood that the senses are not endlessly expandable. Give them too little and they go hungry. Give them too much and they lose their sensitivity.
After enough brightness, the ordinary world begins to look pale. The world itself has not become less vivid. Our threshold has changed. Something within us has been turned up so high, for so long, that quieter things can no longer reach it.
The screen gathers the five colors, the five tones, and the five flavors into a single glowing surface. In a few minutes, the eye can cross distances and emotions that ordinary life would once have asked us to encounter slowly.
It asks almost nothing from us except that we continue looking.
Without deciding to, we begin to raise the price of our own attention. The meal on the table must compete with a hundred brighter meals already seen. The conversation before us must hold its ground against faster and more dramatic ones. Silence, which once gave us somewhere to rest, begins to feel like an absence that needs to be filled.
We are not only losing time.
We are losing the world’s ability to touch us.
This is why the problem cannot be solved through blame. We are not weak for being affected. We have not failed a test that more disciplined people somehow pass.
Any nervous system becomes less sensitive when it is continually flooded. The dullness is not proof that something is wrong with us. It may simply be evidence that we have received too much, too quickly, for too long.
And perhaps this is the quiet mercy inside Lao Tzu’s severe little verse: the eye is not broken. It has been overwhelmed.
Offered less, it slowly remembers how to see.
The plain meal begins to have a taste again. A familiar street recovers its details. A walk that seemed too empty becomes worth taking. The ordinary world has not disappeared. It has been waiting beneath the noise.
There is another cost, deeper than the senses.
Zhuangzi approaches it through a story about an old gardener drawing water from a well. The man carries the water by hand, jar after jar, using enormous effort to irrigate a small piece of land.
A passerby tells him about a machine that could do the work far more efficiently. The gardener refuses. Where there are ingenious machines, he says, there eventually arise ingenious dealings. And where there are ingenious dealings, there grows an ingenious heart: a heart that schemes, calculates, and can no longer rest in its original simplicity.
The story is not an argument for carrying water by hand. Nor is it a demand that we reject every useful invention. Zhuangzi is pointing toward something subtler.
The tools we use do not remain outside us.
They enter our habits, our expectations, and eventually our character. The way we repeatedly do things becomes, little by little, the way we are.
This may be the truest danger of the screen. We do not only look at it. Over time, we begin to resemble it.
We move through our inner life as though it were a feed. A difficult feeling appears, and we scroll past it. A quiet moment arrives, and almost immediately we reach for something brighter. We become impatient with whatever cannot explain itself at once.
Even our days begin to feel as though they should perform. An evening that cannot be photographed, shared, or made meaningful may leave behind a faint disappointment, as though living it were not quite enough.
The restlessness of the machine follows us into places where no machine can help us. Into grief. Into love. Into waiting. Into the slow work of understanding what we actually feel.
This is the cunning heart the gardener feared. It is not wicked, and it may not even feel unhappy. It has simply been trained by speed. It has learned to expect the next thing before the present thing has had time to reveal itself.
If overstimulation changes what the senses expect, then reducing it will not produce an immediate revelation.
The first response to less stimulation is often not peace but boredom. A room feels too quiet. A single task seems unable to hold us. We reach for the phone before we have consciously decided that anything is missing.
This matters because boredom is often treated as proof that the quieter activity has failed. The book was not absorbing enough. The walk was not interesting enough. The conversation did not move quickly enough. But the dissatisfaction may tell us less about the experience itself than about the level of intensity to which our attention has become accustomed.
A person leaving a loud room does not immediately hear subtle sounds. For a while, the silence can feel almost blank.
The same may be true of attention. What has been repeatedly trained to respond to contrast, speed, and novelty cannot instantly recover an appetite for continuity. It needs time to become sensitive again.
This is why the usual language of digital discipline can be misleading. Limits may be necessary, but restriction alone does not explain what we are trying to recover. The point is not simply to spend fewer hours looking at a screen. It is to lower the level of stimulation against which everything else is being judged.
That process is less dramatic than a detox and less visible than a new habit. It may simply mean remaining with an experience after the impulse to leave it has appeared. Continuing to read when the mind asks for something faster. Letting a pause in conversation remain a pause. Not immediately answering every minor discomfort with another source of input.
These moments are not inherently profound. Most of them will remain ordinary. That is precisely the difficulty.
The screen has taught us to expect frequent changes in tone, subject, image, and feeling. Ordinary life rarely moves this way. It repeats itself. It develops slowly. Much of what eventually becomes meaningful begins by seeming uneventful.
The question, then, is not whether technology is good or bad. Nor is it whether we can return to some imagined life before screens. It is whether we still want the pace and intensity of our tools to determine the pace and intensity required for something to hold our attention.
Lao Tzu’s warning is useful because it does not ask us to condemn the five colors. It asks us to notice what happens when they become too many.
The ordinary world may not need to become brighter. We may need to become capable of perceiving lower levels of brightness again.
July 18th:
We are in Grundarfjörður, Iceland!
For my US comrades, here is how you pronounce it: "americafirst"
Here I am trying to expatriate:
July 19th:
Akureyri! This place is awesome 😍
First of all, all the red traffic lights are hearts.
They are 100 kilometers/62 miles from the Arctic Circle, yet they have a lovely botanical garden that had a sunbathing cat in it.
At the tourist center, there's a sexy Bösendorfer that you are not allowed to play but I did anyway and then got yelled at :)
Cute rainbow bench and stairs
Flowers exist here, as well as in other places too
Unrelated to Akureyri, there continue to be unlimited Impossible burgers on boat
July 20th:
More Akureyri cause another stop got cancelled and we stayed here. Which is actually super great because there are a bunch of thrift stores and they were closed yesterday because of the jesus but now we can go to them yay more commodities!
First, we continue to be drowned with chocolate strawberries
Second, ducky
This shit grows in Iceland crazy right
Is this a cabbage I don't know I don't know anything but we love it
Such a lovely server from the Philippines who takes our breakfast order on the boat every morning
July 21st:
July 22nd:
Reykjavik! We went to the Blue Lagoon and I got silica clay face mask in my eyes and ears :) l'm having such a good time highly recommended to anyone who is able to go.
The tour guide on the bus is apparently the father of the lead singer in the Icelandic blues group Kaleo you may have heard of them. He was playing his son's music and singing old viking songs about "outlaws, don't you steal my horse or provisions." I offered my hand for a handshake at the and said thank you so much and he ignored me 😄 baby come back
I chatted with a kindred spirit working in the Blue Lagoon gift shop there and she told me I should move here ehehe we will see. I asked about making friends and she said I wouldn't have a problem with that 😙
July 23rd:
I'm on my way home Bean
I talked to a few employees in the airport about if they like it here and if it's possible to make new friends. The consensus seems to be that if you moved here, you like it, and if you were born here, you don't like it and you want to move to Denmark.
"The grass is always greener."
- Jake Paul
July 24th:
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeee
July 27th:
July 28th:
After months of preparing and waiting for some activist friends returned to town (I didn't want to do it without them), I'm finally giving my vystopia talk!!
Went back to my dermatologist's office today, which was the place where I gave the front desk my phone number to give to a cute intern. I was informed today that that wasn't actually the intern's name and no one knew who I was talking about 😂 maybe I'm hallucinating pretty ladies
Went bowling with my friend Jaclyn and you guessed it, my ass was grass. We didn't use the bumpers :(
July 30th:
Beans thinks he's too good for cat tv
Gave my vystopia presentation tonight!! I will upload the video once I've finished editing it :]
Best wishes to you all 🤗
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