“What?” they said, and “Where is that?” and “Why?”

People were also scared. They asked me questions like, “Is it safe there?” and “Aren’t you worried about antisemitism?” and “Do you promise you’ll be careful?”

I acted calm and even excited, but the truth was, I knew almost nothing about Kazakhstan. I couldn’t picture what it would be like to live there. Would I sleep in a yurt every night? Would I be expected to eat horse for every meal? Would people be nice to me? And, yes, I was worried about antisemitism.

When I tried to find information about Kazakhstan’s capital city of Astana, where I would be living, everything I read was unsettling and scary. English-language sources used words like “bizarre” and “artificial” and “lifeless” to describe Astana. I spent a lot of time with this one article which claims, “here, wolves outnumber people.”

WHAT???? Would I be the only person walking the streets of this shiny, space-age city, fighting off wolves with a stick?

I googled “global wolf population” and found that there are ten times more people in Astana than wolves in the world. Phew.

Then, I went to Kazakhstan.

It’s kind of hard to describe how immediate the feeling was: there was nothing to be worried about. The city was a city like any other. The people were people like any other. I wished I could teleport my entire family there, just for five seconds, so they could stand on the ground, swivel their heads, and say, “Oh, it’s just a place.”

Astana wasn’t lifeless or bizarre. It reminded me, at times, of Los Angeles or DC. It was bustling and modern. There were no wolves at all. I wondered what all those journalists were talking about.

Obviously, there were adjustments. I had to get used to speaking in a non-native language. I had to adapt to some new cultural norms. I had to set up a local bank account. And I did eat horse. But I never felt unsafe, and nobody was antisemitic, and I never even slept in a yurt (honestly, I wish I had). All of the differences were actually interesting and exciting.

Sometimes I felt uncomfortable, but most of the time I had so much fun. I made wonderful friends, I traveled, and I learned so much about the world and myself and Kazakhstan. As trite as it sounds, studying abroad changed my life.

When I decided to go to grad school in West Virginia, though, I started to have déjà vu.

Coming from Los Angeles and New York City, nobody in my circles knew anything about West Virginia. I had never visited the state myself. “What?” people asked me. “Where even is that?” And “Why?”

And those weren’t the only familiar questions: “Is it safe there?” And “Aren’t you worried about homophobia?” And “Do you promise you’ll be careful?”

Well, I’m here to tell you that I am in West Virginia, and it’s safe, and there are pride flags waving all over the place, and I promise I’m being careful.

It’s easy to build up caricatures of other places, especially if they seem far and foreign, but every place in the world is just a place, with its charms and its pitfalls, and every place in the world deserves respect and curiosity.

I can’t pretend to be an expert on West Virginia or on Kazakhstan. But I do think I’ve acquired some experience throwing myself into completely new environments. Here’s what I will say:

My boyfriend and I went for a run in our new neighborhood. West Virginia is The Mountain State, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to encounter some pretty steep hills. When running downhill, my instinct is to lean back, to slow myself down, to regain control. Actually, though, it’s better to lean forward, down into the slope. Open up my stride, and fly.

What I made

I have been cooking up a storm in my new kitchen, and here are some highlights!

Rollin’s lentils:

I went to Colorado for my Grandpa Hal’s memorial, which was a beautiful and emotional experience. I got to see tons of family that I don’t often see, including my wonderful cousin Rollin, who made delicious lentils for a dinner party. It’s honestly hard to explain how satisfying this meal is. Rollin was kind enough to share the recipe with me, and I think it’s fair to say that this will be on the heavy rotation!

Recipe: Dal Bhat c/o Rollin

1 lb lentils
One onion
Five tomatoes/ can of crushed tomatoes
4 cloves garlic
1tbs Graham masala
1tbs turmeric
1tbs cumin
2tbs salt
1.5 liters veggie stock/water
4tbs oil of choice
Rice

Soak lentils in water, begin rice in rice cooker.

Dice onion and mince garlic.

Heat oil in large pot, and add onions and garlic.

Dice tomatoes, add to pot once onions are light brown.

Cook until it feels right, then add drained lentils and liquid.

Add spices for easy way, hold off for hard way. (Once the lentils are done, heat another 2tbs oil in small pan, add spices and stir for 1-2 minutes to “bloom” the spices, then add prior to serving)

Boil for 30-45 minutes until lentils are soft.

Serve with rice, lemon, and sour cream.

The best rice and beans I’ve ever made:

For the first time in my life, I made dried beans! Here is what I have to say about that: it was obviously more work than opening a can of beans, but most of it was quite passive. I just did schoolwork while the beans simmered, and I was planning to be home anyway. The beans are SO MUCH better than canned beans. I honestly wasn’t expecting there to be a huge difference, but there is. These beans were amazing.

I also made Spanish (Mexican?) style rice for the first time. I used this rice cooker recipe. It was very easy to make, but the rice came out a bit dry (I think that shows in the picture). I tossed some sour cream in there, and that sort of fixed it.

All in all, this was a very delicious and scrumptious and perfect lunch. If I had gotten this at a restaurant, I would have been happy about it. Some cilantro would have made it even better.

Dessert:

My boyfriend and I, so far, have made these two fabulous desserts. First, we made blondies, which were basically the best and most delicious thing in the world. We used this recipe because it calls for one egg and we only had one egg in the house. Then, a few days later, we made peanut butter fudge, which had a grand total of four ingredients: sugar, peanut butter, water, and vanilla extract. It’s predictably delicious. A great vehicle for sugar into the body (the most important food group).

Bits and bobs:

A while ago, I asked how to achieve perfect stove top rice, and the response in the comments was resounding: Get a rice cooker. Well, I finally have one! I like it a lot, although I feel like it takes a bit longer than stove top rice, and it also is a bit harder to clean. But I do really like that I don’t have to do anything but press a few buttons.

In my past year of not having a rice cooker, I do feel like I cracked the code for stove top rice, so if you’re interested in that, here’s my basic process:

Add one parts white rice and two parts water into a pot. Measuring actually makes a difference here. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cover. Simmer 15-20 minutes without disturbing.

I think the ratio of water to rice might depend on how tightly the lid fits on your pot.

Thanks for reading! :)

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I wished intensely that my boyfriend could drive it, but it just wasn’t possible. His car is a manual, and I can’t drive stick, so the only real possibility was for him to drive the car while I took the U-Haul. As I stared at the behemoth in the driveway, I contemplated the seven-hour drive to come. I imagined myself trundling up treacherous mountain roads, the box of the truck rocking back and forth and then ultimately tipping over the guard rails and plummeting upside down toward destruction in some foreign canyon.

Obviously that didn’t happen. After about an hour on the road, I felt totally fine driving the U-Haul. I had no more panic attacks. It was only a little harder than driving a large car.

By hour seven, although everything was going smoothly, I was ready to be done. I watched eagerly as the remaining drive time inched toward zero, and I started playing a little game with myself. Forty five minutes left? That’s just a drive from my childhood home to the beach. Thirty minutes? Driving from my childhood home to the dentist. Twenty minutes? Driving to my cousin Lila’s house. Fifteen minutes? That’s just my drive to high school.

My childhood home is a strange place to me. My family moved there when I was a baby, and my dad only sold it a few years ago. Almost all of my dreams still take place in it. And when I set off on imaginary drives, that house is always my starting point.

But it’s not a real place any more. I don’t have access to it, except in my mind.

When the house was sold, an unexpected sadness for me was all the knowledge I’d gathered that suddenly became obsolete. It didn’t matter anymore that I knew the best way to get to the grocery store. I even wrote a little poem about it in my notes app:

I’m mourning the knowledge

that the streetlamp on the corner

gathers cobwebs: best to avoid it.

The knowing which freeway lane to take.

How to use the broken microwave.

Nothing to do, though,

but bury your teeth in the backyard

and go.

For a while, every time I returned to California, I made a point to go to my old neighborhood and see the house. I’ve stopped doing that now. I realized that the house itself means very little if you don’t belong to it. I felt like a thief, sitting in my car at the curb, hoping the neighbors wouldn’t recognize me, lurking for a moment, then driving away. No point in that at all.

I guess it makes sense that I’m thinking about this as I move into a new place. I’ll definitely be in West Virginia for the next three years, and I will gather new knowledge here, and it will start to feel like home. Maybe I’ll stay, maybe I’ll leave.

About a year ago, I wrote this on my substack:

I often feel that, as a young adult, I’m running around the world, ripping off little pieces of myself, and planting them in the ground to see which ones will grow into something lasting. It’s an exciting process—I have all these little seeds of potential. But for the meantime, I’m just scattered about, never quite feeling complete in any one place.

To an extent, that feels true now. I’m just throwing things at the wall, seeing what will stick. West Virginia is kind of a random place for me to be. At the same time, though, it feels like a step away from the drift.

I’m pursuing an MFA here, and I’ll be teaching at the university. I haven’t started my program yet (T minus two hours), so I don’t really know what it will be like, but my hope is that this will be a move to reshape my life around my writing. I hope this program will help me see a path forward as a writer. I hope I hope I hope.

My boyfriend and I picked up a dresser off Facebook Marketplace yesterday. Solid wood, impractically heavy. It’s in the apartment now, and I have no idea how we’ll ever get it out. It feels good to be somewhere to stay.

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What I made

Hot dog dinner:

Summer cannot exist without hot dog dinner. Veggie dogs, of course. My mom and I made this together in California and it was so good and so perfect. I don’t want to hear anyone complaining that I put ketchup on my hot dogs. OKAY????

Lettuce wraps and buckwheat:

My stepmom made these lettuce wraps (with cilantro and lettuce from her garden!) while my dad and I experimented with this buckwheat thing. The lettuce wraps were great and the buckwheat was pretty good! To sum up my dad’s take on the buckwheat: needs meat. Oh well.

Snickerdoodles:

These came out a bit misshapen, but VERY delicious if I do say so myself. I used this recipe.

Berry apple crisp:

My boyfriend and I made this crisp with wild blackberries growing in his yard, blueberries from a local farmstand, and plain old apples from the grocery store. It was so good. Backgammon and crisp is a must.

Bits and bobs

On that drive, I had a lot of time to think, and I started wondering why I had been so convinced that I couldn’t drive a U-Haul. Was it internalized misogyny that made me think I was less capable than my boyfriend? He’s never driven a U-Haul, either, so why did I automatically assume that he’d be better suited to the task than I am? And why did I assume that the roads into West Virginia would be so windy and poorly-maintained? Actually, I drove almost entirely on wide, flat interstates, cutting cleanly through beautiful mountain vistas. I shouldn’t think of myself as a helpless person, I told myself. I shouldn’t think of the world as a hostile place.

I found this recipe that my cousin Lila and I developed many years ago. I hope you enjoy:

Thank you for reading! :)

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I can’t wait for the next chapter—getting my MFA in fiction!—but I’ve been reflecting on this past year as it reaches its close. I wanted to put down in writing some of the hard-earned lessons this crazy city has taught me.

1. “Likable” and “Trustworthy” are not the same thing

Early on in my time here, somebody I liked turned out not to be trustworthy. Because I enjoyed my interactions with this person, I forgot to be guarded. When he asked for my phone number, it felt rude and uncalled for to refuse. When he asked about my commute, it seemed like basic conversational etiquette to respond. But he was not trustworthy, and I shouldn’t have given him access to that information.

After that experience, I became very guarded and cold to everyone around me. I never smiled and I entertained no conversations. But that was also the wrong thing to do. It left me isolated and aloof. I liked my colleagues and acquaintances, but I was treating them as if I hated them.

I think young women get strong messaging that even slight social friction is disastrous, or, heaven forbid, rude. Like, when someone shouts, “Why don’t you smile, Beautiful?” most women I know either smile, or they maintain a neutral face. Those who don’t smile wear it like a badge of honor, like they’re absolute savages who take no prisoners. But actually, all they’re doing is tolerating a small amount of friction. They’re not being aggressive or rude at all. We’re taught to view that small act of agency as transgressive, but it isn’t. Those women are doing a completely normal thing that does not need to be attached to their identity. They have not transformed themselves, by not smiling on command, into rude women.

That insight is what I was missing. It’s not rude to protect yourself; therefore, you don’t have to be rude in order to protect yourself. Therefore, you can protect yourself even from people you like. Trust takes a long time to build, whereas liking someone can be almost instantaneous. So don’t confuse the two, and don’t extend trust where it doesn’t belong.

2. It’s really, truly okay to ask for help

I had grand plans for my year in New York City, which was my first year out of college, not living with my parents. I wanted to be completely independent and completely adult. Instead, I wound up abruptly quitting my job and found myself with no way to pay my rent.

Extremely luckily, my parents were able to help me financially until I found a new job. I was grateful for their help, but I felt absolutely rotten and ashamed. I wrote this desperate, confessional newsletter about it, which was basically a stream of consciousness self-crucifixion for the crime of receiving support.

In retrospect, I feel quite differently about that period of unemployment. Something scary and destabilizing happened to me. I was lucky enough to have a support system, and I was wise enough to use it.

When I published that confessional essay, I received a lot of texts and comments from my peers, saying that they felt very similarly. The truth is, it’s hard to stand on your own two feet for the first time. Needing help is not a failure; it’s basically inevitable. If you’re lucky enough to have people who will offer you support, it’s a better use of your energy to focus on gratitude, not shame.

3. Relationships are the most valuable things you can have

I made the excellent decision to live with three close friends this year, and many more live nearby. They have fed me, comforted me, advised me, done laundry with me, gone to doctor’s appointments with me, sung for me, danced with me, walked aimlessly with me, confided in me, and laughed with me. And I have done the same for them.

More than anything, anything else, I will miss that aspect of New York City. There are so many people here. There is so much love. It’s been a miracle.

4. Most people are just trying to live their lives

I had a weird non-experience this year where I thought there was going to be a mass shooting on the subway (don’t worry, there wasn’t!). It was really scary and I felt jumpy for months afterward.

The most striking thing about the experience, though, was the way it brought everyone on the train car together. People were working together, helping each other, trying to figure out what was happening and what we should do. It’s easy, in a place like New York City, to act like everyone around you is a threat. To some extent, it’s a smart way to carry yourself. Actually, though, 99.9999% of people are perfectly nice and normal, and they’re just trying to get home safe. It was a comforting thing to remember: the person with the gun, the person inciting violence, is absolutely the outlier.

5. Barely keeping it together still counts as keeping it together

For most of my time in New York, I worked as a greeter at a fancy restaurant. I made no tips, only an hourly wage hovering just above minimum. I consistently got fewer hours than I wanted, and most months I was barely breaking even on rent.

As I mentioned before, I’m lucky enough to have a financial safety net. With my job as a hostess, though, I have been able to be, by and large, self-sufficient. But it’s tight. I mean, really, really tight. I have almost nothing left over at the end of the week. It’s not the lifestyle I had envisioned for myself. I haven’t been able to save as much as I wanted. I rarely eat out or go to the movies or go to a museum, and when I do, I feel anxious and guilty about the expense.

But you know what? I still pay rent. I’m still able to buy groceries. Sometimes I feel like I’m barely treading water, but I’m still treading water, gosh darn it! You don’t have to do everything perfectly. Good enough is good enough.

6. I am not a nice person

I always have considered myself to be supremely agreeable, accommodating, and nice. This year, however, I’ve met a different version of myself. I can be snippy, I can be demanding. I get irritated easily, and I am the roommate most likely to shout, “Whose dirty dishes are these? They’ve been sitting here.”

I don’t know if this is a new side of me, or just one I’ve turned a blind eye to until now, but I don’t like it. I’ve come to realize that being “nice” is an active choice, not a personality trait. It’s something I have to do on purpose.

I’ve been really trying to work on that. I mentioned this struggle to my friend and roommate Atticus, and he said, quite reasonably, something along the lines of, “You can’t expect yourself to behave perfectly all the time.” That’s true, I think. Everyone’s only human. Sometimes our emotions will get the better of us. That’s inevitable and natural.

But I also think that those moments should be the exception, not the rule. Yes, I can extend myself grace when I mess up, but I don’t believe that my bad moods should be anyone else’s responsibility. If I’m hungry, or tired, or stressed, that doesn’t give me the right to be unkind to the people around me.

7. Joy takes work

When I first started working as a hostess, I often had a pretty negative attitude. I would gripe to my coworkers about rude or demanding customers, I would complain about the slow days and also about the busy days, and I would go home feeling sorry for myself.

Then, we got a new greeter. Every time I tried to complain to her, telling her a story about an annoying guest, she would just laugh delightedly. “That’s awesome,” she said, every single time.

“Oh my God,” I’d gripe, “the lady at table 3 just made me take a hundred different pictures of her and her husband.”

“That’s awesome!” my coworker would say.

And then I would realize that yes, it was awesome. How many people are so sure of what they want? How many people are so in love that they want to document it? How many people could I make that happy with so little work?

Often it’s easier to read a situation as negative, but it’s definitely better for your soul to find good wherever you can. To be amused, delighted, generous in your interpretation. I don’t think happiness comes from big moments, but small ones. And I think it’s up to us to find it. Isn’t that awesome?

8. Ask for what you want

I often find myself too embarrassed or shy to be honest about my goals, especially if I think that my own desires will be annoying or inconvenient to somebody else. But the truth I’m starting to understand is that asking alone is not presumptuous.

There’s no harm in saying, “I’d love to find a time to meet with you!” or “Do you know of anybody who’s hiring?” or “Could I run this by you?”

If I’m asking too much, people can say “no.” They can ignore me. They can make that decision for themselves.

In general, I have found that people are much, much more willing to help than I would have expected. It can feel vulnerable to open myself up, but how else will I get anywhere? It’s not like anyone is reading my mind. It’s not like anyone is more invested in my success than me.

This year, I have done more “networking” than I ever have before, and it has always gone well. It hasn’t always resulted in the exact outcome I wanted, but every single person I’ve talked to, reached out to, asked for advice, has been encouraging and warm and genuinely helpful. I’m learning to overcome my embarrassment. Ask, I’m learning, and you just might receive.

9. Don’t talk bad about people at work

One day, right after I came in to work at the restaurant, I sat two tables in quick succession. As I was returning to the host podium, a server stormed up to me.

“Did you know,” she demanded, “that Jordan is on break? And I’m covering his section, too?”

“Oh,” I said, “sorry, I didn’t realize. I just got here.”

“Well,” she huffed, “you just double sat me. Pay attention.”

I returned to my station, irritated and embarrassed.

The maître d’ was greeting another party. “Sylvie, could you take them to table 5?” she asked. It was in the same server’s section.

“Let’s do table two,” I suggested. “I just sat her and she yelled at me.”

The maître d’ widened her eyes. “She what?”

It was a much stronger reaction than I’d anticipated. “No, I mean, she didn’t really yell, I guess. She was just kind of short with me. It wasn’t a big deal.”

I seated the party, and when I returned, the manager was waiting for me. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Sylvie,” he said, with a look of genuine concern on his face, “what did she say to you?”

I was astonished at how quickly this situation had escaped my control. “She didn’t say anything,” I said. “She was just annoyed that I double sat her. It’s really fine.”

The manager nodded seriously. “I’ll talk to her,” he said.

“Please don’t,” I cried, starting to feel a little panicky. “Honestly, there’s no need.”

He patted my shoulder reassuringly. “Don’t worry.”

The next time I turned around, he was conferring gravely with the server, who, chastised, nodded at everything he said.

Luckily, that was as far as it went, and I apologized to the server, and everything was fine. But I was just absolutely blown away by the impact my one throwaway comment had. The way the server spoke to me, while not perfectly ideal, was certainly nothing extraordinary or punishable. I had thought I was just venting, but I could have gotten her in serious trouble, or I could have made an enemy at work, which is not what anyone wants.

I think that this is probably an extreme example, but the basic principle is true: it can be tempting to complain about coworkers, but very little good can come from it, unless there’s a truly untenable situation. At best, it might make people uncomfortable, and at worst, it can cause a real problem. Better to avoid it altogether.

10. Give people opportunities to surprise you

This year, I have come to believe that this is one of the most important things in the world. I cannot see inside anyone else’s head. The moment I start to believe that I know what someone will do or think or say in any given situation is the moment I stop seeing them as a human being. I think this is an underlying problem in a lot of political strife, a lot of societal discontent, a lot of conflict.

The wonderful thing about other people is that they know things that I don’t know. They think things that I don’t think. They notice things that I don’t notice. What a sad, lonely life I would lead if I only accepted information that came from my own brain.

I’m ending on this lesson, which may not be the most interesting, because I genuinely think it is the most important one. The greatest secret to happiness that I have found this year is that it comes from other people, and it comes when I don’t expect it, and I have to be ready to receive it. I have to create opportunities for people to give it to me. I have to ask, instead of assume. It’s the only way to live in a living world.

Thank you for reading! :)

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I was there to man the coat check, so it wasn’t clear what I was supposed to do until the guests arrived. Bored, I wandered the building in search of some way to help. I poked my head into the kitchen, where a maze of tense bodies ran back and forth. It was impossible to catch anyone’s eye or ask any questions. I stood in the corner and tried to be both accessible, should anyone need me, and completely out of the way.

“Sylvie!”

I heard my name shouted. I couldn’t tell which direction it had come from, and as I looked around the packed kitchen, all I could see was a dense blur of people.

“Sylvie!”

This time, I swiveled and turned right toward the call. Somehow, on the far wall of the kitchen, a tiny bastion of peace existed. Two of the servers stood in a small, well-lit bar, preparing batched cocktails.

They smiled sunnily at me and, in perfect synchrony, waved.

I left my last job, as a barista, due to an unfortunate incident with one of my coworkers. Let’s just say it was not nearly as bad as it could have been, which is not saying much. I had considered this person to be a “work friend.” I had shared personal information with this person, such as my phone number and the general area where I lived. After this person took advantage of my trust, I was plagued with paranoia, terrified that they would turn up at my subway station or even my doorstep, that they would be waiting around every corner. I lost weeks of sleep. When I found a new job, I vowed to be more guarded. “I’m not here to make friends,” I told myself every time someone tried to strike up a conversation with me.

After a few months, one of the servers started making fun of me for being unfriendly. “Why don’t you ever say ‘hi’?” he would ask.

“I say ‘hi’!” I would protest. “Didn’t I say ‘hi’ to you this morning?”

He’d shrug, then point to one of the bussers. “Did you say ‘hi’ to him? Do you know his name?”

I made a point, in retaliation, to loudly greet everyone by name as I walked through the kitchen at the start of my shift, and to loudly wish them a good night as I left. And every single time I saw that one server, I would smile, wave, and say, “Hi! How are you?” Dozens of times a day, I greeted him.

Of course, that only lasted for a couple weeks, but it initiated, without my realizing it, a thaw between myself and the rest of the staff. I started chatting with people more easily. I started joking around. I didn’t give out my phone number or discuss my commute, but I allowed myself to believe that the people around me were not malicious.

When he and the other server waved at me on the night of the gala, it was a callback, an inside joke. They were wearing their matching uniforms. They were illuminated in golden bar light. Their fingers fanned out as they waved at me, their smiles were broad and mischievous.

Oh my God, I realized, in that precise moment, these are the real people in my real life.

Somehow, I had forgotten that obvious fact.

A few days later, I was standing at the host podium while the manager chatted with another one of the servers. When I first started at the restaurant, I read this server’s friendliness as flirtation, and I tried to maintain a polite coolness to our interactions.

“How’s your wife?” the manager asked.

“She’s okay,” the server replied. “But the baby’s colicky.”

“I didn’t know you had a baby!” I cried. I also hadn’t known he had a wife. I felt obscurely embarrassed by the fact.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s still crazy for me to think about. She’s only five months old.”

“Wow,” I said, and everyone returned to work. Then, I realized that I had been working with this man for seven months.

It’s certainly possible for married men to hit on their younger colleagues. My coworker at the cafe had been married. But I had imagined myself to occupy such a place of importance in this server’s life. “He’s obsessed with me,” I thought, every time he talked to me, no matter how innocuous. It never occurred to me that there might be anyone else more central to his life. He had a baby while we worked together, and I didn’t even know.

I tried to remember why I had suspected him of flirting, and I could not produce any concrete examples. It was my own sensitivity, my own rawness from a recent bad experience, that had twisted completely normal small talk into something sinister. Something self-aggrandizing.

I just read Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and I was extremely taken with the section titled “Lost Letters.” In it, Kundera talks extensively about “graphomania,” the mania for writing books. He quotes Goethe as asking, “Is one alive when other men are living?” Kundera takes this question to be a revelation about the act of writing. In describing reality, he argues, writers demand to be not only the center of the universe, but the universe itself. The universe is, by definition, the only of its kind, so to become the universe, a writer must diligently focus inward. The concept of another writer, another universe, is an existential threat.

I read this passage waiting for my train and found it so prescient and sad that I immediately sent a picture to my boyfriend.

“One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.”

“Uh oh,” I thought, when I read that.

It’s probably human nature to be self-centered. That probably has been true since caveman days, and it would probably be ridiculous to blame self-centeredness, as a general concept, on our phones. We are all, quite literally, at the center of the universe as we perceive it. No matter which way you turn, existence stretches out before you. For all intents and purposes, you are the very center.

But it’s never been so easy to project that perspective to an audience. It’s never been so easy to say, “I’m the center of my own life, and let me show you what that looks like, and maybe I can become the center of your life too.”

I don’t think it’s a stretch to extend Kundera’s definition of a writer to anyone producing content. The internet is exploding with books, just in a new form. Almost everyone I know, obviously including myself, has some platform where they share some version of themselves with an audience.

Nearly everyone is seeking to become a universe. Nearly everyone wants to be heard. But you cannot speak and listen at the same time. It’s just not possible.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return. I’ve never read Nietzsche and in fact generally struggle with philosophy, but my dear friend Atticus introduced me to the concept.

Here’s the thought experiment, from “The Gay Science”:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence” ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine."

I think this is a very beautiful question. I would like to believe that my life is a gift, that it is divine. To me, the fundamental question is, “Am I going to be happy with my life or not?”

Nietzsche’s imperative is amor fati—love fate.

In order to love fate, I think the first important step must be to listen. To observe.

My life, I must remember, is not a background to the drama of my mind. It is not fodder for some future work of genius I will write. It is not a boundless photo opportunity. It is my life. It intersects delicately and sometimes significantly with the lives of other people. It holds richness so far beyond myself that I will never see if I don’t stop to listen.

I was talking about all of this with my boyfriend when an ant scurried across the floor of my bedroom. “Ah!” I shouted. “An ant!” My brain went to infestation, to texting the landlord, to vacating the apartment for 4-5 hours for the exterminator.

My boyfriend quoted Hesse to me: “Every experience has its element of magic,” he said. “Every ant has its element of magic.”

I looked a little closer. “Yes,” I agreed, “the ant has its element of magic. It moves so gracefully.” Six tiny legs carried it with astonishing speed toward its ever-changing destination. I remembered that a single ant is not really a creature to itself, but a tiny part of one super organism, a colony, in the same way that our cells are living parts of us.

I’m not trying to argue against writing, or even against social media. That would be more than a little hypocritical. Thank God for writers. Thank God for Milan Kundera. Thank God for books, in all their forms.

I’m not arguing against personal ambition either, or against the dazzling desire to become a universe of words. That’s something I want, too. I want to twist the circumstances of my life into something digestible and meaningful and true. But how can I do that if I miscast all the characters? How can I be a writer if entire babies escape my attention?

In my quest to write a great book, or even just a good book, I tend to view life as a story. I want to study it from a craft perspective, to learn how it all fits together. But some things don’t fit together in the way I might expect. In the case of my coworker, the story of my own past overwhelmed the reality of the people in front of me. I let myself create a narrative, and I neglected to be curious about the truth. How many elements of magic did I miss?

And—look—here’s the truly shameful admission: I think I could be happy if I never wrote anything worthwhile. I think perhaps I am my own most important audience. I would rather be blind to a book than a baby. That’s all I’m saying.

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What I made

I have some food to share with you all!

Blueberry scones:

My friends and I had a picnic recently, and my boyfriend and I decided to bring some homemade scones! The restaurant where I work has an afternoon tea service, so I had been craving scones for a while. We initially tried to make raspberry scones, but… something went wrong. I guess the raspberries added too much moisture to the dough, because no matter how much extra flour we added (and we had even used less liquid than the recipe called for!), the dough just would not come together. Eventually, we had to give up, because the dough tasted like straight flour and was still miles away from workable. Luckily, we had enough ingredients left over to make a second batch, so we pivoted to blueberry scones with a lemon glaze. They were a delicious part of a wonderful potluck picnic, including a beautiful charcuterie board, yummy baguettes, cookies, and cheeses. Picnic season is upon us!

Mushroompalooza:

I love mushrooms and decided to gift myself a mushroomy week, with mushroom pasta and tofu steaks with mushroom sauce. I truly don’t understand how anyone could dislike a mushroom.

PB+J failure:

Every day, I take a PB+J to work. It’s easy and fast and satisfying and it doesn’t need to be refrigerated or heated up. An ideal work lunch. I like to include some chia seeds in my sandwich to make it a bit more filling and to add a fiber hit. I know some might balk at the thought of improperly soaked chia seeds, but I figure it’s sitting in the jelly all day, it’s probably good enough. I’ve certainly never had any issues arise. As I was adding the chia seeds to my sandwich, my hand slipped, and, well, this was the result:

Okay, so maybe that’s a bit too much chia. I wound up scraping off the excess and making chia pudding with it.

Some bits and bobs

A very famous, beloved singer has been calling in to the restaurant where I work and ordering soup to go. His assistant comes and picks up the soup, then brings it to the famous singer, who lives not far from the restaurant. The famous singer is very nice over the phone, and he always goes out of his way to tell me his name, along with the fact that he is a singer. Then, he excitedly reads out his credit card number, as well as his phone number, the name of the building where he lives, and his apartment number. If I were a very famous singer, I would NEVER volunteer that information over the phone to some random girl who works at a restaurant. I would be using pseudonyms, voice modifiers, and a burner phone. I find it sort of touching that he is so unconcerned about his privacy.

Much of the philosophy in this essay, including the phrase “amor fati,” was introduced to me by Maria Semple’s Go Gentle. The book opened the world of Stoic philosophy to me, and it is one that I find fascinating and powerful, and that I am only starting to explore.

While my boyfriend and I were walking to the picnic with our scones, a bird pooped directly onto them. Luckily, we had the foresight to wrap the scones in cling film. Moral of the story, protect your scones.

Thank you for reading! :)

P.S. Here’s a transcription of the Kundera excerpt:

Someone who writes books is either everything (a unique universe in himself and to all others) or nothing. And because it will never be given to anyone to be everything, all of us who write books are nothing. We are unrecognized, jealous, embittered, and we wish the others dead. In that we are all equals: Banaka, Bibi, I, and Goethe.

The irresistible proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors, and patients shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: “We are all writers!”

For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

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Here’s a cooking story: Last week, I was making pasta, and I threw a quarter cup of boiling water into my own face.

I have always had poor hand-eye coordination.

As I sat in the ER, waiting to be transferred to a hospital with a burn unit (a burn unit), I was almost cheerful. My vision was unaffected. My pain was tolerable. The doctors and nurses were being nice to me. My friend Atticus was sitting patiently in the waiting room, my friend Cheryl was at home making blondies for when I got back, and my boyfriend was driving from upstate to be there with me. I felt extremely lucky.

The only problem was aesthetics.

My face looked radically different than it had before. For all I knew, it could be a permanent change.

I have never been a girl who fantasizes about her wedding day, but I had an unexpected vision of myself in a beautiful white dress, standing beneath a flowered arch, with a giant, weeping, peeling, purple burn across my face. Tears sprang to my eyes.

In the hallway, I could hear the doctors and nurses talking about my burn, debating its severity. Superficial, or partial thickness? Transfer, or discharge? They walked casually past my room, whose door was ajar, and threw appraising glances at me as if I wouldn’t notice.

I wasn’t the only patient receiving such special treatment, such interest. There was also a patient with leprosy.

Leprosy, or Hansen’s Disease, is actually completely curable and not highly contagious. It has deep, outdated, historical stigma attached to it. Most people think of leper colonies, we think of devastation. Our impulse is “get away!” In fact, it is very unlikely to contract leprosy from an infected person. From the CDC: “Leprosy does not spread easily between people. You must have prolonged, close contact with someone with untreated leprosy over many months to catch the disease.” Disease transmission stops when treatment begins.

The stigma surrounding leprosy is a barrier to treatment. It sounds so permanent, so hopeless. People don’t stick to their treatment plans. People don’t seek help in the first place.

Suddenly, as I listened to the doctors gossiping, I was in a league with leprosy. They talked about my burn in the exact same hushed tone, reserved for us two special patients. The severity of our problems was different, certainly. My burn healed in a week, whereas Hansen’s Disease requires one to two years of medication. But in both cases, all the danger was superficial. Mild, but visible.

As I went through my daily life for the next few days, I became conscious of a new way of being. When I walked around my neighborhood, I could feel people looking at me. The cashier at the grocery store asked me what happened. A little girl riding her scooter came to a dead halt when she saw me. She stared at me in open wonder, open horror. Her head turned as I walked past.

I don’t think it’s unkindness that makes people stare. I think it’s human nature. It’s easy to forget that we are animals, but we are. We still have survival instincts. When someone has a noticeable mark on them, we can’t help but analyze it. Is it dangerous? Infectious? A warning? This calculus lives so deep beneath the surface of our consciousness that we don’t even realize it’s happening. It just feels like a tug of our eyes, an irresistible, embarrassed curiosity.

Thanks to the burn, I was in a tenuous, momentary alliance with all the visibly invisible people in the city. Just like the huddled figures on park benches or the shouting men in subway stations, I was noticed, appraised, evaluated for risk. I saw people look involuntarily toward me, then decide to look away.

I didn’t mind being the subject of that attention, actually. I found it mostly novel and kind of funny. But I also knew I was likely a temporary recipient. For so many people, I realized, this was a constant way of life, the only way they could meet the world.

I felt more acutely than ever the way my gaze slides over and snags on the people around me. The people I ignore, the people I can’t help but watch.

When I first moved to New York City, I was surprised at how difficult it was to interact with homeless people, how cruel it made me feel. I rejected so many people every day. “No, I can’t spare a dollar.” “No, I don’t want to buy a candy bar.” “No, I don’t have any extra food to offer you.” At first, I tried to acknowledge each person who approached me, to connect with them on a human level, at least, if I couldn’t help them. But soon, I found myself detached, impatient. People would speak to me, and I would walk straight past them. I disliked this numbness in myself, but I didn’t do much to fight it. I didn’t smile at anyone or give anyone money. “The best way to help is to donate to charity,” I told myself, and then I didn’t donate to charity.

Once, a young man came up to me in a deli and asked if I would buy him something to eat. I was in the act of purchasing a $7 cookie for myself. “Sure,” I said, uncharacteristically. “I’ll buy you a bagel.”

As I waited to pay, the young man asked, “What’s your name?”

I was suddenly wary. I considered lying, but I couldn’t think of anything but the truth. “Sylvie,” I said.

“Do you live around here?”

“No,” I said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Working,” I said.

“Working? Don’t you ever have any fun?”

“No,” I said.

“Do you want to?”

“No,” I said.

I paid for his bagel and left, feeling very annoyed. No good deed goes unpunished, I thought.

A few days later, when I was at work, two women settled down at the bar, right by my host podium. They were visiting from Los Angeles, I heard them saying, and they bemoaned the city’s homelessness problem. I’m from Los Angeles, too, and homelessness certainly is a serious issue there. LA has the highest unsheltered homeless population in the US, with nearly 70,000 individuals, only 23,000 of whom are sheltered. Around 3,300 young people experience homelessness on a given night in LA.

“It’s because of the weather,” one woman said. “They can survive out there.”

“And they can get food anywhere,” the other woman supplied. She was drinking a $25 cocktail. “The government gives them money, and they can get food anywhere.”

“They’re rich!” her friend agreed. She was also drinking a $25 cocktail. “When they ask for money…” She mimed sticking a finger down her throat, retching. “I’m throwing up. This is me throwing up.”

“Of course they’re rich,” said the other woman. “We’d all be rich if we didn’t have to pay rent.”

Their conversation upset me for weeks. In the moment, I came dangerously close to cussing them out. Not that I have any great leg to stand on. In the past year, I have contributed one bagel and maybe five dollars to New York City’s homeless population. And that begrudgingly. I avert my eyes, I quicken my step, in extreme cases I cross the street. But at least I’m not heartless, I thought. At least I haven’t concocted some bizarre narrative where, somehow, I am the victim, because I have to exist in proximity to another person’s pain. These two women, I felt with deep conviction, were evil.

Or maybe it’s just a failure to see. Maybe they encounter so much suffering they’ve forgotten what it means. Maybe they have to explain it away to themselves. Maybe that’s what evil is.

This was a rough winter for New York. We had a few massive blizzards, which ranged from inconvenient to whimsically delightful for most New Yorkers, but they were extremely dangerous for the city’s unhoused population. In a late January storm, 13 homeless people died from exposure.

I was making my way home from work during that deadly storm, and there was a young man sprawled out across a bench in the mostly-empty train car. I thought about switching cars, then thought better. He was just trying to get some sleep.

Throughout the ride, my eyes kept flickering back to him, despite my best efforts. Was he a threat? Clearly not. But I couldn’t stop looking. He was wrapped in a beat-down puffer coat, shivering violently. He held a vape and a Bic lighter to his chest, but his hands shook so intensely that he kept dropping them. When he reached down to pick them back up, his jacket came open a little, and I saw that he was shirtless underneath it, his torso skinny and pale. Finally, miraculously, he settled into sleep. His eyebrows pulled together into a mildly concerned expression. A person’s sleeping face is so intimate.

My stop came at last. It was almost at the end of the line, and I absently wondered where this young man would get off, worried that he might miss his stop.

Of course, I rebuked myself, as I stepped off the train, as the doors closed behind me, he didn’t have a stop. It didn’t matter where he got off. He would stay on the train as long as he possibly could. That was all he had.

For those of you worried about my face, I’m happy to report that the burn is almost completely undetectable now. I look pretty much normal. I have to be mindful of sun exposure for the next year, but that’s it. The doctors at the burn unit said they’d hardly ever seen a burn heal so well.

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As I wrote this piece, I really saw my own hypocrisy and complacency when it comes to my unhoused neighbors. I decided to make a donation to the Food Bank For NYC and to Covenant House. If you feel any of the same feelings I feel, consider looking into food banks and non profits near you.

What I made

It’s been a while since I shared any food on here, but here are some brief highlights from the past few months!

Easy noodle soup:

I’ve been enjoying this really easy soup, where you just chop a bunch of veggies and tofu, throw some rice vermicelli in there, and pour boiling water on top. Miso and dashi. Couldn’t be easier or yummier.

Stewy beans:

Instead of making white bean soup, I’ve been keeping it thick and stewy. You get more bean for your buck. I love it.

Avocado matzo:

I went home for Passover (I’m so behind on my posts 🥲) and ate so much yummy food. My mom made the craziest, most delicious chocolate pavlova the world has ever known. I ate matzo ball soup until it filled my entire bloodstream. But the prettiest picture I got was of this avocado matzo that my stepmom made, complete with edible flowers from the garden. This was my first time visiting my dad’s new house, and it was a delight.

Peanutty stir fry:

My boyfriend and I made this peanut butter stir fry with eggs and broccoli and peppers and rice noodles and green onions that grow wild in his yard. There’s no feeling like harvesting food straight from the ground and then cooking with it. Yummy business over here.

What I learned

My boyfriend and I befriended this lamb and gave it a fashionable hat.

I’m still figuring out how this newsletter will look moving forward and, obviously, I’m having trouble falling into a consistent schedule. Once a week is not sustainable for me at this point, but I don’t want to keep going a month+ between posts. I’ll dial it in. Thanks for your patience.

Thank you for reading! :)

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Once again, dropping the links for the Food Bank For NYC and Covenant House.

I was sitting on the subway, reading. The doors had just closed, but the train had not yet left the station. The whole car looked up at once, at the woman who had spoken, who was staring out the window onto the platform.

“What?” somebody next to me squeaked.

“Okay,” said somebody else, a tall man with a bicycle, “everyone get down. He ran that way.”

The whole train car dove to the floor.

I was on my back, pancaked against the unfathomably filthy ground. I hadn’t seen the man or the gun, but somebody behind me was crying in high-pitched whimpers, like the sound design of an action thriller. I imagined a man standing on the platform, aiming an assault rifle into the side of the train. Could the bullets make it through the metal walls? Maybe.

My hands shaking, I wrestled my phone out of my pocket and texted my boyfriend. “Gun on subway. I don’t know what’s happening.”

Then the doors to the train slid open.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” somebody said.

“Close the doors!” someone else wailed, though it was not clear who they were addressing.

Maybe these open doors were our only chance of escape. I pictured myself getting up from the floor, sprinting out onto the platform, bursting into the freedom of open air. But I stayed motionless, pressed into the grime, with everyone else. There was no gunshot, no commotion.

“Is he gone?” someone asked after a tense few seconds.

“He ran out of the station,” said the man with the bike.

“What are we doing?” asked a young man in glasses. “Are we leaving? Are we staying here?”

“I mean, you can leave if you want,” said the man with the bike. “But I wouldn’t. He might be waiting at the exit.”

Slowly, we all picked ourselves up from the ground. The station was quiet, deserted. We ventured to poke our heads out the open doors. Tentatively, a small crowd gathered on the platform, murmuring and gesticulating. I texted my boyfriend again: “I think it’s okay. Scary though.”

“The cops are coming,” people started to report. And, “The conductor says to stay on the train.”

We filed back onboard. Before long, the train started moving. The rest of the ride was relatively uneventful.

“I made it home,” I texted my boyfriend. “Soooooo scary.” I looked down at myself for the first time and saw that my jeans, where they had touched the floor of the subway, were black.

“I almost got shot!” I cried, after explaining the situation to my friends. As soon as I said it, I realized that it was not true. “That’s an exaggeration,” I amended.

“You didn’t almost get shot,” my friend Atticus said. “But you were near somebody with a gun who was looking to shoot somebody.”

Luckily, my boyfriend didn’t see my texts until the whole thing was over. My first message would have sent him into a panic, he would have been miserable. I’m glad I could explain the whole thing to him calmly and reasonably.

But, when we talked on the phone that night, there was a tiny, shameful part of me that wished he had seen it all in real time. That he would understand viscerally, not just intellectually, how dangerous it felt in the moment. I got frustrated as I tried to communicate the depth of my experience, which felt important and maybe even pivotal to me.

“I hate living in this city,” I groused, even though the nothing that had happened to me was not the city’s fault.

“Let’s get you out of there,” my boyfriend agreed.

After the immediate rush of adrenaline, I found it difficult to talk about my experience. I couldn’t explain it in a way that was both true and harrowing. People were impressed that I had willingly lain on the subway floor. They didn’t seem to care about the gun stuff. Begrudgingly, I had to admit that the gun stuff had not really happened, but the floor had.

It was scary, though, truly. My own death had felt not only possible, but imminently likely. I had been forced to know myself in crisis, and I was not totally pleased with what I’d seen. I had been indecisive, passive. I was uncomfortable, too, with the coldness of my messages to my boyfriend. “Gun on subway.” What if those had been my last words? I sounded like a robot. And when I thought hard about the scene, about my own helplessness, my heart began pounding like a rabbit’s, even as I lay safe in bed. The subway had become a difficult place for me, one that I had to navigate daily. I jumped and flinched at every sound, every sudden movement.

I thought often about the following passage from Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends:

I wanted to explain that I didn’t know how much I was allowed to feel about it, or how much of what I felt at the time I was still allowed to feel in retrospect. I panicked, I wanted to tell her. I started thinking about the heat death of the universe again. I called Nick and then hung up on him. But these were all things I did because I thought something was happening to me that turned out not to happen.

When I talked about the experience, I felt its weight slipping away from me. My own words were destroying it. With each retelling, I injected more humor, more self-deprecation. It seemed less and less serious. I still was afraid on the subway, but that feeling felt less and less justified.

A few months ago, my boyfriend lent me a book called The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. It’s about a mystical island where life’s only goal is to have better, more powerful dreams. The island’s inhabitants describe everything as “nagdeo” or “donagdeo." Nagdeo is conducive to good dreams. Donagdeo is not.

The book is strange and strangely compelling. It maps out a peaceful way of life, simple and egalitarian. Idleness is donagdeo, but so is working yourself to exhaustion. Sharing your food is nagdeo. Talking too much is donagdeo.

I didn’t understand that last rule at first. “What’s wrong with talking?” I wondered. Now maybe I get it.

Recently I saw my friend Sarah, who is the closest thing I have to a literary salon. I was nervous to see her because I’ve been excited about an idea for a new novel. Normally, this would have nothing to do with Sarah, but it happens that the setting for my new idea overlaps significantly with the setting of a novel that she is currently revising, that she’s been working on for years, and that I have had the pleasure of reading.

Of course, I wasn’t thinking about Sarah when the idea struck me. My idea is, I believe, quite different from her book, aside from a superficial commonality. But I still felt that I owed her a heads up before I started working on it, and I fretted for days, worried that she’d feel betrayed, that she’d be angry with me.

“Cool!” she said brightly. “Of course I’m not mad!”

But she did have questions.

I have a strict rule not to talk about my writings in progress. In this case, I broke the rule.

I found myself getting flustered and excited as I struggled to explain the idea, to show that it really was different from hers. Sarah’s face was inscrutable. I spoke much longer, much more breathlessly, than I intended to. A couple of times Sarah said, “Well, that does sound like my book,” and I stammered and blushed.

I remembered why my rule exists. Talking makes things sound stupid. When you make your whole idea sound stupid, it can definitely kill momentum.

Donagdeo.

To my relief, Sarah remained unbothered by my idea, and she went on to tell me about an article she was publishing with the New Critic. In writing the article, she had been thinking a lot about a novelist’s sensibility. “I’m wary of a binary,” she said. “I’m not inclined to judge. I just want to understand where people are coming from. I’m not saying that’s always good”—she laughed wryly—“but you have to think that way to be a novelist.”

The idea feels right to me. I flatter myself to think it explains something about me.

This weekend, I visited my boyfriend’s family for their annual boil day. They tap 16 maple trees on their property and, when the weather turns warm, they boil the sap down to syrup. 40 gallons of sap produce one gallon of syrup. It takes all day.

In general, my boyfriend is more capable than I am. He has physical skills and strength and can easily transform his surroundings into things that are beautiful or useful. Sometimes I feel afloat in his world, impractical.

At 7:30 am on boil day he started a huge bonfire, a rowdy companion to the neatly contained furnace where the sap boiled. A big pile of scrap wood sat next to the bonfire, and he threw it cheerfully, bit by bit, into the flames. He was wearing thick green work gloves, and he offered me a smaller pair of yellow ones. I left them on the table.

Somehow the idea of covering my hands was unappealing. I wanted my fingers exposed to the world, searching tendrils, sensitive and responsive. I thought about Sarah and about being a novelist.

Without the gloves I was pretty useless. I picked up a plank of wood and immediately impaled my finger on an old nail. “Is it okay that I’m just watching and not helping?” I asked, retreating to the warm perimeter of the fire, sucking on my finger to stop the bleeding.

My boyfriend shrugged. “Sure.”

The truth is, I’d be useless with the gloves, too.

The bonfire was really a secondary feature of boil day, but I hardly ever left it. I stood and stared at the embers, which glowed in intricate patterns. The wood burned and thinned and strung itself out. I could not tell what was creating light and what was reflecting it.

A sense of melancholy sat just below the surface of the weekend. As the climate changes, maple trees are being pushed out of their habitat. They’re moving northward. “I don’t know of many operations south of us,” my boyfriend’s dad told me.

“You’re on the frontier,” I said.

“Yeah, on the wrong side.”

Already, the trees aren’t doing well. They’re still producing lots of sap, but their overall health is declining. My boyfriend’s family hasn’t decided if they’ll tap the trees next winter. They might give them a few years to rest.

Change is always sad to me. My boyfriend is more stoic. “We have plenty of syrup,” he said.

The weekend was all about sap and fire. I didn’t talk to anyone about the imaginary shooting on the subway. I wondered if it was even worth writing about. I’m deciding that that incident was not a formative experience, after all. Maybe enough words have been spent on it.

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P.S.

On that hat, the iconography of New York struck me as dazzlingly powerful. The font alone is almost enough to get the message across. Hotdog and pretzel happen to be two New-York-affiliated objects, but it could have been nearly anything. [pencil] [apple] NY or [fork] [seashell] NY or [asparagus] [bowling ball] NY. The meaning is so clear it subsumes the content. We all ❤️ NY.

In real life, I sometimes experience that same feeling of equivalency, a sort of automatic translation that erases the layers of difference between two things. Whenever I see a cardinal, I think of my grandmother. I think of her before I think of the bird. Reflexively, wistfully, invariably, I say, “Ohhh, a cardinal!” and I think of my grandmother, and I think of my mother, who would also be thinking of my grandmother and saying, “Ohhh, a cardinal!” if she saw it, too.

Most of the time, though, real life is not so clear.

When I had been working at my current restaurant for about a month, we got a new server, a tall, serious, Turkish man named Cagkan. When he was first introduced to me, my manager pronounced his name like “Kagan.” Then, I heard some of my colleagues pronouncing his name like “Cajun.” Both camps spoke with confidence, and I was not sure who was correct.

“Hey,” I asked one day, running into him in the kitchen, “is your name pronounced ‘Kagan’ or ‘Cajun’?”

“‘Kagan,’” he said. “Well, actually, it’s neither. It’s ‘chah-KAHN,’ but Americans can’t pronounce that, so I just say ‘Kagan.’”

“That doesn’t sound too hard,” I thought to myself, and I resolved that I would pronounce his name correctly from there on out.

Quickly, however, I realized the flaw in my plan.

“Is chah-KAHN on table 37?” I would ask, and my coworkers would stare at me blankly.

“Who?” they’d say, confounded.

“Chah-KAHN.”

“No, no,” they’d say. “His name is ‘Kagan.’”

The issue was not so much that my colleagues were unable to pronounce or understand his actual name, but that he had already become known to them as Kagan. I was using a name they had never heard before, one that had no link to the person we all knew. In the fast pace of a restaurant, it was impractical to stymie communication like that, all for some vague moralistic stand. I felt like the obnoxious person ordering “broos-KET-uh” for the table.

Now, Cagkan and I have been coworkers for months, and I still flip-flop between the two pronunciations (but certainly never “Cajun”). More of my colleagues have started calling him “chah-KAHN,” but many still call him “Kagan.” I feel a little nervous every time I refer to him in the third person. He seems supremely unbothered by the whole situation, although he seems unbothered as a general rule. Sometimes, still, I’ll say “chah-KAHN,” and the response will be, “Who???”

Unlike [hotdog] [pretzel] NY, where the symbols are nearly immaterial in service to an unambiguous meaning, in the real world, even the correct symbol cannot reliably reach the desired meaning. Everything is a little harder to understand.

Last week, I saw an open subway seat next to a man wearing a tan coat with a shearling collar. As I moved to sit next to him, he looked up at me, and I saw that his cheeks were very sunken, his mouth collapsing in on itself. “I’m crazy,” he calmly informed me. Wordlessly, I walked on to the other side of the train car.

And recently, we were extremely busy at the restaurant where I work, and reservations had to wait a few minutes before being seated. A decent-sized, hungry crowd had gathered.

One woman came up to me after waiting in the bar for about ten minutes. “Excuse me,” she said, “do all these people have reservations? Because we have a reservation, and we were on time.”

“Yes,” I said. “Everyone waiting has a reservation. We’re seating people in the order they came in.”

“Well,” she said, “can we be next? Because”—she leaned conspiratorially toward me—“my husband is getting very ornery.” Her tone implied that I should be worried, and I felt distant gratitude for her warning.

Luckily, they were next to be seated, anyway. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll let you know as soon as that table’s ready.”

“Okay…” she said. “I’ll try to tell my husband, but he’s very upset.”

In a matter of twenty seconds, we had a table clear up, and I went over to the couple, somewhat dreading talking to this ornery husband.

“Hi,” I said, “so sorry for the wait. We have a table ready for you.”

“Oh, great!” said the husband, beaming. He turned to his wife happily with a “See? I told you it wouldn’t be long” look on his face.

She smiled thinly.

And on a slower day at work, a man barged through the door, walked up to the hostess podium, and said something I didn’t understand. “Sorry?” I said, thinking that I hadn’t heard him.

“Oh, you’re sorry?” he asked, visibly annoyed. “Mosh serjofla widon sorry?”

I stared at him, bewildered. “I really am sorry, Sir, I’m just having trouble understanding you.”

“Hontak seeb calabsis,” he said, with such conviction and such irritation that I couldn’t register his speech as gibberish.

He was standing very near me, and I looked helplessly up at him like a fish. “I apologize,” I said, “would you mind repeating—”

“Hontak. Seeb. Calabsis.”

“Have a good day, Sir,” my manager cut in sharply. “Goodbye. Leave my greeter alone.”

“Okay,” he said, suddenly cheerful, waving at her. “Bab gorma kobar. You’re not very Russian.” He was halfway out the revolving door, and he said it again. “You’re not very Russian!”

“Um,” I said, once my manager and I were alone again. My heart was beating strangely. “Can I run to the restroom?” I needed a second by myself to calm down.

I was struck not only by the man’s strange behavior, but also by my own inability to recognize it as such. It had been obvious to my manager. It had been obvious, even, to the man, who did not bother getting upset when he was told to leave. On some level, he knew he was acting in a way that would get him kicked out of the restaurant. I was the only person who had been unaware.

If I can recognize a hotdog and a pretzel as myself and a heart, why can’t I understand people before getting uncomfortably close to them? Why does the gibberish-speaking man have to be breathing down my neck before I realize I should keep my distance?

Of course, the answer is that real things, like people or feelings or relationships, are more complicated than ❤️ing NY.

But, also of course, that doesn’t explain why I seem uniquely vulnerable to misinterpretation. I take people at their word, I see the best by default. This past year, trust has gotten me into some genuinely bad situations. I sometimes feel like everyone else has access to a secret codebook. They can understand the world quickly and completely, while I am stuck in naiveté and openness, perpetually showing my soft underbelly. I have a natural desire to trust and to disclose. Look at me now, doing exactly that. Exposing my thoughts to strangers.

It’s weird, though, to say that I’d like to become less trusting. I’d like to be more jaded. I’d like to have less faith in the world. Those don’t seem like the right goals.

In my last post, I talked about public art and the MTA’s Poetry in Motion campaign. I’d like to share another poem featured in the campaign, one that I have hanging on my bedroom wall:

Maybe it’s foolish to be open-armed and hopeful. Maybe I’m making myself vulnerable and getting nothing in return. Or maybe I can’t fault myself for having that human part, for remaining a believer. Maybe it’s a beautiful thing.

Thank you for reading!

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You may have noticed a change in my posts lately… I’ve been feeling less motivated to write about food, and I’m rethinking the feasibility of a weekly post. I’d rather produce work I feel good about than stick to an arbitrary schedule. Let me know if you miss the food stuff, though! I am still deciding how this newsletter will look moving forward.

On the Q train and the B train, as you pass from Brooklyn to Manhattan, there’s a very cool piece of public art called Masstransiscope. It’s an animation created by the same principle as the zoetrope, where a series of cells moves across a limited viewing scope.

I’m no expert on public art installations, but Masstransiscope is the coolest one I’ve seen. It is ambitious and whimsical and inventive, and it is perfectly designed to make the most of its environment. It takes the mundane motion of the subway and turns it into an engine for art. The animation itself is captivating and delightful, comprised of bright, abstract shapes that whirl around and morph seamlessly into different scenes.

At one point, the energetic swirlings contort themselves into a blue rocket ship, which wiggles for a moment on the earth before launching ecstatically out of frame.

Whenever I watch this animation (which is frequently), I have a strong feeling that the installation should end there. With the rocket blasting off in a puff of cheerful flame. Instead, it continues for a few strange seconds. Some colorful polygons gather into a vague jumble and roll across the frame. Then, abruptly, the whole thing cuts off to blank tunnel wall, and the train trundles on toward the Manhattan Bridge.

I have spent a lot of time pondering those ending frames. Why not leave it at the triumph of the rocket ship? Why this bizarre, seemingly meaningless sequence of shapes? There is no sense I can make of it.

Another piece of subway art:

I really love this poem, which is part of the fabulous Poetry in Motion campaign. Every time I read it, though, I find myself troubled by the ending.

What are these brown trucks in the desert? The birds are driving them? What desert? What harbor? After turning these questions over in my mind on many, many different subway rides, the best I have been able to conclude is that the brown trucks in the desert might be referencing the military. Maybe. I’m far from confident in this interpretation, though, and I don’t know what it means for the rest of the poem.

My dad told me he finds it strange that we don’t consider a book “read” until we’ve reached the very last page. If I read the first 700 pages of an 800-page novel, is it really fair to say that I haven’t read it? Am I not allowed to make judgments on that book, or to draw lessons from its writings? What is so intrinsically important about the ending?

But there does seem to be something important to the end of a book. I think most people would agree with me.

Personally, when I read a novel, I always read the last sentence first.

Sometimes, when I tell people this, they’re horrified. “Don’t you spoil it for yourself?” they ask. But it’s very rare for the last sentence of a book to contain any actual plot information. I’ve never encountered a last line like this: “The killer was actually MIKE all along! The end.”

Usually, the last sentence is basically meaningless when I first read it. It’s like a secret code. The cipher is hidden in the book, and I have to read my way through in order to understand. The satisfaction I feel when I finally get back to the last sentence is intense. “Oh, so that’s what that meant.”

My favorite last line comes from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. Forgive me—if you haven’t read it yet, I’m going to force you into my strange ritual. But I promise it won’t be a spoiler. I guess arguably this could be multiple sentences, but they’re connected with semicolons (and, okay, exclamation marks and periods, but I read it all as one sentence).

I don’t hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!

It’s completely nonsensical like this, stripped of context. When I first read it, I was lightly intrigued. “I wonder what that’s going to be about,” I thought.

And when I read it the second time, at the end of the novel, I was extremely moved.

But there’s really no way to explain the meaning of those final lines without reading the whole book. It’s an understanding you earn by trudging through Faulkner’s trying prose. Beyond being brutal, shocking, confusing, and painful, it is unflinchingly dense. A quotation from my reading journal: “if reading is swimming, this book is peanut butter.”

That quality of Faulkner’s prose, the density, the difficulty, turns Absalom, Absalom! into a visceral experience. The reader has been struggling alongside Quentin for hundreds of pages. We have been confused and hurt and disgusted just as he has. So when he makes this final, frantic proclamation, it really means something. It has stuck with me for years.

Maybe that’s why endings are so alluring—at their best, they can encapsulate and justify an entire experience. They can make sense of things, package them neatly, give us a small token of meaning to hang onto. But they also can’t survive without their context. They are not enough on their own.

Okay, a real-world example. This month, I’ve been practicing No Pick January. Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what that is—I made it up.

My OCD is generally very well controlled, but I have always struggled with compulsively picking at my skin. This is a somewhat common problem, affecting 1-3% of the US adult population. It’s called dermatillomania, or excoriation disorder, or skin picking disorder, and it’s considered a body-focused repetitive behavior (BFRB). Some BFRBs that might be a bit more relatable are cracking your knuckles and biting your nails. They are mindless tasks that serve no practical purpose, and, as in the case of skin picking, can be actively harmful. But, as anyone who bites their nails can tell you, it’s very hard to stop.

I decided to set a challenge for myself this January and forbid all skin picking. For the first two weeks, it worked. I didn’t break my vow at all. Certainly, that’s the longest I’ve ever gone in my adult life.

But it only lasted two weeks before I slipped up. I’ve been trying not to let that get me off track for the whole rest of the month, but the sanctity of No Pick January has been sort of broken. Maybe I will finish strong in this last week, restore some dignity to the whole affair. Or maybe it’s already a lost cause.

One way or another, I know that the ending will not be what I hoped for. I won’t be able to say, on February 1st, “Wow, look at me! I made it through the whole month!”

But does that erase all the hard work I did for the first two weeks? Wasn’t that still a victory of sorts? Not the exact victory I had in mind, but a stroke of real progress and self control? Does the whole thing really have to hinge on the end result?

In a sense, yes it does. No Pick January only worked at all because it was a clear, limited goal. The idea of the endpoint, and my genuine belief in it, was the only thing that motivated me to master my BFRB for as long as I did. “I just have to get through January,” I told myself, in the same way I might tell myself, on a busy day at work, “I just have to get past the 5:30 rush,” or during a boring class in high school, “I just have to get through five minutes six more times.” That goalpost has to be meaningful, or else it won’t help anything. When I broke my No Pick January vow, I destroyed the goalpost, and I placed myself back into the uninterrupted no-man’s-land of normal life. The prospect of “Never Do This Again” is simply too expansive to inspire action.

In another sense, though, no it doesn’t. I read half the book, and that’s infinitely better than reading none of it.

I guess my question is: does the conclusion have to be satisfying? Does it have to make sense? Can’t everything exist as it is, in progress and multifold and mystifying? Of course it can. Maybe that’s not my question after all. Maybe my question is: how can I learn to appreciate it?

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This week, when I had an hour-long lunch break, I went to a famous restaurant not far from where I work. Normally, I take my lunch in the locker room, on a little chair under fluorescent lights and next to a trash can that is not emptied very often. I was feeling festive, though, so I decided to switch up the routine.

As I was walking over, I was struck by how quickly I left the sphere of the familiar. I spend 30+ hours in that neighborhood every week, but once I had gone one block west, everything was completely new to me. I passed restaurants and stores and billboards that I had no idea existed. Everything looked exciting and enticing and strange.

The restaurant had no seating, so I took my food over to a nearby plaza and sat on a low brick wall to eat. A little girl and her mother came by and started blowing bubbles. It seemed like a whole new pocket of New York had opened up to me, all because I made a five minute trip to get lunch.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how geographically limited my life is.

Most days, I walk from my apartment to the Subway station, then I take the Subway to work, then I do the same thing in reverse at the end of the day. Beyond that, I go to the grocery store and the laundromat and the library and (occasionally) my friends’ apartments. That’s about it.

The street outside of the restaurant where I work is well-trafficked and glitzy and packed with tourists. I don’t spend any time on the street, though. I spend my whole day inside the restaurant, which is elegant and dimly lit and filled with soothing jazz music. It’s sometimes hard for me to remember that the world of the restaurant is not universal—there are other things going on right outside the revolving door.

I moved to New York expecting an endless, youthful adventure. I thought the energy of the big city would be invigorating and continually revealing, but the fact of the matter is that I have mostly learned to put my head down, move forward, and tune it out.

On the one hand, I feel a little chagrinned about this. I want to be open to the world and the experiences it has to offer. I don’t want to ignore the excitement that’s right in front of me. On the other hand, it’s simply not possible to pay attention to everything all the time. In this city, there are stimuli everywhere you look. There are people shouting and cars honking and dog poop on the sidewalk and sirens blaring and buskers playing beautiful music and tires screeching and the smell of french fries and a video ad for mascara and a man with his pants down and a cat wearing a fuzzy sweater all the time.

When I first got here, I felt like a character in a musical, prancing through the streets, taking in all the wonderful and crazy sights. Now, I’m just trying to get to work.

I don’t feel like some cultured, cosmopolitan New Yorker, but I have gotten to know my immediate area decently well. I chat with the cashiers at the grocery store, I smile at the veterinarian two doors down when we cross paths. It feels very natural to focus in on smaller communities. I wonder if people are really capable of engaging beyond that scale.

New York City is the fourth place where I’ve properly lived. It doesn’t feel too different from living in suburban LA. And living in suburban LA didn’t feel too different from living in rural Vermont. And living in rural Vermont didn’t even feel too different from living in urban Kazakhstan. The most important things are the people I spend my time with, the rituals I create for myself, the food I eat. Those are the parts of life that I can actually feel, no matter where I am.

Obviously, it would be an exaggeration to say that life in these places is identical. Often, though, the differences live very near the surface. I am kind of becoming convinced that things are more or less the same no matter where you go.

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What I made

Broccoli stir fry:

We are running low on soy sauce so I only used a dollop. The resulting stir fry was not very flavorful, but I ate it all anyway! It’s been a long time (maybe forever?) since I included broccoli in a stir fry, and of course it’s a classic addition.

Chocolate lava cake:

I really wanted to use my mini dutch oven this week, so I impulsively made this lava cake in it. I guess I forgot everything about what a lava cake is and how it works, because I thought I would just cut this big behemoth into four slices and share them with my roommates. As I should have predicted, the slices were extremely difficult to move and basically turned into gloppy messes. But you know what? They tasted good. And everyone came back for seconds! Huzzah. If I made this recipe again, I would definitely use ramekins, as you’re supposed to.

Potato leek soup:

My dear friend Vlera is stuck eating an anti-inflammatory diet, so roommate Atticus and I invited her over for anti-inflammatory soup. We researched what would be least triggering and landed on this potato leek soup, omitting the cream and the salt. As it turns out, leaving the salt out was unnecessary, but luckily salt is very easy to add back in. I’d never actually had potato leek soup before, and I was surprised at how much I liked it. It kind of tastes like mashed potatoes.

Also we had bread.

Tofu shawarma steaks:

In the past I’ve had great success with hasselback tofu shawarma steaks, but this time I couldn’t be bothered to cut the tofu all fancy. This was good too, but not as good as it would have been with the hasselback. But still, very satisfying and savory and delicious. I always forget that tofu steaks are an option, and they’re very cost-effective because I usually have everything I need for a marinade, so all I really have to buy is tofu. I did set off the fire alarm, though.

What I learned

Lava cakes are small for a reason

Potato leek soup is worth revisiting

Thanks for reading! :)

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Restaurant workers of the world, rejoice! The holidays are over! This week, I remembered that I actually enjoy my job when I’m not stressed out of my gourd. A gray cloud of intensity has lifted, and I’m free once more to joke around with my coworkers and seat tables without a crowd of hangry patrons staring me down. It turns out I don’t hate my job, after all.

In a fresh burst of joie de vivre, I was walking through the grocery store when something caught my eye: a pear. “Gosh,” I thought, “if we can put pears in salads, why can’t we put them in soups?”

I had a very exciting vision of myself as a pear soup pioneer. I would invent a whole new dish!

Well, after some googling, it turns out that I’m not the first person to ever imagine such a thing. Still, I decided I’d give it a try. Some of the recipes I saw were for pear and butternut squash soup, which sounded like a good idea to me.

I sautéed up some onion, squash, and pear, along with a bay leaf, and blended it all into soup.

It tasted… good. I mean, it tasted fine. It tasted like butternut squash, with an occasional hit of fruitiness. I’m kind of disappointed in this. I thought the soup would either be super weird and disgusting or super special and delicious. Instead, the pear was overpowered, and the soup was quite basic.

I think I’m going to try again, and I have some ideas to improve it. One: more pear, less squash. Two: Top it with cotija cheese and chopped walnuts. Three: (a suggestion from my mom) include some sherry.

Another option could be to go the sweet route. When I was a kid, my mom would sometimes make a cold Hungarian cherry soup, which was quite delicious. I don’t think pear soup would be good cold, but I could imagine a similar dessert soup. You could add some cinnamon and cream and stew it all into a rich, pie-filling-esque soup.

Somehow, though, that feels like a betrayal of my original vision, which was soup.

Anyway, I’ve been having a lot of fun mulling this over, and if anyone has any suggestions of what could go in pear soup, do let me know! If I ever make a version that tastes good, maybe I’ll share a recipe.

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What I made

Other than pear soup, of course!

A different soup that looks very similar:

Wow, this soup looks so similar to the pear soup that I initially switched the photos while I was drafting this. In fact, this is a carrot peanut butter soup.

Boyfriend and I made it, at my urging. I was very excited to try it, and Boyfriend was very skeptical.

Personally, I thought this was delicious! It was super easy to make (just sautee carrots and onions, add garlic and cayenne, add peanut butter, stock, salt and pepper, simmer, then blend). Boyfriend added cheese to his, which I did not try, but he said it was good. Initially he did not like the soup, but he came around.

I would totally make this again!

Chickpea noodle soup:

Are you noticing a theme here? I’ve been making a LOT of soup lately. Boyfriend’s dad sent me this recipe, and it was delicious! I’ve never cooked with nutritional yeast before, and I can’t deny that it made a very flavorful broth.

For a soup this flavorful, this was pretty easy to make. I would definitely revisit this recipe. I will say, it didn’t do great for leftovers (as I should have predicted) because the noodles soaked up all the broth. I still ate it, but in the future I would probably make this for a big group, and try to eat it all in one go.

What I learned

Soup, soup, soup!

Gary Shteyngart, famous novelist, came into the restaurant where I work this week. I was very excited to see him, but I did not say anything to him. Regardless of how invested I am in their work, I find successful writers to be very dazzling. The few times I’ve interacted with them, I’ve gotten mealy-mouthed and far too excited. I just find it so miraculous that people can live lives like that, you know? I tried to read Absurdistan when I was probably too young for it and never got past the first 30 pages, but now I’m wanting to take a look at his work again. Maybe I should read some Nevil Shute while I’m at it.

Thanks for reading! :)

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Happy New Year everyone! I hope everyone reading this had a wonderful holiday season, and I hope 2026 will be full of exciting and interesting things for all of you.

This year, I spent a lot of the holiday season at work, but I did get to go upstate and visit Boyfriend’s family for Christmas Eve. I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, and I always had this hyper-mythologized idea of it as a kid. It just seemed very significant and mysterious. Now that I’ve seen a couple Christmases, I think that all holidays have more or less the same fundamental goal, which is to give people an excuse to spend time with people they love. Hooray! I can get on board with that.

Now that holiday hilarity is quieting down I will get back on track with weekly posts. In the meantime, I have some cooking to share with you!

What I made

Noodle stir fry:

This stir fry was not particularly delicious because I only included mushrooms, but it was filling and satiating. The one exciting thing about this stir fry is that, for the first time, I boiled my tofu, and I think it made a noticeable difference in the texture and taste! I will be doing that again, for sure. Did I also splash roommate Jacob with boiling water in the process? That’s beside the point. (Sorry Jacob.)

Improvised chickpea situation:

I guess I was going for a chickpea curry-inspired dish here, but as you can see that’s not what I wound up with. This was fine. Nothing to write home about.

Apple galette:

Boyfriend and I made this galette for Christmas Eve, and it was a fun, relatively easy project. It turned out pretty good, although I think we both agreed that berries of some sort would have been better.

Also, Boyfriend’s dad made this fabulous whipped cream to go on top.

Pink pasta:

This pasta is basically a cousin to the tomato feta pasta that was so popular a few years ago. I roasted some beets and shallots and garlic and feta and then blended it all together with the BRAND NEW IMMERSION BLENDER Boyfriend got me! This was its maiden voyage, and while it performed admirably, I feel that I didn’t set it up for success.

This pasta wound up tasting pretty good and looking visually striking, but the recipe was so nonsensical that I wonder if it was AI generated. For one thing, it didn’t include any measurements at all (which should have been the first red flag). But the main issue was that the beets did not soften one bit. I roasted them for twice as long as the recipe called for, and they were still crunchy. I wound up blending them as best I could, but at the end of the day I had to fish them all out of the sauce (pictured below).

I don’t think a single beet got blended here! I love beets, so I considered keeping the leftovers to munch on, but they were NOT ROASTED AT ALL. Like, they were completely crunchy. Inedible, basically. I don’t know if I did something wrong here, but the pasta was still plenty pink and it tasted plenty beet-y. Also, it’s extremely filling! I do think the sauce was too thick—I probably could have watered it down a bit.

Roasted veggie soup:

I think that this was an easier task for my new immersion blender, and this soup was delicious. As I’ve been using it for leftovers, I’ve been thinning it out a bit with some water and salt, which I think gives it a better texture. I have to say, though, this soup is pretty awesome. I roasted sweet potatoes, onion, garlic, carrot, and bell peppers, then blended it all together with some stock and seasonings. Yum. This genre of soup seems to have, basically, infinite possibilities. I am thrilled about my immersion blender, which opens a whole new world of soup possibilities.

What I learned

I went to a bouldering gym with Boyfriend and basically had a panic attack at the top of the wall. I actually really enjoy the climbing up part, but getting down is extremely terrifying for me. I know that the safest thing is to fall, but I totally freeze up and I can’t let go when I’m up there. So, maybe I have some exposure therapy to get started on

Don’t trust suspicious looking recipes

Boil your tofu

Thank you for reading, and happy new year! :)

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This week, my coworker told me that we probably qualify for SNAP benefits. She and I are the only greeters at our restaurant who are actually trying to fashion a living out of the job; the others are students, living with their families or in student housing. We often complain to each other that we’re struggling to pay rent, and she always jokes that we make “Charles Dickens wages.”

When my manager caught wind of the food stamps conversation, he got defensive. “Why do you want SNAP?” he demanded. “You won’t qualify for SNAP.”

So we looked it up, and I think that we probably don’t qualify, but we’re hovering right at the cutoff. When I get my weekly paycheck, accounting for rent, I often find $7 left over for all other expenses.

Sometimes I feel resentful of the other people working at the restaurant, who are all in a tip pool. My position (greeter) is one of the only positions in the place that doesn’t receive any tips. I stand at the hostess podium and listen to Michael Bublé and Frank Sinatra sing Christmas songs, and I angrily calculate how much the servers must be making, or the bussers, or (worst of all) the managers. They all seem oblivious to how little us greeters make and sometimes complain freely about their “low” tips.

“That table only tipped like fifty dollars,” they’ll grumble, as if I also think that fifty dollars is a small sum.

“For the first time all month,” they’ll say, “I finally made $1000 in a week.” As if that’s also what I consider baseline.

But when I go too far down this self-pitying train of thought, I have to confront the other side of the story, which is that my parents have been paying my rent.

Well, not for the last couple months. But in September and October, when I was transitioning between jobs, they did.

I hope it goes without saying that I’m extremely grateful to my parents, and I appreciate all their support. I know I’m lucky to have parents who are willing and able to help me out financially. Still, though, I can’t help feeling that my continued dependence on them is a mark of failure, of arrested development.

I feel this all-consuming financial pressure, but it’s not really true. Every time I talk to my parents on the phone, they ask, “Are you okay for money this month?” I know they’d help me if I asked them to. Not just if I was in desperate need, but if I was struggling at all. I scrimp and save and eat beans and rice, but the fact of the matter is that I’m essentially pretending to be a grownup, with a big, soft safety net waiting patiently to catch my inevitable failure. When the servers at my restaurant complain about their pay, even though they make way more than me, they are citing real problems. They have kids to feed and bills to pay and families to support. They are independent, and I am not. Their paychecks matter, and mine don’t.

It feels very taboo to talk about money, especially to reveal that I’m not completely self reliant. I certainly don’t want to sound ungrateful here. One important piece of the puzzle (and I won’t go into detail) is that I was briefly financially independent, when I was working as a barista. Not only was I financially independent, I was able to save a little bit of money every week. I felt exhausted but satisfied, proud of my efforts. Then, in a very sudden and upsetting way, I was forced to quit that job. Since then, I haven’t been able to return to that level of independence. Usually, I do manage to cover my own expenses, but it’s not pretty. Sometimes, I have to ask for help. It feels like my successful adult life was ripped away from me, like I regressed back to childhood, and no matter what I do I can’t crawl my way back.

Whenever I tell people that I feel lost, that I don’t know how to support myself, that I can’t imagine what I’ll be doing in ten or five or even one year, everyone is very understanding. “You’re so young,” they say. They tell me about their own aimless twenties, when they lived off of scrambled eggs and cheese pizza, when they worked as panini pressers or dog walkers or theme park mascots. Always, they have some unlikely story of how their menial jobs led them to unexpected and lucrative passions. “You never know,” they say, “when opportunity will find you. Just be open to everything.”

It reminds me of applying to colleges. At seventeen, picking a college was the biggest decision I had ever made, and I was wracked with stress, even though I knew I was in a very privileged position. Every adult in my life told me that the decision was inconsequential. “It doesn’t matter where you go,” they told me. “You’ll make friends and learn a lot and everything will work out fine.”

I knew that they were telling me the truth, but it didn’t help. It made me angry, actually. “So what if everything will be fine in a year?” I thought. “I’m freaking out now.” The promises of the future did nothing for my immediate woes.

I don’t feel angry in the same way when people share their stories now, but I feel a sort of wary skepticism. What they’re saying offers a distant hope, but it seems completely disconnected from my current life.

I believe that I will probably be a financially stable and decently happy adult by the time I’m thirty. But when I think too hard about my career, I almost always end up in tears. I feel so useless and unhappy. I don’t know what could possibly be the right path, and whenever I try to find a better situation for myself, I wind up paralyzed and terrified. I feel like a petulant child: “I don’t want a second job. I don’t want to be a paralegal. I don’t want to work more hours. I don’t want to work in a restaurant. I don’t want to work at all.” I can only see the bad in everything—I’m turning bitter. It’s not the sort of person I want to be.

At the end of the day, I’m embarrassed that it’s not easier for me. Life seems so seamless for everyone else. They seem to have direction and ambition and stability. They seem to be excited when they think about the future, and they don’t switch jobs every two months.

And I’m embarrassed that it’s not harder. Why do I get Venmo transfers from my parents? Why was I able to quit my barista gig without a second thought? Why don’t I have to worry about money, and if I don’t have to worry about money, WHY AM I SO WORRIED ABOUT IT?

I think that I will be fine, eventually. I don’t feel fine now.

I don’t know if there’s any upshot to sharing all of this, except that it feels disingenuous not to share it. Even when I post more “vulnerable” writing here, I usually try to end on a positive note. One of my closest friends told me recently that an essay of mine made her feel like something was wrong with her. I wrote about feeling more confident and sure of myself as I’ve gotten older. She doesn’t feel the same way; her confidence has eroded in the past couple years. She compared herself to me and felt lacking.

I realized that I’ve been obscuring the reality of myself on this Substack, even from the people in my real life. In all honesty, I’m not where I thought I would be. I thought my adult life would be difficult but rewarding. Instead, it’s confusing and scary and depressing.

I know I’m young, and I know I have time to figure things out, but I still feel like a complete failure. I feel whiny and entitled and ridiculous. I feel like a slug in a field of salt. I don’t know what to do with myself. And that’s the truth.

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What I made

Um okay it feels kind of crazy to pivot toward food now. But I actually am excited to share this week’s cooking with you, because Boyfriend came to visit me, and he came bearing gifts. He got me a mandolin (!!!) and the most adorable, tiny, one-serving Le Creuset dutch oven I’ve ever seen. He and I cooked up a storm. I didn’t even take pictures of everything, but here are some highlights.

Ratatouille:

Okay, how can you combine the powers of a mandolin and a dutch oven? Ratatouille, of course! How cute is that? I’m literally obsessed with these gadgets I can’t even stand it. The mandolin cuts through veggies like butter!

The tiny dutch oven was basically the perfect size for some ratatouille, and it turned out delicious. Boyfriend even made a second batch the next day.

Noodle stir fry:

Believe it or not, I’ve never stir fried with noodles, and it was Boyfriend’s idea to include them this time. We used the leftover veg from the ratatouille, which was fine but not amazing in this stir fry. But the noodles were a wonderful, satisfying addition, and you’ll definitely see me using them more from here on out!

Lemony butter beans:

This was quite yummy, and almost too easy to make! I just sautéed some garlic in olive oil, added a can of butter beans, some cherry tomatoes, dried basil, cream, and lemon juice. The little pot was tempting me to eat out of it like a bowl, but I realized I probably shouldn’t use a metal spoon on it, so I did transfer it to an actual bowl.

I hope you all love my tiny Le Creuset as much as I do, because you’ll be seeing a LOT of it from here on out.

What I learned

I learned that beans and garlic are a good combo

I really didn’t take enough pictures of all the food I made this week! We also made scalloped potatoes, ill-fated potato chips, and chicken noodle soup (I was sick).

Thank you for reading!

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Everyone keeps talking about Spotify Wrapped, but you know what would be fun? A statistical analysis of what you cooked in a year! So, I decided to do exactly that.

I took to Google Sheets and made a list of everything I cooked this year along with a few descriptive variables, and I was able to put together a little snapshot of the sort of food I’ve been making.

Right away, I learned that I had made 104 dishes this year. That’s just including the things I cooked that I felt were significant enough to include on this newsletter. So, many spaghettis-and-marinaras and beans-and-rices are not included. It’s not a comprehensive list. Also, bear in mind that I only really started cooking in February. I have to say, that’s more dishes than I would have guessed!

First up: The vegan question

If you’ve read my post about being vegetarian, you know that I’ve been toying with the idea of going vegan. I thought it would be interesting to see what percentage of the meals I’m making for myself are already vegan.

As you can see, just under half of the meals I made were vegan.

Then, I thought I would go one step further and see how many of the non-vegan meals were almost vegan. That is, dishes that could be easily tweaked to exclude any animal products.

Here, you can see that just over half of my non-vegan meals are close to being vegan. That means that animal products only play a significant role in about a quarter of my cooking.

That’s less than I would have thought!

To me, that signals two things: one, it might not be very hard to go totally vegan.

But also, two, it might not make that big of an impact. I’m already not eating a ton of animal products. I have to do some thinking and decide if it’s worth switching up my diet even more.

Next, key ingredients:

I thought it would be interesting to identify one “key ingredient” for each dish. So, for example, a tofu stir fry would be “Tofu.” A salad would be “Veggies.” Etc. For desserts, I just put “Sugar” as the key ingredient. In the following graph, you can see the frequencies of these ingredients.

Right away, tofu and beans dominate the field. This makes sense to me, although I wasn’t expecting it to be so dramatic. I eat a lot of beans and tofu, but I didn’t realize how much my diet hinges on them!

Finally, what types of dishes am I making?

I saved this category for last, because it has the prettiest graph. I tried to categorize each dish into the broadest group possible, like “salad” or “pasta.” I also included the group “main” for things that don’t really have a clear category, like a tofu steak or an egg bake. Here’s the graph:

As you can see, I have a good deal of variety here. Soup, pasta, and mains are the biggest categories, and that little green sliver at the top is “dips.” I guess I’m not making a lot of dips.

I’m actually surprised that stir fry isn’t higher up here; I feel like I make that quite a lot. But the numbers don’t lie!

One more thing…

The very last thing I did was add two variables for tastiness of food and difficulty of preparation. I split tastiness into five levels, with 1 being disgusting and 5 being delicious. Of course, this was entirely based on my own subjective judgment. I split difficulty into three levels, with 1 being very easy (think instant ramen or bean and cheese on a tortilla), 2 being average (think soup from scratch or a colorful veggie stir fry), and 3 being a project (think layer cake or handmade gnocchi).

I was curious to see if more difficult dishes would yield better tastiness results.

I ran a correlation test to find the Pearson Correlation Coefficient for those two variables (tastiness and difficulty). Essentially, the closer the absolute value of the coefficient is to 1, the stronger the relationship between the two variables. A positive coefficient indicates a positive correlation (as the difficulty increases, the food gets tastier), and a negative coefficient indicates a negative correlation (as the difficulty increases, the food gets less tasty). The closer the coefficient is to 0, the weaker the relationship.

Well, I got back a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.24. In other words, the relationship is not very strong between the two variables!

I found that surprising, so I decided to run a regression as well. I got an R squared value of 0.86. I’m no statistician, but if I understand correctly, that means that my regression model (where tastiness was the dependent variable being influenced by difficulty) accounts for about 86% of the results we’re seeing.

My political science training has taught me to look for only the strongest relationships, but I’m not in college anymore! The stakes are pretty low here!

I’m going to go ahead and conclude that most of the time, more difficult recipes yield tastier results, at least when I’m the one cooking. My culinary efforts were not wasted.

My takeaway:

I wonder why it’s so fun to see graphs and charts and statistical breakdowns of our behaviors. There’s something thrilling about having cold hard data about yourself. That’s why everyone is obsessed with Spotify Wrapped, right? (By the way, my musical age is 71 and I was the 25,387th most devoted Elliott Smith fan this year and I listened to “She’s Leaving You” by MJ Lenderman 32 times).

I had a lot of fun putting this little thing together. It made me grateful to have this Substack as a record of my year and of my cooking. I can really see how I’ve progressed, and how I’ve integrated this new skill into my daily life. Hooray!

I’m curious what you all have been cooking. What do you think your most common key ingredient would be? What about the types of dishes? Is anyone feeling inspired to make a crazy spreadsheet of everything they cooked this year???

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What I made

Ironically, I didn’t cook much this week. I was busy! Also I got sick. But I did make a very storied soup.

Pumpkin, white bean, and kale soup:

This was quite tasty. But that’s not the point.

The recipe called for a cinnamon stick and a cardamom pod to steep in the broth, which is something I had never done before. Lucky me, we had cinnamon sticks and cardamom pods in the apartment, so I went ahead and popped them in my “broth” (I always just use salt water instead of veggie broth—I’m sure it makes the soup less flavorful but it’s so much cheaper) and turned on the heat.

I turned around to busy myself with some other aspect of the soup, and I noticed a very strong smell right away. It was very earthy. “Huh,” I said to myself. “That got fragrant fast.” But it didn’t really smell like cinnamon or cardamom. I turned back to check on my broth, and then I realized what was actually happening.

I had set a dish towel on fire.

So, what I was smelling was burning dish towel.

Somebody had used it as a pot holder for the kettle, then set the kettle back on the stovetop, with the towel still draped over it. I hadn’t noticed, and when I turned on the burner, the towel draped straight into the flames.

After a moment’s panick, I grabbed the burning towel and threw it in the sink. Crisis averted. Towel dismembered.

The worst thing is, it was a brand new towel! Fortunately, only a small corner burned, so it’s still mostly usable. And the soup tasted very good.

What I learned

Check for fire hazards before turning on the stove!

My apartment needs a better can opener.

Thanks for reading! :)

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A few days ago, I watched How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days for the first time. I thought it was super cute, and I’d definitely watch it again. I have some quibbles, like why do they both feel so betrayed if they were both lying to each other in similar ways? And I didn’t quite track Matthew McConaughey’s love for Kate Hudson given that she spent 85% of the movie being intentionally unbearable. Nevertheless, it scratched my rom com itch perfectly (an itch that only gets stronger this time of year).

Those who know me know that I am a rom com aficionado. I just love them. As I was watching How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, I thought, “This is pretty good, but it’s not in my top tier.” Then I thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to make a list of my top tier?” I mean, a list of the movies that I’ve watched a million times, that hold up to every rewatch.

I thought about including more, but I decided to limit the list to my true all-time favorites. I also want to clarify that there’s a difference between a good rom com and a good movie. The Big Sick, which is in my honorable mentions, is probably a better movie than everything that made the cut. But it doesn’t have the particular comforting, cozy magic of a rom com in quite the same way.

Okay, without further ado, here’s the list!

While You Were Sleeping:

Sandra Bullock is a lonely token taker working on the Chicago L, and she has a one-sided crush on one of the commuters she sees every day. When she rescues him from a mugging and he falls into a coma, she winds up unintentionally posing as his fiancee. This one of the cutest rom coms ever, in my opinion. Sandra Bullock is adorable, the whole cast of characters is lovable, and even though the premise is kind of bonkers, the whole thing feels grounded and human and (most importantly) romantic.

13 Going on 30:

After a failed birthday party, thirteen-year-old Jennifer Garner wishes to be 30. The next morning she wakes up to find that her wish has come true. At first she’s thrilled to explore her glamorous adult life, but when she reconnects with Mark Ruffalo, her best friend, she realizes that she took a turn for the worse as a teenager and has alienated everyone in her life. This movie could be really creepy, since the main character is a thirteen-year-old in a 30-year-old’s body, but I think it manages to stay on the right side of that line, and the chemistry between Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Garner is really great. This is one of my all-time favorites because of its sweetness and surprising maturity, not to mention its message of kindness over material success.

Confessions of a Shopaholic:

Isla Fisher, aspiring fashion writer and hopeless shopaholic, applies to write for an economic magazine as a last resort to get herself out of debt. Her own finances are in complete disarray, but her fashion analogies make her column an unlikely success. Meanwhile, she’s compulsively shopping, being pursued by debt collectors, and trying to hide it all from her boss, Hugh Dancy. This movie is cute and funny (I especially like the Finnish moments), and although its lesson of moderation can get a little buried in the gratuitous consumerist fashion montages, its heart is in the right place.

Clueless:

Clueless is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma, and it’s one of my favorite movies ever. It’s so ridiculous and over-the-top, and I can’t help but get excited when I see places in LA that I recognize (“Ooh, I know that clown!”). Paul Rudd and Alicia Silverstone are pretty cute, but Brittany Murphy basically steals the show. This movie will always have a place in my heart, or I’m totally bugging.

Honorable mentions:

The Big Sick; Bridget Jones’s Diary; Crazy, Stupid Love; Notting Hill; Set It Up; The Holiday; Always Be My Maybe; When Harry Met Sally

What are your favorites?

I may be a rom com obsessive, but I definitely don’t have an exhaustive knowledge base. There are tons of classics I’ve never even seen, like You’ve Got Mail. I’m always open to new recommendations (I’m watching Love Hard right this very instant—it’s pretty cute). Let me know your favorite rom coms, or if you hate rom coms, you should tell me about that, too.

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What I made

Friendsgiving:

I actually didn’t do a classic Thanksgiving this year, but my roommates and I hosted Friendsgiving on Saturday. The only classic Thanksgiving food in attendance was stuffing, excellently made by Haydn.

Let me break down the menu (everything was delicious):

• Pot roast by Atticus

• Fufu by Cheryl

• Chicken tamales by Atticus and Jacob

• Caesar potato salad by Abby

• Roast vegetables by me and Boyfriend

• Chicken dumplings by Vlera

• Stuffing and gravy by Haydn

• Sausage by Jacob

• Pierogies by Boyfriend and me

• Salad by Sean

• Rice pudding by Daniela

• Knafeh by Jacob

• Raspberry cream pie by Paige

• Spiced Mexican ice box cookies by Abby

• Cinnamon rolls by Dylan and Aleks

• Cookies by Mattie

So, a veritable feast. I only ate the vegetarian options (and the stuffing), but I can assure you based on others’ experiences that everyone was batting 100 with their cooking. I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving with their loved ones this year. :)

Noodle soup:

I’ve reached a point in my culinary development where I just improvise all my soups. This one had too much tomato and definitely too much pasta (it soaked up all the broth), but it was hardy and yummy nonetheless. It served me well for leftovers, too, so that’s a point in its favor.

Tofu stir fry:

Look, it’s hard to mess this one up! A standby staple. I usually find that stir fries provide two meals worth of food. Also, I love mushrooms so much and it makes me sad that not everyone likes mushrooms because I feel like they’re missing out on something truly special.

Cardamom coffee brownies:

Atticus and I made these brownies in a fit of late-night inspiration. It really had the vibe of a middle school sleepover. We were halfway through making the batter when we realized that the recipe called for melted chocolate instead of cocoa powder. We only had cocoa powder, and we didn’t want to go to the store, so we tried to sub for the chocolate by adding cocoa powder, oil, and sugar.

Theoretically, that sort of thing should work, but we definitely messed up the proportions, because these brownies were an OIL BOMB. They seriously left a coating on my mouth, and every time I ate one, I felt sick.

The flavor was great, though! I would love to try again and make a less oily version of these.

What I learned

Paper plates are a game changer for dinner parties, especially if you don’t have a dishwasher. True, they’re less refined, but I think twenty-somethings can get away with it. I will take advantage of that for as long as I can.

I read online that it’s not a good idea to freeze soup with pasta in it, but I froze my noodle soup and it was fine. Granted, I only froze it for a few days (which was probably not even necessary), so maybe if it had been in the freezer longer it would have suffered more. But it held up much better than I expected!

While I do kind of miss the traditional Thanksgiving feast, I realized that it’s more about the people you’re with and the spirit of the day than the actual food you eat. Just so long as you eat a lot of it.

Thanks for reading! :)

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This week I was listening to “Between the Bars” by Elliott Smith, and I burst into tears.

It’s a tragic song (far and away Elliott’s most streamed track on Spotify, thanks to an episode of Rick and Morty where its ghostly beauty turns Tiny Rick back into regular Rick), but that’s not why it made me cry.

As I listened, I suddenly had a vivid memory of myself at sixteen, driving to school, with Elliott playing on the car radio. Or me during the height of the pandemic, lying on the couch in my childhood home, listening to sad songs and staring at the ceiling. Or me sitting by myself in my freshman dorm room, scratching out calculus homework with my headphones in.

In the chorus, Elliott sings,

People you’ve been before / That you don’t want around anymore / That push and shove and won’t bend to your will / I’ll keep them still

I felt, suddenly, an overwhelming grief for the versions of me who used to exist. They were quieter versions of me, lonelier and more melancholy. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become confident and social, and probably also happier. But listening to that song, I had a sudden, acute feeling that I had given up some very precious pieces of myself.

Recently, I sliced my finger open with a safety razor. It was a single instant of poor motor skills, and suddenly I had irreparably changed myself, in a very small way. Now, for the rest of my life, there is a tiny sliver of flesh missing from the pad of my finger.

If I had been more careful while assembling my razor, that wouldn’t have happened. There is a clear inflection point: A was the cause, and B is the consequence.

I find those inflection points really interesting. One second before, I had an intact finger. One second after, I did not.

Most of the time, though, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when a change happens. I have always found that fact interesting, too. The change does happen. But where?

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by seeds. They grew, but too slowly to see. I knew, though, that there was a moment when the sprout burst through the surface of the soil. As slowly as they grew, imperceptible to the human eye, I knew that they moved from below-ground to above-ground. There had to be a single, precise instant when the plant first became visible above the soil.

When I think about myself in high school, I really do see a different person than I am now. I had different tastes and different friends and a different personality, and gradually, I changed into this current version of me.

Certainly, every experience I’ve ever had must have contributed to the change. So, presumably, if I had had different experiences, the change would have been different, too. Maybe if I had gone to a different college, I would be unrecognizable today. Maybe if I had taken classes with different professors. Maybe if I had lived with a different freshman year roommate. Maybe if I hadn’t gone to the exact parties I went to. I don’t know which experiences were foundational to the person I’ve become, and which were just filler.

There is no clear inflection point. I do know, though, that the change is irreversible. Maybe throughout my life I will continue to drift nearer and farther from the essence of myself. Maybe sometimes I will be quieter and sometimes I will be louder. But I will never be the same person I was when I was twelve or sixteen or twenty. I am me now, not me then. The seedling is above ground.

As I listened to “Between the Bars,” I felt lonely for a version of me who was often lonely. From my vantage point now, that solitude seemed suddenly sacred and pure. I was alone a lot when I was younger, and I didn’t usually mind it. Often, I chose it. I think I had some self knowledge that I’ve lost now, the ability to recuse myself from other people.

However, if I’m being honest with myself, I know that those choices were tinged with sadness. I preferred to be alone in high school because my friends weren’t always very nice to me. I was exhausted trying to retain their good graces. And my first semester of college, although it was peaceful, was one of the worst periods of my life. I was miserably unhappy.

My life now is happy, more or less. I have a strange, romantic urge to impose a sense of beauty and purity over my past sadnesses, but I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do.

Maybe some sadness is necessary to happiness (you can’t have the rainbow without the rain, etc). Maybe too much happiness defeats the purpose, maybe it’s not the point. Or maybe I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

I’m sure someday I will look back on my current life with unbearable nostalgia. It’s kind of a funny curse of humanity that we enjoy things best in hindsight. I will forget about my current stressors (they will seem so distant and unimportant). Everything will take on a golden cast in my memory.

At the end of the day, though, memory is only memory. This is my only chance to be the version of me that exists right now. I’d better make the most of it.

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What I made

Creamy, garlicky pasta:

This was quite yummy. I know it looks like pasta with butter and cheese, but it actually has a thick, creamy, cheesy, garlicky sauce on it. It was quite delish. However, it did NOT serve me well for leftovers. Something in the sauce separated, and it got really oily when I reheated it. It was pretty gross to eat the second time around. I think this is the sort of dish you should make for a family, not for one person.

Peach pie:

We’ve had a giant bag of peaches sitting in our freezer forever, and my roommate Atticus and I finally decided to do something about it. He put me in charge of the filling, and he handled the crust. Really, he gets 95% of the credit here. He accidentally put too much butter in the crust, which resulted in a ridiculously flaky crust. Honestly, it was divine. There’s nothing to brighten up a cold day like some peach pie. You’d almost think it’s summer.

Carrot and red lentil soup:

I don’t think I added enough water to this soup. I actually burnt the bottom while I was cooking in it, which was something I didn’t even know was possible for a soup. It really had the consistency of a curry more than anything. But that’s not a problem; it still tasted amazing. This was a simple, satisfying, hearty, and warming meal. I actually really liked the thickness of the texture.

What I learned

Not everything is for leftovers.

I used a garlic press for the first time, and I’m a fan.

My grocery store garlic was already sprouted, which is super annoying. I feel like it shouldn’t be sprouted the day I bring it home from the store.

Thank you for reading! :)

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Music

Bleeds by Wednesday: This was basically the soundtrack to my autumn. It’s got that fun country-punk sound that’s well-suited to a moody fall day, and (unfortunately for my roommates), it’s perfect for belting out in the shower. The whole album is worth a listen, but my favorite tracks were probably “Elderberry Wine,” “Townies,” and “Bitter Everyday.”

The Passionate Ones by Nourished by Time: I had never heard of Nourished by Time until my friend Milla recommended this album to me. It kind of reminds me of Alex G, but RnB, which doesn’t sound like it would work, but it does. The album is catchy and dreamy and groovy and, as the title suggests, passionate. This is an album that I can listen to straight through, start to finish, which is something I really appreciate. I especially like “Automatic Love,” “Crazy People,” and “BABY BABY.” But I love the whole album.

Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party by Hayley Williams: Hayley Williams is so cool. She initially released these songs as a collection of 17 singles, which is pretty awesome. I’ve heard criticism that the resulting album feels disjointed, but that doesn’t really bother me. There’s a lot of material here, and her voice is unreal.

A million singles by Magdalena Bay: Speaking of singles, Magdalena Bay is clearly gearing up for something, because they’ve released eight fabulous singles in the past month or so. I’m excited to see what’s coming from them, and I can’t overstate how weird and lush and beautiful these songs are. They’re all great, but if I had to pick a favorite, I’d say “Second Sleep.”

Assorted bits and bobs: I think that “No Trouble” by the Felice Brothers is a very perfect fall song. I also think, ironically, that Elliott Smith’s cover of “Trouble” by Yusuf/Cat Stevens is a perfect fall song. In other Elliott Smith news, “The Last Hour” could only elevate a crisp walk under gray, windy skies.

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Books

Some of the best things I read this fall!

Other Russias by Victoria Lomasko: I really enjoyed Lomasko’s nuanced, investigative look at Russian society in this book of illustrated journalism. Her drawings are super cool, and they provide a sense of life and non-judgment that really makes her reporting interesting. I definitely found myself drawn to the “Invisible” section, where she interviews and draws people who are often overlooked in Russia, like children in juvenile detention centers. I would also recommend The Last Soviet Artist, where Lomasko explores the Post Soviet space beyond Russia and grapples with the war.

The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant: This is a strange, slight book, but it’s packed full of wisdom and food for thought. It does have some pretty intense and violent scenes, but I found it very fruitful and interesting. The story follows a famous writer who lives a deeply immoral life and his arrival in the mystical land of Ata, where people live simply and are ruled by their dreams. It’s cool. I recommend.

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut: If you like Kurt Vonnegut, you will like this collection of his short stories! They’re all clever and biting and propulsive and interesting. Thank you to Haydn for lending me his copy.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami: Murakami’s prose is so clean and frictionless, and he uses it to weave one of the most complicated, bizarre, twisted stories I’ve read. Halfway through the book, I still couldn’t have told you what it was about. That’s not to say it’s a slog to read, or unsatisfying. On the contrary, it’s a page turner, packed full of intrigue and fascinating characters. Ultimately, it’s a novel about a man’s search for his wife, and through all its dreamlike oddity, the book has a core of genuine tenderness that shines through.

Food

Soup: To be totally honest, I never considered myself a “soup person” until I started cooking. I just found soup unsatisfying and random; it was something I would never crave or seek out. Now, though, I make soup most weeks, and during colder months especially I find it to be an absolute treat.

I do think that cooking has widened my palate and made me more open-minded when it comes to food.

Lentils: I’ve been eating lentils like my life depends on it lately, and I actually think they’re fabulous. They can be a base for a yummy, filling salad, or you can pop them in a pot with some rice and spices and have a basic, relatively healthy, filling meal in exactly 20 minutes. I mean, plenty of recipes promise to be done in 20 minutes, but realistically, how many balanced meals are genuinely going to be on the table and ready to eat that quickly? Not to mention, it’s about as cost effective as you can get. I’m not saying lentils and rice are a showstopper, but they’re a great staple and a great backup plan.

Tofu shawrama bowl: If you’re looking for a project meal, this tofu shawarma bowl is gorgeous and delicious. I definitely recommend giving it a try! The star of the show is the super thin, chewy tofu, which you could totally season differently and use in other ways. It’s basically like vegetarian jerky.

Thank you for reading! Let me know what you’ve been loving this Fall :)

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Boyfriend has retreated back to his home, leaving me by myself once again. In almost every way, that makes my life worse, but for some reason, I have to admit that I find it much easier to cook when he’s not here.

Okay, so, picture this. I get home from work at 6:00 to an empty house. I change out of my work clothes and wash my hands. I know I should start dinner, but I’m tired, so I spend 30 minutes watching a YouTube video first. Finally, I start preparing one of the three recipes I’ve selected for the week. It’s a vegetarian soup, and I plan to eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next two days. I spend a solid two hours in the kitchen before I serve myself a bowl of soup and sit down to dinner at 8:45 pm.

Now, imagine that I come home from work at 6:00, and my boyfriend is there, and he’s hungry, and also we haven’t seen each other all day, and also he (a meat eater) is not in the mood for vegetarian soup. Suddenly, instant ramen is looking pretty nice. Yeah, I could go ahead and make a soup just for myself while he makes himself ramen, but I really want to sit down and eat with him. The thought of puttering around in the kitchen instead of hanging out with him is not very appealing.

Cooking together can be fun, but I get pretty grumpy when I’m hungry, so I usually find myself stressed and snippy when we’re in the kitchen together. So, when he’s here, we default to the quickest options possible, like beans and rice, instant noodles, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

It’s a whole new skillset I’m going to have to learn: cooking not just for myself. Or, rather, cooking with other people around. I feel comfortable making meals for people, but I’m not so good at making meals with people. Maybe it all comes back to my desire for control. Maybe it all comes down to hanger. Or maybe it’s because my kitchen is small and I get overstimulated when there are a lot of people rattling around in there. I don’t know!

I do know, though, that I need to figure out how to maintain my habit of cooking once Boyfriend and I are living together (hopefully not too far in the future). I learned a whole new skill from scratch, but now I’m going to have to start from scratch again to keep it integrated into my life. I guess life is all about growth and adaptation.

I’d love to hear how other people approach the dinner question!

At the end of the day, though, the important thing is having food to eat and people to share it with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a home cooked meal or a TV dinner.

And, to be clear, sometimes Boyfriend and I do cook together, and I must say, we make some pretty good food. For example…

What I made

This week, Boyfriend and I celebrated our one-and-a-half year anniversary. My mom thinks it’s funny that we celebrate half anniversaries, but I just get excited! Eighteen months feels like a big deal.

To celebrate, we decided to make a fancy dinner at my apartment. I asked Boyfriend what he wanted, and he immediately answered, “Potatoes au gratin!” Not a single second of hesitation.

So, that was the main event.

I insisted on making a salad to go with it, which did not get Boyfriend very excited, but I was happy.

We also made cookies to finish the meal!

Fancy salad:

I made this to emulate a very fancy salad I had with my mom at a Michelin rated restaurant. Not to brag, but I think I did an amazing job. Where’s my Michelin star? Boyfriend isn’t a salad person, but even he liked it.

It’s just spring greens, goat cheese, and grapes with a vinaigrette. I used the cheapest grocery store ingredients I could find, but if you used high quality stuff, I’m sure it would be even better.

This is just such a good salad. It feels really balanced. The goat cheese and the grapes complement each other really well. I don’t often make myself salads, so this was a fun treat.

Potato au gratin:

For some reason, I volunteered for the task of slicing the potatoes… and grating the cheese… It’s okay, I needed an arm workout!

We do have a cheese grater in my apartment, and I thought it had a mandolin in the middle, but now as I do more research I think that was actually meant for shaving cheese. Long story short, it didn’t work to slice the potatoes, so I just went with a good old chef knife and got them as thin as I could manage.

Despite my imperfect slicing, the potato au gratin was pretty delectable. I mean, it’s hard to mess up those ingredients.

Cookies!

Somehow, I forgot to take a picture of the cookies, but we’ve made this recipe before. The last time Boyfriend and I attempted these cookies, it was a disaster. I don’t know why. This time, the cookies were much better than last time, but they still didn’t spread out at all, and they still couldn’t hold a candle to the first, magical time I made them. I’m starting to wonder if it has to do with the oven in my current apartment? I just don’t know why I can’t recreate the perfect cookies! But they were still really good and we ate them all.

What I learned

I really would like a functional mandolin.

My roommates and I did a fridge cleanout, and there was some gnarly stuff in there. I found at least four different tupperware containers full of ancient rice and beans (and I thought I was so good about using my leftovers!), and I’ll spare you the details, but there was a single slice of turkey that had been there, probably, since we moved in. As soon as it was exposed to the air, it emitted a heinous smell. I mean, truly, I’ve never encountered anything so pungent. Now the horrible foods are gone, and we have so much more space in our fridge, which hopefully will make it easier for us to see what we have and actually use it before it becomes… dangerous.

For the potatoes au gratin, the recipe advised us to use Yukon Gold potatoes, but we just used plain old Idaho potatoes, and I don’t think it really made a difference.

Thank you for reading! :)

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One of my personal mottos is, “everything is easier and harder than everything else.”

For example: when I was in college, I felt extremely frustrated by how insular my world was. I was stressed out and working really hard, but I didn’t feel like I was doing anything that mattered. Like, all my energy and attention was going toward essays that nobody would ever read. It was kind of depressing, and I was anxious to get out into the “real world.”

Now, I can appreciate more fully the easy parts of my college life. I didn’t have to think about money, or planning my meals, or making time to see my friends. All of my physical and social needs were met, and I only had to worry about my intellectual life.

As I’m writing this, I know that it sounds like a convoluted way of saying “the grass is always greener.” But I’m not trying to say that I was wrong to feel fed up with academia. The problems I had in college were real problems. I felt cordoned off from my actual life; it wasn’t sustainable.

And I’m not wrong now to miss the ease and comfort of college. Life in the “real world” is difficult and tiring. Yes, in some moments I find it much more fulfilling than college. But I also find it exhausting, and I envy the collegiate leisure that allows for more creativity and reflection.

It’s easy to be overly nostalgic for the past or overly optimistic about the future, but reality is never as simple as a romanticized ideal. Everything has its good parts and its bad parts. Everything is easier and harder than everything else.

I do find this idea comforting. But if everything is both better and worse, how am I supposed to know which decisions are the right ones?

When Boyfriend and I started dating, I knew that he would never want to live in a big city. At first, I felt some trepidation about tying my future to his. I’m from Los Angeles, and I had always pictured myself living there as an adult. I loved going to college in Vermont, but city life has a lot of things that rural areas just can’t offer—endless concerts and museums and restaurants and excitement, not to mention bountiful career opportunities. Nevertheless, I decided to jump in with both feet. I would spend a year in New York City after grad, and that would be the beginning and end of my urban adulthood.

I’m about halfway through my year in New York, and once my lease is up, I’ll be heading somewhere quieter to live with Boyfriend. In some ways, that transition feels big and scary. There are a lot of things I love about living here. I love that I don’t need a car, that my friends live nearby, and that people who don’t live nearby want to come visit. I love the excitement and hubbub all around me, and I love the grouchy sense of community I feel with strangers on the street. I’ll miss those things when I leave, for sure.

But there are a lot of things I’m looking forward to in the future. I’m excited to have easier access to nature and a calmer pace to my life. I’m excited for the absence of sirens. And I can’t say I’ll miss New York rent.

Most of all, obviously, I’m excited to be near Boyfriend. In some ways, it will be a sacrifice to move out of the city. I’ll be leaving my friends and my job and the possibility of truly returning to my hometown. It will be hard. But it would be harder to be without him.

I guess making the right decision isn’t about avoiding difficulty, but picking the kind of difficulty you can stomach.

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What I made

Beans and rice and eggs:

Since Boyfriend has been here, I’ve been frying a lot of eggs, and I’ve made an adjustment to my typical fried egg formula. Normally I fry the eggs in really hot oil so that they’re super crispy and bubbly with brown lacy edges. Lately, though, I’ve been doing them low and slow, and steaming them at the very end. The result is, I think, slightly less delectable, but way less of a crazy process. I don’t have to dodge the flying oil geysers. Much more suited to the every day.

I will say, this particular bean and rice bowl tasted kind of funky. I made Boyfriend try the eggs to see if they were bad, but he insisted they tasted normal. I guess we’ll never know for sure.

Cheesy garlic butter beans (**chickpeas):

Here’s the recipe I used! It called for butter beans, but in the video she does say that chickpeas would work well. I couldn’t find butter beans near me, so chickpeas it was. This was pretty good with a hunk of bread, but when I had it for leftovers the next day, I mixed it with some white rice, and that was even better. I think the rice balanced out the flavors of the meal (it was less bean-forward) and made it feel more filling.

I would totally make this again. It was a breeze to throw together and tasted like a delicious, creamy pasta dish, only the pasta was beans. I will say, cream cheese is pretty expensive, so if I make this again, I’ll probably opt for the vegan option of coconut milk, which I know I already have in my pantry.

More beans and rice:

Can you tell my budget has been tight lately? Nothing wrong with beans and rice, though.

Ramen:

I have much to learn from Boyfriend when it comes to the ways of instant ramen. Although I will say my humble miso ramen tasted quite delish.

What I learned

I learned there’s more than one way to fry an egg.

Thank you for reading! :)

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This week has been a bit chaotic, to be honest. In a good way! But chaotic none the less.

Historically, I struggle when things are “up in the air.” I like to have a clear sense of what’s going on now, in an hour, tomorrow, and next week. As a kid, I would plan my Halloween costumes years in advance. I tend to keep my ducks in a row, exactly the way I like them.

As I get older, though, I’ve been trying to get better at relinquishing control. I notice myself, without even thinking, micromanaging everyone around me. “Don’t stack the dishes that high!” “Make sure to turn on the vent fan!” “If you fold your shirt like that it’ll wrinkle!”

It’s not a flattering look for me. I do trust my friends and family to manage their daily lives. I don’t know why I feel the need to get involved, but I often have to bite my tongue to stop myself from giving instructions. It’s something I’ve been working on. Letting go.

Really, at the core of it, I have to accept that I don’t know the best way to do everything. I need to be open to what the world and other people have to teach me, rather than trying to impose my own order upon everything.

This is a lesson I’ve really been trying to hold onto this week. My work schedule has been unpredictable, I’ve hardly had a chance to cook, and (minor detail) we have thirteen people staying in my four bedroom apartment this weekend. One bathroom.

Don’t ask me why they all decided to show up at the same time. I’m just going with the flow!

We are currently halfway through the wave of guests, and so far it’s been really fun. I’m trying not to have any expectations. I’m excited to see all the people who are visiting, so the chaos of a crowded apartment is small potatoes. I will take it as it comes.

I’d be lying, though, if I said that this week hasn’t been testing my limits. In fact, here’s a short list of things that have been testing my limits this week:

• There were two reservations at my restaurant at the same time: a party of five and a party of six. When they arrived, they turned out to be one big party of eleven, and they asked to be seated together. “I see,” I said, “let me just ask the maitre d’ if we can do that.” Once I told the maitre d’, her eyes went wide. “Oh no, we can’t do that,” she said. “We take deposits for a reservation that big, and they didn’t pay the deposit. They have to sit separately.” I returned to the guests and informed them that they couldn’t sit together. Whereupon the maitre d’ appeared and said to the customers, “We should be able to get you a table together, I’m working on it right now.” THIS IS FINE. It’s fine. I don’t know why the maitre d’ threw me under the bus or whether it was even intentional. But it’s fine if those customers think I’m incompetent and unaccommodating. It literally doesn’t matter, so I will not make a big deal of it.

• A bunch of my friends wanted to get a treat for breakfast this morning. I was torn between wanting to save money and not wanting to be a stick in the mud. “Treat, treat, treat!” my friends were chanting. I couldn’t decide what to do, and it was unclear to me how immediately we were leaving. I really wanted to take a shower. However, amidst all the chanting, I couldn’t catch anybody’s attention to ascertain what the actual plan was. Eventually the crowd dispersed and I don’t think anybody ever got a treat at all. This situation was fine, and there was no reason for me to be stressed about it. There was no plan, and that is okay.

• My manager texted me a few days ago asking me to start my shift four hours later than I had been planning. They just didn’t have enough reservations to justify me being there for my whole shift. I was pretty upset because I just lost four hours of pay, but it wound up being fine. I think I’m going to pick up a shift on Saturday to make up for it. It’s okay that my weekly schedule shifted around. It’s okay!!!

Life is difficult when I expect consistency and predictability. Life is more entertaining and manageable when I accept that whatever happens will happens. I’m really, really trying to get better at that.

What I made

NOTHING! And that’s fine. I’m just going with the flow.

What I learned

I learned that everything will be okay.

Maybe next week I’ll have more food to share, and maybe I won’t! We’ll see where the flow takes us.

Thanks for reading! :)

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An autobiography of carnivory

When I was ten years old, I stopped eating red meat. I wanted to be conscientious about the environment, my health, and animal cruelty. I felt that cows and pigs were too smart to eat. My parents were very open-minded about this sort of thing (my older brother had been a vegetarian since age five), and they gladly supported my decision.

Around the same time, I also stopped eating fish, ostensibly in protest of overfishing, but actually because I had a pet goldfish, and its dull, buggy eyes appeared before me every time I encountered a fishstick.

Even before I officially banned red meat and fish from my diet, I didn’t eat either of them much. I was a very picky eater as a child, and I felt no draw to steak or hamburgers or pot roast. Giving up red meat was extremely easy. I didn’t miss it, because I didn’t really eat it in the first place. As I got older, I completely forgot what red meat even tastes like. Now, my mind genuinely doesn’t register a slab of meat as “food.”

In college, I started to question why I still ate chicken and turkey, but I felt unmotivated to actually change my diet. Once, having a meal with a vegetarian friend, she asked my thoughts on eating meat. I told her, basically, what I’ve just told you. She frowned and said, “So, you think chickens are too… stupid to deserve life?”

“Oh,” I said. When she put it that way, it didn’t sound like a very morally coherent position. “I guess so.”

But still, I kept eating chicken.

In fact, I started moving the opposite direction. When I decided to study abroad in Kazakhstan, I reintroduced red meat into my diet. Kazakh cuisine is very meat-forward, and I didn’t want to be the rude American refusing to partake in the culture. I knew, though, that I would have to retrain myself to eat meat, because the very thought of it made me gag. Over the course of a few months, I ate a few pieces of beef stir fry, then a nibble of hot dog, then a hamburger, until at last I could, just barely, choke down a carnivorous meal without making a very rude face.

In Kazakhstan, red meat was hard to avoid, and I ate more of it than I ever have before or since, but I never found it particularly palatable, and I gladly cut it back out of my diet when I returned to America.

I felt a lot of cognitive dissonance with my diet. I was disgusted by the meat industry, by the distinction our society seems to make between “animal” and “meat.” It’s really wrong, I believe, to treat living animals as commercial products. We buy our meat in plastic packaging, and it’s very easy to ignore the fact that you are holding a dead animal in your hands. I actually think that the basic act of eating meat is morally neutral, but that the meat industry has twisted it into something unnatural and cruel and wrong. But at the same time, I kept participating in the system.

Then, last October, I was sitting outside with my boyfriend while he ate a heaping pile of chicken wings from the college dining hall. Offhandedly he said, “How many chickens do you think the school goes through in a year?”

For whatever reason, that was the thing that finally motivated me to act. No more meat, I decided, and from that point on, I have stuck to it.

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Being a vegetarian

Naively, I assumed that going vegetarian would be an easy transition. Already, meat was a very small part of my diet. I was only really cutting out one significant food: chicken.

Well, as it turns out, cutting out chicken was really hard. Unlike red meat, I do remember what chicken tastes like, and I really like what chicken tastes like. The other day I saw an ad for chicken tenders and my mouth immediately started watering.

When I eat out, I stare with envy at my friends’ chicken enchiladas and chicken alfredos and chicken shahi kormas. There are only so many $18 veggie burgers a girl can eat.

If I cook for myself, it’s a bit better, but I still miss the versatility of chicken. And also, like, the way it tastes. My friend Atticus, the other day, was asking me what my favorite foods were. I started listing a lot of chicken dishes. “Then why are you vegetarian?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “it’s not like I stopped eating chicken because I didn’t like it.”

In fact, when I finally took the plunge, I allowed myself two exceptions: Thanksgiving and Passover. Those meals mean so much to me; I couldn’t imagine having a tofurkey at Thanksgiving or veggie broth matzo ball soup.

Atticus tried to convince me to relapse on chicken, but I don’t think I will. Unless I someday raise and slaughter my own chickens (unlikely, given my aversion to death and violence), or befriend someone who does, I don’t think eating chicken will be in my future. Personally, I just can’t live with myself if I eat animals who were bred to die, whose lives are nothing but fattening and slaughter. They deserve real lives.

However, my conscience is far from clear. I still eat dairy products and eggs. Do dairy cows live substantially better lives than meat cows? Laying chickens than meat chickens? I doubt it. And don’t dairy farms contribute just as much to climate change as slaughterhouses?

I feel like I should be vegan. I, actually, know that I should. But I’m still adjusting to my lifestyle now, still figuring out how to feed myself properly with a restricted diet. I’m not ready to restrict even further. And I LOVE cheese. I LOVE ice cream. I LOVE cake and pie and cookies. Does my culinary enjoyment matter more than the lives of all those animals? No. But it’s a hard sacrifice for my monkey brain to make.

Maybe someday I’ll go completely vegan, but I honestly don’t think it’ll be for a while. If there are any vegans reading this and you have tips on how to make that transition more manageable, I’m all ears.

Day to day, being vegetarian is fine. I feel a slight easement of guilt, but not entirely. I am able to eat a relatively varied and satisfying diet. It was a big adjustment, and now I’m mostly adjusted. I don’t regret becoming vegetarian, and I don’t plan to undo that decision. However, there is one aspect of vegetarianism that I absolutely hate. And it’s one that I didn’t anticipate at all.

The worst thing about being vegetarian

The worst thing about being vegetarian is that it becomes everyone else’s problem, too.

There is nothing more embarrassing than going to somebody’s house for dinner and having to say, “Oh by the way I’m vegetarian.” I HATE inconveniencing people. I HATE making my dietary restrictions somebody else’s responsibility. It makes me want to crawl in a hole. I can’t imagine how much harder it is for vegans.

Okay that’s all.

A few positives to mention

For one thing, being a vegetarian is generally less expensive than eating meat.

It’s also really easy to get your fiber in!

Obviously I’ve talked about the lofty ideals of it all already, so I won’t belabor the point here. But that too.

Should you be a vegetarian?

Of course, what you eat is a very personal decision. I’m certainly not trying to shame anybody for their own dietary choices. I’m just sharing mine. And I’ll also link to Eliza McLamb’s beautiful essay, “Easiest Thing,” which is definitely worth a read no matter where you stand on the meat issue.

If you currently eat meat and are wondering whether to take this plunge yourself, I would encourage you to do some reflection on your current diet and your reasons for wanting to make the change. Does giving up meat entirely feel realistic? Does it feel worth it? A small, sustainable change might be more impactful than a big change that you can only maintain for a short period of time.

If you’re only feeling up for a smaller step, you can always try giving up red meat. Eating red meat is linked to higher mortality rates, and it also has a huge carbon footprint.

You could also try being a pescatarian, which I know is a popular middle ground.

Or, if you love meat as much as I love dairy, you could cut back on your consumption without completely eliminating it. Why not follow Jenny Rosenstrach’s lead and become a Weekday Vegetarian?

In conclusion

When I became vegetarian, I didn’t expect it to feel like a big sacrifice. There’s a lot of discourse about the reasons for and against meat-free diets, but it’s less common to hear vegetarians or vegans talk about missing meat. Sometimes I feel like a lousy vegetarian when I start craving chicken tenders.

I think it’s very natural, though, and I think it’s important to be realistic about our decisions, especially if we want to stick with them. If you’re thinking about giving up meat, you should know that it might be a difficult change to make.

However, I have no regrets about my decision. If I never eat another chicken enchilada in my life, I’ll be okay. I feel grateful to be one step closer to living a life that aligns with my moral compass.

Let me know about your own meat-eating philosophies in the comments, and thank you for reading!

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