April is the coolest month

April travelogue and round-up

I am biased toward April, and it’s not just because I was born on the third (on a Friday afternoon during a spring thunderstorm no less). I have always held a special place in my heart for the fourth month of the year, firmly rooted as it is in spring (my favorite season) and often fraught with exciting, volatile weather. April contains some of the best unofficial holidays: April Fool’s Day, 4/20, and Earth Day. The NCAA March Madness tournament usually reaches its climax in the first few days of the month, and if you’re into golf, hockey, basketball, and/or baseball, it’s a thrilling time all around. April is a gateway to summertime, with spring break often falling amidst its mere 30 days, and the natural vibrancy of springtime rejuvenation is on full display. I will always maintain that April is the best of all the months, and I won’t hear otherwise.

This April, I turned 27, an impossibly old- and young-seeming age that I rang in with tiki drinks, dim sum, and a 50th-anniversary screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror at the Frida Cinema, which hosted a month-long retrospective of the legendary Russian director’s films. We also saw Stalker (1979) and The Sacrifice (1986) at the Frida later in the month. When I think about Tarkovsky’s films, I think about grass. A field of it rustled by a soft breeze, lush thickets rippled by great winds, submerged strands moving languorously under a body of water’s surface. Grass, and nature by extension, isn’t used as merely a backdrop; it can reflect the characters’ state of mind or the mood of the scene. Whereas I’d already seen both Mirror and Stalker, The Sacrifice was new to me, and it instantly became my favorite of the Tarkovsky films I’ve watched so far. His final work, the film unfolds as a haunting parable centering on a middle-aged intellectual confronting the specter of nuclear holocaust on his birthday. I was deeply moved by the film’s austere beauty and spiritual intensity, as, over 2.5 hours, I watched its characters gaze toward an uncertain future and wrestle profoundly with the weight of the past. And, of course, there were plenty of excellent shots of grass.

I made an almond cake for my birthday and then made it again a couple weeks later because I still had all the stuff (and it was better the second time!)

The weekend after my birthday, my boyfriend and I took a quick trip to Catalina, making the ~22-mile trek from the mainland via the Catalina Island Express. When I first visited the island 5 years ago, during the first summer of the pandemic, the boat was half empty, and we were told to keep our masks on at all times, even when eating. “You can eat, but when you take a bite of something, just replace your mask while you’re chewing” I remember an employee instructing us, one of the more bizarre and dystopian sentences that I heard during that time. On that trip, we hiked from Two Harbors to Parson’s Landing and camped for the night on a beautiful rocky beach facing the open Pacific Ocean. After much trouble getting our campfire lit, we resorted to ripping pages out of the paperbacks we had each brought with us—first the Acknowledgments, then the Tables of Contents, and eventually the pages that we had already read—in a desperate attempt to get something going for our little hot dog dinner.

On this most recent trip, we didn’t venture far from the city of Avalon and spent the night in a hotel. Upon arriving, we played a hastened round of disc golf with a friendly, if somewhat brusque, local who launched discs with the alternating dogged confidence and reckless abandon of the course’s architect. Guerilla in nature, the course is nestled surreptitiously in the hills above the island’s ball golf course, thickly overgrown and nearly invisible to the oblivious onlooker. I was vividly reminded of some of the early scenes in Stalker as we waded through knee-high vegetation and avoided parts of the trail purported to contain potential dangers—not time warps, but poison oak and rattlesnakes. After saying goodbye to our guide, gratefully unscathed and with all of our discs miraculously accounted for, we headed straight for lunch and beer, followed by a spirited game of mini golf.

Later that night, we ate dinner at The Lobster Trap before heading to the Catalina Casino, an architectural gem blending Art Deco and Mediterranean revival, for a screening of Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991) at the Avalon Theatre. I hadn’t seen the film in more than 15 years, but it had been a childhood favorite of mine and my siblings. Watching it again in a nearly century-old building on the ocean and under the theatre’s whimsical murals and acoustically designed domed ceiling created the perfect blend of nostalgia and novelty.

We capped off our trip the next day with a sight-seeing golf cart ride, whizzing away from, above, and through Avalon on roads that hugged the ocean and then quickly climbed to overlooks that offered stunning views of the city and surrounding coastline. It was a fun and ridiculous way to see the whole area in less than 2 hours, and we had an absolute blast.

Disc golf views, oysters at The Lobster Trap, the Avalon Theatre

In the middle of the month, I took a week off to coincide with my sister’s spring break so we could visit friends in Santa Cruz. We took a trip within a trip to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, driving on dizzying mountain roads and even encountering everyone’s first bear! It was incredibly humbling to be among the giant redwoods and stand in the shadows of both General Sherman and General Grant, the largest and second largest trees on Earth by volume, respectively. Back in Santa Cruz, we enjoyed a steam-powered railroad ride through the forest at Roaring Camp, experienced the gravitational anomaly of the Mystery Spot, and relaxed on our final day with a session at a Japanese-style bathhouse. We also took a day trip to Monterey, enjoying the exhibits of the acclaimed aquarium before promptly housing a seafood lunch nearby. This trip was a great little reprieve from the ongoing horrors of adult life during which we all got to feel like little kids again. I love my pals!

(Clockwise from top left) Old sign overlooking the Mystery Spot, black sea nettles at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, lunch at Sea Harvest, Well Within Spa, Marianne's Ice Cream at twilight

I finished two books in April: Skippy Dies (2010) by Paul Murray and The Many Lives of Anne Frank (2025) by Ruth Franklin, the latter of which I listened to as an audiobook. The following blurbs have been reposted from my Instagram account, where I post pithy, heartfelt book reviews:

In The Many Lives of Anne Frank (2025), acclaimed biographer Ruth Franklin explores Anne Frank’s brief yet complex life alongside the complicated legacy of her diary. At the outset, Franklin proclaims that she intends to reevaluate Anne as a human being and a literary artist—“let’s remember her…as a teenager behind a locked door, pen and paper at the ready, watchful, indomitable, alive.” Drawing on diverse perspectives, she delves into the historicity of Anne’s diary, from its slow-to-start journey to publication to the fraught development of its Broadway adaptation and further to its catalyzing effect on the young adult genre, and also examines the cultural impact of Anne herself, from the highly disparate iterations of her that have appeared in works of fiction to her somewhat paradoxical cult of celebrity in Japan. To paint an even fuller picture, she weaves in anecdotal “interludes,” like that of an Ethiopian refugee who stumbled upon the diary by chance and set out to translate it by hand into Tigrigna, or Anne’s spectral presence on Neutral Milk Hotel’s landmark 1998 indie rock album “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” as something of a ghostly muse. She also sets the record straight on certain misconceptions regarding Otto Frank and clarifies other facts that have been blurred over the years. Crafted with linguistic precision and an exacting organizational style, Franklin’s book serves as a remarkable investigative document that maps exactly how Anne’s story has been edited, censored, commodified, and appropriated over the last 78 years. If all this sounds fascinating to you, I highly recommend checking this one out, particularly as an audiobook. I found it to be deeply engrossing, as moving as it was informative, and I greatly appreciated Franklin’s systematic and cross-disciplinary approach to Anne and her story.

True to its title, Paul Murray’s 2010 novel Skippy Dies begins in the style of a cold open with the death of Daniel “Skippy” Juster, a 14-year-old boarder at an elite Irish prep school. Out of context, this first scene is rendered as a farce. However, as Murray weaves the tapestry that culminates in Skippy’s fate over the next several hundred pages, gracefully and brilliantly developing a varied cast of unforgettable characters, the tragedy becomes evident. Murray’s novelistic craftsmanship is on full display as he parallels the all too recognizable absurdity of adolescence with that of adulthood in a way both true and poignant, using a vast and sometimes vexing vocabulary to a masterful effect. I imagine this was as fun to write as it was to read, and I savored it over the last few weeks—a labor of love that I did not at all mind laboring over!

In the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, he declares April to be “the cruelest month.” Why is April cruel? The poem captures the bleak mood of life in London after WWI, a period marked by despair and sorrow. Signs of renewal, like April “breeding lilacs out of the dead land,” mock Eliot and, to him, felt more like a taunt than a promise. Spring’s insistence felt misplaced amid so much lingering wartime despondency. Lately, that mood feels familiar; with so much uncertainty and unease in the air, cynicism comes easily. I’ve been trying to mitigate my own stress and anxiety by rooting myself in the activities that bring me joy and comfort: baking bread, reading, going for long, quiet walks. Hobbies can feel trivial in dark times, but it’s these small daily triumphs—another chapter finished, a new bird sighting—that bring me the most peace and that I’ve come to rely on for resilience.

Outtakes (clockwise from top left): Phish at the Hollywood Bowl, a little free library find in Santa Cruz, General Grant's fire scar, Burgers Never Say Die in Silver Lake (McDonald's dupes in smashburger form)

I told myself I wasn’t going to share more playlists in these newsletters but my taste is just too good and my curatorial skills too excellent—this is a collection of songs that feel like springtime to me!