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I’m writing today from my parents’ back porch on the outskirts of sunny Yerevan, with our tiny dog Cookie yapping inside the house. Our mature apricot and cherry trees bristle in the wind, dwarfed by the massive willow tree beneath my bedroom balcony.
Normally, visiting family in Armenia is anxiety-inducing at best. Like most everyone, my relationship with both my parents is complicated, and my desire to be alone and do things my own way too great for it to ever be a harmonious trip. But this is my first visit in almost two years and being in the embrace of family in the city that saw me grow from teen to young adult has been nothing short of rejuvenating. My Slack isn’t blowing up, my email is my last priority, and I could care less what the discourse of the day is on twitter. I’m finding so much peace here in having to answer to no one, not even Google Calendar.
My days are unplanned, punctuated by random visits to uncles’ houses quite late at night, like the impromptu visit to my uncle’s apartment last night to meet his new baby. The visit began with us arriving at 10:30p and leaving around 1:30a, all while the six month old was fully awake and engaged with her many cooing guests.
Before I flew out here, I’d reached my one year anniversary of going to work in person every day in the middle of a pandemic, with scarcely a break in between. In my restful state I’m reflecting a lot on American work culture and how it’s changed me and the way I view the world—I’ve reached the dramatic conclusion that US work culture robs us of our youth, optimism, activism, and desire to know *the other* and change the world for the better. Our naturally well-meaning attributes are replaced with greed for money and status and consumerism and ownership of things. This isn’t groundbreaking stuff I’m writing here but it is surprisingly the first time I’ve coherently had these thoughts and felt strongly enough to write and talk to friends about them.
For a while, I wore my overwork as a badge of honour until I was exhausted enough to see how little I was getting out of it all. Now, I’m trying to unlearn this instilled propaganda about laziness, hustle, and, the big one, *productivity*. Productivity, as it turns out, is not at all necessary to having a Good Day of sleeping, reading, talking with your siblings, and meeting new people.
I’m thinking a lot too about how lucky I am to be able to take this (unpaid) break from work; so many employers don’t offer paid vacation til after a full year of service to the company, meaning that if you’re someone who circumstantially has to move around or change jobs quite a bit—because of college, parenthood, loss of loved ones, poor management, a partner’s relocation, toxic workplaces—you may end up without a paid vacation for years on end. And that’s if you’re one of the lucky ones—1 in 3 workers in the United States don’t receive paid vacation at all.
What I’m trying to get at is that I’m disengaged. It’s been a whole year of seeing coworkers get sick and selfishly thanking the stars for my own health; a year of begging asshole customers to please consider my humanity and keep their fucking mask on indoors; a year of wondering if the restaurant industry is salvageable at all, if it isn’t a breeding ground for malice toward low-paid workers no matter how good a company you work for. Restaurant owners and managers want to provide hospitality to the ~guests~ at the cost of their own employees, who often fend off unwarranted hostility from those same guests. Alicia Kennedy, writing for her own newsletter, notes that “There is always hostility in hospitality,” referencing Jacques Derrida’s idea of “hostipitality.”
I find my professional goals waning as this past year has brought what I’ve always wanted into sharper focus: travel, connection, exposure to new cultures. This summer promises to be wild and novel. It feels like we’ve all been given a second life—what are we doing with it? If time started over right now, with 2020 being the Before Times, and 2021 being the era of rebuilding Post Covid, what do you want to accomplish this year? And I don’t mean accomplish in that evil “productive” sense we’ve been pigeonholed into. I mean, who do you want to reconnect with? What do you want to make? How will you go about creating wonderful memories that will last a lifetime?
There is no recipe this time, since I genuinely haven’t cooked in almost a month. I made hummus and cake for my birthday party on May 24, packed up my kitchen, moved to a new apartment, and haven’t touched any of the boxes since. Instead, here are a few vignettes of (to me) magical food moments I’ve experienced in my week in Armenia.
I came down for breakfast and found my mother cutting massive fresh sheets of lavash into palm-size squares for us kids to more easily eat. In the fridge I found some strangely solid heavy cream, something very much on its way to being butter, and some strawberry jam in an old nutella jar, which tells me that my mom bought strawberries and decided to turn them into jam for us. It was classic strawberries and cream but made even more indulgent knowing the care and forethought a parent had put into it.
In a large family where kids and uncles and cousins constantly pass through the kitchen, every food thing has to be laid out in massive quantities. For the past five days, an enormous tray full of ripe apricots has occupied the kitchen table, ready for any and all who wander through the kitchen in search of a snack and some company.
One and a half hours on the road to Dilijan my parents stopped our car at a roadside restaurant complex with a small, coal-fired cooking range out front. An older woman approached the car, took my mom’s order, and produced five golden corn cobs from the large pot of boiling water on her cooking range. She brought them back to us individually wrapped in thin plastic bags. We ate our corn cobs in the car cradled in a thick mist enveloping the evergreen trees of the region before descending a winding mountain road a half hour away from Dilijan.
Mom brought in the 35 pounds of fava beans she special ordered from her fava bean lady. Some were destined for our freezer, some for my uncle’s family to eat through the winter. Their growing season is only a few weeks long before the beans grow too large and mealy in their dull green pods. I sat down to open the inedible pods and set aside the large beans inside. I made my way through a third of them before, proud of myself, I took a break for lunch and a nap. I came downstairs an hour later to find that my mom had worked through all the rest of the beans in half the time it took me, and had already set aside a couple pounds for me to take back to my own freezer in Boston.
consuming
Finished Reading Liz Plank’s For the Love of Men: from toxic to mindful masculinity, exploring the intricacies of toxic masculinity and how it binds men to impossible (and violent) standards.
Little Weirds by Jenny Slate, a collection of weird little essays that reminded me to be young forever and to feel love despite dejection.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, a fucking insane apocalyptic novel set in the way too near 2024, exploring what could happen after decades of neglecting climate change, excessive privatization of public services, police corruption, and ideological pigeonholing. No, I haven’t been on edge for days thinking about it.
It’s amazing how much you can read when you don’t need to work and someone else cooks lunch everyday.
doing
Reconnecting with my beloved neighbourhood stray, Chester, whom I’ve known since senior year of high school when she was pregnant with puppies, and meeting some more fun dogs.
Searching for rugs and art to take back to my new apartment.
Sleeping a lot, and brainstorming who of my friends likes Bleachers enough to buy tickets with me for their September 21 show in Boston’s seaport.