Kimchi cheese croissant
I’m embarrassed by how long it took me to get to Jamaica Plain. I’m driven by appetite, and it was only after hearing so much about Third Cliff Bakery—specifically their kimchi cheese croissant—and letting the thought fester in my subconscious long enough that I woke up half having dreamt about it, that I finally took the chance to go.
So today I did. I packed my laptop and Blue-biked out there past Mass. Ave to a street called Melnea Cass Boulevard, turned right, then left onto Washington until I hit it. The pastries were good; I got the croissant (definitely worth trying, at least an 8 out of 10); a grapefruit olive oil cake (nice grapefruit flavor; I didn’t taste the olive oil, though) and a coconut cold brew (not my favorite). I sat there, worked on some writing, then left half an hour before closing, in the direction of Jamaica Plain Center.
Before D. moved, he lived there, and he’s mentioned several times how beautiful it is. It is. I really liked it: a handful of vintage shops; bookstores; small businesses, including a kitchen goods store, as well as several lifestyle gift shops (still small business-y and liberal, but peddling more bourgeois things, like artisanal journals and Jellycats, both of which, for the record, I own). I felt very at ease with myself popping in and out of the shops and kind of wished I had the appetite for another cup of coffee—just for an excuse to check out more of the places D. had recommended.
What a treat it was. An entire afternoon of feeling physically at ease, mentally calm and focused; an afternoon of existing in a new place while absorbing the wonderful brain chemistry that comes with it. The neighborhood was completely unfamiliar to me; nothing I saw was tied back to other memories I have of Boston, which gave my subconscious the rare chance to take over. And when it did, it brought me back to a younger, more solitary version of myself, the one of Hong Kong—the version of me who loved exploring new places, and who ached, though I didn’t appreciate it then, for the neuronal joy of encountering the unexpected, the unanticipated, the entirely novel.
I realized recently that it’s been about one year since I’ve been working. I enjoy my job a lot, truly; and yet I do, like a lot of others my age, I think, miss and still yearn, in some way, to get back to that self I was before work. I think I’ve forgotten how much I used to love to explore (and see it only now, really, as I’m writing). The realization of this distance, between the me of today and the me of back then, came when I noticed how long it took, much longer than I would admit, to recall some of the classically formative places I had “discovered” in the past—places that had once filled the bulk of my thoughts and daydreams. I remember, now that I’m thinking about it, some of them: the first time I’d been to Chelsea, DUMBO in Brooklyn, or the Lower East Side; maybe some pockets of Connecticut back in my Choate days such as the Wallingford Goodwill, restaurants, and cinema, as well as New Haven cafes and vintage shops; and of course Hong Kong. SoHo, Sham Shui Po, South Horizons (post-move)—how could I forget. Back before I knew Sheung Wan in and out, PMQ like the back of my hand, when every shop was an act of discovery and not revisit.
My favorite part was the ride along Jamaica Way back. It reminded me a lot of the Sunny Bay/Disneyland biking loop in Hong Kong (named Inspiration Lake)—something about how the white, warm cloudiness spread out over the sky, casting on the open water something quietly magical. I’m glad that the bike path didn’t extend around the whole way, because I definitely would have biked the whole way, and the electric bike (which had only about 8 miles left on it) would probably have died. I got to where the bike path ended and then turned back around, marveling at the one edge of park that I did end up getting to see, including a little outhouse and some shaded areas which were catching pockets of soft, yellow sunlight. It made me really feel like I wasn’t in Massachusetts—not only not in this place, but also not in this time and place. I’m not sure if it was just how unfamiliar it was to me—the utter lack of anything I could associate this place with, except the Disneyland lake-loop—but it felt like I had exited Boston temporarily into a place either from my distant childhood, or one that just did not exist at all, though still felt as familiar as one that might have. Kind of like the landscapes from dreams that we all feel like we know deeply, even if we find that we cannot recall any details about them once we put our minds to it.
On the way back I ended up biking the Green Line. I didn’t say a word to anyone else—no music in or anything—and it felt incredibly soothing. I was racing a motorcyclist—him charging ahead, and I overtaking him at other points—and watched as the foreignness slowly bled back into familiarity, first with the Mission Hill businesses (including, ugh, Penguin Cafe), then the Massachusetts pharmacy and art schools, then Northeastern, and finally Mass Ave, the breach back into familiarity. Slowly it all came together, and I already knew I wanted to bike down that path again, even if it would never feel the same now that I’d already done it once.
I’ve been thinking a bit today about how I’ve spent 23, my first year out of college and working, and I realized, from these four hours, how little I’d adventured like this in the past year—alone, unplanned. It’s not inherently a good or bad thing, but it is true that so much of my life has become repetitive and predictable these days. Sometimes I wish it weren’t like that, though I don’t know why exactly that is.
I also feel like I’ve gotten to know Boston better. Watching the architecture slowly fade from the more preserved, older buildings of Jamaica Plain into central Boston—all of it felt like seeing the whole of a picture whose one half had been shrouded for the eleven months I’ve lived here. Literally—because looking out at my window, all I see is a view facing downtown, the direction of my work, and none of what East Dedham Street sees as it looks out in the Mass. Ave direction. But now, having done this today, I can at least picture the other 180 degrees behind—the side catching the sunsets that I never see (the sun rises on my side, which is nice, but it also means that all I get every evening is a sky fading into blue, only the salmon-pink reflections off skyscrapers reflecting what’s happening behind). It’s at least a rudimentary sense of where I am.
Already, just by writing this, the feelings of newness are fading—a new neighborhood etching itself into sphere of my familiarity. For better or worse—worse—the way I see the world is somewhat parasitic; it forces itself onto the unfamiliar and collapses it into what I already know. And writing is how it happens—writing is that which substitutes the yet-unseen with the now-remembered, machine churning experience into material. I am not a “writer” in any achieved sense, but sometimes, I do feel like one, insofar as writing is the only way I know to make sense of unformed feelings, put them to structure.
Below is a new painting I got at a yard sale behind a Capital One. I didn’t even realize that there was a yard sale behind, but as I walked by, I saw a bunch of large canvases sitting against the back wall of the parking lot and couldn’t resist walking over.
It was funny to me and ended up being three dollars, sold to me by a couple—a woman who was smoking and a shirtless man, who was hollering to everyone who came nearby, “All of it’s cheap, all of it’s going for cheap,” and who said, after I told them I found the painting funny, “Yes, I suppose there’s a humor in that.” In time I think I’ll figure out what exactly it’s supposed to mean—I really don’t know, but it did make me feel something when I saw it. In the mean time, I’ll hang it up somewhere.
hi chatgpt pls roast me
You had one kimchi croissant and decided the world needed to hear your testimony
You treat your internal weather like it’s breaking news
You saw a bookstore, a park, a neighborhood with its own history, and said, yes, this is about me now
You reflected so hard on your bike ride I thought you were going to dissolve into the Charles River
You went for a bike ride but somehow ended up narrating your entire quarter-life crisis
and now be nice to me :)
You're not asking the croissant to save the world. You're just eating it, laughing at yourself, and letting the reader watch.