It’s been a long time (years!) since I’ve shared my Project Life pages online. I’m both nervous and excited to begin sharing them again. Today, a look at some of the spreads in my 2025 album.
For the last two years (2024 and 2025), I’ve not begun keeping an album until July. I’ve also not gone back to fill in the first half of the year for either year—and I don’t plan to. Is this ideal? No. Am I happy to have some of the year documented v. none of it? Yes.
Some of these spreads are unfinished; they still need journaling. The holdup: I’m still not sure whether I want to handwrite or type my journaling onto the cards that are missing journaling. So it goes sometimes (most times).
I spent the entirety of 2024 and much of 2025 recovering from my 2023 suicidal era. As such, I’ve not been hitting traditional milestones or collecting traditional achievements these last couple of years; everything I have, both tangible and in-, has gone into surviving my own brain.
At the end of 2024, I made a list of things I did for myself over the course of the year that helped me begin climbing out of the abyss. It was a very short list of very simple things. It was also the start of a new practice. Today, I’m sharing the things I did for myself in 2025 that most improved my life. They’re still mostly small things, and many are just accommodations for my and my son’s neurodivergence.
In roughly the order in which I adopted each habit/routine:
Weekly check-ins. In early 2025, I implemented “weekly check-ins.” They’re basically rebranded family meetings for my household of two. Every Sunday morning, my 15-year-old and I sit down and review the upcoming week together using a very rudimentary agenda that we fill in throughout the preceding week. This weekly practice has helped me run our household more efficiently, and it’s helped us both better budget our time, executive functioning, spoons, and expectations for the upcoming week.
Aligned my days with my natural circadian rhythm. For better or worse, my brain is an early bird. Most days, I’m wide awake before my alarm, which is set for an hour that many people consider “the middle of the night.” At the very end of 2024, I stopped fighting against my natural circadian rhythm and began experimenting with living my life by it. By early 2025, I’d settled into a daily schedule that works incredibly well for me and my overactive autistic brain.
Without question, of everything I did for myself last year, this is the most consequential. It has been profoundly helpful in every domain of my life, and I’m eternally grateful to (finally, and at least for now) have the privilege to accommodate my needs in such a significant way.
Changed my volunteer commitment to accommodate my autism. In 2025, I left two volunteer positions that I loved but that were both too late in the day for my overactive autistic brain and required more sensory and social battery than I have. After much searching, I found a different volunteer position that’s a much better fit: it’s closer to my apartment, it’s earlier in the day, it’s quiet and still and repetitive, and there are never more than four people (me included) in the office at one time (and often there’s just two of us). Plus, the employee I’m paired with and I get along really well, I enjoy and am good at the work, and I feel valued and appreciated there.
Created a landing zone for my AuDHD teenager. My son and I live in a very small apartment. My autism cannot handle visual busyness, or things being out of place. His ADHD means that he tends to place things down wherever he is in the moment, creating small piles of stuff all over the goddamn place. To diffuse the resulting frustration and tension, I bought a large laundry basket for him to dump his stuff in (it was, thank god, on sale when I bought it). My only rules: as soon as its contents begin overflowing onto the floor, he has to move stuff into his room, and it needs to be gone through and cleaned out each week during or after our weekly check-in, regardless of whether it’s overflowing.
Amazon Sundays. To add some friction to my spending habits and to reduce my personal carbon footprint (which is negligible and a scam of a concept invented by the advertising and PR industry, I know), I decided early in the year to order from Amazon only on Sundays (excepting time-sensitive issues and extenuating circumstances).
This practice has worked remarkably well. I’m making fewer impulse purchases, which has reoriented my relationship to instant gratification in general, and, sometimes, between the time I add something to my cart and end up purchasing it, I find it locally and give my money to a small business instead of to Amazon. 10/10. Big recommend.
Bought a large carabiner for grocery bags. To corral my reusable grocery bags, I bought a carabiner large enough to clip to a grocery cart handle. No more frustration over bringing too many or too few bags into the store with me. Or over having to dig my bags out from beneath my groceries when I get to the checkout. Or over the bags being strewn all over my car. Now, they live clipped to the carabiner around the passenger seat headrest. When it’s time to grocery shop, the entire collection comes in with me, clipped to the shopping cart handle. At the end of the trip, the unused bags clip back to the headrest. After I unload my groceries, I put the empty bags on my front door’s doorknob and the next time I go out to my car they go back on the carabiner. A very small thing that’s made a very big difference.
Invested in a primo portable outdoor/sunning setup. When it’s nice out, I spend a lot of time outside. Last spring, I bought myself a fancy tanning lounge chair, a large and durable outdoor-friendly bag, and new beach towels. A huge boon to my mental health. I love that the whole setup is portable: I used it basically daily in my apartment’s “front yard,” and brought it all with me to the river whenever I went.
Learned how to cook meat on the stove. It’s amazing how much less frustrating the very frustrating (for me) experience of eating is when the meat that you cook is not either completely burned on the outside and still totally raw on the inside, or perfectly cooked on the outside and super fucking dry on the inside. My current stove-top-cooked meat go-to: perfectly golden-brown, perfectly juicy breaded chicken breast.
Invested a digital meat thermometer. A life-changing, essential tool for cooking meat that is neither under- nor overcooked. It’s kind of unbelievable I lived my whole life till this last summer without one.
Started using food-safe latex gloves. A godsend for someone who both cooks meat daily and hates (HATES!) the sensory experience of touching raw meat. Cannot believe I didn’t think to invest in these gloves earlier.
Beefed up my makeshift home (apartment) gym. Once upon a time I had an actual garage gym (RIP). Once upon a time I will again. Until then, I have the walkway outside of my apartment building, and my living room.
When I relocated to Portland at the very start of the pandemic, I brought only the equipment I could fit in my car. In March 2025, I invested in additional equipment that enables me to do much more at home (so many more options for activities!), where I don’t have to wear a mask. Bonus: outdoor workouts on nice days. A dream.
Began hiking again. I’m eternally grateful to my unreliable and mentally ill brain for cooperating enough to allow me to get in six entire hikes last summer after nearly three years off the trail.
Reframed “lazy days.” I stopped calling them “lazy days” and started calling them “cozy days,” “slow days,” “restful days,” or “restorative days.” A very helpful mindset shift.
Started using a visual timer. It’s hard to overstate how helpful this small change has been for my neurodivergent household.
Added a signature that includes my “inbox hours” to my personal email. Around mid-year, I added a signature to my personal email that clearly communicates my inbox hours and boundaries around access to me/my time. A game-changer.
Swedish death cleaning. In early November, I began the unplanned project of Swedish death cleaning. I’m almost done (so close!) and will have more to share once I’ve wrapped it all up.
Adjusted a plan that wasn’t working instead of catastrophizing, spiraling, and giving up. The plan that wasn’t working? My plan to centralize and organize my digital photos and videos. This plan fell apart very quickly, and I spent most of the year stressed out about it and not working on it at all. A couple weeks into Swedish death cleaning I had a realization, and then an idea for a new plan.
The realization: I don’t need all of my digital media to be in a single place, or for it to be perfectly organized. I need it to be easily findable. What’s important to me is (1) knowing where my digital media lives, (2) what lives where, (3) how to access it, and (4) important dates. The whole point of this project is to make it easier for my kids to find the memories they’re looking for when I’m gone.
The new plan: Spending a few minutes twice a week swiping through the “on this day” photos on each of the services I store my digital media, deleting and tagging photos as needed, and capturing special events/dates in a spreadsheet as I go. It’ll take an entire year to complete, sure. It’s worth the reduced stress.
Tracked my rest between sets. In the final few weeks of the year I began carrying around a mini whiteboard at the gym to track my rest between sets, to ensure I’m not taking too much/that I stay on track with my sets. It’s also helped me learn optimal rest ranges for my body. Another game-changer.
A few bonus bits:
First, seeing this image last year was life-changing. I do realize that will sound dramatic to some (many?). Consider: autism, and its accompanying literalism. All this time, I’ve struggled to keep pace with my peers, wondering how everyone seemed to have much more energy for and much less difficulty with basically everything than I did (do). Until I saw that image, I didn’t realize that “being consistent” and “doing your best” are relative, contextual, and dynamic. I very much thought “being consistent” and “doing your best” meant showing up at your best-ever 100% every single day for every single thing, not showing up at your 100% for that day. Which…explains a lot.
Lastly, two very important things I learned about myself last year:
I don’t enjoy watching movies in the theater because the sensory and social aspects of the environment are too overwhelming and I have no brainpower or -space left to actually concentrate on and take in the movie. I wrote more about this in this post.
The same reason explains why I don’t enjoy shopping for clothing in person: the sensory and social aspects of the environment are too overwhelming, leaving me with no brainpower or -space to actually focus on how the clothing I’m trying on fits or feels. When I get home and put the clothing back on, I almost always end up hating how it fits or feels (or both!) and have to return it, which means venturing back into an extremely overwhelming and unpleasant environment. And so it goes, forever and ever. This is why when I find clothing that I like, I buy as many multiples of it that my bank account allows and hope that said clothing is never changed or discontinued so that when I eventually wear through everything I bought I can simply reorder them online (sadly, this is rarely the case).
In early 2025, I got very into word search puzzles. After completing a few hundred of them, I decided to try making my own. Almost immediately—like, minutes after thinking, “I want to make my own set of word searches”—the creative gods blessed me with the idea of making a Severance-themed collection. And so ensued a three-week-long descent into extreme, all-consuming autistic hyperfocus. The result: the most fun outcome possible.
By the end of that first day—the day the creative gods blessed me with this idea—I’d:
sketched on my whiteboard a very rough idea of what I envisioned each word search puzzle would look (the MDR terminal screen);
begun scouring the Severance wiki for every bit of information I could find about the typefaces, colors, and branded assets used for Lumon documents;
started researching different printing techniques, paper types and suppliers, and local print shops and their capabilities and prices;
created a spreadsheet to organize puzzle theme ideas;
and begun the first of a ridiculous number of rewatches of both seasons, to collect possible word search themes in my freshly made spreadsheet, and to note color and design details of documents in the show.
Within a week, I’d:
ordered paper samples,
emailed various stationery brands and print shops across the U.S. with questions about specific materials and techniques I wanted to use,
researched word search puzzle generators,
researched which design program was best for this project (Adobe InDesign),
watched hours of YouTube tutorials on how to do a bunch of basic things in InDesign,
scoured YouTube for a decent tutorial on how to create a word search puzzle in InDesign,
finished several rewatches of the entire series,
updated my whiteboard to include a very rudimentary checklist of the main project tasks and decisions,
tentatively decided on a local print shop,
and started a file of reference material (colors, paper weights, binding examples, printing techniques, etc. I wanted to use) to bring to the print shop with me.
At this point, I also realized I needed to make two important decisions, or else I’d never get the project out of my head and laptop and into my hand:
I needed to pick a number of word search themes for this first run, and
I needed to pick a date by which I’d start Adobe’s seven-day free trial.
In the spirit of “make it exist first, make it perfect later,” I decided on 13 puzzles and a June 10 deadline, which gave me till June 17 to do everything I needed to in InDesign before the free trial was up.
After deciding on the number of puzzles and my “design by” deadline date, I:
completed a few more rewatches of the series, each time paying attention to a specific puzzle theme or Lumon document design;
decided on cover and page colors, and word search dimensions (25 letters across, 15 down);
reviewed all the entries in my spreadsheet; chose the first 13 themes with word and letter counts that would fit the puzzle dimensions;
created the word searches using two different online puzzle generators;
rewatched the YouTube tutorial I found on how to create word searches in InDesign several more times;
decided which pages would be what color; and
committed to a printing technique (digital) and local print shop.
Because I was on a tight budget for this project, I needed to complete the entire thing within Adobe’s seven-day free trial window. Before I signed up for the free trial, I made every possible decision about the project’s design that I needed to, including visiting the local print shop I decided to use to select my cover and paper options in person, and watched enough YouTube tutorials enough times to feel confident I could do what I needed to in InDesign to bring this project to life on such a tight timeline.
Then, I researched how to cancel the free trialand walked through the steps to make sure the instructions were accurate—I needed to know in advance how convoluted of a process it would or wouldn’t be so I knew how many spoons to allocate to it (thankfully, and surprisingly, it’s a very straightforward process). Only after confirming Adobe’s cancellation process did I sign up for their free trial—which I immediately cancelled so I didn’t forget to do so later/wasn’t charged at the end of it—and got to work. I had seven days to figure out the program and get the project done.
It took me a few days to create all the puzzles and answer keys; figure out how to format the word banks (which didn’t go as planned); and settle on font sizes and weights, and the placement and spacing of the Lumon logo, letterheads, and lines. During this stage, I spent a lot of time browsing other Severance fan art/projects, mostly on Etsy and Reddit, to study the design choices other people—people with actual graphic design skills and experience and knowledge—made. Once I was happy with my project, I sent it off to the printer. A few days later, I picked up the proof.
I was elated. It was so cool to see something I worked so hard on come to life. To hold it in my hand. Prior to this project, I had no experience with or exposure to InDesign (I’d never even opened the program); I had no experience making word searches; I had no experience with professional printing concepts or conventions; and I had (and still have) no graphic design experience or skills. I was thrilled that it all turned out.
A few months later (finances), I formally approved the proof, which officially moved my project into the print queue, and the rest is history.
Here’s a closer look at the final product:
Front cover
Overall, I’m very happy with the front cover—the design, the color, the typography choices I made (typefaces, fonts, leading and kerning, placement in relation to the logo and band of lines).
The Lumon logo is a high-res image from this logo pack. I created the band of lines manually—line by line—in InDesign, using this image, this image, and various other stills from the show I took on my phone as reference for the weight, spacing, and placement, including running the band of lines closer to the right edge than to the left edge.
I’m less happy with the actual title. Or, rather, the second word of the title. I’m not sure why I went with “Macrodata Refiner’s…” instead of “Macrodata Refinement…” While some document titles in the show contain a job title (e.g., “Senior Refiner Morning Checklist,” and “Innie Resignation Form”), not a single document I noticed during my rewatches contains a possessive in the document title. These details are important to me—from the beginning, it’s been important to me this project be as true to Lumon branding and design as possible.
Originally, I’d subtitled the booklet “A Collection of Word Search Puzzles, Volume 1.” Ultimately, I modeled the subtitle off the subtitle of the Security Office Protocol Quick Start Guide, using “Compendium” instead of “Collection” and “Edition” instead of “Volume.”
What I plan to do differently next print run: Change the title to “Macrodata Refinement Word Search Puzzle Experience” (I plan to do this on the “Congratulations” page at the end, too).
* * *
First page
Mostly good.
I modeled this page (and the “Congratulations” page at the end) after the Lumon letterhead, as seen on the Music Dance Experience selection card.
I created the letterhead using a high-res logo included in the same logo pack linked above, and by individually drawing each line using the line tool in InDesign. I’m not sure why I didn’t use the black Lumon logo. It’s true that the logo pack I purchased didn’t include it. It’s also true that it’s available on the Severance wiki. I have no clue what I was (or wasn’t) thinking.
What I plan to do differently next print run: Replace the transparent Lumon logo with the black one. Add the word “backward” after “diagonally.”
* * *
Word search pages
Overall, these pages turned out great. I’m very happy with how well they mimic the MDR terminal screen. My biggest frustration: the word banks.
In the show, the MDR terminal screens display five evenly spaced columns at the bottom. I wanted to mimic this and divide the word bank into five evenly spaced columns. To my infinite frustration, I could not for the life of me figure out how to both divide the word bank into five equal columns and, when necessary, get the text to wrap correctly. The only configuration I could get to consistently work across all pages with all word options was three evenly spaced columns.
My other frustration: the sets of double lines bounding the top and bottom of the puzzle area don’t fully extend to the left side of the page.
What I plan to do differently next print run: Try to figure out how to divide the word bank into five equal columns and how to get the text to wrap correctly. Ensure the sets of double lines bounding the top and bottom of the puzzle areas fully extend to the left side of each page. Add more word searches (13 isn’t enough!).
* * *
Answer keys
These pages turned out great. I wasn’t sure that they would. To make the answers easier to read, I removed the sets of double lines bounding the top and bottom of the puzzle area. I also removed the word banks and left the placement of each puzzle alone instead of centering it on the page. I wasn’t sure how this would look and feel to the eye. I worried it might look and feel ungrounded. When the proofs came back, I was thrilled at how they turned out.
Each puzzle’s answer key is on the back side of the page the puzzle is printed on, with the puzzle reversed so that when you flip up the page you can easily see the answers key without turning the booklet around. The weight of the paper I chose is thick enough that the answer keys aren’t visible through the page.
What I plan to do differently next print run: Nothing.
* * *
“Congratulations” page
Similar to the first page, I’m mostly happy with this page. The color turned out great, and I like the size and placement of the text. My two issues with this page: the transparent Lumon logo, and the possessive in the text.
What I plan to do differently next print run: Replace the transparent Lumon logo with the black one. Remove the possessive: change “Macrodata Refiner’s…” to “Macrodata Refinement…”
* * *
Credits page
Modeled after the show’s end credits, I’m very happy with how this page turned out. Perfect. 10/10. No notes.
What I plan to do differently next print run: Nothing.
* * *
Back cover
In this first run, the “credits” page doubles as the back cover (it’s printed on cover weight paper). It’s fine. In a dream world, the “credits” page would be a regular page and the back cover would be thick chipboard, with a small Lumon teardrop icon debossed into the bottom center on the back. Unfortunately, none of the local printers I asked are able to do this.
What I plan to do differently next print run: Convert the current back cover (which is the “credits page”) to a regular page and use the same cover weight and color of paper as I did for the front cover, with a small white Lumon teardrop icon centered at the bottom on the back.
* * *
Binding
In all of my rewatches of the show, I noticed only one example of a bound notebook—the Wellness Center steno notebooks carried by Ms. Casey (in S1E5, she’s holding one while observing Helly R. in the MDR office upon her return to work after her elevator incident, and is later seen holding a stack of them while walking through the halls). These notebooks are bound using Wire-O binding color-matched to the front cover.
For this reason, I was determined to use Wire-O binding color-matched (as best as possible) to the blue of the booklet’s front cover. Unfortunately, the printer I worked with doesn’t offer Wire-O binding in-house and the binding service they outsource this type of binding to quoted me a ridiculously high dollar amount that was miles outside my budget ($100 for 5 bindings; $20 each). I found a place in town that lets you Wire-O bind your own material using their supplies and tools, for only $0.60 per binding plus a $7 facility day-use fee. After reviewing the proof and seeing how thin each booklet is with only 13 puzzles, I decided to skip Wire-O binding with this first batch and opted to have the printer spiral-bind each booklet in-house, which ran me $5 per booklet.
Two things are true: the binding is well-done, and it’s not what I wanted—and for that second reason alone, I’m not happy with it. I had my heart set on Wire-O binding for three reasons: it’s authentic to the bound notebooks in the show; it’s more durable; and it provides a more polished look. I’m determined to use it for the next print run.
What I plan to do differently next print run: Wire-O binding. The next print run will have more puzzles/pages, and will therefore be thicker and, I anticipate, better suited for Wire-O binding. I’m hoping to use a dark blue identical or similar to the color of the cover. If that’s not an option, I plan to go with black.
* * *
Orientation and dimensions
Because I was set on having the word search puzzles mimic the MDR terminal screens, the collection of puzzles is bound horizontally. It was also important to me that the size of each booklet adhered to common word search book dimensions. Each booklet measures 7″ x 9″, which is similar to many other popular collections of word search puzzles. Before committing to those dimensions, I measured all of the word search books I have at home, and researched the dimensions of a number of top-selling word search book online.
What I plan to do differently next print run: Nothing.
* * *
Colors
I’m very happy with the colors I chose.
Originally, I was set on having the text of everything except the puzzles and answer keys printed on colored paper, so I ordered a bunch of paper samples in different finishes, weights, and colors. I quickly learned digital printing made more sense for this project (you live and you learn). No problem. I used the CMYK values of the colored paper samples I liked to make each colored page the correct color in InDesign.
What I plan to do differently next print run: Nothing.
* * *
Typography
I stayed as true to the show’s typography as much as Adobe Fonts allowed, and I think the typography—all of it—looks great.
What I plan to do differently next print run: Nothing.
* * *
I’m very grateful I had enough time, executive functioning, and money to take this project on. I had so much fun working on it, I’m very proud of how it turned out, and I cannot wait to bring version 2.0 to life.
Two hundred and twenty-two sunrises later, I’m officially done with this project. I had a lot of fun with it, and I’m glad to be done (“done”) with it (I’ll almost certainly have a photo book printed at some point).
September 16, 2025, through October 20, 2025.
The project spans a little more than a year—I began it—randomly and unplanned—on Tuesday, December 3, 2024, and took the final photo Thursday, December 31, 2025. The practice: each day that I went to the gym, I took a photo of the sunrise (“sunrise,” in some cases) over Mount Hood while standing in the same spot in the gym’s parking lot.
October 21, 2025, through November 25, 2025.
During the summer months, when the run rises here absurdly early, I’d interrupt my workout to run outside and take that day’s photo (the earliest photo in the series: 4:59 am on June 10). During the rest of the year, the sunrise happened later in the morning, closer to or right at the end of my workout, requiring much less planning and remembering to photograph (eventually, I set a reminder in my phone, adjusting it throughout the year so it popped up about 10 minutes before projected sunrise, to ensure I could work to a good interruption point in my workout to run out and take that day’s photo.)
One bummer about this project: Because I have a standing commitment on Monday mornings that requires me to leave the gym well before sunrise most of the year, I missed a fair number of beautiful Monday morning sunrises. I still took photos those mornings, they’re just not as stunning as the sunrise actually ended up being many of those days.
November 26, 2025, through December 29, 2025.
And the final two:
Below are larger photos of some of my favorite sunrises.
The three that started it all:
7:02 am, Tuesday, December 3, 20247:18 am, Thursday, December 5, 2024. 7:19 am, Friday, December 6, 2024.
A solid set of January 2025 sunrises:
6:51 am, Tuesday, January 7, 2025.7:11 am, Monday, January 20, 2025.7:27 am, Tuesday, January 21, 2025.7:10 am, Thursday, January 23, 2025.7:10 am, Monday, January 27, 2025.7:12 am, Tuesday, January 28, 2025.
That purpley, pink-ish-orange!
6:34 am, Tuesday, March 4, 2025.
I shared in the last batch of photos that I was surprised the most dramatic sunrises happened during fall and winter. Because our summer days feature more clear skies than do our days during there rest of the year, I’d assumed the summer sunrises would be the most dramatic. Nope! Most summer sunrises were lackluster. After a few in the spring, consistently pretty sunrises didn’t return till fall.
6:29 am, Thursday, September 25, 2025.6:56 am, Tuesday, October 14, 2025.
The sunrise on Halloween Eve is my favorite of the bunch.
7:32 am, Thursday, October 30, 2025.
The clouds on Halloween morning were so fucking cool. I wish my iPhone camera could capture just how incredible they were.
7:48 am, Friday, October 31, 2025.
I wish, too, that my iPhone camera was able to capture what the sunrise the following week felt like. The way the sky was illuminated made it look and feel like it was glowing. It felt like standing in a dream. Very surreal.
7:06 am, Friday, November 7, 2025.7:06 am, Tuesday, November 18, 2025.7:07 am, Tuesday, December 30, 2025. 7:14 am, Wednesday, December 31, 2025.
Last but not least, a photo of the earliest sunrise of the year, mentioned above: 4:59 am, Tuesday, June 10, 2025. Absurdly early to be so light out.
Last November, I, a person who is not at all a movie person, not even in the slightest, decided that over the next year-ish, I’d watch one movie in each of Portland’s historic or independently owned movie theaters. The idea was inspired by the hundred-year-old diary I found at an antique market a few years ago. In it, the diarist recorded her daily life, including the movies she and her husband went to see. She recorded 18 movies in the diary and included a very short review for nine of them, sometimes as short as a single word (“Fine.”), never longer than a sentence (“We wished we had gone home instead.”).
Movie review from the bottom portion of the page reads, “We ate at Hazlewood [sic] at 7:15 [pm] then went to Majestic to see Harold Floyd in “Safety Last!” We wish we had gone home instead.”
My original plan was to watch each of the 18 movies recorded in the diary. I thought it could be a fun way to connect to and learn about both the past in general and the diarist’s life specifically, and a low-stakes attempt to do something outside of my usual creative box. I looked up each title on IMDB and Wikipedia and very quickly learned that all of the movies the diarist and her husband watched in 1923 were silent films (the first movie with synchronized sound didn’t release until three years later), which: no thank you!!! I’m not a regular, modern-day movie person. I’m absolutely not a silent movie person. Nevertheless.
In the process of trying to figure out how I’d approach this project, I poked around the Oregon Theater Project website to see if any of the theaters the diarist and her husband visited were still standing and/or operational (no), and I walked over to my neighborhood video rental store to see if they (1) had any of the titles for rent (yes), (2) had DVD or VCR players for rent so I could actually watch any of the titles I might rent (I forgot to ask), and (3) had any information or advice about how to watch a silent movie (no)—or where to find the music that would have accompanied each title when it was screened for live audiences (no) so that I could play the same soundtrack while watching the movies at home; or whether any local movie theaters screened silent films with live musical performances (not to their knowledge).
Pretty quickly I knew that following through with this approach was more effort than I was willing to put forth. The juice, as they say, would not be worth the squeeze. So I decided instead to watch a movie at each of Portland’s historic or independently owned movie theaters, and I gave myself until the end of 2025 to do so. Close enough in spirit, and a much more manageable endeavor.
I ended up with 16 theaters on my list. (Some people will not consider some of these theaters to be independently owned. I wasn’t super strict with my definition—basically, any movie theater that (1) isn’t a big-box, brand name theater (AMC, Cinemark, Regal, etc.) and (2) is in the city went on my list.). To date, I’ve visited 11 of them, in the following order:
There are five theaters I definitely won’t be visiting, as they cater to an audience that I’m not part of and/or their earliest showtimes are too late in the day for me (my hyperactive autistic brain has a very early bedtime):
I envisioned including a full-bleed photo of each movie’s title screen (or, alternately, each theater’s marquee) on one side of a spread and colored or patterned paper and the movie ticket stub on the other—or, like Jamaica did here, affixing the ticket stub to a sheet of transparency over the photo of the movie’s title screen (or the theater’s marquee).
Going into this project, I was also hopeful that more theaters would have photo booths, and that I’d be able to incorporate the photo strips into a potential mini album. Alas, only two of the theaters I visited have photo booths—Laurelhurst Theater and Kennedy School Theater—and neither of them are film, neither of them produce strips in the traditional/expected orientation, and they’re both branded. Sad! (I do appreciate that both photo booths are reasonably priced ($6.00 card, $5.00 cash) and both give you two strips with the same frames, though I don’t like that one strip is color.)
At this point, I don’t plan to make a mini album documenting this project. Uniformity is important to me in a memorykeeping project like this. If I were to make a mini album documenting this endeavor, I’d want for every spread to follow the same formula. That’s not possible here because I don’t have a title screen photo for each movie, I don’t have a photo of each theater’s marquee (some theaters don’t even have a marquee), I don’t want to use a movie poster for each movie, and the movie ticket stubs (“ticket stubs”) are, frankly, pathetic (I will never shut up about the decline and disappearance of well-designed, quality-crafted physical ephemera). Also—I’m sorry!—movies just aren’t that important to me. I don’t feel compelled to document this project beyond this blog post, and I don’t want to spend more time or other resources on it.
My primary takeaway from this project: more than not being a movie person, I’m not a going-to-the-movies person.
At the movies, there’s too much simultaneous sensory stimuli for my brain to handle. Things that other people can ignore, or that other people don’t even notice, command all of my attention (autistic brains don’t habituate to sensory input the way that non-autistic brains do; we are constantly taking in everything around us, which is why we become so overstimulated so easily and so often). Things like temperature; the volume and complexity of on- and off-screen noises; off-screen movement, which is especially disruptive in theaters that have seat-side food/drink service during the movie; smells—of food, of people, of the facility; and, as in one theater I visited (not pictured), visual clutter (T.G.I. Friday’s-style flair all over the walls, including above and on either side of the screen).
All of these things make it very difficult for me to actually take in the movie: my brain is too overwhelmed by all of the other sensory input it’s inundated with, and I’m too focused on not having an autistic meltdown in public. And that’s before factoring in the whole host of other health issues I have that make existing in public inconvenient, uncomfortable, stressful, etc.!
Do I regret doing this project? Do I feel like it was a waste of time or money? No. I got in a lot of good walks, I saw some parts of Portland I don’t spend much time in, I learned about two photo booths that weren’t previously on my radar (always a win, even when they’re not film), and I learned something important about myself—I learned why I don’t enjoy going to the movies. Having clarity about any aspect of yourself is always helpful.
Will this new knowledge about myself stop me from going to see the Michael Jackson biopic in a theater on release day? Absolutely not. Michael was my first-ever autistic hyperfocus, which developed instantly upon my mom playing for me one evening the first record she ever owned—the Jackson 5’s ABC. I was nine years old, the same age she’d been when the record was released. I will use all of my spoons and every last drop of my sensory and social batteries to experience this movie in person, among like-minded fans.
Best marquee: Hollywood Theater. For sure the most iconic movie theater marquee in Portland, and one of the most well-known alongside that of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
Coolest campus: Kennedy School Theater. I wish I’d had more time to explore this place when I was there. (I haven’t gone back to explore it because I have no reason to return other than to explore it and returning only to explore it isn’t worth the spoons for me right now.)
Favorite title sequence: Gladiator II. My relief when it was confirmed it wasn’t made by AI.
Movie I most enjoyed watching:Conclave. Visually stunning.
Theaters I’m most likely to watch another movie at (if I continue to go to the movies after this project): Bagdad Theater (below) or Laurelhurst Theater. Bagdad is enormous, which means it’s very unlikely I’d ever be seated near anyone else; I like that it has balcony seating; overall it’s just a vibe; and it’s close enough to my apartment. Laurelhurst is the closest of the two theaters with a photo booth, and also I love their light fixtures (see two photos above).
Total cost of the project: $91.50, which is less than I thought I’d spend. To be fair, 10 of the 11 movies I went to were matinees; I didn’t buy any concessions at any movie; I purchased 10 of my 11 tickets in person, which was at least $1.00 cheaper per ticket than buying online; and I either walked to or parked in free zones for 10 of the 11 movies.
*
For the curious, here are the movies the diarist recorded in her diary in 1923, listed in the order she and her husband saw them. Titles are linked to their IMDB page. A review, if offered, is in parentheses.
Corner of a Cinnabon box from our annual Cinnabon (and Build-A-Bear) trip
Second row
Corner of a recipe card I ripped up to recycle after messing up the recipe I was writing on it
Scrap of a popcorn bag from the popcorn machine in the waiting area of where I had my flat tire replaced (boo to having a flat tire, thank god it was under warranty and cost me $0.00 to replace)
Scrap of packaging from a box of Pizza Hut my son brought home
Third row
Leaf from the neighborhood
Part of the bag I brought home my holiday cards in from Oblation
Portion of packaging on a notebook I bought for a new project
Label from new sweatpants I (finally!) bought myself during Black Friday sales
Piece of an old refund/gift card that I cut up while going through a small stack of old gift cards to see which still have money on them and which don’t
Completely rethinking my beliefs about and approach to creativity and the creative process after listening to the latest episode of The Telepathy Tapes.
Never been more thankful for my natural autistic intolerance of protein powders and shakes (it’s a taste and texture thing).
AI will never be your friend: “The only world where loneliness is lessened is a world where humans are given a chance to be closer to other humans, not one in which they become a host for a digital parasite hanging around their neck, draining their life in service of profit for a tech company.”
In the last nine months, ICE has spent $71 million on weapons, a staggering 600 percent increase over the same period last year. Unconscionable.
