05.31.25 [on the F train]

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]

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.

03.15.05 [on the J train]

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]

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]

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

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

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

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: 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.