it's been so long since my last clinic shift that it's now full-on daytime when i leave my apartment in the morning, a vile scenario that benefits no one. did i fall back asleep after the cats woke me up at 4:45? will i end up cross-eyed because i forgot my readers and am writing this while squinting? will trump's appearance at the next knicks game doom their championship run? no one knows, internets; no one knows.
i actually purchased a basketball-adjacent ZOHRAN shirt from the guys at union square yesterday in a fit of hometown groupthink. when i rolled out at ten thirty last night in a fruitless attempt to score eggs for my half-made lemon bars, like 40 of my neighbors were watching game two at the basketball courts across the street from the grocery store. i was charmed.
my one half marathon of the first half of the year is done and dusted, and i'm thinking i might play it cool until the fall; we're missing a bunch of the cutesy midsummer races when we head to alaska with my family in july and august, and i end up with weird welts when i get athletic outside this time of year anyway. the vendors at the street market we visited years ago in southern india had me pegged: i miss my icy russian homeland. bless, there seems to be a race on this morning; folks in bibs were waiting on the platform at herald square just now.
i filed a second draft of my latest piece on death-positive practices this past thursday and ended up getting lyrical in the final paragraph about how i'd like some of my remains to end up with the raccoons in central park. the first draft had ended with death metal and the idea that my greatest fear is that people will think i'm afraid of dying, which my editor didn't get at all. in these more fanciful, passion-project essays i have like a 50% success rate when i just end a piece abruptly and mysteriously, which is maybe a better reception that i deserve. i was shocked when the team wrote to say they liked my pitch; while i like the subject and think it's a good, weird take on their issue's theme, i had been much more confident about the one i sent them a year or two ago, and also this one had a nine inch nails dad joke at the end, and also also i didn't hear back for a long time. but here we are! i fired up my nearly-cancelled zoom subscription to conduct a couple of interviews, i have now visited a cemetery in a professional capacity, and i'll have one more client to list when the horrible contractor-payment company that processes my invoices for my biggest client demands more proof that i have a nominally diverse income stream. much has been written by folks who know a whole lot more about capitalism than i do about how regulations intended to protect freelancers invariably end up punishing them, so let's simply say that i've started making regular donations to the DSA, which has totally torched my inbox in re: solicitations from everyone imaginable. speaking of, i ran into brad lander at a march in times square a few months ago and told him i was looking forward to voting for him, an interaction that felt like the first step on the path to healing after i spaced out and high fived chuck schumer at a half marathon before the last election. lander was also at this year's half marathon and a second hello would really have been progress, but i managed consistently negative splits and a pace that was more than 30 seconds under what i ran on the same course last year, so i'll settle for those gains, i'm not greedy (about this).
04.18.26 [on the F train]
i have a final stanza! a final stanza has been written by me! (passive voice feels important there, since i've been hanging around like a chump waiting for something to occur to me and only managed to toothpaste something out in utter desperation at a library shift this week because i had absolutely nothing else to do instead.) i think it's pretty good; maybe a little treacly, but this is a book for young children and the editor asked for something explicit, and joe says it feels like an ending, and so. i think my sister has been waiting for me to get this out to make her own final push with our illustrations, and i'm hoping i can focus this lovely having-written energy on infusing her with confidence even though we could easily go back and forth even more with the editor, in theory, it feels like something is coming to a head here. surely she too wants to see if something tangible can come out of all of this time and talk–even at the glacial pace that that these things happen, as i've come to understand, who wants to take zoom meetings for a year with someone who won't make them any money?
as if something had actually shaken loose, i then immediately heard back with a yes from a new-to-me print magazine i'd been hoping but not expecting to write for this spring. i haven't pitched a passion project in a really long time, one half-baked idea to a local newspaper notwithstanding, and knowing i'll be part of this weird ambitious collective, a bit like the one for which i've been writing cat and mushroom and bird stories for the last couple of years, feels wonderful. now i have to line up interviews with some old friends and unfamiliar cemeteries before pauline and i head down to puerto rico next month. did i mention this? we have lodging, a car, and a ferry to vieques and back booked, but otherwise–oh, and an evening on a bioluminescent bay, which is my big activity priority for the whole trip, other than figuring out how pauline and i can save the world–we're just going to walk the earth and deepen our respective relationships with bad bunny? consume at least one beverage apiece (one has to pay to bring things on the ferry, and i got round-trip fares for our totes but one-way tickets for drinks)? i was hoping for some inside dope from my therapist, who revealed in our second-to-last call that she lived there for two years, but in our call this week she mostly went on about how misogynistic puerto rican men are. it sounds like she got a pretty extreme experience of that, as she lived there with her husband who was researching schistosomiasis on the naval base during the vietnam war and, in addition to teaching history classes, she spent a lot of time horseback riding in the mountains by herself, but i concede that there's a part of me that's been expecting some kind of weirdness re: two women traveling together. i could draw a little pocket knife in one of my owl tattoo's talons? i wondered if we should look into something like a casual guide for exploring the rain forest, as i have a dreadful sense of direction and utilities on the island are notoriously inconsistent, so leaning on my phone will likely not be a thing, but pauline feels pretty good about catching as catch can, it seems, and if our three-decade friendship culminated in being mugged and eaten by a golden mongoose, that feels pretty good to me.
as if something had actually shaken loose, i then immediately heard back with a yes from a new-to-me print magazine i'd been hoping but not expecting to write for this spring. i haven't pitched a passion project in a really long time, one half-baked idea to a local newspaper notwithstanding, and knowing i'll be part of this weird ambitious collective, a bit like the one for which i've been writing cat and mushroom and bird stories for the last couple of years, feels wonderful. now i have to line up interviews with some old friends and unfamiliar cemeteries before pauline and i head down to puerto rico next month. did i mention this? we have lodging, a car, and a ferry to vieques and back booked, but otherwise–oh, and an evening on a bioluminescent bay, which is my big activity priority for the whole trip, other than figuring out how pauline and i can save the world–we're just going to walk the earth and deepen our respective relationships with bad bunny? consume at least one beverage apiece (one has to pay to bring things on the ferry, and i got round-trip fares for our totes but one-way tickets for drinks)? i was hoping for some inside dope from my therapist, who revealed in our second-to-last call that she lived there for two years, but in our call this week she mostly went on about how misogynistic puerto rican men are. it sounds like she got a pretty extreme experience of that, as she lived there with her husband who was researching schistosomiasis on the naval base during the vietnam war and, in addition to teaching history classes, she spent a lot of time horseback riding in the mountains by herself, but i concede that there's a part of me that's been expecting some kind of weirdness re: two women traveling together. i could draw a little pocket knife in one of my owl tattoo's talons? i wondered if we should look into something like a casual guide for exploring the rain forest, as i have a dreadful sense of direction and utilities on the island are notoriously inconsistent, so leaning on my phone will likely not be a thing, but pauline feels pretty good about catching as catch can, it seems, and if our three-decade friendship culminated in being mugged and eaten by a golden mongoose, that feels pretty good to me.
03.21.26 [on a train i forgot to ID]
I HAVE FOUND IT! the ratty old notebook in which i wrote a couple of my posts from last year IS REGAINED and you will know of, probably, some more excuses for why i haven't pitched my rambling creative nonfiction book yet! very exciting stuff.
yesterday was the first day of spring, and i have a gentle hope that the absolute mountains of shit that have accumulated outside the clinic have melted back into the universe. this week i set off for the farmers' market in head-to-toe malachite to signal that i was in a good mood and was open to longer days, the circle of life, etc, and was asked if i'm irish. it's just the best color, clipboard guy.
the self-imposed deadline of the end of march draws nigh for me and my sister and our goosebook, and i still haven't figured out what the devastating final section will sound like. we have the visual and i know what i want to say, but the part where the actual poetry comes up and out of me in the middle of the night is yet to come. i don't mean to abdicate responsibility for it, i don't think the muse is rooting around in the bottom of her tote bag for me, but there is an extent to which trying to force it just...i mean, you see what i sound like when i'm forcing myself to put pen to paper.
i have a truly massive stack of aviation-related books next to my bed. their titles are all combinations of like a dozen words, the muse is not speaking through whoever is finishing these things up, but i'd like to think i can do better with my own version (even though it's entirely possible it won't be my call). joe and i went to a new friend's birthday on the upper west side a few weekends ago and i met a woman who publishes nonfiction with a big old entity down in DC after years of being in magazines up here (we had several colleagues in common from my days at the ladymag), and in attaching myself to a wall and nattering at her for what felt like an hour about the size of early planes' fuel tanks (she just published a book about another luminary from the same time period) i think i might have accidentally networked? she offered at the beginning of our interlude to hook me up with her entity's magazine, and it's a great one, i'd love to write for them, and maybe i should be trying to do it now. i've mostly been treading water with day-job clients as we wrap the big goosebook pitch, though i did realize yesterday that i very much want to write for an indie mag that almost bit on a pitch of mine last year(?) and it's about time to do another piece about death...that they might want? some interesting legislation has come through recently and local corpses are doing spicy new things, surely that's something i need to cold-call people about.
i have finally been allowed to go back to the blood bank after three months in the wilderness, and they have made up for lost time. at my appointment this past tuesday the gal who stuck me hit the one part of my vein that isn't prolific and it was clear that hijinks would ensue; a more senior tech was hyping her up as she worked, she was new and looked nervous, and when the apheresis machine started whistling and singing about how my pressure was too low she panicked and mashed its buttons until it was barely running at all. the run time recalculated and i was going to be there for...145 minutes. i tried asking, gently, if the pressure might be revisited, but i think the system locks after it's been adjusted a few times, and it's not like i didn't have a good book with me. i was sitting in front of the center's biggest TV and caught two segments of syfy's st. patrick's day leprechaun marathon (bewilderingly, not called LEPRETHON), including leprechaun in space, my franchise favorite. trying to explain '90s horror boobs and the cronenberg and dune jokes to the bewildered gen z techs wasn't especially successful, but i was where i was supposed to be, probably.
pauline and i are meeting up in puerto rico at the beginning of may; i've booked us a rooftop in old san juan and a secret jungle fort near el yunque, as well as an evening of kayaking around in bioluminescent plankton. i have leaned into assembling the wardrobe of a monied septuagenarian widow for this trip and am soliciting tips from both a mexico-based guide i befriended in yucatan a few years ago and, apparently, my therapist, who lived there for a while. i don't trust most people's travel observations, but they're both real ones and i feel the island has plans for us. i am your tool, puerto rico! if your vengeance could involve a golden mongoose that would be especially grand.
yesterday was the first day of spring, and i have a gentle hope that the absolute mountains of shit that have accumulated outside the clinic have melted back into the universe. this week i set off for the farmers' market in head-to-toe malachite to signal that i was in a good mood and was open to longer days, the circle of life, etc, and was asked if i'm irish. it's just the best color, clipboard guy.
the self-imposed deadline of the end of march draws nigh for me and my sister and our goosebook, and i still haven't figured out what the devastating final section will sound like. we have the visual and i know what i want to say, but the part where the actual poetry comes up and out of me in the middle of the night is yet to come. i don't mean to abdicate responsibility for it, i don't think the muse is rooting around in the bottom of her tote bag for me, but there is an extent to which trying to force it just...i mean, you see what i sound like when i'm forcing myself to put pen to paper.
i have a truly massive stack of aviation-related books next to my bed. their titles are all combinations of like a dozen words, the muse is not speaking through whoever is finishing these things up, but i'd like to think i can do better with my own version (even though it's entirely possible it won't be my call). joe and i went to a new friend's birthday on the upper west side a few weekends ago and i met a woman who publishes nonfiction with a big old entity down in DC after years of being in magazines up here (we had several colleagues in common from my days at the ladymag), and in attaching myself to a wall and nattering at her for what felt like an hour about the size of early planes' fuel tanks (she just published a book about another luminary from the same time period) i think i might have accidentally networked? she offered at the beginning of our interlude to hook me up with her entity's magazine, and it's a great one, i'd love to write for them, and maybe i should be trying to do it now. i've mostly been treading water with day-job clients as we wrap the big goosebook pitch, though i did realize yesterday that i very much want to write for an indie mag that almost bit on a pitch of mine last year(?) and it's about time to do another piece about death...that they might want? some interesting legislation has come through recently and local corpses are doing spicy new things, surely that's something i need to cold-call people about.
i have finally been allowed to go back to the blood bank after three months in the wilderness, and they have made up for lost time. at my appointment this past tuesday the gal who stuck me hit the one part of my vein that isn't prolific and it was clear that hijinks would ensue; a more senior tech was hyping her up as she worked, she was new and looked nervous, and when the apheresis machine started whistling and singing about how my pressure was too low she panicked and mashed its buttons until it was barely running at all. the run time recalculated and i was going to be there for...145 minutes. i tried asking, gently, if the pressure might be revisited, but i think the system locks after it's been adjusted a few times, and it's not like i didn't have a good book with me. i was sitting in front of the center's biggest TV and caught two segments of syfy's st. patrick's day leprechaun marathon (bewilderingly, not called LEPRETHON), including leprechaun in space, my franchise favorite. trying to explain '90s horror boobs and the cronenberg and dune jokes to the bewildered gen z techs wasn't especially successful, but i was where i was supposed to be, probably.
pauline and i are meeting up in puerto rico at the beginning of may; i've booked us a rooftop in old san juan and a secret jungle fort near el yunque, as well as an evening of kayaking around in bioluminescent plankton. i have leaned into assembling the wardrobe of a monied septuagenarian widow for this trip and am soliciting tips from both a mexico-based guide i befriended in yucatan a few years ago and, apparently, my therapist, who lived there for a while. i don't trust most people's travel observations, but they're both real ones and i feel the island has plans for us. i am your tool, puerto rico! if your vengeance could involve a golden mongoose that would be especially grand.
11.01.25 [on the J train; out-of-order, found-my-journal update]
with fall travel and work soup mostly over, it's time to take a crack at finishing moves for ye goosebook. i have yet to pop out of bed in the middle of the night to jot down couplets, which is frustrating, but i do think i get what needs to happen even if i can't make it happen just yet. i wrote the maybe-editor this week to schedule our next meeting and she hates my face and/or got laid off and hasn't written back, or it was the week of halloween and she works with children's books and has a young daughter. that came out as "week of thanksgiving"–my sleep has not been consistent! on our five-day lightning cruise to canada and back, i slept so poorly that on our last night when i was rushing to pack my suitcase and fling it in the hallway for pickup i missed a whole dresser's worth of clothes, which left new york harbor a few hours later and have been sailing around the canadian maritimes ever since. i wrote out and submitted an intricate description of said dresser in the stateroom and the sweatshirts, celine dion concert tee, and black underwear it contained, and after a fortnight or so i got a letter congratulating me on the 73% accuracy with which i told the story of my shit (the percentage!) and offering me the opportunity to pay a $150 idiot tax to get it back. i have tender feelings about that shit (which might even be worth more than $150!), i paid, and now i wait. i hope celine has been enjoying the impromptu repatriation.
i've trained and signed up to protect the election on thursday, which feels pretty unnecessary–probably no one is out to terrorize or benight lower east side voters, and i've been an actual poll worker a few times so i already know how it works–but it's a charm that's easy to perform, not unlike this morning's shift. a call for more volunteer clinic escorts went out earlier this week on the last-call channel, but by the time i accessed signup there were already 8 participants. if my last shift and what the group leaders said of the weeks since are seasonal indicators, though, there will be several squirrelly groups of antis there this morning, and we'll need all the bodies we can get. this group does clinic escorting rather than defense, which means we focus on the patients and don't engage with protesters–in the years i've done this i've never spoken to a protester, and i've gotten better at not wanting to over time–but they clearly feel emboldened to harass patients and break laws when their numbers exceed ours. there were probably six mornings earlier this year where they didn't show up at all and i got to go home relatively early, though the hour i spend on the train each way makes that kind of a wash, i guess. i pre-partied for what i'm paying now. i appreciate the nonengagement policy, both because i'd rather not incur the psychic damage, dungeons and dragons style, of arguing with evangelical bigots and because from what i've seen of clinic defense at planned parenthood's facility in nolita it's all too easy to develop a spy vs. spy, neverending escalation loop with an actual two-way scream tunnel. no one could have frightened or wheedled me out of my procedure when i was 22 in san francisco, but i appreciated the empty hospital i found all those years ago; i was fairly vulnerable to psychic damage then as well, though i didn't really know that.
i've trained and signed up to protect the election on thursday, which feels pretty unnecessary–probably no one is out to terrorize or benight lower east side voters, and i've been an actual poll worker a few times so i already know how it works–but it's a charm that's easy to perform, not unlike this morning's shift. a call for more volunteer clinic escorts went out earlier this week on the last-call channel, but by the time i accessed signup there were already 8 participants. if my last shift and what the group leaders said of the weeks since are seasonal indicators, though, there will be several squirrelly groups of antis there this morning, and we'll need all the bodies we can get. this group does clinic escorting rather than defense, which means we focus on the patients and don't engage with protesters–in the years i've done this i've never spoken to a protester, and i've gotten better at not wanting to over time–but they clearly feel emboldened to harass patients and break laws when their numbers exceed ours. there were probably six mornings earlier this year where they didn't show up at all and i got to go home relatively early, though the hour i spend on the train each way makes that kind of a wash, i guess. i pre-partied for what i'm paying now. i appreciate the nonengagement policy, both because i'd rather not incur the psychic damage, dungeons and dragons style, of arguing with evangelical bigots and because from what i've seen of clinic defense at planned parenthood's facility in nolita it's all too easy to develop a spy vs. spy, neverending escalation loop with an actual two-way scream tunnel. no one could have frightened or wheedled me out of my procedure when i was 22 in san francisco, but i appreciated the empty hospital i found all those years ago; i was fairly vulnerable to psychic damage then as well, though i didn't really know that.
09.20.25 [on the J train; out-of-order, found-my-journal update]
i strongly considered using this hour on the dawn train to scare up a first draft of the essay about shoes i told a dear colleague i'd write before labor day, but this whole-blogging-when-i'm-taking-the-train-out-to- clinic-escorting is all i got for the 'champ right now, so i can't hamstring it like that. i was talking to a friend yesterday about wanting to persist and make arm-waves at mental health as we ride this rockslide into authoritarianism, and informal personal writing could be a way to do that, though my tendency of late is to write strident essays about nature that end on elegiac/ambiguous notes. i will tell you how that feels when i get a hard copy of the next one, written last year when this administration was just a twinkle in russell vought's eye, in a few weeks. i think the main way to move forward or at least tread harder is going to be plugging away at the book's foundation. i still haven't found an agent–i haven't queried anyone other than the woman i met at one of these escorting shifts a couple of years ago–and i need to revisit the notes i took on my last feedback call with the prospective editor before they squirt out of my head. a translator friend has been lovely about suggesting jo and i apply to residencies as an author-illustrator team, not unlike how she's done some with poet-partners, and i think something like that would be magnificent momentum. it helped her to think of herself as an artist, she said, she is an artist, she is an artist, and i could use some of that. on persisting, this is also part of it, as are the relatively frequent blood donations i've been making. they're still attractive for all the reasons they always were–an excuse to sit still for a few hours, snacks, community service with minimal conversation–but it also just feels nice to give something intimate away, and to have your humors in someone else's custody for a little while. (i'm still doing platelet donations, since my blood isn't fancy otherwise, so an apheresis machine separates them out and then deposits everything else back in my arm commingled with a bit of anticoagulant, except last time when they took plasma also and i didn't feel the typical lip-buzziness upon return, so maybe the cocktail was a little different?)
i'm headed to mississippi next week for my first press trip in a year and my first visit to the state in a decade. i requested an extra day there and then spaced out and accepted the extra programming they offered me for that day, so i will be lurching groggily between local cafes instead of exploring graveyards, at least unless i pull up my big-girl pants and tell the organizers i've changed my mind. (but what if they booked their flights the way they did because they're showing me around that day? what if i hurt someone's feelings?!) the timing in general is not great, as i'll be home for like a day and then am getting on a boat to canada, but i had been thinking about how i'd like to get back to mississippi, as it happens, and though i have stepped back from most travel writing, i have a feeling i'll want to write out there. emma straub anounced her new novel yesterday and talked about how she saw it coming in the form of a particular trip–that was her next novel, waiting for her. maybe my next elegiac essay about birds is in the south; maybe i can fit in a trip to some extra graveyards after the cafes. i don't know that i'm ready for the next thing to happen to all of us, but i'm ready to talk about it.
i'm headed to mississippi next week for my first press trip in a year and my first visit to the state in a decade. i requested an extra day there and then spaced out and accepted the extra programming they offered me for that day, so i will be lurching groggily between local cafes instead of exploring graveyards, at least unless i pull up my big-girl pants and tell the organizers i've changed my mind. (but what if they booked their flights the way they did because they're showing me around that day? what if i hurt someone's feelings?!) the timing in general is not great, as i'll be home for like a day and then am getting on a boat to canada, but i had been thinking about how i'd like to get back to mississippi, as it happens, and though i have stepped back from most travel writing, i have a feeling i'll want to write out there. emma straub anounced her new novel yesterday and talked about how she saw it coming in the form of a particular trip–that was her next novel, waiting for her. maybe my next elegiac essay about birds is in the south; maybe i can fit in a trip to some extra graveyards after the cafes. i don't know that i'm ready for the next thing to happen to all of us, but i'm ready to talk about it.
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