Hand Drawn (and Hiked) by McCall

Hiya! Happy last Wednesday of October. If you’re sitting here wondering where the heck 2023 went…..same.

One of my favorite theories is that time feels so much faster as we get older because it’s all relative. When we’re ten years old, a year is 10% of our lives and the days of our childhood feel endless. When we’re 30, a year is a mere 3.33% of our lives.

So if this year felt short, it’s because you’ve lived a whole lotta life. Celebrate that.

Mini Musings

A couple weeks ago when I was in South Dakota, one response to a particular workshop we did stuck with and has been rattling around my brain since.

In the exercise, we were talking about brand attributes and how your brain doesn’t have to be either/or. To hit that concept home, we put two different adjectives with some creative tension at different ends of a sliding scale and had participants rank where they felt the brand in question fell on that scale.

One of the final scales we did was femininity vs. masculinity, and asked everyone to rank it relative to those two points. For the adjectives prior, everyone was able to decide what they thought relatively quickly and reach consensus within a matter of 30 seconds. For this one, though, everyone stared blankly at the screen for over 30 seconds.

Finally, one man in the group spoke up and said “I feel like the strength of the brand makes me want to go more on the masculinity side, but the reverence I feel for the brand is really only something I feel for women in my life.”

Since then, I’ve been thinking so much about the broad definition of femininity.

It’s a thought I’ve rattled around my brain for the last ~3 years. In 2020, I realized my definition of femininity was more or less synonymous with weakness (s/o to internalized misogyny).

Femininity is broad, all-encompassing, and maybe even boundless. The best description I’ve seen is, yet again, from Hunter Schafer’s bridge episode of Euphoria.

Nothing definitive to wrap this up — just noodle on that and let me know what it means to you (if you feel so inclined). The books next to my bed are: The Beauty Myth, Want Me, Women Don’t Owe You Pretty, I Hate Men, and Trick Mirror if that tells you anything about how much I love talking about this topic.

Artiste In The Making

Now that we’re into the busy season of drawing, I think it’s an appropriate time to lay out a plan I’ve been working on for the last two months.

While I was in Crested Butte in August, they had the annual Crested Butte Arts Festival. Before attending, I had no idea that was something that happened every year in CB, let alone how much of an art scene there is in Crested Butte. As I walked around the festival, it was undoubtedly the coolest one I’ve seen so far and I decided I had to apply for next year’s show.

The admissions process is different than anything I’ve seen in the past. Typically, when I’ve applied for markets or festivals, the hosts want to know exactly who you are; they want to see your branding, your website, photos of your booth from past markets, and get to know the who behind the booth.

For this, it’s strictly about the art. The selection process is completely anonymous. When I apply, I’ll submit three close-up photos of my art and one photo of my booth (without any of my business cards, banners, or anything giving away who I am visible — this step is solely for the jurors to know I have a full body of work to show, if selected). On top of that, the jurors on the selection panel are completely anonymous. CB is a super small town, but no one knows who they are. This completely eliminates favoritism or any sort of backdoor campaigning to get in.

All in all, a major goal I have for myself is to apply for this arts festival, and a dream of mine is to be selected. This section will ultimately become progress updates on the way to that dream.

The Wild, Wild West

I’m feeling happy as ever because I had a phenomenal two weeks of hiking. A close friend of mine lives in Vail, so we met halfway in Georgetown two weekends ago to hike and gab (because what’s the former without the latter?), and then went for a before-work hike in Morrison with another friend of mine.

While I think it’s time for me to begrudgingly hang up my hiking boots for the season and replace them with snow boots, I’ve gotta give a shoutout to how amazing this summer and hiking season was.

I was able to cross two more 14ers off my bucket list and hike my dream mountain. I was able to car camp on the night of the Supermoon and hike for 2 hours in the moonlight the next morning. I met so many warm, friendly, happy people on the trails, and I strengthened so many friendships that were already so important to me.

Now, I get to take that momentum into the next season. Starting off with a goal that you could probably deduce from the intermittent avalanche fun facts in this section — getting my AIARE 1 with friends.

Candidly, this is something I wasn’t planning on tackling until next season, andI feel pretty out of my depth — but a couple close friends of mine are doing it together and approached me about joining them. I went back and forth on it all weekend and ultimately decided it would be the best possible scenario to tackle it with close friends.

On top of that, not only are they all close friends, but they’re friends I deeply admire. Take, for example, my friend Mel (who I’ll be doing the course with). Mel has the type of confidence, self-assuredness and level-headedness that’s typically reserved for people who travel the world for 3+ months at a time; the kind of person who tells you everything will work out and you actually believe them. You know the kind of friend who you immediately relax when you’re around, and you genuinely look forward to being around them? That’s Mel. And the rest of the girls I’m doing this course with.

More updates to come! Catch me patting the top of a snowpack with a shovel upon first opportunity.

What I’m Noodling On

🎧 I loved the latest episode of the Active Ingredient podcast on making micro-changes in your life to ultimately ladder up to the best version of yourself. I’m a firm believer that change happens in small, 1% increments rather than via massive shifts.

📖 I started the book Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke last week and can’t put it down. Think Maybe You Should Talk To Someone meets an episode of Huberman Lab.

📺 Fun fact: my mom was on Wheel of Fortune in 1989. Her coworker dug up the old video and 1. I can’t believe my mom’s accent was ever so thick and 2. the hair was… hairing. My mom is a genius and somehow walked away with $0, so I have infinite respect for the people who make it big on this show.

Catch you in November!

- McCall 🌻

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