Ma famille
When I worked at an ice cream parlor in my early 20s, I drew up a backup marriage contract with my friend Rhi while killing time on a mid-winter shift. I can't remember the document's timeframe, but I think it was 10 years from the date of signing.
It had a bunch of rules like "right of first refusal if one or both parties acts or looks weird"; "sex is not a given"; and "drug and alcohol addiction is grounds for invalidating this contract." The most crucial clause: The contract would only come into play if neither of us had built a family of our own. It was intended to be an unconventional arrangement.
I also made a deal with my old pals Cailin and Cara, right before we started getting ambitious (Cailin is now a psychologist and Cara is a dentist). This was less of a formal contract and more of a sworn blood oath. It stipulated that after we had gone out and conquered the world, us three would settle down together in a calm rural setting and live out the rest of our days. In particular, we had a fantasy of buying an apple orchard in Maine. We didn't even consider significant others — the three of us would be family.
Such a sweet and naive way to envision our collective futures, a version of saying you'll be friends forever in a bestie's high school yearbook. We wanted to believe it could happen, and it surely would be preferable to whatever fraught and scary things the actual future holds.
I've been thinking about all this non-traditional family stuff because I surprised Abby for her birthday with a trip to Portland, Maine, where I rented a wee cottage and we're eating like noblemen. We've been having such a sweet time, in a way that feels specific to us, little rhythms that are difficult to evoke in words.
We have lots of shared languages, things that vibrate on a specific wavelength we grok as a duo, everything from hating the same people for the same (very valid) reasons to our love of hotel shampoo bottles. It makes this big awful world a lot easier to stomach and navigate; I feel so grateful we built our own version of family. It's me, Abby, a needy cat, and a mischievous pup. No kids, just love and vibes. We travel well together, we hibernate well together — the outside world often feels like an imposition.
Excuse me for getting a bit moony; I'm just brimming with thanks.
In other news, my move to Ghost is underway but not yet complete. They're helping me migrate all the old Haul posts to the other platform; it takes a week or two. Hope you're all having a nice time.
Jesse
Featured Items
Gotta hear both sides! Honestly, this doesn't feel like a real brand name. Neither does the parent company: "Monogram Appetizers, based in Plover, Wisconsin." Look at this earnest video that simply cannot be a real thing that exists in the real world:
I have loved this low-end seltzer brand for years. Abby and I once vigorously drank a bottle in a Brooklyn park with a friend; we couldn't stop talking about how refreshed we were. This is the first time the surplus grocer got it, though, and it's cheap: fifty cents a bottle. The downside is that it's flat, but cold orange water is still pretty refreshing. I bought 8 bottles.
These cookies suck! LOL. Milk Bar and its fancy pastry chef Christina Tosi used to be a thing of legend, pumping out highly coveted cookies for New York City's foodie glitterati. But now they've scaled up and their supermarket version is poopoo. You heard it here first.
This is such a hilarious item to buy. It's a bulk pack of the take-home sushi trays you see at places like CVS and Walmart. The reviews are quite awful! But we own it now. Please enjoy this video of a journalist trying Moji sushi: