In my phone I have a note titled “Why didn’t I think of this!!!” It’s a list of creative projects that I (1) think are clever, fun, and smart, (2) wish I’d thought of, and (3) find inspiring and generative. Today I’m sharing some of the projects on that list here.

Food diaries and a cookbook

Leaked Recipes by data researcher Demetria Glace (photography by artist Emilie Baltz) is a cookbook of more than 50 recipes—and the stories behind them—that were found in some of the world’s biggest email leaks (Enron, Hillary, Pizzagate, Wikileaks, etc.). Genius. Though it’s useless to me on a practical level as a stereotypically extremely picky autistic eater, I wish I’d bought the book when I had the money to.

Sylvia Plath’s Food Diary, a Twitter account—curated by writer Rebecca Brill (who also runs @sontagdaily) and illustrated by painter Lily Taylor—that tweets “everything sylvia plath ate according to her journals, letters, poems, the bell jar & other texts.” That’s literally it. No added context, just excerpts. Love. For more about the project: an interview with its curator.

What I Ate for Lunch and Why, a blog that documents almost every lunch the blogger behind it ate from May 2008 until early December 2015 (and a few entries from 2017 thrown in). Extremely my shit. As the type of autistic who eats the same thing prepared the same way eaten out of the same container or off the same plate using the same silverware while sitting in the same spot at the same time every single day for months and months and months on end before switching things up, the sheer variety of foods eaten is impressive, fascinating, and incomprehensible to me.

What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories by Laura Shapiro is a fantastic idea for a biographical essay collection. I love an oblique and unexpected angle into history.

Memoir-ish and adjacent writing

“Cognitive Behavioral Therapy While Running” is a hermit crab essay by writer Megan Williams. A hermit crab essay is one that takes on an existing form or structure of another type of writing. In this case, Meg’s essay is written in the form of a CBT worksheet. So, so good. (Here is an archived version of it, in case Twitter dies or doesn’t let you see it without logging in or creating account.)

I love little glimpses into other peoples’ lives so naturally I love the classifieds. Over the years, I’ve read a handful of books and articles on the history of the classified ad, and a few pieces of work wherein the writer interviews the people behind the items they list in the classifieds. No one does it better than Miranda July (website, Instagram, Substack) in It Chooses You (I love everything she makes). In the book, a project she took on while procrastinating on another, she and photographer Brigitte Sire travel around Los Angeles, interviewing and photographing “a random selection of PennySaver sellers, glimpsing thirteen surprisingly moving and profoundly specific realities, along the way shaping her film, and herself, in unexpected ways.” A dream project.

Illustrator Carson Ellis‘s latest, One Week in January: New Illustrations for an Old Diary, is one of my favorite projects of the year. In it, she pairs new illustrations with an old diary that she kept for only a week before abandoning it—the year was 2001 and the entries document her first week in Portland as a young artist living with other artists/friends in a warehouse in southeast. I’m such a sucker for stuff like this. Sadly, I missed her author talk at Powell’s. Happily, I made the opening reception of her show at Nationale, which featured original paintings of the art in the book (sadly, I left way earlier than planned because my social and sensory batteries ran out way faster than anticipated). More about the project and an interview with Ellis here.

If you grew up in the 90s with AOL chat rooms and AIM and also enjoy peering into the private parts of peoples’ lives, you’ll probably love People I’ve Met from the Internet by Stephen van Dyck as much as I do. The book is a memoir—in the form of a very long annotated list—of his sex life as a gay teen on the early internet. It’s one of my all-time favorite projects. The concept and material are just so good—and similar-ish to a project that I’ve had in the works since 2017, which also draws inspiration from Sophie Calle’s True Stories, Carmen Maria Machado’s Inventory, Emily Spivack‘s book Worn Stories, and The Museum of Broken Relationships.

Pixel art

This Google Sheets pixel art by artist and creative director Kara Haupt blows my mind. I’m endlessly impressed by people who have a brain that works like this because mine does not (or at least, it has not yet), even when I’m given a pattern or instructions to follow.

I’m also deeply in love with Diane Meyer‘s work, in which she stitches pixelated squares directly onto photographs. Her entire portfolio is incredible. I especially love the scenes from Berlin and the 1970s class photos. (Meyer’s work reminds me of Anna Von Mertens‘s project “As the Stars Go By,” in which she hand-stitched onto large swaths of black cotton the star rotation pattern at different violent moments in history (Wounded Knee, Hiroshima, the assassination of MLK Jr., 9/11, bombings of Baghdad, etc.).)

Security envelope patterns

I can’t get over this curated collection of security envelope patterns. Hoping to craft something similar (I haven’t—yet), I started collecting security envelope patterns earlier this year after seeing a memorykeeper whose work I love used a cut-out from one as the title page for a mini album she made back in 2016 (she took her projects offline years ago and I don’t see an example of it anywhere on Pinterest so I can’t link to it, sorry!). When I saw the zine-like project I almost died. Both ideas are impossibly cool and creative.

Years ago, Austin Kleon shared a link to a home tour with writer Olivia Laing. It immediately became—and remains—my all-time favorite home tour; it’s a comfort video for me, and I return to it often. The place is incredible. Full of art and books and beautiful and sentimental objects and ephemera, it just feels so cozy and eclectic and loved and lived in. It feels, too, very authentic to its inhabitants. And that English garden/yard—be still be still be still, my heart. It’s giving whimsy. It’s giving cottagecore. It’s giving Secret Garden.

Did you catch the part where she talks about her home being a love story? As an autistic who spends much of my life at home, where I have far more control over the sensory and social environment than I do outside of the space, I love this idea—and its sibling idea: your home can be a love letter to your life.

On October 9, 2023, I wrote a list in my phone titled “Things I would do if I had the confidence, patience, time, spoons, in-person community to help/support me from day to day, etc.” There are 14 items on that list. The first two? “Quit my job” and “Start blogging again.”

A month after beginning this list, on November 9, I quit my job. And now, a month after that, on December 9, at way-too-early-o’clock on a Saturday morning because of course the one day a week I don’t have to wake up to an alarm my brain decides I should be up hours before sunrise, I’m starting this blog.

Yes, I caught it: 9-9-9. No, I didn’t plan it. I also didn’t plan for the first two items on my list to be the first two that I crossed off it—and in the order they’re listed, no less.

I’ve no idea where this blog will go or how frequently I’ll post or how long it’ll last. I do know that this blog will be a personal blog (a long-lost and much-missed relic of the [g]olden days of the internet), hence the title and tagline, and that I’d like to keep this thing going for as long as it feels good and fun.

That last bit is especially important. I don’t want this blog to feel like a job, and I don’t want to feel like anything/everything that I share here has to be “perfectly” crafted. I won’t be following any sort of must-do blogging formula or format. I won’t be optimizing my posts for SEO. I won’t be plastering this thing with pop-ups or sponsored content or other ads. And I doubt I’ll be finding or creating a niche or sticking to one topic.

As was customary in pre-social media personal blogging, I imagine this blog will be a combination digital diary/scrapbook/file cabinet/to-do list/notebook, and will include all sorts of things (hence the “etc.” part of its title): photo dumps, link round-ups, book reviews, personal/creative projects I’m working on, thoughts on parenthood, my experiences as an autistic and chronically mentally ill person, people and things that inspire me, people and things that enrage me, trauma and therapy, activism and advocacy and organizing, COVID (which is still a real big, real bad thing), a record at my attempts to complete various items on my “Things I’d do…” list, etc.

What I’m saying is: I’m going to let this thing become whatever it’s meant to be. And I hope that what it’ll be is place for me to organize and quiet my chaotic brain, which, by the way, feels like this:

I also hope this blog will help me find community (I am very lonely), and that it’ll help other people feel less alone in their thoughts and experiences, too. And as long as you’re not a fascist or bigot or other variety of asshole, I’m happy to have you along for the ride. Hello, welcome, thank you for being here, etc.