I was thinking this week about my little dogs. Of course I think about them all the time, but sometimes I have impossible questions for them: are you guys happy? Are you buddies, or siblings, or are you more like coworkers? Why do you get so excited about eating the same thing every day? What is so appealing about barking at a squirrel sitting on a wire 20 feet above your head?
When my older dog was about four months old, we dressed him in a red cable-knit sweater vest and took him with us to what we call the Fancy Lad car wash. At the Fancy Lad wash, you let an attendant conduct your car through the car wash while you pay inside. There is an indoor lobby where you wait for your car to reappear and be vacuumed and dried off by eager high-school students.
In the lobby, it was us and our puppy, about a half dozen other people, and a docile Weimeraner (there with a person, not on his own). Our puppy was fascinated with the Weimeraner because his whole approach to life is DO YOU WANT TO BE BEST FRIENDS? LET’S KISS.
We tried to contain the puppy’s enthusiasm somewhat, but at one point he walked over to the Weimeraner, stood up on his hind legs, and put his front legs on either side of the Weimeraner’s neck. He hugged this other dog. All the people cooed. The Weimeraner ignored our puppy, probably because he is a well-behaved dog unlike every single dog I have ever had.
Then we took our puppy outside, where he tried to eat a cigarette butt, because puppies are the best and also very stupid.
Our younger dog has mental problems which I’ve discussed here many times, and for a long time I thought her ability to just Be A Dog was permanently compromised. But with a shitload of drugs she is so good at it! She loves toys, loves affection, loves eating gross things in the yard. She has dog friends at school. And, in a development that has really unfolded over the last year or so, she will now come up to us and solicit affection in the form of head scratches and butt rubs. I never thought she would do that, I just thought it was beyond her. Turns out she just needed that good good.
Here are some things I’ve made to eat lately (NYT recipes are gift links):
These turkey burgers (I didn’t make the slaw)
This stupidly named salad that I’ve talked about before
Granola that is actually good and is also helping me use the three bags of sliced almonds I found in my freezer, whoops
More of these braised greens, which are so outstanding as a side or with cubed paneer or potato as a main
It’s been a while since I made it, but this pasta was great (as with all NYT pasta recipes, use less pasta or make more of everything else)
I recently changed French tutors, and it’s been amazing. I hate to shade Lingoda too much because most of the teachers I met were very good, but the platform is kind of shitty and the lessons became, for me, too reminiscent of struggling through fourth-period high-school French with Madame Brower.
Now, I talk to a lovely French woman for 45 minutes every Saturday, and we just speak French (well, she speaks French and I do my best), and it is not stressful at all. There is a leap one takes from the level of ability where you can say “Where is the restroom” or “table for two, please” to the ability to discuss what you liked about an art exhibit, and that is where I am now, and I do not feel like I am going to do this successfully by repeating the names of all the things one finds in a city, for example.
As part of my ongoing efforts to learn this language, I’ve started watching a YouTube channel called “C’est meuilleur quand c’est bon” – “it’s better when it’s good,” a title that made my French teacher’s eyebrows raise because…obviously? Things are better when they’re…good?
Apparently CMQCB is also a print magazine and it seems to focus solely on food. The star of the show is a French woman who goes all over France meeting chefs and eating food and having a spectacular time, all the while speaking absolutely blistering French. I watch it with French subtitles in order to get more of the context and mostly hope everyone else in France just speaks more slowly than this woman. (They do not.)
This week I unearthed a pandemic mistake from my closet: a pair of pants I bought from the now-defunct Elizabeth & Clarke. You may remember their Instagram ads, featuring effortlessly stylish women donning their flowing, stain-resistant, “vegan silk” lounge clothes to go from morning matcha latte through WFH and straight to bed.
It goes without saying that I do not belong to this cohort. I frequently wear my pajamas until noon and have two ratty LOFT cardigans that I have been wearing on Zoom calls for a decade (usually to hide evidence of the pajamas). Wearing a pair of pants – any kind of pants – to bed is, to me, deeply psychotic. So I am not sure what I was thinking in March of 2021 when I parted with some of my American dollars to buy the “Gemma” pant and the “Fiona” blouse.
I did wear these items occasionally but TBH the blouse was kind of wack and the pants, while very comfortable, have weird slits up to the knee, which…is stupid and furthermore defeats the purpose of wearing pants at all. (I guess this is to make them comfortable to sleep in? I will never know b/c see above.) In any event, RIP to Elizabeth & Clarke, may you live long and prosper in the afterlife (Poshmark).
In closing!
If you feel like these newsletters are getting longer, you are right! And if it seems as though they are all over the place, you are also right.
Despite ruthlessly curating my Instagram feed and my exposure to “news” (what the major networks and outlets now dispense as news on a daily basis is a fucking J O K E), I still feel overwhelmed by Bad Stuff a lot of the time. So when it comes to sitting down and doing my little newsletter, I just feel like talking about normal stuff, and maybe you want to read normal stuff? Yes I always remind you to call your members of Congress (call them), but perhaps you, like myself, could use a few more moments of cortisol-free brain activity in your day? A reminder, perhaps, that you’re a person with a life that is happening?
I have mostly stopped scrolling Substack, an activity that used to feel safe and wholesome, because every other essay now is “Here is why you should give up hope forever” or “We are all doomed” or some combination of the two. These things may in fact be relevant or true, but I cannot be expected to function while absorbing it all, so I no longer engage with it very much.
It’s not that I want to put my head in the sand, exactly, but I do want to retain some aspects of my humanity. I want to read newsletters about the outfits on White Lotus and I want to hear about what people are cooking and I want to hear stories about bad dates or weird jobs, and I don’t need them all to be discussed against the backdrop of our deteriorating democracy. I just can’t do it all the time. And one way to Be The Change I Want To See is to just type this newsletter every week-ish or so.