I use Marco Polo with some of my friends. It’s an app that allows you to send video messages back and forth and as useless as that may sound, it’s actually a great way to have long form conversations with people from afar without having to schedule a time to chat. It takes a little getting used to, especially if you and your friends are as long winded as me and mine are, but it’s helped me feel a lot less alone the past three years, especially when I’m up at Londo Lodge all alone.
My cousin Renee, who lives in Utah and reads this newsletter, found me on Marco Polo and sent me a message of support. It opened up a conversation about the specificity of how we were raised - we are both white-presenting half Mexicans. There’s just things we get that other people might not. For example, we’ve both borne witness to so much subtle and not-so-subtle racism against Latinos. We’ve both had people say racist things to our faces thinking we were a safe space for such comments. And we’ve both had to shoot people down when they do that. If one more obnoxious gay guy makes a “Consuela” maid joke in front of me I’m going to scream.
My grandparents died pretty early so it’s been a long time since we spent time at their house. But what was interesting in chatting with Renee was how differently we remembered their house. I don’t remember much food there, aside from Wonderbread, Kraft American Cheese Singles, and Oscar Mayer Bologna. My mother didn’t let us have food like that (she jumped on the organic train pretty early) so it was a huge treat for us to get to eat things like that.
One of the things that makes me sad about the Mexican side of my family is that there wasn’t a trove of recipes or culinary techniques passed down. Neither of my grandparents were particularly interested in cooking and my grandmother was bedridden and thus unable to cook for most of my life. I do remember my grandpa used to make menudo, but by the time I had a sophisticated enough palate to even contemplate trying it, I was a vegan (the kind my grandpa made had pigs’ feet in it). I remember that house having only white people food in it.
Renee remembers things differently. She remembers there always being homemade beans and tortillas and that my grandpa made a really good tomatillo. Though she grew up in Texas, Renee spent a lot more time there than I did, so I’m guessing she remembers a more accurate account of what my grandparents actually ate on a daily basis. Something that I didn’t realize until adulthood is that my grandparents bought that food specifically for us. It wasn’t just always there. My grandfather must have known his grandkids liked sandwiches made with Wonderbread, American Cheese, and Oscar Mayer Bologna. There was also almost always that Minute Maid frozen Limeade, the kind that comes in a cardboard cylinder that you have to let thaw a bit so you can squish the brick out and mix it with water. I loved making that (and tangy sugar is delicious).
One thing I got out of the few messages Renee and I shared was a reminder of how delicious homemade beans are. My mother made those from time to time and she’d serve them with thick, chewy homemade flour tortillas, which I loved. But it’s been a while since I’ve made stove top beans, so I gave it a try this week. I like to add a lot of salt, pepper, as many bay leaves as you can find, and whatever spices you have (I like the Trader Joe’s “Everything But The Elote” seasoning mix).
I made some last night and served it over brown rice with some leftover chicken I’d barbecued over the weekend. “Beans and rice” is something most people think of when they think of what you might eat in a financial pinch. And quite frankly, a huge part of why I decided to make it is that I am still very stressed about money and freaked out about how I am going to pay for everything I have to pay for in the next few months.
But I’m definitely not feeling sorry for myself about having to eat beans and rice and it feels like it’s part of a greater shift in my mindset that has allowed me to access joy again.
About a month ago I was in a horrible situation that was all too familiar. Starting on August 1st, I began reminding my manager that I had a payment due August 26th. It was a payment that I very much needed in order to pay my rent. I checked in week after week and he kept reminding me it wasn’t due until the 26th. On the 26th, I checked in again. It hadn’t arrived.
The things that fills me with the most dread are conflict and not living up to my obligations. And I’ve been in this exact position (check from a company months late, fearing eviction or conflict with my landlord) countless times in the past two years. And it just depletes me. It depletes me because I feel like I held up my end of the bargain but no one else did. Depleted because for some reason there are no ramifications for companies paying me late but they’re putting me in real danger (and also fucking over everyone I need to pay).
Because I’d been anxious about that one check for over six weeks, by the time it arrived three weeks late, I was pretty much spent. The landlord came to pick up the check in person and if' I’d had any breath left in my body I would have breathed a sigh of relief. Keep in mind, it wasn’t just about the rent, I also had no money for food or gas during that time. I got stuck at the cabin and was only able to leave when a few hundred dollars came through from this newsletter. And this entire time I had dozens of people I owed money to (the guy who fixed my well, my contractor, and so on) asking me for payment day after day after day. That all just weighs on you.
It was the stress of not having any money (money is agency) combined with the stress of letting people down combined with the stress of I HAVE BEEN HERE TOO MANY TIMES AND I DID EVERYTHING IN MY POWER TO PREVENT THIS.
I got a cold sore from the stress and was too depressed to leave the sofa for a week. I think I must have also been sick or something because usually I can make myself do a bit more than that when I’m down. It’s a weird and terrible thing to be so stressed about money that you can’t bring yourself to work (to make money). The final night of this spell, I had a waking dream where someone was in the room with me and I tried to scream but nothing came out. It felt so real. Finally I was able to wake up. After I went back to bed, I had another dream about loss and woke up in tears. I have never had an experience like this before - I thought those kinds of dramatic dream sequences only happened in movies.
That night felt like what I imagine an ayahuasca trip to feel like. Just the pain and fear and loss of the last three years vomiting out of my soul.
It was an awful week topped off by an awful night. But it became a path to feeling happy again. It was a cleansing of some sort. I’m not really sure why, but I’ve been totally fine since then. Normally I’m pretty good at understanding my emotional state, but I’m currently pretty mystified as to why I’m okay because nothing has really changed in terms of the stressors that I’ve been coping with (mainly intense financial stress and constantly having to choose between two or more absolutely terrible options).
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