We must embrace the soft stuff.

On adopting a dog named Tomato, skies full of clouds, and other tender things — including a reframe of “productivity.”

This story was originally published on Substack. Subscribe here! And, all of the photos included were shot on film in the Bay Area — around my neighborhood in Oakland, along the beach in Alameda, on hilly hikes. Prints are available for purchase. Just email me if you’re interested.

Last Saturday — the spring equinox, and the day we went to meet Tomato — the sky was like a pop art pattern, studded with cartoon clouds. It was a 90-minute trip from our place in Oakland to some small nearby town where the two-woman rescue team was based, and I drove, so that Lauren could study for her Javascript exam that was coming up on Monday morning.

She recited her notes out loud as I steered. “Promises encourage writing asynchronous code in a way that appears synchronous. Okay. A promise is pending when it hasn’t been resolved yet. When the promise succeeds, the promise state is fulfilled. When it fails, the promise state is rejected. Got it.” Her words — or the ways they combined — were such gibberish to me, such an unfamiliar language, that they muddled into a soothing backdrop of white noise. Promise, promise, promise.

The pandemic has stripped us of white noise, like it has stolen so many things. The thick…