Composite Boson

February is for love letters

Hi and thanks for subscribing to my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay then some thoughts on my recent work, things I am reading, writing and listening to and finally some recipes or recipe recommendations. Feel free to skip to whatever interests you. Please do also hit reply at any time, for any purpose - these are odd times and I want to offer as much connection and support as I can. Find me on Twitter and Instagram too. I’d love it if you shared this letter with a friend!

Programming note: Life has been a bit overwhelming recently so Ultracold has, for now, moved to a monthly schedule.

Content note: there is one swear word in the “Reading” section of this letter.

COMPOSITE BOSON*

February is for love letters.

***

A few years ago, I would have felt apprehensive about moving to Williamsburg. It is a part of Brooklyn that has been pretty gentrified for a while, and a part of Brooklyn that saw the rise and fall of a particular type of hipsterdom that gen-Z don’t even know they should despise all those early 2000s thinkpieces that advocated at least despising it. The kind of hipster that lived here when I was high school and college is now a young professional that probably has a kid. I doubt that they still shop at Urban Outfitters though they might wear an ironic trucker hat or two. If you go to a hardware store in Williamsburg everyone still looks like they work and not just shop there, but it’s not that they’re trying hard to be that way, it’s just that that’s been their normal for years. The workpants from Dickies, the flannels, the slight feeling of being calculatedly dirty, it’s all just standard fare at this point. My husband and I are too young to have been an original Williamsburg hipster in some alternate version of our lives, but we are in our early thirties, have tattoos, a look-alike style that inevitably betrays some kind of queerness (we had the exact same haircut before quarantine then one of us gave up on making pilgrimages to the barbershop), and could probably hold a conversation about Neutral Milk Hotel or Joy Division if we really had to. A few years ago, I would have been uncomfortable by how much we blend in here. Now, maybe because I am older, or maybe because the pandemic has effectively cut us off from other parts of city, I am the opposite of bothered.

On Saturday mornings we go to the farmer’s market in McCarren Park. It didn’t take me long to decide which stand will be our apple-and-pumpkin hook-up, which farm will be where I get my kale and potatoes and brightly colored radishes and how often we’ll be in line for shiitake and oyster mushrooms. During these cold months when the market is reduced to just a few vendors, we’ve fallen into a routine. First, we line up for the farm at the edge of the market that has the longest queues, but they happen to be right by the dog park so it’s ok. (We nicknamed one of the dog regulars Roscoe and have been fictionalizing and narrativizing his pursuits with great joy.) Then apples (Arkansas Black was my favorite for a long time, but now I’m leaning towards New Jersey bred Suncrisps), then the mushroom line. A few weeks ago, when my husband was briefly out of town, the mushroom seller asked me why I was “flying solo”. My husband successfully made small talk with the oddly intimidating hard apple cider vendor at least twice. It feels normal to be there on chilly mornings and I love that.

I never plan for Saturday dinners because I want to take some of that good market feeling and turn it into and impulsively loving dish on our plates. For lunch we always get bagels. Untoasted, squishy but sturdy New York bagels that are not too sweet and not too spongey and have that perfect open, hole-y crumb that bread-bakers in other places must be dreaming about. The bagel shop that has become our regular stop on the way home from the market has tofu -based, vegan cream cheese and I think I have to thank all those hipsters for that. Folks that work there are generous with slathering it on, and I commit a food sin and eat each bagel half separately, so my crunchy-and-creamy Saturday morning moment lasts longer. We have Croatian style Turkish coffee in cups we hurriedly thrifted after realizing that all the mugs we had brought to the new apartment with us were hand-me-downs from family, the kind that’s only passed to you once the color has faded or a dishwasher incident ruined some illustration. With their golden rim and bird illustrations (species are identified at the bottom of each cup) they remind me of coffee cups one of my grandmas might bring out at a family holiday dinner. That I could find them in a fairly dirty thrift store that advertises being overrun by “junk “is another staple of living here, in a neighborhood that was at some point deemed hip exactly for this kind of chaotic, mildly dirty, store being around. I love them.

Most days I run on the track in McCarren Park and I both hate and adore the whole thing. The feel of the bouncy dark orange surface under my terribly overused Nikes (I’ve run upwards of 1100 miles since the pandemic started) reminds me of high school in an oddly comforting way. The bright lights that let me run even when my day goes on for so long that I don’t make it out of the house before dusk sometimes feel lifesaving. They enable me to leave both my kitchen-office and my head for a precious 47 minutes or so, letting me surrender myself to a mild mental fog, bad music, and a steady rhythm of unbroken motion.

The McCarren Park track is also the unruliest track I have ever ran on, full of unleashed dogs, only vaguely supervised toddlers and soccer balls flying every which way after escaping the games played in the field nestled inside the orange ellipse. Most weeks there are stains around the 400-meter mark that look unsettlingly like vomit. Most Sunday mornings someone is playing loud music on their phone and I just don’t get that. One of my brothers-in-law, our neighbor twelve blocks diagonal, pointed out to me that there’s always a girl “in the tightest shorts, doing the deepest squats” while stray men ogle from the benches. I bit my tongue and didn’t tell him that a few times this summer I was definitely that girl. But then there are also parents playing ball with their kids, young runners drenched in sweat still taking directions from their coaches, a boxing gym and a yoga studio and a cross-fit group that all moved outside even when that meant being really cold and suffering through strenuous workouts with labored breaths caught in a mask. Sometimes I see people practicing dances, sometimes even on roller-skates. Sometimes I see people holding onto the leash of a dog and trying heir best to get their lunges and squats in. Sometimes a perfect dog will walk itself, its leash firmly between its own teeth, right by me on the track, and be profoundly unbothered by my running. After I come home, spread out my stoically thin workout mat on our kitchen floor, and commit myself to my own planking and crunching, I admit to myself that I love living here.

***

A short list of when I loved something recently, even just for a split second

1.When a scientist emailed a thank you note for an article that I had written about their work months ago, I loved what I do

2.When a friend moved to a new neighborhood and shared an image of their bright, glowing, happy face after a few rough nights in their new apartment, I loved the notion of being free

3.When my mom called to console me in the middle of the night after I had yelled at her all morning, I loved that we were family

4.When some past colleagues came to one of my classes and spoke of their work with so much joy that even the most teenage of my teenaged students recognized it, I loved the desire to discover and learn

5.When a friend I’ve never met in person said they liked watching me braise cabbage on Instagram, I loved that we are all connected

6.When a snowstorm forced me to play catch-up with workout videos instead of running and in-between sets of leg lift and staggered push-ups, I looked at my computer screen just to find that the trainer was also out of breath, I loved my arms and legs for bearing with me

7.Whenever a student raised their virtual hand to tell me something about bocce balls being hit or skydivers opening parachutes, I loved that their words sounded like a better future in the making

8.Whenever I saw a friend complete a project, publish a piece or just make a really good plate of pasta, I loved that there are still so many small victories we can all claim

9. Every time my husband sat down to eat lunch with me as if we hadn’t been in the same space all day for weeks, I loved being us

***

Every time my mother- or father-in-law call to ask about how we are doing, I get a sense that what they’re really calling about, that what they really want to know, is whether my husband and I hate each other yet.

I’m not sure how much I should blame them for this. We did date long distance, a whole 800 miles between us on most days, for five years and are now doing the exact opposite - working from home with nowhere to hide from each other. These just happens to be facts. They could certainly lead you down the road of assuming that we’d both find something new and unexpectedly annoying about the other one, then drive each other crazy through the double whammy of both doing that thing and arguing about it.

Then there’s the issue of how facts turn into a narrative. The stuff of old-timey but also new-timey sitcoms that show you that marriage is all about spats and tiffs and nagging. All just one big comedy of errors that draws on gender stereotypes and anxieties about future or, in darker instances, a struggle for power and financial independence. In any case, TV couples aren’t boringly happy, and I guess that rubs off on your parents and your partner’s parents. They see a situation that looks like it may lead to hijinks or hilarity, or whatever we call it when couples on small screens can’t figure out how to actually tell each other anything and have to resort to petty tricks instead. Based on this, assume that they know what’s coming next. So far, we have managed to steadily serve them a plot twist.

And I guess I am something like a romantic because it barely occurred to me that me and my husband living together after all these years of planes, buses, trains and endless text messages could be anything, but one long sigh of relief followed by a small but sturdy smile, a curving upwards of the lips that feels like it’s there even long after the muscles have relaxed and the moment has passed. After so many years of trying to explain our days to each other until we ran out of words, what could be better than actually getting to share them?

Especially the long hard days of just working, of just pushing through self-doubt and hoping for the best, of holding your head in your hands and listening to the same song over and over on your lunchbreak, of spreading peanut butter and jam on tortillas then eating them in front of the TV around midnight because finding energy to make or buy bread seems impossible, of answering ten emails at the end of the workday and feeling triumphant because of that, of rethinking the way you want to garnish pasta seven times before the water boils, of thinking about taking some really nice pictures of your butt then never actually finding the courage. None of that really fits in a message or a phone call.

It’s the kind of thing that hides in spaces between the calm but not overstated “I’ve been doing ok” and the nearly fully honest “just working and the gym” and the slightly more hopeful “How about you?” These are not the things you daydream about sharing until you are, on one hand, beyond starved for proximity and touch and, on the other, beyond comfortable in someone else’s pocket of what we construct then call reality. For years, we built a shared reality for ourselves without a physical anchor, a fragile structure carried by electromagnetic waves and wishful thinking. Now we can squeeze our clunky, fleshy bodies into it. 

Our apartment is still a bit of a mess. We are keeping onions and bananas in the same fruit bowl. The stove is always splashed with rusty looking droplets of past tomato sauces. On laundry day a towel or two inevitably gets hung in the hallway because the drier in our new building’s basement really struggles most of the time. We both still leave a dirty shirt or a pair of socks on the floor sometimes, a side effect of having gone from college life to graduate school life and never having felt like we can live with neatness and dignity before one or other degree is completed.

I work from the kitchen and my husband wedged a very large and elaborate desk into our bedroom. Some days I walk across the apartment, only a few steps really, and find him in total darkness, barely illuminated by the headache-inducing blue light of his computer. He gets engrossed in reading some study or drafting another and doesn’t notice that the sun has set. Some days it is way past midnight when we manage to convince each other that maybe we should stop working. These are old habits, a shade of our old life still showing through the shiny coat adorning what was supposed to be a new one. It’s hard to change abruptly. Ironically nature does jump, electrons change energy levels discretely and metals go form perfectly normal ones to ones we don’t understand at all the second you turn some appropriate parameter on or off. As people, we often have no idea where these switches are. I’m not sure that we’re any good at being “real” adults and having “real” jobs just yet. But we are good at being together, and I love that.

***

And a small note to me: you don’t have to work 10 hours a day, chase a writing project every week, cook dinner from scratch every night, run 30 miles between Sunday and Friday, spend thirty minutes on choosing the most ethical peanut butter during every grocery trip, increase your push-up count during every workout or respond to every student’s or colleague’s emails within seconds just to be a loved. You’re doing fine.

Best,

Karmela

*A composite boson is a quantum mechanical state made up of two fermions that are bound together. All particles can be sorted into either fermions or bosons. Particles that are fermions typically do not want to occupy the same state, but circumstances such as interacting with each other within some crystal can mediate and alleviate their usual tendency to repel each other.

Do you like Ultracold? Help me grow this newsletter by recommending it to a friend or sharing this letter on social media.

ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

For the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center, I wrote about a study that uses customizable circuits to emulate an electronic material and gain insight into its quantum, topological nature by focusing on defects in its structure. In an unexpected twist, in this case the very sites that would usually be considered a problem reveal hidden exotic properties of the material. It was really nice to write about this study, both because the field of this kind of material emulation or meta-materials really exploded while I was in graduate school and I’m interested in seeing it expand further and because I do still have some sentimental attachment to the Physics Department back at UIUC, my doctoral alma mater.

On a related note, I profiled another teacher for the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools Partnership Program in the same department, which made for another nice exploration of teaching and a practice in writing for me. I’m grateful to some of my old coworkers for thinking of me so often when they have use for a writer.

Finally, I got commissioned to write a short article for one of the science magazines I love and have spent a few days in early February learning about some physics and chemistry that’s pretty new to me, but also very exciting. An editor reached out to me suggesting this story and the fact that they even remembered my name brought me to a few happy tears. I hope to be able to share the article soon.

LEARNING

As I am writing this, we’ve made it through two whole weeks of instruction in the spring school semester and everything seems to be going well. After a long and at times contentious professional development day (will we ever stop having conflicts on whether students have to have their cameras on for every second of every one of their day-long Zoom classes?) and a school-wide, mixed grade workshop on storytelling and community, I plunged into a few days of introducing myself and my teaching philosophy to almost seventy new students. Though by the time the first Friday of the spring semester rolled around I felt a lot of my anxiety diminishing, that whole week did once again remind me to be mindful and humble as young people give me their attention and aim to do what I tell them. Though I had been teaching college students since I was a sophomore in college myself, my one semester and two weeks of high school teaching experience have made me realize how much responsibility and, for the lack of a better word, honor there is in teaching like never before. I’m not deluding myself in thinking that this will be an easy semester – I am teaching two classes more or less from scratch, supervising an individual study, and helping with college advising – but seeing students again after two weeks of finals, grading and planning did put me in a more inspired mood.

READING

I finished reading Zadie Smith’s Intimations. I started it in the fall of 2020 and it took me more than a few months to get through its hundred or so tiny pages. Smith is an elegant and smart writer. Her prose is quipy, digestible and flows nicely. This was not a hard book to read – what was hard was finding and committing time to it. This problem is somewhat ironic since Intimations is a book of essays about the COVID-19 crisis written early in the pandemic, mostly already outdated by the time of publication because the pandemic moved so fast. To me, it seems like time has simultaneously been going by so slowly and so quickly in this last year and Smith’s essays struck me as a time capsule that could never have been anything else. I spent a lot of time in 2020 worrying about the future and about how hard it is for me to imagine something past the terrifying capital-N Now. This book took me back to a time when the current now was the future and I found a bit of tenderness and comfort in that. Smith writes about New York with a love I only got a small taste of before everything shut down but that also rings familiar beyond the specifics of the place, just as a careful noticing of what makes a city. She writes about herself and people around her with kindness but not without a critical eye, keeping us all accountable as we encounter and endure this crisis. Though it feels like it was written decades ago, or at least that’s how hard I have to try to conjure the sense memory of early COVID days, this was a good book to usher what I hope will be more of me reading this year, and more of me treating each new good moment with awareness and care that constructing a time capsule of my own could require.

Two great advice columns by John Paul Brammer from the Hola Papi newsletter: one on comparing yourself to your attractive friends where he writes

“There are no easy answers, but what I’ve found is that we need more than one pair of eyes to see ourselves with. What do I mean by that? Well, gazes are constructed. The way you look at other people and at yourself has been informed by biases, social conditioning, and interpretations of personal experiences. In other words, what might feel like a totally natural process of looking at a person is actually a series of decisions—on some level, consciously or unconsciously, we are choosing to assign value to someone based on arbitrary standards.”

And another on about dealing with feelings of lost or squashed potential for a different life where he advises

“It’s less important, I believe, to go hunting for the epiphany, and more important to accept that life moves this way and we can meet it with some grace and flexibility. It’s actually okay that you feel unsatisfied right this moment. You simply won’t always have that spark you mentioned. But not having it right now also doesn’t mean you won’t have it again. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure. And even if you were, being a failure for a while doesn’t mean you’ll stay one. It just makes you a person.

I think you should stop thinking in terms of recapturing your passion and think more in lower-stakes terms of, “what do I want to do today? What can I do today?” Things might not be ideal, there’s no sugarcoating that. But there are still things, and there is still a you, and while navigating the peaks and valleys, try to remember: This won’t be forever, and there’s always, always, a corner to be turned.”

In many ways, I felt like all of Brammer’s advice was secretly for me and not any of his anonymous letter senders.

The poem Disbelief by Kamilah Aisha Moon and the poem Body Clock by the young neurodivergent poet Imane Boukaila featured in Chris Martin’s The Listening World newsletter.

Two lines from recent letters by Fariha Roisin that stuck with me:

“Nothing is stagnant, why do we think safety resides in numbness?”

And

“To transform is fucking uncomfortable, to do it anyway is an act of faith.”

LISTENING

The Return of the Living Dead soundtrack and Roky Erickson’s The Evil One. These are both goofy and odd, but also genuinely fun and good. A sort of pick-me-up that doesn’t make you want to run in the middle of a snowstorm, but it might make you miss slightly grimy house parties where long-haired hipster smoke on patios and that one drunk girl asks for your name again despite having met you at least five times before.

Deafheaven’s discography because I appreciate how ever-so-slightly corny Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is in trying to be a romantic avant-garde black metal record, because New Bermuda is underrated as a solid post-metal effort and because Sunbather was one of those records that lowkey blew my mind in college and still really holds up.

Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division because drafting this letter reminded me that that’s actually a really good record, regardless of whether it’s been over-hyped and over-used as a symbol in popular culture.

WATCHING

Mostly, we have been steadily investing time in the Wire and have made it a few episodes into its fourth season. Though it is 20 years old at this point, the Wire still feels quite relevant and its portrayal of the war on drugs and urban policing rings as even more raw and poignant against the backdrop of the last few years. I maintain that none of the characters in this show are actually all that likeable and that most of them never fail to make the wrong choice. However, both their trying to keep doing what they think they are meant to do and the show’s effort to expose structures that foster all of their troublesome traits and behaviors, are probably exactly what makes it so hard to not get full engrossed in this series.

The only movie we watched recently is the 1975 Sidney Lumet crime drama Dog Day Afternoon. This is one of those typical New York movies that people really like to reference, partly because the main character makes for an extremely memorable young Al Pacino role. There is a lot about this film that didn’t necessarily age well, though I acknowledge that it is based on true events and the queerness of its not-so-honorable characters has not been made up by some writer, but overall, it is just an amazing feat of filmmaking. It is dynamic, colorful, and full of engaging characters, all within the confines of a pretty small space and not all that much movement. It certainly has the feel of a stage play, but not in a way that would make it feel stuffy or heavy. Though it is two hours long, by the time Dog Day Afternoon ends, the pace of the story, and the emotionality of it, has ramped up so much, and so much has happened, that when the one last truly shocking moment happens it feels like we’d spent a lifetime with its characters.

EATING

I spent most of January sharing vegan tips and recipes on my social media as a part of my yearly “Veganuary” effort. All of these posts have been collected here. This is certainly not a cookbook just like I am very much not trained in anything culinary or nutrition, but it is a summary of some tricks and ideas I’ve picked up over the last few years of very enthusiastic cooking. Most of the write-ups in this document are guidelines more than anything else, and I hope they can inspire anyone who comes across it to eat more compassionately, more consciously, more radically and more creatively. Veganism is not perfect and it’s not a panacea, especially when coopted by capitalism and defanged as some plant-based fad, but I still feel that it can do a lot of good and that most of us ought to use it as a starting point for being better at engaging with the planet, animals and other people.

Some things I cooked in the past month: soft beer pretzels, Buffalo cauliflower and queso-adjacent cashew cream because Super Bowl was a good excuse to throw together a spread (my husband made a bean chili and Bloody Marias with homemade pickles), arepas with black beans, roasted plantains and ancho chile sauce, baba ganoush that included an eggplant exploding in our oven but still tasted good, a Sicilian style pizza for two in my cast iron skillet based on this recipe for the dough (it’s too complicated for the effect it produces), a walnut apple cake with mascarpone style cashew frosting for a friend. I improvised most of these with minor ingredient planning only. I can’t seem to focus enough to be fully wedded to a recipe h