The Lake House
We’re back at it again with the three-months-of-content newsletter! To what do we owe the pleasure? Anxiety. Desire. Accomplishment. Perfectionism. Documentation. Anxiety about a desire for a sense of accomplishment rooted in perfectionism and a desire for documentation. You know it.
I’m writing this in the final days of January, still bowled over by all of 2021 and simultaneously deleting months upon months of 2021 photos from my phone. (Don’t worry! They’re on Dropbox! And an external hard drive! Future civilizations will need to know what blurry sandwiches I ate! What screenshots I took of weather forecasts!)
In a previous issue in this series, I wrote about annual trips to my grandparents in small town Ohio. More recently, I found myself thinking about a family trip to Ithaca for a week one summer. We were regulars there – my childhood home is a 45 minute drive from downtown, a bit longer to Cornell’s campus and collegetown. Some months we visited for half a Saturday, other periods it felt like we were there every other weekend. We never spent the night; it was so easy to head home after the inevitable dinner at Sangam. Our trips had a strong routine: a bookstore, lunch, some more bookstores, browsing at Contemporary Trends, maybe a diversion for me depending on my most recent hobbies/whims, dinner, home. It was our collectively favorite place. By around the time I was 10, my parents were considering a more serious relationship with Ithaca, maybe a boat, maybe a lakehouse, something. With some family friends, we booked a lakefront cottage in nearby Lansing for a week in July. My parents rarely took us anywhere for more than a long weekend of chilling somewhere, let alone a destination without preset activities or must-see cultural institutions. As Kelsey once wisely put it, we took trips, not vacations. My branch of the Bardhan family tree isn’t a lot of relaxers. (I’m getting better?)
That time by the lake was one of the most boring weeks of my young life. The TV had approximately 1.5 channels on it. I didn’t bring nearly enough to read or stay occupied. I was peak squirrelly. (I don’t know what young-Neil expected to fill the time.) My brother fished a bit from the dock, caught a few bluegills. Our fake-cousin Evan, always the cool one, kicked back and listened to Midnight Oil tapes on his Walkman. One of my baby teeth fell out and I somehow lost the evidence (still, the Tooth Fairy gave me a quarter!). The adults sat around and chit-chatted about professional lives and friend-group gossip, probably read some books, maybe napped, whatever middle-aged people do. I have a lot of clear visual memories of this place and yet, I barely remember anything happening. When I read about vacation houses in cookbooks or fiction, sometimes I picture the simple kitchen of this house. Its owners stayed on the first floor, or maybe it was next door, with their fluffy spaniel Sammy, short for Sambuca. We went on a boat at some point with the owners, but nobody in either family went tubing or waterskiing.
I think it was, looking back, generally a nice trip for everybody, and a jump outside our comfort zones. We never repeated it. My parents briefly had a weekend house in Ithaca, though not lakefront. By the time I was an adult, I developed my own routines, or at least preferences, in town. I visited during grad school for a linguistics conference, a concert, a spring break writing retreat, all sorts of quick stays. For a lot of reasons, it’s obviously not a trip that I can repeat, but I’d be curious what a week by the lake with two nuclear families would be like again, no devices, no obligations.
Reading: I found myself (literally) in You Can Go Your Own Way by Eric Smith. I thought about grief in a quick essay on avalanches and in the Zen teachings of The Five Invitations. I devoured the trainwreck that is Group, a memoir about therapy. Scott of Action Cookbook recommended the eerie/pleasant Last Night At The Lobster which is on a shortlist of books I've read that upends how I think about fiction.
Eating: I made several batches of Serious Eats sugar cookies in service of an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer. South Philly's Izzy’s 33 has a non-standard breakfast sandwich I enjoyed several times over. I’ve been visiting the neighborhood's new Hong Kong pastry shop The Dodo a lot and learning new things about tea and tarts. A Smitten Kitchen squash pasta bake was a regular in rotation, so autumnal and flexible. On a road trip, we picked up a coconut cream pie from Bingham's near Scranton. (I was trying to surprise Kelsey with a lemon meringue pie; this was the closest they had.) The Pioneer Woman's tomato soup expects you to get tomato juice, but if you only have Bloody Mary mix that'll do fine.
Beating: As ever, I've been digging monthly Freshly Squeezed releases of electroswing; October was a particular highlight. The Kleptones' OVERLOAD mega-album went public. In my stack of old CDs, I unearthed Medeski Martin and Wood's Shack Man which time machined me to sophomore year of high school. Same goes for randomly coming across Spirit of the West's "The Crawl" on a sea shanty playlist Kelsey found. I have a note in November that I listened to "Eisbär" and boy would I like to know what exactly that means, beyond the literal German translation! Oh, and I saw Bob Dylan in concert two nights in a row.
Deleting: Literally no notes here for three months.
Retreating: I started my participation in the 10-year-long Listening Project and I wish I could spend 60 hours a week doing just that. Kelsey & I somewhat unexpectedly took the slow driving tour through Edwin B. Forsythe
National Wildlife Refuge during a weekend trip to Atlantic City. We also hiked a bit of the Batona Trail and stumbled upon Salt Spring and Ravensburg State Parks. (One of these is pictured below. I can't remember which!) Plus, we made our annualish pilgrimage to Spencer Crest Nature Center.
Meeting: I'm hosting a couple of the First Person Arts #US podcasts this season. Cathy Goodwin interviewed me for her Strategic Sotryteling podcast the other day & I told my professional connect-the-dots story. In a few weeks, you can hear me talking to old pal David Dylan Thomas on his "Lately, I've been thinking about..." series. February has a bunch of digital events for me. On 2/9, I'm co-hosting Neil Estate, the property listing comedy game show on YouTube live. The next day, I'm telling a story in the First Person Arts StoryGym. Then on 2/12 I'll be a contestant on the Highwire Improv Pop Off game show. Valentine's Day has me telling a story in the First Person Arts Ex-Files. Then, 2/15, I'll teach my next iteration of Storytelling in the Workplace. And the last show on the horizon is the 2/16 Penn Nursing Story Slam, which I'll host. It's a lot! Then I'll take a break for a little bit and maybe write some more?
We did it! We got to the end of this together! Yay!
I’m writing this in the final days of January, still bowled over by all of 2021 and simultaneously deleting months upon months of 2021 photos from my phone. (Don’t worry! They’re on Dropbox! And an external hard drive! Future civilizations will need to know what blurry sandwiches I ate! What screenshots I took of weather forecasts!)
In a previous issue in this series, I wrote about annual trips to my grandparents in small town Ohio. More recently, I found myself thinking about a family trip to Ithaca for a week one summer. We were regulars there – my childhood home is a 45 minute drive from downtown, a bit longer to Cornell’s campus and collegetown. Some months we visited for half a Saturday, other periods it felt like we were there every other weekend. We never spent the night; it was so easy to head home after the inevitable dinner at Sangam. Our trips had a strong routine: a bookstore, lunch, some more bookstores, browsing at Contemporary Trends, maybe a diversion for me depending on my most recent hobbies/whims, dinner, home. It was our collectively favorite place. By around the time I was 10, my parents were considering a more serious relationship with Ithaca, maybe a boat, maybe a lakehouse, something. With some family friends, we booked a lakefront cottage in nearby Lansing for a week in July. My parents rarely took us anywhere for more than a long weekend of chilling somewhere, let alone a destination without preset activities or must-see cultural institutions. As Kelsey once wisely put it, we took trips, not vacations. My branch of the Bardhan family tree isn’t a lot of relaxers. (I’m getting better?)
That time by the lake was one of the most boring weeks of my young life. The TV had approximately 1.5 channels on it. I didn’t bring nearly enough to read or stay occupied. I was peak squirrelly. (I don’t know what young-Neil expected to fill the time.) My brother fished a bit from the dock, caught a few bluegills. Our fake-cousin Evan, always the cool one, kicked back and listened to Midnight Oil tapes on his Walkman. One of my baby teeth fell out and I somehow lost the evidence (still, the Tooth Fairy gave me a quarter!). The adults sat around and chit-chatted about professional lives and friend-group gossip, probably read some books, maybe napped, whatever middle-aged people do. I have a lot of clear visual memories of this place and yet, I barely remember anything happening. When I read about vacation houses in cookbooks or fiction, sometimes I picture the simple kitchen of this house. Its owners stayed on the first floor, or maybe it was next door, with their fluffy spaniel Sammy, short for Sambuca. We went on a boat at some point with the owners, but nobody in either family went tubing or waterskiing.
I think it was, looking back, generally a nice trip for everybody, and a jump outside our comfort zones. We never repeated it. My parents briefly had a weekend house in Ithaca, though not lakefront. By the time I was an adult, I developed my own routines, or at least preferences, in town. I visited during grad school for a linguistics conference, a concert, a spring break writing retreat, all sorts of quick stays. For a lot of reasons, it’s obviously not a trip that I can repeat, but I’d be curious what a week by the lake with two nuclear families would be like again, no devices, no obligations.
Reading: I found myself (literally) in You Can Go Your Own Way by Eric Smith. I thought about grief in a quick essay on avalanches and in the Zen teachings of The Five Invitations. I devoured the trainwreck that is Group, a memoir about therapy. Scott of Action Cookbook recommended the eerie/pleasant Last Night At The Lobster which is on a shortlist of books I've read that upends how I think about fiction.
Eating: I made several batches of Serious Eats sugar cookies in service of an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer. South Philly's Izzy’s 33 has a non-standard breakfast sandwich I enjoyed several times over. I’ve been visiting the neighborhood's new Hong Kong pastry shop The Dodo a lot and learning new things about tea and tarts. A Smitten Kitchen squash pasta bake was a regular in rotation, so autumnal and flexible. On a road trip, we picked up a coconut cream pie from Bingham's near Scranton. (I was trying to surprise Kelsey with a lemon meringue pie; this was the closest they had.) The Pioneer Woman's tomato soup expects you to get tomato juice, but if you only have Bloody Mary mix that'll do fine.
Beating: As ever, I've been digging monthly Freshly Squeezed releases of electroswing; October was a particular highlight. The Kleptones' OVERLOAD mega-album went public. In my stack of old CDs, I unearthed Medeski Martin and Wood's Shack Man which time machined me to sophomore year of high school. Same goes for randomly coming across Spirit of the West's "The Crawl" on a sea shanty playlist Kelsey found. I have a note in November that I listened to "Eisbär" and boy would I like to know what exactly that means, beyond the literal German translation! Oh, and I saw Bob Dylan in concert two nights in a row.
Deleting: Literally no notes here for three months.
Retreating: I started my participation in the 10-year-long Listening Project and I wish I could spend 60 hours a week doing just that. Kelsey & I somewhat unexpectedly took the slow driving tour through Edwin B. Forsythe
National Wildlife Refuge during a weekend trip to Atlantic City. We also hiked a bit of the Batona Trail and stumbled upon Salt Spring and Ravensburg State Parks. (One of these is pictured below. I can't remember which!) Plus, we made our annualish pilgrimage to Spencer Crest Nature Center.
Meeting: I'm hosting a couple of the First Person Arts #US podcasts this season. Cathy Goodwin interviewed me for her Strategic Sotryteling podcast the other day & I told my professional connect-the-dots story. In a few weeks, you can hear me talking to old pal David Dylan Thomas on his "Lately, I've been thinking about..." series. February has a bunch of digital events for me. On 2/9, I'm co-hosting Neil Estate, the property listing comedy game show on YouTube live. The next day, I'm telling a story in the First Person Arts StoryGym. Then on 2/12 I'll be a contestant on the Highwire Improv Pop Off game show. Valentine's Day has me telling a story in the First Person Arts Ex-Files. Then, 2/15, I'll teach my next iteration of Storytelling in the Workplace. And the last show on the horizon is the 2/16 Penn Nursing Story Slam, which I'll host. It's a lot! Then I'll take a break for a little bit and maybe write some more?
We did it! We got to the end of this together! Yay!
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