kidchamp dot net

09.13.25 [on the J train; out-of-order, found-my-journal update]

2026-03-31T18:46:00.000-07:00

i have gotten out from under the absolutely unstoppable avalanche of library holds that all turned up at the same time with an unexpected assist from nordstrom rack; when i was in california with my mom earlier this month i tried on some readers in the sunglasses display and lo, the fine print on the other glasses' tags leapt into almost aggressively sharp focus. turns out my book light wasn't on the fritz and i wasn't dying, or dying significantly faster than most of us are, anyway; i just can't see for shit now. i've kind of been waiting to wear glasses all my life, and i certainly spent enough time wearing clear ones recreationally to deserve this; it's fine. in the zombie apocalypse i would run out of blood pressure pills and go down even if presbyopia didn't lead me to miss a telltale lurch behind a burned-out car, so it's not like my long-term outcomes are super different now anyway. it is a little creepy that text without glasses now looks like pure fuzz–i was compensating enough to be none the wiser until that fateful day at The Rack–but we fall apart very slowly and then all at once, i guess.

it's time to revisit ye children's book draft and come up with a deal-sealing version that will win hearts and minds in the publishing industry and put jo and me on the path to creative nirvana. i have continued to keep my work calendar mostly free of more-creative projects to leave mental room for this, though i'm tired and scattered enough that i don't have much to fill that room with just yet. it's a little scary that i saw my family in california mere hours after my most recent call with maybe-editor (who has also seen the pee-wee documentary and knew what i was talking about when i brought it up!) and had difficulty describing her feedback in detail–but i took notes, so maybe it doesn't matter?

i had my yearly physical last month and received a handy-dandy little chart of how my humors have performed over the last decade or so. i can't say i was surprised, but it was still sobering (no pun intended) to see the dips and spikes in 2021, my first checkup after lockdown, like a tree's ring after drought or wildfire. i now enjoy something like consistent health, the fact that i'm becoming a mole person notwithstanding. i have three more half marathons and a five-miler before the end of the year; i have a novel i don't remember requesting waiting for me at seward park. it's the most wonderful time of the year.

08.16.25 [on the J train; out-of-order, found-my-journal update]

2026-03-31T18:36:00.000-07:00

what i'd hoped would be a neurotic account of yesterday's long-awaited meeting wtih my (and my sister's?!) maybe-editor must instead simply be a neurotic account of more waiting; she had a plausible kid-emergency yesterday morning (and probably the night before) that led her to ask for a bump to this coming friday instead. and that should be great, my sister and i can be more prepared! hell, we're so prepared it might even make strategic sense for me to mention our non-negotiable partnership and send over proof that it's undeniable (i.e. some character sketches to show range and a well-considered mockup of the page-by-page illustrations with my text) before we talk! that's my new hunch, but i'm still so nervous about spooking this editor before she's all in on the project. there's so much i don't know–like, i thought it was a selling point that i wrote the thing in verse (what she'd said in her original note to me was that "it doesn't even have to rhyme," which, since the catchphrase that inspired her reaching out does indeed rhyme, meant that i assumed it was a plus). now as i'm looking up potential agents a bunch of them note up front that they don't want rhyming picture books, and that led me to a bunch of articles about how resistant gatekeepers like agents and editors are to verse. this seems to be because most of it is shitty, but i have a real knack for assuming my own stuff is shitty until i have incontrovertible proof otherwise. oh god, what if it is shitty! but maybe-editor seemed to really like the first draft, and the second is much stronger, and i know i need to push. my sister had a crisis of confidence a week ago when she realized this maybe-editor is with a big-deal publisher and then she checked out a bunch of illustrators' portfolios as linked from their book agents' pages–a classic way to psych yourself out, comparing your nascent stuff to stuff that beat the odds and worked after lots of folks polished it–and i tried to hype her back up with perspective, which she turned around and did for me when i freaked the fuck out yesterday. another reason it's wonderful to work with someone i trust completely!

bearing in mind that this will make me sound like a maniac, i was thinking about our project as i watched pee-wee as himself this week. paul reubens came around to realizing performance art for children was exactly what he was meant to be doing, presenting them with infinite possibilities and influencing how they would grow up and express themselves was everything, and he was unapologetically odd and uncompromising as he made that happen. and he was (apparently incredibly difficult to work with and) right! he had grace fucking jones in issey miyake on his christmas special! (not totally synonymous with anarchic childhood but god i love her.) and the verse is good, it's serious and affectionate and the kind of thing that's a pleasure to read and hear, and this illustrated place that so few people (and pretty much no kids) get to see is so singular in the world we're trying so hard to join...i really hope it's as special as i think it is, on my best days. i really thought my piece about black magic performed with trader joe's products was undeniable as well, though, and it fell completely flat. not the same thing, i know, but i sure do love to revisit my failures. poking old scabs! all the old scabs!

01.31.26 [on the J train]

2026-01-31T20:37:00.000-08:00

if it would bother you to know about the most notable dream-logic elements of the secret agent, the very good brazilian 2026 oscar contender about dictatorship, stop reading now; if that doesn't feel deal-breaky and/or your memory is bald-tired like mine, know that i woke up thinking about the two-faced cat (conjoined cats?) that move/s through its recife apartment building/hideout. for the most part the filmmakers went with practical effects – there's another sequence where a severed leg reanimates, saint's-limb-performing-a-miracle-style, and kicks a bunch of people cruising for sex in a public park, and that's all stop-motion animation – but the cat/s is/are CGI, i think? there's a blur to its/their face that i associate with the progressive lenses i got a couple months ago and still haven't worn enough to see through without a bit of vertigo. as i was trying and failing to get a good night's sleep before this morning's train ride to clinic escorting, i mused that i'm pretty okay with a bit of dream logic in most movies now; half the time the news reads like something my brain riffed as i nodded off anyway.

i'm starting to wonder if i need to pick a role and stick to it when it comes to...the news? i rolled out for protest monitoring three times this month and feel like i'm finally settling into meaningful contributions; i know what to film and how to make my observations useful, i can be conspicuous in a way that feels like it deters institutional overreach, and i can recognize and work with cops' and protesters' behavior patterns. but i'm also scheduled to train up with a nascent neighborhood rapid-response patrol today, to be more like the observers deterring federal agents in minnesota, and i don't know that i should do both. does it matter that local law enforcement and i recognize each other now, as the anti-abortion haranguers i might or might not see on the sidewalk in 15 minutes and i do? it's way too late for me to wear a mask, and i'm sure i'm on plenty of lists. but i am relatively safe and it's my responsibility to spend down as much of that privilege as i can, right? in any case, more training is always a good idea; i would be the hypercompetent elinor smith of this moment, not the amelia earhart whose bravery and luck become a fatal talisman. that's what elinor seemed to conclude about amelia, anyway. she didn't go so far as to call her intentionally underprepared, but she did seem to think she was performing courage for herself. no, i still don't know if i'm going to write a book about that.

01.24.26 [on the J train]

2026-01-30T10:44:00.000-08:00

i left the apartment with an extra giddy-up in my step to make it to the library before heading out to queens this morning, as i was not interested in having the shards in my life for another day or two. i don't remember bret easton ellis being that bad — i don't remember much about rules of engagement, honestly, though i know i preferred donna tartt's the secret history if we're ranking fictionalized-bennington novels — but hoo, friends. it did entertain me that a key scene went down at crystal cove, the park/beach due west of my dad's place to which i repair when visiting the OC, and his fixation on ultravox's "vienna" did inspire me to watch the banger of a video and then pick up the demonic lafufu i found on the giveaway heap in our laundry room, which i steeped in boiling water and woolite and have added to the rotation of creatures that join me via my tote bag for protest monitoring and reproductive health clinic escorting, and that's not nothing. do i need to read less than zero or, like, american psycho? my library-holds queue threw a four-book clot last week, so i won't be doing it any time soon, at least.

i got a bitchy letter from the blood bank saying that, per the FDA, i was nearing the limit of what one can safely donate over the course of a year and won't be allowed back until mid-march, maybe i could do them a favor and be a little more mindful of my schedule in the future? i called to contest that, as i was/am way under the max of 24 platelet draws at least a week apart that their literature mentions. as the aggrieved gal at their call center explained, my donations had all been triples, as the techs are directed to optimize donors' visits. "and your platelet count has been going up over time," she said in an accusatory way. are you blood-shaming me, lady?! i tried to suggest, respectfully, that the letter's patronizing wording and tone were perhaps at cross-purposes with their center's aims, and that it was challenging to keep pacing in mind when i received weekly texts about critical platelet shortages i alone could resolve and also wasn't informed that i was up in Ye Threefold Bloodlettings, but i don't think she was interested in being receptive to me, and that was not a me problem.

on bloodlettings, luc besson made a dracula! i don't know much yet, but the romantic trappings and mars attacks!-adjacent vamp-coiffing suggest it'll be francis-ford-coppola-ish, and more of that energy in 2026, please. in other news of the not-traditionally-alive, we saw 28 years later: the bone temple despite my worry that it would hurt my feelings (a fear i also had and was later sheepish about with the first 28 years later movie) and holy shit, that's the most fortifying business i've seen in ages. absolutely everything about ralph fiennes's character was delightful (inspired, i dug around this week for iron maiden 50th-anniversary tour tickets and would have planned a trip around a show, were they not some $400 and up per seat), and i burst into tears at the last line. it's fortifying to watch the zombie metaphor evolve past capitalism and fascism to whatever this is; i'm really hoping danny boyle can land the plane with the final movie in the cycle. i was reminded of the harbinger, the COVID-in-new-york-city movie that unpicked experiencing the pandemic here for me, and i dearly love to see genre films meeting their moments. i'm almost tempted to hang around and try to talk the local horror folks into letting me volunteer for their film festival again this year (they absolutely didn't need the extra hands and were humoring me last year, the softies).

01.01.26

2026-01-01T18:07:00.000-08:00

2026: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

i ran six miles.
i watched part of mamdani's public inauguration.
i ate half a burrito.
i took a nap.
i found a hole in my sweater.
i wore fingerless gloves.
i walked across the williamsburg bridge.
i ordered leeks vinaigrette.
i loaded three washing machines.
i emptied the dishwasher.

12.27.25 [on the J train]

2025-12-31T12:37:00.000-08:00

our first proper snow of the year, and it's still coming down; the only folks on the sidewalk at a quarter to seven were me and a guy in one of the amazon tuk-tuks. i left the christmas tree lights on so joe will wake up to the cats basking under it like sea lions at the wharf. i have at long last transitioned to reading the new jessica mitford biography, and while it's not especially difficult to tell an interesting story about mitfords it's a relief to be out of the land of shaggy memoir. memoir is hard, turns out! (every version of the nonfiction book i plan and re-plan in my head has a little less of me on the page; it's not that i don't think there are worthwhile braided narratives out there, it's that voice tells a better story than anecdotes do, i think. is this a story, or even a voice? i think it's a ritual.) chances are good, though i shouldn't talk about it, that the anti-abortiion protesters won't be at the reproductive health clinic this morning and we can all go home after chatting about sci fi and knitting in the basement for a while. i have missed that over the past few months; trying to fall asleep in time to get proper rest before one of these shifts is stressful, but it does me good to share space with these people. my social life as a volunteer has contracted since i stopped working at the bird hospital and the bookstore; i spend plenty of time at the library uptown and the atmosphere is wonderful, but i'm mostly in charge of a quiet study room, so i'm not talking to anyone. i get little concentrated bursts of company when i head out to monitor police at protests, but the experience of interacting with that crowd is, weirdly, overwhelmingly negative; as a rule, they're absolutely terrible at following directions or staying on topic (when we're chatting on signal about upcoming trainings or actions, not actually showing up for them). ditto the folks in charge of election protection that i met before monitoring a poll site this november. discouraging if not a little terrifying! but if widespread meaningful change is going to happen, maybe the incompetent need to be part of it as well? i'll be going for an early-to-me walk with my dad tomorrow, our equivalent of a holiday get-together since he's usually spoken for on christmas itself with my stepfamily. i suspect that this year they went down to virginia, where my garbage stepbrother has relocated to better terrify athletes and international fans as a member of the administration. i was too surprised this summer when his mother bragged about the work he was doing to make any kind of meaningful response, and maybe that's for the best, much as i've never decided which one poisonous text i'll send him before he blocks my number and/or changes his own. you'd think that since i now run so often and for so long i'd eventually get to the end of my grievances, but there are so many things to stew about, internets!

i think i've actually found a podcast i can put on instead of cable news as i finish my quilt after joe's gone to bed. i'm a little reluctant to look into how many episodes there are total because it's going to be like five, but what a quintet! it's a former coast guard helicopter pilot speaking with other pilots and authors about women in aviation. everyone is almost painfully competent, and there are no commercials. it's possible that in making my way through these stories i'll find that i don't need to tell one myself after all, but that wouldn't actually be a bad thing, if your point in making things part of the world is that they aren't yet. what isn't yet?

12.22.25

2025-12-22T20:56:00.000-08:00

ah, nothing beats the feeling of sitting down to finally type out the four last posts you first wrote longhand on various early-morning trains and discovering your notebook has been decluttered into functional nonexistence. (it's very likely still in the apartment somewhere, but i'd have to tear at least one and realistically like two and a half closets to know for sure.) and i was feeling so smug about technically blogging once a month all year! i will dig for the notebook, obviously posterity can't be expected to face the future without access to whatever i rambled en route to my volunteer gig, but i probably need to accept that i might not find it for a while. it's okay; i'm okay.

i ran my five half marathons (halves marathon) for the year, and i think i clocked a personal record on the last one; satisfying, that, and i've already booked my first for the new year, which not so coincidentally is the same course. my last 2025 writing deadline was friday, so i'll spend the next week digging around for that fucking notebook, getting ahead for the few pieces i have on the books for next year, and jolting out of bed in the middle of the night to write a heart-wringer of a final stanza for ye children's book. (we're still going back and forth with the prospective editor; she's accepted that jo and i are a package deal and now needs us to submit a few full illustrations and a whomper of a draft that tears her feelings limb from limb.) i've finally started hand-quilting the quilt i started piecing circa lockdown in 2020, and it's not at all what i imagined and very cool, if painful; i need to develop a system that doesn't involving stabbing my leg with each stitch to be sure i've gotten through the top, batting and backing. i'm nearly 200 pages into margaret atwood's memoir and as of today have the prospect of a new jessica mitford biography that just erupted from my holds list at the library to carry me through the remaining, oh god, 300 pages or so; there's a lot of midcentury canada out there. my reading for the second half of the year has been much more enthusiastic, as i realized at a fateful visit to nordstrom rack with my mom that i desperately need readers; in addition to the pair i bought on the spot, i now have a big-ass pair of progressive aviators that i know i need to start wearing but currently fear and try to ignore. the cats are parked under the christmas tree like fruitcakes. i'm forty-seven. there's a breeze.

07.26.25 [on the F train]

2025-07-27T18:15:00.000-07:00

yesterday i turned in an author's note and a new draft of the book i'm writing, internets! i am writing a book and i'm pretty proud of it so far! this progress doesn't mean much in practice to people who aren't me, since my potential editor has yet to present it to her acquisitions team and who knows what they'll think, but the vibe i get from her (and sometimes my vibe-based predictions bear out, it's technically possible) is a good one, and the last time we had a zoom call she said she thought we might be ready to present after this draft, maybe. i addressed her notes diligently, and gave her a version that's nearly twice as long as the previous one and full of the stage directions and hijinks she requested; assuming this is all material we can shape and shape as we go and she's not likely to announce that she hates my face and wants nothing more to do with me, it seems like good things are happening? the x factor now is how she will respond to the revelation (and it will be a revelation, we haven't talked much on this to date) that i must work with my sister as my illustrator-partner. this has become more and more apparent to me as i write and talk with people about the project, of course it has; at first i fixated on what a fellow clinic escort who happens to be a children's book agent(!) that i met like two years ago told me about how writers and illustrators almost never come as a package deal, it's standard practice unless you're some crazy-famous pair for a publisher to accept your manuscript and then look to their own contact list for the second half of the book. but we are a writer-illustrator rather than a pair of nobodies, you see; the idea of handing off my baby and waiting to see if it finds a proper life partner has never sat right with me, this story has a million little fiddly parts that an artist needs to have in mind to get it right. filing text and then just trusting that to fate is nonsensical. jo created our wedding art, she created the portrait of chuck that's on my back forever, and i can't imagine anyone but her telling this story with me; i also can't imagine cannonballing into a subcareer as a children's author without her as my partner. our artist mother was our first teacher (not a metaphor, she came in to teach at our elementary schools); we've been absorbing the world in tandem all our lives, and we share an imagery set that we're already referencing explicitly as we plan out how to make the book-folks see what's plain to us. we want to make a new, magical thing together, and i'm so nervous that being honest about what i want will cost me what feels in my shakiest moments like conditional approval from the powers that be, but what if everyone isn't telling me they like my story just to be nice? what if it's finally time to stop being the formerly precocious child who gets bored and gives up on things when they get difficult and actually fights for something wonderful? what if we had the confidence of a mediocre white man?! poor joe is already reeling from how much i've had to hype myself up to keep going with this, and i think he too is a little afraid that my insisting on working with my sister could cost me everything when it comes to this publisher, but if i let myself be intimidated and don't push for what i know i need to be great then it's cost everything already, right? when did i turn into a motivational poster? watch this space.

06.28.25 [on the J train]

2025-06-30T20:14:00.000-07:00

this past sunday was, i realized, the first day on which i've seen every member of my immediate family in 14 years (when my sister got married in san francisco). we weren't all in the same place: i woke up at my mother's house, went down to tiburon with that sister for my cousin's celebration of life (and we saw our father and other sister), then swooped back up to mom's. that's...better, honestly; i don't know that there's much to be gained by rounding all of us up, though it would be wonderful to have to consider it when, say, my niece or one of my nephews gets married one day. my niece, speaking of, asked at dinner the other night if we thought the robot apocalypse was nigh, and what did we think the world would be like in 30 years? she's latched onto the idea that the ozone layer repairing itself means that ecological disaster isn't nigh, and her mother does not wish to disabuse her of that notion. her father offered that he thinks there won't be any cars, and i predicted that humans would clot in denser living arrangements and free up more contiguous green space. i also more or less admitted that i expect her to grow up into a postapocalyptic warrior-chieftain who rules gently-parented peon-followers with an iron fist, which she seemed to take in stride; she noted that she thinks she's ready to see the terminator, and i warned her that she's going to have to deal with arnold schwarzenegger's bare ass if so. i guess that if a macho 11-year-old girl is going to experience an ass, that one is relatively benign?

on apocalypses, we saw m3gan 2.0 last night and i was prepared to be disappointed after learning that, as in terminator 2, the titular killer robot is repurposed to defend the very fleshbags it was once intent on annihilating. i'd forgotten how much i enjoy allison williams's unexpectedly-legit comic delivery, and kate bush is deployed delightfully. i'm not all that interested in talking about AI, but that was a pleasant riff on the end times.

05.31.25 [on the F train]

2025-05-31T20:43:00.000-07:00

we flew out to arizona for my stepsister's wedding at the beginning of the month. she's the last member of my immediate family and stepfamily to marry, a detail most of us don't think about very much and a couple of us think about so intensely that i imagine one of those movie scenes where a bunch of buzz-cut, midcentury-ed-harris-y dudes in a control room applaud a wall of monitors and slap each other's backs and shake hands with cigarettes dangling out of their mouths, and also they are all simultaneously jane austen characters. the wedding was in sedona, a place joe and i lunched in with my in-laws maybe 15 years ago that i am old enough to consistently associate with axl rose and stevie nicks' fajita roundup. it was very scenic! we didn't see very much of it, as we drove up from phoenix midday on a friday and decamped in the early afternoon on a sunday, but i appreciate why people associate it with vortices and very much appreciate that it's home to the flagship location of the rock store i favor when we're meeting joe's family up in flagstaff. my stepfamily is...colorful, and i've spent a lot of time on the metaphorical and literal treadmill over the last year thinking about what i would or wouldn't say to the estranged member of it who crashed my grandmother's memorial service during the first trump administration (he served in that one and is serving in this one, and though he is too stupid to be effective at much of anything i resent quite energetically the way others have stooped for him); that time he and his wife approached me and, off guard, i chatted politely with them. joe feels very strongly that i should hold my tongue in person for the sake of the mutuals i esteem, and i feel that's how we slide into fascism and fantastize about picking pieces of his equine teeth out of my knuckles. one of my sisters and i talked about this at length and she was going to wear a rainbow pin to wedding events to telegraph, among other things, her disinterest in engaging; ultimately she did not, but her sons and i did. i couldn't tell you if someone told the garbage relative that i wasn't interested in interacting with him; i moved to the other side of a few rooms out there in arizona, and ultimately i'd decided that if i had to say anything to him i would just say no.

my father gave a speech the night of the rehearsal dinner, which was maybe a big deal or maybe not; we met the bride when i was in my twenties and she was barely a teen, so i think there was a lot more riding on how everyone else moved through that event than on how i did. i love her, and i'm glad for her that she's had someone other than her own terrible father to help her figure out how the world is put together; i'm proud of him for standing up for her in ways said terrible father couldn't or wouldn't. i think my empathic imagination is respectable, but i don't have any idea what it would be like to be her, not really. when she was in college she got a tattoo on her instep that says INHALE / EXHALE, but thanks to the dodgy script and, you know, this universe's dodgy script it appears to read INHALE WHALE. that's what i think it must feel like to be her; inhale whale. at a post-rehearsal reception she told me very sweetly that i was welcome to take molly with everyone at the afterparty the next day, and i leave it to you to decide whether or not that is something i did. speaking of choosing one's own adventures, the sister who pussied out of wearing a pin to wedding stuff (i kid, mostly, she is a kinder person than i am) got this bracing library book in which one of the decision-tree outcomes was getting enslaved by christopher columbus, a work that could be in some peril now that the administration is purging public collections. i am rooting for the woke choose-your-own-adventure book; hopefully someone sneaks it to the little girl whose horse-faced dad is dead to me, a towheaded little sprite who skipped down the aisle at the wedding with her anti-vax mother, who sported a slit-to-the thigh, sheer and boned layer cake of nude tulle like the onlyfans tooth fairy.

04.26.25 [on the F train]

2025-05-26T19:22:00.000-07:00

we flew home from portugal via toronto this past sunday on the first flight that has ever given me occasion to resent canada (we were delayed for flimsy-sounding reasons that kept changing; we had to transfer from one toronto airport to another that was, inexplicably, just offshore in lake ontario; we were assured many times that our luggage would be checked through and transferred without our having to collect and haul it across town, an idea so lovely and hard to believe that we visited the first baggage claim anyway and found our suitcases circling the chute like orphaned ducklings). our two weeks abroad were unusual ones: i thought to look up local protests the night we arrived on the eve of the "hands off" actions april 5, and was delighted to discover democrats abroad were planning an action in the praça dos restauradores, which was a five-minute walk from our hotel. i found an art store with poster supplies, holed myself up in the bathroom as joe slept off his jet lag, and made a double-sided placard: THEY ARE JOKERS, NOT KINGS and MAKE AMERICA CONSTITUTIONAL AGAIN (NAZI DOGE FUCK OFF). duolingo had been doing its best to teach me some portuguese and i considered cutting my sign in the shape of an apple (MACA = maça), but i checked myself before i wrecked myself. about 700 people gathered at the plaza—i actually believe this figure, a few diligent souls moved through the crowd counting us head by head—and drew comparisons with portugal's carnation revolution 51 years ago, yelled earnest things about social security (many expat retirees on the scene), sang leonard cohen's "hallelujah," which i have accepted as something we're going to hear everywhere on all occasions for a little while longer. (i kind of hope his estate is litigious?) we spent the subsequent week engaging in light tourism, with my mom and stepdad joining in a few days later, then took a train up to porto and boarded a riverboat, where in retrospect we really shouldn't have killed an albatross. it seems someone ele boarded when they weren't at their best, for norovirus whipped around the decks over the next week like me at the local roller rink when i was nine. joe went down early saturday night, mom and doug joined him in the wee hours, and at least four waves of contagion rolled over us as we tried and failed to sail up to spain, thanks to once-in-a-decade heavy rains that confounded the douro river's locks. we were stuck in the same valley town for four days, and the invalids couldn't even open the drapes in their cabins, as we were parked between other stranded vessels. the sandwiching was so enthusiastic that we accessed the beleaguered valley town through a couple of other ships, so i'm beginning to think they got a few turns with saramago's revenge as well. as that happened i learned that my cousin's brain cancer had accelerated and he was likely to die before we could get home, before i could get there if i bolted and brought him portuguese norovirus, and so he did. i spent my days joining various hikes and bike rides by myself watching fog roll through terraced vineyards in the rain and imagining what it would be like to be 40 and give birth to my second daughter right before my husband died. in my mind's eye my cousin is a little boy with a san francisco giants tee shirt hanging past his knees and ears like pennants, and i don't know when i will think of him as someone who isn't going to write back. our last interaction was his laughing at my enthusiasm for enrique iglesias's "escape," which is an easier place to leave things with someone than where my sister had to try to steer things at his bedside for all of us. joe came to the deserted patio where i'd been assembling a huge puzzle all week to say that it was time to come back and pack, it wasn't fair for me to clang around when he was sleeping, and i caved, then tantrumed: i'd had a rough couple of days, all i wanted was to finish a fucking puzzle, if he wasn't going to offer any comfort why couldn't he just leave me alone. so that's how i sobbed over a thousand pieces of the mona lisa while the night crew played eurovision pop, her right shoulder fused together where my mom had spilled nonalcoholic prosecco on it a few days earlier. i wish you were here.

03.15.25 [on the J train]

2025-04-28T20:44:00.000-07:00

baby's first rally on the steps of city hall was successful, i hope; i signed up to roll out in support of city legislation that would defund and defang an especially gross portion of the nypd that was created to face domestic terrorism and has become (surprise surprise) a wildly expensive protester-savaging brigade. i learned that standing in the morning sun for an hour is no joke, so i need to stick to a light sleeved shirt if i'm going to hide my tattoos (is that even a thing, since i don't wear a mask and my Resting Progressive Face was absolutely in every photo and video that day?), and downtown in general evokes the mariko aoki phenomenon, so maybe i should skip coffee (joe: "if you'd taken a dump on the steps of city hall you'd definitely be in everyone's facial-recognition system"). i hope the legislation gains sponsors and supporters this year; our councilperson is considered low-hanging fruit, so i'm game to show up at her office and make the ask in person. maybe we could also hype each other up about the virtues of congestion pricing and luring our governor/senators/mayor into a trebuchet? i don't have a lot of spare time on my hands but seem to be in the sweet spot where momentum breeds momentum. that's been true socially, too—i've seen like a dozen friends so far this month, several of whom *hung out in our apartment,* and i don't yet feel like walking into the sea. i even went to a birthday thing where i only knew the host! i realize how mini-golf all of this is, but it's very easy to tuck myself in a demisocial space where i'm pleasant in passing—like, i don't know anyone's name at the library beyond the staffer who showed me how to monitor the quiet study room—so leveling up to, i don't know, brunch and drinks isn't nothing.

joe is in arizona this week, so i made a daunting vat of chili the day he headed out and have been cranking out lifestyle content in silence; once a day i roll out for an hour to thrift shop or wander through an uzbek grocery store, it's all very efficient. even so i'm still unable to file more than one story a day; that's probably a good thing, i should be making steady progress on the longer-form pieces i've been working on for the past six months (mushrooms at the end of the world) and need to hand over before we meet family in portugal (what the cat saw). instead i skitter off and ping editors: wouldn't it be fun to do a little pop culture piece real quick? the uzbek grocery store has wooden barrels of linden honey from russia that are the size of a toddler's head, like something donkey kong would have thrown during the cold war, and my yearning for one very nearly overwhelmed the fact that russian stuff is not the stuff to acquire right now and joe wil straight-up walk out if i buy any more honey (the trove we've got right now is probably our most significant apocalypse accessory). it's harmless to circle back and look at them, though, no? this is the bootleg breakfast at tiffany's remake our moment deserves.

02.25.25 [on the M train]

2025-04-28T20:25:00.000-07:00

our apartment has been photographed for a tour, as have i, though joe and the cats will i guess remain unknown to the blogosphere! i wish we'd made an appointment even earlier, since by the time we got down to business the last of the extra-golden light was slinking out of the living room, but at 9 a.m. i was already a scattered babbler, so god knows what would have happened if we'd aimed for some properly rosy-fingered dawn. the photographer spent a full two hours doing her thing, only 15 minutes of which were watching me try to convince maya to let me hold her for more than three seconds (the shape of a proper camera is scary, and it makes such mysterious clicks). i wasn't nervous, but i still can't smile on command, so we'll see what J the blogger and her team think about that.

apparently it could be months or even a year or more before anything is published online, which feels like fair play after all the house tours i've kicked down the calendar as a freelancer. and sometimes tours get killed? though that seems unlikely here, since they shelled out for a proper photographer and i don't plan on becoming a flamboyant public racist or anything? even if i do and it is, the apartment's in the best shape of its nearly 15 years with us: with this shoot hanging over my head i finally got the coat rack installed beside the front door (it had been crouching against the mirror on our dining table for at least six months, which probably means a year), the curtains are up in the bedroom (they'd been in the back of the closet since february of 2020), the bowls of christmas ornaments and lights are out from under the dining table and hidden behind the crazy silk flower garland i created above the kitchen cabinets, and those flowers are all off the dining table. it's all very exciting.

02.08.25 [on the J train]

2025-03-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

most people probably don't need to hear that naomi novik's temeraire series, an alternate history in which the napoleonic wars are fought with dragons, features Dragon Tribulations, but i was not ready for it and had to fawn over the cats in the wee hours this morning to self-soothe. if the rest of the books are anywhere near as entertaining as the first i will be well pleased; if they are not i will rewarch master and commander and imagine russell crowe as a dragon and be well pleased.

in contemporary fantasy, i'm about to start the follow-up to cadwell turnbull's magnificent no gods, no monsters, and i genuinely can't remember if i've posted about it before; a hazard of writing this stuff out when i'm still more than half-asleep on the train, but one does what one can with what one has. he explores identity, othering, allyship, and intersectionality by working through the idea that "monsters" (anyone who uses magic, from seers and witches to shapeshifters) have always lived among nonmagical humans, various secret societies have tried to protext/exploit/exterminate them, and now everyone knows about them—sort of, as their revelation is suppressed and lots of people don't want to wrap their heads around what it would mean if, say, the cops gunned down a werewolf. several of the principal characters work together at a cooperative bookstore; the title's a riff on "no gods, no monsters," the old anarchist chant. there's a scene of extreme violence near the end (speaking of trigger warnings, my sister pinged me to warn me about that) which comes closer to what i imagine perpetrating or being the victim of a similar act would feel like than anyting i've read before; the whole thing is a magnificent work of empathy, and i kind of want to read it again. (like lincoln in the bardo, its polyphony gets kind of slippery from time to time, especially when characters are time traveling and skittering between multiverses.) but there's no time to reread! there's barely time to read! you'd think joe and i would be barreling through media we'd been neglecting in favor of the 3-4 hours of cable news we were mainlining before the election, but that time seems to have simply disappeared. i'm going on longer walks and spending an extra 15-30 minutes a day at the gym, but that doesn't account for it. i certainly haven't been cleaning, i haven't been writing all that much, and i haven't been napping as frequently, though saturday afternoons are still long-haul adventures. i would love to discover that i've been winking out and fighting crime in another dimension, but aside from some inexplicable thing that's gone down with my left knee and some inconvenient acne, i have no physical evidence of this double life. probably i'm underestimating my fixation on reddit.

02.04.25

2025-02-04T10:59:00.000-08:00

my protest-monitoring whatsapp group pinged sunday night with an alert about a rally happening on monday: that meant that we were supposed to stay tuned for a signal chat link we would join if we could attend the protest, where we'd meet staffers and other volunteer monitors, then buddy up and spread ourselves out around the action to monitor any police presence and interactions between them and protesters. that link didn't come, though, so while i planned to go and headed uptown with my vest in my bag yesterday afternoon, i didn't know until i got there if i'd be reporting to anyone at all. i didn't report to anyone present, exactly: one other monitor, M, showed up and we were left to ping each other in the chat that had finally fired up a few hours before the rally. we're supposed to begin our work by walking around the perimeter of the event, so i circled the park as groups arrived with flags and signs, massed on corners, and, uh, parked their patrol cars, vans, and schoolbuses; everyone fell silent when i passed through them in my little vest. i'm still not very good at identifying subspecies of authority figures, so i was thrilled to have M. monitoring is a little like storm chasing in that you can't really tell what's coming, especially if you're new to it: protesters don't often announce their intentions ahead of time, we were told, and we weren't supposed to interact with them anyway, so we didn't know if the rally would turn into a march. we certainly weren't supposed to interact with the police, who did approach and ask me questions about the protest a couple of times; i tend to freeze up and fawn when that happens, and am proud that i simply said, as trained, that i wasn't with the protestors. i can smile cryptically for my community! (our signal chat eventually swelled to six, but M and i remained the only members on the ground, unless you count the one who dropped out so they could attend as a protester; i respect that, i wanted to be there as a protester myself).

i tootled past the SRGs with their beltfuls of zip ties, posting updates; i noted when a surveillance drone went up, filmed a uniformed officer filming the protest with his personal phone, logged estimates (a thousand protesters and a few hundred cops, maybe? more?) and shows of force, traded commanding officer ID information with the staffers in the chat. (five minutes after i stonewalled a cop and sent in his photo, the chat supplied me with a full record of civilian complaints of excessive force against him. he was the one who'd spearhead the arrests, i was advised.) i followed along when the rally became a march and everyone headed south, where M and i were chided for not staying in sight of one another (but there were only two of us!). marchers began thanking us, cops pulled out barriers, one protester was arrested in the middle of the action where we couldn't see them (just two of us!), with a fluorescent-hatted NLG team at their side (the NLG gets right in there to assist people as they're taken, and are brave and wonderful). after about three hours and a zigzagging march southwest the remaining protesters gathered one last time at another park, then melted back into the city; the cops did whatever cops do, and M and i smiled at each other and bid the chat a good night. i unzipped my little vest, folded it into my tote bag, and looked for the F train, lightning in my veins.

01.25.25

2025-01-31T19:04:00.000-08:00

my aunt and uncle evacuated from pacific palisades, from the house i never did manage to visit for one of their legendary halloween parties but did stop by in the fall when my dad and i made a susan-orlean-inspired pilgrimage to the los angeles central library, two weeks ago, and have been having a septuagenarian sleepover at dad's place in newport beach ever since. i know a little about unexpected time in someone else's space, given the week joe and i spent on the upper east side at my stepmother's apartment when the lower east side lost power during superstorm sandy, but we had the place to ourselves and the ability to hike home and visit our cats; there was no chance of that home blinking into nothing. i thought of how meticulously my aunt made up the guest bedroom for my one night in the palisades, complete with faceouts on her bookshelves on intrepid women, of the backyard mini-canyon my uncle named the valley of fear where joe and i once thought of having a wedding reception, then think of their creaking up dad's stairs to the bedroom where my stepsister once left a half-eaten postcoital lollipop stuck to the nightstand. my aunt's a retired judge and my uncle's a retired lawyer; as i imagined, they've been eavesdropping in the background as dad leads mediations via zoom. have they finished all of his partial bags of spicy potato chips? are they watching the senate vote on cabinet appointments? they are the lucky ones, of course, and friends of friends all over the city have no homes to revisit. fire has been a dirty word since long before i was a little girl; i remember a soccer teammate losing her home to the mudslides after the laguna fires, and practices during those same fires when we could see flames on a distant ridge and the smoke cover was so low you could kick a ball and lose track of it before it came to earth—what, exactly, were we thinking about how lungs worked in the mid-'90s? but that wouldn't be the apocalypse, everyone knew southern california would conclude with the big one. an eight point three, all the kids were familiar with that. the science piece i've now been writing for six months is in part about fire; yesterday my editor asked if one of my experts' pilot study fields had, er, burned up this month, and i asked if i should reinterview everyone to bring the piece up to date with the latest catastrophe cycle. no need, he said, and he's right, it's all evergreen. the internet reminded me this morning that executive orders can't actually defund anything, congress has the power of the purse, but i stil think about the president treating gavin newsom like volodymyr zelenskyy. what does outrage extinguish?

i completed the first round of training to begin observing and documenting protests here in the city—specifically, the way authorities overstep at protests. this is the phase in which i soak up savory terms and anecdotes illustrating those authorities' crookedness and cowardice; there was a similar phase as i first prepared to become an abortion clinic escort, and it's a comfortable time, one when i can relax into having allocated emotional resources constructively. the last big phase of my life was a very manual-labor-oriented one—cleaning cages and tending to individual birds, reorganizing and stocking bookshelves, ferrying indie films across town and handing out ballots. this one seems to be about holding space and bearing witness to minimize vulnerability—the antis outside the clinic toe the invisible lines outside its doors when we outnumber them, my subterranean study room is only open at the library when someone like me is supervising it, the videos i record and data i log via signal will perhaps become part of civil rights cases. this is all appropriate, i think, i am where i should be in my arc as a volunteer, but one does miss the, uh, more aerobic community service? hence all this compulsive running, maybe? i might skip the gym today—but one never knows, now does one now does one now does one.

01.20.25

2025-01-20T21:07:00.001-08:00

the feeling i've had most consistently of late is that it is time to run again; i need to run some more. my system needs to digest the things i've shoveled into it, my knees need to forget themselves anew, the last few nalgenes of water need to get wherever it is they go when i manage to stave off headaches. it's not that running is especially pleasurable, it's that it's so quantifiable. this distance at that pace for those hours, and a symbolic penny in the container in my closet for every mile behind me. before the election i'd watch cable news as i ran, but i've been doing less and less of that this winter. our building's exercise room was packed this afternoon, and it was impossible to feign ignorance of the woman in a designer museum sweatshirt waiting to swoop on a treadmill, so i ceded mine after four miles and a few primetime suggestions of the inauguration. i read all about the executive orders after a bath, though, and now it is time to run again! pokémon go pairs well with restlessness like mine; all these steps help me hatch eggs and evolve buddies. i really went bananas with runs and walks this week (which is fine when you're sick as long as your symptoms are above the neck, the internet says) to try and collect eggs that might yield a new-to-the-game species; no successful hatches so far, but my little digital incubator has miles to go before we sleep.

my partner says that providing the amount of support i need, which i am to understand is a great deal of support, can be difficult for him. it doesn't really matter if that's more or less support than anyone else needs, i reason, since he is the only person who lives with me, has been for a quarter of a century now, and if he feels it is a daunting amount of support to give then that assessment is the one that matters. the idea of my needing a great deal of support isn't shameful to me, but it is surprising. how much work should a writer show their spouse? how often can one solicit shoe feedback? at what point have you shared so many Fun Facts from the book you're reading that you might want to think about auditioning a new prescription? my therapist seems to believe that i'm doing my best, and i would like to carry that around like proof of vaccination. i would like that vaccination, to be Doing My Best.

01.01.25

2025-01-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

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

2024-12-31T13:16:00.000-08:00

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.

12.28.24 [on the F train]

2024-12-30T19:43:00.001-08:00

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 remember 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]

2024-12-30T19:23:00.000-08:00

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.

10.26.24 [on the F train]

2024-12-24T19:59:00.000-08:00

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.

10.12.24 [on the F train]

2024-12-23T19:51:00.000-08:00

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]

2024-12-23T19:22:00.000-08:00

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]

2024-12-23T18:59:00.000-08:00

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.