Emchap’s Shit from the Internet 10/24/18 🍠
This was going to be a whole newsletter about how I spent last Sunday at the Hollywood Sculpture Garden, taking photos of an old man's terrifying art installation built precariously into the side of a hill, and how the whole experience was a weird combo of amazement at the giant testament to wealth and will combined with melancholic sadness/general loneliness about some Life Stuff, and then spinning that out into some sort of halfway-nice self-reflection, but that got shot all to hell about halfway through my first client call this morning.
The sculpture garden had bats flying around it. They were nice.
The fact that I got into October before having weeks like this is still a positive thing—god knows I was crying about shit in New York like three weeks after I showed up and continued that right on through the rest of my time in the city—but of course no one likes being sad, no matter how many bats one gets to consider as extended metaphors about life while standing in a rich dude's yard.
I got told today that someone I care about thought I was being condescending during a conversation, which of course I never want to be thought to be. It was kicked off by asking for explicit confirmation of what the other person meant when they were talking (which I see as an effort to make sure I understand what the other participant in a conversation means and which of course others sometime see as me implying that I don't know what they're talking about, none of which matters in the moment).
I realized—as I was spending the afternoon talking with friends with whom demands for explicit definitional accuracy are commonplace—that this is probably the biggest change that happened to me when I was in New York. I started hanging out with engineers instead of improvisors, and I started feeling on secure conversational footing with them because they all ask the same questions I ask. I hadn't realized it was behavior that had changed. I don't know how I feel about it.
I'm going to get a torta tonight at the mediocre Mexican place with the nice employees, and I'm going to drink a beer, and I'm going to be thankful that every time I sullenly sit on my balcony I am still overcome with an incandescent sort of joy about how I get to live in the prettiest place in the world.
Shit to read
An amazing review of an amazing trash food.
Jenny Holzer is cool as hell.
The legal weed industry is still very racist.
The data nerds making graphs of their breakups are of course fascinating to me.
I enjoyed this old Toast piece about mental illness and love.
Ghosting: not a new thing.
The NFL is a garbage organization and the least it owes people is healthcare.
Always here for descriptions of homosocial behavior in Lord of the Rings.
The Kids in the Hall seem like good dudes, mostly.
Shit to eat
Have a truly garbage day.
Look at the sort of lumpy gnocchi you planned to eat.
Ignore them.
Get out a big enamel cast iron dutch oven and toss it on medium heat with 2 tablespoons of olive oil.
On the burner next to it, heat up enough salted water for pasta.
Chop up an onion. The recipe says medium onion, but a big onion that you cut the dodgy bits off of will work just as well.
Toss in the onion, and several cloves of garlic, which will just be like six tablespoons of the pre-minced stuff because life is short and mincing is hard.
Stir it up until it's browned slightly.
Toss a can of tomato paste in there.
Keep going until that's kind of cooked up. Like five minutes?
Dump two ounces of vodka in there and deglaze the pan.
When you do this, move your head away from the dutch oven because otherwise you will inhale a BUNCH of vodka vapors and it will be Unpleasant.
Drop the heat down to low.
Take a quarter cup of hot water from the boiling pot and pour 3/4 cup of heavy cream into the same measuring cup.
Dump the whole mess into the dutch oven, stir, and take off the heat.
Cook pasta in the boiling pasta water. Something that will hold sauce.
Hold back a cup of the pasta water, and drain the rest.
Realize that the recipe says this should be done with glass and not plastic, and consider maybe that you have measuring cup carcinogens, and decide "eh".
Dump the pasta in the sauce, and stir.
Add in half a cup of the pasta water, and stir.
Take half of what you've made, and eat it on the couch, and feel better about the state of things.
(Adapted from Bon Apetit)
Shit to listen to
I like this cover of "If I Had a Boat", a song that I'm pretty sure I picked a few weeks ago but am definitely too lazy to go fact check.