Friendstagram

Slowing down and finding new ways to connect

Sometimes the culture we decide to consume offers little clues of what’s to come - or maybe it’s just me and the way the universe operates in my life. For example, I had no idea that rewatching Northern Exposure with my mom over Christmas would be a harbinger of my own big move to a relatively remote part of the world.

For those who aren’t familiar, or weren’t alive in the 90s, Northern Exposure was a TV show about a Manhattan-born doctor named Joel. Joel is a real city slicker who graduates from Med School at Columbia with a mountain of debt. In order to pay off his student loans he signs up to help out underserved communities across the US. By luck of the draw, he is sent to the frozen tundra of Alaska. He thinks he’s going to Ankorage only to find out when he arrives that he will be sent even farther off the grid to a tiny town who knows where. He’s stuck there for four years, and fish out of water hilarity ensues. It’s certainly a precursor to Schitt’s Creek with Joel’s love of big city comforts (hot water, bagels, privacy) and his inability to procure them in his new hometown.

One of the highlights of the show is a focus on the indigenous culture in Alaska embodied by Joel’s aloof assistant Marilyn and the hiply dressed Ed. My personal favorite, maybe because of my future as a podcaster, was always John Corbett as the local radio DJ whose role in the plot is negligible but memorable,

Since watching the show in December, most of our lives have changed dramatically, mine included. After a long road trip, I now find myself in a similarly remote place where I too feel like a fish out of water: Santa Fe, New Mexico. I have learned since moving here that it has a population of a little over 2 million, more than a million less than the city of Los Angeles, spread across a state about the size of Texas. Between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, the state’s two biggest cities there are miles upon miles of mostly empty land - much of it reservation.

I have had to get used to the new landscape of the high desert, which is mostly dry and brown because here it’s still winter. On my way to Santa Fe for the first time, I was accosted by a white-out blizzard that lasted for one hour and melted as soon as it touched the ground. I had weather whiplash. And to be honest, weather not included, when I first got here I was wondering why the hell I drove here, sight unseen, to live for a while in a place I had never been. And then to find myself surrounded by dirt, the occasional flash snowstorm with no green, and none of the things I loved about living in California like California itself - well there was a grieving process to be sure.

Early in my Art Date blogging, I wrote about Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the part in the plot where Richard Dreyfus crafts a weird rock formation out of his mashed potatoes, only to find out later that’s a real place where aliens land. He eventually leaves his wife and kids to meet a beautiful single mother (yikes, the 80s) and go with her to this supernatural destination with a bunch of other hippy artists.

An image from an early essay on the blog about intuition and my interview with Rachel Dawson for The Side Woo https://artdate.substack.com/p/learning-to-listen-to-the-inner-knowing

Moving here has been a little like that. I got the idea in my head to go to Santa Fe, and after two and half days of being here, I was offered a job with a former professor to help her work on a big painting commission. The timing was nothing short of a miracle for me, and I gathered for her. She is working on 4 giant panels that requires every inch of me and her other assistant who she is having help make these paintings, on a pretty tight deadline. Plus for me, I had left Los Angeles, looking for a change and hopefully a more sustainable creative life that didn’t involve 8 hours of spreadsheets a day. It was a win-win.

^ This is one of 4 panels that will all be hung vertically. Amy wanted me to say that this is nowhere near finished.

Since then, I’ve been trying to acclimate to this new lifestyle in a Southwestern environment, eating all the foods I can with green chiles and some with red. I have learned there is so much more to Albuquerque than Breaking Bad, although yes drugs are a problem. Santa Fe is pretty, but it seems its secrets are slow to be revealed.

One of the things that I can’t take for granted about this move is it’s the first time in 20 years that I have made a major life change without the security blanket of Instagram or any kind of social media- unless you count Nextdoor which meh.

I am of the age that when I left for college we had nary a Facebook or even a Myspace. And even in the early aughts, all the social platforms were desktop-only, which meant when you left the house you had to be present with the people around you. And when you were home it meant you couldn’t receive phone calls, so you were constantly doing math to find a balance.

Having just gone through my second Flip Phone February, this time with a more sustainable approach of a pared-down iPhone rather than a minimally functional flip phone (imo), I will say it has been easier to spend less time on my screens. The key difference is that I have not just deleted the Instagram app from my phone while leaving it dangling on my desktop like a delicious, frustrating-to-eat carrot, I have deactivated it. The digital hoarder in me is scared to officially delete it, but I am setting the intention to do it in March.

The change has been similar to when I stopped drinking - I just quit cold turkey. No regrets, no looking back. It feels like divine intervention to be honest. If only I could cut out $7 lattes with that much clarity. This has freed up so much of my brain space, it’s hard to quantify. It’s not that I am filling that time with so much more, but I am more clear-headed.

I do miss seeing random updates from friends, or having spontaneous conversations with people, sometimes strangers, across the world through the app. Or being part of the comments about some juicy piece of artworld gossip. But what I have been trying to do instead is send unsolicited photos to friends the old-fashioned way, over text. I call this practice Friendstagram, and I invite you to take it on if you’re looking to wean yourself off doomscrolling.

It can be hard to be proactive about reaching out to people, even long-time friends, for no good reason. Especially when you may not see them for months or longer because you no longer live in the same town, or even the same state. But the payoff is that you get to have more deliberate conversations and check-ins, and the shares feel more meaningful, versus Instagram’s spray and pray technique of reaching an audience.

The other thing I have done is talk way more to random strangers in the real world. It may help that the average population in Santa Fe is around 65 years old (just a rough guestimate), and that the boomers who live here are more comfortable offline than on,and therefore more open to random chats on the street. (Let’s party like it’s 1999!)

But I think also I have changed. I have been so much more open-minded when meeting new people, and more present for opportunities to talk and keep a conversation going rather than turning back immediately to my phone. For example, I went to Harry’s Roadhouse after work one night, and ended up chatting to a couple next to me. After asking them about the three deserts they ordered (living the dream), they invited me to a Big Richard concert because they had an extra ticket. If you haven’t heard of Big Richard like I hadn’t, they kick some major bluegrass butt. It was so fun, but there were many opportunities for that interaction to never have happened.

Slowing down and stepping back is painful for me, a Capricorn moon, as is making big changes. But in the discomfort I have found I get the things I wanted but couldn’t access before when my head was swirling with online activity and FOMO: more real-life connection, more presence of mind, and sometimes more opportunities.

Because I’m off Instagram, I haven’t been good about promoting the podcast, so I wanted to share a few of the recent episodes, including the one that was released this week with Samantha Rosenwald.

Below a conversation I had in October 2024 with artists Kayla Tange and Malado Francine where we talked about major life changes, and how the universe delivers on your requests but not always in the form you think you want.

Finally, a conversation I had with artist Rio Asch-Phoenix about his photographic documentation of Canyon Hills, a beautiful open space that is under threat of development. I wanted to talk to Asch-Phoenix about this work because the land is right by my house in Tujunga. When I think of things that I miss the most about California, the hike through this area almost every day is one of the rituals I miss the most. The current update on the land is that the developers have to hold off because a rare bumble bee was discovered nesting on the property. They are now suing Asch-Phoenix and the No Canyon Hills activist group for damages. Phoenix had a show of his work at Monte Vista Projects in LA, but it looks like they may have taken it off the site. If you want to donate to the cause, check out No Canyon Hill’s website.