Welcome!

There's 90 of us now. That's 30 breakout rooms of three people! What's a breakout room? It's a way to make big Zoom calls more personal. The host cues up a discussion prompt, then creates sub groups to enable a more intimate and active conversation.

Tonight was the first live session of Write of Passage, Cohort 8 -- 300 students from 35 countries. That's a lot of human rectangles in the Zoom grid. The four people I met in breakout rooms were all really cool. Excited for more!

Thanks for being an early subscriber to my digital postcard. I prefer the description postcard (rather than newsletter) cuz it feels more casual, personal and specific to a moment in time. Each week I share updates, anecdotes and links to things I enjoyed recently.

TIP: First-time recipient? A reply will help prevent these emails being marked spam. Don't feel obligated to say something kind or clever. In fact, I encourage the opposite. Make your reply as conveniently incoherent as possible. A quick: "sDGHsdasd" is splendid :)

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Toronto → Calgary

On Feb 28th (Monday night) my girlfriend, our dog Kiwi, and I flew from Toronto to Vancouver. We'll be in Vancouver for March visiting family and friends. Then in April we start a new lease in Calgary.

Wait what? Didn't you just arrive in Toronto this August? Like... 7 months ago?

Yup.

Wow, ok. So why the move?

The apartment we lived in was absurdly expensive. We moved in peak COVID, so rental incentives made it feel like a good deal for the first year. The building's in the heart of the city and bursting with amenities. It was a great place to get our bearings, sample different areas, then figure out our next location.

In January we started talking through options for our next move. For the first time, it dawned on me we were positioned on a never-ending rent treadmill. Buying a home in Toronto, or Vancouver is insanely expensive. But I've always been surrounded by people from these two cities, and became accustomed to viewing preposterous numbers as 'standard'.

Most of my girlfriend's family lives in Calgary. Every once in a while a mortgage comes up in conversation. It's always far less than our rent. My gf and I look at each other thinking: maybe we really ARE crazy to live here..

We can afford to buy a house in Calgary. But my girlfriend hasn't lived there since high school; and I never have. We've moved five times in the last two years. With that trend, it makes sense to see if we can stay in one place a full year before committing... So we're gonna try it out!

Here's some reasons why:

1. Less is More: We'll pay $1.3K less on rent each month AND UPGRADE from a 2 bedroom apartment (800 sqr ft) to a 2 floor townhouse (1,100 sqr ft). STAIRS!! Feels radically 'credible adult' to occupy a dwelling with stairs :)
2. Citizen of the Internet: This fall I formed genuine friendships online. I've seen promising traction with ideas I share in this newsletter, on Twitter and in my illustrations. I want to lean into this momentum. Right now the most valuable thing I can do is build an audience, and get the compound interest of growth rolling in my favour. Lower expenses encourage further experiments.
3. SOMO: In Toronto, I was paying a premium for proximity I didn't use. This "Stress of Missing Out" made me feel guilty writing or drawing. I should be out exploring this city! -- I was exploring. I was just doing it digitally.
4. Timezone: My girlfriend works remote for a company in LA. She works on PST, but we lived in EST. So she worked till 8 or 9pm every night. I prefer to be a morning person but adopted the late cycle to stay in sync.
5. Family: It's easy to drive between Calgary and Vancouver. We'll see the majority of our family and friends much more regularly than out east.
6. 15min Radius: Through the last 3 apartments we've lived in, I realize 80% of our life occurs in the 15min walk radius of our doorstep. Our new address is a few minutes walk from multiple dog parks, good running trails and restaurants. Achieve those core things, and the rest is icing.
7. Space: Our last 3 apartments didn't have space to setup 2 home offices. My gf is on calls all day. I'm not, I just need quiet space to concentrate. So I foraged out onto the wild tundra of patchy amenity room wifi connections, libraries and parks. This time I'll have my own dedicated desk in our place.
8. COVID: Proximity to events doesn't mean much when venues are closed, or require the steady recirculated CO2 of a mask. We've continuously bet (incorrectly) on the pandemic being almost over. This plan is based around the factors we control.
9. Travel: The heavy anchor of rent kept us tethered locally. I've got friends and family all over the world I want to visit. If COVID restrictions lift for good this time, the light anchor in our new plan makes more visits possible.

So, last Sunday we rented a UHaul truck. We moved our possessions into a UBox that'll ship across the country. It was a true Tetris masterclass. There's less than a shoebox of unoccupied volume in this shipping container:

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Gargoyle Kid

On Saturday, the day before loading those boxes above, we visited my cousin Bryce. Framed on a wall of their beautiful home is this photo:

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What a gorgeous wedding photo! Such a classic, wholesome family...

...Wait, who's that in the upper right..? The gargoyle kid?

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Yup. That's me.

From age 4-12, I brought faces like this to every photo occasion.

Even wedding photos.

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"Kiwi, Pound it!"

Kiwi learned a new trick instantly a couple weeks ago. My girlfriend said "pound it", held out her fist, and Kiwi immediately knew what to do:

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Rituals

About 6 months ago I discovered Cubicolor. Their album Hardly A Day, Hardly A Night quickly became my favourite music for the editing stage of writing. I describe them in my focus albums post as: "Similar cool pensive clarity to Radiohead, but more melodic, calm + EDM-y."

  Rituals Cubicolor

My rituals are currently upside down. My brain's in a time zone 3 hours ahead. Our dog Kiwi, and my parent's dog Molly sprint around the house barking at each other all day. But this weekly email is a ritual worth preserving.

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That's all till next week!

Thanks for reading,

Tommy

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PS. Replies Encouraged :)

• If you have 27 seconds to jot an impression of this postcard, please do!
• I know each of your lives bustle with activity. If it helps, think of the reply as a text (rather than an email).
• A quick jotted: “Calgary's a cool city! You should check out xyz” or "Lol, I was a young photo troll too... (insert photo)" is valuable signal of where to re-invest :)

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