7 / Manœuvres

Thank you for checking in! Thank you for being a friend!

Mark your date books, preferably with a sticker, a stamp, or exclamation points, whichever comes easy to your hand. I will help run a few upcoming events at Cincinnati's extraordinary Mercantile Library, and you will need to remember these days to attend. I'd like to see you there.

This Thursday is the second meeting for the Stationery Club, a cordial get-together for fans of journals, hand-written letters, scrapbooks, and planners. It's an invitation to touch paper. At our first gathering in March, more than a dozen folks stopped by to compose personal notes and hang out with fellow stationery appreciators. Someone even shared her end-of-life planner -- her excitement over the book, and her daughter cringing beside her, made the show-and-tell more amusing and less morbid than it sounds. After the April 9 event, the club will come together again May 13.

And on May 28 at the library, I will lead a pop-up where we'll talk about Elaine Castillo's provocative 2018 novel America is Not the Heart. The book follows queer Filipina Geronimo de Vera as she immigrates to the States in the '90s, rebuilding her life after she was captured and maimed for working with communist rebels in the Philippines.

I've never hosted a book discussion! But the cultural book clubs at the Mercantile inspired me, and I hope to produce a series that explores works by Filipino authors someday. I want to try out the idea and test local interest with this one-off. So if you can be there, or if you can reply and suggest any advice for running a book club, I'd feel more confident about this assignment I've taken on.

And if distance or the calendar works against you, denies your attendance, we will find another time we can meet. But mark the dates regardless, in the same way you reserve a small space in your heart for a favored face. If you return to those pages later in search of another appointment that slipped from your memory, when the marks catch your eye, resist the impulse to sigh over missed dates. Consider instead that someone reached out to you and invited you to spend time with them, had also saved those days for you, held a small space in their heart for your favored face. It feels nice, right?

A few dope things that have been on my mind:

1. Zine making workshops - After decades of reading zines, I made my first one at a workshop last month. Rummaging through the supplied materials, I found magazine pages about Frankenstein's monsters and photos that signaled defiance, so I fashioned a booklet about disobedient geometry, a phrase from an offbeat movie Alexis and I recently watched, The Bride! (2026, dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal). I see a lot of these workshops advertised, usually at libraries or arts centers, some lasting a couple of hours, others multi-day affairs. Look for one that's close to you and that matches the time/effort you want to commit, and touch paper.

2. $10 plays - Our regional theater Playhouse in the Park runs a promotion where you can score a ticket for $10 instead of the typical $40-100+ price. These are often for great seats -- the two I picked up this year for Little Women and Mrs. Christie sat centered in the first rows of the alphabet. The catch is the theater announces the sales just a day before the showings, and you must buy your tickets in person the next afternoon, hours before curtains open. I still pay full price for a play or two each season, but I love a great deal and an opportunity to see a production I don't know much about, to dress nice and chat with strangers during the intermission. Maybe your local theater has similar promotions?

3. JB Weld ClearWeld - I broke the hell out of my glasses, snapping a stainless steel arm from the acetate frames. I resigned myself to either rushing a cheap, LensCrafted pair, or driving 2 hours to the nearest shop that stocks Mykita glasses for a wildly expensive replacement (progressive lenses). Before I severed them, the original lightweight frames were the only pair I've owned that kept its posture on my compact Filipino nose, instead of slipping every few minutes like a relaxed body sagging on a low couch. Thankfully, a light application of JB Weld's clear epoxy re-attached the arm to the frame, a fix more discrete and stable than my initial embarrassing attempt to tape the pieces together. Shit was looking bleak for a minute there.

4. Fun stamps - I noted to a friend that I loved the Goodnight Moon stamp on the card he and his wife sent. He tells me his partner saved the stamps for people who she thought might appreciate them. See what putting yourself out there to be recognized as a a real appreciator gets you? The opportunities that present themselves? The world opens up to you, sharing its gifts. You get special consideration for nice stamps.

♫ It's almost the end of the show ♫

So many of the quotes I've recorded from recent consumed media (plays, books, television) followed a theme of love, as many examined lives tend to lean toward. Here they are for you to lean on:

7 / Manœuvres

Credits: The title comes from how they spell maneuver across the Atlantic, where I suppose they have a surplus of vowels for these things. I appreciated that British group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark opted for that spelling, and this newsletter acknowledges that putting our appreciations out there invites serendipities.

In a French class last year, our professor scribbled on the board a word with the œ ligature, perhaps cœur. One of my classmates raised his hand and asked in an accusatory tone, "Why are those letters touching each other like that," as if he'd caught them in a forbidden embrace. I loved that.

Thanks to Hillary, Kara, Amy, and Shannon from the Mercantile Library for offering their encouragement and resources for the events I mentioned. Appreciation to Megan for the copy of The Prophet procured from a White Elephant gift exchange. And shout-outs to Kenny and Claire for the Goodnight Moon postage, as well as to Lara, Nick, and Lorenzo for their handsome stamps.