Notes on July
Food, books, fruit picking, teaching mems, wedding guest clothes, etc.
This is a post rounding up some random thoughts about things that I’ve eaten/watched/read in July, and some random other things that I felt moved to jot down here, with a few assorted pics mixed in. New type of newsletter for me, but it feels very summer-appropriate!
-Continuing my vegetarian/pescatarian journey, I wanted to share a couple things I cooked lately that I must hard recommend. These are absolutely not grill dinner. They are meals that I have cooked on the stove, since the Philadelphia heat has chilled out at least a bit since the beginning of the month when it was borderline unbearable. The first is this paneer masala. This was SO GOOD!!! The creaminess of the sauce comes from blending tomatoes and cashews with water, so it’s very vegan-friendly if you sub tofu for the paneer and use vegan butter or coconut oil for the butter. I added a can of chickpeas as well as the paneer, and tofu and/or cauliflower would also be delicious in this. I fudged it a bit on the spices (ground cardamom instead of whole, etc.) and wound up adding an extra teaspoon or so of garam masala. Anyway, 10/10. On the side, I made basmati rice with a tablespoon of butter and some whole spices thrown in the rice cooker, and a raita-type sauce with yogurt, lemon, cilantro, and diced onion and cucumber.
The second recipe I want to recommend is this one for Greek-style green beans. I made this last night to welcome home Lola and Clover who had been protesting in DC during the Christians United For Israel Conference. BTW: FUCK CHRISTIAN ZIONISM!!!!!! Anyway, this was a really nourishing and tasty meal that used up a bunch of farm share veggies. I added some green peppers alongside the beans and some lemon juice and dill at the end. On the side, I made Aran Goyaga’s naan recipe from her gluten free baking cookbook which actually slaps sooo hard. I don’t think this recipe is online anywhere, but if you regularly engage with gluten free baking, you must get this cookbook. Sorry to sound like a weird fake influencer, but it’s true.
-One of my favorite activities in the world is picking fruit. This is a genetically inherited trait that I received from my mother and the fact that fruit-picking brings out an obsessive, hoarder-y quality in me is surely based in ancestral trauma talents that made my great-great-greatx1000-grandmother the best gatherer in her radically egalitarian hunter-gatherer community (I’m re-reading The Dawn of Everything). One of my dearest hopes is to get a cherry tree in front of my house. Anyway, last year I went street-picking in West Philly with my friend Ella and we picked SOOO many cherries (both sweet and sour). This year I missed cherry season (turns out it’s way earlier than I remembered), BUT I have picked wild blueberries in the NJ Pine Barrens not once but twice, both times stumbling into blueberry patches while going on a hike/going for a swim. Tomorrow I am hoping to go back to my swim spot and pick more (fingers crossed they’re still bountiful). Last time I made this cake with my haul, this time I’m just gonna eat em I think. Also hoping to catch street-tree peach season in West Philly in August, watch this space.
-After we finished “I Kissed a Girl,” Lola and Clover and I started watching an extremely insane show called “TransAmerican Love Story.” It’s from 2008, and the premise is that eight men are competing for the affection of a trans woman named Calpernia Addams. In each episode, she makes the men do a campy challenge, which some of them are VERY uncomfortable with. There’s something about reality tv from this era that’s sooo captivating, a la “Rock of Love” and “The Real L Word.” Like, none of these people could get cast on reality tv today - they’re both too regular and too weird. On the show, Calpernia is advised by her bestie Andrea James, also a trans woman. We learned from Wikipedia that the two of them produced the first all-trans production of The Vagina Monologues and also that Andrea is known for going extremely hard in her activism targeting a researcher who basically invented the concept of rapid-onset gender dysphoria and promoted the concept of autogynophelia. Anyway, this show is a rabbit-hole of insanity and delight and me and/or Clover will probably write something more about it here at some point, but for now suffice it to say we recommend. Unfortunately, the only way we have been able to figure out to watch it is purchasing each episode for $2 on Amazon Prime.
-This month I absolutely devoured All Fours by Miranda July! The first section in particular really captured something about the experience of infatuation/falling in love that I’ve never encountered on the page before. Falling in love is torture!!! I was also really moved by rest of the book. Just highly recommend. If you read it, you gotta also read this New Yorker profile of July, which gets into how the writing of the book precipitated a series of parallel events in July’s life. I also appreciated this essay by
which, among other things, critiques July’s reflexive preoccupation with thinness and the fatphobia that seeps into the book. I definitely also noticed this while reading, and agree with Emma that there’s unexamined fatphobia here. I think there are also seeds of critique laid in the book, even if they’re not fully realized or articulated; the book’s whole premise, to me, is that our bodies and desires will always continue to surprise us, if we let them.
-This is totally apropos of nothing, but I recently remembered a really touching and also (to me) useful moment from teaching at Harvard last spring that I wanted to write down. I was a teaching assistant for my advisor’s course on Race, Gender, and Performance, which was a Gen Ed class with a diverse array of students. The course taught students the concept of performativity, first with J.L. Austin’s concept of the performative speech act and then leading into Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity. During one discussion section meeting, one of my students, a very sweet and earnest boy on the football team, expressed skepticism. We were talking about how saying “it’s a boy!” or “it’s a girl!” when a baby is born is a performative speech act - aka, it performs the act that it describes (producing a gendered baby). My student was like, “doesn’t ‘it’s a boy’ just state a fact? How is it creating a new reality?” I responded, “when a baby’s born, you could say ‘this baby has a penis!’ and that might simply describe a reality of the baby’s body. But nobody says that! Saying ‘it’s a boy’ triggers a whole set of social and cultural scripts that will impact so many dimensions of how that baby is treated and understood that will continue for the rest of its life.” I saw understanding pass over my student’s face, and he was like, “wow, okay, I get it!!!” It was such a cool teaching moment that I never want to forget!
-Remember when Clover wrote about plastering for Clover’s Corner? Yeah, that room’s still not done! SOMEONE (me) wasn’t pulling her weight. But, after neglecting it for several months, we are back at it and nearing the end. Plastering is done, and I’m drywall-taping the corners and then it will be time to paint. I’m sooo excited for this room to be complete and we will prob write a follow up post for the paid subs about the rest of the process.
-In August, Clover and I are going to two weddings! One cousin wedding and one friend wedding, which will actually be my first friend wedding because all my friends are gay. Because I’m crazy, I decided to sew new outfits for both weddings (and I also made a dress for Clover lol). Anyway, not to reinvent the women’s magazine wheel, but….dressing for weddings! It’s complicated, huh? I am making a look for Clover’s cousin’s wedding that she warned me might make me look conspicuously gay (it’s midi skirt and a black linen vest) but I’m like, IDK, I feel like I would look and feel weird if I was wearing a Reformation slip dress? I guess what I’m saying is…what are we wearing to weddings (not like weird gay weddings, but cousin weddings)?
-I’m writing this down mostly to remind myself next year…every year I get intense summer panic in July about summer going by too fast/not having time to do everything I want to do, etc. etc. This reminds me in a way of the panic I felt about aging in my early twenties (which I no longer feel). Now the summer panic is subsiding and I’m feeling more spaciousness about having already done a lot of fun summer stuff and having time for a lot more. Every year, I think that the summer is going by especially fast but I think that this is fully just an annual experience for me? I would love to not be stressed about the passage of time, but then maybe my entire personality would also be different….
Okay that’s all! Go swimming and eat ice cream!!
i know this is a year old but i am reading through the dyke domesticity archive after being put on by the latest material girls podcast episode on "sapphic"
anyway you probably do but do you know this ross gay poem about street picking in philly https://poets.org/poem/fig-tree-9th-and-christian