Something Good #40
house hunting, history of something good
Hi, I'm Nina Iordanova and this is the 39th edition of Something Good, a newsletter filtered through my 🧠, 🖐, and ❤️. Coming your way every two weeks, I hope you find something good here.
Hello!
I don’t have any new house updates yet.
Even though it’s technically too early to be looking, I’ve been checking obsessively every morning about what units are becoming available. I’m working with a real estate agent but still like to be problematically hands-on.
I have two lists of requirements. One is the normal, reasonable, aspirational list:
Spacious
Bright
Floor-to-ceiling windows
Big kitchen
Good storage space
Great view
Walkable neighbourhood
The other is my secret list that I don’t tell my agent about:
Must be east facing
Cannot have a sliding door separating the bathroom from the bedroom
Needs to have a closet immediately upon entering
Must be wider than it is long
Cannot have open shelves for cabinets in the kitchen (things get dusty)
Cannot have stacked sets of cabinets in the kitchen (too short to reach the top)
Must have counter space on either side of the kitchen sink
And so on, to an increasingly particular degree
I think there just comes a time when you have to ask yourself, okay, do I maybe need to let go of some of these requirements and just learn to adapt to a new space? And learn to love the new light that will come with a west-facing view, or the warmth of wooden beams to put dishes and cups on?
While it’s a nice thought, I’m not there yet. I think there are so many things it’s okay to settle on - food, clothes, gambling on an online purchase - BUT BY GOD I WILL LOVE THE HOUSE I LIVE IN!! AND I WILL WRANGLE IT INTO MY CHECKLIST EVEN THOUGH I HAVE NO CONTROL OVER WHAT GOES ON THE MARKET WHEN!
—
I had a couple of people (!!) email me last week asking why I started writing Something Good. It’s been almost two years now (!!!) and I think it’s a good question.
I’ve written on and off since I was little, mostly poetry or short fiction. For a couple of years when I was 13-15, I also played a text-based RPG hosted on a forum. You had a character and you wrote as them, and you interacted with other people’s characters, played out storylines the mods would host. It was really cool. One was in a Harry Potter inspired magic school, the other was a 19th century pirate island in the Caribbean.
I remember rushing back from school and logging onto the forum, waiting for other people to come online so we could play? write? together, often late late into the night.
I had a lot of free time as an actor so I continued to write poetry and even some scripts. I’d wander around the city and find a nice spot to sit in, drink a coffee or eat an ice cream, and write.
In my last relationship, my partner and I would write together. We took turns playing No Man’s Sky - one of us would explore the world, the other would watch and write. We’d use the landscape and what happened in the game as inspiration, but we’d stitch it together the way we wanted and weave a story in between. Then we’d swap controller and laptop, and the player would become the writer and the writer the player. We were both building the story and telling it.
At some point, I got deeply embedded into the business world.
At that point, writing became very practical. It had a purpose. It succeeded or it didn’t based on email open rates and clickthroughs. It was guided by best practices and SEO and rules. It stopped feeling like exploration and creation, and started to feel more like a right and wrong way to do things.
When Something Good originally launched, it was a newsletter for the community-building version of our company - Good People.
I started it because I thought writing business-y things about community could be a good intersection, and would let me have more fun with it. I knew it had to be useful, so I mostly focused on sharing articles and links, quotes, etc. There were some parts I really enjoyed, but I felt beholden to making it useful and worth peoples’ time.
(Check out Something Good #1!)
As we started to wind the company down, I began to focus more on the personal parts of the newsletter. Stories from my own life, articles I found interesting (even if they were unrelated to community), excerpts from books I was reading.
I’d always wanted to just share my own stories and thoughts, but it honestly didn’t feel worth anyone’s time. Like why. What was the point. What would anyone get from it?
I remember a couple of issues in, I ran a poll and asked everyone subscribed (that’s you!) what they would want to see more and less of.
The surprising thing that came back was that people said they wanted less articles and links and more personal stories!! What!!!
And I think that was the permission I needed to start to lean into the personal storytelling part more, and to (very slowly) start to drop the “useful” side. If that’s what I wanted to write… and that’s what people wanted to read… okay!!!
So now I consider this a public diary of sorts. The emails, comments, likes and stories you share with me are so rewarding (truly make my day), but I’d like to think that I write this mostly for myself. It’s for future me and maybe my future kids to look back at and think, this is how you thought. These were your concerns. This is how you saw the world. This is what you wanted to share and remember and what stood out.
Maybe they’d see me growing up as well.
It’s also been a lovely way to connect with people around the city, around the world!
You (most likely) are here because you once had an interest in a version of our business.
But now that business is gone and the only thing I write about is… me. My life. My point of view. There’s nothing useful, and yet there’s still something that keeps us together.
I think that’s very, very cool.
✨
Warmly yours,
Nina
Thanks for reading and I'll see you in two weeks! 👋
Thank you for sharing your stories.