this morning, in my first interview of the cycle, my interviewer jovially slipped in the adverb form of the f word about 11 minutes in to the 15 minute Zoom, which is a green flag for me. the call went well and gave me confidence, which i am grateful for and, at the same time, the increasing amount of cortisol that has been circulating through my system this week as i have and schedule increasing numbers of Business Interactions (which to be clear i am grateful to have and be scheduling!) has been quite a pivot from my blissful wistful summer of disengagement from wage labor and my body has been telling me that it’s feeling the change, along with whatever else it usually feels this time of year (a summer hangover or some submerged trauma of back to school seasons past).

one thing that will be good about working at a new place will be having to be less self-conscious about whether i’m repeating anecdotes. in grad school, i had a professor of a three hour seminar who would tell us the same anecdotes and riffs over and over, week after week, without any real variation or seeming self-consciousness that he was doing this, like almost verbatim, even as the students sat around the seminar table, unable, especially as the semester droned on and the repetitions accumulated, to keep ourselves from grinning and laughing through another one of the endless inside jokes of our education. one of the bits he would do that i sometimes still think of, because it was meta in this context, was about him in the late 60s seeing a reading by John Barth* where Barth “duet”ed with a recording of his own voice on a reel-to-reel tape recorder (just gonna put a marker down now i never liked anything written by John Barth, though i do like the idea of a gimmicky reading like this which is totally something i would do).

at the time, i remember thinking, of the story repetitions, “wow, that is embarrassing lmao” and i still do think that on some level but also now ten years later (still WAYYYYY younger than he was TO BE CLEAR!) sometimes…i find myself repeating myself too 💀. or having to do the hedge of “have we talked about [x]” or “i can’t remember if this is something i told you before…” but this feels (to me) really tedious if i do it more than once so i try to use it sparingly.

in my defense, i have a memory i would put up against anyone else’s in a memory fight but i talk a lot take a lot of conversation responsibility and imo, on some level, occasional accidental repetition because you don’t remember who exactly you’ve talked to about something is the bon vivant’s cost of doing business for reliably sparking, nurturing, and safely maintaining the fire of a conversation (you’re welcome). part of it is also that in most social situations, i have smoked very strong weed beforehand/during. part of it is this newsletter, which has in many ways been good for my memory, in that writing about things embeds them both into the physical memory of the disks in the data center in Northern Virginia where this is stored and back into my neural cortex, but bad in the sense that it’s another vector of where i could have possibly already told a story to someone (or have a false memory that i did) that i have to consider.

and then, outside of actually talking to people via my mouth, there is the parallel feeling, when making notes for what to write here or while improvising my way through this newsletter when i have to take into account that over the previous 1,500 issues i may have already mentioned something multiple times, often with strikingly similar language in such a way that unintentionally, through the accumulation, reveals something about my psychology or how i understood the memory (or, alternately/at the same time, the favored tropes and devices that make up my writing, like doing a list of “in part [this], in part [that]”).

i was planning to recommend the cake Deborah made this week, Alison Roman’s raspberry ricotta cake, which uses frozen raspberries to great effect, and then looked it up in my Gmail to see how may times i’d already mentioned it in this newsletter:

7/22/18

i'm thankful that she made this raspberry ricotta cake, which is one of my favorite summer cakes, and that soon the house will be perfumed with it. i'm thankful that her monstera died, not because i'm happy it died, but because she was bleaching the pot it was in afterward and the smell of the bleach got her to open the windows, which is something we don't do enough and provides nice ambience. i'm thankful that our street is mostly a quiet one. i'm thankful the cake just came out of the oven.

7/23/18

i'm thankful for the raspberry ricotta cake, which was as good as i remembered it.

9/3/19

barbecue at a friend's house, the sun set beyond high fences, everyone loved d's raspberry ricotta cake

6/18/22

i'm thankful that d made raspberry ricotta cake for the second time this week and we had extra large slices because it's saturday.

8/28/23

also i had an extra large slice of the raspberry ricotta cake deborah made which is as good as ever and she says it's also a very low effort cake to make

so i was like am i really going to recommend this recipe yet again, it’s good (“as ever” / “as i remembered it”) and good dessert is always worth celebrating, but then, writing this out, i discovered that all the previous times i linked to it, i had linked to the original Alison Roman recipe in Bon Appétit, but the version that Deborah actually makes, i noticed the other day glancing at the printout she magnetized to the fridge, was not the original at all, but an Orangette adaptation. so in a way, this is still new content!

she made ours with frozen blueberries this week because it’s what we had in the freezer and while raspberries are the ideal in terms of their tartness, it still hits, and this variant also satisfies, to quote Deborah, “the blueberry muffin craving” if you find yourself afflicted by such things (no judgement).

Weekend recommendations:

• the last couple of days, i’ve become a religious convert to the World’s Greatest Stretch, which Deborah told me about a while ago but i wasn’t listening and then i “discovered” it. i have some of the world’s tightest hips and while i have various tools i have employed over the years (pigeon pose, seated forward fold, jamming a lacrosse ball into my hip socket and floating my entire body weight on it) and i may just be in a placebo honeymoon period, this stretch seems to fold and unfold me in a way that’s unique from the others. (i know that i should really be doing some strength stuff also but baby steps)

• it’s still a couple weeks till Nigella Bakeoff, but the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is back (Hulu) and i’m back in 🤠. there’s a great self-reflexive framing device to the season (building it around Taylor’s Bachelorette season getting canceled just before airing and so we get this countdown week to week to everything exploding). in the third episode they go to New York and they’re as messy as ever and also Mikayla is a stoner now.

• i enjoyed playing for a few minutes with this browser game take on Asteroids where instead of the ship, you’re space as well, shifting gravity to clear the field. this trippy website visualizing Bluesky streams as crowds of characters in some digital Burning Man

• new songs from Tinashe (glow in the dark jazz piano glissandos the ice the whole song’s built on, the confident lust of the chorus) and Victoria Monét (iconic sample, squelchy slap bass runs, clouds of silky vocals calling and responding)

• more and more every day i believe Sour Skittles to be in my pantheon of perfect candy (Skittles Gummies are trash tho)