Once Upon A Fine

If we start out the year as we mean to go on, 2019 is going to be The Year of Crossword Puzzles. Also, The Year of Walking Many Miles Before Sunrise To Get To A Less-Crowded Tube Station After Fireworks and The Year of Grocery Shopping Because I Needed Milk For Tea.

Most importantly, it’s going to be The Year of Writing.

I haven’t been writing here because I feel like I’m just adding more noise to the cacophony of the internet. The world feels so full of memes and cat videos and news outlets and novels and just sheer content that it’s hard to feel as if whatever I might create matters at all. I don’t want to fill up the world – even the digital world – with unnecessary clutter.

This feeling of creating nothing but clutter has been following me since early 2015 or so. There are many personal reasons and global-political reasons for this, but partly, this might be because blogging has changed so much in the past decade. When I started blogging in 2007, the community was fledgling and raw. Since then, it’s become highly professionalized. I now feel pressured to create a personal brand with my blog, to use this site as a jumping off point for a career, to use the correct tags and categories for optimal SEO, to think about monetization and maybe even future sponsorships. The same goes for my other social media accounts, especially Instagram.

But try as I might, I just can’t seem to conform in the ways that I know will grow my audience. I’m not great at ensuring I use the same filter presets for each Instagram photo so that my grid will look enticing to new followers, nor have I managed to find my topical niche – I certainly can’t write about marriage, motherhood, or entrepreneurship, though it seems that most of the blogs I used to enjoy reading in the early days have all gone in those directions. I’m not that great of a food photographer either, and embroidery is about the limit of my DIY. I’ve considered a travel blog format for these years abroad, but I’m not traveling – I’m living here. And a London blog seems redundant: there are more London food, tourism, and travel blogs than you can shake a stick at, so I’m not sure what new ideas I could bring to that already groaning table. I could do book reviews, but my reading is so eclectic I’m not sure who would tune in regularly to my hodge-podge of academic scholarship, children’s literature, and whatever Audible Daily Deal happened to catch my eye. I’ve thought about television and film reviews, but I’m in no way qualified to write those, and I would love to have a fashion blog, but I think my style has always been too eclectic to really gain a following. It’s sometimes vintage, sometimes ultramodern, mostly sweaters. Yet, I want to write about all of these topics and more – and, spoiler, that doesn’t make for great branding. Plus, I like words more than photos in my blog posts. I am a verbal, rather than a visual, person.

I feel like the Charlie Brown of the blogging world. “Oh, everything I touch gets ruined!”

And, as much as I’d like to say, “Well, I’m just a hobby blogger,” or “I don’t really try with my Instagram photos,” I know that actually I do put a lot of effort into my content. I know that I’ll compulsively check my views and likes and hope that I’ll get a lot of comments. And I also know that I won’t really get much feedback. I’m aware that this is largely because I’ve not worked on my branding, and I haven’t figured out SEO keywords and I haven’t found the community I want to work towards reaching. But because this is a personal blog, it feels like a personal failure.

Outside of social media, too, I’ve questioned my own self-worth again and again in the last three years. In terms of political engagement, relationships, and figuring out how to contribute to the world, these have been three of the hardest and most introspective years of my life. Most of that introspection is in handwritten journals that god-willing will never be tweeted out four-hundred years later like Samuel Pepys diaries (if you don’t follow @SamuelPepys on Twitter it’s so worth it for the comments alone).

While I still can’t say that I feel like what I write has much value, and I still struggle with the feeling of adding to the din, I do believe that, maybe, writing again could plant a seed in some way. My little personal blog that I kept after undergrad brought me friends from as far afield as Australia and Hawaii, people I cannot imagine not having in my life. Maybe all I really need is to find my little cluster, rather than my thousands of followers. So in 2019, be prepared for those book reviews, film reviews, food reviews, and fashion updates, complete with iPhone photography and a lot of heart.

If you’re struggling with feelings of self-worth, you should write, too. Or post whatever art or photos you secretly want to post but think aren’t good enough. I think I’ve finally come to the conclusion that putting ourselves out into the world will always be better than hiding away, even if it feels like no one is listening.

After all, maybe – as they say in the musical [Title of Show] – it’s better to aspire to be nine people’s favorite thing, rather than one hundred people’s ninth favorite thing. Maybe it’s not about the numbers at all. Maybe one person reading this needed to read it. Or maybe, it’s only that I needed to write it.

At long last, I am breaking my blog silence to bring you – wait for it – a review of Taco Bell in London. Yes. They have them here. I first became sensible of this fact on the Russell Square Tube Station lift, thanks to an advertisement telling Londoners about a new location close to Senate House library. As I read, my pupils dilated and an unstoppable grin spread across my face. Joy suffused my whole being. I looked at the other commuters and tourists in the lift with me, bundled in grey coats and scarves, beleaguered expressions upon their faces, and wished that I could convey to them my feeling – my feeling that Heaven was here on earth, in London, and that it came with a side of queso.

In the United States, Taco Bell is one of my favorite fast food guilty pleasures. It’s not Mexican food, no matter how they package it, but it’s not not Mexican food, and who can resist a good Mexican ‘pizza,’ chalupa (which bears no resemblance to an actual chalupa that you might find in actual Mexico), and some nachos? So, given the dearth of Mexican food in this nation (or not-so-Mexican food, as the case may be), I had to give their Taco Bell a try.

I ended up at the Hammersmith location for lunch. The whole experience felt surreal, as if I were visiting Taco Bell in a dream. Nothing was quite like it ought to be, but still recognizably Taco Bell. The menu is pared back – the craziest thing on it is a ‘Triple Double Crunch Wrap’ (sort of like a slightly crunchy hamburger). No breakfast menu. No Doritos Loco tacos, no chalupas, no Gorditas. Worst of all, no Mexican pizza. Listen, I love Taco Bell in the middle of the day, but we all know those off-the-wall dishes are meant to play to the midnight stoner crowd. Guess Taco Bell UK hasn’t discovered its true calling yet.

The restaurant was surprisingly large given that we were in the middle of a city. They had touch screens for ordering, which maybe they do in the States now, too, but I’ve never used a Taco Bell touch screen. I clicked on the ‘Tacos’ tab. I added a basic Crunchy Taco to my cart. Unexpectedly, it gave me a choice of filling! I could have seasoned beef, grilled chicken, spicy Mexican chicken (whatever that means), slow cooked pork, or beans. I chose beef. Then it popped up and asked me if I wanted to add lettuce and cheese to my taco for an additional 30p per item. Not extra lettuce and cheese, as I could also add extra beef for 70p, but did I want lettuce and cheese AT ALL. What?! Isn’t the definition of a taco that it comes with more than meat and a shell? Well. I added the lettuce and cheese. I also got an order of nachos.

My order came up, and I secured a little table near the back. The first thing I noticed was that my nacho chips were nothing like Taco Bell USA chips. They were a heavier corn chip, kind of like cheap store-bought chips that you’d buy on sale, then wonder why you didn’t just splurge on Mission Organics chips. They were covered in what I thought was paprika, but on tasting seemed like a mix of paprika, salt, and whatever fake orange cheese comes on Doritos. The queso looked like the glorious-terrible plastic cheese of Taco Bell USA, but when I tasted it, it had a flavor more akin to Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese sauce. Still, I’ve been so starved for queso of any kind that by the time I was nearly done with my chips I’d convinced myself it was pretty good. After all, I was eating them in view of a light-up sign that read “Live Mas.” It was almost like being home. That, and my tacos were perfection. They were exactly like a Taco Bell taco should be.

As I finished inhaling my meal, I looked around at my fellow diners. I realized I was literally the only person who had nachos instead of fries. Everyone. Had. French Fries. At Taco Bell.

Excitingly, though, the guy next to me had the churro dessert option, which I’d considered getting, but didn’t, and it comes with a little container of dark chocolate sauce, and I might have to order that next time. What’s that, you say? Next time? Next time. Yes, in spite of my better judgement, I imagine that for me and Taco Bell – as always, whether in North America or across the pond – there will be a next time.

(My meal at Taco Bell Hammersmith. I nearly forgot to take a photo I was so excited, so I’d already eaten about half of it. Two crunchy beef tacos, an order of nachos and cheese, and some gross Pepsi Max thing because they have a soda fountain and I imagine they don’t want to put drinks with real sugar in so that they don’t have to pay an exorbitant sugar tax.)