Anthony Bourdain Taught Me How To Eat

 Anthony Bourdain taught me how to eat. He taught a lot of people how to cook, how to travel, what to order in a restaurant, what to pay attention to—the feeling of barbecue sauce dripping down your chin, the sound of peanut shells cracking open under your fingers, the smells of meats (all kinds of meats) roasting or braising or grilling or steaming, the sound of a thousand people screaming in a city street or a thousand mosquitoes buzzing in a forest grove, the taste of damn near everything—but he taught me how to eat.

When I was eighteen, I worked in a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop manned by twenty-something year old cooks and chefs: half-papered cooking academy drop-outs who thought they knew better than their teachers, and who decided to open a little nineteen-seat joint to prove it. It was half Tampopo and half Kids: sociopaths saucing noodles at 6 PM and drinking shots at 9:30. It was 2002, and Bourdain had recently published Kitchen Confidential (the cover photo showing him and two unnamed associates posing with kitchen knives the size and attitude of machetes) and A Cook's Tour (the cover image of him, in some unnamed Asian country, camo tank and half-smirk on display). Everyone in the restaurant had read them, and most had taken the Gospel of Anthony to heart, which was: eat good food, see the world, and be as macho as you can. Bourdain knew he was putting on a persona—he says in the introduction of A Cook's Tour that he wants to see the world, and hopes it looks like the movies—but for precocious chefs in small towns, Bourdain was an avatar of all they might be one day: smoky, smart, gnawing on roasted duck on the floor of a Vietnamese fishing hut.

Perhaps most of all, Bourdain represented a certain kind of authentic man. He certainly curated his experiences to be tough, what with the drinking and the drugs and the travel. He wanted to get in there, see things not from the window of a tour bus, but from the back of a sampan. Cooking, which is often fussy and perfectionist, wasn't really his calling. He wanted to be a war correspondent, with the front lines on the edges of the kitchen. He offered a path into the world that was informed by adventure and great food, not necessarily in that order. I still remember a daily special that our cook created: mango and lightly grilled octopus served wrapped in udon noodles and nori, a bastard's version of sushi, and easily one of the top three things I've eaten in my life. That dish would never had been made if the cook hadn't said, "Fuck it, I've been reading about Bourdain in Japan."

One of my favourite things about Bourdain was that he ain't no snob. He insisted that international street food be taken seriously as a culinary tradition, which, for a guy who came up in relatively posh rooms, bucked the norm. He opposed the insistence that only French food could be serious, and, with his books and television shows, showed viewers at home the plethora of unfamiliar, weird, confusing, and downright unpalatable eating there was to be had. Some of it was stunt food, for sure, but a lot of it was just saying, "Hey, chuckleheads, get a load of this pho." I really believe that reading Bourdain in 2002, before moving to Toronto and before getting my feet wet with David Chang or Munchies, opened me up to what was out there. It taught me that you can eat basically anything, anywhere, and have it be meaningful.

Because Bourdain was passionate and erudite and raw and sexy, because he was well-traveled and a halfheartedly reformed drug addict and an accomplished cook, because he could write 3000 words on, basically, "I went for dinner at this place," he was a hero to a lot of us young food-minded folks. His space was unabashedly male—there were not a lot of women in his books, like, at all—but it was also about all the damage that he had inflicted on his body and his psyche, and that he had lived to tell about. He was a survivor, saying, "Hey, follow me. I made it. You might too."

In later years, I stayed away from his media presence, because I was worried that he was like an album I had listened to too much freshman year: would it hold up if I went back and spun it again? But I always loved encountering him in the wild. I read his articles in Lucky Peach. When his partner came out against Harvey Weinstein, Bourdain was there by her side. His support for her complicated his macho persona: it was her fight, and he was in her corner. It felt grown-up, to be there but not in the centre of the frame.

And then, of course, he died this morning. I wonder if those young punks who staffed that hole-in-the-wall had a bad time hearing about it. They followed a lot of his same path: drugs, disappearing into other jobs, running out of money or good luck before their thirtieth birthday. He was what winning looked like, what getting out alive could be. Suicide is a haunting thing—questions about what went wrong, and how, and why—and it's scary, because maybe you or me hold the seeds of it in our own imperfect little hearts. It seems like something we're powerless against, because we don't see the dark heart of it, creeping up and around and inside; we see the outside, where people fake feeling okay for one more day, until they don't.

I am so, so grateful to Anthony Bourdain for teaching me what it is to eat. Taking my time, considering my options. Treating highbrow like lowbrow and vice versa. To have a brotherhood of cooks, a community of people who look to food to answer questions: how am I creative? How do I express myself? What do I bring to this millennia-long conversation about how we nourish ourselves? To go in search of deliciousness in unexpected places, of adventure, of hope. Because that's what eating great food is, really: it's the hope that somewhere in the meal, you'll taste something you've truly never tasted before.

Things That Happened in 2017

2017, in a nutshell

January: Our kid turned one and Trump was installed, drywall-like, into the White House and we marched in the streets and we also got our eviction notice. January kind of set the tone in a lot of ways, y'know? The Women's March was good and made me feel like that anger and fear were put somewhere; I think it's telling that the year that started with the Women's March ended with #MeToo. I know I certainly did a lot of processing this year around feminism and what it means to be a woman in this world.

February: We went to a "play-in" at City Hall to protest the high price of child care in the city; I doubt the protest did much, but we got our picture in the paper and I felt a bit like I was trying to cash some of the cheques the Women's March wrote. NS and I went to the Beaver Valley while Mike stayed home to work, and we watched Abstract on Netflix and I thought about going back to school for design. We started house-hunting for a new place to live.

March: NS learned to walk the week that we packed up our place, and it felt like our life was falling into the ocean. We didn't have a new house lined up; we saw dozens that were somewhere on the continuum from "pretty nice" to "literal murder basement," and applied to a few, but nothing was rolling our way. I felt so manic and crazy at this point in the year. Our friends kept us afloat with food and wild-staring-eyes coffees, and I love them to the moon and back for this; but March 31 rolled around and we had no new house. The utter terror of being homeless with a toddler is difficult to put into words; it ripped our marriage up and made me yearn to flee the city into somewhere, anywhere, that felt like it wanted us. The big news story this month was how Toronto housing market was incandescent, and it really felt like we were among the victims of, like, a wildfire or a flash flood.

April: We moved into my in-laws place, where I spent a lot of the month being consumed with rage about how nice their house is (so nice!) and how shitty the apartments we could afford were (so shitty!). I took a lot of baths and went for a lot of walks. I visited my parents in Sauble Beach, where condors perched along the ridge of their barn roof.

May: We got a new place! Yay! Yay? We moved all out stuff in on May 1 and didn't actually move ourselves in until mid-month, because the amount of stuff we had was so much bigger than the amount of space. I was an absolutely rage-tyrant to my husband and there was a lot of blaming going on, which left a big boot print on an already tender relationship. I'm ashamed now of how much anger I allowed to intrude into our marriage. Our house continues to be too small for us, but I have several tiny corners that I've made my own, and sometimes daydream about the day we pack it all up for the Next New Thing. However, in May, we were still unpacking, and I was still absolutely engorged with shitbag feelings, and things were Not Very Good.

June: June was the month that our neighbour went berserk on a semi-regular basis, which was terrifying and sometimes hilarious (like when he got arrested wearing nothing but a pink towel), and which added cement to my hunch that our new address was terrible. Real talk: even though we felt safe (mostly, although I did have this recurring daymare about him trying to break into our apartment to rob it and discovering me alone with a baby), the reality of living next to someone who was a domestic abuser, drug addict, bungler of B&E attempts, and general filthy-mouthed nuisance, was a spiritual drag. Trying to decide if I should call the regular police line or 911 was a real fun time; listening to him scream and kick out windows was a real fun time; watching the cops pull up, again, was a real fun time. He left on July 1, and it sort of felt like the moment you christen a ship with champagne; except in our case, the bottle was full of asparagus pee.

July: DRAG RACE ON NETFLIX. Changed my life, seriously.

August: We house-sat for two weeks and visited my parents for two weeks, so it felt a lot like being on vacation. I learned how to give a dog eye drops. There was a partial eclipse. I threw my best friend a surprise bachelorette (with a lot of input and assists from friends near and far). There was racial upheaval in the USA. I made jam for the first time. I read The Argonauts. We talked a lot about Game of Thrones. August felt like a patchwork month, stitched together out of nothing much. Being in transition between places felt almost normal, except that the homes we were in weren't our home.

September: We celebrated three years of marriage by going to Momofuku and falling in love with it. (Ginger Scallion Noodles, hello). We also went to the Drake Commissary and for fancy gelato, and slept in, and frankly, I think that date saved us a little. It feels like it's been a tough, low-connection year, and sometimes a little splurge can be a real balm. I said to someone not that long ago that sometimes, I just want to feel expensive. You know? Like, all my clothes are bought new and not from Costco and my skin looks like it has Sephora lotions slathered on it, and I feel like I have the means to care for myself in a thoughtful way? Like that. So a date devoted to just the two of us, where money wasn't really an issue, felt like such a GD luxury.

October: I went through this really intense two-week period of wanting to move to Port Elgin and open a noodle shop. I even wrote a business plan. On the other side of those two weeks I came to understand that I have no real idea what I'm doing, and for now, because of various factors, we're tethered to Toronto. This is a not-very-affirming drag. But on Halloween, NS sat in a fire truck and we still talk about it.

November: Work ramped up to a degree where I basically skipped my birthday this year. But! We went to the Beaver Valley and started learning how to play Dungeons and Dragons, and man, that was fun. I had a bit of a meltdown due to proximity to some expired friendships, and I'm trying to figure out what to do with those feelings—I don't feel like reconciliation is the right move, but neither is trying to stuff my emotions down a well. And I don't really know what the middle ground is! Mainly I'm trying to come to terms with the idea that other folks—who I used to know and love!—think of me as a villain. And trying to figure out if I can sit in that comfortably, or if there's anything to be done. ANYWAY, FEELINGS, GOD. Sometimes, I'm so grateful for the billion hours of therapy I've had since I was 18; I would be even more of a basket case without them. As it stands, my basket is roughly $400-corporate-gift-sized, which, like me, is filled with expensive jams.

December: I did a bunch of work for a new client. I felt rather competent in my job, which was a terrific feeling. We watched Moana on the daily, and I felt rather less competent as a parent, but hey—this is a bit of a fallow season when it comes to maternal energy. Winter is really tough with a toddler; the snowsuiting alone crushes my soul, and that's before I even have to haul an ice-covered stroller up a flight of stairs, negotiate mittens, figure out snacks, try to pick a destination that will kill a morning but preferably doesn't involve de-/re-snowsuiting, find a TTC route that doesn't involve passing through Bloor-Yonge Station, and so on. Also, I have a terrible cough!

And, of course, this little month-by-month roundup doesn't really capture how bonkers this year was. Being evicted is one of those life-defining moments that made me realize that I wanted to change my life. I no longer felt safe, like the world was my oyster, like anything was possible. It was the same feeling that intruded after my sister was sick, after my dad's surgery, after NS's birth. I wanted to retreat, redesign, recalibrate, realign. I wanted to feel like the universe might care about our little family; and if not the universe, at least the GTHA housing market. But alas, the signs don't point in that direction.

But it also doesn't capture some of the sweetest parts of the year. I deepened my friendship with my mom-friend bestie through weekly bagel dates and playground hangouts; I watched NS transform from baby to walking, talking toddler; I spent many hours with my sister watching Flight of the Conchords and talking about relationships; I spent most Tuesday mornings with my husband, chatting in "our" coffeeshop; I texted my mom a thousand times; I got to see my dad bloom back into health; I read the New Yorker every week; I helped friends move; friends helped us. Even if the universe is like [shrug emoji] at our everyday life, there are people in our world who care very much; they were the sustenance of 2017.

Fall Sweater Horoscope

 ARIES: You're in a song-lyric phases, aren't you? One of those seasons when every song on the radio is about you, exposing your secret heart, no matter if it's Leonard Cohen or Justin Bieber. When all you want to do is drive somewhere alone, belting out songs at the top of your lungs, palming away tears or letting out those primal yips and howls that threaten to erupt morning to night. You know what, Aries? Do it. Get in your car and turn up the Top 40 and borrow the words to feel your feelings.
Recommended sweater: cardigan

GEMINI: The world needs more queeroes. We need more drag stars, more lipstick femmes, more dirty knees and torn fishnets. We need more rock stars who fuck their fans, more trans liberators, more random acts of affection between friends. We need less toxic masculinity and emotional labour. We need more glitter and more tenderness, more butch bears and more leather. We need the fringes, because that's where things really start to sway. Do you have enough fringe in your closet, Gemini?
Recommended sweater: crop turtleneck

TAURUS: You always make me think of muscle cars! To me, Taurus is the most macho sign in the zodiac, a real emblem of butchness and posturing. I think of Brando in his silly hat. I think of McQueen from Cars. I think of cigarettes dangling from the edges of lips, scraped knuckles, whiskey straight and slammed back. Anyway, this is all to say: don't be a cartoon version of a person, a paper-doll outline of a 1950s detective, or a 1980s Aquanet secretary or a 2017 Tumblr gender nerd. Give yourself dimension and shadow. Don't pose.
Recommended sweater: fisherman

CANCER: I read an interview with Rashida Jones recently, where she talked about the difference between feminism (the goal of lifting up women within a patriarchal capitalist society) and the feminine. And I was like, "YEAH!" but then I realized I didn't really know where to go from there. I love being feminine, and being queerishly femme—interrogating what it is to be female in relation to both men and other women, in both a capitalist system and edging outside it. Cancers have a great gift for empathy; your goal this fall should be to channel that intuition into channels where the waters are murky.
Recommended sweater: angora waist-warmer

LEO: Tap into your feline side this fall and stop working so hard. Cats sleep like ten thousand hours a year (Ed: not true?), and they also give zero fucks about other people's feelings (Ed: confirmed), so maybe it's time for you start gazing out the window in a tawny, "ask me again about the Edson file, Carl, I DARE YOU" manner, and then slowly pick the steak out of your teeth with a credit card before falling asleep at your desk. And if your current job doesn't allow for this, pivot until you find one that does.
Recommended sweater: sweatshirt with a cat's face on it

VIRGO: Last month, The Knife released their Live at Terminal 5 concert video, rife with weird instruments and highly choreographed dance routines. It's unclear, from watching the video, who exactly is in the brother-sister duo of the The Knife and who's doing support; the idea is that everyone would meld together into one cohesive entity. No backup singers, no stars. The world could stand a little less hierarchy, which makes me ask: are you upholding these less-awesome power structures, Virgo? Do you share your limelight?
Recommended sweater: sparklegoth capelet

LIBRA: Every time I think about Libras, I think of candles and altars, animal skulls and feathers. I think of my old friend the Libra, who had the most beautiful green eyes and who smoked like a chimney. I think of broken hearts and velvet ribbons—tactile gifts we give ourselves to heal and mend, to remind ourselves of old wounds. I think of how hard it is to be kind to those who have hurt us, and how fucking important is it that we try anyway.
Recommended sweater: Pendleton blanket wrapped just so

SCORPIO: Did you know that scar tissue is sticky? It binds together layers of our bodies—skin, the underlying muscles and fats, fascia and organs—into a mess of connection. This connection, which isn't really how our bodies want to work, causes pain and other side effects. Physiotherapists recommend scar massage, a process of poking and prodding these over-enmeshed areas to loosen the connections and work towards better health. It's a metaphor, Scorpio: don't let yourself become too connected, too enmeshed. Keep some layers in your life.
Recommended sweater: Fair Isle

SAGITTARIUS: Can we talk about Winona Ryder in Stranger Things? Can we talk about how affirming it is that this messy, shaky, edgy, unbelieved character—who is so yelly and jittery for most of the show—is, by the final episode, whispering soothing salvations into our heroine's ear? And can we talk about how mothers have it so hard? To be jittery and jumpy is antithetical to the Earth Mama ethos; it's off-putting and not calming. But there she is, doing her mom job, despite being a total mess, and it made me feel SO MUCH BETTER about all the times I feel like my blood has been replace with carbonated iced coffee and I still manage to pull it together for my kid. It's possible. Thanks, Winona. I needed that.
Recommended sweater: v-neck cashmere blend

CAPRICORN: A short list of things I don't understand: why men get all the props in modern art; how I'm supposed to feel about Yayoi Kasura's infinite rooms (claustrophobic? agoraphobic? both?); how people who live in Toronto afford international vacations; what is included in an all-inclusive resort; how transfers work with TTC Presto cards; how vaping is "not smoking"; why I'm so puffy all the time. A quick Google search could probably clear about half of these, but I kind of like living with a little bit of mystery in my life. How comfortable are you with the unknown, Capricorn? Do you fight the compulsion to know every answer?
Recommended sweater: the one your ex left at your house two years ago

AQUARIUS: I've been thinking about manifestos a lot lately. What's the difference between a manifesto, and say, an artist's statement? A list of demands? An explanation? A poem? A manifesto feels to me both grandly self-indulgent and the act of carving out space in the cosmos, claiming space, demanding to be counted. For women and femmes, this act is not self-indulgent at all, but a moment of violence against the status quo. You may not be a woman or a femme, Aquarius, but I hope you count them as part of you allies and your inner circle. Read their manifestos. Stitch them on a flag and fly them from your rooftop.
Recommended sweater: oversized cotton blend with holes at the hem and the thumbs

PISCES: Many years ago, I went out for Nuit Blanche and ended up at OCAD very early in the morning. Wandering the pillars of the school, I came across their student exhibits—paintings, drawings, and a curious section devoted to the "curatorial" students. One corner was heaped with images of the Virgin Mary: candles, paintings, icons, sculptures, mannequins dressed in blue, so on and so on. I remember feeling a bit affronted, because, to me, curation has less to do with whole-hog collecting and more to do with editing: the careful inclusion of what matters, and fuck the rest. But maybe I'm wrong, my fishy friend. Maybe it's not about what gets put in, but what gets left out. After all, you can't have everything. Where would you put it?
Recommended sweater: cable-knit

Lucky Peach (Or: How I Learned To Be Myself and Eat)

Back when I was eighteen and becoming myself, I got a job at a Cool Restaurant. Or, what passes for a Cool Restaurant in a small town, and to a teenager, and to a person who has mostly read about Cool Things rather than experiencing them in person. It was a watershed moment, a summer of hangovers and weird sex, secret cigarettes and making five hundred tax-free dollars a week with no real expenses other than magazines and fun clothes. It was the last hurrah of high school and the first wobbly steps into adulthood, a summer where a Cool Job meant getting invited places I had no business going, and being too emotionally uncoordinated to know I didn't belong. 

It was a hole-in-the-wall joint that served eight or so dishes, not including daily specials, all of Asian extraction, cooked and served by white people who had read Hot Sour Salty Sweet and who were offering a bit of that Thai/Vietnamese/Japanese profile in our small Ontario town. When I say it was small, I meant it: six tables of two outside on the sidewalk, bar seating for six more inside. The walls were orange and green, the bathrooms decorated with a former server's photos from a trip through Southeast Asia. There was a big bottle of fermenting kimchi on the counter; in my protozoan foodie state, I avoided it assiduously. I waited tables, made smoothies, peeled carrots for fresh juices, ran the dishwasher, took takeout orders, and handled money. It wasn't my first job, but it was the first where I made real bank, where I could wear whatever I wanted, where I could name-drop it and people would say, I love that place!

Working at a Cool Restaurant had its perks. I was able to keep tabs on some of the most exciting boys from high school, who otherwise would have been distant figures at basement shows, house parties to which I was only peripherally invited, and 'zine launches. I started talking to adult men—the ones who worked in the kitchen and who dated the other late-teen and early-twenties girls who worked with me—and discovered that they were fuck-ups, nice guys, and destroying angels. They were more assured of themselves than the guys I had gone to school with, more confident in their opinions, but still underneath it all, they were the same basic animal as the boys I already knew. One wore wool socks and Chelsea boots and soft twill cargo shorts and cooked with his flames spiking to the ceiling; one listened to punk music and work black baseball caps and was kind and unbelievably handsome; one was skinny and slithery and funny and mean. They all invited their friends to come visit them at work, so there was a hall of mirrors of guys like them, but a little different. I don't know if I was too awkward, too young, or not pretty enough—all three might be true—but I was able to eavesdrop while they drank beer and listened to hip-hop music and scrubbed the grill, and I mopped the floor and cha-chinged the final count of sales. On a good day, fifteen years ago, we could move a thousand bucks worth of noodles in a night, and everyone would get a Tiger beer on the house.

My boss lent me his copy of Kitchen Confidential. I read it, and understood that the fuck-you spirit of Anthony Bourdain skittered off the page into everything those guys did. My small town has a prestigious cooking school; we have more than our fair share of swish restaurants and mid-20s guys who know about mother sauces and who wear foam shoes and drink too much. There is romance in cooking—at least, there is if you're a man, not some schlumpy home-cook woman—and what Bourdain taught me was that there's a yang to that yin. Cooking school dropouts and self-styled renegades can open restaurants too. With his travel book, A Cook's Tour, I learned that everywhere has a Cool Restaurant, but sometimes it's a better choice to eat in the shitty-looking diner, or the ma-and-pa pho joint, or the restaurant in the city's revolving tower. Cool can be on the move. Cool can be Formica tables and chipped bowls, or perfect soft-and-crunchy salad rolls from some unassuming local chain, or the fucking "sharing plates" at the hip new place in town. (Side note: a pox on sharing plates. Just serve me an appetizer or a main, not some five-bite platter that satisfies nothing and no one.)

Since moving to the big city fifteen years ago,  I've eaten in a number of nice restaurants and a bunch of Cool Restaurants, and they've ranged from fine to outstanding. But there's a certain punk spirit that's MIA, a middle finger that's quietly folded down. I think it has to do with where your weird comes from.

In a city, you can tap into a vein of weirdness, no matter what weirdness you're after. Get yourself to the right city, and you can find your people: goth sparklebunnies, jockey standup comedians, gay ballerinos, anarchotrans youth, whatever. Activists, artists, cooks, writers, musicians, fashionistas—the subcultures that make a city pennies compared to, say, its banking sector, but that indelibly flavour a place's broth. In a city, it's simmering along, ready for folks to find it. In a small town, you have to cook that scene up from scratch. You have to fill in some blanks—read about it and then muddle your way through a DIY version, watch a video on the internet, make do with whatever weirdos and losers you find along the way. You learn it from cookbooks, from travelogues, from homemade darkrooms, from crystalline tarot-card hippie girls, from drug dealers, from the nerds in your class who have taught themselves how to clone a Moog on their laptop, the beautiful girls who are comfortable with muse status, the sneaky ones who eavesdrop and write about it fifteen years later.

All of this is to say that when I found out that Lucky Peach, the culinary magazine, was closing down, I got to thinking about Cool Jobs in Cool Restaurants and how much that particular Cool Job impressed on me about food. I ration each issue of Lucky Peach; if I don't, I'm overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content (fuck, there are so many words in each issue!), and I'm overwhelmed by so many foodie feelings. I don't cook for a living—I never have, and I probably never will—but I like thinking about food. Lucky Peach takes food seriously, but also makes fun of it a little. They give the recipes but also the stories: inspirations, context, emotion. The magazine gives the strip-mall restaurant, the home cook, and the Cool Job place equal credit: good food can come from anywhere, be anything.

Food, along with fashion, is, I think, one of the great self-definers we can make for ourselves. The type of food we get nostalgic for, that we challenge ourselves with, that we reach for in moments of celebration or grief, the type of food we travel around the world to eat? There are a million ways food defines a life—the feeling of being in your parent's kitchen late at night, the food you ate at your wedding, the first meal after you gave birth, the only things that tasted good to your dying mother, the restaurant where your partner proposed, the snacks you pack in your carry-on luggage, the things you drank on patios in your twenties and in your sixties, the things you taught yourself how to cook, the flavours you love, the things you hate, the millions of bites that you took over a lifetime—it's all just as much who you are as your job or your clothes, your family or your hometown.

I have no idea where any of the folks who worked with me are now. I have heard that one went to prison and then rehab; I have heard that one married the owner of the local sex shop; I have heard that one went on tour with his band (and I have a vague memory of running into him at a sweaty basement punk show not so long ago). I don't know if any of them remember me—I doubt it, there was a rotating cast of pretty, mouthy young things behind the counter, and I was neither the mouthiest or the prettiest. I grew up with parents who had traveled extensively in Asia, and who could cook tonkatsu at home, or roll up maki on a Saturday night. I grew up with the same food as my Cool Job served, and then I got to serve it myself, and now when I'm nostalgic for that summer, or my childhood, or myself, I eat that food. I miss those weirdos, and my old, half-formed self, and the feeling of possibility that comes from the unending summer, the unopened magazine, the freshly cooked plate. I hope something comes up to replace Lucky Peach; we need that awestruck, educated, madly-in-love approach to food, refreshed quarterly.

Evicted

Evicted is getting a hand-written form under your door, unsurprisingly because your superintendent told you it was coming, but reading the crumpled pages for clues for what your life will be like now. Evicted is cinderblock walls and freight elevators up to a storage unit that is four degree Celsius, we're all shivering in April as we load in box after box after box. Evicted is passing your upstairs neighbour without saying hello, because they get to stay in their home and you're out like last night's pizza box. Evicted is wondering if there was anything you can go, how much fight you can fight, that little brainworm that wonders if this, despite paying your rent on time and never blasting your music and being generally pleasant, is somehow your fault. Evicted is house-hunting in a city with a 1.4% vacancy rate, where the average rent went up by $300 in 2016, where we've applied for three houses and gotten none of them. 

Evicted is also walking through your apartment, the apartment that was your son's first home, where he learned to eat and sit up and crawl and say his first words, where your husband would snuggle with a sleeping newborn while he watched horror movies and you slept, where there were dozens of sink baths and the baby's first Halloween, his first Christmas, his birth day and his first birthday, where you laboured in the shower and in the living room and over two interminable nights, where you meet this person who is now in your bloodstream, and evicted is weeping because you have to close the door on those spaces and never see them again.

Evicted is fighting with your husband because we don't know where to go, where to live, how to live, and because there is no union in your wants, there is wanting in your union. Evicted is dancing in your mother-in-law's kitchen, swinging the baby over your head with a smile on your face and then bursting into tears as you spin him low, because while her house is beautiful, it's not your home. Evicted is resenting her beige walls, not because they're beige, but because you don't have any walls of your own.

Evicted is grief, the loss of a home, a house, an address. Evicted is suspending magazine subscriptions and using your in-laws as a mailing address. It's suitcases on the floor, lined up and lids neatly flipped down so things look tidy. It's a milk crate that doubles as a bedside table, and a pile of things—books, cards, an iPod, a jar full of markers—that make you feel safe. Evicted is not knowing where you packed the library books.

Evicted is anger, rage, frustration, hopelessness. It's low morale and wild mood swings. It's spending rent money on things that might make you feel okay, because when you're staying with your in-laws, you don't have to pay rent, so it feels like there's some windfall. Evicted is thinking about ways to pay them back for a month (maybe more, hold your breath) of free lodgings. Evicted is hearing the baby cry in the middle of the night and getting out of bed as fast as you can, because you don't want to disturb everyone's sleep. It's whisper-fighting, it's long silences, it's sleeping on opposite sides of your double mattress. It's undereye bags and eye twitches. It's long walks to get out of the house. It's cooking in someone else's kitchen, keeping everything so clean, so neat, please don't notice we're here, please don't be mad at the space we're taking up.

Evicted is an unexpected rush of shame, of embarrassment. It's another thing in a line of things—sick parents, bad births—that make you wonder, "Is this a bad time, or do I have a bad life?" It's wondering if you have done something to deserve this, and if so, how to reverse it. It's trying to remember if you've stolen stones from scared burial grounds, and if so, which ones. It's thinking about how you will talk to your son about why you had to leave his first home. It's being blessed that people took us—him—in. It's an emotion so loud and unshaped, roaring and buffeting the inside of your head, that it deafens you everything else, joy especially. It is trying to figure out how this story ends, and not having an answer.

Evicted is more than storage units, more than boxes, more than crashing at the in-laws, more than moving. It is fear. It is heartbreak. It is rage.

Where We're At

My life is basically on fire right now: between 24/7 childcare duties, part-time work that is just a weensy bit unboundaried, being evicted, househunting, the snowstorm, a baby who is learning how to walk/unlearning how to sleep, and also the general day-to-day grind of it being almost, but not quite, the end of winter...I am tired. I think I'm actually doing okay, emotionally, right now, but I'm also looking forward to having my midlife crisis/breakdown sometime in the next 18 months. Once we get unpacked, of course.

Anyway, because this blog is my neglected friend who still loves me despite the fact that I never call and never write, and when I do show I'm all disheveled and distracted, I'm here to write a very haphazard list of things that are sustaining me, or non-mom things I'm thinking about, through this tire-fire of a financial quarter.

1. Soma chocolate. I keep some gingerbread toffee from Christmastime beside my bed, and every now and then I remember it's there, and I eat two glorious bites. (Don't be fooled into thinking I'm some sort of chocolate aesthete, though. I mainline a Cadbury's bar every other day. "Why can't I lose this baby weight?" It's a mystery, truly.)

2. The New Yorker. My ability to read any kind of book is basically nonexistent right now, so I lean heavily on The New Yorker to make me feel smart. Their arts writing in particular is such a luscious, nourishing slice of heaven—last year's profile of Michael Heizer, the recent profile of Catherine Opie, even the interview with Jack White (in which he talks about the talismanic power of three in his creative practice); all are helping me stumble forward in my own self-conception as an artist. I realize that this sounds self-indulgent at best and insane at worst, but after a decade of saying "I want my spaces to look this way, I want my clothes to tell this story," I'm starting to realize that I can recast all that as being in service to a larger through-line in life, and that feels pretty delicious.

3. I'm currently running a March Madness-style poll on my Facebook page, in which I attempt to goad my friends into narrowing a list of 32 films down into the Ultimate Feel-Good Movie. It's so much fun.

4. The third Baby Dance Party is coming up this weekend, and I'm getting a new phone from my earnings. Lord knows I've made my poor Galaxy Nexus suffer long enough. I will miss you, little friend. Remember that one time someone posted a picture of a spider on Twitter and it scared me so bad I dropped you on the bathroom floor and cracked your poor screen? And instead of replacing it or feeling bad, I then just thought of it as being "a reason not to take my phone if I got mugged"? That was very silly. Also, your camera was terrible.

5. I am feeling all these feelings about my body, which is basically: Okay, now I am a fat mom, so what am I going to to about it? Because right now, in this season of my life, I don't have the time or the space to work out. Normally, I exercise at home, but it's hard to do on a hardwood floor that creaks like a fucking horror movie all day long, because just breathing weird from two rooms over will wake this baby up, so forget about a floor that makes it sound like a pile of lumber falling off the side of a boat. And the snow and the cold make it very unappealing to do long summer-style walks. And I eat chocolate all the time. And muffins. And brownies. And I'm not exactly mad at it, but I am just very aware that the longer this shape and weight lingers, the tougher it will be to dispense of it. And I'm just so body-tired all the time. My back hurts. My wrists hurt. I am not in dance- or yoga-shape. I am unbendy. It's shitty, because two years ago I was in the best damn shape of my entire life, and I knew it, but I took it for granted. I can get it back. And now? I am...not. And I can't figure out which reserves to draw from to make the changes, because it feels like all my reserves are tapped.

6. Building on #2, Abstract, on Netflix, has been so inspiring and cool. I love how confident all these designers are; like, they show up, and they do their jobs—well, because they're at the top of their game—and they're pretty humble but not falsely so, and the stories that they tell are just astounding. I need a push, a change, a new direction. I love being a mom and being a writer, but I want to change the shape of the world. So: How?

Things That Happened in 2016

January: The big news this year was the birth of Noah Stanley Kochany Cinovskis, baby extraordinaire. He arrived at the top of 2016, January 25, six days late and after three days of fuckin' back labour that had me seriously questioning how many kids I want ("zero" no longer being an available number). I had an emergency C-section. I didn't poop for a week. The baby had trouble latching but we got him fed. It was cold but not insanely cold. So: solid B, overall.

The other big thing has been my father's recovery from his brain tumour, a metastatic melanoma that reared up three days before last Christmas. He had emergency brain surgery at the tail end of last year. The day before our baby was born, my dad started radiation therapy. My sister moved back to Ontario, quitting her job in Calgary to be here. M and I were useless and distracted with the final weeks of my pregnancy and Noah's birth. Also! David Bowie died.

In January, everything felt edgy and extremely emotional, which is basically the theme of 2016: Edgy and Extremely Emotional (E&EE).

February: I spend a lot of time thinking about moving to the forest and starting a commune. Every time I close my eyes, I'm picturing tiny houses, ringed at the edge of a field, each with a nook to sleep and a place to park a laptop, where the membrane between inside and outside is thin. This is the first time I think seriously about leaving Toronto, and the idea, in various permutations and executions, will be a motif for me this entire year. I feel so depleted, and the idea of recharging in this city seems totally impossible.

March: My parents housesit in Etobicoke and we spend a bunch of time in their white-leather living room, wondering who, exactly, decorated this house. I take the baby to the One of a Kind show and it's like going out with the Beatles in 1964. Women are elbowing each other out of the way to fawn over him. I leave with a dozen butter tarts and a newfound appreciation for personal space. I do a workout for the first time since NS was born and cry because my body feels so irrevocably unsame.

April: The days are all of the same: we sleep, sort of; we walk a lot; we eat a lot; we try to get the baby to sleep. Buds appear on trees and our jackets stay in our closets, but it feels like time out of time. Looking back at the spring, it feels like something we survived. New moms on Instagram who are seeing other people's beautiful babies and weirdly flat stomachs and fun brunches, while you have a screaming infant who doesn't sleep and who just pooped on your last clean pair of sweatpants? Take heart, you are not alone in feeling like you were sold a bill of goods. This is a tough era, the first three months. I kind of can't believe we got through it.

May: I launch The Stroller Derby, which is where I've been writing for most of the year. It's fun to have a different outlet—my mom voice, which is different from my Hipsters voice—but I also miss writing this blog, too. This year's creative output has been...compromised, shall we say.

June: Mike goes back to work. It's weird and hard to be alone with Noah all day, but it's also fun and easy, in other ways. His sleep is all over the place. Naps take so much energy to make happen that by the time Mike gets home from work, I am spent. He's also spent, because night sleep isn't much better. I miss him, but I'm also glad to have my alone time again—only now, they're snatched moments instead of hours. I spend a lot of time walking Noah in the stroller.

July: Sleep deprivation. Hard. Worse than anything. There's a moment where I go into Noah's room for the third—fourth? fifth?—time that night, and a tree taps gently on his window, and I am convinced and terrified that it's a murderer. I have panic attacks. I'm seeing things out of the corners of my eyes: a backpack in the corner transforms into a severed head. I feel utterly broken. Ultimately, we sleep train Noah, because we have to: I am really losing my mind. I feel so upset about this, though. I wanted so desperately to give him everything, to never hold myself back. But I can't give him my sanity, because he needs me to have it. I feel lonely and like my mom friends with judge me, so I get weirdly evangelical about the benefits, even if it's just to my husband and neighbour, both of whom sleep trained, too. This feels like such a dark time of the year.

August: I spend a week in Stratford, saying a slow goodbye to the place my parents lived for almost twenty years. It is time to sell that house. Five bedrooms is a lot of bedrooms for a family of two, but my siblings and I have a tendency to rotate home every now and then, and it feels sad to lose this huge house, surrounded by trees and friendly neighbours, in a small town studded with coffee shops and nice little bistros. Even though I haven't lived there in years, my parents' move feels like a real loss to me. I spend a few weeks obsessing about moving to a small town, walking the trails, working in a little shop or at a relaxed firm.

September: I start group therapy at Mt. Sinai, because my post-natal anxiety was pretty heinous. It was kind of a big shrug, if I'm honest, but it was nice to feel supported, and like I wasn't alone. Mental health issues have always been a rough area for me, but since my 20s I've been getting better at insisting on help, and refusing to feel any shame for needing it. Anyway, this was more of that.

October: We dress up like witches for Halloween and hit two separate kid parties. It feels very parental. I do some heavy emotional work with a friend with whom my relationship hit the skids right before NS was born, and it feels so hard that about seven different times I feel like saying. "Fuck it, let's not be friends any more!" but that's not the right answer. After a lot of emailing and some in-person talks, we feel more settled, but holy mother, that was hard.

November: I threw my first event, a dance party for parents and babies. I rented out Buddies in Bad Times, sold tickets, made a playlist...all the things you do when you're throwing an party. This was a prime example of "fake it 'til you make it," because I didn't even really think that hard about what I was doing; I knew if I did, I would start to second-guess myself and get imposter syndrome. So I just kind of did it. And you know what? It was awesome. I got some critiques (about hours, how to make the event friendlier to queer families, about the music), but I also got great feedback from parents who were like, "THANK YOU, I just wanted to go dancing one more time before my children graduate middle school." Also, Donald Trump won the 2016 American election, and everyone started barfing and panicking and have not stopped.

December: We host Christmas dinner. We fight a lot. We make up. We buy each other cookies. We let each other sleep in. We drink tea. We play Peggle. The baby gets his first cold. I make resolutions. I look at the baby while he nurses, half-dreaming, and I cannot even begin to tell you about all the different ways my life—my heart—has exploded and shimmered and ended and begun this past year.