𝐃 𝐗 𝐌 𝐈 𝐍 𝐈 𝐐

The notion of productivity, its very aura, had long repelled me. It struck me not as virtue but as bondage disguised in aspiration. I was, for some years, possessed of the faint and foolish belief that the acquisition of a Field Notes notebook, slim and vaguely masculine, along with an overly wet, lushly bleeding fountain pen and a Leuchtturm1917—one of those pristine German notebooks with embossed dates and numbered pages—might transform the paralysis of writer’s block into some tidy sorcery. That by binding myself to objects of intention, I might become intentional. But this illusion was tied up in another: that neatness, tidiness of thought, elegance of line, some performative sense of uniqueness, was necessary. That the mind, in order to be externalised, must first be ornamental.

Naturally, nothing came of it. My notebooks are numerous and uneven, littered with false starts, grand intentions, the detritus of self-consciousness. There are pages I have begun to fill, only to abandon them mid-line, stricken by the faint terror that the page was not pleasing. Not charming. Not clever. And when they failed this false test, I longed to tear them out in shame, as if writing were theatre and the audience forever watching.

The same, I have found, holds true for books. For years I was confounded by the impulse to annotate. Why scribble in margins if one reads merely for the slow, undemanding pleasure of it? In school, annotation had been tactical, an instrument of argument, of analysis. Its function was to prepare the text for dissection, not to caress it.

But now I see I was missing something. We live, or at least I live, in a moment shaped by an aestheticised kind of intellect. Annotation is no longer merely scholastic but performative, a little theatre of enlightenment. I suspect it began, though I might be wrong, with the millennial penchant for distressed eyewear and late-blooming engagements with philosophy, as if a reading of The Ethics in one’s twenty-ninth year could lend retrospective shape to all prior chaos.

This does not bother me. None of it does. It merely gives me pause. Social media, and my presence within it, became a kind of mirror-maze that refracted my desires into consumable, consumptive forms. It has taken from me not by force, but by seduction, the ordinary fugitive joy of private creativity.

Now, though, I begin again. Or perhaps I begin for the first time. I sit quietly, regarding the olive green roll-up pen case Antonette (Mendoza) gave me two decades ago, before time tilted and immigration rewrote the texture of days. I nestle it beside the pencil case Sara (Hando) offered in that same season of departure. These small relics, worn at the edges, seem to carry the scent of earlier versions of myself.

I find myself circling back to an earlier version of myself, one I had long considered chaotic, yet who, paradoxically, produced more than I do now. That version, unruly as she was, vanished somewhere in the long shadow of migration. And so I have resolved, quietly and without ceremony, to return to what is comfortable, and to begin from where I left —

• The LA 1.16 Soft Goods case was purchased in 2014, in San Francisco’s Japantown. At the time, it housed my Field Notes—creased, coffee-stained, cannabis-burned. Now, it has been repurposed as a holder for our passports. Practicality has eclipsed sentiment.
• The Audio-Technica headphones are for silence. Or rather, for the management of noise. I use them religiously, a barrier against unwanted noise. They were a gift from my husband in 2022.
• Stalogy is my favorite. Hobonichi is too delicate—too thin to withstand fountain pen ink. I plan to replace it with a Midori once I’ve ran through it — hopefully. Note: These notebooks are not for important ideas. They are a kind of escape hatch. I doodle in them to avoid—to keep myself off my phone.

Productivity influencers love to boast about unlocking the secret to reading while working full-time. I find that hilarious. Reading isn’t a trick—it requires a specific mindset, an emotional state. Choosing to read instead of rotting your brain with a movie depends entirely on how much mental space you permit yourself. CEOs and influencers read 100 books a year because they have time.

In the past two weeks, I’ve read over ten books, just from my shelf or the local bookstore. And that’s me taking it easy. I read quickly—out of habit, necessity, and a practiced kind of hyper-focus. The truth is, I can do this now because I have time. Or rather, because I’ve learned how to steal it.

• The Hidden Cafe has nice ambiance. I can take my dog there and he can play with other dogs or hangout with people who love dogs. They also have two gluten-free cakes I can eat… if I like the taste of coconut.

My problem with most coconut-based cakes in the Western hemisphere is that they almost always taste like macaroons (not macarons). A vegan chocolate cake made with coconut? It ends up tasting more like a chocolate macaroon than chocolate. A vegan lemon meringue pie with coconut flakes in the gluten-free crust? A lemon macaroon in disguise. Why not just make a macaroon? What am I missing?

The truth is, after speaking with Antonette before I had to go, I realized what I was really craving wasn’t a different cake. I was my friends, my past, and some version of myself I quite liked. What’s the point of gradually slipping out of society to “find myself,” if in the process I’ve only lost who I was?

So, I’m stepping back from philosophy and critical theory for now. I’m allowing myself to regress into old habits—blogging, reading, loitering in coffee shops—not to escape, but to reacquaint myself with myself.

There is productivity in chaos.