Living in Notes

If you’ve noticed fewer emails from me lately, there’s a reason: I’ve been living in Notes.

For the last little while, most of what I’ve written has landed there instead of here in your inbox. And I’ll be honest about why. Notes feel liberating in a way a full post doesn’t. I can catch whatever happens to be crossing my mind — a memory, a small mishap, a song I’d forgotten I loved — and just put it down, without turning it into an event. No subject line, no “new post” fanfare, no feeling that I’m knocking on your door yet again.

Because lately, there’s been a lot crossing my mind. More than usual. And if I’d turned every one of those thoughts into a proper post, I’d have shown up in your inbox every single day — and nobody signed up to be bombarded like that. Notes felt like the considerate option: there if you want them, easy to scroll past if you don’t.

There’s something else, too. Writing small has loosened me up. A post carries a certain weight — it wants a beginning and an end, it wants to be about something. A Note just wants to be true for the length of a paragraph or two. I’ve written more in the last couple of weeks than I had in a while, precisely because I stopped asking each thought to be important enough to mail out. Some of them turned out to be my favorite things I’ve written all year.

So think of this as a little map to where I’ve been. I’m still figuring out the right rhythm — maybe a steadier cadence here, with Notes in between for the overflow. Rough draft, as always.

You can find them all — and whatever I’ve scribbled since — on the Notes tab of my profile. But in case you missed them, here are a few to start with:

• The Last Scrobble — a decade-old music-tracking account, and what 28,818 forgotten songs told me about who I used to be.

• A Small Fortune — the birthday my parents turned an Atari 2600 into something far bigger than they could have known.

• The Lab Coat — a cold cup of tea, a very eager freshman, and a cafeteria tray that had other plans.

• They Always Had Cake — a delivered cake, and the ones I still remember from a house that somehow always had one.

No pressure, of course — that’s the whole point of a Note. It’s there if you want it. But if any of them sound like your kind of thing, you know where to find me.