Mere Being - 033 - July - Game Changers, Ethnographies, Hollandaise Sauce

Hello! The terrible heat has continued! It's been better the last couple of days but damn, July.

We actually went and got a window air conditioning unit because while we have air conditioning the house wasn't really designed for it, and it has a hard time keeping the bed room in particular cool. Now we've got that set up and I can get the night time temperature I need to, you know, sleep.

I'm just starting to get stuff out of the garden — we got 2 cucumbers and one pepper and the squirrels got a third cucumber. Picked the first cantaloupe today. On the way: A ton more peppers, cherry tomatoes, eggplant, and at least one more cantaloupe (fingers crossed?).

It Came from the Other Newsletter

In case you missed 'em, here's what else I published last month

A writeup of my Zettelkasten process
A review of AI writing and why it's so difficult to read
What we can learn about business decision-making from the habits of Sumerian Kings
An announcement about Concourse, the world's favorite continuous thing-doer
a photo of geraniums outside a restaurant in Tahoe
a photo of lavender
a photo of tiny pink flowers
a photo of a chrysanthemum
a photo of lilies wrapped in plastic

Oh! And! The thing I've been working on! The backlog task tracking thing! It finally has a real landing page.

I also finished posting all 31 issues of Walking in Oakland a pop-up newsletter of photographs and short essays that I wrote during a period in October 2021 while I was living in Oakland and waiting for my car to get repaired. That's available now to all paid sponsors of the newsletter. Next I'm going to start posting reissues of Nomad Exquisite, a collection of photographs that I made while moving from Oakland to Berkeley a few years ago. You can read more about what you get at the membership page, but the short version is, "If you like the newsletters enough to buy me a coffee per month, you can do essentially that by becoming a paid member."\

Game Changers & Gay Ethnographies

I finally did it: I finished watching the gay hockey show. And read all the gay hockey books. (From that series, anyway. I know there are more gay hockey books.) I've been meaning to try romance novels for a while and this seemed like a good entry point.

Unfortunately for me the third episode is a detour into Kip and Scott and, like, look, I enjoyed the rest of the TV show, it's fun, but I spent the second half of it just thinking, when are we going to wrap up this thing with the neurotic twinks and get back to the adult men with beards and the smoothies? Those two are just much more my speed on a bunch of levels. I also really liked that Kip is a basically normal New York gay guy. "My otherwise great boyfriend is still in the closet, how long can I deal with this and/or the profound disapproval of my friends" is a real problem that people have.

I have complicated feelings about the fact that these are books written about gay men by and mostly for straight women— and while these ones are mostly pretty good, and the TV show itself has a male show runner, there were enough details that felt kind of off that I needed a palate cleanser.

So: Ethnographies. I had Brown and Gay in LA in my Kindle bookshelf already, and then after I finished that one I picked up a book it references, Sweet Tea, which I'm about a third of the way through now.

Brown and Gay in LA is about gay second generation immigrants. (I am a total sucker for any kind of second generation immigrant story, for reasons I'm not entirely clear on but that I suspect have at least a little bit to do with being a military brat, the other "third culture" experience.) It's hard for me to offer a review of a book like this because it's largely accumulation of detail. Lots of similar-but-different stories from lots of similar-but-different people.

One category of detail that stands out and was new for me: A lot of the men talk about academic achievement having been driven by this feeling of difference. Lots of variations on, "Well if I can't be the son my parents wanted then I can at least be very academically successful in the way that they wanted."

Another detail: Being gay and coming out to your parents as gay often involves disrupting the life that your parents imagined for you, and this can be much more intense for kids from immigrant families. Often this imagined life for their children is one of the main reasons immigrant parents came to the country in the first place.

One thing that both Game Changers and the ethnographies have in common: They're largely about the relationships that these men have with their families. In the romance novels usually one of the characters has a good, positive relationship with their family, and the other one's relationship is strained or entirely absent. And that then drives a lot of plot, since the relationship that they have with their parents informs how they relate to the romantic relationship.

Hollandaise Sauce

I've been making Eggs Benedict a lot for my partner on the weekends lately. That means: Hollandaise sauce.

This is one of those recipes that isn't actually that hard but does require some repetition to get right. There are a lot of small variations in recipes, I'm still working out exactly the right way to do it. I don't fuck with a blender or any of that.

What I've been doing is just whisking 3 egg yolks at a very low temperature until they start to thicken up and change color, then add about a lemon of lemon juice, and then about a stick of clarified(ish) butter — what I mean is I do boil the water off like it's ghee and then strain the milk solids but without being too fussy about it. Then I add some white pepper.

A lot of recipes will tell you to use water but I've found that makes the sauce too liquid. It's still not quite as thick as I'd like even with the above process — I might try cold butter next time.

Anyway! This is already hella late so that's what I've got for y'all this month. Thanks for reading, and remember— I love getting e-mail from ya'll.