Maryellen Stewart @maryellenstewart - Tumblr Blog

Ernst Haas.

What a delightful commemoration.

“Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life. When I was twenty-four, the most I wanted was a cramped afternoon among strangers, or to dawdle down a sidewalk without my father waiting for me, to be safe someplace far away, to be home somewhere.”

-Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen.

If there’s one thing Ottessa's going to do it’s write a comically unlikable female protagonist. Her gals can be miserable. Vile. They’re grotesque! Ottessa's prose is not here to make you feel good. She doesn’t play that game...except for this one paragraph near the end of Eileen that is like having my own experience read back to me. BTW, Ottessa is on Depop under the handle “@realottessa.” Stars! They’re just like us.

They just don’t make ‘em like Monica Bellucci anymore.

I'd never been to New Orleans before. For 3 days, the city welcomed me with kindness, warmth, revelry, and skies so blue it's what airline pilots call "severe clear.”

NOLA was big and easy, as advertised. Here is what I'd like to remember about my time there:

I stayed at Hotel Peter and Paul, aka "the gingham hotel." There are 12 different variations of gingham across the property. As I was checking in, I thought, "Haha, I'm check-ing in." Get it? Sigh.

The Bywater neighborhood and its shotgun homes, packed tightly together and painted funky colors.

Arthur, my driver from the airport who called me "Miss Maryellen" and was SO excited to show me John Goodman's house.

Breaking open the soy sauce crème brûlée at N7. I searched on the internet to see if there are ASMR channels dedicated to this soothing trigger. Of course there are!

A sweet-smelling fragrance in the air from blossoming tea olive trees. Delicious.

Ken and Beth, the elderly couple I chatted with at Arnaud's French 75 Bar while enjoying a French 75. They told me that in the days after Katrina, they drank their 300-bottle wine collection with their neighbors in the street. The power was out everywhere and it was all going to spoil in the heat. A police officer stopped while Ken was in his car, motor running to charge his cell phone. He saw a wine glass in Ken's hand, tipped his hat, and kept on driving.

Turkey and the Wolf's house-smoked ham sandwich with herb mayo, a hunk of sharp cheddar, cranberry sauce (canned!), and spicy arugula — perfectly constructed synergy and served on a McDonald's Disney Hercules plate. On my way to the bathroom I noticed something hanging on the wall. It was a grease-stained handwritten note from the owner's father in a frame: "Words can't express how proud I am of y'all."

Sitting in a ray of sunshine at 9 in the morning, covered in powered sugar from a Cafe Du Monde beignet while a jazz band played "When The Saints Go Marching In." Later on I learned that locals know to wear white clothes when eating beignets.

Losing half an afternoon at Peaches Records, which has aisles and aisles of CDs, shrink-wrapped in plastic and organized by genre. It was like walking into a time machine. Relatedly, yesterday I read this A.O. Scott piece in the New York Times that said, "The things you loved when you were young will never be able to make you young again," and I had to lie down.

Bywater Bakery's king cake, shimmering with sugar, served by the slice, and only available between January and Fat Tuesday. New Orleans has a "cake season." Well, isn't that fun!

I’d like to note that my round-trip ticket to New Orleans, from normal airports at normal times, was cheaper than the Amtrak I took when I was in a long-distance relationship with a guy who broke up with me while eating a bagel I’d carefully brought him from Brooklyn. There is a lesson here somewhere.

I had a delightful chat with Kyle Chayka from The New Yorker about this thing right here: my Tumblr! I've officially stuck around long enough to see the nostalgia pendulum swing from unfashionably dated to sentimentally hipster. At one point during our call, Kyle joked that he wanted his article headline to be: "Why Would Anyone Still Be On Tumblr?” Real heads know.

I love this quiet, insular, off-the-radar relic of a platform and talking to a mostly empty room. I never feel pressure for likes, comments, to scale, or to perform. I don’t link out for more exposure, and I never check who’s reading or engaging. There are no influencers. There is no sponcon. It’s like the internet at the end of the world. Anything I put here is for someone else to stumble upon, and until then? It's just for me.

“The word consists of the reflexive/passive prefix ma-, the root ihlapi, which means ‘to be at a loss as what to do next.’”

Just a dash.

Year seven. Year six. Year five. Year four. Year three. Year two. Year one.

Not to break the fourth wall and all, but I can't believe I have been writing these for seven years. That's one of the longest anythings I've ever anything'd.

It was my first pandemic birthday. My best friend and her boyfriend surprised me with a dumpling takeout feast from three (3) different Chinatown spots. My friend Alex asked me what kind of cake I like and then baked me that very cake from scratch, garnished with branches of sugared rosemary on top. What does one do with this gratitude — this so-grateful-they-exist-edness? Where do I put all of it? I guess I talk about it here.

Measured and silent, like defusing a bomb, like trying to buy Jordans, I secured vaccine appointments for my most vulnerable family members and finally for myself. I thought about my grandfather as the nice nurse jabbed my non-dominant arm. We talk about Werner all the time — stubbornly, implausibly refusing to let his memory die with him. Mom warms plates in the oven for 15 minutes before serving dinner, a hat tip to his restauranteur background. My older sister wears his gold wedding band in her ring stack, my little sister tans in his striped beach chair, I throw a fistful of dill into salad dressings. The people we lose are honored in our actions.

Moderna coursing through my body, I watched New York shimmer back to life against all odds. I went on a 10/10 perfect date with a Twitter admirer in town for one night only: totally comfortable, the time we had just wasn't enough, the kind of connection where you wonder what could happen if there wasn't a country separating you, roots firmly planted in your respective cities. It was an encounter that didn’t inspire regret but rather, reminded me good men are out there. He'll probably read this. Hi.

I made Pan Con Tomate all summer long, some assembly required, each batch gently tweaked with my own improvements to become exquisite. My friends and I called them "tommy toasts." The bread is absolutely key here: the crustier and denser, the better. On a nice night, with a glass of cold wine and the sun setting at 8pm, my tommy toasts are greater than the sum of its parts.

Feeling very "been there-done that" about the Catskills, I went on a summer vacation to the Berkshires. I stayed at a midcentury modern hotel lending itself to be Instagrammed, founded by the drummer of a popular indie-alt band. I upgraded my room because my frugal mind never lets me do stuff like that. I rolled my suitcase through the door, looked around my palace, and just started laughing. I hiked to a waterfall and picked blueberries. I had breakfast at a roadside diner and posted a picture of the Coca Cola-branded stained glass ceiling fans to my Instagram Story. A stranger DM’ed me to say she went to that diner with her family as a child and had forgotten all about it until this very moment. I ate an edible from one of the 5 dispensaries within earshot and fell asleep for 13 hours texting on my 6-foot iPhone cord in my king size bed. The great state of Massachusetts, just like the Bee Gees sang about.

I did a pilot TikTok program for a dream client in April, then again in August, then for Black Friday. A few days ago I got hired back with a yearlong contract. I love being Gen Z's cool auntie, the teen whisperer, texting in group chats with their parents and getting added to the Christmas card mailing lists. What's my big secret to being a liaison to this mysterious generation, getting through to them? Kids are a lot smarter than they're given credit for: so treat them that way. I have more advice on this subject, but I only talk that way for money.

In the fall, my mother called to say she was getting married. For the last 18 years, it's been a modern arrangement between mom and her boyfriend — separate homes, weekends spent together, 2 vacations per year, no forced familial bonding, a privilege, something that could just be hers. Like all great love stories: he proposed marriage, she said, "Let me think about it," and then gave him an answer 1 week later. In spite of the stereotypes, helping plan a wedding for 2 Virgos was wonderful! I recently read an article about how the act of planning engages the brain’s frontal cortex and takes you out of your emotional headspace for awhile. In 2021, I planned a lot. I also Googled "rat pack tribute band" and hired this guy Patrick who travels around the country impersonating Frank Sinatra to be the wedding singer. "Wow, he sounds just like him!" everyone said.

The astrologist I like to read, whom I only choose to believe when her predictions are good, said 2022 will be the best year of my life to date. Let's get to it! Show me what you got.

Today I picked up a bunch of Mazzola Bakery's lard bread for Christmas in Connecticut. I try to bring something iconically “New York” home with me for the holidays — propaganda for the city, cheerleading, the Big Apple’s hype girl, if you will. There’s been fresh ravioli sheets from Arthur Avenue, black & white cookies, kettle-boiled bagels and bagel shop scallion cream cheese that just tastes better when someone else made it. And babka! Man, that babka was so good. Halfway back to my apartment but still 30 minutes from home, shivering in the withering cold, sneakers on my feet, I decided to tuck the loaves under my arm and make a bolt for it. At one point this group of cool teens yelled after me, "What's up girl! Where you running to with all that BREAD?"

We took our dog Lola to get pet pictures with Santa, and the photographer emailed out the entire photo gallery to buy your prints. Best day of my life?

"Please treat your garlic with respect. Sliver it for pasta, like you saw in Goodfellas; don't burn it. Smash it, with the flat of your knife blade if you like, but don't put it through a press. I don't know what that junk is that squeezes out the end of those things, but it ain't garlic. And try roasting garlic. It gets mellower and sweeter if you roast it whole, still on the clove, to be squeezed out later when it's soft and brown. Nothing will permeate your food more irrevocably and irreparably than burnt or rancid garlic. Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screw-top jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.” -Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

A few Sundays ago, I took a fresh pasta-making workshop at Home Cooking New York in the Lower East Side. Everyone sits down for a family meal at the end, so we began the workshop by making a lemon-garlic dressing and massaging it into chiffonaded lacinato kale so it would be tender by dinnertime. Standing at our stations, ready to be covered in flour, knives out, our instructor Chef John told us, "Never measure garlic by what the recipe says. You measure garlic by your heart."

Fall foliage season means I get to do my favorite thing several times a week: walk by someone taking a picture of someone by a tree, ask if they'd like one together, start head-on and then crouch for a low angle, maybe tell a joke for natural smiles, maybe snap my fingers so their dog looks into the camera, "get closer. and lower your arm," a few vertical, a few horizontal, guaranteed to be their Christmas card, and then I vanish into the night. "Who was she?"

“To see someone reading in New York is to witness an act of determination.”

Fall makes me want to buy a sweater that is the same as all my other sweaters but also, somehow, different...you know the one.

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Maryellen Stewart