Bread and Bread

The first week or so of the quarantine was strange for a dozen reasons, which I wrote about for MUTHA , but because we're living (knockonwood) through one of the most momentous non-moments of the past century, I thought it might be good to jot down some notes on this part of it too: the new-normal aftermath, the long days that are mostly okay but missing something. I have nothing special to add to the already overwhelming amount of content about the challenges of working from home with no childcare, or the dueling manifestos of "Now is the time to write that novel/build that treehouse" and "It's okay to just survive, we're in a fucking pandemic." But this is my blog, and maybe someday I'll want to look back at how we stitched together time during this time. I wouldn't say we have a schedule, but we have a rhythm. We're not really homeschooling Dash, but he's learning. We've never been especially strict about screen time, but we...

Artist Minna Dubin started making #MomLists as a way to continue her artistic practice when time was fragmented but her parenting experience called out for documentation. She encourages others to make them too.  Photo by Nong Vang / Unsplash 1. Our routine is already haphazard. You ate peanut butter crackers and a cookie for dinner. Can I even call it a routine? Or dinner? 2. Neither of us is good at this—the pivot from semi-solidity into liquid night. 3. Your other mom works late. We Facetime with her and you cry into the camera. 4. You shift again. We sing “The Scientist” (the Glee version). Your voice is sweet and I marvel that you already carry a tune better than I do. 5. Your bedtime babble: a pastiche of airplanes, police dogs, your school friends’ catch phrases. 6. The negotiation phase: You run to the living room for “one toy!” I eat the quesadilla you abandoned next to the bed. 7. Yes, we eat in bed. 8. You are distraught. It was your favorite “taco.” ...

From my travel journal: Thursday, our first in Mexico City, we kept it mellow and walked around Polanco, which all the guidebooks say is the "Beverly Hills of Mexico City." It's true that I saw a BMW motorcycle and lots of professional dog walkers, but Polanco has more urban flare than BH. We spent a lot of time at Lincoln Park; there's a statue of Lincoln here that says "a gift from the people of the United States to the people of Mexico." Nearby a store had hung a #fucktrump banner. Better than a wall. We stayed up talking to the friends we're staying with, Laura and her wife, Molly. I've known Laura since I was a little kid; our moms were good friends, and hers passed away recently, from Alzheimer's. Laura said that navigating her mom's illness would have been twice as hard without her sister Lindsay, and that's part of why they wanted a second kid (Cora is four, Evan is 20 months). It's sobering, but it did push me more in...

1. turnips and sugar skulls The other day I caught a lighthearted BBC News Hour story on Halloween. Two reporters with crisp English accents discussed the fact that Halloween had been exported from Ireland and Scotland to North America, altered, then re-exported back to the British Isles. “Pumpkins are a new world vegetable,” one of the reporters said. “If we wanted to truly celebrate a local holiday, we’d be carving turnips.” “Turnips!” the other exclaimed. “Well, that sounds quite mushy.” Turnip spice latte, anyone? Around the same time, I read a Huffington Post piece titled “Dia de los Muertos is Not Halloween,” which included some good (and sadly not obvious?) points like: Dia de los Muertos is about “paying respects to late loved ones, honoring their lives, and acknowledging the fragility of life,” not just painting your face like a calavera and partying. Fair enough. But one (white) activist in my Facebook feed posted a long admonishment to her fellow non-...

1. all my omelets become scrambles I’m lying here in bed, full of eggs and fresh tomatoes. Yesterday Nicole and I saw The Hundred-Foot Journey , a movie that will make you want to cook an omelet. It takes place in the present day—as evidenced by the presence of molecular gastronomy, racism that disguises itself as nationalism and a fleeting glimpse of a cell phone—but you would not know it from all the bicycles, cobblestone and charmingly eroding cottages, all shot in the same buttery light as the food that the main character cooks. Eat, drink, homme, femme. The movie is about a snooty French restaurant that competes with a new Indian restaurant across the street. It’s a nostalgic, fanciful and predictable movie, but also one that treats its characters with love and respect. It is middle-of-the-road—the characters literally kiss in the middle of the road that cuts between the restaurants—but in the best way. A movie you would take your mom to, but which would remind you th...

1. rock, mud, logs and europeans Here is my mini-mini version of Wild (probably—I still haven’t read it. But I want/plan to!). A grueling two-day hike is like every life journey: If you could see what you were getting into, you probably wouldn’t sign up for it, but in the end you’re glad you did it. We rented a car (left side of the road—I was happy to be a backseat passenger) and drove through the sheep and cattle pastures of the NZ countryside. NZ is a big dairy exporter, and these cows look much happier than the ones you see on the side of the 5 freeway in smelly Hanford, California. These cows gambol . Happy as cows in spring. From the little town of Thames, we turned off into the parkland of the Coromandel Peninsula and began our backpacking journey through the ferny forest. It seemed one part NorCal, one part tropical rainforest. We went up, up, up, taking turns wearing Emily’s too-big backpack, whose straps dug into my collarbone. Doing something physical an...

I’ve been working like a motherfucker lately. Or perhaps like a no-one-fucker because when you work a lot, there’s less time for fucking. When things were slow and same-old-same-old sometimes at P&W, I occasionally envied people with “real” jobs—I had a kind of Mad Men image of striding into an office, rolling up my shirtsleeves and clacking away at a keyboard as part of some larger mission. Work is so American and noble. Let's get to work here at this beautifully designed modern coffee table. Work is such a human-sized, fortunate, un-existential problem to have. It’s not an exclusively first-world problem, but at its best it can be kind of adorable. And now that work is so very much in front of me, the problem of too much work feels bourgeois and un-artistic and banal and a silly thing to stress about because I have my health (at least I think, knockonwood), and I’m mildly embarrassed and ashamed that I’m letting work stress get to me. But how could anything you d...

I’ve been thinking about space lately. I’m finally living the Eastside dream I’ve had since I started making pilgrimages to Silver Lake in college . I start the day with a train ride that takes me across trestles and over a cement river. I eat lunch in the middle of 1938’s idea of China—neon-outlined pagodas and bamboo lettering. And then I go home to Highland Park’s rolling hills and gold-pink light. I took a long walk on Saturday and found an old glass-works studio I’d never known about. Old New Chinatown. Sometimes, even now that it’s (nearly) all familiar, L.A. still takes my breath away. Other times I wonder if the magical space I longed for in my twenties is made magical only by my longing. It’s like having a crush on someone and then marrying them. Your love dives deeper than you ever knew possible, but the exotic twinkle fades. A little while ago, a writer I know, who recently moved to L.A., asked her Facebook friends what their favorite coffee shops to write in w...

1. down-to-earth takedown I’m about halfway through the New Yorker profile of Jennifer Weiner , and it’s kind of grossing me out. Summary: Jennifer Weiner is a writer of smart-skewing chick lit (which I have not read) who publicly gives the literary establishment a hard time for ignoring popular literature, especially popular literature by women. I think she and Jonathan Franzen have gotten into some kind of Twitter war without Franzen even being on Twitter. Rebecca Mead’s article raises some legitimate points—namely that the literary establishment honors many women writers, but it rightly favors those who create more complex characters than Weiner does. OMG, she is clearly wearing a coral top because she's a bitter shrew who wants you to like her. But the article takes Weiner down using the kind of petty, snobby, sexist digs that drive home Weiner’s point about how non-edgy female writers are treated. Mead compares Weiner’s outfit at a speaking engagement to something a ...

I was supposed to visit Tracy in Joshua Tree this past weekend, but her mom had some health stuff (shout-out to Bev Kaply!), so we postponed. I was sad not to see Tracy, but found time is always a bit of a silver lining. Yesterday AK and I found ourselves with the kind of weekend day we used to have back before she worked an average of six and a half days a week. We slept till nine. I made blueberry walnut pancakes. We hiked Debs Park , where we watched the world’s second most energetic dog catch air and practically take flight as he chased a ball thrown by his similarly athletic person. His person had another dog, a curly mix who was content to walk the trail at a reasonable pace. AK did that dog’s voice: “Oh, you know…I just like to read.” I added on: “Brunch would be nice too.” We bought DayQuil for AK, who caught my cold this past week, and antidepressants for me and anti-aging moisturizer for both of us, because it’s time to find out if that shit works, at Targe...