WHAT I WROTE YESTERDAY:

October is my favorite month because it brings me my favorite weather (crisp, rainy, colorful), my favorite foods (pumpkin pie, soups and curries of all kinds, pears, squash), and my favorite holiday (Halloween, obviously). I am so glad it’s finally October. The changing of the month hasn’t suddenly relieved me of my depressive tendencies, but it has gotten me to start treating myself a bit better.

For the first time ever, I am going to get to celebrate Halloween exactly how I want to. Every year from when I was born to when my mom met my friend Tiago’s mom at a PTA meeting, I spent Halloween with my parents. After that, I still spent Halloween with my parents, only, instead of spending it in my neighborhood, I spent it in Tiago’s and counted out my candy from trick-or-treating on the carpet in his basement. I did this until I was seventeen.

After that, I went to college, and I spent every Halloween working or going to sleep early because I had work the next day or both. The Halloweens when I was still able to do something, I was living with S, and it was just a given that whatever plans I made would involve her and therefore would have to be something she enjoyed as well.

None of this was really all that bad from an objective standpoint. There were fun parts to working on Halloween. Last year, I was at the coffee shop and I got to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. Towards the end of the night, there was still a lot of candy left, so I started giving out big handfuls to any kid that came in. One boy looked at the candy I dropped in his bag, looked back at me and said, “I fucking love you.” Then he ran back out, screaming to all of his friends about how awesome I was and how they all had to go back and get candy from me.

There are also a lot of pros to having someone who is ‘your person’ to do things with, even if it does come with a sort of obligation. As unhealthy as a lot of parts of S and I’s friendship were, when it was just us, doing almost anything with her was fun. Even though I have a lot of close friends, I haven’t been feeling as at ease around them as I used to, I think because I’m scared of what happened with S will happen again. The kind of closeness I had with her took so much time to build and having it ripped away was so painful that I don’t want to try again. At the same time, I know I have to risk that pain if I want to experience all of the good parts of that closeness with my current friends. If I want to actually fall in love and have the kind of passionate relationship I write about, I’ll have to risk even more. Going into October without a designated partner in crime does feel a bit lonely.

Despite the drawbacks, I am not going to let the prospect of spending Halloween (and the days leading up to it) alone scare me. That’s what watching horror movies is for. My plan is to make a list of all the Halloween-themed things I want to do this month and do them. If having someone with me would enhance the experience and someone is available, amazing. If not, I will happily do the activity by myself.

Some of the things I’m considering doing, in no particular order, are: carving pumpkins with my little sister over video chat, going to Halloween parties (I’ve been invited to one so far, but we’ll see if some more pop up), going apple-picking, going to a pumpkin patch, doing a corn maze, going to creepy themed bars/restaurants, going to a haunted house, watching classic horror movies that I haven’t seen before, going to the Village Halloween parade, making pumpkin pie, making Halloween decorations. Some of the things I’ve already done are: started reading The Dead Romantics, bought pretty much every vegan, pumpkin-flavored product that Trader Joe’s is currently selling, started watching The X Files for the first time, and started writing some spooky erotica which I might share on here as a free Halloween present.

Obviously, the list of things I have done is much shorter than the list of things I am going to do, but it is only the sixth of the month, so I think I have some time to catch up. There’s another thing I’ve been doing recently that I’m very proud of and, even though it isn’t exactly Halloween-themed, I think it is a direct result of the power that October has over me.

There is something both relaxing and invigorating about October. The cozy sweaters, the hot cups of tea, and the scent of pumpkin spice make me feel like I’ve been swaddled in warm blankets, but the chilly air and feuille-morte awaken a sort of primal urgency in me. October reminds me of my own mortality and that of the people I love. With Halloween so close, cheerful memento-mori are all around.

Far from depressing me, these ponderings make me feel more alive and more human than I do any other time of the year. While I more easily give in to the urge to curl up in bed with a good book and a steaming mug of apple cider, I am also overcome with the urge to create and to hold (secular) communion with the people I care about. The activity I’m proud of, is the perfect outlet for these conflicting urges. You’ve probably already guessed what this thing is because because it’s in the title: cooking.

From the day after Ash’s party (when I started feeling ‘sick’ and ordered food twice in one day), I was seriously abusing my credit card and my GrubHub app in a way that I never have before. At the time, the idea of cooking my own meals felt as ridiculous and undoable as making a new outfit out of old bed sheets to wear to work everyday. Anything I thought about making for myself sounded disgusting and my appetite was virtually non-existent. Then October came, it got cold, it started raining, my vegan cookbooks came in the mail, and Trader Joe inspired me to go shopping with all of his pumpkin-themed products.

Suddenly, I was hungry for my own cooking again. Although I know I live in New York City and, barring the (second) apocalypse, I don’t have worry about ‘preparing for winter,’ that primal October feeling started to get to me. I needed to stock the pantry, I needed to learn how to cure (fake) meats, I needed to provide for my … roommates? In all seriousness, there is something really beautiful about cooking, especially in October.

In the summer, I’m so hot I want to die and all I’m really hungry for are sandwiches and salads and cold slices of fruit. In the summer, cooking is a horrible chore. In October, the heat pouring off the stove is a blessing and the early darkness makes me grateful to be inside laboring over a pot while I listen to a podcast.

I’ve never really cooked with cookbooks before because my mom never used them (sometimes to the whole family’s detriment) and I thought I was happy with the handful of meals I could make well. Now that I’ve tried cooking from a cookbook, I realize how wrong I was. The process of cooking is so much less laborious and brain-melting when you have a set list of ingredients to add to your shopping cart and instructions to follow once you get back from the grocery store. The likelihood of success with a new dish is so much higher when the execution is based on something more than what I think probably goes in that thing I had that one time.

It isn’t just the logistical part of the of the cooking process that’s better. The emotional and intellectual components of cooking are so much better with a cookbook. Following a set of instructions turns cooking into more of a meditation than frantic dash into an unexplored forest. Going back and forth between the book and the stove gives the process a witchy/medicinal/academic quality which makes cooking feel like exactly what it is: a sacred human ritual. Maybe all of this sounds completely unhinged, or extremely obvious to every normal person who didn’t grow up with weird hang-ups about following recipes, but for me, all of this is a revelation.

I’ve decided that I’m going to go through one of my cookbooks at a time, so that all of the food I’m making sort of goes together and I can fully immerse myself in one cuisine. The cookbook I’m starting with is called Provecho, and it’s full of veganized recipes for Mexican staples. The first recipe I made was pozole rojo, which is a mild red soup filled (in the vegan version) with hominy, onions, and meaty oyster mushrooms. It’s topped with cabbage and radish, and eaten with tortilla trips. Often it’s used to cure hangovers.

Keelie, one of my coworkers got Provecho from her friends as a birthday present because she’s Mexican and lactose intolerant. She was excited when she found out that I’d actually started cooking from it (apparently a lot of people buy cookbooks and then never use them) and was fake mad when I didn’t bring in any samples of the finished product. Today, I ended up bringing in the pozole rojo and she liked it enough to eat it for lunch! It’s just really cool to be learning about/cooking these foods and then getting to hear about how they’ve played a part in her life. Her suggestion to squeeze a bit of lime on the soup was invaluable. My other coworker, Vince, said the soup tasted like SpaghettiOs, which I hear are amazing, so that was pretty cool too.

WHAT I WROTE TODAY:

I stopped writing yesterday so that I could go make arroz amarillo to go with the frijoles colombianos that I’d already made. Sadly, this effort was a complete disaster. First, I undercooked the rice. Then, in a misguided attempt to fix this mistake, I overcooked it. I don’t know why this upset me so much, but I was actually on the verge of tears. I think the only reason I didn’t start crying is because my roommate Lis was in the kitchen and I didn’t want to subject her to that.

In an effort to somehow make the overcooked rice edible, I mixed it with a bit of flour to make dough and pressed it into my waffle iron to make savory waffles. At the time, I really thought I was being innovative. This morning, I ate three of the waffles with some of the frijoles colombianos and now the thought of eating either of those things ever again (at least the versions of these things currently waiting to grow mold in my fridge) makes me sick to my stomach.

My experience trying to make arroz amarillo has compelled me to make a couple of amendments to my opinion of cookbooks. I still stand by most of what I wrote yesterday, but I will say: I think my rate of success with cookbooks vs just following my instincts in the kitchen is actually higher with just following my instincts. I think that cooking with a cookbook is still an incredible learning experience and I plan to continue doing it, I just think I need to do it while keeping my wits about me.

Several times while I was making the arroz amarillo, I had a feeling it wasn’t going to work out, but I proceeded full steam ahead anyway. In the future, I’m going to listen to that voice inside me that says “maybe the heat should be a little higher” and “maybe that’s too much water.” It’s also entirely possible that I didn’t follow the recipe as closely as I should have because I was talking to Lis while I was cooking. Despite all of this, I still stand by the fact that cooking with a cookbook is amazing: I have a place to write down all of my notes and I can always try again with slight twists on the same independent variables.

I have faltered a bit today in my conviction to enjoy October because I failed at arroz amarillo, I’m on my period, I have a horrible headache, and today was far too warm for fall. However, now that it’s dark, I can already feel my mojo coming back. I am still excited by the prospect of walking through Prospect Park at dusk, shopping for sweaters, crocheting, sketching dragons, writing spooky erotica, going to bookstores, sightseeing in Sleepy Hollow, and using Halloween as an excuse to show the people I love how much I care about them.

The lessons I’ve learned just over the course of writing this blog post are: 1. when you try something new, it’s okay to be excited about it, but don’t become so excited that you blind yourself to its faults and start acting like a brainwashed groupie; 2. October might make me feel better, but it’s not going to hold my hand and do my work for me; I have to actively tap into that October energy, use it as well as I can, and make it last as long as possible; 3. Periods fucking suck and they’re sexist. God is sexist.

Thanks for reading.

XX Scarlett