July was such a packed month—I’m exhausted but for entirely great reasons. This month I achieved a really exciting personal milestone—after 20 years of living in Toronto, I finally played a show at the Rex Hotel , the legendary jazz bar on Queen St. When I moved here for school in 2006 (oof), I was studying jazz and dreamed of playing at the Rex one day. Instead, I ended up playing in indie rock…
What the hell, July is half over already and I’m finally looking backward at June… it was such a full month, I feel so blessed! It was a great month for shows. One of the standouts was Cadence Weapon in the back room of the Cameron House(!) with an eight-piece funk band (!!!) playing most of his great new album Forager , plus some old hits. I’ll be bragging about that show forever. A live band is…
Another friend of mine passed away in late May. Mike McAuley, frontman of hardcore bands Mickeys Crew and Human Trainwreck , true Yankees fan, friend to all cats and a generally great guy, is no longer with us. I have fond memories of attending a game with him at Yankee Stadium—every time the crowd would get way too excited about a routine flyout he would yell at them to chill out and learn to…
I felt sluggish, disinterested, adrift, dissatisfied this month. It was a slog. I’ve seen a few creators I like categorizing their time by what they consumed and what they produced - not in a productivitymaxxing way, but more like “am I spending too much time consuming and not enough time creating?” sort of way (I’ve also seen references to “consuming hobbies” and “producing hobbies”). I really…
Hello! It’s been a hot minute … monthly feels like a nice cadence but sometimes it feels like absolutely forever between posts. Maybe it’s just because it’s finally spring-ish and things are happening again but March felt busy! I saw a number of really good shows this month, including one of the best top-to-bottom bills I’ve seen in some time: Mod Lang , Shadow Show , and Daniel Romano’s Outfit .…
Somehow January felt like it lasted a million years but I barely remember February happening at all. Is this what life is like with increasing sunlight? I’m into it. As you can see, I did a lot better on my ear training habit last month and a lot worse on the mobility (in my own defense, I had a terrible cold for almost two weeks). Consistency is really hard! I was only aiming for 2-3 days a week…
Man, January felt a trillion weeks long, didn’t it? My friend Dan McQuade passed away at the end of January. I wrote about him , but I’ve obviously been thinking about him a lot still. I have this tendency, when someone passes, to justify or contextualize sadness about them—I say things like “We were friends, but we weren’t close friends,” as if to say, don’t use all your limited condolences on…
The singular Dan McQuade passed away this week . He was just 43 years old. He was a friend of mine, though not a close one. Just like everyone else who has ever met him, I loved his enthusiasm and sincerity and bottomless love for Philly. We didn’t get to hang out much, but every time I walk by the bar where he and his wife and I met up when they visited Toronto, years ago now, I think of how…
I’ve been gravitating toward having a single longer-form thought at the beginning of these retro posts, and then throwing some grab-bag items in afterward. There’s nothing wrong with this format, but after re-reading last week’s post, I feel like it could have just been its own post. I didn’t need to jam that into a retro! It made sense to—it was indeed related to something I did and something I…
In my “stuff I’m looking forward to” last week I mentioned Rogers v. Rogers , a one-man (!!!) play at Crow’s Theatre based on the book by the same name . A number of people I know saw it before we did (I accidentally texted Jenny on two different days about it) and all of them came back with rave reviews, and still, I was like … a one-man play about … Rogers ? The telecom company? Are you kidding…
I got a really nice comment about the retro posts the other day: these posts bring me back to the early-aughts-blogspot days, I think they’re great! It’s probably no surprise that that’s exactly the vibe I’m going for here. Very pleased to learn that it’s working! Last week I was lucky enough to be able to take a little time off around the holidays so last week was my first full work week in a…
I waffled a lot about what to include in retros, and eventually waffled about writing retros at all, because I’m always re-evaluating how much to share about myself online. Sometimes I lean way into oversharing, as we probably all do, because it feels like a way to be vulnerable and connect with other people. Other times I share very little, especially when I’m considering all the audiences who…
After a brief interlude we’re back on the retro train over here! It’s almost annual reflection season, which I’m sure will figure prominently in future retros, but for now I’m hoping to just build a habit again. Thanks for being here to read these. Here’s some stuff that has happened in the past few weeks. The burnout didn’t magically go away I actually had a nice few months! I had almost five…
“…Remember that if there is to be drama in your life somebody must pay the piper in the coin of suffering. If not you—then someone else.” “Oh, no, I wouldn’t like that.” “Then be content with fewer thrills.” —L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon When I dared, after Game 5 of the World Series, to get excited that the Blue Jays were one win away from winning a championship, I got scolded by a boring…
This retro was meant to happen on September 28, but that day I ended up being a little busy: As these things sometimes go, the baseball just kept on happening, and the Jays kept on going, and now I’m writing weeks late before they play game 6 of the ALCS, which is frankly ridiculous. This team lost 88 games last year and they are playing the Mariners in the ALCS . Again, ridiculous. Baseball…
The other day, a key broke off of the little low-profile keyboard I’ve had for four and a half years. I love this keyboard. It’s pink (delightful!), it’s extremely thin and requires very little movement of my hands and wrists, and it easily connects to multiple computers. Basically all I need in a keyboard. I ordered a new one. But because it’s been almost five years, the same keyboard isn’t…
I’ve long enjoyed Jenn “hotter and smarter” Schiffer’s weekly retro posts , so much so that I’m going to try doing them myself. I know myself, though, so I’ll refrain from labeling them “weekly” or “monthly” or any interval at all, lest I miss one and then worry the entire endeavour is irreversibly ruined. (I do suffer from perfectionism, why do you ask.) This one is mostly about the past month,…
Let me tell you about something that happened to me recently. Minor background: Where I work we use Tuple for pairing. It’s wonderful and I’ll sing its praises any day—I think it’s really changed how I look at remote collaboration—but those details are not particularly important for this story. Anyway, so here’s what happened: My colleague called me, on Tuple, unprompted. My first reaction was “Oh…
This year, I read: Elise Hu - Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital Culturally fascinating! I learned about this book from Jessica DeFino’s anti-beauty-industry newsletter and found it a really interesting perspective on K-beauty, cultural norms, and the performances we all do in our lives to project certain ideals. Arielle Greenberg - Superfreaks: Kink, Pleasure, and…
Last year, I read: Andy Greenberg - This Machine Kills Secrets (audio) Kyle Chayka - The Longing for Less Aubrey Gordon - You Just Need to Lose Weight (audio) Don DeLillo - Pafko at the Wall Walter Álvarez - T-Rex and the Crater of Doom (audio) Andy Greenberg - Tracers in the Dark (audio) Evan Drellich - Winning Fixes Everything (audio) Kirsten Grind - The Lost Bank (audio) Melissa Febos - Whip…
Let’s revisit something I wrote in June 2017: First blog posts are awkward. I’ve written a lot of them only to abandon the blog a year or two later, so I’ll dispense with the formality. Hello. Awkward. Anyway, the internet sucks a lot more than it did six years ago, but this site still exists, and I’m glad it does. All of my “content creation” between the last post here and this one was on…
I’ve never had a year like this one. This exercise feels a little narcissistic and maybe it is, but it’s nice to look back on a year before embarking on a new one. I’ve never been very good at recognizing my own strengths and accomplishments, instead focusing most of my energy on what I didn’t do or what wasn’t perfect. Pam Selle does this great thing called Bullets , where she keeps a list of her…
My main non-day-job gig right now is playing in a live karaoke band, simultaneously the most fun and most difficult gig ever. When I joined in January the list was already hovering around 300 songs, so you can imagine how daunting it seemed to try to learn them all, especially since I cover multiple instruments. I’ve been tinkering with ways to handle this for months. My first attempt just…
There’s this weird thing that happens when you get over the first few bumps in a beginner learning curve and your muscle memory starts taking over, like you’re suddenly having an out-of-body experience, observing yourself doing things without any input from your brain. When I’m playing guitar, I’m often scrunched over the body of my Tele in a terrible office chair in the corner of my apartment,…
First blog posts are awkward. I’ve written a lot of them only to abandon the blog a year or two later, so I’ll dispense with the formality. Hello. Thanks for stopping by. Here’s what’s been on my mind recently: I’m learning how to play guitar for the zillionth time in my life. This time it’s finally sticking. I’m a musician foremost, something I’ve spent over two decades doing—the idea of learning…