write me well

  • Short & Sweet

    It never serves me well to sit down for a writing session with absolutely no idea of what I want to write, but this afternoon has been particularly aimless. I have completely finished my coffee, sorted through all of the random writing files in my OneDrive whose mysterious titles are some form of “Document [insert numbers 1 – 21 here]”, jumped around my blog to see if I feel like changing the layout, and made my way through 90% of a playlist I have called Vauxhall 2019 that means nothing to anyone but me, for whom it is a time machine that transports me instantly to my commute from Mortlake to Central London from January 2019 through August of that same year. Truly, nothing has been achieved.  

    After spending a final ten minutes on formerglory.ie, my latest favorite website for daydreaming (it specializes in posting period properties in Ireland, the focus of most of my daydreams since its the EU country that remains to us without having to learn another language), I figured I might as well just open a blank Word document and see where it takes me. 

    Last time I wrote I decided I should find a new writing project, and while I am nowhere near finding such a project, I still think this a good idea. I was vaguely hoping to be inspired by one of those Document Number Whatever files, only to be disappointed by many of them (SO MANY OF THEM) not being short-lived creative projects, but rather derelict cover letters. Does anyone else ever pause to think how many cover letters they have written in their life? How many minutes they have surrendered to this most mundane, useless, and modern exercise in time-wasting? A chronic career-jumper, fluent in the professional pivot, this is a life statistic I don’t know that I’d actually ever want to see. It goes without saying that the files did not provide even the slightest bit of encouragement in the writing department.  

    I think I will keep today short and sweet, much like the entire month of February was. February was so fast that it didn’t even make it to the whiteboard calendar we keep on our fridge – just this morning I wiped off January and replaced it with March. February has my birthday and our wedding anniversary, and this year, it also included a trip to South Carolina, just over ten days of a brutal cold, and as it always does, four fewer days than most other months. So, sorry February. You passed in such a blur that according to our Frigidaire, you never happened. Don’t take it personally. 

    What I will say is that it was a February full of wins, despite its brevity. That trip to South Carolina at the beginning of the month was not for fun reasons. In fact, it was for a memorial of a close life friend of Aaron’s. But it was in many ways, exactly what we needed after the tumultuous six months we have had. One of those four-day spreads where you are somehow able to step completely away from your day-to-day, to literally leave the clouds behind you and experience sun and the warmth of genuine people, the reality of grief but the joy of a life that was very much worth celebrating.  

    The world remains very much on fire. I won’t lie about that. But I have been lucky enough in my immediate surroundings to see and touch and experience some real joy these past few weeks. Also, did you know we have a cat named Kevin? His existence has somehow escaped posting since his arrival back in late August, so you will have to just trust when I say he is a meow-based goober that while troublesome at times, has become the Bobby Boucher to my Kathy Bates. He is no small part of the laughter that has been experienced this month. 

    Okay, folks. That will have to do. Thanks for sticking around for the long posts, the short posts, and the meandering, vaguely useless ones. Life is a funny little thing, but we do what we can.  

  • New Year, Old Feels 

    I am usually not a big January fan – I once wrote here that “grim is a rather nice word for January”. But this year I was here for it.

    Fall felt long and hard and exhausting, the way life can be sometimes. When January arrived, I was ready to shove all of the emotions and struggles of the past four months into a box right next to our Christmas decorations and move right along.  

    The Christmas decorations I knocked out in a single morning, a simple task aside from getting so increasingly annoyed at how long it was taking me to remove the lights from our Charlie Brown-sized Christmas tree that I just threw the thing out on our deck to deal with later. (I eventually aggressively stripped the lights by spinning the tree itself like a reverse Fruit Roll Up, pine needles flying and Kevin watching in horrified curiosity from inside.)

    The emotions and struggles? Not so easy. Life has no regard for seasons and will continue to put you through the wringer at its leisure, and the only course of action is to decide what to do with the time that is given us (I see you Gandalf). Sure, The White Wizard was talking more about the impending end of Middle Earth (and Tolkien was talking about the horrors of a world war), but the statement rings no less true in the context of each of our tiny little lives, wherever they may be.  

    Sometimes, life is just real hard. You can be surrounded by people you love, life can seem super simple and settled, there can be no tangible thing to hone in on as the Cause of All This Stress, and stressful it will be. You will still have to wake up each morning, find a thing that will motivate you to get out of your bed, and choose to give the whole racket a go. Add on that the state of the world has been doing THE MOST to destroy the ability to “give it a go” on a daily basis, and fuck, bro, that is just really tough to do. 

    So, despite knowing full well this is the way of the world, what did I decide to do at the beginning of January? I tried to pack away all those autumnal struggles with some New Years Intentions.  

    I called them intentions, because as a deeply grayscale person in a society that’s out here acting like everything is black and white, resolutions are far too resolute for my own comfort. But regardless of what I called them, given my mindset, writing down any long-term optmistic intentions seemed a bold-ass strategy for tackling my emotional exhaustion, new year or no.

    BOLDER STILL, the more I thought about them, and about what to write for my first post of the year, I decided to share them here.  

    Because the truth is this: the stupidest, tiniest little attempt at developing who you are as a person or the things that surround you? For me? That is just one of those things that never ceases to have the capacity to motivate me to get out of my bed. I don’t care if it is THE lamest cliche on the earth. An itemized list of things to aim for? SIGN ME UP.

    So, copied directly from a brand new notebook (because where else would I have written them), I give you my intentions for the hot mess that very well may be the year 2025: 

    1. Write more! So much more. Would love to start a new project. 
    1. Add something new to my life routine. Who knows what this will be. Some ideas: Sewing. Knitting. Skating?? Language learning. DIY-ing. Something…musical? 
        1. Reduce sugar intake. Basically, stop buying a weekly dessert item. 
        1. Paint something (or multiple somethings!!) in this house. 
        1. Find something that makes me appreciate my amazing silly body. Some kind of movement. It has done a fantastic job of getting me this far. I should probably return the favor. 
        1. Be a better communicator. Stop stewing. Share your thoughts. Even when they are scary or feel dumb. 
        1. Narrow career goal. Tough to do with a sort of unknown long-term (i.e. potentially moving to Europe), but at least figure out some over-arching goals. 
        1. Be okay with prioritizing small beauty and finding ways to bring it into every aspect of my life. 

        Will I actually do any of these things? It is entirely possible I will not. Did writing them down in a new notebook achieve anything? Not…not really. But stay with me here. 

        The horrific fires happening in LA have produced some harrowing imagery, and a particular story that came out of them has stuck with me. An artist had posted a video a few days before the fires started, a simple tour of the home she and her husband had created and the studio within it. The original intent of the video was just to record and celebrate the home they had created, and how much they loved it, and within days, it became a record of a place completely and unexpectedly destroyed by a fire. And they re-posted it in the aftermath with the added caption: “I wish I had known this would be the last week we would spend in our home.” 

        Sure, a home (especially a beautiful one) is a pretty universal thing to find joy in and be motivated by. Nobody looking at that video would be surprised that it brought that artist a huge amount of joy. But the tragic one-hundred-eighty-degree twist of that video just really drove home for me that we do not know what is going to be here tomorrow, what we will need to find next week to get us through the tough moments.

        It doesn’t matter what you need to focus on to get you through the day, what motivates you to get out of your bed. Do what works for you, take the video of your house, appreciate your silly little body, write more. In whatever way makes the most sense, decide what to do with the time that is given you.  

      • “November!”

        About a week ahead of my birthday this year, I had a sudden, urgent need to hear my dad’s voice.  

        The twenty-seventh of last July marked five years since I’ve heard it in real time – technically, five years and ten days, because our last phone call was a little under two weeks before he died. I talked to my dad fairly regularly, took pictures with him less so, and to my eternal regret, took even fewer videos of him. So few, in fact, that I have none. Not one video with or of my dad from the last fifteen years.  

        Most people have a slew of home movies to consult in moments like these, but in that moment this past February, I had no such luck. Not only did I live about a thousand miles away from the pile of our family’s home movies, but the home movies themselves had for several years presented their own challenge. Sometime in the early 2000’s, my sister had the forethought to transfer the aging VHS tapes they were recorded on to DVDs. She spent meticulous weeks one summer watching every single home movie, since you had to play them to transfer them, pressing all the right buttons to get them safely burned onto this significantly more resilient format. Birthdays, backyard play sessions, a random recording of my dad’s then-commute home through Newport Beach…she watched and recorded them all.  

        Thinking the home movies were now safe in their fancy new format, none of us really clocked what happened to the original VHS tapes. The last time I can remember seeing them, they were in neat rows inside of one of those faux wood, stackable, slide-open tape holders that everyone had in the nineties. During the disbursement of my family’s shared possessions in 2011 when we lost our house (shout out to the economic crisis of 2008), who knows where they went. Their unknown location was no big deal right up until the next time we tried to watch the DVDs, and every single one of them failed to work.  

        Our first thought was that the movies had been recorded incorrectly. My sister took one of the discs to a specialist, who told her, very matter of fact and with absolutely no awareness that he was crushing our collective family history, that none of the DVDs would work in any DVD player outside of the one that had created them, and there was nothing we could do about it. Since we couldn’t even figure out where the originals had ended up, I will let you guess whether we had any remote idea of where that DVD player had ended up either. (We did not.)  

        Despite all the DVDs being deemed to be in a useless vegetative state, when I moved to Washington last year, my sister gave me the disc containing my first birthday, and I promised I would do my best to find a way to make it work. Life happened, and I promptly forgot about it until that moment last February when, more than anything, I wanted to hear my dad’s voice again. 

        So, with the sense of urgency of someone that knows there is only one way to make something happen, and you are that way, I decided to get my first birthday DVD out of its prolonged coma.  

        I did a fair bit of Google searching for a data retrieval specialist to assist. I found a few, but none that sounded remotely confident that they’d be able to solve my issue. The last one I spoke to admitted he could try, thought it was unlikely it would work, and would then feel bad charging me for the failed attempt. Because the experts didn’t seem to have any faith in their own ability to solve my problem, I thought I would try and solve it myself.  

        The first and foremost mystery to solve was exactly what was wrong with the DVD, and therein was my biggest challenge. If you simply Google “my DVD won’t play”, that problem is simply too vague, and you’ll get nowhere fast. Most forums will assume your disc has physical damage, but I was absolutely sure that wasn’t the case here because they were all pristine. Others would suggest that your disc actually never had any data recorded on it in the first place, but I knew that wasn’t true either: you could see the varying degrees to which data had been physically stored on each disc by flipping them over and taking a careful look at where the iridescent digital surface started and stopped.  

        In my many, many searches, the most promising website I found was Pacific Video Repair, an amazing company conveniently located in Washington state, that specialized in data recovery from damaged VHS tapes. On their FAQ page, a somewhat vague answer about problematic DVD files made it sound like they might be familiar with my conundrum. Hopeful for the first time in months, I sent them an email asking if they’d be able to help me even though what I needed was outside the regular scope of their work.  

        Pacific Video Repair got back to me within 24 hours and the answer, unfortunately, was a hard no. But they did say in their response that they were, in fact, very familiar with the issue I was describing, and that it sounded like what had happened was that the video files had not been successfully finalized when they were originally recorded on the disc, leaving them only playable on the DVD player they were recorded on.  

        Now that is a level of specificity a girl can Google! 

        With this added descriptor to my problem, it was not long before I found this incredibly random six-year-old video on YouTube, made by someone who doesn’t even seem to specialize in this kind of content, with over 1,600 likes and 340 comments from highly emotional people JUST LIKE ME, desperately looking for a way to rescue their old DVDs. And those comments, my friends, were euphoric and filled with profuse thanks – because the method described in this guy’s sixteen-minute video fucking worked.  

        It took two excruciating days for me to find this out for myself, because I had to locate a working computer with both a DVD drive and access to the internet, and holy shit is that harder to do in 2024 than I would’ve thought. But I ordered a new power cord for the Sony Vaio my parents had bought me back in college, spent over an hour getting it turned on and updated to 2024 standards, and then followed TheMaxAcceleration’s step-by-step directions.  

        Like the hundreds of commentors on that video, within twenty minutes, I was absolutely bawling, my nearly-thirty-five-year-old self watching my one-year-old self seated in the middle of our old condo, both of us listening to my dad chat aimlessly with my grandpa and great uncle. Hearing my dad call me “sweetie pie”, something he had not done for years and I had long forgotten he ever did, was worth every minute of the struggle.  

        When my sister visited in July she brought the rest of the DVDs to be rescued, and although life happened again and it’s taken me ages to do so, I’ve now successfully recovered all but three of them. While what I had been most excited about at the onset of this adventure was to unlock the home videos I remembered most – ones with my sisters and I being in turns obnoxious and adorable towards one another, or ones with my extended family ceremoniously gathered in folding chairs as one of us opens presents on a birthday – my favorite, by far, is one of my parents before any of us were born.  

        My mom is heavily pregnant with my oldest sister, and my dad, in anticipation of her arrival, has just purchased the video camera that would come to film every one of our home movies. The entire video is just clips of the two of them hanging out with their cat in their messy 1985 apartment. They are so relaxed, so happy, and so silly. My dad sounds just like I remember, and my mom’s voice is equally unchanged. In a moment of quiet she suggests making a cheeseburger casserole for dinner, to which my dad says “that sounds like a great idea”, and then it cuts to my mom holding the camera, filming first my dad and then herself in the mirrored sliding door of a nearby closet. Shortly after that, it cuts again, the camera now back in my dad’s hands, and for no more than five seconds, there’s my mom, age thirty, hanging out on the sofa, smiling up at my dad. Another cut and a shot of her walking through the hallway towards the kitchen; another and she’s picked up a freshly baked layer of cake and taking a whiff, then holding up a jar of frosting and saying “frosting”, pointing at the calendar and saying “November!”…because I guess with the novelty of a brand-new video camera, what else is there to say?  

        My oldest sister’s birthday was yesterday, which means that footage was being filmed just over thirty-nine years ago today. I don’t really have anything more profound to share than all of that; to put to paper this new memory of unlocking old memories, only to find ones that don’t even really belong to me, but matter that much more because of it.  

      • Certain Mugs are for Coffee 

        Barring life and the way it can, well, get in the way sometimes, I catch up with my aunt every other weekend. My family always lived in California, and she mostly always lived in Colorado, so for the first half of my life, her voice always reminded me of Christmas. It was something I only ever heard seasonally, and in my mind it had a lovely musicality that paired neatly with memories of Christmas Eves of family and pasta and baked fish and selecting a single present to open ahead of Christmas morning.  

        Because of that distance, and likely also a lack of commonalities that created as much distance itself, we weren’t particularly close while I was growing into my adolescence. But in the September of my second or third year of college, my aunt emailed me to let me know that she had an upcoming work trip to The Hague, and she wondered whether I’d be interested in taking the short flight from Norwich, where I was living at the time, to Amsterdam to come spend the weekend with her. A broke college student, she even offered to pay for my airfare, so off I went.  

        I arrived on a Saturday morning and we proceeded to walk all around the city, having coffee after coffee, pastry after pastry, making our way to the blustery overcast seaside and through sprawling cobbled squares, all the while just talking. And we talked so much.  

        She shared family histories, snippets of lore that had created the dynamics I’d grown up with and in observation of. I showed her my smartphone (the year was 2010) and all of the handy features it had, and when she got home, she promptly purchased her first iPhone. We talked about finances and budgeting, and when I got home, I promptly opened a savings account.  

        As much as I know nostalgia has an ability to gloss over memories like these with an almost infallible filter, I look back on that weekend as one of my favorite souvenirs. Sure, on the first morning I spilled coffee on my leggings, and because I hadn’t wanted to check a bag I then had to wear coffee-scented trousers for the rest of the trip. But it was also the start of a wonderful adult friendship between two people who previously had simply been blood-related peripheries in each other’s lives.  

        Lacking a lifelong equivalent of Spotify Wrapped, I can’t say for sure – but I would bet that in that single weekend, my aunt and I spent more time together than we had across the rest of our existence thus far combined. It was the first time we got to exist independent of the rest of the family, the first time we were able to experience each other as individual adults and not as Aunt and Niece or Adult and Child. In just under 48 hours, it cemented a closeness in us that I am grateful to say remains to this day, and is likely the seed for our current habit of catching up. 

        All of this to say, we now speak roughly every other weekend – again, barring life and its lifeness getting in the way – and just like they did in The Hague in 2010, the things we talk about range from our work to politics to family to dreams and aspirations. The last few times we’ve spoken, politics has inevitably come up, and we’ve spent long stretches bemoaning capitalism and its many failings. A failing in particular that came up a few weeks ago was how well we’ve all been trained to have a preference (and delight in said preference) about the most ridiculous things, such as what hot beverages can be consumed from a particular mug. Because, and I know this is not unique to my aunt and I – certain mugs are for coffee, and certain mugs are for tea.  

        (If we’re really diving into it, certain mugs are for English breakfast teas, others for fruit-laced white teas, and still others for hot chocolate, but I digress.) 

        Capitalism, and the American political system that we live in and supports it, just feels so tough to face right now. Because the world is already filled with so much awfulness. Just, truly awful, horrific stuff. The kinds of things that if we’re being frank, have always been happening, just without a 24/7 news cycle and social media to witness it anywhere in the world in real time. It’s a privilege but I’m deeply resentful that something I wanted to be excited about – getting to vote for potentially the first female president – is actually super frustrating and disheartening because while I made the decision to go with “it’s a strategy, not an endorsement”, it still feels like an endorsement of genocide. And if it is, that’s something I have to live with. 

        It feels very impossible to work against that tide of awfulness, especially when I’m reminded that something like having a preference about a cup – something I really enjoy having a preference about – is ingrained in me because of such a broken system. BUT. Something else I talk about with my aunt, and that I talk about a lot with my best friend, is how much we can do, even if it feels like we can’t.

        Voting isn’t just about federal offices; it’s about local ballot initiatives (and how all three of Washington State’s can go fuck themselves, funded by Let’s Go Washington as they are). Having preferences isn’t just about spending money and aesthetics; it’s about supporting the people that create them or supporting second-hand shopping and the right to repair movement. These things are also about the joy to be found in the human condition – sure we are capable of truly horrific things. And yet, at their most basic, most humans will still want good and to do good, to find joy and to create and build community.  

        So that’s the angle I’m leaning into. Befriending and looking out for our neighbors. Donating locally. Supporting small businesses that are about what I’m about. Taking a cat off the street and getting him neutered (and becoming obsessed with him. His name is Kevin and you’ll hear more about him one day). 

        It’s not a perfect system – it is a broken system. Revolution could be nice, but let’s be real: the other side is way too well-armed for me to feel that anything good could come of it. So me and my coffee mug (it’s from a breakfast joint that’s been open since 1929 that Aaron and I went to with his best friend back in April) are going to just do our best.  

      • Hash Browns

        One of my longest held beliefs is that nothing says I Have Today Day Off like going out for breakfast. Whether we’re talking breakfast burritos, pancakes, omelets, or hash browns. Country potatoes, biscuits and gravy, bacon and eggs, or French toast. I truly think there is no way to thoroughly and joyfully announce to the world that the day ahead is yours and yours alone than hitting up a greasy breakfast joint. It is the taste of freedom.

        Today I had the day off, and so when I suddenly became absurdly hungry while wondering what to do with myself for the rest of the morning – like, unbearably hungry – I took it as a sign. It was coming on 10:30am and my body knew that I could not waste this opportunity of a Day Off by not treating myself to a diner-style plate of breakfast food. Nothing else would do, so off I went.

        Maybe it’s because I had no choice for a large part of my adulthood, but another long-held belief of mine is that going out to eat by yourself is an experience that everyone should enjoy from time to time. I lost count well over a decade ago how many meals I’ve gone out for on my own, and being alone at those meals is something I’ve never regretted or resented. But for some reason, today, I had this completely unbidden wish I wasn’t alone. After ordering my biscuits and gravy with a side of hash browns, drinking my coffee in my own little diner booth, I suddenly pictured my dad sat across from me, and imagined that this breakfast was a long-awaited catchup after not seeing each other for just over five years.

        This does happen from time to time, as I’m sure it does with anyone who has lost a loved one. I’ll just be bopping along and then I will be absolutely zapped with the sensation that my dad is nearby. The first time was while working at the Anthropologie in Spitalfields – to this day I have to remind myself that the vivid image I have of my dad seated on a bench outside the store, one arm stretched over its back, watching passer-by and waiting for me to finish work, is not real.

        I can think of at least three not-so-random reasons that this happened today. One, just over a week ago marked the fifth anniversary of my dad’s death, and it was the first since he died that came and went without me even realizing. Two, this morning, like so many mornings, I happened to look at my phone at 11:11am and thought of him. And three, I have a distinct memory of going out to breakfast at IHOP with my dad sometime during 2012, seated in a booth very similar to the one I found myself in this morning. I remember writing a Tumblr post about it, because as I added salt to my hash browns that morning and caught up with my dad – who in 2012 was really having a tough time – I thought that no matter how difficult and shitty things had become, I wouldn’t trade him for any other dad.

        So, I spent my breakfast wondering at all the things I would say to my dad if we were, in fact, having breakfast together for the first time in five years for some unknown reason that was interesting and mysterious rather than sad. There would be SO much to tell him.

        Nope, I don’t live in London anymore. Moved back in 2021 in the midst of a pandemic that you were very lucky to miss experiencing first-hand. I left retail! Yes, I know you were always proud of me no matter what I did, but I like to think you’d be extra proud of me for finally achieving that goal. I’ve moved about five more times, moving is still the worst. And I got married! Yes, to that boy you hated when we were in high school, but I promise he has become a very responsible adult that has more in common with Grandpa King than you ever would have guessed was possible, and it makes me so happy that you knew him. I wish I could’ve been more supportive of you when you needed it, but man that’s easier to see in retrospect than it was in the moment. I love you and I miss you very much, but I’m also glad you didn’t have to endure the insanity that has been (and continues to be) the world since you left it in mid-2019. Thank you for buying a ridiculously fancy video camera in 1985 and recording so many random childhood moments, but also – would it have killed you to get out from behind the camera more often! It’s okay though, hearing your voice is still the best. (Even if what you’re saying is an exasperated “See, now that’s the problem!”)

        What a breakfast that would’ve been. Don’t get me wrong: my biscuits and gravy and (extra crispy) hashbrowns were delicious, and I devoured them in less than fifteen minutes. I still have the rest of the day off and the humidity has calmed down, so it is a glorious and breezy seventy-five degrees. Life could be a whole lot worse right now and my grief has mostly receded and turned into a nostalgia that is more warm than sad. But getting to share this morning with my dad? That would’ve been a pretty great way to spend a day that was mine and mine alone, and I think I’m just going to pretend I got to do it anyway. (You ordered the chicken fried steak – the “Big Chicken” version. Neither of us knew what it meant but it seemed like the right thing to do.)