Inputs:
The Light Years: The first in The Cazalet Chronicles, a series of five books about an upper middle class family in Britain covering the late 1930s-1950s, this book features lots of women saying “Hm? Oh, how marvelous of you, darling,” lots of psyches shattered by The War, lots of children scowling down into their Bovril (what is Bovril?), the like. The stakes are low, everyone is to some degree unpleasant; and I will 100% read the other 2,000 pages of this series, most likely while I am blearily feeding an infant in the middle of the night, because that’s just how I’m made.
Outputs:
Back when I was expecting N I started using Peanut, an app that is essentially Tinder but for connecting with other mothers with whom you want to make small talk at the park while half your attention is directed at preventing your child from tumbling off the slide or eating wood chips. Some of these interactions are great and led to friendships, some are great and then the person vanished without a trace (CRUSHING). Most are a 6/10 in that they kill some time, you might learn about a good new playground, and when it turns out that your photos were not an accurate predictor for how much you have in common you can always fall back on the seductive tedium of discussing The Children.
I keep going back to Peanut, flipping through profiles, trying to figure out who is just there to pitch an MLM, even though no one is suggesting playdates these days. I felt ambivalent about going out of my way to meet people with kids before the pandemic and it seems futile now, but I also have this panicked feeling that despite all the checking-in texts with friends (with or without kids) that have been exchanged over the past year I’ll still have to start over with all of my relationships when things go back to normal and I need to have some backups lined up. Today I brought chili and oatmeal cookies to a woman I met on Peanut who just had her second kid. We’ve video chatted a few times but the brief masked Tupperware handover was our first IRL meeting and I have no idea when we’ll have another one as long as we’re both unvaccinated and caring for delicate little germ sponges. But she’s basically the most sustained connection I’ve formed in the past year and that makes her feel weighty, somehow. Part of the reason I was so fascinated by Peanut when it first came out was that I’d met Taritree too young to have any firsthand experience with dating apps; but assuming life goes on this way for several more months it seems I’ll have to keep figuring out not just meeting people but forming meaningful relationships in a remote setting based on the hope that one glorious day we will eventually have the opportunity to make awkward playground small talk.
Condiment Corner:
As noted previously I cannot get H Mart delivery at my house but my mom can, so when we were visiting her I stocked up on a few things including this kimchi. Am I such a connoisseur that I can articulate the precise ways in which it is superior to the sad hippy kimchi? Not really, I just know that the other stuff was basically sauerkraut and this is actual kimchi. We’ve had it with bulgogi and a seafood pancake based approximately on this recipe (I subbed King Arthur Flour GF pancake mix for the AP flour to satisfactory results) and felt our crumbled world ever so slightly right itself again.