a live show, a park picnic, & a really good weekend overall
Hi hi hiiiii friends!
How are we all doing? Tell me something that’s going on with you!
Amazingly, I’m doing pretty well right now.
I hope I’m not jinxing it by mentioning that I’ve recently started antidepressant medication, but holy shit– I don’t think my brain has felt this clear and optimistic in years. I’m still tired most of the time, but now I don’t feel like I’m fighting for my life every morning. It blows my mind that some people are born like this and then just stay this way.
On Friday, Misha and I saw Japanese Breakfast and Luna Li perform at the Regency Ballroom in SF, the first live show I’ve been to in two years (!!!). It was a birthday gift for me from Misha, which is a pretty good fucking gift, especially because of how damn passive I am about knowing / meeting / making plans with people who share my music tastes.
It was the kind of show where I knew every song by heart as well as how it was written. Where I melted under the bisexual lighting and the body heat of three hundred strangers; was made whole again by every guitar shred, every drum riff, and that incredible, incredible gong moment in “Paprika.” In the moment – and for the entire week following – I didn’t know how I could ever be happier.
On Saturday, we spent most of the day outside with my family, enjoying some extremely gorgeous weather in SF. It’s rare that we ever get to shed our jackets up here, even during the summer months. The picnic blankets and the baby bucket hats came OUT.
Speaking of, I would kill for this child – the most aggressively happy, impossibly chipmunk-cheeked baby there has ever been:
People around me who are older / at the stage in life where they are starting their own families are having an unforeseen effect on me.
Misha and I babysat his niece a couple of times this year, and – pre-medication – I had at least one meltdown about the fact that this blue-eyed, blonde-haired baby did not look like me, irrespective of the fact that she has a completely separate set of parents who both also look nothing like me. This snowballed into a weird kind of despair about how firstborns usually seem to inherit most of their looks from the father and how crushed I will be if after nine months of pregnancy followed by hours (maybe days) of excruciating labor, my child emerges from my womb and doesn’t have my brown eyes, the eye color of poop and ordinary-ness and hardship.
But there are also good realizations nestled in too.
I have always thought Amy would make an excellent parent, based on essentially having her as a surrogate oldest sister to Ceci and me for the last quarter-century. I feel extremely hopeful that the baby will grow up well-adjusted, well-socialized, empathetic, thoughtful, socially and environmentally conscious, and with no lacking sense of dry humor because of the environment his parents are raising him in.
Yes, father and son are donning matching Golden State jerseys!!! How cute is that!!!
The weekend ended like this:
This Korean rice cake and dumpling soup? *kisses fingertips* Definitely joining the steady rotation of comfort foods to order in when I’m feeling under the weather / homesick / too lazy to cook.
And a special meal for the little one as well:
Please note my father, who exudes this energy:
I didn’t mean to make this newsletter so family-centric, but I guess this is the turn we’re taking in this crazy, wacky world.
When I first started college, I accumulated a lot of guilt about moving so far from my parents and how doing so would impact our family’s finances. A couple of years later, I started noticing how certain aspects of my childhood carried over into my adulthood in counter-productive ways, and, for a while, I harbored a lot of bitterness towards my parents because of that. Both times, Amy walked me through the necessity of children looking after their parents just as parents look after their children, especially if the family roots have been torn out and stomped on, like ours have. If now I can understand and honor the importance of family, it is largely because of her.
Some other good things recently:
The feeling of cool night air on the other side of a heavy duvet;
A huge, weirdly well-stocked Rite-Aid that I went into for one thing and left with eight, which I can’t stop thinking about;
Driving alone more and realizing I’m a lot less anxious about it than I used to be;
Making travel plans for 2022;
How bouncy and shiny my hair is the day after shampooing;
The cardamom-maple iced lattes Misha makes me in the mornings;
The Brew Dr. crisp apple seasonal kombucha, which is not sold anywhere in my immediate radius and which I also can’t stop thinking about.
Going to go take my little sourdough baby out of the oven now and think about how much fun the 0.5x camera angle is.
Peace! And love!
Grais