A new ongoing project You Know What I Love is a week-ishly testament to something I love in my nearby surroundings. It’s an ongoing love letter to my beloveds afar, and the world outside my brain. An expanded gratitude list. Preventative medicine against forgetting how much I love my life just as it is. An action against lack-based advertising. A self-portrait in a menagerie of fondnesses.
One of my favorite things about falling in love- romantically or through friendship, is learning to like things you hate, or appreciate the world from your beloveds perspective- learning how to see or find love in places that wouldn’t normally come easily or quickly for you. I often don’t love many the things my beloveds do (the color orange, action movies, Mariah Carey), but I love better understanding them, or making room for them in my life because of proximal insight. I like that internal breaking feeling when aversion or indifference shifts to curiosity.
So to help myself see better, to remember, to teach myself where love lies, this is
You Know What I Love.
Mostly the subject of You Know What I Love will be from my neighborhood, with extended scope for travel or special occasions. What Hannibal Lecter says, he claims he got it from the bible, “we learn to covet first that which we see every day” has stuck with me since I heard it first as a middle-schooler. I want to learn to love (I’m already super-skilled at coveting) that which I see every day, and realize my love for my immediate surroundings. To experiment with focus and attention. To practice love I can reach out and touch. And to share it with you.
You Know What I Love, #1
Pastries, particularly chocolate, from Tartine bakery.
When it rained for two months straight the winter that was the beginning of ‘06 and I was walking around dazed and changed- newly sober, in what I call my “Invisible Toddler” persona, giant baggy hoody, similar pants, baseball cap and hiding, trying to figure out what to do with myself I started a trick to get myself to get up in the morning and go out in the rain to yoga class. The trick was Tartine on the way back.
Triple birthday breakfasts for all the wonderful women I love born on June 16th, chocolate pudding licked off bare breasts, first wooings of the best Craigs List score ever with frequent text invitations to sugar, and the ultimate period craving satisfaction. It makes me high, even just the refined smell of the sugar inside the shop, the unfailing line to build anticipation, the saliva seeping while I crane my neck, and oh the variegated beauties behind the counter, a romance in every transaction, a blissful future unfolding with each spoonful.
tres leches cake, coconut cream tarts, banana cream tarts, lemon tarts, dark chocolate cake, chocolate mousse cake, opera cake, eclairs and the famous chocolate pudding
