I/O and Other Stories
I tend to write these posts first thing in the morning, when the rest of the house is still asleep; there’s something about that space, that stillness, that allows my brain to unravel in the way that it’s easier to share here — I feel less self-conscious about using the time so selfishly, perhaps, knowing that everyone else isn’t even awake yet. (One of the joys of being an early riser, I guess. Go figure.)
More specifically, I tend to write these posts first thing in the morning on the weekend, and schedule them out far in advance. That’s not always the case — I’ve written about my three week buffer of posts in the past, but recent events have meant that I’ve been writing posts day of publishing, in part out of a need to shout into the void, in part because what had originally been scheduled felt especially meaningless and facile in comparison — but, more often than not, it’s a Saturday or Sunday morning where I’ll write what will eventually appear here.
A lot of this is because of the way my brain works. Writing during the main part of the day feels like it needs to have more purpose, like it needs to be for someone or something else: that it’s work, or it’s Wait, What? and not just me writing for my own needs. I can’t explain why that feels true, but it does; let’s just go with it.
But there’s also a thing where, for the most part, I save this writing for the weekend because the weekday mornings are for reading, whether it’s the news or social media (which is, I increasingly feel, still the news, just in a different format), or research for some particular purpose. It’s not reading for pleasure — that’s an evening activity, or, again something I do on weekend mornings — but reading with the intent of learning and searching out new information that I’m going to need in the short term.
None of this scheduling or organized methodology was planned, or even formalized until I started thinking about it recently, but somehow, I’ve ended up with a system where there’s a very clear demarcation between my input and my output, and what kind of both goes when. My subconscious is far more organized than the rest of me.
June 17, 2020
June 16, 2020
Eat Up
The very notion of having a “favorite restaurant” is something that I struggle with, I have to be honest; there’s something about it that feels, if not pretentious and filled with privilege, then something approaching that — the idea that I have enough knowledge, that I’ve eaten somewhere enough times to be able to faithfully announce, yes, that’s the place, that’s my favorite restaurant makes me curiously self-conscious in such a way that I’m sure that my 20th century Scottish upbringing is playing mind games with me in ways I can’t fully appreciate. And yet, I very definitively have a favorite restaurant.
To be fair, this isn’t the first time in my life I could say that, and the first time it was true was during that 20th century Scottish upbringing. There was an Italian restaurant in my hometown called L’Arlecchino that little kid me would’ve died for — not, it should be pointed out, because of any Italian dish, but because they made cheeseburgers that, to this day, I remember as being magical and unique. (The restaurant was still open the last time I was in Scotland, but I didn’t get a burger from there, being all too aware of the potential for utter disappointment and disaster.)
Today, it’s a place called Malka that I’m equally passionate about, despite a lack of cheeseburgers on their menu. It’s a restaurant that opened just months ago, albeit one that had been on my radar for years before that, because it was once a food cart that I was a regular at — something that I suspect would’ve been true even if it hadn’t been two blocks away from where I lived at the time. The cart initially lured me in with its name — “Carte Blanche,” a pun! — and it being an airstream that sang of 1950s Atomic Age cool, but it was the food, and the people behind it, that made me come back on a weekly basis.
Carte Blanche then, and Malka now, simply offer the most delicious food I think I’ve ever eaten; I can’t actually describe the flavors in any way other than to say that they feel welcoming, consistently surprising and comforting at the same time, and shockingly tasty. It’s food I’m familiar with — mac and cheese, pulled pork and salad, chicken sandwiches — made with ingredients that don’t make sense thrown in (mushrooms and arugula and tomatoes in mac and cheese?), but the end result can’t be argued with. It’s addictive, and near everyone I’ve introduced it too agrees.
Like the food cart, the restaurant has more or less become a weekly destination even in these COVID times — it’s take-out that makes us impossibly happy, and that I offer too-big tips to, to make sure they stay alive during all this insanity. It’s a place, and a menu, that makes me happy simply by existing. If that’s not reason to be a favorite restaurant, what is…?
June 15, 2020
June 12, 2020
You Know It’s Three Weeks, I’m Going Insane
Usually, there would be two weeks’ worth of THR newsletter images in this post, but because of the Memorial Day holiday weekend, there’s only one — we took the week off. So you get one, but at least all of them are kind of great and colorful…? Just imagine that the missing images translate as me taking it easy for once.
June 11, 2020
Cancellation Notice
So, I cancelled my New York Times subscription.
I’d subscribed digitally just after Trump was inaugurated, in part because I wanted to support journalism in an era that would need journalism, and also because I knew realistically that I’d want access to more than the 10 articles a month limit you get without a subscription. I wasn’t the biggest Times booster, even though I enjoyed a bunch of writers there (and particularly enjoyed their podcasts, too; The Daily was a must every day for a long time), but it felt important to finally sign up to the Times as an accompaniment to my already present Washington Post subscription.
(I’d been a Post subscriber for longer for two reasons; I prefer that paper’s political coverage by far, and the digital subscription was far, far cheaper. The Times subscription felt overpriced for what I was getting out of it, to be honest.)
I stayed a Times subscriber through multiple concerns about coverage and weakness in both reporting and editorial point of view; sure, my readership of it dropped to almost non-existent outside of the big stories, but I was still supporting journalism, dammit! As a journalist myself, it was a point of principle, even when the journalism being practiced didn’t seem to uphold the principles I would’ve wanted it to. And then the Tom Cotton op-ed ran.
There’s so much about that op-ed and the circumstances of its creation and publication that are, to say the least, troubling, that came out in the days after its publication — that the section editor didn’t read it prior to publishing, that it was pitched to Cotton by the paper, that it didn’t go through fact checks and was subsequently found to fall under the paper’s own journalistic standards — but for me, even just seeing the headline “Send In The Troops” was enough. It was time to cancel.
(The piece was trash, of course, but it was lying, dangerous trash calling for martial law in a public venue that should not, under any circumstances, publish such inflammatory bullshit at a time like now. Days later, I’m still incandescent with anger over how irresponsible the piece was, how drastically the Times failed in not only allowing it to run, but commissioning it in the first place.)
There’s a whole process you have to go through in order to cancel your Times subscription, it turns out; it’s not like you can just click a button. In total, it took me an hour or so, and an online chat with someone called Eric to shut it down. What stands out about the whole thing, though, was Eric’s response when I told him why I was cancelling. He dropped the attempts to keep me by lowering the price or offering additional add-one, and just thanked me for being “an important voice for change.”
When even your sales staff think some things are worth cancelling over, that’s probably a sign you’ve fucked up, surely.