#59// before love

a year of food, office, home

Dear Reader,

How are you? It is the month of love and I reckon you are swamped with romance reading lists? Not gonna lie. I had the exact same brilliant idea which disintegrated into this letter of things I loved that are not directly related to conventional love.

Read

I spent many hours last year, spilling onto this year, listening to the audiobook What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci, narrated by the author himself. I would listen while being in my small kitchen—peeling onions, cooking up a gravy, finely chopping garlic, increasingly frustrated with the chore, the lack of counter space, and everything wrong with my life, screaming when I drop something on the ground, occasionally muttering ‘I hate this’. In contrast, the book is a celebration of food. It is calming, stuffed with plates of food, and the love of friends and family who partake in Tucci’s culinary experiments. Joyful eating. Joyful cooking. Joy.

Tucci reads “…food is just there. A beautiful, varied thing waiting to bring satiety and solace and offer hope while death and arithmetic haunt me”. I paused to reflect. When he talks about his first wife who passed away, about the time shared in their shared home, I felt moved. When he jammed the narrative with a recitation of the menu, I got distracted. He talks about his parents and ‘Scandi stuff being the rage in sixties and seventies’. I thought about my parents and grandparents. The Scandi rage in our lives arrived when social media popularized #nordic as an aspirational interior in the 2000’s, and it’s mostly on the ‘gram or on the some-day-wishlist.

When Tucci announced that he wishes he was forty, for forty is the best age to be in, I laughed. I don’t know. Forties scare me, just like how the thought of thirties once did. He says forty is the age when you are mature (I thought only the twenties were the annoying, stupid years of our lives. Oh no!), and have more money. That makes sense, I thought to myself while whispering a silent manifestation for the future to at least present itself with more money, maturity-locked or not.

I enjoyed how I interacted with the book in that space between the life of the rich prominent personality that Tucci is, and my own life, much duller in comparison. I listened to him visiting fine restaurants that I might probably never visit, even as a tourist. I could feel his frustration when a salesman rang up his bell for donation when he was in the middle of barbecuing for a family meal. I laughed when he narrated his ordeal of forgetting to empty water bottles before security check at the airport and lamenting the loss of Yeti water bottles that might’ve ended in the trash, if his wife Felicity did not step up and drink the stale water (!) in front of the security personnel. I was amused because I own a Yeti too, a coffee mug that I do not love as much as Tucci loves his child’s water bottle, but finally, there is some common ground between our lives.

I stumbled on a social media post about how he keeps throwing jabs at Felicity in this book, after which I could not stop noticing it. It hadn’t caught my attention before that, if at all there were previous instances. It made Tucci feel like a teenager (hoping for his wife’s train to be delayed because she forgot how important his day was?), even cruel (“Felicity was out at a “retirement dinner.” I didn’t know sex clubs hosted those.”). I made a mental note to google what went wrong between them but I soon forgot about it, and when I remembered, I didn’t want to know. But I googled his line of pans and read about people’s opinions of the cookware written through anon handles on the internet.

When private, bitter thoughts seek into pages made public, it makes you a little uncomfortable. But very little of other events, be it why a dish disappointed him or what he talked with (famous) friends over food, make the cut. In short, the book is a dairy of what Tucci ate over the year, sometimes whiny (got it! You hate airline food), often perfunctory, mostly superficial (You wouldn’t recommend that dish. But why?), wrapped in a twine of family, grief and the everyday.

I thought about love while accompanying Tucci over his year. The very act of food appearing at the table, whether for self or to be shared, is an act of love. I lapped up all the food named in the book—pasta, butter, marinara. I enjoyed the read. I wouldn’t have finished it if I didn’t. Maybe you would too.

Watch

Two recs for today, which are completely opposite to the kind of background TV that Netflix is going for. I am guilty of background TV, just as much as Netflix’s audience managers are advocating, but these shows below need your attention.

I am absolutely smitten with Severance S2, in spite of finding it rather slow paced compared to S1). I spend way too much time reading my way through Severance theories (You gotta admit, the intellectual viewers are really doing us a favor. They nail the details I miss) and also hunting for clues (guilty of rewatches).

For those new to the show, it follows people who willingly get severed so that they have two consciousness, one work self (called innie) and one outside self (called outie) with no overlapping memories. Then the innies, who work in brightly lit, green-carpeted, minimalistic rooms in a maze-like office with long hallways, start wondering what is happening in the outside world they (?) live in. They get curious about work which is ‘important and mysterious’ and involves numbers in addition to occasionally singing praises of a god-like Kier. Bring on capitalism, propaganda, cult-ish workplaces, bosses breathing down your neck and goats! (yes, goats).

PS: The book Severance by Ling Ma is fantastic. This isn’t an adaptation of the book.

A still from Severance

Last weekend I binged S3 of The Morning Show and enjoyed it. S1 is perhaps the strongest, and tightest among the three seasons. In S1, set in the wake of the #MeToo movement, we follow a morning news program host, the ever-smiling Alex (Jennifer Aniston), whose show-host-partner has come under scrutiny because of sexual allegations against him. Alex is now paired with the loud, impulsive, scowl-faced reporter Bradley (Reese Witherspoon), because of a decision that involved minimal thinking. They don’t get along, but there’s a show at stake.

A still from The Morning Show

I loved how well the show presented corporate media, work place dynamics (and dirty politics), women in male dominated work spaces, minorities sidelined in a white-dominated work place (in a parallel irony, in the show too), a world with no heros but many grey characters, among a few things. Nobody is a friend in corporate, but there are these moments of genuineness. I liked how The Morning Show makes you think about both sides? The liberal and the conservative ideas. The popular and unpopular opinion. The dismay of political correctness. About wokeness being hollow at times, but a need of the hour.

Season 2 is half baked (shallow, set in the pandemic); skip right onto S3 featuring a shrewd, heartless, tech-savvy billionaire who launches rockets and wants to buy a media channel.

Also linking my viral list of Apple TV shows (incredible TV btw) on Twitter/X if you are looking for more.

Amazing Links

1. Listen to the sound of love, compiled from comment sections under love songs in Youtube (loving this!)

2. What is rotting, if not rest?

3. This will resonate with anyone who has called many places home and struggle to come up with an answer to ‘where’. The homes I carry with me

4. In the restful houses of women who live alone

5. You might’ve missed my 10 best books of 2024

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I keep thinking that short newsletters are the way to go in this attention deficit economy but I rather enjoyed typing this long one out. I hope you are doing well, with or without love. After I send this letter to you, I am off to treat myself to a little pick-me-up in a cup of sugar-free hot cocoa to which I will dutifully add spoonfuls of sugar after the first sip. No marshmallows. For marshmallows are for team players (forgive me Kier, that is a Severance reference which makes no sense to be in this paragraph bidding bye). Love’s in the air and this letter comes to you with—

Much love,

Resh x