I can hardly believe it, but it’s been two years since Devin and I got married!
This whole thing started when I walked into the cafeteria and thought, “Who is that cute boy. And how have I not seen him before?” That was ages ago, but sometimes when I see Devin across a crowded room I still think, “Woah. Who is that?”
I think it’s because I never wear my glasses.
Happy anniversary, Devin! Here’s to two (hundred) more.
When Devin and I decided we were moving away, we also had some ideas about how to spend the summer. We could stay in New York and pay rent or we could sublet our apartment and use the money to visit family and friends instead.
This summer seemed like a particularly good time to do the latter because pretty much everyone we know is either getting married or having babies right now, and who wants to choose which wedding to skip and which babies not to smoosh? I mean, not to be too dramatic, but that’s like the Sophie’s choice of social calendars.
So we packed our bags and boarded a westbound train at Penn Station. (A train? Why a train?) I’m glad you asked! Trains produce half the carbon emissions that airplanes do, so going by train is a more environmentally friendly way to travel. And the views are not bad either.
Here are some photos I took on the first leg of our journey to California from the New York island.
Have I mentioned we’re moving? We are, to Madison, Wisconsin, where Devin will do a Ph.D. and I will do a T.B.D. ; )
Today was my last day of work in New York. Usually the office has a great view of the skyline, but today the view was blocked by heavy clouds, like a curtain falling at the end of a play.
The other day we woke up early and had breakfast on The High Line, overlooking a bright mural.
I’ve been feeling pretty weird about sharing this recipe because I used collard greens, which have traditionally been used in African-American cuisine and have recently been aggressively marketed by Whole Foods in hopes of making them trendy and driving up the price. (Writer/feminist/activist Mikki Kendall aptly calls this “food gentrification.”)
So, before I tell you the recipe, I want to clarify that I am very much opposed to driving up prices and making fruits and vegetables even more inaccessible for low-income people and people of color around the world. The good news: you can use any kind of sturdy green for this recipe. I used collard greens because that’s what was sent in our local-food package that week, but I think lettuce or chard would be even more delicious!
The key thing for me is to eat as much fresh food as I can (it tastes better than canned or frozen stuff) and learn how to cook with what I have. Instead of buying into food trends, I think we should consider what’s best for our planet and our communities––if that seems hard to figure out, just buy what’s cheapest!
Summer Wraps
To make these wraps, you’ll need
• greens with big leaves (like chard, collard greens, or lettuce)
• meaty filling (like tempeh, tofu, or meat)
• assorted vegetables for topping (like caramelized onions, baby greens, and carrots)
• readymade barbecue sauce (OR ketchup, vinegar, maple syrup, and chipotle powder)
1.If you’re using lettuce, skip this step! If you’re using a green like chard or collard greens, start by blanching them. That way they won’t be so tough to eat, and they’ll have time to cool before you’re ready to eat them. Blanching basically means dunking vegetables into boiling water for a few seconds, but this recipe has good instructions if you need a reference.
2. Devin makes fantastic caramelized onions, but they take a while to cook, so you’ll want to start these early in the process, too. Here’s a recipe for reference.
3. We usually make our own barbecue sauce because it’s so much cheaper, especially since we have an endless supply of maple syrup from Devin’s family farm, but store-bought is just as good. If you’ve never made it before, take note: barbecue sauce is ridiculously easy to make, but you do need a little time for it to cook down. (The more you make, the longer it takes.)
Combine
1 cup ketchup
¼ cup vinegar (I usually use apple cider vinegar)
3 tablespoons maple syrup (you could also use honey or another sweetener)
½ teaspoon chipotle powder, a.k.a. my secret ingredient (I use it in everything!)
…and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally until it’s nice and thick (around 15-20 minutes).
4. Cook your “meat” of choice. Devin and I cut tempeh into thin slices and cooked it in a skillet with a little bit of oil, flipping the pieces once to make sure they got crispy on both sides. It took less than 10 minutes.
5. Chop your other veggies pretty small so that you can fit them into the wrap easily. We had baby greens (they were microgreens, I think) and carrots, so all I did was wash the baby greens and shred the carrots using a vegetable peeler.
6. Put out all your ingredients on the table, and let everyone make their own wrap. Make sure not to fill it too much, and roll it like a burrito.
It’s all easy, and you could make everything ahead of time to take for a picnic.
Happy summer!
If you ever need a hype man for your blog, Devin is the dude for the job. I speak from personal experience.
See, one night I was walking down Broadway in SoHo when it started snowing lightly. I had just gone to the Westminster Dog Show Semi-Finals with two of my friends. We’d all worn ridiculous hats and seen A LOT of dogs.
I was having a private moment, thinking there’s nowhere else I’d rather be when this man appears out of nowhere and asks if he can give me a valentine. (I forgot to mention it was Valentine’s Day). I said sure, and guess what.
It wasn’t even creepy at all!
It had an encouraging message inside and a dog on the front. Yes, my friends, a DOG VALENTINE ON MY VALENTINE’S DAY OF DOGS! I could not make this stuff up and hope that if someone ever writes a biography of me they include this as an Important Life Moment. The valentine-giver didn’t include his email or Twitter or anything, so it wasn’t just a random act of kindness; it was a random act of kindness without self-promotion in the digital age (doesn’t that sound like a line from some hand-wringing think piece about how the internet has robbed us of our humanity?).
Anyway, that story actually has nothing to do with the matter at hand, except that it happened as I was walking to an ice cream shop to meet Devin. When I got there, I explained I was meeting someone before sitting quietly and looking out the window.
Then, in walks Devin. First, he asks a couple of questions about the chocolate milkshake. “I’m reviewing it for a blog,” he clarifies. Suddenly, the ice cream salesperson is falling all over herself to help us, giving us the owner’s phone number, calling headquarters to find out what kind of chocolate they use and if it’s fair trade. Things. Are. Happening.
Devin explains that he review shakes for my blog, and the attention shifts to me. “What’s it called?,” asks a girl from a small college in rural Pennsylvania.
“Smooth Liminal,” I answer, trying to channel Devin’s easy confidence.
“Oh! My friend reads that!”
I’m pretty sure “My friend reads your blog” is the 2015 equivalent of “Yeah, I loved their first album,” but I try to play it cool because hello, who doesn’t read my blog? ; )
Then, I stood a little taller and said yes when the salesperson offered to let me sample every flavor.
Last week, in solidarity with the #March2Justice, I abstained from public transit and spending money. (Learn more at http://www.march2justice.com).
I rode the subway again for the first time when my fast ended at midnight last night. It was rush-hour crowded, and I was stuck between a DJ making a new song at full volume on his laptop and two White women discussing break-ups (“I don’t think we’ll be friends again, but I think we’ll be friendly, you know?” “Totally.”) Then, this dude got on and started dancing along to the beats. I was like, How annoying! until I realized we were wearing the same shoes. And then, we got off at the same stop. We are neighbors. He could live in my building. We could have everything in common…
(I really missed the subway.)
This morning I got on the train and listened to a mom teach her daughters about empathy (“How would you feel if someone said something like that to you? Always think about that before you say something. You have to find a way to express your thoughts without being hurtful.”) and setting boundaries (“You teach people how to treat you. If somebody does something to you that you don’t like, you have to let them know it’s not OK, otherwise they’ll keep doing it.”)
To my left there was a dad holding up a laughing baby so the baby could hold on to the rail, and to my right was a high-school student doing his physics homework. At the next stop a woman got on wearing a shade of lipstick I’d never seen before (somehow pink, orange, and red all at once!).
As nice as it is to be aboveground in the spring, there is no place in New York more beautiful and perfect than the subway. And nobody can tell me otherwise.
Last fall, I had the opportunity to contribute to the first issue of Catcall, a new quarterly feminist zine. Writing this essay was very cathartic for me, so I asked if I could share it here, and it’s reprinted below. A warning: in the essay, I talk about my first experiences of sexual harassment, so you may want to skip reading this post.
“I don’t really get along with girls.”
When I was in high school, the coolest thing you could be was “one of the boys.”
“I don’t really get along with girls,” girls would brag nonchalantly.
I never knew how to respond to that. I would have been crushed if I mentioned that I was a girl and they admitted that they didn’t like me, so I stayed quiet. Sometimes I’d smile and nod like, “Yeah, boys are so much cooler” even though it wasn’t true in my life. All of my role models were women. I liked hanging out with my boy cousins, but apart from that, all my friends were girls. In my family, it was my grandmother and the aunts who took care of us and kept the family together.
I love my uncles, but it’s always been clear that, if not for my aunts, I might never see them. Their role at family events is primarily to show up, and I’ve never even thought of calling them in an emergency. My mom and my aunts on the other hand have nurtured my dreams and helped me in every facet of my life. I have cried with them my whole life, but I have never cried with my uncles.
“What’s wrong with girls?,” I wondered.
“Girls love drama” was another popular proverb at my high school. “Drama” could be anything from gossiping about friends, stealing boyfriends (whose agency seemed nonexistent in these scenarios), or crying because you didn’t get invited to your best friend’s birthday party.
It appeared the worst thing you could do was to express emotions in a feminine way; the opposite of that was being a boy, and if you couldn’t be that, the next best thing was to be “chill,” cool and unfazed.
I tried to be chill, and here is how it usually played out. I saw or experienced something upsetting, and instead of speaking out, I smiled and went along with it.
Example: a boy in my Speech class, says to my table, “Yo! Did you know they have boobs on Xanga?” Instead of protesting the situation or walking away, I sit and fake-laugh as they pull up a webpage on our class laptop and proceed to rank photos of disembodied breasts.
Another example: I’m waiting for my ride in the winter of ninth grade when a group of boys starts talking to me. One of them says I have big lips and probably “give good blowjobs.” I don’t know what that means, but I try to laugh like a good sport before shaking my head slightly. Even that slight refusal is met with derision. “I don’t want a blowjob from you, anyway,” he says. “Your lips are too chapped.”
Again I laugh with the boys.
When my ride arrives, an older couple who are family friends, they tease me about “flirting” with that boy and say that they waited a little bit to drive up because they didn’t want to interrupt.
I have so many questions. “Is flirting supposed to make you feel humiliated? What’s a blowjob? Why was any of that funny?,” but instead I blush silently.
Looking back, I realize that “chill” has been a silencing mechanism in my life. The opposite of being chill is caring, about anything—but especially things that challenge the status quo.
After all, the boys in my school also had “drama.” Messy break-ups, broken friendships, even fights that culminated in physical violence, but none of that seemed like a big deal. They were allowed to express their emotions in stereotypically masculine ways, and nobody expected them to be nice all the time.
As a person of color with tremendous White privilege, I’ve experienced racism from both ends. When people don’t realize I’m Mexican, they make jokes that are straight-up racist. When someone dares to speak up, the response is some variant of “Relax. Can’t you take a joke?” On the other hand, when people who know my identity want to tell a racist joke, they’ll wink in my direction as if to say, “You’re not a killjoy, are you? You’re cool like us.”
I don’t like being a killjoy, but being cool hurts.
Today, at its most basic, my feminism means doing gender and surviving a racist, capitalist society in a way that doesn’t hurt, and for me, that means not being chill. I don’t laugh at jokes that aren’t funny. I speak out against injustice when I have the strength and words to do so. I escape situations that make me feel unsafe.
When I first visited my college, a boy laughed at me when I asked if he’d been involved in any protests. “We don’t do that here,” he said smugly.
Four years later, I led a Take Back the Night march, the first in decades at my small liberal arts school. It hurt to walk past the cool boys laughing at us and smoking cigarettes outside the campus coffee shop. But it would have hurt more to stand with them.
Confession: aside from writing and thinking up ways to disrupt the social order, cooking is my biggest hobby. I was pretty annoyed with myself when I realized that because it’s not exactly exciting. At all. I wish I were a painter or a drummer or even an electric racecar driver, but I’m not. I’m not even a chef, just a home cook who gets excited when her Crockpot soup tastes good. Is that worth sharing? I kept thinking about it and came up with two things:
Q: First of all, how lame is it that my hobby is something women were forced to do for generations?
A: SO LAME. My grandmother would not be impressed.
Q: On the other hand, how cool is it that my hobby involves preparing something that is necessary for human survival, saves me money, and helps me keep my friends alive, too?
A: That sounds better. I have to cook, so I might as well enjoy it, and actually, Devin almost always cooks with (and without) me, so in our house cooking isn’t “womyn’s work,” it’s a shared chore and one of our favorite things to do together. (I know my grandmother would be happy about this because she once told me that she thought American men were a little more feminist than Mexican men because they weren’t afraid of the kitchen.)
All that to say, I’m going to start sharing my favorite recipes here! Devin and I almost never make the same things two weeks in a row because every week we get a package of whatever fruits and vegetables are in season from Nextdoorganics, so we often find or make up new recipes. And all the food we make is seasonal and vegetarian, which sounds fancy, but is really code for cheap! My hope is that the recipes will be helpful or inspiring to someone.
And now, without further ado, I present unto you…last week’s lunch.
Salad with Roasted Beets, Israeli Couscous, and Orange
First you’ll want to peel, chop, and roast the beets because that takes the longest. We peeled and chopped about 10 beets (you could use any amount) into half-inch pieces while we preheated the oven to 400° Fahrenheit. Then, we spread them out in a glass pan and tossed them with some olive oil and a little salt before putting them in the oven. We cooked them for about an hour, stirring occasionally. If you’re cooking fewer beets, they won’t take as long. The number-one tip for roasting vegetables is to cut everything roughly the same size and cook it in one layer so it all cooks evenly. You’ll know they’re done when you can easily poke them with a fork.
Next you’ll want to make the grain. Devin and I happened to have Israeli couscous in our kitchen, but you could use any grain. Israeli couscous is really easy to cook because it’s not actually couscous. It’s just little balls of pasta, so if you can cook spaghetti, you can make this.
2 3/4 cups broth or salted water
2 1/4 cups Israeli couscous
Bring water to a boil and then pour in the Israeli couscous. Turn down the heat and simmer uncovered (check it every 5 minutes until it’s the consistency that you like your pasta; it took me less than 15 minutes).
Chop or tear whatever lettuce or greens you want with your salad. We used a small head of leafy lettuce. Then, chop the orange into bite sized pieces. You could also use any fruit. I calculate one half of a fruit per person because I love having a lot of fruit in my salad.
Finally, toss it all with your dressing of choice. I adapted this pomegranate vinaigrette (leaving out the oil and mustard) because we happened to have pomegranate molasses, but balsamic vinaigrette would also be really good. I tossed the dressing with the beets when they came out of the oven and poured more on my salad right before eating it.
I packed up all the ingredients separately to prevent sogginess then took them to work the next day. Ta-dah! It’s an easy, cheap salad if you make it at home, but a New York restaurant would probably charge more than $10 for something similar.
Just a quick post to link to this essay on being misidentified as White: http://the-toast.net/2015/03/05/right-words-say/
It’s the most familiar thing I’ve read in a long, long time (possibly ever).
smoothliminal 
