lately

Ginger lemon cookies and these cats and snow in October are all high on the list of things making me happy right now. These cats these cats these cats. It is such a simple thing. When I lie down they fight for space on my chest. Just a warm, simple thing.

I'm looking for someone to teach me how to play the guitar. I already have one. It's in the corner of my room. Once I could pick out "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" very, very slowly, but even that has been lost. I will provide baked goods in exchange. Or you could come over and I could let you lie down and the cats could stretch out over your chest, too.

I'm learning a little about control lately. About taking back control.

I've been thinking about something I read, about Donald Crowhurst.  I think it might all be related, somehow - autonomy, control, loneliness, the small worlds we construct, the stories we build so carefully that we start believing them to be true. Let's all get better together.

Texas

Today I was struck by the unseasonable and irrational desire to get in a car and drive through Texas. The long way.

I've been listening to a lot of Youth Lagoon. 

The only time I've been to Texas: I slept on a couch in Austin belonging to a drummer I had met at a hostel in Louisiana. He took me to hear music. I felt less like myself than I ever had before. I snuck out of his house in the morning. I almost lost his roommate's cat. I got my first and only oil change of the 25,000+ mile trip. I drove thirteen hours to Silver City, New Mexico, stopping in El Paso to get a look at the border and eat some tex-mex. And there were cats. 

It's a really good thing I haven't owned a car at any point over the last few years. The number of times I have wanted to get up and go. I'd be halfway there by now, the ink-night coating my windshield, the windows rolled down just enough to keep me awake. 

at the beach

"I'm changing I'm changing I'm changing: I've changed! Redemption, transformation - God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?"

My happiest moments in New York are those where I feel true ownership of this city. Or maybe that's saying it wrong: it's when I feel true ownership of my presence here, my decision to come, to stay.

I sat on the stoop this afternoon to finish Goon Squad, and the late-fall sun was hitting the crests of the brownstones across the street, and the trees are starting to turn, and the city smelled, for the first time, not like garbage or sweat or just sheer human presence, but really, truly, like fall, thick and crisp, like change. A woman walked down the sidewalk with her daughter and called her "angel eyes" as the toddler pulled leaves out of her tiny pink shoes. And people were coming home from their Sunday errands with bags of toilet paper, and couples rode by slowly on their bikes, and no one was yelling. The sky was moving like it was made to, the clouds like someone was gently pulling them on a string. I sat on the stoop until the beds of my nails were purple with cold, and if you won't judge me I'll tell you that I had to swallow hard to stop from crying, suddenly seized by such intense cherishing for my small piece of this huge city, so terrified by the realization that the trees were changing and I almost missed it.

Maybe this is all anyone here is searching for - these moments when it feels like every decision that brought us here was intentional, purposeful, meant to get us to exactly where we are.

dressing down

Bought this stunner at the Flea this weekend: heavy gold brocade, complete with crinoline (!!) and a tag that reads "Cotillion Designs." Since I never got a cotillion, I plan to wear this to all sorts of wildly inappropriate events, like Board meetings and perhaps my dear friends' engagement party in a few weeks time.

how i feel today

Northern Pike

All right. Try this,

Then. Every body

I know and care for,

And every body

Else is going

To die in a loneliness

I can't imagine and a pain

I don't know. We had

To go on living. We

Untangled the net, we slit

The body of this fish

Open from the hinge of the tail

To a place beneath the chin

I wish I could sing of.

I would just as soon we let

The living go on living.

An old poet whom we believe in

Said the same thing, and so

We paused among the dark cattails and prayed

For the muskrats,

For the ripples below their tails,

For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making

under water,

For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.

We prayed for the game warden's blindness.

We prayed for the road home.

We ate the fish.

There must be something very beautiful in my body,

I am so happy.

                                                                                                James Wright

Canadian Thanksgiving: an iPhone retrospective

Made: 

Kale salad with walnuts and cranberries in a lemon vinagarette

Roasted butternut squash crusted with breadcrumbs, thyme, and garlic

Apple pie in a cheddar crust 

Consumed: 

Grilled portabellos (pork for the meaties) 

Roasted vegetable soup

Homemade bread, rye and white

More apple pie, with ginger, vanilla ice cream, a sauce that approximated caramel  

Everything doused in balsamic glaze, everyone doused in wine. 

It was a different city. There were no hand turkeys. Many people were missing from the table. But I am so, so thankful for the people in my life who have made room for me these past few years. It might not seem like a lot to ask people to share your holiday by eating a boatload of delicious food, but I am still staggered by the generosity and love. 

random act of bravery

It's like a festival of honesty round these parts lately. Like SXSW, if instead of drinking a lot and dancing to awesome music, people sat around and had really uncomfortable, painful conversations with each other.

where is the Land of Tim Riggins?

here.

the word for spoon

Maybe it will surprise you to know that I used to hate crème brûlée. It should surprise you: a person might as well hate trench coats, or baby squirrels, or sex. But a bad crème brûlée borders on tragic, apologizing, pale and rubbery, the crust not shattering against your spoon but rather sagging wearily into itself with an exhausted squeak. My dad also used to set things on fire. He had an oversize blow torch, back when he still made things with his hands - real things, not seared tuna or saffron risotto - and my memories of crème brûlée are of charred dishtowels, my dad swearing, my mom opening windows, and the whole thing was so 1996, the crème brûlée, the fucking crème brûlée, the raspberry coulis, so chic, so impossible to recreate. 

But it was the only dessert in the dark bistro in Brussels, which I remember as having heavy wooden tables lit by candles, and a menu written on a chalk board on the back wall that was almost impossible to see. There was horse on the menu - cheval, which made us pause and mouth the word, confirm to each other that it meant what we all thought it did - and then, scrawled at the bottom, the crème brûlée. 

I don't remember what else I ate that night. I don't remember much of the trip at all, honestly. Tom had left only days before and my parents flew me to Europe because that's what parents do when they live thousands of miles away and get woken up by hysterical phone calls from their only daughter. They buy a plane ticket and then I was on the floor in the Heathrow airport and then in a hotel room in Brussels, sucking cough drops with Flemish labels, writing long, desperate emails to my boyfriend of eight years who had suddenly, maddeningly decided to destroy himself.

I trailed my parents for days around the city, and then around Luxembourg and into France, barely registering where I was, as my mom lifted my arms and pointed them at churches, graffiti, monuments, murmuring look, look. There was a museum with headphones that tuned into the radio waves of various musical instruments in glass cases when you walked closer to them. It was orbital: forward into a glockenspiel, turn left into Zimbabwean drums, in and out of these auditory worlds and the strange, still seconds of silence between them. Look, look, Meghan. Look. And what she was really saying: Wake up, Meghan.

It started with the waiter, who was cute in that rare European way - not vaguely wet or oil-slick, not overly feminine. And then none of us could remember the word for spoon, kept repeating couteau, fourchette, couteau, fourchette, until the waiter came over and I stopped fucking crying long enough to look up at him and say, "We can't remember the word for spoon." He came back with a whole handful of spoons, laying them out in front of us, "Cuillere, cuillere, cuillere, cuillere," smiling at me as he did so, and I laughed and realized I was flirting and had a flash, nothing more, that said - This will be your life now.

And the crème brûlée, when it came, had a crust that crackled when we broke it with our three spoons, and a delicate vanilla custard that was only barely sweet, spicy and silky, the shards of burnt sugar catching against the roof of my mouth like thin sheets of ice. And it was a bit like waking up. 




Last night, for the first time in weeks, I made myself dinner. I cancelled a date with the skinny guy from the elevator. I put on Dan Mangan's new album. And then I sliced a zucchini and a summer squash into thin rounds. I filled a pot with bulgar wheat. I sauteed the vegetables in olive oil and threw in the crisp of a fennel bulb and some snap peas. I stirred in pesto and chickpeas and squeezed over half a lemon, catching the seeds in my palm the way my dad taught me. I tore parsley leaves with sea salt. I ate slowly, on my couch. I tried to wake up.