10 Things: Kaitlynn Webster
All Katilynn's recommendations for living the fullest of lives
Surprise! A little bonus content for you this week, in the form of a wonderful list of things to do and think about and make and change from ‘zine-maker extraordinaire Kaitlynn Webster, a.k.a., The Mindful Narcissist. I hope you enjoy this incredible list as much as I did — excuse me while I go to make a Pizza Journal!
Hi! Tiny small introduction - I’m Kaitlynn! I make zines and write newsletters under the name The Mindful Narcissist, which started out as a joke in 2021, and is a bit that I have committed to. Going by this name has led to a lot of people approaching me at markets and telling me about their experiences with actual diagnosed narcissists, and I have added “this is not a newsletter about clinical narcissism” as the tagline to my substack because at one point half of my subscribers were psychologists working with clinical narcissism. I’m an artist and curator, and the work I make is rooted in collaboration and reciprocity, and the beliefs that time and urgency aren’t real and love is magic. These are ten things that I hope will make your life a little less convenient and subsequently, a little more joyful (read my inconvenience manifesto here)!
PARTICIPATE IN: a reading challenge
Ideally, at your local library if they’ve got one! I’m on year three of doing my library’s annual reading challenge, in which they provide 50 categories and to complete the challenge, you get to read a book that fits each category. I also just got a copy of the library’s summer bingo challenge, which includes not-strictly-book-related items like doing a random act of kindness and checking something out from the Library of Things. (Does your library have something like this? At our library you can check out stuff like bike locks, bundt pans, telescopes, memory kits… and so so much more. It’s kind of the coolest thing?) I love to complete a little quest, and I believe that supporting public library programming is essential!!
KEEP: a pizza journal
I guess it doesn’t have to be pizza, but I can’t imagine a better comfort food to use to track one’s life. I bought these little pizza journals for my best-friend-house-mate and myself a while back on a visit to my hometown. I think the intention behind them is to test pizza at a variety of places and keep track of your favorites. The reality of what the journals have looked like for us is, we have one favorite pizza place in town and all of our entries so far, bar one entry from our trip to New York, have been at that same pizza place. At the bottom there is space for notes, which I’m sure is intended to be used to track information about the pizza itself, but we fill it with a tiny journal entry about our day.
QUIT: music streaming services
Subscription-model capitalism is baloneeyyyyyy when physical media still exists! I’ve been on a big inconvenience kick for a while now (as in, intentionally increasing inconvenience in my life), and quitting music streaming services has been one of my favorite inconveniences. I have decided it is simply not worth it to have an entire world of music at my fingertips. I love buying CDs and records from local artists, and borrowing CDs from the library. More little quests! If your town has a college radio station, this is another great way to get your music fix. Every college radio station I’ve listened to is manned by volunteer DJs who get to play whatever they want, which usually results in a lot of very niche playlists. Our local college radio has a DJ that plays a variety of contemporary Chinese music on Monday evenings.
LISTEN: Punjabi pop
This one has admittedly been much harder to do as a consequence of the whole quitting music streaming services thing. But the algorithm fed me a clip of Diljit Dosanjh’s appearance on The Tonight Show and WOW I am hooked. This does not happen to me very often, but the night I was fed that clip I went down an hours-long rabbit hole and stayed up WAY past my bedtime watching every Punjabi pop music video I came across on YouTube. One particularly notable music video plot includes a suitor impressing his lover’s parents by solving a traffic jam using his elite tractor-driving skills.
DRINK: poor man’s kombucha
a recipe The recipe: a shot (or less. Or more! You decide!) of apple cider vinegar (with the mother, of course), diluted with one can of the sparkling beverage of your choice. I think my favorite flavor combination with apple cider vinegar is the Beach Plum La Croix. Benefits of this drink: 1) it is cheaper than kombucha, which has become an insanely expensive beverage, 2) it still has all of the good gut things that kombucha has, and 3) it has saved me from my mosquito allergies. (now is a good time to say that I have done and will do nothing to verify the claims of benefits 2 and 3 but they do seem very true and real to me) I have an awful allergic reaction to mosquito bites, and also the most delicious blood in the world. I have always been a mosquito magnet, which is very unfortunate combined with the allergy. A few years ago I came across an article on the internet that I didn’t actually thoroughly read, but (as far as I can remember) it claimed that regular apple cider vinegar consumption changes the pH of your blood such that it is no longer appealing to mosquitos. I went all in on that claim with no further research and have been consuming apple cider vinegar almost daily for years now and you know what? I barely get any mosquito bites anymore. Case closed.
CREATE: a zine!
Did you know that literally anything can be a zine, and probably most things *should* be a zine? (what is a zine? A small, self-published booklet! You say it “zine” like in “maga-ZINE”) And there are so many fun zine formats! I have included a video of a very easy way to make an 8 page mini zine with one sheet of paper, no staples required.
Things that I have made zines about: my soulmate best friends, every note I made in my notes app on a vacation, every pasta shape I tried in 2024, every duck I saw in 2025, tiny collages, all of the convenience store snacks I ate on a trip to Seoul, the strangers I met during a 17 hour layover in Iceland, ridiculous wine tasting notes… ANYTHING CAN BE A ZINE!
Prepare: your go-to karaoke songs
Some karaoke opportunities are planned, but others are thrust upon you. Better to always be prepared. My go-to songs are “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Deep Blue Something, “If I Could Turn Back Time” by Cher, and “Absolutely (Story of a Girl)” by Nine Days.
PLAY: The “don’t-look-it-up” game
In the interest of trying to increase inconvenience, a fun game to play is to try to remember the answer to something instead of just looking it up on the internet. For example: I was listening to Chopin with a friend and they asked what music era Chopin was a part of. Neither of us could remember, so we played the game and tried to remember everything we knew about Chopin and the music eras that we knew he might have been a part of. We went through historical events, his contemporaries, common motifs….every single thing we could remember from music theory classes we’d taken years ago. The best part of the game is that in the end, you don’t actually have to verify whether or not you were right! Sometimes it is just nice to see all the things you know that you can remember if you let yourself. Journey over destination, etc etc.
EAT: quick pickle anything
Summer is the season of the quick pickle. Cut your quick pickle vegetable of choice to a size that is nice to bite. Submerge in rice vinegar and a pinch of sugar. Maybe add some other spices if you feel so inclined. Follow your heart. Mix it up so the sugar is dissolved and let it sit for 15ish minutes - and you have quick pickles! We do this regularly with cucumbers, carrots, and radishes. It would probably work equally as well with other vegetables of similar consistencies. They keep well in the fridge for around a week.
MAKE: a short-term bucket list
I recently crossed off one of the final items on my 30 before 30 list, which was to attend an opera at the Metropolitan Opera House I started doing this when I was 18 - I made a “20 before 20” bucket list, which consisted of 20 things I wanted to do before I turned 20. Then I made a “25 before 25” list. Now I’m just about done with my “30 before 30” list. A few notes on the contents of the lists, should you choose to take on this tradition yourself: I believe the items themselves must be fluid. My lists change A LOT - because several of the things I thought I really wanted to do when I was 20 and making my “25 before 25” list were of no interest to me whatsoever by 22. How was 20-year-old me supposed to know what 24-year-old me was going to be really interested in? So I let the items change. As soon as I got into grad school, I took one item off my 25 before 25 list and changed it to “finish grad school”, a thing that I was basically guaranteed to do. The items on my lists are not all monumental tasks - they are mostly things that are pretty easily accomplished within the given time frame, but that could also be easily forgotten if they weren’t written down. As previously stated, I love a little quest - these lists of little (and not-so-little) quests feel like gifts to myself. If you happen to start a bucket list, connect with me and let me know what’s on it!!
xoxo,
the mindful narcissist
as a fellow zine person I really enjoy how zine-adjacent many of these items are; love the idea of keeping lots of little highly specific log booklets!
Pizza journal is brilliant. Definitely doing a french fry journal for myself.