Issue #36
Hello my beautiful little leaves who are slowly turning orange and crunchy,
Welcome back to yap-ville. Population: you.
The first week back to work after a vacation is a time of complete lethargy. I spent this entire last week re-organizing my to-do list instead of actually just doing the things on it. This is a three-week triple-feature newsletter. I present to you the rantings of a sleep-deprived goblin.
Dopamine Menu
A dopamine menu is a curated list of ways you can get a boost of dopamine into your system, whether you have just five minutes to spare, or an entire weekend free.
This is my personalized menu. If you want to write your own, take a scroll through Pinterest for inspiration, check out this blog post, or even ask Chat GPT to help you make a customized dopamine menu based on your birth chart.
Appetizers
Quick, easy, and accessible ways to get a hit of dopamine during your work day.
Stretch your body
Complete one cleaning task
Blast a Chappell Roan song and dance and sing along
Smoosh Dozer’s face and annoy him for a bit
Entrees
Main course activities that take more time and that may need a bit of planning.
Take an everything shower
Walk Dozer in the forest
Get high and look at the plants in your garden
Practise watercolor painting
Cook a meal you love
Read a book
Walk around a thrift store
Have a picnic at the beach
Sides
Activities that are great to do alongside other tasks that are kind of a drag.
Listen to a podcast while running errands
Put one of your comfort shows (The Office, Bobs Burgers, King of the Hill) on in the background while you’re cleaning the house
Listen to a Studio Ghibli playlist on YouTube when you’re writing
Desserts
Those activities you absolutely love, but are best enjoyed in moderation.
Go out to eat
Get yourself a tasty (and expensive) little coffee
Eat pizza while binging Netflix
Scroll through reels
Specials
Activities that aren’t always available, and may need extensive planning and/or money to do.
Host a party
Go camping
Take a mini vacation
Get a little spa treatment
Sleeping beachside on Texada Island.
I revamped my personal YouTube channel and uploaded my first video in years. It’s a tiny vlog about my little van life journey trip to the island. Please enjoy in all my embarrassing glory.
I can’t believe it’s almost a wrap on the gardening season and pretty soon I’ll be tucking everyone in for the winter. Here is a long garden update for you to celebrate my joys and lament over lessons learnt.
My only two zucchini of the season.
An incredible harvest of tomatoes that I’m so excited to make many batches of marinara sauce with.
Late sunflowers popping up all over the garden
My vine maple slowly turning red
Thriving marigolds, floppy tomatoes, tall corn, and a still-blooming geranium
My one and only eggplant consumed by slugs
The cold-weather greens I planted about a month ago now have not been successful. This was supposed to be a prosperous lettuce crop.
Mullein I brought home from the island
Baby pumpkins, doing their best
Maybe my favorite part of the garden: a marigold patch I planted in the ground (gasp! Don’t tell my landlords), surrounded by river stones collected by my upstairs neighbor, being looked after by a piece of art my boyfriend made
A never-ending supply of fresh herbs that I’ll be harvesting and drying before the frost sets in late October
The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger. If you’ve ever once thought to yourself, “Man, plants are pretty neat,” you’ll love this book. My mind was blown many times over as author writes about a completely new way of seeing plants - their intelligence, ancestry, genders, personhood, and more. Schlanger interviewed and walked alongside botanists from around the world, compiling scientific evidence and mountains of research that will make you see plants in a completely new light.
The Other Significant Others by Rhaina Cohen. This book reimagines what life would be like if we could shift the main relationship in our lives from romantic to platonic. It examines why society generally treats people within committed romantic relationships as more mature and whole than those who are single. Cohen interviewed dozens of people in non-romantic-life-partner relationships and includes anecdotes from her own close friendships as well.
I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokpokki by Baek Se-hee. A fascinating and highly-relateable book that chronicles the authors psychotherapy appointments as she struggles with an ongoing battle with depression. If you like talk therapy podcasts like Other People’s Problems hosted by Hillary McBride, you’ll probably love listening to this audiobook, as it is essentially transcripts of her sessions with her therapists, followed by short reflections on the session.
Inside Out 2. This sequel is finally streaming on Disney and it was okay I guess. As the protagonist turned 13, new emotions were added to the roster, with anxiety being the biggest player. It was kind of a sweet way to personify anxiety as this feeling that has the best of intentions, they want you to succeed and avoid danger, but anxiety can be powerful enough to override every other emotion and often manifests in shame and low self worth. It points out that anxiety is not all bad, anxiety is the reason we study for tests, remember deadlines, and show up for work on time, but it shouldn’t be the driving force in your life.
Every meme and video with sweet Moo Deng. In case you have been living under a rock, Moo Deng is a baby pygmy hippo born two months ago in a zoo in Thailand. I am obsessed. I would die for this baby hippo.
A week away:
Horticultural Therapy course at Catkin Gardens. This course was specifically related to garden planning and design. We spent a lot of time touring through her large property and garden and listening to her careful reasoning and thought behind all the design and plant choices throughout. We learnt about the elements that make a garden therapeutic, how to design a garden with the project and/or clients in mind, how to draw a bubble map to draft a rough layout of the garden, budgeting for the installation and maintenance of a therapeutic garden, how to enhance an existing garden’s therapeutic value, and much more. Completing this course also counts as credits towards eventually becoming a registered Horticultural Therapist.
The cabin near Powell River. After just two nights of sleeping in my van at the side of the road, my body was wrecked. I think it was mainly burnout, and my body wanted a nice, relaxing, restful vacation instead of an incredibly active one. So, I retreated to Lucas’s dad's cabin for a few days, where I did nothing but sleep, read, eat, and kayak.
Texada Island. Craving some adventure, I took the short ferry ride from Powell River to the largest of the Gulf Islands, Texada. I learnt that even though it’s a huge island, only about 20% of it is inhabited. I tried to drive the entire length of the island, but was stopped by a grave-looking warning sign when I was close to the end of this bumpy forest service road I had been following for an hour. The sign clearly stared it was only safe for 4x4 vehicles beyond that point, not wanting to be stranded with a broken down van, I turned around. I ended up camping for the night at Shelter Point, even though there was ample free parking spots around the island, I wanted to have a beach-front campground with access to running water, bathrooms, and a picnic table to make my morning coffee on. Of course, I browsed through the island’s two thrift stores before heading back and bought an armful of vintage craft books and this lamp that retails for $260.
Sleeping next to waterfalls and the ocean. For my last two nights on the island, I slept in the Nymph Falls parking lot and the Qualicum Beach parking lot.
Since being back:
A stained glass portrait of Dozer. We’re DINK-WADs, of course we commission an artist to make a stainglass portrait of our dog. Get your own from Starglass Designs.
Aleph Eatery. While visiting my sweet friend Vera in East Van this past week we treated ourselves to the Jerusalem Feast at Aleph Eatery, the most aesthetically- pleasing Middle-Eastern vegan restaurant. I don’t normally fangirl over hummus, but their hummus was mindblowing. It was the creamiest, most delicious hummus I’ve ever eaten.
Huge patches of mushrooms in Chilliwack Community Forest. My first free Sunday back home, I took Dozer to frolic in our favorite forest where we were greeted by countless mushrooms.
Recipe testing for The Korean Vegan. I was selected to be a recipe tester for The Korean Vegan (Joanne Molinaro)’s second cookbook. I’ve cooked almost every recipe for her first cookbook, and based on the two recipes I got to test out, I’m stoked for her upcoming publication!
A common question I get when I lived in my van was, ‘What do you eat?’ So, here is a list of everything I ate on the road:
Hummus and veggies
Oatmeal packets
Kraft dinner (they make vegan KD now!)
Tortellini with tomato sauce
Bananas
Coffee
Hot chocolate
Fried egg and toast
Fruit loops
Way-too-expensive BC Ferry cuisine
Here is a simple curry recipe I made one night:
Sautee 1 diced onion, 1 diced carrot, and 1 diced red bell pepper (honestly, just throw in whatever veggies you have) until soft. Drain and rinse a can of chickpeas and add that to the pan with the veggies. Add whatever curry sauce is your favorite (I usually make my sauces from scratch, but they’re incredibly labor intensive, so for camping, just buy it in jars), I used a plant-based butter masala sauce. Rinse the jar with some water and throw that in the pan too. Add a few spoonfuls of coconut milk powder (or straight coconut milk if you’ve got that on hand). Simmer until it has reached your desired consistency. Serve with rice or naan.
Thanks for reading What Am I Doing With My Life.
If we haven’t had the pleasure of meeting - I’m Andrea Sadowski, a writer, photographer, and silly little guy. If you enjoyed this post, here are a few ways you can connect with me:
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I am honored to have written this newsletter and experienced all the joys within these words on S’ólh Téméxw, the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Stō:lo Coast Salish peoples.