we watched the oscars last night.
i want to say that plainly because i’ve been thinking about it all morning and the thing i keep coming back to isn’t the ceremony itself — it’s the room we watched it in. the room i’ve been building for two months. the room that, last night, did exactly what i’d been asking it to do since we arrived: it held an evening.
julian made popcorn in the cast iron — not microwave, not stovetop-in-a-disposable-aluminum-pan, but the cast iron dutch oven with the lid slightly cracked so the steam escapes and the kernels don’t get soggy. this is a recent development. three weeks ago he was a microwave popcorn person. i have not commented on the shift because commenting on it would acknowledge that my influence is working and i prefer to let these things naturalize without a ceremony.
we sat on the couch with the bearaby across our laps. the culver was doing its thing in the corner. the smart bulbs were at 2700K. the arch mirror was catching the screen’s light and redistributing it across the wall in a way that made the room feel twice as deep as it actually is, which is the kind of optical trick i used to engineer professionally and now do accidentally in a managed-community apartment in the suburbs.
conan was hosting. he was good. he was doing that thing he does where the joke is that he’s aware the entire enterprise is absurd, which is the only honest posture available to a person standing on a stage in front of people wearing watches that cost more than our annual rent, in a year when the strait of hormuz is closed and gas prices are climbing and there are seven confirmed american casualties in a war that started sixteen days ago.
i’m going to come back to that. but first: the oscars.
paul thomas anderson won three times, his film six times. i need to sit with this for a moment because i have feelings about paul thomas anderson that are not entirely rational and i’ve never had a venue to express them until now.
i watched magnolia for the first time when i was twenty-two, in an apartment in the east village that had radiator heat and a window that faced a brick wall three feet away. the apartment was terrible. the movie was not. it was the first time i understood that a film could function the way a room functions — that it could create an atmosphere so specific and so sustained that you forgot you were watching something and started feeling like you were inside something. that the camera could do what lighting does: establish the terms of a space before anyone in it opens their mouth.
he’d never won before last night. thirty years of making films that feel like rooms you’ve been invited into, and the academy had never once said: yes, this is the thing. and then last night they said it six times, for a film about — from what i can gather — something historical and dense and probably three hours long, which is exactly the kind of movie julian falls asleep during and i watch with the specific focus of a person who is taking notes on how light moves through the frame.
julian did not fall asleep. this is notable.
jessie buckley won for hamnet, which i haven’t seen yet but will, because jessie buckley is the kind of actor who makes you understand that performance is a material — that it has weight and texture the way stoneware has weight and texture, the way a linen napkin has drape. she does not perform feelings. she inhabits them. there’s a difference that i think most people don’t notice and that i notice in the way i notice thread counts: compulsively, and with opinions.
michael b. jordan won for playing twins in a vampire movie directed by ryan coogler, which sounds like a sentence i would have found confusing five years ago and now find exactly correct. coogler won for the screenplay. jordan was — from the clips they showed — doing something i’d describe as “controlled devastation,” which is when an actor is clearly operating at full capacity but the performance never spills past the frame. it stays in the room it’s been given.
and autumn durald arkapaw won for cinematography. the first woman. ever. in ninety-eight years of the academy giving out that award. she asked all the women in the audience to stand up with her, which is the kind of moment that could have been performative and instead was just — accurate. a room full of women standing up in a room that had never asked them to.
i watched that from the couch, under the weighted blanket, in the light i chose, and i thought about rooms.
here is the part i’ve been circling.
the news is loud right now. i don’t usually talk about the news here because this is a space about apartments and stoneware and the specific texture of turkish cotton, and the news is about war and oil prices and a strait that’s been closed and a death toll that is climbing in a place most of us couldn’t find on a map six months ago. i read the news every morning on my phone in the bathroom — the bathroom that now has towels and a waffle curtain and amber glass dispensers — and every morning the distance between what i’m reading and where i’m reading it feels like a gap i should be ashamed of.
julian and i don’t talk about the news the way we used to. we used to argue about it — not about positions, but about proportions. how much attention does this deserve. how much of your day should be shaped by something happening six thousand miles away that you cannot influence. he’s a pragmatist about these things. he reads the news, he understands the news, and then he makes eggs. i read the news and it follows me into every room.
except last night it didn’t.
last night we watched the oscars and the room held us and conan made jokes about the absurdity of caring about movies while the world does what it does, and i realized that he was making the same argument i’ve been making in this space for two months: that the small thing is not a retreat from the large thing. that making popcorn in cast iron while the news is running its ticker across the bottom of the screen is not denial. it is the other thing. the thing where you build the room you can bear to sit in, and then you sit in it, and then you are a person who can face what’s happening because you have a place to face it from.
a hearth is not an escape. a hearth is a position.
i’ve been writing this blog for about six weeks now. in that time i’ve hung a mirror, claimed a bathroom, hosted seven people for dinner, and argued publicly with my husband about paper plates. i have not changed the world. i have changed the room. and the room — the one with the arch mirror and the weighted blanket and the beeswax tapers and the stoneware plates that julian no longer questions — the room has changed me.
not dramatically. i’m not going to claim that sourcing turkish cotton towels is a spiritual practice or that the correct kelvin temperature is a form of enlightenment. but i am going to claim this: i am calmer in this room than i was two months ago. i am more present in this room than i was two months ago. and when the news comes in the morning, i read it from a place that i built, in a room that i chose, at a table where real plates are stacked and real napkins are folded and real candles have burned and left wax on the wood that i haven’t cleaned up because the wax is evidence that something happened here.
that’s what i have. it’s small. i’m arguing that it’s enough.
julian went to bed before the best picture announcement because he had an early shift. i stayed on the couch under the bearaby and watched paul thomas anderson walk to the stage for the sixth time, and the room was quiet except for the television and the refrigerator’s ambient commentary and my own breathing.
the apartment was dark except for the screen and the culver lamp. the arch mirror was doing its work — pulling the blue light of the broadcast and placing it on the wall behind me so the room felt like it extended further than it does. the waffle curtain was visible through the open bathroom door, catching the hallway light. the bamboo tray was on the counter, holding the amber dispensers, holding the morning.
i sat there for a while after it ended. not because i was savoring the ceremony or thinking about who deserved what. just because the room was good. it was quiet and warm and it smelled like beeswax from last tuesday’s dinner, and i was sitting in a place that i had made, in a city i didn’t choose, in an apartment that was designed to belong to no one, and it belonged to me.
march is half over. the bathroom is done. the living room is done. the news will continue. the apartment will continue. i don’t know what room is next — the bedroom, probably, which is currently operating in the condition of a room that has accepted its own factory settings without complaint, which is the most dangerous kind of room because it’s the one you stop noticing.
but that’s next week’s problem. tonight the oscars happened and the room held an evening and i’m writing this in the morning with coffee in the le creuset bowl that julian still calls a cereal bowl, and it’s fine. it’s small. it’s the whole project.
no products this week. just the room and the evening and the argument that small things are not small.
we’ll see what march asks for next.
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