HOW COULD I ALMOST FORGET.

CALIFORNIA IS THE LAND OF FLAMIN’ HOT EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE.

I’m here in California again. Last day. Ethel is buried in the overflow of white undershirts in my mom’s closet, but we’ve been walking around a lot, absorbing the most surreal place that I’ve ever known. How could this place exist? The sprawl, the sunshine, the shopping malls. Everything here always catches me by surprise.

Runaway shopping carts…

Magnolia that is always in bloom…

Kumquat trees…

Target casinos…

So I went to a fancy dinner last night at the James Beard House. The food was presented by Karen and David Waltuck of Chanterelle, which was mourned when it closed last year, at least by my friend Leon, who calls it the best restaurant in New York and his favorite restaurant, and now that it’s closed, what will he do without another favorite to fill its shoes? I’d never been, so I didn’t have the same sentimental attachment as a guy who’d gone for every birthday and Valentine’s Day since he was 12. But there’s still a part of me that wishes I could have known it in the way that he had, not just for a five-course sampler with bits of things on either end. Because the fried oysters and mushroom truffles and the seafood sausage and the ravioli and the pears were, in fact, divine. Imagine what they were really like in their native country?

We ended up sitting on the lower level next to the kitchen, and after so many glasses of paired wines, we grew enough grapes to step over and ask what it is we should keep in mind if we should ever attempt to actually make the seafood sausage. So we’re talking to the sous-chefs, who look at us, amused, when all of a sudden, they part like waves and out comes David Waltuck himself, and since I hadn’t deified him, I hadn’t ever known him, I just told him straight up that the accompanying beurre blanc sauce tasted kind of like French onion dip. He was too nice. “There are a lot of shallots in it; I’ll take that as a compliment!”

I asked if he was sad.
“Not tonight.”
I told him the rest of my table was sad.
“Nobody died. It’s okay.”

But he seemed sad. He looked sad. I would be, too.

As the waitress poured a second bottle of wine, Ms. Kazan insisted that Mr. Doyle “tell the ‘je ne sais quoi’ story,” which he did. (In a nutshell, a man having a very public fight with his lover in the West Village screams, “You have NO je ne sais quoi!”)

“Oh, my God,” Ms. Kazan cried. “That never gets old.”

^{Clap clap to Douglas Quenqua!}

is a new car. just kidding. not my message. but i like the song.

muahahahahahahahaha it will go on my site first! ugh it looks so much longer on the internet
also, these players do not necessarily correspond, so don’t get it twisted pls thx

Her name is Wolfgang Etheldeus Mozart, Ethel for short. She’s a 9-year-old Maltese that I adopted from the Humane Society on 59th Street, a therapy dog surrendered by her previous owner, a man who’d been abandoned himself by a wife who’d run off to Las Vegas with her new lover. They must have treated Ethel, formerly known as Pucci, like one of Elizabeth Taylor’s lapdogs (though with shorter hair), and I hope she’s got it good with me.

Ethel was preceded by Tabasco Chicken Nugget, an orange tabby I adopted from a no-kill shelter in Queens over the summer. He was 4 months old and was eating a Cheeto puff in one of the pictures the shelter posted of him online. He also had herpes and these weird, filmy eyes, plus an upper respiratory infection and a big oozing lump on his shoulder that landed him in the emergency room at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday night. Once Tabasco’s health improved, he turned crazy, and was always doing laps around my apartment, spraying litter everywhere and scratching at my face. He attacked my friends and my neighbors started getting annoyed at all the running in the middle of the night. I took him back to the shelter.

Before Tabasco, there was Monkey. Monkey was my first cat ever; I’d grown up with dogs and rabbits and fish and birds. I was walking past the window of an East Village animal-rescue-slash-screen-printing-shop, and there she was, this 3-month-old Abyssinian mix. She was so friendly. “She’s just like a Monkey!” the shop owner, Robert, said. She came home with me the next day, and that first night, all I did was hold her paws and stare at her face. A few days later, I noticed bile on the floor. Then she started hiding in my closet. I took her to the vet, and when I called them later that day, they said she was dead.

A month before Monkey, I’d found out that my ex-boyfriend Carlo, the one I’d lived with, the one I’d gone to Iceland and Belize and Nicaragua with, the one I’d made baby names with, the one who’d given me baby shoes for Christmas, the one I was going to spend the rest of my life with, hadn’t left because he was too busy with medical school and unable to prioritize (his word) our relationship, but because he’d met someone else, someone who looked like me and had the same last name as me. The difference was that she wanted to be a doctor, and I didn’t. He and I had been meeting each other weekly since the break-up, meetings that he initiated most of the time. I’d had my suspicions about my doppelganger, when one night, he told me over dinner at a loud, crowded restaurant that yes, Dorothy was more than just a friend. I went home, drank two bottles of soju, and spent the rest of the night vomiting in the shower.

A little after Monkey died, I went out with a guy I met on the Internet. We were supposedly an 81% match, which isn’t very good, but he seemed like a man on a mission — really smart and so busy, which tends to be my type. We dated a few months, but all I was doing was hard-bargaining so I could see him a couple days a week. Desperate wasn’t a good look from either point of view. When that was ending, and ending badly, I adopted Tabasco, and that ended badly, too.

I’m with someone new now. I’m not sure what to make of it. It feels like he just showed up one day, and now he’s in my apartment, cooking dinner, lighting candles, doing the laundry, taking care of the dog, walking me to work everyday, making me laugh. The pieces are all supposed to fit, and mostly they do when I’m not really thinking about it, but I still dream about Carlo sometimes. Ethel, for her part, Wolfgang Etheldeus Mozart — she can’t seem to stop falling asleep on my lap. At the very least, there’s her.

Charlotte Gainsbourg is like a dream person.

You all read this, right? If you haven’t, you should. There have been some pretty extraordinary related events since the publication of the piece, so lots of follow-up if you’re into it.

It got us talking that week about last meals, which I know now is the thing that every chef gets asked in every interview ever, but I digress. What would yours be? I had a hard time coming up with mine, and then the things that kept floating to mind were piecemeal: guava from that lady’s house-restaurant in Caye Caulker, I forget what came next, these choongmoo kimbap things that my dad and I used to eat every Saturday after choir practice. And I don’t know what it is about my daddy issues these days but every time I talk about my dad I start to cry. So there I was on the D train home from Coney Island, fwapping tears off my fat cheeks as I talked about North Korean rice rolls.

A couple weeks ago I came across a list of final meal requests by people who were executed in Texas from 1982-2003. As you might expect, many asked for meaty things — T-bone steaks, cheeseburgers, ribs. Benjamin Stone requested Coke. Some declined their meals altogether. Odell Barnes, Jr. asked for “Justice, Equality, World Peace.” Karla Tucker asked for a banana, a peach, and a garden salad with Ranch dressing. My favorite might be the guy after her, Steven Renfro. “Bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich (BLT) with extra bacon, cherry pie, vanilla ice cream and two cans of Dr. Pepper.” Last meal after my own heart, but in the end, if I could, I would ask for Korean food.

Time to reflect, time to contemplate, these things haven’t come in an abundance of late.

I’m moving on from my job, my life of two and a half years, and starting a new one. Today was my last day and I’m sitting here in the airport waiting to board a plane home. The goodbyes were either non-existent or insufficient and I feel unsettled by how messy everything feels at the end.

He says it puts the people who mean something into relief. You come to recognize the ones that matter. She says that it always comes as a surprise, the people who will say something to you, the people who will say goodbye.

They can’t all matter, at least not for me, even though I want that. There’s never enough energy or time.

That’s what he kept trying to tell me, that he was so busy, too busy, really crazy it’s so busy, and I wanted to believe him because he is, and he’s his own kind of very big deal, and it’s a legitimate thing to say, I guess, but I’m beginning to think that this too busy shit is almost never true. I was thrashing around trying to get him to see me, and when he looked I could only feel bad about myself.

And you wanna know what? All along there had been someone else, someone who made it funny and easy and who was there. It took me by surprise. Why that was so scary I can’t say but something inside me changed.

And so it goes…