Friday Joy: Creativity Is a River

On turning pillowcases into dresses, the 1989 Danvers Falcons & reaching peak bean

Welcome to Friday Joy! This is a weekly short piece on something that is making me happy, and a few recommendations for TV shows, books, and articles to check out. I hope it brings something good into the end of your week.

Me at 16.

Creativity was how I survived being 16. After school, I made zines, typing on my mom's old typewriter and cutting out pictures from magazines, my desk covered in smudges of dried glue stick. I wrote songs on my guitar and practiced with my band. I cut pillowcases into dresses (thanks, Sassy!) and made patches for my backpack out of glitter paint and scraps of old pants. I was headed to film school for college. Creativity would be my career, I thought.

This summer, I unexpectedly found a cache of "Japanese Candy Friday" posts that I wrote when I lived in Japan. Each week I would buy a new and intriguing candy at the grocery store and write a short review of it for my blog. They were so funny! They captured so much more about life than candy, and it made me so happy to read them, and so terribly sad. Because I missed writing like that—totally free and unencumbered by academic conventions or the needs of advertisers. I missed being creative.

Despite being from L.A., I'm not a person who buys into woo. But I believe in the power and omnipresence of creativity, and its availability to anyone who wants to tap into it. I see it like a river running under the surface of our lives. We can dip our hands into it when we need a refresh, a reminder that there are unknowable and beautiful secrets beneath the everyday. And when we need a big dose, we can jump in and surrender completely, floating along and trusting the current to take us somewhere else.

It is really hard to be a mother of young children and be creative. At least, it has been really hard for me. Writing fell away when it stopped being my job. I gave away my sewing machine. Never used my nice camera anymore. Cooking dinner used to be a creative outlet for me, back in the days when I would pick up "I don't know, whatever looks good!" from the Hollywood Farmers Market, and could start cooking at 7pm. Then I had a kid. Who became very picky. And being explicitly UN-creative in my cooking was how I survived the first six years.

But getting back into regular writing with this newsletter has loosened something. It's good, remembering that river. It opens up so much, and not only when I am sitting in front of my computer. A couple weeks ago, while my mom was visiting, we went to one of Denver Art Museum's free days, and I felt like a cup filled to the brim. Not only with the capital-a Art, but also in the Northwest Coast and Alaska Native arts collection, looking at a carved wood mask from the 1800s, and thinking about creating beauty, and how humans everywhere throughout history have understood that we can't just live on the surface of our lives. We create to dig deeper, to find meaning, to build ritual, and to connect with others.

It's so powerful and it doesn't have to be big. I had forgotten that for so long, and it is bringing me joy to be back here, remembering.

Leave a comment or reply to this email and let me know: How are you bringing creativity into your life?

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What I’ve been into this week

Watching

Los Espookys Season 2 on HBO Max. Los Espookys is finally back! I was in love with the weird, spooky, hilarious world they created in the first season, and the second season is even better because they dive right into the deep end, and I am here for it. Briefly, it is a show about a group of friends in an unspecified Latin American country, who are hired by clients to create fake supernatural occurrences, with the real supernatural sometimes intruding on their own lives. Created by Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega, and Fred Armisen, its vibe can best be understood by scrolling through Torres's and Fabrega's Instagram accounts. They star in the show (brilliantly) alongside Cassandra Ciangherotti and Bernardo Velasco, who are also great. Fred Armisen is kind of useless, but I'm sure he helped get the show green-lit. Good for him.

Reading

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry. I swear I didn't plan to make this such an October-appropriate collection of recommendations. But this book is about a 1989 high school girls' hockey team in Danvers, Massachusetts, home of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. They make a dark pact in order to turn their team's losing streak around, but are also high schoolers in the late ‘80s, so they sign that pact in a notebook with Emilio Estevez's picture on it—if that gives you the idea of the tone. One character's really high, hair-sprayed bangs become a kind of embodiment of evil called The Claw. It's fun!

Cooking

Mayocoba beans cooked in the Instant Pot with a bay leaf, salt, and lots of garlic olive oil. (These beans apparently hold their shape no matter what, so I cooked them for 45 minutes on high pressure and kind of forgot about them, so they depressurized naturally—and they are perfect, not mushy at all.) These are Colorado-grown beans that I got as a thank-you because I am doing a bean-related citizen science cooking project for a PhD student, and just typing out that sentence brings me joy. I’ve reached peak bean! I like to warm them up, top them with a fried egg, and eat them with toast for breakfast or lunch.

Thinking About

What Does Cultural Appropriation Really Mean? by Ligaya Mishan. I've been thinking about culinary appropriation a lot lately, I think because this is the first time I've lived in a majority-white city, and have seen some glaring examples of white chefs pushing a "concept" that involves food from a country that they visited on vacation, executed without respect or fidelity to the original culture. And everyone seems kind of…fine with it? But do these chefs need to show respect and fidelity? What does that look like? Is there room to mix things up and use another country's cuisine as a jumping off point? Where is the line, if it exists? Mishan's article is about much more than just food, but involves some of the same questions, and I find the discussion fascinating. I'll likely do a full essay on this topic at some point because clearly I have a lot of unanswered questions.

What are you watching/eating/reading these days?

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