Come taste the soup inside my head
Welcome to Group Living and Other Recipes. I decided to start this Substack as an experiment. Although I run a noodle business and it takes up much of my brain and time, I have nonetheless been motivated to write about the soup inside my head for the last two years. I’ve been published here and there, but I haven’t known exactly how to bring it together. My main topic has been group living—I grew up and currently live in a communal household—but overtime, everything from my love of mushroom hunting to my Filipino family’s history has found itself under that heading in my mind.
I am challenging myself to be more disciplined and write with deadlines (albeit self-imposed). This is not journalism; it’s more like a notebook. But I hope it provides both you and me many opportunities to learn about things we don’t yet know about and ask questions that we cannot answer.
I am writing this first post from my home in Portland, Oregon after over a week of wildfire smoke has choked the air for hundreds of miles in every direction, in the midst of the pandemic, in a city that has put its heart on its sleeve in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and been attacked by paramilitary and mischaracterized by the national media. The sky has been a sickly wane yellow—a surprisingly accurate representation of our battered spirits—and everyone I know, including me and my loved ones, are in a panic that doesn’t dull. I feel like I should be fleeing, but instead I am sitting in the living room, writing. Welcome to the chaos.
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