New year, new beans.

On the tiny ambitions I'm bringing to 2024.

If you have not seen Scavenger’s Reign you MUST.

Happy New Year, darlings. I hope this finds you healthy and pleased and hot and well. I’ve never been a huge “resolutions” person—their tendency to be compulsively fatphobic is, tbh, unbearable!—but I do enjoy periodically resetting intentions. It gives me the same flavor of fresh, energizing hope I used to get every year on the first day of school. (You couldn’t say boo to elementary-school-aged Carmen in early September. She was on top of the world.) I taught last fall and while I loved it deeply, I was very busy and very worn out. Not a lot of space for new plans or even keeping up with old plans; just trying to keep my head above water.

So right now feels as good a time as any to put these ideas somewhere. Anyway. Here’s the plan.

1. Keep track of the books I’m reading and movies I’m watching in 2024.

Perhaps self-explanatory, but I am so bad at keeping track of what I’m watching and reading, and then when people ask me what I’ve been watching and reading my brain goes blank as if I’ve never read a book or seen a movie in my life. So I started some lists on Evernote. We’ll see if this sticks. So far in 2024, I’m really loving Scavenger’s Reign (2023)¹ on HBO Max and editor Richard Wells’ folk horror anthology Damnable Tales². And while it was technically last year, I saw some really great movies over the holiday break: May December (2023)³, Repeat Performance (1947)⁴, Anatomy of a Fall (2023)⁵, Godzilla Minus One (2023)⁶, The Boy and the Heron (2023)⁷, and After Life (1998)⁸. I also made my partner watch all three Lord of the Rings movies with me on Christmas Day and I am pleased to report that they remain as excellent as I remember them. (I am also pleased to report that despite her skepticism, she really liked them.)

2. Writing more in this Substack.

One of the contradictions of my life is that since I grew up oversharing on online blogging platforms, I have always really enjoyed social media, especially social media platforms where I got to tap into my skillsets and try new things and talk about my life and my interests. But—if I can be frank, and I am trying in 2024 to be frank—it is actively terrible being a person of any kind of public interest and being on social media. (Here, I just deleted a long and unnecessary explanation as to why this is! I’m sure you can figure it out.) This isn’t meant to be a whine; it’s just a fact. So I’ve been increasingly skittish about my presence online as a way of preserving my creative energy and my time and my practice. But whenever I bust into a post here, I always feel very energized. I guess because I’m getting back to my roots—that is, long-form slightly-too-honest meandering. And because this Substack doesn’t have any particular agenda, I get to just write about what’s caught my attention that day or what I’ve been thinking about. So I’d like to try and write more here! Coming soon: a series of posts derived from the occasional small essay I write in people’s Facebook comments.

3. Especially write more, here, about my hobbies. Well, hobby.

I’ve always had this complex about the fact that I had no hobbies—I’ve tried my hand at various visual art practices (watercolor, sculpture, ceramics, miniatures, embroidery) and physical activities (roller skating, dance) and nothing has ever really stuck. This is especially hard when the activity has a high cost of entry—classes or subscriptions or supplies. It always makes it feel like such a waste when it all inevitably falls away.

But I realized recently that I do have a hobby; something I spent a lot of time and energy and money and mental space cultivating that has nothing to do with how I make a living; something that is very creative but also free of all of the professional anxieties and obligations that come alongside my creative professional practice. And that thing is cooking. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. I only subscribe to two magazines and they’re both cooking magazines. I buy cookbooks and actually read them. I’m always thinking about new recipes. I’m excited about cooking techniques and new-to-me ingredients, and geek out over useful kitchen tools. I find cooking liberating and relaxing and enjoyable, even at the end of a long day. And I’ve been doing it long enough that I’ve gotten… good? I can adapt and modify recipes I find, throw things together on a whim, and pretty reliably make gorgeous, delicious meals for myself and my partner and anyone lucky enough to come over to my house.

To be clear, no one is ever going to pay me to cook for them, and that is not an ambition or goal of mine. I guess that’s what a hobby is? Something you love dearly and have no desire to professionalize. And I’m guessing—well, I’m not guessing, I know—that part of the reason I wasn’t articulating cooking at hobby was it felt genuinely kind of weird to say, as a fat person, that I love cooking and food. But I’m saying it.

Anyway. One of the exciting food updates last year was I finally got off the waitlist for the Rancho Gordo Bean Club (I know, I know, how very 2020 of me) and have been on a major bean kick. The two exciting recipes from the last month have been Lukas Volger’s Smoky Confit’d Beans with Olives⁹ and Marcus Samuelsson’s Black-Eyed Peas with Coconut Milk and Ethiopian Spices¹⁰. I also have been experimenting with bean cooking techniques—Instant Pot vs. stovetop, brining/soaking or not. I swear by Nik Sharma’s baking soda & salt brine; it’s resulted in the creamiest, tastiest beans that don’t bust open and also don’t have to be cooked for ten bajillion years. (Just don’t brine AND Instant Pot your beans or you will end up with bean paste.) So watch this space for more random food and cooking content.

4. Hang the art in my new place. Use up the nice candles. Finish [redacted]. Make preserved lemons. Keep at least one plant alive¹¹.

We’ll see!

1. An absolute stunner of a show; animated sci-fi horror. Jeff VanderMeer by way of Junji Ito.

2. Fave story so far is Thomas Hardy’s “The Withered Arm.”

3. Perfectly devastating and skin-crawling and shockingly funny.

4. A noir New Year’s counterpart to It’s a Wonderful Life, this movie is about fate and destiny and bad relationships and has a fantastic gay character and the writing is extremely snappy and good.

5. Deliciously ambiguous and intriguing, and provoked an multi-day conversation between me and my partner about our disparate readings of the underlying reality of these characters and the events of the film.

6. Years ago I saw an American Godzilla movie and it was so mind-bogglingly terrible I was actively enraged, and this film was so fucking good it wiped the other one from my brain entirely. Phenomenal, and definitely worth seeing in theaters.

7. There is nothing like a hit of Miyazaki. Nothing. The minute that heron had human teeth and a fucked-up voice I felt my whole body relax.

8. Lovely and life-affirming and melancholy.

9. I belong to a RGBC Facebook group and approximately twice a week someone makes a post about this recipe saying I HATE OLIVES CAN YOU MAKE THIS WITHOUT OLIVES and yes, you can, you could use sundried tomatoes or capers or any other number of things, but sweet jesus why would you, olives are the greatest food that has ever existed.

10. Black-eyed peas for New Year’s, of course! Served with big chunks of homemade sourdough that a friend brought over. I’d never used berbere (an Ethiopian spice mix) before but it was so absolutely perfect here. Also, this is a very spicy dish. I sort of assumed the heat was from the de-seeded habanero, but on the aforementioned RGBC Facebook group I saw a conversation about this recipe that said that the berbere (which has chili pepper) is the source of most of the heat. So if you’re like me and usually amp up the listed spices on dishes, maybe go easy here if you’re sensitive to spice, and/or serve it with something to cut the heat. (Bread, rice—honestly, a big dollop of Greek yogurt would have been fantastic on top.)

11. My Ficus Audrey is sick and losing leaves and I don’t know what to doooooooo.