2025: THE YEAR IN REVIEW
i sprayed rubbing alcohol on a tree.
i cut the sleeves and hem off of a tee shirt.
i ran five miles.
i texted my college roommates.
i refilled my water bottle.
i sang to the cats.
i set an alarm for 6:45 pm.
i sent an email to myself.
i rinsed out a plastic container.
i watched death bed: the bed that eats.
12.31.24
hey hey, a non-train post! i hoped to write a post while donating platelets today, but it seems that downing extra multivitamins last night wasn't enough to summon The Good Blood; my iron was lower than it's been in ages. i ran instead, a satisfying-enough physical feat for the last day of the year, though it is a bit awkward that i didn't return the free socks they passed around before medical intake. in 2025 i'll snort caterpillar-fat rails of lentils and be an absolutely incomparable donor-diarist, david cronenberg wishes he had characters like next-year me at his fingertips. maybe i'll also lean into writing-writing?
we have new year's eve Outside Plans for the first time in many years, and tickets to something for the first time ever, i think: we attended and loved a night of yo la tengo's annual hanukkah residency at bowery ballroom a year or two ago, and the venue is close enough that we can walk there and back without soul-kissing THE LOWER EAST SIDE AFTER HOURS ON A HOLIDAY!!! for too long (i cherish our neighborhood, but its late-night chaos is uncompromising). yo la tengo won't play any of the songs they've played on nights 1-6 and they'll have mystery guests who won't be most of the soft boys (sigh, night four) or david sedaris (last night's opening humorist), and it's all very exciting. i actually found my old Dissipated Disco Mermaid sequined dress in the hall closet last night, so i will wear that and try to manifest a year of art and action.
we have new year's eve Outside Plans for the first time in many years, and tickets to something for the first time ever, i think: we attended and loved a night of yo la tengo's annual hanukkah residency at bowery ballroom a year or two ago, and the venue is close enough that we can walk there and back without soul-kissing THE LOWER EAST SIDE AFTER HOURS ON A HOLIDAY!!! for too long (i cherish our neighborhood, but its late-night chaos is uncompromising). yo la tengo won't play any of the songs they've played on nights 1-6 and they'll have mystery guests who won't be most of the soft boys (sigh, night four) or david sedaris (last night's opening humorist), and it's all very exciting. i actually found my old Dissipated Disco Mermaid sequined dress in the hall closet last night, so i will wear that and try to manifest a year of art and action.
12.28.24 [on the F train]
this could be the weekend i finally get around to arranging the heap of silk flowers i've been saving up to create a european-ish sidewalk-boutique arch to hide all the crap we've piled on top of our kitchen cabinets. i still don't really know how i'll anchor them so that they look dimensional and fabulous without making it virtually impossible to access the crap they'll be obscuring, but that's something i can't really know until i haul out the ladder and packing tape and get going. (there's a version of this DIY in which i make, i don't know, a wall-spanning little roll of chicken wire or floral foam or something to serve as that base, but i think at the end of the day i'll be coming back to packing tape.) i swooped by michaels the other day to feast on heavily-discounted seasonal flowers and wired ribbon and found neither; most of the christmas-ish stuff on clearance was stocking-stuffer trinkety business, and who wants that? i dropped off a print i've been meaning to frame for several months and got a dopamine hit that felt a little like finishing an apartment-wide dusting jag. i'm puttering thus now because i was teasing a blogger about how she should feature a tour of our place—who else has so many copies of nineteen eighty-four, a rhinoceros head made of cargo pants, and an unflattering michel gondry portrait?—and she said yes, let's do it, so at some point in the new year a photographer will come over and memorialize all the weird little crafts i've made instead of progress on paying work. my motivation here is something like my friend abbe's when she and her now-husband were moving from brooklyn to philly, though we aren't going anywhere in a literal sense: she wanted to suspend the place she loved in amber, to leave a little fossil record of what she'd assembled around her over the years. she first contacted an interior photographer she found through another online tour, and that person said her rates were high but if she pitched the project to a site, said site would pay for her work, and lo! a tour came together. in our case there is, of course, a little of my look-at-me-don't-look-at-me craving for strangers' no-stakes approval, which is...pretty harmless, i guess? and i get to talk about my mom and sisters and friends? i am strongly tempted to stage our bedroom with the still-unfinished english paper piecing quilt i assembled in the first years of the pandemic, and just admit that even though it's not quite done i want people to see it; it feels like transparency is the best approach to whatever this is, though i will also be jamming a lot of stuff in our closets and have already lugged home a bunch of those vacuum storage bags people use to minimize their linens.
what dad and i had planned as a post-holiday central park walk turned into a manhattan-spanning trek yesterday; we met at columbus circle and wandered up the western side of the paths, then cut into the upper west side in search of bulk holiday cards he could use for gifting at his office. i promised he'd find a bunch at my old nonprofit bookstore (not so!), so we took the subway down to soho and wandered uptown again after failing. he said i'd never brought him to the bookstore before? that feels wrong, but i can't prove otherwise, and since he clearly doesn't remember it in its glory, which is why i'd hope he's mistaken, it doesn't matter. i guided him to a beloved taqueria on st. mark's and a bakery i frequent in cooper square, and he will rememember those. after walking all the way back up to the east 90s and meeting up with our spouses for dinner i abruptly ran out of gas, which hopefully didn't read as intensely as it felt; surely it was an okay night, even if my face lost the ability to do pleasant face-things. i am not expecting to change significantly in the new year, but maybe we'll all have a bit more energy and a rising tide will lift all butts? this is my wish for the people. i really don't want to fall asleep on this train.
what dad and i had planned as a post-holiday central park walk turned into a manhattan-spanning trek yesterday; we met at columbus circle and wandered up the western side of the paths, then cut into the upper west side in search of bulk holiday cards he could use for gifting at his office. i promised he'd find a bunch at my old nonprofit bookstore (not so!), so we took the subway down to soho and wandered uptown again after failing. he said i'd never brought him to the bookstore before? that feels wrong, but i can't prove otherwise, and since he clearly doesn't remember it in its glory, which is why i'd hope he's mistaken, it doesn't matter. i guided him to a beloved taqueria on st. mark's and a bakery i frequent in cooper square, and he will rememember those. after walking all the way back up to the east 90s and meeting up with our spouses for dinner i abruptly ran out of gas, which hopefully didn't read as intensely as it felt; surely it was an okay night, even if my face lost the ability to do pleasant face-things. i am not expecting to change significantly in the new year, but maybe we'll all have a bit more energy and a rising tide will lift all butts? this is my wish for the people. i really don't want to fall asleep on this train.
12.21.24 [on the F train]
i've been pingponging between books that carry me down history's lazy river like the life preserver i was instructed to turn upside down and step into like a diaper when i was in a biosphere in mexico this past spring (laura maiklem's mudlark, a wonderful long view) and bleeding-edge ones that make me feel abruptly and specifically like shit (paul lynch's prophet song), and that has been a good-enough way to move through the world. (a panhandler on the train is chatting with a woman a few seats down who just gave him some change: "i feel lucky to be in new york, it could be worse: i could be in a different city, in a different state, in a third world country. i could be in detroit." in ian frazier's paradise bronx i just learned new york is only city to adopt constitutional language obliging it to address inhabitants' right to shelter.) i have not been doing a very good job of catching up on the work that piled up before the election; when i get tired of being in my skin i go running or go up to grand central station to donate platelets, which you can do pretty often, since they give you most of your blood back and i have a lot of platelets (i am unironically proud of this). the first time i got settled in my pleather lab-recliner and the tech could see the needle mark from the last time i was there i was a little embarrassed, but now i don't care. i got an email from the volunteer coordinator at the library saying that the guy who'd been flaking out of his shifts after mine had officially flaked off for good (which i thought we'd talked about and determined long ago, but i respect her system), and so now i'm The Study Room Monitor for all of wednesday afternoons if i want. i told her i would rule with an iron fist and am unironically proud of that, also.
i think the work buildup is under control now, or at least the parts of it that call for acute creativity and can't unspool while i'm on something like autopilot. i had an unsettling afternoon about a month ago when i spent an hour working on research for a design story, tried to save the word file, and was informed by my own laptop that i already had something by that name. turns out i'd spent an afternoon at the library the day after the election doing the same work—taking many if not all of the same notes, even—and completely forgotten about it. when i turned in revisions for a big, earnest science piece earlier this week my editor thanked me for taking my time with it, which read not as a passive-aggressive dig but as actual appreciation for not having to deal with it earlier on his end. my other essay editor has made analogous noises hinting at her own lack of peace. i am not glad for that, i want all of us to be living our best and most effective lives, but since the feeling of being a little less alone is going to be there whether or not i acknowledge it i might as well be grateful.
i think the work buildup is under control now, or at least the parts of it that call for acute creativity and can't unspool while i'm on something like autopilot. i had an unsettling afternoon about a month ago when i spent an hour working on research for a design story, tried to save the word file, and was informed by my own laptop that i already had something by that name. turns out i'd spent an afternoon at the library the day after the election doing the same work—taking many if not all of the same notes, even—and completely forgotten about it. when i turned in revisions for a big, earnest science piece earlier this week my editor thanked me for taking my time with it, which read not as a passive-aggressive dig but as actual appreciation for not having to deal with it earlier on his end. my other essay editor has made analogous noises hinting at her own lack of peace. i am not glad for that, i want all of us to be living our best and most effective lives, but since the feeling of being a little less alone is going to be there whether or not i acknowledge it i might as well be grateful.
10.26.24 [on the F train]
it's hard not to slip into the dire belief that if i'm not going to pennsylvania and canvassing or spending all spare time phone banking or both that the country will slide into fascism and it will be all my fault. i sent 300 letters to georgia and feel good about them, and i know that we're all trying to correct for what we now think of as complacency leading up to hillary clinton's loss in 2016, but i should not have pitched a big story that's coming due on 11/7, or pushed another big story's deadline to 11/4, or both, right? i've been making little swiftie-style beaded bracelets and sending them around the country to friends and family—PGH FOR HARRIS WALZ, WHEN WE FIGHT / WE WIN, WRONG RALLY—which doesn't make a lot of sense, but here we are.
the half marathon last weekend was surprisingly okay! mysterious things happened to the ball and toes of my right foot around mile 11, so i started folding in a bit of walking at that point, but my average pace ended up being around a minute slower than what i ran in the NYRR's new york half in 2015, which is not so terrible. i wasn't going to undertake another half until this one again next year, maybe, but i got an email about entering the lottery for that NYRR race, which isn't until march and is so popular that my chances of a spot are slim—i don't think i've ever made it through that lottery, i've had to fundraise my way in with charity slots—so eh, why not? i'll have enough time to train properly for it, and i've enjoyed creeping back up into running more than 5K at a stretch. my body doesn't love those long runs, not that it ever did, really, but their utility for smoothing out my nerves in the years since i stopped drinking has been undeniable.
to my great surprise, i got a shoutout in the annual nature and science writing anthology i've been courting for the last couple of years. my philip k. dick joke title, out there in bookstores forever! i actually updated my website bio to include the longlisting and wondered if i'm any more likely to score an agent for the book i'm hoping to write; dare to dream, or something. i revisited the exchange i had with an agent a decade ago after an editor connected us and he maintained that i should have a proper proposal, which would include a couple of completed chapters, before shopping myself around for representation. so what i'm currently doing—slowly picking up secondhand paperback copies of related nonfiction and working my way through them with dogearing because i keep forgetting i have sticky notes next to my bed, makes sense? i would like to apply for a writing residence to work on part of this, that was always one of the sub-projects that attracted me to a longer project, but i'm still unclear on where i'm supposed to be in the book process when i do. maybe it's time to actually start asking friends with longform credits about that?
these overlapping big stories standing in the way of my saving democracy have netted me more practice with interviews than i've had in a long time. they're exhausting, first dates and blue-book final exams all at once, but they're also satisfying in the way that Having Written is satisfying. maybe they will generate the momentum that will tow me through a massive manuscript, though i really need to jump on that if so, since my principal subject's surviving children are quite old. i rationalize my shyness in relation to them by telling myself that the book is and isn't about her, it's really about all the things she touched and, you know, the real book is the friends you make along the way, but that's not really so. i need to hitch up my big-girl pants and talk to her kids while there's still a chance they'll talk to me. if i can make myself vulnerable to astrophysicists and entomologists, surely i can make myself vulnerable to them.
the half marathon last weekend was surprisingly okay! mysterious things happened to the ball and toes of my right foot around mile 11, so i started folding in a bit of walking at that point, but my average pace ended up being around a minute slower than what i ran in the NYRR's new york half in 2015, which is not so terrible. i wasn't going to undertake another half until this one again next year, maybe, but i got an email about entering the lottery for that NYRR race, which isn't until march and is so popular that my chances of a spot are slim—i don't think i've ever made it through that lottery, i've had to fundraise my way in with charity slots—so eh, why not? i'll have enough time to train properly for it, and i've enjoyed creeping back up into running more than 5K at a stretch. my body doesn't love those long runs, not that it ever did, really, but their utility for smoothing out my nerves in the years since i stopped drinking has been undeniable.
to my great surprise, i got a shoutout in the annual nature and science writing anthology i've been courting for the last couple of years. my philip k. dick joke title, out there in bookstores forever! i actually updated my website bio to include the longlisting and wondered if i'm any more likely to score an agent for the book i'm hoping to write; dare to dream, or something. i revisited the exchange i had with an agent a decade ago after an editor connected us and he maintained that i should have a proper proposal, which would include a couple of completed chapters, before shopping myself around for representation. so what i'm currently doing—slowly picking up secondhand paperback copies of related nonfiction and working my way through them with dogearing because i keep forgetting i have sticky notes next to my bed, makes sense? i would like to apply for a writing residence to work on part of this, that was always one of the sub-projects that attracted me to a longer project, but i'm still unclear on where i'm supposed to be in the book process when i do. maybe it's time to actually start asking friends with longform credits about that?
these overlapping big stories standing in the way of my saving democracy have netted me more practice with interviews than i've had in a long time. they're exhausting, first dates and blue-book final exams all at once, but they're also satisfying in the way that Having Written is satisfying. maybe they will generate the momentum that will tow me through a massive manuscript, though i really need to jump on that if so, since my principal subject's surviving children are quite old. i rationalize my shyness in relation to them by telling myself that the book is and isn't about her, it's really about all the things she touched and, you know, the real book is the friends you make along the way, but that's not really so. i need to hitch up my big-girl pants and talk to her kids while there's still a chance they'll talk to me. if i can make myself vulnerable to astrophysicists and entomologists, surely i can make myself vulnerable to them.
10.12.24 [on the F train]
my therapist seems confident that the harris-walz campaign will bring it home next month, though a bit of me wonders if it just makes sense to project that when you're a therapist. i was thinking about managing expectations when i talked to the guy who irradiated our cat this week (said cat has early-stage hyperthyroidism, which can be managed with a specialized diet and daily oral or otic meds forever or cured by paying someone to inject radioiodine into him and then keep him in a "cat spa" on the upper west side until the geiger counter hollers a bit less lustily, the option we chose—who needs a fall trip abroad, anyway?): this specialist is absolutely the dude you want doing this to your cat pal, manhattan prices aside, as he helped develop the treatment decades ago and has apparently cured tens of thousands of patients with it. (see also: take your pet to a spay/neuter clinic at your local shelter if you can, since they perform way, way more of those surgeries than your regular vet does.) but he is also very much a vet specialist, with the kind of firm boundaries that make sense when you're working with the kind of people who can afford medical staycations for their companion animals: he does not answer his phone, he calls precisely when he says he will, and he does not speculate about effects and results that are not directly related to what he's measured and observed in clinical practice. i am used, for better or for worse, to doctors' reactions to the charm offensive i release like cuttlefish ink when we interact, so the fact that he chose not to reassure me with optimistic bromides when i hoped the cat wouldn't develop renal issues after we knocked out his thyroid was...surprising but not unwelcome? in other news, we completely ignored the clinic's diligent instructions about how to manage matty's atomic breath after i brought him home yesterday morning. part of that is pragmatism—we have a one-bedroom apartment, and herding and isolating a still-radioactive cat are orders of magnitude more difficult than trying not to share or catch COVID—and part of it is wishful risk-taking after reading up on how specialists in other parts of the state and country tell their clients to minimize harm. in some places cats are inpatients for 10 days, and in others it's just two! some docs say you can open the bedroom door after a week, others talk up lead underpants! i did not want to limit myself to a few minutes of contact a day for any length of time and am also still vulnerable to the magical thinking that if i intentionally experience some sort of hardship for the cat it will improve his health outcome, so kind-of exposing myself to radiation it is. i understand that this is superstitious and childish, but i'm clear-eyed about choosing it as a stress response.
i have settled into what looks like a regular weekly shift monitoring the garden-adjacent quiet study room at an uptown branch of the NYPL, and i love it; it's not really a swap-in for my old afternoons at the nonprofit bookstore, since it involves almost no talking or physical work at all, but it's an anchor in my week that i'd missed terribly. the atmosphere in there is wonderful, and it's been incredibly conducive to work so far; i think i've written a hundred get-out-the-vote letters on recent afternoons, and i've finally managed to dig into all the research i need to do for a pair of assignments coming due around the end of the month. speaking of stress responses, i've been napping and running hard when i should be writing; childish procrastination and i know it, but i have my first half-marathon in years next weekend, and all things being equal, i would rather not have my internet pal who works with the raccoons and swans in prospect park end up finding me insensible in a thicket somewhere, which is definitely what happens when you arrange interviews and hit deadlines at the expense of long sessions on the treadmill.
i have settled into what looks like a regular weekly shift monitoring the garden-adjacent quiet study room at an uptown branch of the NYPL, and i love it; it's not really a swap-in for my old afternoons at the nonprofit bookstore, since it involves almost no talking or physical work at all, but it's an anchor in my week that i'd missed terribly. the atmosphere in there is wonderful, and it's been incredibly conducive to work so far; i think i've written a hundred get-out-the-vote letters on recent afternoons, and i've finally managed to dig into all the research i need to do for a pair of assignments coming due around the end of the month. speaking of stress responses, i've been napping and running hard when i should be writing; childish procrastination and i know it, but i have my first half-marathon in years next weekend, and all things being equal, i would rather not have my internet pal who works with the raccoons and swans in prospect park end up finding me insensible in a thicket somewhere, which is definitely what happens when you arrange interviews and hit deadlines at the expense of long sessions on the treadmill.
08.17.24 [on the F train]
chocolate-chip raindrops this morning, the kind that might or might not add up to one wet cookie when i get off the train in queens. i should really start carrying a little fold-up tarp or industrial garbage bag for my tote, which would compact and travel much more imperceptibly than a full-fledged umbrella and protect the only stuff that really can't get wet. i'm semi-paused on almost all work right now, as the new third-party payment-processing contractor that handles compensating contractors like me for my biggest client has now taken almost a week to renew my apparently-expired approval, a slot canyon that seems to have affected me first among the client's freelancers and which seems unbelievable even by generic-corporate-fuckery standards (i am denied access to all of the client's assets and tools, so i can't research or build a damn thing). it's been fewer than 90 days since they approved my initial contract, a process more invasive than the blood and urine draws i underwent for my yearly physical yesterday (a background check, seriously? for a writing-jokes-about-couches gig?). this has meant that i've had luxurious stretches of time in which to run errands (with the understanding that i had to be able to sprint home at any moment) and that my schedule for the next month and counting is absolute hash, as all kinds of stuff has accordioned down the line. i generally don't care all that much about when things happen, despite my procrastinator's fundamental fear-based obsession with deadlines, but i am almost incandescent with rage about this shit; this processing contractor has already demanded invoices from my other clients to make sure my work is diversified to a degree that satisfies them—so infantilizing i don't know what to tell you—and if, say, the most pressing piece i've got pending isn't sorted before tuesday night, its editor is going to have to reassign it and i lose $600 for work that's already taken me more than two hours. i don't have any colleagues in this scenario, not really—everyone's either someone who offers me work or someone whose incompetence prevents me from doing work—so i can but holler here, since anything else would make me a real bummer to hire again. freelancers are supposed to be cool girls.
a friend of ours has taken a full-time gig with the harris-walz campaign and is either moving or has moved to delaware for the next few months. i have a theory that going up there with jigsaw puzzles and snacks would technically be infrastructural, which seems to underwhelm joe. i think we've scrubbed most of our travel plans for the fall—we've both booked solo trips out west to visit family, but he doesn't have the vacation days to really unfurl the way we like to until the end of the year, and we're already committed to a thing with my folks in the spring—so, like: delaware! it would be so cheap, i bet, and i could pretend it's comparable with door-knocking! i know that's not so, at least the door-knocking part, but i'm working my way up to more full-contact election suport.
i took the ferry out to the rockaways for the first time in several years a couple of weeks ago, at the invitation of a friend who rented a place out there for part of this summer. the stretch of beach she favors is vastly superior to the crazy-crowded portion i used to visit, and her car-based setup camps rings around the towel-and-tote situation that was all i was used to bringing out with me. i told her quite a bit about what i called 'the beach companion i lost to her office-based job,' though i didn't really get at all the reasons that relationship fell apart, at least partially because i myself don't know. could she smell the loss on me? i felt like i reeked.
a friend of ours has taken a full-time gig with the harris-walz campaign and is either moving or has moved to delaware for the next few months. i have a theory that going up there with jigsaw puzzles and snacks would technically be infrastructural, which seems to underwhelm joe. i think we've scrubbed most of our travel plans for the fall—we've both booked solo trips out west to visit family, but he doesn't have the vacation days to really unfurl the way we like to until the end of the year, and we're already committed to a thing with my folks in the spring—so, like: delaware! it would be so cheap, i bet, and i could pretend it's comparable with door-knocking! i know that's not so, at least the door-knocking part, but i'm working my way up to more full-contact election suport.
i took the ferry out to the rockaways for the first time in several years a couple of weeks ago, at the invitation of a friend who rented a place out there for part of this summer. the stretch of beach she favors is vastly superior to the crazy-crowded portion i used to visit, and her car-based setup camps rings around the towel-and-tote situation that was all i was used to bringing out with me. i told her quite a bit about what i called 'the beach companion i lost to her office-based job,' though i didn't really get at all the reasons that relationship fell apart, at least partially because i myself don't know. could she smell the loss on me? i felt like i reeked.
07.06.24 [on the J train]
biden's disastrous debate appearance last week and the supreme court's even more disastrous ruling on presidential immunity this monday added up to the first time in a long time that i've truly felt the kind of liquefying panic i felt the night of the election in 2016, the kind that meant self-care also performed as self-care, like hey look at how productively i'm thinking about and processing this: i signed up for this morning's clinic-defense shift, reactivated my account at ye olde get-out-the-vote letter-writing site and claimed 100 prospective voters, started running a few miles every time i feel like throwing up, and so on. it is not really working. i tend to lean on or at least talk this stuff out with joe when apocalypse feels extra-imminent, but he has...i want a metaphor that gets at how bad things are without blame or rancor, and i don't really have one. i am tired of meeting him in brooklyn for movies and feeling like i'm coming home alone even though i'm not. i'm tired of waking up from a nap after one of these clinic shifts and realizing i'm eating dinner alone even though i'm not. i understand that we are more than our most pernicious afflictions—god i'm grateful that people who love me have been able to see me through mine, because there have been some doozies in the last few years, thanks for nothing, brain chemistry and alcohol—but it's really hard to accept, as my therapist says i must, that the person i love isn't going to change for the better and the best i can hope for is to become someone who can get by without expecting anything from them. i have never been able to handle being left or feeling like i've been left, and here i am, with the only obvious relief i can see planted on the other side of my acting the way i've always told myself no one ever would, not if they really loved you or if you were really worth loving. is this like the sensitive new-age version of living long enough to become the villain? it is hard to watch the world and your partner fall apart at the same time and feel like there's essentially fuck-all you can do about either one.
06.22.24 [on the F train]
we tootled down to philly earlier this month to see the rolling stones, a commute i'd happily make again given the postapocalyptic condition of metlife stadium, their closest venue to us. by the time i got through the ticketmaster queue the only affordable-ish seats were part of some VIP package that earned us two massive boxes of questionable swag (did i need a hackney diamonds sippy cup? a wireless phone charger? i brought one of the sets down to a now-PA-based friend we visited the night before the show and she got all excited when she mistook the branded playing cards for branded cigarettes, but no such luck). these tickets also earned us the right to enter a general-admission pit—not one beside the stage, a tertiary pit behind a seated section in the middle of the field—a couple of hours early, so by 5pm i was standing a few inches taller than the people in front of and behind me, thanks to some A/V cord cover platform, and wondering if i had to wait until it got dark to start eating the peanuts i'd bought upstairs and dropping the shells on the ground. i couldn't tell you whose idea this early-to-the-GA-pit idea was, but i can tell you that it turns everyone into a cop, because once people with cheaper tickets and different-colored wristbands started worming their way through the spaces we'd staked out before they were born, even the sweet retiree next to me who'd brought his adult daughter to the show and last seen the stones in 1972 (when he was a ninth grader and they shared a bill with stevie wonder and tina and ike turner) was ready to rip off interlopers' heads and shit in their neckholes. cocktails did not improve this vibe! i agreed to plan the trip and show because i didn't see david bowie or johnny cash before they died and was willing to insure myself against regret that i'd never seen the stones, and i stand by that investment, terrible GA seats aside (the power move in situations like that is to hold fast until the day of the show and buy seats through something like stubhub). sure, we spent most of our time watching mick and keef on the jumbotron rather than through the frankly rude hairstyles of the half-ogres standing in front of us, but standing on a field on a warm summer night and hearing the opening notes of the song bill gates paid millions to license for windows 95 felt like turning to see one of warhol's jackies wink at you. as pauline kael would say, i succumbed. i'd estimate 85% of our fellow concertgoers were wearing shirts from previous stones tours, and the vibe was not unlike what friends have described from, say, jimmy buffett shows; there was a strong old-people-prom undercurrent. "okay, everybody out," a record-store owner had barked at joe and assorted other shoppers earlier that afternoon, "i'm taking my dad to the stones show!"
the rest of the philly surgical-strike weekend was wonderful; the cafe that's been making us a beanful, oniony artichoke salad for 20 years made it for us again, and in trying to shop for quilting fabric i accidentally attended a lovely multimedia show about a cabaret artist who came out to her aunt as trans and was told she had a twin she'd eaten in the womb (so her museum experience began with me eating a pale, green-white chocolate fetus that tasted like frosting). she's my little rock and roll?
the rest of the philly surgical-strike weekend was wonderful; the cafe that's been making us a beanful, oniony artichoke salad for 20 years made it for us again, and in trying to shop for quilting fabric i accidentally attended a lovely multimedia show about a cabaret artist who came out to her aunt as trans and was told she had a twin she'd eaten in the womb (so her museum experience began with me eating a pale, green-white chocolate fetus that tasted like frosting). she's my little rock and roll?
05.25.24 [on the F train]
i was thinking as i shuffled down east broadway this morning that maybe apocalypse movies (and horror?) are my versions of Soothing Media à la cozy mysteries, or when someone is murdered in a bucolic oxfordshire village and the townsfolk (and a key outsider??) have to jump into their cardigans and figure it all out over digestive biscuits. that is probably a pseudo-insight i unthinkingly took in from an old new yorker piece about how YA readers love disaster books because adolescence is a disaster anyway, i don't know. there's a silver lining in my near-total inability to get through my magazine stack lately: no more wondering if, "maybe she's born with it/ maybe it's david remnick!" anyway we saw the furiosa prequel last night and i thought it was pretty wonderful. having gotten a taste of eco- and psychological australian devastation on my trip to tasmania a few years ago i get george miller a lot more than i did when fury road—which i might in fact have only mostly seen—came out back in 2015. the end of the world almost always boils down to resource wars unless you're emily st. john mandel, but miller really makes that cabbage feel precious, to say nothing of the gasoline. i loved the first chase scene and how each suddenly-available motorcycle got scavanged mid-pursuit—i mean, obviously, but i bet NASCAR pit crews love the mad max family of products. i personally would favor them for the hair and makeup alone, but throw in attacking paragliders and the fact that gender inequality and sexual violence inform the story in a way that doesn't devolve into mere titillation or shock and well done, australia. also i was yesterday years old when i realized tina turner was singing "all we want is life beyond thunderdome" in "we don't need another hero" (i thought it was "all we want is to be young"? listen, i haven't seen that movie).
on cozy mysteries, i just finished both my name is barbra—which kept going so ferociously that i was half-sure gnomes were sneaking to my bedside and writing more of it each night and read like emily dickinson journaling between bong rips, definitely no ghostwriter there—and the hunter, an actual mystery i failed to realize was a sequel to another tana french book about mysterious death in remote small-town ireland. that's fine re: the hunter, one reads tana french for vibes and emotional pointillism rather than for jaw-dropping reveals, and it'll probably be at least a few years before i remember to go back and read the book that came before it.
barbra was more like broadway pointillism, which increased my understanding of show tunes and how one arranges and phrases them by about 5000% (i have never seen funny girl or gypsy, much less i can get it for you wholesale). i read it because i love memoirs, and because i wanted to dig around in barbra's account of the perfectionism that has made her so notorious, and becuase i wanted to know more about why she cloned her dogs and has a personal ice ream shop in her basement. i can't say i know much more about the dogs or the basement, but it does seem like she gets savaged for working practices that would be fairly unremarkable for male directors. she's pretty shameless about being late all the time, which is unfortunate in the context of what she asks of other people, but i am also late all the time and i don't have a presidential medal of freedom.
on cozy mysteries, i just finished both my name is barbra—which kept going so ferociously that i was half-sure gnomes were sneaking to my bedside and writing more of it each night and read like emily dickinson journaling between bong rips, definitely no ghostwriter there—and the hunter, an actual mystery i failed to realize was a sequel to another tana french book about mysterious death in remote small-town ireland. that's fine re: the hunter, one reads tana french for vibes and emotional pointillism rather than for jaw-dropping reveals, and it'll probably be at least a few years before i remember to go back and read the book that came before it.
barbra was more like broadway pointillism, which increased my understanding of show tunes and how one arranges and phrases them by about 5000% (i have never seen funny girl or gypsy, much less i can get it for you wholesale). i read it because i love memoirs, and because i wanted to dig around in barbra's account of the perfectionism that has made her so notorious, and becuase i wanted to know more about why she cloned her dogs and has a personal ice ream shop in her basement. i can't say i know much more about the dogs or the basement, but it does seem like she gets savaged for working practices that would be fairly unremarkable for male directors. she's pretty shameless about being late all the time, which is unfortunate in the context of what she asks of other people, but i am also late all the time and i don't have a presidential medal of freedom.
05.11.24 [on the F train]
sprang! subway! no one is awake for a good reason! i couldn't fit a volunteer shift in last month and shouldn't really be starting with catchup now, i have a nasty week i should be pregaming, but the cats sense weakness and have been wedging my jet-lagged ass out of bed, so here we are. we did not see any of the solar-storm super-southern aurora borealis last night—even if it had been clear, light pollution is of course dreadful here—but i did see enough of it on social media to wish in the abstract that we were still in scandinavia. in practice i was in stockholm last friday, copenhagen the friday before that, and tulum the friday before that, so i'm pretty okay with never going anywhere ever again (except philadelphia next month for a rolling stones concert? i have no good excuse for that).
mexico was wonderful, the first press trip i've taken in a long time that made me feel like press trips are worth my time—which sounds silly, but since my main travel outlet switched over to all paranormal content a couple of years ago and i'm neither about to start ghost hunting nor especially interested in wooing new outlets, it's tricky to come up with ways to write about the things i'm invited to experience that don't make me feel like a shill. in truth i'm a writer who likes to travel rather than a travel writer, probably—one of the other americans on this trip was telling me about the industry conference i avoid every year and she and many of the writers i meet on these things seem to feel are indispensable, and it sounded like immersion therapy, or enhanced interrogation, or rush week at a southern school—matching with and speed-dating PR reps who then might or might not invite you to fly halfway around the world to spend two days at an all-inclusive resort devoted to steak, everclear, and show tunes, and while i get that this kind of full-body shudder is such niche privilege that i should just offer myself up as the first protein when the resource wars begin (you know they're coming soon, these lisa frank trapper keeper skies last night were no accident), wow, ritualizing what i do in a baldly networky way makes me want to walk into the sea. another beauty of the mexico trip is that for once i knew what (and that) i'd be writing about it before i accepted: a dear old friend from my magazine-staffer days asked if i would go and cook up a piece on solo travel for her new magazine, and that's very much the sort of thing i can get excited about doing. amusingly, though the trip was pitched to her/me as a gender-specific thing, other writers didn't arrive with that frame—and lo, there was a dude among us (two, counting the photographer/influencer who shot us all week). so technically a vagina travelogue it was not, though it functioned that way anyhow, a bit—beyond the collective appreciation of each other's sundresses and blouses that kicks off group meals on most temperate press trips, talk stayed reasonably clear of lady zones. despite my disdain for networking crap and industry gossip, i also picked up some interesting stuff about how other clients and markets work—like, if you're an australian writer it's hard to pitch a trip unless you're the only person in the country writing about it, and though US-based writers almost never feel obligated to promise coverage beforehand (and i can count on one hand the times i happen to have done it), it's standard practice in other places? i still haven't written about the cruise joe and i took last fall and the crazy bahamas trip that happened 16 hours after we got back from paris, and while i plan to get on that, i'm not especially excited about it. it feels significant that i haven't made much of an effort to fold these subjects into my pitches for the outlets i typically save for passion projects. am i quiet-quitting this phase of freelance writing, at least for now? mexico makes a compelling case for keeping an open mind—it was the perfect trip for me to take without joe, given the focus on swimming in caves and waking up before dawn to streak into the ocean. if i can position myself as my friend's startup's tropical goth crone, maybe i can wriggle out of the world of slideshows and bullet points and sing of iguanas in my own dialect. it has a certain something.
mexico was wonderful, the first press trip i've taken in a long time that made me feel like press trips are worth my time—which sounds silly, but since my main travel outlet switched over to all paranormal content a couple of years ago and i'm neither about to start ghost hunting nor especially interested in wooing new outlets, it's tricky to come up with ways to write about the things i'm invited to experience that don't make me feel like a shill. in truth i'm a writer who likes to travel rather than a travel writer, probably—one of the other americans on this trip was telling me about the industry conference i avoid every year and she and many of the writers i meet on these things seem to feel are indispensable, and it sounded like immersion therapy, or enhanced interrogation, or rush week at a southern school—matching with and speed-dating PR reps who then might or might not invite you to fly halfway around the world to spend two days at an all-inclusive resort devoted to steak, everclear, and show tunes, and while i get that this kind of full-body shudder is such niche privilege that i should just offer myself up as the first protein when the resource wars begin (you know they're coming soon, these lisa frank trapper keeper skies last night were no accident), wow, ritualizing what i do in a baldly networky way makes me want to walk into the sea. another beauty of the mexico trip is that for once i knew what (and that) i'd be writing about it before i accepted: a dear old friend from my magazine-staffer days asked if i would go and cook up a piece on solo travel for her new magazine, and that's very much the sort of thing i can get excited about doing. amusingly, though the trip was pitched to her/me as a gender-specific thing, other writers didn't arrive with that frame—and lo, there was a dude among us (two, counting the photographer/influencer who shot us all week). so technically a vagina travelogue it was not, though it functioned that way anyhow, a bit—beyond the collective appreciation of each other's sundresses and blouses that kicks off group meals on most temperate press trips, talk stayed reasonably clear of lady zones. despite my disdain for networking crap and industry gossip, i also picked up some interesting stuff about how other clients and markets work—like, if you're an australian writer it's hard to pitch a trip unless you're the only person in the country writing about it, and though US-based writers almost never feel obligated to promise coverage beforehand (and i can count on one hand the times i happen to have done it), it's standard practice in other places? i still haven't written about the cruise joe and i took last fall and the crazy bahamas trip that happened 16 hours after we got back from paris, and while i plan to get on that, i'm not especially excited about it. it feels significant that i haven't made much of an effort to fold these subjects into my pitches for the outlets i typically save for passion projects. am i quiet-quitting this phase of freelance writing, at least for now? mexico makes a compelling case for keeping an open mind—it was the perfect trip for me to take without joe, given the focus on swimming in caves and waking up before dawn to streak into the ocean. if i can position myself as my friend's startup's tropical goth crone, maybe i can wriggle out of the world of slideshows and bullet points and sing of iguanas in my own dialect. it has a certain something.
03.30.24 [on the J train]
there's an oak leaf pressed in this notebook from the owl funeral i attended last month—along with the zoo photo safari i'd taken just over a week earlier, one of the stranger trips i'd taken for an article, though there's a strong likelihood i'd have gone to the funeral anyway. i've now been writing and/or fretting over my latest Earnest Science Feature for nearly three months, though it feels more like thirty. i haven't begged joe to read any of this one except for the first version of the opening scene (one of my favorite will mcphail panels is the one where a woman asks a spider she's trapped under a glass to read something she's written), but given how much i've bitched and tossed around in bed about it, i'm sure he'll be as glad to see it out of our lives as he was, say, when i finished my orwell essay for the new york times. out, it will soon be out! until i get a big old tattoo of its subject in may, that is. (owl, not orwell.)
a man on this train is snoring the sort of snore that seems like it'd rouse the snorer, or jolt him a few inches in the air, at least, but he snores on, and i wish him well; it would be nice to be flat for a few more hours. i'm trying to get a few more bleary mornings volunteering in queens out of the way early this spring, as i'm going to mexico on assignment(!!) in a few weeks and joe and i are then meeting my folks in copenhagen, where i have decided i don't care if it's touristy to truck out toelsinore kronborg castle. we have planned little else beyond a few meals and a night at the opera and, oh, a shared airbnb i picked for when we migrate to stockholm. will my stepfather, aghast at the way i live when i'm not at a high-end hotel, decide he doesn't love me anymore? will joe out-snore this guy on the train, who sounds with every breath more and more like he's awake and trying to fool schoolchildren? will i join the danish swans and leave my terrestrial life behind once and for all? hard to say. i ended up not interviewing a colleague out in prospect park for the swan essay i sent off to the printer this week, as the thing was short enough that bringing in another voice was going to be kind of weird and she was being flaky enough about meeting that i didn't have the energy to keep chasing. i did send a draft of the piece to my friend R at the bird hospital—not because i needed to check facts, exactly, but because anyone who knew what i was talking about would know where i was talking about, and i wanted her blessing.
she called me from her long-overdue vacation and gave it, and told me Secret Owl Things about my other feature, and let me know, when i finally screwed up the courage to ask, that bird ben, the northern cardinal i've loved for a a decade, died last summer. i don't know how to write about that, and imagine i won't for a long time; knowing ben changed me in a way i might not understand until i'm very old, if i get to be very old. i do know that R's three-part benediction—you've done right by swans, i trust you enough to tell you confidential things about the owl, we can remember ben together—felt a bit like permission to take full height in this version of myself. i wonder sometimes if she knows how badly i wanted her to see this identity all those years i cleaned cages and wrestled geese, and i know that one of her great gifts is to speak to the people we want to be on our best days. i don't mean that i'm a few inches in the air like the snorer uptrain (who's still at it!), but i have had occasion to say yes, yes, that is what i meant.
a man on this train is snoring the sort of snore that seems like it'd rouse the snorer, or jolt him a few inches in the air, at least, but he snores on, and i wish him well; it would be nice to be flat for a few more hours. i'm trying to get a few more bleary mornings volunteering in queens out of the way early this spring, as i'm going to mexico on assignment(!!) in a few weeks and joe and i are then meeting my folks in copenhagen, where i have decided i don't care if it's touristy to truck out to
she called me from her long-overdue vacation and gave it, and told me Secret Owl Things about my other feature, and let me know, when i finally screwed up the courage to ask, that bird ben, the northern cardinal i've loved for a a decade, died last summer. i don't know how to write about that, and imagine i won't for a long time; knowing ben changed me in a way i might not understand until i'm very old, if i get to be very old. i do know that R's three-part benediction—you've done right by swans, i trust you enough to tell you confidential things about the owl, we can remember ben together—felt a bit like permission to take full height in this version of myself. i wonder sometimes if she knows how badly i wanted her to see this identity all those years i cleaned cages and wrestled geese, and i know that one of her great gifts is to speak to the people we want to be on our best days. i don't mean that i'm a few inches in the air like the snorer uptrain (who's still at it!), but i have had occasion to say yes, yes, that is what i meant.
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