My dear pasta recipe :)

"Caro Sugo pasta sauce" means "my dear pasta sauce." As with all recipes, read the instructions before starting, lest you jump the gun. 

This shit has kept me going all week tbh

Buy

I assume you have non-garlic olive oil, salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes. (I like red pepper flakes from Aleppo.)

All Trader Joe's-brand ingredients

• Black pepper Barilotti pasta (Limited edition)
• Caro Sugo Italian tomao basil pasta sauce 
• Sweet Italian sausage
• Organic basil

  The organic basil for the east coast TJ’s tends to be a lot softer and smoother than the non-organic basil, which is bumpy and rough. We care about texture since we’re leaving the basil in, but do as you please 🍃
• Thyme
  Get the fresh kind 
• Eggplant 
• Cherry tomatoes

  Get the Villagio Marzano ones in the little bag — they look kinda elongated and are really sweet 
• Ciliegine or pearl mozzarella
  If you can handle

Make

This makes enough for you and a buddy or two helpings or dinner + a midnight snack 🫂

1. Set salted water to boil.
2. Into a cold pan on medium-high heat, squeeze out one Italian sausage into tiny blobs. If you’re making enough for two or like it …meaty, do two. You want the pieces bigger than a big blueberry, smaller than a cherry. Think green grape, I suppose. (I use the rest of the sausages across my other meals or freeze them.)
3. While the pan heats up, cut like 1/4 of the eggplant into cubes that are just a hair bigger on each side than the sausage blobs. I only cut enough to match the amount of sausage. Toss it in with the sausage and give it a little olive oil & a couple cracks of black pepper. 
4. Let the sausage season the eggplant with salt & herbs by pushing it around a little, but don’t be aggressive. We want little crusts to form on the sausage & the eggplant will stick if we rush it. If it doesn’t want to move, don’t insist. 
5. Strip a few threads of thyme and toss them on the sausage pan. If you want it spicy, and you should, now is the time to bloom the red pepper flakes. I like a hefty pinch.
6. Boil as much pasta as you want for 11-12 mins.  (I prefer to prep sauce but make my pasta fresh whenever I want it, so I only make as many noodles as I can eat.) Stirring occasionally helps this shape cook evenly. Cut a handful of cherry tomatoes in half, the long way.
7. When the sausage and eggplant are ready, turn off the heat and leave it in the pan. Drain the pasta, put it in a bowl, & give it a little olive oil.
8. Get the empty pot ripping hot again — when it’s at a high heat, pour in some olive oil and carefully add the tomatoes. Do not touch them for like a minute or two — you want them to blister. If it starts smoking, that’s good. Run the fan. Once they release from the pan, push them around to get them a little softer, then reduce the heat to medium. Add half the jar of sauce with the sausage & eggplant and let it all come to a simmer.
9. While the sauce heats up, wash and strip a handful of basil leaves from their stems. I like a big handful personally. If you have the rough kind of basil, tear it up. If soft, leave it whole. Add the leaves into the sauce once it starts to bubble up & turn off the heat immediately.
10. Scoop half of it over your pasta & add the cheese. More black pepper! 

Save the rest for later or share with a friend <3 

I can't stop fucking eating this summer salad

I have been eating this salad non-stop. It's literally all I crave and all I enjoy right now. This is my take on a salad that I ate at a restaurant in Boston last summer, where I had this four times in a week.

in all its glory

I make it out of all Trader Joe’s ingredients, except for the fig balsamic, which my friend Ally got me at the Flatiron Eataly in NYC.

Greens

• butter lettuce + arugula bag mix 
• torn basil (lots) 

Protein + fat

• Trader Joe's grilled lemon pre-prepared chicken breast -- I usually cut up like 1/2 cup or so and microwave it for 30 seconds. A whole package lasts me like 3 huge salads
• Plain chevre (if you don’t like goat cheese, torn mozzarella from a big ball would work just as well)
• Slivered almonds (not sliced)

Fruits: be not afraid to try your fruit at Trader Joe's, especially the berries

• Ripe nectarine: smell the stems
• Strawberries, sliced: smell the pack for that sweet, achey summer smell 
• Blackberries: try one
• Blueberries: try one, look for dusty skin

Dressing: I don't mix this beforehand. I put this on the salad all at once and then toss the shit out of it 

• Fig balsamic or any good balsamic vinegar (good balsamic pours quite slowly, so I do a bunch of thin drizzles)
• Olive oil (2ish big glugs) 
• Generous squeeze of lemon 
• Salt
• Pepper

I eat it out of a big mixing bowl like an animal

Baking with my grandma, working on my tan, and other benefits of being home

I was home in Chicago for ten days this past week — I'm about to go to bed, so I'll make this quick. The highlight was making mamón with my gramma, which my sister filmed on my phone. 

I love my gramma. 

It was a family movie kind of week. My mom took me and my sister and my cousin to watch Freakier Friday, which was really well done. I normally hate sequels, and I was really nervous about this one being terrible, since I love the original so much, and I love Lindsay Lohan. It was really sweet actually, and it was the kind of Filipino representation I really fuck with — these people just happened to be Filipino. It was also the kind of LA depiction that felt really sweet to me: Larchmont Wine + Cheese mentioned, a couple of Silver Lake shots right near where my friends live. Made me really happy. Made me miss LA. 

We watched Spy Kids and Thunderbolts on my last night, which was awesome. I really loved the combat and Lewis Pullman and Florence Pugh's performances. I don't really give a shit who knows it — I really like marvel movies. I find them so comforting. Yeah. Even the era of Marvel we're in now has some good stories, one of which is Thunderbolts. 

These are my favorite things about being home: 

1. I don't have any friends at home, due to me going to boarding school and having fallen out of touch with my friends from middle school and early high school. I have two cousins that I really love, and a couple of aunts, and my gramma and my uncles. But outside of them, there's no one to see, which gives me a lot of time to...
1. Walk around my neighborhood with a book or on the phone. My neighborhood is just one big loop that backs up to another big loop neighborhood via prairie path. The part where the two loops meet is a beautiful pond with a bench, and it's nice to sit there in the summer and read. 
2. Spend the day at my favorite antique store, which is one town over, and within walking distance of the salon where my aunt cuts my hair, this amazing pizza place, and a bookshop in an old house. I go and I poke around until I've exhausted the entire shop and chatted with Dori, the lady who owns it, for an hour and a half. It is my secret weapon for gifts and jewelry, and this time I bought two rings.
3. Sit at my parents' patio, soak in the sun, enjoy the flowers, do my computer work, and sip my coffee. I could sit out there all summer long, all day. I love eating my breakfast out there, going for walks between meetings... I'm obsessed with the patio. 
4. Lay on my checked blue quilt in the backyard with Finn, my dog. He is perfect. He loves to picnic. We read together. 

Unfinished thoughts on "being someone" to return to later

Molly and I were talking about this thread today:

Which reminded me of this conversation I had recently, with another old friend: 

I spent all of my teen years studying the people I'd silently elected into the Someone class of whatever it is they did well — being good at volleyball, being preppy, being cool, being a Christian, lol — not by doing, but by obsessing over what it took to be Someone who would. And desperately seeking their acceptance and validation. 

Fwiw, I don't regret the way I did this when I was between 11-13 years old; that's basically how to be that age. You observe, you tastemake, you emulate. I remember just using the internet to surf blogs and look at Pinterest and watch YouTube videos of random people and stare at fashion catalogs to literally sample the elements of personhood and of beauty from the world. I had an Alexa Chung phase (sigh). But I unfortunately didn't learn the differences between attempting to be someone who x and just doing x until much later, like my early twenties. I don't remember when the shift happened, but it eventually just did. And I'm trying to figure out how. 

On the body knowing, on loving it

 

The idea that the body knows what it needs — to heal, to return, to self-regulate — reigns in my mind, but some days it feels like it's becoming less and less true. 

It feels like I've been sick for months and months on end. I'll heal and then get sick again a few weeks later. I've been getting fucking wrecked, honestly. 

When I was in the hospital for my cyst rupture, the imaging showed that I have another one growing: 2.5cm on my right ovary, emitting random hormones that my body doesn't know what to do with. I've been breaking out hormonally, I gained a little weight, there's lots of water retention in my face, and I've started a few of the other typical PCOS symptoms. I do not know how this might affect my fertility. It all feels so defeating when I dwell on it.

Some days I believe the thing about the body knowing, that it works diligently and actively in ways I don't understand, can't see, can't ask it about. I think where I’m landing most nights is that it’s best to actively practice love toward my body — neither to treat it neutrally, nor to shame it. 

Earlier this year I took a bath for the first time since I was 19 or so. The way I even got into the tub was kind of funny: I came home from something very late at night, and I felt sickness coming on — eyes hot, body aching, weak. I stood at the corner of my island for what felt like several minutes contemplating what I would do if I had a boyfriend or a friend over and they felt the way I felt inside. I watched this alternate version of myself spring into action; she drew a bath, turned down the lights, and put on music. She cut fruit. She boiled water for tea. She enjoyed doing something nice for them. 

So I did all of that shit for myself. I made noodles and drank tea and cut oranges and had them all in the bath and drew up little islands of bubbles to cover the surface of the water. It felt strange to do this very loving thing for this body, my body.

I was mostly just shocked at how easy it was to do once I pretended I (the giver) was different from myself (the recipient), and I was surprised about how it felt to receive. It did feel good being on the accepting end of care, even when the person who generated it was me, and not someone else.

It occurred to me then that showing my body love can be a pretty straightforward thing. Self-love had always sounded like a waste of time, a sort of inwardly slouched affection for myself, a weird term for an elusive state of mushy spiritual unlock that you achieve by somehow inducing yourself to fall in love with you. Those definitions don't interest me — I feel more comfortable with the idea that loving yourself might simply be a thing you do or don't. It's a verb. It's a practice. It's not a feeling or an attitude or a state of enlightenment.

I find it useful to think about building consistency in serving my body or my heart/mind, then executing each act of service as consciously, meticulously, and faithfully as I would if I were serving [insert person here]. It’s easy to fall out of this thinking, but the easiest way back in is to start by pretending that my receiving self is my friend — she just happens to look a lot like me. 

I’ll even address her differently in my mind — stand to the side of her, examine her situation from a few feet away, and speak with compassion and acceptance. If she's feeling shitty from a lack of sleep, I can withhold judgments or assumptions about the reasons why she stayed up so late. I can ask her questions about how she's feeling and why she might be skipping out on sleep, and I can more easily get to answers when the primary feeling she's feeling isn't self-judgment. I can ask her what she needs, and if what she really wants is a bath, even if she doesn't feel like she deserves it. (I would never consider whether my friend deserves a bath; I'd just tell her to get into it.) After enough time, I've found that I've stopped pretending to be my own friend. I am. 

Anyway, anyway. The biggest discovery for me here is probably that I don’t need to rely on affection or draw on emotional love for myself to show love to my body. Even in times of exhaustion or even self-loathing, I can just decide to. 

My favorite page from my favorite book on writing

When I turned 23, my friend Meghana gave me a copy of her favorite writing book. When I moved to DC, I forgot to pack it, so I bought the 2nd edition, which isn't nearly as good. I've been craving the guidance from the first chapter, Thinking Well, and now that I'm back at my parents' house, I finally have it.

Here's page 5 of Writing With Style, Third Edition, by John R. Trimble:

All writing is communication. But most writing hopes to go further. It hopes to make the reader react in certain ways—with pleased smiles, nods of assent, stabs of pathos, or whatever. 

So we can say, generally, that writing is the art of creating desired effects. 

Now for an essay writer, the chief desired effect is persuasion. Suppose you are that writer. You want your readers to buy two things: your ideas and you, their source. That is, you want them to view your ideas as sound and interesting, and to view you as smart, informed, direct, and companionable. (All of these things, of course, are desired effects.) If you don't persuade them to accept you, it's doubtful that you'll persuade them to buy the ideas you're proffering. We buy from people we like and trust—it's human nature.

The big question, then, is how to win readers? Here are four essentials:

1. Have something to say that's worth their attention.
2. Be sold on its validity and importance yourself so you can pitch it with conviction.
3. Furnish strong arguments that are well supported with concrete proof. 
4. Use confident language—vigorous verbs, strong nouns, and assertive phrasing. 

While that looks like a pretty full recipe for successful writing, it isn't. Even if we exclude sheer artfulness, one thing is still missing—and almost always is. The ultimate way we win readers is by courteously serving them—that is, satisfying their needs. An experienced writer knows that to serve well is to sell well; equally, to sell well is to serve well. They are complementary activities. The means are inseparable from the ends. 

The writer, for all practical purposes, does not exist without the assent of his readers, who have the power to shut him off at whim. This fact of life makes pleasing them absolutely critical. But that's only fair. If we're going to ask them to give us their time and attention, then we're in their debt, not the other way around, we must be prepared to repay their kindness with kindness of our own. Beyond pleasing them simply to square debts and keep them reading, though, there's also the practical necessity of pleasing them in order to persuade them. Samuel Butler long ago remarked, "We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself." I don't wholly agree with that, but it's certainly close to the truth. A pleasing manner surely makes one's arguments themselves seem pleasing because it dresses them in an aura of reasonableness.

A dump of the flotsam in my head (Should I have made bank on Notion templates in 2019? I'm reading nonfiction!)

As I was laying in bed just now working on a presentation for Monday morning, I started catching up with Hannah Witton. One of the things she brings up is wanting to sell Notion templates, which is something I always regret never having done. I think often about the amount of money I could have made doing this over the last six years, and it makes me sad. 

I also know exactly why I didn't do this; I was more interested in teaching people how to form relationships with their own information than selling them templates — teach a man to fish, etc., etc. I do believe it's hard for people to put templates into effective, sustained use without knowing how to think in Notion, so I stand by my lack of movement on templates on principle, but I know I could have made a fuckton of money. The templates I designed for students are still the default ones in the product. 

I wonder if I could just become a Notion influencer. I think that was the other thing — I didn't want to be associated with the Notion brand; I found it cringe after a little bit. Mildly cheugy or something. Even though I knew they did things well, even though I loved the experience, even though it gave me everything. It was something about the sort of blind consumer subservience to the aesthetic of a software brand that rubbed me the wrong way? And also just the ongoing frustration of being conflated with the brand itself. I didn't want to be the Notion girl anymore — not on campus, not online, not at parties (I was). And as a 4/7 enneagram boomerang, I had to find ways to be Different. 

But maybe I should just publish my fucking templates?

For the first time in years, I feel like I really want to read, I like reading, and I want to read several books at once. This happens to line up really nicely with me being home, where I have unlimited access to my parents' perfect backyard and patio, where reading and drinking coffee is a joy. The books I have with me are: 

• You Are the One You've Been Waiting For by Richard C. Schwartz, PhD. It's about internal family systems therapy, or "parts work," and it's basically about how to use parts work to sustain intimacy in American romantic relationships. I could give it a more impassioned pitch, but it's late. Also the writing? Fine. Content highly useful though. Can't imagine starting another relationship without finishing this. I think I'll make it required reading for any future boyfriend-to-be.
• Fundamentals by Frank Wilczek. On physics, brimming with joy and conviction, written in plain English.
• Writing with Style (Third Edition) by John R. Trimble. This is the best book I know on the craft of writing — specifically the third edition. Very practical, not up its own ass. Essential.
• Musicking by Christopher Small. It's about the meaning of participating in live music, no matter who you are. I've talked about this one in "tales of a night out walking." (Not with me, but I wish I'd brought it: Keep it Moving by Twyla Tharp. Also mentioned in that same other post)
• How Things Are Made by Tim Minshall. It's a book about how manufacturing shapes our lived reality.

What I find really cool about all of these books is the sense of conviction and perspective the author brings me, the reader. This is a little meta, but in Writing with Style, Trimble talks about writing as the art of creating desired effects, and how the best way to do this is by courteously serving your readers. All six of these authors create within me the same delight in the subject that delights them. It's like listening to a teacher who goes to great pains to transmit their passions to you. They offer me the lenses through which they experience life.

It's cool to look within and around and see more layers. There's more to love, more to question, more to piece together. And for that I thank the authors of these books — for the first time in years, I'm reading nonfiction again.