Repeating Decimal
Who are we allowing to be in pain as a habit?
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 and recipe recommendations. Feel free to skip to whatever interests you. Please do also hit reply at any time, for any purpose. Find me on Twitter and Instagram too.
This letter contains references to racialized violence and police brutality. In light of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police and subsequent protests, if you can, please consider donating to the Minnesota Freedom Fund here or a bail fund in your area. If you are able to vote in local elections, please consider researching and supporting candidates that aim to implement bail, policing and incarceration related reform legislature.
REPEATING DECIMAL*
He went completely white very young, probably before he was thirty. Not gray but white. A soft snowy fuzz of wispy strands atop a face that looked stern if you didn’t know to look for the permanent but slight upward curvature of his lips. He was the older one, much older than my grandmother, but you’d never know. He carried himself as if he was going to be young forever, walking to the markets most mornings, ducking into every Croatian dollar store equivalent (sve po dvanaest kuna), picking up every stray piece of furniture left by the side of the road. It drove my grandma crazy, the knick-knacks he’d buy and the garbage he’d drag home to repaint and reassemble.
What I remember most about him is the way he spoke. He called my dad Tesla because my dad had gone to school for electrical engineering. He’d tell me, whenever I threw a tantrum about having to wear an annoying kids’ outfit, that I’d be pretty even if I wore a burlap sack and “a brick on top of my head”. He’d break out some mumbly Italian occasionally and completely stump me. Once, on a late and lazy morning at our cabin in the woods he greeted me with a melodic ‘buon giorno’ which I promptly mistook for an offer of a type of salami. He’d run his fingers across his face and say ‘domani si faciamo la barba’ which meant that the next day (domani) he’d bring out what was a stand for flowerpots that he re-made into a shaving station. It had little round shelves holding an old-school razor and a bushy, bristly brush for applying shaving cream. I don’t think I ever really saw him sport a beard (la barba), maybe because he made shaving into such a ritual. The phrase of his that stuck with me into adulthood is one that translate into English most badly and one that I couldn’t seem to look up on any dialect website. Part of me now doubts whether he actually said it: so many of my childhood memories are a daisy chain of re-remembering memories and there is much family mythos built around my grandfather. The phrase is this: ‘imaš grdu bol’. Literally, it means “you have an ugly pain”, but it’s use is really more akin to “this habit of yours is really no good”.
I could never quite make sense of this choice of words. In Croatian, and in the dialect my grandfather spoke, one does not have a pain. You experience it as a verb but do not possess it. When it rolled off his thin lips, however, in his velvety voice trained by years a capella singing, it sounded right. I hear the same correctness in these words when my father repeats them. He has been cutting his hair extremely close to his scalp for years so I cannot tell whether he is white enough to morph those moments of exasperation into another layer of an already compounded memory though. I’ve tried it too, accusing someone of having an ugly pain. I told my husband the whole grandfather story. He tends to leave kitchen cabinet doors open while we cook our quarantine meals together. “What if I bonk my head?” I ask with frustration, weaponizing a phrase his Brooklyn-born-and-bred father introduced me to, then follow up with “do you know what an ugly pain is?”.
Of course, he knows.
***
I’m thinking of pain often because there seems to be so much of it everywhere around me now. I’m thinking of my grandfather often because he is the only grandparent I lost and there seems to be so much loss everywhere now as well. I remember his funeral vividly: I felt lost in a way that is now quotidian. I had disbelief, shock, grief and regret intertwining to form a big heavy knot at the bottom of my stomach and no tools to untangle it or mechanisms to force it out. My brother was too young to attend the service and subsequent march through the cemetery, but I had to go, and I frankly had no idea what to do. Something shifted in me once my younger cousin started crying. The loss became more real because they had verbalized it for me. I’m struggling to find that verbalization, that loud, wet, tangible something, as the pandemic continues to take lives. The silent ever-presence of pain and loss is as difficult to grapple with as the sudden presence of death (my grandfather died unexpectedly) in my family was so many years ago.
***
There has always been a swarm
of hungry ghosts orbiting my body—even now,
I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds
of fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone. They are
arranging their plans like worms preparing
to rise through the soil. They are ready to die
with their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth.
Kaveh Akbar, What Use Is Knowing Anything If No One Is Around
***
A good yoga practice will teach you to settle into an uncomfortable pose and pay attention to your body. To notice the parts that are stiff, the parts that are tense, the parts that hold pain. Yoga should not hurt, but teachers will encourage you to push yourself, to get close to pain without fully letting it take over. In savasana at the end of practice, they will often suggest you systematically go through your body and make an inventory of what feels how. My practice has diminished during quarantine, but my pretty incessant running gets to my knees, hips and hamstrings with regularity so I keep digging for YouTube videos that can teach me how to breathe into those pain-points. I make a mental list of them as I struggle in pigeon or lizard, chronicle the pulls, tugs and creaks of my muscles, tendons and joints when there is a standing split or a shiva squat. In the context of the never-ending and inescapable now, that inventory of pain seems both necessary and completely useless.
***
After a few nights of watching the High Fidelity reboot, I started imagining Zoe Kravitz’s perfectly cheek-boned face turning to the camera, her lips coated in some immaculately matte simulacrum of their actual color, and saying, in that very nonchalant way: “Top five pandemic pains?”.
The pain in my mother-in-law’s back that recently landed her in the ER for hours? The pain in my grandfather’s knees that’s making it hard for him to walk on the other side of the world? The pain of now knowing when I’ll see him do that painful walk again? The pain of not being able to go home, any home? The pain of knowing some of my family are so close, but it would be so dangerous to get any closer? The pain of being stuck in a family house basement like a pair of kids who never tried to do anything with their lives? The pain of not being able to plan for the future? The pain of knowing I had put my life on hold for six years to get a degree and now this even more severe hold hit? The pain of sharply feeling disrespect, and lack of empathy, whenever someone on the street is not wearing a mask? The pain of every news segment being about death and fear? The pain of others infusing the airwaves, being carried by soundwaves, flooding newspaper pages like ink that started to spill and never stopped overflowing? I think I might need a bigger list, just five may really not suffice.
Maybe I should just list the constant pain in my stomach because I am still eating my feelings. Maybe just the pain in my feet because I am still trying to run away from anxiety. Maybe just the pain in my hands because I keep touch warm pans, getting splashed by boiling soup, not paying attention while I chop my millionth onion of the millionth quarantine dinner. Top five things I’ve become apathetic to during the pandemic?
It is obscene to try and rank pains when we are all so rife with them. And they are all ugly. Face-scrunching ugly. Tooth-gritting ugly. Warm-tear ugly. Empty-stare ugly.
***
In December, before I went to the hospital, I was in more pain than ever before. While I was in the ICU, painkillers steadily dripped straight into my bloodstream. I tried to refuse the scary sounding anti-pain stuff, but a very calm and collected surgeon gave me a very calm and collected talking to. There was a button I could press when the pain got really bad and the drugs would rush in through the tubing in my arm to numb me. For a few days I was a bionic woman in the sense of my defenses against pain being artificially augmented. When I was sent home, the pain was mostly gone, but I had to wait for scars to fully cover the spots where the pain had started and where it had raged the most. My mother-in-law still reminds me, almost daily, to put cocoa butter lotion on these scars. They wrap around the very top of my neck like a badly positioned necklace, an out-of-fashion collagen choker. They’re an ugly residue of pain, even when they smell like chocolate.
***
a body loudly
consumes days and awaits the slow
fibrillation of its heart a lightning rod
sits in silence until finally the storm
Kaveh Akbar, A boy steps into the water
***
The ugly thing about pain, about living in its aftermath, and about living with it as a staple of the present and almost certainly a prominent feature of the future, is that it can consume everything else. When it is big enough and constant enough, it can turn it all into ugliness and mourning. Maybe this is why I keep thinking about my grandfather’s non-sequitur of a phrase. I rephrase it into a new adage: the pain you have has turned ugly because you have let it become a habit.
***
There’s an old episode of Invisibilia that follows a teen girl with amplified pain syndrome and has attracted a fair amount of controversy since it aired. The teen’s story is complex, and to help frame it the reporter lays out some of the history of the treatment of pain in American medicine. Some aspects of how we think about pain and ways in which it is treated are addressed less. Namely, pain is racialized and gendered and coded differently for different people in different cultures, but this complication is not given much space in the episode. The anger this selective framing attracted online underscores how complicated pain can be and how hard it is to talk about it even when you deal in storytelling for a living. One of the themes of the episode is the teen’s identity becoming centered on being in pain and being friends with others that are pain. Her mom worries about the seemingly rapid transformation of her daughter into a first and foremost “sick girl”.
I don’t love this episode, and I don’t love this show, but I do worry that my identity, whatever it is, will be swallowed up by my pandemic pains and anxieties. Slowly erased by my becoming a “pandemic girl”, a “pandemic person”, a person that takes too many pain inventories just because the world is in such chaos that the gut instinct to do so seems unquestionable and infallible. I complain to my husband about coworkers and collaborators that retroactively apply the pandemic as an excuse for past failings and mistakes, then turn around and proactively apply the same logic to my future. I worry that caring about all the pain and anguish I am carrying right now will turn ugly, ugly in my grandfather’s parlance, by the virtue of my not questioning whether I really need to have all of it on me at all times.
***
I am thinking through my pains and habits in a week where the news here in the United States are consumed not by the coronavirus, but rather another horrifying death of a Black man at the hands of a police officer. His name was George Floyd. There are protests by those these events affect the most and there is punditry and social media outrage by many who are affected much less. A few days after the protests start, in an organizing meeting for a group I love one of the leaders mentions that we should address this moment, but we struggle to find words that can adequately express all the bad feelings that instantly well up. Shamefully, while we talk I moderate my tone and self-censor a few words I judge may sound too radical because I am not alone and want to avoid confrontation with people in my household at all costs. They aren’t all around and I don’t know whether they are paying attention to what I’m saying, but I am anxious of the white-on-white fight I might spark. I also don’t know that they would disagree with me, but I do know with some certainty that starting a conflict would hurt. While I’m weighing my words, someone else on the call, a person of color, simply says – can we just be explicit about what we’re trying to discuss here? In that moment I am embarrassed of myself and I realize that all my theorizing about being consumed by pain, about letting my identity lapse and be morphed by it, is such nonsense.
In this country, whole communities have been built on foundations stained with pain, unable to just choose to not carry some of it in their bones. Since the pandemic started, I have been trying to process the notion that bodies are now a liability, that I should be scared of my own body and bodies of others because they might be silently carrying the virus. For so long, having a Black body has been a liability just by virtue of how the society we live in has been defined and maintained. My own body being a signifier of a potential disaster is only new and potent to me because I have been privileged enough to not have to think about it before. There is pain underpinning the identity of this nation I have been trying to blend myself into for over a decade. And it is not the pain of struggling through adversity and coming out victorious and exceptional like I was taught in history class (along many other immigrant students ready to gobble up whatever American myth we were served), but pain inflicted on many that built this same nation up under duress or without being given credit. In the grand scheme of things, my pain is small, and I can overthink it as much as I want, but pains of many others are so gargantuan in comparison and need to be acted upon. Have we made it a habit to hurt others by not being able to look past what pains us?
The ugliest thing about pain is that it can make us myopic and harden us to pains of people who don’t seem to be just like us. When we engage in being hurt as a habit, we tacitly give ourselves permission to think that this is what everyone else is, or should, be doing too. Maybe this is why conversations about privilege are so hard: acknowledging privilege sounds like we might be diminishing the hurts that we endure so often that they seem to have become habitual. It is possible that nothing ever really changes because we assume that being in some pain is normal for everyone, that everyone should at some point grit their teeth some and every refusal to do so constitutes a riot. How ugly does someone else’s pain have to get before we recognize it as an unacceptable staple of their daily life? We should all act to make sure that no-one in our community is habitually being hurt, habitually exposed to unnecessary pain. Alternatives to our taking action are, in this case, absolutely hideous.
Best,
Karmela
Image Source: Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence, 2005. Adapted: Ellen Tuzzolo, 2016; Mary Julia Cooksey Cordero, 2019
* In mathematics, a repeating decimal refers to a decimal representation of a fraction whose (non-zero) digits repeat at regular intervals. This periodicity in digits means that the decimal representation consists of infinitely many periodically repeating blocks of numbers (for example 1/3 is represented as a zero followed by infinitely many threes.)
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ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: I have a new pre-print available online so the manuscript I have been mentioning over the recent weeks is now out there for any interested physicists to comment on before collaborators and I toss it over to some editor and their chosen team of peer reviewers. This pre-print evolved from chapter eight of my thirteen-chapter doctoral dissertation and chapters eleven and thirteen are in the process of being similarly transformed. This reduces my publication wishlist to a single dissertation chapter that needs one more small calculation before it can be re-written as a “real” paper. The tricky thing is that it’s not clear what exactly that calculation should entitle or how to avoid its failing like some I had previously attempted while working on this same subject matter. Some of my doctoral work has come out of fishing for results by trying to read and calculate a ton, but now that unfocused approach seems more precarious. To be clear, it is not crucial that I make this one last paper happen, but this part of my dissertation centers the kind of topic that throws you deep into 1960s and 1980s math literature and repeatedly displays the ridiculous breadth of your field, so I don’t quite yet know how to fully ignore it. As I block off bits of time to chase something like resolution to this project over the next two months, before my current research position officially runs out, I am again a little shocked when I remember that my Ph. D. has for all intents and purposes actually been completed. As in, I actually completed it and will have a piece of paper saying so in my hands so soon that I can assign it a date. I keep promising myself I’ll stop and celebrate this occasion properly after my husband defends his dissertation and we are both equipped with the doctoral title, and I hope that regardless of how much progress I make on this I really will.
LISTENING: The self-titled EP by the 1980s Kentucky band Squirrel Bait which is the sort of proto-grunge that I would usually associate with the 1990s and dislike, but somehow works for me. A Spotify rabbit hole took me to this single by a related act called Slint which is less grungy, louder and even more enjoyable. this two song EP scratches the same itch for melancholy harshness as many of my rougher favorites along the lines of Cult of Luna or Ash Borer so I will certainly be seeking out more.
Keeping up with the somewhat glum and moody tone that has permeated my whole past week, I also listened to this episode of Slate’s Hit Parade on British goth rock and took a few dives into Chris Molanphy’s companion playlist. I’m not sure this genre will ever really be my thing, but in a past life I did probably dismiss the likes of New Order or Love and Rockets too swiftly out of some misplaced sense of metalhead purity and superiority.
READING: Poems from neurodiverse writers rounded up in this newsletter by Chris Martin. Each is gorgeous and impactful in its own right.
This poem by Ada Limon and this one by Marie Howe.
This letter about heckling, cowardice, British politics and the coronavirus. A line that stood out:
“Attempts to control the tone of discourse are attempts to professionalise it, to keep the grit of public experience out of the vaseline that keeps political life lubricated, that keeps wealth and influence circulating within the halls of power.”
This incredible essay from the Paris Review that seems to be about nothing in particular other than venting and imagery for so long that once you realize that its form is starting to converge to one point with its content, you get a bit of whiplash.
This letter about making it through virtual-ized, digitized, covid-ized finals by my Instagram friend Lin. She writes about:
“Long, sleazy afternoons, uncomfortably warm, where I just Stare at the academic papers open in a corrugated accordion of tabs. Look at the words lumped together. Spaces between Paragraphs, Sermonising.”
and that’s exactly the mockery I feel I’ve received at the hands of 1992 papers on the infinite-dimensional Riemann theta function while waiting for my avocado mint ice cream to set on a foggy Friday morning in quarantine Brooklyn.
Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller (of the Invisibilia and Radiolab fame) which is something like a biography of the taxonomist David Starr Jordan but also a chronicle of fighting capital-C Chaos in your life even when you know there’s no rational reason to believe you might win. There’s just a touch of whimsy in Miller’s writing style that is too much for me, but I also cannot seem to put this book down. It is propelling, it asks big questions without dwelling on them too much and with too heavy of a seriousness, and it is structured almost as a succession of snackable anecdotes that add up to Jordan’s life rather than a linearly marching forward biography. I am surprised that there is not a podcast counterpart to it yet, not because Miller is a veteran podcaster and a heavy in the field, but because the layout of the book follows the beats that a good podcast story has to have really meticulously. Because of my own podcast consumption, I know some sort of a twist must be coming and I’m sort of eager to get to it.
WATCHING: This past week of TV watching has been a tour-de-force in my girl-crushes: first Janelle Monae in the second season of Homecoming then Zoe Kravitz in High Fidelity. My shallowness aside, both are solidly decent shows and both actresses put in a great performance.
I was a fan of the Homecoming podcast and liked the visual tricks and ticks of the first season of the TV version as well. Season two is less interested in nerding out about old thrillers and noirs, but Monae and Hong Chau (excellent in HBO’s Watchmen) carry the slightly less fresh story really well. And though this show is very much prestige TV and packs in layers of meaning and commentary, the episodes are short, efficient and not weighed down by the prestige-ness of it all. It’s a show about heady ideas that is still digestible and doesn’t fatigue you before the season seemingly quickly runs out.
High Fidelity episodes similarly clock-in at around half an hour and pack in a lot of feeling without being overly heavy. Being something like a remake of the movie of the same name, this show is about heartbreak and relationship messiness on top of not really being about anything more particular than conversations and anecdotes. The Brooklyn quality of it is believable and it at times almost reminded me of Seinfeld. Though some of the dialogue, and some of the main characters’ inability to learn any lessons, does fall into the same lineage of near-comedy, High Fidelity is in no way outdated and showcases the diversity of its characters in a refreshingly organic way. In both High Fidelity and Homecoming, actually, there’s plenty of queerness and so much more than sad or clever white people, and it all feels delightfully normal and real.
EATING: We grilled for Memorial Day and my charred vegetables marinated at the table in a heavy mix of olive oil, lemon zest and juice and lots of crushed garlic tasted so much like barbecues back home. The warm sun makes me want to put lemons into everything and without a doubt it makes me want to eat foods that are secretly all about being homesick. (Mix 1/4 cup good olive oil with zest of one small lemon, a few tablespoons of its juice, a good sprinkle of salt and two or three well crushed cloves of garlic. After your veggies have good grill marks and are soft when pierced with a fork, toss them with this mixture in a big bowl, and let marinate while still warm. A few minutes is enough, perfect timing for grilling up vegan hot dogs actually, and you can add more of the dressing to them as you start to eat.)
I made this falafel in my in-law’s air fryer (five minutes at 390F then flip and give it five more) again, and again it was really good. Every time I make it, I promise myself that I will never make falafel with cooked chickpeas again and it is so good that I have actually kept that promise despite remembering to pre-soak them being kind of annoying. I also wholeheartedly endorse the dilly tahini sauce included in the same recipe write-up.
I’m still working on a garlicky sauce for bok-choy-ish veggies that will successfully scale up, but we paired my last attempt at using it on Chinese broccoli with some tomato tofu based on this recipe and liked the latter a lot.
The brownie recipe I am sharing below came about mostly because we ran out of wheat flour and I wanted to force myself to use some of the almond flour stockpile in our pantry before braving the grocery store again. I am not sure how all that almond flour made its way to this household where very little gluten-free or grain-free baking happens regularly, but I guess I do like for my baking to be challenged and pushed in new directions. I have also had some massive chocolate cravings. Basically, these brownies were inevitable. They are fairly simple, really rich and have a texture that is chewy at the edges and crisps up nicely wherever it touches the pan (and I have learned to bake small batches in loaf pans to maximize that contact) while also being fairly fudgy and dense in the middle. I am not typically a fan of the overly fudgy brownie and have generally advocated for more of a crackly-top, easy-to-cut iteration of what I still perceive to be an extremely American dessert, but I have to admit to really liking these. They do need to cool down quite a bit before being sliced to prevent being a major sticky mess, and they also benefit from a night in the fridge for sure. I made them late at night and had a nice slice with my breakfast and a very hot, very black cup of coffee, an eating configuration I would certainly recommend if you also give them a shot.
For 4-6 nicely sized brownies you will need:
1 tablespoon ground flaxseeds mixed with 3 tbsp water and let sit until thick and sticky
6 tablespoons white sugar
2 tablespoons coconut sugar (or more white sugar)
1/4 cup vegetable oil (or canola oil or melted coconut oil)
2 tablespoons almond milk (or any other milk you like, or coffee or water)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup finely ground almond flour
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1. Preheat the oven for 325F
2. Line a loaf pan with parchment paper, allowing for some overhang on the sides so you can lift the brownies out later. You could use aluminum foil as well, but brownies will stick to it much more.
3. Mix all the liquids in a medium-sized bowl. In a smaller bowl mix the dry ingredients, making sure the almond flour and cocoa powder are not clumpy
4. Mix the dry ingredients into the wet with a rubber spatula or a whisk, just until no streaks of dry flour remain. The batter will be fairly thick and sticky, not necessarily pourable (add a tablespoon or more of milk or water if you’re finding it really hard to work with)
5. Transfer the batter to the lined pan and spread it to all corners with the spatula. Smooth over the top and try to make sure its evenly distributed across the pan
6. Bake for 35 minutes or until the top looks slightly sunken, has cracked in a few places, and a knife or a fork comes out clean when you pierce the brownie
7. Let the brownies cool in the pan for 10 minutes. This helps them keep cooking and setting outside of the oven
8. Transfer to a cooling rack and let cool completely then move to the fridge or eat immediately
As these are fudgy, they’d be perfect with some chopped up berries, some (vegan) whipped cream or vanilla ice cream or just a lashing of caramel. Here are some good tips on whipping coconut cream at home, and here’s a recipe for vegan coconut caramel and vegan tahini caramel. If you want to buy vegan ice cream, Oatly is incredible, New Yorkers should for sure track down some Van Leeuwen and, in a pinch, Aldi brand is decent too.