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.
Showing posts with label volunteer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label volunteer. Show all posts
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.
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.
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.
12.21.24 [on the F train]
i've been pingponging between books that carry me down history's lazy river like the life preserver i was instructed to turn upside down and step into like a diaper when i was in a biosphere in mexico this past spring (laura maiklem's mudlark, a wonderful long view) and bleeding-edge ones that make me feel abruptly and specifically like shit (paul lynch's prophet song), and that has been a good-enough way to move through the world. (a panhandler on the train is chatting with a woman a few seats down who just gave him some change: "i feel lucky to be in new york, it could be worse: i could be in a different city, in a different state, in a third world country. i could be in detroit." in ian frazier's paradise bronx i just learned new york is only city to adopt constitutional language obliging it to address inhabitants' right to shelter.) i have not been doing a very good job of catching up on the work that piled up before the election; when i get tired of being in my skin i go running or go up to grand central station to donate platelets, which you can do pretty often, since they give you most of your blood back and i have a lot of platelets (i am unironically proud of this). the first time i got settled in my pleather lab-recliner and the tech could see the needle mark from the last time i was there i was a little embarrassed, but now i don't care. i got an email from the volunteer coordinator at the library saying that the guy who'd been flaking out of his shifts after mine had officially flaked off for good (which i thought we'd talked about and determined long ago, but i respect her system), and so now i'm The Study Room Monitor for all of wednesday afternoons if i want. i told her i would rule with an iron fist and am unironically proud of that, also.
i think the work buildup is under control now, or at least the parts of it that call for acute creativity and can't unspool while i'm on something like autopilot. i had an unsettling afternoon about a month ago when i spent an hour working on research for a design story, tried to save the word file, and was informed by my own laptop that i already had something by that name. turns out i'd spent an afternoon at the library the day after the election doing the same work—taking many if not all of the same notes, even—and completely forgotten about it. when i turned in revisions for a big, earnest science piece earlier this week my editor thanked me for taking my time with it, which read not as a passive-aggressive dig but as actual appreciation for not having to deal with it earlier on his end. my other essay editor has made analogous noises hinting at her own lack of peace. i am not glad for that, i want all of us to be living our best and most effective lives, but since the feeling of being a little less alone is going to be there whether or not i acknowledge it i might as well be grateful.
i think the work buildup is under control now, or at least the parts of it that call for acute creativity and can't unspool while i'm on something like autopilot. i had an unsettling afternoon about a month ago when i spent an hour working on research for a design story, tried to save the word file, and was informed by my own laptop that i already had something by that name. turns out i'd spent an afternoon at the library the day after the election doing the same work—taking many if not all of the same notes, even—and completely forgotten about it. when i turned in revisions for a big, earnest science piece earlier this week my editor thanked me for taking my time with it, which read not as a passive-aggressive dig but as actual appreciation for not having to deal with it earlier on his end. my other essay editor has made analogous noises hinting at her own lack of peace. i am not glad for that, i want all of us to be living our best and most effective lives, but since the feeling of being a little less alone is going to be there whether or not i acknowledge it i might as well be grateful.
10.12.24 [on the F train]
my therapist seems confident that the harris-walz campaign will bring it home next month, though a bit of me wonders if it just makes sense to project that when you're a therapist. i was thinking about managing expectations when i talked to the guy who irradiated our cat this week (said cat has early-stage hyperthyroidism, which can be managed with a specialized diet and daily oral or otic meds forever or cured by paying someone to inject radioiodine into him and then keep him in a "cat spa" on the upper west side until the geiger counter hollers a bit less lustily, the option we chose—who needs a fall trip abroad, anyway?): this specialist is absolutely the dude you want doing this to your cat pal, manhattan prices aside, as he helped develop the treatment decades ago and has apparently cured tens of thousands of patients with it. (see also: take your pet to a spay/neuter clinic at your local shelter if you can, since they perform way, way more of those surgeries than your regular vet does.) but he is also very much a vet specialist, with the kind of firm boundaries that make sense when you're working with the kind of people who can afford medical staycations for their companion animals: he does not answer his phone, he calls precisely when he says he will, and he does not speculate about effects and results that are not directly related to what he's measured and observed in clinical practice. i am used, for better or for worse, to doctors' reactions to the charm offensive i release like cuttlefish ink when we interact, so the fact that he chose not to reassure me with optimistic bromides when i hoped the cat wouldn't develop renal issues after we knocked out his thyroid was...surprising but not unwelcome? in other news, we completely ignored the clinic's diligent instructions about how to manage matty's atomic breath after i brought him home yesterday morning. part of that is pragmatism—we have a one-bedroom apartment, and herding and isolating a still-radioactive cat are orders of magnitude more difficult than trying not to share or catch COVID—and part of it is wishful risk-taking after reading up on how specialists in other parts of the state and country tell their clients to minimize harm. in some places cats are inpatients for 10 days, and in others it's just two! some docs say you can open the bedroom door after a week, others talk up lead underpants! i did not want to limit myself to a few minutes of contact a day for any length of time and am also still vulnerable to the magical thinking that if i intentionally experience some sort of hardship for the cat it will improve his health outcome, so kind-of exposing myself to radiation it is. i understand that this is superstitious and childish, but i'm clear-eyed about choosing it as a stress response.
i have settled into what looks like a regular weekly shift monitoring the garden-adjacent quiet study room at an uptown branch of the NYPL, and i love it; it's not really a swap-in for my old afternoons at the nonprofit bookstore, since it involves almost no talking or physical work at all, but it's an anchor in my week that i'd missed terribly. the atmosphere in there is wonderful, and it's been incredibly conducive to work so far; i think i've written a hundred get-out-the-vote letters on recent afternoons, and i've finally managed to dig into all the research i need to do for a pair of assignments coming due around the end of the month. speaking of stress responses, i've been napping and running hard when i should be writing; childish procrastination and i know it, but i have my first half-marathon in years next weekend, and all things being equal, i would rather not have my internet pal who works with the raccoons and swans in prospect park end up finding me insensible in a thicket somewhere, which is definitely what happens when you arrange interviews and hit deadlines at the expense of long sessions on the treadmill.
i have settled into what looks like a regular weekly shift monitoring the garden-adjacent quiet study room at an uptown branch of the NYPL, and i love it; it's not really a swap-in for my old afternoons at the nonprofit bookstore, since it involves almost no talking or physical work at all, but it's an anchor in my week that i'd missed terribly. the atmosphere in there is wonderful, and it's been incredibly conducive to work so far; i think i've written a hundred get-out-the-vote letters on recent afternoons, and i've finally managed to dig into all the research i need to do for a pair of assignments coming due around the end of the month. speaking of stress responses, i've been napping and running hard when i should be writing; childish procrastination and i know it, but i have my first half-marathon in years next weekend, and all things being equal, i would rather not have my internet pal who works with the raccoons and swans in prospect park end up finding me insensible in a thicket somewhere, which is definitely what happens when you arrange interviews and hit deadlines at the expense of long sessions on the treadmill.
03.18.23 [on the F train]
after a year and a half of these crack-of-dawn journeys i can affirm that no one is on the subway at this hour for a good reason. it's not like buses in san francisco, where the 7 AM'ers were like actively casting spells to pry open the gates of hell and accelerate the end of the world, but the collective ugh up in here is palpable. i do these abortion clinic escort shifts once a month and was considering going again next weekend so i'd feel okay about skipping april, when my schedule is tricksier than usual because we'll be in iceland for two weeks, but back-to-back daybreak shenanigans would be too much for me. i do appreciate the community i feel on mornings like this one, as we wait to hear what that trump appointee out in amarillo will rule about mailing mifepristone, and everyone is grateful to have like-minded, action-oriented company, but my seasoning as a human shield wears thin with overuse, and the catharsis of confrontation just gets corrosive in big doses.
on horse pills, we saw our, i don't know, sixth play of the year on thursday. it was love, set in a temporary housing center in england, and it was wonderful. in another month or so it will probably start feeling like too much to have two or three artsy nights out per week, but for now it's excellent. all of the new york city, right in the kisser, go ahead! tonight we're headed up to the philharmonic, and i will disco nap hard enough this afternoon that i definitely won't fall asleep in the middle of the program. it helps that i crammed in a tár viewing right before the oscars last week; cate blanchett is MSG for me when i don't have a taste for something on my own, though even her formidable work in i'm not there couldn't make me care about bob dylan. in a year in which michelle yeoh didn't win everything, CB would have won another oscar; instead she just floated around in a cocoon of louis vuitton ecosilk like the gracious technolympian she is. i doubt she was bothered.
both the editor and the freelancer who fact checked my draft have written to say how much they love my robot cat essay, which has been a real relief; i didn't want to make a big deal about how much it means to me, but as i've said, i'm trying to break their hearts. that feedback is nipping at me to plot out another weird passion project, but i'm not very good at premeditating those–certain kinds of writing are like throwing up. afterward you're usually able to piece together what happened to get you to that point and you're grateful to be on the other side, but it's generally an unhealthy thing to get into on purpose.
on intimate fluids, i gave blood for the first time in ages yesterday, and my iron levels were totally unremarkable. at last, i am iron woman! is it sobriety-related? did the random daily multivitamins some PR person mailed me work better than all the others i've tried? did the blood bank get so desperate that they relaxed their guidelines for this along with everything else (the cooling-off period for donations after tattoos is now just three months–or no months, if you get tattooed in new jersey)? i won't look a gift needle in the mouth, but i will start donating platelets as often as i can. getting to read for two hours while watching my blood cycle through a machine, then drinking cranberry juice and feeling smugly helpful without actually having to interact with anyone? delectable. if they brought back those little bags of cheez-its for the are-you-going-to-faint-or-what tables it would be perfect.
on horse pills, we saw our, i don't know, sixth play of the year on thursday. it was love, set in a temporary housing center in england, and it was wonderful. in another month or so it will probably start feeling like too much to have two or three artsy nights out per week, but for now it's excellent. all of the new york city, right in the kisser, go ahead! tonight we're headed up to the philharmonic, and i will disco nap hard enough this afternoon that i definitely won't fall asleep in the middle of the program. it helps that i crammed in a tár viewing right before the oscars last week; cate blanchett is MSG for me when i don't have a taste for something on my own, though even her formidable work in i'm not there couldn't make me care about bob dylan. in a year in which michelle yeoh didn't win everything, CB would have won another oscar; instead she just floated around in a cocoon of louis vuitton ecosilk like the gracious technolympian she is. i doubt she was bothered.
both the editor and the freelancer who fact checked my draft have written to say how much they love my robot cat essay, which has been a real relief; i didn't want to make a big deal about how much it means to me, but as i've said, i'm trying to break their hearts. that feedback is nipping at me to plot out another weird passion project, but i'm not very good at premeditating those–certain kinds of writing are like throwing up. afterward you're usually able to piece together what happened to get you to that point and you're grateful to be on the other side, but it's generally an unhealthy thing to get into on purpose.
on intimate fluids, i gave blood for the first time in ages yesterday, and my iron levels were totally unremarkable. at last, i am iron woman! is it sobriety-related? did the random daily multivitamins some PR person mailed me work better than all the others i've tried? did the blood bank get so desperate that they relaxed their guidelines for this along with everything else (the cooling-off period for donations after tattoos is now just three months–or no months, if you get tattooed in new jersey)? i won't look a gift needle in the mouth, but i will start donating platelets as often as i can. getting to read for two hours while watching my blood cycle through a machine, then drinking cranberry juice and feeling smugly helpful without actually having to interact with anyone? delectable. if they brought back those little bags of cheez-its for the are-you-going-to-faint-or-what tables it would be perfect.
02.26.23 [on the F train]
the nasty adventure of my thinking it would be a good idea to immediately adopt a kitten–which joe wasn't on board with at all but was willing to endure without objection for my sake–seems to be over. last thursday i applied for a little flame point kitten i found on petfinder, and on friday the rescue group emailed to say that my vet and former vet didn't have much information on matty, and he hadn't been seen since 2021; had i taken him somewhere else, perhaps? i hadn't; he loses his shit when we pack him up to take him to the doctor, and between the pandemic and steve's acute illness we decided to let things ride for a bit. i wrote a quick note back explaining that in a way that made us sound at least non-monstrous, and i wrote a longer one the next day to emphasize our essential fitness as pet guardians. i sent another one on monday with a link to a catster piece i wrote back in 2015 about how matty was so shy with strangers that we got a baby monitor to point at his food dish so we could let the petsitter know he was still alive when we went out of town. that last email really felt like showing my ass; i'm easily googled and my writing would have turned up in a cursory search, but intentionally exposing myself and all kinds of positions some rescue-group rando might find objectionable (when i friended steve's foster on facebook years ago i soon learned she had a robust array of exotic political stances) felt desperate. it was desperate. i am used to cat groups leaping at the chance to give me fancy kittens; steve's foster called me an hour after i applied for him and marveled at how our vet knew us by name, then confided that we beat out a vet tech as potential adopters. she drove all the way to philly to meet us and make the ol' steve transfer. matty's foster wasn't quite as exclamatory, but she okayed my flying all the way to los angeles for him, a thumbs-up i wasn't expecting in the least even though my introductory note made the notebook sound like reservoir dogs. these jersey folks with the flame point kitten, though–nothing. their autoresponse said they'd only contact me if i was approved, and that i should wait five business days. i did, feeling a bit more like no one would give us a cat ever again with each one, and on thursday i googled the group to see if, i don't know, they seemed like the kind of people who would take exception to my having 50 copies of nineteen eighty-four. i found an absolutely scathing passel of yelp reviews alleging that their fosters were horrifically negligent, that their screenings for parasites and things like FIV were breezy at best, that they were abrasive and disinterested at adoption events and maybe a bit racist(?!)...and, by the by, they asked for more info and rejected or ignored strong-sounding candidates all the time. that is lousy news for the little kitten i'd hoped to bring home, assuming he's there and up for adoption at all, but it's a relief to me; i couldn't in good conscience bring a potentially-very-contagious cat to live with matty (several yelpers railed about feline coronavirus, which terrifies me), and maybe the stink of neglect doesn't cling to me as enthusiastically as i thought it did. we won't really know until we revisit this stuff when we're back from iceland in may–if we're not impulsively adopting a cat now, i want to wait until after that big absence so a new creature won't lack us immediately–but the thought has given me some peace, and i'm grateful for that now.
i asked my editor for an extension of the big cat essay i was to turn in two weeks ago, and she was kind about it, so i'll be turning a draft over early this week. the robot cat manufacturers i expected to ignore me actually got in touch a few days ago (still got it with cyborg cat people, baby!), so i have a singular mise en place of uncanny-valley stuff, philosophy, interview notes from a wonderful turkish documentarian, and bioacoustic studies to dump into the ecstatic poetry that got me in this mess and cook up...something. it might be really great! it is almost definitely going to be really long. i already worry that i'm going to disappoint the aforementioned documentarian in the brevity with which i'll visit some of these cat-musings, but essential catness and the human heart are a lot to unpack in 1500 words, reader. if i make a crack about efelines dreaming of wireless mice you have permission to fire me from a cannon.
coldest sidewalk shift of the winter at the ol' health clinic–i tucked a couple of hand warmers under my icelandic wool fingerless gloves and i still feel like i'm writing with frozen breakfast sausages. i was hoping the cold would keep most of the protesters away, and one of the regular churches did wimp out on us, but the ones that showed were especially noxious: livestreaming and filming us, blocking patients' access to the clinic door with one of their signs featuring tiny baby parts splattered on coins and dollar bills, heckling the security guard. i should feel lucky that they almost never single me out for abuse–i guess the same vibe that makes people ask me for directions and if the thing they're trying on looks good says that i won't really take it to heart if you tell me i'm no better than a school shooter. my typical unpicking of the morning's stitches is to hop out of the subway at the greenmarket on the way home, and i brought a couple of shopping bags with me, though i'm guessing vendors will be staying home today as well. i've already gotten enough frequent-frigid-shopper card punches for this year's winter warrior spoon, but they aren't carrying them at the administrative tent yet. where is my spoon, friends?
i asked my editor for an extension of the big cat essay i was to turn in two weeks ago, and she was kind about it, so i'll be turning a draft over early this week. the robot cat manufacturers i expected to ignore me actually got in touch a few days ago (still got it with cyborg cat people, baby!), so i have a singular mise en place of uncanny-valley stuff, philosophy, interview notes from a wonderful turkish documentarian, and bioacoustic studies to dump into the ecstatic poetry that got me in this mess and cook up...something. it might be really great! it is almost definitely going to be really long. i already worry that i'm going to disappoint the aforementioned documentarian in the brevity with which i'll visit some of these cat-musings, but essential catness and the human heart are a lot to unpack in 1500 words, reader. if i make a crack about efelines dreaming of wireless mice you have permission to fire me from a cannon.
coldest sidewalk shift of the winter at the ol' health clinic–i tucked a couple of hand warmers under my icelandic wool fingerless gloves and i still feel like i'm writing with frozen breakfast sausages. i was hoping the cold would keep most of the protesters away, and one of the regular churches did wimp out on us, but the ones that showed were especially noxious: livestreaming and filming us, blocking patients' access to the clinic door with one of their signs featuring tiny baby parts splattered on coins and dollar bills, heckling the security guard. i should feel lucky that they almost never single me out for abuse–i guess the same vibe that makes people ask me for directions and if the thing they're trying on looks good says that i won't really take it to heart if you tell me i'm no better than a school shooter. my typical unpicking of the morning's stitches is to hop out of the subway at the greenmarket on the way home, and i brought a couple of shopping bags with me, though i'm guessing vendors will be staying home today as well. i've already gotten enough frequent-frigid-shopper card punches for this year's winter warrior spoon, but they aren't carrying them at the administrative tent yet. where is my spoon, friends?
12.29.22 [on the 6 train]
it's warmed back up, and we're headed up to the bronx zoo - by 'we' i mean my local family minus joe, who is a good sport about excursions like these and no fool when given an elegant out - to look at lights, i think? my yen to craft enrichment piñatas for tigers up there was the beginning of my many years as a volunteer at the bird hospital; i tweeted about how my DIY skills were unimpressive to zookeepers and a friend who did wildlife rehab out on long island introduced me to my local bird people. i still haven't been back up there to volunteer since the winter before the pandemic, and i still can't tell you if or when i'll go. i know i miss being in a basement full of pigeons, and i know i don't miss sharing space with indifferent high school interns and, let's be honest, newer staffers who don't know what i already know how to do. i also miss the bad old days before best practices started including drawing a curtain around the waterfowl tank so human oglers don't disturb the birds. it is good and right to do that, and to speak as little as possible when handling patients and to discourage especially friendly ones, and it is fantastic that a big batch of tristate-area teens is learning that pigeons aren't voodoo dolls or garbage. i acknowledge this! i also miss slipping into the songbird flyway and having ben the cardinal swoop down to land on my shoulder and sing the song he only ever sang for me, which wouldn't ever happen again anyway; he's lived at the founder's house for years and years now, and he might not still be alive. i gave my beloved nonprofit bookstore a chance to evolve into something good after some unfortunate changes, and while i'll never be allowed to accidentally molest wildlife again, maybe i should give my relationship with the hospital a chance to heal into something different-but-serviceable. you know, like a pigeon's callused stump after its foot self-amputates. but i am a sentimental old goth and i also enjoy not knowing when i've done something for the last time. my dad and i happened to walk past the hospital earlier this week - it didn't dawn on me until it was about to happen - and i felt like i was driving past an ex-boyfriend's house. there were turtles in the window, but none i recognized or could greet by name.
12.17.22 [on the J train]
i remember my [abortion clinic escort] shift just before christmas last year as the coldest by far, and i have thus wildly overdressed in a sweater from the reykjavik red cross and some insulated stirrup pants(!) i bought for a press trip in the french alps long ago when the earth was flat. i had actually intended to ski on that trip, and after i mentioned as i got fitted for my equipment that i hadn't been on a slope since adolescence, someone showed up at my room with a supplemental insurance card. fair play, club med; fair play.
so i think what's happening is that i'm going to try blogging in a notebook whenever i ride the subway, a nod to the early days of writing out my posts on the back stairs when we lived in san francisco. less angrily, i hope, or angered for different reasons. we went out to bushwick last night for a son little show and when i met joe at a restaurant beforehand - a place styled to look like its owners' parents' turkish supper club in midcentury wisconsin, as i recall - he said i had a 'scattered and off' vibe (which he eventually attributed to the blogging). so that's something we can expect going forward, maybe. the show itself was at what i would call an archetypally bushwickian venue - hairy light-threaded star clusters hanging around the big old disco ball (joe called them neurons, i called them vogons), a big sign prohibiting body shaming, permanent illuminated signs for the EXIT, the COURTYARD/SMOKING, and FOOD TRUCK. the person who searched my bag noted faux-neutrally that i had a lot of earplugs. "you never know when you might grow another ear," i said. the bathroom attendant had a QR code in case you wanted to venmo him. son little himself was sleepily charismatic, and delighted when the crowd added in "whoa-whoa-whoa"s for the "blue magic" singalong. no one had done that before, he said, but it made sense that new york originated it, he reasoned.
i still haven't convinced my editor to take me up on the iceland travel piece i mentioned back in october, but i did sell and write her the iceland story i nearly reported for her colleagues on the print side more than a year ago, and i suspect it's going to do well. the many icelanders i interviewed have thus far been pleased with my diligence and accuracy, and that is all i really care about, though i certainly wouldn't sneeze at being the magazine's de facto iceland correspondent. one of the translators i pinged who was particularly generous with her expertise has been really warm as a general proposition, and i think maybe we'll be friends? (she seems to spend half the year in iceland and the other half in brooklyn.) that's especially buoying at the moment, for i seem to have lost friends this year.
in the course of an argument joe and i had in the spring, he told me that one of the old pals we'd visited in the dominican republic a few months prior had suggested to him that perhaps i had "the kind of syndrome that makes people rant in the street." i immediately texted said pal and told him how hurt i was that he'd made that suggestion. well i seemed not myself, said he. i explained that there had been a global pandemic, and that i was newly sober, traveling with a partner who was in serious distress, and unexpectedly writing my first piece for an outlet i badly wanted to impress while on vacation, and i guess i'd thought he would see me in the context of all those things, and extend me the empathy i've tried to have for everyone else as we navigate our respective challenges. i was also mortified, because i had worked so hard to be a good guest when we were out there; i couldn't believe i was being pathologized. i tried to explain that there had long been plenty of mental health professionals attending to me and that maybe calling me the manic street preacher of the lower east side was not thoughtful or kind, but he didn't seem very interested in listening to me. when i texted a few months later to say that i care about them and hoped we could figure something out, he and his wife said they want to meet me in person to talk about it; given how pear-shaped things seem to have gone the last time we saw each other, i don't want that. so i am mourning them. i thought they saw me.
is that brutal? what if anything do you owe someone who tells you they think you're something you're not and keeps insisting on it when you disagree and offer a bunch of evidence to the contrary? i don't intend for subway bloggin' to focus on mental health, which i don't enjoy discussing all that much, ironically, but i did just spend two hours getting properly preached out on a street corner, so i feel like i came by it honestly. this morning it wasn't all that cold, but the antis packed up on the early side, and i'm now officially done human-shielding for the year, praise hekate. take care of yourselves, and each other.
so i think what's happening is that i'm going to try blogging in a notebook whenever i ride the subway, a nod to the early days of writing out my posts on the back stairs when we lived in san francisco. less angrily, i hope, or angered for different reasons. we went out to bushwick last night for a son little show and when i met joe at a restaurant beforehand - a place styled to look like its owners' parents' turkish supper club in midcentury wisconsin, as i recall - he said i had a 'scattered and off' vibe (which he eventually attributed to the blogging). so that's something we can expect going forward, maybe. the show itself was at what i would call an archetypally bushwickian venue - hairy light-threaded star clusters hanging around the big old disco ball (joe called them neurons, i called them vogons), a big sign prohibiting body shaming, permanent illuminated signs for the EXIT, the COURTYARD/SMOKING, and FOOD TRUCK. the person who searched my bag noted faux-neutrally that i had a lot of earplugs. "you never know when you might grow another ear," i said. the bathroom attendant had a QR code in case you wanted to venmo him. son little himself was sleepily charismatic, and delighted when the crowd added in "whoa-whoa-whoa"s for the "blue magic" singalong. no one had done that before, he said, but it made sense that new york originated it, he reasoned.
i still haven't convinced my editor to take me up on the iceland travel piece i mentioned back in october, but i did sell and write her the iceland story i nearly reported for her colleagues on the print side more than a year ago, and i suspect it's going to do well. the many icelanders i interviewed have thus far been pleased with my diligence and accuracy, and that is all i really care about, though i certainly wouldn't sneeze at being the magazine's de facto iceland correspondent. one of the translators i pinged who was particularly generous with her expertise has been really warm as a general proposition, and i think maybe we'll be friends? (she seems to spend half the year in iceland and the other half in brooklyn.) that's especially buoying at the moment, for i seem to have lost friends this year.
in the course of an argument joe and i had in the spring, he told me that one of the old pals we'd visited in the dominican republic a few months prior had suggested to him that perhaps i had "the kind of syndrome that makes people rant in the street." i immediately texted said pal and told him how hurt i was that he'd made that suggestion. well i seemed not myself, said he. i explained that there had been a global pandemic, and that i was newly sober, traveling with a partner who was in serious distress, and unexpectedly writing my first piece for an outlet i badly wanted to impress while on vacation, and i guess i'd thought he would see me in the context of all those things, and extend me the empathy i've tried to have for everyone else as we navigate our respective challenges. i was also mortified, because i had worked so hard to be a good guest when we were out there; i couldn't believe i was being pathologized. i tried to explain that there had long been plenty of mental health professionals attending to me and that maybe calling me the manic street preacher of the lower east side was not thoughtful or kind, but he didn't seem very interested in listening to me. when i texted a few months later to say that i care about them and hoped we could figure something out, he and his wife said they want to meet me in person to talk about it; given how pear-shaped things seem to have gone the last time we saw each other, i don't want that. so i am mourning them. i thought they saw me.
is that brutal? what if anything do you owe someone who tells you they think you're something you're not and keeps insisting on it when you disagree and offer a bunch of evidence to the contrary? i don't intend for subway bloggin' to focus on mental health, which i don't enjoy discussing all that much, ironically, but i did just spend two hours getting properly preached out on a street corner, so i feel like i came by it honestly. this morning it wasn't all that cold, but the antis packed up on the early side, and i'm now officially done human-shielding for the year, praise hekate. take care of yourselves, and each other.
10.10.22
i got up at a quarter after six on saturday morning to take a train out to queens and mill around on the sidewalk in a rainbow vest for an hour, at which point the escort leaders ruled that no abortion protesters were going to show up to harass clinic clients and we could all go home for the week. this is the future liberals want! i hopped back off the train just north of union square to exclaim over dahlias, shell out for a bunch of foraged maitakes, and hem and haw through a pile of decorative gourds, then walked home and wrote a shitload of letters to prospective texas voters.
i keep wanting to re-pitch a travel piece on iceland that i dangled in front of a new editor a few months ago, but we're leaving town at the end of the month and i haven't gotten blasé enough about writing for this particular outlet that i could have a piece for them pending while i'm abroad. i should plan what we're doing when we're to be abroad! i should plan.
i keep wanting to re-pitch a travel piece on iceland that i dangled in front of a new editor a few months ago, but we're leaving town at the end of the month and i haven't gotten blasé enough about writing for this particular outlet that i could have a piece for them pending while i'm abroad. i should plan what we're doing when we're to be abroad! i should plan.
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