Unquiet
Things

I was recently watching something on YouTube with Yvan, something like “What it costs per week to live in the Japanese countryside.” It was a family of four, and the mother was narrating the video. We got to the part where she showed the week’s grocery tally, with the caveat that it wasn’t too much money because “we’re not big eaters.” What! I just wasted 15 minutes of my life on you, lady!

I am absolutely a big eater. I love food. I think about food. I plan meals and eat them and think about the next thing I want to eat before I have even finished. At the beginning of the year, my doctor wanted me to lose 25 pounds to help with my blood pressure, and while I hate that weight loss is the medical go-to, the truth is I haven’t felt comfortable in my body for several years. So here we are.

Twenty-two pounds down, doctor’s appointment in a week. The meal prepping isn’t new, but I’ve gotten more consistent with it. We haven’t had delivery in seven months, which I’m ridiculously proud of. I like to cook anyway, so this has made me more creative and consistent in the kitchen. This current fridge snapshot is full of vegetables that I have pre-chopped for soup or whatever else. There are leftovers from our Sunday family dinner (salmon and corn chowder and sour cream cucumber salad) and a cream of mushroom soup I made last week. There is homemade sauerkraut (!!) and watermelon rind kimchi. So many things! I spend a large portion of my Saturdays puttering around in the kitchen and most of this culinary menagerie is the result of those efforts. P.S. Yvan got me this Masontops fermenting kit, and for about a year it sat around untouched because I was a little scared of it, but I am off and running with it now!

Movement has helped a lot too. I’ve weaponized my pacing. I get between 15-20K steps per day, either starting with a 5am walk around the neighborhood, or if I’m being honest, it’s mostly me marching, trotting, and shuffling around the house for twelve hours. I’ve also started using my 5-pound weights for about five minutes of daily exercises. Plus some traditional Chinese morning exercises—fast arm movements to get energy flowing. I don’t know what to call them exactly, but they showed up on my TikTok as “ancient exercises.”

Anyway, that’s all I want to say about that. Literally everything in the world you could natter on about is better than listening to people talk about weight loss, I get it.

This is an admittedly kind of gross-looking picture, but it seems I haven’t taken many photos lately, and maybe I have just forgotten how. I’m realizing I mostly view things through a lens when I am trying to come up with an idea for social media, and I haven’t been on social media since early June, so I haven’t even thought about it.

Anyway, here’s that saurkraut and the watermelon rind kimchi, along with our breakfast soup. It’s a dashi broth with a little soy sauce, mirin, and sugar, along with the finely chopped cabbage core left over from the saurkraut, some eggplant, shimeji mushrooms, and a bit of egg. I made biscuits yesterday and anytime you do an egg wash on top of a bread before it goes in the oven, you’re only using like 10% of it, and I hate wasting the rest! So I just put it in a little container overnight and drizzled it over the hot soup just before I took it off the burner. It was so, so good.  This isn’t a meat soup, per se, but I usually do snip in a tiny bit of marinated pork when I make this, just to add some extra flavor. I am pretty sure this is not how you are meant to use this spicy marinated pork bulgogi, but it works for me.

Anytime I talk about breakfast soup now, I think about this meme that my best good friend sent me, something like “bro goes to Japan one time and won’t shut up about soup.”  I don’t even have an excuse, I have never been to Japan! Forgive me. I, too, am a bro who cannot shut up about breakfast soup.

This is a rose that only blooms once a year. I don’t know if that’s how it’s meant to do, but that’s how she does for us. These catch-up posts feel like they’re becoming a bit rarefied and infrequent, too. Anyway.

• I finally watched Sinners, and it was as fantastic as everyone said it would be. I loved how it added a little extra something to vampire lore without trying to reinvent the entire wheel. I would have loved more of Remmick’s backstory, but that’s probably a very white audience response that completely misses the point, even if it also feels like a natural story-lover reaction. (But that “Rocky Road to Dublin” scene was pretty incredible.) And so was the scene where Sammy’s song brought all the ancestors together! On a related note, I never did watch Nosferatu. I was pretty rabid to see it, but once I finally got the opportunity, it bored me to tears within 5 minutes. I think it’s because I’d seen the Werner Herzog Nosferatu a few months before and had already made up my mind that anything that came after was going to be redundant and would pale in comparison.
• Andrew Michael Hurley is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. If you’ve ever read Robert MacFarlane’s lyrical, deeply researched writing about ancient British landscapes and thought, “what this needs is some creeping dread, ghostly presence, and unexplained rural menace,” then you’ve found your writer. I just finished Devil’s Day, and this story about a Lancashire farming community’s annual sheep gathering and the folk rituals that keep ancient boundaries intact could have been co-written by MacFarlane with all of the quietly beautiful prose about bleak moorland, bitter winds, and wild, brutal landscapes. I don’t want to diminish either writer’s unique voice with comparisons, but they both capture how landscape becomes character.
• Speaking of books, I’m about halfway through writing my newest one! Three books in, and I still don’t know the rules about what to share before official announcements. Or even when to make those announcements, hahaha. At any rate, if you’ve been into my explorations of art’s stranger territories, this one continues that tradition.

• In other news, a friend told me people think Labubu dolls are cursed, and hearing that just made me feel ancient. For those equally out of the loop, these are collectible devil-grinned, rabbit-eared toys that became a massive trend, and now people are claiming they’re haunted. It all feels stupid and garbagey – I can’t explain it better than that, but I have zero patience for manufactured spookiness around what are basically expensive bag accessories.
• I bought carnivorous plants – a tiny pitcher plant and a small venus fly trap – and have somehow kept them alive on the back porch for a whole month. They like it boggy and bright, and apparently don’t actually need to eat bugs if they get enough sun, which seems like cheating but whatever works. Somewhat related: I have never seen Little Shop of Horrors. I know someone is going to ask.

• I am equally out of the loop because of this summer social media break, and it feels exactly like elementary school summer vacation. The relief from shedding obligations that were completely imaginary in the first place is indescribable. I never want to go back. I mean, I probably will. But as of right now, if social media all broke down and went away forever, I would not shed a single tear.

That said, I’m planning on getting my blood pressure situation sorted and becoming an immortal blogging vampire though, so rest assured, you can always find me here.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?