the last 100 days of my 20's, landline girl summer, and mermaid powers

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Structured like a tasty meal for weird/creative/silly geese, Goose Food is your weekly-ish whimsy-fueling checkpoint to add some pizzazz back to your inbox and some creativity back to your juices.

Hi, I’m Noelle! I’m a writer, dog lover, and booktuber with an IRL background in events, wine, and luxury hospitality. There’s a goofy little word goblin chef under my hat cooking up the newsletter carte du jour— bon appetit!

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🧀 appetizer

cleanse your palate with an amuse-bouche for your brain

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wanna play mermaids?

The end of June brings the Summer Solstice, and first official days of summer. It’s my favorite season. Long days full of sunshine, wildflowers, ice cold beverages on the patio, and the smell of BBQ always on the breeze. It’s fresh-picked berries from the farmers’ market and concerts in the park and throwing the windows open at night to hear the crickets and maybe an owl or two.

Let me get something off my chest real quick: the summer deniers suck the life out of me. Yes, it’s hot. It’s humid. No one likes being sweaty. I KNOW. I’m just so tired of the Eeyore energy every summer. Stay hydrated, wear sunscreen, stop wearing polyester, keep extra deodorant and facial mist in your purse, and strap the hell in. You might actually have fun if you would just be open and curious, instead of wishing for fall as soon as the first heat wave hits. You could be grilling veggie kebabs and drawing with sidewalk chalk and perfecting your fruit smoothie recipe and attending the summer music series at your local brewery and getting tan lines on your feet from wearing the same sandals every day. (Okay, this will probably be an entirely separate essay later this summer.)

…Anyways. What I’m saying is, collectively, we could be romanticizing summer more instead of wishing it away. May I remind you, you were once a kid playing mermaids in the pool, wearing goggles and fins, practicing your mermaid swim and dreaming up different magical powers for your ongoing game of pretend with your friend from down the street? What would it take to tap into that carefree, imaginative, exploratory, collaborative energy again?

Do you wanna play mermaids?

What color is your tail, and what’s your magical power?

(Mine is like a yellow-orange ombre, with sparkles, and my power is that I can talk to dolphins and whales, and also sharks like me and don’t attack me and actually I can talk to them too.)

via Pinterest

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🌭 main course

chef’s special— chew thoroughly!

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I have 100 days left of my 20’s

Growing up, teachers in early elementary school would assign open-ended projects for the 100th day of school each year. The project could really be anything, there were only two rules:

1. It must be homemade.

2. It must include 100 of something.

I remember one year, maybe Kindergarten, I strung colorful plastic beads on a shoelace with 10 different patterns of 10 beads each. Another year (or maybe this was my brother?), my dad supervised as we halfway-nailed 100 nails into a 10x10 grid on a large block of scrap wood.

Everyone from class would bring in their projects to show-and-tell on the 100th day of school, celebrating the schoolyear “milestone” with creativity and community. Other kids would bring in 100 small baked goods, or sculptures made with 100 acorns, or something spelled out with 100 pennies, or mini log cabins made with 100 popsicle sticks, or 100 sunflower seeds glued to a canvas, or a collage of 100 stickers, etc.

Fast-forward 25 years or so, and now I often catch myself arbitrarily measuring time by 100s. (Last year, I vlogged the process of reading 100 short stories in 100 days). I look for and notice 100s in the wild, and I’m always pleased when I find them in unexpected places. Though I rarely, if ever, make the time to Properly Celebrate with whimsical math-adjacent art projects anymore.

So a week ago when I happened to google “how many days until my birthday” on a whim, and the result was 107 days, it felt like both a reassurance and a nudge.

My 30th birthday is in 100 days.

I do not fear my 30’s; I have no anxiety about leaving my 20’s behind, and I’m trying to reframe any thoughts of dread/unease related to aging, when I catch myself going there. I want to allow myself to age in peace. I’m looking forward to this next decade, and I’m grateful for all the lessons and treasures my 20’s held for me. And/but/also, I can’t help but reflect about who I thought I’d be by age 30.

On my 23rd birthday, I remember having the thought that I was as close to age 16 as I was to age 30. I played it cool and wrote a lengthy Instagram caption about it I hoped came off mature and chill, but at the time, the idea that I was as close to 16 as I was to 30 actually did scare the shit out of me.

Now, at nearly 30, I’m as close to 37 as I am to 23.
I’m as close to 44 as I am to 16. (!!)

My 16th birthday was 5,020 days ago.
My 44th birthday is 5,200 days from now.

My 16-year-old self is nearly 14 years behind me now (about 50 100-day-blocks).

In highschool, Age Thirty felt so grown-up, so far away, so completely unknown. I projected all my hopes and dreams onto that imagined 30-year-old version of myself. And in many ways, I have made her proud. I have built a life I think she’d be pretty excited about, even surprised by. I feel proud that I’ve become a person that she’d have felt seen by. She would feel understood and heard. She would feel safe with me. All the mental/emotional/spiritual work I’ve done in the last 50x100 days, I did for her.

and/but/also

I haven’t moved to that city [yet].
I haven’t bought that house [yet].
I haven’t written those books [yet].

(I did find the person, though. Oddly enough, I met him about 100 days after my 23rd birthday.)

I could tie this into an inspo-y conclusion about how “the time will pass anyway,” and how I definitely could have made the time to write more throughout my 20’s, or taken the leap to move somewhere new. I could wax on about “how you spend your days is how you spend your life” etc etc etc. Honestly, when I started writing this section I thought that’s where I was going to end up.

With 100 days left to honor this era, I don’t want to waste any of them feeling frozen under the weight of my own expectations.

I’m determined to celebrate the reality of my 20’s as they actually were: uncertain, fun, volatile, healing, expansive, soft, and unexpected.

I haven’t yet decided what whimsical creation I’ll make for my birthday, but I know it will be handmade and have 100 of something.

via Pinterest

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🥗 sides

perfect pairings for the vibes we’re cooking with today

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it’s Landline Girl Summer

My screen time is absolutely out of control. My phone addiction is off the charts. I have a daily limit for Instagram set to 1 hour, but every single day I catch myself going into my phone settings and increasing it by 5 minutes at a time, multiple times a day, until I often end up back at 2+ hours again. WHY? Why do I do that?!

There are a lot of great essays floating around Substack about our attachment to our phones and the dopamine slot machines social media apps, so I won’t regurgitate it all here.

But I am sick of feeling like I am simply unable to find/make the time for the things I say are important to me, when I ALWAYS find/make the time for hours of scrolling, every day, no matter how much I shouldn’t.

To be clear, scrolling on The Apps is *not* important to me, but my behavior says otherwise. If I made a list of 3 non-negotiable things I wanted to do every single day, 3+ hours of screen time would not make the cut, but I know it would sneak in there in practice, Trojan-horsing its way through other activities by promising “research” and “inspiration” and “examples” and suddenly I’m 87 reels deep again.

Something I’m going to try this summer, starting this week*:

1. Keep my phone in one place in the house, where it can’t move.

   Ideally this would be somewhere neutral and open like the kitchen counter, but I do still need it for an alarm clock, so for this experiment my phone will live on my nightstand all summer.
   

2. Turn the ringer on for calls and texts (how retro) so I won’t be worried about “missing something important.”
   I can’t remember the last time I had the ringer on. I don’t even know what my ringtone is.
   

3. If I want to sit and scroll, I have to go to the Landline Spot and do it there.
   Another reason a neutral area would be better, but I think having to make a special trip, on purpose, just to scroll will help as a deterrent. I know that guilt and shame are not super helpful when it comes to changing an ingrained bad habit, so rather than beat myself up about how much screen time I accrue, I’m just making it a lot more inconvenient to accrue it.

I work from home and am generally a homebody in my leisure time, so this will honestly capture the majority of an average day. However, I will still take my phone with me when I leave the house, let’s be real. I respect the girlies embracing and reclaiming the flip phone life, but that is not my truth. Unfortunately, I need Google Maps, Spotify, my calendar, and the checklists in my notes app if I’m to survive in the wild. I just need to also set the expectation that I’m not going to sit in my car and scroll in the grocery store parking lot as a loophole (I’m saying that now because I know I’d convince myself otherwise if I didn’t— keep me honest).

*I am actually 1 week into Landline Girl Summer now, and it’s INCREDIBLE. I am more productive, more present, and more focused. I am actually doing the other important things I’ve been wanting to make time for (hi, Substack!). I still get my social media fix but I have to make a pilgrimage to The Spot, and after about 10-15 minutes it feels like plenty. I am genuinely so excited to continue this through the summer; it’s already made such a profound positive difference for me.

via Pinterest

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🍰 dessert

a dopamine snack for your mental sweet tooth

read books, be goofy

No one is doing what newlynova is doing on bookish internet.

Recently, I’ve been wanting to seek out more creators that lean into the whimsy and silliness Of It All, and Lexi DELIVERS. Please enjoy this delightful and refreshingly-goofy video, where she chooses a different book to read based on each frame of an entire game of bowling.

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🥡 take it to-go

feeling full? like it, share it, & reheat the leftovers whenever you need ‘em

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end-of-post secret:

A friend and I decided to have a cozy craft day with clay recently, and I made an extremely cursed goose bust. Make things with your hands, it’s fun!

Love ya, hungry geese!

Stay funky,
Noelle

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