Sense / Making: March 2026
monthly round-up
Welcome back to Sense / Making, an end-of-month dump about what made up my month. It includes the following sections:
Eyeing (watching, reading, viewing, etc.)
Feeling (disability, illness, exercise, or other physical or emotional updates)
Smelling (perfume writing)
Tasting (restaurants, recipes, food and drink)
Listening (music and podcasts)
Sixth Sense (the spiritual stuff)
Normally, only paid subscribers will have access to the full rundown every month. This month, I’ve made the entire edition free for no reason other than I’ve sent you a lot of emails recently and I’m bored.
MARCH 2026
Tasting- Whatever I Can Get My Hands On, Frankly
We’re in limbo with the condo. We were supposed to close today. Obviously, that’s not happening, or I’d be telling you about it. I don’t know when we’ll close.
We did the inspection two weeks ago, though we shouldn’t have. The sellers said, “Everything is done except for appliances need to be installed!” They agreed to a special waiver that would allow us to petition for repairs or replacement of appliances any time within the first year of ownership.
Then we arrived with the inspector to find half a dozen workers traipsing through the apartment working on various projects. The plumbing wasn’t done. The cabinets weren’t done. The baseboards weren’t done. The lighting wasn’t done. Basically, almost nothing was done and appliances weren’t installed.
The inspector blatantly said we shouldn’t have done it so early but, welp, too late. Luckily, the half of the unit he could inspect - the walls and floors and ceilings - came back great and he was able to get up on the roof and give us some peace of mind about that at least, while we waited another week to hear back from the HOA, which is dragging its feet on getting us any and all information about the community and building we’re joining.
Needless to say, we have absolutely no idea when we’re moving and that means we don’t really know how much food to buy each week. We don’t want to stock up just in time to move it all, but we’re exceptionally stressed, so we actually haven’t been buying enough. We’ve been ordering out a lot, which isn’t great for our bodies but is excellent for the spirit!!
At the end of the day, fed is best.
Eyeing - Eddington
This month, I grabbed Eddington on Blu-ray from the library. After hearing all the mixed reviews, I was curious to see if a bit of distance between the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic might help its case, and I think it does. There’s a particular tenderness I think viewers can bring to a movie that so adeptly showcases the stir-craziness and political activation that long-term isolation caused.
» SPOILERS BELOW «
The first 85% of this movie is truly fantastic; there’s something deeply realistic and pitiable about the nuanced on-screen meeting of angsty, bored leftist teenagers in a small town; sexist powerful pretty-boy liberal politicians in the same corporations’ pockets as those on the Right; and well-meaning but emasculated and disenchanted old-school Republicans who are losing faith in democracy just like the teenagers are. The unexpectedly removed mental break of Phoenix’s Sherrif Joe Cross was the perfect end note… and then the movie didn’t end.
When the film cut to a secret cabal of “leftist agitators” clad all in black and surrounded by weapons, money, and protest signs on a private jet headed for Eddington, I knew all was basically lost. When Sherriff Cross got COVID from the homeless man he killed - after his refusal to enforce masking mandates kicked off the entirety of the film’s events - Aster had the chance to tee up a perfect lesson: Cross could get caught or even die alone from the illness he refused to take seriously.
Instead, Aster commits to making the film something else entirely: The MAGA Horror Story. By turning the ending into a lone hero shoot-out where one strong man fights against the encroaching liberal terrorists ruining his peaceful, respectful, insular homeland, Aster makes the entire movie a farce. Eddington is what MAGA thinks is happening to the United States. For the first two hours of run time, they’re not wrong. And then they are.
If the film had been marketed as such, if Aster and the rest of the team had been able to say plainly that they made a movie reflective of the alt-right narrative, at least they could make the true claim that a broken clock is right twice a day: There are concerns that people like Sherrif Cross have that are fair, and there are hypocrisies peddled by the Left that cause more harm.
Unfortunately, Eddington leaves viewers with what all both-sides-isms leave their participants: Nothing at all of use.
Smelling - The Best of Indie Perfume
This past weekend, I attended Fumed: A first-of-its-kind, all-indie perfume expo that featured dozens of the best independent, creative perfumers of our time. It was a magnificent, magical weekend. I smelled so many truly inventive, wacky, weird, special things. I’m going to write a whole post about it, so stay tuned.
It’s April Fools, which also means that lots of brands are playing cheeky games with silly fake products on social media, and this year the theme seems to be “disgustingly savory scents and flavors.” I’m curating some favorites over on my Instagram Stories, but between Hilary Duff’s “Gross Food Game” and the return of chain smoking, I think it’s safe to say that consumers are tired of sweet.
Listening - Lily Allen’s ‘West End Girl’
I’ll admit, I’d already listened to basically the entire album on YouTube in fits and spurts, but once I got the CD from the library, listening to the entire saga all the way through made it even move obviously genius and insane.
We need more blatantly autobiographic, direct albums like this one.
Some favorite tracks:
Feeling: - Welcome Back, TMJ
I’ve had TMJ (temporomandibular joint) pain for as long as I can remember. Both sides of my jaw click, but my left worse than my right.
Part of the issue is that I have an extremely small mouth, so I often over-extend my jaw muscles while eating. At some point I’ll probably need to get one of those expanders. They kind of look like the illegal spider-shaped orthodontic contraption from the viral Tumblr post about my hometown Tracy, California. (What, you don’t know about the viral Tracy, California Tumblr post?? That’s your gift for today. Please enjoy this lore about where I went to high school.)
I usually sleep with a very thick plastic mouth guard, and that helps a lot. But recently, I’ve been so tired that I collapse straight into bed and am out before I can get my mouth guard in. A week or so without my mouth guard is not typically an issue, but this month’s stress compounded it in such a way that last week, after just two days without my mouth guard, I could hardly chew any food, no matter how soft. The left joint was so swollen it was like a knot on the side of my face, and I couldn’t get my mouth fully closed.
Anyway this condo stress is eating away at me from the inside out. I hope the “Feeling” section of next month’s round-up is something like “FEELING - FREE!!!!”
Sixth Sense - Was That Lent?
In a few days, Jesus is going to have a final meal, wash his friends’ feet, be murdered by the government, and then come back to life.
For the last 40 days, I’ve given up alcohol. I only broke the fast once, which is fully incredible given the amount of stress I’ve been under since Ash Wednesday (we toured the condo the following week…)
I’ll admit, I think I believed a lack of alcohol would completely change my body, mind, and sleep. Maybe for the first week it did? I definitely had a moment after dinner with friends where I realized I wasn’t ruminating over every single thing I said or did, if people liked me, if I talked too little or too much, and I had the conscious thought that perhaps much of that social anxiety comes from or is worsened by alcohol.
But do you know how bad I’ve wanted a glass of wine this month? A margarita?
Lent always ends up being very penitential, no matter what I do. I think it’s part of the season, baked into creation. It was a terrible time to not be able to use alcohol as a coping mechanism, and also, I developed some weird, new, probably still bad coping mechanisms to fill its space: Lots of scrolling, lots of reading. I played a lot of Minesweeper, actually?
Becoming “land-owning gentry” as my pal Steve Millies called it is unbelievably stressful, and we’ve had a relatively straight-forward time of it (*knocking aggressively on wood*) We have friends who had to go $100k over asking to come out on top of 10 other offers. We feel happy to not be going it alone. Housing for all my friends!!!
And yet, I don’t think I’ve thought about Jesus even once? I’ve hardly gone to church, the weekends have been so packed with work I couldn’t do during the week because of condo things.
Lent is supposed to be a long descent into Holy Week. This year, Holy Week has been dropped at my feet and I’m pleasantly surprised to find it there. I’m throwing myself into Holy Week with excitement. I often remark to Guy that I wish I could send myself into a void - a temporary pocket of total darkness and silence where I could calm my mind and no one could find me - and then reemerge when I’m ready to resume what’s weighing me down. I’m hoping to make this Triduum a void of sorts. A vacuum of darkness, of religious obligation, where I cannot be bothered. A tomb.
See you next month xx