Off-grid foraging-fed independent homesteading (e.g. this guy) is an aspirational dream for me that I know I’ll never pursue. There’s aspects of this way of living that we can pull into our lives without committing to living in the woods and building our own shelters out of clay and straw.

Buying in-season produce from local producers gets you cheap and tasty veggies. You can end up with an absurd amount of produce though, which is where traditional recipes from regions that grow the produce you have too much of can help. I accidentally bought way too much zucchini last year and made spaghetti alla nerano, a pasta dish where the zucchini is broken down to become the sauce. Pickling in vinegar is a good way to make use of veggies that you’d otherwise have to toss.

One way to get in season produce in the Dallas area is Profound Foods grocery delivery. Profound marks which producers are local and what produce is sourced elsewhere. Farmers markets are another way, but I’ve had some lackluster experiences at the ones near me. CSA’s may be an option for you, but I haven’t been able to get signed up on any local to me.

Standard Ebooks is a collection of well formatted ebooks in the public domain. There a lot of great books available: Great Gatsby, Frankenstein, The Count of Monte Cristo. Public domain ebooks I’ve downloaded in the past have been frustratingly poorly formatted, with weird characters or missing/extra whitespace.

Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was a fun and easy read. I was surprised at how modern the writing style and ideas felt.

Death is easy, life is hard

Every second is a path

Every moment, piece of art

- Tommy Cash

Hannah Diamond’s pop track Hi could be dismissed as a silly teenage heartbreak song given it has all the trappings of a banal pop song. Highly produced artificial sounding vocals, the synthy instrumentation typical of bubblegum pop, and the literal lyrics make it feel like a parody of 2000s pop. But the song itself is genuine.

Hi is about longing for a deeper connection we don’t know how to make. The music video, like the rest of Hannah’s work, takes place in a world where she is a popstar a la Britney Spears. The video shows Hannah interacting with other people through one-way spaces: interviews, runway walks, photoshoots. She is separate from the rest of the world. She only gets to engage with others through the internet. This separation leaves her trying to find ways to prove that her connection with someone is authentic “Tell me a secret. Or something that only you know. I just need to know a little more. About you.” She’s questioning if the person is even real: “Feels like I miss you. But is it really the real you?.”

The repetition of the chorus “I don’t want to be alone in my bedroom,” leaves us hoping that the character will turn this new understanding of their feelings into some way to break free. Instead, we hear that she’s fallen back to where she was at the beginning. Hannah says “Hi! Oh my god, it’s so good to see you!” to the person on the other side, playing along in a pretend relationship.

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Is it surprising that this song came out in 2015? The feelings discussed in the song are common internet sentiment today. We can draw connections to the isolating nature of the internet, or the loss of certainty that the “person” on the other side of any interaction is actually a person.