On Tiny Perfect Tacos, Excellent Books and Other Reasons to Live
Are we all watching Ms Marvel? Because we really really should.
Several years ago during a particularly difficult season, I went to Gabriola Island with my husband. It was a work trip for him, but while he was in meetings, I read and wrote and walked and dreamed and bit by bit, tried to pull myself out of the fog. One of the books I read during that trip was Mandy Lee Catron’s book “How to fall in love with anyone.” (if that name sounds familiar, she wrote a viral Modern Love article a few years ago about 36 questions and an eye contact exercise that may produce feelings of love). And while there is very little I can recount specifically from that book now, Catron’s phrase “perfect tiny tacos” and the image of people seeking out dark restaurants during a sunshine-filled Vancouver summer has been lodged in my brain ever since.
The image comes from this section of the book where she describes a date with someone named Scott:
We went to a place that had all the ambiance of a dive bar: no sign on the door, a windowless room in a basement, a dark hallway that opened to a “patio” in the alley where “mice” scampered under the Dumpster. (“A lot of mice around this time of year,” our server said with studied casualness.) But like every other restaurant in Vancouver that summer, they served perfect tiny tacos...”
I have no idea what a dive bar is but I have said and thought about the phrase “perfect tiny tacos” hundreds of times in the intervening years. It has become a shorthand that denotes absurdity and joy and meandering through the city on a perfect temperature evening.
This past weekend I was in a park with friends having a wonderful conversation over tea and cheesecake, and at one point a man walked past us singing opera loudly, and I thought, “ah yes, perfect tiny tacos.”
It is an automatic response to familiar stimuli. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how often we respond in well-rehearsed ways to familiar stimuli, especially when stretched. Some responses (like my tacos) are harmless, but others are harmful. One antidote to responses that do not serve us well is to examine them, understand why they occur, and pause to practice different responses, but this is not easy work. (Another antidote that Charles Duhigg in the Power of Habit and James Clear in Atomic Habits discuss is changing your systems and your environments.)
A book I read recently that looks at both of these antidotes is “Olga Dies Dreaming”, a book about characters stuck in their patterns and desperate to change. The book follows two characters: Olga Acevedo, a wedding planner who runs her own business and her brother Pedro “Prieto” Acevedo, a congressman. Their mother left them when they were children to fight for Puerto Rican self-determination, but has not been silent since then - in the decades since her departure she writes letters to each of her children critiquing and commenting on their choices and decisions. Their father too, though more present, couldn’t emotionally and mentally be with them in the way they needed him to be. This history impacts both siblings differently. For Olga for example, her attachment style means that withdrawing and disappearing is her first reaction when stressed. When she meets someone she seriously likes, he has stability needs that stem from his own attachment style and Olga realizes how much she needs to work through and heal to live her life fully.
But this isn’t a book solely about relationships - it is about so much more. It is a love letter to Brooklyn, an examination and critique of American neo-colonialism, an exploration and critique of class, a description of being a racialized woman navigating and searching for her place in the world and in her career, and an exploration of what social change means and looks like when that social change comes at the cost of family harm and abuse. It is also a book about secrets, familial patterns, not being able to be your authentic self, fear and grief, global exploitation, and Puerto Rican self-determination. The throughline of the book through these topics and what makes it sing is its complex and textured characters. For me this book was a five star read.
One of my own patterns is that when things get busy, I am quick to abandon my own health and joy practices and my ability to see beauty diminishes. I am trying to change this. This week I read Nikita Gill’s wonderful June 2021 poetry collection “Where Hope Comes From”, and the collection was a needed reminder to keep going, to open my heart, and to seek out and cling to little bits of hope in my day. (If you like Maggie Smith’s book “Keep Moving” this book felt sort of like that.) I’ve returned to the poem below more than once.
A few days later after reading this poem, I watched a June 2022 interview/conversation between Sandra Oh and Jung Ho-Yeon where Sandra Oh asked Jung Ho-Yeon about her care practices and then shared the following wisdom:
“I think when people are in extremely, amazing, privileged, heavy responsibility positions like this, your personal health, I realize, comes first. I realized that because honestly, I got sick. My whole body got very, very sick. Even though you keep on working, it’s like, oh I can’t sleep, oh my back hurts, I don’t know what’s wrong with my skin. These are the things that come in that you realise, that you learn….that I learnt. That I had to take care of my health first. That is not only your body, but it’s your soul as well.
Between that interview, the poetry collection and Olga Dies Dreaming I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the connection between joy, health, work and reshaping one’s patterns, and I have been trying to take steps to prioritize my health. This has crept into my television viewing, and even though I’ve watched a lot of wonderful television lately, I think the selections below have stuck with me because in some way they address this theme.
Here are some of my favourites:
A Little Bit of Hope (To Watch)
Hacks: I just finished Season 2 on Crave, and I thoroughly enjoyed this story about a seasoned comedian and a millennial comedy writer trying to work together to create something new. It’s funny, clever and eminently watchable. It’s also an example of the power of changing stimuli and one’s environment. When the younger comedy writer Ava for example realises she makes poor choices when upset, she downgrades her smartphone to a flip phone, stops drinking and removes the things that make her behave in ways that she regrets deeply afterwards. Overall, the writing is sharp, the characters are flawed, and it’s just very good.
Couples Therapy: While all seasons of this show are wonderful, the third and latest season of Couples Therapy on Crave shows four new couples sharing their therapy sessions with Dr Orna Guralnik. Every aspect of this show, from the actual therapy sessions, to her clinical sessions with her supervisor and her sessions with her peer group are fascinating, and it is both a masterclass in expert facilitation and inquiry and an example of what it can look like to explore your own personal patterns and attempt to forge new responses.
Ms Marvel: Streaming on Disney+ Ms Marvel is vibrant, unapologetic, and 16 year old me would have lost my mind watching this show. For me, this show is not about representation, it is about small moments where culture and faith are there as the backdrop of the story but they don’t need to be overly explained. So much of what is done well in this show is clearly through hiring well at the leadership level and then getting out of the way for people to staff their teams well and make confident creative choices that support what this specific story needs and what a story always needs to be told well. Above all, this show is joyful, and despite having never really having watched anything from the Marvel universe, I am very very here for it now.
A Little Bit of Hope (Reading)
Lessons on Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus: Set in the 50s and 60s, this book is about Elizabeth Zott, the host of an afternoon cooking show that takes women seriously and teaches women chemistry and how to make dinner at the same time. A lot of the elements of this story felt too much when layered together, but I really loved the main character (and really all the positive characters), and the love story between equals.
What are you reading this June? Are you watching Ms Marvel? I’d love to hear from you.