Hello world.

How’s it going?

I call this one: Monday morning drinking coffee in the pool of sunlight that is my kitchen table, thinking. Here’s what about.

 

MY SURPRISING BOOK RECOMMENDATION

Unexpectedly, I’m reading a graphic novel. Words I never thought I would say, because, to be honest, I always assumed that graphic novels were more about the graphic and less about the novel. I always associated them with thirty-year old men living in their mother’s basement with their D&D collectibles. Plus, any time I opened one, the chaos practically gave me a seizure. Following the text throughout the images felt like a dizzying scavenger hunt. I just wanted words. So when I received Alice Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home, in the mail for one of my classes, my first instinct was to close it before the room started to spin. But then I tried it. 

I read a few pages and fell completely into her world. Not only was I hooked by her story, but by the way that she was telling it. She writes in short, blunt sentences that pack a satirical punch. It’s been called a “tragicomic”, which, is pretty perfect. It’s devastating, yet light-hearted. It’s darkly humorous. And, it involves growing up within a gothic revival home, soo yes. This is me recommending a graphic novel. Take full advantage, it might never happen again. 

SOMETHING GOOD

In other news, my older brother and his girlfriend are in town from LA, which means my mother is over the moon, planning family dinners and shopping and whatnot. She was not, to say the least, one of those mothers who was ready for us to be out of the house. And on the rare occasions when we are all together again, she beams so brightly that it’s almost blinding. 

Tonight is such a occasion. I’ll go and help my mom cook, an event that invariably involves opening all of the windows and playing Ella Fitzgerald while we sip wine. My brother and his girlfriend will roll in around five and we’ll sit around and catch up over little bowls of green olives like Cup of Jo is always talking about. Because they are, for whatever reason, fun. 

I know that I write a lot about the difficulties I have always had with friends and relating to the people my age. I write about the loneliness of college and the utter disaster that is the average twenty-year old guy. And that’s good stuff. It’s real, often comedic, sometimes tragic, stuff. The kind of stuff that you write about, because you need to. But I realize that what I don’t always write about are the things that are good. And not just because of that one comment that I should write about something uplifting, which still makes me laugh. So this is my happy. Listening to music and eating dinner with my family on a warm summer night. It’s homemade blackberry-peach cobbler and eight p.m sunsets that make all else cease to exist. 

A WABI-SABI DINNER PARTY 

Which is to say, one of my favorite things in life is an intimate dinner party, or a dinner party with just a few humans that you adore. There’s no drama, no chaos, no stress. You put some fresh cut flowers on the table and open the windows. You light candlesticks and play Bossa nova on a speaker. It’s very wabi-sabi, that Japanese concept of imperfection that I’m eternally obsessed with. (I wrote a post about it a while back that you can read here to learn more.) And sometimes, those humans that you adore bring little things that make it especially memorable. 

Like tonight, my brother and his girlfriend brought mochi and lychee fruits for desert. His girlfriend is part Taiwanese and has been teaching us all about different foods and traditions that we would have otherwise never tried. After dinner, we all sat around the table cutting the mochi into pieces so we could try all of the flavors. We peeled lychee fruits and tasted their refreshing sweetness for the first time in our lives. We talked and brewed loose-leaf tea. It was cozy and comfortable, not pretentious or stuffy. It felt like love. Love that lingered on the table long after everyone had left.

THE AFTERMATH

What do I mean? 

Some of you know that I have a strange interest in photographing the “ugly” aspects of things. Here is one of my favorite photos that I took of some dirty dishes, for example. 

There’s just something romantic and picturesque about the way that a room or a table looks after the party, when its guests have long dissolved from the scene. I find those empty scenes to be rich with love and life in all of the ways that the preset dinner table screams sterile. You can’t hear the laughter as a gift is opened or see the wine glass getting tipped over from a sweep of the arm during the telling of an elaborate story when looking at a flawless room. You can imagine these things, but you can’t know that they happened. When you see the aftermath, when you see the wine stain and hear the crackle of the wrapping paper crunching beneath your foot, you know. 

This is what I know tonight: a plate with half of a tahini mochi resting on it, the knife balancing on the edge. Little red wrappers from the box of deserts. A half-eaten casserole dish of blackberry-peach cobbler with the serving spoon still resting on a peach. Drops of candle wax hardening on the table. Forks resting on plates. A small bowl of discarded lychee peels. Chairs all pushed out at odd angles, astray from their symmetrical resting places.

These things may sound odd. Dirty dishes and empty wrappers and fruit peelings may not sound beautiful. But these things tell stories that perfectly manicured rooms can never quite muster. They tell the story of the night, of where it started and where it ended up. It’s all right there, resting idly as evidence of a few hours that slipped away from us like butter. 

Happy Tuesday. 

Love, m.

JOIN THE FUN 

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