it’s the most dreadful part of winter, and so
i usually use ulysses to write on my ipad, but it keeps re-downloading all of my cloud files and i get distracted by staring at the sidebar which is in a continual and infinite state of redownloading and so nothing ever gets written
delights
i stayed up past midnight to finish the guest, which felt breathless, in that i was always holding my breath. a goodreads review: “well-written but i don’t need a book to give me anxiety, i already have it” which is true but i was glad to have something propulsive to read that pulled me to the next page and the next. it felt very real, cinematographic. also i am such a rule follower and the main character is very much not; so much of my life i am often thinking: is this okay? is this correct/right/ethical thing? and she does the opposite. it felt like reading with my hands over my eyes.
over vacation, i read ross gay’s the book of (more) delights and samantha irby’s quietly hostile at the same time. i didn’t intentionally pick them to read as a pair, but on the plane, i wanted to close the book of more delights (metaphorically and electronically, on my kindle) and pick up something else easy but not so wondrous. i wandered into sam irby’s book and it was a perfect antithesis. at one point, in my drowsy airplane mode, i forgot i was reading her and thought ross gay was suddenly very weird, describing drinking a bottle of water in the shower, detailing some electrolyte kombucha drink that a friend had given him and suddenly he was cooking meat. slowly i realized the narrator was not, in fact, ross (who might drink kombucha but probably not in the shower and who is definitely vegan).
delights is warm sunlight and fragrant coffee, petrichor and earth and magnolia petals. dandelions are sacred, not just a hardy weed but something to eat, to admire, a thing of poetry. quietly hostile is much more vulgar, even grotesque. she describes telling her dying mother that she loves her. her mother’s response is: “are you sure?” it is much more consumeristic and unserious. in my mind it’s a modern exhibit of pill bottles, clothes, takeout containers, bodily fluids; delights is a series of light studies, soft pastels. but of course there’s more to it than that.
did you ever read any narnia? in the most famous book, the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe, four children step into a fantasy world. the white witch lures one of them (the prickliest one) with the promise of turkish delight. reading this as a child i thought that turkish delight must be the most amazing thing, and when i finally tried it, it was disappointing (lol i saw a tweet or meme somewhere about this being such an american experience). ㅎ sent me some delights last christmas, organic weed gummies in her (and j)’s neverending quest to find a weed that works for me; they are encased in a small paper carton where you lift the flap and a thin paper sheet to reveal a grid of perfect gelatinous cubes dusted in sugar powder. i thought it was kinda turkish delight-like, until i read the accompanying literature which specifically says they are turkish delight-style edibles. and they are, indeed, delightful, a gentle jammy touch of fruit.
cooking
lately my creative energy has taken the shape of cooking and reorganizing. reading recipes feels tiring and they’re not typically structured in a format that works for my brain. for example, the ingredients will say: 2 tbsp of this, 1/4 cup of that. then the step-by-step will say “add this and that” and my eyes zigzag up down up between the ingredients list and the instructions in an effort to understand and confirm how much, exactly, i should add of this or that.
but watching people cook is comforting. it shifts the slurry of words into a familiar frame-by-frame scene that crackles and sizzles. if a horror movie prickles my nerves with loud stings, youtube videos and tiktok clips offer a soothing balm with the steady repetition of dices and minces, the blooming of aromatics in fats, ingredients ushered into glass bowls or pottery, muddled and chiffonaded and seared.
i have been obsessed in particular with nara smith (age 22, libra, model, mother of two and soon to be three). there is something very calming about her voice and the way she applies concealer under her eyes. i thought it was surprising that she was so young until i looked at her husband’s instagram and realized the book of mormon was pinned to his grid (he is also a model and young and has some very blonde blue eyes american jeans marlboro thing going on but he could be any other white dude imo; she is much more interesting). then it all made more sense, the brush strokes of this idyllic young cosmopolitan family, the next wave of the mormon mommy bloggers, which is fascinating and also somewhat upsetting (see: the LDS church’s long history of white supremacy and racism on top of well, everything else). at twenty-two i didn’t know how to roast a chicken, much less slice plums into thin papery rounds underneath a pile of arugula and torn chunks of burrata! she’s not homesteading but she will make a fresh loaf of bread, process her own nut butter, and macerate fruit on the stove just to put together a pb&j sando (cut into triangles with the crusts shorn) for her small children. i scrolled all the way down to her first video to watch it from the beginning, which is actually very annoying to try to watch a tiktok account front-to-back because of how you’re bumped to the top over and over again, but i did it. the videos are so short you can watch a handful at a time.
anyway: the tone is gentle. i welcome more gentleness into my life. more resting the dough. more letting it rise. more fermenting. there is a tamar adler essence to the rhythms and the flows —- the weekly pickling of sliced red onions, the efficient fridge clearout salads, the generous drizzles of olive oil. i find her knifework kind of enchanting, and in fact she recently got a shun nakiri knife which looked so nice that i impulsively got one. why yes, i would love to have more fun doing tedious mise en place, and to find more calm and joy in the kitchen.
i have been reading saving time by jenny o’dell, which traverses the history of the conceptualization and commodification of time. she recounts the start of the pandemic, the flattening of time experienced, the insular loops of daily routines that people began to find unbearable but that i find comforting.
we have cut down sugar, by which i mean no more daily dessert, and thus no weekly intensive bakes, which i guess has freed up more space and time and imagination for meal planning. usually j does that and the lion’s share of cooking for us (which i have so appreciated over the years — when we were first dating he would roast a whole chicken, which was very impressive!!!, out of which we would make chicken tacos and cold chicken salads). it’s been nice to try new things. most recently i made eric kim’s gochugaru salmon with crispy rice, and pork shogayaki. when bananas get overripe, i freeze and bathe them in melted chocolate and coconut oil. i also made onigiri with egg yolks cured in soy sauce and mirin, and beef and onions; incredibly messy but delicious. it’s nice to build something to look forward to every day, to let a yolk steep overnight, for rice to cool, to await the next morning.
end the occupation
from the river to the sea
palestine will be free
🇵🇸