Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week: 

1. I start each of my notebooks with a guardian spirit, but my winter notebook went several weeks without one until I saw this picture of Edward Gorey. (From a review of Mark Dery’s new bio, Born to be Posthumous.) 
    
2. I’m reading Survive The Savage Sea, the true story of a family who got stranded for 30 days on a raft in the Pacific Ocean. (I learned about it from artist Nina Katchadourian, who explains why it’s her favorite book.) 
    
3. The music recording app Garageband was released 15 years ago. I wrote about my six-year-old son’s obsession with it and why it’s one of my favorite pieces of software ever. (Tip for other parents: we’re using iOS 12’s built-in Screen Time to avoid fights over iPad usage, and it’s working pretty well so far.)
    
4. “It matters not where or how far you travel... but how much alive you are.”
    
5. A lot of this rang true: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. (The book Petersen cites, Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days, is worth reading.)
    
6. A recent study showed the median pay for full-time writers is stupidly low, surprising no full-time writer alive. Cartoonist Nate Powell posted about how the numbers work out in comics, and why it’s still worth it. (Reading the past two items, I was reminded of the last line of Steve Albini’s classic essay about the music industry.)
    
7. Something more uplifting: A woman turned a 110-year-old dead tree into a Little Free Library. 
    
8. Ear candy: we’re not even 2 weeks into 2019, and my 2019 playlist already has almost 2 hours of music on it. Phew. (A few of the songs on that musical diary come from Nick Cave’s list of “hiding songs.”)
    
9. ICYMI: here are my 20 favorite reads and 100 things that made my 2018.
    
10. Remember: You can always turn around.