july + august in retrospect
cursed by an employee of the US state department
p.s. this email might be clipped when you view it from your inbox. it’s best to read it on your browser or on the substack app to see the photo gallery at the bottom!
in this email:
things i’ve published
an absurd late summer curse
languid summer breakfast
tiktok and algorithmic hell
august angst
photos
reader, i’ve been gone for a while. while i haven’t been writing here, i have been writing about restaurants elsewhere. in may and june, i wrote a roundup of the best breakfast spots in boston and the best of davis square in somerville. in july, i was knee-deep in pasta, which means i ate at 22 restaurants in boston’s north end neighborhood to find the best italian spots. a lot went into the guides, and i hope they can give you some inspiration if you find yourself in boston.
a late summer curse
in mid august i began suspecting that someone had put a curse on me. it started with a benign comment i made to my partner on a tuesday that i was bored and craving drama. mostly i meant that i couldn’t wait for season 8 of selling sunset, but the universe heard something else. within four days, i would go on to have the most unexpected yet maddeningly infuriating fight over text message, then to stupidly slam into a parked car, and later to realise that the mysterious meme account that had recently been liking all my tiktoks belonged to a man that had ghosted me four years prior.1
call me irrational, but i am putting the blame for all of this on the deeply unpleasant man my partner and i met in the patio of our bed and breakfast on our last day in provincetown. he was a nomadic employee of the US state department that coyly referred to himself as “currently homeless”2 and urged us to take advantage now of Bolivia’s impending financial collapse because, i quote, we “could have the best vacation there for cheap since the locals are desperate for the US dollar.”
once he made light of the azerbaijan-armenia conflict and cutely both-sided it (as if it hasn’t had devastating, deadly consequences for armenians in the last 4 years) my partner mercifully made an excuse so we can get back to our room, where both of us proceeded to squawk about the interaction for the next several minutes. mid-shit talk, i realised i’d left my bag in the patio and left the room to grab it, only to walk out into the shared hallway right at the same moment the unpleasant man came out of his room, which was right next to our room.
i immediately understood he’d likely heard our entire private conversation through the poorly insulated walls of our 180 year old bed & breakfast, avoided eye contact with him, and ran downstairs to grab my bag. i’m not going to say he was a witch, because witches are inherently anticapitalist beings that wouldn’t go around encouraging people to exploit another’s financial collapse, but i’m not discounting that this incident was the cause for my ensuing troubles the following week.
languid summer breakfast
the intention of this “month in retrospect” missive is to write about what and where i’ve been eating all month, but my new-ish freenlancing gig has created a confusing boundary between what i write for pay and what i write about here. i’m paid now to eat at restaurants and write about them, and i don’t want to double-dip and write about those same restaurants here, so the roundup is not as full of meals as before because i’m eating at fewer places of my own volition and consequently cooking less at home.
however, i’m still making the most of my homecooked meals by going deep into summer produce: my kitchen overflows with corn, tomatoes, peaches — around this time each year, i become more and more desperate to cling onto summer, but alas, i saw pumpkins at the farmers market last week so i know the end is near.
i will forever be your annoying friend that reminds you that fruit is better outside the US, actually, but massachusetts grows a formidable peach, firm yet sweet enough to quench my eternal thirst for the iraqi fruit of my short-lived baghdadi childhood. i’ve been eating these peaches over the sink, slicing them up and shingling them over a thick hunk of toast slathered with ricotta drizzled with honey and basil and red pepper flakes, or cubing them to go along with pork meatballs and rice.
with the tomatoes, i prepare a breakfast of “summer shakshuka.” it is composed of two fresh grated tomatoes mixed with paprika, salt, calabrian chili paste, topped with one or two poached eggs, crumbled feta, oregano, black pepper, and a douse of olive oil. i love a languid summer breakfast.
can the tiktok algo just like … chill out?
i’ve been wondering a lot about whether i’ve wasted my time not intentionally building up an audience online. say what you will about influencers, but they have an easier time getting eyes (and paying eyes!) on their various creative projects. they can carry that initial tiktok/instagram audience with them over onto substack over onto a book deal that translates into book sales, and frankly i feel like i missed the boat and that i should’ve gotten on tiktok in 2020 when my tapped-in bestie told me to do.
thanks to the freelancing gig, i’ve spent the last couple of months doing something unusual for me: dressing up, sometimes daily, and going downtown for dinner several times a week. in the spirit of taking full advantage of the opportunity, i decided to start making tiktoks of the outfits.
the intent was to make videos that encourage mindful clothing consumption and showing that there’s a lot to personal style that you can’t learn about through fast fashion hauls or buying into the latest trends. but very quickly, even though i thought i knew better, the app consumed me.
here’s the thing: “shopping my closet” and trying to come up with new little outfits? so much fun. filming and editing videos and rejoicing in learning and getting faster at a new skill? so very rewarding. uploading the video to tiktok and pathetically waiting for the number of views to go up because when number go up it means i let myself feel good about myself? absolutely fucking humiliating.
the thing is, i’ve studied social media and marketing and find the entire venture not just exhausting but soul-sucking. but i thought that making mindful tiktoks could be a valiant effort in adding to the burgeoning “deconsumption” and “deinfluencing” voices, but I found that i (my attention, my dopamine levels) was immediately subsumed by the app, just like the algorithm intended. i’m not sure what the fix here is, but i would love to hear about how others balance time between promoting their work on social media versus putting in the time to do the actual creative work.
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august angst
in a normal year, september always arouses a vestigial back to school spirit in me. i reassess my commitment to my yearly goals, sign up for a french class, buy new pens, consider getting back into knitting. this year, the pervasive feeling i’ve had from mid-august till now is one of malaise and restless energy. it feels like the final month of summer was building up towards something that didn’t come, and now i’m left in a state of tension due to a lack of resolution. i had a call with Olivia last week and I know at least she’s feeling this way too, of having a well of built up energy with nowhere to put it, despite september typically being an invigorating month for her.
maybe the catch is that this hasn’t been a normal year, and maybe it’s foolish for me to want to believe that i should be functioning normally, productively, easily, docilely shopping for the season like an industrious consumer when gaza’s been upended and i wake up to american media gaslighting me into believing that all this civilian death is all part of self defense. the closer we get to the one year mark of this genocide the less sane i feel. where does the grief go?
reader, i never cared much for 85% of the people i online dated, so when things fizzled or people stopped responding it never phased me. this one, though, left me devastated and distrustful of people for nearly a year.
the state department pays for these types of employees’ housing for the duration of their careers in foreign service.
"it feels like the final month of summer was building up towards something that didn’t come, and now i’m left in a state of tension due to a lack of resolution." Omg I did not realize that this is EXACTLY how I feel as well until I read your words, but yes! yes yes yes
(1) OPAL!!! An app for social media blocking! It’s brilliant. (2) I remind myself that people doing content for a living are doing it for a living and we are also doing so much else. It’s not gonna work the same and that’s ok (because when these apps or algorithms change or die out… we still have talents and skills and portfolios!). It helps me! But also I love your TikToks!