The Better Matters Blog

On May 26, I gave a lecture on parking garages as part of the PLACE TALKS lecture series. You can watch it here.

I’m having a really good time doing my Friday roundup columns on Zèbre. It’s forcing me to remember, and it’s forcing me to pay attention to the details and write down things that are outside of myself—I only hope that they’re of interest to others.

Here are the last 3:

October 23

October 16

Every time I try to refocus this blog, I can’t seem to stay on track. Personal essays are scattered in with one-off songs and images and reblogs, and the lack of continuity drives me nuts.

Hi, I’m going to rate some things on this overcast (quel surprise!) but strangely balmy San Francisco morning. Making a new friend: A+ Straight Outta Compton: A- The sushi last night in Japantown: B- The “Secret Breakfast” Humphrey Slocombe ice cream flavor: C, surprisingly Feeling like the world is full of possibilities after feeling like a bum in a dark hole for the past week and a half: A+++

The Saga series: A This book club I’m a part of: A Another book club event I definitely don’t want to be a part of: “Discuss Modern Romance, picnic... and maybe yoga!”: C The subtle sexism in this one Meetup group I’ve been going to: F My camera being broken: F Leaving work at 3 pm to go camping in the redwoods: A+++

Squats: B The Twirl and Dip swirl cone dipped in TCHO chocolate with sea salt on top: A for taste; D for price The fact that summer fruit season is almost over: F The health of the very expensive plant I bought: A! My TMJ: F The number of times I catch myself grinding my teeth on a daily basis: F Revisiting this New Yorker story about pandas: A My local laundromat: B+

“Ochsner called the second section 'occasional ideas.' These seem to be general thoughts that did not fit in with the notes on specific islands. It also contains citations for literature related to his observations.”

Whenever I find a song that I listen to over and over again, I always tell myself, “Kristina, cool it. Don’t post a single song on your blog. Save it up for a playlist. Save it up for your new personal publishing venture*. Do something interesting with this song. Don’t just post it on Tumblr accompanied by lyrics you particularly feel from a part of a song that you like.”  When you live on an island Nothing ever falls in place The winters are violent And you can't ever feel your face You can't fucking feel your face

Existing, being, interacting, and reading the internet is enough to give you an ulcer. I used to have people to complain with regularly about how awful the internet was, but since I’ve moved across the country and need to make new friends, I don’t want to be known as the person who complains about the internet. What’s the point? I also love it, as someone who has interacted with it daily since she was 12, loves it. I love what you can make with it; I love how you can interact with people you like on it. But the internet, on the regular, makes me feel loneliness, frustration, and anger, with its kneejerk reactions, fleeting obsessions, article dogpiles, and reportage of the most mundane of activities. (Somebody tweets.)

I’m especally lonely now—sometimes I avoid Facebook or Instagram on weekends where I know a large group of people I know are hanging out somewhere and having fun where I’m not. If I don’t see evidence of it, the ache is amorphous. There are no images to fixate on. I can only imagine things. 

This is another one of those weekends. Many of my friends are at a music festival in Wisconsin. What a peculiar ache. Tomorrow morning I’ll ride my bike by the ocean and in the afternoon, I’ll ride a ferry across the bay. In the down hours I’ll spend time in a bookstore, I’ll clean the apartment, I’ll bake some banana bread. Whatever it takes to take up time. 

Good thing #1: OKREAL What could be an obnoxious website containing interviews with stupidly successful women isn’t. Its tone feels more honest than other similar websites. 

Good thing #2: Abdi and the Golden Ticket on This American Life. Now that I have a 20 minute walking commute, I listen to a lot more podcasts. This one was fantastic.

Good thing #3: “Off Diamond Head” by William Finnegan in The New Yorker. A beautiful piece from a few weeks ago about being a surfer, and an outsider, in Hawaii. Finnegan’s book, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life comes out next week.

One of my favorites from one of my favorites.

Your face did not rot like the others–the co-pilot, for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn- mush: his wife and daughter, the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon. He was more wronged than Job. But your face did not rot

like the others–it grew dark, and hard like ebony; the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole you to come back for an evening, down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you, read your face as Dallas, your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads his braille editions. I would touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page. However frightening, I would discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make you face your wife, or Dallas, or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy orbiting, and I would not try to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know is this: when I see you, as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life, spin across the wilds of the sky like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were the residue of a stranger’s life, that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky, I cannot get off the ground, and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling to tell me that you are doing well, or that it was mistake

“Finding Is Losing Something Else”

Finding is losing something else. I think about, perhaps even mourn,     what I lost to find this.

Anni Albers, Knot, 1947

“Barnes creates a detailed two-page spread for each match he commentates for BBC Radio Newcastle. The notes are divided into two color-coded segments: The left-hand page contains background information on Sunderland’s opposition—the club’s starting XI from its last fixture, previous results, and stadium details—while the right-hand side is updated in real time as the action happens.” —via Eight by Eight

“I bought the Yoko Myth wholesale. The only received images I could conjure of her were ones in which she was tied to John: Here she is sitting silently at the Let It Be sessions as Paul fumes; there she is entwined with her man in the famous Annie Leibovitz picture. I still considered her name an insult — the woman who won’t let the boys have their fun. In my early 20s, it felt important to let men believe that I wasn’t like that. I hated all the parts of myself that could be perceived as co-dependent or excessively feminine. I was terrified of vulnerability because I thought it could exist only at the expense of independence. I thought I knew what a feminist was. I thought I knew about Yoko Ono. I had a lot to learn.”

— Yoko Ono and the Myth That Deserves to Die -- Vulture (emphasis mine)

3 (+1) Things You Can Do While Dealing With A Break-Up in a New City:

1. Talk to your friends instead of reading old emails and text messages or listening to old voicemails. Your friends are your lakes. Dwelling on memories of your ex is a desert and you will only suffer from dehydration. You will perish. If you find your mind stuck in the desert, use your body and leave it.

2. Go find new words that will make your heart full again, if only temporarily. Even if these words are in a bookstore, and even if every bookstore reminds you of your book-crazy ex, words will help fill you up again with a range of human emotions that either mirror your own or take you out of your own head. (Poetry, if you like that sort of thing, can help you shed a lot of tears, if it is in fact tears you need to shed to move into the next part of your day.)

3. Dress for success. If you are in a new job in a new city, which you are, wake up in the morning and put on all your expensive fancy makeup and put that expensive “serum” in your hair even if you don’t know what it does. Put on tights that cut into your belly full of ice cream. Heels, too, even though you’re late to work and you’d be a minute faster in flats. And stand up straight.

You will try to: Go to places where you like to be and where people you might get along with would be (example: bookstores, museums) and maybe there are cute boys there you can talk to. There probably aren’t because your glasses are still very foggy and all you can see is an alternate universe where your loved one is still by your side and not 2,000 miles away.

I can’t stop talking about Arizmendi Bakery. My relationship with pastries has been a long one, and my first memory of eating them was 25 years ago, on the top floor of a high-rise hotel in Hong Kong. I was five, my mom was pregnant with my brother, and what I remember from that trip is as follows: watching kung fu soap operas in the hotel room; waking up in the middle of the night and vomiting all over the bedspread; going to a store with some of my dad’s friends and accepting the gift of a little ceramic poodle (which I remember feeling guilt at having let these people buy it for me); and eating a pile of chocolate croissants from the breakfast buffet every morning. 

I live two long and three short blocks from Arizmendi, a worker-owned bakery that opened in 1997 in Oakland, and then in my temporary neighborhood, Inner Sunset, in 2000. It’s also directly on my walk to work, should I choose. I’m saying it’s not out of my way in any way, shape, or form. I resisted its draw for three whole days until I decided I needed a cookie (I was gearing up for a tough phone call): a mint double chocolate cookie. I stayed away for another week, but any sort of willpower is now gone. 

Here’s what I’ve tried:

Double chocolate mint cookie: A Sourdough chocolate croissant: A+ Sourdough boule: B (I know, what’s going on?) Giant brownie: A Tomato, spinach, mushroom focaccia: A (it’s basically pizza) Corn-blueberry muffin: A+

For as much time as I’ve spent in bakeries, however, the flow of Arizmendi - getting your baked good and paying for it - is still a struggle for me after a handful of visits. I think it’s because everybody there is a regular and can zoom in on exactly what he or she wants. There are two stations for selecting bags and the little white sheets you use to grab the goods, and if you skip one over, it’s hard to go back, because people keep walking in behind you. It’s like trying to parallel park on a busy street. The fear is the same; the flush on my face that begins to pool is the same. This morning I fumbled in selecting focaccia, getting sauce all over my jacket sleeve and hand, but the man who came in behind me stood patiently behind me until I collected myself. I left the pastry door open for him, assuming that he would also be selecting some bread from that case, but instead he closed it after I had moved on and moved onto the next shelf.

People are patient until they’re not. As I zigzagged around the store, each person kept track of the order they entered and let me pay before them. But this morning, I needed to swerve out of line. I didn't have enough cash for my treasures - focaccia and a muffin - and had to fumble around my purse for quarters. The line moved on. I wondered if anybody inside might lend me a dime if I came up short.