I never watched Everything Everywhere All At Once. Everyone told me I’d love it, in its humorous exploration of all the lives we could live. But after its run in theaters in 2022, it never felt right. I’d scroll past it on the Delta inflight screens, too small to enjoy. I’d click past it once it was streaming on Max, there was no way the size of my television and lack of surround sound could do right by the many universes the film would force me through. My mom kept telling me how weird it was and always forgot the title, giving it her own title, Hot Dog Hands.
—
On Tuesday night, after cancelling and un-cancelling a couple times on my friend because I wasn’t sure if I was ready to take my spaceship Honda on the road after last weekend’s big storm, with a few hour warning I told her we were going on our island retreat. She was directing me to a ceviche restaurant in Kansas City, Kansas, the only food we needed after an inch of ice and eleven inches of snow accumulated in the days prior. Who needs soup when you can have cold, lime-cured fish? We had both had hard 2024’s in different ways, for me just life, and for her just health. We sat in the empty parking lot at the ceviche restaurant and talked about our nervous systems, how much better they were feeling in 2025. How good it feels to not have a body in an activated state of concern. How everything is a little lighter. How it was easy to tune back into the bits that feel good.
The restaurant was us and a family a couple booths over. We scooped the ceviche onto tostadas, smothered it in salsa verde that we decided was just blended jalapeños, drank sueros, big ol steins of sparkling water, salt, and lime with a salted rim, the size of our heads so big I almost needed to grab it with two hands, and picked at a whole fried fish with our fingers, licking off our finger tips in between breaking off bits of the cripy outer edges. “I love your enthusiasm,” she told me after the umpteenth time I exploded into some kind of loud response. A lot has changed in my life in the last few years, and even more so the last few months, and yet, somewhere, someone wired my brain to be on such high power microscope mode that I can’t seem to unsee the bits worth being enthusiastic about: the jokes on vanity license plates, the way my hand fits around your forearm in a dark restaurant in between bites of fries, how good it feels to walk down the middle of the street at night, alone but surrounded by everyone in their homes, held, as the sidewalks still unshoveled are not sidewalks at all but berms for me, a marble rolling head first down the road, tumbling. I tried to tell my friend it wasn’t because of all the new in my life that I could see all these things, it was just how my brain worked. A blessing and a curse as I couldn’t see, for example, the need to fold the fourth load of clean laundry that I’d piled on top of the other that day.
—
A week ago Bad Bunny came out with Debí Tirar Más Fotos, an arguably perfect ode to Puerto Rico, to growing up, and a fuck you to the colonizer. It is Puerto Rican through and through with jarabe and bomba and nostalgia for grandfathers in the streets and for the tastes and sights of home and for the love we want to remember exactly as it is, in its thickness. For the pride of loving someone, someplace, something, so dearly that you want to layer it in itself. I couldn’t turn it off once I’d turned it on, testing some threads pulling Spanish from the back of my child brain, reading English translations of lyrics and crying about them in the car, on the couch, in the art museum as I stared into a thick piece of colored glass refracting rainbows in its edges.
—
On Friday, my friend and I sat down to play Phase 10. Recounting my week, I asked them if they liked ceviche, saying we should go and make fish piles on tostadas and drink sueros the size of our heads. I then asked them if they’d heard the new Bad Bunny album but for some reason my brain short circuited and I said Bad Benny. We laughed. “Ba-ba-bad Benny and the Jets” we sang.
—
Later in the game, when they were really kicking my ass and they were on Phase 8 and I was on my third retry of Phase 6 (a run of 9 cards of one color is really fucking hard, okay?), they asked if we could turn on a livestream of their brother hosting a video game competition in LA. We found it, and he began to perform a dramatic monologue about ceviche. My friend and I silently looked at each other, pretending everything was normal, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t normal. He said the word ceviche probably 14 unique times. Him over there in LA in a theater streamed out to over 60,000 viewers and us, two queers on a couch in Kansas City with snow on the ground. We finished the game. They won. I showered. And we continued on to the big event of the night: hiding in the balcony of the ABBA tribute band that was performing in town.
—
ABBA is one of those groups that has a song for every season. You can crave them dancing, singing alone in the car, walking the dog, seething with heartbreak, or teeming new love. Their sound spans generations partially because of how accessible and partly because of Mamma Mia, the stage musical, and mostly because of Mamma Mia, the movie adaptation with Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan. And all of those reasons, all of those feelings, all of those generations were in this theater up the street from the first house I lived in in Kansas City. Every song that the tribute band would start (and when I say tribute I mean they were doing a full act that they were Agnetha, Anni, Bjorn, and Benny, even with some really bad Swedish accents) I’d turn to my friend and say “oh god this one is also really good.” It pulled up memories of my first trip to New York City, my grandmas singing the songs by heart, my mom blasting it in the Yukon XL. When we reached the part in the set where they introduced the band and they turned it over to the pianist to do a solo, some repetitive chords were hit. Bum. Bum. Bum. Bum. It was the start of Benny and the Jets. Ba-Ba-Bad Benny and the Jets. We turned to each other, eyes even wider than the ceviche time-space-bend continuum.
—
I met someone with an Everything Everywhere All At Once tattoo. They were, rightfully, appalled that I hadn’t seen it yet. It felt like maybe it was time, like this was the time all along. So we watched it. And cried. And I called my mom afterwords and told her to try it again. That maybe she could get through the hot dog hands if she knew that actually it was a movie about a mom and a daughter figuring out how to love each other through change, that it’s about all the lives we could live and how to fall in love with the ones we have through change, that it’s about all the strange ways we’re connected, across all these possible lives, and how even in the smallest detail, like a googly eye, ceviche, or a mispronunciation of a Puerto Rican Latin trap artist, we all have little sparkling webs connecting us, drawing us into each other, building nets of meaning, dangling little hooks to get caught on if we so choose. I didn’t watch the movie over and over and over and over. But this time I did watch it. I watched it with you, on the week the world opened its mouth, and spit out bridges of cured fish and Bad Benny.
Last night I made salsa verde in the middle of the night and I really recommend you give it a go because it’s so satisfying. Put some husked tomatillos, some unpeeled garlic cloves, a pepper to the hotness of your choosing (I did one serrano), and a couple mexican green onions (or halved white onion) on a cookie sheet. Broil them til all the skin blisters brown and the tomatillos are crying their juices. Let it cool. Blend it all whole (but peel the garlic, please) and add some salt, cilantro, and diced white onion to taste.
I finished What it Takes to Heal by Prentis Hemphill and what a perfect first book of the year. Their definition of love kicked me in the ass: “love is when we will another’s existence.”
My sister and I are starting to plan a trip to Mexico City. It will be my first time and I know many of yall out there find it to be one of the Best Places On Earth TM so I’d love your recommendations of places to taste, cry with overwhelm of joy and beauty, dance, find treasures, and all the other good things about being alive. Message me about them!
As a Southern Californian, and as a human who cares about other humans and our earth, I’m fucking wrecked about the Los Angeles fires. I found myself weeping easily at the footage, whether it be Black families with their generational homes, now just ash, or a baby deer trying to find a way out with a scorched bum, or horses going back to save other horses, or nearly unpaid folks who are incarcerated working 24 hour shifts to try and push back the line of fire. And just the flames, you know? The flames and the flames and the way they are like the bombs that have been dropped in Gaza and the way all this devastation and inhumanity is avoidable and the way we’re being tasked with an invitation to keep showing up for each other. Show up for each other. Donate to the Go Fund Me’s. Support the organizations supporting day laborers. Support incarcerated firefighters. Buy each other masks and donate clothes. We have to take care of each other.