Mark Twain

"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” This quote can be attributed to Mark Twain but is often recited by my dad and also me when I’m trying to impress girls at parties. Everyone has heard that quote by now, I’ve used it this week and as my ex would say, “it’s getting a bit stale.” The weather as of late has been cold and rainy and dark. The kind of weather that makes me tune my TV to the crackling YouTube fireplace. It’s also been muggy and sweaty and hot. It reminds me of when I was in middle school and my family took a trip to visit my aunt in Boston. I said, “What is this?” The answer was humidity. When I got my iced horchata latte from my neighborhood coffee shop, Yvonne, the owner, comments, “it’s muggy.” She’s right. We talk about the weather but it’s not in a distant way, it’s more like we just know hardly know anything about the other. I say goodbye and she calls me “mi amor.” She knows hardly anything about me, but I can tell she means it.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies. My Letterboxd is a cry for help: A Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Moonlight, Brokeback Mountain, and Inside Llewyn Davis. I’ve been thinking about allusions. In A Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the characters are reading the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. It becomes a point of contention between the characters, should you look back even if it means losing the one you love? When I’m grocery shopping for the cooking school I listen to Jim Henson’s The StoryTeller recount the myth. Am I the type of person to make the “poet’s decision” to look back at Eurydice? To choose the memory of her? This is what I think about while picking the best carrots for knife skills class tomorrow. The best carrots are short and thick not long and narrow; that’s the best practice for chopping. I wonder what the characters in movies will be discussing in 2040 or 2137. Who will be the tragic lovers that they debate? They’re probably on outer space articulating whether Adam and Hannah from Girls should have ended up together.