_{Not an essay about mahjong, but definitely something for idle hands and its really pretty!}

Remember that saying — idle hands are the devil’s workshop?

The Puritans weren’t wrong exactly. Hands without a task will find trouble — or worse, they’ll just scroll. But the Puritan solution — keep busy, stay productive, treat rest as moral failure — was never really my philosophy. But there is some truth to this.

I think I always knew, somewhere underneath, that the hands and the mind are not separate. It’s there in Buddhist practice — monks raking sand gardens, nuns folding cranes, Thich Nhat Hanh writing about washing dishes not as a chore to get through but as the practice itself. Not quieting the mind from the outside, but recognizing that humble, close-ended, physical work is a form of attention. A form of restoration. You don’t rest from the work. You restore yourself through a different kind of it.

I grew up Thai Buddhist, and knowing something and remembering it are different things. Sometimes you have to weed a courtyard and bake biscuits you’ve never attempted before to find your way back to what you already knew.

There’s a specific kind of restlessness that comes after finishing something big. Not laziness — the opposite. A charged stillness where you’re too depleted to create but too wired to stop. Last week I turned in two writing assignments, completed a freelance job, locked a final cut on a documentary short, and delivered a rough cut on a feature documentary — all in the span of two weeks. It sounds triumphant, and it was. For about forty-five minutes. Then came the what-do-I-do-with-myself moment when you’re too restless to sit still.

The answer, I decided, was not my phone. It was dough. It was dirt. It was a courtyard divided into six quadrants with a weed problem and a plan.

Think of it like switching train tracks. The bullet train of narrative construction and editorial judgment runs so fast the landscape becomes a blur. Sometimes you need to move onto a slower track. Not to stop. To actually see the scenery again.

Here’s the thing about the kind of work I do: writing, directing, and editing run on a very specific cognitive track. Narrative construction. Judgment. Language. Decision-making. After a sustained period of output, that engine isn’t just tired — it’s hot. You know how your iPhone won’t charge when it’s overheated? It still needs to charge, it’s just physically unable to until it cools down.

That was me.

Weeding is a problem to solve. Gardening is a system to build. Baking is a small act of faith. But they’re all close-ended tasks that live in the body — in your hands, your eyes, your nose — with an expected outcome that doesn’t require philosophical heavy lifting to reach. The curiosity stays lit: will the biscuits rise? Will the massaman work on a white pizza? Have I finally gotten ahead of the weeds? But the stakes are low and the track is slower, and your mind can wander, replenish, and breathe.

And here’s the thing I didn’t expect to feel so strongly: the accomplishment counts. My biscuits will not be reviewed. My tomato seedlings will not affect the cultural conversation. My weeded courtyard will be seen by, at most, a handful of people who come over for dinner. And that is completely okay.

The scale is different. The validity isn’t.

This is what my hands knew that my exhausted brain had temporarily forgotten: making things matters, even when — maybe especially when — the audience is just you, and a few people you love.

The Courtyard Problem

My Santa Monica courtyard is a small brick square that I genuinely love and chronically neglect. Between the bricks, over the winter and rainy spring, an entire civilization of grass and weeds had established itself. Not cute weeds. Tenacious, ugly little invaders in every crack.

The prospect of weeding the whole thing had been so overwhelming I’d been ignoring it for weeks. But I knew if I didn’t take care of it by May, there would be no chance of a summer garden. Every day I walked out of my house, the jungle was there to greet me.

So here’s the reframe that changed everything: I divided the courtyard into six quadrants and gave myself one rule — 45 minutes per quadrant, one quadrant per day.

That’s it. That’s the whole system.

Day one: Quadrant One cleared. Absurdly accomplished.

By Day Six, the whole courtyard was done, and I had created the proper conditions for what I actually wanted — a summer vegetable garden. Eggplant, hot peppers, and tomatoes. But not just any tomatoes.

I brought seeds back from Campo de’ Fiori in Rome — San Marzano, cherry, and Principessa — and grew them, four or five seeds to an egg-carton container, on my windowsill for nearly a month. This week, they were finally ready to be repotted into their proper home. About fifty seedlings, each one moved individually into its own little pot, set up in the cleared courtyard.

There is something quietly profound about seeds soaking up sunlight on the other side of an ocean. Same sun, different hands, an ocean breeze, soil from somewhere else entirely. A little packet of potential life and joy that I nurtured into existence at this very time and place.

The Baking That Wasn’t Supposed to Happen

I don’t bake.

Let me be clear: it’s not a particular joy for me — mainly because I haven’t had much practice, which is saying something given that I’ve made a living as a food producer for over twenty years. Baking, with its ratios and patience and total refusal to be improvised, has always felt like a different kind of mental exercise than cooking. More rules. Less room.

There was a sourdough phase during Covid. After several hit-or-miss dense loaves, the practice was not deemed worth the effort.

But this week, with nowhere I had to be and nothing I had to start, I baked. Three things. In one week.

And here is what I learned: baking can be fast. Baking can be a Tuesday. It does not require clearing your calendar or making a whole event of it. Here’s what civilizations have known forever: there is a miracle that happens when you have flour and water. Sustenance in any number of carby, glorious forms.

Perhaps I have been making my life unnecessarily dramatic, and in doing so, preventing myself from a whole other category of creation and self-reliance.

So I made three things. Here’s what happened.

Jingalov Hats

My friend Ara Zada — who co-authored the beautiful Lavash cookbook — taught me this recipe, and every time I’ve made it I’ve been struck by the simplicity of a warm wrap of fresh herbs. When the freshest herbs finally appeared at the market, I made them for my mahjong group.

Jingalov hats are Armenian flatbreads stuffed with greens: basil, opal basil, Thai basil, parsley, cilantro, spinach, arugula. They come together faster than you’d think, and the result is fragrant, grassy, deeply satisfying. The kind of thing that makes people ask, wait, you made this?

Yes. I did.

[⬇ Jingalov Hats Recipe — tap to open]

Roman White Pizza with Oxtail Massaman

This one is fully mine, in the way all the best dishes are: assembled from other people’s knowledge and your own audacity.

The pizza base comes from the Roscioli cookbook I carried home from Rome — a white pizza made with 00 flour and carbonated water, which gives the crust a texture that’s both crisp and airy, topped with paper-thin sliced potato. From there, I went somewhere off-script: oxtail massaman curry, finished with caramelized onion, finely sliced makrut lime leaves, cashews, Thai basil, cilantro, and fried shallots.

The combination works because massaman is the most Italian-adjacent Thai curry — warm spices, long braise, deep savoriness. Massaman usually has potatoes in its gravy, so the thinly sliced potato on the crust was a natural bridge. Crispy, almost like an Asian poutine pizza if you squint. And oxtail — unctuous, slow-cooked, falling off the bone — is a workhorse of Italian cooking too.

It made complete sense. Or at least, enough sense that I committed to it fully.

[⬇ Roman White Pizza + Oxtail Massaman Recipe — tap to open]

Biscuits (The Convert’s Journey)

I had never made biscuits before. Not a humble brag. Simply true. Biscuits felt like Southern grandmother territory, and I am neither Southern nor a grandmother.

On Instagram, Irene Wong — food producer, showrunner, chef, person who makes everything look like it was never difficult — makes the fluffiest, most mouthwatering biscuits. I finally decided to just do it.

Twenty minutes. Fluffy. Buttery. Gone.

I will be making biscuits again. Many times. Starting soon.

[⬇ Irene Wong’s Biscuits Recipe — tap to open]

What Replenishment Actually Feels Like

There’s something about completion that creative work almost never gives you.

A cut gets locked and then reopened for one more pass. A draft gets finished and then the notes arrive. The finish line moves. You live in a state of permanent incompletion, which is generative and also, quietly, exhausting.

But a weed, once pulled, is out. It will return. But not today.

A biscuit, once baked, is done.

A tomato seed, repotted, has moved to its next stage — from a small pot on a kitchen windowsill to a proper home in a courtyard, carrying with it the memory of a market in Rome where I stood in the March light, slipping seed packets into my bag like contraband.

The feedback is immediate and physical and unambiguous. Your hands did a thing and now it exists, warm and finished and real.

No one has to greenlight it. No one has to pick it up. The audience might be three people at mahjong night and some tomato plants. And that satisfaction — the quiet, private, uncelebrated satisfaction of having made something — is exactly as valid as finishing a script.

It goes out into the world. It affects people, a few people, your people. It is energy you chose to create and release.

This is, I think, what the Buddhist idea of right action looks like on an ordinary Tuesday in Santa Monica. Not grand. Not witnessed. Just hands doing something real, something complete, something that didn’t exist before you made it.

The devil doesn’t want you weeding your courtyard and baking biscuits you’ve never tried before. He wants you on the couch, half-watching something, too tired to begin and too restless to stop.

But your hands know better. Give them something to do. Something small, something completable, something that won’t be reviewed or distributed or given notes on.

See what they make.

What do you make when your brain needs to cool down? I’m not talking meditation or a walk — I mean actually make. Tell me in the comments.

Watch the Balenciaga Campaign Here

The first time, I was inside it. I was Sarah Pidgeon, alone on cobblestone. I recognized that feeling — that private-public aloneness of being in my own world in a city of millions. Then the frame widened and I saw the crew, the camera, the direction, the instruction to keep rolling. I was no longer her. I was part of the crew watching the feeling being constructed. By the end, I was neither. I was a passerby who had wandered into someone else’s movie, briefly aware that my ordinary day had become part of something being made.

_{(from @balenciaga)}

Three ways into the same sixty seconds. And I have not been able to stop thinking about it.

Even the campaign’s Instagram handle — @keeppprolling — suggests that we are always being watched.

For me, another Easter egg — whether deliberate or not — was the vertical film within a film featuring ReelShort star Chris Quartuccio. I see you, Chris. IYKYK. I do not know how intentional the casting was of a familiar face from a vertical platform inside a campaign designed to circulate vertically on social media, but to those of us watching the vertical space, it added another layer. The campaign was not only about a woman being filmed in New York. It was also about formats watching each other: cinema, fashion film, social video, vertical drama, behind-the-scenes content, and the viewer moving between all of them.

I usually think of meta as distance. The wink. The parody. The moment a film turns around to remind us that it knows it is a film. Meta as the God voice — the work stepping outside itself to signal its own awareness.

What Song does is the opposite. She uses the reveal of the crew, the monitor, the instruction to keep rolling — not to break the spell, but to deepen it. The moment we see the production around Sarah Pidgeon, we do not feel tricked. We feel implicated. We are no longer simply watching a beautiful image. We are inside the act of making one.

That, to me, is meta as intimacy. It does not say: this is fake. It says: this feeling was made — and now you are in it.

I know A New York Minute is branded content — I know this because I own a twenty-year-old Balenciaga Ink Moto Bag, my divorce gift to myself, and I still believe in that feeling when I bought it. And I know A New York Minute and Ex-Wives of Beverly Hills are not the same scale or the same conversation. But watching Song use the reveal of the apparatus to pull the viewer closer rather than push them away clarified something I had been trying to name. Ex-Wives was already living inside that idea. This framework gave it clarity.

_{(from @balenciaga)}

That is why I could not stop thinking about The Ex-Wives of Beverly Hills, the comedy pilot I directed and co-created with my friend Nicole Hansen.

[Watch the Ex-Wives of Beverly Hills trailer here.]

Because what Song captures in three elegant minutes on a cobblestone street, we are all living in full-time. We are in a surveillance culture now — Ring cameras, phone cameras, social media, the ambient sense of being documented whether we choose it or not. Ex-Wives is not just a show that uses cameras as a storytelling device. It is a show about what happens to women who are performing, whether they know the cameras are there or not. When you cannot separate the life you are living from the version of it that is being recorded.

Ex-Wives began as parody. A comedic riff on the docu-follow format — Real Housewives gloss, over-the-top drama, midlife meltdowns played for laughs. Parody gave us the surface: the house, the women, Beverly Hills as a pressure cooker. But parody keeps the audience at a comfortable distance. It says: look how ridiculous this is. And I did not want distance. I wanted the opposite.

So the show moved toward mockumentary — and with it came a more interesting question: what does it mean to watch someone manage her own image while the cameras keep rolling? In a traditional mockumentary, the camera threads the story through confessionals and interviews — The Office, Abbott Elementary, Modern Family. The characters step out of the action to tell us what it meant. But stepping out of the action is still a form of distance. I did not want the viewer to feel like an audience member being given an explanation of what they just saw.

I want the feeling of someone who had wandered into the production of someone else’s life.

I began to think of Ex-Wives not as parody, not as mockumentary, but as constructed-footage comedy. The format has been explored in horror and thriller, in films built from device screens and surveillance footage. I asked myself: what happens if you bring that same instinct into comedy? Into an ensemble of women? Into Beverly Hills, where the surfaces are glossy and the lives are curated?

That question also connected to what I was seeing in vertical storytelling. My son Ethan’s ReelShort film Point Dume — which won a Student Filmmaker Award from ReelShort and features Chris Quartuccio alongside a Gen Z cast — reminded me how native this instinct already is to younger filmmakers. His characters are influencers; the footage is their own, performed and accidental at the same time. They are already living inside the camera. Watching social native creators work this way gave me permission to follow that thread to Gen X — to ask what pressure looks like for women in their 50s, in Beverly Hills, when the cameras never stop and the image they have built is exposed.

Ex-Wives of Beverly Hills is a constructed-footage ensemble comedy about women whose lives become impossible to separate from the cameras supposedly documenting them. Not a mockumentary. Not a parody. The cameras in this world are already there: the wedding videographer hired to preserve the fantasy, the phones that record everything, the Ring cameras that capture too much, the social posts that turn humiliation into content. The apparatus is never invisible — and it is never the joke. It is the architecture.

_{(photo courtesy of DP James Markham Hall, Jr (center) (clockwise) AD and Editor, Nikos Spiradakis, actor Rob Morrow, line producer Alastair Shearman, Post-Supervisor Tina Brettschneider, Best Actress Debbon Ayer, me, Co-Creator, Producer and actor Nicole Hansen)}

The meta quality of Ex-Wives is intimacy. The viewer is not outside the story looking down on these women. The viewer is implicated in the act of watching them. We see the image they are trying to create, and we also see the moments when that image fails. The comedy lives in that gap — between the life the women are trying to stage and the life the cameras reveal.

The scenes were scripted with a clear emotional shape and a destination, but the actors were given room to find how they got there through improv. That looseness was essential. The performances are messy, overlapping, full of uncomfortable silences and true reactions no one planned. In the space between the written beats, something less controlled can emerge. Those are the moments that make a viewer lean in because they are recognizable.

I want the audience to enter Ex-Wives the way one enters any beautiful constructed world: seduced by the surface, then gradually aware of the machinery underneath. The aspiration matters. The beauty matters. The fantasy matters. But the show begins after the planned image collapses, when the cameras keep rolling and the women have to decide whether the footage will expose them, trap them, or finally let them be the protagonist of their own life.

It was built around women in their 50s — divorced, competitive, fabulous, wounded, and funny — who are not side characters in someone else’s story. They are the story. The show is about female friendship, where love and resentment live in the same room. Where women who were taught to compete for men, beauty, status, and relevance are forced to confront the fact that the only people who truly understand them are each other.

Watching Song’s campaign reminded me that the reveal of the apparatus does not have to destroy the feeling. Sometimes it is the only way to let the viewer fully inside it. It helped me use familiar grammar — cameras, footage, performed ease — to get somewhere more honest, and to laugh at ourselves when honesty becomes unbearable.

That is what three one-minute films on a cobblestone street in New York taught me about my own show.

Ex-Wives of Beverly Hills (@exwivesbh) recently won Best Episodic, Audience Award for Best Short Film, and Best Actress for Debbon Ayer at the IFS L.A. Film Festival (@ifs.film.festival), and Best Web Series Pilot and Best Producer for Nicole Hansen from the LA Independent Women Film Awards (@laindependentwomenfimawards).

Eda Benjakul is an award-winning filmmaker, director, and co-creator of The Ex-Wives of Beverly Hills. She is a Sundance Episodic Lab Finalist and Stowe Story Lab Fellow for the drama pilot Star of Siam, LA News Emmy-nominated and Daytime Emmy Award-winning producer.

Spoilers for Off Campus on Amazon Prime.

In Off Campus, Hannah’s advisor tells her that music is not really about the melody or the words.

“It is about how it made you feel. It creates memories. It etches them into our bones.”

That line stayed with me because one of the central songs in the series, “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You,” is not just a song to me. It is a place. It is a city. It is a version of myself I had almost forgotten.

For me, the song is late summer, 1994.

I was in my early twenties, living in New York City, and falling in love with the city in the way you can only fall in love with a place when you are young enough to believe it has chosen you back. I was walking home from work near Lincoln Center, where Alison Krauss, one of my favorite singers at the time, was performing “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You” at a free outdoor concert.

I remember the moon over Lincoln Center, the warm breeze of late summer, the skyscrapers around us, and that voice. Alison Krauss sounded almost impossibly pure piercing the night air. The violin and banjo cut through the plaza in precise, staccato bursts that seemed to disappear the instant they reached your ear.

I got goosebumps.

I still cry when I think about it.

Not because anything dramatic happened. Not because the night changed my life in some obvious way. But because, for a moment, nothing was missing.

I lived in New York City. That had been my goal since I was sixteen years old. I worked at network news when journalism was a calling. My friends were living lives beyond anything they had imagined for themselves too. We were not rich. We were not powerful. But we were inside the dream.

It was a time of discovery and support, though I do not think we would have called it that then. We were too busy living it. We stayed out all night, got home at four in the morning, woke up at seven, and did it all over again. We believed exhaustion was glamour. We believed cheap apartments, late-night diners, breaking news, and impossible ambition could hold us together forever.

There was a romance to New York then. Not an easy romance. New York was never easy. But there was a feeling that if you could survive it, the city might reveal something to you. It made you sharper, funnier, braver, more yourself. The streets felt like a test and a promise. The future was all potential. The world had not yet become something you checked on your phone every few seconds, doomscrolling the next disaster.

That song became part of the soundtrack of that time. And with it came bluegrass music, which I loved from then on.

Years later, when I was going to get married on a farm in New Hampshire in September 2001, I booked a bluegrass band from New York to play at the wedding. “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You” was going to be my wedding song.

The wedding never happened.

And New York changed in an instant.

After September 11, everything became divided into before and after. The city survived, because New York survives. It grieved, rebuilt, adapted, kept moving. But it was never the same. The romance did not vanish, exactly, but it changed shape. It became heavier. More haunted. The city that had once felt like a place where anything could begin also became a place where everything could end without warning.

I had shared the song with someone I loved, not because I needed completing, but because I didn’t. That night at Lincoln Center, I had felt entirely whole: the city, the music, the life I had built exactly as I had imagined it. I did not need anyone. Then I found someone who made me happy, who helped me imagine a life beyond work. “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You” became our wedding song because it held that feeling too: love chosen from fullness, not hunger.

Then the wedding didn’t happen. The marriage ended just before our son was born.

And I stopped playing the song. There are songs you stop playing not because you forget them, but because they start to hurt in a way you cannot name.

Somewhere in all of that, I forgot about Alison Krauss. I forgot about bluegrass. I forgot about “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You.”

Or maybe I did not forget. Maybe I put it somewhere I could not reach.

Then, decades later, I heard it in Off Campus.

Which is random. Weird. Almost embarrassing, honestly. A contemporary YA romance on Amazon Prime should not be the thing that returns you to the emotional center of your own life. But that is also exactly how music works. It does not wait for a serious context. It does not ask whether the vehicle is prestigious enough. It just opens the door.

I heard the song again, and it gave me back its original joy. Enough time and perspective had passed to let me hear it without the disappointment.

And Off Campus is not only a contemporary YA series. It is also a mixtape.

That feels important. The show understands music as collection, as memory, as something handmade even when it is streaming. Mixtapes appear in the series, which is funny because we stopped making them on cassettes around the millennium too. Around the same time the old New York disappeared, the cassette mixtape disappeared with it.

A mixtape was never just music. It was a confession. A map. A time capsule. A way of saying: this is who I was when I made this, and maybe this is who I hope you’ll hear.

Maybe your twenties are the age of the mixtape.

Not because you only make them then, but because your twenties are when life itself still feels like one. The heartbreak song sits beside the running song. The going-out song sits beside the song you cry to on the subway. Nothing quite matches, but somehow it all belongs because you are the person holding it together.

I have recreated some of my old mixtapes from college and my early years in New York. They are full of running songs, motivation songs — songs meant to push me forward, make me faster, stronger, less afraid.

Alison Krauss was not on any of them.

And yet she may have been the truest song of that time.

Not the song I used to become someone, but the song that caught me in a moment when I already felt whole. Standing under the moon at Lincoln Center, listening to that angelic voice, I did not need to run harder or prove more or outrun anything. I was simply there. Happy. Open. Certain, in the way only the young can be certain, that life was unfolding in the right direction.

That is what Off Campus gets right about music. It is not only about taste. Music is the body’s archive. It keeps the versions of us we cannot always access on our own.

In the show, “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You” becomes a portal. It carries feeling before the characters fully understand what the feeling means. But Hannah does not end the show by singing that song. That would have made the story simpler, more sentimental: the old song returns, the old self returns, everyone gets to go home.

Instead, she finds her voice.

She sings a song about believing she had lost the girl she used to be, only to realize that girl was still part of her. Not untouched. Not unchanged. Not waiting to be restored like an old photograph. But present.

That is the deeper insight. Nostalgia is not the point. Integration is.

When I heard Alison Krauss’s version again, I thought I was grieving New York, 1994, ABC News, late summer, my friends, my old ambition, the woman who booked a bluegrass band for a wedding that never happened. I thought I was grieving an old life.

But maybe I was hearing a part of myself that had gone quiet.

My son is now the age I was then. He lives in New York, in the same neighborhood where I once lived. He walks by Lincoln Center almost every day to get the train. I wonder what he hears. I wonder what songs are attaching themselves to his buildings, his corners, his late nights, his private hopes. I bet he has his own New York City soundtrack, one he may not understand until decades from now, when some random show sends it back to him.

I hope whatever songs attach themselves to his New York will one day return him not only to the city, but to himself.

I cannot go back to 1994. I cannot return to pre-millennium New York, or the wedding that did not happen, or the version of myself who believed the world was my oyster without irony or hesitation.

But maybe she is not gone.

Maybe she has been waiting inside the music. Inside the moon over Lincoln Center. Inside the banjo cutting through the city air. Inside the memory of a night when nothing was missing and everything was there.

And maybe all of us have a song like that.

A song that holds the best version of us. Not the most accomplished version. Not the most polished or impressive or healed. But the version who was open. Hopeful. Alive to the world. The version we sometimes lose track of while we are busy surviving.

What is the song that defines the best version of you?

Find it. Listen to it.

And find yourself again.

We had a rocky and distant relationship growing up, but in the last few years, we found something new between us: a gentler, more connected bond. On the phone, each pause on the line reminded me how much had changed. We had only just begun to understand each other as adults, and it’s hard to accept that this newer bond has limits of its own.

I wanted to reconnect and in looking for a way to do that, I stumbled back into a memory I had forgotten — one we made together in the kitchen, where I find my joy.

This is the letter I sent along with Coconut Cookies for Mother’s Day.

Dear Mom,

I woke up early today to bake cookies.

Do you recognize them? They’re the coconut ones from The Swedish Covenant Hospital Cookbook. Remember that spiral-bound book with the green cover and black cursive writing? The one from the hospital where you worked — the one that lived at the bottom of the bottom kitchen drawer. Pages like the coconut cookie recipe and the farmer’s egg casserole were shiny with butter and oil thumbprints — our thumbprints.

We used to make those cookies together every Christmas so you could bring them to work. They were so good, we started baking them for any occasion. You’d clear and clean the white kitchen table — the same one where I did Dad’s algebra homework, the same one where we had dinner every night.

You’d lay out the hospital paper on the table, and I would gather the equipment: the sifter, the hand mixer with the metal beaters that clicked into place. I’d scoop the flour into the sifter and squeeze the handle until my wrist got tired. Then you’d take over. We had to plug in the mixer on the floor near the sink because the cord didn’t reach the table. I’d cream the butter and sugar, already dreaming of how good the beaters would taste when I pulled them out to lick them clean.

Today, when I started gathering the equipment, I set up my stand mixer — because it’s the fastest way for me to mix things. But then I thought, no — I want to remember what it felt like to do it the way we used to. So I found my hand mixer. I don’t own a sifter with a handle, so I used a fine sieve instead. The sifting was easier than I remembered. Still, I wonder if my flour was as fine as it used to be — falling like snow flurries that melted the moment they touched my nose.

Then I’d bring the bowl over, and you’d add the flour and use your muscle with the mixer as I rolled around on the step stool with wheels. When I used my hand mixer today, I remembered why we had to mix the butter and sugar first. Like an algebra equation, the butter and sugar were in parentheses — becoming one entity before adding the flour. I had to adjust the speed so the flour didn’t fly everywhere. I had to use a spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl and fold the flour into the creamed butter and sugar. It required some patience, a bit of muscle, and coordination. I wondered — did we use eggs or any kind of binder in our cookies? I didn’t remember cracking any eggs, so I skipped them.

Once we had a dough, we’d fold in the shredded coconut by hand. Then came the scooping — lining the trays with little mounds of batter. We focused, quietly, working side by side. I remember that time because you always seemed happy baking. Making something special. Not something expected, like dinner every night or the weekly khao mok kai or the farmer’s egg casserole you prepared for us before your week of double shifts. These cookies were a treat — for others, yes, but also for us. The kitchen and the baking were a place free of expectation, criticism, and regret. It felt like our safe space, where the cookies represented our bonding time.

Now, in my own home, I’ve made a habit of prepping food in the mornings — the quiet hours before anyone else is awake, when I can still my mind and ease into the day. It’s a small comfort, a rhythm I’ve grown into. I imagine you do something similar now in your own way — sitting with your cookbook and Dad’s papers, copying notes onto scraps of paper, trying to hold onto the details that feel like they’re slipping away.

I know you can’t cook anymore — your hands have arthritis, and the recipes don’t quite line up in your mind the way they used to. I miss your cooking Mom. You moved through the kitchen with such quiet confidence, never even using measurements, adjusting by feel and taste. And now, even though the motions have changed, you still have the best taste buds and I like to think that touching those old pages still gives you a kind of peace. Maybe that’s something we still share: the urge to return to familiar things. To stay close to what we’ve loved by holding it in our hands. To cook and taste things — even if only in memory.

I couldn’t find the original recipe for the cookies, so I tried to recreate it from memory. Working on baking shows taught me about ratios and technique — how a 3:2 flour-to-butter balance makes the perfect shortbread. But I remembered our cookies were lighter than that, so I added baking powder. I mixed the dough, rolled it into balls, and chilled them so they’d hold their shape in the oven.

Back then, we’d just drop spoonfuls straight from the bowl. Pan after pan. The last batch was always the flattest and crispiest because the butter had started to melt on the warm pans before they got to the oven. They were misshapen and still delicious.

I didn’t realize at the time how much those hours meant. That they would become a memory only we shared. Before my brother and sister were old enough. Before you got too busy. Before I stopped asking.

This Mother’s Day, I’m not writing the usual card thanking you for your sacrifices, for the jobs you worked, or the things you gave up. I’ve written those letters every year I can remember.

This year, I want to thank you for this time together.
We laughed. We baked. We were present.

Thank you for giving me something I could pass on to my son without even realizing it. We make holiday cookies now, too — every year. I had forgotten that you and I ever baked holiday cookies, since we stopped after I turned nine. And I had forgotten about the coconut cookies — until now.

Maybe you won’t remember. Maybe this note will get tucked into a drawer and lost. But I believe there’s still a part of you that remembers the sound of the sifter. The flour landing on the table, on the floor. The mess we didn’t mind because we knew we’d sweep and mop after. The warmth of the oven. Packing the cookies for your co-workers.

Lately, our phone calls have been hard. I often walk away from them sad, wondering if I remind you of the years when I was a teenager — when we argued more, when we were both caught up in our own distractions. I know it’s not your fault. I know your memory is shifting, rearranging time. But it makes me sad, reliving the years we were furthest apart without being able to replace those feelings with memories of our recent time together.

That’s why I’m writing — why I’m baking — why I’m sending these cookies. I wasn’t sure how they would turn out, or even if they’d be worth sending. But the memories of love were baked in, and they tasted like home.

I hope they help you find this memory. One with sugar and flour and butter and quiet joy. One where we were simply together — side by side. That’s the version I’m holding close now. A version of us that was happy, gentle, and good.

And I’ll remember enough for both of us.

There’s a saying that people don’t remember what you do — they remember how you made them feel. I’m choosing this feeling: comfort. Your spark of creativity. Your joy.

With love always,

P.S.: My mother is now 94. I don’t know if the letter was ever read to her — the cookies sat uncollected until Tuesday. When I called, she told me she liked them. “I really like coconut cookies,” she said. She didn’t remember that we once made them together. So I’ll keep that memory for both of us.

I am watching Alysa Liu’s gold medal performance on repeat. It is pure joy.

Donna Summer plays and suddenly I’m back in the ’90s, Walkman in hand, running the loop in Central Park. The song hits at mile five of six — the stretch where the runner’s high kicks in. No pushing. No pain. Just gratitude. For being young. For New York. For momentum.

Flow without force.

I haven’t felt that kind of alignment in decades. Watching her, I felt it again.

What strikes me is not only her excellence — though it’s undeniable — but her freedom. She doesn’t look burdened by the myths I was handed as a woman of Generation X.

These Games have felt like more than athletic triumph. These women are quietly subverting a belief system.

Watching her celebrate without restraint, I realized how carefully I had learned to measure mine. We were taught to calibrate our joy.

Myth: Fake it till you make it.
Alysa Liu: “I love struggling. It makes me feel alive.”

Myth: Kill them with kindness. Let them think it was their idea.
Eileen Gu: “Let me put it this way…”

Myth: Go along to get along.
Hilary Knight: “It’s not my responsibility to explain someone else’s behavior.”

They are not performing deference.
They are not managing comfort.
They are not waiting for permission.

And I am realizing how much of my life was built on doing exactly that.

Fake It Til You Make It

No one wore jeans to work unless it was Casual Friday. We carried sneakers in our bags and changed into heels at the office. I once got reprimanded for open-toed shoes. (They were Clergerie.)

We dressed like authority before we had it.

That armor turned inward. You didn’t show uncertainty. If you didn’t know the answer, you found it before anyone noticed.

The playbook was simple:

• Be agreeable.

• Work harder than everyone else.

• Don’t complain.

• Your turn will come.

Translated, this meant holding back in meetings. Not sitting at the table unless invited. Softening ideas. Managing egos. Expressing gratitude for access. Delivering results without visible ambition.

Fake confidence. Fake ease. Fake gratitude.

“Fake it till you make it” assumes there is a stable destination — a title, a seat, a moment when the performance ends. But what if the destination keeps moving?

I thought endurance was integrity. I didn’t realize it could also be inertia.

Performance has a cost. When you are constantly scanning for how you’re being perceived — competent, likable, non-threatening — your nervous system never stands down. Vigilance becomes anxiety. Anxiety masquerades as ambition.

You begin to confuse purpose with proving. Exhaustion with meaning.

When you fake ease long enough, curiosity shrinks. Originality feels risky. You wait for your turn. Sometimes it never comes.

When Alysa Liu stepped away from skating after doing everything “right,” she disrupted that script. She returned only when she had control — over her training, her music, her pace.

She didn’t fake it. She recalibrated. She didn’t wait for her turn.

The Charm Offensive

Early in my career, a (male) mentor offered what he called the secret to success: use the charm offensive. Make powerful men feel smart. Let them think it was their idea. If necessary, use your sexuality — subtly. A hand on the arm.

At the time, I thought this was wisdom. It was really a cultural operating system.

Gen X women were taught:

• Be likable.

• Be attractive but not threatening.

• Be confident but not arrogant.

• Influence without confrontation.

• Protect male ego.

This was framed as savvy.

But if power requires seduction or ego management, whose power is it? ​​In a system that didn’t want female authority, charm was survival. We were trained to manage power — not assume it.

When Eileen Gu says, “Let me put it this way” the phrase is not charm. It is control. She is reframing the narrative.

The charm offensive centers others’ comfort.
The reframe centers intellectual authority.

One requires seduction. The other assumes you already belong.

That’s the shift.

Boundaries

When Hilary Knight said, “It’s not my responsibility to explain someone else’s behavior,” I felt this in my soul before I really heard it in my mind.

It felt radical. Because as an eldest daughter in an immigrant family, harmony was survival. It was my responsibility to manage the emotional weather of a room before I learned to manage myself.

I became the fixer. The path-clearer. The one who absorbed discomfort so others didn’t have to. Managing power meant managing perception. Managing perception meant managing myself — my tone, my ambition, my joy.

We were trained to manage power.

Hilary’s sentence does something deceptively simple. It separates accountability. It draws a clean line between what is mine and what is not.

That line is the work.

It means I do not have to cushion every statement. I do not have to preface my ideas with apology. I do not have to seduce agreement. I do not have to absorb discomfort I did not create.

For years, when the pressure built, I didn’t assert. I detonated. I left jobs. I left rooms. I left entire systems. I called it reinvention. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it was escape.

Boundaries are quieter than escape. Less dramatic in the short term. More sustainable in the long one.

The charm offensive assumes you must win someone over. The reframe assumes you already belong. The boundary assumes you are already whole.

That may be the shift I’m witnessing.

We were trained to manage power. They move as if it already runs through them.

We were taught to calibrate our joy — to temper it, earn it, justify it, delay it. To make sure it didn’t look too easy or too large or too undeserved.

But joy, uncalibrated, is not indulgence. It is information.

It tells you when you are aligned. It tells you when you are performing. It tells you when you are proving instead of living.

Watching these women compete, I thought I was witnessing confidence and discipline. What I was really witnessing was sovereignty. They are not faking ease. They are choosing alignment. They are not managing power. They are assuming it.

Maybe that is what this stage of life requires of me — not another sprint, not another reinvention, not another attempt to earn my turn.

Just enough stillness to notice where I have been managing — and where I can simply stand.

Flow. Without force.

Vertical storytelling is not simply short-form cinema. It is a form engineered around anticipation rather than immersion. I am trying to understand how I can participate in this ecosystem and keep what I value about story.

A friend with whom I’ve co-written three romantic comedies has found massive success in vertical micro-dramas. She literally wrote the book on it — How to Write a Vertical in 10 Days (2025, Isabel Drean), now a bestseller in screenwriting circles. My son, still in college, pays his rent writing them. I have tried and failed to write one in ten days. I respect the craft.

Vertical is not Quibi, that well-funded 2020 experiment that tried to shrink television into the shape of a phone and collapsed within six months. Quibi misunderstood the medium. Vertical is something else entirely — something more precise. It does not compress cinema. It optimizes craving.

Late at night, in bed, I move through endless series: YA romances, billionaire heiresses, taboo age gaps. Every ten episodes, a cliffhanger. I scroll. Sometimes I fall asleep mid-series. Sometimes I feel vaguely gross — drawn to a shirtless actor my son’s age, scenes that hover soft-core adjacent, cruelty packaged as entertainment. The experience is not nothing. It is entertaining. But it is rarely nourishing.

Meanwhile, 2025 has been one of the most immersive years in film I can remember. Perhaps because so many filmmakers are auteurs — writing and directing from an interior place. Sinners. Sentimental Value. Frankenstein. Rental Family. Films where you feel an artist working something out through film.

Three, in particular, clarified what I’m circling:

Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025): grief made visible, healing emerging through the act of creation.
Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025): kinetic chaos that hijacks the nervous system delivering hard-won catharsis.
Wuthering Heights (Emerald Fennell, 2026): a stylized fever dream of toxic relationships, ‘hurt people hurt people’, an artistic ick forcing you to sit inside rot long enough to earn beauty.

They are radically different. Yet all required endurance. All asked something of me.

I walked out changed.

In 2000, psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock described “narrative transportation” as a mental state in which attention, imagery, and emotion fuse. When transported, we do not analyze; we experience. The story integrates. It settles into us. Catharsis is not the climax. It is what you carry out with you.

Vertical platforms operate on a different biological rhythm.

B.F. Skinner’s research on variable ratio reinforcement — the mechanism behind slot machines — showed that unpredictable rewards generate the most compulsive behavior. You pull the lever because the reward might come next. Infinite scroll is built on this logic. So are cliffhangers engineered every ninety seconds.

Neuroscientist Kent Berridge, at the University of Michigan, distinguishes between “wanting” and “liking.” Dopamine does not create pleasure. It creates anticipation. It spikes in pursuit. The wanting system is restless, unsatisfied, future-oriented. Vertical storytelling is exquisitely calibrated to this system. Every micro-episode ends before resolution. The reward is deferred. You are propelled forward not by depth, but by lack. You are hungry, then briefly affirmed. Hungry again.

Vertical storytelling borrows the architecture of the scroll. Each micro-episode ends before emotional integration can occur. The cliffhanger is not a narrative device in service of meaning; it is the engine itself.

It is narrative junk food.

But even junk food at least fills you temporarily. Vertical often does not. It is closer to ultra-processed snacking — engineered for mouthfeel, salt, sugar, speed. Designed to bypass satiety signals. You can consume an astonishing amount and still feel strangely unsatisfied.

Film, at its best, is a meal.

It requires sitting down. It unfolds in courses. It activates anticipation, yes — but in service of digestion. You laugh. You grieve. You endure tension long enough for release. When it works, your nervous system completes a cycle. You leave different than you entered.

This is why you can watch verticals for two hours and feel vaguely empty, yet carry a film with you for weeks. One stimulates appetite. The other metabolizes emotion.

Verticals, by contrast, rarely allow completion. They traffic primarily in two currencies: romance and revenge. But romance without vulnerability is just desire on a loop. Revenge without wound is power fantasy. The feelings that would make either resonate — longing, humiliation, grief — require time. Vertical has been engineered to outrun time.

Three series illustrate the pattern:

How to Tame a Silver Fox (ReelShort, 2025) is the wanting loop perfected: forbidden romance, enemies-to-lovers, constant deferral. You know exactly where it’s going. That certainty is the hook. Each cliffhanger reignites anticipation without delivering transformation.

Watch Out, I’m the Lady Boss (DramaBox) uses revelation instead of romance. Every ten episodes, power inverts. It’s Clue without the murder — Miss Scarlett in the drawing room, but stripped of moral inquiry. The pleasure is comeuppance, endlessly postponed.

And then there is My Crush Thinks I’m a Boy (DramaBox, 2025), written by my son Ethan. I watched him build it — a girl disguising herself to enter an all-boys fencing academy, discovering her former hookup is now her roommate. It sustained dramatic irony. It asked the audience to care about Ari as a person, not just as a premise.

It trended when it launched. Then it dropped off the popular list.

The hook worked. But then it asked for something slower—staying with a character as she evolves. It felt almost like an ’80s movie — earnest, character-driven. It was less provocative. Less cruel. It did not escalate fast enough.

The platform did not reward it.

Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist, calls this dynamic “the race to the bottom of the brain stem” — platforms competing for our most primitive impulses: fear, outrage, desire, tribal belonging. If vertical has gained a foothold in the U.S., the real question is not whether it can replace film. It’s whether intentional storytelling can survive inside systems optimized for compulsion.

The horror genre may be uniquely suited to the vertical frame. Its narrowed field of vision heightens claustrophobia, intensifies close-ups, and weaponizes what lurks just outside the cropped edges. Because horror depends on anticipation and jolt rather than prolonged emotional digestion, it may align more naturally with vertical’s architecture than romance or revenge.

I don’t believe the generation growing up on verticals is shallow. They are hungry for what humans have always been hungry for: to feel seen inside a story, to metabolize emotion, to not be alone. But if their primary narrative form is engineered for hits rather than journeys, they may struggle to recognize the difference between stimulation and transformation.

Not because they are incapable of transportation — but because so much of their environment is designed to interrupt it. You can scroll for hours and never arrive anywhere.

I still think about that hawk. How it moved — unhurried, immense, entirely itself. It carried a memory from a film into my lived experience weeks later. That is what transportation does. It leaves the screen and enters the world with you.

That is the difference.

Tomorrow marks one year since the fires tore through Pacific Palisades. I wrote this essay in the immediate aftermath, trying to make sense of what we lost - not just structures, but the parts of ourselves that lived in those spaces.

I was in Chicago when the fires came, planning my return to a place that no longer existed in the form I knew. Watching from a distance as my son’s childhood landscape vanished felt like losing his memories along with my own. But in writing this, I realized something: the Palisades wrote itself into us so deeply that we carry it forward, even in absence.

To my friends and neighbors who lived this loss firsthand - I’m thinking of you today. I’m holding you close remembering the place that taught us about community and possibility and beauty - that remains.

The Santa Anas tell California’s true story. While we bask in the warm air’s tender lies about permanence, the winds arrive through the canyons, carrying a harder truth: nothing stays. When the Santa Anas cleared the skies, revealing snow-capped mountains to the east so we could remind ourselves that we too had a winter season, we accepted the gift. Their howling winds would rattle our windows, eerie sounds cutting through the night, serving as a reminder of the comfort of our shelter.

Now, in the wake of the fires that tore through Pacific Palisades, I search for words to make sense of what was lost. People say, after disasters, “They’re just things. At least you’re safe.” But it’s never just about the things. It’s about the memories they hold. The life you built around them. The sacrifices you made to be there. The feeling of a space that was yours — corners filled with light, the walls holding the energy of joy, grief, hope, and growth. Spaces become part of us, and when they are gone, we mourn more than walls and roofs. We mourn the parts of ourselves that lived there. The winds, once a source of beauty and clarity, reveal their duality becoming messengers of destruction, carrying embers through the canyons, turning paradise to ash.

There are moments that shape your life, though they rarely announce themselves as important when they happen. They are not the moments captured in photographs or celebrated with toasts and speeches. They are quieter than that. Subtle. The way sunlight slants through a kitchen window at a certain hour, inspiring the start of the day with every possible beginning. The sound of your child’s laughter echoing off canyon walls, joy bouncing between rock and sky, as if the canyon stores this energy to give back to us when we need it most. Swimming after dolphins in the cool ocean on a hot day, their bodies gliding just beyond your reach, showing you how close your dreams have always been. These moments don’t ask for your attention, but they linger. They imprint themselves in your memory, and when you revisit them, they remind you who you were and who you became.

When I think of the Palisades, it’s these moments that rise to the surface. It wasn’t the place where I grew up, or even where I spent most of my years in Los Angeles. But it is the place where I grew in other ways — into a mother, into myself.

Pacific Palisades was the end of everything when I initially moved from New York to Hollywood. It marked where Los Angeles surrendered to cliffs, where America gave way to endless ocean. It was not a place for beginners. And then it was, when I met Andrea.

Andrea was 24 when I met her, a fellow producer at an internet start-up in the days before Wi-Fi. Newly married, she exuded the kind of confidence that comes from chasing dreams and catching them.

She and her husband had invited the crew to their storybook cottage, a modest home tucked into the hillside. A skylight flooded the living room with sunlight, while a window above the sink framed a scene of darting hummingbirds. Their home was unassuming but full of pride — a testament to what could be built amidst the grueling hours of entertainment production. It wasn’t just a house; it was their sanctuary, carved out with care. There was a first home pride and grounding about the place, something that made the long hours and impossible deadlines worth it.

Years later, when my life fell apart, Andrea opened her second Palisades home to me. By then, I was a newly divorced mother with a one-year-old son. She and her husband had moved to a small one story house closer to the village, with a pool and three tiny bedrooms. It wasn’t much bigger than their first home, but it had the same unassuming charm, the same sense of welcome. I stayed there while Andrea and her husband were out of town, where he was editing a major film. Those months were a lifeline. I was unsure of my footing, and Andrea’s home became a refuge. It was there, in that house, that I began to reimagine my life, to see possibility again.

The term location, location, location was most fitting for this little home. It said starter family all over it. One weekend early in my stay, I put my son down for a nap and hopped in the shower, trying to savor a moment of calm in a new, uncertain chapter of my life. As I dried off, a knock at the door startled me. Before I could answer, I heard voices inside the house — and there they were, a couple from the neighborhood, holding my son. He had somehow figured out how to open the door and wandered outside, and they’d brought him safely back. I felt a wave of guilt — how could I have let this happen? — but also an unexpected sense of comfort. These neighbors didn’t judge; they only reassured me. Their kindness revealed something about this place: it wasn’t just safe — it was communal. Everyone looked out for one another. That moment stayed with me. It was the first time I realized I wasn’t as alone as I thought.

You could walk to ‘the village’ and the Mayberry diner was its center, making it an unlikely small town within Los Angeles. Servers knew regulars by name, while city workers, young couples, and the occasional celebrity formed an unexpected community on this single block where everyone exchanged greetings. And there was a farmers market on Sundays where kids find their friends and chased each other around and asked for money to buy something from Benton’s sports shop on the corner. It was a perfect vision of motherhood, one I had never experienced growing up and better than anything I’d seen on TV.

Over fifteen years, much of the Palisades transformed as modest homes fell to massive new construction, with fresh families filling spaces that crept to property lines. Andrea’s family moved from their starter home in the Alphabet Streets to a different kind of sanctuary — a two-story house with ocean views that preserved the neighborhood’s original spirit, where she would raise her son.

A house became available next door to her and I found myself working tirelessly to rent it. By then, I had spent years in the punishing world of television production, a life of grueling schedules and cross-country travel. I had built a good career, hauling my son along with me as a toddler, juggling single motherhood with deadlines and airport layovers. When that house became available, I knew it was my chance. It wasn’t cheap, and I stretched myself to afford it, but I didn’t hesitate. I had seen how my outlook changed by living in the Palisades, how the open spaces rewired my brain for something more expansive, more hopeful. I wanted that for my son. I wanted him to grow up in a place where the ocean and the hills could shape his imagination. I wanted him to have the mindset of open spaces, of light, of possibility. I knew it would make him a different person. And so I worked for it, because I knew the reward would be worth the sacrifice.

The eucalyptus tree in our backyard claimed half the space with its roots, its leaves casting dappled shadows like nature’s stained glass. At night, I strung lights from its branches for outdoor dinners. The leaves were a natural frame for sunsets where we would contemplate our day, wish upon stars, and dream under full moons, unaware that this beautiful anchor of our lives — an immigrant like so many of us — harbored a darker truth. Its oils and dry leaves would become perfect kindling in the California drought. The tree that sheltered our memories would later feed the flames that devoured them. Like my family, the eucalyptus created a life of beauty in a place where it was never meant to take root — its shade and grandeur masking its precarious existence in a landscape that was not meant to be.

Our sons grew wild in that landscape, their childhood measured in trails hiked at Will Rogers, hills rolled down at the Polo Fields, distances swum to greet dolphins in the Pacific.

What I didn’t understand then was how the Palisades would root itself in me. It wasn’t mere beauty — it was an education in stillness. The place rewired something essential in me, taught me to read meaning in the light shifting across hills at dusk, to find clarity where sky meets sea. Even now, I can close my eyes and return: the eucalyptus leaves hang sharp in the air, framing the sliver of ocean in the distance, and I am grounded again. Some places write themselves into your cells. The Palisades taught me how to hold space for awe, became the quiet center I carry within me — a mental refuge I hold onto for gratitude and solace.

As our sons readied themselves for college, we found ourselves drawn daily to the bluffs, as if the vastness of ocean and sky could prepare us for the emptiness to come. We’d trace the same path past our neighbor’s collection of wind chimes — copper and brass catching light, their sounds carrying on like fragments of conversation. The chimes had been hung there for everyone, this stranger’s gift becoming our compass as we tried to read the future in the horizon. Their varying tones spoke of transitions we couldn’t yet name, each ring a note in the symphony of letting go. We were learning, even then, how to hold both presence and absence, how to find meaning in spaces about to empty, how to carry forward the music of a place that had shaped us.

Today, that life exists only in memory. The fires took the physical place that shaped these memories, their joys, their struggles — Andrea’s home reduced to ash. We had already watched one transformation: years before, the village was razed and reborn as an outdoor mall, its studied attempt at small-town charm standing where the community diner once held court. The Tesla charging stations had arrived with the same inevitability as the children’s retreat to screens, both marking how the Palisades’ spirit ebbed like a slow tide, drawing its life force back to sea. Now this harbinger of change, stands as the only town center to survive the fires — a cornerstone for rebuilding what was lost.

In Will Rogers, the hills remain, though fire has scarred the trails where we once walked with our children. This eternal nature that wrote itself into our cells, that nourished us and our children, remains. I find myself mourning not just what burned, but something more elusive: the footsteps of my son running around the sunlit streets, the servers at Mayberry who knew every name, the simple belief that such places could remain unchanged.

The Santa Anas cloaked themselves as time, reminding us that even the most beloved places are not immune to change. The winds cannot be stopped and now manifest themselves as a force of destruction, reducing what we hold dear to ash.

Yet, in losing the physical place, we are taught how memory preserves what truly matters. As we sift through the flood of memories, they begin to sort themselves: some become mere nostalgia, sweet but distant; others remain as touchstones, moments where we grew, where we learned to love, where we became who we are. The mourning itself becomes a form of preservation — it’s the way the morning light on water taught us to pause, the way mountain trails showed us how to find our footing, the way a sunset trained us to see both beauty and loss as intertwined.

I had the chance to live this because of Andrea, who embodies the free spirit of the canyons — an explorer who finds grace, wisdom, and joy down every path. Though the fires took her home, the Palisades remains part of her and all of us who loved it — an unshakable foundation, a compass pointing us toward grace and possibility. Some places write themselves so deeply into us that their absence becomes a kind of presence, and we carry their spirit forward — finding traces of their light in every new beginning, every moment of connection, every choice to notice beauty.

Seems like everyone is talking about Heated Rivalry—the show that slid into the cultural zeitgeist somewhere between turkey and Christmas roast. I’m from the Midwest. My college won the NCAA hockey championships. I was a hockey WAG. So when I started watching, I had my own experience with hockey.

What I got instead was emotional vulnerability, softness between men, and a romance where explicit passion coexists. The physical intensity of competition is redirected into the heat of desire—and into the taboo of a relationship that must remain hidden.

Trust me—you’re not checking your phone during this show.

My son casually mentioned that his female college friends host regular “BL nights”—streaming Boys’ Love programs, mostly Japanese series full of emotional tension and just enough physical closeness to feel electrifying. I’d never heard of BL. But once I started looking, I saw it everywhere—especially in vertical microdramas. Turns out this genre isn’t new; it’s just new to many of us.

Before I Knew BL

The first thing I noticed about Heated Rivalry was how the men looked—masculine and athletic, yes, but with an androgyny I don’t usually see in sports. Smooth skin. Delicate features. Handsome in a way that borders on pretty.

Later I learned there’s a term for this aesthetic in Japanese BL: bishōnen—“beautiful boy.” These characters aren’t meant to reflect conventional masculinity; they’re idealized through a female gaze, shaped by desire rather than realism. BL originated in 1970s Japan as manga created by women for women, centering romantic relationships between men that were expressive, stylized, and emotionally heightened. It expanded into anime, live-action adaptations, and now vertical microdramas—short episodes that compress entire romances into addictive minutes. The stories repeat familiar pleasures: enemies-to-lovers, masculine worlds charged with emotion, and intimacy that unfolds largely in private.

How Heated Rivalry Exists in This World

Heated Rivalry is based on romance novels by Rachel Reid. Showrunner Jacob Tierney preserves the emotional core while allowing the characters to be tender, awkward, funny, and articulate—qualities rarely afforded to men in Western sports narratives. (There’s so much to say about Tierney’s visual language alone—cinematographer valentina.vee on Instagram does comprehensive breakdowns that are an absolute joy. Follow her if you want to really dive in.)

The series is set in an extremely masculine arena where the stakes for visibility are impossibly high. During the show’s timeline (2008–2017), there are no openly gay pro players. This creates the conditions for a particular kind of tension—one BL has long explored—between who someone appears to be and who they might become.

There’s a Japanese concept about people wearing three masks (mittsu no kao): the mask shown to the world (tatemae), the mask shown to close friends and family (honne), and the truest mask shown to no one—not even yourself. In Heated Rivalry, Shane and Ilya navigate all three. They perform ruthless competitiveness in public, cultivate tenderness in private, and struggle most with the third mask—the self they haven’t yet learned how to name.

Here’s what I understood as a writer: mask three is where yearning lives. You can’t offer someone what you haven’t discovered in yourself yet. The ache isn’t just I want you but can’t have you. It’s I want you, and I don’t yet know who I am allowed to be.

What feels genuinely new about Heated Rivalry is how it redistributes risk. Physical intimacy is allowed to be explicit, mutual, while emotional exposure remains the dangerous act. The physical is hot and heavy. The emotional intimacy iced out . Desire is permitted without punishment; recognition, naming, and choice carry the real stakes.

How YA and BL Share the Same DNA

Heated Rivalry has found dedicated fans among Gen Z gay men and straight women. Its appeal to women—including middle-aged women like me—mirrors series like The Summer I Turned Pretty. These stories share a key ingredient: the tension of being physically close while remaining emotionally distant.

Mainstream heterosexual romance is often filtered through the male gaze. YA and BL offer the female gaze—focused on intimacy, emotion, and safety. Men are emotionally expressive, vulnerable, even soft—and desirable. It’s emotional wish fulfillment: not just for love, but for a reimagined masculinity unburdened by dominance and emotional isolation.

Audiences are no longer satisfied by romance where power imbalance creates desire. Heated Rivalry broke open desire emerging from mutual vulnerability constrained by circumstance—two people equally capable, equally desiring, equally limited.

Yearning as Structure (and What I’m Stealing for My Own Writing)

This is where YA and BL thrive—and where I’ve learned the most. Yearning is the aching tension of wanting someone deeply while being afraid to act—silent glances across rooms, being close enough to smell someone’s hair but not touch it. It isn’t about hesitation; it’s about delay imposed by identity, timing, and the world watching. It’s built through prolonged internal conflict, emotional barriers, and repeated near-misses—almost kissing, almost confessing.

In these stories, the payoff isn’t sex; it’s recognition. Consent and communication don’t interrupt the tension—they are the tension. Physical intimacy happened early, even explicitly in Heated Rivalry, but the emotional climax arrives when characters choose visibility over hiding.

I see how powerful this structure is. Cliffhangers aren’t about plot twists; they’re about emotional pacing. You stretch the longing. You sharpen the silence. You give weight to small gestures.

In Heated Rivalry, it’s Ilya telling Shane his hotel room number as code in the rink, or the meaning embedded in making a tuna melt. The story happens in the margins—in glances, gestures, and pauses. That’s where the audience lives. It’s the moment before the choice. That’s yearning. That’s mask three pressing against mask one.

The Takeaway

I started watching Heated Rivalry expecting sports. What I found was a masterclass in emotional architecture. It showed me that romance works when power is balanced, emotions are mutual, and physical intimacy can be as satisfying as emotional recognition. Yearning isn’t a delay tactic—it is the story.

We are in an era of romance storytelling where emotional connection, consent and communication overpower conquest and domination. That is the new fantasy.

What does watching Hamnet in a dark theater have in common with looking up at the sky to ponder a full moon? Both are acts of immersion. In the theater, I’m enveloped by nature on a big screen—wind, trees, the countryside. Under the moon, I stand in the infinite blackness. Different settings, same feeling. A kind of surrender.

Chloé Zhao has crafted a film that reaches into the soul and confronts humanity. It is special. It makes you stop and be in the moment, if you are open to it.

The first time I saw Hamnet, I braced myself. I already knew the story—knew what was coming. The unspeakable. A mother’s worst nightmare. So I armored up. When it finally happened, I felt... nothing. Or rather, I wouldn’t let myself feel. I heard sniffling around me, the quiet grief of strangers in the dark, but I stayed numb. I told myself not to give in.

What I noticed instead was the land. The wind. The trees. I had gratitude for nature that wasn’t just a setting—it was a character. Sacred. Alive.

My son saw the film on the other side of the continent, in New York. He told me it had wrecked him. I told him I hadn’t let it in.

He said, “But that’s the whole point.”

Not the words, he explained, but the feeling of the words. The energy.

I had missed the plot.

There’s a moment in the film when Shakespeare, played by Paul Mescal, has an actor repeat a line over and over. It isn’t right until the actor feels the energy of the words. Not word perfect, not the right tone—but the life behind them.

After the screening at the Directors Guild, Zhao spoke at a Q&A. She said she didn’t rehearse lines with the actors. Instead, they did breathwork. They focused on energy, on connection—to each other, to the location, to breath. This wasn’t about delivering dialogue. It was about embodiment. Her filmmaking feels more like ritual than performance, the camera capturing something ephemeral and alive. The long takes in natural light let you travel—not just through physical space, but through dimensions of memory and feeling. ​​The film doesn’t just show you these moments—it makes you live in them.

She also said she isn’t a Shakespeare scholar. English isn’t even her first language. So she had to feel her way through his work. To connect through energy. Her words echoed what my son had said: it’s not about the words exactly. It’s about what they carry.

A week later, I attended a breathwork workshop for the first time (a friend took me). I didn’t know then that I was preparing for something. During the session, I felt myself lift above my own body—not in the sense of leaving it, but in fully occupying it. For once, there was no thought, no anxiety, no anticipation. Only sensation. Swirling energy rose and fell around me, releasing something deep in my DNA. In that space, my father came to me—not as a memory, but as presence. Everything would be okay, he seemed to say. Not in words, but in the way breathwork speaks: through energy, through knowing.

Part of the workshop involved a release of yelling while a gong vibrated. It was so intense that I saw color emanating from my body. I didn’t know the breathwork had prepared me until I sat down in that theater again.

The second time I saw Hamnet, I let my guard down. I sat with Agnes (Jessie Buckley). I climbed into the bowels of the tree. I let the feeling move through me. The film became a place I could inhabit, not just observe. In the film, nature heals Agnes. She finds solace in the land, in the trees, in what endures. But for Shakespeare, art is the healer. The play becomes his vessel for grief, his transformation of loss into something that endures. I use art and self-expression to work through things. When my father died, I wrote. But nature as healer? Breathwork? That’s new territory. Hamnet shows me both can be true—that grief needs multiple containers, that art doesn’t replace presence but creates a space where presence can still be felt. And maybe that’s what I’m doing now—learning to inhabit both.

I felt the cathartic release of the play within the film. It wasn’t just a story—it was energy. It was presence. What Gen Z might call a ‘vibe,’ but that’s too superficial. It makes it aesthetic, curated, consumable. This is uncontrolled energy that moves through bodies, not around them. Not something you observe—something that inhabits you.

Now, under the full glow of the Wolf Moon, I feel its call to be illuminated. I’m seeing Hamnet again, not just to witness it, but to absorb it. To breathe with it. I want the energy to pass through me the way wind moves through leaves. To feel it and then let it go.

Tonight is the Wolf Moon. I step outside and looked up at it glowing in the vast black sky. Standing there, I understood the connection I’d been circling. That dark theater, this infinite sky—the same surrender.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes in Women Who Run with the Wolves about the wild woman archetype—the part of us that listens with the bones, that knows how to grieve, create, survive. The howl is not pain, but power. The wild woman doesn’t watch the moon in silence. She responds. She calls back. She is surrender.

Art doesn’t erase grief–it gives it a place to go. Hamnet was the bridge that transported me between worlds, to a place where I could find different meanings.

Tomorrow, I will attend another breathwork workshop. The day after, I will sit in a dark theater watching Hamnet for the third time. A ritual I have created for myself to face this new year.

Now, under the Wolf Moon’s fierce glow, I see it clearly: I’m being called to feel deeper. To howl—not with sorrow, but with life.

Like the wolves, maybe we give energy to the moon—not through understanding, but through surrender. Through feeling. Through howling back.

It started with a birthday gift. My friend is the kind of person who’s impossible to shop for — eclectic, curious, a person with varied and diverse interests. Then I spotted a book on the passenger seat of her car: Raising Bonsai.

I didn’t know much about bonsai — I thought they were just miniature trees, a decorative little thing to sit by the window. But the book intrigued me, and I figured a bonsai would be a meaningful gift. As luck would have it, a friend’s father happened to be a bonsai master, and he invited me to their local club meetings.

I thought I was helping someone else start a hobby. As I watched the delicate pruning and careful shaping of those tiny trees, it made me reflect on the path of raising my son. Bonsai, it turns out, isn’t just about trees. It’s about intention. Patience. Growth. And, perhaps most unexpectedly, the quiet art of letting go.

The bonsai master studied the little tree — droopy, bent like the Grinch’s Christmas tree — and without hesitation, began to cut. Like Edward Scissorhands, he lopped off the sagging top and clipped away every other branch with surgical precision.

I gasped with nearly every snip. What had been cute and crooked now looked fragile, exposed — like it could barely support its own weight.

It reminded me of my son, just nine months old, wobbling as he pulled himself to stand. His head was too big for his body — like a bobblehead on popsicle sticks. Every instinct in me wanted to hold him steady. But even then, he’d wave me off. I’d hold my breath as he teetered, then fell backward with a thud.

Pruning feels like taking away. But really, it’s making space — for balance, for strength, for growth.

I think about the choices I made for my son — the things I gently withheld or redirected. No lopping off of limbs, but quiet trims: no TV in the bedroom, no fast food, co-sleeping for maybe way too long. And limits I set for myself, too — putting my own dreams on hold to shape something else into life.

At the time, each decision felt small. But looking back, they were like those careful snips. The acts of quiet, intentional shaping and just like the tree, he didn’t need me to shape his path for him, only to clear what might block the light.

Once the tree was pruned, the bonsai master wrapped thin copper wire around the remaining branches. Gently, deliberately, he bent each one — not to force it, but to guide it. The wire gave the tree structure, preventing it from sagging under its own weight.

I thought of my son again — that same 9-month-old, now grown into a teenager with opinions as strong as his will. He had always waved me off. First with tiny hands. Later with the words: “Don’t tell me what to do.”

I tried not to. I wanted to be different from the way I was raised — where every activity was an expectation, every skill a future résumé line. I was made to play piano for twelve years. I haven’t touched a piano in thirty. I didn’t want to force that same rigidity onto him.

Instead, I gave him freedom. Or tried to. We made a deal: he could explore anything — karate, music, theater, robotics — but he had to stick with it for six months and give it his best effort. That was my version of wiring: not to control his path, but to offer shape, structure, and support while he figured out who he was becoming.

Looking back, I see how delicate that balance was. There were times I bit my tongue so hard it felt like parenting through silence. And times I gave advice that, in hindsight, may have felt more like pressure. I wonder now if some of that “wiring” was too tight. Or if, maybe, it gave him just enough resistance to strengthen his own roots.

After pruning and wiring, the final step was to repot the tree. The master cut down the container, removed most of the soil, and trimmed the roots — yes, even the roots. Then he re-planted it in a shallow tray, exposing just enough of its upper roots to give the illusion of an ancient, miniature tree gripping the earth.

I was stunned. I didn’t know you could cut the roots. But he explained: root pruning allows the tree to grow stronger, more compact. To settle in a new home.

That’s when I realized the repotting was the hardest for me. I thought I had already done the difficult work: raising my son on my own, shaping his early years, being patient when I didn’t know what came next. But watching him leave for college was its own kind of cutting. I had to make space for him to find where he belonged.

He left for college across the country, only to return a semester later, after three rounds of COVID isolation and an overwhelming sense that he wasn’t ready. I worried I had done something wrong. Had I given him too much freedom? Not enough preparation? Was it my fault the roots didn’t take?

And then, something shifted. A mentor from high school introduced him to climbing — a discipline that demanded both focus and freedom, risk and control. It gave him something he hadn’t found in school or music or any of the “baby branches” we’d tried before. Climbing helped him feel capable. Capable of holding his own weight.

Unlike a bonsai, he wasn’t meant to be contained in a tray and shaped by my hands. He needed space. And time.

He found his footing at community college, where he became a quiet leader. From there, he applied to an Ivy League school he had once dreamed of. He got in. A long-forgotten dream, maybe as much mine as his.

Today, he’s still in school. Still climbing, still writing music, still exploring. But now, he’s also working as a professional writer — developing microdramas for major studios, and making films with his friends. The thing I never taught him, but had made my living with, has become the thing we now share.

When the bonsai master had finished shaping the little tree, I asked, “So what now? Do I bring it back next month?”

He shook his head. “No — maybe in six months.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Six months — the same deal I made with my son for every new interest, every baby branch of identity we explored together. Karate, music, theater, robotics. Try it for six months, I told him. Then we’ll see.

“So… what do I do in the meantime?” I asked.

The master looked at me and said, simply, “Wait.”

Parenting felt like that too, especially in the early years. I remember waking up every morning and telling myself to notice. To look for the tiny shifts — the first time he made a joke, the way his eyes changed when he learned something new. That kind of noticing takes patience I didn’t know I had.

But somewhere along the way — between the activities, the musical theater, and college rejections, between pandemic shutdowns and unexpected returns — I lost that sense of stillness. I stopped trusting that things were happening beneath the surface.

I didn’t intend to learn bonsai. It found me when I thought I was doing something for someone else. And in the slow, meditative work of shaping tiny trees, I found a reflection of what I had already done — and what I was still learning to do.

Raising my son taught me how to care deeply without clinging. To shape without controlling. To trust that letting go is also a part of parenting.

Now that he’s grown, still growing, I’ve been learning to tend to myself. To repot, prune, and gently rewire the parts of me that were paused for so long.

Bonsai takes years. Years of careful tending with almost no visible change. You water, prune, rewire. You watch and wait. Growth happens below the surface first — in the roots, in the quiet. Just because something takes time doesn’t mean it isn’t working.

And like any bonsai, we’re all works in progress — slowly, patiently growing into something strong, shaped by love, and the roots we share.

A year ago, as I prepared to move, I began the slow process of letting go — not just of furniture or kitchenware, but of the living things I’d nurtured through the pandemic. My plants had become companions, their quiet growth, proof of time’s passing. Saying goodbye was harder than I expected. I watched a pothos I’d trained along my bookcase reappear, now draped over a shelf on a friend’s Zoom call, and a potted citrus collection — makrut lime, calamansi, yuzu — taking root on a sunny East L.A. hillside. One plant, a tradescantia that seemingly had died and revived more times than I could count, left L.A. , reappearing in an Instagram gratitude post, reminding me that my spirit stretches to Sin City. Even my strawberry pot — now tended by a four-year-old who celebrates each berry like a holiday — reminds me that what I let go of has a new life somewhere else.

Some items were easier to pass on — I sold my beloved cast iron cookware collection of Le Creuset and Staub. The rest became a frustrating mix of toss, donate, or schedule for large-item pickup. But when the donation truck finally arrived — the day before I had to vacate, after a two-week wait — they were too full to take my 200-pound custom-built dining table, my Weber grill, or my son’s nearly brand-new gaming chair.

There was no way I could leave them in the alley to become a possum habitat.

In last-minute desperation, my friend offered to post the items to her local network. Within an hour, she was coordinating messages: “Leave the gaming chair on the porch.” “Barbecue in the driveway, please.” “The table will be picked up at 7:30 a.m.” I was stunned. Weeks earlier, I’d tried Marketplace and Nextdoor — not even a nibble. But these heavy, can’t-fit-in-your-backseat items were gone within hours.

Later, I asked how she worked this miracle.

“Buy Nothing,” she said casually. “It’s a local Facebook group — people give and ask for things. It’s kind of amazing.”

It really was. I told another friend how this group had saved my move, and she lit up. “Oh, I’ve been using the Cobble Hill Buy Nothing group in Brooklyn for years,” she said. “I fed my dog for a whole year with bags of gifted kibble.”

Opened dog food. Who would think to offer it — let alone accept it?

When I moved back to my old neighborhood months later, I joined the local Buy Nothing group out of curiosity. On the first day, someone posted a wine decanter, a sofa… and grape leaves.

Grape leaves?

Who posts grape leaves? Why?

Was there some sort of underground market for grape leaves? Like who is answering this post?

Apparently, me.

I worked on a food show with —attorney by day; Athenian cook other at times. She taught me how to make stuffed grape leaves for the show. I’d never made them on my own, but something about that post sparked possibility. I messaged the giver. She sent me her address and told me to take as many as I wanted. So I hopped on my bike, scissors and tote in hand, and rode about a mile to where the vines curled over a wooden fence.

I clipped leaves like treasure, tucked them into my tote, and rode home with the sun on my face, completely delighted by the absurd joy of free grape leaves.

Back in my kitchen, I realized they wouldn’t last. I had to cook them that day.

I boiled the leaves in salted water, drained and carefully separated the delicate layers, clipping stems with scissors just like in Yumna’s video. I wrapped them in a damp towel and made the filling: soaked short-grain rice, ground lamb (in hindsight, a beef blend might’ve been better), baharat spice — a mix of cumin, coriander, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, and Aleppo pepper. It needed a little something more, so I grated in onion and tomato for a tangy base, added the rice, salt, and pepper, and began the assembly.

Rolling each leaf, I layered them tightly in a pot, drizzled olive oil and lemon juice over each stack, covered them with broth, and simmered them for 20 minutes. Only a couple burst open. The rest — imperfect but beautiful — looked exactly right. I let them cool, took a bite, and… they were the best stuffed grape leaves I’d ever had — second only to Psistaria in Chicago. And maybe they tasted better because I’d picked the leaves. I’d made something by hand, from start to finish, with a plant that had no price tag.

The next day, I brought a few to work — they made a perfect lunch. I shared some with a coworker. Then I packed up more to give to the friend who had first posted my furniture. She had recently helped me weed my (tiny) new garden. Grape leaves for weeding felt like a fair trade…and I’d agreed to watch her cats while she was away.

In her backyard, along the fence, I noticed something. More grape leaves.

“I didn’t know Santa Monica was a grape-leaf-growing town,” I joked. “I joined Buy Nothing because of you, and the first thing I got was grape leaves. Now I know where to restock.”

After I left, she texted me: “Those were the best stuffed grape leaves I’ve ever had.”

Was it the hyper-local leaves? The lamb, the spices, the sun, the bike ride? I don’t know. Maybe it was the gift — a circle of kindness where giving isn’t about getting rid of something, but creating connection.

I brought over another batch, and she gave me a 40-pound bag of dirt for my garden.

A few days later, I posted a bed frame and mattress. My son had left for college, and I’d downsized to a one-bedroom. A neighbor claimed it immediately — she was helping a neighbor who had recently moved out of his car and into his first apartment.

I was thrilled to give it. Not because I was decluttering, but because I knew who it was going to. This wasn’t a tax write-off — it was a real gift, passed on with intention.

This is the heart of Buy Nothing: it’s not just the free stuff. It’s the thought behind it. The way an unused bed becomes comfort for someone who has known the inside of a car as home. Grape leaves become a shared meal. Dirt becomes a garden. A simple act — offering what you no longer need — becomes a form of participation in something that feels quietly radical: a community that trusts in giving and believes in enough.

In this little circle of exchange, I’m not just letting go of things.

I’m taking part in a new kind of wealth — the kind that grows when you give it away.

Because Buy Nothing isn’t about free stuff. It’s about seeing value where we once saw trash, generosity where we once saw transaction. It has redefined abundance — not as having more, but as needing less and sharing more freely. It’s taught me that giving isn’t just a way to empty a garage; it’s a way to fill a life — with connection, kindness, small rituals of care.

That weekend, I went to the farmers market. The seed exchange was giving away cilantro and cherry tomato seedlings. I planted them in the dirt my friend gave me. Now, every few days, I pluck a tomato — warm from the sun, bursting with sweetness. The cilantro flavors my sauces and tops my dishes — I cut as much as I need, and then it regenerates. Kind of like Buy Nothing.

And I think: none of this cost me anything.

But it gave me everything.

Stuffed Grape Leaves

• 2 tablespoons olive oil plus more for drizzling between layers

• 1/2 pound ground beef + 1/2 pound ground lamb

• 1/2 teaspoon salt plus more for seasoning layers

• 1 Tablespoon baharat spice (see above for spice mix)

• 1 cup short grain white rice (soaked for at least 6 hours)

• 60–70 grape leaves (these can be purchased in a jar OR picked off a vine, cleaned and boiled in salt water)

• 1 medium sized tomato (I used a grater)

• 1 small onion (I used a grater)

• 1/4 cup lemon juice

Instructions

• Gently separate and wash the leaves individually. Cut off the stem. Cover them with a damp cloth so they don’t dry out.

• When the filling is ready, these leaves can be laid out flat.

• Heat a large pan with olive oil, and cook ground meat until browned. Season with salt and 7 Spice.

• Add onion, tomato and uncooked rice to the ground meat and mix.

• With a grape leaf flat on a surface, scoop a heaping teaspoon of the rice mixture into the center of the grape leaf, and carefully fold in the sides and roll.

• Line the bottom of a large pot with olive oil and grape leaves. Neatly arrange the stuffed and rolled grape leaves in rows, alternating directions, to completely cover the circumference of the pot. Drizzle each layer with olive oil and season with salt and pepper to taste.

• Place small round plate on top of grape leaves in the pot to hold them down and prevent floating while they are cooking.

• Add broth and/or water to completely cover the grape leaves and the plate, then cover the pot and cook on Medium heat for 30 minutes, until most of the water is absorbed and the rice is cooked.

• Remove from heat and let cool uncovered for 30 minutes and transfer to a dish.

I began a holiday tradition with my son when he was three years old. We baked sugar cookies. I still use the same cookie cutters, stored in a gallon Ziploc bag — the candy cane, the Christmas tree, the snowflake, and my favorite: fluted biscuit cutters I use solely to create wreaths. Every December, we invited his friends over to decorate. I loved watching boys sit quietly, intensely focused on icing and sprinkles, treating each cookie like a small engineering problem — until they realized the icing was simply a vehicle for getting as many sprinkles onto the cookie as possible.

When my son went to college, the baking stopped. I suppose the tradition lost its reason. For a few years, December passed without flour on the counters or my familiar frenzy of buying tins at Michael’s.

This year, inspired by the tins I had been collecting over time, I decided to bake again. This time, the baking wasn’t for entertaining children or assembling teacher-appreciation gifts. It was for me. I wanted to engage my creative side in a tactile way, creating each recipe with intention, where taste, technique, and texture offered immediate feedback and the chance to refine the work in real time.

I gave myself a week — a finite span of days devoted to planning, prep, timing, and attention. I wasn’t sure how it would turn out — whether I’d wind up giving the cookies to friends and family or to the dumpster — but I felt compelled to make something that might pull me into the holiday spirit.

Holiday baking, especially for someone who doesn’t usually bake, requires organization. An inexperienced baker has a different relationship to time. You can’t spread tasks out the way you do the rest of December. Dough has to chill, rolled to an even, exact thickness. Icing has to set. Cookies need to dry overnight before they can be packed. There are no shortcuts. You have to think several steps ahead — what can be baked today, what must wait, what needs a full night to rest. And then there’s babysitting an oven whose temperature settings you don’t quite trust, watching carefully for the precise shade of beige that signals a bake is done. Baking insists on presence — monitoring edges, checking textures, catching the exact moment something is ready.

Each year when we visited my sister’s family for the holidays, we waited for the cookies her Italian mother-in-law sent. They arrived from New York in a Priority Mail box, wrapped in tissue paper, somehow intact. Pizzicatti. Anginetti. Tadal. Struffoli — tiny, honeyed clusters like caramel popcorn studded with sugar beads. Italian rainbow cookies that were really miniature cakes. Enough to feed a houseful of people. Every cookie unmistakably handmade. You could taste the technique in them — the experience, the repetition, the generations of tradition. They weren’t impressive because they were perfect. They were impressive because they were part of a legacy.

I thought about those cookies while deciding what to send my own family this year. I wouldn’t be traveling home to Chicago. Funds were tight, and anyway — what do you give people who can buy whatever they want? I wanted to send something that carried intention instead of expense. Something that felt like a place. I decided on cookies. A California Christmas. Citrus. Herbs. Olive oil. Sunshine and ocean breeze packed into a tin. Everything represented this place — what grows here, what I can find at the farmers market or in my garden, what makes California taste like California.

In years when I was working, refrigerated dough made sense — the boys could decorate, and that was the point. But I knew how to make a good pie crust, knew the rhythm of folding dough in thirds and rolling it flat, building layers. I used that technique here: fold, turn, roll, repeat. When the wreaths baked, you could see it — the edges stacked in visible layers. The cookies tasted distinctly made, not just mixed and cut. Flaky where sugar cookies are usually dense, delicate in chew, but sturdy enough to hold their shape. Each turn added thin sheets of butter and dough that separated in the oven into something lighter, more complex. This wasn’t the refrigerated roll I’d buy when the boys wanted to bake and I didn’t have time. This was time I had deliberately set aside.

I decorated the sugar cookies with pistachio pieces, freeze-dried raspberry, matcha, and rosemary. They were the most time-consuming — not to bake, but to finish. Each layer of icing needed to set before toppings could be added. The placement was random, but like paint splatters on a canvas, each cookie told its own story. They had to dry overnight before they could be stacked without smudging. Decorating them demanded patience.

I had wanted to make lemon bars, but remembered those Priority Mail boxes that arrived somehow intact — I needed something equally sturdy for shipping, something that would hold its shape and stay tender. I made Meyer lemon olive oil tea cakes, adapting a cake traditionally made with whole oranges. I swapped in Meyer lemons from my tree, replaced butter with local Frantoia olive oil for its peppery brightness and grassy, almost bitter edge, and added cardamom for warmth. I baked them in a mold of thirty tiny shapes, each its own bite-sized architectural structure. They came out soft, light, and impossibly moist — bright with citrus, grounded by olive oil and spice.

The third bake was a coconut pandan shortbread, inspired by palm trees and adapted from coconut cookies I used to make with my mom when I was young. I melted the butter to infuse it with pandan’s tropical scent, then let it resolidify. These were usually drop cookies, but the last time I made them they tasted wonderful yet felt too fragile for stacking. This time, I rolled the dough into a log and sliced it — more stable, better suited for travel.

Baking kept me in one place — working through different steps of each recipe, swapping mixing bowls, preparing sheet pans of dough while waiting for timers, watching edges brown, checking textures. I made it an opportunity to set my own December soundtrack. I didn’t have to hear an endless loop of “All I Want for Christmas” bleeding through mall speakers, tethered to checklists and frantic searches for the right Lego set. Instead, I asked Alexa to fill the house with music I actually wanted to hear — songs that felt chosen, not imposed. Laufey’s jazz-inflected nostalgia. Kacey Musgraves. Dolly Parton’s “Hard Candy Christmas,” cutting through December’s saccharine sweetness with something honest. The music wasn’t background. It was company, playing while my hands were covered in flour.

Local friends who received the cookies commented first on how the sugar cookies looked like small works of art. No one could quite identify what the tea cakes were made of — only that they were heavenly. Soft. Light. Moist. Citrus-forward, with something savory underneath. The coconut cookies were almost biscotti-like, perfect with coffee. I liked that the cookies resisted easy explanation. They were all originals — like snowflakes, no two exactly alike.

Inside the tin were hours spent thinking of family — hours I couldn’t walk away from, pressed into something that could survive the journey. From my counter in Santa Monica to Chicago in two days.

My mother would open the tin and taste California.

Meyer Lemon Olive Oil Tea Cake

Makes 60 small tea cakes

1 # kataifi dough (or filo, shredded), thawed and fully dried

After drying gently crush into loose strands

Batter:

6 large eggs

2 1/2 cups (550g) sugar

3 Meyer lemons, scrubbed and seeds removed

2 1/2 cup olive oil

2 t vanilla extract

1t salt

1 t ground cardamom

1 t baking powder

1. Prep kataifi

Thaw completely, pull strands apart, air dry overnight, gently crush by hand.

2. Make Batter

In food processor: add sugar + whole lemons (cut in pieces)

Puree

In a large bowl, add eggs, oil, vanilla to sugar and lemons

Add salt, cardamom, baking powder

Fold in kataifi.

3. Spray cake mold and dust with flour-tap out excess

Pour to the edge of the mold

350 for 20 minutes

Cool 10 minutes before removing

Two years ago, we sold my childhood home. My parents had moved there in the late 1960s, to a quiet neighborhood in the City of Chicago. Letting go of that house wasn’t just about giving up walls and floors — it was about shedding a version of myself shaped by those walls and finally making room for the person I’ve become.

The house itself was a nearly 2,000-square-foot Georgian, two stories with three bedrooms upstairs, built in the 1950s. When my parents bought it in 1969, they purchased it from the original owner. My family lived there for over fifty years.

I grew up in that house with my parents, brother and sister. As a child, I remember feeling as though there were spirits in the patterns of the wooden doors, urging me to leave. It never felt like a home. It was simply a place to eat and sleep. I don’t remember a single moment of laughter echoing through it. The house carried a thick cloud of stress and worry — one so heavy that even the constant spray of Lysol couldn’t cut through it.

The Lysol, while disinfecting the air, also served another purpose: masking our culture. It tried to erase the smells of garlic, fish sauce, and cilantro from my mother’s weekly meal prep. She would make khao mok kai, a chicken biryani dish, in one of those oversized aluminum turkey trays meant for a twenty-pound bird. It would last us the entire week while she worked the overnight shift as a nurse.

I wasn’t far from the truth in sensing that we were not entirely welcome in our neighborhood. We were the only Asians — and the only non-white immigrants — on a block largely made up of European immigrants. It was considered a “good” neighborhood: working-class, city-employed families, including my mother, who was a health inspector for the city and therefore required to live within city limits. Still, there were acts of vandalism against our home and thefts — car parts taken, and even the diplomatic license plates stolen from my uncle’s Volkswagen Beetle parked out front.

I walked to the elementary school three blocks away. Outside the den’s back door was a small green wooden box where we hid the house key. One snowy winter day, I forgot to put the key back. The wind chill was fifty-five degrees below zero, and I had to pee. I remember the panic clearly: My first thought was how much trouble I was going to be in for forgetting the key. It was so cold I wondered if, if I peed my pants, would it freeze. I thought about knocking on a neighbor’s door, but we didn’t really know our neighbors — not even after living there for ten years.

We never used the front door. The lock was always stuck, and the door itself was impossibly heavy. There was a pattern to it: being quiet. Not asking for help. Not being vulnerable. In that way, the house was closed off.

Perhaps the most joyful moments were Sunday evenings, when we sat in the den with our Swanson TV dinners — Salisbury steak was my favorite — and watched the Disney movie of the week. The food came in its own compartmentalized tray, each section perfectly portioned and separate — nothing to share, nothing to serve family-style from a communal platter. It was American food, not my mother’s interpretation of what she thought American food should be. For those few hours we felt like we were doing what American families did. I felt normal. It was the closest we came to belonging — not to each other, exactly, but to the idea of what a family in that house, in that neighborhood, was supposed to be.

It was rare for us to eat in the dining room. When we did — usually when company came over — the dining table was transformed into a buffet table, chairs pushed against the walls. For us kids, it marked the beginning of a familiar dread: being called to perform at the piano. I would play while my brother and sister sang. Raising your voice to sing should be joyous, especially in a group. But this wasn’t about joy. It was about showing off our training, our obedience. We performed like well-rehearsed proof of our parents’ success. All show and no soul. It mirrored the house itself: more facade than home. Maybe that’s what taught me to stay small, to avoid being the center of attention. I’m often off-tune when I sing, but I enjoy hearing others sing together — really sing, because it gives me the permission to (off-key voice and all) to join in and partake in the joy.

For my immigrant parents, the house was supposed to mean security. It was the ultimate proof they had made it. They worked double shifts and side hustles to pay for it, pouring everything into those walls. But the house they bought to protect us became its own kind of prison. They spent so much time working to afford it that there was little time left to live in it.

Every conversation I remember revolved around maintaining that facade — saying the right things, proving our place in the hierarchy by comparing ourselves to others. There was always a perceived rival. In exchange for the sacrifices my parents made to buy the house, we were expected to live up to them. You couldn’t admit uncertainty or failure. Everything had to be perfect the first time. That’s a lot of pressure to place on a child.

And that pressure carried into adulthood, year after year, during the holidays. Instead of Christmas lists, there were lists of accomplishments — career updates delivered like talking points. No one really wanted to know how you felt or what you believed. We assumed our roles. As the oldest daughter, mine was to plan, shop, cook, and clean — quietly keeping everything running.

Just as the house itself was limited — one and a half bathrooms shared by five people — the depth of our relationships felt limited too. Even after we grew up, moved away, and built families of our own, returning to the house meant returning to the same conversations: gratitude for the roof over our heads, appreciation for the sacrifices made, proof that we had used what our parents worked for to secure a better place for ourselves and our children. When my brother bought his own home and our mother moved in, the pattern relocated. Ownership still meant authority; the right to have an opinion still belonged to whomever held the deed.

I love my brother deeply, and I love his family. It saddens me not to be with them, especially during the holidays. I want to sit at the table and unpack our childhood together — to name what shaped us, what hurt us, what we survived. But I also understand that they don’t want to relive it. They are happy moving forward, building something lighter, something unburdened.

My sister chose, years ago, to step away entirely — to estrange herself and her family, with whom I had once been so close. I respect her choice, even as I grieve it. Each of us learned different ways to survive that house: some by leaving it behind, some by rebuilding elsewhere, and some of us by returning to its rooms in memory, again and again, trying to understand what they took from us and what they gave.

I still revisit the house — physically and in my mind. I’ve learned that I need to confront what I feel, not bypass it. I love my feelings — even the difficult ones — and in finally giving them space, I’ve found a kind of liberation I can’t yet explain, only honor.

This year, not going home feels bittersweet. There is relief in realizing I no longer have to relive the ghosts of holidays past — the rehearsed conversations, the walking on eggshells, the version of myself shaped by obligation rather than honesty. Without a physical place pulling me back into old patterns, I’ve been able to set down the baggage I didn’t realize I was still carrying. The door I was once afraid to open no longer exists, and though I had to leave, I no longer carry the version of myself that needed permission to go.

The past can remain where it belongs, and I can be at home, fully, in my own skin.

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