Squark

On turning 31 and a good year in friendship

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SQUARK*

We were sitting in a New York City diner that looked, smelled and felt like a New York City dinner. The kind where most of the space is too narrow and the person at the counter could be an extra in the Sopranos. Where the menu is laminated, the cups are plastic, and the seats in the booth are squeaky or garish. Where the coffee is somehow both too watery and too sour and the only vegan menu on the item are the French fries. Two cups of coffee, water and two plates of fries sat between us as we tried to recap our life stories to each other, broken into fragments of joy and grievance alike. Sometimes they fit together like just similar enough puzzle pieces made by different manufacturers. 

A server brought my friend a plastic plate almost fully engulfed by three of the largest chocolate chip pancakes I have ever seen. They smelled like burnt oil from the griddle, melting chocolate and eggs. My friend cautiously tasted a few different flavored butters that were already on the table, settled on one then topped the whole thing with syrup from a squirt bottle, the kind I was at the same time mercilessly squeezing to force some ketchup onto my fries. The chatter in the diner was loud. The line by the door was long. About halfway into December, the weather had finally gotten a little more seasonally cold and I was grateful to be at a booth with my scarf bundled next to me instead of in line, by the door that kept being opened then closed then opened again. 

Briefly, while my friend was busy working the syrup, I was transfixed by how cinematic it all felt, how unreal it is to live in a city like New York and have friends that care for you within it.

***

Just as November turned into December, I went on a short reporting trip to Washington DC. The nation’s capital is just close enough to New York that my travel consisted of inhaling dinner at my desk in lower Manhattan, power walking to Penn Station in a tourist-induced zigzag, and taking a long train trip. My final destination was a cheap hotel next door to the venue where I’d be hunting and gathering information on all things quantum technology at an international conference. I am a notoriously bad transit reader and barely ever manage to crack a book open in the subway, but I still packed Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True, just in case the slightly bigger train was going to inspire me.

The book had shown up in many recommendation emails, Instagrams and Tweets that I am exposed through algorithm (dark) magic, and I had heard Hsu speak about collecting memorabilia on an episode of New York Times’ Popcast, a confluence of the kinds of things that often compel me to buy some book and then call the decision impulsive. I didn’t read about the book enough to know more than that it was a memoir that mostly takes place during Hsu’s teenage and college years. When I started reading it, I quickly realized that it was actually mostly about friendship. 

It opens with no hand holding and no introduction, just plunging you into Hsu’s short, but melodic sentences. He describes driving in his car with his friends, sometimes to a diner or a donut shop, often singing. He’s not fancy about it, just sincere in a way that makes imagining those scenes immediately feel emotional. I was drawn in by this. 

I can’t drive and my memories of friends from my teens and 20s are generally if not bad then lacking. It’s likely that I have not sung along to the radio in the car for a good decade. However, I recognize the softness of nostalgia for ritual, connection and the kind of freedom that allows for even the silliest of a friendship’s moments to feel very profound.

Hsu was born in the small Illinois town where I went to graduate school. He is now a professor at Bard College, something I was on track to become in the teaching job I left earlier this year. Throughout the book he describes himself as trying to be cool in that pretentious, I-have-something-to-say way that folks that wear thrifted grandpa outfits and take philosophy classes for fun do. I saw a lot of myself in this, maybe I still do. I underlined the section where he describes wearing floral button downs and thrifted cardigans - I have interviewed Nobel laureates looking just like that. Hsu relentlessly talks about discovering music and studying it in minute detail, hunting for all references a song can make and then the references to those references, all the way to an obscurity that feels safe to claim. I never had his breadth or the same kind of devotion, but I felt a kinship with this too.

He writes “What I prized was seriousness. I wanted to apply it to some small world, hidden in the larger one.” And then later: “I couldn’t imagine letting down my inhibitions around people I’d be silently judging the whole time.”

I remembered a party where I had, in a moment of disinhibition, claimed that “most people are mid”, then another evening where I complained about how un-seriously and nearly fraudulently people care about things so vigorously that my partner mistook it for comedy.

There is also a lot that divides my and Hsu’s experience. My whiteness for one, and the fact that my non-American family never left our non-American home. There is also the issue of age and gender, and probably a thousand other things that I did not notice because I was so consumed by Hsu’s text. But this is what good writing often does; it induces moments of self-reflection by showing you echoes of your own virtues and flaws in someone else’s story. I read most of the Stay True on that train ride.

***

December is my birthday month and I never know what to quite make of that. I stopped having birthday parties for friends around age 11 and most of the parties my family members have thrown for my birthday have not actually been for me. Getting older during a season when all media is saturated with recaps of the year, top ten lists and calls for inventorying your feelings, accomplishments and relationships alike is stressful. Sandwiched between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, my birthday is often a day when I feel grateful if I am not in a worse mood than simply exhausted. 

This year, December brought me something different. 

On its first Friday, I went dancing with a friend, staying up deep into Saturday, riding the L train home among everyone else whose makeup got smudged while they were out.

The following night I was at another friend’s apartment in Queens, gingerly holding onto a Dollar Store cake carrier and a cake I had made from scratch between dancing and venturing into the subway again. 

Social engagements piled up for the whole week after that. 

Rain-soaked drinks with friends in Hell’s Kitchen where we talked about robots refereeing baseball, toxic academic jobs and the convenient inconvenience of wearing jumpsuits over pita bread and a beet dip in the kind of magenta that is supposed to be the color of the next year. 

The office holiday party where plus ones were encouraged. First, we guessed who was who in a baby photo challenge then took over the back of a bar that was clearly not optimized for an already raucous staff of a small newsroom and their partners. 

Another drinks appointment with another friend, this time warm and spicy, with a month's worth of partner drama and personal growth to catch up on, my friend in the softest looking purple jacket and me swaddled in leopard print and a blanket scarf.

A Sunday morning spent looking at Mugler fembots and dresses made of car parts at the Brooklyn museum, followed by that fry-heavy diner meal.

A Monday night dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, sharing a mammoth serving of soft and tangy injera with friends, getting a big download of information on becoming a co-founder of a tech startup while trying to discern a yellow split peas stew from a red lentil one. We had deliciously tiny coffees and talked about not watching Ted Lasso. 

A Sunday crepe date with a friend followed by sifting for pint glasses through rows of porcelain, plastic and actual dust at a second hand store. At the next one, she had to put her whole body into zipping me up into a shiny dress I would never wear except for laughs on a Sunday a week before Christmas.

And in-between all that, I threw myself an unfashionably early birthday party. 

***

I stopped having birthday parties as a pre-teen partly because I worried that my friends did not actually like me and partly because I couldn’t understand the kind of heteronormative boy-girl romances that these parties were meant to be a breeding ground for. As I got older and developed enough of an interest in everything not mainstream to both genuinely buy into being
“alternative” and perform it all the time, I could infuse the rejection of birthday parties with the kind of coolness that Hsu identifies in Stay True. The kind of coolness that hides self-doubt and a fear of being hurt as much as it reflects passion and interest. 

After I moved to the United States, birthday parties both became more of a family concern and more emotionally charged. There had always been family birthday parties, for my aunts and uncles and cousins, but now they were not just a nominal celebration of my having made it through another year, they were a chance to acknowledge that I was still part of the family. These parties have never been for me, and as I kept getting older in a foreign country and by myself, they became sort of comical. Relatives would bring me gifts that I would have only liked when I was 16 or right before I moved, they could never really remember what it was I was now doing abroad, and whoever had to sit next to me during the dinner portion of the night would always struggle with the awkwardness of my being vegan. It was always like a sitcom episode - the kind that plays off a lack of care and attention to detail as hilarious because what’s a little self-centeredness and miscommunication between people that love each other by default. 

These parties made me bitter and then the anticipation of bitterness made me anxious about attending them at all. I would overthink them and make it all subjectively more tragic than it probably needed to be. Last year, when I was turning 30, my mom was staying with my partner and me. The notion of a family-tinged celebration immediately put me in a terrible mood. I made a cake to make myself feel better, my partner made us tacos to make me feel better, and I wrote about wanting to feel better. With the reality of the COVID-19 wave that New York was experiencing at the time adding to my bitterness a heavy dose of bigger-than-me desperation, I wrote:

“This is not the feeling I want to cultivate in my 30s, but it has been a reality for the culminating years of my 20s. I am trying to learn how to sit with it without letting it consume me completely.”

***

I want to tell you that I woke up the next day, a few hours into my next decade, resolved to be different and then was actually different afterwards. Instead, I contracted COVID-19 and quarantined with my mom, who was also infected, until I had to go back to my old teaching job, still sick. The new decade was not off to a good start. I don’t want to tell you how many days and weeks that felt like they were off to a bad start I had afterwards. 

***

When he is describing his early college years and solidifying the cast of characters that would become regulars for the bulk of Stay True, Hsu intermittently takes time to reflect on friendship through the lens of Aristotle, Jacques Derrida, and himself. At one point, he writes

“There are many currencies to friendship. We may be drawn to someone who makes us feel bright and hopeful, someone who can always make us laugh. Perhaps there are friendships that are instrumental, where the lure is concrete and the appeal is what they can do for us. There are friends we talk to only about serious things, others who only make sense in the blitzed merriment of deep night. Some friends complete us, while others complicate us.”

Later, he describes the “forward facing dimension of friendship, the knowledge that you will grow old, or apart, and that you may one day need each other in some presently unimaginable way.” and quotes Derrida in saying that “to love friendship, one must love the future.”

I’ve written this kind of sentence before too. In fact, I seem to have written it over and over throughout the past year. It was a year where I worked too much (again), slept too little (again) and substituted baking, colorful eyeshadow and workout classes for what probably should have been therapy (again). But it was also a year when I constantly wanted to tell you about my friends. 

In June, I wrote: 

“None of my friends are perfectly healthy or perfectly productive. None of them are perfectly defined as some sort of individual that could be sold wrapped in shrink wrap like an eerie late capitalism doll. But I think I can see a future full of care and love and eroding boundaries whenever we laugh together, or even when we commiserate about our often overlapping emotional baggage”

When I got close to a new friend a few months ago and inevitably started sending them snippets of these essays, I repeatedly worried out loud that opening so many of them with “a friend recently told me” would put them off. They were the proverbial friend in one soon enough, and what they told me mattered. Just like it did every other time before, every other time when I felt like the funny moments, the insightful moments and the quietly beautiful moments me and a friend had shared had to be committed to writing and recorded in a way that cannot get away from me.

My 30th was the year when I became a full-time writer worthy of the blue check on Twitter while those still meant something. It was the year when I quit a job for the first time. It was the year when I became a regular at enough business to feel like I could eventually pass as a real New Yorker. It was the year when I got invited to corporate labs and startup founders sent me emails with many exclamation point. It was the year when I found a lot of solace in adding a “they” to my pronouns and talked about being queer more than ever. It was the year when writing about abstract things I love got me a literary agent (who may or may not have given up on me shortly after). It was my third year in a marriage that is only getting happier, a ninth year of loving my spouse. It was the year where I wrote more than a hundred articles and cooked hundreds of meals. 

And it was the year when I was in love with my friends. 

Like Hsu I needed them for all: serious conversations, laughs, merriment, self-betterment, solace, excitement, all of it. I was less lonely than I ever was in my 20s.

***

Before my birthday party, I had to go to the store to buy ingredients for the birthday cake three times. The first time I forgot sugar, the second time I bought the wrong kind. I was roughly as excited as I was nervous and my attention kept slipping from my grocery list to counting how many chairs we have or how many clean glasses. When I was young, my parents always fought before hosting parties. When I hosted dinner parties with a boyfriend in college, the fighting would happen afterwards. So I understood that some sugar confusion was not the worst case scenario and that there is lots of merit in being calm. Still, I could see the faint purple tint in the grout on the bathroom floor where I had broken an eyeshadow months ago more clearly than ever, and every mark on our floor screamed embarrassment as I tried to clean. I told my partner, as I often do, that my cake would either be the best one or the worst one yet and decorated it in a mild fury, with many brief fridge breaks, not trusting my own hands to stay steady.

In Stay True, Hsu describes his dorm room and later his college apartments. The details of them feel like markers of a particular age, like shorthands for what it’s like to be living on your own for the first time and trying to discern whether you actually have economic means for it. The poster phase, the makeshift furniture phase, the I’m-actually-just-at-my-partner’s-house-a-lot phase. The way you occupy space and what you need that space to be like in order for you being there to feel normal changes over the years. Those changes are never as obvious as when you are trying to see it all through the eyes of a guest that’s just about to knock on the door. 

At what age should they feel like they are being entrusted with your vision of permanency, of a space that you’re ready to claim beyond embellishments and making the best of what you find there? In college, having a dinner party rather than going out felt like a mark of adulthood and a performance of sophistication, even though I remember one very expensive and spacious apartment with a gorgeous view of Chicago’s Lake Michigan that was christened by friends sitting on camping chairs as all real chairs I had tried to buy were lost in the mail. My now husband and I hosted exactly one dinner party together in graduate school, in his apartment that was almost a thousand miles away from mine, and it felt like we were trying to manifest a life we weren’t sure we could actually ever have. It was a performance just like all the past ones had been, just like any event that is out of the ordinary and involves other people tends to be.

My unfashionably early 31st birthday party was fine. Not just fine, but normal - like something that is not a big deal because when you have friends, you sometimes have them over for a party. And they laugh with you about whether the Macarena is actually a good song and eat off the small plates you thrifted in graduate school and take slices of cake home with them in old take out containers. And when they leave, you sit on the couch and feel normal, like your skin fits right and your apartment actually matches you, for once.

***

On the first weekend of December, a friend took me dancing to the kind of place where queer millenilas make-out without shame and All I Want For Christmas Is You is chased with remixes of Bad Bunny with everyone screaming the lyrics to both. I could think of dozens of past iterations of me that would have thought it was thoroughly uncool to be there. I have always been too stiff and too awkward to dance beyond nodding my head here and there, but my friend had no such problems. I had no choice but to get pulled into the minor chaos of the dance floor. When Mariah came on and I mouthed some of the words, my friend yelled “They know the words!” on top of it all, with a giant goofy smile and lanky, soft arms reaching for mine. 

There is as section of Stay True where Hsu describes his friends singing the Beach Boy’s God Only Knows and singing it badly, ruining the song’s harmonies. He writes about the experience as nearly transcendent:

“I finally felt in my body how music worked. A chorus of nonbelievers, channeling God. A harmonic coming together capable of overtaking lyrics about drift and catastrophe, a song as proof that people can work together.”

All I Want for Christmas Is You is a very different kind of classic than God Only Knows except that it, apparently, feels the same way, when it brings you closer to a friend.

***

“In real life, I feared stepping into too large a world and failing. But I wrote things that were earnest and open, that I would never dare say out loud,” Hsu writes in Stay True, describing his commitment to a zine he’d written for years. These letters feel the same for me. And if you count yourself as my friend, here I am, openly and earnestly saying “thank you”, maybe even “I love you”, for having made my year better. I hope you’ll stick around to see what 31 will be like.

Best,

Karmela

*One unproven theory of physics says that every particle has a “supersymmetric partner” that is named with an “s” at the beginning. A squark is then a partner particle to a quark. Quarks themselves are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. If you think of an atom, its constituent parts are some number of electrons (atoms of different elements can have different numbers of electrons) and the nucleus. In the nucleus you find protons and neutrons and then each of those is actually a collection of quarks held together by nuclear forces. In this sense all matter is quark matter, including you and me, and if supersymmetric theories are correct, it would all have a counterpart in squark matter.

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ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

Mid-December, New Scientist puts out a double issue reviewing the past year in science and offering readers a few more longer pieces than usual, to tide them over to the next issue which comes out in January. These so-called Christmas features are typically more lighthearted, focusing on the snow, reindeer or games you may play with your family during the holidays. As a very new staff writer, I got very lucky when I managed to convince an editor to let me write one of these features. I wrote about the physics of the ultracold, a topic that I have been obsessed with for years as both a scientist and a writer, and was delighted to see it in print alongside a gorgeous illustration. The pitch is simple: What happens if you take atoms to temperatures way, way below the freezing temperature of water but not all the way to absolute zero? They do not freeze, but instead become fully quantum matter, the kind that plays by the rules that are hard to imagine for big and warm creatures like us. Since the 1990s physicists have been both uncovering those rules and charging to places so cold that they may break them yet again.

An old story of mine, about time crystals made of light, got rounded up in this Scientific American review of the most exciting quantum physics moments of 2022. This was an exciting moment in my career as a reporter as I managed to get my first Nobel laureate on the phone (incidentally, I called up the second for my holiday feature) and, as arbitrary as awards are, it felt meaningful that he took me seriously. I am also still incredibly fond of the working relationships I had at Scientific American before I was even writing full time so seeing this article resurface felt very personally meaningful as well.

The conference I attended in Washington DC was the inaugural Quantum World Congress where I mostly listened to politicians, consultants and startup executives struggle with talking about quantum technology while avoiding actually engaging with the details, and realities, of the science behind it. I did catch one cool announcement among all that speechifying though, about a tiny quantum computer in Finland getting connected to Europe’s largest supercomputer, and wrote about it here.

LEARNING

In recent letters, this has been the most difficult section to write. This is not necessarily because I am not learning anything, but more so because the things I am learning are incremental and not very splashy. Going into the eighth month of my reporting job, there seem to be quite a few minutiae of reporting that I must have learned just to avoid general employment trouble, but I seem to be lacking language and metrics for qualifying that learning.

It is in the nature of being a science reporter that I am always learning new things about the physical world and processing them with the part of my brain where some scientific training remains lodged. So, I could write about new techniques for controlling atoms with lasers or new imaging devices that require very little light or about how antimatter and dark matter are connected. Learning about these things is meaningful and I feel fortunate to have it be such a big way of how I exist in the world. I also easily lose that perspective when it is pointed out to me that in eight months I did not, in fact, learn not to use Oxford commas or that I always have to remind the reader of what a photon is. My goal for next year is to find more balance between the macro perspective where I am learning a lot and the micro perspective where in my day-to-day life it feels like I am actually learning very little. 

READING

This Undark interview with law and biology professor Jonathan Khan about the use of DNA phenotyping for cold cases in police investigation. It is always valuable to be reminded how the “veneer of scientific objectivity” can be misused or leveraged to keep an unjust system acting unjustly. 

On a similarly tech-dystopian note, this Motherboard story about automatization of landlords in economically declining cities really underscores how data, algorithms and “intelligence” can be put in the service of greed. 

And this one, from the Atlantic, on “luxury surveillance” or buying expensive devices that monitor your every move under the guise of enabling self-betterment. Here, Chris Gilliard makes some very poignant connections between technologies like Amazon Ring and Halo and the long history of police and government surveillance of people of color and immigrants, writing:

Hidden below all of this is the normalization of surveillance that consistently targets marginalized communities. The difference between a smartwatch and an ankle monitor is, in many ways, a matter of context: Who wears one for purported betterment, and who wears one because they are having state power enacted against them? Looking back to Detroit, surveillance cameras, facial recognition, and microphones are supposedly in place to help residents, although there is scant evidence that these technologies reduce crime. Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of surveillance technologies—even ones that offer supposed benefits—creates an environment where even more surveillance is deemed acceptable. After all, there are already cameras and microphones everywhere.

This piece in Quanta Magazine by one of my current co-workers on how we actually don’t know why plants’ pollen is chemically and materially resilient enough to spread everywhere where flowering plants can possibly exist.

LISTENING

The Spotify algorithm led me to Julia Jacklin, probably after I listened to the same three Lucy Dacus songs for the whole workday again, and I have been liking some of her older records. Both 2019’s Crushing and Don’t Let The Kids Win from 2016 are a flavor of indie music that manages to be upbeat and serious at once, always digesting some uncomfortably gendered experience, but stopping just short of convincing you discomfort is all there is to it. Jacklin’s latest, PRE PLEASURE, feels heavier, like it is telling a more coherent story and that story may require both a higher production value and more of the listener’s contemplation.

I returned to Horsegirl’s Versions of Modern Performance thinking I would find echoes of the kind of catchy, diluted punk rock that had everyone obsessed with Olivia Rodrigo last year and was happily surprised to remember that this record owes a lot more to Sonic Youth and post-punk than anything that happened in the mid-2000s. Horsegirl have some edge (the name itself tells you that they know what cultural niche is ready to embrace them - and it is not actually “horse girls”), but this is also a record that is easy to listen to. It makes a lot of safe choices that mostly work and make for an enjoyable coherent piece of alternative music that simultaneously feels old and new.

black midi’s Hellfire is loud and chaotic, with no apparent desire to fall within a single genre. It reminded me of IDLES or maybe a soundtrack for a community theater production gone terribly wrong. This is not a pleasant record, but it is interesting and rich and, as a consequence, definitely a fun one to sink some time into.

Aenima by Tool because I heard an episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s about its first track and I’ll let Rob Harvilla convince me that it is ok to enjoy self-indulgent near-nonsense if it also, musically, goes hard.

WATCHING

Netflix’ Dark eventually went pretty off the rails, but I quite liked its first season which made me want to check out the latest show by the same creative team, the very international costume drama with a twist called 1899. Unfortunately, this show has none of the great atmosphere and tantalizing pacing that Dark had early on and is, instead, very busy with half-baked characters and ideas that have not been developed past what one may think up after half a semester of introductory neuroscience or philosophy. My partner and I kept watching the show because I had some hope that the big final twist would surprise me, but even its stylized predictability fell flat.

Having been both disappointed by 1899 and above average busy, we spent many nights watching the animated Batman series from our childhoods and I continue to be very compelled by this show. The animation and the overall aesthetic quality of it, an odd mix of art deco and anime influences, is immaculate and though my adult eyes do not see anything that Batman does as genuinely sympathetic there is still something to be said about the character as an entry point into thinking about vigilantes, policing, and what it means to be a villain. 

We only watched one notable movie recently and it was Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin which has emerged as an Oscar contender and has been granting Colin Farrell a new burst of spotlight. Farrell is very good in this film and the whole thing is as gorgeous as it is absurd. There is more than one way to read it, maybe it is a commentary on male friendship, maybe it is about not being able to keep going unless you have a grudge, maybe it is about effects of isolation and national distress, maybe it is just about how doubling down on a contentious view rarely ends well. The fact that so much can be happening in one fairly minimalist film with a cast of just a few memorable faces speaks to it being interesting and artistically meaningful. Yet, I am not sure that I actually liked it as something about it felt just a little too aware of the former, a little too quaint even in its turn to violence, maybe even a little smug along the way. We re-watched In Bruges before diving into Banshees, directed by the same person and spearheaded by the same duo of actors (Farrell’s counterpart in both is Brendan Gleeson) and I liked it less than I remembered liking it in college - and probably for the same reason. It does the same overcommitted bit while also managing to pack in a whole boatload of a very 2008 offensive edginess.

EATING

It’s holiday party season which also means that it’s cake baking season for me. I made two layer cakes that I was pleased with recently, a very chocolate-y one and a seasonal one marrying gingerbread and raspberries. Both were made to be shared around a busy table or eaten off a paper plate while sitting on a rug and courting someone’s small dog, two really solid ways to consume cake this time of year.

For the first, I used my standard chocolate cake recipe from this write-up then drenched one layer in coconut caramel (I improvised something along these lines with coconut cream and coconut sugar), then topped it with a buttercream based on the same caramel, then topped it all with more cake and a chocolate coffee frosting. 

For the second, I used this gingerbread cake as a base, but with maple syrup instead of molasses, threw together a very simple raspberry lemon jelly for the middle layer then covered it all in a raspberry buttercream, flavored with raspberry jam which is one of my favorite shortcuts for making both colorful and flavorful frosting.