There's a particular kind of exhaustion that only travelers know — not from the miles, but from the constant becoming. Every new place asks you to be slightly different: more curious here, less opinionated there, always ready to absorb.
A week in the highlands of Portugal changed everything I thought I knew about movement and rest. I had planned to cover ground. Instead I sat at a window for three mornings watching the same goat eat the same patch of grass.
I didn't take many photos. That felt important.
The roads there are empty in the way that makes you realize you've been filling your life with unnecessary traffic. Not metaphorical traffic — actual, literal noise that you chose to live inside without noticing it had become the wallpaper.
I bought a sketchbook six months ago with the full intention of never using it well. That was the deal I made with myself. No good drawings. No pressure to improve. Just marks on paper that represent the fact that I looked at something.
The sketchbook is half full now and none of it is impressive. Wonky chairs, a coffee cup that somehow has five sides, a tree that looks like broccoli.
But I can tell you exactly what the light was doing on that Tuesday afternoon in February when I drew that broccoli-tree. I can describe the cold and which direction the wind came from. The bad drawing is a perfect memory capsule.
It was a layover that became a detour. I had six hours to kill and ended up staying a day and a half. The city had a way of making you feel like you'd lived there before — not in a mystical sense, just architecturally familiar in some bone-deep way.
I found a market that sold mostly things nobody needs and bought two of them. I ate at a place with no English menu and pointed at what the table next to me had. It was good.
The museum cafe is the museum's unconscious. Nobody designs it with the same care as the galleries. It's where the institution relaxes into what it actually thinks of its visitors.
Contemporary art museums tend toward cold concrete and overpriced sandwiches. Natural history museums have the best kids' menus. Small regional galleries almost always have someone's grandmother's scone recipe in rotation and a dog-eared copy of a local history book by the till.
I've started rating museums by their cafes first. It's a reliable proxy.
I finally finished a thing I've been meaning to make for two years: a small controller that lets me adjust the colour temperature of my desk lamp with a physical dial instead of an app.
It's an RP2040 running MicroPython, a rotary encoder, and a cheap MOSFET module. The whole thing fits in a 3D-printed case that took four attempts to get right (the lid kept warping).
Warm light for reading. Cold light for working. A satisfying click to switch. Sometimes the simple version of a thing is the one worth building.
2025 in numbers: 6 countries, 14 cities, 1 apartment I actually like living in. A year that started with too much movement and ended with enough stillness to remember what I'm doing all this for.
Things I did more of: cooking, reading on paper, calling people instead of texting.
Things I did less of: doom-scrolling (mostly), buying things I don't need (somewhat), saying yes when I mean no (improving).
