Más, más!
Bad Bunny, Walter, Sully, and Me
I know it’s been many days since the Super Bowl, but I am still not over Bad Bunny’s halftime show. I have watched it so many times. I suck on it like a pacifier. My toddler now requests “Buneee” first thing in the morning, and we dance. He likes the drop in “Baile Inolvidable” and the first twenty seconds of “Nuevayol.” He says “Más! Más!” until I start the song again. Bad Bunny is making my little white boys move. Los gringitos del mundo se mueven con Bad Bunny!
Bad Bunny inspired me to take Spanish lessons, and I now meet a Bolivian man named Walter over Microsoft Teams weekly to speak Spanish with him. Our most recent topic was the history of film, and when I asked his favorite movie, he said Sully. I told him, in my broken Spanish, how I was at a Mets Game where Sully threw out the first pitch. I told him we went crazy for him! Nos volvimos locos por Sully! His eyes lit up! I got to see Sully in person? He asked. Wow. Walter and I spoke as much about Sully in Spanish as two people on a Microsoft Teams meeting maybe ever have. I don’t understand everything Walter says, but his passion for Sully was palpable.
I haven’t been writing much. I’m in the consumption era of my creative cycle. Fattening myself up with stories and content like the very hungry caterpillar. I have watched a lot of movies and read a lot of books already this year and am logging them on Letterboxd and Goodreads. I like these record-keeping apps. If you care to look, I am leaving behind a detailed digital footprint. You know how it was a big deal that Luigi Mangione had a Letterboxd? I do not plan to assassinate anyone, but if I do you can piece together my motives through my Goodreads. I am also collecting little bits of the internet in a big Google document. Links to poems and Tiny Desk concerts. I am keeping a spreadsheet of things I want to buy and making myself wait thirty days before buying them. I have started keeping spreadsheets for fun. I am not writing, but I am collecting personal data about myself on Google Drive. This is its own time-consuming pursuit. This could be my life’s work. The quiet, but dutiful, tallying of my digital media consumption. I am not writing; I am collecting.
What else? My husband and I have started a series of dates where we eat around the world in NYC, inspired by these two nice bros on TikTok who are doing the same. So far we have done Bolivia (you bet your ass I told Walter about this) and Uzbekistan. I do not want to talk negatively about any cuisine so I will say I loved Bolivian food. There is one Bolivian restaurant in Queens, called Bolivian Llama Party. It is a window-service only hole-in-the-wall, where you have to squeeze a plastic chicken to be seen. It was freezing rain on the day we went, and we ate Saltenas, which is basically an empanada soup dumpling, in our Jeep. The soup filling was a lot to reckon with while eating in a car, but the car has already been properly ruined by my two toddlers, so what’s a little Saltena soup juice in the seat crevices?
On our way to the restaurant, we look up fun facts about the country. Uzbekistan is double landlocked (land-locked by other land-locked countries) and was under Soviet rule until 1991, and now lives under an authoritarian regime. We also learned is that they have access to high-speed trains but it’s thought of as low-class to take the train, and a status symbol to use the cars. So they sit in gridlock as trains whiz past. The United States is a total shit-show, but based on fun facts alone, I still prefer it to the lifestyle in Uzbekistan. If an Uzbek person is reading this (you never know where your audience may reach on the World Wide Web), please feel free to school me if the fun facts I found on an expats blog gave me an improper picture of your country.
Winter beats on; the snow may be here until May. I am tired of grey skies and dirty snow. I am spending too much time on the Internet. I am trying not to be on my phone around my children. Who am I to moderate their screen time while my own phone is its own little problem? I think I may take up knitting. The problem with this is that I told my husband that if I ever felt the urge to take up knitting again he had to stop me. I told him this because every time I have tried to take up knitting I fail and then I just have a jumble of yarn and needles laying around for awhile. So the urge has reared its ugly head and he is following my instructions trying to stop me. I understand that I instructed him to do this but his protestations are somehow only making my desire more powerful. My hunger to knit is all-consuming.
Tata!
thank you for this! It is just what I needed. "I’m in the consumption era of my creative cycle" is my new favorite answer to the inevitable question: "Have you been writing?" Although now that I think of it, it might be more accurate for me to say: "I am not writing; I am digesting."
I've never talked about seeing Sully at the Mets game in Spanish on Microsoft Teams, but I now desire to