Autumn Check-in
Tuesday, October 22, 2024. Long overdue pulse check.
Last year, close to the end of autumn, I wrote about the changing seasons and how it felt to see winter approaching after a particularly difficult few months. It’s comforting that time moves on even when you’re stuck in one place. Some people might find that scary, but relinquishing control to the cycle of seasons thrills me. Last autumn, it was because time made me feel less frozen in my grief. This year, it’s because I’m trying to slow down intentionally.
I’m working very hard to change my relationship with rest. I grew up in a house where rest was treated like an indulgent luxury, a decadence associated with laziness. There was no stopping to smell the roses, no “this is enough.” It made me feel like I could never stop moving. Even when I have fun, I have to do it at one hundred percent.
The past two weeks were a rest stop after some of the busiest few months in recent memory. I was fortunate enough to travel six times between April and October (thrice within Ontario, thrice outside of it). I got a new job at the end of June. This summer, I went to concerts, parties, restaurants, and on dates like having fun was my new job.
Through all that, I had a great time but rarely stopped to take stock, so I’m doing that now. While life will still be busy, I’m trying to slow things down so I can be alone and do the things that help me feel like myself.
I fear I’m now doing introversion at one hundred percent, but let’s just take it one step at a time.
Here’s where I’m at!
Kitchen
I’ve been cooking up a storm of comfort foods. My life revolves around cooking and food. When I go on dates, I try to discern if the person is someone who will spend all morning on a Saturday making pancakes or eggs benny from scratch with me. When I travel, I eschew hikes to stroll through local grocery stores like they’re art exhibits. If I have to run an errand I’m not looking forward to, I tack on an extra stop for a treat. When I have a day off, I rarely ever reach for takeout or food delivery—I spend hours cooking a meal because it feels like a form of stress relief.
Some recent dishes include:
White cheddar mac and cheese with a crunchy panko topping and Brussels sprouts.
Roasted tomato soup using the last of the cherry tomatoes from my mom’s garden, with garlic bread grilled cheese—yes, grilled cheese made with garlic bread.
Pierogi from scratch (honestly? I wouldn’t do this again. I dutifully caramelized onions, made fresh dough, and spent two hours wrapping the pierogi, only to want the ones from Cafe Polonez. Their pierogi are so good I’ve written about them on here not once, but twice).
Pav bhaji. This is a staple. I’ve stopped holding back on eating butter-forward meals.
Chocolate cake. This recipe is one I’ll come back to soon.
Bookshelf
I’m about to surpass my goal of reading 30 books this year! With roughly 10 weeks left in the year, I wonder if I can push my book count to 40—but having read 30, or having read at all, is enough. Here are some recent-ish standouts.
Severance and Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
Ling Ma’s novel and short story collection were among the best things I read this year. Severance, Ma’s novel about a young woman named Candace living in New York during a global pandemic, was released in 2018. It prophetically predicted what would happen in a real pandemic. A year and a half after Severance’s release, the world shut down because of COVID-19—but it didn’t really. Not for everyone. The book toys with this disparity, and while it’s hard to describe in one sentence, I’d call it an eerie yet funny critique of North American work and office culture.
Whereas Severance tested the waters of surrealism, slowly dipping in a toe, a foot, a leg up to the knee, Bliss Montage dove in headfirst. I’ve never read anything like Bliss Montage, and it inspired me to be more playful and weird with my choices in books and writing. My favourite stories were “G,” “Oranges,” and “Peking Duck,” the last of which draws on some of the same themes as Severance—being a first-generation immigrant, fraught mother-daughter relationships, and identity exploration. Those three stories are admittedly the least surreal of the eight stories in Bliss Montage, but they were the ones that resonated most. “Peking Duck” is available online on The New Yorker website.
Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
A fact about me is that I hate true crime. I think it’s a genre that relies heavily on shock value, the exploitation of the lives of women and people of colour, and generally rote storytelling that never uncovers anything new. I expressed this opinion in an essay for VICE years ago called “We Don’t Need Any More Stories About Ted Bundy.” So, imagine my surprise when one of my favourite reads of the year ended up being a true crime-esque novel based on Bundy’s despicable crimes.
I loved this book for two reasons. One: it’s not actually about Ted Bundy—it’s about the women he hurt and killed, the people who loved them, and the way the legal system let victims down repeatedly. Two: it’s a great story. Knoll writes deftly in two time periods from the alternating perspectives of two women. She goes back and forth quickly without losing the thread of the story. The ending was devastating but well-told because Knoll spent so much time building the characters and their lives outside of the crimes that they endured. Knoll wants you to know that Bundy’s victims were real people, real girls and women. Women with aspirations, women on the precipice of finding out who they were, women who made mistakes, women who really, truly, had their whole lives ahead of them. True crime often tells you that; Knoll shows you.
All Fours by Miranda July
I’m still digesting a lot of what I read in All Fours, but I can pretty confidently say it is the single horniest piece of media I’ve consumed in years. July puts everything out there in a way that’s sometimes uncomfortable to read as a woman, and I found myself thinking, “Oh… we’re saying that part out loud? We’re telling people that’s something that happens?”
In many ways, All Fours felt like a woman trying to liberate herself from the terror that is her own body and mind. It’s a desperate, weird, filthy, anxious, and beautiful look into a woman who is all of those things. It’s human, it’s delightful, it’s annoying. I thought I couldn’t get past the first thirty or so pages, but I’m so glad I did.
Honourable Mentions (aka books I liked but don’t feel like writing paragraphs about)
They Said This Would Be Fun by Eternity Martis (read with care and righteous, vindicating anger if your higher-education experience was also unbearably white)
Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford (take breaks reading this one, maybe to check up on your family)
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (yes, I read it for the first time about two weeks ago. Miles better than the movie, but Rosamund Pike, you will forever be Amy)
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (atmospheric, character-driven mystery with a slightly disappointing but unexpected ending)
Dishonourable Mentions (aka books I didn’t like but also don’t feel like writing paragraphs about)
We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza (interesting concept but entirely too soft on the topic it attempts to tackle, and frustratingly apologetic in all the wrong ways)
Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby (there’s only so much I can read about diarrhea before a book feels irredeemable, but that’s entirely on my weak stomach. No pun intended there)
Music
Brat summer turned into brat autumn in my house. I have been listening to Charli Xcx’s brat remixes non-stop.
Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat builds on Charli Xcx’s first album so well. I made a playlist called “brat 2 brat” where I organized each original track and its remix to play back to back so I can better understand the creative choices of the remix album. Most remixes feel like a flip-side of the original track, like if Charli Xcx made brat in an alternate universe. Others, like “Club classics” and “B2b,” directly reference brat’s success. I love how the “Club classics” remix interpolates “365,” as though acknowledging that “365” is now a club classic.
That being said, the tracks are not equally made and some remixes are better than others. I loved the remixes of “Everything is romantic” (more on that in a second), “Rewind,” “360,” “B2b” “Talk Talk,” “Club Classics,” “Girl, so confusing,” “So I” and “365.” I liked the remixes of “Guess,” “I think about it all the time” and “Apple.” I appreciated what was happening with remixes of “Spring Breakers,” “Von dutch,” “I might say something stupid,” “Sympathy is a knife,” and “Mean girls,” but I won’t return to them very often.
“Everything is romantic” featuring Caroline Polachek might be my favourite song of the year. I love the way the song builds and peaks, the visuals it conjures in my brain, and the conversation Charli and Caroline have about love, life, and success. It's the only remix that completely blows the original track out of the water for me (“Girl, so confusing” featuring Lorde is up there too).
What a treat to get such a fully realized complement to an already fantastic album! No one is doing it like Charli Xcx right now! This feels like a moment in music that people will endlessly try and fail to emulate in the future, like Beyoncé’s surprise releases and visual albums.
Honourable Mentions
When a Thought Grows Wings — Luna Li
BETA — Peter Cat Recording Co.
Where the Butterflies Go in the Rain — Raveena
Verbathim — Nemahsis
By the end of this year, I’ll have seen all these artists live in Toronto!
Oof, this felt like a long one. I don’t even feel like talking about TV and movies in this post because we’ve already covered a lot. I’m going to try to do these check-ins more often so it doesn’t become cumbersome to share all the things I wanna chat about!
I’ll leave you with this: my wonderful friend Nooria (DJ Heebiejabi) is playing at the Arch Café on Friday, October 25, in Toronto. All ticket proceeds will go to the Gaza Food Program. Please join me in buying a ticket as a donation even if you can’t attend. The ticket link and more information can be found here.