Week 44, 2025 — quiet days

I came back from Bavaria mid-week and sent another Postcard—yay! I get a nice handful of replies each time, sometimes from people I haven’t interacted with in ages, and that makes me happy. For me it’s a win to send out a clean signal that’s perceived to be inviting enough to spontaneously shoot back a reply or text. A while back I thought to myself, it would be something to still be sending sporadic Postcards in ten, twenty years time. It was a thought that opened my aperture for this project and makes me feel more generous and generative.

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I cleaned and oiled my hiking boots over the weekend. These are proper leather boots that I splurged on a dozen years ago, after being enthralled by a store staff who taught me what to notice in my feet. It’s only these past few years that I felt I’ve grown into someone who hikes enough to be wearing these kinds of shoes. I resoled them this spring at a specialist shop in Paris and upgrade the insoles, too. I’m caring for the things that carry me, and realizing I’ve become the person I once bought them for.

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I finished reading Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. It’s a business book that is partly an autobiography of Guidara’s successful career in the restaurant business. All of the stories are from his early days or his experience building Eleven Madison Park into a Michelin Star restaurant, which I enjoyed alot, as it’s not a world that I’m familiar with (other than through TV shows like The Bear). The meta-lesson that I got from this book is not to accept industry norms or customer expectations at face value. Anything and everything is open to observation and experimentation.