I saw something nasty in the woodshed
When I was a kid, I took voice lessons. It was an hour a week and my teacher lived far enough away that it didn’t make sense for my mom to drive home during, so she would go to the nearby Shopper’s Food Warehouse to get some things, and then she would come back and sit in the car and read. When my lesson was done, I would come out of the house to find a giant Shopper’s Food Warehouse croissant waiting for me, which I would systematically peel apart and eat in layers all the way home.
I hadn’t thought about that croissant ritual in years. Recently I was at a restaurant with my dad, sitting at a table on their patio. While we ate, a woman and her young daughter walked up, the daughter wearing head-to-toe pink ballet gear and carrying the tiniest puppy (she–the puppy–was introduced to us as Paris). The staff was waiting for them, and they were promptly seated at a patio table. As they settled in, I realized that this too was a ritual–they likely had a standing reservation for that table and that they (and Paris) came for quiche and frites every week after ballet.
I love little rituals, and in the weeks since I sat with Paris and her family on that patio I have been noticing them in my own life. I bring water to work and dutifully hydrate throughout the day, but for lunch I buy a bottle of San Pellegrino and treat myself to fizz. My therapist is a block from a great little Cuban restaurant, and when we briefly went back to in-person therapy, I walked over after each session and had a tortilla and a café con leche and read a book as a little debrief. There’s a fancy little grocery between my house and the nearest big shopping district, and if I’ve had a particularly stressful shopping trip (many of them are), I will stop and get myself a specific grain bowl and some Italian rainbow cookies as a reward.
It is not lost on me that all of my rituals are food-based, but one does what one can to get through. Just as I have trained my dog to go calmly to bed by giving her a tasty dental treat each night, I have trained myself to get through the late stage capitalist hellscape which is my lived environment by creating little rituals with which I reward myself for good behavior.
Dog Thing
Mixed Media
good reads: Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, a Lost Generation Love Story by Amanda Vaill: Sara and Gerald Murphy were names I’d come across a few times while researching contemporary artists. They seemed to be just a regular (if well-off) American couple who had made their home in France after World War I, and so many artists and writers loved them (I was partially wrong here–Gerald had a brief but groundbreaking career as a painter). I find people who excel at creating environments where artists thrive very interesting, and am drawn to the inter-war period in Europe especially. What I found in this book were two people who made life fun and interesting and lovely, for their children and friends and everyone around them. They suffered great and small tragedies and never failed to come to the aid of a friend in need. Vaill wrote this book with such tenderness and respect–a difficult line to walk in biography, especially with subjects who were likely queer, but never defined their own identities in those terms. I enjoyed it immensely.
Death of an Irish Mummy by Catie Murphy: The newest in the Dublin Driver Mysteries, a series which follows an American woman who works as a limo driver. I love this series not because it’s particularly genre-breaking (it’s plenty cozy and there are lots of puns) but because it is set in a world which resembles my own–queer, and filled with found family.
good film: Cold Comfort Farm: My mom was always very good at coming across gems in the 90s, and when she brought this one home from Blockbuster, it quickly became a fave. It’s been nigh-impossible to find streaming for years now, but my friend Kevin unearthed it as a surprise when we went to visit him last weekend, and I was delighted to find it just as magnificent as I recalled as well as much more unhinged.
good tv: Death in Paradise: I’ve been catching up on the gentle murder shows I’ve missed during the past couple years when I haven’t watched much tv regularly at all. I remembered Death in Paradise as fun but sort of mindless–the sort of thing I could half-watch while playing a video game–but discovered as I caught up with series 9 and 10 that the quality of the writing had so improved that I didn’t want to be distracted from it.
good game: The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles: Rounding out this missive’s unintentional murdery theme with a very murdery game. These two games (released together for the Switch) are not brand new, but they had never had an official English-language release before. They follow a distant ancestor of Pheonix Wright as he journeys from his native Japan to Victorian England and along the way meets (of course) the Great SHERLOCK–wait, sorry–HERLOCK SHOLMES (for copyright reasons). They were great and I loved them.
Lastly
I came across Polina Osipova‘s art recently, and fell in love. She creates costume pieces inspired by her native Chuvash culture and modern concerns, such as surveillance. Here is a very good interview with her from last year.
