The November Log: Watches, Reads, Feels
Every passing movie, book, and thought that I can remember from this blur of a month
“You want everything?” I ask Luke over the phone on my way to the bagel place. A bird swarm dives in cursive u’s, and my stomach drops. I want my summer order, the bagel sandwich I had on the way to Rockaway Beach. A pumpernickel bagel with avocado, red onion, and something else you can’t remember. Instead of improvising, I order Luke’s everything bagel with cream cheese (toasted) and the “going green #3,” a thick veggie sandwich on pumpernickel.
There was some news article about farmers, or authorities, or maybe neither, in Mexico razing forests to meet international avocado supply. This headline alone shows the extent of a single want, echoed throughout the world. If everyone wants something, what happens at the bottleneck? There are some people who have passed through, made it to the other side and found what they wanted, and there are others who have to hold back and wait.
At this bagel place while you wait, one dude walks in and asks for the same old same old while his girlfriend (who does not have the same “regular customer” rapport with the cashier or bagel chef). The girlfriend orders tofu scallion cream cheese on a pumpernickel everything with lox. “Very fancy,” the regular explains of his girlfriend’s order to his buddy, the cashier.
The tofu cream cheese feels like another bottleneck. Is she someone who is morally pro-soy or anti-cream? But the lox. Perhaps her digestive system’s protests are stronger than her mental/emotional stances. Or maybe I’m projecting. In fact, my body is still protesting the baked potato soup from earlier this week, but guess what’s in the fridge and freezer, waiting for the right amount of laziness before I come crawling back. Lazy, delicious comfort might move people more than most motivational or physical forces.
*
November was a blur with a red holiday ribbon running through it. The first cold snaps, the renewed need for lip balm, the urgent lotioning of hands often mocked as a screen cliché: a wife quietly applies creams to retain moisture as her grievances against her husband, late to join her in bed, surface.
My nails grow out then break. Ripped cuticles run alongside them in the opposite direction. The growth and breakage, pruned by my teeth, is the cycle of this month. I fantasize about painting my nails a plum or berry, a color deep enough to turn your arms into a harvest. The nails’ discordant shapes and lengths gives my hands the impression of being both preschoolish, the fearless first line attacking new experiences like paint or mysterious goos, with matronly, straight-lined knuckles. In college and early years after college—in fact, until maybe a year ago—your nails grew in transparent in the largest of flags suggesting a nutrient deficiency. They grow in white now, though there’s one white skid against your middle left fingernail that suggests maybe more fruit or vegetables, please.
*
As I walk home with a paper bag of bagels, I walk by my pet store. I love my neighborhood because of my pet store. Out front, there’s a red and yellow banner boasting of a closing sale. Whenever I walk into that store, I greet the owner the way he greets me. “Hello, my friend,” I call out before moving to the back aisle with the cat food. He has explained that his landlord has taken him to court and at some point stop responding, which means he can stay open another month he didn’t expect to have the store.
The store itself is the pet store of your imagination. Birds in cages, dust-furred cats sleeping on bags of dog food and curled next to the cash register. The smell reminds me of days off visiting the National Zoo in DC. I loved the dirt-coded rank of the elephants and gorillas, the coppery and humid scent of the reptile house. It’s a scent that’s alive.
I buy more of the wet food my friend recommended last time, and he always gives me a discount, because he says I laugh like his sister. “You laugh with your heart.”
Without a job and with my two-mile dog walking commute, I’ve seen more of my neighborhood this fall than I had in the first year of living here. It’s bars and restaurants and dog shops with bright, new logos. There’s a weekend farmer’s market. There are preschools speaking German or French. There are pizza places that shut down at 8 p.m. and some knock-off Manhattan branches that stay open late but offer a different style of pizza than the primary branch you remember.
That primary branch of pizza, the one with all the celebrity pictures framed inside? That pizza is wet. I have always stood by that.
But it was so close. Right outside Luke’s old apartment. So was the W-4 stop. Everything from anyone’s apartment in Manhattan feels twenty minutes away.
That’s the thing about this neighborhood. It’s not close, and the subway roundtrip is now almost $6. This is petty cash for most salaried folks, but when I walk the dogs for $15, I walk wherever I can.
The one luxury I gave myself this month is the Alamo Drafthouse monthly pass. Like the AMC model, for a monthly fee subscribers can see up to a movie a day. Alamo is one of those movie theaters that offers chair-side waitstaff, so even as I see these incredible movies, I watch them next to the ghost of someone’s deep-fried pickle spears or grease-bomb teriyaki chicken wings. I order nothing, sometimes a water. If there’s anything I miss, it’s buttery popcorn. The popcorn is $10 for unlimited refills, but who has ever actually refilled their large popcorn in the span of 120-minute runtime? As martyr-some as I sound, it’s nice to learn to enjoy something without the frills. I’m already getting away with a movie on a Friday afternoon. Do I need the popcorn to tell my senses that I’m really here, that I didn’t just imagine it?
I want everything: to have the bills paid, to have the weekends off, to be close to Manhattan with all the amenities Brooklyn affords, to feel creatively hyper-productive yet satiated with my vision and yet again validated enough by some editor’s proposal to pay for my work. I feel eager and locked up with fear, over-confident and underwhelmed by my work.
*
After digging through the storage basement at my parents’ place on Thanksgiving, I found high school copies of Death of a Salesman, All the King’s Men, Tale of Two Cities, and Pride & Prejudice, all littered with my teenage annotations. I want to review my handwriting against the classics. The books sit on my stairs as a bookcase overflow.
Someday, I want a library.
It feels impossible to want a library, or even a wall of books, in New York. Unless you’re this billionaire couple who bought the Strand’s rare books collector’s old apartment and pretended like they didn’t have billions of dollars to buy and renovate it (see below):
A video like this is infuriatingly casual with the wants and wealth, the reek of it contagious through the video. The standards of how-you-could-be-living raised 1,000%.
Sometimes, realizing a want leaves you with the same empty stomach feeling you had when you started.
*
Watching those birds pull their wings in and flap around reminds me that there are other ways to express gratitude. Yes, this is the month of “thanks” that can feel as canned as cranberry sauce.
I watch those birds, with the ghost instinct of Friday optimism, and Luke has coffee and scrambled eggs at home, and holiday lights start to line the street, and I think, I like that.
What a simple way to express gratitude. Instead of “want”, with eyes out to the abstract and the thing that doesn’t exist yet but could with the right methods and ambitions, “like” looks to the real and concrete. How tasteless a word for an exciting gut sensation, the instinct to explore and uncover more good.
What I liked this month
Books
If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery: The inside-panel summary of this book does not do it justice. This book feels the written version of FX’s Atlanta. It bounces between characters and timelines each chapter, and it stitches in surreal situations. These chapters feel baked and ready for screen adaptation. They’re visual enough to play across your mind’s eye with the quick pacing of a car chase and grounded in the family’s conflict between generations as they assimilate to life in America or hold onto their Jamaican roots.
The Stone Sky (Broken Earth Trilogy #3), by N.K. Jemesin: I have gone back and forth and back and forth on whether this is a series for audiobook. The narration by Robin Miles across the three books is amazing, but this last book decided for me that reading the physical print copy is best for understanding this sci-fi world. (Unless you’re fine rewinding a lot to triple-catch details.) This final book of the Hugo Award-winning series stays as fresh and novel as the other two books. I could never tell where the story would turn next, and that unpredictability stays consistent to the last pages. Lose yourself in this world!
Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay (#3) + The Story of the Lost Child (#4), by Elena Ferrante: These books are just delicious. They are the perfect Venn diagram between quick, breezy, soapy small town drama and an insightful portrait of a female friendship that’s hostilely competitive and somewhat co-dependent. It’s also an amazing technique how the prodigious friend is only seen through the current friend’s vantage. We never get to see inside the mind of the “brilliant friend,” but we see how her small actions ripple out and transform the town or the protagonist.
Land of Milk and Honey, by C. Pam Zhang: I have been on the library waitlist for a minute on this one, and I’m so thrilled it’s finally here! I’m savoring it like a good dessert. From where I’m at so far? Worth the wait. A chef in a smog-ridden future where animal and plant species go extinct daily takes a job on a mountaintop with a billionaire who has the last existing food stores. As with any billionaire project, something is not quite right. Not only is this book a tight bulls-eye of food writing, speculative climate apocalypses, and odd power/class dynamics, but it is written with an extremely beautiful prose style that underlines the pleasure and horror of each scene.
Murder on Sex Island, by Jo Firestone: Unlike the Broken Earth trilogy, this one must be read via audio. Jo Firestone, a comedian who puts quirky into another bracket, writes this satire about an undercover private investigator lying about her identity who has to explore a reality show murder by becoming a contestant on said show. Oh, and the show, “Sex Island”? It’s like Love Island, but people are eliminated or promoted for how good they are at sex. This is a giggly hoot that I can’t stop listening to.
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Movies
We’re putting that Alamo Drafthouse membership to work. Here’s what came out this last month (and some of these were originally featured in The Beginner’s List to This Fall’s International Film Festivals).
Priscilla (writer/director Sofia Coppola): This movie is absolutely stunning, frame to frame. I can’t stop thinking of the scenes of decadent food brought outside Elvis’s door day to day, the outfits, the way Cailee Spailey transforms from a teenager to a mother in such a short runtime. Though some reviewers called the movie superficial, the underlying engine of the film is Coppola’s ability to turn Elvis into any man and their relationship into any sideways, controlling dynamic.
Saltburn (w/d Emerald Fennell): THIS. I loved this movie. I don’t want to say too much else. This also is a lush visual experience like Priscilla, and the casting is perfect (double the Elordi, double the fun), but Fennell uses beauty to lure the audience in before suffocating them. Worth seeing in theaters, especially when you can hear the people next to you having a similar visceral cringe.
Dream Scenario (w/d Kristoffer Borgli): I was so, so excited about this film, and yes, Cage is good and goofy in this. There’s one really iconic scene that made me laugh out loud and reinforces that Ari Aster, for all his horrifying ways, has a great sense of humor. Otherwise, it feels like it leaves a lot of questions left unanswered, which makes the premise feel thin, like a comedy sketch stretched over 90 minutes. Sure, you can see it, you won’t regret it, but if you’re like the viewers in the lady’s room after I left the theater, you might be annoyed to spend a ticket’s worth on a movie that makes you say “What the heck was that about?”
Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Bottom (director Paul Briganti / writers Please Don’t Destroy): This is pure dumb hijinx. If you dig their SNL sketches, you will like the odd absurdity of this. I can’t remember the last time I watched a movie filled with so many hard jokes and odd situations for pure comedy’s sake. I giggled a lot. Available now on Peacock.
Quiz Lady (director Jessica Yu / writer Jen D’Angelo): In that same vein of itching a nostalgic genre scratch, this movie has all the right funny beats and sweet sister moments. When a introverted sister obsessed with a game show is signed up to appear on air by her whacky “life coach” sister, what can you expect? Certainly not a pug kidnapping. I’m a huge Sandra Oh fan, and to see her be the reckless, hair-dyed, car-accident-causing sister is a true joy. Available now on Hulu.
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TV
With all these movies and books, it’s hard to finish a series of TV, okay?? Take that as a sign that I’m not just watching TV all day in this fun-employment phase (though I want to so so so bad). I’m in the midst of watching Fellow Travelers on Showtime and The Enfield Poltergeist on Apple. (The second is a documentary where they have actors lip-sync to original tapes on spooky paranormal activity happening in a British household. So cool, so spooky!)
The Curse (Showtime), My Brilliant Friend (HBO), and so many other shows are on the list. Cross your fingers that the upcoming December hibernation assists in my binging. The gift that keeps on giving, Clark!
I have heard this laugh that comes from the heart. I like that