Hi!

Happy Sunday. ❤

I’m drinking tea under a cloudy sky, enjoying the first free weekend that I have had in a very long time. I’m also being very honest. Interwoven in this post are some things I haven’t told you. Things that, in a perpetual effort to foster a wholly authentic space, I am telling you now.

FRIDAY NIGHT

But first, a window into the wild Friday night of a twenty-one year old.

The other day after class, I asked my professor if he could recommend me some reading on one of the topics we had been discussing that day. I thought he might send a book title or two. Maybe a favorite scholar of his. I opened up an email later that evening with all his current research attached to it. If you know me at all, you know that this was exciting to say the least.

I spent my Friday night, like any normal college kid, pouring over that research, jotting thoughts into my journal and feeling quite mind-blown over things I never knew. Things about gothic literature and the expression of the female experience in horror that are radically illuminating how I see this world. I suppose that’s what learning feels like. It’s not so much a sensation of stepping into a new place, but rather of someone turning on the light and you finally being able to see so clearly what has been all around you for your whole life.

A LIFE UPDATE

Speaking of life, I recently decided to take some time off from working at the cafe in order to focus on both my sanity and my school work. These are my last few months of college, my last few months of living in San Diego before starting the daunting endeavor of apartment hunting in New York. The endeavor I have been dreaming about since I was fifteen. The one that is now somehow only a matter of months away. I want to enjoy those months as fully as I can. I want slow Saturdays and Sundays to make banana bread and read books and feel fully human. So I’m listening to Harry Connick Jr., writing, and feeling healthier than I have in a while.

I also moved back in with my parents for this final semester in order to save money for New York, a move that has, in hindsight, become more of a way to spend time with them before starting my life an entire continent away. My external family is a fiery mess and we avoid the flames at all costs. But my immediate family has somehow always maintained the kind of bond that is stupidly picturesque. Like, matching pajamas at Christmas and family FaceTimes on Sunday afternoons picturesque. So moving back home for these last months is not a particularly traumatic or difficult thing like I hear so often from peers who have done the same. I’m grateful for that.

MY MOM IS A WITCH

My parents are also just hilarious.

My mom is always making some kind of new health food and telling my dad that he should just try it, that it’s full of antioxidants or great for inflammation or some other collection of buzz words that circulate around the cult of health.

She’s recently been getting really into “herbology”, a field I tell her would have had her burned at the stake during the witchcraft trials. This only excites her. If you tell her that you have a headache, she will brew you a cup of ashwagandha tea or tell you to put chia seeds in your water to hydrate at a cellular level. Her latest thing is marshmallow root, which, apparently, we are supposed to make a gel out of and then put that gel into our water every day in order to become super humans. I’ll let you know. As we speak she’s in the kitchen, bottling her own sauerkraut. She has given my father and I strict instructions to not go anywhere near it. We think she’s a witch.

What really got me though, was tagging along with her the other day to the grocery store, not knowing what I was getting myself into. We ended up at this health co-op by the beach that was so stereotypically hippie that we could not contain ourselves. Which is really saying something, considering how hippie we are ourselves. Or so we thought. We had to refrain from laughing in the bulk section as we looked around and saw everyone wearing hemp-seed sandals, scooping sprouted oats into their own mason jars. Where are the plastic bags? My mom and I had clearly missed the memo. This was a bring your own container type of situation. Plastic is obviously for devil-worshippers who wish to detonate mother earth. Everyone also just looked incredibly stoned, which they most definitely were. I know, because I happened to go to high school just up the street from said co-op.

JUST BEING

But in all seriousness, life feels gentle and loving right now. This is my first weekend in a very long time of not waking up at five a.m, working all day, and coming home to cram as much school and blog work in as possible before the next day starts.

Today I woke up slowly. I had coffee with my parents in the yard, listening to jazz and watching the birds land in the nectarine tree. I got a “miss you” text from my coworker that made me want to cry, but I know that this is the best thing for me right now. I am breathing again. I’m reading my professor’s research and cutting up fresh fruit and going for walks in the evening. I’m feeling the texture of these last months, the ones that are in my hands at last, before my life changes all over again. I’m opening bottles of red wine and cooking dinner with my mom as the sun goes down, lighting candlesticks on the table so that every night is a little dinner party. I’m staying up late to read Norwegian Wood and crying over the beauty of Murakami’s prose.

But mostly, I’m trying to remember to be a human being, not just a human doing. I think that’s important.

So happy weekend. I hope you find some moments to just be as well.

Love always, m.

GET ON THE LIST

Subscribe to give your inbox something to look forward to.