Ephemera

By Jen Myers — May 15, 2026

Note: I published this, and attempted to send it to everyone via email, on May 15, but I discovered after the fact that it did not seem to actually have done the email part. I got confirmation from a few folks that they never received anything, so I checked some settings and tried to send it again. My apologies if you did not get this earlier and/or ended up getting this more than once. I believe everything should be sorted out now.

And we're back.

I didn't intend to go a year without sending a newsletter. It just sort of happened. But lately I've been feeling like not only getting back to it but also getting back to essays, which I used to do in my newsletters all the time. So this time around I've got updates on stuff I've done and made as well as a new essay.

I know some of you have been reading my newsletters for years and years (I first started sending them in 2014). I have always appreciated that, but it seems even more vital now than it used to that when humans put together their odd little thoughts and send them out into the world, other humans receive them. I think it's a valuable activity for us to participate in. Good job, us.

I made a few improvements to the Jen Digital Expanded Universe in the past few months. I refreshed my personal website a bit and, most notably, added a new section for Marginalia, where I keep an ongoing feed of things I find interesting. It's like Tumblr except I own it and I do not keep track of what the world thinks about it in terms of "likes" or "reposts." But it would be neat if you like it. You can get all the Marginalia posts along with my longform website posts in my single RSS feed, just like it's 2003 again.

I also posted a list of books, experiences and Things I Liked in 2025, and my list of Favorite Films of 2025.

Since we're well into 2026 now, that means my 2025 media log is officially complete and available to peruse, if that's something you're into.

There's been some of my regular Recently posts as well:

My little horror film podcast, Quiet Little Horrors, has been moving steadily along. So far this year we have released episodes on:

And coming up this Sunday is our take on The Bride!

In my home, I have a dish of coins from all the places I have ever been. One yen coins from Japan, five pence coins from the United Kingdom, ten cent coins from New Zealand. A handful of Danish kroner and Swedish kronor, and various fractions of the Euro. A few tokens and pressed pennies from amusement parks and roadside attractions. This dish started as an easy receptacle for loose change left over from my travels, but it is now a satisfyingly solid remembrance of where I’ve gone and what I’ve done and what I’ve made a part of myself, an artifact small but with weight and meaning, the material remnants of the lines I crossed around the world as I went out to meet it.

I realized recently that, over the past few years, I have not been adding to my coin dish, even though I’ve been visiting new places. I’ve been to Brazil twice and have yet to touch physical currency there; therefore, no leftover coins. It’s the same for other objects I used to collect and hold on to: plane tickets, transit cards, maps, museum guides, even receipts in foreign languages that I would find later and feel pleased at the reminder I once did something like buy a sando at a Tokyo 7-11. But almost all of that is all digital now. Even passports are digitally scanned and verified and then the machine gates open to let you through. No stamps in the passport pages, no tangible indication that you were ever there.

Our lives are now dotted with the holes made of the missing ephemera of our experiences. It is all now too ephemeral. Where there used to be a significance in holding onto objects not designed to be held onto, we no longer have the choice. I no longer have paper tickets to concerts and movies that made me vibrate with empathy, or a map of the roads I drove alone and free, or business cards and scribbled phone numbers from new friends. There are no out-of-focus snapshots of smiles and scenes. There are no letters from people whose handwriting is as familiar as my heartbeat. Daily life can be uncluttered, convenient and frictionless, and it makes the present moment go by even faster, and nothing is left to mark the passage.

Which, often, is a fair bargain to make. A daily life full of inconvenience and difficulty does not enable mindfulness, either. It’s also worth questioning any sort of over-attachment to external souvenirs that take you out of the purity of the moment. And I am not oblivious to the incongruity of advocating for physical objects via the mediums of email and website. But I have always had an unfortunate gift for dissociation and I have learned the work that it is to stay present in the experience of being in the world. It is work that benefits from mild friction, from conscious awareness of time and place, and part of that work now is seeking out ways of being and memory that are less ephemeral.

I just returned from my first trip to Amsterdam, and on the steep, spiraling staircase of my 17th-century canal-side hotel, I picked up a two Euro coin. It was one of the rare times during my trip that I handled physical currency rather than tapping my phone. I brought the it with me across the ocean back home and, from a deliberate height, dropped it into my dish of collected coins. It met the others with a substantial sound, and I was gratified to be there to hear it.

Thank you for reading. You can still catch me now and then over on Bluesky. You can also reach me by email, should you wish to do such a thing, at [email protected].