Pretty much everything I do these days gets interrupted. I remain abjectly grateful that X isn’t seriously colicky—parents who live through that should get medals and combat pay—but even on good days, there’s a timer on everything. (The BabyConnect app rules our lives.) Any work we get done is managed by passing the baby back and forth like an enraged little football until a nap descends, a miracle. So there’s a keen pleasure to be derived from finishing any task, no matter how small, dull, infuriating, or grubby: figuring out and fixing a titanically absurd health-insurance problem, for example, or blasting the bathroom tiles with a toxic but efficient mildew remover. These might have stripped a week off my life and a layer off my lungs, but now the shower is blinding white and everything is better.
We got our so-called stimulus payments this week, aka “bare minimum survival cash,” and dutifully stimulated the economy by ordering a fancy-ish new coffee maker, the Oxo one recommended by the Wirecutter, despite also reading articles that declared Wirecutter to be full of shit. Coffee setups are fascinating to me—highly personal and contentious, yet none of the extremely confident commenters on the internet is willing to acknowledge their own confirmation bias. Most of the time, the best coffee setup is just the one you have. We’ve been managing with a grinder and a French press/cafetière for a couple of years now, and it’s perfectly fine, though washing the press has become one of those small chores I disproportionately hate. But now with both of us home, and coffee upgraded to the status of medical necessity, we wanted something with a higher capacity, that was ideally programmable, with a thermal carafe (to account for the aforementioned getting interrupted/sidetracked constantly) and certainly no more than $200, which already strikes me as an absurd amount to spend on a coffee maker. But it’s my birthday this week, so sod it. I’ll report back.
Food continues to be a reliable pleasure. I made my go-to beef stew again, which doesn’t require messy flouring/searing, just time uncovered in the oven and some regular stirring, and still comes out beautifully browned and with a rich sauce. (I don’t bother with all the finishing touches in the recipe, but it’s fine without.) I also made French toast, mostly because it features prominently in a very sweet, very funny, and very British romance novel I’ve been reading in galleys (Boyfriend Material), and I am suggestible like that. So I threw it together yesterday for breakfast/brunch/the mid morning meal known as “have you eaten anything yet today?” Just four eggs, half a cup of milk, a little cinnamon and nutmeg, and six thick slices of white bread, soaked in the eggs and fried in butter, with a few blueberries thrown into the pan at the end and served on the side, with maple syrup and more butter. Downright seductive.
And by some miracle (naps!) we also managed two films this week: Knives Out, finally, which was as joyful as I was hoping. I’m a sucker for that particular pleasure of watching something intricate and disciplined unfold so precisely, generating the same snap and fizz you get with the best ’30s comedies, or an elaborately choreographed dance routine. Then last night, Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies on Criterion, which also plays out around elaborately choreographed routines—in this case, synchronized swimming—but focuses on the messiness of them, the bodies within the machine. It follows three teenage girls trapped in a kind of magnetized triangle of attraction and repulsion, and like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, has some incredible set-piece shots, often closeups of the central character, Marie, as she gazes at Floriane, played by Portrait’s incredible Adèle Haenel. The camera gets in close to the teen and pre-teen swimmers in their bedazzled costumes, shellacked hair, glittery makeup, smiling through the labor of moving together in the water. You hear their breath and watch their faces gripped in concentration, and see the obvious resonance with the way that the girls are struggling to perform in public, for each other and for the boys who call the shots but barely say a word.
Speaking of films, I just joined Letterboxd. I’m getting used to it, and haven’t done much beyond logging what I’ve seen, but the reviews and lists are great, for idiosyncratic things like, say, “agonizing queer coming-of-age dramas set mostly in swimming pools.” Find me on there!