Volume 1, Issue 10
March 30, 2021
What It's Like To Live in a Four Hundred Square-Foot Box (With You)
There is the unrolling of the yoga mat between the kitchen and the clothes closet, your stepping over me as I downward dog.
There is the installing of the AC, and the uninstalling of the AC, and the installing of the AC, and me lying on the bed next to the AC feeling like a princess for all that cold air.
There are phone calls to your dad, to my dad, to your mom, to my mom, to friends, but rarely to each other, since the other is always right there.
There is the eternal question, what are we doing for dinner? If we’re tired there is Indian take-out and sushi from the place downstairs and chicken burritos and sometimes a microwaved tamale, all shared on the ottoman together.
There is the time you tried to fix the leaking bathroom pipe and the four hundred square-foot box filled up with steam faster than we could even believe, with four of the tallest and burliest firemen squeezing inside to rescue us.
There are girl and boy farts both.
There is the realization that space is just a matter of what you’re used to.
There is a linocut print on the wall of a cocoon that says, “Trust the process.” We try to.
There are tears. There are tantrums we thought we weren’t capable of having as adults. There is somebody’s PMS. There are apologies in the form of French fry runs.
There is the time in the night when I had a nightmare and reached for your hand and you did your signature move of extending a single finger in return, committing to this bit even as you slept, and we laughed so hard we woke ourselves up.
There is an attempt at home cooking the kitchen simply wasn’t built for. There is the boiling of the chicken bones, the sauteeing of the vegetables, the rolling out of the Pop-Tart dough and the baking of the chocolate banana bread, all done on one single block of counter space. There is your enthusiasm for every single dish and your standing by me at the sink, elbow to elbow, wiping every plate clean.
There is the writing of the graduate school thesis and the complaining about the graduate school thesis and the fear of the graduate school thesis not getting done on time.
There is your video gaming and my knitting and our TV watching. There is a lot of Modern Family because you know I like that show and so you’ll always put it on.
There is the sound of the exhaust from the bus outside that I hear in the night, the sound that sometimes annoys me and sometimes saddens me because it’s not like the sounds of home but mostly thrills me because it is another sound proving I live in New York City.
There is the everlasting reckoning with ourselves, the daily tussle and peacemaking with our own imperfect natures, now done in front of a witness, a guide, a mirror, a supporter, a commentator, a reality check.
There are days so ordinary we have forgotten them forever.
There are hopes and dreams for the future so precious they make me shiver: of a puppy we will adopt together. Of crossing that line into our thirties and all of the adulthood that will come with it. Of future homes we’ll live in besides the four hundred square-foot box, homes dreamt of not because they will be more special, or magic up greater happiness, but because they will be another thing shared, another thing taken on together, forever ours and only ours, no matter who buys them, or sells them, or rents them after us.
My Obsession with Facial Massage
I’ve had a gua sha tool for a few months now, but I’ve only recently fallen in love with devoting fifteen to twenty minutes a night to massaging my face. This Beauty Shamans Instagram I’ve started following has completely inspired me and started to change the relationship I have with my skin.
Caring about having good skin is one of those things that is an exchange of energy between you and you. As someone who in general finds the current cultural beat to be too shallow and too hung up on an image of perfection, with a weighted pressure on women in particular, I definitely feel resistance and guilt around investing too much in my outward self. Which is pretty useless, because having skin that I loved would hurt...absolutely no one. In fact, the joy and pleasure it would bring to me would probably radiate outward into the world. I think there is such a thing as positive selfish energy, and usually the times when I am open to that and investing in it are the times when I am happiest, too.
I have a damn hard time remembering this, though!
Doing daily gua sha and facial massage a la Beauty Shamans has felt like a wonderful act of care and luxury in the direction of positive selfishness. I don’t really spend a lot of one-on-one time with my face. But carving out part of my nighttime routine to open the lymphatic system around my neck and chin, lift the muscle around my cheekbones, and massage the pressure points in my eyebrows and forehead has really helped me to get to know it intimately. And it’s made me realize I really like my face. And I really love caring for my skin. “Self-love” is such a buzzy concept right now, and I take a little pride in admitting I don’t know what the hell that even really means. I don’t think half the people that say they do, really do. But taking care of my physical body has always felt like a reliable access point into true self-love. Caring about the food I eat feels like an act of love. So does exercising so my body will feel good.
Shelly Marshall, the guru of Beauty Shamans, shares a lot of techniques and products for improving your skin’s health and appearance. But her number one most important thing you can do for yourself is to spend time loving your skin.
The benefits of facial massage are numerous: an immediate benefit is lymphatic drainage of the face and neck, which dramatically reduces puffiness by moving out stagnant lymphatic fluid that isn’t draining properly. A healthy lymphatic system is a critical component of a healthy immune system (it literally is your immune system). Facial massage also brings blood flow and circulation to the face, which helps your cells optimally heal and regenerate. And gua sha helps to smooth out the collagen adhesions that build up around wrinkles.
If you don’t have a gua sha tool, her face massage techniques are here, and they only use your hands. I love to light a candle and do this routine. I’ve found it to be a natural meditation, too.
The topic of positive selfishness is truly one I don’t feel like an expert in yet, but can sense it’s something I need to work on — if you have any thoughts or insight around this, or if you’re a woman and have anything to share about your own experiences navigating the beauty world, I would absolutely love to hear what you have to say. Comment box is below as always!
Non-Toxic Cookware
Jake and I got dinner recently with a friend of ours who works for a healthy materials lab — apparently, the use of building materials that are highly toxic to humans is incredibly common, causing more deaths in home fires than the actual fire itself (here’s a little reading on building materials if you’re interested.) This conversation, along with this recent news piece about the appearance of dangerous chemical particles phthalates turning up in children’s mac and cheese, has made me turn a more critical eye to the materials Jake and I are consuming. The very first thing I thought of was our pots and pans.
It turns out that — just like nearly every consumer good — the cheap stuff is worse for you. Jake and I had been rocking some Target-bought pots and pans for a while now that I’ve always thought looked suspicious. I noticed the coating was starting to chip in some places and this just intuitively seemed like it was not good for us. I found this article really helpful, which breaks down the major risks of toxic cookware and which labels to look out for when shopping. The key takeaway is that improperly or cheaply made cookware doesn’t protect against heavy metals from the pan leaching into your food, and heavy metal buildup has a myriad of negative health effects on the body.
Our most used cookware item is definitely our frying pan, so in my gradual transfer to non-toxic I’ve replaced it with this Ozeri pan, pictured above. So far it cooks beautifully, and its chemical-free list aligns with the criteria in the article. I also love speckles (I think speckles are my favorite design pattern!) and the color cream, so it fits into our collection nicely.
Not to get into it, but I was so aware of Jake and I’s privilege in being able to simply go out and purchase a non-toxic pan. It consistently saddens me how crucial economic privilege is to a healthier, easier, better-quality life. Everybody needs to be able to cook food, and it’s unfair that wealth is the only thing that can shield you from accidentally imbibing something harmful that shouldn’t even be harmful in the first place.
The more we learn, the more we understand (about all the evil in this cold, cold world). Happy shopping!