Hi {name}!
The last time I sent out a love letter was Feb 16. If you've subscribed since then, this must be your first time receiving a love letter from me.
Let's catch up! Here are some things I've been up to since February:
1.
I spent a week in Vietnam with my husband for our overdue honeymoon. My last trip out of the country was in 2018, so this was much-needed and beloved. We only had Hanoi and Sapa stops this time, but we hope to see Da Nang and Hoi An next time!
2.
A close friend threw a PowerPoint party for their birthday, and I signed up to participate. I was originally going to demo an original framework for "everything journaling," which my husband suggested I call the AND Method, short for Apple Nocom-De Leon. Cute but I didn't get that far; I got stuck distilling and reviewing components from everything I've ever tried. Sort of a spiritual relative to techo kaigi, if you're familiar.
What came out was a Yapperpoint abstracting the base ingredients of most (but not all) information, knowledge and productivity systems in my vault notes and how one could go about customizing (or creating!) a system for oneself without the heavily branded and oft-paywalled systems made by productivity bros. I'm quite proud of the Yapperpoint and delighted by the reception to it, and I've delivered the presentation twice now.
3.
Not unrelated to the latter, I put out feelers for a journaling hangout concentrated on commonplacing and knowledge exchange. Probably because I never say it with my whole chest, but I didn't get an inch check outside of my friends so I've shelved it for now! (My friends and I do, however, have a casual commonplace exchange happening in my Side Quests Discord server.)
4.
I'm on the third of six stages of a Sisterhood of the Traveling Journal project I joined at the start of the year. TLDR we each have a journal that we rotate throughout the group via mail, then we're going to cap it off with an in-person meet-up in July. I have some thoughts about how deeply disconnected I am from the larger "journaling community" here in Philippines, and I have some broader, less-manifest thoughts on community in general as well.
5.
I attended my first ever Manila Pen Show! I'm thrilled that, not only did I get to attend, my husband went with me! I walked away with a stack of inks, a glass dip pen, and some minor things, but I actually feel very little guilt about it all.
6.
My health's been up and down since my mental health break in February, and I've since tried returning to yoga. I found a yoga instructor who conducts online classes, it's incredibly convenient and affordable. I stopped attending after my last chronic pain flare-up, and something's keeping me from resuming. It feels weird to be held back like that, because the yoga's been good for me, but I'm trying to honor my gut.
7.
After a friend influenced me into playing Reverse:1999, a mobile gacha game, I've had short bursts of character design and illustration ideas. I don't force it to become a daily practice so as not to take out the joy of it. I've been messing around with pencil sketching, colored pencils, and acrylic markers. I'm also trying to ignore the voice in my head saying I need alcohol markers too.
8.
I got some old, buried feelings of my chest, related to a historical fantasy project I had going on roughly 2018-2020. It was/is called Diwa, and it was meant to be a way to explore my spirituality specific to my culture's roots, especially since I was semi-active in the animist reconstructivist community at that time. I passively shelved the project after a now-former friend got too inspired by my use of the diwa concept, and I had weird, unresolved feelings about it for some time until my Stardust/Makoltaverse took over my brain in 2021 instead.
Anyway, at the encouragement of some writer friends, whose literary opinions I hold high, I've taken Diwa off the shelf and dusted it off, and I'm exploring the possibility of overhauling the setting into a more steampunk-ish one.
9.
I really miss sending out a weekly commonplace letter. I even bragged about this somewhat during my second Yapperpoint delivery, saying that sometimes the note has served its purpose upon being shared with others, and I don't feel too bad about deleting it then.
But the real reason I stopped (besides the travel interruption in February) was that my logs got filled with Instagram/TikTok/YouTube videos, which were a pain to annotate. My weekly logs are backlogs to this day. The last weekly note I created was dated April 27. Oops.
10.
Still, here are some pseudo updates on the commonplace front, in the form of updates to the vault:
- I am currently reading my 14th book of the year! This is very important. During my worst reading slump years, I struggled to reach 10 books a year. Now I'm just about guaranteed to exceed my goal of 15. My favorite book notes are part of the backlog because there was so much to annotate, but some notes are at least up with my rating. My favorite reads so far this year are The Poet Empress and On the Calculation of Volume I.
- This is a lowkey controversial one, but the group chat and I have private talks about performativity, especially in the midst of this year's Internet trends. I've started writing my thoughts down and relating external ideas that I find. It's called taste signals and performative anything.
- As I drag my friends into my casual astrology studies with me (we have three witches in the group!), I've been inspired to start digitizing and updating my grimoire notes. Some of them are still private, but I've been referencing the astrology index/glossary a lot for some key terms. I don't have a lot of friends to talk to about the 12 Houses, so that's my motivation for maintaining these notes!
- As far as intentions go, I want to explore more notes, ideas and content about systems, which is a potential """"niche"""" for me; polymathy — which by sheer coincidence I think is a good lens for talking about Artemis II; and identity (which is tangential to taste signals and performativity, but I haven't written anything in that vein yet.)
What have you been up to lately, {name}? What have you been reading and what's been on your mind? And if you have side quests or passion projects you need to discuss with somebody, maybe I can invite you to my quiet little Discord server with friends?
Either way, you'll hear from me again very soon!
Warmly,
Apple