Final File_27

March in review.

In March I found myself back at the beginning as I often do, traveling to the edge of the spiral only to begin the journey again. in the center I name my fears. I’ve spoken them out loud to two friends who have become sisters. Both ask if I’m in therapy (no). Therapy is for people with finished drafts and time on their hands. I have neither. I have more access to myself though, and that has to count for something. I find myself more easily now and that has to count for something. I’m sure of it.

Anyway, onto the post.

Notes From March

• I started off the month with book club. We read I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For by Bzrat Mezghebe, a novel about Eritreans living in the DMV-area shortly before and after independence. It grapples with transience, inheritance and silence, interrogating what it means to make a life in a new land and the nature of home. Our full review of it, here.

• We had friends Christmas three months late because schedules are difficult and as we get older it gets harder to sync. We got it together eventually and it felt less Christmas-y and more like a long overdue hang. C and I have always hosted, but this year, Allie had us all over. We ordered pizza, drank wine, and hung Allie’s mirror (Carrie did it really, we just cheered her on).

• I’m in an Aretha phase at the moment, specifically her 20th studio album, Let Me In Your Life. I’ve been listening to “Until You Come Back To Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)” on repeat.

• I didn’t really do much in the way of a Valentine’s Day gift for C so I made it up to her in early March with a “yes” day. We started with lunch at Bordertown in Greenpoint. She ordered a pork belly situation and I got a blue crab and shrimp tostada, which I still think about. Then we moved on to Tokyo Record Bar, which she’d been wanting to try. We ended the day at Human Head, where we moved slowly through the selection. The music they were playing was very cool, so cool I couldn’t Shazam it, and it was filled with people who are clearly serious about music. We left with lots of records, including the movie soundtrack recording of The Wiz.

• Herrana, a director and filmmaker I admire, posted on her Instagram story that she was hosting a volleyball pickup game. I haven’t played in a decade but was a setter all through high school and have been meaning to find an adult league. It was fun! I definitely needed to warm up more beforehand—I was sore for days. I also threw my back out which feels like something to file under stuff that happens after 30.

• After volleyball I met up with a college friend Ganeesh, who’s one of the funniest people I know. We went book shopping together, shaded in details of the last couple years, and plotted world domination. I think we made lots of headway.

• Got an incredible facial at Spencer’s Spa. It’s as gorgeous as they say.

• That Sunday, after biscuits, C, Allie, and I went to Hellbender for brunch. We walked in two minutes after it opened and there was already a 20 minute wait. We walked around the block to kill some time and ended up at Topos. I bought three books, including an Alice Coltrane biography and a gray Penco clip. At Hellbender we had an incredible steak and fried mozzarella that I’d eat everyday on repeat. After, we went shopping at Uniqlo and C bought some fun pieces for Spring.

• The following week, C, Carrie and I got dinner at Fish Cheeks and then went to see Hoppers. The theater, hilariously, was full of adults.

• I went on a book date that I’m very excited about. More on that, soon.

• I finally got my hair cut and colored. I love it so much I posted three photos and immediately went to Allie’s house after so we could talk about it for fifteen minutes.

  

• I made a pilgrimage to Stray and ended up talking to Danny for hours as I always do. I bought records, an enamel tray, and a sculpture that Carrie said could “easily cost $1200” but only ran me $60.

• Joanna invited me to a focaccia making event she hosted with Haven Well Within. We gathered in this low lit cellar beneath La Mercerie, which, thinking ahead, would be perfect for a birthday dinner or book launch. I put garlic and rosemary on mine (I’m a simple girl!) and chatted with my seatmate Jessica until it was time to go. We both work in beauty, so we ended up talking shop, arriving at the conclusion that this peptides craze and aesthetics obsession is really about externalizing the appearance of wellness rather than actually being healthy and collapsing the two to be synonymous. There are racist undertones in this pursuit that I don’t need to belabor (y’all are intelligent!) but we’re moving in a sinister direction.

• On the first nice Spring day we went to Bar Heretic in Fort Greene. It was slightly too cold for outdoor dining and the thin cardigan I had on but we did it anyway. They serve natural wines and everything we had was phenomenal. Even the orange was good, which if you know me, is saying something.

  

  The thin ass cardigan in question

• My friends Blake and Asia collaborated with Brown Sugar Babe on a fragrance collection and they had an event in New York to celebrate. I loved the campaign, which recreated iconic scenes from Waiting to Exhale. I also love them—they’re gatherers and community builders so it wasn’t shocking to me when I walked into the low-lit, mirrored room, I was met with Black women and men who were brilliant, fabulous and wholly themselves. It was a testament to the way they move through the world and I loved seeing that come together in real life. The scents smell great too, which is sort of a given.

• I saw Pillion with Alex and Court. I enjoyed it! More on that down below.

• The following week, we ventured to Jersey for a triple date with Jade, Nicole, BA and Nikki. We went bowling and talked about AI. I am, unsurprisingly, staunchly against it but it was interesting to talk to someone who’d moved from my position to fully adopting it and integrating it into their everyday life. On some level I understand the logic—freeing up the mental space occupied by menial tasks like emails and keeping track of invoices or whatever to make room for other things is seductive. But I’m increasingly hearing it referred to as a thought partner, a tool to gain clarity on ideas. I view this as an act of self-deception, aided by the facelessness and initial depersonalization of large language models. In the pitch, people say I just need to train the AI bot in the same way one trains an algorithm—that by feeding it you get closer to the desired result. But didn’t we learn this lesson the first time around? Thanks to those very same algorithms, we are more siloed in our digital echo chambers than ever, but at least there are other people there. With AI, people are wholly alone, believing they have company. I want people to consider that we are less in control than we believe, that we are being fed, the mind slowly tuning to the frequency of amalgamated, stolen goods. That’s not even to speak of the willingness to cede authority to the LLM because it’s fast-responding. Ease does not equal accuracy and yet it’s being treated with increased deference. It feels that we’re getting further away from the plot and that even the staunch holdouts are starting to be persuaded by the perception of ease and increased productivity. I’m concerned people have begun to give up on pushing back meaningfully, which portends a bleaker future than I previously predicted. All that said, the wings at Albatross in Edison, New Jersey are pretty good.

• That Wednesday I had a marathon of events. I started the morning with Good Weather Skin to celebrate the launching of the brand’s mineral spf lip gloss, which, impressively, has zero sunscreen taste. It was in the village so I walked the couple blocks to Three Lives and Company where I bought five books, none of which I went in for. I worked for a little and then went to an Ebay event where I ate lots of steak skewers and prosciutto on a potato chip. I ran into lots of people I admire, like Dolly, who talked me through running a micro-bakery deep in the pandemic and Mikey who runs Page Break, a very cool reading retreat series. I also met Talia, who was curating an edit, along with Emilia and Jalil. After, I stopped by Pearl Box for a Hero Cosmetics party and then walked across the street to the Staud event thrown by American Express. I told three people I wished they were raffling off statement credits to settle outstanding Amex debt. Instead I got a silk scarf from the collection and a t-shirt. The party was at The Manner hotel. It has a living room that looks like something out of The Incredibles 2. While there I ran into a musician and artist I’d met at a brand dinner two summers ago and we had an illuminating conversation about the novel. She’s on her third album and told me the hardest project is the second, which I’m finding to be very true.

• The next day, I met up with Chinue at Hunter’s Point Park. She is the little sister of a set of twins I went to preschool with. She’s a writer now and in the beginnings of a very interesting novel I hope I’ll be able to read soon. We caught up (I haven’t seen her in 20-something years so there was a bit to cover) talked about books and she recommended two: Meridian by Alice Walker and White Teeth by Zadie Smith. I headed to Book Culture in Long Island City after to buy them and only found White Teeth. Somehow they had no Walker in stock. While I scanned the shelves, I overheard a woman asking for Strangers which was accidentally shelved in fiction. I thought that was funny. I checked out three books and took pictures of the interesting stuff I want to buy at some point in the future.

• The following Saturday, I went to the Honey Pot salon series, which focused on reclaiming wellness and figuring out what that means for us as Black people. It was a beautiful event, partly, I think, because everyone took it very seriously. It was at Apartment Rael, which I’ve been meaning to go to, and started out with a short breathwork session, led by one of the panelists, Teya Knapp. During the breathing, which required quick inhales and exhales, I peeked one eye open like I used to in church during prayer and was pleased to see everyone holding themselves and closing their eyes. Like I said, real serious. Kayla Greaves hosted the panel and did an incredible job. She held the energy in the room so delicately and by the end I wished she would host everything. Sasha Bonét was also on the panel, which was exciting because y’all know I love Sasha. While there, I told her that The Waterbearers is the most important book to come out in the past five years. I think every Black woman should read it and then give it to somebody else and then those people should have a book club. She read passages from the book during the panel and each section sparked a tangent of conversation that seemed to call up memories for just about everyone. We had a brief intermission and then did writing exercises with Craft & Release that asked us to interrogate our memories and write scenes based on them. Mine were too personal to share but I liked hearing other people’s reflections.

  

• The day after that (I’ve been very busy), I did a reading at NYCxStudios for their Reading the Greats series, where a writer reads a short story written by someone they admire. I chose “Shape Ups at Delilah’s” by Rion Amilcar Scott, which was published in the New Yorker a few years ago. It starts out as a love story between two exes but unfolds into a fable—exploring ownership, misogyny and theft. It’s about so many things but what I keep coming back to is the idea that there is the work and then there are the tools we use to do it. The tools might fascinate onlookers, especially those who want to do what you do, but they are ultimately immaterial. It’s a fantastic story and I hope everyone will read it.

  

• While there, I had an interesting conversation about love as a force, a source of power, neither good nor bad, just an energy that tethers two people together. This reflection was initiated by the book I’m currently reading, Another Country by James Baldwin, in which love and desire drives a character to violence and madness. I’m oversimplifying it, surely, but it got me thinking about how we bind love to goodness. Good love is real love, healthy love is real love. The rest is attachment or karmic debt or some other, sinister thing. And it’s not that I disagree with this idea wholesale, or think we should go around getting into or encouraging toxic relationships, but I am interested in decoupling love from the practical and elevating it into something divine. If love is energy and by extension, power, then we are constantly in negotiation with it. It can overwhelm us, it can make us feel strong, it can ruin us, it can free us. It’s something I’m still circling and will probably always be.

• On the very last day of the month, I went to a dinner hosted by Aunu, a beauty brand that formulates everything with manuka honey. I’ve long-loved manuka—I have HS and it’s a gamechanger for wound care—so I needed little convincing. I ended up being seated across from Willa, who I used to work with when I was a baby beauty editor at Nylon. She was doing social at Bustle and already a star. Now she’s the editor-in-chief at Cosmopolitan, which, if you know Willa, is not at all surprising. It was good to catch up. I also spent lots of time chatting with the dermatologist next to me, lamenting about the evolution of aesthetics and asking him what people were coming in for these days. More C02 lasers and very intense treatments, he said. Interesting!

Reading

I picked up more than I completed but I read two books this month

Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian

I like a novel that does something interesting with format, which is why I picked up Seduction Theory. It’s told through a graduate thesis written by a student, Roberta, who’s the sort-of mistress of her professor, Simone, whose husband, Ethan, has cheated with the secretary Abigail. It’s a compelling idea but the execution was ultimately confusing because the story is told this way but there are instances where the novel abandons the thesis and jumps into the “real,” along with things Robbie couldn’t possibly know.. It’s hard to tell where the thesis is engaging in critical fabulation, which makes you question the situation entirely and not in a good way.

Loved One by Aisha Muharrar

This came highly recommended by Extracurricular readers so i placed it at the top of my list. It’s about a woman named Julia whose situationship-turned-best-friend, Gabe, dies, leaving her with an enormous amount of grief. She decides to go on a quest to collect some of his belongings, most of which are in England with Elizabeth, the last woman dated. Julia hatches a plan to track her down and the two end up forging a shaky alliance while she’s in town. Despite being near-total strangers, they are linked by this loss, bound by grief and also separated by it. It wasn’t for me, ultimately, but if someone told me they enjoyed it, I would understand why.

Watching

A good mix!

Still from Chameleon Street (1990).

• Chameleon Street - This is a film about a con artist, William Douglass Street, who is beleaguered by his desire for upward mobility despite his lack of hard skills. Impatient and certain of his greatness, impersonates various professions to make money. He takes on lots of roles—journalist, doctor, lawyer—and is successful at them, which is part of the hilarity. Street is also a misogynist, often casting off the women who love and believe in him without a second thought. It creates an interesting, complex portrait of a man who is being stepped on by a system and is, in that knowledge, turning around harming other people. It has a sort of surrealist feel to it too, and reminds me of Percival Everett’s work in tone. I liked it a lot and would love to see more indie films explore spaces like this. It’s a shame this didn’t herald the beginning of Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s long career of writing black comedies, but is instead an instance of his genius and potential.

• Bridgerton - Part two was better! It takes on class in a more meaningful way and illuminates the stringency of their society in a way that expands the universe but it’s still not good. The biggest miscalculation the writer’s room made was the reveal of Lady Whistledown—even Gossip Girl knew to keep you-know-who’s identity low until the end.

• Fackham Hall - Parody movies are back! This one takes aim at the Downton Abbey and Gilded Age-type films of the world, which dramatize the lives of the aristocracy. I didn’t expect this to be as good as it is, or as smart, but it was both of those things. Very funny, too.

• Neighbors - A24 getting into unscripted television has to mean something for the film industry writ large, but I’m not sure what. Either way, Neighbors is funny. It follows sets of rival neighbors who are angry with each other for various offenses, like the height of a fence or a property line. These disagreements have spiraled into full-on feuds, where cops are called, restraining orders obtained, and Youtube channels started. Of course the characters are quirky and a little nuts. A fun watch, and does something for the part of me missing Tiger King.

• Vladimir - I really enjoyed the book but feel differently about the show. The tone feels off, as does the cinematography. It’s a little too glossy and hokey. What made the book good was the largely internal observations of the main character, which, given the medium, are largely absent from the adaptation. This is the trade-off of moving a story from one format to another. Sometimes it works, in this case it doesn’t.

• Rooster - A little funny, a little corny. Yaminah, whose mom is a brilliant professor, said it’s an inaccurate depiction of academia because they have too much time on their hands.

• DTF St Louis - There’s a dark aura around this show. And I mean that literally. Everything is very gray. I don’t love that but I do like this show, which depicts a complicated relationship between a broadcast news reporter and his ASL interpreter. The show is constructed as a puzzle, depicting the same dynamic and set of circumstances over and over but with a little more information each time. It’s a bit tedious, but feels true to the way we understand information. Either way I’m invested, and watch it every week.

• Wonder Man - I really enjoyed this show, which is about an actor with magical powers who is taking great pains to hide them in a society where it’s not accepted but valued by the government, who want to use his abilities for their own gains. To do this, they create an elaborate scheme involving an aging actor plagued by scandal, who, over time, starts to become attached to his target. It’s well-done and the characters are complex. I’m excited that it’ll be back for season two.

• White Lies - After watching Chameleon Street, I was algorithmically directed to White Lies, a comedy about a museum worker who pretends to be an artist to impress a woman who happens to be an art dealer. The problem is, he doesn’t have paintings. He decides to pay a white woman who’s addicted to drugs to use her paintings, most of which are self portraits. He crafts a narrative around it—a commentary on white beauty standards—which made me laugh because it made a little sense. The art dealer, on her part, is struggling to get him represented at the gallery she works for, because they’re uninterested in breaking out a young Black artist with illegible work. It’s an interesting exploration of these dynamics and plays on the idea of the Black trickster, a popular figure of the 80s and 90s. These characters often exploit white ignorance in order to enrich themselves, a subversion of a power dynamic where Black people are held down socially and economically. It also explores the protection of illegibility from the position of the illegible person, vesting them with the power rather than that illegibility locking them out of opportunity. It illuminates how a lack of knowledge can work in the favor of the exploited and oppressed. It pokes fun at liberalism and exposes a tendency toward white saviorism by showing a more complete picture where the white person isn’t totally aware of what or who it is they’re trying to save. This trope has largely disappeared from film, but it’s something I’m noticing in watching White Lies and also Chameleon Street. Maybe I’ll write about it. We’ll see.

• Hoppers - I loved Hoppers, a film about a girl who wants to save a pond in her hometown from developers. It was in turns funny and profound. My one critique of the movie is that it invokes the idea of humans as capable of change while the “other,” in this case, the animals, as one-track minded and incapable of nuanced thinking. Either way, I really enjoyed it.

• Anniversary - This is a banger of a film and I think it’s crazy more people haven’t seen it. It’s about the breakdown of a society ushered in by a white woman who writes a radical book about restructuring America to become a technofascist state. It’s told from the perspective of a professor, who once had this woman in her class. She was dismissive of her then and a bit scared by her and is startled when she shows up at her house on her anniversary and is introduced as her son’s girlfriend. The movie revisits the date over the years, showing the evolution of their everyday life. It’s fascinating to watch the transition from normal to unrecognizable and comparing that to our current moment. Spooky but necessary watch.

• Pillion - This movie needs a trigger warning for anyone who’s been in a relationship where they felt no control and at the mercy of the person they loved. It follows a gay man, Colin, who has never been in a romantic relationship and meets a much more experienced, motorcycle-riding guy, Ray, in a bar. The two have a quick, brutal sexual encounter that Colin takes in stride. This is the beginning of their relationship, where Ray is in total control and Colin will do nearly anything to keep his attention. Ray’s rules are so strict and immovable that if Colin wants to continue to see him, he has to do what he says. Pillion is nightmare fuel for anyone who has been in a relationship where any attempts to assert their needs results in punishment or withdrawal. It’s a hard watch but an interesting one and is another piece of evidence for my theory that many of the most universal stories are deeply specific.

• Top Five - Why did Rosario Dawson have that fedora on?

• Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice - Really bad, wow.

• Maggie’s Plan - Maggie Has a Plan is about a woman named Maggie (played by Greta Gerwig), who wants to have a baby. She’s willing to do this on her own and when we meet her, she’s settled on a quirky but attractive sperm donor willing to give his genetic material with no strings attached. This plan is sort-of thwarted when she falls for a coworker, a professor at her college who’s in a complicated place in his marriage. His wife is the accomplished one while he has a novel he can’t finish, which he blames on not having enough time to complete due to his responsibilities at home. Maggie offers to read his novel, which endears him to her, and eventually they begin an affair. Things continue from there but it ultimately felt flat to me. No one was evil enough or interesting enough for me to care and everything resolved too easily for the stakes to feel real.

Wish List

This image from Pinterest lives in my head rent-free

• These pants from Brooke Callahan, which come in an incredible amount of colors. I’m feeling the green and the turquoise—I’m in a blue phase

• As a Queens resident, I feel that I need this shirt from Only NY

• These taffeta shorts from Chan Luu

• Brown denim

• Denim shorts that stop four inches above my knee, these Levi’s feel approximate to what I’m aiming for

• A Longchamp Le Pliage tote. I had one all through college and miss it terribly.

• I came across Nina Gordon, an Australia-based jewelry brand that works with lots of silver. I’ve been wanting to wear more bracelets so I immediately saved this thin bangle. I did some more clicking around and found these tiny silver hoops, which are very cute too.

• Also into this ring from Mexico City-based brand Ruiz.

• Decided I wanted a pair of Nike Shox after someone I follow said wearing them with a pair of flare workout pants has the same vibe as jeans and a pointed heel.

• These sunglasses from 12PM Studios

• I also want a pair of mid-rise jeans that stop just under my belly button. These “low-rise” jeans from Gap look promising

• A slip cover for my chaise. I’ve been saving Etsy makers and sifting through their reviews for weeks but am very open to recommendations

• Rain boots. I like these hemp ones

• Something about this Kotn shirt is doing it for me, I’ve been loving the double-layered thing

• St. John’s was doing well in the Final Four, which led me down a merch rabbit hole. Some stuff I turned up from Homefield, a coaches jacket, this t-shirt, and a corduroy hat

• I’ve been on a quest for long-sleeve t-shirts. My search has turned up a few promising options, including this one from J Crew and this Gap one

• I need a new shower curtain and I kind of want a striped situation. I’ve sent this one, this one, and this, to C

• A going out top I can wear with capris

Expense Report

• HonestBaby Wash Cloths - I’m a big fan of baby washcloths. They’re thin but not too scratchy and work well for getting in all the nooks and crannies. These are my favorite—I recently bought another five-pack.

• Some stuff from ASOS, most of which I returned

• Boring car stuff

• A plane ticket to Antigua for my sister’s birthday

• So many books I’ll probably make a video about it, including

  • Sunjata by Suso and Kanute

  • A High Price for Freedom by Clyde W. Ford

  • I Give You My Silence by Mario Vargas Llosa

  • The Last On Earth by Deepa Anappara

  • The Loneliness of Angels by Myriam J.A. Chancy

  • Cosmic Music by Andy Beta

  • Fixer Chao by Han Ong

  • Red Pill by Hari Kunzu

  • Set for Life by Andrew Ewell

  • Reel to Real by bell hooks

  • Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks

• Records from Human Head

• Many dinners out