Very Particular Personal List – June 2025

From a reader/writer with two homes, so in love with the fact that I never ever know what will make the list next month.

Thoughts provoked by Substack essays:

– am I a critic or a fan? (Rayne Fisher-Quann’s survey)

– I relate to the floater friend concept re: having several distinct non-overlapping friend groups, but I’m too heavy to float; am I a puzzle friend, or an umbrella friend?

– I plan to have even more IRL, face-to-face, paper, material, handshakes, neighborhood connections, maps, hugs, hangouts, zines, flyers, posters, physical art projects, and collaborations in my life, as listed here, here, and here

Things that make being “a creative” more “real”:

– analyzing what I want to do and most of all why I want to do it, and then how I do it (small daily realistic action steps); learned here from Anna

– my first ever paid (!) creative non-fiction publication: a microstory about my pencil stub collection for Prachi’s The Enigma of Objects that you can read here

– going on the trajectory of 100 subscribers on Substack

– a friend at a social gathering introducing me as a writer, not a translator

© M. K.

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Neurological concepts I learned from this book on the construction of emotions that make life easier:

– the fiction of the self

– simple conscious recategorization of feelings

– words > concepts > holistic body-mind processes

– affective realism sucks! curiosity is cool!

– there is no single reality (emphasis on “single”, not “reality”)

_ degeneracy/variation is the norm

What I miss about Germany, especially after my most recent trip:

– three daily walks (one of them a hike) with our family dog Ori

– morning walks with my mom and Ori

– evening walks with my dad and Ori

– minimum 8 hours of uninterrupted, quiet sleep time in a perfectly dark, perfect-temperature room, on a perfect mattress, every single night

– daily reading of the local newspaper while having breakfast or supper

– Apfelsaftschorle and Körnerbrötchen