i love my grandparents btw

not sure if that's clear from the essay. americans lack strong relationships with their families after all

My holiday ends tomorrow. I fly back to LA in 24 hours to begin 2023. A few days after I get back, I start a new job as well! It’s an incredibly regular job, with an onboarding process and benefits, a job that ends the vagueness of unemployment: an anxiety that had somehow grown comforting. 

Despite the tension unique to nobody’s family dynamic, I feel no joy in leaving home again. When I moved from Michigan to begin college in Evanston, and again when I graduated and got an apartment in Los Angeles, I thought I had experienced the heights of “leaving.” Since then, I’ve discovered that leaving never stops and only gets more difficult. Luckily, this occurs with a strong, direct relationship to how much the love for what you leave grows.

This trip, I was lucky to get to spend time with my grandparents. For the first time, I appeared to them as an adult. There are lots of cliches about spending time with your grandparents, and dedicated readers of this newborn newsletter know by now that I am simultaneously very averse to and very inclined towards cliches of all kinds. One of those cliches is that grandparents are filled with infinite wisdom, and every day you spend with them, it becomes more important to mine every bit of this wisdom out of them. 

In practice, I find this difficult. When I first realized that I should be spending more time actively seeking to learn more from them, I was met with a lot of internal resistance. Mining wisdom out of my grandparents felt manipulative, like a commodification of our relationship. Is forcing old people into delivering life philosophy really for them or for me? Wouldn’t they rather just hang out and watch a Malayalam movie? Most of the time, I think that’s true. I never knew the right questions to ask anyway.

But something different was in the air during these few weeks with my grandparents. Without provocation, musing of the highest quality came up naturally. I didn’t build it, but it came. I want to share some of these nuggets, not to commodify my familial relationships, (this is a free newsletter after all) but because I learn time and time again that the cliches are worth embracing: sharing movies with my loved ones, making new year’s resolutions, and writing an essay at the end of a family staycation about the things you learned from your grandparents. Why the hell not.

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My grandparents on hobbies: “A good hobby is not something that you ever try to get better at. That makes it work. However, with any hobby you do, there should be some finished product created. Otherwise, you are wasting your time, and a good hobby should not be a waste of time.”

This is complicated for me. What separates a hobby from work? A finished product from an improved result? Why is one favorable over another? Many of my hobbies do feel like work. That makes sense given that I turned my favorite hobby into my college major, and subsequently my main career pursuit. 

A recent development to my hobby situation is that I have been considering getting back into playing sheet music for the piano. There is a kind of finished product here, the progress of learning a song. However, by practicing the piano, I’m sure to get better at the song. So, does that constitute a good hobby or not?

On friendship: “It’s important to keep in touch with your friends from school. Those are the best friendships in life.”

I believe this! My friends from high school, college, and from my first years out of school are all extremely important to me. But is it true that the formations of my best friendships only lie behind me? Is it fair to all those I meet in the future to hold the circumstances of our introduction against them? 

Most of my good friends from school are scattered across the country. Most are not pursuing the indulgences of the entertainment industry, and have no reason to live near me in LA. At my loneliest, I wish I could forge equally strong connections with the people who live in my neighborhood. And shouldn't I believe that's possible? 

On Christmas: “American holidays are built around gift exchanges because they lack strong relationships with their families.”

If you have grandparents from another country, you’re gonna hear some shit about Americans. It’s wild to have heard shit about Americans all my life, then grow up and realize those Americans are around me all the time. Worse, I’m one of them too!

This feeling of ~confusion about one’s cultural identity~ has inspired some of the most unnecessarily criticized poetry to ever be written. Indignation and scorn about writing that references smelly lunchboxes and the taste of mangos plagues the digital footprint of the diaspora. And yes, in my own creative life, whenever that's been pitched to me as a premise, my taste has rejected it. No one likes a cliche. 

But I must say, I can’t dig through pomegranates with my grandmother at the kitchen table for too long without hearing about the mangos she grew up buying out of a truck in her neighborhood. And I do encounter uncomfortable questions from my peers not about the food in my lunchbox, but about why I go home so often, why I don’t accept money from friends, or why I apologize to objects that I graze with my foot. Cliches, man. Sometimes they hold up. 

On drugs: “There is no reason to do drugs that haven't been prescribed to you to help heal the body. The body itself has the ability to not only withstand, but come back from enormous amounts of suffering. Thus, you should trust it.”

Context here is that my sister just got her wisdom teeth out. She’s popping prescription percocets and immediately knocking out every time. She is not having fun, but from an outsider’s perspective it’s kind of funny.

In reference to the quote, older generations are obviously, typically, more conservative than younger ones. I can't pretend to always live up to their ideals, but I couldn't help being struck by this notion of resilience. My grandparents have withstood and come back from enormous pain. It’s impossible to live in the world and not be affected by it, and they’ve spent a lot more time than I have involved in this exchange. It could be easy to fetishize their suffering, to commodify their advice and turn them into sage characters, but the main thing I’ve learned from the musing of the past few weeks is that our lives have been made up of entirely unique challenges and perspectives. 

My grandparents don’t wax poetic about where they’ve come from or what they’ve endured. I believe that our character is forged in our fires, and I am well aware that much of their advice to me is a product of their specific fires. I haven't seen the same flames as they have, and they don’t wish that I would. If I ever have grandchildren, I’ll have different lessons to impart onto them. I’ll tell them that it's great to take up an instrument, and nice to have friends who live on your street. I’ll tell them what it was like to be Indian-American in the front end of the 21st century. Above all though, I’ll talk to them about resilience. If it’s a cliche, it’s a gorgeous one. 

My grandparents on nature: “Look at the designs made by nature and you will see there is no greater artist. But if you spend all your time studying the beauty in flowers, in forests, you’ll never be able to stop. There is no use in thinking about this all the time.”

My rebuttal: And why the hell not?