Hi, I'm Nina Iordanova and this is the 21st edition of Something Good, a newsletter filtered through my 🧠, 🖐, and ❤️. Coming your way every two weeks, I hope you find something good here.
Hi!
Merry Christmas to you if you’re celebrating! This feels like a day that used to be so full of joy and excitement, and for the past few years I’ve been missing that. So I hope your yesterday and your today are full of that sense of possibility and wonder, and that you wake up without a stress ball in your stomach. I hope you let yourself eat leftover cake when you wake up unreasonably early and aren’t even hungry, then cake again for proper breakfast, then maybe again for lunch with tea.
And if Christmas isn’t your thing, I hope today still feels a little extra special.
ONE.
I ordered Pizza Nova for dinner yesterday and had a Hawaiian pizza and Italian chicken wings. The pizza was fine but the chicken wings will be turned into soup.
I have been advised not to use pizza place wings in a soup, but that is exactly where they are going to go. Nina’s Pizza Nova Chicken Wing Soup, a recipe that will be handed down to my children’s children because Pizza Nova will still be around when all else has failed.
TWO.
I’ve been binge-watching my favourite genre of TV, what I like to call the magic school show. A magic school show does not need to have a literal magic school per se, BUT! here is the basic premise:
A group of young people is thrust into a situation of grave danger that forces them to discover and/or develop magical skills throughout the show. Love triangles develop! Stunning CGI abounds! Intense colours everywhere! Everyone becomes powerful! Someone is betrayed!
How many shows could there possibly be in this quite specific genre, you ask?
More than you think, yet never enough 🥲 And I am willing to dig deeeeep into the barrel of Netflix and Amazon and Disney to get my fix. Currently watching A Discovery of Witches.
THREE.
Puppy girl was born!!!!! But I passed on her, at least for now. I’ve been thinking a lot about where and how I want to live, how much time I want to spend outside of Toronto, how spontaneously I want to be able to travel and for how long. And that feels like something I need to put more time into exploring before I commit to the 10+ years of Toronto-bound life that puppy girl will bring.
I’ve got some tentative travel plans for early next year - a month in Colombia with work friends, a month in Sofia, Bulgaria alone - and I want to see how I feel after that.
The idea of a fully digital nomad life doesn’t appeal to me. I like having a home base here, a place that’s familiar and comfortable and that I’ve spent a lot of time making my own. But when I picture what my happiest future could look like, I’m not sure that it’s rooted fully here. It feels like I have one foot in Toronto propping the door open, and one hand extending, grasping blindly for something I can’t quite name.
I feel so proud when friends and neighbours and acquaintances make passing comments like,
“You’re always coming and going.”
“I’m surprised you’re here - it feels like you’re always somewhere else.”
“You’ve barely spent any time in Toronto these past few months.”
And I feel proud not because travel is a status thing or something I aspire to - I’m just proud to feel like this thing, this feeling I’m looking for, whatever it is, wherever it is - I’m proud that I’m trying to get it.
And maybe the answer is here in Toronto, puppy girl at my side, living a normal post-Covid life… but I’m not ready to close the door yet.
FOUR.
MORNING ANIMAL
I wake up at 5:30am, hungry for time.
Most days I feel like a creature all mouth and hands
and unfillable stomach, blind
to everything but time
and insatiable.
Maybe if I wake up early enough,
maybe if I don’t eat,
maybe if I do it all in the right order,
I’ll have enough time.
Maybe my life will feel long enough.
Maybe if I catch each moment, I can string them together in a necklace to wear
and dance in freedom in the dusk
taking the hours with me wherever I go.
FIVE.
Thank you to everyone who wrote back after my last newsletter, it meant a lot to know your thoughts were with me and my family.
I hope you have a wonderful, magical end to the year.
✨
Warmly yours,
Nina
Thanks for reading and I'll see you in two weeks! 👋