one book that has been a refuge for me during this time is ross gay’s the book of delights, a collection of 100 short essays written over the course of a year, each a different take on the seldom-explored emotion. especially amidst this period which has been deemed a net loss, delights is a welcome reminder that joy and gratitude can still be found in every contour.
today i reached his essay “stacking delights,” a role call of the backlog of delights waiting in his queue after five months of writing. the piece is simply a list, a cleansing that allows each of them to breathe as opposed to going stale in waiting. it has inspired me to consider the delights that persist in my life in this moment of isolation. including but not only:
nico’s mom, who sent our entire household handmade facemasks and assigned specific ones to each of us based on color, and how this makes me feel like a ninja turtle.
popping a mango ginger chew before putting on that facemask and letting it dissolve so that i can glide down the backstreets on my bike with a secret in my mouth.
the way lovely said “just make sure it’s not toxic” when i told her that i had picked a bunch of jasmine flowers from our yard to make yunnan-style scrambled eggs, to which i said “it’s probably fine” but looked it up anyway only to discover that yes the kind of jasmine in our yard is totally toxic, so even though i didn’t get to make yunnan-style scrambled eggs i still got to spend a morning picking flowers.
the la times profile on ben barcelona, the 81-year-old retiree who, until the pandemic, had an 8-year streak of going to a different museum each day of the week, and who says “art is everywhere. now the streets are my museum.”
tammy and aerica and mei and emmy, and the creative inspiration they’ve given me this week, and mentioning them in the old school way not the instagram tagging way, and the delight they may experience in case they come across this anyway.
waiting in line to get tested while listening to mariah carey’s 2018 album caution, which i had reluctantly pressed play on when it first dropped, only to fall in love with it because it totally gave me butterfly vibes, until over time it gave me its own vibes.
how revisiting caution inspired me to then revisit the catalog of bone thugs, which sparked a newfound appreciation for wish bone, the bone who i had slept the hardest on.
how revisiting bone thugs reminds me of the time in sixth grade when i was on a bus home from a church retreat and someone in the back played “tha crossroads” on repeat for the entire two hour commute and when i got home all i wanted to do was listen to more “tha crossroads.”
sesame seeds, in all contexts, but especially in furikake, and especially when a furikake-flavored sesame seed is stuck in my teeth until i coax it out with my tongue and squeeze out a mini sesame seed from inside that sesame seed with my front teeth.
my top right front tooth, which is gently chipped from a quinoa tortilla chip from trader joe’s that i bit down on with too much excitement in 2017.
egg.