fiction & caffeine

The first true spring day always sucks me back through time. There have been falsely warm days already, but today you can smell the warmth; the air is silky like the petals of purple crocuses you’re surprised to see already in bloom. This day sucks me back through my life, to a recess spent playing kickball, to the quiet of the halls between the final bell and softball practice. “I know this air,” my body says. It remembers it passing through the wool skirt of my Catholic school uniform between my stocking-less thighs (against regulations). It remembers it going through my hair on the deck of my Upper West Side college campus as I sped through Saramago’s Blindness before the quiz, running on sugar and reeking of coffee after a morning spent working at Starbucks. This air sucks me back and pushes me forward, reminding me time never stops, which has always been the thought most comforting to me.

This morning I’m eating my oatmeal and contemplating brownies. I’m going to make Thomas Keller’s recipe from Ad Hoc at Home today. They’re proven rich chocolate clouds of comfort and joy. As I went over the recipe again, I smiled at the moderately involved procedure necessary for something so seemingly simple—melting the butter, using the stand mixer to beat the sugar and eggs. Yesterday I’d been considering making vegan ones from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. The process there involves a blender, a bowl, a pan.

This difference is in tune with the most recent issue of Lucky Peach, which I’ve been reading this weekend: “The Cooks and Chefs Issue.” There are a couple of pieces on the Food Network and its shift from having chefs like Batali to cooks like Ina and Giada. Though Ad Hoc at Home is full of ostensibly simple recipes, Keller also can make you feel a bit foolish if you don’t have two bowls for your KitchenAid. You will never feel that way going through Isa Chandra and Terry Romero’s cookbooks; they will anticipate any blushes of foolishness and swipe at them with a witty parenthetical. (It helps that vegan baking never requires the folding of a delicate meringue into cake batter, but the principle stands.) There’s also the anticipation of labor after the fact: the chef’s recipes will be intense without an eye toward the towering pile of dishes, and the cook’s will recognize it and do its best to alleviate it.

Neither approach is better. Each has its place. It’s funny to me that every Legitimate Chef I’ve read talk about the Food Network has the utmost respect for Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, whose show was a fixture in my house growing up and whose cooking most closely resembles my mother’s. But that’s not how most people have lived.

And I’ve been lucky enough to have lived a good food life, even when everything else was shit. My grandma died when I was five, but I have vivid recollections of lamb chops and strawberries dipped in sugar. There is a picture of her sitting on the couch reading a cookbook that immediately came to my mind when I did the same a couple of months ago, connecting me back to something I had spent some time rejecting. My mother’s David Eyre pancakes and empanadas and everything defined happiness in a not-always-happy home. When my parents’ marriage began to truly fall apart, it was marked by the decline of dinner—mashed potatoes began coming from a box before they disappeared altogether. This is why I’ll often say it depresses me to eat some combination of food or at certain restaurants. I’m not being dramatic (maybe a little); I just want to eat food that feels real and cared for.

When I was a teenager I would say I’d secretly like to be a pastry chef, as though it were already determined I couldn’t be. Vocational school seemed out of the question. Of course I used the high-falutin term instead of shooting for “baker.” Now that’s all I care to be, though I’ll take influence and recipes from chefs and cooks alike, because the goal is just to get some rich chocolate clouds of comfort and joy, stuff that makes happiness in the midst of misery, no matter how many dishes I need to do. (And of course, my boyfriend refuses to consume tofu.)

This is as thin as I should be, as thin as I always was. My back should ache whichever way I turn from overuse, from not enough rest for repair. I should delight in eating only fruit and nuts, inviting jokes about not having finished pecking at my meal. I should feel so light as my pants get loose and my period stops and everyone says, “Alicia, you look so great.”

While sitting here snacking on organic mini-wheat cereal wet with organic almond milk, wearing glasses and ostensibly working on a book review, I take a look at my Facebook feed and see a girl I knew in elementary school posing for a picture in a smoky club. She and her friends wear tight, insanely short dresses. I wonder what my parents would have had to have done differently to make me that person instead. We were in the same class every year, often compared because we were both very short and had Puerto Rican dads. Her legs were always stick-thin, though; mine have always been thick and muscular. Maybe it was only that that caused us to have opposite lives. I think it’s as simple as the nature of your thighs when you’re a girl.

Hi, I’m a child. A newly 26-year-old child. THIS IS WHAT I DID ON MY BIRTHDAY! It was my first vegan one, you know.

7 a.m.: regular Wednesday morning yoga class. Teacher told me I look like I’m “shrinking,” and made hand motions to note that it was in girth and not in height.
9:30 a.m.: eating my usual oatmeal at the table. Savoring it. Scott asks me if I want my gift, and I warily say yes, even though he was going about it in a way that was making me nervous. Anyway, we’re going to DisneyWorld next weekend. Seriously. I’ve been pining for a ride on Space Mountain for the last few years in a really immature, spoiled, unbecoming way. And now I get to go. Look at what behavior pays off in this world.
10 a.m.: go to the nail salon and get a gray mani-pedi. Looks sick. Feel awesome.
12 p.m.: get in the car to take my favorite drive down 25A to Port Jeff to eat at Tiger Lily Café. Enjoy a sesame tofu wrap. Walk around the town. On my way back, stop in Stony Brook Village to check out a fair trade store. Decide Scott would be upset if I brought a giant wooden bowl into our already overstuffed kitchen and buy nothing.
4 p.m.: walk over to Cinema Arts Centre with my friend Kyle to see the new Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In, for the second time this week. It’s really freaking enjoyable. Kyle needed to see it. It only cost $11 to see it twice because being a CAC member rules.
6:30 p.m.: go to Sapsuckers and get a veggie burger (no bun, no cheese—hello). It’s made with fresh vegetables and hummus; it’s not some prefab patty. Devour it, their fabulous fries, and two iced teas.
7:30 p.m.: Herrell’s Ice Cream for one scoop peanut butter No-Moo and one scoop chocolate No-Moo. At the last minute I tell him to throw some pecans on it. It’s good.

Then we caught up on some HBO shows and I went to bed early. AWESOME!

These are the best things from my Facebook wall:

I’ll be 26.

During some recent domestic squabble with Scott about cooking, I said something about how in the last few years I’ve had to graduate from college, develop a career, and deal with my parents’ divorce—I hadn’t had a lot of time or space to get into cooking, so I’m sorry if my late blooming in that department somehow makes my new interest less authentic. I tend to place smaller issues on perhaps a grander stage than they’re worth, but this was an epiphany for me: I really have had a lot to deal with in the last four years. It’s only in the last one that I’ve settled into myself.

I feel like I’ve been rewired. It’s thanks to yoga. I’m not perfect and have had my share of meltdowns since starting to practice seriously a little over a year ago, but they don’t linger and I’m able to see and accept them for what they are. I’ve recently started to meditate, which has opened up more for me. I’ve also decided to start eating completely vegan. Though I’ve dabbled for a while and eat mainly whole grains and vegetables anyway, I want to be really committed to it, for health and sustainability.

I’ve let go of all expectations for myself and my life. It’s happening; it’s happening right; I’m approaching it all with love and joy. No effort is wasted. When I’m not obsessed with the results of writing, I can actually write. When I’m not eating shitty food, I’m not obsessing over my body. I’ve never felt better, and I’m excited to carry this forward.

Though I know it’s wrong, I water down the grinds in the French press and begin to pour them down the drain. As the brown sludge hits, a police siren sounds on a nearby block and I think they’re coming for me.

The Vinyasa teacher I took today said this in class, while explaining where our Root Chakra is. Yoga teachers! They are great. She went on to say how she’d get one eventually, after being barred by her parents for religious reasons (this is a middle-aged woman). She said, “One day I’ll have the courage.” “Courage” isn’t a word people often assign to the getting-of-tattoos, but it’s the one that most resonates with me. I too put off getting a tattoo out of fear of parental retribution, so when I finally got one last November it gave me a huge sense of relief, and of autonomy. Banal “I’m a grown-up, I do what I want!” autonomy, and autonomy in the sense that I was, for the first time, defining myself. I got a skull doodle of Jeff Buckley’s because I’d been listening to a lot of Buckley and reading my teenage journals, in which there are pages and pages about his music, and his lyrics are carefully written in pink gel pen. I never want to lose that girl, and I never want to forget how important his music is. And so, the ink. The process itself is cathartic because there’s so little about your physical self that you have control of, yet there you are emblazoning your outside with some essential representation of what’s within, what’s important and valued. In the next month or two I’ll get another, and I have another planned for when I finish yoga teacher training. We come full circle, because it was this yoga teacher who was a student with me in another class earlier this week who asked if I’d done teacher training and said I’d be a great teacher (she doesn’t know how difficult it is for me to talk to people, but that’s another reason I want this challenge). I’d been doubting myself about whether this was something I should be saving for and working toward (because I want to do it in Puerto Rico), but I took it as a sign. Tattoos, teacher training, courage.

Last night at the Bell House, Scott and I, plus a couple of friends, went to this special live recording of StarTalk Live as part of the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival. It’s astrophysicist Neil deGrasse-Tyson’s podcast in which he talks to non-scientists about science. He’s absolutely fantastic—entertaining, enthusiastic, hilarious. I felt like I was getting everything he was saying  and learning despite being, you know, a language person who coasted through all her science classes. With Eugene Mirman, Kristen Schaal, Scott Adsit, and Alan Alda all being funny with a hint of seriousness, it was a great freaking time. Also, Alan Alda and I, at the same time, answered the question of “What power?” with “The power of voodoo.” So Labyrinth reference reflexes are something we have in common, in addition to shared Fordham alumni-ness.

There was a minor fiasco a couple of weeks ago regarding the potential adoption of a puppy. The fiasco was that I picked one out at the shelter and when they called our landlord, he said it would have to be no more than 20 pounds when fully grown. They couldn’t guarantee this, so I couldn’t get a puppy and I cried all day and night like a child. Scott likes cats a lot, though, and wouldn’t shut up about getting one. Cats are not my thing; I’m a big, sloppy dog person. But my resolve faltered at some point, and now there’s this cat here whom we’re calling Ricky (after a John Frusciante song). He’s sleeping on my lap and it’s pretty cute. I bonded almost instantly despite my attempt to put up a callous front. I’m a sucker, a sap. I let it walk around on my desk because I’m not a disciplinarian. Don’t let me have children. My parenting would be half “Veruca! Sweetheart!” and half weeping in a corner not letting anyone touch me.