#5: Marla Chinbat
"Oooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmm. I’m a Buddhist but not a very good one at the moment."
Welcome to Health Gossip. Today’s guest is Marla Chinbat, an art student, blogger, and waitress living in Chicago. She’s currently working on a film about her family’s immigration from the Czech Republic to the US, and also made this great Gigi Hadid boxing montage. A friend after previewing her answers: “Wow, I don’t know if I ever asked myself about health at 21.” Enjoy!
At a glance…
Location: Chicago
Big 3: Virgo/Capricorn/Sagittarius
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
Ommmmmmm. Nice cuticles. Ommmmmmm. Good posture. Ommmmmmm. Breathing from the bottom of your lungs, being all up in that body, Alexander Technique-style from my acting days (iykyk). Oooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmm. I’m a Buddhist but not a very good one at the moment.
Healthy Life = Beautiful Life. It’s like that Maslow chart where aesthetic needs are around the top. I strongly believe in creating a visual language for yourself to be healthy. Off the dome: Amber Heard, Dakota and Elle Fanning, Emily Jane Browning, Imitation of Christ Fall 2011, and the IBM tower from the 1964 World's Fair. Also, playing mobile games and sudoku.
How would you describe your current lifestyle?
Incubation stage. I’m totally obsessed with school right now. Pretending to be an academic, my beloved art history lectures, all this really stimulating talk on container technologies and modernity and documentary, fervently keeping up with esoteric art speak jargon by analyzing e-flux articles... I’m Really Making This Whole Public University Art Degree Thing Work For Me.
Xylitol gum after eating to remineralize my teeth. Slathering my legs in lotion to keep them gleaning. My perfect painting professor can slouch on her stool so I feel fine if I do it too. (I guess I’m really more scared of tech neck.) Creating photographs in my head about design lecture characters such as Peter Behrens and Walter Paepcke and the Container Corporation of America (his ass was responsible for making Aspen, well, Aspen! Look it up, it’s freaking bonkers! Also his company, the CCA, was said to have one of the largest corporate fine art collections ever. Cray cray). Gourmet latte paradise when I’m at school—my favorites are black sesame hojicha and golden chai.
To refer back to health, pointed actions (cranberry supplements, boiled water, and a highly curated yet simple skincare—to name a few) to prepare myself for the full fledged Goop lifestyle awaiting me in the future…yes, that's it.
Otherwise, I K.I.P.C. (Keep It Pretty Chill). I waitress. I’m painting celebrities right now and still playing with a lot of latex and am working on sticking to a ~practice~ at this time. Loafing around on Instagram and Poshmark and documenting my online treasure hunting like any other normal girl. So busy for some reason.
How do you start and end your days?
On a perfect start, I am packing myself as many snacks as possible and have time to do my concealer at home and douse myself in a combination of perfumes (right now my decant of Serge Lutens Dent de Lait is making me smell like the most beautiful type of sweat) while sipping on a heaping glass of milk tea. On bad mornings, I’m making up my face on the train.
To end—also with my big tea, a habit I’ve kept from my classy ass mother, but actually it’s because I’ve inherited her trait of hating tap water and thus not drinking very much water at all (something I’ve finally overcome through the purchase of a beautiful water bottle, the Kinto Day Off Tumbler in white). When I feel extra crazy at night, I file my nails and boar bristle brush my hair with some baby powder and put on perfume again. Common feminine practices <3
Was there a specific moment in life that made you more conscious of your health?
This question is really stumping me. I think living through the realities of our healthcare system as most other Americans (although I’m technically not American) have, has fundamentally affected the way I approach my health. To this day, I am restricted to inadequate therapies and feel pigeonholed into just having to deal with my bouts of paranoia and attention deficits, something I hope doesn't escalate into full-blown mania as I enter my 20s. Being witness to my parents as they tack on more pressing health problems with no insurance only makes this health anxiety worse.
This is just scratching the surface. It’s hard not to think of health under the framework of consumerism and pop culture. This very real thing that one must actually pay close attention to has been taken advantage of [by influencers and companies], and it’s falsely empowering. I struggle with this and often just revert to radical superficiality—beautiful athletiwear, VPL, Stella McCartney for Adidas, all the other precious clothings and characters and phenomena... I can't make up my mind.
What's your relationship like to death?
I know I haven’t been getting enough sleep if I start to get all weird and paranoid about spontaneously being the victim of a gruesome attack, so I definitely fixate on it often. Otherwise, in terms of the concept itself, I really am hung up on the sudden, quiet finality of death. In video games I feel like it’s all about dying and I think it can portray that ultimateness of it well; the emotional liminality of cut scenes and dying screens really tickles my fancy. Clock Tower 3 and Sims 3 are both very good. There’s also the Pasolini essay, “Observations on the Long Take,” which I think about often when pondering death/film/digital footprint. “It is thanks to death that our lives become expressive.” Another thing of his worth reading is this spooky interview, “We are all in danger,” from the day before he died a violent death. RIP Anton Yelchin, I loved you in Like Crazy and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Do you have any recurring dreams?
Yes. I have one where I brace to jump 50 feet into the air, and then I panic and float down much to my relief. My dreams always happen in the buildings of my elementary and high schools. Stairs and stairs and stairs... and lots of teeth drama, of course. (My very front tooth is fake. Lots of oral surgery trauma, so I dream about it now that it’s over.)
Do you believe in the concept of self-healing, or that one can heal oneself?
In the way our body repairs wounds, I believe our brains function the same. You don't notice a cut healing until it’s done. If we associate movement and activity with conscious goals, thus treating our bodies with grace and compassion, we can heal traumas. Real. Hippie. Stuff. You don't notice the absence of a harmful thought until you get reminded again.
The little experience I’ve had with somatic therapy was seriously groundbreaking, like those videos of people thrashing and crying at Evangelical church.
Where do you look to for information or guidance on matters of health? Do you work with anyone on a regular basis?
Lots of Reddit research. Lots of word of mouth from friends, my mom, my sister. Of course, I worship Korean and French skincare, Japanese haircare, and Chinese medicine. I really love old fashioned habits like using cold cream and keeping your nails clean. I definitely follow the spiritual and non-spiritual rules my mom told me as a child: no cutting your hair or nails at night, keep the soles of your feet warm in the winter to protect your liver (?)… All those Vogue celebrity skincare videos can be so irresistible, too (though I know they’re just selling things to me and none of it is real). I work with this video on a regular basis, a yoga sequence video from my first acting movement professor that I have downloaded to my laptop just in case it ever gets taken down. When I did that sequence everyday, I felt like a God.
Fuck, marry, kill: three health trends of your choice.
Fuck: sexy juices and smoothies. Marry: xylitol. Kill: non-dairy milk.
What are your grocery staples? What types of meals do you find yourself returning to?
I'm really actually not that sophisticated of a cook; I liked to think I was until I couldn’t deny that my boyfriend was much better at it. Thai curry and miso kimchi stew are the best things I can make—versatile, easy, and light.
Condensed milk is a total staple for me. If I run out of milk for my tea, this works. It is also the most quintessential ingredient in my comfort/budget meals (Kasha porridge and чихэртэй будаа, which is “sweet rice” in Mongolian). Both are kind of the same thing, just in different mediums (farina and rice, respectively). They are the marriages of milk, condensed milk, and butter—the most beautiful combination in the whole world. Kasha was a childhood breakfast not just for me, but for my parents during the Soviet days of Mongolia.
It’s a grocery store goldmine where I live. Aldi keeps it real and Joong Boo (the Korean grocer) keeps it fun. If I’m really yearning for some out-of-the-pantry ingredients, I can make my way to my local co-op and spend an obnoxious amount of money on things like capers, plantain chips, Milk Bar cookies, lifeless kimchi, beeswax makeup, and really yummy but expensive beer. It's like a shittier, coldly lit, less stocked Whole Foods. I enjoy it all the same.
What do you think is the most pressing health issue of our time?
Weed and derealization.
What advice would you give to the person reading this?
Take the labels off of your lotions and tubs and bottles. Butter instead of oil makes your food taste better. Honey is vegan.
