Everything I Loved in March
Easy bread making, less drinking, town-hopping
Happy April, Beauties and Blueberries!!
First, an update on Tulip Watch 2025:
Here was the planter in front of this godawful civic building in February:
And here it was yesterday!
The other day I saw a video of a baby goat learning to walk on his first day of life. While much more competent than a young human of pretty much any age, he was wobbly and stumbly, buckling under his tiny weight as he figured out what legs are for on damp green grass.
This is very much how I think about the month of March in this hemisphere: a month that wobbles and stumbles its way forward into the ripening of a year, after a couple months in the newborn sleeping/screaming stage that is winter.
New York wobbled into deceptively warm days, then buckled under clouds and even snow flurries the next week.
We were never promised Spring in March, but that doesn’t stop me from acting entitled to it! I’m trying to appreciate the slippery grey days like this one where I’m happy to work inside instead of prancing around in a floral gown shirking all duties. Rain adds an atmosphere of industriousness, which I suppose I need in this Tax Season and Figuring Out My Budget Time. Ugh.
To keep my spirits sunny this month, I continued indulging my obsession with line dancing—and got to learn this new choreography to The Giver!
I invited a friend to the line dancing party, a precious soul who grew up gay in the rural Bible Belt and later found home in New York City, as so many rural-Bible-Belt-outcasts have done before him.
As we leaned on the bar and watched the more advanced dancers scuff and grapevine their way around the floor to Country Girl Shake, he grew a bit teary-eyed and said he wished his childhood self could be here and see how easily he belonged here.
He told me that it’s taken a lot of Beyoncé, and now this jubilant line dancing scene, to make peace with his Southern roots.
I could relate, as line dancing in a mega-inclusive space in NYC has been doing some reconciliation work deep in my Deep South DNA. I have a lot of love and affection for that part of my heritage, but not exactly pride, and certainly complex feelings.
Every culture has a shadow and a sun side; some cast a much longer and darker shadow than others. Being able to feel the sun rays—in this case, the celebration of queer history and joy in line dancing and country music—is an alchemical salve.
Here are a few of my favorite dancing tunes—they put me in the BEST MOOD!
Who knew that a few months ago in Chicago, when I spotted a pink cowgirl hat dress with sequin sleeves at a craft market, and absolutely HAD to have it, would it come in so handy as a maternity outfit for my yet-to-be-discovered line dancing career!!???
March was also the month when I finally started the process of changing my name…only a couple years after I decided to!
LISTEN: I don’t know how much experience you have with going to bureacracy buildings in order to accomplish something, but it’s a torturous affair.
In order to find the office you’re looking for, you simply look for the ugliest building in the entire area, and then you ask the grumpiest people you can find where the most claustrophobic room is, and voila—you’ve found the overheated understaffed offensively beige room where you’ll be sitting for the next several hours staring at a screen that will tell you when your number’s been called.
Oh and right now it’s at 22 and your number is 586.
That’s why I’ve been procrastinating.
But I got a couple new forms of identity this month, which I now consider my greatest accomplishments in life for all the decades they took off my existence.
Let’s talk about something more pleasant: Things I LOVED in March!
Oh! Did I mention my book is now available for pre-order??
Well, since you brought it up….
Pre-order here!
And start planning your outfits for two book events in July—I’ll be in DC at Sixth & I on 7/15 and NYC at The Strand on 7/18! (Bring your handheld fans! 🥵)
NOSTALGIC KITCHEN APPLIANCES
Have you considered a bread machine?
I know that Gen Z has been all over 90s fashion, but I’ll let you children in on a hot secret: 90s KITCHENS are the real gem of the era!
Real ones know that the most enchanted, utopian place to be in 1998 was a luxurious Williams-Sonoma on the third floor of the mall, especially around Thanksgiving as I put in the #1 spot of Mari’s Favorite Things, age 13.
I will never again know the happiness and safety that I knew in these stores.
BUT, I can replicate a small part of the alchemy now by purchasing used appliances that were all the rage in the mall kitchen store heyday, such as a food dehydrator and panini press. (Where did all the panini go?!)
And this month, I fulfilled a middle school vision of perfect adulthood when I bought a bread machine on eBay:
Of course there were fancier Japanese ones that looked like they might also be able to do my banking, but this one for $40 is mercifully easy. I’ve been using it almost every day (one negligible flaw is that it basically makes 1.5 servings) and I feel as much like Nara Smith as I’m ever going to.
Fresh baking bread is one of those profoundly evocative aromas that it seems like something that humans were made to smell, like a hearth fire or a newborn baby. There must be some gene passed down from ancient ancestors specifically to perceive this essential scent and connect it with home and primal nourishment.
UPSTATE ADVENTURES
I went on two weekend adventures upstate this month, and paused to really appreciate how accessible these wonderful towns are from NYC.
I’ve lived in a lot of different cities and it’s never been a routine part of my life to visit nearby towns on the weekends (though my mom noted it was The Thing To Do when we lived in Northern California but I was too busy developing my fine motor skills to remember that time of life).
Probably because I can’t drive, and most cities don’t have a hefty collection of cutie pie main streets along a couple train lines??
Anyway, I’m grateful for that!
Last weekend I took my mom to Dia: Beacon, which is a very easy day trip from NYC if you’re into museums that display rocks in the walls and holes in the ground:
This museum is divisive (my friend Susan describes it as a museum where they hang a paper clip from a piece of string and call it an exhibit), but it’s awe-inspiring to me! The scale of the art and the building itself give me a cathedral-like feeling of wonder and reverence.
Even so, if you don’t come in with at least a little humor, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just a different experience of art when you walk into the largest display room in the museum only to see a pile of dirt on the floor with a protective rope around it.
The more colorful works always make me happy, no matter how esoteric. When we saw this number below, my mom said, “Look, a gender reveal!”
Earlier in the month, I planned a trip to Arthur’s Acres Animal Sanctuary, where a brusque grump who swears like a sailor and yells at you for not wearing boots takes care of dozens of rescue pigs.
He’s one of those special beings on earth who handles humans roughly and abruptly, but melts into maternal goopiness when he greets one of his previously abused, neglected, or soon-to-be-slaughtered pigs. I adored him.
The highlight was getting to sit with these two pigs for a long while. They were much larger than the others, bred for meat, and were enjoying a snooze together on a rainy morning.
I tried to pet them awake to no success, so instead just put my hands on this one for about half an hour, feeling her breathe and softly snore—her little heartbeat palpable through her muscular neck.
I don’t have much to say about that experience; it’s the kind of moment for which words pitifully fail.
After our love session, Farmer Todd showed me a video of one of the pigs, on her last day of life, saying goodbye to her favorite companion—who died just a couple weeks later even though he was healthy.
One of the frustrating things about writing a book about animals is that it’s impossible to prove that animal behavior has meaning, even though intuitively it seems so obvious.
(I also can’t prove that my reality is your reality, my red is your red, etc etc but that seems to matter much less in the human world)
I cannot prove that this dying pig is saying a farewell to her best friend, knowing that she’s out of time.
I cannot prove that cows creating a circle around their dead family member while moaning and stomping is a sign of grief.
I can’t prove that rats are literally laughing when you tickle them and emit sounds of unmitigated glee while playing games.
But I don’t know what else any of this behavior would possibly be?
New Yorkers love to ask each other if they’d ever move upstate. It’s one of our favorite hobbies.
After seeing this recent New Yorker cover, I was practically shocked into urgently forcing my wad of dollars upon the nearest Hudson Valley real estate agent just to get a wood shack or anything that would take me away from this impending misery:
I already feel like my life in New York is 90% just carrying bulky things around!!
Yet, for every “I don’t know how anyone lives in New York” comment I get, I can think of yet another reason to smile on the return train trip home.
Even so, it’s always fun to dream, and I love watching the show Small Town Potential specifically about house-hunting in the Hudson Valley to pretend I’m doing just that!
MISOPHONIA HELP
Since I can’t drink right now, I’ve taken the opportunity to zoom out and get some perspective on why exactly I drink (aside from the obvious scenarios such as sitting by a sparkling body of water on a sun-bathed afternoon, or eating Mexican food, or spending 3.5 hours waiting to get a new ID).
I’ve noticed that my #1 trigger is that I get annoyed very very easily.
Drinking, besides a comforting ritual for me that tastes good, smooths the sharp edges of extreme irritability in my mind. Let’s discuss.
A few years ago, I posted this illustration on Instagram:
The post got a lot of engagement which made me feel better about the smacking offender, but a lot of the comments brought up the term “misophonia” which I found totally unnecessary.
Even back then (and it’s gotten much more rampant now!), I was uncomfortable with the automatic internet-diagnoses of normal human problems: being distracted, being annoyed, being hurt by a friend. These are normal and a part of life!
Having a term for any unpleasantry rubs me the same way of wrong that it did when a therapist recommended an anti-depressant for me after my dad’s death.
“This is….grief?” I responded, and didn’t take her up on the pills.
That said, now I take pills for a couple diagnoses that I’m so thankful to have, as the terms help me navigate mental afflictions that are hard to explain.
And, for the first time, I’m accepting that “misophonia” (literally, “hatred of sound”) is a real and (this part is important) treatable condition.
Here are a few of my symptoms: