Last weekend, with temperatures hovering in the high 60s, I was on a damn rampage. On the menu:

• Chicken chili

• Butternut squash soup

• Corn muffins

• Tuna salad

• Chia seed pudding

That’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the whole week, baby! The chia seed pudding (breakfast) and tuna salad (lunch) are the side characters so let’s get those over with.

1. Mix two cups of milk to a third cup of chia seeds, eat with yogurt or fruit or whatever your heart desires. I did one layered with vanilla Greek yogurt and topped with bananas and dates, and one layered with pumpkin yogurt (vanilla Greek yogurt mixed with pumpkin puree) and crushed graham crackers. Be creative!

2. Chuck three cans of tuna into a bowl, add yogurt/mayo/mustard in your preferred ratios and whatever accessories you want (red onion, pickles, dill, grapes, apples, chickpeas, celery, herbs, capers, literally whatever floats your boat).

Bada bing bada boom.

Chicken chili

I love chili. Some people are a little crazy about it. My uncle, for example, has a literally insane recipe with like 96 ingredients and fifteen hours of slow-cooking. These chili recipes are meant to scare you away from chili. Chili is not scary. Chili is easy.

My recipe, below, is an amalgamation of many recipes I’ve cooked before. What I love about chili is that it’s endlessly adaptable. You don’t even really need a “recipe” for it, as you’ll see by my adjustable instructions.

I timed this and it really is only ~30 mins of prep: 15 minutes to peel/chop veggies and 15 minutes of active cooking time over the stove. Also it is really customizable! Experiment! My uncle likes maple syrup and BBQ sauce in his and I think uses bison meat. So do what you want! My only real piece of advice is not to skimp on the seasonings — a tablespoon of each seems like a lot, but it’s a lot of chili.

Butternut squash soup

Squash is such an underrated veggie, imo. A few weeks ago we picked up a giant candy roaster squash from the CSA and I stuck the entire thing in the oven, roasted it, mashed it with some butter, and ate it straight out of the container for like five days straight. It was delicious! We were then on a butternut squash pasta kick — you can make a fire mac n' cheese with it or just roast, mash, and thin out with pasta water for a nice sauce.

This week was finally time for soup. Butternut squash soup is also supremely easy. Here is how I do mine:

This soup is like a hug <3 It’s pretty filling and I literally could just eat it by itself, but it’s not really a full meal so I usually will toast a piece of bread. If you are #proteinmaxxing you could also blend in a cup of cottage cheese or use bone broth. I eat a chicken sausage on the side and call it a day.

Corn muffins

I’ve actually never made corn muffins or cornbread before, but I do loveeee a good hunk of cornbread with chili. There was some corn meal in the pantry when we moved in (unopened) and I had some leftover Krusteaz gluten-free flour, so this felt like the perfect time to experiment…

I frankensteined two recipes together for this — this classic one by Sally’s Baking Addiction and this better-for-you one by Amy’s Healthy Baking. Thanks Sally and Amy <3

I used Amy’s ratios of corn meal to flour (1 1/2 cups cornmeal and 3/4 cup flour), about 2tbsp of butter, 1 large egg and one egg white, 2 tbsp of honey (no sugar), and yogurt. I used regular milk with vinegar in place of buttermilk.

These were just okay — they’re a little too mealy and dry. I think I need to workshop the recipe. I also think overbaked them (I think 19 minutes was a little too long or maybe my oven was a little too hot). Next time I’ll probably add a tablespoon of olive oil, use a 1:1 corn to flour ratio, and reduce bake time. I don’t think the GF flour made that big of a difference but I also might try AP flour.

They are good warmed up and spread with a little extra butter. Since they’re kind of dense, they’re also a sturdy topping for the chili which I like.

If you take anything from this, don’t be afraid to experiment! I like tweaking recipes to make them more appropriate for everyday consumption (ie not including an entire stick of butter sorry) and seeing what swaps or additions I can make to up the nutritional value of a dish (ie sweet potato brownies actually fire).

If that doesn’t make you seethe with jealousy, I don’t know what will! It is at this time of year that the spirit of a white millennial woman possesses me and I become obsessed with fall — sweaters! boots! crunchy leaves! pumpkin spice flavored e̷̡̹͚̍͝ṿ̷̞̥͌ȩ̵̎̓́r̸̽͊̌͜y̸̠̿͆t̴̟̗̙̓ḧ̶͖͇̭́̓̌i̸̪͚͔͆n̴̛̦̍g̶̣̫̀̎!

Anyway, I digress. I had two really wonderful weekends to kick off the fall season. Let’s review:

Last weekend, Philip and I drove west, to Marlinton, West Virginia. In Marlinton, West Virginia, for 35 years and counting, citizens have gotten together for the Harvest Festival and Roadkill Cook-Off. The event draws close to 15,000 attendees to a town whose population doesn’t even hit 1,000. The roadkill cook-off is arguably the crowning event, in which dishes must feature at least 25% wild game and an animal commonly found dead along the road.

My mom invited us to go and I at first said, wtf is a roadkill cook-off, and then, upon learning the above information, said sure why not.

We arrived in Marlinton on a beautiful Saturday morning. I started the day with an almond milk vanilla latte at Rivertown Cafe, which used to be the city’s hardware store. I straightened the hem on my favorite thrifted horse sweater, which I had broken out from the basement storage box for this very occasion. Then we began our stroll.

The Marlinton Harvest Festival had quite the assortment of things you could buy from the various booth sellers. We saw: a booth with a raffle for a rifle, hand-painted saws, crocheted opossums, those butter squishy toys, planters made out of pots and pans (yes my mom bought one), pottery, fudge and freeze-dried candy, candles that looked like cakes and other desserts, candles that looked like candles, clearly AI-generated quilt designs, and not one but TWO turkey calls.

I was sorely tempted by a charming handmade jack-o-lantern mug but millennial woman was quashed and I ended up only with a bag of kettle corn, which was actually the best kettle corn I’ve ever had in my life. I immediately proceeded to cram handfuls of it into my mouth like a small child who’s never eaten in public before. Win!

Then! The main event! The roadkill. We paid $10 for a wristband that would give us sampling abilities and off we went. Here are the dishes we tried, ranked in order of my least favorite to favorite:

1. Mac of the Ditch (pulled BBQ black bear meat over mac n’ cheese). Bear meat was the most interesting of the roadkills we sampled, but this didn’t do it for me. The meat was fine but there was too much BBQ sauce to really taste it. The mac n’ cheese though… something was off. It had a plasticky middle school cafeteria energy and not the good kind.

2. Pirate Ship Pork (wild hog and apple stew). Wild hog, surprise surprise, tastes like pork… I had to steal a bite of Philip’s meat because my sample didn’t have any in it, which I feel like was kind of the whole point. The meat itself was really nice and tender but the apple stew was lowkey reviling to me. Points for creativity, and I maybe got a bad bite but did NOT like the flavors of this. Something tasted quite artificial and sour.1

3. The Route 66 Head-on Harvest (venison and boar stew). This had a really nice flavor, like a good hearty chili. I thought the meat was cooked well and the mix of venison and boar was tasty, though again mostly I just tasted the spices. The veggies tasted like they might have been the frozen kind and overall this was a little watery for my taste.

4. Road Hard Ruttin’ Buck with Skunk Cabbage (venison with stewed cabbage). I would make this at home! This venison had the best texture and flavor of all the venison I tried, and the cabbage was very unique with a nice spicy/sweet glaze. This was just a little too spicy for me and overpowered the rest of the dish.

5. Jolene Don’t You Take My Deer Cake (venison over corn hoecake with cranberry chow-chow and beet cream). This was so good we had to go back for seconds. The hoecake was a nice sturdy base for the venison, which almost melted into the chow-chow and was a little sweet and a nice textural variation. The beet cream was delicious and so creative! This dish had the most elements but each was really unique and the bite came together astonishingly well.

Each food stand also had a theme which you can likely tell from the titles of the dishes2. There were many a raccoon-themed photo op and I enjoyed staring at a man dressed up as a stag/boar franken-animal who must’ve been sweating his ass off. There were also many small dogs and bees to contend with. (Seriously I think Marlinton residents have the highest number of small dog pets per capita.)

The six bites of roadkill we had (and my six handfuls of kettle corn) did not do much to fill us up, so we went off in search of lunch and ended up back at Rivertown. Philip and I split a shrimp burger and a chicken salad, both served on a brioche bun with homemade potato chips and both really solid. Ugh I’m getting hungry again just thinking about this!

(Rivertown Cafe had a cute free lending library so I also took home a copy of Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders, which is apparently about a plague. They also had lots of mass market murder mysteries and children’s board games with bite marks in them.)

On our way out my mom and her Phillip3 made us come back to their car for a mysterious gift they had to give us that was too heavy for us to carry…

Mysterious gift turned out to be a literally MASSIVE pumpkin that rode back with us and now hangs out on the porch. Phillip (the West Virginian) got it at Dave’s Farm Supply. Awesome gift.

Philip (the Charlottesvillian) and I spent the rest of the weekend at his grandmother’s house in Clifton Forge. Her house reminds me of my grandmother’s old house — like a bug in amber, black-and-white photos of great-aunts as children, Philip and his cousins in tiny shoes, staring up at the camera like they’ve never been asked to pose for a photo before.

It is also funny to me being in an old person’s house and seeing the ways in which they’ve lived their lives for so long — how they store their bread, if butter lives on the counter or the fridge, all of the dishes and random pieces of chocolate tucked into cabinets. In my own grandmother’s kitchen, where most of the appliances were older than I was, there was always a box of Oreo thins in the cabinet. Discovering them felt like seeing an iPhone in a Renaissance painting.

In Clifton Forge, we did basically nothing except cook, eat, go out to get food, and sleep.

(Philip also took me on a “walk” that was actually traipsing off-trail through the forest behind his grandmother’s house in an obsessive quest to show me what he kept obliquely referring to as “the pit” and which turned out to be a really nice natural little valley in the forest and not at all a pit. It was landmarked by a cool three-trunk tree and we saw lots of little spiders and an inchworm.)

We had dinner the first night at Cucci's, which has no internet presence except this Facebook page that hasn’t been updated since 2016. They had a salad bar that brought me back to the glorious days of the UVA dining hall where I basically lived off the salad, cereal, and toast bars. They also had a massive dining room filled with families, kids coming back from soccer games, firefighters — this is the kinda place you grow up going to every Friday night.

After our massive salads (mine had beets and bacon bits just to give you an idea of what I was working with), we split a pizza with half sausage and mushroom and half just cheese. One thing I am learning to admit as an adult is that a good slice of just plain cheese pizza is lowkey unbeatable… something about the way the cheese melts… When we got home I slept for probably 11 hours, and the next morning we had terrible coffee and donuts from a dimly lit maze of small shops in what used to be the bank in downtown Clifton Forge. “Downtown” is literally a single Main St whose main feature is the Ace hardware that takes up literally an entire block. Delightful small-town charm at its finest.

Our final night we went to Haywood’s in Lexington, VA. This is a very cute spot at the George’s Inn that has live music on Sundays — in our case an Australian jazz pianist who played lots of meandering covers. I got grilled asparagus covered in a generous heap of egg salad that was way better than it sounds and tried Philip’s caesar salad (crunchy, cheesy, so delicious) and his grandmother’s whipped ricotta toast (one of my favorite appetizers on any menu). I had a very thin chicken breast with pesto for my main and a giant arugula salad and some of Philip’s homemade spaghetti. Everything was cooked well and impressive and lovely. We eavesdropped on the VMI boys with their dates and chatted up our waiter before we left.

Then we went home and slept more and worked from home on Monday from her house. Breakfast was cereal and raisins and lunch was a turkey sandwich. I felt like a kid again!

The only other weekend I didn’t have other sh*t on my calendar (like actually I don’t think I’ve been this busy since college!) was this weekend, so it was also the only weekend we could go CAMPING! We rented gear from UVA rec, which you can do as a student or community member for actually not that much money! Then we zipped up to Shenandoah’s Big Meadows after work on Friday. I was VERY CONCERNED about arriving after dark and having to set up the tent in the dark. Luckily the dark was not a concern!

The pouring rain, though… that was another story.

We were able to build a fire (thank god) before the rain started in earnest. We set up the tent in the rain (aka Philip set up the tent and I helped by identifying one thing that fit into another thing) and then cooked dinner in the rain — potatoes wrapped in foil and the best sausages ever. While they were cooking we ate a bag salad out of the bag and some cheese and crackers (no utensils just biting into the block of cheese). Literally everything is better cooked over a fire and also everything is better when you’re starving so this was probably the best meal I’ve had in my life.

For dessert we had my favorite dessert of ALL TIME which is a s’more. And not just any s’more. A s’more in which the chocolate is replaced with a REESE’S PEANUT BUTTER CUP.4 In this case a dark chocolate reese’s peanut butter thin. The s’more is probably what helped me get through the night on the ground in the pouring rain.

In the morning I was impressed by how relatively dry we were. We did immediately get basically soaked while packing everything up, also in the pouring rain, and I did strip butt ass naked in the public bathroom to change my clothes. That’s just show business baby. We finished our pilgrimage at Tip Top Diner, a Charlottesville institution I had never been to before.

It was literally SLAMMED on this rainy Saturday morning and our poor waitress was sweating and dealing with a giant 8-top that asked for a new thing literally every time she got there (sweet tea but with NO ICE this time! side of ranch! five pancakes, ordered off-menu! the lunch menu! more hot sauce!). Kim, if you’re reading this, I love you <3

I drank two cups of the best coffee I’ve ever had in my life (diner coffee is superior), ate an entire breakfast plate and then finally crushed a table pancake5.

When we got home we went grocery shopping and took a three hour nap. It was glorious. And (as I told my coworkers when they expressed SHOCK that I had camped in the rain), my next camping trip can only be drier! But really as long as there are s’mores and as long as it’s followed by a trip to a diner I don’t really care what the actual camping experience is like. The joy is in the journey the novelty foods.

Since I started a real M-F 9-5, weekends have become far more sacred to me. Sometimes I have weekends like these two, with travel and outings and friends. Sometimes I have weekends where I do Nothing. These are still good weekends! I try hard not to put any pressure on the weekend — if I can get a little extra sleep, do at least one thing to prepare for the week, and read a few pages of my book, I call it a success. And the balance is nice. A jam-packed weekend makes me a miss a slower one, and a lazy weekend makes me itch for activities.

I hope you, too, had a nice weekend.

Recently, though I find myself reading books and immediately forgetting about them. I struggle to find my next read, scrolling through Goodreads or Libby and feeling uninspired and bored.

I wanted needed a syllabus.

And since I am no longer a student, I found mine in the Booker longlist. The Booker Prize (previously known as the Man Booker) is awarded annually to the best work of fiction published in the UK or Ireland. Its very prestigious and an honor to be short or longlisted. Booker novels tend to lean more experimental and diverse than prizes like the Pulitzer. This year there are 13 novels on the longlist. Here is what the Booker website has to say about them:

The longlist transports readers from a hospital in Mexico City to the Kent seaside in a post-apocalyptic Britain; from an assisted-suicide clinic in Zurich to the barren hillsides of the Outer Hebrides; from the criminal badlands of West Dublin to Kingston, Jamaica in the late 1980s; from an unnamed medieval court to a prison cell that defies explanation.

Tonally diverse, the books abound with humour and heartbreak, satire and surreality. There are fresh takes on dystopian sci-fi, royal history, the crime thriller and the campus novel. There are books about memory, mortality, metamorphosis and murder; about old lives and new worlds; about the limits of human understanding; about reconciliation and retribution; and about the many ways we reckon with the past.

The longlisted authors represent seven countries and three continents, with the majority of them from the UK. Past winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart and previous shortlistee Elizabeth Strout are nominated, alongside 10 authors who are longlisted for the first time – including three debut novelists. Among the nominees are poets, playwrights, editors and critics, as well as a former competitive trampolinist, an ex-lawyer, a fashion designer and a former child actor.

(I never googled who the former trampolinist is because I wanted to see if I could tell from the books. I still haven’t looked it up and I have zero idea. Just goes to show you can never judge a book by its cover 🤣🤣.)

Anyway, I read 10(ish) of the 13 on the list3 and that’s where I stopped because I wanted to finish this article before the shortlist drops. Which is today. After it drops I will probably have some thoughts. Here is the list:

• The Shadow of the Object

• Switzy

• Helen of Nowhere (⭐⭐)

• The End of Everything (⭐⭐⭐)

• The Disappearers

• Black Bag (⭐⭐⭐⭐)

• The Renovation (NA)

• May We Feed the King (⭐⭐)

• The Palm House (⭐⭐⭐)

• The Things We Never Say (⭐⭐⭐)

• John of John (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)

• All Them Dogs (⭐⭐⭐)

• The Vivisectors (ZERO STARS)

I wanted a list of reads that went beyond the Tik-Tok slop clogging the NYT bestseller list (WHY IS VERITY BY COLLEEN HOOVER STILL THERE???). I wanted interesting, well-written books. Because these are books nominated for a very presitigous prize, I hoped they would all be good, if not totally to my taste. Unfortunately that was not the case and is actually maybe impossible. I’ll tell you more about that after I share my thoughts on each book I read.

Helen of Nowhere

Fitzcarraldo Editions (publisher) is into weird sh*t, so it should come as no surprise that this is weird. Unfortunately I didn’t like it. The author was clearly trying to Do Things with structure and point of view, but these things clashed and failed to tell a good story or even a coherent one. I did not think this begged the question “What is the true cost of happiness” as the blurb suggests. This did cost me like two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

The End of Everything

The best way I can describe this is like playing an open-world dystopian video game where you are given no context or history, and must go around collecting objects and trying not to die. In fact I think this would make a really good video game. It made only an okay novel — some really lovely prose and a gripping premise, but too little explanation to make this sticky enough. I believe there is a balance between spoon-feeding and starving, and I walked away famished.

Black Bag

Now this is what I’m talking about! I’m not going to tell you anything about the plot of this book because I think it’s best that you go in blind like I did. Just know that you are in for a wild ride… this book is ridiculous and bizarre and also full of very astute observations that made me feel very human. I did not laugh out loud (sorry I’m just too stoic for that) but I did smirk often while reading this. I just think people need to be weirder!!!!! Embrace insanity!!!!!

The Renovation

Ok I didn’t finish this. I liked the premise (woman’s bathroom renovation fails because they replace her bathroom with a prison cell) and the style, but I just couldn’t get through it. I might return to it later (especially if it ends up on the shortlist) and I suspect I will probably enjoy it.

May We Feed the King

This book had major Fisher-Price play kitchen vibes but was trying very hard to be Michelin-star kitchen. I mean that both literally (we follow a museum curator buying fake foods for displays) and figuratively (overwrought story with no payoff).

The Palm House

I really liked Gwendoline Riley’s First Love and I think this is worse. Her writing is still very sharp but nothing of substance happens. When you write a book where nothing of substance happens, it has to be supported by very excellent writing, very excellent characters, and/or a very excellent setting. Unfortunately these characters and setting are just decent and so this kind of falls apart at the edges.

The Things We Never Say

This is one of the more “normal” books on this list in that it would probably appeal to your mother (not mine but yours). There are characters, dialogue, a plot. I think Elizabeth Strout is kind of overrated so I also thought this was overrated. It’s just. Fine. An average novel. Strout is too heavy-handed with the political messaging but I at least liked reading it (low bar but one many of these novels fail to clear!)

John of John

I am a SUCKER for real Irish (scottish)4 lit. Sally Rooney, Tom Coilbin, Ali Smith, etc etc. I just love a rainy, depressing cliffside!!!! This was so beautiful. The roads, the houses, the cupboards, the looms, fires, girls in skirts, beer, peroxide hair, everything so solid and real. I don’t want to give too much away but the family dynamics and the exploration of queerness and religion are so good.

All Them Dogs

This is real Irish lit in a completely different way. It’s a very violent, bloody gang novel. People describe it as “gritty” and “explosive.” I think this is a really impressive debut from a craft perspective but it was just so awful to read that I was literally dreading picking it up. (I think that says more about me than the book, but still).

The Vivisectors

Bad. So bad. I couldn’t finish this. It is one of the most insufferable pieces of writing I’ve ever laid eyes on. Takes place in University City, whatever the hell that means. Everyone is angry and cruel and the gardeners of the city are staging some sort of coup, which is probably an extended and stupid metaphor for something.

As you can tell, a lot of these books — longlisted for this prize out of one hundred sixty three other novels — SUCKED ASS (in my opinion). And I didn’t even get to complain about them in a seminar!

So what have I learned from this experience?

One, taste is subjective. Which, duh. But really. Even a group of celebrated writers and critics pick books that some people hate and some people love. These people likely thought that all of these books were well-written. I did not. So even something like “well-written,” which in theory should be supported by specific parameters, is subjective.

In other words, prestige means nothing when it comes to personal taste.

So takeaway number one is that you should read whatever the hell you like to read. Who cares what other people think or what smart people have to say. The Booker longlist will not save you.

Takeaway number two, though, is that sometimes it is good to expand your horizons and read books that were not recommended to you by a girl on TikTok telling you that “these are the six books that changed her life.” Go to a bookstore and ask the bookseller to recommend something to you. Google another prestige list and read a few books that interest you. Figure out what YOU like, not what people online like. Free yourself from the shackles of other people’s bad tastes.

Actually I think moms are often right and sometimes it just takes us a long time to realize it. Sometimes we never realize it. Sometimes our moms are wrong (not mine though, she’s always right, hi mom!)

But I think my mom was right about being an adult.

In college, I used to complain to my mom about feeling busy or overwhelmed on the phone, and she would say in a tired voice, just wait until you get to the real world1.

This used to really piss me off, because the world I was living in felts so real. I was juggling lots of responsibilities — a full-time course load, a part-time job, and another full-time “job” (unpaid) at the newspaper. Plus hobbies. And extracurriculars. And I also had to somehow feed myself and brush my teeth and call my grandmother and exercise.

What she should’ve said was just wait until you graduate and get a 9-5 and no longer live within spitting distance of your best friends and can’t walk everywhere. That’s when shit will really hit the fan.

And lo and behold…

The world I was living in during those four years of college was very real, but it was nothing like the world I live in now. College is a very unique experience for most people.

You have a huge amount of independence, which a little terrifying but mostly awesome. You have a built-in community of friends and professors. You are constantly getting to engage with the world in new ways. Schedules change every semester so nothing is that boring. You have an end goal, a defined path: take X number of classes in Y number of semester to graduate with Z degree. Sure, you’re figuring out what Spanish Lit class you want to enroll in, but the pearly gates of graduation are always on the horizon.

It is the best of both worlds: You’re grown up enough that you get to make your own decisions about how much dessert to have but not so grown up that it’s totally inappropriate to get black-out drunk on a Thursday with your best friends.

Adulthood… is not that. Sure, I don’t have homework anymore, but I also have to put phone calls with friends into my calendar. My week is structured around the 8 hours I spend at a desk, and then I try to make the other hours fulfilling and productive and restful. There is less novelty. I have to care for myself differently, cook and grocery shop because I no longer feel good living on protein bars and cottage cheese bowls from the dining hall, and also there is no dining hall anymore. Stretch after the gym.

I have my own EZ pass. I get property tax bills in the mail. I have to worry about the gray fur growing on the air conditioning vent by the bathroom. I have to schedule (and pay for) my own teeth cleanings.

I am freer than I used to be and still more bound up by bills, by life, by being a good friend, daughter, person.

I feel like there’s a sort of taboo around saying you miss college. For me it stems (perhaps obviously) from the fear of being accused of peaking in college, every high-achiever’s worst nightmare.

Now, I am fairly certain I didn’t peak in college, mostly because I was semi-convinced that I had peaked in middle school and high school, and it is safe to say that I did not.

So evidence suggests that I will look back on photos of myself in college and cringe, that my brighter days are ahead. (I hope to peak at ninety-three, hopefully somewhere on a porch, eating something I grew myself and petting a dog.)

But still. I had a great time in college. I loved taking weird classes like Spanish linguistics and yoga and something called “Hacking for Humanists” where I did a machine sentiment analysis of Pride and Prejudice. I loved eating microwave popcorn for dinner with my roommates. I loved the endless freedom of a Monday without classes. I loved that my “job” was reading books. I loved waiting tables and editing articles, long marathons in Clem, going out on Thursdays, making my friends with cars (Eva) drive me to Cookout for milkshakes.

And I miss all of those things. Wouldn’t you???

There is something particularly challenging about those first few years in the milieu of post-grad life. Some of my friends got jobs immediately after graduating or applied to grad programs, and can probably say with some confidence what they’ll be doing in five years. Some of my friends moved to new cities or even new countries. Some have jobs they don’t love, have no idea what their “career paths” will be, are pursuing their dreams and working odd jobs to get by.

I fall more into that second category. I moved to Spain for a year after graduation to teach English with no intention of making that my career. I came back and moved to New York to work for a woman who made fancy Jell-O, hoping to break into the publishing field. I got offered a job at Penguin Random House and turned it down because I changed my mind.

And, I moved back to my college town.

I came across a collection of letters while I was working on this essay. They’re all written by young professionals who moved from major cities to “second and third-tier” cities for family, for love, or for a slower pace.

The letters are sad. The writers seem disillusioned, some of them unsure if they’ve made the right choice, all of them missing bits and pieces of the places they left. Their relief at having left a big city is tinged with the fear of starting over.

As an exercise, I wrote my own kind of letter. It goes like this:

Hello,

I moved away from New York in early May for many reasons — I wanted to be closer to Virginia, to my sister, mom, and grandmother. I didn’t want to do long distance with my partner anymore. I started getting a weird, panicky feeling in the city. I cried myself to sleep many nights, alone in my tiny, windowless apartment.

And I love Charlottesville, my new home.

There are fig trees in my neighborhood. A few weeks ago, the little green buds transformed, almost overnight, into heavy purple fruits. Many of them fell into piles of wet leaves by the curb and began to rot in sticky, fermented piles. But many handfuls ended up in my fridge: for jam, a cake, brought to a friend.

The kitchen is big enough that I can buy a whole chicken and butcher it on the counter, the freezer big enough to hold bones and onion skins for stock. I have a washer and a dryer and a dishwasher and air conditioning, and none of those things are particularly shocking for a person to have.

Some evenings after I work I sit on the porch in my rocking chair. I read. Other evenings I play pickleball after work. Almost all evenings, I stretch out onto the floor, which is clean, because we have a vacuum cleaner. I tell Philip about my day. He is my favorite roommate.

But sometimes it’s hard to be here. It makes sense — I moved from the largest city in the world to the 937th city. It’s also the city I spent four years in as a student, and living here as an adult is much different. I am barraged by constant reminders of what it was like to live as a student, when I surrounded by my closest friends, discovering countless new things about the world, those four strange years of excitement and novelty and challenge. My life was very vivid in Charlottesville during those years, and it is a different shade now.

I miss New York, too. I see my friends in the city posting about new plays they’re seeing, music they’re making, bars they’re staying out late at, and I feel that phantom-limb pang. In New York, I could walk everywhere, and it felt normal. Here, I have already fallen into the convenience trap of having a car. I miss walking. In New York, my friends were out of college, figuring things out, working to enjoy their life outside of work. Here, my coworkers are much older than me, and most of the people my age are students, in a very different phase of their lives. I feel out of place among them, where in the city I was just right. In New York, I was writing a play with some of my friends. We had dreams of producing it in a small theatre. Here, the community of writers is smaller. I miss the vibrancy of New York, the density.

Here’s the thing: despite all that, I know, deep down in my bones, that I made the right choice. I would make it again. And also I know that I will always wonder what my life would’ve been like if I’d stayed in New York. I will always miss those things about the city.

One thing about growing up — about being an adult — is that you realize the world is not as black and white as you thought it was. Two things can be true at once, even if they seem at odds with each other. You can love the place you’re in, love the people you’re with, and ache for the old place, the old people. You can be sure of your choices and wonder too at the potential of the roads not taken.

I can love Charlottesville and my life here and miss New York, and my life there.

There is gray space.

The editors respond to the writers with a lot of grace and wisdom. They are empathetic. They tell the writers to keep their eyes open, to cultivate passions, to find peace and potential. My favorite response is to a young woman just a year older than me, who moved to smaller city for her boyfriend. The editor tells her kindly to think of her life as having gotten bigger, not smaller. You haven’t lost Guangzhou; you’ve just added Changsha. The editor encourages this young woman to lift her head and look around.

Do you know the poet Su Dongpo? He was exiled — truly exiled, not just relocated for a boyfriend — to some of the most remote corners of Song Dynasty China. Huangzhou. Huizhou. Danzhou. Places that were basically wilderness. And in every single one, he found something to love. In Huangzhou, he discovered the pork dish that bears his name. In Huizhou, he wrote about lychees. In Danzhou, he built a school. He didn’t love these places because they were lovable. He made them lovable because he decided to love them [….]

There’s a line from Su Dongpo — the one everyone quotes, but it’s everyone’s favorite for a reason: 此心安处是吾乡 — “Where the heart is at peace, that is home.”

I am finding things to love — the figs, the farmer’s market on a Saturday morning. An iced coffee with maple syrup. A cinnamon raisin bagel. A summer storm on the porch. A person to come home to, a person to help you fold the laundry. And I am learning to be an adult. I scheduled a doctor’s appointment. I paid my taxes. I’m making an effort to learn new things (a guy named Paul is teaching me the guitar). My heart is learning to be at peace here.

Philip and I are playing the alphabet game in the car except we’re picking a song that starts with each letter instead of looking for road signs. Lake Street Dive’s cover of Rich Girl, Jeff Goldblum’s Tattoo, When the Levee Breaks, not quite having time to finish Zombie by the Cranberries before we reach our destination:

Pen Druid Brewery, ‘NEAR INTERSECTION OF ROUTES 522 & 231.’

Crunching over the gravel in my poorly-chosen blocky sandals, we head around the brewery, a nondescript white building, and approach a small trailer in the back. A wood plank balances precariously atop old barrels, serving as a makeshift host stand. A woman at the front in an apron, a kitchen rag sticking out of her waistband, tells us to sit wherever we like, inside or out.

“We got you” she says, and then disappears around the back.

It’s hot, so we sit at high bar stools in the brewery facing the Blue Ridge. The space is small, dominated by big wood tables and benches. There’s are two other couples eating, and a group of people playing a spirited card game.

At the bar, the menu is trim: five native “yeast beers,” three “spontaneous” brews, some ciders, a selection of wines by the glass and bottle.

When we ask, the bartender explains that “spontaneous” brews are inspired by brewing methods in the Senne River Valley that result in what are called lambics, beers fermented through exposure to native wild yeasts as opposed to cultivated brewer strains. They’re carbonated by adding sugars like wort or honey before packaging, and are different from a sour like a Goses or spiced beer like a saison.

We try the Peaches and the Hesperus (named after the Greek ‘evening star’), a blend of mead, cherries and cardamom. Both are unlike anything I’ve ever had — incredibly effervescent and light. The peach tastes so strongly of actual. perfectly-ripe peaches that it feels like I’m really biting into one.

The beer is good, but we are here for the food.

Sumac, which Pen Druid calls a food truck, was founded in 2020 by Daniel and Abigail Gleason. Daniel is Michelin-trained, but, as you may have guessed, this is not a fussy white tablecloth establishment. For one, the entire kitchen is the trailer in the back — really a corrugated shipping container welded onto a cattle trailer. Dishes are served on paper plates with plastic forks. The menu is seasonal, with changes made weekly, and based on the growing seasons of the area. Almost everything is sourced within 150 miles of the restaurant.

This place has been on Philip’s radar for a while, but our visit is spurred by our friend Clem, who works at September Sun farms and told us she also cooks at Sumac — this was, appropriately, while grating a frozen tomato over a heap of ricotta for us at Tomato Fest a few weeks ago. Now, waving at us through the window of the trailer, Clem offers to take us on a tour of the kitchen after the meal.

I’m going to start there, though, so you have context for what comes next.

The space is tiny, basically a screened-in porch dominated by the monstrous oven, heat emanating in oppressive waves. There’s a smoker and a grill, and in the trailer, a single line for expo opposite the garde manger. A dish sink no wider than a filing cabinet. The shelves are lined with jars of spices, pickled items, cookbooks (Gran Cocina Latina, The Nordic Cookbook, The Salt & Straw Ice Cream Cookbook). There are trays of baked goods.

One of the chef hands us tiny shortbread cookies studded with lavender that melt in my mouth. Later he walks by with an entire baking tray filled with every possible size of tomato, all rolling around. He offers us one. Clem’s bangs stick to her forehead as she walks us through. We stick to the walls to avoid getting in anyone’s way, even though we’re in everyone’s way because the space is barely wide enough for two people to pass in front of each other. The kitchens I worked in were palaces compared to this place. It makes it even more impressive that they are able to get such beautiful dishes out of such a small space.

Speaking of the dishes.

the melon course

The first course included two melon-based dishes: a tuna crudo with compressed watermelon, basil, and strawberry vinegar, and a skewer with compressed melon, lonzino, and lunchbox peppers resting on a bed of whipped ricotta.

The tuna was not for me. I found the fish a little overpowering and quite chewy and tough, and the vinegar and basil didn’t come through enough. Compressing the melons in both dishes made them denser, and I missed the light, juicy bite of a fresh piece.

The lonzino — an Italian cured meat made of boneless pork loin — in the second dish made up for the melon misstep, but the star of the show was honestly the whipped ricotta. It’s housemade, and so incredibly rich that at first I thought it was butter. I could’ve just eaten a bowl of that.

the intermediate course

Clem arrived with a couple of extra “intermediate” dishes. “I hope you’re hungry.”

Luckily, we were. The first was the Sumac plate, which was reminiscent of a Girl Dinner: a massive hunk of focaccia, nectarines and blackberries, a pile of whipped ricotta, and pickled radishes and green beans.

I need an entire paragraph for this focaccia. It was the most insane focaccia I’ve ever seen in my life, huge, beautifully crusty on the outside with a generous coating of olive oil but tender and bouncy in the middle. I wanted to lie down on it like a mattress. I wanted to eat it for every meal for the rest of my life.

One of my favorite bites of the night was a piece of the focaccia with ricotta and a bit of nectarine — sweet, a little salty, rich, but brightened with the punch of fruit, just so so good. The bite of that crusty bread is indescribable. The pickled radishes were also incredible, quite tangy but also still snappy and satisfying.

We also tried Sumac’s version of elote, which came smothered in a black garlic mayo with pickled peppers and goat cheese. This was definitely a grown-up version of the mayo and cotija version I’ve had before — the corn was charred and smoky, and the goat cheese worked surprisingly well with the mayo. The corn was a little dry and I wished there were more peppers/something acidic for balance, but I love corn on the cob so much that I still gnawed on the cob like a squirrel when I was done.

the veggie course

You can’t really call this a salad course because it isn’t, but the elements are there. First up was a huge slice of seared tomato, layered with a light ‘corn custard’ and mustard seeds. The tomato was perfect, blackened but still so juicy, light years better than anything in the grocery store. The corn custard was light and almost frothy, a sort of savory whipped cream. It tasted exactly like corn ice cream, which Philip and I made once when we first started dating.

Another highlight for me was the grilled eggplant, which was an entire half of an eggplant dolloped with pepper mayonnaise, XO sauce, and little red onions. I thought this was incredible. Clem told us that they used a mackerel instead of scallops for the XO sauce, a little bomb of umami exploding against the tender grilled eggplant. This checked all the boxes for me: a little spice and crunch from the XO sauce cut with the fattiness of the mayo, a little sweetness from the eggplant, which was tender but not mushy or slimy. I think this could convert even the most ardent eggplant hater.

the carnivore course

This was the first meat-forward course on the menu, which I appreciated as a veggie lover. At this point I was full of eggplant and ricotta and bread, but there was more to enjoy…

The first was a skewer of smoked chicken with yaupon sauce, a pan reduction flavored with tea (and I suspect maple syrup). It rested atop a bed of popcorn grits (!!) which Clem explained are made by popping a bunch of popcorn and then milling it down into grits. These sounded kind of gimmicky but genuinely did taste exactly like popcorn. The chicken was perfect: moist, pulling away easily from the skewer, and smoky without overpowering. With the popcorn grits and that glaze, it was very nearly heaven.

The second dish was breaded catfish topped with fried okra “scales” atop a green tomato and melon gazpacho. This was a delightful presentation. I’ve never had catfish before and was surprised by how dense and meaty it is compared to other whitefish. It didn’t blow me away, but the gazpacho was delicious — quite sweet and almost nutty, with little cubes of pickled melon that added textural interest and some bite.

the dessert course

A pair of desserts, the best kind! We had a blueberry sorbet with a cucumber granita and cider gelee and then a corn cake with a creme anglaise, a peanut caramel sauce, and an entire peach on top.

For those uninitiated, I am a dessert connoisseur and have very strict requirements for what constitutes dessert. (I am genuinely working on a piece about this so no spoilers here). Due to my elevated tastes, neither of these knocked my socks off.

I thought the sorbet was nice and refreshing, but the blueberry flavor was a little weak and the granita was icy and inconsistent in texture. The cider gelee, however, was a star — so much flavor in a coin-sized bit of goo! It added a nice tang to the dessert.

The corn cake was almost like a muffin, sweeter and fluffier than cornbread but with a similar flavor profile. I am not an expert on creme anglaise, but I thought this was fine, maybe slightly split. The peanut caramel sauce tasted good, but the peanuts were big and kind of texturally off-putting. This would’ve been better with fewer elements — honestly just the corn cake and something cool (temperature) to balance it out, like a peach or vanilla ice cream, would’ve taken the cake for me. Pun intended.

Dessert is dessert, though, and I thought this was a nice way to conclude — produce forward and not too rich or heavy.

my final thoughts

Sumac is a very special experience. Clem told us that all of the chefs have a dish on the menu. You can tell that they are constructed with a deep love for food and for cooking.

It’s not anything fancy. The servers are also the cooks, and they arrive to your table sweaty. There are no candles, no real silverware, and the “ambience” is rock music and a big black lab panting at a picnic table outside.

But the food is good. It comes from nearby, and you know who cooked it, and it tastes delicious, and honestly, that’s all I want in a restaurant. It is a feast for the eyes, the stomach, and the soul.

We will be back!

My definition of insanity: seeing women trapped in your ugly ass wallpaper.

I’m not seeing things in the wallpaper (yet) but I am doing some things over and over again and expecting different results. Actually, at this point I’m not even expecting different results. I’m kind of apathetic about the results. I’m just doing the same things over and over out of habit and then when the results occur as expected I’m going oh, hey results, wazzupppppp.

Anyway, I thought it might be a good exercise to put in writing what these things are in an attempt to stop doing them and thus encourage different and theoretically better results.

1. Putting various products in my hair

A secret about me is that I have curly hair2.

Unfortunately I have zero idea how to take care of it because nobody else in my family and possibly the internet has hair like mine: fine, but dense, with weird flat bits on the top and a Hermoine Granger-esque tendencey to triangulate. It frizzes bad but any product I put it in weighs it down into a limp, greasy mess. My best results (see left) come from a simple shampoo and air dry situation, with MAYBE a little oil to tame frizz. And yet! I continue to fall for various gels, creams, mousses, and leave-ins that promise definition, bounce, shine, etc.

I am never defined, bouncy, or shiny. A lesson must be learned.

2. Getting ready for bed when I’m tired

I do not like to get ready for bed if I am at a 7+ in terms of how tired I am3. If I am over a 7, I tend to be lazy about getting ready and skip steps such as skincare, flossing, etc. I also am way more likely to scroll on my phone than read for nonsensical reasons.

Perhaps most horrifically, I am WAY more likely to lie down in bed before getting ready for bed, which just increases my level of exhaustion and also results in even more time passing before I am actually in bed and ready to sleep. I did this last night and was so pissed off by the time I got into bed about how tired I was that it wasn’t even ENJOYABLE!!!! SINFUL!!!!

What I really need to do is get ready for bed after dinner before I do things like go on my computer, watch TV, work, etc.

3. Not having my next book lined up

The cycle looks like this:

I need to either download a second book in tandem with the first or download a second when I hit the halfway mark on my current book. Or just keep a legitimate TBR somewhere instead of just manically scrolling on Goodreads and waiting for a good book to drop into my lap. Or just download six or seven of those TBR books onto my Kindle already.

There are actually lots of solutions to these problems, and yet I’ve failed to take advantage of any of them.

4. Waiting for inspiration to strike

When I was an undergrad I had a professor who told me that writing is not like thunderstorms and ideas will not strike like lightning. Writing does not occur (for most people) in wild, incessant outpourings (or downpours). Writing is like going to the gym: it is boring, and you don’t always want to do it, but the only way to get strong is through discipline.

Despite this stellar advice, I am constantly lounging around in bed waiting for inspiration to walk up and smack me in the face. Inertia keeps me under the covers. Inspiration does not come. I read instead (productive procrastination) and my muscles atrophy.

5. Not packing snacks

One thing about me is that I am a hungry girl. I have never understood people who can just “forget” to eat or go without breakfast. If I do not eat at regular intervals, I get hangry. And I do not mean this in a cute way. I mean am a raging b*tch. I have a hard time focusing and reading complex sentences. I freak out over small things. I have met very few people who react as poorly to hunger as I do. I used to think this meant there was something wrong with me. Now I realize I just need to eat every few hours.

When I’m at home and in a stable routine, this is usually doable. But if I’m not at home or have a spontaneous change that means skipping a normal meal, I need to have a snack. And I am constantly forgetting to bring a snack. Like girl it is as easy as throwing a protein bar into my bag or keeping a bag of chips in my car and yet…

6. Going more than 3 days in a row without exercise

Ok, fine, fine, I admit it — moving my body does make me feel better. I am usually very good at getting myself to the gym, but I tend to be kind of all-or-nothing, especially when I’m out of my normal routine. At home, I go to the gym or go for a run basically every day. When I’m on vacation or traveling, though, I tend to throw it all out the window, which always makes me feel… bad.

Part of this is because my mental vision of vacation is that it needs to be RELAXING and CALM and CHILL and that means lying on the couch all day, and so I convince myself that I need to lie on the couch all day, but actually I hate lying on the couch all day and I do not feel relaxed or calm or chill but insisted restless and sort of feral and in fact I would be much more relaxed if I just went for a little jog or did yoga or moved my body literally AT ALL at one point during the day.

7. Badly f***ing up my hands/feet

Okay this one is a) gross and b) vulnerable, so bear with me4… I have a TERRIBLE habit of picking at my nails/cuticles/calluses etc. I used to bite my nails but grew out of that when someone told me it’s really bad for your teeth, and I realized it’s gross to stick your hands in your mouth all the time. Somehow it is NOT gross to me to peel your nails off and leave little cuticle flakes on the ground, so that’s what I do instead. It is literally just a unconscious habit at this point, especially when I’m especially locked in while reading something. At my desk today I looked down and I had literally torn a hole into my callus while reading about Silvio Berlusconi. If I’m home and have my socks off I will also destroy the calluses on my feet/toes.

I actually don’t know how to solve this one. Someone online said you should have a rubber band on your wrist and snap it every time you catch yourself picking at your hands, but I feel like I’d look like even more of a freak if I was constantly snapping a rubber band on my wrist and had like a giant red welt from it.

8. Hostage negotiating my way out of my phone addiction

The world does nOT need yet another f*cking essay about how phones are bad and we need to get off of them, so I won’t write that essay, but I will admit that my phone is bad and I need to get off it.

Unfortunately I keep attempting peaceful de-escalation strategies like setting easily-overidden time limits or convincing myself I’ll “scroll at the gym only.” I am, in other words, negotiating with a terrorist (the apple ecosystem), when the only thing that has actually, successfully worked for me is to delete the f*cking apps.

Anyway, that’s all the things I do that I shouldn’t. Will I stop anytime soon? Who knows! Let me know your bad habits and how you’re solving them!

If you’re unfamiliar: The Odyssey follows Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, who is on his way home after the Trojan War ends. The Trojan War is a legendary siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek armies, who were pissed because the Trojan prince Paris stole a beautiful woman.

What I remember about The Odyssey is that it was the source material for basically every Basic English Term I encountered throughout my many, many years studying English — the hero’s journey, plot structure, the basic forms of conflict, rhetorical devices, epics, oral storytelling, etc.

I do not want to add my voice to the din, but this Discourse reminds me of another bit of entertainment revolving around a Troy….

I am speaking, of course, about the smash hit Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) High School Musical, released in 2006.

If you’re unfamiliar: Troy Bolton is the leading man of the High School Musical franchise. He is the epitome of Boy: floppy brown hair, dreamy blue eyes, a tortured inner soul, ripped1. When we meet Troy, he is singing his little heart out with a mysterious dark-eyed beauty at the ski lodge his parents are staying at for New Year’s Eve. When school starts, Troy recognizes his karaoke partner in homeroom; it turns out she’s the new girl in town! But Troy must keep his buttery baritone a secret… for he is ALSO the CAPTAIN OF THE BASKETBALL TEAM!!!! And the captain of the basketball team can’t play basketball and sing in the musical. This man vs. inner desire to sing Sondheim is the central conflict of High School Musical, which spurred a wildly successful three-movie franchise.

Now, spoiler alert: Troy eventually discovers that he is a multi-faceted human being who can 1) basket and 2) belt.

As the target audience for the HSM trilogy has come of age, enrolled in a liberal arts college, and majored in Media Studies, there has been a fair amount of rewatching and reanalyzing the beloved DCOM series. Most of it, to nobody’s surprise, is about how any number of the characters are actually gay.

cinephile and the city

The LGBTQ+ Community Has Forgiven Troy Bolton

I think I knew High School Musical was a bisexual allegory before I even knew what bisexuality was and certainly before I knew I was bi myself. This can’t just be about basketball and theatre, I figured. This boy is battling demons, and the demons he’s battling are bisexuality. I can sense it…

Read more

4 months ago · 45 likes · 6 comments · Kiara

This is not particularly surprising given the common stereotype that “theatre is gay,” or, more specifically, that men who do theatre are gay. Interestingly, there is actually not a ton of empirical research to back this up, though anecdotally, we all know stereotypes come from somewhere. Theatre is, after all, traditionally associated with more “feminine” behaviors (dressing up, makeup, dance, emotional vulnerability, etc.) and the arts are increasingly a progressive/liberal space2 and tend to be more open and accepting.

Does that mean Troy is actually a gay man?

…. Well. The first High School Musical movie was released over a decade before Disney Channel’s first openly gay character debuted in 2017, just a single year after gay marriage was legalized. That same character was the first to utter the words “I’m gay” in 2019, a milestone for the network. While Kenny Ortega, the series’ director, is a gay man, there is no way he could’ve gotten away with writing a canonically3 gay character.

But there are signs…

Perhaps most famously is a scene in High School Musical 2 in which Chad (jock) performs a musical number to prove to Ryan (artist) that he does not dance, replete with leaps, spins, and literal swing-dancing. After the number ends, the next scene cuts to Ryan and Chad wearing each other’s outfits. Basically everyone was reading into this, even at the time.

Here’s what the actors have to say about it:

Apparently, Ortega “always intended” for Ryan to be gay but felt he couldn’t come straight out and say it, so he implied it in a homoerotic dance number instead!4

There are other more scholarly works examining the queerness inherent to theatre and thus High School Musical; you can explore the Queer Wiki page dedicated to the franchise or read a literal research paper from an undergrad at the University of Arizona, who writes:

But I don’t think Troy gets into theatre because he’s secretly gay, or repressing some internal feminine desires. I disagree that “Troy operates as a locus of identification for this queer boy spectator5.” Troy is just a normal Guy.

Which begs the question: why sports man like sing?

To preface this: I didn’t grow up around sports. This was not for lack of trying — my mom put my sister and I in dance lessons, ice skating lessons, and swim lessons. There possibly something karate related. We had brief stint at kiddie soccer. I played in two dodgeball tournaments in summer camps when I was in elementary school. But nothing stuck. My sister and I were not particularly motivated to run around outside hitting things. We much preferred riding our bikes to the gas station and punching each other in Wii boxing.

So naturally, without sports to fill up my extracurriculars and with no desire to join the Quiz Bowl Team, I was a Theatre Kid. I acted, produced, did lights and sound, student directed, stage managed. I watched bootlegs (slime tutorials), listened to the Into the Woods soundtrack at least 19 times, knew everyone starring in Waitress at any given moment. I collected Playbills. I sang “Astonishing” in the shower. I wrote my college essay about live theatre. The only “fantasy” teams I was interested in were those concerning the OBC of Hamilton.

When it came to sports as an adult, I fell somewhere between “what’s a football” and “can recite the slash lines of every Yankees player.” In high school, I attended handfuls of football and basketball games, but only because I was taking photos for the newspaper. In college, football games were mostly an excuse to hang out with friends and tailgate beforehand. I liked watching NFL games and would not despair if someone changed the TVs in the bar to the soccer game. I went to a few UVA basketball games and cheered when they scored, but I did not scream expletives when refs made bad calls. My mood was unchanged whether we won or lost.

All this to say: I have never really understood the all-consuming fervor of rooting for your team. I did not understand men6 who cried when the Ravens lost the Super Bowl or who screamed, outraged, red-faced, at a bad ref call. I did not understand why’d you fly hundreds of miles in a jersey to see your favorite team play. I didn’t understand the fervent worshipping of stars like Messi or Aaron Rodgers, LeBron and Tiger Woods.

And then the World Cup came along.

I watched many of the games after work with friends and to my surprise, found myself holding my breath when games got close. I ate up pictures of Norwegian darling Erling Haaland and his taxidermied raccoon. I peed only during commercial breaks. I asked Philip incessant questions about yellow cards, offsides, corner kicks, and penalty kicks in a genuine effort to understand what was going on. I felt a literal pang of sadness at Mbappe’s exit and a thrill of delight during Spain’s takedown of Argentina.

Sitting in a bar in Charlottesville, cheering madly at the screen whenever Spain made a shot and Argetina’s shaven goalie leapt in front of it, throwing my hands up when that Argentinian midfielder sent the Spanish guy7 flying, surrounded by other people screaming and clapping along with me, I started to get it.

I understood why Troy Bolton, star of the basketball team, destined for sports greatness, ended up on a stage.

There are many things I love about theatre. While it is a form of entertainment, it is also a way to engage with community. As an audience member, you are a single drop of water in a sea, everyone there to bear witness, to watch something bigger than them, to escape their own lives for an hour or two. You are seeing someone do what they love, doing what they do best. After a big dance number, in the moments after the song ends when the actors are standing frozen, their chests rising and falling, sweat glittering on their foreheads, you are cheering for someone who has just given it their all.

You want to root for them. You want to scream wildly when they succeed, when they land the backflip or sustain that show-stopping note, when a joke is delivered with perfect timing. You want the bad guys to lose and the good guys to win.

I remember standing in the wings during a run, waiting for my cue, palms sweating, heart racing, ready to deliver a show. I remember the thrill of the stage lights, nailing a pick-up, getting a hard-earned laugh from an audience member. Once, I remember a castmate flubbed a line, jumping ahead a few scenes, revealing some piece of information that we weren’t supposed to know yet, and the rest of us recovered so gracefully, because we were ready, we had been rehearsing, running, we were a team.

People who don’t understand theatre — as I have failed to understand sports — tend to think that acting is a selfish endeavor. There is a belief that actors act because they want to be seen, to show off. They want a spotlight and attention. You get into sports because you love the game, and if you happen to get a little fame from it, fine, but you get into acting because you want to be seen playing the game.

I think that’s an unfair characterization of actors. I did not audition for the school play my freshman year because I wanted attention, or to be seen. I did it because I wanted to be on a team, to work towards a collective goal. I wanted to tell a story. The audience, the fame (if you’re lucky), is a byproduct.

The same is true for the hundreds of young people working three odd jobs in New York just so they can spend forty cumulative minutes on stage manning a talking owl puppet who falls in love with a scientist8. They are not in it for the fame, not in it for the critical acclaim or audience adoration. They are in it because they love kicking a ball around.

And I get it! I understand the thrills, I understand how someone can worship Messi in the same I worship Sarah Bareilles — this is someone who has dedicated their life to a sport that they happen, yes, to be really really good at. And that is a joy to behold.

So yes, the skillsets are different. There is less inherent competition in theatre. But I think there is an easier explanation for why Troy ended up auditioning for the winter musical that has nothing to do with his repressed feminine desires. It is not that his “relationship [with Gabriella] provides the perfect heterosexual ‘cover-up’ for his queer passion for singing” — it is that Troy Bolton likes to be on a team.

He likes to play.

Here is another:

Even though I am learning a lot about supply chains, LLM training methods, tokens, data centers, and Chinese competitive strategies, one can only stare at sentences like “this final stage of the dependency lifecycle examines whether localized footprints initially secured by filling physical infrastructure capacity gaps, cemented through host-nation reliance on proprietary software and platform operations, and safeguarded by local governments adjusting their regulatory and procurement behaviors to favor these systems ultimately scale into regional or global baseline standards” for so long before one’s mental capacities short-circuit.

Sometimes I complete “monkey tasks” when I need a break, which are tasks so mindless even a monkey could do them. Other times I Google acronyms people use in the office like CRADA or OTA and learn about them. Sometimes I do none of the above, like today1.

Today I use the Wayback Machine to look at UVA’s parking citations webpage. It’s only been scraped a couple times, and only as early as 2025. I am looking at the UVA citations parking page because I am convinced that you used to get a warning on your first parking violation, even for metered spaces. I remember getting a warning once outside the AFC, which is a metered spot2.

However, the current citations page explains that warnings are NOT issued for “ParkMobile non-payment.” The 2025 page on the WayBack Machine says the same thing.

This also appears to have been the case in December 2024 and in May 2023, according to Reddit. Still, I am clearly not the only one who was confused about the warning citation language:

I could not find any historical information on official parking policy from official UVA sites (they have terrible historical record-keeping habits, at least publicly), so I looked back into my texts, searching for ‘parking ticket’ and ‘warning.’ Some potentially compelling evidence:

Central Grounds does use ParkMobile, and as far as I can tell, used ParkMobile in 2022.

(It’s hard to tell when exactly UVA starting using ParkMobile as widely as it does now. UVA Health seemingly implemented it in September of 2020, and in October, the city of Charlottesville reported switching to ParkMobile in downtown garages, noting that “contactless payments through ParkMobile are already available … at some UVA parking facilities.” So I would guess that this started in earnest sometime between late 2020 and 2021.)

So, at least in one instance, UVA did issue a warning for parking in a ParkMobile spot. It is still unclear to me, based on other internet sources, whether this was ever a policy or just an occasional kindness. For example:

According to this Redddit post from August of 2019, someone says you don’t get a warning in metered spaces. But then I found a UVA Law student’s op-ed about parking in the Virginia Law Weekly — she pulled FOIA data from the Department of Parking and Transportation at UVA (queen) and reported that “each license plate gets a warning first.”3 Does that include for ParkMobile violations? Unclear!

It’s all kind of a mess, which has led me to the conclusion that written policies are unclear, may change without warning, and are not enforced with 100% accuracy. Surprise surprise.

Some other interesting findings: in February of 2022, according to my texts, a friend got a $45 ticket for parking at North Grounds (which would be a level one violation).

In April of 2025, according to the Wayback machine, level-one violations cost $50.

The same was not true in October of 2025, where level-one violations were increased to the current $55. Compared to 2022, that’s an increase of 22% over three years, and a 10% increase over the span of just six months (between April and October 2025).

The Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress reported that from May 2025 to May 2026, CPI-U inflation4 went up 4.25 percent.

Is it fair to map US inflation with UVA parking citation? That’s for you to decide. I’m simply arranging facts.

Some other interesting parking-related facts:

• The City of Charlottesville’s fee for violation of meter ordinances is $15. Their operating budget is less than 270 million. UVA’s operating budget is nearly 6 billion dollars.

• Nearly half of UVA’s Parking & Transportation budget came from parking fees in 2023. They made almost 1 million dollars from citations that year, around 4% of their operating budget. Unfortunately, I can’t find updated numbers because the links to view some of the PDFs are broken.

• William & Mary charges $10 for a first-offense, Level I violation.

• VCU (whose campus is largely located in the city of Richmond) charges $35 for expired/prohibited parking, and the City of Richmond charges $30 for meter violations.

• UNC (whose endowment is over $20 billion, larger than UVA’s) charges somewhere between $15 and $25 for meter violations.

I mean no ill will towards the employees of P&T at UVA, who are merely doing their jobs. It just sucks that their job is to give me a ticket at 7:42am, 12 minutes after the parking requirement kicked in, my car a mere island in an ocean full of empty spaces.

Part of me wants to rage against the machine and never pay for parking again, but I don’t make enough money to afford to pay that many parking tickets, and I’m afraid of authority. 50 minutes at North Grounds costs $1.70 (if you pay through the ParkMobile app, which includes evil hidden platform fees), so one parking ticket equates to approximately 32 instances of just paying for parking.

Probably there’s a lot to say about Marxist/anarchist theory and environmental debates about parking and driving and moral frameworks or philosophical musings about rule-following as it underpins societal functioning, and someone who has a longer lunch break than me should look into all that.

I have to get back to reading confusing sentences and answering emails.

Last week, though, it was still an appropriate 80ish degrees, with cool mornings and brisk evenings. So last week, I picked up kale, beets, carrots, bok choy, and broccolini and cooked everything over heat.

An ode to roasting

In my humble opinion, roasting vegetables is the superior way to prepare them — even in the hellish pits of the summer season. Plus, if you’re quick, you can pull open the over, slide a tray in, and slam it shut with minimal heat escaping into the kitchen / your face.

Roasting vegetables is quite simple and requires basically zero instruction. There is a subset of the internet that will tell you it is more complicated (all veggies must be totally dry! you must soak starchy veg to remove excess starch! you can’t use olive oil, you must use avocado oil! too much salt dries them out!). They are mostly lying. Really you just cut things up into mostly similar sizes, toss them in an oil and seasoning, and roast them. The timing and temperature are google-able but tbh I almost always default to 400/425 and then just check periodically until they are done or to preference.

So in that spirit I just threw the carrots, broccolini, and beets into the oven at the same temp. I had an onion, so as a bonus I sliced that up and chucked it in too. Carrots and broccolini took approximately 20 minutes. Beets took closer to 50. The carrots I covered in cinnamon (trust), the broccolini in salt. The beets I did nothing to, but when they were cooled I peeled off the skins.

The beets went into a salad of massaged kale, goat cheese, and lemon + EVOO. The other veggies I laid atop a smear of ricotta cheese, because I saw it at the grocery store and thought, wow, I haven’t had ricotta in a while, I wonder if it’ll be good with these veggies? And it was! The subtle sweetness of the ricotta was especially and surprisingly good with the chicken sausage I made for the broccolini — a kind of cool, sweet balance to the fattier meat.

The gnarly bits

“What to do with carrot tops” returned one resounding Google result: pesto. I have in the past sang the praises of random green pestos, and this was no exception. I did not have any nuts or cheese (sorry) so I just used my immersion blender’s food processor attachment to grind these down with olive oil, lemon, ricotta, garlic, and some S+P. Final product was somewhere between a pesto and a chimichurri, and was delicious as a base for fried eggs and a pasta sauce loosened with water.

Now to the more spectacular use of the gnarly bits: gnarly soup.

Gnarly Soup was inspired by my dear friend Wells, who I always feel I’ve shared a connection with over food. In fact, one of my earliest memories of Wells is at UVA, sitting in the AVP living room and eating a quesadilla he had made me out of ingredients purchased solely at Trader Joe’s, including their vegan chorizo. It was the best quesadilla I’ve ever had.

While I was in New York Wells and I had a loose tradition of cooking and/or eating meals together — his truly awesome kimchi nachos, my caesar salad soup, a selection of Whole Foods hot bar items, overstuffed sandwiches. One of Wells’ go-to meals is lentil soup, cooked exactly the way I like it: no recipe, no measurements, just vibes. The iteration he made for me before I left was just an onion, some carrot, chicken stock, lentils, and an eye-watering amount of curry powder. It was perfect.

I had no onion, so Gnarly Soup was a base of carrots, kale stems, and beet stems. Gnarly! I cooked them down until soft, covered them with water, and added the Trader Joe’s chicken broth concentrate, which is surprisingly excellent and richly flavorful. I threw in a cup of lentils, simmered until they were soft, and then blended the whole thing up with my immersion blender. This would’ve been better with a more diverse assortment of spices, but I only had garam masala and salt, so. I topped my bowl with some yogurt and lemon, and while it was not quite as good as Well’s (the fresh sourdough also helped in his case), it was filling and filled with probably a million grams of fiber.

And we all know fiber is the new protein.

Things go south…

Unfortunately this was around the time I experienced a death in my family, and shockingly, I did not want to cook vegetables afterwards. I went home, optimistic kale in tow, and my mother and I proceeded to eat Chipotle, Indian food, and Sweet Frog for 90% of our meals. But even facing death, thou shalt not waste, so my mom googled “what to do with so much kale” and we decided to just cook it down. I added apples, sunflower seeds, and some quick-pickled red onion. We dressed it with mustard, olive oil, vinegar, and a touch of maple syrup. It was the best way to shove as much nutrition into our bodies as possible with very minimal effort.

I picked up Week 3 of the CSA in the midst of all this, still with very little motivation or appetite. Philip (bless him and his creative cooking brain) came with me and took over. (I did not get a beautiful flat-lay photo but we ended up with cabbage, cauliflower, garlic scapes, sugar snap peas, and escarole.)

… and then north!

Philip took me to Wegmans and I wandered around like a ghost trying to decide what I wanted. We landed on buttered noodles, toast, and pickles. But with a little CSA zhuzh.

Philip took the garlic scapes — the edible stalks of garlic bulbs, milder than the cloves with a texture closer to green beans — and sauteed them with butter and olive oil. We spread them on toast covered in a thick layer of farmer’s cheese and my leftover pesto. It was delightful, and I recommend them if you can get your hands on them.

At his house, we roasted the cabbage and cauliflower with miso and he stewed the escarole. I am not actually the biggest fan of escarole, but with beans, olive oil, lemon, and parmesan — I think similar to Alison Roman’s Lemony White Beans and Escarole — it’s hard not to like.

Like with the kale, I think sauteed greens are actually better cold, when they’ve been marinating in all the good stuff. This is especially true in the summer. Plus, as I mentioned, they are a very easy way to get a lot of nutrients in at once, since most greens lose a massive amount of volume once cooked down. So with that I say,

Go forth, be brave, and fear not your oven!

He had two sisters, my aunts Ellie and Lorrie, who love me and my sister as if we were their own children.

He liked magic. My mom says he was good. One of my earliest memories of him is doing a trick with some sort of soft ball, making it disappear and then multiply. Singing “Little Red Wagon” to my sister and me. The sound of fingers sliding on a fretboard sounds primal to me, because of my father.

I don’t have many memories of him after that. My relationship with my father is, was, has been, complicated. As many things are.

But my father. He is someone’s son, someone’s brother.

There is a photo of him I find with the original members of the band Metallica. There is a photo of him in a suit and tie, a photo of him graduating high school, a photo of him with my sister and I balancing in his lap, small, mouths open at the camera.

I’m at the mall when I find out. I’m trying on pants. My mom is covering her mouth, I am feeling something in my throat grow.

Do you have to bring the clothes out of the dressing room after you find out about your father’s death?

There’s that Richard Silken quote, about how really ridiculous it is to fall to the floor crying. How you’ll realize, on the floor, that you didn’t do a very good job painting. And there: a dressing room in the mall, that horrible, fluorescent, dressing room lighting, fuzzy walls. All those pants I didn’t put back.

And I can’t remember how to spell ‘fluorescent’. I keep thinking the ‘u’ should go after the ‘o.’ Flower-scent.

My father was good at skiing, but he had a terrible time getting his feet in the ski boots.

My father was very smart, and very good, and sometimes good people get sick, and sometimes bad things happen to good people.

I am not sure, really, how you’re supposed to tell people when something like this happens. By the way, my father, who was my father in some ways but not in many, my dad, died.

The way I am doing it is by forgetting how to spell fluorescent, writing, trying to explain how it feels to look at pictures that are of a person you know but a version of them you never met. I think maybe there are better ways, but probably there are worse.

My father had red hair when he was a child, and freckles. Neither of us really look like him. But my sister’s hair glows like lit coals under the sun. Summer comes, and we are covered in spots.

He will be buried beside his parents, and my Uncle George in a plot of land in New York.

My father is survived by me, by my sister, by his sisters, my cousins. His friends. Music. Card tricks that make a kid’s jaw drop. The sound of fingers squeaking on guitar strings. Freckles in the summer.

And most importantly, happy first week of the September Sun produce CSA! I have literally been looking forward to this since I decided to move to Cville. What a privilege it is to hold food with real dirt on it in your hands! Food that was grown in the earth not so far from where you live! To have so many fresh vegetables in your fridge that you panic just a tiny bit over how you’ll use them all! (At least while I am still cooking for just me…)

I picked my share this week (pictured above: beets, radishes, green onions, baby bok choy, arugula, English peas, frisée) with no plan and cooked with abandon. Next week I would like to plan a bit better but I had moved to Charlottesville literally less than 24 hours prior and I had nothing but hotel half-and-halfs and a Celsius in the fridge, so. Sue me. Some of these meals are a little haphazard. Slapdash. Eclectic. But they were (almost all) delicious. And creative.

Lots of green salads

As I mentioned, I did not Plan when I selected my veggies or grocery shopped. So a majority of the greens went to unoriginal salads — frisée and arugula, some coarse salt, olive oil and acid. But summer is for simple salads! Frisée is in the endive family and is a fun, sort of bitter green. Highly recommend picking up an alien-looking leafy vegetable next time you’re at the grocery store and chucking some salt + EVOO + acid on it.

I did mix it up on Wednesday when New York Times’ Cooking newsletter told me that ‘Ali Slagle has a new summer salad.’ Chicken salad slaw with peanuts and nori, hell yeah! I could make that!

Except I did not have peanuts. Or that much chicken, really. Also I had hella greens. So in classic me fashion I actually did not follow the recipe really at all (which, by the way, is the best way to ‘follow recipes’ without making your life an endless parade of grocery store visits) and just threw together said greens, a huge and healthy dose of green onion, some cucumber and some chicken. For the dressing I went in the direction of peanuts…

Anyway it was actually a delicious salad and I would like to make it again one day properly. For now I’ll continue co-opting NYT cooking recipes.

Bok choy (and miso)

If you don’t have miso in your fridge/pantry right now… RUN DON’T WALK!!!! Just kidding if I ever say anything like that seriously you have to kill me.

But if you ARE going to run anywhere to buy something, let it be a nice container of miso and not your third special-edition Hello Kitty Stanley cup with matching Hello Kitty charm straw. (p.s. I made that up but actually I could see some of you eating that shit up…)

Anyway for the baby bok choy I 1) cut them down the middle, 2) seared them, and then 3) covered them and let them steam. And then I covered them in miso!!!!!!!

Brief recess because I’m going to tell you about the greatest life hack ever: you can just take a block of silken tofu and blend it with seasonings to make a sauce. I added peanut butter, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and gojuchang and threw it on udon noodles. IT WAS SO GOOD. Proteinmaxxing. Going to be experimenting with sweet silken tofu recipes next week.

For the second batch I just cooked normal tofu and topped it with more copius amounts of green onion. It is kind of amazing what a handful of green onion does.

Beets and radishes

I think roasted beets are my favorite food. If you don’t like a roasted beet in a salad with goat cheese or with a little piece of citrus or just with olive oil and salt I think you need to reevaluate. So of course I roasted these beets and put them in a salad with goat cheese. I ate three just standing up over the sink and stained the cutting board bright pink.

I was NOT going to roast the radishes. I was going to be brave and eat them raw. Raw radishes are weird. They have the texture of an apple but the flavor of something angry. I ate one raw and then decided I didn’t want to eat anymore raw. In a moment of genius (?) I smashed them alongside some baby potatoes and roasted them and something magical happened! They tasted way better?? Almost buttery?

Peas (and the gnarly bits)

These peas!!! I also love peas. I’m not sure I ate them much growing up but these days I could eat like six cups just with butter and salt. I shelled them by hand which I hoped would be sort of romantic in a churning butter, salt of the earth, tradwife way but was honestly just kind of annoying. WORTH IT THO!!!!

I boiled these with pasta, chicken sausage, and more arugula. (Honestly the pasta and chicken sausage and arugula was overkill and I should’ve just eaten them plain.)

Now I did attempt to eat all of the veggies in their entirety. I did not find a use for the pea shells (although Reddit says you can blanch them then strain them or use them for stocks) and some of the radish greens wilted because I neglected to trim them from the radishes first </3

I did chop up the beet greens + leaves and sautee them with scrambled eggs and the result looked actually so putrid that I can not in good conscience include the photo. Also I didn’t chop up the leaves or cook the stalks long enough so this was a pretty major flop. The other batch I literally just roasted in the oven. Everything got crunchy and salty and delicious. Hooray!

That brings this week to a close, just in time for new veggies! This week taught me 1) the importance of planning and 2) the versatility of food. Next week I will endeavor to sketch out a littleeeee bit more of a list and also experiment with new ways of using up those gnarly bits.

To you, dear reader, I pose a challenge (or two): go to a local market/find a farmer and buy something you’ve never cooked with before. Cover it in oil and salt and experiment!

At the top of my inbox: New jobs available at Bertelsmann and its Subdivisions. We have new job openings that match the set search criteria in your job newsletter.

I used to: pore over these, looking for any I might be a good fit for, mentally calculating how many hours it would take me hit ‘submit’ on the application in hopes I’d be earlier than the 300 other hopefuls.

But this time: I scroll to the bottom and hit “unsubscribe.” Funny how you can want something so bad and then just — not, anymore.

Now: I’m in Virginia, in my old house. It’s for sale. I left New York with all of my stuff crammed into the back of Philip’s Jetta (thank you <3). I’m packing again.

This is: not what I thought my life would like like at this point.

Living in New York was dropping Mentos in a bottle of Coke that lived in my chest.

Sometimes a building, stifling feeling, itchy. The loudness. The fear, and with it, often the shame, of seeing someone asleep on the street and walking past them. The prices!! Good God, the prices. And the fact that there are so many people. The lack of stars, of true, wide space.

Sometimes a sweet, joyous fizz. Cooking spicy lentil soup at Wells and Ray’s apartment with their leftover veggies. Sleeping over at Lydia and Jo’s before an early day at work, cracking up on the couch. Seeing shows with Joaquin, drinks on the street with Susana, Cooper and jazz. Friends in general, dogs and babies on subways, the subway in general. The sheer, overwhelming number of coffee shops and bookstores and general stores and delis and bodegas. The cold whip of wind on the roof of the Whitney. Weird art. The fact that there are so many people living in such a small space. Bagels. Sitting on folding chairs and watching my friends sing, watching them act, watching them pursue the things they love with a fierce energy. Things bubbling up out of my heart.

There are probably people who’ve written better essays about loving and hating New York. Already I miss it, already I don’t.

I think there is something kind of attractive, even weirdly romantic, about being alone. Playing solitaire in the park, going on long walks, spending a few hours falling down a rabbit hole of research or reading. I associate this kind of ‘alone time’ with stability, intelligence, surety.

I used to be good at being alone. This is not to say I was intelligent and stable, but I was comfortable whiling away hours reading, running errands, writing. Increasingly, in New York, I was not. My job(s) were mostly solitary, my time with friends was erratic. My roommates were strangers. I was not good at it, being alone.

I think part of it is that it’s hard to go about your day in such a huge, bustling place and have nobody to share it with. I sometimes felt invisible walking around the sidewalks, like if I sat down on a bench someone might come by and sit on top of me. Like I had zero actual weight in the world. I would be weaving in and out of crowds in Union Square and be struck by the sudden realization that there was literally nobody who knew where I was, what I was doing.

It was nice, and it was also kind of awful.

Because I like to talk, and listen, and make jokes, and laugh at other people’s jokes. I like to point at something cool and say “hey, look at that!” and have someone else go “oh, cool!” I like eating with other people, and cooking with them. I like sharing music. I like gossiping with friends. I like coming home to someone and talking about my day. Waking up and listening to someone’s crazy dream, even though everyone knows listening to other people’s dreams are annoying as hell.

In the city — the most densely populated city in the world! — it was ironic how desperate I was for that sort of connection. Sometimes I was better at seeking it out, and “dinner with Sus” would shine like a beacon on my calendar. Other times I was worse at reaching out, and I’d go three or four days speaking only to my mother on the phone or the cashier at the grocery store.

It feels silly and obvious to say it, but man! We, humans, we are meant to be around each other! To laugh and point at cute dogs and maybe be a little mean to each other but then forget about it. Being alone, quite frankly, sucks.

My best friends from college joke about living together in a commune one day. I think we’re on to something.

You know how when you’re a kid you feel invincible? And then later, like you are the only person to ever experience something? It’s, like most things, a real psychological phenomenon called the personal fable. It happens, like most things, because your brain hasn’t developed all the way yet.

I have never felt that invincible. I was, as far as I remember, a risk-averse child. I did not like climbing on high things, going fast on scooters, talking to strangers who could murder me, or trampoline parks (because the instructional warning video they use to scare you into behaving well worked too well on me).

But right now, there are days when I am certain I am the only person alive to experience such overwhelming, big feelings, such chaos in my life, despite the fact that literally everyone says that your early 20s are a crazy time.

Maybe that’s where the invincibility comes in. I did not expect that these years would feel so tumultuous for me. Because here I am, shocked that life feels so unstable and subject to change, shocked that nothing is happening the way I thought it would, shocked that I am not the same person I was ten or five or even two years ago.

Surely everyone else has it figured out, surely nobody else feels like they’re pivoting constantly, rearranging constantly, on some wonky rollercoaster path.

I’ve gotten into a habit of asking people how they got to where they are now. I am always surprised and soothed by their answers.

The doorman at my old boss’s building is taking night classes to be a software engineer, and used to sell drugs. I read a memoir about an ex-journalist who worked in TV and then decided to be a therapist, and is now very successful. Some guy I did high school theatre with produced his own play and is now attempting to earn a spot in a banana-eating contest.

What I’m trying to ay is that I don’t think anyone has it figured out. Nobody knows what it’s like to be you, but probably many people can come pretty close to understanding the fear, the uncertainty.

You aren’t that special.

Lydia told me about her “frontal-lobe-development realization” that everything will always be changing, all the time. Won’t stop when you turn thirty, forty, fifty. So why spend all this time stressing about change now? Why not just buckle up and enjoy the ride?

This part of the ride is involving a lot of packing tape. I have a roll I bought in a FedEx in New York that sticks to everything but the actual cardboard box I need it to. There are little crumpled-up balls of tape everywhere in my room. The packing is making me sort of dizzy. I’m talking to myself.

In two days I’ll live in a new place.

I have to buy new shampoo, because I finally used up the stuff I bought from Costco nearly a year and a half ago, and I’m overwhelmed by how much shampoo there is to choose from.

In two days I’ll have a new job.

I have to get rid of more t-shirts. I’ve accumulated so many t-shirts from being in college clubs, and they all mean a lot to me, but one person cannot possibly own so many t-shirts. Right?

In two days there will be more chaos, and uncertainty.

I have to cancel my old health insurance and (re)register to vote in Virginia and maybe pay $500 worth of outstanding taxes and transfer my EZ pass information and get gas and get my car inspected and do all of the other things that make up a life.

Not the way we use the word now — “this bagel is awesome,” “that hat is awesome,” “that pilates class was awesome” — but truly awesome: from awe, a word which originally meant a feeling of fear or dread mixed with profound, divine reverence.

“We overuse the word now,” he said, in a depressed sort of way unique to older generations mourning the loss of the landline, Cheez-Ballz, words like awe.

I think about that a lot.

In many ways, it is true: the thought of a Fresca Slurpee, while delightful and sweet and intriguing, does not strike me with a feeling of profound reverence bordering on fear.

But it some ways, a Fresca Slurpee is f*cking awesome. A monk in the 17th century would almost certainly be shocked into awe and reverence if confronted with a 7-Eleven, a machine from which an icy neon liquid gushes, Blue Heat Takis lined up in rows under fluorescent lights.

I get this sense sometimes in New York — a sense of perhaps misplaced reverence and awe that a city so large, so teeming, can operate at such scale.

It starts with the subways.

I type “Home” into Google Maps, and no matter where I am, it can tell me which subway lines to get on, which ones to transfer to. It predicts with almost 100% accuracy when exactly I will walk in the door. 8.58 million people live here. There are 660 miles of total subway tracks, 472 stations, 25 lines. It is staggering, when you really think about it, that there is a piece of technology that can tell me, to the minute, when I will arrive home.

(What’s even crazier is that most of the system in NYC is still operated manually via “fixed block” signaling that requires actual humans to pull levers and control switches.)

Sure, it’s not perfect. Subways are delayed, rerouted, get stuck. This very morning I was over an hour late to work because the G isn’t running this weekend. But still — it is awesome to travel in this way, so accurately, alongside millions of others. There is a very real sense of wonder when the L train comes rushing into the Lorimer station, the force of it whipping my hair around, and there is a tiny part of me that is afraid at this beastly machine of metal and steel hurtling underneath our feat. It’s a reverential feat that we’ve figured this out. Indoor plumbing, transportation, the fact that I can pull out a little rectangle and type in any question I have and have an answer in seconds.

Kind of awesome.

My mom mailed me an article a few months ago, printed and stapled in a box filled with yarn for my next sweater. She is delightfully old-fashioned in that way (mom, if you’re reading this, I said it’s delightful!)

The piece is about C.S. Lewis and bleakness in the modern age. The underpinnings of the article are about secularism and how modernity has confined religion to the private sphere, “stripping us of a shared moral tradition and language.” It’s an interesting read, however you feel about secularism and God.

The bit that I like best, though, is about fairytales and wonder. Lewis’ most famous work, The Chronicles of Narnia, starts with a dedication to his granddaughter. He writes that “some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

[I]n place of cynicism Lewis challenges his readers to recapture wonder in everyday life. He doesn’t mock critical thinking in favor of childishness but instead looks down on the accoutrements of adulthood we take on that so often blind us to life’s beauty that only childlike imagination can recall. To live like Lewis is to live a life of enchanted engagement with reality. Only in doing so can we chase away the pitfalls of modern living that lead to loneliness and gloom.

I read The Hobbit last year, my return to fairy tales as an adult, and was delighted. How wonderful it was to read about grassy knolls and dragons and wizards! It reminded me of that sense of childlike wonder Lewis talks about, the way I played as a child, imagined great big worlds teeming with adventure, the way I jumped and flung myself around with my sister, catching lightning bugs on muggy summer nights, hiding pinecones for each other to find, sneaking through our neighbors’ backyard to a big parking lot behind a church. Eating ice cream with sprinkles. A light pink shirt I used to have with a velvet horse on it, one I wore basically every day. Making music videos with my friends in our backyard. Losing track of time.

It is easy, in the slog of the everyday, to lose sight of the awe, the wonder of our lives. And I think Lewis is right: this is how we chase away the loneliness and the gloom. Too often we are caught up in tedium, in false spurts of stimulation that come from tiny rectangles, medium rectangles, big rectangles.

There’s another great Substack piece about this phenomenon of “numbing out.” The author, Catherine Shannon, argues that we are intensely detached from the world, intensely apathetic. And not just that! We use detachment as a weapon. Everything becomes stupid, silly, ironic, dumb.

The opposite of love is not hate, but apathy. I hope it’s obvious why this is a problem, but maybe you’re still thinking so what. To put it succinctly: when you take an ironic, negative, or numb attitude to everything, you are by definition not on the line for solutions, and when you stop looking for solutions, you lose all agency and will in your life.

I see this all the time — numbness, detachment, irony as a protective shield. People who talk about being so tired that they cannot and will not engage with the world. Bed rotting. Making fun of people for enjoying literally anything.

There’s an episode of an Ezra Klein podcast1 with Naomi Klein on the “mirror world” of the right — it’s a good episode, but I was most struck by a part where Naomi talks about cynicism.

She talks about the idea of “neighborism,” welcoming people freely with open arms, without jargon. Simply caring for one another. The night shift workers that keep NY running, doing laundry for neighbors who can’t leave their homes for fear of ICE.

Everyone is so cynical about those early Covid days when people clapped for health care workers. But I actually think there was something really beautiful about what was being expressed and insisting on seeing the people who make the world work, who hold the world up.

She’s talking here about this moment serving as a breakthrough moment for labor rights, so I’m taking her a little out of context here, but I was really moved by her description of that act as beautiful, an insistence on recognition.

And it is! Beautiful! Humans can be so evil and cynical, and we can also be beautiful, caring, thoughtful.

It feels kind of silly to be writing a piece about beauty and positivity when the world feels like it’s going to sh*t.

But I feel strongly that the best way to combat this is not to give into the sh*tiness of it all, not to despair or pull the covers up over your head. Do not be the person to add more to the quagmire of sh*t. Do not roll your eyes at beauty, and wonder.

Shannon recommends an antidote to “numbing out” in the form of seeking truth, making mistakes, and most importantly, trying at things. I think she’s right. As I’ve written about before, avoiding opinions doesn’t make life any smoother. Avoiding mistakes is even worse, because it’s impossible, and you’ll suck at it. Live your life rolling your eyes at everything and they might get stuck that way!

So yeah, a lot of the world is dumb and silly and annoying, but a lot of it is awesome. Cherry blossoms in D.C., tulips in Brooklyn. Fresca Slurpees. Reading fairytales when you turn 25. Being in love. Buying people flowers, even though flowers die. Taking pictures. Work hard and fall down, get back up with grace.

Take the subway and let the L scare you a little bit with how awesome it is.

[T]he earth is not very fertile, people are not always grateful, flowers eventually die. But do you still see the point of it all? Do you see the beauty of the gesture?

More than usual, I’ve been thinking a lot about myself.

What I want, what I need, how I feel, how I make decisions.

And to be honest… it’s uncomfortable.

I know (I KNOW!) it is a necessary process we must all go through. Self-reflection allows us to make good decisions, helps us be more self-aware, and can improve our relationships with ourselves and others. Measured self-reflection is good in these circumstances.

But it can also be really bad, especially in this unique point in history. Never before have humans had such unfiltered access to so many other humans. We are constantly barraged with other people’s thoughts, lives, and opinions, constantly forced to reckon with ourselves in direct comparison to thousands of other people. Are you a Carrie or a Miranda? A ENTJ or INSP? An autumn or a winter? Are you a girl’s girl or a pick-me or a pear shape or a tradwife is your shirt embarrassing are your jeans too tight are you laughing too loud is that girl judging your lipstick does your friend actually hate you is everyone staring at you?????

To always be thinking about yourself is exhausting. To always be second-guessing, doubling back, revising the mental image you have of you. To never get to live in your own skin because you’re too busy shedding it, over and over.

In psychology, there is a distinction between self-reflection and rumination. Self-reflection is the ‘good’ type of thinking, which involves purposeful and intentional critical thought about yourself and your decisions. Rumination, on the other hand, is classified by obsessive and spirally thinking about yourself and other people.

The general consensus is that while self-reflection is positive and self-attention can have positive affects, rumination can increase symptoms of depression and anxiety. Which… duh! Thinking about yourself and spiraling constantly is bound to cause some depression and anxiety. I should know.

There are a few things I do to avoid this kind of negative self-thinking. I try hard not to get sucked into Instagram Reels (or YouTube shorts if I’m off Instagram, which are somehow worse), where I see countless other mid-20s New York young adults living far more fabulous lives than I do. I try not to spiral on the subway. I try not to panic over getting dressed in the morning. I try not to think too much about the social event I just left and wonder if that joke that everyone laughed at was actually inappropriate and everyone only laughed because they felt terrible for me and as soon as I leave they will talk about me.

But sometimes trying isn’t enough. Sometimes you need pure unfettered distraction.

And this is where knitting comes in.

I’m coining a new term in this essay (loosely defined) called introspective and extrospective hobbies. Extrospective is a word I made up based on what I think the best opposite of introspective is but I’m open to suggestions.

Introspective hobbies are ones that allow/require you to think and reflect do them. Prime examples include journaling or hiking. These are activities that allow you to reflect — mull over an interpersonal problem, replay conversations from earlier, or daydream.1 In other words, they give you space to think about yourself.

Extrospective hobbies do not require/allow this type of reflection. They are hobbies that require focus and attention on the hobby itself. Think rock-climbing, needlepoint, or learning to play an instrument.

This is not a black and white distinction, and hobbies fall on a spectrum. Some extrospective hobbies like knitting may transform themselves into introspective hobbies if you get good enough at them to go on autopilot. You can make some introspective hobbies more extrospective, like listening to an audiobook on a hike. These hobbies may be active (requiring some level of physical effort like team sports) or passive (reading or watching TV).

Here’s my take: you’ve gotta have introspective and extrospective hobbies.

Journaling is a wonderful hobby and tool to work through complex emotions or help make difficult decisions. Walking or running outside is one of my favorite methods to just let my brain go when I’m puzzling over something or feeling creatively blocked. I’m not arguing that these things are bad, but if all of your hobbies are the kind that keep you trapped in your own head, you’re missing out.

This is where the knitting comes in. My mom has been knitting for years (basically since she was a teenager) and has completed sweaters, blankets, scarves, and a very chic little bowtie for me. I have asked her to teach me a couple times now, but have generally run out of patience and/or time up until this phase in my life.

But over Christmas, desperate for a hobby and something to keep myself busy, I made her teach me to knit. It took a lot of patience from both of us. I kept getting confused and wanting to give up and have my mom solve all my problems (#relatable) and she kept getting annoyed and wanting me to fix my own problems (#lifelessons).

But eventually… I got there. I knitted a pair of slippers. And also I knitted a cute little plant cover.

The thing about knitting is it requires enough focus that I cannot meander. I can just barely hold a conversation on the phone (and by that I mean I can listen to someone else talk to me). I have a TV show playing in the background, but it can not be a TV show I care about it. In order to keep the tension steady, in order to stay on top of the pattern, not lose track of the increase or which row I’m purling or which stitch I have to slip, I must stay focused on the task at hand.

I cannot think.

And it is really f*cking nice, to do something with my hands and not my brain. To have my attention laser focused on yarn, needle, slip, stitch, wrap, knit, purl.

This is part of the reason I loved waitressing – the constant, steady thrum of my thoughts reduced to butter to table 4 extra knife to table 6 more coffee more cream fries on the side ice napkin dessert. To pour, carry, scrub, swipe. To not have to think. Or more importantly, to not have to think about myself, my day ahead. To not overthink.

Knitting and other extrospective hobbies are a wonderful distraction from rumination. To engage fully in something that distracts from the inside buzz of thought and planning and live is a beautiful thing. But there is a caveat:

You really have to engage and focus on the hobby. I tell a lot of my kids (the students I tutor for the SAT, not biological children) that focus is a muscle. In order to get better at focusing, you have to train. You have to practice. You have to push to failure. Especially with our wrecked attention spans (an essay for another day), sitting down and knitting/reading/playing an instrument/puzzling for an hour is tough. There are still times I find myself wanting to (and giving in to) picking up my phone and checking my email or text while I’m knitting. But this destroys the purpose, because then I start thinking about all the emails I need to respond to, all the tasks I need to complete, and so on until BAM! I’m ruminating.

The key is just forcing yourself to be in this hobby, to exist and ignore the urge to check/scroll/distract.2

If you can find an extrospective hobby that you like and get really good at locking in during it, you have 1) an option to distract yourself in moments when you start ruminating and 2) the opportunity to build skills that help you stay present, which in turn helps you avoid rumination in the future. A win-win!

So if you don’t already, pick up an extrospective hobby. Spend some time knitting, playing a sport, practicing an instrument. Set a timer for 30 minutes and focus INTENSELY on the book you’re currently reading.

And stop thinking about yourself so damn much!

I listened to the album for the first time when I moved to Virginia. In fact, one of the most vivid memories in that period of my life is laying on the mattress on my new bedroom floor (we had zero other furniture at this point) and crying through “The World Was Wide Enough.” I had the bug.

I strongly believe that Hamilton really was ground-breaking and genius and all the other things people said about it. To this day, certain lines get me. I will inevitably tear up when Leslie Odom Jr.’s voice cracks on “They say / Angelica and Eliza— / Were both at his side when he died.”

There is one very niche line, though, that pops into my head at random times. It’s during “Your Obedient Servant,” a reference to a real-life letter1 Burr sent Hamilton before their fateful duel:

[HAMILTON]
I am not the reason no one trusts you
No one knows what you believe
I will not equivocate on my opinion
I have always worn it on my sleeve

This is reflective of a common theme and point of tension between the two: Burr is patient and controlled while Hamilton is brash and outspoken. Burr wants to see all the options before he votes and Hamilton is already drafting the legislation. You see it clearest, I think, in “Non-Stop,” the insane Act I closer that traces Hamilton’s meteoric rise from an aide on Washington’s staff to his penning of the Federalist Papers.

In the song, Hamilton approaches Burr to pitch his series of essays, asking for help, and Burr says no. He is afraid that Hamilton is “backing the wrong horse.”

[HAMILTON]
Burr, we studied and we fought and we killed
For the notion of a nation we now get to build
For once in your life, take a stand with pride
I don’t understand how you stand to the side

[BURR]
I'll keep all my plans close to my chest
I'll wait here and see which way the wind will blow
I'm taking my time watching the afterbirth of a nation
Watching the tension grow

Burr is clearly risk-averse. He is watching and waiting silently. Hamilton is shouting from the rooftops2. And this was largely historically accurate for both men. While there’s no solid evidence of Burr “switching parties” as Hamilton later claims — largely because Burr seemingly never declared his allegiance to any of the many proto-parties around at the time — he was arguably pretty opportunist, aligning himself with the Federalists when he campaigned for governor of New York in 1804 despite building huge opposition to them a few years earlier in Tammany Hall3.

The thing is, the reason that line sticks with me, is that I really relate to Burr (minus the political machinations and treasonous accusations).

I am watchful, cautious. I tend to equivocate on my opinions, to keep things close to my chest, wait and see. This fueled less by blinding ambition and more by my people-pleasing tendencies. I don’t want to be disliked. I want people to know that I am thoughtful and capable of seeing all sides of an argument. I want people to know that I am empathetic.

Unfortunately, never expressing my opinions makes me feel spineless and has, interestingly, eroded my actual desire/ability to form and express opinions.

I’m trying to change that. I’ve already written about my attempts to stop waiting for the perfect moment, but I have been trying to engage with forming opinions more in 2026. Reading more non-fiction, more podcasts, more news. And not just reading but taking notes, synthesizing, and deciding what I think about them. Practices I learned as a student that I largely abandoned after graduation.

So if you’ll allow me, I’d like to practice being unequivocally (and angrily) opinionated. Below are some of my opinions, in no particular order. And while normally I’d attempt to posture, to soothe by assuring you that this is my opinion, that these aren’t true in all cases for all people, I’m not going to do that. I’m going all in and I’m going to trust that you will be a thoughtful and measured reader. And if you hate me after this, write me a letter. We can duel at the Hudson!

Fro-yo shops should never add the toppings for you.

If I walk into a frozen yogurt shop and they 1) pour the ice cream for you or 2) add the toppings themselves, I will walk out. I don’t want some girl with a slick-back ponytail and a cute apron sticking approximately five nuggets of cookie dough to the sides of my yogurt, where they will inevitably slip off. The true spirit of fro-yo is adding salted caramel and cotton candy and chocolate peanut butter to one cup and then covering that sh*t in Nerds, graham cracker crumbs, and marshmallow fluff4. The floors must be sticky and there must be a 99% chance you will die if you have any sort of nut or gluten allergy. Sorry, real fro-yo isn’t a safe space for people with allergies.

Leaving people on read all the time is rude and irresponsible.

Respond to your damn texts. There is no reason to leave close friends or family on read for more than 48 hours. Even if it’s just a “sorry will respond to this later” text. This will not deplete your ‘mental bandwidth.’ You will survive the effort it takes to type six words, I promise. iMessage has this great feature (and it’s not even new anymore, it came out in 2022) where you can mark texts as ‘unread’ if you have trouble keeping track. You can even pin messages you need to respond to. OR YOU CAN CALL THEM!! You really just don’t have that many excuses anymore.

There are always better options than DoorDash or Uber Eats.

I don’t care how tired you are or how barren your cupboards are. Drag yourself to a grocery store and buy some sushi (sometimes half-off at the end of the night!) or instant ramen. Eat a bowl of cereal, make some popcorn. Go out and pick up your $34 burrito from the damn restaurant. Better yet, sit down and eat it there. Say hello to the hostess and ask about the specials. If this is a recurring habit for you, learn how to cook. It takes very little effort and is cheaper. We are already so disconnected from where our food comes from. You do not need to disconnect yourself even more by making a man on a motorcycle leave a soggy heap of fries at your door.

We do, actually, owe each other things.

None of this “you don’t owe anyone ANYTHING” bullshit around me. You owe people decency and kindness — you should hold doors for people and give them space when they get on the train. You owe them a text back (see above). You owe them an explanation, an apology, a heads-up.

There’s too much cream cheese on bagels these days.

I want to be able to taste the bagel. Not the sixteen heaping tablespoons of chive cream cheese you slathered on it. I should not have cream cheese literally oozing out of the bagel when I pick it up. I do not want to take a bite that dissolves into creamy slop seconds after it enters my mouth. There should be crunch and texture. A cross-section bagel should never have a > 1 or even EQUAL ratio of cream cheese:bagel.

Some things should remain private between you and your partner.

I don’t think it’s necessary to share every intimate detail about your sex/love life with your friends, especially when you’re in a long-term, serious relationship. This isn’t Sex and the City and you aren’t Carrie Bradshaw — how would you feel if you found out your partner was detailing every single embarrassing aspect of your relationship to their friends every Thursday over dirty martinis? I’d feel a little shitty, to be honest. Some things should be sacred 🙏.

Not everyone needs to go to therapy. Or college.

Not going to say anymore about this one.

Country music is FUN and I’m going to play it when I drive.

NOT ALL COUNTRY IS RACIST AND CORNY! “A Life Where We Work Out” by Flatland Cavalry? One of the most beautiful songs of all time. Literally ANYTHING by Sturgill Simpson?? Scratches an ITCH for me. And then YES even the corny sh*t like “Bless the Broken Road” by Rascal Flatts is romantic and beautiful and twangy and I won’t apologize for knowing all the words! So… shake it for the birds, shake it for the bees, shake it for the catfish swimmin’ down deep in the creek. Country girl, shake it for me.

Bag charms and blind boxes are stupid.

I also feel like I don’t need to add much here. If my sister is reading this — I love you and your bags are very cute but they don’t need those dumb charms and you don’t need dumb plastic babies with their bare asses (?) on your bookshelves. Instead, try: hiding non-perishable snacks around your apartment, forgetting about them, and discovering them later while you’re cleaning. (Blind box but Oreos instead.) Going outside and collecting trash. (Interesting, random, and also usually plastic.) Making a bag charm out of things you already have (Old carabiners? Some random fun string? Earrings you don’t wear anymore? Bag charm, bitch).

Ok phew I feel fired up now. I’m ready to FORM MORE OPINIONS and TELL PEOPLE ABOUT THEM. But before I do, one last thing:

It’s normal to change your mind.

It’s normal to hold opinions and have them shift with time, with age, with meeting new people. It’s normal to let things change your mind. Admitting that you were wrong, misinformed or just a little mixed up is scary, but it doesn’t make you weak or bad. It makes you normal. It makes you human.

So who knows! Maybe you’ll catch me loading up on cream cheese or leaving my mom on read (actually that one has happened, sorry mom).

But for now — I will not equivocate on my opinion(s).

No, actually, it’s February 13th. Ironically, as you’ll see, I’ve had a hard time finishing starting this piece again.

Lots of reasons excuses for this:

1. Had nearly 15 hours of lessons this week, which all require prep and follow-ups. Most of the lessons are just talking for an hour straight which is tiring in a way I don’t expect.

2. Had to build two shelves and a table which took way longer than expected because the instructions were seemingly written by a six-year-old child whose only experience in construction is Lunchables stacks and plastic blocks.

3. Haven’t interacted face-to-face with another human in a meaningful way in nearly a week. This makes me feel numb and weird and counter-intuitively really removes me from myself.

4. Haven’t been sleeping all that well and thus feeling more drained at the end of the day. Feeling like I need to “relax” at night. Good Relaxing is knitting or reading, but I finished my slippers and am reading a bad book, so instead I do Bad Relaxing, which is scrolling.

Philip asks me on the phone if I feel “burdened” more than usual, probably because I am having a manic breakdown about shelves and have been in bed before 10pm four out of five days this week. I say yes, I’m feeling burdened, and after wallowing for a little longer, I resolve to get out my funk.

Unfortunately this means confronting the reasons why I am in a funk. I check my screen time. Nearly five hours on Instagram this week. I’m supposed to have Instagram deleted.

I delete Instagram. I text friends and ask if anyone wants to get a beer even though part of me just wants to go to bed early again, not commute 40 minutes in the cold. But this is the kind of funk that requires a little bit of work to get out of.

I go to a coffee shop and resolve to start again.

A few days ago (now many days ago, see, it was February 8th when I wrote this part) I decided to stop checking my phone first thing in the morning. A resolution, except I didn’t make it on January 1st. In fact I spent more days in January scrolling on my phone before bed than not scrolling. But falling asleep to YouTube shorts and waking up to emails and texts and DMs about jello was doing bad things to my brain.

I had been thinking about this resolution for a while. In an email my friends I noted that I wanted to “transition back” to having my phone on the other side of the room at night, which I’ve done a few times before.

Transition, except is no “transition” needed for this. I either sleep with my phone plugged in away from my bed or I don’t. “Transition” is a crutch. Because I was waiting. I was waiting because a random Tuesday didn’t feel like the right time to make this call. I wanted a good-feeling day. I wanted a first of the month or an end of the week. I wanted a sign from God. But I didn’t get any of those.

So I plugged my phone in and shoved it under my bed and didn’t go on it before I slept. I made myself get out of bed in the morning, brush my teeth, drink a glass of water, and make my coffee before checking it.

And I felt better.

Here is a list of reasons I have waited to do something:

• Too old

• Not old enough

• Not the right time

• Too cold

• Too tired

• Not the right place

• Don’t want to regret it

• Wanted to do something else

• Afraid

• Need more time to think

• Overthinking

In my fourth year of college I took a seminar called “Character Traits and Success.” It was invitation-only for undergraduates because it was technically a class in the graduate school for business, so most of my classmates were much older. (I remember one was married with a kid on the way, which at the time was mind-blowing to me).

“Class” was sort of a stretch — every week we’d read an essay or lecture about leaders, virtues, morals, success, etc. Then we’d get together and eat pizza and discuss said readings. Then we’d drink wine and chat in a more informal setting.

(I had a weird phobia of accidentally getting drunk around adults at this point in time and also took the class on Monday nights, so I literally never drank any wine but I did steal copious cups of coffee from the lounge below the classroom).

It was a really lovely semester, my first and last without the near constant work on The Cavalier Daily. I liked the class. For the most part our discussions were thought-provoking if occasionally contrived. We read Plato, Nicomachean Ethics, part of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, and David Foster Wallace. We talked about discipline, about money, about ambition.

At the very end of the class we read Regrets of the Dying, a collection of observations about regret from a palliative care nurse. The idea is that regret can teach you lessons. People regretted not expressing their feelings, working too hard, staying stuck in old habits. Most people regret chances they didn't take as opposed to mistakes they made.

The idea, the takeaway, is that you’re supposed to take risks. You’re supposed to live honestly, with intention, and not hold back because you’re afraid. Otherwise, you might regret it.

A couple days after I start writing this I am listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with George Saunders, who’s just come out with a novel called Vigil. I haven’t read it yet but I love George Saunders and I loved Lincoln in the Bardo.

I literally almost stop walking because in the first few seconds of the podcast Ezra plays a clip of George speaking at a university and he says:

“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was right there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded sensibly, reservedly, mildly.”

There’s a psychological term for it, because of course there is, when you experience little coincidences in the universe that feel as though they must be related, must be magic, but are probably just, well, probability.

But still. I was just thinking about regret – I was writing about this very thing, regretting not doing something, and here is George Saunders in my ear, as if he’s logged into my Substack and reading my drafts. (George, if you’re here, would love to grab a coffee and chat. You seem great).

So of course it felt meaningful, especially because Vigil, I gather from the podcast, is about regret. Ezra and George cover a lot more ground — about truth, evil, about God and judgement, about comfort and grace. It’s a great episode and I think everyone should listen to it. But I was struck by one section where George talk about one of the inspirations for Vigil, which is The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy.

Tolstoy has layered in this idea that Ivan is starting to realize that he wasted his life by this idea of being normal. There’s a beautiful moment, where after many, many days of saying: Why am I suffering so much when I lived the perfect life? when he finally says to God: All right, maybe I didn’t. Maybe I lived out of alignment with truth.

And at that point, he begins this rapid transformation. Salvation in that moment is to align yourself with what is actually true. The truth is you lived your life in the wrong way.

At some point he says: All right, I can’t go back in time, but I can start now, essentially. I can start being in alignment. I didn’t live in the right way.

You can feel the pain start to go out of him.

I am afraid, deeply so, of living my life wrong. Of wasting it. I fear I will one day regret key moments of decision in my life. I don’t want to be on my deathbed realizing I’ve done it all wrong. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

So what are we supposed to do?

I don’t know. Obviously. How can you answer that question, really? God only knows (literally, depending on what you believe). But I think, I think, there are some things you can do. To live fully, to live without regret.

1. You can live in “alignment with truth,” whatever that means to you.

I majored in Creative Writing because that felt like the truest thing I wanted to do in college.

It hasn’t necessarily been the most helpful degree in terms of figuring out what I want to do with the rest of my life (‘published novelist’ is actually quite a challenging career to pursue) and I sometimes wish I had majored in something more utilitarian.

But nothing has felt truer to me than the feeling I get reading a piece of fiction that changes my life. There is no regret. I think of when Jesse Ball gave us all a thick piece of paper in increasingly smaller type as his syllabus, crying on the Lawn a month later after reading The Unfortunates. Meeting with Anna, who to this day is one of the best educators I’ve ever met, so kind and generous with her time and wisdom.

Holding an entire 60 pages that I wrote, wearing a pink dress and a hand-made crown of laurels while I read some of those pages, my hands shaking. Getting to spend two years with classmates whose work I still read (shoutout to and her lovely drivel!).

How can I regret something as true as all that?

2. You can choose to reframe regret as gratitude.

I do think regret can be a useful tool — reading about what other people regret can help orient you towards truth. But that doesn’t mean you won’t ever make the wrong decision. It doesn’t mean that you won’t look back on certain parts of your life and wonder if you should’ve done something different.

These are the moments that are ripe with the potential for regret. They are also moments that teach you a lot about life and about yourself.

After college I moved to Spain, as many of you probably know. This blog was born in Spain, out of that decision. (Happy 504 days of internet diary, by the way!)

There were so many things about Spain I loved. I loved living in the little apartment on Calle Cuna with Jonah and Philip. I loved playing Bananagrams and going to Five Guys with the friends we made in Spain. (One of those friends just moved three doors down from me!) I loved going to Aldi four times a week.

But then there are some days I look back at that decision and wonder if it was wrong. Despite the things I loved, living abroad was hard for me. I didn’t like my job. I had health issues I couldn’t resolve. I cried a lot and was not always kind or a good friend. Coming back to the U.S., I felt (and still feel) adrift compared to some of my peers who jumped into full-time jobs out of college.

And then I think about how much I learned.

I learned that being close to family and friends is really important to me. I learned that I don’t want to teach English. I learned how to deal with really hard moments and how not to deal with them. I learned that most things don’t change unless you do something about them, that you can’t wish for life to get better. You have to do that sh*t yourself!

I also learned how to apply for a visa, how to stand up for myself against weird landlords, how to cook liver, how to order tiny beers in Spanish, how to kiss people on both cheeks and not make it awkward.

How can I regret learning so much?

3. And finally, you can stop waiting. You can choose to do it now, and hope you mostly regret the chances you didn’t take.

George (Saunders, in case you forgot) says it best:

All right, I can’t go back in time, but I can start now, essentially.

You can just do it, now, just make a new decision that feels truer or feels better. Because then at least you won’t regret the chance you didn’t take, right?

That can be something small with an infinitesimal chance for regret, like sleeping with your phone on the other side of the room.

Or it can be something bigger. Telling someone you love them, even if you’re not sure if they feel the same, not waiting for some sign. Just writing that application and submitting it, not waiting for the right time.

I was really scared of moving to New York. But I decided I was more scared of not doing it. I was afraid that I’d spend another month at home in Short Pump and really not taking that job when I had the chance.

So I stopped waiting and I said yes and now I’m here, and how can I regret being brave? How can I regret saying yes and at least finding out?

You can’t go back in time. You can’t change the past. But you can change the right now. You’re never stuck, not really. Even if you realize you really have made the wrong choice, you can make another, different one. You can make mistakes and even more mistakes, but I really do think mistakes are better than wondering what if.

So what are you waiting for?

This may come as a surprise to those of you know me as a the Creative Writing Fiction English Journalism Humanities Girl, but it is true! I find data specifically to be very interesting. I like seeing visual, numerical representations of confusing things. I like identifying trends. I like that with data, unlike with fiction, there is usually a Right Answer, or at least a final destination.

(For example, you do not have to spend an hour having a breakdown with your thesis mentor about your character’s first name and also how to decide what choices they should make when there are so many choices for them and what if you make them make the wrong choice and everything turns out bad and wrong?)

With data, you analyze, you debug, you interpret. You cull and pivot and clean. There is an endgame. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and you can find all the corner pieces first or all the blue pieces first or all the ends but in the end you have a complete picture.

In another world, I may have majored in Computer Science or Political Science, but alas, I am 1) not actually that good at math and 2) someone who uses “alas” in sentences with a straight face.

I’ve been thinking a lot about numbers lately, about the vast amount of data thrumming under my feet to keep the world moving — the data behind the subway system, behind the swipe of a credit card, the data behind the building I live in.

I also think a lot about the data of minutiae, like: how many hours of sleep am I getting? How much time did I spend on Instagram last week? How many steps do I take? How much am I spending on groceries? Thinking and sorting these numbers help me feel a little bit more in control of my life.

There is one data point that’s really been irking me since I moved to New York which is: how much time do I spend commuting?

In college I thought very little about this because I always lived within 10-20 minutes of most everywhere I needed to go. Back home, I lived in Short Pump, Virginia, which meant I lived within a 5 minute drive of Target, Walmart, Kroger, Food Lion, the gym, another Walmart, six gas stations, and three cute local bookstores.

In New York every errand takes three times longer than it used to. I am not necessarily busier than I used to be, but I feel like I have fewer hours in the day because I spend so much damn time in transit. At least it feels like I do. And then that got me thinking: how much f*cking time do I spend on the subway anyway?

The data monster in me woke up. Measure, it whispered. Make table. Pivot sheet. Excel. Color code. Graph. Numberssssss. So I gave data monster a cookie.

Methods:

The goal was simple: figure out how many minutes a day I spend commuting. My first task, though, was to figure out what that actually means.

“Commute” is defined, according to Oxford Languages, as “a regular journey of some distance to and from one’s place of work.” Cambridge defines commuting as “travel[ing] back and forth regularly (as between a suburb and a city).” I do not have a traditional ‘commuting’ lifestyle because I work two part-time jobs, and one is remote. The other requires me to run a number of errands in the city. I also do spend a fair amount of time “commuting” to other events like social outings with friends, and I wanted to take that time into account too.

I ended up going with a broader interpretation: the time I spend journeying between home and a secondary location, and vice-versa. The commuting falls into three categories:

• “Work” counts as my physical ‘office’ or a library/coffee shop where I may choose to remote work

• “Social” includes commuting to a bar/restaurant, a friend’s apartment, or a coffee shop

• “Errands” include basic things like grocery shopping but also errands I had to run for work

Essentially, any time I spent traveling from one major spot to another was included.

I decided to spend seven days measuring my commute. Again, because of the nature of my jobs, my weeks look different: some weeks I go into the ‘office’ three or four times, other weeks I go in once. Because I live in a windowless apartment, I do try to get out of the apartment every day, whether that’s walking to a coffee shop or training to a library. So I typically ‘commute’ every day no matter what in some sense. I also typically run an errand or two a week, usually to the grocery store and occasionally for work.

(The week I chose was also the week of snow-mageddon in NY, so over the weekend I did less travel than usual).

To measure, I started a stopwatch on my phone when I walked out the door of my apartment and stopped it when I arrived at the door of my destination.

I also kept track of the method of transportation (by train and by foot, except for an outlier where a friend gave me a ride home that I did not count) and what I did during the commute (reading, eating, scrolling, or talking).

Results:

I spent 641 minutes commuting. That’s nearly 11 hours, or close to an entire waking day.

(I spent exactly one more minute commuting for social purposes this week than for work purposes (244 minutes vs. 243 minutes) which is interesting — I think this is largely because my “work” trips are almost all in Manhattan and an easy 30ish minutes off the L, while most of my social trips were further into Brooklyn and took almost double the time.) I spent 154 minutes commuting for errands.

I by and large rode the L most often (I did not break the trips down into time spent on each line because that seemed too finicky but maybe worth doing one of these days…)

I did a fair amount of reading on my commutes (172 pages across the week) but also a fair amount of scrolling on my phone or zoning out. (Like with methods of transit, I didn’t break activity down by time spent commuting).

Observations:

I SPEND SO MUCH TIME COMMUTING!!!!

Like wow. Ten entire hours of my life spent in transport, in liminal spaces, moving from point A to point B. It’s kind of a sobering fact. I think this is especially true because it’s not like screen time, where I can ‘reclaim’ this time by putting a block on social media or buying one of those Bricks or whatever it is people are doing these days to spend less time on their phone. I literally must sit on the L train, I must walk to the grocery store.

(And yes, technically I don’t have to commute for the social activities, nor do I have to leave the house on WFH days, but if I didn’t view these as required I would literally never leave my apartment and probably would lose a lot of meaningful friendships.)

One thing about the New York subway system is that it’s full of interesting moments and interesting people, if you know where to look. Some moments from me included:

• a Hasidic jew next to me watching manosphere videos on his phone

• a man texting someone in spanish about buying a pizza, but only next week after he’s been paid, despite begging from someone I assumed was either a child or his wife

• someone listening to country music on old-fashioned headphones which bled sound so incredibly loudly that I could literally hear every word

• lots of strange silences that for some reason only occur on very crowded subway rides, usually the L during rush hour

• a girl with very vivid, beautiful tattoos on her ankle (a rose, a bee)

• lots of kids. once, a mom berating her kid for touching the subway pole with his bare hands because it is “very dirty”

• lots of dogs. sometimes very well-behaved dogs who sit neatly between their owners’ legs and other times dogs on laps that squirm and wiggle.

• women selling gum, often with young daughters

I did scroll on my phone a lot, despite setting a mental intention to do that less. This was sometimes doing things like responding to emails or texts and sometimes things like reading the news, but it was also sometimes just scrolling on Instagram or clicking around on Substack.

Conclusion:

I think once you accept the fact that commuting is, for many people, a necessary sort of evil, you can start considering the things that make it… less evil. Like if I have to spend an entire day’s worth of time I might as well make it worthy!!!

I think the first thing I’d like to do is stop going on my phone during my commute. I often justify this by 1) reading Substack, which feels better than just scrolling on Instagram, but I’m still just scrolling (and often the Substack devolves to Instagram and is not actually often meaningful reading).

If I could take ten hours a week off my screen time, that would be a huge improvement. So resolution number one: no more phone.

Instead, in ten hours I could easily read one or two books. (Granted I can only read during actual minutes spent on the subway, not while walking, but perhaps that’s an argument for audiobooks….)

I could also write, draw, or simply sit with my thoughts. Most of my ‘nothing’ time during commutes was because I was simply too tired to do anything but stare, and honestly, that was often a nice moment of just… nothing.

I dislike the idea that you need to effiency-max every single moment of your life, but my commute feels like a good place to start practicing more intention. Writing, reading, pondering.

And dreaming up more things to data-ify! #WomeninSTEM

Ok, time to walk home. And then walk to the L train, and then sit on the L train, and then transfer to the ACE and then go home and then walk to a coffee shop and then take the G to Brooklyn and then and then and then

On Jan. 17, 2025, exactly one year ago, I was in a tiny pueblo 40km outside of Seville teaching kids who understood maybe 12% of what I was saying about color theory and basic circuitry. I wrote emails exclusively in Spanish. Drank little cups of beer. Danced at clubs that closed at 5am.

Later in the year: traveling with my blue backpack, sweating, sleeping in strangers’ homes and hostels with long dark strands of hair in the shower drains. The Duomo, the Seine, swimming in alpine lakes, sitting on stone steps and eating sandwiches.

And then home, and then moving to New York, sweating on the subways, shirt sticking to my back and then suddenly having to text my mom “Can you bring your wool coat to WV so I can get it” because I wake up one morning to the cold.

It is strange to me how much can change over the course of a year and how impossible it feels that anything will change that much again. How much time can pass in a year, somehow way more than 365 days. How the minutes do not always proceed in a linear fashion but also sometimes seem to twist and leap and twirl away.

I had meant to write this at the beginning of 2026, as a sort of reflection on 2025, since that’s often what people do at the turn of the year. I have written before that I think the New Year is a trap designed to trick you into thinking it is the dawn of something new and special and exciting when really it is just a click forward in time like any other day/moment/second.

So really it’s fitting that I’m three-ish weeks late.

I have quite a terrible memory. I have found this hard to describe to other people — it is not really that I cannot picture things in the past but more so that I cannot set them there. No memory of mine has any sense of time around it. I have a hard time even feeling the passage of time, marking it instead by changes in seasons, in haircuts, in clothes. When I remember something that has happened to me I have to think about who my teachers were at the time in order to assign it a place in time or some other landmark like that.

2025 feels like that. If I go back through my photos I can find the months that mark specific things I was doing but they do not feel any further away in my memory than the photos my phone shows of me in Charlottesville in 2020, a medical mask dangling from my hand, my hair long.

In 2025:

• A birthday party in a friend’s apartment, a leg of literal jamon on their kitchen table, a homemade cake.

• Oranges falling in heaps from the trees, run over by motorcycles. Tiny dogs.

• Granada. Tapas and narrow streets crowded with incense and trinkets. My knee was hurting badly then, I remember.

• Writing and drawing lots. Eating tripe and liver.

• First time in Paris. AirBnB with basically a ladder to get up to the top floor. Pastries, museums. The Mona Lisa from afar.

• Had a terrible infection around my mouth and had to film a video for my school’s website.

• Octopus in Galicia with Susana. Pasta, beers. Lots of walking, chatting, lying out and feeling the sun.

• Staying home sick once from school just because.

• Porto. Stopping somewhere between Seville and Spain with Sona and Philip to eat at a restaurant. Sausages, green wine. A huge museum. Oysters and custard tarts. Later, the oppressive and unending rain and cold. Dirt.

• Watching people smoke in the park and tossing frisbees around. Picnics. Bad, cheap bottles of wine.

• Kids making things out of clay in school. They know the names of some animals in English. Horse, turtle.

• Big house on a rural farm with a dog. Hot dogs and juggling. A big horse, getting lost on the roads back to the house. Card games.

• Mallorca and swimming in the ocean, salt and sun. Cathedrals and sunburns.

• My sister and mom in Spain. Long, hot days, lots of tapas, showing them around the city.

• Goodbyes. Italy, long-lost cousins. Pasta cooked in oil, garlic. A woman on a balcony giving us basil, asking about Trump. (They always want to know about Trump).

• Seeing my old au pair for the first time in ages and feeling like she looks the same as she did when I was eight.

• More long, hot days. Small dogs in coffee shops. Meals cooked out of groceries at the end of their lifespan. Euro notes.

• Germany, France. Driving through the alps listening to American music. German beer. Monoprix. The beach and steaming mussels in red wine and lemon, Philip gutting a fish on the balcony.

• The first Diet Coke after getting home.

• Cooking, running, seeing old friends. Sweaty bars with English music, being able to sing along for the first time in a year.

• Making honey on a neighbor’s porch, a giant steel drum spinning thick golden strands of the stuff off the frames.

• A crab boil, Bananagrams, more sunburns. Duck. Long lazy days in the sun, the thwack of a rubber ball against a paddle. Teaching word games to parents.

• Driving to the city without being able to see out of the rearview mirror. Yellow overalls. Bioplastics, gelatin.

• The best slice of white pizza I’ve ever had (with lemon).

• My new room, LED panels to mimic the sun, a tiny spider hanging off the eucalyptus on the shower head and leaving it be.

• Memorizing the stops on the L train. Thinking about how 365 days will pass again in this arbitrary chunk.

In my mind’s eye that is 2025: a collection of bullet points that swim tenuously around in my head but mostly around in my phone, in my camera roll. A little depressing but I am trying to make up for my terrible mental memory by committing some of it to that list. I’m afraid it’s a bit of a boring thing for most other people, but it’s my year, so there’s that.

In a more interesting vein, I would also like to talk about the books I read in 2025, but in a separate post. I will tell you that I am resolving to knit a sweater in 2026. Been keeping up with flossing. Trying to do puzzles and play board games which makes me sound like I’m not that fun. So also trying to eat interesting foods and drink interesting drinks and stay out too late, on occasion.

I am thinking about the things that will mark 2026, the bullet points I will put in a list this time next year. Maybe cabbages in the street, maybe snow melting to slush. Maybe the soothing hush of a library, grocery shopping. Maybe space travel. Maybe not. Lots of maybes in 365 more days.

It’s literally the only way I’ve found I can keep myself organized and on track when I have so many different things to do during the day. And it works! I find that I get distracted less often when I have specific things to keep me oriented towards through the day, and since I usually make the lists the night before, it has drastically reduced the level of anxiety I feel at night before bed.

It also makes it really hard for me to exist in the present moment because I always know what is (should) come next. I close my eyes and see the notes app. I’m walking to the grocery store and thinking about the other six blank circles left in my day. I’m on the subway, trying to read, and thinking about the emails I need to send.

Last week I went with my friend Joaquin (you’ll also note I dropped his cookie box off on Tuesday) to an invited dress of “All Out,” a new play on Broadway about ambition. It was less a play and more a reading of a bunch of different stories with musical numbers by Lawrence. It was fun and enjoyable but it was not fun enough to hold my attention for ninety minutes, and sure enough, I caught myself midway through a skit about Paul Revere’s horse Oatsy (who is depressed because Paul Revere has gone on to bigger and better things post Midnight Ride) thinking about the email I had forgotten to respond to and mentally adding that to my “tasks” list for when I got home.

On the subway home Joaquin and I talked about the weirdness of the show and why they had decided to move the floor back and forth so many times. I told him I wished it was snowing. He got off the stop before me and texted me — it was, miraculously, snowing. I walked home feeling glowy and buoyant. I was not thinking about lists. I was thinking about how I love the city in the snow, sodden socks, children with gloves, scarves wrapped round and round and long woolen coats.

It is usually those little moments that get me. A show literally designed to entertain audience members for two hours had me drifting away, but I see a woman coaxing her dog into the snow, his legs stuck out all awkwardly as he tries to walk in tiny boots, and I forget the Gmail app even exists. Little unplanned moments of pure, undistracted joy.

My love for the city is not mutually exclusive with my distaste for it. There are things about living here that make me feel kind of depressed about humans.

The delivery drivers lined up outside of McDonald’s, motorcycle helmets obscuring their faces, weaving in and out of traffic to deliver a soggy Big Mac to someone a mile away.

The guy watching TikToks out loud on the L train, sitting just inches away from me, eyes glazed as he swipes and swipes and swipes.

A woman asleep outside Union Square on the ground, the way we all move past her without blinking.

Lines for $40 hot cocoas. Lines for basically anything, actually. Paying $11 for a mediocre coffee. Dogs having to pee on concrete. The way every single bar of soap is locked up in CVS. Sometimes I miss my car.

(One day a week ago I was on the train, reading / getting distracted by my phone when I heard a man sneeze. I didn’t look up. He sneezed again and then again and and then again and at this point it felt worth looking up, but when I did he was moving his hand away from his mouth and there was a long, sticky tendril hanging off of it and then he wiped it on the literal subway pole before stuffing his hands back in his pockets and I could do nothing but sit in frozen disgust for the rest of the train ride.)

Also the way I can’t see the moon anymore, can’t see the stars.

And! I love the farmer’s markets in the winter, apple cider donuts, the doormen at my boss’s apartment who tell me stories about their kids. One of them says I look “real tired” one day and the other says “you can’t tell a woman that.” I love the Trader Joe’s cashiers who tell me I should just bring a rolling suitcase in next time. I love scallion pancake breakfast sandwiches. I love KiKi, the old guy at my gym who tells me I look strong and fist bumps me when I leave.

The guy at the bagel shop who tells me I can come inside for quarters whenever I want, that if someone’s bothering me on the street I should let him know. The crossing guards, the bus drivers.

Buildings twinkling across the river at night. Steamy windows during happy hours. Bagels. Deli coffee. Telling a woman that yes, the L does go all the way to Union Square, don’t worry, it’s the stop right after 6th. The orange seats on the Q. It’s the greatest city in the world when I’m giving someone directions.

I have a thing about ordering groceries (or takeout from those motorcycle men). It’s a thing that stems from a belief that we should just go outside and get our groceries, for goodness sake, get the cart and bag them up and take them home.

(this obviously does not apply to people who live with physical limitations and rely on food delivery services to live, people working 50+ hours a week, single moms, etc etc. it’s a sort of privilege to say this and I hope nobody is feeling like I’m shouting down at them from my high horse. more like declaring things softly from atop a miniature pony).

I do not have the instacart app on my phone. I will not pay $7 to have a meal delivered to me when I can a) make it at home or b) eat in a restaurant.

But when I moved in to my new apartment I realized one night that I had no groceries, no pillows, no trash can, no mattress, no MILK for my COFFEE!!! The horror!! It was 5:41pm so the sun had gone down. It was 39 degrees. I really really did not want to walk 20 minutes to Trader Joe’s or even 10 minutes to the more expensive C-Town or Key Foods. I needed mini marshmallows for cookies and you couldn’t get those at Trader Joe’s anyway.

So I ordered grocery delivery. A man named Luis went to Target for me and picked out a little white trashcan and the marshmallows and a cheap pillow. I followed his progress on the app, watching his little car icon get closer to me. He brought it up to my door.

Bringing those big red fabric Target bags into my apartment, I felt a deep kind of shame, like New York had broken a key bit of my spirit into pieces. Stupid city making me order stupid groceries to avoid going out in the stupid cold!!!!!

To make up for it I found a $25 Ikea duvet on Facebook Marketplace and trekked 40 minutes on the bus into Queens to pick it up from this lady who was sitting in her car to avoid the street cleaners towing her.

The duvet is stained and too light for the winter. It was heavy and I didn’t wear gloves and my knuckles are literally cracking from the cold.

I could’ve bought a new one. I probably should’ve. It would’ve been warmer and not covered in weird brown splotches that won’t come out even with bleach. But I’m fighting conveniences tooth and nail.

It’s so I have stories to tell my kids about walking uphill both ways to school.

I turned 24 recently. Because I was born so close to Christmas, most of my birthdays are spent with my sister and mom and not friends, who have usually gone home for the holidays. This is the second year ever my sister and I have ever been apart for our birthdays.

When we were kids mom would take us to get mani/pedis but because I was a freak, I hated people touching my feet and got incredibly bored waiting for the women to finish my nails. Plus (because I was a freak) I had a very bad habit of peeling the polish off within days, leaving flakes of red or blue on the carpet and in my sheets.

One year I finally said I didn’t want a mani/pedi so my mom gave me $40 cash and dropped me off at Barnes & Noble. Birthdays after that got better for me when I realized I did not actually have to get my nails done if I didn’t want. (also I encourage all my friends to give me $40 and leave me alone in bookstores if they’re looking for gift ideas for me).

We’d go out to dinner (California Pizza Kitchen and brownie sundaes) and sometimes go see a movie or a show. We’d eat cake and open our birthday cards. For many years we had birthday parties with whoever was in town. We went ice skating once, built gingerbread houses. One year my sister and I went to the mall and got like twelve free birthday gifts.

I was always jealous of my friends with summer birthdays or even birthdays during the school year, the ones who got to blow out candles at school lunches or have pool parties. Last year, in Spain, I ate a tapa and walked across town to see Philip’s Christmas concert, and it was a sweet day but I really very badly wanted to be home in Virginia.

I love birthdays, really, because I love to celebrate people and bake and I love the way candles look on top of birthday cakes. But they are usually cold and dark and come with weird feelings about aging.

This year I invited some friends over and had a small party. I leveraged my NYC connections for a reservation at a fancy cocktail bar and felt very chic. We met Cooper in Williamsburg and spent the day wandering, drank a Guinness and ate pub food as the sun went down. Philip and I tried Win Son bakery and I ate the best donut of my life. I slept in and stayed up late. I remembered my Starbucks birthday reward at 7pm and got a quad shot of espresso, no ice, for the next morning. I made a molasses gingerbread cake and got to blow out the candles. I had no lists. It was a perfect birthday weekend.

New York does make me feel young. 24 is nothing here. “You’re still a baby,” the doorman tells me when I say my birthday is coming up. There’s so much life to live.

When I was in elementary school there was a piece of a big concrete tunnel pipe on the woodchips. Kids would line up a few yards away, get a running start, and launch themselves up the side of it to sit on top. I was always too small and slow to get up there properly. I’d sit inside the tunnel instead or kind of shimmy my way up with a boost from an older kid.

I went back to my elementary school a month or so ago and the playground looked so small. The chairs were tiny, the slide miniscule.

When I’m walking home from work I pass a playground. There are kids toddling around in their big coats, shouting at each other, swinging, running. Kids in the city always make me think about how weird it would be to be a kid in the city, when I grew up in the suburbs, riding my bikes in huge cul-de-sacs and catching fireflies in the front yard on muggy July nights. Makes me feel so old, so far away.

I’m sure, though, that those kids will blow out their birthday candles at 24 years old and go back to those playgrounds and think about how small everything is, how big they’ve gotten since. Feeling too old, feeling too young. They’re not mutually exclusive.

Buckle in, people, because you’re about to hear a story. A story about how I baked nearly 300 cookies and moved apartments in the same week. Longtime readers of internet diary will recall my 2024 cookie box, in which I made five different types of cookies with a questionable oven, no electric beaters, and a dream. I was also living in Spain and two of the cookies were vegan. I did not make things easy for myself.

This year, the stakes were slightly higher because I decided to do a Real Cookie Box instead of bringing all the cookies to an exchange. This required some additional admin work. I made a form. I made a flyer. I marketed. People ordered. (I also decided to donate the proceeds to NY Food Pantry in the spirit of the holidays. I encourage all you readers to pick an org that speaks to you this holiday season and make a donation! Time, money, etc. Good for the world and good for your spirit).

Then it was time to R&D. The internet is of course filled with beautiful cookie boxes around this time of year: the New York Times released a "cookie week" recipe collection of zany, gorgeous cookies. (Miss me with the popcorn cookie though that one looks disgusting). This woman on Substack made the most beautiful box with the most perfect little mushroom meringues and I will not sleep until I recreate them later. Also obsessed with this Reddit user ‘motherofsausagedogs’ who made seventeen different types of cookies including a homemade Oreo.

But for my own box I knew I needed to keep it simple. My constraints included living in New York city and thus having a tiny kitchen, living in New York city and thus being broke and unable to afford stand mixers or 19 gallons of egg whites for meringues, living in New York city and working two jobs, and living in New York city and having to move apartments in the same week I was planning to do all of this.

So I did some research and took some notes. I browsed Substack, Reddit, and Sally’s Baking Addiction for recipes (reputable sources ONLY, people). I narrowed down my options and decided on non-negotiables (something chocolate, two classic options, something crunchy, fruit). I did math (!!) to scale up a bunch of recipes, calculate what ingredients I would need, and threw them into a Master Spreadsheet (here, in case you are curious). And then I made a Plan so that I could do all of this and not lose my mind.

Without further ado, my cookies:

Brigadeiro

The first of two not-a-cookie cookies, brigadeiro are a treat I grew up with. They were introduced to me by my Brazilian au pair, and became an easy, unique treat to bring to birthday parties and Christmas parties every year. Made with just condensed milk, cocoa powder, and butter, they are somewhere between a truffle and a caramel, and they have this deep, rich flavor and wonderfully chewy texture. They’re usually coated with something like sprinkles or nuts — I chose cocoa powder and shaved chocolate for a little bit of a neater finish.

They are seemingly simple to make but take a lot of hands-on work, so I made them nearly two weeks before the delivery date. You basically just combine your ingredients and then cook them down over the stove until the mixture thickens and begins to pull away from the sides. It is imperative, however, that you stir and scrape the bottom of the pot constantly, otherwise the mixture can begin to burn and get clumpy. Then you must wait for it to cool until you can handle it. Then you must roll the dough into little balls, which is not as easy as it sounds because it is incredibly sticky. I coat my hands lightly with some oil and wash them fully every third or fourth ball (so you better have a good hand lotion…). And after that you have a glorious pile of these delightful truffles!

Cornflake crunch squares

I saw these like two months ago on easygayoven and couldn’t stop thinking about them. Plus I knew I wanted something crunchy in the box. So these were an automatic in. They were the only “cookie” that I couldn’t prep ahead of time so I made them on Saturday in two big batches. They were very easy since they’re essentially just rice krispie treats with 1) browned butter and 2) the add-in of butterscotch chips. The texture after mixing the ‘wet’ ingredients together kind of scared me but once I added the cornflakes it was normal and chill.

My only critique with these is that I thought the chocolate coating was unnecessary and too sweet. This might be because I did use chocolate chips from Hersheys because they were cheap and WHY is chocolate so expensive?? But even with a higher quality chocolate I think these would just be better naked (to be fair I am a dessert purist and generally think chocolate muddles things up).

Matcha crinkles

I LOVE a crinkle cookie but I didn’t want to just. Make a crinkle cookie. Especially because they’re usually chocolate and I had enough chocolate in this box already. But I wanted to redeem myself from the matcha cake I made for Philip’s birthday that nobody could eat because it literally rotted overnight. Still mourning that. Anyway my mochi matcha cake was transformed into these matcha crinkles cookies.

I made this dough ahead of time and it was a b*tch to work with, so sticky and wet even after I froze it. These definitely saw a lot of spread when they baked and the crinkle was not as successful as it could’ve been, but they tasted nice and I thought the texture was spot on. (Probably would’ve tasted better if I used ceremonial-grade matcha instead of culinary grade, but #bakingonabudget, so)

Spiced shortbreads

Last year’s cookie box included my nanny’s traditional Scottish shortbread recipe, which is literally just butter, sugar, and flour. I knew I wanted a nice shortbread in this box but I didn’t want it to be that sweet or heavy, since I did already have many sweet and heavy options. Originally I wanted to try a cheese/spice cracker but decided that parmesan would throw off the vibe of this box.

I found this recipe for traditional Speculoos cookies and changed the name because these taste nothing like the plane Biscoff cookies most people associate with Speculoos (they are much better imo). These were the easiest and most fun cookie because I got to use REAL COOKIE CUTTERS and not a cut-up Pepsi can rim!!! How fun!!! I made the dough and baked these in advance and they kept well in the freezer. I ‘refreshed’ them in a warm oven as recommended. My only critique here is that I wish I had rolled these thinner and done their initial bake for a little longer, as I think they were just a little too dense/chewy. Otherwise fabulous and one of the cookies I will definitely make again.

Raspberry citrus thumbprints

This was the fruit non-negotiable checked off! I have always wanted been obsessed with linzer cookies (and Ikea’s kafferep) but they require lots of work, special ingredients, and time. So I went with linzer’s easier but tasty cousin, the jam thumbprint! I followed Sally’s recipe but went with raspberry jam for the center since I’m not a huge fan of lemon and thought this would be more festive…

These were the easiest cookies (thank u sally <3) because I could make the dough way in advance, they were easy to roll, and they froze well and maintained their shape. The hardest part was getting an indent in them with my thump that actually held the jelly??? I think probably I should’ve used a teaspoon or something. I added a lemon glaze last minute on these and thought they were delicious, a nice balance of tangy and sweet with that lovely jammy center.

And that, my friends, is my 2025 cookie box. I am honestly shocked that these all came together and I didn’t light anything on fire or break our oven. Plus I think they tasted pretty good, but don’t take my word for it…

The moral of this story is that you can do anything you set your mind to, including bake 5 types of cookies in the span of two weeks in a 10sq ft kitchen. A big thank you to everyone who bought a cookie box and supported this big process. I’m looking forward to an even bigger and better cookie box in 2026. Probably not a bigger kitchen, but a girl can dream.