A Breather, in Colombia

On learning how to take a break every now and then.

Before we get into this week’s post, I’d be remiss not to remind you that my debut novel, VICTIM, is now available for pre-order. VICTIM is a fearless satire about a hustler from the Bronx who sees through the veneer of diversity initiatives and decides to cash in on the odd currency of identity. If you enjoy this newsletter, I think you’ll also enjoy the book.

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Last week I was on vacation in Armenia, Colombia, visiting my wife’s family. We stayed with them in their home, and lived like locals. 

We shopped at the supermarket and took our kids to play in the big plastic ball pit nearby. I ate a lot of incredible bread, drank a lot of great coffee, ate delicious fried chicken from Frisby’s (the Colombian version of KFC, but better), and threw back a few Aguila’s (the local beer).  

We went to the Parque del Café: an entire amusement park devoted to the story of how coffee is grown and produced in the region. We went to a nearby finca, traversing through dirt roads, to get to a horse ranch owned by a Spanish man who made his career teaching horses in Spain to walk paso fino style. I watched as my soon to be three-year-old rode a pony around the ranch for an hour, loving every minute of it. 

We went to a wedding in Filandia, a small, and increasingly popular, colonial architecture style locale with tons of great food. The wedding was in a church located smack dab in the town square and was open to the public. 

I spent most of the service walking my 11-month-old daughter by her hands up and down the aisles in the back of the church, steering her away from lit candles. My daughter is intent on walking any day now, and the only thing she seems interested in doing these days is practicing. 

In fact, I spent a lot of time on my trip walking my daughter around Colombia by the hands. Without fail, usually right after I was able to quickly sip a cup of coffee in the morning, she’d come looking for me, grab my hands, and essentially say to me: “Come, papi, let’s go.”

I had no choice but to submit. That wasn’t the only thing I had to submit to.

Because as much fun as I had with my kids and my family, I can’t say the trip was all joyous. Mostly because I have always had a hard time taking any kind of break from writing, and from reading. 

My wife jokes that I don’t know how to take a day off. She’s not wrong. Whenever I find myself with down time, I look for ways to fill it up. I like to grind, I like to feel I’m making “progress,” to feel like I’m moving forward. Like I’m not “wasting time.” 

But as I’ve gotten older, and become a parent, I’ve started to learn that taking time off from the intellectual, creative work I love to do is actually important.

It provides with you a needed breather. A moment or two to collect yourself. Remind yourself a whole world and life exists outside of your identity as a writer. And also, often, provides you with some unlikely inspiration—inspiration that arises only because you’ve given your mind permission to take a break. 

Even though I know this, I still have to remind myself every time I actually attempt to take a break.

While on vacation, especially over the last year or two since I’ve traveled with my kids, I’ve had to slow down and tell myself: It’s okay if you don’t write anything down this week. It’s okay if you don’t get to read from that book you’ve been meaning to finish. You’re not missing out, you’re not losing ground. 

Having kids helps a lot. 

I don’t even need to worry about quelling my desires to do work because of the fact that I simply don’t have the opportunity to do it anyway. My daughter needs walking around by the hand. My son needs to get to the park or the pool so he doesn’t get so bored he destroys wherever we’re staying. They both need food. Baths. Naps. There are pictures to be taken. And so on.

So far, of the handful of trips we’ve made as a family, there has been little downtime for myself. 

A lot of times, in these moments on vacation, I’ve wished to myself: If only I could have 20 minutes to myself to be alone, to read an article on the computer about the latest thing that happened, or make some progress on that book in my bag so I can finally make a dent in my massive TBR pile.

But then when those moments come, usually in the hour or so after the kids are down for bed, I’m so tired from all of our adventures that I only have energy to watch some TV with my wife or play my Nintendo Switch for a bit. 

I have a tendency to hold a grudge about this. To paint myself as the victim for not having the space to do what I want. But at a certain point during our vacation last week, I just accepted that work wasn’t happening, and that this was okay. 

I accepted that I’m not going to have time to read my book, to work on my next Substack as much as I wanted to, to read up on everything around the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision, and, you know what? That’s cool.

I’ll get that time again. I have it now, now that we’re back home and back into our normal rhythm. And guess what? I didn’t miss out on anything. The world is still in tact. My writing is right where I left it.

At a certain point on our trip, I made the decision to just focus on being with my kids. To focus on holding my daughter’s hands while still wants me to. On playing whiffle ball with my son and having fun with him at the pool. 

Doing that, it turned out, proved way more useful to me than fretting about what I couldn’t do.

I returned back to Miami feeling a bit renewed, mentally that is. I can’t say my body feels rested—traveling with kids is often anything but restful—but my mind certainly does.

And for that, I’m thankful. 

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ARCS ARE HERE!

Upon arriving back to Miami from Colombia, I found a pleasant surprise waiting at my doorstep. A delivery of some advanced reader copies of my forthcoming novel, VICTIM. 

Opening the box and holding the copies in my hands felt surreal. I keep telling people that each step of this long process makes things more and more real to me. Having a pre-order link was a big step, but an even bigger one is holding a printed copy of the thing and realizing that soon others will be doing the same.

A real, physical product out in the world, all because I stared at my laptop screen and messed around on this weird thing for 10 years. Wild. You can read a bit about this journey in a recent interview I gave to the University of Miami Arts & Sciences program (I am an alumni of their MFA program).

Anyway, if you are a book critic, and are interested, hit me up about snagging an ARC. Digital copies are also readily available on NetGalley. 

Peace,

Andrew

RECOMMENDATIONS 

• I loved this recent interview of rapper, and actor Ice-T on the Drink Champs Podcast. I’ve always respected Ice-T’s transition from one of the earliest gangster rappers to a long-running actor on one of television's most popular shows. Here, he drops some useful jewels, and also some hilarious stories. 

• I read a lot about the affirmative action decision since touching down in Miami, and I really appreciated Matteo Wong’s piece in The Atlantic on what the decision likely means for personal statements in college applications. According to Wong, and others who have written on this, the Supreme Court’s decision could lead to students feeling even more pressured to display their racial and ethnic background in essays and lean into negative stereotypes in a performative way. “Writing about one’s race can be clarifying, even revelatory; de facto requiring someone write about their racial identity, in a form that can veer toward framing race as a negative attribute in need of overcoming, is stifling and demeaning.”  

• Threads debuted while I was out of the country. I’ve been playing around on it, but, so far, don’t find it all that great of an experience. I still prefer Twitter. The New Yorker’s Kyle Chaka did a good job of summing up what being on the platform is like these days. “...much of what I see on Threads is the kind of banal celebrity and brand self-promotion that I tried to avoid on Twitter—posts from Chris Hemsworth and Ellen DeGeneres, Spotify asking fans for their favorite playlists, and suggestions to follow Kardashians.” As I mentioned on Twitter the other day, so far, Threads seems to be the Kidz Bop version of Twitter. It remains to be seen whether that will change.  

• Alice Gribbin
  has an excellent piece in Tablet that picks apart the popular notion that “all art is political.” Framing all art in that way, and producing art for the purpose of advocating for politics, can often leave us missing out on truly transformative work, she writes. “More broadly, the arts suffer because they have been overtaken by a perversion of the democratic spirit. Political art has been prominent; derivative, pedantic, unambitious, historically ignorant, shallow, designed-by-committee art has been more prominent still. Great artworks may or may not be difficult but are always ruthlessly singular expressions, their nature aristocratic.” Gribbin has an addendum to the piece on her Substack that is also worth checking out. 

• Christine Emba of the Washington Post wrote a much-discussed essay on the crisis of manhood. It is very good. I appreciated that she tried her very best not to pull punches and dance around some of the harder truths about masculinity and how men are biologically wired. The piece doesn’t really point a way forward, but I think it advances the conversation in a meaningful way—particularly for those on the left who are becoming increasingly concerned about disaffected young men and who are ready to be real about why those men are drifting toward people like Andrew Tate and Tucker Carlson.