On August 30th it will be an anniversary that means a lot to me. Weird, a year, but there it is. I don’t really know how much meaning to ascribe to the passage of time. My hair is longer, my body is different, I’m tan and muscled and somewhat purified. As pure as one can be when people still try to reach out for you when it’s not you that they want. I don’t have to be shame’s only daughter for trusting others.

I have three beautiful new (to me) purses (CDG Aoyama, Brown Prada Leather, White Bottega from the 90s). I got rid of my old loafers. I sold my Ralph Lauren tweed hunting suit. It made me sad, but I know it doesn’t work anymore, and I simply do not hunt! My new loafers are the Square toed Geel ones, they’re surprisingly comfortable. Most of my new clothes are olive green and navy blue. But I got a teal Agnes B cardigan because my mom has a navy blue one. I have Vibrams and mini shorts for hiking and the jade bangle stays on for good luck. In the evening I’ll switch to the Manolos. There’s no one watching, which I prefer.

I’m highly competent, I can write blogs even while I take care of my home and speak to my friends and do supply audits for work. I can lend my mom Lispector and Murdoch while she hands me The Golden Bough. I can go to the beach and the pool and the creek all on the same day. I can cry about those far off years and still concentrate deeply enough to throw a good bowl out of red earthenware. I long to walk forever in the light, but I still know the secret of the quiet night and recognize the importance of darkness. You have to bring the darkness to the light, you cannot try to bring the light into the dark.

If I had to pick a lesson I’ve learned (and learned and learned and learned) this year it would be to always trust the feeling even if you can’t find a reason for why it’s there. I always know in my heart what is right and what is not even when it’s early and inexplicable and when I ignore it I only get sick or involved in some sort of nightmare. I think most people don’t particularly deserve the benefit of the doubt but I’ll still come to birthday parties and pay for our cosmos and pick you up from the airport. There’s still a river of light that I love, and always will, even if I don’t know who it belongs to anymore, or maybe never did. I’ll ache until you’re here but my life is still beautiful, peaceful, and fun. I dance and I work and I’m brave and I’m fragile but soft like a flower (zinnia season almost over), so I don’t shatter anymore.

1. Your attention is the most valuable thing you own and can give, it’s the altar where you worship. Are you happy with where your devotion sits?

2. Is the increase in being seen worth the increase in being misunderstood?

3. Am I safe if I camp alone as a beautiful woman (yes)

4. Does the specialness lessen when more people look?

5. How dare you?

6. Which of your mistakes have become your greatest reward?

7. Are you open to it?

8. Can I show you where the giant swallowtails lay their eggs?

9. Why would you do that to me?

10. Do you know how to stay or is your life built on the concept of giving up?

11. Can you feel my energy shield?

12. Do you want to drink my sweat, chase me through the forest, and hold my arms when you meet me on the shore?

13. Will you put the rocks I like in your pockets?

14. Are you going to put me in a Situation?

My stories right now don’t feel worth telling, but I’ll tell them anyway.

I knew it was a 2pm check in but I still left my house at 10am, figuring that since it was a 45 minute drive and I had to get provisions anyways, I could kill just a couple hours at the beach. When I passed Lana’s tunnel, where the 10 meets the 1, I felt the familiar feeling of openness that always comes with the Pacific Coast Highway when there is no traffic. I stopped at Will Rogers beach. I like to stay in the waves for as long as possible, ducking under or jumping over, swim out far enough to alarm the people I’m with (if there were any), and then come back to my towel. Near me under an umbrella were teenage boys, one saying how he preferred smart girls so wouldn’t be able to find one wherever they were going tonight. I found it sweet, but wondered how he discovered the girls were smart.

The second time I came out of the water I found my towel was still very wet, and sand clung to me. Sand always clings— it reminds me of a part in Lives of the Saints, where her boyfriend’s father’s wedding band is inscribed with “I Cling to Thee.” How I would like that, one day. What is the point of speaking in opaque terms about being alone, about freedom, about love. I know you just like my mom’s dog knows the sound of her car when she’s been alone.

The house in Topanga was tiny and adorable, I did not like the stuff on the walls, but what did it matter, for two nights. I was surrounded by elms and a few oaks, the brush threatening a fire, but it wasn’t the season. Within the first hour I saw bunnies and a lizard. I booked the place almost entirely because of an outdoor clawfoot bathtub. I could find a lot of happiness in very little space, provided it comes with a view. I ate bowls of granola, made little matcha americanos with cold foam. I tried to write but the words would not come. What I mostly felt was the serenity and peace of being alone, of no expectations. When you pass into Topanga Canyon you drive by a big Rock. It felt protective, I wanted to reach out and touch it, but there’s no place to pull over. I took a bath outside. I read poems, and looked out at the sky, hoping to see the moon. I felt happy. Maybe I’m glad I’m here, despite it all. Maybe I’m here for a reason. I slept a little afraid, hearing rustling outside. When I woke up there was a California sister perched on the outside of the house. Just like me, California sister.

Some days the cold foam is the only thing shaking off the summertime sadness. But then I’ll have a good hair day, and make a plan, and discover I can make a simple syrup from Fig leaves that tastes somehow French, the herbaceousness good for both lemonades and vanilla pound cakes. Even when a mosquito gets in the house and bites my ankles 6 times I’m reminded of how sweet my blood is, how I am desired. So maybe it’s not so so much of a mystery anymore, but whatever. No one reads anyways. I visit my dad in the hospital. We have some kind of intervention that fails. Its a cosmic joke, to look at your parents and see yourself, to have to argue with them as they become you, as they become their parents. You simply have to look away.

When I think about myself in the more distant past, I recognize in my actions a kind of lack of the gentleness which I now possess, which is strange given the roughness I’ve experienced. I guess that this is what has made me gentle, knowing that despite it all I do not want to become like the people I loved who may have loved me back, but were inadequately equipped to be kind. I do see throughout the years a potent desire for believing only the good in people, for seeing the bad things but viewing them as aberrations, rather than part of one’s character, and assuming everyone thought the same as me. This is a strange element of optimism, the persistent hope that has caused me a fair amount of torment. Despite that, it’s not something I wish to change. I am trying to continue to view people as the goodness they possess, but still be able to judge a situation as tenable or untenable if nothing changes (because my heart always believes that it can change). In loneliness and sensitivity and the suffering that comes with them I also find freedom and the superpower to be sensitive to the needs of those I engage with. Selfishness, makes me spiritually sick, gives me an ache in my lower back that does not originate from the physical realm. I’m aware of the hurt that has been done to me, but it makes me aware of the hurt I have done to others, for which I remain ever sorry. It’s all well and good to believe we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us, but everyone has their own points of intolerability. I have viewed others’ capacity for love and forgiveness as the same as my own, and have learned that this is not the case. It’s strange, I find, that people will love you forever, but not be able to forgive, or see the truth. Love dies within me, memories of those lost fade, but forgiveness and charity remain forever, they’re the only things that allow for starting over.

I’ve just made something I’ve made many times before, a Blueberry Conrmeal Tart. I’m dying to sit in a creek and hold a frog in my hands. Something about rocks and flowing water and canyon roads mean a lot to me.

In The Days of Abandonment, when her husband leaves her suddenly, Olga’s abandonment is like a fever, it breaks after the worst of all possible days. It isn’t like waves of an ocean, it doesn’t get slowly worse and then slowly better. It is the worst day of your life, your body is in agony, and then suddenly after a good night of sleep the heaviness leaves you. Any dignity she started out with is gone, her grace is gone, and then it hits a cresting wave and with her dead dog and sick child, she realizes she no longer loves Mario. She has been angry but aching for him, but the anger pulls her back to her roots. She returns to her Southern childhood, the themes of Ferrante coming to the foreground of Southern ambitions, Neapolitan women unable to pretend to be from upscale Turin. Ferrante emphasizes the vulgarity that comes with being Neopolitan, the vulgarity of the female species, in a way that recalls Munro’s short stories. Though Olga tries to resist Anna Karenina and Simone de Beauvoir, she finally relents and becomes a woman destroyed. It is only in her destruction, resisted for so long, allows her to return to herself. She doesn’t have to repress the Southern aspect, doesn’t have to play a supporting role anymore. Maybe the hardest part of this marital abandonment is that it puts her back in charge of her life, and her choices, things she hasn’t wanted to be responsible for. If she wasn’t happy before, it was because of her husband’s job, her children’s school. Now her life is her own.

Belle Burden does the same thing, I believe, though with much less self awareness (this part makes sense, as she writes a memoir while Ferrante writes a novel), and the kind of repressed grace and matter of fact acceptance that comes from a waspy upbringing and a lawyer’s education. Her writing brings some freedom, even if it also costs her some social connections. In what case is it better to speak? Sure, there is an immediate rush to comfort and support, but then they know, and the judgments begin. And things change, in the midst of the transformation that is grieving a lost life, but opinions will turn to stone. Burden and Olga will forget their weakest moments, but the people they have leaned on or trusted never will. The loss of dignity cannot be regained, though it seems that way to both narrators. And sometimes we see that it will come back to us. How can we prove then that we are fixed? I think that those challenging days are mostly forgotten, where the transformation truly alchemizes something inside, even if invisible to those around us. The cost of community is being willing to be honest even if it results in judgment. Burden sees this as unfair, where we as readers, even if we hate her husband, see that this is just life, and this is part of the risk you take when you engage with anyone.

Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey has a theme running through it of atonement, of Odysseus’s wandering being the cost of his trickery. In order to finally get home, he has to take a leap of faith, surrendering to the water, trusting that his god will not let him die. This becomes a story of atonement in Nolan’s retelling, one that I think is beautiful. At the end of journeying to the underworld and hearing his prophecy, he is attacked by the dead soldiers from the Trojan War, who attempt to stain him with their own dishonor. There is an aspect of this in Burden’s and Ferrante’s abandonments. Are they writing their story, calling their friends, to attempt to give their husbands the dishonor they have felt in being discarded for other women? It’s tempting, I see, to want to let the people decide what is fair, believing that they have been a victim of injustice. But life is not like battle, we have no Zeus’s law. There are no victims in love, only active participants. We take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith and if it does not pay off, we can choose Grace and Dignity and fall apart in private, waiting for the proverbial fever to break, or be loud and possibly gain community at the price of losing some, who will take the “victor’s” side.

In life, we always find what we are looking for. It’s why we must be careful of people who have built their life on loss; they will always be prepared to find it again. If you are looking for whimsy, for beauty, for miracles, you will find them. If you expect to be a victim, you will position yourself as one, instead of taking responsibility for yourself. Burden takes on a woe is me perspective– which of course is understandable given her circumstances. But she lacks hope; she continually braces for new impact, so of course she finds it. In giving grace and charity and compassion to others, even those who have hurt us, we are able to give these same things to ourselves, to live them in principle, and make our life full of them. It’s the very premise of forgiveness, and atonement. In letting go of the hurt we have felt from ourselves, we simultaneously let ourselves off the cross, which is great because we need the wood.

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Happy summer. What a weird year it’s been– like my move across the country, and my spirituality, and my introduction back to working full time and I think most related to this blog, my composing of gay little emails about circling back and checking in, and its destruction of my unique voice. I guess I had been feeling like a Princess in a kind of old maid way, the kind of off-putting and undersocialized daughter of some lord, who never married and just lives tucked away in the family home reading books and memorizing poems and playing the piano and taking dance lessons and attending to family matters. Now I’m more of the world, in the world, contributing to the world. Using the money from my full time job to stimulate the economy by buying random stuff off ebay and going to fancy matcha shops for cream top drinks and tipping 50%. (All them matcha lattes, you gotta do pilates) I try to continue to Larp as unemployed but the truth is I have two jobs.

Here are some of the things I’m searching for on ebay- Yeezy (i want the shoes and maybe some random top), Eileen Fisher t-shirts (they’re beautiful cotton with a lovely silhouette), Ralph Lauren sweater american flag sweater for the World Cup and then fall, Guess jeans (they seriously are the most flattering), Agnes b striped shirts and of course The snap cardigan (they also have gorgeous leather purses but i don’t love the logo), beat up designer handbags (miu miu with ink stain, i can fix her). My gorgeous and genius friend Giovanna Flores has the perfect desktop accessories.

My continued education, in which I am reading Greek plays. My knowledge of these plays is mostly from reading Jung and his students, but it’s time to go to the source. Antigone is a beautiful name for a daughter, especially if you want your daughter to be dutiful, to be obedient to her own beliefs even at the cost of her own life. Iphegenia less so. Eurydice, my favorite, because Anne Carson made her so. The paradox of longing, the mechanisms of turning back, how nothing really ever existed at all.

“8 I was. I lost. I sang. I knew. I ever hope for that strange

autumn light again with the good dog again with the

thousands of years. Scrap of [me] off Eurydice torn. Her

number I lost her lark I shot and she a pulse. History never

looks so possible as when leaving a heart spilt among the

stones crying Don’t read it again it was perfect”

I have been dealing a lot this summer with Loneliness. I try to recognize it’s an expansive feeling; one that indicates I have been healing and now have room for more in my heart. But I’m possibly too comfortable with loneliness, and feel safe in solitude, so I am careful. I practice this in physicality by swimming in the ocean alone, which typically means being brave enough to get into the water while still being trusting enough to leave your stuff on the sand. Trust tends to be easy for me but gets me into trouble.

Right now I have a complicated relationship to reading and writing. Reading because it was my main coping mechanism last year– pain feels less heavy when you have a good book to dig into. When your pain echoes throughout NYRB and all four Sea of Infertility books and every single Alice Munro story, it doesn’t feel as isolating. But I have other hobbies now that get in the way of my reading time, and pottery has made me superstitious about sharing my creative endeavors. You can think you’ve made a perfect vase and completely destroy it during trimming. I’m being very zen with it now, and practicing letting go by not firing anything. I’m able to be proud and then I wedge it back to nothing. As Iris Murdoch said, the enemy is the fat relentless ego.

I have a sweet matcha every morning with this Coconut Vanilla Malk Creamer and a good quality matcha. I spent years and years drinking only unsweetened alt milk, or just the tea. And I do like just the tea but I recognize that this sweet drink bumps my gratitude and happiness levels at least 10%, possibly more, so it’s worth it. Ray Peat vindicated, I guess. The bitter taste in my mouth is balanced by sweetness. The thing is I still like the bitterness, still need that to be the main flavor, but I need the sweetness too. How sweet it is, now you’re in the world. My joy and my heart, or whatever it is. My pottery studio is next to a sports bar. I walk in wearing a weird outfit, my arms and legs and feet covered in clay, drink a beer and watch the World Cup. I feel fine.

I’m trying to be honest about who I am, but I still find myself performing in some ways. (I used to want to be a wife and mother but now I think I would just like to be a tree). But I’m delighted by the surprises of life, like opening a used book I purchased four years ago to find a beautiful one line review of it, written in pencil. “It’s discouraging. Man is not even able to destroy himself, he can only destroy others.” So true, so true.

I Love Dick - I wonder if this is a uniquely feminine story because men don’t write stories about unrequited affairs, or just if they do write them they are less abject and degrading, more asymmetrical than actually unrequited, and often ending in death for the man (Sorrows of Young Werther). Does Kraus lean into this pathos because it’s just how she thinks, or is she doing it purposefully? Is she making a point? I don’t like the way she is neurotic without failing but in honesty is the book more about the dissolution of her marriage to Sylvere? She felt something in Dick that he says he never felt (I find this unlikely but to what degree he is not honest will not be known, and I wonder if even he knows) largely because of what is lacking in her personal life with Sylvere. Maybe she is looking for rejection. Are you looking for rejection, Chris? Is rejection the thing that makes us feel fear? Do we seek it out because we fear it or do we fear it because we are being drawn to seek it out. I find myself analyzing novels in my search for meaning but Chris has conjured one, both epistolary and autofiction, out of one night. Maybe there are people like this book— I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but I can’t stop thinking about it, searching for a way to tell everyone why and how I did not enjoy it, calling it by name, saying hey a load of THIS. Here are all my negative opinions about something that seems to have grabbed onto me, something that I can’t stop thinking about. Maybe you don’t want to get close to anyone you could actually love again because it hurts too much to know they are talking about you, great failures and smallest flaws, with their friends. Sure, she’s great, but she doesn’t shave her legs enough and she doesn’t strive for success enough and she doesn’t have any friends who will watch the World Cup with her at the sports bar down the street on a Tuesday at 1pm. Now that I’m not around, do you have what you want. Do you know what that is now that I’m gone? I can’t love anyone else because they’ll never mean as much to me as you. Everyone wants a devoted and sweet little agreeable wife until she’s disappointed in you and then she has to go, and expeditiously, because if you look in her eyes you’ll want to die and really, well, it’s better her than you. After all, she offered you her life and her soul and it would be rude to not accept, would it not.

The thing about I Love Dick is the resolution, in which he categorically denies any relationship with her, but wants to remain friends with her husband. He refuses to even give her a kind response in all her desperation, her bid to be seen. She talks around feeling made invisible by her relationship to Sylvere; she is his second wife and works on allowing them to be comfortable and investing their money so that they can both make art. She drives while Sylvere sits and sleeps, she keeps quiet with the other 30-something wives while the 50-something husbands discuss esoteric politics. Maybe once you have been viewed as desperate by the person you love, ignored and dismissed, it feels better to open that desperation up to the world. If your creativity is linked to your emotions, why should a woman have to disregard desperation, the deep wide gulf of rejection, just because it makes her look bad? We should not be punished for identifying with the full spectrum of human emotion. If Dick refuses to see Chris in her pain and her confusion, then the world will see her. A resolution is so tidy.

Chris relates herself to Hannah Wilke Wittgenstein, and describes her art as deeply personal, and naked, both literally and figuratively, and she was a darling until people got tired of her. “No one apart from Hannah’s closest friends and family recognized the sweetness and idealism at the bottom of her work. Her warmth. The human-ness of her female person. In an amazing text written in 1976, Hannah proved to be her own best critic: ‘Rearranging the touch of sensuality with a residual magic made from laundry lint or latex loosely laid out like love vulnerably exposed... continually exposing myself to whatever situation occurs... Gambling as well as gamboling... To exist instead of being an existentialist, to make objects instead of being one. The way my smile just gleams, the way I sip my tea. To be a sugar giver instead of a salt cellar, to not sell out…’”

Degradation can be fixed by love. Mostly, now, it will be healed with self-love, and self-respect (so boring), but in romantic love we see it healed as well. Romantic love like this is just now so rare, partly because of a hate for ugliness. In our manicured and consumptive world, we are expected to be always beautiful, always kind, always in a high place. Optimized. The most romantic thing I can think of in our modern era is Jeff Bezos’ leaked sext— “I love you, alive girl.” She moves, she is complicated and sometimes opaque, but this all proves that she is alive, that she is real, that she is of the world. The woman who lays next to you at night feels the full spectrum of human emotion. And to love her is to see the world through her eyes.

I love you honey bear but it’s now troubled water and you were such a Paul Simon fan on my 30th birthday but now you don’t wanna lay you down. Fake ass Paul Simon fan doesn’t even want to be a bridge. What hurts more, the cruelty or the attempts to be kind? Yes, I wasn’t who you thought I was. That can be a gift though, I’m a constantly changing being, flowing through the universe, open to gifts that I might not yet understand. To look upon these changes, to watch pain be alchemized, it used to make you proud. I’m deeply impressive and wildly special. You’ve never met a bitch like me in your life and you never will again and my face will keep its sweet loving aspect while yours will fold and crumble. But it is not about who is better, it is about me and the depth of my talents and beauty and goodness. I’m still here and I don’t need a bridge over troubled water because now the water is my friend and I move with it and here I am safe in the muck and mire.

In high school the books that affected me most were The Unbearable Lightness of Being and East of Eden. When I turned 18 I got a stupid tattoo, a quote from The Unbearable Lightness of Being that reads “there is no perfection, only life.” By tattooing it on my body I wonder if I cursed myself with living through some of Tereza’s pain. What strikes me the most now though is that I was to go on to struggle with an addiction to perfection. And what also strikes me is that there is a similar quote in East of Eden that says “ And now that you do not have to be perfect you can be good.”

Maybe good is harder than perfect is some ways. The opposite of perfect is not imperfect, its nothing. No trying. Right now maybe I am bad. But it’s the shadow so I try to enjoy being bad. My bowls are crooked right now. The glazes pool in unburnished parts. I pull walls with the wheel moving too quickly and end up having to turn a cup into a cream pitcher. Who cares though, it literally only has to make any sense to me, and its fun to be a novice. My favorite part is that I have a dried poppy seed pod to use as a signature. My name felt too “liv laugh love,” and the eucalyptus pod looked too much like a butthole.

So I’m rereading East of Eden on the train to Emeryville, which feels appropriate. Its the central valley after all. After high school my friend got “thou mayest” tattooed on the back of her neck. Her name is also Olivia. I had a tattoo in the same place. Synchronicity. Sometimes to simplify things you first have to make them more complicated, do you understand? I’m going up the state for a jade bracelet, to keep me lucky.

Now that I have some disposable income again, I’ve been trying to reorient myself away from scarcity. What is truly important to me? I love clothes but am trying to keep things minimal, sticking to vintage and classic (my two new bags: a 90s dark brown prada and a mini CDG Aoyama in black, petit bateau deadstock, my favorite underwear). But I let myself be influenced by tankair, and I bought a my mum made it babydoll dress I have wanted for a year. The beauty regimen I’ve decided on was coined by a guy (sorry) but I think it works - “organic free range foid.” But where is the line? To me it’s eyebrow gel, lip liner, and gloss (I’ve been buying the edaem gloss for all my friends) with nothing else. Its waxing your lower stomach and bikini line, but otherwise leaving a trimmed bush. It’s like the implication of being natural but better :). No nail polish, but still manicuring your nails, so you can show by the MOONS that you are in the bloom of health. I keep my skincare simple, just cleanser and moisturizer and a mandelic acid serum for my jawline and tret. Also everyone’s holy grail mask, a mix of VIP02 and Vivant.

In the name of reinforcing that my resources are not scarce, I have been kind of doing whatever and buying whatever. The past month I’ve gone to Erewhon every Saturday. And that buffalo cauliflower hits, but I can tell that the food is Spiritually Bereft. The thing is, I just had to get it out of my system. I still like Sunlife Organics though! I have gone back to the Korean Spa lately (disposable income, free time), and my favorite one has a sundeck where you can sunbathe in the nude, which for me is the only way to sunbathe. This summer I’m finally going to do it (get my legs tan).

Lately I only want to wear my jeans are so low and loose you can see the top of my panties when I bend over the wheel, except on Saturday mornings when I put on some chaotic color combination of ballet clothes— yellow tights and pink shoes and navy shorts and a hunter green leotard with a black wrap. I’m taking some random vintage t shirts to the tailor, to have them taken in and hemmed a little higher. In September, when I’ve been where I am for a year, I’ll purge any clothes that don’t feel surrounded by light. I think I know what most of those things will be, but I feel that, for now, I should be chaste in making this decision.

I got a membership to Lacma and a membership to the Pottery studio and I’m going to send the next three months going to the Butterfly Pavilion every weekend to see if I can get them to recognize me. My mom says they won’t. I believe that they will. I’ve been obsessed with butterflies lately- two necklaces, the stickers on my phone case and notebooks. They’re the whimsical symbol to me.

Now that I’m working again I feel the push and pull of Data. Many glorious and meaningful optimizations to be made, peptides to be taken. I’m tempted, don’t get me wrong. But I’d rather stick my hands in the dirt and try things out and let myself fail and have some sleepless nights followed by exhausted days. Maybe all I do is endure because it keeps me sharp. I’ll figure it out and right now I’ll be on the journey. I tried to get a heart rate and sleep tracking ring but I realized data is for work and I have boundaries. It’s all happening, in that I am coming to conclusions, which is huge for me.

Everyone is like you can start over as many times as you want. I realize that I Can, but why on earth would I want to? I’ve let go of everything that has ever made its way across my hand. I do not want to do it again, so I haven’t been grabbing anything.

Coming soon to this page or some other publication— I finished Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility. My thoughts seem endless, but they’re getting more clear. I’m grateful. I haven’t felt like sharing lately, but I’m trying to push through. I am working on a piece somewhat defending Alice Munro, sorry, but I still think all female experiences are worth exploring.

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The thing that struck me the most about The Drama was that its premise made sense. I don’t know if it was a good movie, but it was certainly interesting, and as I said before, beautiful. Charlie (Robert Pattinson) is given a real, tangible reason for cold feet and panic, a week before his wedding. His friends tell him to run. But he comes back to Emma, and holds her close, sleeps next to her, kisses her hand, while thinking about his doubts. While thinking about running away. In this way, the movie is correct when it says that part of love is a humiliation ritual, when Charlie’s speech says that love is egoless. The ego will willfully rebuff love, the ego will misidentify the truth to save its own humiliation. But we must have humility to enter into a lifelong commitment.

In love, we want to appear at our best, but be loved at our worst. We desire a love that will remain even in moments of anger, of conflict, even of violence. We want someone to look at us and say with faith, yes, the good outweighs the bad even on your worst day. Does it matter at all that someone can love you when things are easy, when life is simple, when you are fuckable and wet and nubile and open, if they can’t show up with a bloody face and an apology?

The Drama sells the viewer on the purpose of a modern day wedding. Charlie has to write a speech about Emma, he has to put into words for his family and friends why he loves her, why he is choosing to spend the rest of his life with her. A lot of what he writes is about her empathy, about her kindness, and when she is revealed as a would-be school shooter, he starts to question this. He starts to delete anything relating these words from his speech. But it is arguable that it is her corrupted empathy and kindness that led her down this dark path as a young girl left alone by her peers and would be friends. Her great capacity for love, which Charlie has experienced first hand, has led to a great capacity for pain. Presumably, the school shooting would have been a precursor to the actual point of this act– her death. That is what she was really planning, a suicide that would finally show people the pain endured. In a way, the modern wedding is facing this fear of not really knowing in front of community, and being rewarded by the deepening of love that sometimes comes via cortisol spikes. In its inverse, it is seen when Emma’s school is rocked by the death of a classmate in a different shooting, which leads to her finally bonding with her classmates, and she is finally seen. She says the feeling was like “waking up from a bad dream.”

Charlie is forced to choose Emma, or not to. And at the end, he almost does something bad, but just like Emma, he doesn’t. The violence for them happens after they are already married, of course during his speech. Away from Emma after finally facing that he might actually lose her, he is desperate and alone, searching. He calls her and says, I know you don’t want to hear from me, but just let me know that you are okay. It’s beautiful to call the person you love even when you know, or at least you think, that they don’t want to hear from you. It’s beautiful to ask them to let you know that they are okay. Emma shows empathy, kindness, charity, and capacity for love when she shows up. Charlie’s eyes fill with tears. Like Orpheus, he turns back, and he is rewarded when the woman he still loves, despite knowing the worst thing she has ever done, shows up.

How incoherent love can feel, how impossible to parse it is why you will show up at a restaurant to look into the watering eyes of someone who has hurt you immensely, how nonsensical the cruelty can feel when it begins to evaporate, when someone willingly turns away. It is all just a choice– any relationship will ultimately require accepting the darkness that lines the light.

Marquis de Sade wrote about two sisters who, in a scheme of revenge against their father, are deposited in a nunnery. After getting thee to a nunnery, the sisters, Juliette (bad girl) and Justine (good girl) are set upon by the abbess, who only succeeds in corrupting Juliette. Justine manages to remain “good” and get away, but as she flees with her virtue intact, she is met with many perils that rob her of her dignity and good name. The good girl is tormented, while Juliette gives in and uses her sexuality to acquire freedom. She is corrupted, in a way, but able to use said corruption to find joy, wealth, and safety, whereas Justine continually falls into the hands of villains who ravish and torture her. Eventually, Juliette rescues her from her safe position, but Justine grows morose and is then killed by lightning. She joins a long line of literary women destroyed.

I was led to Sade’s Justine via Lawrence Durrell and his Justine, who at first seem to bear no resemblance to De Sade’s, except in reverse. Sade quotes are the epigraphs on all of Durrell’s Alexandria quartet, and if I had to relate their Justines I would say that Durrell’s Justine does not care about damage her love affairs have on the men she uses because of her rape as a young girl. The narrator says of his eponymous lover that “there are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.” It’s all very French– even if Durrell was technically Irish, he is much more influenced by Proust than Joyce, and clearly sees his own Justine as connected to that of Sade. “There are two positions available to us—either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy. I ask whether there can be any hesitation, lovely Therese, and where will your little mind find an argument able to combat that one?”

In Madame de Sade, Mishima seems to make the point that Justine is based on the Marquise, whose wifely devotion and piety (virtue) led her to much unhappiness. That she becomes a pawn in her husband’s sadism is part of the devotion and piety. She is ultimately a masochist, though discovers it only in her mental strain, not in the actual physical act. Durrell’s Justine seems the opposite of a devoted wife until the entire story is revealed in the third act of the quartet, and her affair with the narrator is shown to be on her husband’s instructions. Darley, the narrator, is a British spy, and Justine’s husband, Nessim, is, in a fashion, working a Coptic gunrunning scheme in support of the future nation of Israel.

Is Virtue, in its altruistic state, inherently masochistic? By considering others, by being devoted and empathetic and kind, don’t we allow ourselves to be ravaged by marauders? Aren’t we the maiden Justine, walking through the forest, allowing ourselves to be victimized? When she is rescued, and no longer allowed to be tortured, she gives up on life. De Sade has an intrinsic understanding of womanhood, though he has perverted it. Juliette delves deeper into herself, becoming not the maiden but the wild woman, and is allowed freedom. She is not masochistic because she flows through the world, sticking to the grey instead of being forced into black or into white.

In considering Sade, we must have a French woman’s opinion. In Simone De Beauvoir’s Must We Burn Sade?, she argues that his significance is that he reveals the ethical risk of desire and sexuality as a place where freedom is expressed, and the nature of this freedom. She received backlash for using this book to identify Sade as a moralist. In his four books, throughout the love affairs of the people of Alexandria, Durrell references Sade because he sees love itself as an act that is always met with some type of pain. His characters suffer, and have affairs, and fall in love, and suffer more. Bathlazar, the narrator of the second book, eventually cuts his own hand off in a fit of madness induced by a lover who leaves him. This gets to the point of the matter– “When you are in love you know that love is a beggar, shameless as a beggar; and the responses of merely human pity can console one where love is absent by a false travesty of an imagined happiness.” Rather than just Justine, all people who love are framed as masochists and sadists to some degree. To save ourselves, we hurt others, and we hurt ourselves to attempt love at all. Only in keeping to solitude do we ensure safety for our hearts.

“And there was one dream common to most young aristocrats of the time. Scions of a declining class which had once possessed concrete power, but which no longer retained any real hold on the world, they tried to revive symbolically, in the privacy of the bedchamber the status for which they were nostalgic, that of the lone and sovereign feudal despot. The orgies of the Duke of Carolais, among others, were bloody and famous. Sade, too, thirsted for this illusion of power. “What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything about you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you... every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.” The intoxication of tyranny leads directly to cruelty, for the libertine, in hurting the object that serves him, “tastes all the pleasures which a vigorous individual feels in making full use of his strength; he dominates, he is a tyrant.”

“Ominous roiling in the Crater Lake atop the Volcano:

When meeting an impasse, the Superior Person turns his gaze within, and views the obstacle from a new perspective.

Offer your opponent nothing to resist.

Let a sage guide you in this.

Good fortune lies along this course.”

The superior person knows that there is a woman sleeping in her bed.

The superior person experiences this information with emptiness; it does not really compare to the pain already endured.

The superior person knows that you loved me in the morning even if my hair was not a golden storm— so now they smile like me and you.

My eyes may be soft with sorrow but I am the superior person.

I’ll take you down to the river and you’ll chain me up like Andromeda and I will still try, in my way, to be free.

The superior person knows that she will not trust you, despite your lingering touch on her perfect body.

The superior person does not know if Perseus is fated to come, to release her, to make her queen.

So now Andromeda is the superior person again and long may she reign.

Have no doubts, but seek guidance from someone you respect.

A constant move toward greater clarity will bring reward.

Faithful patience, for a long, slow distance.

Do not travel blind now that it is come to distance.

Her awareness of your addiction to the perfection of her body is what has chained her to the rocks, she let herself be led there.

They say she will be unchained and allowed to find her deepest passion, when

she is no longer Athena, no longer Suzanne, no longer just a visage.

They say that perfection is masculine because it is black or it is white— feminine says, be water, my friend.

Water off a duck’s back, my mother says.

But I am not a duck and sometimes the water must ravish.

They say the feminine is trust but trust in what. Tell me that, Athena, Andromeda, Artemis? What do I trust in now that I am no longer chained.

The superior person lets water ravish them.

Without warning

As a whirlwind

swoops on an oak

Love shakes my heart

If you will come

I shall put out

new pillows for

you to rest on

Thank you, my dear

You came, and you did

well to come: I needed

you. You have made

love blaze up in

my breast—bless you!

Bless you as often

as the hours have

been endless to me

while you were gone

I was so happy

Believe me, I

prayed that that

night might be

doubled for us

Now I know why Eros,

Of all the progeny of

Earth and Heaven, has

been most dearly loved

She was dress well:

Her feet were hidden

under embroidered

sandal straps—fine

handwork from Asia

But you, monkey face

Atthis, I loved you

long ago while you

still seemed to me a

small ungracious child

I was proud of you, too

In skill I think

you need never

bow to any girl

not one who may

see the sunlight

in time to come

After all this

Atthis, you hate

even the thought

of me. You dart

off to Andromeda

With his venom

Irresistible

and bittersweet

that loosener

of limbs, Love

reptile-like

strikes me down

Afraid of losing you

I ran fluttering

like a little girl

after her mother

It is clear now:

Neither honey nor

the honey bee is

to be mine again

Day in, day out

I hunger and

I struggle

You will say

See, I have come

back to the soft

arms I turned from

in the old days

Tell me

Out of all

mankind, whom

do you love

Better than

you love me?

I said, Sappho

Enough! Why

try to move

a hard heart?

You may forget but

Let me tell you

this: someone in

some future time

will think of us

Pain penetrates

Me drop

by drop

Summer Book, Tove Jansson

While weeping very loudly on a plane, the guy next to me was snoring in a way that went above and beyond annoying because it seemed medically dangerous, this is the book that I read. It made me miss a childhood I had never experienced, one in which my home was an island and I had no mother and everything was fun and joyful but also realistic, with pain and death. Both the child and the grandmother seem in dangerous positions, one too young and one too old, yet they are left alone while the father is remote in the background. Jansson wrote this as an older woman after her mother died, and you can tell she is both the child who needs a mother and the grandmother who is trying to keep her granddaughter safe while coping with her aging body, doing the work of living on the island that created her. Living this close to nature begets a more fundamental understanding of death. You know that the seasons change, that the pig must be slaughtered and salted, and just as surely you will die. Midsummer comes as surely as Midwinter does.

Trouble is my Business, Raymond Chandler

I’m a huge Chandler fan but it must be said that his short stories are not capable of the depth of character that is developed in his novels, so everything is a little shmaltzy, a little corny, a little too pulpy and crime ridden. Nothing can match his prose in The Long Goodbye, and the length of the book that allows him to wind through the crime solving his beautiful and incredibly insightful descriptions of Los Angeles, and the unique way that its newness and seeming beauty allows it to become more haunted than most cities, the way it is only allowed to be so shiny because of the depth of the depravity that lies below the surface. These were a nice distraction though, a good beach read if you like that sort of thing.

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

I’ve previously written about Faulkner’s Wild Palms, about grief and love, so I wanted to read something by Faulkner that was just about grief this time. Obviously to have grief there must be love, but this love is familial, not romantic. My mother is a fish is a succinct summary of this kind of grief, so intense that it makes no sense, that it cannot be grappled with, and yet our minds still try to. We cause ourselves so much suffering trying to make sense of what cannot make sense. As the Buddhists say, pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice. Yet suffering is innate to our minds, and we must reach a high level of spirituality in order to be able to not choose suffering. Ophelia understood that her Hamlet was a fish when she threw herself into the river.

Madame de Pompadour, Nancy Mitford

I don’t really have anything to say about this one other than it felt like divine intervention that I picked this up off my mom’s shelf before the next book. I love Nancy Mitford’s funny novels and hateful joking letters to her sisters, but she treats everything like an inside joke, and I just did not study enough about the French aristocracy to understand her little jokes about Versailles and its inhabitants. You could tell she had fun writing it though, and that made me happy for her.

Madame de Sade, Yukio Mishima

Stunning, brilliant, I loved this. It is always enchanting to me when I pick something up off the street and read it months later and it resonates so much with me. Madame de Sade is a play about the wife of the Marquis de Sade (who I still cannot think of without thinking about Armie Hammer). Mishima unsurprisingly knew all about Sade, and was struck by the fact that his wife waited until just as he was released from prison to leave him. Mishima clearly puts himself in the shoes of the wife, and in her place sees the interplay between her devotion and her husband’s sadism. Mishima imagines that her wifely devotion to a man that was mad, bad, and dangerous to know was her own way of contributing to BDSM, and the main element that fuels the bond between the Marquis de Sade and his wife, even if she never actually participated in sexual BDSM.

My Death, Lisa Tuttle

The reviews I’ve read of this book are annoyed that the plot “twist” seems predictable. I hate spoiler culture. A surprising twist is not indicative of a good story; we know most of the time what will happen in storytelling because it is all archetypal. Lord of the Rings is not rote because we know that good will triumph over evil, and the Odyssey is not rote because we know that Odysseus will eventually find his way home to his wife. All hero journeys are the same. Women have different journeys; they instead take the path of the trapped, the stolen, the locked away, and must journey inside to find themselves. This is what the narrator finds when she goes in search of a project. The journey only takes her to herself. It reminded me a lot of Possession by AS Byatt. Lisa Tuttle had an interesting life– she dated George RR Martin (speaking of spoiler culture). As always though, I find that the NYRB books have often been out of print for a reason. They seem promising but are usually a bit disappointing (imo), like The Dud Avocado and Cassandra at the Wedding.

The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, AS Byatt

After being reminded of Possession, I picked this up. I find fairy tales very inspiring. I loved that while it is technically a short story collection, the first four stories are very short, and the last is a novella so beautiful and poignant that it is not really a fairy tale. Byatt proves herself to be a very skilled researcher as well as storyteller, interspersing her story about an aging but realistic woman with expert knowledge about Chaucer, Gilgamesh, and One Thousand and One Nights. What does it really mean to love? What does it really mean to give someone freedom when they ask for it? Does time really cast a spell on you or will you forget me?

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut

In all honesty I fucking hated this!! I don’t have anything else to say. If it had been more difficult to read I would have just put it down but whatever I finished it and I don’t have anything nice to say. I know it is probably a very important work but I really did not enjoy it at all.

Lavinia, George Sand

My friend told me she loved Lavinia (no author provided), so I ordered both this book and the next one from the library. I like that French people have names like Lavinia, and Hercule, and Lionel. After years of being a rake, Lionel settles down to marry a much younger woman, and at the announcement of his engagement his old fiance asks that they do the traditional handing back of their love letters (like the unfollowing of an ex and the removing of her image or whatever). He does not wish to see Lavinia, but agrees. Though he has not seen her in 10 years, he is struck to the heart by her beauty and grace, and surprised by her admission of her own fault in their love affair, which significantly alters the way he thought he would feel about her. He seeks to rekindle, but she denies both him and her French suitor, facing him with the level of pain he caused her during their original affair, which has now robbed her of her ability to love at all. She then sends him off to start his married life, while she is left to contend with her own heart, closed by his callousness.

Lavinia, Ursula K Le Guin

This reminded me so much of Mary Renault’s The King Must Die. I love the idea of being a princess, being divinely protected, and going to live in the woods so that you can confer with the poet who is writing your story. It is not only about security of knowing things before they happen, but knowing that your story is important enough to be recorded for the future. There is also true freedom from regret; if our lives are entirely fated, have already been written by Virgil, then we never have to waste our time wondering about paths not taken, or kings not married. Don’t we all dream of being as important as princesses, but still being able to hide in the woods, to commune with our maiden and our crone at any age. To dress in gold and perform sometimes, while still being free to frolic alone in the dirt of the altar, unafraid of prying eyes.

The Human Stain, Philip Roth

I liked this more than American Pastoral. The story is intriguing even before the reveal (this time truly surprising), and Roth has so much narrative ingenuity. Nothing is rushed, everything is revealed at the right time, and every line is so resonant as to make the reader feel like they had never really known a feeling until Roth described it. His main character is a classics professor who ends up in a fitting drama for the era of the Clinton Impeachment. I liked his throwaway conversation between men who posit that if Clinton had just fucked Monica in the ass instead of being precious about blowjobs, she never would have blabbed to Linda Tripp. The ancient greeks knew ball — they understood that we become what we worship, that some of us are demigods, and that most are depraved and destined for failure, even if the story inspires Homer. But unlike the classics, life for Roth is just a string of fallacies; there is in fact no Greek tragedy, it is solely farce. Love and death mean as little as life itself. Family and lovers can only disappoint and harm. Few moments be meaningful in the long run, and you will remember a woman dancing her clothes off better than you remember the birth of your child.

The publisher describes the “If you give a” series as a “‘circular tale’, illustrating a slippery slope.” So in helping someone repeatedly, you slip down the bottom of a hill, and potentially reach a low point. This seems to be a uniquely modern American idea. First published in 1985, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie spawned many similar (or exactly the same) books that entered the lexicon, going so far as to be referenced in the film Air Force One. The president, captured, uses the eponymous line to tell his Vice President not to negotiate with the terrorists. It coincided with the beginning of the Millennial generation, the first children to be read this series, maybe by their parents, or possibly by Laura Bush, who honored the authors of the series at the Celebration of American Authors during her husband’s first Inauguration.

The American Right, and a lot of the Left, parrots Christian, albeit mostly Protestant, reasoning for their actions. But those words are not in the bible – religious teachings are about lending your neighbor a cup of sugar, and then being able to follow up with eggs, and then the next week asking for the favor to be returned. But the mouse eventually wanting milk is no reason to not give him the cookie. The act of generosity honors both giver and receiver and is at the heart of being a human. These stories should not be told to children. Children should be told to give the mouse the cookie, and the milk, and then a kiss. These stories might be adorable, but I believe they have had an insidious effect on the generation that they were read to.

I find myself thinking of it so often because I have been needing help, and sometimes being offered that help, but I am afraid of what taking this help means for me. Without self reliance, what can truly belong to me? If you give a girl Vintage Issey Miyake Pleats Please, she is going to want some Sophie Buhai jewelry to go with it. If you give a girl a place to live, she is going to want to make it into her home, and most of all, if you give a man the power to feed you, he is going to have the power to starve you. I see it as a cautionary tale to myself – Don’t ask for pancakes, because then you’ll need to ask for syrup. I think that this book infected our generation on both sides – being both afraid to offer and afraid to ask for help. This makes Help itself a bad thing; needing help dehumanizes you, makes you a pig or a mouse. This fear of asking for help and receiving generosity harms our collective soul; there is a reason that all myths and legends have guest rules, and feeding and housing guests as a sacred covenant between people. God says to Love Thy Neighbor, to do good works of charity. In loving our neighbors and doing good works, we both annihilate our own greed and allow our future selves to accept charity and love from neighbors. This builds community.

In Marianne Williamson’s lectures on A Course in Miracles, she talks extensively about the seven heavenly virtues and how they can make you happy in the present. Basically, the seven deadly sins don’t send you to hell, but they create hell in the here and now, while the seven heavenly virtues allow you to cultivate happiness by creating action that does not cause fear, the opposite of love. One of her interpretations of charity is to always expect the best from your loved ones. Treat everyone as if we have no reason to believe that they won’t do the right thing, won’t change, won’t at some point stop asking for syrup and milk to go with their pancakes and cookies, respectively. This is a beautiful interpretation of charity; in letting go of the past and any negative expectations of our loved ones, we honor their infinite ability to be different, to change, to become the beautiful ball of pure light that God created them to be.

My story of needing help and support in the past year and offering what I could in return does not at this moment have a happy ending. I wonder if my intense desire for self-reliance corrupted the gifts, or if I have reached the point where the book is correct. Maybe in my weaker moments, or when I am losing hope, I agree that if I ask for a cookie, I’ll have to ask for the milk, and so it is better to never ask at all. Whatever the book makes me feel about my own need for help and relationship to those who offer it to me, it will never dull my desire to give all that I have. In giving, I feel whole. In giving, I reach my highest self, the truest person that I am, that pure ball of beautiful golden light. No children’s book or amount of pain can make me feel that giving is not worth the risk.

The body remembers. I have been practicing piano again, which is always a frustrating experience because I’ve forgotten many of the things I used to know. The funny thing is, my body has not. I will be limping through pieces with a brain that cannot quickly translate the notes on the pages to notes on the piano, but I make the same error that I then find was circled by my piano teacher when I was 17. In this case, I hold my finger on the key despite a rest note, and I do it in exactly the two places it is circled on the paper from 14 years ago. The mind can adapt, but the body remembers.

I relied too heavily on muscle memory in piano. I would speed through things with no engagement of the mind. My teacher was old school in that she was mean and probably wanted to hit my hands with a ruler. She would try to break my reliance on muscle memory by having me play as slowly as I could, disregarding the composer’s tempo. Muscle memory would fail and I would have to revert to my mind, and if that wasn’t there, I couldn’t play. Looking back on notes from 14 years ago, it's easy to see what your mistakes were, but your body only remembers that motion, that hand position, that hold. Seeing that the mistake exists is not enough to fix it. It just makes us aware we are walking into a trap.

Today, on a walk, we found a monarch butterfly on the sidewalk. We picked it up so it wouldn’t be trampled, but it had clearly just hatched, and was missing part of a wing. It couldn’t fly. I moved it to the grass. It went into its chrysalis anticipating a change, but came out incorrectly, and now it will die. 100 feet ahead we found a caterpillar on the sidewalk. My dog tried to pick it up, but its spikes protected it, and I grabbed it instead. It was looking for a place to undergo its metamorphosis. I moved it to a hedge. I hope that when it hatches, it is fully formed, with enough wings to lead a healthy life.

William Faulkner wrote a character who loses his virginity at 27, and says that what would have been over in 2 seconds at 14 was over for him in three score and nine. He meets Her and is in “eclipse,” “out of time,” “that condition, fact, that does not actually exist except during the instant you know you are losing it.” After he is jailed for killing his woman in a botched abortion, her husband comes to him with a cyanide pill. He refuses, thinking “between grief and nothing, I chose grief.” He communes with his anima, for he knows that the womb and the grave are one. We can all hope that we value love enough to choose grief over nothing, but not all of us were not written by Faulkner.

The butterfly saddens me. This beautiful creature, with such promise, just born into a brand new life – would he choose grief, or nothing? Having just come from nothing, wouldn’t one presume he would be okay to go back? Or in butterfly years, is one second of sunshine and grass and flowers worth the pain of being born wrong? Faulkner’s Harry Willborune has spent his life living on scraps, saving and working hard to put himself through medical school. He only smokes on the weekend, does not go out, and lives entirely monastically until he meets Charlotte. The purity and privation does not work anymore. He must have her by any means necessary, and steals money and leaves his internship in the last two weeks to go away with her, whether they starve or freeze. He knows that having met her, he can never go back to living on nothing, and even after she is gone, he holds onto her memory as proof. A life lived to the fullest briefly is more valuable to him than his years of peering into windows, waiting for something. It is not Charlotte herself that gives his life value, it is the love that she awakens in him that he cannot let go of. His love of her makes life, however awful it becomes, worth living. And so he chooses grief.

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Well I broke down, like a little girl

~~

Like a little girl, I’m at my parents house. My mom makes me dinner at night and lunch in the afternoon. She washes and cuts up fruit for me every morning. I sit in the grass. I hug my dog. I shut my bedroom door.

The Mother is a terrible figure to face. This steady presence, this first comfort, turns out to be ever changing and almost unknowable. I’ve gone to great lengths to know my mother. She worked at a bookstore in the West Village, so I did the same. She got her heart broken in New York and moved back in with her parents. She got her MFA in Santa Cruz at 33. She knows what you did because she’s been you.

My first day here I pull books and spread them out around me. We share a love of cooking, of herbs and beautiful verdant gardens, of postwar French and English novels, of leafy centerpieces, of cotton linens and methods of organization where everything is put away. I think that your 20s are for sorting out your Daddy Issues and your 30s are for sorting out your Mother Issues, which are infinitely more complex, especially if you plan to become a mother yourself. My Daddy issues were external and obvious; my mother issues are a part of my deepest self. Is it necessary to shore up these issues before you procreate? Isn’t it impossible not to give your child some sort of complex that they will have to sort out for themselves? So what does it matter.

Here are my favorite books for dealing with emotional crises, not the kind that needs action, but the kind that percolates slowly in the background of life. They’re not self help or Jungian theory about integrating the shadow or A Course in Miracles, but absorbing books that allow you to forget briefly, to become lost in story.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

The title alone! Yes, please, take me to Cold Comfort Farm. Funny, sweet, silly, fast paced. Slightly mocking Jane Austen and Nancy Mitford (although one could argue that Mitford was already mocking Austen) without being overly satirical or critical. From the first page one understands that everything will work out as it ought to. Kind of a beach read, but instead start it in the afternoon so you can finish it before bed and drift off to sleep with your mind at ease.

Dune by Frank Herbert

Okay, this one feels like a guilty pleasure in some ways. I find fantasy and sci fi very comforting because they take you away from the real world. This sense of being elsewhere is especially helpful when you don’t want to face what is around you. Lord of the Rings or the Foundation series will do the same, but Dune has something special for the feminine. The Bene Gesserit witches exert control over the Imperium, yes, but they also have special training that gives them complete control over their body, at the smallest function. There is insomnia, no illness, no allowing your cells to betray you. Imagine being trained and conditioned from child to have complete control.

Lapvona by Otessa Moshfegh

Otherwordly – the conflict in this book is likely not something that has happened or will happen to you. Allow it to wash over you, have fun reading the nasty, disgusting description that Moshfegh is famous for. You aren’t going to have a more pathetic life than Marek so everything will seem a little more okay after you put it down.

The Classic Illustrated Sherlock Holmes

What do small griefs matter when a killer is on the loose? Conan Doyle is the best to ever do it for a reason. Plus, these can probably keep you busy for as long as you need distracting. Once you finish the entire collection your life will be different.

Other things to do while you recover:

• Try on all the random clothes left from different trips home and months staying there.

• Donate all the stuff that you don’t want anymore, and cut the things that are falling apart into rags.

• Try on your grandmother’s costume jewelry, and her real jewelry. Imagine.

• Work on applications for Master’s programs.

• Dig your arms into the dirt and then pull them out and cover the hole.

• Put on a strange but still cute outfit and use your old cotton flowy yoga vibe bag and walk to Century City Mall. Get a $22 Matcha Goddess smoothie from Sunlife Organics and wander.

• Relearn Samuel Barber’s Pas De Deux on the piano

• Forage lavender flowers, passionflowers, and lemon balm. Make them into a strange tea elixir that is calming. Drink with lemon.

“All these, though, are relatively unimportant. There are only three things I need, to make my kitchen a pleasant one as long as it is clean. First, I need space enough to get a good simple meal for six people. More of either would be wasteful as well as dangerously dull. Then, I need a window or two, for clear air and a sight of things growing. Most of all I need to be let alone. I need peace. From there—from there, on the sill of my wide window, the plan is yours. It will include an herb-bed surely, and a brick courtyard for summer suppers.” - MFK Fisher (I do not recommend her writing while upset, as she is too home and hearth oriented. Cooking is so corporeal and utilitarian. We don’t to be reminded of those things right now.)

“I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless....”

A sublimated bilious attack… how beautiful. It was in the afternoon on Tuesday when I realized I was in the throes of a bilious attack that I had tried, but failed, to sublimate. I went on a trip over the weekend that was busy and stressful… TO ME. To a more balanced person, maybe this would have been an easy and not at all stressful trip. But just being away from my home puts me under duress, and when coupled with a strange bedroom with low light and windows that don’t open, I find I am in dire straits. I returned home on Sunday evening with great relief, but a somewhat sharp and throbbing pain in my belly. My small glandular crisis commences.

Pain in the belly is difficult. Just the word “belly” is odd. Admitting that you have issues in that arena is embarrassing and difficult to confront in a Fruedian way. I let it linger (did I have to) until Tuesday morning. I tried to read Libra in the loud and horrible waiting room while actually just listening to Sherri Shepherd lecture Chelsea Handler about not washing her legs. Sherri Shepherd wants to stress the importance of using a washcloth with soap on your legs, and washing between your toes, because of bacteria. She said if you would like to be humbled, use a WHITE WASHCLOTH. I have never in my life been humbled by a white washcloth on my legs, but maybe I’m built different. The nurses had trouble getting a line into my vein (they always do). I got a cat scan to rule out appendicitis. They told me I had an inflamed gallbladder and might need surgery, but after an ultrasound they found no gallstones and let me leave.

The gallbladder is in charge of bile production, working jointly with the liver. A weak liver is said to press against the gallbladder. If one is weak, it also strains the other. Anxiety manifests when the liver is weak, and indecision and fear manifests when the gallbladder is weak. A bilious attack, while digestive in origin, can result in prolonged fear. Do I even need to say that I am always afraid? In TCM, all meridians connect.

When MFK Fisher writes about feeling bilious, it is the result of over indulging, of too much rich food and good wine. An ailment that comes from joy is very different from one that comes from stress, even if they both result in a bilious attack. I wish I had a hangover instead of being so afraid that I inflame my own insides with the power of my mind.

So, it all comes down to detoxing. Put the castor oil pack on your belly. Drink the epsom salts. Do an olive oil and lemon juice shot. “Detoxing” when referring to your diet is a very nebulous term, one I enjoy as a hobby but don’t fully trust as a real thing. Detox Salad. Detox Soup. Detox tea … Anyways, here are some of the recipes I am making as I wait patiently (not) for an appointment with my PCP to diagnose me, to ease my inflammation. I can be generally unwell – a bad characteristic that I don’t want to fall victim to. So now I am detoxing, I guess.

Detox Soup

• Full head of broccoli

• 2 lemons

• Half an onion or shallot

• 3-5 garlic cloves

• 1 tbsp Olive oil

• 3 cups Bone Broth

• 2 cups of arugula

• Salt and Pepper to taste

Heat Olive oil in a stock pot. Add minced garlic, shallot / onion, and the zest of both lemons. Stir until fragrant. Add chopped broccoli and a pinch of salt and continue sauteeing until cooked through. Add the Bone Broth and boil for 5 minutes. Add the juice of both lemons, pepper, and the arugula. Remove from heat and blend until smooth. Serve with extra pepper.

Detox for the Soul

This is the perfect early dinner for when you are sick of cooking and maybe a little burnt out, aka in need of B Vitamins.

• 1-2 tbsp ghee or coconut oil (you can use other oils but these will give you a rich flavor that most other oils lack)

• 1 scant cup popcorn kernels

• 4 tbsp nutritional yeast

• Salt to taste

In a stock pot with a tight fitting lid (I recommend something steel, as a dutch oven will be a little too heavy to get a good shake on), heat the oil / ghee on high until shimmering. Add the popcorn kernels and cover. Hold the lid and shake to evenly coat and disperse the fat and kernels. You will start to hear popping soon. Shake frequently. Turn off the heat once the popping dies down. If you can hear a pop and count to three before hearing another, it's ready. Grab a large bowl and pour the popped corn in, adding salt and nutritional yeast as you go. Enjoy while watching something stupid.

Detox Tea

• Large Mason Jar or Tea Pot

• 4 Cups Boiling Water

• 1 inch peeled and grated ginger

• 1 tbsp dried hibiscus / sorrel

• 2 Spearmint tea bags

• 1 Roasted Dandelion Root tea bag

Boil water. Add ginger, hibiscus, and tea bags to your vessel. Pour boiling water over and let steep for ten minutes. Drink slowly over the course of an afternoon, adding warm water to the elixir as needed. Do not drink below room temp. Ice water and cold water are poison on your digestive fire.

I’m still trying to finish Libra. On the plane I read Munro’s “Too Much Happiness,” which I adored, especially the title story about the Mathematician. My Father and brother are mathematicians, in their own way. Blaming her daughter for her molestation be damned, the woman can write!! Sorry. It’s awful. I’m disgusted. But her characters are complex enough that it doesn’t seem to surprise me. She writes love and companionship so honestly.

Sometimes moving to rhythm is what we need to get to a better headspace in order to stop overeating, overthinking, smoking, drinking, arguing; this is the actual important part of fixing our bad habits. The act of over - anything is bad for our psyches, and causes discomfort in everyday life. Panic at the idea of the next meal, sweet treat time, any stressful phone call, etc. Panic before a deadline, before a difficult conversation, before putting yourself out there.

Pilates as a practice is mostly about control. Cuing a class of thirty people to use the correct muscle groups and breathing practices during an exercise is difficult — they might clearly understand your words and think they are doing the exercise correctly, but taking your own hands and putting them in correct form will instantly fix something they do not know is wrong. It is a generous gift to set someone on a correct path, to hold them purposefully until they are able to adapt for themselves. I do not teach yoga, but I find myself looking around the room a lot to make sure I am correct - with no mirrors, it is hard to judge if your mind’s presentation of the instructor's words have come to a cohesive pose. Yogic adjustments push the student further into the pose than they would be able to push themselves, which gives an almost teaser-like quality to what we will be able to do if we keep working.

Words can only mean so much. Sometimes a student is doing all they are capable of doing, trying their best, and just holding their torso still or lifting their leg slightly higher can instantly shake them out of what they thought was correct. If we are not in the correct form, we are not actually doing the exercises, but we can get better. And maybe getting better isn’t the whole point - maybe moving the carriage back and forth in a stretch that feels good is why you paid the ~$60 to attend a class. But I think that most people would like to think that their practice increases their skill.

Lately I have been thinking about baths a lot. I find water very healing, as I’m sure many do. I love the sound of the running shower, the thought of immersing myself in the tub, or the sea, or the cold plunge at the spa. So I am considering an inflatable bathtub (consider the bathtub) for the floor of my shower. It seems low vibrational, like a kiddie pool, but I need to read and soak at least once a week for my physical and mental wellbeing, and I want to do it naked. I miss being a teenager and having friends with pools whose parents left town a lot. It always meant hours of skinny dipping with my girlfriends. I want to swim naked in the ocean, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Now reading : Come and See by Fanny Howe, then The Return of the Lost Soldier by Rebecca West. I am not really a poetry person but was curious. The Return of the Lost Soldier was short but devastating for anyone who still remembers the first time they fell in love. Rebecca West was HG Wells’ lover and there is a book of their letters to each other. I love collections of letters; they seem to me like a lost art. They are always deeply personal and beautifully written. I want to spend afternoons keeping up with my correspondences at my writing desk instead of walking around hunched over my phone. Instead of just reading the letters though, I started The Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West, but had to pause to look up her Wikipedia because it felt very counterrevolutionary and almost antisemitic as it describes the trial of a Cold War Era spy. This part of her bio made me pause and decide to DNF.

I’m still slowly reading Ulysses, but I can’t read it before bed because I get too befuddled due to my exhausted eyes. But I despise reading multiple books at once. On that same topic, my parents gave me a New Yorker subscription this year and I HATE it. It just piles up and I don’t need 40 copies because my home is not a psychoanalysis clinic. (My analyst’s waiting room does have only old New Yorkers to read, which I find very apt and honestly chic.)

No recipe this week, just my favorite suggestions:

• Ottolenghi's Roasted chicken with clementines and arak, a beautiful dish for a dinner party. When I think of this recipe I think of eating chicken drumsticks, which makes me think of newly pregnant Betty Draper coming home from having sex with a stranger in a bar to eat a cold chicken leg out of the fridge. I think that one was fried, but still.

• Very Plain but Perfect Salmon: Cut nice salmon into filets, salt them, and lay them flat on a baking sheet lined with foil. Set oven to broil and place the top rack. Cook until the thin pieces are browned, about 10 minutes, depending on your oven and the thickness of the filets. Every time I cook Salmon using a different method I’m disappointed.

• Poke Bowls for Dinner: It is almost the season of “what can I make for dinner that will involve not turning on my oven or working over the heat of the stovetop,” of not being able to bear the heat so leaving the kitchen. Did you know that sushi grade fish is just fish that has been flash frozen? Also, the most likely to have parasites is salmon, because of its time in fresh water. Also, poke is like ceviche in that it “cooks” the fish with a marinade. I get frozen tuna, thaw, then marinate in equal parts tamari and rice wine vinegar, with half that amount of sesame oil. Add red pepper flakes and green onion to taste. Serve with cucumber salad, pickled ginger, fresh rice, and baby lettuce mix.

• White People Tacos: Cook onion, diced bell peppers, and ground beef with this spice mixture. I often add extra cumin and extra red pepper flakes. Put in tortillas, or just mix with rice and put in a big bowl in the fridge for meal prep. Serve with shredded iceberg, pickled jalapenos, and lime juice.

I have housewife fatigue. I haven’t eaten anything that I did not prepare myself in too long. I also have horrid hay fever; I’ve heard that histamines build up in your body and once your “bucket” is full you start reacting to everything. A dermatologist once dragged the slightly rough wooden edge of a swab against my skin and diagnosed me as “highly allergic” when I went in to ask about regular hives / rashes that I get. If I had no budget I would expeditiously acquire:

• 1 lb of Nettle Tea from Mountain Rose Herbs

• Serrapeptase from Mary Ruth Organics

• Quercetin from Pure Encapsulations

• Lithospheric Vitamin C from LivON

• I would also get Allergena (Zone specific) and go back in time to start taking it daily in March. It is meant to be an inoculation against the specific pollen in your area.

I hope no one else has hay fever, I hope your buckets are not full, I hope you are eating delicious dinners with sharp, light wines. <3

Anyways, the sandwiches. Every week I make them in the same way, with the same ingredients, and everything is carefully measured during these weeks because I have to enter it into an app so it can provide data and insights. But for some reason every week I feel nervous that they will be bad this time. This feels like an essence of a psychological problem; I follow a ritual (egg sandwich recipe) that has always yielded the same results (my boyfriend likes them) but feel disconnected from said ritual, because I am doing the labor but not participating in its output (eating the sandwich), so I feel certain that this time it has gone afoul. Although I have done my preparation, I feel anticipatory failure. Why? I guess that it is a disconnection between the execution of something and what it yields. There has not been a lot of try hard and succeed lately, instead chaos seems to reign, and I’m stuck in a holding pattern where different methods always yield the same result: FAIL.

It’s like rain on your wedding day. It’s like feeling upset once the tulips reach a certain level of beauty because you know that they’re closer to being dead than they are to being born. It’s like lying on a shakti mat and reciting the rosary every day for 2 months to ask for a specific job even though you aren’t Catholic. (But did I get that job? I did.) It’s like how all my writing is about my boyfriend. It’s speaking like a little child all the time and feeling stupid. It’s like applying to 10 jobs every morning and hearing back from 2 a month. One might as well be screaming into the void. But I still say the same prayers every morning and night and I still throw the I Ching and I tend to the well of my inner strength (this is all you have).

Still, I have been feeling susceptible to psychic attacks in the form of chronic illness grifters with things like histamine intolerance and hypermobility. I adore this kind of content, but my current stress level makes me feel more, oh yes, I have that too, and less like I am an impartial observer. I realize that histamine intolerance and hypermobility are real, and I’m intrigued by both, but these people are so often trying to sell you something. I’m sympathetic, because I also would love to be paid for my recipes, or just general info about the supplements I like and the way I clean, but I think introducing a chronic illness to people who need community is lecherous.

I recently read Dominick Dunne’s “Another City, Not My Own,” a (semi) roman a clef about the OJ Simpson trial. Dunne is a great crime reporter. A family friend was OJ and Nicole’s children’s preschool teacher. Strangely, she and her husband fled LA for Santa Barbara after the Rodney King riots, where she was then killed in a car accident. Dunne’s story is sickeningly name-drop-y, and every person he name drops is singularly charmed by him. I think that he leans into this and his writing has some awareness of it, but not enough – you could tell there was not a ton of humor he talked about knowing Sinatra, or Jack Nicholson, or his close relationship with Elizabeth Taylor. This was probably more fun and made more sense in writing columns for Vanity Fair. This LA based crime book made me reach back into the archives for Chandler - I devoured The Long Goodbye on a reread. Chandler impresses me more each time; it doesn’t matter if you remember who perpetrated the crime, the way Philip Marlowe gets there is always more interesting. After reading a lot of Simenon and Manchette earlier in the year, it was lovely to be reminded of Chandler’s beautiful prose. His books cast a large shadow over his imitators. After The Long Goodbye, I picked up Killer in the Rain. These short stories weren’t published until after his death because he cannibalized all of these stories for his novels.

Lately I’m obsessed with BEVERAGES. I shouldn’t say lately; I’ve been drinking 4-5 pots of tea every day for like 8 years now. Before I started (and then stopped) drinking coffee I would have green, black, or oolong before noon and then switch to kukicha until about 3pm, after which I would have herbal. Here are some of my tea rules:

1. Start the morning with caffeinated tea. Green is for warmer, sunny days and Black is for colder, dark days. Oolong is vers.

2. Lean into the features of the tea – I love the deep richness of Yunnan Gold for Black Tea, and the intense grassy lightness of Japanese Gyukuro for Green Tea.

3. Be generous. Even if you only have a small amount of a very expensive and/or special tea, it’s better to have one perfect cup to really taste it than to spread it out over 4 cups without much flavor.

4. Peppermint and Chamomile are at the bottom of the pyramid for herbal tea. They are easy to find and can cover most bases. Above that row is raw whole ginger, which is nice to have on hand for other things besides tea, hibiscus, and spearmint (important for me because of its anti-androgen properties). Above that is roasted dandelion root, nettle (helps with allergies), lemon balm, and other “remedy” herbs like oakstraw, moringa, chrysanthemum, etc. This is all according to taste and ailments - I really enjoy things with medicinal tastes but I know some people hate them.

5. The best way to make peppermint is to put a pot on the stove with 2 quarts of water and bring it to a boil. Once boiling, add 2 tea bags (or 2 tbsp of loose leaf dried peppermint) and simmer for 10 minutes. It should reduce and be quite dark in color by this point. Pour into a large jar or tea pot and enjoy.

6. Mixing herbs: Chamomile with lemon balm before bed. Add a generous amount of chopped fresh ginger to peppermint to fix any ***tummy trouble** (sorry).

7. Buy dried Sorrel (hibiscus) in bags next to dried chiles in the Hispanic food section of the grocery stores. I like to pair it with ginger or roasted dandelion.

   

Now into my more special beverage recipes… starting with MATCHA. Get a nice quality matcha and be generous with it, otherwise it’s not worth it. This way it will be good plain – you won’t have to make a coconut peanut butter and jelly matcha latte (looking at you blank street).

1. I’m an almond milk apologist. I know its watery and flavorless, but I still kind of love it? That being said, SIlk Unsweetened Soy milk is a nice texture, and I get Elmhurst Hazelnut milk or Cashew Malk as a treat. Coconut is a nice idea, but the flavor can be quite overpowering.

2. I always add collagen powder to my lattes for a nutrition boost. I like this one.

3. Really tired, have a busy day ahead of you, but don’t want to spend 11$ at the coffee shop? Get an espresso shot and bring it home - add it to an iced matcha latte with a good amount of cinnamon. I used to drink these throughout my shift when I worked as a barista.

4. Make it Blueberry or Strawberry by microwaving your frozen berry of choice in a bowl for 1 minute, until it is warm. The liquid will release at the bottom of the bowl. Mash or blend it up and layer it at the bottom of your iced latte.

5. Once it is True Summer, the nicest 2pm treat is a matcha lemonade. Heat 1 tbsp of honey using a quarter cup of hot water and mix with the juice of one lemon. Let cool, pour over ice, and add your prepared matcha. Sip slowly while sitting in the sun.

For my other special drinks, I love a kombucha. I’m a GT girl - Healthade just doesn’t do it for me. It’s a good reward for grocery shopping. In the summer, I like to pour half a bottle over ice and top with sparkling water, add a quarter of a lime, and sip slowly through a straw. My favorite flavor depends entirely on my mood but right now I really love the anniversary one. I’m not a huge fan of mango or strawberry. For almost a year in 2016 I made my own kombucha, and it was so fun to flavor, but it just got kind of nasty, and it can be annoying to have to constantly take care of. My other Special drink right now is “nature’s gatorade:”

• Half cup of Coconut water

• Sprinkle of salt

• Juiced citrus (Lime, Lemon, Orange)

• 2 tbsp ginger shot (I don’t have a juicer so I blend peeled ginger root with water and then push the pulp through a mesh strainer. I usually have this stored in the fridge)

• Half cup of water (expert level: use cooled spearmint tea instead for its anti-androgen properties)

My mom recently sent me dried herbs from her garden, wrapped in paintings. I would like to get these framed, but more than getting them framed I would like to buy a house to have a garage so I can have a workshop area to make the frames myself. My desire for candles and produce is the same - if you give a mouse a cookie, she is going to want a house and a garden to grow the wheat, mill the flour, collect the eggs from her chickens, and to make the cookie herself. If you give a pig a pancake, she is going to want a family dressed in matching gingham pajamas to feed them to. My desire to live like this, to make my own clothes, frame watercolors in the garage, and collect eggs from chicken coops, isn’t just a tradwife larp. It’s the solution to my disconnection from the end product, my current seeming inability to affect outcomes.

So I took a second (third?) sabbatical. My nicer computer broke earlier this year and I have been trying to get by with a mostly broken one, and by trying to get by I mean suffering with perceived (not real) dignity. It only works plugged in, the W and 2 keys are broken, and is running on a very old operating system that did not allow me to update Chrome, which was so slow on some websites that it would overheat and shut off if I try to use them. Like Goodreads .. funny because I also think Goodreads sucks and is stupid, but I like to keep track of what I am reading, just because I simply adore all forms of tracking. I did what any sane person could do in the face of a broken laptop and got addicted to Tiktok. I don’t have Instagram, and X the everything app is simply too strange and nazi-esque to spend a long time on. Not Tiktok though! I was learning so much about fake nutrition science (a passion of mine), yoga flows, weird workouts, and a TON of what I eat in a day (WIEAD). But for some reason, screentime on a computer makes me feel busy and successful, while screentime on phone makes me feel like a hunched over idiot purposely poisoning myself.

I have been thinking a lot about eggs, both the proverbial and literal. Putting all one’s eggs in a singular basket. Hard-boiled eggs. The price of eggs. The science of what they do in baking. The eggs below the dove nesting outside my kitchen window. Mostly the last one, mainly because I loved her dearly. I grew up with lovebirds as pets in the kitchen, and my mother and I would sing to them every night before we covered their cage with towels. It was “Good Night Ladies” from The Music Man, except we would sing “Good Night Jack and Sam” instead. I thoroughly enjoy The Music Man, not enough to watch it as an adult, but enough to think fondly of Marian the librarian, especially with things like:

• Now don’t dawdle, Amaryllis

• She made BRAZEN OVERTURES to a man who didn’t have a friend in this town ‘til she came here! Oh yes! That woman made BRAZEN OVERTURES with a gilt-edged guarantee… She had a golden glint in her eye and a silver voice with a counterfeit ring. Just melt her down and you’ll reveal a lump of lead as cold as steel - HERE - where a woman’s H E A R T should be!

The dove nesting right next to my stove became my little pet - I loved saying good morning and good night to her, and asking her how she was. But one day she and the eggs were just gone. It was strange, I was home and I didn’t hear a squabble, or the sound of a squirrel or a crow or anything, they were just there and then suddenly gone, so I don’t know what happened. But it has always been difficult for me not to take things like that as omens. Two years ago in June a stray cat died in the grass outside the kitchen windows of the apartment where I lived, and as it decomposed I found a new place to live.

So sometimes we can’t help that all our eggs are in one basket. Maybe we only have one basket at that point in time. Maybe there is only one egg. We don’t all have the luxury of many eggs, and many baskets. How is one meant to rebuild baskets?

Eggs ostensibly turn into live offspring. I have always thought of the idea of having children difficult to disentangle from my own idyllic childhood. I think of it in film photos, in little Hanna Andersson striped pajamas, as me becoming my mother, with a child that is just myself as a little girl. The idea of me, I am ~now~, becoming a potential mother, the place where I live forming someone’s earliest memories, is more challenging to wrap my head around. It seems like a lot of responsibility, a very very large egg in a tiny and fragile basket. In Notes to John, Didion’s private notes (to John) are regarding her meetings with a psychiatrist, which stemmed from a situational depression due to her daughter Quintana’s alcoholism and personality disorder. Didion strikes an impressive figure in that her private journals don’t betray a self that is different from the one she projected to the public in her novels and essays. She describes years of almost constant situations where her daughter is in crisis, and the impact this has on her. Knowing that it ends with her husband’s deadly heart attack, just months after the last journal entry, and then dissolves into her daughter’s long illness and death, makes it very poignant and depressing. I can’t, or maybe I all too easily can, imagine how complicated these parental relationships can get. That even after your child’s 38th birthday, you might be stuck in psychoanalysis for years to discuss what your Mother or Father did or didn’t do, and why those things may have led to seemingly insignificant choices that eventually led to your daughter’s long term mental illness. I do recommend the book if you are interested in Didion or psychoanalysis. I like that her psychiatrist says that she needs to act cheerful to be cheerful, and that working is the best way to banish her depression and anxiety.

Lately its been quick cry, pilates, another cry, coffee (matcha), GO. But seriously I can’t stop crying in public, and then I get angry because people look at me. I am reading Ulysses for the first time but want to read Agatha Christie instead (lazy), so have been doing one of my favorite things and reading the Wikipedia plot summaries for her mystery novels and trying to guess the murderer before its revealed. This works because by the time I am an old (or just older) woman, and less snobbish about what I read, I will likely have forgotten enough to enjoy the actual novels.

Here is a recipe for 6 egg sandwiches that can be stored in advance. They are good for meal prep. If you have time, double the recipe and freeze half for a rainy day. I also see people doing this kind of prep in their last month of pregnancy to fill the freezer for early newborn days.

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I hate therapy. I have never found excessive inward searching to be helpful; it’s constant cycling over the negative lends itself too easily to the neurotic. I would prefer long walks and tennis and gardening and hunting, like a turn of the century English gentlewoman. I guess a lot of them kill themselves, so maybe it is not an apt comparison, but FOR ME, not “letting the side down,” as it were, fixes a lot of my problems.

I cried a lot, but maybe not enough. I am a huge baby, I cry at everything: the swell of music in a trailer for a children’s movie is enough to do me in, but sometimes in intense situations I will have to quiet myself and try to hold it in. People say that crying is healthy as a release of emotion that would otherwise lodge as chronic pain in your shoulders and hip flexors, body keeps the score style. I was agnostic about this kind of thing, but recently have been using yoga blocks to unlock tension in my traps and suboccipitals, two places that seem to be emotional wells where I do feel somewhat chronically tight. My hips on the other hand don’t usually feel tight, but working with a kettlebell to “press” out the roughness there does increase my feelings of safety and security. I’m giving myself grace in the form of giving into the most woo-woo beliefs; I hope that by doing so, I will be able to *believe* enough to actually heal my emotional responses via somatic stretching, and journaling, and putting my bare feet in the budding grass, and eating spoonfuls of sea moss, and pressing meridian points. I realize that a lot of this is luxurious, and smacks of overconsumption, but not the way that I am doing it now.

I spent a week at my parents’ house; they live in a major city but for the past five years when I go visit them I am essentially isolated to their neighborhood, by choice. I don’t drive and staying local feels like I could possibly be in a small town. We arrived at the tail end of a week of rain, so everything looked extraordinarily fecund. The wildflowers were blooming, the fruit trees were beginning to bud, and it all makes my heart hurt. After all, these things arrive only to disappear – the buds on the avocado trees will eventually turn to avocados that will be fought over by my parents and the neighborhood squirrels, or eaten and then promptly thrown up by my dog. Everything good and beautiful comes only to leave again, it is all so fleeting. I think that is part of the draw of Los Angeles; come here, we don’t have the beauty of fall because there is barely a winter, all that is green will mostly stay green, unless it is burnt to a crisp.

My mom has mint and lemon balm in the backyard, they are both essentially weeds and my thirst for their calming tea does very little to diminish their growth. My mom and dad are set in their routines and do not like a lot of chatting; I use my time there to raid my mom’s collection of books and walk 7 miles a day. I quit drinking coffee because of an upsurge in my recurrent insomnia. I slept a lot. I found it all to be boring but healing. When I got back to my apartment there was a dove nesting in a pot on the fire escape outside the kitchen windows. She sometimes leaves the nest, and I can see two eggs. It feels auspicious: the symbol of peace is currently nursing her hopes for the future. She does not seem to be bothered by me, though I spend a lot of time in her face (the oven is right next to the window). I sometimes see her husband visit her. I try not to think about what will happen when the babies are born; I do not want to fill my life with unnecessary grief via worries about the future anymore. I am not afraid

.

My favorite recent books:

• No Room at the Morgue and Skeletons in the Closet by Jean-Patrick Manchette: A French detective story a la Raymond Chandler, whom I love. Get them from the library and read them in a day. These would also make great gifts for a Dad or Grandmother. I am waiting for similar books by Patrick Modiano and Georges Simeon.

• Shame by Annie Ernaux: I nodded the entire time. Yes, adolescence takes a whole lifetime to unpack and process.

• Cheri and the Last of Cheri by Colette: turns hetero relationship dynamics on their head, imagine a younger man acting like a bitch all the time and being always forgiven because of his beauty. Colette is a lot like Didion in her desire for fame and fortune and praise, but her prose is short and to the point where Didion’s is flowery. I read an old copy that was translated in the 70s, but NYRB has just published a new translation of “The Pure and the Impure.”

My favorite recent food:

• Pickles: cut garlic, jalapeno, carrots, and cabbage into bite sized pieces. Boil the jar and lid to sterilize then add your vegetables to the jar in pretty layers, and then add in a mixture of half white distilled vinegar, half water, and a tablespoon of salt that has been boiled and cooled. Put the lid on and let sit on your counter for 2 weeks. Use the brine in salad dressings or to heal a hangover.

• One ingredient prep: We are doing our 12 week cut right now so here are some of the things I have on hand that can be made into a meal:

  • Salad Greens (remember that arugula doesn’t last long, and kale needs a lot of work to be pleasant to eat.)

  • Rainbow Vegetables (You need to be eating the rainbow. Radishes, carrots, beets, and celery are all delicious raw, steamed, or roasted)

  • Frozen Broccoli (it can be roasted from frozen with just oil spray, salt, and a very hot oven)

  • Frozen Turkey Burgers (these also cook from frozen)

  • Baked Potatoes and Baked Sweet Potatoes (so much better when made in the oven, but I hate waiting the requisite hour. I will cook them on Sundays and keep them in the fridge wrapped in foil to round out a meal)

  • Sardines / Tuna / Trout in cans (lovely on a salad or toast or over rice)

  • Hot Sauce, Kimchi, Pickles (necessary for dieting. The green cholula is my favorite hot sauce right now)

I will be posting regularly again, thank you and love you~~~

Liv

I used to crave pancakes sometimes, then realized that a desire for pancakes was my warning sign for depression. It reminded me of the Sabrina, the Teenage Witch episode where she gets addicted to pancakes. I love Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. I would watch it on the big TV as background noise while I did my SQL queries and wrote emails. I don’t really crave pancakes when depressed anymore; working at the diner and constantly smelling pancakes seems to have rewired that part of my brain. The thing is, I don’t like pancakes, which is why the craving was such an alarm bell for me. It becomes symbolic; stuffing yourself full of flour, sugar, butter, and oil and not enjoying it as walking through life feeling like you don’t deserve it. I like waffles though, with whipped creme and strawberries. Those are not a depression food for me, they remind me of being a child.

When I feel discombobulated (maybe because of some vague emotions or an intense day that still must be processed, perhaps after a migraine or right before a cold) I need soup. I would always get pho delivered when I was hungover, but it is not as good when delivered. You need the hot broth and the raw beef to get the best health benefits from pho. I like to cook a spicy chicken and rice soup (I just don’t enjoy chicken noodle, rice is the superior soup grain). Women are damp and cold (yang) so we need soup — according to TCM we are not meant to eat anything cold. Ice water is poisonous to the womb. Once dampness collects, it is like the mold of the body and very hard to get rid of.

When I am sad in a practical way (i.e. job woes, getting paragraph long texts from people) I need to bake. In Marion Woodman’s Addiction to Perfection, she has a picture of two spirals. When the spiral goes inward toward the unconscious, it causes depression. When we turn our spiral outward, toward consciousness, we are able to use it to create, to express ourselves. In expressing ourselves creatively, we recognize, acknowledge, and release the feelings that would otherwise poison our mind. The eponymous Perfection in the book serves as a way to take ourselves out of our lives because we cannot perform it. We opt out in order to save ourselves from mediocrity. But mediocrity is the cornerstone of life, we are made of our averages. Every day is all there is. I tell myself that this is why I bake random things without recipes or even careful consideration, which often yields bread or cookies that are edible but not totally correct. I am capable of making things successfully, but sometimes I just need to fuck around and be laissez-faire.

Happiness (not celebration, but in a peaceful and content way) calls for a savory and simple dinner eaten with someone you love, like broiled salmon with boiled new potatoes and an arugula salad with balsamic dressing. Squeeze lemon over the salmon and dip the potatoes in dijon mustard to pretend you are in Provence. Or sear a steak in a ripping hot cast iron skillet, 4 minutes on each side, and serve with a microwaved sweet potato (slice open and smush with salt) and butter lettuce salad with radish, cucumber, shaved pecorino, and vinaigrette.

Vinaigrette

1. Grab a small jar (I run empty jam and mustard jars through the dishwasher to use for things like this) and fill it 1 inch with vinegar (red wine, champagne, balsamic, or lemon juice). Add a pinch of salt and stir with a fork until it dissolves.

2. Pour in the same amount of olive oil. You can tell when it is even by looking at the separation, which is why I use a clear jar. I like a 1:1 ratio, but use more oil if you prefer a more traditional vinaigrette.

3. Add in 2 tsp of dijon mustard per 1 inch of vinegar. Grind in fresh pepper. Put the lid on the jar and shake vigorously until completely emulsified.

The body keeps the score. Or, your subconscious keeps the score, so it eventually comes up again. I love healing frequencies, and drinking tea in the dark, and other “‘deep healing”” strategies. I want those HEALING SUPPLEMENTS that you read about on esoteric health forums, I want lactoferrin powder and lithospheric glutathione, B vitamin injections, and Sun Powder’s Tocos for Vitamin E. I do my sun salutations in the mornings, I dry brush towards my heart before my shower, and I put my feet on the wall for twenty minutes in the evening. Sometimes my shoulders creep up to my ears and my neck pitches forward and I get a slight anterior pelvic tilt, all of this leading to my body feeling unwieldy, another stress warning sign like when I crave pancakes. Dancing is supposed to help, to create joy and move fascia. Long walks help too, especially when you have to gear up for snow. Last time I moved it was summer and I had the flu, so I left my Uggs behind, because I thought I had outgrown them. But Uggs are the cutest snow gear. I like to wear them in cropped tan with a black unitard and thick white socks that bunch above the Uggs. Don’t fight your body, it is sacred ground.

Like the health data on eggs, the info about processing of emotions changes every few years. Recent studies now show that letting out emotions like fury, anger, rage, and annoyance do not help, and being able to process them internally is healthy. Don’t say that, go to the sauna instead, make a white pizza out of foccacia dough, zucchini blossoms, and ricotta cheese. Go hit tennis balls against the backboard. Be quiet, return to your own inner peace. Focus on your drawing, get your hands messy with charcoal, write a letter to your pen pal or your parents.

For CELEBRATION, you need to gather all the people you know into a very small room, and eat and drink copious amounts. I love Champagne, my second favorite sparkling wine is Lambrusco, anything in a fancy glass feels very celebratory (I don’t like sweet cocktails). I think the essence of gourmet is not “having” to do something. When you have to make coffee every morning, it isn’t special, it’s a routine. Eating rich meals, drinking wine, having desserts, these all should be done with an air of carelessness; no thoughts of excess calories or hangovers, but a kind of luxurious slowness. The essence of Gourmandise is celebration; its not a weeknight sheet pan dinner. This is the backbone of hosting — it must be done with an affected ease that still betrays the complexity of the event. Light candles, line the table with lace and roses.

Some beautiful ideas I’m stealing from books / my friends:

1. Use butcher paper as a table cloth and have people write or draw on it. Keep the wine flowing.

2. Once your flowers are starting to wilt, cut them down to the smallest stem and float them in a small bowl of water. They make excellent centerpieces because the don’t block you from the people across the table from you.

3. Put your food on trays, each item on its own plate and little bowl. Arrange it beautifully. You eat with your eyes first.

I’m read a Danielle Steel novel. I don’t know what I expected, but despite going in with a mind more open than usual, I am still shocked. Her characters say “damn” every other word and once you notice it (about 2 chapters in), its difficult not to throw the book across the room. I guess she knew what women wanted, but it’s just too ridiculous to take seriously. I am currently reading Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery, a book that feels like it was written specifically for me, with its combination of fairy tales and fallen women, ghosts that feel Victorian, and the tragedy of love and what happens after losing yourself in it.

There are snowdrops blooming already; the crocuses have started to bud.

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