Greetings, book and treat people!
As usual, this week’s essay isn’t about what I said it was going to be about. One day I’ll write an essay about the fabulous book We See Each Other by Tre’vell Anderson, but today is not that day. I watched Red, White & Royal Blue over the weekend and I hated it, it was so bad, I could hardly finish it, there was not one thing I liked about it. I wasn’t expecting much from it because I love the book, but it was even worse than I imagined. Happily, it doesn’t matter! I watched it, it’s over, and I never have to watch it again. I can just keep rereading the book forever. The book is The West Wing, but make it super gay. What can I say, it’s my ultimate escapist comfort read.
Anyway, I cannot think about queer media, queer representation, and the discourse around any of it for one second longer, so I wrote about something else.
A few other things:
What is happening in Maui is just so devastating. There are a lot of ways to help, and I’ll collect some resources for next week’s newsletter. For now, I want to share that Paige, who is a wonderful and thoughtful bookstagrammer, and who lives there, is collecting funds via Venmo and distributing them to families in need, prioritizing Native Hawaiians who have lost their homes.
Yesterday I read Habitat Threshold by Craig Santos Perez, a Chamoru poet who lives with his family in Hawaii. This is one of my favorite poems from the book (though the version he reads in this video is slightly different from the printed one).
I usually don’t send out previews of paid newsletters to free subscribers, but a lot of you are new, so I wanted to give you a sense of what to expect from a paid subscription. I’ll only send out a preview every six months or so, don’t worry.
Last weekend I finally made it to the Ashfield Lake, a place I’ve been hearing about since I moved here. It was a cloudy morning and hardly anyone was there. The lake is small and lovely, surrounded by hills and houses tucked into the woods. My bestie and I swim way out into the middle and floated. To put my body into water: the most extraordinary gift.
On the way home, I stopped by one of my favorite spots (Wells Provisions, if you’re local) and sipped a rose cardamom lemonade while reading my daily poetry (Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan, which I loved). It was a simple, magical Saturday. It filled me up with big love for this place where I live.
I still hate August. August is one of my two least favorite months. The other is July. Together, they form an intolerable stretch of heat. Summer makes me grumpy. The heat makes me tired. Bone-deep tried, snap-at-everyone-I-see grumpy. When the temperature gets above 80 (which is most of the time), I struggle to leave the house. When it’s really hot, I sometimes can’t even find the motivation to take myself to the river. “Just revel in tomatoes,” friends tell me, when I ask them how they survive summer. But I have to drive to the farm to get tomatoes, and a lot of the time, I just can’t. I want to make extravagant meals with glorious summer produce but I’m so tried and so grumpy. I want to garden but after forty minutes on my knees in the dirt, in the heat, I’m swearing at the sky. I want to hang out with friends on my porch but it’s too sunny. All summer long, all I want is for it to be over. From June until the leaves turn, from those first itchy, sweaty, horrible July days until the blessed, biting winds of October, I’m waiting for it to finally end.
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