09.04.23
I think trying to independently procure meals at my parents’ house is the closest I’ll ever get to foraging for food.
I tend to stay in bed longer when I’m upstate. At my own apartment, I typically plug my phone in on my desk across the room, so I can’t endlessly scroll as soon as I wake up (unless I get up, unplug my phone, and get right back into bed which I… Actually do quite a lot… I never claimed to be perfect!). But in my childhood bedroom, since repainted and refreshed — clearly mine and clearly reminiscent of an adolescent media diet heavy on musical theatre and the Muppets, but these days more an homage than a time capsule — the logical place to plug my phone in is next to the bed. Every morning, I spend some time scrolling on Twitter before popping over to YouTube Shorts, which I have become addicted to in place of TikTok, which I deleted several months ago. YouTube Shorts doesn’t Get me like the TikTok algorithm did though, so I will only be sucked in for so long before I get past videos of other people’s babies and mic’d up MLB players into things I have no interest in and/or am completely perplexed by, and opt to just get up, finally.
I make a point to take advantage of opportunities to sit outside when I’m at my parents’ house (my apartment doesn’t even have a fire escape — don’t ask me how that’s allowed because I don’t know), so most mornings I get a cup of coffee and read on the porch. After I read the New Yorker Weekend Essay about listening to Taylor Swift in prison sent to me last night in a group chat with my Swiftie-est friends, I plucked my dad’s copy of the Mel Brooks autobiography off the shelf. I have a copy of it at my apartment too, and can pick up where I left off tomorrow when I get home. I finished the book I brought with me, Samatha Irby’s newest, yesterday during my porch reading time.
It’s sticky today, the last few weeks of Summer humidity clinging on like I do with any boy who doesn’t really like me that much. I am, however, quickly chased back inside by the yellowjackets that seem to be nesting in the upper corner of the porch’s awning, even though my dad insists that yellowjackets only nest in the ground.
“I see them going in and out of there,” I tell him after scurrying back into the house.
“IMPOSSIBLE!” he jokes, and Googles whether or not I could be right (I am).
Around 11:30am I am done with coffee and start thinking I should eat something. I am pretty diligent about having several different kinds of food to eat at any given time at my own apartment, so I always have something that I’m actually interested in eating available to me (covert brag that I own a copy of Intuitive Eating with a perpetual bookmark around page 20, where I start to get overwhelmed), but I’m often not so lucky at my parents’ house. They’re on a pretty consistent cycle of making dinner a few times a week and eating the leftovers for lunch most days, especially in the summer when they are both not working (my mom is retired now, but my dad still works in schools — he’ll go back to work tomorrow), but there’s not a whole lot piquing my interest in the fridge right now. My dad ate the coconut curry chicken he made on Friday night for his dinner yesterday, polishing it off before I got home from Sam’s birthday party last night, so the shelf that usually houses leftovers is barren.
Half a tomato from my mom’s garden, several tubs of strawberry probiotic yogurt, a crusty bottle of Sweet Baby Ray’s. Meh. I take out the deli turkey and eat a slice of it on its own, because making an actual sandwich feels like an ordeal. There’s about 75% of one slice of extra-sharp cheddar cheese (unclear what happened there) that I split with the dog, who always appears at the sound of the cheese drawer opening. I pour myself the remaining slightly-stale Honey Nut Cheerios, about six bites worth, purchased two months ago and slowly chipped away at by me on my visits. I pour the bottom of a gallon of 1% milk over it and settle on the couch — inside, away from the wasps trying to storm the castle — and finish the first chapter of All About Me!, which is, unsurprisingly, so very charming.
