High Vapor Pressure
They say that you should never go to bed angry, so how about ending the year angry?
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HIGH VAPOR PRESSURE*
In recent years, my rage has always been gendered. Being angry felt like a reclamation of space that I was told I could not enter or occupy because I was female. Being angry felt like finding a new frequency in my emotional spectrum and growing comfortable with it. It did not always feel like power. It rarely felt healing. It did, however, feel like it could become a part of some self-improvement project or a starting point for a reshaping of who I was at a time. In my mind, there was always so much to be angry about: my mom wrapping herself in clingfilm underneath tight shorts to burn off cellulite during our long walks when I was a child, my dad saying that women can never be taken seriously if they yell in a way that’s too masculine, my grandfather disrespecting my grandmother even after a lifetime of togetherness, my mother-in-law cautioning me against gaining weight even when my health was in jeopardy, my colleagues suggesting I pair boys with girls in my classes so that the girls could help maintain peace and order, my government trying to regulate what kind of care I can access for my body, my Supreme Court being stacked with sexual harassers, the person I was supposed to consider my president being a misogynist and getting political points for it. Small things that made me angry connected to the big things that made me angry. I could tell myself that the system of anger that was self-assembling inside of me reflected a system of unfairness that was objectively outside of my head. That system could be criticized, deconstructed and advocated against. There were goals that anger could be funneled into, even when they were very modest or hyper local. I was an angry woman sometimes and during some times, and in some places, that was more than fine.
For the past month I have been angry in a way that is aimless and formless. I have been angry about the pandemic and the people that seem to be consciously or unconsciously aiding its spread. This pandemic rage has been something like a first cousin to feeling utterly helpless.
***
It started after the COVID-19 infection rate in New York City climbed above 3% or the magic number that city authorities decided would bring about broad school closures. I saw my students’ energy plummet once we moved to fully remote instruction again. Their cameras turned off more often, their silences became longer and longer, and our march through kinematic equations or integrating volumes of revolution slowed down to an uneven jog. A few parents emailed me to say they have noticed increased anxiety in their children. Presumably they were asking for my understanding and empathy. I couldn’t help thinking that they also just wanted to externalize their own worry into the somewhat tangible form of symbols on a screen. When my school held parent teacher conferences, I spoke to over 50 parents. My colleagues warned me that when they held the most recent round of these, now virtual, meetings last spring, only a few parents actually showed up. This time it was clearly all very different. I put on a big smile and conjured some pep in my voice, told myself that it was too late to worry about my very red eye make-up or my accent, and rattled off as much good news as is possible in five minute bursts. By the end of the first night, after almost three hours in that headspace, I felt near-manic. When the adrenaline subsided, I was back to being angry.
I know where my rage comes from. The loss that COVID-19 has brought about here in the United States and back home in Croatia is of such magnitude that it is hard to truly process. To cope with this impossibility of sickness and death, my mind and body are violently reacting with anger instead. What does it mean for 3000 people to die in one day? I have begun to believe that the human mind, and maybe the human heart, are just not wired in a way that would allow them to make full sense of such numbers. The big losses induce a sad numbness. This is a flat feeling, more like a constant background beat of badness than an emotional spike that can give rise to tears. The small losses, however, the ones that can be verbalized with painful precision, for me, skip over sadness and immediately evolve into rage.
I am angry at everything my students have lost and everything my family has lost and everything I have personally lost not even through sickness or bodily harm, but just through being cut off from each other, from being pushed into isolation, from having had to turn our everyday decision-making mental apparatus into a pocket-sized risk calculator. A part of my anger is certainly also that I know how lucky I am – I am housed, employed and all of my family members that have been infected with the coronavirus have recovered quickly and without any long-lasting consequences. I am likely among the last people that should complain. Yet, even I feel the impact of the pandemic so strongly and consistently.
***
The issue of being angry with someone for something that they personally did or did not do thus affecting a community you’re a part of is one that has seen a lot of play in American life in recent years. In fact, at times it seems like American politics is fully driven by angry contempt for some sort of an “other side” or, in more extreme cases, hate for the proverbial capital-O Other. In the past election cycle, both sides spent so much time, money and energy on pandering to voters that were angry because they felt forgotten, economically endangered or in some way robbed of their power and, often, their masculinity. Politicians that did not want to capitalize on that anger or use it for their own purposes by making it run even hotter, told themselves that they could alleviate and assuage it by changing their language, by engaging hypothetical compromises and overall dancing around the issue of who gets to be angry and whose anger gets rewarded in this country. Frustratedly, unable to unplug from political commentary but so tired out by it, I often complained to my husband, a social scientist, that the angry forgotten voter that’s about to change their mind this time around probably just doesn’t exist. However, the people that those voters were angry at – progressives, lefties, immigrants, queers, women and people of color – did exist. They were often not being pandered to at the same scale. And the people that I think I am angry with right now, the deniers and the irresponsible and the uninformed, also very much do exist. The question of whether they have as much power over the health of my community as I ascribe them in my angriest moment, is less clear-cut.
The pandemic anger, or more precisely, the anger at the mishandling of and disregard for the pandemic feels so new and disarming because there is no way for me to strawman the people I want to blame as just one neatly delineated group. They are not just supporters of a party I don’t like or residents of a state I only have badly stereotyped impressions of nor are they just one demographic. Of course one can always be angry at the government (though, as a particularly left-leaning professor friend recently pointed out to me, many of that ilk have now found themselves in an odd situation of having to advocate for trusting the same state that they had previously criticized for years), but that has always felt like a very different undertaking and a very different instinct than being angry at a stranger walking down the street without a mask, a relative that keeps crossing state line, or a student you hear has thrown a big party just last week. The fact that people making mistakes and deciding to behave both badly and unwisely during this time are diverse and real and fully fleshed out rather than cardboard cutouts of someone you can dislike from a far, makes the anger feel dirty and questionable. It is hard to blame someone that does not fit a well demarcated box that was already designated for blame somewhere in your mind-palace. It’s even harder to be angry at someone who doesn’t really have that much power over you, who is not in charge of laws or jobs, but rather just another nobody like yourself.
***
A few weeks ago, my husband and I met a friend for outdoors brunch. We sat at a sunny picnic table huddled in coats and blankets, eating shrimp and grits (them) and kale and avocadoes (me). The friend, gorgeous when backlit by the winter sun, their hair briefly showing something like a hint of gold, shared Thanksgiving stories and Christmas plans, all involving visiting family in a different state. The rest of our conversation had been a typical mix of millennial gloom interspersed with bits and pieces of academic fun facts from all our respective fields. Though there is joy in commiserating, discussing our lives at the edge of thirty, amidst a year as strange as this one, only managed to not sink us all deeper into bleakness because the backdrop of a bright Brooklyn day was so nice and our warm coffees and cool brunch cocktails so full of kick. As we hedged on mourning our late twenties sacrificed to academia and our 2020 lost to the pandemic (this was going to be the year when our lives finally truly start!), I was stuck on the conversation about traveling. We had all immediately acknowledged that it does, these days, feel like the whole world is watching you the second you leave your home.
Will strangers on Instagram berate you if you visit your mom inside her home? Will they immediately equate you to partiers and rule breakers that truly are spreading the virus even if you take many, many precautions? The flipside of my pandemic anger is that it keeps me at only a small step of distance away from becoming someone that points fingers or gives into temptation of policing their neighbors. Ironically, in a year when so many of us came around to considering police abolition and defunding as not only a serious possibility but almost certainly a necessity, here is a perfect situation to push us right back towards some sort of a coronavirus panopticon. Everything about my anger again feels counterproductive and near dangerous.
***
In one of the segments on a recent episode of WNYC’s On the Media, a producer shares their experience of reading an article about a heartbreaking nursing home pandemic story and being awoken from their pandemic apathy. The conversation with the show’s host ultimately devolves into the more fundamental question of how much empathy and how much emotion is one even supposed to feel when faced with an unprecedented amount of catastrophe. Social scientists have previously argued against too much empathy. Empathy can lead to impulsive decision making rather than thoughtful and well-calculated ways of helping those we empathize with. Similarly, who we feel empathy for is conditional on both who they are and who we are. The usefulness of empathy, to put it bluntly, is quite limited. At the same time, not showing any, getting used to suffering at the large scale, makes us feel like something within us is broken, like we might suddenly have too much in common with some psychopath from the kind of true crime story that dominates streaming services. Thus, the notion of performance enters the picture as we find ourselves in situations where the lack of emotion (sadness) or the presence of a seemingly unvirtuous one (numbness, anger) needs to be made up for.
I thought of how widely I smiled while telling parents that their child is doing well in “probably the hardest math class at this school this year” as if it weren’t by default a major victory that they have been able to adjust to remote advanced math instruction at all. I thought of a few nice days off my husband and I sneaked into our schedules around Thanksgiving, how we sat on a blanket in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and made jokes about crawdads as if the park weren’t so empty and our tickets timed because people are dying and would be dying even more widely if those precautions weren’t in place. I feel guilty for being able perform too much pep when I am feeling down, and I feel guilty when it seems like I’m not performing enough sadness when I am feeling uplifted. Almost a year into the pandemic, reality seems to slip away here and there, and everything becomes a game of self-questioning and performance for the audience of your own self. Partly then, the anger stays with me because it feels real and raw and like I am not just letting it in for the sake of satisfying some form.
***
They say that you should never go to bed angry, so how about ending the year angry?
At roughly this time last year, I was having a very different personal crisis. I had landed in an Intensive Care Unit after three emergency surgeries that came seemingly out of nowhere. A bad toothache turned into a bad root canal which then turned into a really bad infection that almost killed me. My husband and I spent our first Christmas as a married couple in the ICU, eliciting sighs and teary looks from every nurse that caught wind of our story. For a while I was on a ventilator and could not speak, only text my husband and my mother-in-law who dutifully slept on uncomfortable chairs inside the unit during the first few nights that I spent there. I am still scared when I think of the fog of pain medication that reigned over my mind in those days and how real the pain that necessitated it really was. I am scared to think about the experience at all though I cannot avoid seeing the deep scars beneath my jaw and on the side of my neck every time when my face pops up on screens that make up my virtual classroom. And I keep thinking about waking up in the ICU and realizing I was only breathing because something was mechanically keeping my throat open, because a piece of technology was making it possible for air to enter my lungs. How much ventilator talk did we all hear in the early days of the pandemic? Every one of those discussions made it a little harder for me to swallow my next breath. Every mention of intubation activated some fear that my body carries but my mind hasn’t unwrapped from an anxious knot just yet.
In my mind, when I stop to yell at every person that is doing the pandemic wrong this is one of the weapons I can wield – I know what it’s like to be away from family (as an immigrant, I’ve had years of practice) and I know what it’s like to be on a ventilator, just barely having made it through what could have been a tragedy. It would probably make me feel better to let my anger out this way, to yell until I feel spent, to verbalize all the reasons why I am doing this better than this imaginary other person, to more seriously deny that I am only angry because I’m not sure I can handle being sad and scared instead.
***
Reflecting on that last terrifying month of 2019 some thirty odd letters ago I wrote
“It is a tired trope to say that sometimes real life is more odd and more intense than anything on TV, and it would ring equally hollow for me to go on about how being sick had humbled me, how it shocked me to learn how fragile my body is, how my number-trained mind shuts down with any attempt to absorb the weight of me just having been unlucky enough to develop a statistically unlikely condition. Joking about it at parties is the quicker way out, and maybe being able to laugh because I am so much better now is superior to dwelling on the large dose of uncertainty I was administered just as the year, and the decade, was about to turn.”
Reading the words back now, wearing the same track pants I had worn to both the Emergency Room and a New Year’s Eve party that marked the end of the first phase of my recovery I feel like both everything has changed, and nothing has changed at all. I ended the last year feeling fragile and wounded and I feel physically stronger now (the pandemic has certainly allowed me to supercharge my workout routines and my running). At the same time, I never stopped being dealt all that uncertainty. At the end of the past decade, trying to chew an Oreo with my painful stiff jaw at that party, I was also building up a good reserve of gratitude and just a little bit of hope. The fact that I am now sitting in the kitchen of the first apartment my husband and I got to rent together after six years of dating long distance, writing in between work for a difficult yet worthwhile full-time job and a slowly growing second career in writing, is objective proof that I was not fully wrong to not dwell on all the badness that had come crashing down on me. One of the things that I seem to have lost to the pandemic is the ability to take a longer view. I’ve written about needing to stretch my imagination past the confines of current corruption and decay in the structures of our society, but somewhere along the way those muscles contracted again. If I force myself to reengage them on a smaller scale, I can start to see that feelings can be temporary whether they be those of force or powerlessness. You can get away from them, but it takes time and work and dedication.
I can’t promise that I won’t go to bed angry on the 31st, and I can’t promise that I won’t wake up with a slow burning fire in my core on the first day of the new year. Maybe I’ll still be angry on my late December birthday too, maybe even while I’m eating cake and embracing the celebratory sugar rush. But when I look back on this year, I want to make sure to have learned something from that anger and to have left some space for other feelings I have to keep reminding myself I still have capacity for. I cannot sugarcoat the memory of this past year nor do I really want to, but reducing it to one sentiment would be one more lie I could try to tell myself.
Thanks for sticking with me this year.
Best,
Karmela
* Vapor pressure is the pressure exerted by a vapor of some substance in thermodynamic equilibrium with either a solid or a liquid phase of that same substance at some given temperature and within a system where the vapor particles have nowhere to escape to. A typical example would be the pressure exerted by water vapor within a lidded pot boiling on the stove – when there is still some water at the bottom of the pot, the vapor pushes on the lid, or exerts pressure on it, so much that you can often see it shake. Substances with high vapor pressure at room temperature are called volatile and expected to boil into vapor even when they are not externally agitated.
ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING: I have a short article on ultracold molecules and quantum chemistry in the December issue of Scientific American, and a version of it has also been posted on their website. I wrote this way back in the summer as one of my first more serious writing assignments and I still really like it. In part, I just can’t get over the many facets of ultracold physics research and how much it can further our understanding of fundamentals of the physical world. As a complement to that, I have also had really great experiences working with Scientific American editors and really appreciate all the time they have spent on collaborating with a very green writer like me. I really hope to continue some of that work in the new year.
I also had a story on quantum cryptography, the one I kept referring to in my past letters, published on Physics World. I’ve engaged with quantum information science much more as a writer than I ever have as a physicist, and it’s been really fascinating to immerse myself in that branch of science with a wish to understand, but without the pressure to come up with something new within it.
Finally, I managed to squeeze in one more writing project for my graduate alma matter, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and profiled a high school physics teacher who is taking part in an educational outreach project run by the physics department where I studied. The program brings together the expertise of physics education researchers and teachers that are veritable veterans of the classroom which is really very valuable for everyone. Having now been full time teaching for a few months myself, interviewing a teacher with twenty-five years of experience that is still excited about the job and still wants to learn how to be even better at it was personally meaningful to me as well. And the article was really fun to write as it gave me an excuse to flex somewhat different muscles than those I have been training with all of my science writing so far.
And his past year has been a really big one for my writing. If I can be proud of anything that I have done in the last twelve months it is certainly the articles that I have published as a freelancer and all of my other writing work (this newsletter even got a shout-out on a minisode of Supercontext!). Since I started teaching full-time it has been much harder to find time to pitch, research and write, but I am determined to keep pursuing science writing in the future. Here’s everything I wrote this year:
Ultracold Molecule Mystery Solved, Scientific American
Identical Quantum Particle Pass Practicality Test, Scientific American
Time's Arrow Flies Through 500 Tears of Classical Music, Physicists Say, Scientific American
The Coolest Physics You've Ever Heard Of, Scientific American Observations/Opinion Blog
Fast Quantum Random Number Generator Could Advance Cryptography on the Cheap, Physics World
Ultracold Atoms Can Work Together To Shape Or Steer Light, New Scientist
Deborah Jin Engineered New Quantum States of Matter - Twice, Massive Science
Physicists plucked and collided two ultracold molecules with laser tweezers, Massive Science
The International Space Station creates bigger, colder states of matter than are possible on Earth, Massive Science
Hands-on at a distance: Making sense of physics with Jill, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Physics Department home page
Creativity and authenticity are key ingredients for successful student-led DEI advocacy, Science on a Postcard Blog
Amidst National Reckoning with Racial Injustice the Physics Community Reflects on Its Own Inequities, A Science Blog by Science Talk
Quantum Physics is Easier to Understand as an Adventure, Lifeology Blog
LEARNING: I started writing this letter three days before winter break officially started in New York City high schools and it is probably fair to say that in my many years in school, I had rarely been this eager to take time off. Of course, as was the case while I was working on my PhD, my time off will be short and packed with holiday activities and therefore very much not like the fully carefree break that I hope most of my students will plan for themselves. Regardless, being able to say that I have made it through my first five months of teaching high school without any major issues (ignoring circumstances bigger than me) gives me a small feeling of satisfaction if not of full-blown accomplishment. A fellow teacher recently shared with me that they had spent some amount of their first semester crying in the principal’s office and while I am constantly so saddened to see teachers get little support and respect overall, the comment did put my frustrations and tiredness in perspective.
Parent teacher conferences were certainly nerve wracking and my impostor syndrome resurfaced in a whole new guise for those few days. It all went well, however, and I think I am overall becoming more emotionally equipped to think of myself as a person of authority. I have also been given a chance to offer a college-level course of my own design in the spring semester. Though such an undertaking will definitely mean more work for me, I could not pass up the opportunity to teach some modern physics and a very introductory quantum mechanics to the incredibly bright high-schoolers I work with every day. I would have done anything to take a class of that sort when I was in high school. Though I am often at war with my past selves, that particular iteration of me has made it impossible to not be at least somewhat excited about teaching in the spring.
In contrast to that cautious excitement, I have also been really worried about a handful of my students that seem to be doing rather poorly and are at risk of failing my 9th grade class. It is not that I never had uninterested students or students with poor work habits before, but in the past, they were always college students. With twenty-somethings it was possible to tell myself that they get to make the decision to fail and that they’re mature enough to deal with failure. With these young students that don’t respond to my trying to reach them, and sometimes neither do their parents, it all feels more personal, more impactful and more dire. As in past months, I am learning that teaching requires a large amount of managing my own emotions and my own well-being so that I can maximize the benefits students get from our work together. The circumstances of the pandemic surely increased the need for this, but regardless of what the following months look like in our school I’m guessing that part of the job will not change at all.
LISTENING: On topic for the end of the year, I really liked this episode of Imaginary Worlds discussing fictional monsters and villains that seem to best reflect the state of the world in 2020. From Jaws and Jurassic Park to Animal Crossing, the theme of capitalism being as villainous as any unexpected monster lurking around a corner becomes evident in the host Eric Molinsky’s interviews very quickly, and that feels both insightful and of the moment. Imaginary Worlds is a well produced and interesting show, and I appreciated a lot of its episodes this year, regardless whether they were about trauma and Cowboy Bebop or real-life vigilantes inspired by ones in comic books.
I also appreciated this episode of Call Your Girlfriend on what they termed “COVID consent”. It’s an exploration of all the conversations we now have to have before seeing someone to make sure we are on the same page about how exactly to stay safe from the virus. It was interesting to hear this discussion from the viewpoint of a relationship expert, someone who is well-versed in coaching folks around discussing sexual consent, which is another area where, as a culture, we don’t seem to do enough. The mention of terror management and the finding from psychology that when they are reminded of their mortality people often fall even more in line with their in-group regardless of whether that puts them in danger or not was also interesting and offered a possible avenue for understanding some of others’ irresponsible pandemic behaviors that have been bothering me so much.
Cult of Luna released a new single called Three Bridges and I have really enjoyed listening to it over and over. I pre-ordered their upcoming record that this single will be featured on, and once again dipped into their catalogue for some noisy and grumbly comfort. This band has come to mean a lot to me in the last decade even as I have diversified my musical favorites beyond heavy and heavier genres of metal so it’s great to see them still producing music I like, especially now that they are doing it on their own label.
Just like any other Spotify user I also spent some time looking at the handy, Instagrammable, top artists and songs of 2020 graphic that the service generated for me. As in past years, my choice of running music was a big factor for the list and some tracks that I seem to have listened to repeatedly were for sure just a device for keeping my feet going. However, I was somewhat surprised to see King Princess and Orville Peck topping my charts since they are musicians I only started to seriously listen to this past summer. Much like my running music, their records have gotten me through long walks to work and train rides during which my mind felt spent and emptied. I listened to their song on repeat when I felt like I couldn’t handle listening to anything more challenging or grating, so their being my most beloved artists in the past year maybe says more about it than many of my attempts to intellectualize my feelings can.
READING: I wanted to read 20 books in 2020, but barely managed 7, comic books included. I definitely did not finish Gravity’s Rainbow or any other books that were on my shortlist, whether they be gargantuan or tiny. It makes me sad that my time was pulled in so many other directions and that, at least in part, I was also quick to choose to invest it elsewhere during some moments where sneaking in a page or two would have been possible. It seems unnatural to be investing myself in trying to become a writer, but then not managing to read much more than a newsletter here and there or a short book every few months. I hope to be better at building this habit and balancing it with both my workload and a fair amount of inertia-driven TV watching, in 2021.
WATCHING: My husband and I have been pretty committed to ending each night with some time in what we’ve dubbed our media room, glued to a big screen instead of our laptops or phones. As a consequence, we’ve watched probably too much mediocre-to-bad TV and a pretty random smattering of movies.
On the TV front, we finished Schitt’s Creek which remained fun and wholesome in its later seasons, but definitely also started edging on being too saccharine and, at times, a bit lazy. This is a clever show in all its episodes and some of its staple jokes never lost their novelty. However, I was relieved to see it wrap up when it did, thus saving itself from becoming just a watered-down version of the first few, very punchy and colorful, seasons.
We also watched the first season of Evil on Netflix. Despite all those hours spent staring at its psychologist-and-priest protagonists, I have nothing particularly good to say about this show. Its premise is an inferior X-Files rip-off, its treatment of real-world issues shallow and therefore problematic, and its production value is really not great either. This is trashy supernatural crime TV at its best iteration of the worst of the genre and definitely an enraging guilty pleasure beyond anything else.
Finally, we completed season two of Killing Eve and are currently somewhere halfway through the show’s third season. I loved this show when it first started and its colorfulness and dynamic, often tongue-in-cheek, storylines made me less sensitive to its treatment of queer characters or the suspension of disbelief all the spy-and-assassin stuff often called for. The second season of Killing Eve is simply written less well so all of those troubling details started to come through and conspire to make the show less fun and less good. It’s not so much that it jumps the shark, because it was always a little ridiculous, as much as it is that it starts to feel unpolished and half-baked, like the writers had some good elements and ideas, but just didn’t really manage to stitch them together in some coherent way. I’m sure we’ll finish watching season three, just out of the kind of curiosity and misplaced loyalty you get when you stick with a show night-after-night, but it did lose a lot of the original spark that drew us in to begin with.
When it comes to movies, we did follow the crowd some and checked out Mank on Netflix. This also incentivized us to spend an evening revisiting Citizen Kane. Growing up with a father who was trying to be and sound like a cinephile quite hard, I had heard of Citizen Kane all throughout my childhood and in recent years, as I started taking after my dad and consuming a lot of movie criticism and commentary even when I haven’t actually seen the films, I’ve been aware of the discourse surrounding it beyond kitchen table conversations as well. There isn’t much anyone can probably say about Citizen Kane at this point and still sound original, or maybe even sincere, but for sure the classic film made an impression on me, both delighting and surprising me and delivering on what I expected from it. I really liked watching this movie, so thanks to David Fincher (and his dad who co-wrote the script for Mank) for giving us an excuse to indulge in some Welles genius. As for the actual film he made, named after and centered on Herman J. Mankiewicz who wrote the Citizen Kane screenplay, I did like this one as well. As in his other films, Fincher is committed to detail, so he sells the black-and-white photography quiet successfully and the feel of the whole thing matches the era (the 1940s) that he is trying to explore. The dialogue is fast and snippy, Gary Oldman is great in the titular role and Amanda Seyfried is stunningly brilliant as the actress Marion Davies. This is a more fun movie than many that Fincher had made before, but also a pretty emotional one at times, delivering gut punches more powerful that the shock of, say, graphic murders in Zodiac. At the same time, this is not by any means a perfect movie. Though the Easter-egg-hunt aspect of it for anyone that’s seen Citizen Kane (there are some nice parallels and references scattered throughout) may make it seem beyond intricate, it does end on, as far as I am concerned, an unnecessarily low and petty note. Fully knowing that there’s some Pauline Kael Raising Kane stuff happening here, I was still taken by surprise by the last few frames of Mank because they just seemed at odds with the rest of the film and struck me as possible Oscar-baiting via sheer controversy. I’d recommend watching Mank – it’s fun, clever and the craftsmanship is wonderful – but I would have personally certainly preferred for it to have ended with a touch more dignity for its protagonist.
In the remainder of our unstructured movie watching: David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence which we really enjoyed, the 1976 media satire Network which was fantastic and uncannily prescient (speaking of Cronenberg, this film would make a really excellent double feature with Videodrome), and the pretty terrible Al Pacino, John Goodman and Ellen Barkin neo-noir erotic thriller Sea of Love which makes no sense and features one problematic scene after another, but we somehow still could not look away or stop making jokes about it to each other (for what it’s worth, John Goodman is having a really great time here).
EATING: We spent both Thanksgiving and Christmas at home by ourselves so I wholeheartedly threw myself into cooking foods that could remind us of either our Brooklyn family or past trips to Croatia. My husband learned how to make a pecan pie and vegan mushroom rosemary gravy and I turned out more than one walnut and poppy seed roll styled after my grandma. I turned to various blogs and cookbooks to veganize baked mac’n’cheese and candied yams for Thanksgiving, then to the kind of forums where Croatian women share their recipes to veganize a stuffed meatloaf and then later, for Christmas, a kind of charred-then-boiled-the-gravy-soaked pasta I had previously only ever had out of my grandma’s kitchen and a smoked cod spread my father is the ultimate master of. There was also homemade layer cake and cookies gifted to us by friends and way too much eating so we could snatch a bit of bliss for ourselves, even in 2020.
In-between holiday eating, I stuck to our usual fare, relying on old favorites like lentil dahls or trying out new takes on noodles such as this recipe for Noodles Singapore or this steamed Chinese eggplant dish that I also served over a pile of noodles. I breaded and pan-fried some lion’s mane mushrooms after a very successful trip to the snow-covered farmer’s market, and I discovered yet another great way to cook rice after reading the Mississippi Vegan cookbook for the thousandth time (the secret is to inundate it with everything umami, from miso and tamari to garlic powder and nutritional yeast). We had tacos at least three times and my cashew cream worked out every time. I baked a few round and oily focaccia breads and studded them with whatever I could find in the fridge. I inhaled a lot of sandwiches lazily reliant on vegan “meats” and “cheeses” in between Zoom classes. I’m guessing the early months of 2021 will be exactly like that as well.