Updates / On Being Restless

"You could make a real home here," people have said to us. They're right. It's peaceful here: neighbors with kind faces who actually drive the residential speed limit on our street, citrus trees and a planter full of basil and parsley in our backyard that we have somehow managed to keep alive. Even the "noise pollution" (the subtle whoosh of traffic on the freeway behind us) sounds pleasant. We've made some attempt at settling. We hung pictures, we painted, we hired a plumber to fix the pipes and threw a housewarming party (in that order, thank god). Yet. 

I am, have always been, restless. Or hungry, if you prefer. I blame the books and the solitude that comes along with reading so much. Dwelling in other worlds, other lives gives me an appetite: to learn more, to see more, to read everything, to eat more meals that make me weak in the knees. If it seems strange that I haven't spent more than three consecutive years in any one city since I graduated college, this may shed some light on it. I get curious about other places, other ways of living too easily. I married a similarly transient soul, which is fortunate or unfortunate for the two of us (probably a bit of both).

We've found soulmates in each other, but not yet in a place. Since we moved out of Downtown LA, into Studio City, we'd quietly resolved to stop looking for it. A house in the suburbs seemed a standard landing place, one we shouldn't plan to leave for the foreseeable future. We'll get there, we thought, and contentment will follow. It didn't.

The pull toward something new, a change of scene, feels even stronger this time. I'm already elsewhere in my head, longing for the thrill of a new city, the chance to learn its nooks and crannies.  I said we've never found a soulmate in a place. That's not entirely true. We've known for years what that place might be, if we gave it a fair shot. But New York City, objectively, is a tough place to live. It's not practical, we always told ourselves. 

But we are not practical. We are restless, if not downright impulsive this time. We made the decision a few weeks ago.  A decision from pure pathos. I still haven't come up with an explanation that will make any sense to anyone. So here is one that doesn't make sense: I like brick buildings and riding the subway, Brooklyn makes me nostalgic for my grandparents and the stories they told me about growing up and making a home together, I like seeing live jazz at 1am, and I like the special kind of solitude that is being alone amongst hoards of people. And I won't even mention the food. That goes without saying. Adam has his own reasons for loving it, too. They're not as bonkers as mine, but I'm grateful he has them and wants to try this as much as me.

So we're going to New York. Now you know, if you didn't already. I am thrilled and terrified in equal measure. I also might be severely unhinged. Only time will tell. But for now, my restless mind has another adventure in another city to contemplate. And I feel more settled now that we're busy packing our stuff, getting unsettled, if that even makes sense. It probably doesn't, but here we go anyway. Again. 

The Italian Cure, Part 1: Rome

How was Italy? Well, reader. All the things. All the things you've already heard about Italy. The architecture! The art! The carbs! Italy captures people. I can see, now having been there, how one can leave drunk and high off of the physical and edible beauty. It's dazzling, honestly. And the food is good. Too good. I had bowls of pasta and scoops of gelato I wanted to bathe in, to marry, to go on a secret vacation with and never return so I could eat only that for the rest of my life. Italy is about the sensual, about what's good and honest. It has the power to snap us back into this business of really living and out of the mundane fog of the quotedian. That, I think, is the appeal: perspective. And also: pure hedonism. When we boarded the plane to Rome, I needed a heavy dose of both those things.

Adam and I moved from a city apartment we loved to be homeowners in what still feels like a strange house, both the noises and the suburban silences unfamiliar. I know I should feel accomplished, more grown up. But somehow I feel like a toddler wearing my mother's high heels. When I look at the knee-high weeds in my backyard (why do they keep coming back?!) or hear the high-pitched squeak of my bedroom door hinges that no amount of oil has been able to fix, all I can think is  I am wholly unprepared for this. By the time our trip rolled around, I'd been spending six days a week working on my business and the remaining one on my house. I was tired and not a little defeated. 

We landed in Rome at 3 pm, red-eyed, delirious, and happy. In the cab ride over to our hotel, we talked about beating the jetlag, staying out through dinnertime, finding ourselves a piazza to loiter in and a trattoria for pasta. Of course, faced with a bed and an opportunity to change into pajamas, we collapsed immediately, slept almost solidly until the next morning with the exception of asking the hotel kitchen to send up two plates of pasta and one very necessary bottle of Chianti. We ate and drank in bed, feeling like characters in a dream, and then promptly fell asleep again. 

We woke up at 6 am, hungry. For breakfast, yes. But also for unstructured days stretched out before us, a sacred offering of time that belonged only to us. For not working and not feeling guilty about not working. For just existing. Italy is the right place for this, my friends. We walked thirty minutes or so as the sun rose higher and burned off the cool, salty humidity in the air, crossed the Tiber, and found ourselves in Piazza del Popolo. Our only company two old men reading the paper, waiters and busboys setting tables in the cafes surrounding the main square. From a table in one of those cafes, we drank strong cappuccinos and watched Rome wake up. A parade of girls wearing short, butt-cheek-grazing shorts walking right alongside clergy in long gowns and habits and families in their Sunday best, ready for mass. Men with neck scarves. A vespa rider ashing his cigarette with one hand, multitasking. Lots of small dogs and serious-looking footwear.

We spent our time in Rome getting on a more Italian wavelength, or at least our impression of it. In other words, we slowed down. We let our real lives get small beneath the possibility of the present. Every day, we walked until we couldn't anymore, until we felt every nook and cranny of the cobblestones through our shoes. We stopped in cafes to hydrate and caffeinate and rest our feet. At some point in the day, we switched from espresso to Prosecco. There were gelato breaks as well, moments of cool, velvety nirvana. We found our favorite places and stuck to them.  I had an intensely fragrant, orange-almond flavor from this place three times in four days, so I'm calling that our winner. But we also loved this place and this place. We had outrageous lunches with salumi and rose and big bowls of pasta, the kind of lunches you stumble out of, slow and food-drunk. The kind of lunches that can easily derail a workday.

Roman food might be my favorite of all time. They have four classic pasta dishes: Amatriciana, Gricio, Caccio e Pepe, and Carbonara. They're all dead simple, a blank canvas ready and waiting to highlight the quality of the ingredients, which are essentially fresh pasta, tomato, egg, cheese, cured meat, salt, and pepper somehow varied enough to make four distinct dishes. My obsession with Amatriciana runs deep. The fatty intensity of the cured pork cheek cut so perfectly by the acidity of fresh tomatoes: I think it's the same chemical reaction that causes love at first sight. I had it here and here and several other times, including that first night at the hotel, although I barely remember half-sleep-eating it (true to form, however, I do have a picture of it). I also had caccio e pepe with outrageously floral pepper here during what was probably one of the best lunches of this trip, and if we're being honest, my whole life (which has obviously been a lie up to this point, without this pasta). 

Happily, we caught the tail end of artichoke season. Yes: artichoke season. It's a whole thing here, and a magnificent thing. Artichokes are so plentiful and so good this time of year. They're on every menu and even stacked decoratively in baskets outside of restaurants as if to reassure diners that this establishment can indeed support their need to consume many, many plates of artichokes.  We had them raw, sliced thin with shaved pecorino romano, lemon juice, and strong olive oil. We had them cut in half and baked with a tangy-lemon marinade. Every artichoke dish we had was worthwhile. But especially: just the tops, deep fried in olive oil, sitting on the plate with their stems up (which, it turns out, you can also eat). I know this is a vegetable we're talking about. But somehow that sumptuous salt-on-fat-on-crispy-skin combo tastes like the skin of a perfectly roasted chicken, better even. The shock of how good it tastes just reminds you why you're alive. Ironically, that kind of fried goodness will also kill you slowly... but in a nice way. 

It rained on our last day in Italy, a change from all the bright, hot weather we'd had the previous week. The train got us back from Tuscany around noon. We dropped our bags and made a pact to stay out all day, absorb as much of the city as we could possibly take back with us. We wandered back through a lot of the places we'd seen already, through the ancient part of the city and through Trastevere, the old Jewish ghetto and possibly my favorite Roman neighborhood. We at suppli and fried artichokes in what is basically the Roman equivalent of Grand Central Market. We stopped to look at the ruins on the side of the road and wondered if Romans feel more rooted than the rest of us, living amongst constant reminders of their ancient and storied past.

We had drinks around 5 pm along with all the people ending their work days, stopping to catch up with friends before going home to their families for dinner. We felt relaxed, entitled to just sit there and talk about life, about what we'd seen that day, about whatever we pleased, negronis in hand. Hedonism, some might argue, is not a proper pathway to mental clarity. I beg to differ. In that moment, we knew Italy had done whatever it was supposed to do: lift the haze, make us feel alive via pretty golden buildings and prosciutto and fresh pasta and drinks at 5pm every day. In that moment, we saw the world through Roman eyes. And we vowed to take just a bit of that perspective back home with us.

A Year of Forward Motion

"If you're going to have a fear of failure, you're just never going to learn how to cook. Because cooking is lots of it, one failure after another. And that's how you finally learn."

Julia Child understood something about cooking, and life, that made all her endeavors seem effortless—even though, objectively, they were not. Her baby, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, took a whopping decade to write. Her cooking shows were lessons in humility. Fans of hers could watch Julia slice into her own finger while dicing a carrot or burn the roux for a béchamel right from their televisions screens. And then they could watch her laugh it off, as she always did, and move on to finish the task at hand. Not taking things too seriously: that's what Julia understood. It allowed her to approach cooking with a levity that made home chefs feel comfortable with their own failures too.

Enthusiasm, for cooking and eating and writing about cooking and eating, maybe the only quality I have in common with Julia. I dip my toes into the ocean as if a tidal wave could reach the shore and swallow me whole at any moment. I add unnecessary layers of complication and general angst to most things in front of me, and I take failures personally. But dwelling on fear, I learned embarrassingly recently, is something of a luxury, uncomfortable as it is. It requires time and brain space I just couldn't give up this year. 

Since January, I've traveled to nine cities and five countries, started a novel, started a business, grew the business, stopped writing the novel, and started writing another novel with a better story. I enrolled in a weekend culinary school program. I learned what activism means to me and the small part I can play in helping our country change its course. I turned 30, freaked out about aging for a hot second, and then realized I wouldn't trade the years I've had with this brain and this body and all my favorite people for anything. I've read 11 books that have all reaffirmed something I already knew—that fiction can sometimes be the best conveyor of truth. I said goodbye to my Grandpa who was the truest mensch I ever knew and who stayed engaged and interested in the world until the very end of his life. 

"No fear." That's what Julia used to say before stabbing a lobster between the eyes or flipping an omelet. And I've repeated it to myself all year. A kind of mantra. I said it before sending emails I was nervous to send, before making decisions that felt big and course-altering, before showing pages of my novel to my writing group, and before my first attempt at poaching an egg the old-fashioned way (no container—just a dash of vinegar and a swirling pot of hot water). And I made plenty of mistakes. Although it should be noted, for the record, that I poached the heck out of that egg on the first try. A small accomplishment, I know, but one that I'm pretty pleased with.

Rather than dwell on the shoreline, I dove headfirst into the waves this year. I dove so many times I felt numb, pins and needles, from the shocking cold. And that's the thing about "no fear," about embracing forward momentum. You get used to it. I've had lots of failures and some successes I never thought possible, and I've gained courage equally from both. So here's to the past year and to this next one—may it be another year of living enthusiastically and fearlessly as Julia did and may the lessons be just as rewarding as they've been. I wish that for myself and for you, too, reader. 

Dive Right In

Oh, hey. It's been a minute, reader. The reason for my absence is about what you'd think. Work, travel, work, work, lots of good and much-needed visits from family and friends, more work, etc. But here's something else true. Writing, after a long period of not writing, is like catching up with a friend you haven't seen in ten years—where do you even begin? Every day I don't write, the rift opens a little wider.

Lately I've been coming home from nine-or-so hours in the office (and hopefully one good hour of barre), grabbing a hot shower, and laying on my couch for a precious couple of hours. Ignoring my lonely, untidy kitchen and the impulse to write for fear that my prose will devolve into something truly horrible and mundane. Folding fitted sheets, deep conditioning my hair... you get the picture.   

The same has been true of cooking. I find myself a stranger in my own kitchen these days, casually passing through to make coffee, fulfill various snacking impulses, and unpack the takeout from our usual line up of Thai, Chinese, and Indian. I'm now regularly surprised by what I find in the fridge—which, if you know how stringent I usually am about fridge order, tells you the gravity of the situation.

When I do cook, I seek out the grand, complicated recipes. It's been so long, I tell myself. Why not go big? Last Sunday, for instance, I attempted an elegant roast chicken recipe I've been eyeing in Melissa Clark's magnificent new cookbook, which had herbs and sherry and smoked grapes. Who in their right mind—I am really asking you, reader—who uses the oven in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave in Los Angeles? The stakes were too high, the conditions too unfavorable. I fully cried. Twice.

But writing and cooking poorly, sloppily even, is probably better than not writing and cooking at all. Maybe it's better to dive right in, make a real mess of things if you have to. And so I will see you back here soon, reader. If all goes according to plan.