The internet is a horn of cornucopia overflowing with mostly harmless self-help advice from aspiring gurus. Drink water. Yup, sure, can’t hurt. Go for walks. I get my 10,000 steps in every day. Try to get eight hours of sleep every night. It’s hard because I do love scrolling in bed at night, but yes, when I get a full night’s rest I’m usually less of a blob the next morning.

The advice is almost always obvious and well-intentioned, I guess. Self-help gurus are like scam artists with good hearts. Eat vegetables? Read books? On it. There are life coaches who share wisdom like “set a goal” as if that’s a secret they’re only sharing with thousands of their closest confidants. Yes, by all means, set goals. One of them should be to ignore anything called a “productivity hack.”

My favorite kind of advice though is about building good habits. I can’t get enough. How did you start running? How did you quit eating sugar? Tell me: how do you wake up at 6 am?

There is a popular myth that it takes 21 days to create a habit and that’s largely debunked. It can take one person a week and another two months to perfect a new personal ritual.

Me? It took about four months and now I can’t stop calling friends up on the phone and talking to them for hours about movies and feelings and politics and feelings. I have standing weekly calls with a couple of friends who live far away from New York City. I have one monthly call with a friend who I’ve known since high school. I call friends out of the blue, and now they’re starting to do the same with me.

I still see friends in the flesh. I go to the movies and then afterward, eat slices of pizza in parks with them. I hang out with their kids. I am as social as I can be.

I was wrong about podcasts, a few years ago I declared them a fad. I couldn’t imagine anyone choosing to listen to the radio in the digital age but I was wrong. Hoo-boy, was I wrong? What I totally didn’t get was how intimate it is to invite a tiny voice into your head. It’s less passive than I thought it would be. I’m able to concentrate on other tasks but I can also get lost in storytelling or long-form interview podcasts.

I’ve started listening to podcasts because I enjoy long walks with my one-eyed mix Shih-Tzu Morley Safer — who is the color of Golden Grahams cereal — but I’ve also started talking to friends on those walks. Handsfree. Technology!

I do not believe there were any silver linings to the pandemic, it remains a nightmare and I wish it had never happened. But, I suppose, the pandemic did force me to call friends because having to perform on zoom was exhausting and texting is fine, just fine, but after a while, all the texts bleed into one long boring e.e. cummings poem titled “u ok?”

It is my understanding that younger generations are terrified of the phone. They prefer texting or DMing or video. But I don’t think my newly rediscovered love of talking on the phone can only be enjoyed by those of us who grew up with landlines. My house in the 80s had one phone and it would ring loudly out of nowhere and when you said “hello” you had no idea who was on the other line. It was terrifying unless it was your best friend, and then it was a tiny Christmas.

One of my regular phone calls is my friend Yvonne, a therapist in Vancouver who I’ve known for almost thirty years. I met her in college and we became immediate friends, she is gentle and fierce and absolutely hilarious. She was also the first biracial person I’d ever really met. Her mom is white, German-born and her dad is Black and her late maternal grandmother was raised in Germany during the war. I met her a couple of times and she was adorable.

Yvonne knew what it was like to walk around with a mother who didn’t share her skin color and to see how society treats her based on that. I grew up thinking I was alone, that I was the only person who looked different from their own flesh and blood. We use to talk all night, smoking cigarettes, planning how to take over the world.

When I moved to New York City a quarter of a century ago, Yvonne was my first call, on a payphone, because she had moved here a few months prior and was living at a hostel for young women that would not allow any men to visit. We spent years being broke together and making art. She eventually moved to Canada for love and stayed because Canada is like America with lower blood pressure. I protested the move, of course, but also wished her well.

She and I had grown apart the past few years. There was no reason for this, we both had busy lives. But one day I was thinking about her. About how she made me feel less alone once upon a time. I reached out. Called her up. That’s that. BFFs.

So here’s some self-help advice: call your friends or family on the phone. Besties, siblings, mom or dad. Plan it or surprise them. Talk about the weather or really get into it.

Thanks to therapy, I’ve learned to be more open with those I love. I don’t dump my feelings on them but I’m more likely now, in my old age, to tell a friend about my insecurities. I’ve also become a better listener, I hunger for stories about kids and jobs and hopes. My calls are full of laughter and secrets, cheers and whispers. I walk around New York City and talk to the people most important to me in my life while my dog hunts for who knows what.