Update for Grampa

Dear Grampa, 

I’m doing okay, good even, here in DC, where it's 90º and sunny. I miss you every day. I used to think people were exaggerating when they said that kind of thing, you know, after people died, but I get it now. 

Many things have changed. For one, I’m not with that guy anymore. I’m not with anyone, actually. I think I prefer it that way, that this has actually been really good for me, but I wonder when that will change. I cut a lot of my hair off; Dad thinks I’m going to meet someone soon. Those things seem to be related in his head. 

I think a lot about whether you’d be proud of me, whether you’d be happy for me. I’ve made a lot of mistakes this last year — selfish things, silly things. Things that make me want to be little again, want nothing I do to matter. I wonder what mistakes you made at my age, how you dealt with them, or if you let God deal with them for you. 

I wish I could ask you how you felt about yourself and your life when you were 27. Were you sure of anything? 

I wish I could spend one more day with you on the couch, asking you question after question about your life. To this you’d probably ask me why, and I think the real answer is that I hope I could gather some kind of sense of self from stories of who you are and where you’ve been, in the way that heritage seems to leave others with little to think about who they are in the world. But this is also an unfair read of everyone around me, and your story is your story, you might say, and not mine. And you’d encourage me to make my own anyway. It did always seem like you were seeking invention, self-invention or real. 

And so the conversation turns to what I have been doing. What I am building, what I am proud of. What I want to invent. 

I’m building a life, a nice, easy life, here in DC. It is a little weird doing this so far from home, but you did this too, didn’t you? You would have been right around my age, and you and Gramma had Dad. Did it ever make you feel funny? The weird thing is that I don’t feel like it’s that deliberate. I’ve found myself here, and so here I am. I’m making friends, I’m cooking for people. Stuff that’s always been part of our lives. 

I have two jobs, too. At Job #1, I do creative direction and storytelling in science and technology policy, trying to help the government maintain global leadership in science and in AI. That’s why I’m in DC.

Job #2 is a creative studio called Spaghetti Dog that I started with my friend Maddy. We take all kinds of jobs, mostly in LA, and the core of what we do is connect people who have something to say to the people who should hear it, and we make sure that story is as alive as can be. I worked on a wedding last year for my friends, and I produced and edited their love story to be told by fourteen of their closest friends before a live audience of 90 guests. Earlier this year, I was backstage at the Hollywood Bowl to see an artist I was working for briefly, pinching myself and taking ginger shots for my stomach. I creative directed some visuals for her festival performances, and I’m working on an upcoming album release for someone so kind and talented. I’m getting closer and closer to the dream of getting to build worlds around music. I make things with my hands: small crafts, like knitting, and installations for events. I think of you and your dreamy, meticulous sketches and your prototypes all the time, and I make my own. I built a 6’x10’ foamcore display inside the Library of Congress recently after completing a test build the day before in my office. You’d have probably had a better solution than painter’s putty for the thing I had to fix at the last minute, but I think you’d have been proud of how I did it. 

On the side, I’m not building parade floats or having hundreds of people over in my backyard for egg rolls, but I’m nurturing my little corner of the world. I hosted a spring camp for creative women in rural Washington in March. I’m having friends over at Mom and Dad’s in September. I just hosted my first album listening party on Wednesday and today I’m getting together with my friend Lydia to plan out the next few months of music. 

I look roughly the same as I always have, though a few things are new. My hair is back to the same length it was when I was three. Instead of two ear piercings, I have five, and there’s a rock in my belly button. I’ve only gotten two more tattoos besides the one of your hands. They say it’s addicting, but I seem to have leveled out for now. 

I have a best friend in San Francisco. She just got married and they have a new cat. I also have dear, dear friends in Boston, New York, LA (do you remember Juliet?), Chicago, and here in DC. Life these days is so distributed. I think of you and Grampa Bob and your matching shoes, a fifteen minute drive away. 

All of this makes me wonder what’s next. Not in an I’m in a rush sort of way, but as in I’m wondering what this will all lead to. But I guess I can cover that in the next update.

P.S. I’ve been thinking about volunteering lately. Anytime someone asks me for cash, I see you and the dollar bills you kept neatly in your wallet. I take out cash at the grocery store so we can give it together. 

potatoes for elvira

hi love, 

these potatoes are for you. I can’t make them for you in person, so this is the next best thing. You do need a day's notice to make these. It's also not hard work, but this is a recipe that moves somewhat slowly. I like to make it while calling friends like you.

Ingredients:

1. 1 Trader Joe's bag of gold potatoes. Alternatively, get like 7-8 big gold potatoes. 
2. Pinch of baking soda
3. Diamond crystal kosher salt
4. A few glugs of olive oil
5. 2 cloves of garlic
6. 1 lemon, preferably unwaxed 
7. 3 tbsp butter
8. Dried oregano
9. Black pepper grinder

Supplies:

1. Pot 
2. Sheet pan 
3. Thin metal spatula 

Instructions:

1. The day before you make the potatoes:
1. Get a half pot of water boiling with a palmful of salt and a tablespoon of baking soda. 
2. Peel and cut the potatoes into 1.5-2 inch chunks. I took this picture to give you a sense of how big I cut them: 
   
   
   
3. Boil them uncovered for 12-15 minutes. A lot of recipes call for these to be parboiled, but I actually just cook them all the way. This is a recipe that benefits from negligence. 
4. When they're soft when stabbed with a fork, fish them out into a bowl, toss in like 3 tbsp olive oil, then shake the bowl until all the potatoes look fuzzy and there's mashed potato forming on the sides of the bowl. 
5. Lay them out on the baking sheet to dry. Once they've stopped steaming, set them in the fridge uncovered overnight. 
2. The next day:
1. Set a rack in the middle of your oven and preheat it to 450º. When the oven is ready, get the potatoes straight in from the fridge. Set a timer for 45 minutes.
2. Grate two garlic cloves and a whole lemon into a bowl using a microplane, then add few tsp of oregano and a few cracks of black pepper. 
3. Melt 3 tbsp butter on low in a small saucepan over the stove, and dump the garlic and lemon and spices in. After 1-2 minutes, when it smells loud, take it off and put it in the bottom of a bowl big enough for the potatoes. (It’s important that you actually cook the lemon zest in the butter; if you don’t, it will turn the butter bitter.) 
4. Like 45-55 minutes later, when the potatoes are deeply browned at the edges and on the sides but the bottoms aren't literally black, take the pan out of the oven and let it rest for 5 minutes. (The potatoes will be easier to scrape off if you wait a second.)
5. Scrape the potatoes off and put them in the bowl. 
6. If you're ready to serve them, ross them with the lemon butter and serve immediately. If you need time, throw them back in at 425º for 7-8 minutes and then toss them with the butter.

Enjoy your chicken, send me pictures. Love you <3 

Things I've bought recently

• Some '90s Isaac Mizrahi kitten heels with an elasticated back strap, in a sort of yellowish almond color. Pointed toe, black bow. 
• Six used books: 
• How it Works, Steve Parker 
• The Random House Book of How Things Work, also Steve Parker 
• The Squirrel's Birthday and Other Parties, Toon Tellegen (I have owned a copy for years, but this one is a gift for my CEO's kids)
• Writer to Writer, Gail Carson Levine (I've had the LibGen version for years, found the physical version in Baltimore) 
• Architecture by Team, William Wayne Caudill (This will come in handy at work)
• Simple Gifts, author unknown, on simple shaker projects you can do at home 
• LUSH Glory conditioner, in the smallest size. (I was curious. Will report back.)
• Two Stevie Wonder records: Songs in the Key of Life and The Secret Life of Plants, both of which I've been searching for vintage copies of for some time now, hoping for intact booklets. I found both of them at Bmore Flea. 
• Morgan's pharmacy run
• Nuxe Huile Prodigieuse Or Florale (after trying all four) 
• A313 (giving this a try at Savannah's behest)
• mixsoon Bifida Essence (I swear by this for repair) 
• Homeoplasmine (sigh) 
• Two boxes of Annie's white cheddar shells 
• Haribo Happy Cherries
• A birthday card in the shape of a brontosaurus 

And now for a month of trying not to purchase anything...

a poem

 

save your voicemails

At the end of the work week, I found myself under my desk, resisting the urge to put my head between my knees, sipping electrolyte solution. For moments like these, I keep a pouch of this stuff in my bag, folded up into an Altoids tin along with some eye re-wetting drops, healing ointment, and a single Cold-Eeze lozenge. I'm still not sure what had caused me to nearly collapse. I sat there for about half an hour and eventually decided to call a car. 

I stepped outside. It had just rained. The sun was setting but not yet gone, washes of warm light and cold shadow falling over the cars and the apartment buildings. A man and woman stood nearby, chattering loudly about why prediction betting should be regulated, and probably soft drinks along with them. They didn't seem to know each other that well; it was news to her that he used to be a libertarian. She clearly liked him. He was clearly unsure. 

I put my headphones in and saw two missed calls, one from my optician in LA. Her name is Mimi, and she is also a DJ. Your voicemail box is full, said my phone, so I started to delete the messages, tens at a time, from robots and people I didn't recognize. I culled everything, save for a few here and there, and got all the way back to the beginning: mid-2022.

That can't be right, I thought. I checked my deleted messages. I checked my saved. 

I opened Voice Memos and searched "grampa." Where the fuck was my car? "Grandpa." Nothing. "Voicemail." Only one memo, 18 seconds long, labeled "Voicemail-105.m4a." Mar 17, 2023. I swiped away. It began to rain.

The voicemail I was looking for had been delivered in 2020. But what if I'd had the good sense to save it in March of 2023?

I went back to my memos, searched "voicemail" again, and this time I pressed play.

I wept. 

It rained. 

By the time my car arrived, my eyes were dry and I'd listened to it a few times. I fell asleep on the way home. 

All in all, I had a good day at work today. A good week, in fact, and I'd like to tell you about it, save for the fact that I'm supposed to have gone to sleep hours ago, and I should save those thoughts for the morning. There are a lot of them. The reason I'm up is my friend — my cousin, in effect. I don't believe in platonic friendships unless they're like this one. He once told me I'm as sexual an object to him as Dwayne the Rock Johnson. We decided to go on a road trip this year, one where we each have some kind of question we want to answer. I told him I wanted to go find a bunch of Filipino people in middle America and ask them how they ended up there. 

a phone call, a date, a memory

I called a friend today — he's funnier than me, often in this sort of dark way, but he's also wise and his thoughts feel well-measured. Maybe but is the wrong operator, because maybe "darkly funny" is something you only get to be if you're a little bit wise and good at measuring out your words. Whatever the case, I find him gentle and tactful when he needs to be. He asks good questions, which is the most important thing in writers and photographers of any kind, and he is both. So I asked him to write with me on a script I’ve been thinking about. He said he'd give it some thought. I hope he says yes. This is the kind of idea I haven't been able to shake for years, but it needs the right team.

I went on a date the other night. I felt almost nothing about it — good guy, good taste in sweater, good cologne, good face, good mustache geometry. Pleasant enough conversation. He explained what it would require, technically speaking, to gene drive mosquitoes out of existence, and why malaria vaccines are a better alternative (I had asked). But I wasn't really in it. The whole thing felt like a task. I had this thought at one point that he pursued a lot of the interests that I thought were cool on paper in a sort of boring way. He asked me if I wanted someone to walk me home, and I said no. 

Instead, I took myself to the bookstore, which was open late. While I was there, I shamefully purchased Rosie Kellet's In For Dinner on my phone while standing in the cookbook corner; it was readily available on the bad app for half the price. I needed to cut corners somewhere. 

I walked out with two things: A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver and the making of a story, Alice LaPlante — I've been in the mood for instruction lately. I made my way home, tiptoeing over ice, happy to be returning to my empty apartment, happy to make tea and think private thoughts to myself.

I fell asleep reading Oliver. In the morning I dragged both her and LaPlante to a teahouse the following afternoon, where I waded deep into the first chapter of the making of a story, where LaPlante proposes a few simple exercises. The first one is a finish-the-thought prompt: “I don't know why I remember…” A single image came to me immediately:

I don't know why I remember driving through downtown with ▭ when I first moved back to LA after that summer I spent living above the garage. Specifically, I remember reaching across the gap between the front seats and thumbing through the hair by his ears.

After a while he said, "You know, you don't have to keep doing that," which I now understand to mean please stop. And I said, "No, it's okay," which I now understand to mean I'm doing this for me, not for you. I was still in disbelief that he was real.  

I stayed home sick from work today and will probably do the same tomorrow, but I dragged myself to the grocery store because I needed some very important things: biscuit dough, green onions, silken tofu, mushrooms, frozen strawberries. When I’m sick I want to eat everything, like my body is burning fuel to heal itself. I mean, I guess it is.

to be specific in our affections

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about specificity. There’s this clause that’s bound itself to my brain like a barnacle, and I notice it whenever I get into the elevator or turn on the shower:

to be specific in our affections

It’s been stuck there since this phone call I had in December. At some point, I said something nice. My friend paused and said, “You are very good at giving compliments.” 

You have two immediate options when you get a compliment: shiver it off or accept it. The latter is better. Then you can do what I do and spend your commute thinking about whether it’s really true, and why or why not, and what it really says about you. When people compliment you on giving compliments, it might be because you’ve noticed some small subtle something in them or picked up a pattern in the way they move, and named it.

So maybe what I’ve been thinking about isn’t just specificity, but specificity in love. In friendships and in romance, I lean into love that feels specific. It’s easy to forget how actively we can design our affections for every recipient: I don’t want words that could be meant for anyone else; I don’t want to vaguepost. I want a love that’s conscious of my quirks. And when you have a love that exists specifically between two individuals, this creole of affection starts to emerge. The love gets wonderfully weird, and then it becomes durable. How can two people constantly designing their love to welcome the strangeness and specificity of the other do anything but last?

There's this poem I think about a lot but can never find, which I think I encountered in an anthology when I was in high school. The poet writes about his wife's elbows, how they matter to him — it’s a comment on how we write about loving the neck and the lips and the eyes but what about the elbows? So much hinges on them, literally.

Don’t bother looking for it. None of the poetry that surfaces on search for love and elbows is worth reading. It's all too ambitious, too corny. I liked that one poem because I think the author understood that his job was simple, was to show you something small.