In case you’d like to hear the sweet sound of my nasally voice mispronouncing the Latin name for things, I’ve started recording audio for my Substacks (press play above!).
Here’s a q 4 u: would you rather sleep in a four-star resort or in the forest?
I vote forest. And I’m not even kidding.
I took my kids camping (the first night on my own, the second night with a friend and her kids) and then we went to Whistler where I discovered something I’ve long suspected about myself: I’m happier in the woods.
A lake is more fun than a pool. I’d take a campfire over a sauna any day. A view of the mountains is nice, but I’d prefer to hike them.
Letting my kids spend hours trying to flip each other out of the hammock beats having them bounce off the walls of a hotel room. Seriously.
It’s not even about building character and blah blah blah, it’s more about building fires.
I have a hunch all the unplugged doing is good for our nervous systems. Because you become so occupied with getting ice and firewood and reorganizing the cooler after your kid shoves the ketchup in sideways so it won’t close properly, you don’t fixate on the usual nonsense. Or at least I don’t.
We were hardly far from civilization: we could be in town in ten minutes if we wanted to. We had running water, electricity and showers. But we slept under the stars. And had to listen out for bears (one was trawling our campground while we were there).
Twice my five-year-old, beaming from ear to ear, said “I’m just so happy!”
Me too, kid, me too.
Plus, when you’re camping, your kids can’t make you take them shopping.
A Substack I wait for each week
Nothing makes me feel more with it—and out of it—than Casey Lewis’s Substack After School, which chronicles the trends and habits of Gen Z and Gen Alpha (though I have three of the latter so I feel like I understand that world pretty well, while at the same time, not understanding it at all).
In the latest After School, Casey talks about the rise of the Camp Snap, a screen-free digital camera. My sister-in-law has one and it’s something I’ve been meaning to get for my girls so they’d be forced to take actual photos instead of just doing what they end up doing every time they ask to borrow my phone: recording GRWMs (which, for those of you who don’t have three Gen Alphas as your dependants/roommates, means Get Ready With Me, where people record themselves getting ready for… idk, standing around in a river or whatever).
Worth the Wait
All the links you’ve been waiting for.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to wrap my head around the fact that for my youngest, machines will have always been able to think as far as she’s concerned. The New Yorker wrote about A.I. as a member of the family in their July issue. I wrote about it what it’s like having Alexa in my home in early June.
My littlest is now asking for an Alexa and when I think about the fact that the chatbot is always listening to our conversations (something she weirdly admitted herself when my kid asked her!), it makes me want to replace Alexa with a six-disc CD player.
A few days after I wrote my Robosocial piece, I also posted a Note that said Substack should have a way to let people know if a newsletter has been written by AI. Boy, did the comment threads go in some interesting directions, with people(?) accusing other people(?) of being bots. Honestly I couldn’t even tell.
But the exciting thing about all this is that now, Substack has released a feature that allows you to tell if a piece has been written by AI. The Waited, for the record, is not.
I’m currently watching the dark and hilarious Bad Sisters, which doesn’t quite fill the Widows Bay void, but comes close enough.
I was going to say A Bronze Age doesn’t feel very Vancouver, but upon further reflection, it actually feels very Mount Pleasant, my old neighbourhood. Not only is A Bronze Age designed in Vancouver, it’s made here too, and in an Amazon world, that’s a beautiful thing. They’re having their summer sale, in case you’d like to get a pair of lace shorts or a headscarf or a bento-box bag everyone will ask you about. (This isn’t an ad, btw!)
Before Christopher Nolan reinvented the Odyssey, Jasmine Sealy did. Listen to our conversation about about writing, reading, mentoring, parenting, and forgetting what’s in your own book.
The way Emily St. John Mandel described the rain in the Glass Hotel felt like the most BC thing I’ve ever read. She’s coming to the Writers Festival in September to discuss her newest release Exit Party and you can get tickets here.
Speaking of international bestselling Canadian authors, I’m currently (finally!) reading Meet Me at the Lake… at the lake. I’ve never been to Cottage Country, but this rom-com reminds me of reading Kit Pearson as a kid.
Thanks, friends! Hope you get to sleep under the stars soon!
Kelsey
P.S. “Hurray for this chat, I loved it! Also love and appreciate all you do to create community 🩷🩷” was SUCH a nice comment (thank you, Kayla!) on this episode of the Waited podcast with Mahsa Di Placito, which you can listen to here.
P.P.S. It’s almost been a year since this incident and my hamstring still hasn’t healed.
I was obsessed with Kit Pearson as a kid!! Now I want to read “meet me at the lake” (the TBR keeps growing!)
Yes team lake! Heading to cottage country today and it will be worth the full day of travel to get there for some forced unplugged time and nature-therapy...