Sometime at the End of October.....
I am not sure to what I might attribute my long haitus. Time is an obvious and universal constraint, and still not the one I have been most up against. Lack of content or ideas seems lazy and contrived. Work paralysis, penchant for procrastination, these are ongoing and yet highly inconsequential truths. I have had moments before when writing is not the first thing or even the last thing I have turned to as a mean by which to understand myself within the context of the world around me. Sometimes life moves so fast it is as if I am riding a high-speed train, and to make sense of a world that is blurry and fleeting requires the type of effort I have not recently possessed.
There is also something to be said for making up for lost time. I used to have these things which I referred to as “lost days” and in any given year, which have, especially in college, been busy to say the least, I might have had four or five of these days. These were the types of days that I spent doing nothing, sometimes in the solitude of my room or maybe in the seat of a plane taking me across the Atlantic or maybe in the corner of some coffee shop going through LinkedIn toward one or another fruitless end trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. The last six months have been a string of consecutive lost days, days not tethered to any sense of purpose other than waiting out the clock.
So maybe it’s not like I am on the train, but somewhere next to, trying to outrun it in a race I will inevitably lose. To be able to reflect is to have something to reflect upon. I am trying so hard to make up for lost time that it is as if I am not fully conscious of the world around me, not fully present in any moment, so geared toward an unknown end, and I am tired. “What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.” (Joan Didion) Time has been lost this year. Time with friends, time outside, time in a classroom, time learning, time doing things you love. Thought has been lost, misattributed to all the things that have gone wrong. And where I do not mourn these things, I do fear what more there is to lose. And it is this fear from which I am trying to run.
In the midst of all this running, I have not been writing and I have not been cooking and I really have not been doing many of the things that I love the most. And I suppose this is the reason for my hiatus. And I hope that this is what marks its end, the finish line of this futile race. This is all to say there will be new things coming to the blog, an ongoing record of the things I love.
Weekly Reflections, Week 2
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about storytelling. Namely, storylines from books that I was read when I was a child, the kinds that take place on the edge of a forest and in the midst of romance and on the heels of tragedy. The ones that may begin with once upon a time…or in the beginning…or on a dark and stormy night…and end with happily ever after.
The hero’s journey. An indefatigable storyline, whose aspirational and dangerous singularity Joseph Campbell drew up and put forth into the world like an architect erects a building. This is the type of story that carries with it the sense of cohesion and linearity that, these days, I am at once longing for and wholeheartedly resenting. This is the type of story that is meant to be contained within the pages of a children’s book. But even Anna Karenina threw herself under a train. And Juliet drank the poison. And Hester Prynne was ostracized. This is just to say that all stories don’t have a happy ending, although I think I always knew that. We read their stories, the ones cut short, not because they are hopeful, but because they are meaningful, tethered to some force like love or loyalty or sacrifice, a storyline of importance. “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life.” (Cambell) What storytelling gives us the power to do is explain the unexplainable, ascribe meaning to the meaningless, to derive cause from effect. And we wear our stories on our sleeves like we once wore our hearts at a time when passion was unconstrained in order to brand our self-proclaimed meaning to the world.
This week, as I was finally settling into my apartment, unboxing the last of the scarves and jackets which had been sitting in a corner of my closet, I was feeling at once unattached from the space I was occupying and a general sense of weightlessness. To what meaning am I tethered? What line can I draw through my story to giving it a semblance of coherence like the kind found only in the pages of a children’s book?
My own story does begin on the edge of a forest, or more accurately, a path through the woods, in a white house in a small town outside of Boston. Fast forward twenty-one years, I find myself not in the throes of romance (much to my personal dismay), nor on the edge of a dark dark wood, but on the outskirts of a college campus, thinking about what story I have to tell.
I have more often described myself in college as “shambly” than I have anything else. Certainly never impassioned nor emboldened. I switched my major every week for two and a half years and only declared Foreign Affairs under certain duress in the way of daily emails from my college advisor. I am not in any clubs or organizations. Even the “theme” of this blog is something I turn about in my head daily, dissuaded by the idea that food is not so much a theme as it is a necessity and that so much of my life happens between meals.
In a recent conversation with a friend who is in the midst of applying to jobs—a process as foreign to me as navigating a city whose language I don’t speak—she relayed that the most difficult question she has gotten in any interview has been “what are you most passionate about?” She asked me how I might respond…the only thing that came to mind was “banana bread.” However true, probably not the answer a veteran Bain consultant would be looking for.
How do we articulate a cohesive narrative about our lives when our lives aren’t cohesive? They splinter off every three or four years and evolve into some new chapter that is of a similar duration. How do we draw a line through our stories when they are anything but linear?
I suppose this is all just to say that I am still figuring things out. And this blog is increasingly going to reflect that narrative, one of “shambliness” and all of the goings-on between meals and all of the thoughts that have no meaning and no explanation, the consequences of actions long-passed and since forgotten. And I thank you as you indulge me in my own messiness.
on repeat
scenes from this week
things i’m loving right now
~Hanes men’s sweatshirt in black
~Best Dressed’s how 2020 has me feeling
~Pumpkin spice nut pods
~thoughts of home
~buying fresh flowers (a recent break from my typical broke college student regiment)
~Joan Didion’s On Self Respect (I have read this enough times to almost have it memorized)
~a glass of red wine at day’s end
~Morgan Harper Nichols’ On Waiting
recipes i’m loving
triple sweet, one bowl apple cake
Ingredients
2 heaping cups finely diced apples
1/4 cup sugar (I used coconut sugar)
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
1/4 cup unsweetened apple sauce
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup gluten free flour
1 tsp baking soda
Pinch of salt
1 heaping tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
pinch of salt
optional: walnuts, raisins
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8x8 pan with coconut oil and set aside.
2. Place apples in a mixing bowl. Add sugar, maple syrup and honey. Stir to mix and allow to sit for about thirty mins
3. Add oil, vanilla and applesauce. Mix well.
4. Add in flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. Mix until well combined.
5. Spread evenly in prepared baking sheet and bake for 40-50 minutes.
also…
blackened salmon
from Plated by Erin
golden milk
from wit and delight
Weekly Reflections, Week 1
It seems too easy to say that things have changed, and yet, in the midst of this particularly difficult year, I find myself clinging to any sense of ease that happens to presents itself. Relationships have changed, shifted under the immense weight of passing time like the shifting of the tide. Institutions have changed. What was once the foundation from which a sense of routine and purpose grew, has now crumbled, only to be patched up and put together by the likes of tape and glue. What is left of college, the weeds growing on the razed landscape that was the comings and goings of classes and clubs, is the just simple reminder that “virtual connection” is nothing but an oxymoron. So things have changed. And what makes college so unique is against the soft and mundane drum of its constant and subtle evolutions, how easily one can feel so abandoned by a place that has the power to all consume.
What I am having a hard time grappling with is that, in the midst of all this change, I feel in some ways almost stagnant, suspended in time, contained in space, like a bear hibernating in winter, protecting itself from the elements’ wrath. When you look around my apartment, there are teacups everywhere. Books are strewn across every table in the same way pillows are thrown on a couch, with a deliberate carelessness. The yoga mat that is usually tucked in the corner by the door is unfurled on the stained white rug. There are clothes on the floor of my bedroom, but the counters in the kitchen are well kept and wiped down. This is home and also a world beyond. Hand-washed dishes drip dry on the rack next to the sink. Two of the four chairs at my kitchen table sport half-empty bags from one or another grocery run or a day at work. Sneakers have been left out, not returned to the now empty wicker basket in which they are meant to be kept. These are the marks of a busy life contained. Music is likely playing from the small speaker on the bookshelf by the window. Recently, I have been listening to a lot of new music on new Spotify radios that I have newly discovered. A candle is always burning. There are bobby pins everywhere. The room in which I sit is illuminated by the warm glow of fairy lights that weave between and curl around the corners of picture frames hung above my couch. The shrapnel of a mind on the outs with an institution that I am so steadfastly clinging to during my final year in its midsts, on the outs with itself, scattered across the living room floor. These are the things I find myself looking at for the better part of most days.
Things have changed and what change has the power to do is strip us of a sense of autonomy that I, in the earliest stages of adulthood, was already working so hard to hold on to. Autonomy, the power to think and make and act upon decisions for ourselves, providing some degree of control or power over the events that unfold within the goings-on of our everyday life. To no longer be stagnant in the midst of my own clutter, sprawled out before me in every corner of my apartment, I am going to be writing these reflections, reminders of the ways in which I am slowly coming to not only reclaim, but also hold on to a sense of autonomy in a world on the outs with itself.
I woke up at 5:30 this morning. I had to set an alarm, although I was not tired when I awoke. I love the mornings, I love to find productivity in their silences. I picked up my tea cups, four of them, one on the table by my bedside, one on the coffee table, two on the kitchen table, and I put them in the sink. I plugged in the fairy lights and sat down at the chair by the window and began to write.
How are you doing this week? Are you coming to terms with change? Or are you pushing back against its every tremor? Do you take comfort in how temporary everything is?
on repeat
scenes from the week
Things I’m Loving
~almond milk lattes with cinnamon and nutmeg
~freshly squeeze lemon juice. I add this to lemon water in the morning, salad dressings, smoothies, roasted salmon, you name it, it probably has lemon in it
~David and Goliath, by Malcolm Gladwell (September read!)
~hygge. burning a lot of candles and drinking hot tea (is it fall yet?!)
~These articles from the NYT and the New Yorker: How to get the most out of college and Late Bloomers
~Listening to NPR’s Code Switch and Arm Chair Experts on long morning walks. (Did I mention morning walks?!)
~gold hoop earrings, the perfect accessory
recipes i’m loving
chewy chai chickpea blondies
1 can chickpeas drained and rinsed well
1/4 cup creamy almond butter
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup coconut sugar
3 tsp vanilla extract
6 tbs blanched almond flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 heaping tsp cinnamon
3/4 tsp cardamom (or 3-4 cardamom pods, shelled)
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp black pepper
Directions
In a food processor, purée chickpeas, almond butter, syrup, sugar, vanilla until smooth. Add dry ingredients and purée until well combined and there are no lumps.
Take your bowl off the base and remove the blade and spread mixture into 8x8 baking dish lined with coconut oil.
Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.
small batch homemade granola
22tbsp melted coconut oil
2 tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp honey
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup rolled oats
2 tbsp quinoa
large handful raw nuts (I use walnuts)
cinnamon to taste (lots of cinny!!)
Directions
Preheat oven to 350° Fahrenheit. In a medium bowl, add coconut oil and microwave until melted, about 17-20 seconds. Add in maple syrup, honey, vanilla, cinnamon, and salt. Whisk to combine.
Add the dry ingredients and mix until they are well coated and come together in small in clumps.
Spread evenly on a lined baking sheet. Bake for 12 minutes. After twelve minutes, with a spatula or spoon, mix granola and then spread it out again into an even layer. Turn pan 180° in the oven and bake for another 12 minutes.
Allow the granola to cool for at least 20 minutes. When the granola is cooled, break into large chunks and use to top smoothie bowl. Save the rest in a mason jar or lidded container for up to two weeks.
