The question of what was irritating my gastrointestinal system got me thinking about the gut-brain connection, which I always think about because I studied it one semester at university, and the class was considered experimental and prestige, reserved for the top students in psychology, and so whenever someone mentions that the gut has a brain, I say: I studied that in school!, even though it was only for a semester. Though the research was limited back then, it made a lot of sense to me—that the gut had a brain—having had an eating disorder when I was younger and experienced bodily sensations that continued into adulthood. Even though I graduated from disordered eating to what I consider, today, as a healthy relationship with food, whenever I eat more processed foods, fats, and refined carbs than I am used to, I feel an emotional state of dissociation and anxiety arise from within my gut, as though my gut, suddenly inflamed and injured, sends signals of distress to the rest of my body. That feeling was often paired with a belief I have learned, over the years, to shed like the skin from a snake, though it sometimes still revisits me. The belief sounds like this: I AM SO FAT. (I used to be a chubby kid). I wonder which came first, the belief or the biological response. The same thing happens when I go for long periods without exercise, and regardless of which came first, the end result is a state of irritability, depression, and confusion. And in the rare moments in which I am not thinking about what life changes I need to make in order to feel less irritable, depressed, and confused, I sometimes think: Oh, maybe I do not need to uproot my entire life. What about my gut? What’s going on there?

The gut is such a complicated quest, though. We put so many good and bad things into our mouths (no pun intended; and if any clarification is needed, cock is neither good nor bad, but holy) that I wonder what the end sum is: Vegetables, fruits, meats, sugars, chemicals, caffeine, alcohol, purified air, contaminated air, tap water, bottled water, microplastics, VOCs, particulate matter…It is difficult to believe that I have the shiniest, healthiest gut, despite eating a produce-heavy diet and exercising on a regular basis, when it has been proven that the majority of our food and beverage companies have been poisoning us for a profit. Every day I take a probiotic strain that may or may not be doing anything to help my enteric nervous system. How do we know what is actually working? How do we know if our guts are good?

Of course, if I am simply asking why my farts smell nuclear, the answer is probably just dairy or garlic or something not cooked or cleaned thoroughly enough, though I will continue to ignore that I am lactose intolerant. Restrictions are thieves of joy.

Or maybe it is the alcohol. Every other month, I make an event in my calendar that reads “SOBER :),” an event that has waned from the optimistic three months to the realistic one month to the embarrassing two weeks, and every week after that, I delete it, because I find myself wanting to have one glass of wine or a hazy IPA (or if it is a Saturday four or five), and although I know that my relationship with alcohol is not destructive, I find it embarrassing that I continue to attempt at leaps of sobriety, namely when I am hungover, only to then go to the gym and eat lots of vegetables and live my normal weekday life, feeling as sprite as a fawn on adderall, debuffing my original ambitions into a silly promise that no longer makes sense. There was a span of three months in New York where I did go sober, expecting it to transform me into Superman with super-productivity and super-no-depression, which would inevitably lead to major life changes like a multi-million dollar book deal and becoming close friends with Ariana Grande, but no such transformation occurred. Instead, I felt the same. So then I started drinking again. I do, however, wonder to what extent my social beverage rituals affect my overall gut health, which affects my overall mental health, which affects everything. But then I flick open my LED device, the modern enslaver, and digest today’s data about war and death and abuse, a reduction of horrors that seem to always originate from the country I call home, and decide that it is better to enjoy our lives with our friends while we can.

So here I am, once again, secreting a gas that could end us all, attempting to crawl across the sofa to escape the vicinity of the cloud I have created, except I collapse halfway across its green belly, defeating myself, for the sour farts have evolved into more: liquid stool, exhaustion, and feeling generally unwell. I do not have the energy to escape my own demise. So I inhale in the smallest breaths I can manage and wave my arms in a makeshift fan, accepting that this, too, is a part of the human experience. Or perhaps this is just the condition of our time, a symptom of being a human in 2026. The world is sick. So we get sick, too. Or perhaps I ingested the wrong bacteria and now I need medicine. My gastroenterologist appointment is tomorrow. ☷

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Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

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A crush I have had for four years stands across from me. I notice him and then pretend I have not, so as to avoid the potential mess that I associate with the idea of my partner noticing me notice him, the two of them standing just a few feet away from each other, though pretending itself creates a mess of its own, my body immobilized by the mild stress that pretending—to be, to not be, to see, to not see—manifests. It is awkward that I want to have sex with someone who is not my partner. It is awkward that my partner knows this. It is awkward that my partner is okay with me having sex with other people, but I have yet to do so, because, beneath it all, I feel too awkward to do anything unexpected. A part of me feels embarrassed, as if the traditional expectations of monogamy, though I do not agree with them, judge, in the end, some kind of moral truth that I still measure myself by: A normal person should not yearn to have romantic episodes with other people. A normal person should not have the same crush after four years. A normal person should be able to bury desire. And everyone wants to be normal, I think, even if we pride ourselves on being different, even if we know that nobody is normal, that fantasy and psychosis is a part of the human condition.

A friend of mine speaks to me in Spanish. I answer in Spanish, unable to think of something to carry the conversation much further, for my attention is still focused on pretending. She and my partner leave to order drinks, followed by another friend. I look in the forbidden direction, slightly up and to the left, and see that the crush has left.

I sit down next to two people I know, their speech aflight at a speed I cannot board without disruption. I listen and smile, waiting for one of them to reel me in. They are speaking in another language, something Slavic or not, and for a few seconds I worry about how I look, wondering if I am the only person not engaged with another. Even if I was speaking to a friend just a minute ago, someone might see me and think: LOSER! I am an innocent sardine stuck in the sea of humiliation, waiting for a hook and line, until I remember that nobody is paying attention to anybody else, and that I am not a fish, I have legs, which means I can stand and join another conversation. For now, though, I sit.

My partner hands me a beer and stands with our friend, chatting. Cold, effervescent wheat floats on my tongue. I consider standing with them, but my brain feels fogged from the day drinking, the exertion of Spanish beyond its reach, and I do not want to change the language, so I smile instead. He smiles back. The black of night spreads all around us as a chill brushes my skin.

K, the husband of a friend and a friend himself, returns from the bar with a lime-green cocktail and a shot of mezcal. I thank him and hold the tiny glass cup between my fingers. Sipping from it feels like sipping from a candle, kisses of volcanic wax coating my tongue. I ask him how his month has been. He tells me that it has been good, though, as usual, he has been working too much.

It seems like that’s how it always is with running your own business, but I hope that eventually you’ll be able to relax, I say.

It’s not even the business, though, it’s just me. In theory, I could relax, but my mind is so focused on producing and winning—even if I tell myself to take a day off, I can’t. I think it has to do with coming from an economy that developed so quickly.

K tells me that the economy in Lithuania was “learn fast and grow fast or be left behind,” and that growing up with less most likely led him to always believe that he had to earn more. I tell him that I feel the same way, though I have been, by all means, attempting to rest full-time. After planning a career hiatus that I had saved for over the span of several years, all I could feel, after an initial week of euphoric freedom, was the guilt of not participating in the transactional economy, as if one of my main value metrics, developed without my choosing, was how much monetary value was created by any given activity. I felt silly existing without the anchor of money, without the idea of “I am earning this much” to verify that I was leading the actions of a responsible life. Though I intended to take this time to identify the directions I wanted to live towards, for my career and my spirit, my creativity and my purpose, the main thing I found myself thinking about was the money I was not earning, or the money I should eventually earn. He tells me that he understands exactly how I feel.

It’s so boring, I say, thinking like this.

I wish I could change myself, he says, and be more relaxed.

I tell him that it’s a start, at least, realizing how his thoughts and behaviors have been shaped by late capitalism and hustle culture, and then add: Although, I don’t really know anything. The more I live, the less I feel like I know how to be a person.

He laughs: It’s weird being a person. Sometimes I feel like I need alcohol to be myself.

Because you feel anxious?

I don’t know. Sometimes I just feel like I don’t know what to do, or what to say. What is anxiety for you?

I think it’s like that, I say. When I don’t know what to do with myself, when I am worried about things that are not real, although sometimes it feels like the worrying is not about anything in specific, as if there is a blanket of static in the air and the static prevents me from seeing what is in front of me, from rooting myself in the present. It is especially strong when I forget that everyone everywhere experiences the same things. The other day a friend of mine told me that she felt like she was pretending to know how to be a person most of the time, and she was tired of it. She surprised me when she said that, because I never thought that she felt that way, too, but that’s the trick of the mind: We always assume that everyone else knows how to be, and that we are the only ones that haven’t figured it out yet.

I feel like I am not very good at knowing, either. She helps me, though, K says, looking over at his partner. Sometimes I will be in my head, confused about something, and she’ll smile and say: “It’s like this!”

K’s eyes flicker over towards A. She laughs at something a friend says and leans over, a slim frame of black and silver. I admire the way that he looks at her, and admire her for being who she is.

It’s so silly, I say. We’re all out here trying to do the same things, trying to be people, and yet, it’s so messy being people, like: I will never be able to know you the way that you know yourself—how you experience the world—and you will never be able to know how I experience it, either. The best we can do is say things to each other, but even then, you are hearing something I am saying and I am hearing something you are saying, which is not the same as saying it, or thinking it. You are literally perceiving what I am saying right now, which is weird, because I forget about that. In my experience, it’s like: This is K, this is what he said, this is what he meant, but it is all an interpretation. I forget that we are interpreting each other all the time. There is always space between us.

Right, and sometimes I don’t know what I want to say. Like, have you ever had the form of a thought, but it doesn’t actually shape itself into anything? I’ll have that sometimes, and then someone will ask me: What are you thinking about? And I don’t know what to say, because whatever is inside of me has yet to metamorphose into language.

I laugh: I think I have too many thoughts—and I pay too much attention to them.

Really? You always seem so clear, he says. I think that the way you carry yourself and the way you are is really authentic.

Maybe I’m like that around you because I don’t feel judged, I say.

I tell K that I remember the first time I met him. I had been hanging out with A and M, a mutual friend of mine and A’s. It was my first time in their apartment and, accordingly, I was eager to display my positive self, the self I tend to express when I am out in the open world, because what we express tends to multiply. So I expressed every admiration I felt: for their dog, for their furnishings, for the home they built for themselves that was, in every detail, the home of two tastemakers. When I did so, both A and K responded with the kind of enthusiasm that fills your bones with fluff. I felt safe. Both of them appeared to be indiscriminate with their kindness, and so I felt free to be the person I am when I am kind to myself, to make stupid jokes and dance like a renounced nun.

I remember that, he says.

K’s eyes glow atop his skin like two bright stars in a field of wheat. A walks over to us with a white chalk smile, bright and nostalgic, and I think to myself that their eyes are the same. Their skin, too. I wonder how everyone I know who parties, travels, and lives a somewhat unconventional life appears younger than their age—perhaps youth has less to do with the tautness of skin than it does the bounce of spirit—and then I remember that botox is as widely worshipped as sunscreen. I consider when I will start worshipping myself.

Coca? A asks. I doubt and then nod, suggesting that my partner might want some more, too.

We go, and then they can go, she says.

We trot down a stream of concrete blocks to the first level of the bar and weave towards the back. A wash basin, urinal, and sliding door are covered in curtains of red light, graffiti and stickers stuck to the walls. I knock to see if anyone is inside, then slide the door open and closed.

I lean on the wall as A pulls out a small plastic bag, confessing to her that I felt so awkward when we first arrived, playing peek-a-boo with a crush I have had for longer than I would like to admit. Her face curls up into the bright folds of a spring dumpling, exuding a laugh that warms the sides of my face like steam. She tells me that she felt the exact same way at a different bar just a few nights ago. We talk about the embarrassing humanity in having a crush, about the desire to experience—which has more to do with the creativity of desire than it does the actual experience—and all of the peculiar ways in which something so small can feel big in the moment, though it is is objectively small, a crush, the kind of thing that is impartial as to whether you are five years old or forty.

I hand her a small ring of keys. The amber light falls on everything, cloaking us and the walls, and I cannot help but feel that we are living inside of a picture, one small frame in a gallery. The enclosure of the bathroom stall feels like a comma, separating us from the rest of the party. She says something that makes me laugh. I say something that makes her laugh. And then we both laugh again, I think not because of our words but because of our laughter, which feels funny and light on its own, bouncing off the walls like colors on a canvas. Though the stall is spacious and we are standing a few feet apart, it feels as if we are tucked into a shell, such that the space between us is barely there; not distance, but fluid, holding us like children in a womb. ☷

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Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

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A few months ago, a friend I considered family, a friend I had spoken to only a few weeks prior, encouraging him to write again, agreeing to help him edit his thoughts towards coherency, a friend I expected to see in the future, demanded, even, despite the odds—for the echoes of his community confirming he would win, overcome, heal, seemed loud and large enough that they should come true—passed from cancer. We called him E.T., Edward, Ward. The last voice message he sent me on WhatsApp remained there, saved as unread, as if perpetuating its unopened nature would extend his life beyond the day he left. As if by keeping the words he sent to me unheard, it could be that they were never said, which meant, at some point, with the press of a triangular button, he could say them, I could hear him, and it could be that he is still here.

I added photos of E.T. to the altar my partner and I made for Dios de Los Muertos, alongside family members and friends who had passed in different years, some before I was born: my grandmothers, my grandfathers, uncles I had never met but heard many stories of, friends and family who had passed too soon—Moesi, Tomi, Lillian—too tragically, although to describe death like that makes me uneasy, for it assumes that the people who have passed on lost, that the living are the ones who continue to win. We lit candles, adorned the altar with favorite drinks and snacks, and surrounded their portraits with stained clumps of orange, the cempasuchil flower believed to act as a pathway for the dead, so as to offer them a chance to return, to enjoy, to embrace their loved ones. I like to believe in this idea, that the flowers are a path, that each and every person we honor returns as the best versions of themselves, new versions of themselves, unhindered by the expectations of a society or the limits of human life. My partner and I talked about each person we placed on the altar, what they enjoyed when they were here, what they might be doing upon their return. Who they might be growing into and all the ways in which they’ve evolved, no longer tied to the limits of the human mind, nor the distractions of the ego.

As I spoke about E.T. and looked at his photographs, a part of me felt that it was untrue, it could not be true. Somewhere, in some other dimension, in some other world, there was still a time yet to be had where we would run into each other, where we would laugh and hug and talk comedically about the woes of being queer, the hurdles of being Asian, wielding self-deprecation like a blanket stitched from the sun, sealing it around ourselves in a giggle as bright as the moon. I still don’t know if I know, if my body knows, if the part of me that exists between the neurons and vessels and organs knows. I know that I was told he is gone, and yet my mind still wonders: Where is gone? And how can I visit there?

In an attempt to encourage myself to process, I opened E.T.’s message and pressed play. His voice rang with texture, canny and particularly him, the way a saxophone is a saxophone, the way an instrument can take you back to your home, to your land, to a time in your life where all there was was the sound of it playing. I began to cry, listening to his timber, his pauses, his inflection, the generous use of girl, and thought to myself what I always think when I think about death: How is this possible? I understand the mechanics of it: Our heart stops, blood ceases its circulation, neurons fire their last signals. I understand its commonplace nature: Everyone dies. But it feels something beyond cruel, something beyond confusing, to accept that one person is no longer here and the rest of us are. That we will continue living, the world will continue as the world, and life will continue as life. It is almost as if I lack the language to understand it, as if it is something that transcends language itself.

Ever since my amah passed, grandma, Ah-Mah, Popo, Kwai Jin, Jeanette, I have had recurring dreams in which I see her again, in which I forget that she is gone, in which I remember that she is gone and then come to the conclusion that she has returned by some miracle or medical breakthrough, in which it feels so real that she is there with me and that I am holding her rice paper hands that the reality I belong to in the waking world loses its credibility, so far thinned as to shock me like a thunderbolt when it pulls me back to the other side. When I wake from these dreams, I wake sobbing, the part of myself that still does not know enough, that may never know enough “she is gone,” being scolded by reality and brought back to its terms: She is gone. You cannot hold her hand. You cannot hear her voice.

My partner says that these dreams are visits from my grandmother’s spirit, which is a belief I like to indulge in like cocoa when the clouds link arms and the trees lose shape. I also believe that it is the slow process of my consciousness beginning to understand that she, as the person I interacted with in this world, is gone. Perhaps both are true: In these dreams, her spirit is guiding me along the process of grief like a lighthouse in a storm. The last dream I had of her was the first dream I did not wake from crying, though I still felt the tears, somewhere, in my chest or on my temples. Perhaps they’d just learned to stay put.

In Buddhism, it is believed that death is not the end. There is the notion of rebirth, and of karma, both of which dictate that we are reborn into another form according to the actions, intentions, and attachments we exhibited in all our prior lives, collecting a calculation of energy that determines where we end up and how—as a human or an animal or a ghost, with preferential or unfortunate circumstances—but rebirth and karma itself are just two ideas birthed from a larger notion. The Buddhist belief that intrigues me the most is the notion that the beginning and the end, two clean mechanisms created by humans, do not exist. We view death with fear and discernment because it signals, in our minds, finality. Yet, if all matter is indestructible, then we existed before we were born, and we exist after we die. Death in the buddhist view is the end of a body, not a spirit nor a soul. We become attached to this life only because this is the limit of our knowledge.

I like the idea that life does not begin with birth, nor end with death. It makes sense to me: There is so much in this world that we do not understand. Why assume that we die with our bodies when we’ve yet to discern how, exactly, our bodies conjure our selves? I like the idea that there are things we do not know, that Buddhism does not know, that we will never know, and that the space the unknown lends us to imagine and create can serve as a shelter for grief and all of its parental forms—joy, love, longing—and where there is shelter there can be a home, a home we all belong to, no matter which part of life we are living: the figurative beginning, the figurative middle, the figurative end. Or, beyond.

I like to imagine new places, better places. Places where we can fly, form, dissolve, where the sweet clarity of the world–the nature of love and time, the way everything seems to soak over with light when we consider the power of both–nourishes us to the core of whatever it is we are, if anything at all.

Death, of course, still deepens the heartbeat and saturates our hours with an appetite for what can not be—another conversation, another day, another decade—regardless of how sweet and how far we imagine, for death feels unfair. I think about all of the people who have had their lives cut short by disease, by tragedy, by the white rage of an empire, and most of anything, it feels unfair. Unfair how life can be grouped into a number, a count, a historical statistic, squeezing all of the dreams and tears living entails by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions, into a handful of syllables: over 66,148 Palestinian civilians, as many as seven million indigenous American civilians, over 13,883 Ukrainian civilians, over 600,000 Armenian civilians, genocidally murdered by the IDF, European settlers, the Russian army, the Young Turks. Names that erase other names that will, too, in the end, be erased.

It feels unfair how time spills over us, how all of the lives that we have lost become a story. Even the ones that live to the end become stories, too. Time has no mercy for human nature and its tendency to pull towards meaning. Like iron sand around a magnet, we live in meaning as if it is eternal, creating it, sharing it, offering it, until it is not. It feels unfair that everyone was once a child, a youth, a wild thing searching for the roots with which we firm ourselves into adulthood, and if lucky enough to reach it, once those roots grew, a thing more calm, a thing more patient, watching the days roll by until the final bye was ours to give. Unfair that the world rushes on once we’ve said it.

The cruelty of human life is that none of us knows what lies ahead. We barely know what we are. On a recent walk in the city, a podcast chosen at random whispered a quote in my ear: When you fall off of a cliff, you can grab onto the rock falling next to you for comfort, but it will not change the outcome, it will not lessen the blow. I rarely think of life like this, but it is, isn’t it? We are all falling, attempting at flashes of certainty or will, and yet, nothing really is certain, nothing bends fully to our will. We come into this life with no knowledge of what it means to live, and then we learn. We learn that this is a spoon, this is a fire. We learn that people matter, that fighting for them matters, that enjoying them matters most. We learn that survival requires a certain suffering, though suffering is not all there is. We learn about joy and where it comes from. We learn about narrative and how it binds us, emboldens us, tears us apart. We learn how to unlearn the things we thought learning required, once seeing it as law that this is that and that is this, that the this and the that were not malleable, until the world itself appears malleable at its core, until we see that truth is a shapeshifter.

I hope we learn, most of all, that life is a freefall, that the best we can do is notice every detail as we plunge alongside the rest of the world. I hope we hug and kiss the rocks around us, dance with the light as it cascades by, and hold each other’s hands until our hands are no more, until the fall ends, turns into flight, becomes something else. ☷

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

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Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

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I am going to miss being in the drama of today, concerned with this specific breed of uncertainty, wondering what it is I should do in this part of my life: finish the book, find a new job, finick over the idea of making content, doing this or being that. I am going to miss not knowing whether or not we should move, whether or not moving is a good idea, because it will seem silly—joyful, even—to consider that we were so concerned with knowing: knowing what is right, knowing what to do, knowing where to go. I am going to miss being here, wherever here is, wherever here was, before the here changed, before we decided what was right, what to do, and where to go.

I am going to miss the shirts I wore every day. The simple green one that Mijael told me highlights the dew of my skin, the soft, purple sweater that feels as if I am disappearing into a cloud when I toss it around my arms, the blue one and its fuzzy decal of a small Korean dog. I am going to miss the color of my hair, the shape of my body, and the face I see in the mirror.

I am going to miss the songs I listen to every day, the automatic and overplayed playlist Alexa resumes at default, the bell of the trash truck that arrives when it wants to and the silk hum of a Sunday when the traffic outside dissipates to the songs of birds, branches, and a temperate breeze that sometimes reminds us this city was first a valley. I am going to miss the rain, the way this mazed metropolis seems to grow from a generous downpour like a freshly fertilized grove of trees when the damp recedes to light, when the blue comes out and warmth reigns uninterrupted.

I am going to miss Everything, the great everything that constitutes now, and yet, I do not always remember to study it in detail. I am still learning how to be inside of Everything before it rushes past us, becomes back then, last year, when we lived in Mexico, when she was here or he was here or they lived down the street—the glossy, colorful past. The interiors we lived in, the dishes we chipped, the things we thought about, talked about, and danced towards like birds, chirping, chattering, singing the same song no matter how specific this time feels, no matter how crazy this generation is, no matter what day it is on the calendar.

The everything I am going to miss includes being myself—thirty, in Mexico, too full from drinking three lattes and splurging on a set of inari sushi from the Japanese market down the street—being, in all its infinity. I am going to look back at this screenshot of a psyche when I am older, by a month or a year or ten, and think: Wow, there I was, living.

It is so easy to get excited about the future that the cliche human habit becomes living for it, as opposed to living for ourselves here, in the now—which, despite having become a marketing cliche of its own—is all that we have. So we learn to meditate, to journal, to find gratitude in what happened today, because noticing is not guaranteed, rather, it is a muscle, a skill, an art of living, even and especially when the living feels tough.

All of this is not to say that thinking about the future is a fatal flaw. In fact, we need to be able to construct future visions to feel hope in the present, the fuel for all of the things that living requires. And lately, thinking about the future has been a powerful practice for paying attention to the present.

–

When Mijael and I travelled to Japan in March, I fell in love with the country all over again: Tokyo, Kyoto, the mountains, the sea. As we stumbled around the metro and indulged in glimpses of another life, another neighborhood, another city, I imagined the two of us growing something greater than a glimpse, moving to Japan in our fifties or sixties or seventies, learning the language, visiting the countryside, adopting new customs like rice and fish for breakfast, traveling to nearby countries for the holidays—Vietnam, Singapore, China—and sitting at a park for an hour, watching the world go by as the two of us grow older. San Francisco, New York, Japan, Mexico, there are many places that I imagine us being in, many backgrounds that emerge, pixel by pixel, thought by thought, when I consider the chapters of our lives that we have yet to live. When I imagine these chapters, they are usually saturated with precious details—light, color, and joy—as opposed to the mundane to-do’s of planning, or the fear and angst of doubt.

I think about the light in Japan, the bright, wide, pastel blue painting the canvas of our lives. The soft, aerial chime of Japanese and mild hum of well-designed public infrastructure joining the soundtrack of us. A wooden table on the floor, much like the one we have now, but with foods of a different habit: sembei, sake, onigiri. Brands from the store we will come to know like the ones we’ve come to know here. Favorite cafés and overhyped restaurants. The likes and dislikes of a city, of a country, of a culture.

These precious details remind me of the chapter I am living in right now, too: all of the details I have come to take for granted because they are all around me, and for some reason, it always feels as though what is around us will always be there, like words in a book we have intended to read for years, when, in reality, what is around us is always changing, and it is impossible to turn back the page. How many pages did we pass up reading, thinking it was more important to get to the end?

Perhaps it is a generational curse: The tendency to forget where we are, to lose the art of noticing. We grew up in an environment that trained us to focus on what is ahead: school, then university, then job, then career, with a magnificent yield of production, achievement, and creative realization somewhere, ideally everywhere and always, in the in-between. We wake up to screens that display a million alternate realities. We see our peers and idols living here, doing that, entering another period of realization, abundance, creation, generation, invention, reinvention—the word “next” seems synonymous with today’s young people. I do not think I know a single friend of mine who has thought: I will live here for the rest of my life; I will do this for the rest of my life. On the contrary, we are always thinking about what is next.

I suppose all I am trying to say is that every little detail is precious, if only for the fact that it is never ours to keep. At some point, we will find ourselves with different details—different smells, faces, items, plants, things to worry about and things that disappear the worrying—and, at some point, we will each find ourselves with no details at all.

It feels a little bit silly to be writing this, like: oH maH GAwd! EvERayTHANG is SOO prECiOUs—especially in the context of current events. However, I feel as though it is the human condition to continue to need to say this, to want to say this, because it is impossible to live in the art of noticing, in the rich joy of the details of our lives, without interruption. It is impossible to live in the electric gratitude of what we have, who we know, and all that is around us as a constant. However, we can feel that electricity more often and more clearly the more we remind ourselves that it exists, that it is the current of life itself, and if there is anything that can help us live with joy—despite everything going wrong, going weird, or going different than we expected—it is our ability to tap into our lives right now, to notice and to feel, and we all deserve that.

So I am here, saying it again: This, too, is a precious chapter of our lives. I hope we live inside of it before we remember it. ☷

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Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

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Oop.

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Where to live, what to do? My partner and I have been preparing to submit his green card application to make it easier for us to share a life together between Mexico and the United States. Easy, however, does not seem to coincide with the potential danger of said partner being detained for no reason. Easy does not coincide with the pervasive fear that settles in an innocent heart when it is told—through media, policy, and the actions of a corrupt government—that it does not belong. Easy does not coincide with wondering, at any hour of the day, if we and our loved ones are safe, if the violence of a government that prefers to profile and persecute first, prove second (if at all) are only a random encounter away.

The decision to move back to the United States was a result of several pros and cons lists (assigned to me by my therapist) that I analyzed in an attempt to assemble an idea of the future. I had realized, just over a year ago, that it was hard for me to envision a future where I stayed in Mexico forever. Although my Spanish is improving, the language barrier is an omniscient haze that dilutes my ability to connect with people, grow in my career, and feel an acute sense of belonging, despite the profound belonging I feel with the friends I have met throughout the city.

Despite my love for Mexico, I miss home. I yearn to commit to a place for a long period of time, and for that place to be somewhere Mijael and I can a) both grow professionally and b) be closer to family. Based on those yearnings, we decided that California made the most sense. We spent months preparing the paperwork, studying the rent prices, and giving a heads up to family and friends. Our plan was to move within a couple of years, until the news, our friends, and the all-consuming voice of fear questioned whether or not this was a good idea. If and when the green card application is approved, we’d have to move within six months. What if things are the same, then? What if they’re worse?

–

I scream into a pillow and stare at the ceiling. Dobby’s room protects me from the constant movement of the outside world, a world in which the majority of my friends and I have begun to feel as if our youth, our hope, our ability to perceive certainty alongside our ideas of the future have started to dissolve. Maybe this is a part of growing older. Maybe this is specific to living in a political climate that is near-identical to a fascist regime. Maybe this is a symptom of our online culture and the normalcy at which one can scroll through ten different tragedies from ten different countries in a matter of seconds.

Okay, it’s not a big deal. If there is anything my generation is capable of, it is adapting: to the COVID-19 pandemic, to the changing climate, to a generation of politicians who have failed us in every sense of the word. If we do not move to the United States, then we can stay in Mexico until things are better in the United States.

But what if they never are better? What if the entire notion of moving to the United States is an outdated hope? Two months ago, I visited my dear friend Grace in Seoul, South Korea who I had known since university. She contemplated aloud how crazy it was that South Korea grew to become such a wealthy and influential nation, considering her parents immigrated to the United States to give her a better life—now, they were all immigrating back to South Korea.

It seems the United States could be headed for the opposite narrative. The videos I have seen (and shared) joking about how insecure the U.S. is compared to other nations are bountiful. America, the land of overpriced healthcare, mass shootings, inadequate public transportation, a lack of work-life balance, growing wealth inequity, and a shriveling middle class. What if it’s all downhill from here?

The anxiety demon ignites the tips of my fingers and traverses me through a funnel of videos, articles, and social media posts reaffirming the inevitable collapse of the United States. One video forecasts the different ways in which the United States will fall as a global power, another contemplates how China will surpass the West (in ways it has not already), another details how the U.S. will become one of the worst places to grow old in. I start searching for the best places to live amidst the climate crisis, political instability, and societal collapse. The list does not include Mexico or the United States.

Australia is too far. Canada is too close. Japan and specific countries in the European Union glitter on the screen. A deep dive into the potential routes for relocating to Japan or the E.U. brings me to a bright, albeit manic, conclusion: it is actually possible; my career qualifies for Japan’s HSP Visa, Mijael qualifies for a German passport through his family.

I stare at the screen: Japan or the E.U.? I start a pros and cons list for moving to both. And then I start to laugh: What the fuck am I doing?

Right now, we are in Mexico. Right now, I am learning Spanish. Right now, I am surrounded by people I love who I want to spend time with. Right now, we are living a comfortable life in a precious little apartment, free from the stress of adjusting to a new city, a new home, a new reality. Right now, I am planning to visit my parents on a frequent basis, to show up for the people in my life in the ways that I can until I am closer in proximity.

I inhale the stale air in Dobby’s room and come to two conclusions:

1. I want to be present for our life in Mexico for as long as we choose to live here

2. Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok are probably not the best sources to consult for major life decisions.

I close the pros and cons list and open a new document, dropping several legal firms, immigration lawyers, and family contacts I can potentially reach out to for advice on whether or not the United States is a safe place for my partner, for us. Over the next few weeks, I reach out to all of them.

–

A month later, I return to the land of horrifying news to spend time with my parents.

Newspapers, napkins, and half-eaten plates of pesto pasta cover the table. We drink wine, wonder aloud what movie we should watch, and abhor the current events. A conversation about the ICE kidnappings and general anxiety around racial profiling leads me to a question I never thought about before: Is it even safe for my partner to travel in the United States? We were so focused on assessing whether or not we should move that I overlooked the fact that we had already booked our flights to visit the family in December.

Christmas without Mijael? The thought makes me want to cry. Two glasses of wine in, I spiral around the interior maze of fear that I suspect is one of the administration’s main OKRs for a successful term in office—incite the biggest fear, the best fear: fear of safety, fear for our loved ones.

Does this mean that Mijael won’t be able to see my family until 2028? I Google “is it safe to travel in the U.S. right now as a Mexican,” filter the search to “Past month,” and read through the horror stories: European tourists who were detained and deported, a father who was kept in a holding site for a week, multiple Reddit users recommending that tourists avoid Los Angeles at all costs. Los Angeles is not Sacramento, but it is California…I send out more emails inquiring for legal opinions on whether or not traveling as a tourist is safe, especially for someone who might be profiled, before taking a sip of wine and staring into the abyss.

When decision anxiety rains over my vision, it comforts me to think about the pasts I was never a part of. The pasts of generations prior: of my grandparents, of my great grandparents, of all of the people who ever felt insecure about what the future held or how to navigate it. I wonder what my great grandmother thought about when she boarded a ship from Japan to the United States in the 1800s. I wonder what my grandmother thought about when she left Hawaii for the mainland. I wonder what each of us thought at any point of our lives when we were scared, unsure, but ultimately alive, challenged with the very thing that makes life worth living: a choice.

There is uncertainty in everything: when we get inside of a car, choose to take a job, tell a person we love them, step outside into the world for a walk, a drink, another day. The point is that, despite uncertainty, despite anxiety, we always end up doing the thing—doing our part as a person in this world: a friend, a daughter, a husband, a colleague. We show up. Regardless of how we do it—tired, optimistic, at our best, at our worst—we are doing it, simply by being. By showing up, we show up for ourselves. We show up for others.

I remind myself that fear makes things appear much larger than they are. My parents are a five-hour flight away. If necessary, my partner and I are accustomed to spending time apart, having done long-distance before. Most importantly, we have the liberty of choosing whether or not we want to take the risk of being in the United States in the first place. Our daily lives are in Mexico, a place where he belongs. A place where I am learning to belong, too.

–

The next day, I meet my friends in Sacramento for a break from all that is required to be a person in 2025. The plan is to paddle on the river, drink craft beer, barbecue a grand dinner and pretend that we are kids again—or rather, stop pretending that we became adult versions of ourselves that dissolved the kids we once were—and have a proper sleepover.

Light spills over land with the precise warmth and reach I consider Californian. Raquel and I talk about things the way we learned to talk about things, the way we learned our friendship, driving together to meet our friends. When we arrive, we scream and shout—Ashley, Shauna, Maia, Andrew, Nick—organizing ourselves into this car or that car, borrowing this and forgetting that behind.

In the car, I get a call from Antonio, the first friend I met in Mexico City. He asks me if I am okay. I tell him I am and ask him why he’s asking. He says that there are protests in the city, demanding that the foreigners get out. He wanted to call his friends back in CDMX to make sure we were okay.

Oh—I’m visiting my family in California, I say.

Thank god, he says.

I thank him for calling. We tell each other we love each other and hang up. Shauna hops into the car, Andrew starts the engine.

–

I am grateful that I am out of the city, but I am neither surprised nor offended at the protests, which feel long overdue, considering the growing discourse around Mexico City’s gentrification and lack of government action to prevent displacement. A year ago, I wrote a piece about this. Despite xenophobic language containing its own dangers, I understand anti-foreigner sentiment, especially when it is targeted towards a specific kind of foreigner, one who does not attempt to learn Spanish, one who treats the city as a seasonal playground, one who considers being nomadic a personality—or worse, a personal achievement.

Sleepover

Gringo Guilt: Should I Go Back to Where I Came From?

gringo guilt in a globalizing world…

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2 years ago · 4 likes · Travis Zane

The fact of the matter is that the majority of Mexican people are being priced out of a city they call home. Although the root of this problem is not exclusive to foreigner presence (displacement is rooted in political and policy failures, not foreign demand), the Mexican government has done nothing to protect the Mexican people over the past ten, twenty, thirty years. Rather, it did the opposite: encourage the process of gentrification by establishing partnerships with companies like AirBnB, so as to profit from the influx of purchasing power.

Mexican people have every right to be angry, and the anger needs a place to go. Though it is impartial and incomplete, it is only natural for people to yearn for a clean cause when the true source of what oppresses and exploits us is abstract, goliath, and difficult to imagine impacting with large-scale change: the government, the system, neocapitalism. If the image of the privileged foreigner is the vehicle for the fight against gentrification, then I posit that it is our responsibility, as such foreigners, to see the vehicle to its destination, so long as it does not harm us along the way. In response to the anti-foreigner sentiment and general discourse around gentrification, change is on the horizon, including recent efforts from President Claudia Sheinbaum to build 1M low-cost housing units and CDMX Mayor Clara Brugada to implement key policies positioned to prevent displacement, including an income-tax for property owners and a Reasonable Rental Price Index. Not because the government agrees that foreigners are the problem, but because they see the suffering of a people and their demand for change.

–

We glide along the streets of Sacramento. Trees, cars, and light traverse around each other like threads in a scarf. I open my WhatsApp to a number of group chats popping off about the protests. Crowds of Mexican residents are marching around the city, chanting “Gringo go home!” I scroll through photos of signs reading Go back to your country!, Expat = Gentrifier, and Yanky go home. I laugh, not because the sentiment is funny, but because the first thought that comes to mind is: Mijael is not wanted in the United States, I am not wanted in Mexico.

Where are we going to go?

What are we going to do?

We are going to jump into the water when the sun weaves a silk from the sweat on our skin. We are going to laugh when our friends laugh, because it feels good to laugh together. We are going to forget, for a moment, about all of the possible triumphs and horrors that traverse before us, so as to know what this piece of life feels like: the maternal rock of a board on water, the rich silence of a Saturday spent outside, the helium joy of being together. ☷

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

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Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

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At 3:35PM, I arrive at the gate, scan my boarding pass, and prepare to walk through.

The woman mutters something to me which takes me approximately four seconds to translate. In those four seconds, I wonder if I am being upgraded from Volaris Basic to Premium, considering I have flown the purple plane near eight million times, before realizing that Volaris is not an airline that gives out free upgrades, less free water, free pretzels, or free magazines. By the fourth second, I realize that the woman is telling me I cannot board: I need a sticker. I am a resident, so I need a sticker. For what? I ask. She doesn’t answer. Instead she tells me that I need to go to Gate 10, which is—stored in my memory of this airport—more of a hike than a walk, which means that if I am to hike to Gate 10, I will miss the flight. It is already 3:40PM. The gate closes in five minutes.

Por que? Tengo mi tarjeta de residencia aquí. She repeats herself with the emotion of a glacier. Then again, then again, then again, as if to ward my gringo ignorance back into the abyss of the Benito Juarez International Airport. At this point, I realize that she will not change her mind. No matter if I get on my knees, shake my little ass, or make up a story about being the godson of Claudia Sheinbaum, Glacier Face will not let me through the sacred black lace of the boarding line. So I start walking to Gate 10, thinking: Puta madre, if she thinks I am going to run and make a fool of myself, she’s delusional—she probably wants to laugh at me with all her Volaris friends. So I waltz with the posture of an elegant deer past Gate 16, then 15, then 14, and then quickly abandon my ego once I am out of sight. I graduate to a jog, then a run, then a sprint. I arrive at Gate 10 with no justice in sight: no window, no office, no sign reading IMMIGRACIÒN. I pace around like a manic turkey until I spot someone wearing a uniform that looks like it belongs to the airport. My beak flops open and I plead in a pant: PERDON, SABES DONDE ESTA LA IMMIGRACIÒN!?

We exchange a string of Spanish until the man decodes my exhausted accent. Necesitas un sticker? SI. Eres un residente? SI. Necesitas ir a Gate 25. NO MAMES GUEY, LA MUJER DICE QUE NECESITE FUI A GATE 10. No mames. SI NO MAMES. Quieres que me ayudarte? SI, POR FAVOR. Pero necesitas dígame un gran tip. OK OK.

When the man offered to help, I thought he would pull out a sticker from his pocket and slap it onto my passport. Instead, he swings out a wheelchair and commands me to sit down. So I sit. He sprints me through the terminal at a speed that teeters between turtle and lambourghini, catching his breath at an attempt of more of the latter, weaving between crowds of people who could not care less to move out of the way, which I do not blame them for. Mira! Otra mas gringo que pasó demasiado tiempo en el lounge!!!!

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I clutch my oversized backpack—savior of many luggage fees—and brace my core so as not to plummet into the cold, hard floor. I imagine myself as my grandmother Jeanette, who, on many occasions, took the liberty of being wheeled around many airports, cruises, and hotels, the staff at any institution drawn to help her like iron sand pulled to a magnet (or attendees to a demanding elder). A part of me wants to laugh, except nothing is funny about the gate closing at 3:45PM and the time reading 3:43PM, only just as we pass Gate 15, then 16, then 17—which is now completely empty. Everyone has boarded but me.

The man asks me why I waited so long. I say NO SE, pero se, porque la champagna fue muy rico.

He tells me that every time I leave Mexico, I need a sticker. Why a sticker? He has no explanation. Every time I leave? I ask. Yes, he says, because I am a resident. At which point I wonder several things: a) Why was I never told this when I got my residency, or at any point of the ticket purchase, flight check-in, security checkpoint (when I presented my residency card), when I signed into the lounge (and presented my residency card yet again), b) why a sticker, of all things, c) why for residents—shouldn’t tourists have to go through more than residents, and d) will Volaris rebook me at no cost if I miss the flight? Isn’t this partially the woman’s fault for telling me Gate 10? My inner voice erupts with side-eye. It’s your fault, hoe.

I dig into my backpack for a 300 peso bill and clutch it in my palm as we whiz, then roll, then whiz to Gate 25. Miraculously, somehow, we make it, even though a part of me thought that Gate 25 might not exist, that we were going to collide into some wormhole and arrive into a new world, a Gen Z Narnia where none of the current world events are real, where the climate is changing in a different way (cleaner air, more resources), and I am not the lead in Fast & Furious: Wheelchair Drift. Where everyone is swimming in the lounge champagne with nowhere to go, nothing to do.

I catapult out of the chair as the man points me towards a small desk. My watch reads 3:50PM. In a polite scream, I ask the lady at the desk for a sticker. She assesses my boarding pass and ID for a microsecond, puts a little sticker inside of my passport, and then hands them both back to me. Es todo? I ask. Si, she says. I turn to the man who wheeled me here and hand him the bill. Estas seguro, es todo? Si, he says. I tell him I’ll run back—it’ll be faster.

So I run. Without exaggeration, I run like I never have before. I run, run, run, run and ignore the volcanic lungs, tendons, and muscles inside of me that scream for a pause, a breath. I tell myself that I have trained for this: Every morning spent in the gym was not to make my body tea or chisel my waist into something immune to dysmorphia. No, every morning spent in the gym was for this. To get back to Gate 17 before the plane goes into the sky. I sprint like a lion with a lame leg, the backpack consistently throwing me off balance,as numerous Mexican families, couples, and groups of friends gaze at me with amusement: MIRA A ESTE GRINGO! JAJAJAJAJAJ!

SI, ES MI! EL GRINGO MÁS RÁPIDO DEL MUNDO! Why the f*ck is the stretch from Gate 22 to 21 so long? Who asked for a Cinnabon, a jewelry store, and a magazine kiosk all in one stretch? WE’RE AT 20. TWENTY IS ONLY THREE AWAY FROM SEVENTEEN. ANDALE. I sprint with the force of a cheetah on cocaine, leaping towards visions of me and my parents, me and my friends: a sleepover with Shauna, Maia, and Raquel, sitting on the couch with my Dad and Mom, opening the fridge five million times because it is stuffed with random things that I would never buy myself, many of them likely long past expired.

Faster. FASTER! 17. I leap to the desk panting, near tears, as the staff assess me with the same glacier expressions I withstood thirty minutes prior.

NECESITO ABORDAR, I say. ESTE ES MIS VUELO.

No es posible, the first man says.

POR FAVOR.

No, the woman next to him says. The third woman next to her just smiles.

I am begging now, but by the fourth no—and smile—I lose it. So I summon the power of my grandmother Jeanette.

NECESITO ABORDAR AHORA. NO MAMES, TUS COMPAÑERA ME DIJO QUE TENÍA QUE IR A LA PUERTA 10, PERO NO, ERA LA PUERTA 25, ASÍ QUE FUI A LA 10 Y LUEGO A LA 25 Y CORRÍ AQUÍ. TENGO EL STAMP.

They laugh and say no again, but Grandma Jeanette is with me now.

NO MAMES. PUTA MADRE. MIS FAMILIA ESTÁ ESPERANDO PARA MI. NECESITO ABORDAR AHORA. LLAMAR AL VUELO. AHORA. EL AVIÓN ESTÁ AHÍ MISMO Y LA PASARELA SIGUE EN PIE. ANDALE. DEJAMÉ ENTRAR.

They laugh again, but this time one of them pulls out a walkie talkie and mutters something. The walkie talkie mutters back. They tell me to run onto the plane, so I run.

GRACIAS, I pant. Kind of, I think.

I run onto a flight that is half-full and nowhere near leaving, home to a few people putting their suitcases into the overhead compartments. I find my seat—panting, coughing, about to keel over—and toss my backpack onto the floor. A white woman at the window with oversized headphones wrapped around her ears like Hawaiian sweet buns ignores my presence altogether, which offers a glint of relief, considering I am sweating from all pores: around my temples, through my shirt, and off the sides of my waist. I feel like a swamp monster sitting amongst a row of swans.

Now that I am finally able to take a breath, I cannot stop coughing. I cough, cough, and cough, and even though I am holding my arm to my mouth, I can see the older Mexican couple in front of me attempting to inch away, leaning into the seats in front of them, so as to avoid any potential contamination from El Gringo del Pantano.

I know how they feel, because I have felt it, too: the germaphobic desire to teleport the coughing presence a galaxy away, out of sight. Every time someone coughs near me—sneezes or does anything that signals being sick—I wince. My face curls up and the stink eye takes over without my conscious command. It takes me at least fifteen minutes before I can bring myself to think: I hope they are okay. In those first fifteen minutes, all I can think is: Ew, get the fuck away from me.

Perhaps this is my retribution: Doesn’t every person who sits inside of a lounge being served champagne by workers who subsist off of tips, despite being employed by a 218 billion dollar company, deserve to become a swamp monster? To melt in shame in public?

I am coughing to an extent that eventually triggers worry. It feels difficult to breathe. Every time I breathe in, I cough. I can’t manage to breathe in deep enough to feel satisfied. To feel like I do not need to breathe again. And then I wonder: Is this asthma? Am I having an asthma attack? In my second year living in Mexico City, I researched the air quality: several studies have linked the development of asthma and breathing problems to the city’s pollution. Perhaps I have become a statistic. I breathe through the little straw of my water bottle as a makeshift inhaler, hoping that it helps, yet the coughing persists.

What if we get in the air and this gets worse? What if I die because I ran so hard to make this flight? A part of me is worried, but a part of me also wants to laugh: El Gringo del Pantano is fighting for his life in Economy. The entire reason I almost missed my flight was because I wanted to stay in the lounge. I wanted to sip the champagne, sink into the soft chair, and pretend that I was not someone accustomed to fighting for their life in Economy. It makes sense that this is how I die.

Let’s restructure this moment, I think. On the bright side: I want to live. Although that basic sentiment is, more or less, a foundation, thinking “I want to live in this world” has felt questionable over the past year, given everything we have witnessed, and been unable to change, as a species: genocide, disaster politics, doubling down on our damage to the planet we call home. At what point do we burn everything to the ground, and at what point do we accept our fate of extinction? If all of the good people in this world gathered together and decided it was time to hit the “END” button, I’d throw in my hand with the team. And yet, these are just words, just ideas. Perhaps the truth is better reflected by the moment: I am suffocating in a seat that does not recline, and yet the desire to live burns bright: I want to be here for as long as I can be. I want to fight the bad. I want to share the good.

When I left for this flight, I journaled for around five minutes about the things that I am grateful for. I rambled on about feeling like I have become comfortable with myself—with my relationship, with my life, with my friends, with living in Mexico City, with belonging being a multi-faceted, non-exclusive thing—in a way that I haven’t felt before. I spent a lot of my twenties searching for some brilliant becoming in the form of a career, a love, a personal evolution, and although I am still excited about the process of discovery and the delight of becoming, I feel like I know—beyond the conceptual form of knowing (so as to feel it in my body, in the daily process of living, as opposed to coming upon a realization that is then forgotten again and again)—that this is my life, that there is no searching, for it always is.

And so here I am, fighting for my breath, because now that I know this, why would I want to leave? I try to cough quieter and quieter, but the air escapes me like a whoopie cushion. I see myself being seen by the white lady with huge earphones and the couple in front of us, by the man next to me, by the people behind me, and it all feels a little bit absurd: none of us know each other, and most likely, none of us will know each other. For the rest of their lives, this is the only role I will play: El Gringo del Pantano.

We rise into the sky and encounter a level of turbulence that makes my stomach do a backwards flip, miss the land, and fall on its side. I lean back into my seat and rehearse the mental therapy I developed for turbulence on a plane, imagining legendary Pokémon supporting the wings, the belly of the vehicle, and the sides. I envision Moltres, Articuno, Zapdos, Latios, Latias, Rayquza, and Mewtew flying alongside us, ensuring our safety, a million Dragonairs and Dragonites and Gardevoirs and Alakazams using their magic, might, and moves to keep us afloat. Pikachu on the helm directing the team, Charizard at the back running quality control. And then a thought creeps in: What if I was supposed to miss this flight?

No mames. What if this was the universe attempting to save me…What if my turkey ass running through the terminal and transforming into El Gringo del Pantano was my fatal decision. What if I was supposed to miss the flight! The turbulence gets worse.

At my funeral they’ll say that, at the very end—at the very least—I flew. It was what I always longed for as an air sign, the ultimate Aquarius. Asian-American Oedipus. I always dreamt beyond the ordinary: being a world-famous author, making house music with Ariana Grande, owning a cafe somewhere green in Brooklyn. Harliv would reference how many times I joked about dying, suggest that this was my ultimate manifestation, and note how I would have hated that the word “manifest” was used in my eulogy. Claudia would reminisce on the day we laughed about plane anxiety, sitting in the little bedroom with twinkle lights draped over us. Mijael would cry a lake around Mexico City, its dense force paving streams and rivers, giving life to fauna and flora the way the indigenous designed it to be before the Spanish invaded and whited the color out with concrete. An initial flood would wipe out the fresas, leaving only fertile land for the rest.

At this point, an ethereal calm flows over me: If it ends, at least I got to be here. At least I got to be who I was, who I am. At least I got to fall in love with the best person in the entire world, at least I got to know what it means to believe that statement, to feel it, to know: There is no one better than you, even if that is not true, even if that is irrational, that is how much I love you, that is how much love we’ve built together, that is how fickle objectivity seems in the light of everything you mean to me, beyond time, beyond space, beyond words. At least I got to fall in love with a fleet of incredible people from all over the world. At least I got to be a son to a mother and father whose love fueled every moment of joy I have had the privilege of tasting. At least I got to be best friends with my grandmother. At least I got to be a brother, a cousin, a nephew, a friend, a bestie, a soul sister, a passing warmth in the story of so many lives in so many places. At least I got to be El Gringo del Pantano. ☷

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

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With love,

Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

Join the party on: Instagram 🪩 TikTok 🪩 YouTube 🪩 Bluesky 🪩 X 🪩 Website

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On one hand, I understand that the vortex of TikTok is designed to make our inner thumbs spasm in hypnosis. Social media was engineered to capture our attention and hold it hostage. There are reports that the world is, in fact, better off than it was fifty years ago. There is less poverty. Higher child survival rates. But better does not equate good; better is not enough for the families who are losing their loved ones every single day to the black box of “detainment camps,” which are better described as concentration camps—over 4,700 people have been disappeared by ICE since Trump entered office. Better is certainly not enough for the people who have been disappeared themselves.

If one more person tells me to call my representative I am going to lose it. We have called our representatives, protested peacefully, donated to jail bonds, spoken out in public, reposted to the discourse of awareness and resources five million times, and still: the communities that have been marginalized since the founding of the United States continue to be targeted, disappeared, killed—fast by the hands of their neighbors, slow by the design of our institutions.

I am tired of writing these things. Of having to write to feel any sense of stability in the first place. We are the cells of the lungs of a smoker, the cells of the liver of a chronic alcoholic. The only way to change the behavior of the body is to fight back—or to end the body altogether. It feels like nationalism at large is in the midst of global decay. We are tired of decisions being made by men in wide offices who know little about what it means to live a real life, to feed a family, to cope and battle systems of oppression across class, race, gender, and sexuality. We are tired of certain men making the same men rich as the bones of populations pile up. Tired of seeing genocide play out like a reality TV show. Tired of arguing for the right to live: theirs, ours, everyone’s.

We spend so much time debating the rights of a nation to retaliate against another that we ignore the rights of a father, friend, or cousin to live. We have been sold the story that we belong to a nation, that those nations are held together by governments, when, in reality, we only belong to a nation until we are the ones being used as debt, we are only protected by a government until we are not, until we are deemed the enemy, which has recurred over and over and over again (slavery, Jim Crow, Native American “boarding schools,” Japanese American Internment, Lavender Scare, Operation Wetback, post 9-11 surveillance and detainment to Muslims, mass incarceration that disproportionately affects Black populations, ICE raids).

The reality is that we are—and always will be—the ones who lead the nation. We are the labor, the power, the economy, the future. So why are we not being heard? Why must we ask, over and over and over again, for our basic human rights.

Debating whether or not a nation as a state has the right to bomb another is, effectively, debating whether or not a politician has the right to mass murder civilians. These debates are futile. The problem is, and always will be, the gruesome mechanics of politics devised by those with legislative power. A nuclear threat was not the culprit for the 4.7+ million people killed in post-9-11 war conflicts. We are focused on the wrong threats. Remove the alcoholic from the body; remove the dictators from our nations. We are long overdue for a revolution, and yet, I cannot picture what revolution looks like.

In a time where the majority of us spend five hours on our phones, three hours in a relationship with a streaming service, and eight (or more) hours working to be able to afford the basics of modern life, it feels—to some extent—that revolution itself is yet another luxury that could only be afforded by generations prior. We protest, we speak out, we organize, and yet, at the end of the day, we continue to work for, and within, the systems we disagree with. We take breaks from social media and the all-hours news cycle in order to not only continue fighting, but continue living. Continue on.

This seems to be the online consensus, though: That America, at some point, will unravel like a poorly tied knot. That revolution—or perhaps just decay—is inevitable.

In a TED Talk that made me feel seen and defeated at once, an NYU professor assesses the greatest transfer of wealth in American history: from the young to the old. The talk details how young people today are significantly worse off than ever before—we have a surplus of technology to keep us entertained (or, some may argue, depressed) and a deficit of capital to keep us housed, fed, and capable of maintaining an upwardly mobile trajectory. The numbers speak for themselves.

A common theme I surface in therapy is a disillusionment with our modern societies: Israel’s genocide of Palestine that we have witnessed—and failed to alter the course of—over the past two years, Trump being voted into office, Trump’s war on: reproductive rights/DEI/LGBTQ rights/the climate crisis/people of color/immigrants/the working class, expanding mining across public lands, the frat culture of the ultra wealthy that feeds off of human violations, the growing death toll in the DRC and the world’s lack of interest in speaking about it…On one hand, we are hyperconnected to the realities of places we will never be and people we will never know, which often serves as the basis of the argument that we are unnaturally aware of what is going on in the world, which is why we are supposed to disconnect, turn off the news and set down the phone. On the other hand, it is only natural that we care about these things, because these things are not okay. These things are mothers and fathers and sisters, lovers and friends being erased in a matter of seconds by a missile. By an illegitimate claim that a people are less deserving than another when our DNA reads no different. It is only natural to want to know, to know and then be upset, for it is a lack of knowledge that ultimately leads to human death. If we are not disillusioned, not upset, not not okay, I would argue that we are fooling ourselves, turning a blind eye to what is actually happening. But is that all there is to be said: that the world is falling apart, and so we should fall apart as well?

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The only good thing about the omnipresent algorithms of social media—which always seem to feed us the very things we’ve been talking, thinking, and writing about (via devices that always listen and see)—is that these same algorithms, at times and on the offhand, actually give us what we need. After a therapeutic week spent with my cousin, confiding in shared anxiety around the state of the world between sadistic jokes and mouthfuls of tacos, YouTube suddenly began recommending videos about the collapse of the United States, the rise and fall of American imperialism, and—most importantly—how to survive amidst the doom.

The conclusion we always come to is that we have a choice: we can let the doom of the world immobilize us or do what we do best—keep on living. The more I grow up, the more I am able to recognize that hope is a muscle we can train stronger, that joy is a language we can learn to speak, and that the gumption for living we so often yearn for, that we admire through the protagonists of novels and films, is not an enchanted disposition we are born with but a choice we must learn to make when we are faced with reality: a reality that is cruel, unfair, and unchanging. A reality that requires us to choose how to live: in woeful surrender or joyful resistance.

The problem with joyful resistance is that it sometimes feels impossible to see what is joyful about any of this. If hundreds of thousands of people are dying by the decisions of a few men, what is so good about this life, about humanity? And yet, achieving the impossible is innately human. It is human to defy the odds. The odds of a universe with life-supporting conditions is 1 in 10^120—a number so large we don’t have a category for it. It is in our nature—and a part of our survival instinct, a part of our resistance—to be an anomaly, to say: I am here, living in a pile of shit, and yet, there are beautiful things. Today I saw the sun filter through the leaves. Today I drank a glass of wine that reminded me of the strawberries my grandmother used to feed me in the summer. Today I did fifteen pull ups; last month I could only do eight.

This past weekend I slept in a warm bed. I hugged my partner with every ounce of force I had in me. I traveled with friends to the forest outside of Mexico City and ate soup inside of a restaurant beneath the pouring rain. We walked with wet socks, eyelids dusted in moisture, and inhaled the delicious air as if it were an offering from a supernatural source, and it might as well have been, because that is what we must see if we are to choose to live life: offerings here, offerings there, from the earth and from each other.

We talked about the world. We talked about nothing. Talked about going on a trip altogether, if not this month then the next, if not the next then the one after, if not the one after then the one after that. And in these small instances of living, the existential woe of what it means to be alive today dissipated into the background. The fact of the matter is that every person alive today is exactly that: living, showing up, doing it. Whether or not we feel like we know what we are doing has little meaning, for we are always doing it. We are here, and we are here together. And I think that is enough: to witness each other, to share our time, to choose hope over despair, to recognize that the choice itself is what makes the story of humankind worth something, no matter how poorly written it might be. To remind ourselves, over and over again: At least we are writing this part together. ☷

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

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With love,

Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

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Victoria was not alone: Nearly every character in the season failed to establish a memorable personality, let alone a colorful role in the plot. Out of the nine hours my partner and I spent watching the season, wondering if the end-result would yield regret, there were precisely four minutes that stood out to me. I might venture to say, however, that those four minutes made the rest of the season worth watching, for that one scene branded into my memory the etch of a cinematic gem.

My brain, or perhaps my heart, stores many of these gems. To name a few: the moment Mahito helps the warawara fly into existence, foreshadowing his own acceptance of his mother’s death in The Boy and the Heron, Elio’s father urging him to feel as much as he can in Call Me By Your Name, attempting to give Elio a will he never had, Ōtaro cheering on Nae in her pursuit of Harumichi in First Love, despite Ōtaro loving Nae himself, Evelyn’s final monologue to Joy in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Sonmi’s speech in Cloud Atlas. Each of these moments flared out of the scripts they sprouted from the way a phoenix rises from burnt coal, giving birth to something precious, something so rich in feeling that it appears as if its pixels might develop a material form, so that I might hold it in my palm and memorize its sparkled edges, despite the rest of the film cascading down into the broken fuzz of short-term memory.

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In this gem, Carrie Coon delivers a scene that wraps the narrative of three women—Jaclyn, Kate and Laurie—navigating the turbulence of friendship with a crisp, golden bow, the sole narrative in the season that ends with a nourishing twist. Though all three women grapple with isolation, taking turns being the odd one out based on their predispositions—infidelity, conflicting politics, varying expressions of success—Coon’s character, Laurie, appears to be the most isolated, lacking in both what Jaclyn and Kate represent: a polished career and an abundant marriage. Her isolation leads her to take a few things too seriously, have sex with a man who attempts to scam her, and stumble over the insecurities of comparison more than anyone else. In the final episode, however, she takes a leap that sets her apart, one that changes the course of their story altogether. While Kate and Jaclyn toast to a successful trip, reciting gratitude and blessings, Laurie indulges in the opposite: the truth. She confesses to a profound sadness she had been feeling the entire time.

As Laurie delivers her truth, she posits that her failures, in the face of those she grew up with, feel transparent and exposed, and in that exposure she stumbled through tunnels of rumination. She had been attempting to define what makes her her, what gives her life meaning, since it seemed so apparent for the other two (beauty and fame, religion and marriage), and all she could come up with was a long list of failures—a failed marriage, a stagnant career, a mess of motherhood—until she found an epiphany in the rough. Laurie realizes that she does not need anything to make her her, to give her life meaning, for time gives it meaning. Living and sharing life—a process they each witness and experience alongside each other—is deeply meaningful, perhaps more than anything else, in and of itself.

When Coon delivered the monologue, the whole of me pulsed with feeling. I think a part of growing up is grappling with the fickle properties of time. Time is a fictional creation, yet it defines each of our waking days. Attempting to measure it is an inconsistent feat: a young person might be 12, 18 or 30 years old while a young star might be three billion. Time passes us and rushes us and categorizes our lives into chapters, chapters in which we are all, in effect, doing the same thing: attempting to define what meaning is (and how to acquire it).

“Existential” is a common adjective brought up by my therapist—existential pressure, existential anxiety, existential meaning—and is, perhaps, the main adjective that differentiates the human experience from the animal one. We are the only species known to proactively attempt to establish meaning in our lives. In that search for meaning, time is often seen as something we must conquer: this year we want a new job, in five years we want more money, by forty we want to feel even more secure in who we are, before death we want to know that we lived a meaningful life. It is also something that we cannot conquer, for it is out of our control. As our sums of days on this planet continue to amass, it becomes as easy as it is tangling to wonder what time is, and how, in the face of its ruthless nature, we hold onto meaning. We got the job, we found love, we started a hobby, we bid farewell to loved ones, we let new loved ones in, and the world—no matter how much meaning we define for ourselves—continues to carry on. With or without us, time flows.

At first, Coon’s monologue sounds pitiful, the energy is one of admission, of surrender, and then, as humility matures into clarity, we see something greater than the dimensions of a single emotion, something spanning beyond the narrative of winner versus loser, something as expansive and layered as the universe itself. Time, in the end, gives meaning to all of our lives. When the seasons of us come to a close and our cells fold back into the soil, meaning by virtue of this or that is a metric too small. The external properties by which we define ourselves—our things, our relationships, our careers, our experiences—are all eventually erased by time. And yet, before that erasure, and perhaps because of it, we share profound meaning. When Laurie looks at her friends, she feels the meaning of her life in full, a meaning that underlies all of our lives: that we were there, that we were them, that we are here, that we are us. That we exist. The meaning we search for is both ephemeral and omniscient, in that meaning itself is not something to be obtained or optimized, rather, it is everywhere, constantly appearing and disappearing, belonging to us so long as we are present, so long as we are aware.

I’d like to pause for a laugh, because I feel like everything I ever write trails to the gamut of presence. It is, however, a topic I keep returning to out of necessity. In a world that can too easily feel dystopian, as a member of a generation that trends towards depression and anxiety, remembering what matters—and that mattering itself is baked into our innate ability to exist—offers some relief from the pressures of today. As a thirty year old youth living in said dystopia, I often find myself overwhelmed by the future: social, political, environmental, personal. Are we entering a recession? What will we do when climate disasters multiply in frequency? How will I share life with my partner in a country they are foreign to?

While all of these questions are fair to ask, beneath each of them lies a bed of anxiety birthed from expectation: the expectation that we need to arrive at the answers now, and that in doing so, we will ensure that our lives are good, meaningful, “figured out,” so to say. The funny thing about “figuring out” as a process is that we tend to realize, at one point or another, that we were always figuring it out the entire time. Figuring things out is the human condition. As Laurie attempts to figure out what gives meaning to her life, she realizes, in the end, that she had been figuring out meaning the entire time, that by living her life as herself, witness to her two friends, meaning was being born in each moment, with or without the ego’s demand.

This past weekend, Laurie’s words seemed foretelling. In a sun stained cove made fresh by the wet breeze of San Diego, I watched one of my best friends get married. Across a span of forty-eight hours, different communities I grew up with gathered to celebrate a moment in time, a moment that encapuslated the sparkling nature of time itself: what it means when two people share a life, what it means when they commit to sharing it—pains, miracles and all.

What I love about a wedding is that it is not just about two people, it is about the millions of people they each were, are and will be. It is about the people they watched grow up and the people who watched them grow, too. Weddings are the community’s form of a convention. We gather not for an industry, but for each other: the love woven by a couple and the webs of belonging they continue to knit—across cities, phone lines and continents. As I danced, sat and laughed alongside many of the friends I grew up with, I felt what Laurie spoke of, the dazzling density that accumulates in the heart when we witness each other grow.

Though life can feel quite long, we are only here for a brief moment. As we navigate its brevity, meaning pores over us in greater, brighter amounts. The trick is being able to see it: the more we have lived through, the more we have shared, the more we have watched each other—and ourselves—stretch, break, mend and stitch back up into brighter beings, the more meaning there is in simply being here. As I watched my friend Maia say “I do” with her characteristic humor and witnessed, for another moment that I hope is only a fraction of its total, all of our friends wiggle, cheer and express ourselves—expressions of the people we were and the people we are becoming—I felt something beyond words. Something quieter than joy and wider than hope. Something I saw transpire in those four minutes on the screen.

It is a bit ironic, that when we have no words to explain what we are feeling, what we tend to be feeling is the grand complexity of meaning itself. And so, like Laurie, Jaclynn and Kate, I continued to repeat the words we consider the most meaningful. We all did.

I love you. I love you, too. ☷

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

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With love,

Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

Join the party on: Instagram 🪩 TikTok 🪩 YouTube 🪩 Bluesky 🪩 X 🪩 Website

This question has surfaced amidst a variety of my social circles over the past several years, ranging across different cities, cultures, and ages, all sharing the same sentiment: it is difficult to develop meaningful connections with people once we are no longer kids, which often translates to: people with less time than before.

For most of my life, I thought I knew the answer: be outgoing, host all the time, invite everyone to everything, and always say “yes.” The strategy yielded a bright harvest: I have been fortunate to know a surplus of friends in every setting I have ever lived (or traveled). I am blessed to not be able to count the number of people I consider my family on my fingers. And yet, a feeling of hunger still arises when I think about the word “community.” Not because I believe I lack it in whole, but because the wholeness that I crave—community to the extent that I wish we could experience it—is not something that is embedded into the everyday structure of adult life.

The kind of community I dream about looks like this: a group of people who know each other to the core, who share similar values, who hail from diverse backgrounds, who aspire toward shared goals, who are committed to the area they live in and—most importantly—who see each other out of habit, out of the design of their daily lives. I crave community as a living, dynamic force that exists beyond the efforts of a single person. Where each person knows they will see each other, not because they calendarized an hour to do so two weeks before, but because seeing one another is a built-in rhythm, guaranteed by the collective interest: a natural, coveted part of life, as opposed to something we manage and schedule.

The desire to belong to a group—a living community—is an animal urge. Social connection has always been central to the health and evolution of our species. For most of human history, people lived in tightly knit groups—extended families, tribes, villages—where daily survival required collaboration and time spent together. Friendship, in those contexts, was not generated or planned; it was a byproduct of shared labor, mutual care, and physical proximity.

This kind of cohesion was not accidental, it was structural. Before industrialization, communities were interwoven by design. People worked near their homes, often in agricultural or domestic settings. Meals were shared, child-rearing was communal, and the boundaries between work, leisure, and rest were porous. But with the rise of industrial capitalism came a reorganization of time and space: work moved out of the home and into factories; time became standardized and segmented; the laboring body was separated from the social, resting one. As historian E.P. Thompson writes in Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism (1967), the shift to clock time—central to the advancement of capital productivity—disrupted pre-industrial rhythms of life, replacing communal flexibility with individualized scheduling.

The consequences of industrialization are still with us. In the U.S. today, adults spend significantly less time with other people than in previous decades. According to the American Time Use Survey, people spent just four hours a week with friends in 2021, down from six and a half hours in 2014—a 37% decline in less than a decade (source). While the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated isolation, it did not invent it. Over the past several decades, we have experienced a long, slow unraveling of social closeness, one that bears great consequence. Research shows that loneliness increases the risk of premature death, heart disease and stroke. In other words: social health is mental health, mental health is physical health.

It is no wonder, then, that the desire to return to the social benefits of “the village” is a shared sentiment amongst the majority of my friends—albeit, a modern, urbanized version of the village. We want the village but with better lighting, more space for self-actualization, and the option to close the door: individual apartments clustered on a shared property with courtyards, kitchens, and living rooms designed for gathering. This modern fantasy of the village is, in many ways, the capitalist mind yearning for old times, the tension between the village boy and the knowledge worker. Capitalism has conditioned us to crave autonomy, to value ownership, to want “our own” of everything—our own space, our own careers, our own things. And yet, beneath that desire for independence is the undying need to be surrounded by people who know us. At our core, we are interdependent beings.

Perhaps the closest thing we had to the village was the school. School is a social structure that guarantees the conditions most conducive to belonging: repeated exposure to the same people, a shared experience (learning, growing, surviving), and the freedom to exercise spontaneity and pass idle time. A 2018 study by Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas found that it takes about 50 hours to move from acquaintance to casual friend, 90 hours to become real friends, and over 200 hours to become close friends—and that leisure time, not work or task-based time, is the most effective type of interaction. As students without a rigid 9-to-5 schedule, we could hang out for 200 hours. We could linger. We could get close. Not through planning, but proximity.

When we graduate to working adulthood, that design most often disappears. The structure shifts from social to personal. Our time becomes increasingly privatized: it is allocated to the tasks required to maintain our own lives—working, eating, cleaning, resting, exercising. The remaining time outside of work is often consumed by whatever will help us feel a little more sane, a little less tired. Sometimes that’s socializing. Sometimes it’s a hobby. Sometimes it’s being alone. If we break it down mathematically—assuming we sleep a healthy amount (8 hours), work full time (8 hours), embark on a commute (1 hour), make ourselves food (1 hour), exercise (1 hour), spend time getting ready (30 minutes) and time winding down (30 minutes)—we’re left with four discretionary hours each day, at best.

If we cannot return to pre-industrial village life or move into an urbanized commune, what can we do?

As always, we can do the best with what we have. If we understand the social challenges of the realities we live in (late-stage capitalism, transnationalism), we can begin to account for them. We can care for our social health the same way we care for our physical health through small, intentional choices that sprout a sense of community in our everyday lives—organizing, showing up, committing to a place. Though the answer is trite, it is easily forgotten, especially when the word community has become a trend of its own, much like happiness, marketed as an external experience that one must attain, attract or—in the worst cases—purchase via a monthly membership to a club, app or event series.

I started this written meditation with a simple question: How do we find community as adults? As I have written around the thought, I realize that the answer may reside in a rewording of the question itself. Instead of asking How do we find community?, we ought to ask: How do we form it?

The reality is that community is not something we find, it is something we create. Through effort, ritual, and a willingness to organize. Through building our own villages in the context of modern life: dinner parties, open invitations, group classes, a generous use of public space, spontaneous visits to friends nearby and calling those far away. While our societies may not be designed for the kind of community we once knew, we can create our own beds of community by acting as organizers for each other.

When I think about life’s big questions, I often think about my mother. Her closest friends live hundreds and thousands of miles away. Her job as a counselor was tiring and endless. Yet community was never something she appeared to lack. Throughout her career she built loving relationships with colleagues and students alike. She texts as if it were an olympic sport, sharing every little detail of the day’s story with those she holds dear. And the majority of her hobbies yield things to be shared: vegetables from the garden, figurines made from wine corks, bottles of jam gifted to friends and family.

Earlier, I deduced our community dilemma from the discretionary hours an average working adult has left in a day. When I picture my mother, however, the limits of those hours do not seem fateful. Perhaps attempting to quantify our ability to form community is antithetical, for community as a living, dynamic force came long before the clock. It arose between people living in the world, not those optimizing their lives. And it continues to arise between those who host, those who ask, those who call and those who arrive. Those who consider, time and time again, that all that truly matters is that we are here, together. That time evolves from something measured into something precious as soon as it is shared.

If we all volunteered to form community—across every aspect of our lives—I’d gesture to say that the post-industrial unraveling of social closeness is simply that, an unraveling into raw material, threads with which we weave new shapes of community. New ways of belonging to each other.

We say it is hard to make friends as adults because we want to feel the electricity of friendship more often. When I say we, I mean everyone. We search for community because we want to belong to its bright expanse, to know and be known.

So...Why don’t we? Invite them over. Give them a call. Say yes to the invitation. Place mutual friends together in a room and see what happens. Surround yourself with the same strangers until nothing is strange about anyone. Bring the parts of your personality that exist beyond the stiff format of a workplace into that place—the office or the call—and dare to see those same parts of your coworkers. The more we see each other, the more we feel seen.

The village, so to speak, starts with a villager. ☷

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

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With love,

Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

Join the party on: Instagram 🪩 TikTok 🪩 YouTube 🪩 Bluesky 🪩 X 🪩 Website

Half Thoughts started as a parody of the poetic style that has become popular with the help of social media vehicles like TikTok and Instagram: short poems that read like simple thoughts spoken aloud, often with little room left for interpretation. A part of me wanted to make fun of the style while another part of me wanted to see what I could make of it (you can read more about the origin of the book in the last newsletter). In mimicking anything, though, we open ourselves up to becoming a part of the mockery itself, and so I will happily admit that while the book began as a pursuit of satire, it transformed into a pursuit of other expressions, too (morality, identity, queerness), which means that the poetic style I once made fun of also became a medium for my own voice, putting me into the same position as the poets who I once considered silly, eventually bringing me to realize that I was sillier making fun of those poets than I was doing as they did: attempting to express myself through art (which we are always better off with than without), all of which makes this book a work capable of being both laughed with and laughed at, depending on your level of discernment for the day.

Having been tapping away at my first novel for three years now, I found writing with the elementary rhythm of a simple thought to be a bit intoxicating: I could communicate what I wanted directly into verse with the flash of a few keystrokes, as opposed to a few thousand. It was as if I had suddenly discovered pre-made furniture from IKEA that I could assemble and arrange how I wanted, as opposed to chipping away at a block of wood or mound of clay for hours. First I wrote some stupid things, then I wrote some serious things, then I wrote some heartfelt things. The result of the book is an expression of my varied selves: part silly, part despairing, part hopeful—and every part of me is happy to share it with you.

I do not know if it is the simple act of holding a book with my name on it or having released something to the public that is, by all means, a vulnerable expression of myself, but I do know that I am very happy and proud of this little book. Though the contents are not perfect (I suspect nothing will be that we write ourselves), sharing it feels right. Sharing it reminds me that I am a writer who is learning how to write every single day. That writing—as with any form of art—is an expression of our becoming, of our existing, of our life, and if nobody buys or reads it, that is okay. We share it because it gives us joy. We share it because it is honest.

I chose to self-publish Half Thoughts without any attempt at finding a publisher in the first place. Although I self-taught myself into a creative career and every form of art that I know, the concept of self-publishing a book seemed scary, too near the cliff of cringe. Doing this was, in many ways, a risk-free way of experiencing self-publishing prior to doing so with a more “precious” project like a novel. While I still have dreams of working with a reputable publishing house in the future, self-publishing Half Thoughts has completely changed the way that I think about publishing—and being a writer at large.

Though I always felt an affinity for the self-publishing industry due to its DIY (and anti-corporate gatekeeping) culture, I had maintained my view of self-publishing as the last alternative for a real writer due to the vanity concerns most artists have. I considered writers published by Penguin or listed on the “NY Times Best Sellers” list as legitimate and self-published ones as amateur, and no writer wants to be amateur, for perfectionism is a plague that bothers us all. We fear not only that our work needs to be perfect, but that we need to be perfect, too. We need to be celebrated by the right people, recognized by the right institutions and supported by the right names. We want to be seen as the prize-winning author, not witnessed as the indie author sharing their work without a spotlight to amplify it.

Self-publishing Half Thoughts has made me realize that the most powerful thing a writer can do for themselves is not win a book deal, but allow themselves to create and share. The sheer power that a self-published author has is what every writer dreams of: you have an idea, you make it, you share it. You do not need to wait, court agents or send a hundred unanswered queries. Or better yet: You can do that (I very likely will do that) with the grounding knowledge that there is always another option: to create the things that we want to create and share them as they are.

For many, self-publishing is a no-brainer decision: better profit-margins, IP ownership, authentic connections to readers. I recommend it, though, not for its comparative benefits over traditional publishing but for its ability to instill in a writer the confidence that most of us lack. Giving ourselves the permission to create something and publish it allows us to take responsibility for the artists that we are: to notice them, to nurture them, to show up for them (as them). It reminds us that what makes us artists is not what we receive, but what we share—the process of making and sharing is the core of any craft.

Self-publishing this book has given me a form of assurance I did not expect, one I barely knew I lacked. When I look at the book, I feel that I am a writer. I allow myself to live, walk and breathe as a writer. I am proud of the book, not because it is being read by thousands of people or generating passive income, but because it is a result of my authentic experience and the permission I gave myself to create. I am proud of it because it is imperfect—a representation of the writer that I am right now—and, I feel, the beginning of a longer journey. ☷

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

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With love,

Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

Join the party on: Instagram 🪩 TikTok 🪩 YouTube 🪩 Bluesky 🪩 X 🪩 Website

Eleven months ago, I saw a poem on TikTok that made me cackle, thinking that the poem the creator was sharing was a joke. Shortly after, I began to spiral, realizing that the poem was not a joke but an excerpt from the creator’s self-published book, its genius affirmed by hundreds of thousands of people in the comments, despite my opposite impression. I thought: Surely, this has to be a bit…No one, in their right mind, could read this and think it is good.

My disposition made me consider something I had never thought about before: Am I wrong? More precisely: Do I not know what good writing is? Are the millions of people who liked the video and commented “omg buying immediately,” “i felt this in my heart,” “need this book now” an accurate representation of the general public’s literary taste, which then, in my perspective, lacks any and all artistic sensitivity, which would then make me a literary snob? And if all of the answers to the questions above are yes—the public enjoys reading turds—then why am I spending so much time trying to write things that sound like diamonds (or, at least, tumbled rocks)?

The poem, more or less, read like this:

I read it over and over again, clicked on the creator’s profile—which made me cringe a thousand times more (a white guy living in Paris with several other poems that read like texts)—and ended up on the Amazon page for the book itself, which had hundreds of gushing reviews about how emotional and raw the poetry was. I soon realized that my investigation was futile: whether or not the poetry was good did not matter, for it was achieving what most writers cannot: sell. Besides, who am I to decide what is good or bad?

Yet the investigation was not solely launched out of my desire to define some objective rank of artistic quality (and note that that poem ranked on the lower end). It stemmed from a broader question as to why I care about writing well in the first place. If the majority of people prefer click-bait poetry and Colleen Hoover, then why am I attempting to write like Rachel Cusk or Tommy Orange? If I have a dream of writing for a living, a dream that most writers chase, then why don’t I write silly pages that the masses can read at the same speed with which we refresh our feeds?

The thought of doing so, however, prompted no temptation. We want to write what we want to write. The catch, of course, is that writing what we want does not guarantee an income. Writing for a living typically translates to writing to sell, for in order to make a living, we must sell, no matter what it is we do (our time, our art, our words, our knowledge). The reality of most full-time writers involves writing and selling not only essays, op-eds or books, but courses, workshops and how-to guides, the latter of which makes me shudder.

I soon came to terms with the fact that the business of writing is not something I am interested in, for it, too, is the business of selling, and creating things with the intention of selling them is already what I do in my day job. My career as a [insert vague marketing title] has outlined the path towards the financial freedom I once associated with the holy-grail of book deals I thought I was entitled to, as every writer does, convincing ourselves that that one book will let us stop working, until we realize that overnight success is a misaligned, if not unproductive goal to hinge the pursuit of a craft on, and that perhaps the dream itself is not to be paid to write, but to be paid and get to write.

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I realize, then, that my dream is not to write for a living. My dream is to write for myself—for the things I feel, believe that matter and hope to inspire in the people I love. For play, for fun, for discovery. The same goes for anything I create: videos, little designs, dinners with friends. Being able to write is the goal, not sell a million copies. Being able to take care of ourselves and the people around us, while creating things that are true, is the ultimate dream. So I continued to work and continued to write, unmoved by the turd poem that stopped me in my tracks—albeit, for one thing.

Before I scrolled onto the next video, another laugh bubbled at the bottom of my belly: It was funny. It was funny how simple the poem was: you stole my heart / and now i am broken. Had the book been written as satire, intended to make fun of its own form, I would have bought it. I would have enjoyed it. The sheer presentation of such simple thoughts in the format of a poem struck me as hilarious, and soon a million others came to mind:

bitch
      why did you make dinner
      if you aren’t going to wash the dishes

— roommate

it is a simple exchange:
       tomorrow's joy for
                            tonight's camaraderie

acute euphoria for a
                      delayed desire to die

just remember to take your milk thistle

— another one, please

first came the coffee
    then 
        came
              the exorcism

— febreeze

And thus was born the idea to create a poetry book that would not be called a poetry book, for all of the poems inside of it would mimic the elementary style of a third grader speaking their thoughts aloud. I thought: Instead of being a hater, I can have fun, celebrate the subjectivity of art with a comedic creation of my own. Over the next few months, I wrote over a hundred poems—or what I call “phrases,” considering I know little to nothing about poetry—and made it into a book.

The problem with creating anything is that it often becomes something we care about. While the intention of this book—titled Half Thoughts—was supposed to be pure satire, a parody of the work from the online poets I considered cringe, I ended up caring for several of the phrases I included in the book. I realize that this makes the book complicated, for some of the content is not designed for laughs, however, I would still be delighted if those parts were laughed at, because the reality is that I, too, am an aspiring writer, and the process of growing into anything (our creativity, our personhood, our relationships) is hilarious: the awkward ways we say things, the terrible first drafts, the incredulous or non-existent plots, the meaningless content. So I invite us all to laugh—and, if we wish, inquire.

The Kindle version of the book is available for pre-order here that will be released on March 15th, 2025 (there will be a print version available on March 17th, 2025). As a thank you to everyone who has supported my writing via a subscription to Sleepover, I’ll be offering paid subscribers a free copy of the book—just reply to this newsletter with your address. ᡣ𐭩

I know: Not me selling something immediately after talking about how I am not writing to sell JAJAJAJ. The thing is, self-publishing at large (on Amazon, Substack, Spotify, TikTok, YouTube) is a form of decentralizing the relationship between the artist and the public. Every artist’s dream is to a) make something they are proud of and b) share it with good people, the people they belong to, in the hopes that all those people feel inspired, find each other and, perhaps, find them. Before self-publishing came to light, a writer had to wait to find an agent, a filmmaker had to wait to find a distributor, a musician had to wait to get signed onto a label. Now a writer can publish their project in a matter of hours on Amazon KDP, a filmmaker can share their work on YouTube and a musician can release their music on Spotify or Soundcloud. While there are clear and pressing downsides (like the low payouts for artists on Spotify, the inequitable distributions to creators on YouTube and Twitch—which is why I started working in Web3 to begin with, but more on that later…), being able to create something and share it with the world is a powerful process, and I am low-key infatuated with the values that self-publishing represents: power to the people.

So I see it like this: I am writing things for myself, and then sharing them with the world. ☻

Without further ado, here is a little preview of the book itself, Half Thoughts:

how many hours
have i thought about
pretty men

who have nothing to do with
                                      my real life?

 — screen time

he said he was a filmmaker and
    a photographer and
a playwright and
                 a model and

in between all of those incomes

he still has not
venmoed me
for dinner

— manboy

do you have any dietary
restrictions?

vegan, vegetarian,
gluten-free?

no
   please
         i need the meat

the men i see in the evening
                  have barely anything to eat

— flat ass

we are the              
             puppets
   of billionaires and
                  millionaires and
            know how to point fingers at each other
        better than at
              the truth

go back to where you came from!
stop taking our jobs!
gentrify someplace else!

— trick mirror

why are we talking about selena gomez
                                       and bailey bieber

when my cousin had a piano recital
                     and no one came to see her

— talking heads

i wanted to change the world
until the one hundred and seventh person
                    said to me
                                          this is just how it is

and one hundred and seven months later
as the world choked in carbon and
                                 bodies laid on the floor

the only thing i knew how to say was
                   this is just
                                                            how it is

— burnout

the other day i came upon
               a modern eureka:

instead of entering
      a mental breakdown
              i can
                    wash my face
                    and eat a meal
  
— choices

i started writing
poetry
yesterday;

for $29.99,
you can start
writing poetry
too!

— creator economy

dumplings thick like tree bark
           soft like a
                   supple hug

 and stuffed with pork
 by the hands of a grandmother

— homesick

the world is drowned and
on fire

                       swept up by the wind or



buried by the land



                          but at least we
                               have techno

at least we have
                                       uk house garage

— optimism ☷

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

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With love,

Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

Join the party on: Instagram 🪩 TikTok 🪩 YouTube 🪩 Bluesky 🪩 X 🪩 Website

Every time I send this newsletter, I am a bit uncomfortable. Each essay is incomplete, imperfect, not exactly what I want it to be. It could be shorter, longer, more concise, more abstract, more descriptive, less personal, more morally succinct. And yet, I send it out, because anything and everything could be more or less of something, and there are other things to do.

Launching the newsletter itself was something I feared a couple years back. I thought: What if my writing sucks? Who cares what I have to say? What will I even write about (the last thought still appears, at times, like the familiar shape of a cumulus cloud, the kind we cooked up animals from as children, especially in the weeks where I postpone writing the newsletter till the night before). In what some of my friends would label “typical Aquarius fashion,” I made a goliath sized format for the newsletter, injecting it with so many promises and ideas that it could not be a failure, for something so large could never possibly fail, including weekly playlists, editorial reviews, interviews and personal essays. Needless to say, the goliath format shed a few pounds, then a few more, and finally arrived at something I enjoyed creating: a simple essay every two weeks.

I started it, it transformed—at times appearing completely different than I had intended—and now it is no longer scary.

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If I dive back through the pages of my life, there is a common theme threaded between the chapters. Behind every great decision I’ve made, both fear and wonder were present: deciding to pursue a “creative career” after nothing but four years of labs and research papers, moving to New York without a plan, creating a home in a foreign country. Wonder nests inside fear like the center of an unfurled blossom, waiting to give life, waiting to spore seeds. First comes one, then comes the other.

It is not just the great decisions, but the small ones, too: opening a blank page, starting therapy, recharging the batteries of a camera that had not been touched in a decade. In doing the things that scare us, we are actively being—and becoming—people that make us proud. People who create, people who grow, people who discover what exists beyond the expectations of our everyday lives. In avoiding discomfort, we remain safe, sealed off, immune to the prickled spines of cringe that crawl around any act of creativity or risk, intimidating us with our own insecurities, the ones that keep our dreams hidden in a safe, the ones that sound like: Am I any good? This sucks, this is not perfect! I am not there yet.

The funny thing about those voices is that they only appear when we are becoming, when we are getting there (which, of course, often ends up being no different than here, in that the condition of the artist seems to be a never-ending process of becoming).

It is easier to think “I am not there yet because I have not tried” than to think “I am not there yet because I am learning.” Creativity’s most seductive opponent is the promise of inaction: as long as we have not tried, we remain ripe with unused potential. As long as we wait a little bit more, we can continue believing that we will be the best (once we try), that life will happen to us, that we might become the best versions of ourselves immediately, an overnight story, instead of sludging through the reality of what it means to tackle a dream: an artform, a language, a relationship, a career, a move.

There is a saying that the artist is destined to remain unfulfilled, incomplete, for an artist’s tastes—what they deem beautiful, perfect and aspire towards—will always outpace their ability to create. Many joke that this is why some artists become critics. It is easier to say what is good and bad than to take the good and bad and mold it into something of our own, something that may be too much bad and not enough good, something that could always be better.

My hope, however, is that the artist can alter that destiny, that instead of viewing ourselves (and our work) as incomplete, we can accept ourselves as we are, the way we admire and cheer on plants that sprout new leaves, celebrating the process of becoming itself and all of the discomfort it requires.

This period of my life is uncomfortable. Every time I sit down to write, I am uncomfortable. Every time I consider what the next month will look like, I am uncomfortable. Every time I make a content plan or script an idea for a video, I am uncomfortable. I feel fraudulent, I feel silly, I feel dumb. And I am not only learning to see through those feelings, but to be proud of them. To notice that they are cues that I am headed in the right direction.

So here I am, sharing something else that makes me uncomfortable: I am learning to make vlogs. Even writing that sentence makes me cringe, because there are so many judgements rooted within the word “vlog” (or “content”). People associate content, vlogs, YouTube, and any form of the medium as premature, childlike, a hobby-esque form of creativity that pales in comparison to a feature film. Or maybe that is my own voice, the artist’s voice, that thinks something needs to be perfect and pickled with accolades in order to be taken seriously.

On my thirtieth birthday, I decided to film myself. To make a vlog. In between the giddy joy of a child playing with leggos, I felt the insecurity of a teenager doing the same thing. It was frustrating and uncomfortable and awkward, playing with a tripod for the first time and using settings on my ten year old camera that I never knew existed. I wondered if I was wasting my time, then shook off the thought, for I had not felt as excited about making anything since I was in college, since I used to stitch together over-saturated clips of myself and my friends in an attempt to recreate the aesthetic of the cinematographers I loved most. At some point, I stopped attempting because I thought I was too far behind. I was self-conscious about what people would think in the setting of an adult conversation (what do you do? I’m a YouTuber). I moved onto other forms of creativity, forms that seemed more legitimate (what do you do? I’m a copywriter), as well as necessary, according to my rent. So I picked up the marketing hat and dropped the creator hat.

Now I am putting the hat back on. Now I am trying on many different hats, realizing that hats are meant to be worn, not identified with.

It took me four years to be able to say “I am writing a book,” many more to say “I am a writer.” Recently, at a gallery opening in the city, a new friend presumed that writing was my profession, my role, as they came across my Substack prior to our meetcute, and I responded: No, kind of. And then I was like: Wait, yes, I am a writer. Despite spending the majority of my day job writing copy, spending a few hours each week writing this newsletter and a few hours more working on my book, I feel uncomfortable claiming any creative title, for there is, still, a flame of insecurity that flickers in my chest.

The thought that too easily consumes the creative person is: Who cares? Who am I to do this? Why would I film my life, write about my life or share anything I make in the first place?

The more I give into my creativity, however, the more I give it the space to breathe, removing the chokeholds of what kind of artist I should be—of what an artist is in the first place—and in doing so realize that being a creator is about being in the process of creation, the relationship we have with words or colors, clips or sounds, allowing them to channel through us like a ray of sun so that our experiences on this planet might synthesize into something new.

Of course, what every person wants is to find a community through the things they do. The human dream is to belong, to find people that think like them. To help other people feel seen, heard and held, especially if we are artists, because if we are artists, there is no doubt that we have felt unseen, unheard and not held enough. So we create in an attempt to do all three for each other.

I have dreams of publishing my book and curating little gatherings in bright spaces, encouraging people to share their voices, to know each other and celebrate each other. I have dreams of being able to translate the feelings that move across my heart and mind through images and sounds. I have dreams of evolving this newsletter into something more communal, something less “I publish, you read.” The most honest dream of all, though, is that I dream of making magic, to materialize all of the things we experience into something that reminds us to be proud—of our friends, our neighbors, our mothers, our fathers, the people we know and the world we live in, despite peoples’ capacity to destroy it.

After filming or writing something, I can still think: No one is going to watch this. No one is going to read this. Those thoughts, however, are near translucent, because the dream is not to be read or watched. The dream is to be ourselves: human beings, becoming and changing and doing the only thing that we actually do: be, eternally incomplete (and therefore as complete as we'll ever be), at once fractured and whole, cringe and proud, wrong and right, a work of perpetual creation.

I still have a voice of judgement in my head that labels things as good or bad, that reads a poem TikTok and thinks: This is the worst thing I have ever read. Though I may still agree with that voice, another voice appeared, too, that thinks: That person is creating. They are sharing. They are making something, despite all of the doubts and insecurities we download at a young age, some more than others, some less than others, that discrepancy a design of colonialism, speaking to why most creative fields lack ethnic, gender and socioeconomic diversity, why there are too few creators who are queer or BIPOC, why most of the shitty poems I see online are from cis, white men.

Regardless of what it is we create, regardless of whether or not we share it, I think it is important to give ourselves the permission to do so—especially if we feel scared. Especially if we were taught to be uncomfortable, if we grew up in a society where the artists we read, watched or listened to did not look like us, walk like us or think like us. In my opinion, we deserve it the most. We need it the most, to look fear in the eye and call it for what it is: a sign that we are moving in the right direction. ☷

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

Subscribe now

With love,

Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

Join the party on: Instagram 🪩 TikTok 🪩 YouTube 🪩 Bluesky 🪩 X 🪩 Website

There is a Bad Bunny song that has gone viral on TikTok, titled “dtmf,” an acronym for the album’s name: DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, which translates to (in Puerto Rican and Caribbean Spanish slang) I should have taken more photos. The trend is subtle, a collage of videos that people stitch together to the second chorus, typically featuring the people they love, the places they lost, or the moments that made them wish they had the power to make something last forever: a sunset, a boyfriend, a father, a daughter, a city, a neighborhood once less gentrified, a street once called home. When I first listened to Bad Bunny’s new album, I paid more attention to the melodies than the lyrics. I did not dwell on the album’s name until I saw videos on TikTok celebrating the title track.

Bad Bunny’s new album is a tribute to the Puerto Rican diaspora, a commentary on the ongoing waves of neo-colonization that continue to transform places like Puerto Rico and Hawaii (and Mexico City, Bali, Cape Town, Lisbon—the list goes on), and a celebration of Puerto Rican music itself. It tackles the capital forces of displacement and gentrification with melodies and lyrics that function as mirrors. Everyone has lost something; everyone, at one point or another, has felt lost themselves. The album forces listeners to consider the communities and livelihoods that are being lost right now, that have been forced to lose over the past several decades at the hands of the American empire—most ironically personified by Americans who move, in mass, to “find” themselves. The purpose of the album is captured no better than in the short film Bad Bunny created himself.

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When I revisited Bad Bunny’s album with the context of the creator’s intentions, I thought: PERIOD. This album slaps. I listened through it and thought: This album is important. And then, a week later, “dtmf” appeared on my playlist as I attempted to overcome a third shoulder press at the gym, and then I felt it.

I did not recognize the introduction, nor the first quarter of the song. I thought: Why haven’t I heard this before? Maybe I skipped through it. The chords are nostalgic, a bit sad, a bit romantic. And then the chorus appeared, and I thought: Oh, this song. The one I keep humming, the one from TikTok, the cornerstone of the album. I took a deep breath and attempted my fourth rep. And then the version of the chorus with everyone singing, engineered to sound like the collective effort of a group of friends on a beach or a crowd at a concert, rang around my ears like gentle fireworks, queuing fireworks of my own. The shoulder press clang back down on the machine and I felt the corners of my eyes go wet.

Not this, I thought. Not me crying in a Smart Fit.

I tried to push the swell of my throat down to my heart, then from my heart down to my gut, breathing long in an attempt to ward away the longing to cry and smile at the same time, to scream and melt on the floor in a chorus of laughter, at least until I reached somewhere private. But I let the song keep playing. In fact, I started it over, just to hear it again. And so the tears fell anyways, precious little gems tumbling through a stream.

I thought about my grandmother. I thought about Mijael. I thought about Palestine, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Mexico…I thought about my parents and I thought about my friends. I thought about everyone on TikTok who had posted their own precious collection of gems for the entire internet to see—clips of a house, a brother, a dog, a country—one of those rare trends where everyone comes together to honor something real, to share their life stories in the comments and question how odd it is that everything, and everyone, eventually becomes a story. How difficult it is to see someone or something become a story when it did not have to. How confusing it is to ask: Why?

Today (as I am writing this: January 22nd, 2025) marks a year since my grandmother passed. Before writing that sentence, I thought to myself: Haven’t I written about this enough? Yet here I am again, crying. I have cried, and I will continue to cry, because grief, I realize, is not something that we graduate from. It is a topic we will continue to learn about in the grand course of life, and it is not always sad.

Over the past year, I have had many dreams about my grandmother. Typically, I will notice her in a room or a house. Everything will feel normal until I realize that she is supposed to be gone, that her being right in front of me is a miracle, at which point I pulse with the urgent desire to talk to her, to ask her everything, to tell her everything. In some of those dreams, I do: I tell her about my life, I ask her about hers. In one, I interviewed her. I asked how she felt on her wedding day. What song they played when she walked down the aisle. In that dream, she told me it was Over the Rainbow, which was always her favorite song, the hawaiian ukulele fluttering in the air like a flock of island birds, and then she started to sing it:

Where trouble melts like lemon drops…

High above the chimney top…

That's where you'll find me…

As she sang, I realized that she was talking about herself. That she was, finally, somewhere over the rainbow. I woke up in a convulsion of tears, barely able to realize that I was awake, thinking: She is gone.

There are ways, of course, that the people we lose will always remain here (in our hearts, in our minds), but it is true: They are gone. I have had enough dreams to know that, enough tears to prove it, but still, sometimes, I will find myself doing something ordinary like watering a plant or watching television, and it is as though I have forgotten, as though, in the current of my everyday life, I still expect her to be here, and then I will remember. I think that is what grief is: remembering. Remembering them, remembering that time, remembering us. Remembering that everything, in the end, will be something to remember. Remembering, then, to take more photos before it is over.

The thing is, I did take photos. I took videos. I took voice memos. Every year, I tend to take more of all three than most people take in their entire lives. Ever since I got a camera, I became obsessed with documenting. Obsessed with trying to capture things before they got lost. Yet the trick of life is that we cannot capture everything, no matter how many photos we take. In the end, it is not about the photos, not about the videos or the ways in which we preserve our stories. It is about the way we lived inside of them before they became just stories.

“dtmf” is a wonder of a song. It flashes through the temperatures of life like the soundtrack of our own. With a melody designed for nostalgia and a chorus that flickers between grief and hope, it is impossible not to reminisce, not to want to sing along. It is impossible not to want to scream it, at the top of our lungs, with our friends, to our families, inside of our own heads, humming along the shapes of places and people lost into some form of spiritual permanence, because it reminds us, just like grief does, to pay more attention. To witness the interiority of our lives.

Maybe the title of the song should be something else: “dpma,” debí prestar más atención. All I want for all of us is to pay more attention. ☷

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

Subscribe now

With love,

Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane

Join the party on: Instagram 🪩 TikTok 🪩 Twitter 🪩 YouTube 🪩 Twitch 🪩 Website

However, this birthday feels a bit different. Over the past few weeks, an aversion towards my new age appeared like a tsunami in the desert: I am turning 30. Although I have never been one to over-identify with a number, leaving one decade for another has transpired a cocktail of discomfort in my gut, a mixture of doubts whose emotions feel familiar, yet whose acoustics only rung clear as of recent: Where am I going? What am I doing? Is this enough? I have carried these questions throughout my life like cryptic stones in a bag, stones I thought I had to carry until I discovered their meaning, only attempting to readjust their weight when not doing so risked falling apart.

But here is another question: What if I drop the stones altogether? What if I take them out of the bag and decrypt them for good, let them summon whatever great insecurity lurks in the deep beyond and look the monster straight in the eye. In doing so, the stones might polish into crystal, the questions might refine into reflections: on fear, on hope, on self.

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When I first sat down to plan my thirtieth birthday, one part of me wanted to organize something grand while another wanted to disappear. I felt unprepared to awaken in the age that so many of us grew up equating with adulthood, a figurative dimension in which our life’s biggest dreams should have already materialized, because no one wants to be a late bloomer. When older, no one wants to ask themselves the question their younger self would have asked, if granted the power of time travel:

Am I who I thought I would be?

When we are in our twenties, we think about growing old as a foreign place. We imagine that when we get there—our thirties, forties or fifties—everything will be different. The popular perception is that everything will be worse. It will be too late to want certain things, let alone pursue them. We think that our happiness and humanity will be defined by the things we did or failed to do, as if we will not be the same people still trying to do certain things and failing at others. So we make promises to ourselves: I will do this before I am thirty, I will have this before I am forty, as if ticking off boxes before a certain age insures us against life’s biggest threat: whether or not we will amount to enough. (Spoiler alert: we are enough.)

The thing is, when we get to that place—the “old” that is relative to however old we are now—we tend to feel the same. If not the same physically, then mentally. If not the same mentally, then spiritually. The same being: We are changing. We are growing. We are making mistakes and learning from them. We are excited, hopeful, delusional and bored. We are becoming better people, better at being better to ourselves. Better at realizing that we are already better enough.

Perhaps we never feel old the way we expect to because age is, at its core, a construct of time. A construct within a construct. In categorizing our lives into years and those years into decades, we limit ourselves to a linear story. We think: at 30 I am this, at 50 I will be this, at 70 I will be this, when, in fact, living is a quiet chaos of becoming, nonlinear in its nature. We are never 30 or 50 or 70. We are thirty and five minutes and fifty three seconds. We are fifty and a few weeks. We are seventy and seven months and three days. Our selves and ways of being in the world are born again, and again, and again. In finishing this paragraph, you are different than you were at the beginning.

So if we are always changing, always aging, then what is “old”? Old is relevant. One one hand, sixty is old compared to forty. Forty is old compared to thirty. On the other hand, the selves of our past—us when we were nine, nineteen or twenty nine—are old, too. Perhaps the earliest (youngest) versions of ourselves are actually the “oldest.” They are, after all, the oldest models, the least renewed, the least reinvented. Perhaps as we grow older in age we attain a kind of youth that depends upon our ability to live outside of time’s rigid frames: outside of desires, deadlines and did or did not’s.

At any given moment, we are a culmination of our selves from the past and our selves from the future, the common denominator being our selves now, here, in the present. The present is all that matters.

As I ask myself the grand question: Am I who I thought I would be? The only answer that comes to mind is: I am who I want to be.

Ten years ago, when I turned twenty, I sat down to envision everything I aspired towards over the decade to follow. Revisiting that document, there are many aspirations I did not reach, many that make me laugh and cringe: collaborate with Beyoncé (never got to thank her), win nobel prize (what?), become a published author (still love that for us). My first instinct was to rush to finish everything I thought I would have finished by now, as if life were a test that we could cram for the night before, realizing, too late, that we had spent too much time enjoying ourselves than studying for what mattered. So I started writing Beyoncé an email—until I remembered that I did not have her email address.

Of course, what matters is that we enjoyed ourselves. That we decided we deserved joy, allowed ourselves to embody it, instead of waiting for someone else’s permission—the most conservative administrator most often being ourselves.

I suppose, if there is any intention I have for this new decade of my life, it is to give myself the permission to claim it as my own. The permission to wake up and feel: this is my life that I am living, a life filled with so much magic and whimsy that it is mine and mine only—our lives are only ours to live. The permission to be the hope and awe that I have spent the past decade searching for, even if I was lucky to find it in many of the people and places I learned to call home.

Looking back on these past ten years, I am proud—of myself, my friends and my family. Of all of us. I am amazed at what we are capable of when we befriend our intuition, when we swap fear for trust.

My twenties were laced with an urgency to live, as if life was a sport that I could become the best at. I was obsessed with finding meaning and joy as if it was the center of a cinnamon roll, so as to sink my teeth into its flesh and share the sweetness with everyone else. I moved abroad three times, said yes to everything and dove into risk without a second thought. While my approach was a bit demanding, eager to the point of impatience, there was some magic in believing that there was a difference between living and living.

The only issue with the gusto of my earlier years is that it grew from a misinformed idea: that I needed to live before I got old, that the time would eventually run out. The funny thing is that time is always running, that is how we designed it. If we try to chase after it, we will always feel behind.

I realize, now, that there is no behind. In fact, there is rarely ever a need to run. If we stop running, we might see the only thing that matters, the thing that never changes, no matter what decade we’re in: We are here. We get one chance to be here, to know what it is like to be here, to know what it is like to be us, and to share all of its tastes and colors with the people who make here into home.

This is my chance, this is your chance, this is our chance. ☷

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

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With love,

Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane

Join the party on: Instagram 🪩 TikTok 🪩 Twitter 🪩 YouTube 🪩 Twitch 🪩 Website

In the first ten days of the new year, we have witnessed ongoing layoffs, a major communication hub (TikTok) threatened by the US government with little to no basis, and the tragic blaze of Altadena and Los Angeles on the news, social media and messages from friends and family. What I feel the most, walking into 2025, is that we need reminders more than we need resolutions. Reminders that everything is okay until it is on fire. Reminders that the fires will eventually go out. That everything will be okay again, even if it seems impossible.

Even if all we can think about right now is what the fuck, the bites will go down. Things will get better. At least, that is what I tell myself.

Walking into 2025, I felt surprised at the modesty of my emotions. Typically, I approach the new year with zeal and a side of oversized hope: that this year will be the year for exponential growth (more exponential than last year’s), that all of the gargantuan goals I noted for myself on the eve’s prior would miraculously manifest over the next twelve months, and that, with a clean calendar, anything was possible. The world could be better. What I felt this year more resembled the affability I now experience while boarding a plane. Like: “Oh, here we go again,” remiss of the helium gut feeling of going somewhere, anywhere.

I wondered: Maybe some years aren’t meant for zeal. Maybe, at a certain age, it fades like the elasticity of our skin.

On the way to the airport, our cab driver played music from the 2000’s: Rihanna, Rihanna, Rihanna, and then a Calvin Harris song that I used to binge listen to in the 10th grade. I thought about how long it had been since I fell in love with that song, how hopeful I felt whenever I listened to it. I recalled driving down the empty, olive-dotted roads of my hometown and feeling the Northern Californian breeze hiccup through my half-opened window: Anything was possible, because nothing had really happened. There was college. There was growing up. There was living in a city for the first time.

I questioned what, exactly, made me so excited. What happened to the silver, glimmering part of my brain that smiled at the simple thought of: What if? If anything, I have more than I did back then: more freedom, more knowledge, more self-compassion, more love, more money. And then I realized I was leaving something out of the list: More expectation.

As I have grown up, it seems I have acquired, like a taste for alcohol, an affinity towards spending more time in the bittersweet expectation of the future than unfolding, in the present, life’s unpredictable wonders. I book my flights four months in advance, plan things out to a tee and consider the unknown akin to a dangerous place I should not venture back to, even though it was once a place I loved. As we grow older, we learn to plan. We learn to live in the future: do this then do that, get this then that. We think that if we plan our lives out perfectly, we will be perfect too, become a version of ourselves that is better than the version that we are, which is, it seems, the ultimate human illusion: that self realization will make us whole. And if we are whole, if we are perfect, if we are better, everything might be okay—even as the world burns around us.

Watching clips of Altadena on fire between check-ins with friends and family, I thought: Is it growing up that makes us jaded, or is it growing up in this particular time? Everything is on fire again, but this time it is worse, it is different than before—severe drought conditions and abnormal winds have amounted to over $135 billion in losses—and what is most confusing about this all is that things feeling worse and unprecedented is, perhaps, the only reliable thing about life today.

Helpful Links:

• Resources regarding aid for the LA fires

• Donations that will reach those impacted by the fires fastest can be made through the Wildfire Recovery Fund, American Red Cross or the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation

• Many affected by the fires have started GoFund me campaigns

On New Year’s Eve in a queer bar in Medellin, I asked a question I often ask strangers to generate a response we might not write down on an immigration form (current address, occupation, location of birth): What are you most excited about? A friend of a friend told me that they barely made it through 2024. They were just excited about making it through another year.

I realized, then, that many of us barely made it through the last year. 2024 was difficult for anyone who cares about genocide, LGBTQ+ rights, or the future of America. While I laughed at several memes that depicted us stumbling from one year into another, I did not register—in my own words—that 2024 had been traumatic, nor the likelihood that most of us are still processing what happened (and continues to).

In the first week of 2025, there is already more to process. There are already a lot of people who are feeling like they might barely make it through this year.

I have been trying to understand how entire neighborhoods, let alone cities, can be burned to ash. I have been trying to understand what this means, when the shapes and settings of the stories of our lives that we so closely associate with who are suddenly cease to exist. Perhaps it is impossible to understand this type of trauma until it reaches us at our doorsteps. In many ways, as residents of today, we are simply waiting until it reaches us: a fire, a hurricane, a tornado, a war, displacement or unemployment or the lack of affordability that living seems to follow on an upward curve.

Existential burnout is a double edged sword: With so much going on in the world, the world needs us to participate, to believe in better, to believe in ourselves. The world needs us to recognize that not everything is terrible and not everything is bad, that we are good enough ourselves, so that we may live as active participants of our own lives—and each other’s. Yet doing so is difficult when the world itself seems to be broken at the seams.

I can only imagine the grief associated with the loss of home. The loss of an entire country. The loss of a neighborhood. The loss of a garden, kitchen, hall and window you know better than the words Monday and Friday. How do we start over again? We do, because we have to, because we want to. Because, with the help of each other, we can.

The trite things are always true: The best that we can do is do with what we have. The most beautiful part about being human is that, though we are unable to direct the course of our lives in any guaranteed way, we are able to direct the way we experience life itself. When faced with the devastating effects of natural disasters that have become supernatural in the wake of the climate crisis, all there is to do is help each other. I think that is what we do best. At least, that is what I am telling myself.

The thing about being young is that we do not know as much. We are able to wonder about the world because we have yet to come to expect certain things: that big corporations lay waste to the land, that the people suffer the consequences caused by corporations, that there are more of us who want change than the people who have the power to make it. Now, in a time where it seems that there is too much to know—too much that we already know and do not act on—maybe, in order to keep fighting, to start again, to bring hope into the new year, we need to tell ourselves things that might be true. Things that can be true, even if it is difficult to imagine along the life we see today: a new home rebuilt stronger, a nation reborn into a better future, a time where we are all good enough because we feel so, because we remind each other.

Things that can afford us a brighter outlook on life, so as to light the way forward. ☷

Note: This week’s edition of Sleepover was sent a week late. Newsletters will resume as normal (with the next out on Thursday, January 23rd).

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

Subscribe now

With love,

Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane

Join the party on: Instagram 🪩 TikTok 🪩 Twitter 🪩 YouTube 🪩 Twitch 🪩 Website

Here, I have put together a list of all of the things I love about Christmas. I have compiled the best movies and songs and snacks that roast the chestnuts in my heart and keep my nuts from cracking. These findings are comprised of decades of research, playing said movies and songs so many times that it is still up to debate whether or not my partner Mijael married himself into an insane asylum. Mijael might say that I am obsessed with Christmas, that my relationship to it is abnormal, which is another way of saying that he is a loser in the competition of holly jolly joy. I should acknowledge that I most likely inherited my love for Christmas from my dad, who taught me that it was okay to play Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas in October and leave the lights up till spring, and who, after eating an entire tub of ice cream or plate of peanut butter cookies, boasts a close resemblance to Santa Claus.

Christmas is everything. Christmas came before science. Christmas is the original god, the original sin—besides the fact that it is Jesus’ birthday, which seems irrelevant, considering I am not religious—it is everything good and bad and beautiful and boring: giving (gifts, time with family) and sacrificing (money, sanity) and performing acts of gluttony (gorging ourselves with food and wine, laying around doing absolutely nothing) all at once. It is capitalism at its worst and best: inboxes glittered with scam-worthy sales from companies that deserve a slop full of side-eye from anyone who cares about the climate crisis, gifts wrapped under the tree from family members who rarely return until pine can be smelled around the house. It is family and friendship, solitude and reflection, and—contrary to popular belief—the season with the lowest suicide rates of the year. Periodt!

Without further ado, here are my favorite things about Christmas, the best Christmas movies, the best Christmas songs, and the best Christmas snacks…

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☃︎ favorite xmas things ☃︎

Stocking gifts that you will never use — The magic of a stocking gift resides not in the quality of the gift itself, but the act of burying your hands into a decorated sock sized for an ogre and pulling out random trinkets, things you’ve seen laying around the house and things you may or may not have gifted someone in your family the year before. Another bottle opener, thanks mom! Socks as thin as a free condom from a college fair, thanks Santa Claus (who is also mom)! A candy bar that I saw laying around the house, thanks Santa’s Elf (who is still mom)!

Awkward conversations with relatives you should know better — Family is a funny thing. On one hand, it’s like: We’re blood! Some of us have known each other longer than the dwindling career of she who shall not be named, some of us have seen each other grow from the half-personality of a teenager into the full personhood of an adult. On the other hand, it’s like: We’re family, time to act like the versions of ourselves that don’t scream at 4AM in the club or talk about getting pegged in a bathroom or lay on the floor and stare at the ceiling after work (hoping that it will fall and crush us) or vent about our kids and our husbands and our lives over several glasses of wine. How have you been since last Christmas? Good, you? Good. Silence and several sips of cheap champagne. My favorite part about the awkward conversations, though, is that they only seem awkward when you, yourself, are the awkward one—or, in my personal history, fourteen or seventeen or twenty years old, unable to sit with silence—or simple conversation—in comfort. Now that I am approaching thirty and the end of the prime of my life comfortable confidence of adulthood, it feels like I do know my relatives, even if there is still room for all of us to know each other better. That’s what the awkward conversations are for. Awkward buds turn into beautiful blossoms!

Flirting with diabetes — There is nothing more Christmas than wondering if you are shedding off a few years of your life by shoving another goliath sized slice of pie into your mouth, sandwiched between two cookies shaped like snowmen (now a slush of sugary dough) and another bite of stuffing (now a slush of salty starch). As my partner always says, once you have something sweet you should have something salty, and once you have something salty you should have something sweet, and by that logic you can spend the next three days continuing to shuffle between the dessert and the mains until nothing remains of the Christmas dinner or your stomach ruptures and you die, whichever comes first.

The holiday hangover (on the 26th or 25th, depending on when you celebrate) — The only redeemable hangover is the hangover after Christmas, precisely because our ability to flirt with diabetes remains. Christmas dessert is one step below Christmas dessert the next morning. I have never robbed a bank or slept with a married man (aside from my married man—AYYYY), but I imagine that both still fall short of the delicious itch of naughtiness satisfied by eating pie for breakfast. You crawl into the kitchen in a tired slouch, pour yourself a hot cup of coffee and take your seat at the table of holiday degenerates, shoveling another piece of the pie or cake or strudel you regretted eating two servings of the night before. Today, there is no regret. Today was designed for a hangover. It is still cold and everything still looks festive, but it’s over. The presents are opened and the guests are gone. It is both depressing and fulfilling at once: Now we have to wait another year. In a few days, we will walk into another year. For now, though, it is just us and whoever we are with, the television and a day where we all are—or should be—disintegrating into the couch. If you wake up early and go for a run the day after Christmas, you are, by all means, a certified psychopath.

Primary colors barfed on everything everywhere all at once — Growing into this day and time is depressing and scary and unprecedented: all time high temperatures, a buffoon made of Cheez Its for a president, tornadoes and tsunamis in California, multiple genocides carried out by the Israeli state without consequence. You know what is not unprecedented? The colors red, blue, green, yellow and orange, splattered around houses, trees, walls and shelves like flowers in the spring. We need a break. We cannot be saturated by the bleak reality of the world every day of the year. If there is anything magical about Christmas, it is that it brings a magic we can expect: a feeling, an event, an aesthetic. It adds some stability to the otherwise very unstable human experience. You know what lifts me out of the existential spiral of wondering if, and how, the climate crisis will ever be reversed if the major corporations that fuel the majority of C02 emissions are never held responsible? Iridescent lights strung around poorly chopped branches. A string of illumination around an ashy storefront. Lights here, there, everywhere. (Do not talk to me about how iridescent lights are less environmentally friendly. If 100 companies have been responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, THE PEOPLE GET TO HAVE THIS.)

⋆⁺₊ best xmas movies ⁺₊⋆

The Elf — New York on Christmas. Will Ferrel and Zooey Deschanel. That actress who always plays the mom and does it so well. Daddy issues fixed in 97 minutes. No further explanation needed.

Happiest Season — THIS MOVIE ROCKS. The first time I watched it, I was like: Oh! OH! WE HAVE OUR OWN CHRISTMAS MOVIE. TWO LESBIANS AND A GAY TAKE THE SPOTLIGHT! I adore this movie with all of my heart. While it does lack representation (the whole cast is white as snow, the majority of them—besides Kristen Stewart and Dan Levy are straight), there is warmth to be found in seeing a queer narrative on the screen, especially in the setting of a holiday rom-com. Year after year, this film is becoming my go-to over my other favorite pastimes, the biggest of which follows…

The Holiday — Despite my coming into a sense of Asian and queer personhood over the past several years, I still manage to watch this movie at least five times before November. It is a cis-typical, white Christmas movie, but it vibrates a part of me that no other movie can. Maybe it is the too-relatable narrative of unrequited love that starry-eyed, calm-souled Kate Winslett suffers through, a narrative I struggled with for the twenty years of my closeted life. Or maybe it is the familiarity of Cameron Diaz as an actress herself, flooding my heart with warm memories of watching Charlie’s Angels one Christmas with my grandparents in Lake Tahoe, promptly falling in love with Lucy Liu (the kind of love where you want to be someone, not sleep with them). Or maybe it is seeing the warm, festive weather of Los Angeles contrasted with the cozy depths of a British winter. Or maybe it is the soundtrack, created by Hans Zimmer and Heitor Pereira, not that those names mean anything to me, considering I just googled them, but it is, by all means, an incredible soundtrack, which makes sense, since I recognized Hans Zimmer as a famous name. The songs Gumption and For Nancy were composed for the people who believe in little moments that feel larger than life—sipping coffee on a Tuesday morning, running with your best friend in the dead of winter from one bar to another, dancing around the kitchen beneath the scent of half-baked pastries, reading a newsletter from your favorite person in the entire world.

Love, Actually — Here is the only other cis-typical, white Christmas movie I will watch over and over and over. For me, it falls one step below The Holiday, yet still sits amongst the most iconic holiday films: the cast, the story lines, the irresistible London aesthetic! I love Emma Roberts more than any other British actress whose name I can actually remember, not to mention Kiera Knightly or the man who was also Snape or Hugh Grant, who I definitely fell asleep fantasizing to several nights as a teenager, though now he kind of just looks like a saggy rottweiler in the form of a man, my original infatuation as lost as the plot of the sex stand-ins who fall in love with each other. The fourth time Mijael and I watched it, Mijael was like: why are they even in the movie? And even though I was ready to cuss him out and deliver a seven hour thesis as to why every story mattered, I realized: Oh, why are they in the movie? And then there is the obvious tear-jerking compilation of airport scenes from Heathrow, a montage that spoke to my soul when I recently picked up my mother, father and mother-in-law from the Benito Juarez airport last month. There is so much anticipation built up behind waiting for someone behind the gate, watching other people—families, couples, kids, adults—wait for their loved ones, too. Even thinking about it makes me want to SEEP FROM MY EYES. It’s like, WOW: HERE WE ALL ARE, JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE WITH EACH OTHER!

The Grinch (2018) — The original Grinch is an amazing movie, but the animated version with the soundtrack by Pharell speaks to me on another level. The way that Cindy Liu’s character evolved into a badass, fearless child? The way that the Grinch and his dog somehow became beautiful and aesthetic, as opposed monstrous and gross? The way that the animation itself comes to life with every speck of snow and lick of light!? 10/10.

The Christmas Movie — I am including this so no basic bitches whine their basic bitchc complaints. The Christmas Movie is probably the movie I associate most with my childhood, even though I don’t really like it that much. All I know is that it played every single year on repeat on cable (and then satellite) television, which means I have seen it 1,000 times.

Single All the Way — An honorable mention, considering it is one of the few queer (read: gay) Christmas movies available (unless you’re on Pornhub watching santa fuck an elf). In all honesty, this movie is not amazing, but it is a) studded with scenes of Jennifer Coolidge being Jennifer Coolidge and b) gay! Which means that it is enough, for the sake of representation and sprinkling the presence of Queen Coolidge herself into your holiday weekend.

Smiley’s (Series) — This is the only series on the list because every other recommended Christmas series on Netflix seems to be the same story but in different languages with different actors, and it’s like…Why? Why do I need to watch a hetero Swedish Christmas series in the first place? And then the same hetero series in Italian? That’s not the representation we want, Netflix! Luckily, we have Smiley’s: a beautiful story about two gay men who fall in love in Spain and stumble over their insecurities, all the way up to Christmas (and New Year’s).

❅ go-to xmas playlists ❅

Here are my ten favorite Christmas songs, selected for variety.

Here is my favorite Christmas playlist to throw on when I am feeling too manic and in need of a calm-me-down.

Here is my favorite Christmas playlist to throw on when I want to celebrate Christmas with friends and family.

✩ legendary xmas snacks ✩

Sugar-free Hot Cocoa (raw cocoa powder + hot milk) — I know what you’re thinking: You organic, grass-fed, California cunt. SUGAR-FREE cocoa!? Since when was it a crime to enjoy our Hershey’s hot chocolate instead of wallowing in self-hatred as we sip on bitter ass cow juice mixed with raw cocoa powder, the fuck? But hear me out: If it’s sugar-free, if it is literally just cocoa with milk, you can drink SO MUCH OF IT. You can drink this hot cocoa at every hour of the day. And the benefits of raw cocoa powder!??? GIRL. DO YOU EVEN KNOW!? RAW COCOA POWDER is packed with PROTEIN, ANTIOXIDANTS, MINERALS and THEOBROMINE, which sounds like Theo James, who I think about whenever I am not thinking about Mijael. AKA skin on fleek, ass getting phatter in all the right places so Theo James might actually one day notice you. Milk itself has enough sugar in it for the combination to taste delicious, and instead of dosing yourself with heinous amounts of fructose you’re dosing yourself with NATURE’S NECTAR. It is important to note that I am saying COCOA powder, not CACAO powder, which is literally bitter AF, more Timothee Chalamet with a bald head looking like Dobby from the streets than Theo James with his thick candy cane dick forearms and beautiful forehead.

Star-shaped shortbread cookies — I imagine this is like a child’s verison of crack cocaine (because I have never done crack cocaine, not because I am no longer a child).

Sugar cookies made by your mom because they were made by your mom — Periodt. Or if not your mom, then someone who has mom energy (which can also be you, queen).

Those oreo-like cookies with chocolate around them — JESUS SNOWMEN WITH BIG ORANGE CARROTS (BOC), these cookies are so good. I do not remember the last time I fell THIS in love with a commercial cookie since those frosted animal crackers that we fiended over like cocaine in grade school. I suppose the secret here is a mound of chocolate around a cookie. ‘Tis the season to sugar coat EVERYTHING. ☷

Note: This week’s edition of Sleepover was sent a little early, because…Well, it would have been depressing to send a letter about Christmas after Christmas. Moving forward, we will resume with the regular schedule: A new letter every other Thursday!

With love,

Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane

Join the party on: Instagram 🪩 TikTok 🪩 Twitter 🪩 YouTube 🪩 Twitch 🪩 Website

At first, I thought that I could list out all of the things that happened, as if to immortalize them across the public threads of the internet. I could tell the story from my experience, how it felt to stand up in front of the people I love and share how much Mijael means to me, but I think most of us already understand what a wedding is, the purpose of one and how it plays out.

Besides, I already jotted down manic notes the week after it happened in an attempt to combat the natural decomposition of memory.

What I want these words to piece together is the part of it all that I did not expect: the feeling. Perhaps not of getting married itself, but of witnessing how much we matter to each other. We often think about a wedding as a marriage of two people. White dress and black suit. Open bar and overpriced food. But what I felt, that Friday and Saturday, is that a wedding is a reaffirmation of multiple families, chosen and kin.

Seeing my closest friends from California and Mexico show up for me on a month’s notice, spending time with my family and Mijael’s family under one roof, and witnessing people from all stages of life (high school, college, adulthood—Sacramento, San Francisco, New York, Mexico City) dance, sing and laugh together meant more to me than I could have imagined. Without being too trite, everything felt perfect. Everything felt easy. Everything felt right.

The day of the ceremony, a clarity embellished my consciousness that resembled, oddly, a feeling I dawned upon during the passing of my grandmother. Pure love, but instead of being lined with grief, it was lined with hope—or belief. As I screamed with my best friends in our little apartment in Cuauhtémoc and watched the smiles of my parents glow brighter and longer than I’d ever seen before, all I could think was: Oh, this is it. This is everything. This is everything I have ever wanted and everything I will ever need.

If you think about it, a wedding is the true mirror of a funeral. All of the people we care about are in one place, except the difference is that we are still living to witness the coming together: of friends, of family, of the stories we share and the cross-cut paths of the communities we belong to. Instead of revisiting memories of our loved ones, we create them in the present day. If a funeral is a celebration of a life that ended, a wedding is a celebration of life itself—together—as we are still living.

We titled our wedding la boda chiquita under the impression that the wedding would be a small event, fifteen or so people gathering at a bar after a marriage at the civil registry. Considering the short timeline, we limited the invites to our friends living in Mexico and our closest people from home, a sure fire way to keep it chiquita. However, anyone who knows me knows that my chiquita is relative. The Aquarius nature is to make a big deal out of everything. Hence, la boda chiquita evolving into a three part experience with multiple cakes, meals and close to ninety guests in total.

As we approached the date, many of our friends joked about the name. On one hand, it was nowhere near as small as we originally intended. On the other hand, it was intimate, considering we did not have the time to invite many people outside of Mexico, nor our extended family. Though I am a firm believer of the more, the merrier and there are many people I want to share everything with, the intimacy of the wedding and the irony of the name la boda chiquita felt emblematic of a larger philosophy that I have started to step into as an adult: small moments are what constitute the big joy of life. Or: nothing about life is “small.”

The morning of the wedding, a wide smile remained laminated across my lips. I allowed myself to taste the coffee in my cup and see the joy on our family’s faces when we mouthed each other good morning. I allowed myself to melt into the music singing from my earphones as I biked to our apartment. I allowed myself to smile and scream and laugh as I breathed in the bright of the thought: I AM GETTING MARRIED!

I realize now, some days after the wedding, that I can continue to allow myself bliss. Any day of the year, I can choose to look in the mirror and smile, thinking: I AM ALIVE! I AM MARRIED TO A KIND KING! I HAVE A ROOF OVER MY HEAD! I GET TO SHARE LIFE WITH PEOPLE I LOVE! I GET TO EAT DESSERT FOR BREAKFAST! CARROT CAKE AND CONCHAS AND RED VELVET COOKIES! I GET TO FEEL THE ADOLESCENT FRUSTRATION OF LEARNING A NEW LANGUAGE. I GET TO FEEL HUNGRY AND THEN FULL AND BUZZED AND THEN LUCID. I GET TO HOLD HANDS WITH A BOY THAT I ADORE AND WALK WITH MY FRIENDS AROUND THE CITY.

It’s like: Joy is a current that we always have the option to swim in. Dive in!

A wedding is a celebration of life on a grand scale, yet we have so many opportunities to celebrate life with a grandiose glint every day of the year. Whenever we meet up with a friend or text a loved one or go out for drinks on a Friday night, we have the opportunity to celebrate each other. Whenever we wake up and stare at the ceiling, we have the opportunity to celebrate ourselves: We made it to another day!

I used to think that the best years of our lives were reserved for when our dreams crossed over to reality, for when we became the people we compared ourselves to or achieved the things we sought after with wanting hearts. Standing in the love of my family and friends reminded me that we often mistake our dreams for things when they are, in fact, people. It is a dream come true that we get to spend time with the people we love. It is a dream come true that we get to know anyone over the course of ten years, twenty years, three years or a month. It is a dream come true that we get to be ourselves.

Life is not about attaining what we want, but wanting what we have. If there is anything we should attempt to master, it is paying attention to the things we have before we reach the point where all we can do is want them again: this moment, that moment, a day with ourselves at this age, an hour picking out groceries from the supermarket with our father, our mother, our friend.

At twenty nine years old, all I really want to do is show up for the people in my life. If there is anything that my friends and family have taught me, it is how to do just that. The wedding itself was only possible because of them: the mastermind behind my outfit (Lalito), the artists who performed and DJed (Sameya, Juni, Allan, Damian, Liah, Naia), the coordination of the soundsystem (Juni), the absence of archival anxiety afforded by my dear friends who played the photographer (Lu) and videographer (Purnima), the party prep work (Antonio), the flowers and leis (our mothers), the anything-that-helps (our families) and every single one of my friends who offered to carry something somewhere or ask the bartender for more drinks or take care of something we could not take care of ourselves. My favorite part about the wedding was that it felt like an experience we stitched into life together. Having several people come up to me and say “so and so is awesome!” made me feel like we were all the bride and groom. It was a marriage for everyone.

In anticipation of the big day, I expected to be happy, to have fun and to create some core memories. I did not expect to be reinvigorated with an inspiration to live. Mijael and I engraved the words aqui and koko along the insides of our rings, meaning here in Spanish and Japanese. While there have been many moments in my life where I have wanted to escape the here, or where the now did not seem all that magnificent, I know that I will always have a reason to be here—and to want to be here—because of the people in my life. Because of Mijael, because of my parents, because of my friends, because of us all.

As I stepped into my wedding outfit, Lu’s camera surrounding me in a shower of clicks, I thought about the photographs of my parents getting married themselves, about the ethereal space between them today and the versions of them in their thirties. It struck me how quickly the seasons repeat themselves, turning frames into pastimes. Us now into us then. When the now becomes then, the only thing we will care about—all of us—is that we looked upon each other with awe. That we taught each other what it means to love. That we knew, to our cores, that the biggest and brightest parts of life were born from the smallest decisions, decisions we had at our neural tips every single day: to look life in the eyes and embrace it for all its colors. Green, blue, yellow, pink, purple, black, white.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming! I decided to skip one edition of this newsletter due to personal events, AKA getting engaged and married in one month. With that brief hiatus, Sleepover has returned (every other Thursday). ☷

With love,

Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane

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Trump is the American president. No matter how many articles I read in an attempt to understand how that statement is a descriptor of reality, as opposed to an absurd once possibility, I come to the only conclusion I can: This is where we are. And after spending a week in a haze of panic and sap of anxiety, cold and unprocessed and suffocating, I am attempting to understand the only question left that seems to matter: Where do we go from here?

When Trump became president in 2016, I experienced a shattering. What seemed impossible to my twenty one year old brain suddenly became the foreground of the country I walked in. Above all, I felt angry. I felt eager to fight and understand, understand how this could happen. For four years, the anger grew and took on different shapes, looked like grief and hopelessness on certain days, action and revolution on others, and I continued to try to understand how this could happen: Black death, Asian hate, police brutality set against a growing budget, despite public demands for divestment, the mismanagement of a global pandemic and human rights violations against the people who deserve rights the most: trans women, trans men, anyone who looks Muslim, asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants.

November 6th was less of a shattering as it was a solidification of what it means to exist in human society. Of what it means to live in the United States. As naive as it may sound, the first thought that appeared to me was that the world will never be the world we imagined: there will never be a world in which everyone believes a woman has a right to her body, in which everyone believes a body deserves to breathe no matter how it dresses or who it loves, in which everyone believes that equity should be the goal, as opposed to self-preservation. This is something that has taken me a long time to swallow. And yet, it is true. There will always be bigotry. There will always be hate. So again, I ask the question: Where do we go from here?

Do we distrust every person around us, considering the majority of the vote went to Trump? Do we scream and fight? Do we evolve the 1514% surge in Americans looking to move abroad after Trump’s victory to a 1514% surge in Americans leaving the country?

The reality is that most people will not leave. The reality is that America is embedded in our lives like shine in silk, like plastic in society, a political and socioeconomic machine that reverberates across the everyday privileges Americans live on a daily basis: our currency, our passports, our opportunities at financial mobility. These are, of course, privileges that disproportionately benefit some over others. The reality is that the world is disproportionate. The reality is that some people do not care.

Recognizing what is real is sometimes depressing. However, doom leads us nowhere. Skepticism and disbelief—that the world will never change, that we have no chance at trying—is useless. It helps no one. And it convinces the individual that they are just a speck in an ocean, incapable of shifting the current, which can become the deadliest current itself: inaction and apathy towards human injustice, created by millions of specks that decided it was better to give up than to try.

Having asked myself How did we get here? over and over and over again makes me start to wonder if I am missing the point. So I sit here and ask myself: What would it be like to be a Republican? What would it be like to have voted for Trump? It is easy to label millions of people as uneducated, bigoted and blind. It is more difficult to look at those millions of people and wonder what it would be like to be them. When I consider this, I consider how easy it would be. How easy it would be to blame the world for my problems, to frame other people as aberrations to an otherwise unbothered existence: immigrants, queers and people with skin tones that hold more dimension than the dough of a hot dog bun threaten white American life. We threaten the reality of the people who think that America is, and should be, for one type of person: white and cis and male, despite the country having been built by everyone else—as well as people who mistake themselves as one of them, failing to see that they are puppets.

Blame, puppets, uneducated. These are all fighting words that both parties use. When I start to think about the nature of the Republican mind, I am reminded that it resembles, in many ways, the nature of American politics at large. Democrats blame republicans, Republicans blame democrats. When I take a closer look at the social atmosphere of politics, it is shocking how much it reminds me of adolescent behavior. Of saying things we do not believe simply because others are saying the same thing. I wonder how much of politics is groupthink, how much of bigotry is born from wanting to belong to one side because that is the only side you were taught, because belonging to that side means that you belong to something. 

The us versus them mentality is boring. I am bored of wondering why, why people vote one way, why people want my people dead, why people believe they have the right to be assholes. What I am interested in is how we can save each other. How we can make sure that our rights are not pummeled into dust. This is real: Donald Trump is our president. Again.

Something I keep hearing is that ignorance is the problem. That miseducation is the deadliest political weapon. It is clear that many miseducated people voted for Trump. However, many miseducated people voted in general. The fact is that our institutions have been, and are, failing us. The fact is that most of us are not civically engaged to the point where we are able to do anything beyond knowing, knowing that we think this and they think that. The fact is that most of us are tired. The fact is that it is easier to be broken than to pick ourselves up and question what a fixed world looks like, considering we have never seen one. We have always needed to fight. The American experiment—and the experiment of capitalism at large—was never equitable, never just. I think, on some level, many of us still need to accept this, in order to do the fighting in the first place.

It will never be perfect. But it can be better. So let’s start from there.

Every day, we have the opportunity to show up and participate in civic life. Every day, over the past four years, I have personally turned down that invitation. I write and post and speak up, but I do not show up in the way that I used to, organizing in little rooms in New York in an attempt to fight for the environment, for asylum seekers, for the queer community. Right now, America needs us to show up. That is all it needs. It does not need us to find an answer as to why people voted for Trump, it does not need us to feel some sense of closure over what happened on November 6th. It just needs us, period.

We need to get together. We need to scramble around the messy art of organizing and do whatever it is that we can. And I do not think it has to be as difficult or challenging as it sounds. A somber occasion can be made into something beautiful, as long as we remember how to laugh, how to dance, how to see each other and recognize that we are—and never have been—alone in any of this.

When Donald Trump was elected, I wanted to leave. Leave the world and find a new one. I felt grateful that I was not in the country when the results came out and reconsidered returning anytime soon. However, the flight only gets you so far. There will always be something else to run away from. When we fight, we learn how to survive. We learn how to face what is scary in order to reach something better.

I want to fight, to show up to the party, no matter how tragic that party is, because all of my friends are there, all of the people I care about, the families and faces and aspirations I have yet to know that so closely resemble my own. I want to be in America in order to show up.

Even if the America we have been fighting for has never been real, it is made real in the fight. In the fighting, we make the most of what we have. We try our best. That is how I want to live my life. ☷

With love,

Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane

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I have been saving this letter in an attempt to answer that question, to stumble upon some outline or story that might express the excitement that sits at the root of my soul whenever I think about this. I tried to come up with a few introductory statements, the kinds of sentences that start a novel and make you shiver with presence. Life is… Love is… But I have never been skilled at conjuring clear hypotheses. The only thing I am naturally good at is having a lot of them, and questioning the ones that we were taught to believe.

The hypothesis most proposed by humankind is that romance is our golden purpose. That every Romeo needs his Juliet and every Juliet needs to sift through a thousand Romeos until she finds the right one. That until we find, or are ourselves found, we know only a slice of the life that exists, because True Love is a different thing, an ephemeral and magical beast that requires the right place and time, what some often call “fate.”

Like most queer people, I was neither Romeo nor Juliet, and I learned to feel as though I was fated into something wrong. Even though I believed in the golden purpose as a child, falling in love with love through books and films, the media of the 90’s and 2000’s included no characters that I could play, so I refashioned its shape into the vehicles of friendship, family and self-realization—things I could actually relate to. Romance, for me, was at first impossible and then secondary. I thought that I had to fall in love with a woman until I did not, at which point I had already redefined what falling in love meant (with friends, with family, with the process of becoming), and I did not think about falling in love at all.

Until, one day, I did, sitting with myself in the shared TV room of an apartment I moved into in Mexico City, which is, as “fate” might have it, when I met my partner. The rest of my housemates were out, or in their rooms, and it was the first rainy day of the season. I thought to myself, as I finished watching a Christmas movie: I think I am ready to fall in love. I realized that I had never wanted to before, that in all of my previous relationships, I was somewhere else, in my own world, focused on other things. At that point, though, I felt ready, attuned.

I opened the Tinder app and messaged an assortment of people I matched with, knowing too well that I would forget about the conversions and return to the app a year later, as I always did. Except this time I didn’t. I matched with a handsome man who looked like an actor in a Spanish show I binge-watched over the pandemic (Élite) and we talked, unable to meet due to travel and COVID, for the next three months. His tattoos and chiseled face made me swipe right. His thoughtful, playful, excited responses to my (what one might say overly eager) ability to share personal details and random parts of my daily life made me excited to message a stranger. 

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The funny thing about our relationship is that it has taught me more about free will than it has about fate. As a child, I used to think about love in the format of the golden hypothesis: that it was something that happened to us, a miracle that befell the most-deserving in a season of good fortune. Thinking along these lines—that life is a story that occurs on the outside, as opposed to a series of choices we are intrinsic to—is, perhaps, the thing we get wrong the most often. We assume the separation of reality and responsibility with almost everything: love, happiness, success, health. That these are things we get, have or receive, as opposed to co-create through a string of everyday choices. Being in a relationship with Mijael over the past three years has taught me how to co-create—a life, a relationship, a community—and allow myself to grow in the process of creation. It has taught me that a relationship is not built by a magical meeting of two people, Romeo and Juliet. Rather, it is built through the art of showing up in our everyday lives and making little decisions.

Here is one of ours: WE ARE GETTING MARRIED!

Those four words form a phrase neither of us expected to say. Marriage is something that Mijael and I used to talk about the way my generation talks about going to church (hard pass). The institution always seemed a bit old-fashioned to us, an inflated custom that descended from things we were never included in in the first place (the church, social order, gender roles). Until we realized, of course, that making this decision would not only represent building a future together, but enable it. If and when we want to move to the United States (or elsewhere), marriage is a strategic union that enables a path to citizenship. As we thought about marriage through this lens—minus the flowers and ring and mortgage required for a wedding—it all made sense: the union will make it easier for us to continue building a life together, wherever life takes us.

After finding our way to the phrase—we are getting married…we are getting married!—excitement followed like sun after rain. At first, we thought: Let’s do it now! And then we realized that marriage, like all of life’s big events, presents a choice: even though this is a decision between us, it also means something to other people. Which means that it can be something between us and the people that we love. If there is anything I have learned over the past twenty nine years, it is that the biggest opportunity we have in this life is not to do, become, or achieve, rather, it is to expand the ways in which we share life with each other.

First we told our parents, and then our close friends. We decided to plan the legal ceremony for when both of our families are in town (conveniently, we had already planned to host them in the city for Thanksgiving). We thought: we can do the marriage at the courthouse! And then we thought: well, we will want to celebrate after, so maybe we can invite our closest friends to a bar! And then the excitement kicked into mania and I created a seven page Google Doc outlining all of the things we could plan, distinguishing what we are now calling “the little wedding” (taking place over Thanksgiving weekend) and “the big wedding” (to take place in four or five years).

After Mijael had enough time to cope with the fact that he is marrying an aquarius princess—a master of transforming something small into something not-so-small-anymore—the excitement, for me, tumbled into a turn, and I found myself stuck in a bubble of anxiety. The assumptions of the golden hypothesis made me wonder if we were ready for marriage, as if taking this step was supposed to appear somewhere in a series of life events that coincided with self completion. Both of us are still building our careers. I am still looking for a therapist that accepts my health insurance. Neither of us are millionaires. Mijael still has trouble describing what I do for work. I thought: Are we the people we need to be to get married? What if we are premature, like undeveloped infants leaping out of the womb? What if people leave our little wedding and call it cute, modest, thrifty, because we are doing it so unconventionally, pragmatically fast?

I went for a walk with my close friend Claudia and she popped me out of the bubble. She asked me why I wanted to get married, to think about what it meant to us, as opposed to what it meant to society. The answer was immediate: I am excited to grow with Mijael. I am excited for the both of us to continue creating a life together, outside of Mexico or inside of Mexico or anywhere in the world. I am excited for us to move somewhere new and do something scary. I am excited about the nature through which we formed this decision, through a series of conversations where we laughed and questioned and smiled aloud, without expectation or worry, knowing—at the foundation of us—that whatever we’d decide would be right, for it would be a decision made together.

I think that is why I am writing this: It’s like, We are getting married!, but those words mean something different to me than the way the movies or books portray them. It is not about doing it, not about proving our love or becoming husbands after boyfriends or portraying ourselves as a unit to the external world. It is not about reaching a milestone or a graduation on the relational clock. It is something more innate to what I understand love to be, something simple like watching a bud unfurl to a blossom: Here is a person that I love. Here we are together, sharing a life, building new ideas as to what it (life) looks like, knowing each other deeper and wholler every day. Here we are tripping over one another, holding one another, shouting at each other with the faith and courage to be better, brighter or just as we are.

When I think about us, I see light. Black, white, blue, red, yellow, purple, green. I see two people furnishing the interiors of their lives with real wealth, doubts made convictions and insecurities made strengths in conversation, the bright orange feeling of belonging to any place or point in time, because wherever we are, we will have each other. I see dreams that scare and chapters that forsake that bend to the confidence we hold in each other. I see laughter. I see awe. I see hope. I see mistakes, cracks in the ground that give way to stems and branches. I see flowers.

Marriage makes sense to me now. Legally and spiritually. And I realize that this is probably what marriage has meant the entire time, without the fuss of religion or gender, and that this is what my married friends went through themselves. Marriage is another little, big decision in building a life together. A wedding is a celebration of that life.

Last weekend, Mijael and I remixed the tradition of the proposal by planning “proposal days” for one another. I took Mijael on a scavenger hunt around the city, stopping at a Japanese onsen and a Mexican beer festival, “popping the question” with a pair of matching tattoos. Mijael took me to my favorite park in Mexico, decorating the lush grass with an indulgent picnic and a letter he wrote to ask for my hand in marriage. As he read the letter aloud, I started to cry. 

I thought: Here is a person that created something in my true language, English and the written word. Every line he spoke sparked a world in my mind and a memory in my heart, brought up beautiful things I had stored in my brain and perspectives I often forget when lost in the flurry of everyday life. Here is a person that has been by my side for the past three years, who has walked me through grief and held me through angst, who has let me hold their hand and carry their weight when they needed the same in return.

What people do not tell you about love is that it helps you believe in yourself, in ways we all should believe in ourselves already, but those ways are made difficult by life, its trials and traumas and natural currents to doubt. The phrase “you have made me a better person” is trite, yet telling, because that is what people do. We inspire each other.

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To this day, I still do not believe in soulmates. I do not think that any two people are destined to be together, but in the end, that is what it feels like, isn’t it? That we found each other. That some mythical force orchestrated our paths to cross like comets in the sky. What I do believe is that in this life, we have limited decisions. We have limited time, energy, and resources. No matter how abundant and limitless life might be, it means a monumental amount that one person chooses to dedicate their limits to another. That two people choose to expand their limits together.

All of this is a long way of saying that I feel like the most excited person on the planet, marrying Mijael. He is the best person that I know. Whenever I heard other people say these words, I’d think: How cliché, you must not know that many people. But I think I get it now. It is not about one person standing out from the rest, nor possessing exclusive qualities that others lack. It is not about our appearances, personalities, habits or talents. It is about the light that shines inside of us when we spend enough time cherishing another, and when another person teaches us to cherish ourselves.

Knowing Mijael inspires me to know myself, to know my friends and the strangers on the street, to know my family, to know the world. The love I feel for him is sometimes indescribable (hence: 2371 words to say “we’re getting married!”). It envelops the world that I know and expands what it can look like. It reminds me of what it feels like to be a child and makes me excited to grow old. Most of all, though, it makes me eager to be here, living in this cup of life, happy to soak up every ounce of feeling it has to offer. ☷

With love,

Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane

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The nostalgia does not only arrive at the sight of Pokémon. It also arrives when I listen to the timid hum of the street outside as the workday recedes to the evening. It arrives when I think about returning to the house I grew up in and our family room with a once-white carpet and a table covered in crumbs. It arrives on Christmas Eve. Over a long holiday without work. When I find myself on a Saturday afternoon with nothing to do.

If there is one thing I am the most nostalgic about, it is the experience of having nothing to do. Summer nights stretched out by television programs and mornings spent kicking a soccer ball on a field, over and over again, with no intended goal. When was the last time we found ourselves ripe in the bliss of nothing: doing nothing, thinking nothing, wanting nothing?

It seems like the older we get, the more there is to do, think about, and want—maybe there is a point where the wanting regresses, since most of the older people I know seem to be happier with themselves than their less mature counterparts, but alas, I am only turning thirty next year, which is another way of saying that I am not very old and have less responsibility compared to others (no children, no mortgage, no pets, a partner who cooks and cleans more often than I do 😬). However, in the scope of my life, I am the oldest I have ever been, which is another way of saying that, although I have very little responsibility as an almost-thirty year old, I have a lot of responsibility compared to my fifteen year old self. For example, there are almost twenty different “to-do” items stuck in a mundane note on my phone. Some of those items have been there for the past week, some the past month and some the past three years: get the scalp cream from the pharmacy (1 month), create more tiktok videos (2 months), submit health insurance claims (2 weeks), tailor your clothes (3 years), work on poetry book (1 day), organize trip for mom (1 month), practice djing (5 months), get flu shot (3 months), switch PW manager (1 week), finish claudia’s gift (1 month).

When I look at this list every week and realize that I have only added to it, I wonder how it is that there are so many things for us to do. I sit inside of the weird thought that everyone everywhere has too many things to do. That living, as an action, requires a lot of things to do, and everyone who is alive has to take care of these things, independently. We work, exercise, organize and go about our little tasks (or let them fester on growing notes), all at the same time. When I say this, I do not mean to be the gen-z millennial hybrid saying life is so hard! I don’t want to work! Why do I have to do this! I am less overwhelmed than I am curious: How do we manage the business of living?

As probably seen on a Bed Bath & Beyond sign, there is power in perspective. A trend on TikTok highlights the power of gratitude by replacing “I need to” with “I get to,” where creators film mundane aspects of their lives and reframe them in the light of an opportunity, as opposed to a task. Other creators capture little moments that might be considered hassles—like waiting 20 minutes for a taxi to arrive or having to wake up early for work on a Monday—and present them with the intro “what a privilege it is…”: what a privilege it is to not know what to eat for dinner and get to choose, what a privilege it is to feel tired after traveling in an economy seat. These videos jolt recognition in the brain like little hard candies filled with gratitude, reminding us that much of what we experience as stress can be transformed with the trick of insight.

Yet perceiving life’s tasks as little gifts, as opposed to requirements, is not a disappearing act. Life is busy. There are many things to do, and there will continue to be many things to do. While it makes me excited to think that it is a privilege to be alive, that I get to go buy a cream to heal the weird rash on my scalp because my scalp is a healthy, living thing, the yearning to do absolutely nothing still stirs in my gut whenever I encounter anything nostalgic. Every time I see Pokémon—on cards, on TV, on keychains around Mexico City—I think about the days in which Pokémon was my sole purpose, in which building the perfect team of six was the only thing on my mind, the only goal I had for months on end, and in that thought, I yearn for a time in which I can allow something as simple as Pokémon—an obsession unrelated to productive output or getting somewhere advantageous (material, monetary, social), unless that somewhere was the Elite Four—can overtake my life.

That yearning makes me wonder about many things. If, and when, will we be able to do absolutely nothing? If there is no other phase in our lives—aside from childhood—that is unbusy, then how do we begin to live a little less busy in the phases we have left? Is that nostalgia real in the first place? Is there something magical about thinking less, doing less and wanting less that is exclusive to being a kid? 

Of course, as kids, we did do things and think things. We also wanted things, many things: dogs, dolls, Jim from the seventh grade and our high school mechanics teacher. We cried and went through our own traumas. It is not that we were these balls of bliss floating inside of life as if it were a bubble. Nostalgia itself can be considered a miracle born from self-selective memory, in which we idealize the past to construct coherent life narratives that protect us from trauma. It is our mind's means of mending over the ugly, the same way our bodies heal cuts and tears. 

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However, there is something else about this nostalgia that goes beyond selective memory. Even if I know that the bliss of childhood is a trick mirror, there is a hunch I have that things might make more sense—across the board—if I am able to access the mindset I had as a kid. If I am able to stop thinking about the future and outlining how to get there by erasing everything on my to-do list and playing a video game instead. It just feels like, as adults, we have been doing things, thinking things, and wanting things for too long. By looking at nostalgia in the eyes, I might learn something.

Sometimes, when I study the gigantic list of things I want, need, or get to do, I lose track of the plot. The story that all of these tasks tell me is muddled: what does buying antifungal cream have to do with writing a book? What does creating an Instagram Reel have to do with my day job? Nostalgia is not only a mechanism for healing past trauma but also a way of bridging the past with the present. By linking our past and present selves with the power of a memory—or more often, the residue of many—we create a bridge between the two, forming a continuity in our identities that helps us mitigate feelings of disconnect and overwhelm. In other words, nostalgia is nature’s remedy for existential anxiety.

Personally, this tracks. What interests me the most about Pokémon is not Pokémon itself. Rather, it is the idea of being able to pause life, to take a break from everything I think about as an adult and follow my infant instincts instead. To remember who I am and see the life in front of me. These infant instincts are almost always present-focused: stare at the sky, play a game, listen to your partner talk about what he wants to do to his hair for the seven hundredth time, because there is so much here in the present, so much color and joy and love, that it would be a shame to skip over it.

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The art of skipping over is, in many ways, a survival mechanism. At a certain age, we learn to navigate life with a temporal compass—we learn that if we do X we will get to Y, or that in order to get to X we first need to reach W. Without the ability to plan and think ahead, society would rip us apart. Our temporal compass helps set ourselves up for success, however, I fear that many of us live with that compass on overdrive, spending more time in the process of getting from one place to another than we do in any one place itself.

Nostalgia helps us reconnect with the present. It helps us feel the fabric of life that is not stitched by a series of conditional to-do’s. It helps us notice what we might be nostalgic about when we are seventy looking back on thirty, or ninety looking back on seventy. It helps us experience things as they are—not as they might be or could be, based on what we do now.

If I am being honest with myself, I am writing all of this in response to the pressures of growing up. Next year I will no longer be in my twenties, and although that carries no implicit meaning, considering age is just a construct, society adores that construct, so I find myself with a handful of emotions in need of processing. Excitement, doubt and confusion. Insecurity, fear and hope.

There are only a few months left in the year, and these next few months will be busy: visitors, holidays and a big surprise I will share in the next newsletter (🥰). There are goals that I have yet to complete, like finishing the first draft of my book, that I expected to check off in 2024. There are others I have yet to complete, like becoming a published author, that I expected to check off by age 30. Although I understand, intellectually, that there is no such thing as being behind your own life, the anxiety I feel around these goals has led me to slot the majority of my free time this past week towards working on them, cramming my calendar into such a tight schedule that I am, no doubt, driving myself to the point of overwhelm, all in an attempt to catch up.

Catch up to who? To what? To where?

When I glance at Pikachu’s round face, I think about the plump little eight year old me that used to lay on the floor and play Pokémon Yellow for hours. I think about all of the little details I’d like to revisit, if only we could teleport back to a point in time and watch ourselves live, notice everything that life entailed. I think about how I will want to do the same thing when I am older, thinking back to now. How the only person I have to catch up to is myself, the person sitting here, writing this newsletter, looking at my partner, whom I realize I have projected my anxiety towards over the past few days. How I want to hug him and hold him, the same way I want to be hugged and held.

How the only place I have to get to is here. ☷

With love,

Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane

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