Tag Archives: love

Myself in Notes, 2014

life, writing, , , ,

DIG_E_2013_Twice_Militant_06_PS4
This list was inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s series of birthday notes, written annually from when she was 23 to 33. You can see these candid, intimate glimpses of her life on display at the Brooklyn Museum until March 16th.

I love:
The Park Slope Food Coop
My office “family”
Learning obscure skills (blacksmithing)
Traveling to foreign countries
Efficiency (though not at the cost of human relationships)
Handwritten letters, and making time to write them
Carbs: bagels, pizza, pasta, rice, beer
Biking year-round
Lucky Peach
Sherlock Holmes (BBC)
Being fit
Being alone
Sleeping on the floor
Brooklyn

I’m bored with:
My glasses
Hunter x Hunter
Game of Thrones books
Swiss chard
Marijuana
Trying and failing to get Cronuts

I hate:
Not being able to recognize people readily (face blindness)
Cockroaches in my building
Too damn high rent in NYC
Oxford commas
Mixed signals
Being lonely

I’m proud of:
My ability to emotionally move on (after a breakup)
My ability to physically move on (since everything I have can fit into one car)
My family, who accomplishes crazy feats, feeds me well and behaves with rational insanity
Friendships, many of which hit their 10-year anniversary last August
Decisiveness, ripping off bandaids and not looking back
Zen, achieving inner peace when NYC tries to make that impossible

I wish:
To again write words that will spur laughs, inspire wonder, incite anger or change lives
To evolve from being a cook to a chef
To live in East Asia someday (Hong Kong?)
To be in love again someday

Living in the Greatest Clusterfuck in the World

life, work, , , ,


Just another rental sign in NYC

Living in New York is like spoonful of Chinese medicine—intense, acerbic, unmasked. At the end of the day, you feel like you’ve gotten better, or at least tell yourself that you’re doing better, because otherwise the rent is too damn high to justify being here.

I’ve been away from Italy for about three months now, and get asked now and then on whether I miss it. The short answer is, no. The long answer is, I can get all the burrata and olives I want at the Food Coop, along with kombu, almond butter and sunflower sprouts. So no, I don’t find that I miss Italy at all.

I do miss having an apartment that’s large enough to swing a cat in. Going from a transoceanic long-distance relationship to a 200 sq ft studio apartment has required a bit of adjustment. Sometimes I can’t believe he refuses to touch asparagus; other times I never fail to act in a considerate and socially acceptable manner. Kidding. I have my flaws too, but at least I can blame those on PMS. And despite the fights and heated debates where words like Trust and Dependence and Trolling are thrown about, we’re making it work. Bedhead and morning disgruntlement have now become oddly endearing.

On the plus side, cleaning the flat involves about three minutes of sweeping the floor.

The job is still exciting, and I never get tired of telling people I work in the film industry and sustainable food advocacy. For an added ego boost, I receive emails semi-regularly about what great work we’re doing, how I’m a ray of light that is transforming the food system. I feel lucky that I get paid to do things I would do on my own time, and that I’m meeting like-minded movers and shakers. Last week, New Yorker editor John Donohue thanked me for reading and promoting his book. No John, thank you for giving me your number…can I send you some pitches?

With my director away on maternity leave, I also have a good deal of autonomy and decision-making power. It’s a funny tightrope walk, knowing that I have just enough rope with which to hang myself.

We’re hiring an intern now. Funny that just four months ago, I was that intern. And now I’m getting profiled on Good Food Jobs.

On Food Writing

writing, , , , , , ,

Before you ask, no this isn’t a photo of me, it’s the daughter of a family friend, picking Asian pears in the orchard.

“People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest way to answer is to say that, like most humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it, and the hunger for it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one.

I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.

There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity.

There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?”

-M.F.K. Fisher, Foreword to The Gastronomical Me