familiarity
I like a bold, homemade matcha tea.
Mind the wording there. Not a latte — just straight powder and some hot water. Now before you think I’m about to wax poetic about my ten step matcha routine, I’d like to clarify this isn’t any of that artisanal, frou-frou, whisk into a delicately-glazed-and-fired Japanese wabi-sabi bowl froth. This is Costco, baby. This is that 4 pm bleary-eyed grocery trip, terribly-average, recipe-calls-for-half-a-teaspoon-but-instead-I-put-four-teaspoons-oh-and-I-microwaved-it-in-a-mug bitterness. I take a sip and recoil.
Almost unpalatable. But it gets the job done.
Admittedly the rest of my tastes often reflect these hastily-made beverages: hopelessly basic, just good enough. I like campy anime and League of Legends streamers and low top black-and-white Converse All Stars and I rotate between the same three pairs of jeans for far greater a period than I should. Spend enough time with me and you’ll start to notice a pattern — if I truly like something, I will never get tired of it. Give me the #16 large pho, the B10 dumpling soup medium spicy, a double-double with grilled onions, a tray of Marugame udon over and over and over. At one Italian restaurant I’ve been ordering the exact same spaghetti bolognese for almost two decades, and I continue to read repeats of Murakami more than I’d care to admit, even though by this point I can practically predict the next remix of thematic jazz song title and plot device cats and misunderstood, sadboy protagonists.
Are any of these the divine pinnacle of experience? Damn right, they’re not.
But what they are is familiar. And sometimes, that sort of down-to-earth reliability is the most important quality to have. It’s a subtle comfort to know that when you walk into the noodle joint at 7 pm on a Friday you know it won’t be busy, or that when you need to pick up another pair of shoes you know they’ll be on the shelf at a random Foot Locker, or when you get off work there’s something to look forward to as you recklessly launch yourself onto the nearest surface for a twenty-four minute episode reprieve. Comforts of regularity.
Someone once told me that just because a movie or a concert didn’t blow you away doesn’t mean that you wasted your time. Some things are just pretty good. And that’s all they’ll ever be — pretty good. I think there’s a certain appeal in that, in knowing that it’s not exactly great, but you still spend your time with it anyways. I appreciate fondness grown through familiarity. Times spent wandering fruitlessly with friends for Saturday night plans through West Village both terribly sober and terribly cold, family spending Christmas Day idly sprawled over a couch with an old Mission Impossible film droning in the background. It doesn’t matter that they’re not the most compelling moments, what matters is that they are yours.
There’s always so much in front of us. I adore the Peruvian restaurant down the street plastered over with sticky notes and makeshift menus, items crossed out in permanent marker and faded from years of sunlight pouring through windows. The grass-stained creases on your shoes. A library copy of The Giver with numbers overflowing out of the due date card, pages mangled and dog-eared. The purest form of appreciation is to be continuously worn down and stitched back up, to be chosen once more despite countless faults.
As we live things inevitably get broken. And every day you can say “I’m moving on, I’m not working with this anymore.” But remember the alternative: the best parts patiently lie, biding their time for the person who sticks around. It’s tempting, and far too easy to discard the old. It’s much more demanding (and rewarding) to work with what you have.
Take stock of the frayed and well-used things you’ve carelessly strewn around your life without thinking, the stuff that you keep reaching for out of convenience, the friendships and habits you fall upon absentmindedly, the homey restaurants you frequent: sometimes it tastes bitter, sure they’re kind of rude some days, the seams are starting to fall apart, some may even call it average. But it’s familiar, and it will be there for you when nothing else is.