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.

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.

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?