[NYC/BK] the heart goes where it's known.

i spent friday night alone, revelling in being back home in familiar spaces, and started stacking my time with people starting on saturday morning, beginning with breakfast at prune with a friend i met on tumblr about 7 years ago. (holy crap, it’s been 7 years! i literally stumbled onto her tumblr when i was going through hashtags for one of alexander wang’s RTW shows!)

the concept of “online friends” might seem alien and/or weird to some, but i’ve been making friends via the internet for at least a decade now. some have become good friends, while i’ve yet to meet some “in real life”, but whatever the physical status, these friendships are like any other friendship — the fact they originated and/or continue online doesn’t make them any less real or valid or valuable than the ones i carry out in-person.

maybe this will make better sense to some out there if i add this: that living across the country from my core group of people has inevitably taken my core community on-line. we primarily text now. we email. we exchange DMs on instagram. we occasionally facetime or talk on the phone. we might facebook chat if i were on facebook.

long-distance teaches you that being present in people’s lives doesn’t always mean being present physically. it doesn’t mean those physical relationships aren’t important; i don’t actually believe that online relationships are totally sufficient because we need physicality, we need hugs and sensorial contact; and that’s why i will continue to make the effort to bring as many of my online friendships into “real life” as i can.  i love these connections i’ve made, though, and i love them even more when we’re sitting across the table from each other, talking about everything we talk about online but in-person, interrupting each other and laughing together and becoming more than social media handles and profile pictures to each other.

saturday was a day for old friends, though, friends i’ve known for years, who have been a part of my life for years. these are the connections i was afraid to lose when i had to come back to california earlier this year, so i was a little nervous going back, wondering if much would be changed, if i were holding onto nostalgia when our lives had gone marching on for months. i’m glad to report all that nervousness was for naught.

one of the biggest highlights of my weekend was catching up with my book club. we came together a few years ago because i went to a marilynne robinson event in park slope in 2014 and i was leaving when someone stopped me in the aisle and said, are you anna? it turned out we were in the same vocational intensive that season, and she gave me her email, so i emailed her, and we became friends, and she said, i know these other women who also read robinson and maybe we should get together and talk about lila, so we did that, and that became a book club, and we’d meet every month (or so) to chat about our book of the month but, really, to eat and talk and hang out.

i don’t think i can ever fully express how much i miss this group of women when i’m in LA.

we met up for lunch at one of my favorite places, at their west village outpost, and we exchanged sweaty hugs and sat down to drinks and pizza in a noisy, cozy restaurant space, shouting at each other even though we were smushed together against the wall. we talked lives and books (and got in a mention of lacan at one point) and current updates, and time went faster than i wished it would.

i wished it weren’t so loud in the restaurant. i wished we could linger more. i wished i wasn’t so far from all this now, that this was still our monthly thing, gathering at an apartment and sharing food and alcohol and company.

i miss a lot about home, but there’s little i miss more acutely, more intensely, than this.

[NYC/BK] home again.

apparently, september is the month of daily blogs, and this new one is about home. this time last week, i was en route to brooklyn for a glorious five days back in my city, roaming my stomping grounds and seeing all my favorite people and eating so much delicious food. it was a wonderful few days, and, of course, i took so many photos, so here, over the weekend, are five days of posts, one for each day the week before.

there will be fewer words than usual in these because they’re intended to be more like photo-essays than anything — or maybe that sounds fancier than i intended because all i’m really doing is putting down a record of the weekend, because i want to share some images from the city i love and consider home, the city i hope to return to sooner than later.

and this goes without saying: this expat new yorker was so happy to be back in the city she belongs to, the city that belongs to her, and you will never be able to convince her that there is a city in the world greater than new york.

[san francisco] go west.

it has been a week of recuperating, of kind of shutting down and just going to work and doing little else in the spaces in-between. last saturday, i finished my book — or, maybe more accurately, i finished this current iteration of my book — and i sent it off to an agent for consideration.

it's been a week (minus twenty-four hours), and i'm still kind of stunned that this happened, that there is a complete manuscript in my hands, that it was the culmination of 2-3 weeks of frenetic work, edits and rewrites and rereads done in the spaces between work and sleep, work and sleep, work and sleep. a year ago, i didn't think i'd be here — hell, a month ago, i didn't think i'd be here. i didn't think i'd ever be able to sit down and tackle all the issues in my book, take it apart, and put it back together again.

if there's a lesson to be learned there, maybe it's that things get done a little bit at a time. things get done by doing the work. things get done by taking care of yourself, listening to your body and your brain, learning to work and live and create within your limitations.

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it's not that there wasn't a cost, though.

my insomnia is at an all-time worst, and my inability to sleep and to sleep well is taking its toll. when i say "insomnia," i don't mean that i have difficulties falling asleep — i have difficulties staying asleep, achieving deep sleep, waking up rested. my psychiatrist has tried a slew of medications from lorazepam to trazodone to gabapentin, none of which is prescribed primarily for insomnia but is used off-script to treat it, and, unsurprisingly, none of them has worked. lorazepam does help lessen my anxiety. sometimes. trazodone did nothing. gabapentin worked the first time then proceeded to give me the worst nightmares, nightmares of violence and terror and brutality, my subconscious taking the medication and wreaking havoc.

before we proceeded further, my psych referred me to a sleep clinic, told me to test for apnea just in case, though i didn't think apnea was my problem. the test came back as very, very mild, that, if a normal human has 5 apneas per hour of sleep, i have 6.5, and the sleep clinic nurse told me i could fix that likely by learning to sleep more on my side. (i spent 80% of the night on my back.)

the thing, maybe, though, is that my psych and i both know that my insomnia is directly related to my anxiety, that i wake up having panic attacks and can't sleep because my brain is racing, churning over all the various crap that i chew over, fret over, obsess over. it's not that i do any of this intentionally; i don't spend much of my waking hours very cognizant of these things that apparently haunt me; but i wonder if maybe that statement, too, isn't contradicted by the fact that i pick incessantly at my nails, at my cuticles, at the skin around my nails, picking and picking and picking to the point that i've drawn blood and the ends of my fingers are tingling from pain.

my mother asks why i can't just stop, that it looks so disturbing, but, as with other things in my life, i don't know how to tell her i can't.

it's impossible, in many ways, to convey the impossible.

last weekend, i went to san francisco, and here are a few images from the weekend. my best friend moved to san francisco when i came back to LA, so i've been going up often to visit her, to see my brother and now sister-in-law, to meet new friends — and my weekends in SF tend to be gloriously chill weekends in which we do nothing but eat, hang out, and, apparently, walk up and down the same few streets in the mission over and over again.

i love these weekends. i love the ease and comfort of them.

anyway, so, it's been a week of recuperating because i'd no idea how much i'd driven myself past the point of exhaustion to finish this manuscript. it means it's been hard to find words for much of anything, to put my thoughts down cohesively, to mull over things. in san francisco, i went to see ingrid goes west, which i liked, and it made me think about social media and instagram and what is real and what is authentic and what is a personal brand and at what point does the brand subsume authenticity and turn it into a gimmick? it made me think about celebrity and how much i hate celebrity and how much i dislike it when someone's persona, her personal brand, takes the spotlight over her work and her work becomes secondary. it made me think about how much i dislike it when a woman will skill and infinite potential chooses that for herself, and it made me think about that part of myself that reacts so instinctively negatively to that because maybe there’s something odd about that, about how, for someone who writes so much about her own self, the self as brand makes me so uncomfortable.

i’m aware of all the contradictions in my sentiments.

like i said, though, i’m still recuperating, still letting my brain take things easy this week, so we’ll have to revisit all of that later. have a good weekend, all! there’s a massive cookbook post coming soon!

[seattle] take heart, take care.

so, while i'm in seattle, i meet up with a friend, and we talk about a whole lot of things, one of which is self-care. i feel like self-care has become this trendy word, this idea that's being thrown about casually — or maybe not so casually — it just sometimes feels that way because it usually leaves me wondering, okay, so what the hell is self-care?

what does it look like?

self-care is important, though. it's important and crucial that we learn to care for ourselves, that we nurture ourselves and are kind to ourselves, but words are words, and theories are theories, and the question comes down to, how do we practice that then?

again, what does it look like?

we exist in a culture that's all about constant motion, one that likes to chart progress and success like they're quantifiable things. we should hit certain milestones in our lives at certain ages, and we should always be moving forward, always going on to the next thing, always moving up and up and up. we should always be running; to be still is to falter — it is to fail.

it's a pervasive mentality. there was this horrible ad i saw once on the bart in SF, and it had something to do with being a doer, and being a doer meant that you never slept, drank coffee for lunch, were aways on the hustle. the ad made all this sound positive, like it was desirable, like, if you weren't a doer in this crazed sense, then you would never amount to much — you were already a failure; you weren't a doer; you were a nothing, no ambitions, no drive, no potential.

and i thought how stupid that was, how inane, how damaging. i thought how stupid it was that we live in a culture that's so fixated on the go go go, so obsessed with the idea of motion that it'll willingly and masochistically fester in this deception that motion is the same as productivity, that motion is some kind of measure with which to determine someone's skills or passion or determination.

it irritates me because it feeds into this idea that there is one way to be. success must look a certain way; ambition must exhibit in a certain way; and we must fit into our assigned narratives and hit all the milestones that will lead us on the path to a good, meaningful life.

the fundamental problem with that, though, is that there is no such thing as one way to be. there is no one life to live. there is no one "good" and "meaningful."

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the more fundamental problem with that is that there is no one kind of human in the world. we're all different, and we come in different shapes and sizes and styles with different ambitions and dreams and passions, and we come in different bodies.

we come with different brains.

that means that we come with different limitations, different priorities, different wants, and that further means that we come with different skills, different abilities, different strengths. like, my weaknesses might be that i’m shit with organization and ascertaining the most direct route to any task, but my strengths are that i can think out of the box, have a strong visual eye and creative perspective, and am flexible, able to adapt and change and run with it, whatever “it” is. i might have issues with maintaining strict order (or, uh, following it), but i can solve problems and come up with creative solutions. if my weaknesses are others’ strengths, then my strengths are others’ weaknesses.

and that is crucial, i believe, and that is where i’ll always argue against the idea that there is one “right” or “best” way to be. there are many “right” and “best” ways to be, and there are so many ways that we all contribute to society. we can’t all be hyperactive “doers,” just like we can’t all be corporate ladder climbers or artists or stay-at-home parents. we can’t all be planners, and we can’t all be accountants, and we can’t all be musicians.

however, we all need each other for society to thrive, and we need to respect that we are all different, that we have different needs, that we have different ways of hustling and struggling and persevering — and i’m feeling kind of blah about this post so far because i feel kind of preachy, but i don’t know — this has been sitting on my chest, and i wanted to get it off.

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in seattle, we eat really great sushi.

a few random things, then, i suppose:

i like staying at the w because i like that their toiletries are sourced from bliss. i love the smell of bliss products, how clean and not cloying the scent is, and i love the quality (except for the conditioning rinse; that does nothing for my hair) — but, more than that, i like that i can sample bliss products because, body butter withstanding, i still can’t commit to purchasing any of them.

i always hate that hotels give you bars of soap, though. who uses a whole bar of soap? unless it’s during a super extended stay? it feels like such a waste. can you recycle soap?

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seattle is supposed to be a coffee town, but i don’t drink a single cup of seattle coffee there. or maybe i do — i’m not sure where little oddfellows in the elliott bay book company sources its beans from, but i don’t go to any “iconic” seattle coffee shops, nor do i try any of their roasters, nor do i have any coffee that blows me away.

part of that is time and laziness. part of that is also that i’m still thinking about the beans i brought back from reykjavik and wishing i could find those again … those were damn good beans.

next time i go to seattle, i’ll drink more coffee.

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i think it’s adorable how frequently animals seem to factor into the names of eateries in seattle. you’ve got the fat hen, the wandering goose, general porpoise, the walrus and the carpenter, etcetera etcetera etcetera. i love it.

going back to self-care, though — i’m still working on it. i’m still working on figuring out what it looks like — and, specifically, what it looks like for me. i’ve figured out a few things, like, that learning to be kind to myself is learning to be okay with myself, to remind myself that, hey, i’m okay right now as i am, flaws and all. that taking care of myself means listening to my body, my brain, and knowing when to take an easy day and when to be more ambitious. that self-care ultimately means balance; it means trial and error; and it means having bad days and having good days and not attaching more to either than necessary. a good day is a good day, and a bad day is a bad day, but they are all days to get through, to survive, and that is what we strive to do — to get through, to survive, and, hopefully, to thrive.

[quinault] green hearts.

i’ve been trying to come up with words to accompany this post, but, for some reason, i keep coming up empty. i feel like i’ve got so much swirling around in my brain right now that i can’t seem to focus, but there’s also this — that, sometimes, the world sweeps you away, and, sometimes, you just need to stop and soak it all in and stop trying to fix particularities to it.

in seattle, we drive two-and-a-half hours to the quinault rainforest and two-and-a-half hours back, and we do some hiking while we’re there, which, to me, feels like getting drunk on color and textures and light, and i think, sometimes, we don’t need to imagine fantastical worlds.

sometimes, we just need to get out and open our eyes.