My father called to invite me over for dinner but now it’s been hours and I’m still unshowered on my couch, considering stopping by the store for seltzer water and returning home. We have a strained relationship, and even though my grandmother - his mother - died last week, I don’t feel as though it’s occasion enough to be flung full force back into a close familial arrangement with him yet. I’m aware of how cold this seems, but I don’t have much faith in my father’s consistency, death or no death, so I am wary. I will probably stay home.
Consistency, I realized last night while texting with a man I’d recently slept with, is something I value. The thing is that I am horrifyingly inconsistent myself, like my father, and sometimes I remember this fact and think, well, how do I have the nerve to expect that of anyone? But I do have the nerve, and sometimes I’m let down but not often. Most of my friends are steady and supportive and listen with enough interest to prevent me from posting vague, moody things on Twitter, so I am grateful.
The afternoon after we first slept together, aforementioned text man and I got lunch at one of my favorite diners. He’d suggested a French restaurant I hate, having once waited ages there for a jambon beurre so bad it still puzzles me whenever I think about it. I didn’t tell him this, because I was too hungover to wring the story of any drop of judgment of his food preferences, but I did offer an alternative. When we sat down it occurred to me that some member of my family could walk in at any point and I’d be put in the awkward position of introducing them to this man I liked enough to do non-sexual things outside of the house with, but did not like enough quite yet to be linked with in anyone’s mind as a couple, let alone any of the family members who frequent this diner, because then I will be asked, “How is your friend, the one I met at…?” at every family gathering I attend until I die. I ordered an Arnold Palmer and scanned the room while text man said something about investments. My first Arnold Palmer was perfect, but my second was mostly lemonade, which disappointed me. Is text man consistent? It’s too early to say and too early to care.
Anyway, the reason I started this newsletter was to do something I liked to do on my oft-neglected blog, which was post links. Here are some:
1 “Sheriff: Woman breaks into home, pets dog, washes dishes, leaves”
2 I know I’m always complaining about Bon Appetit but May’s issue has a few good pieces on Italian-American red sauce restaurants, which hold a place in my heart damn close to diners and delis.
3 A mutual on Twitter posted this fantastic Emily Nussbaum profile of Ryan Murphy from last year, which admittedly endeared me to a person I hadn’t spent much time considering before.
4 Sika deer and snow monkeys, sitting in a tree, f-u-c-k-i-n-g
5 “Melville is great for a few reasons, but to me his chief greatness is in his recognition that to bring the Negro into the human family means more than just making the Negro white. He understood that such an invitation is always an invitation to remake oneself, to upend and reorganize the way we think about our humanity. He asks us to exchange one universal — a narrow, white supremacist ideology — for something else, something more capacious. Something Black.”