The Best Place to Feel Lonely Is in a Bagel Shop

In the loneliest time in my life, I spent a lot of time in my local bagel shop. I was living in Baltimore, a new city, and had just gone through a splintering breakup. As a middle school teacher living with two others, I was often surrounded by people….

In the loneliest time in my life, I spent a lot of time in my local bagel shop. I was living in Baltimore, a new city, and had just gone through a splintering breakup. As a middle school teacher living with two others, I was often surrounded by people. And yet I was lonely in my classroom full of students and lonely in my apartment full of roommates. I was lonely in my room at night, where Netflix would accost me with the passive aggressive, “Are you still watching?”

On Sunday mornings at the bagel shop though, being alone never felt so bad. I had my Sundays down to a science. Grabbing my latest book, I drove eight minutes to the bagel store by the water, one of the few routes I had memorized. There, I waited in line while watching for a booth to empty.

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When Everything’s Wrong, Only Baked Pasta Feels Right

Lasagna, like all baked pastas, is a dish that suggests being warm inside on a cold day. It is the kind of food that numbs pain and softens edges, turning a sharp and bitter world toward small, sense-based pleasures. The blurring effect of heavy carbs …

Lasagna, like all baked pastas, is a dish that suggests being warm inside on a cold day. It is the kind of food that numbs pain and softens edges, turning a sharp and bitter world toward small, sense-based pleasures. The blurring effect of heavy carbs on the nervous system is much the same as a blasting radiator. And in a certain kind of cold weather, sometimes it’s hard to know if food is actually good, or just warm. Baked pasta is almost always both, but sometimes the temperature matters as much as the taste. That warmth itself, as a key ingredient in baked pasta, points to how these dishes act as a material form of unconditional love.

I started making lasagna, mac and cheese, baked ziti, and other variations on the theme about a year ago, during an uncertain fall that chilled into an oppressive winter. I love cheese and pasta and always have, but I hadn't made them myself all that often until 2020. It seemed like these sorts of dishes required an occasion, a big family holiday with a heaving table. Dare I make one in my own home, on any normal day of the year, just because I wanted to show someone I loved them, or feel like I was loved? Just because I wanted the brain-smoothing comfort of a vat of pasta and cheese? I dared.

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Drinking Is a Huge Part of Thanksgiving—Here’s Why I’m Avoiding It

I stopped drinking in late 2018, the part of the year that leans toward Thanksgiving and the downhill cascade of holidays that follow it. I wasn’t dealing with an addiction, exactly, and therefore my experience of quitting alcohol was much easier than …

I stopped drinking in late 2018, the part of the year that leans toward Thanksgiving and the downhill cascade of holidays that follow it. I wasn’t dealing with an addiction, exactly, and therefore my experience of quitting alcohol was much easier than it is for many people: I didn’t like how alcohol made me feel anymore, and I was no longer getting any enjoyment from it to counterbalance its negative effects in my life. In short, I didn’t like drinking, so I stopped doing it. For this reason, I try to say that I stopped or quit drinking rather than that I got sober, to make a clear differentiation between the relatively straightforward process of letting go of a bad habit, and the far thornier and often lifelong struggle of a recovering alcoholic.

The truth is that I rarely miss drinking, and when I do, it’s occasion-based and never actually about the booze itself. There are certain events—almost always a celebration of some kind, whether an official holiday or just the festive exhale on a Friday afternoon at the end of a long week—that make me wish for the gesture of a drink, without the actual drink itself. Thanksgiving has been one of the times when I have had to work the hardest to re-create that gesture, underlining the holiday aspect of a holiday through other means.

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