itstheinternetofthings

[itstheinternetofthings]

At my office, view of the Empire State Building, view of water tower and sky. I have many tasks to complete. I am well-dressed and busy. I have many friends and many hobbies. I take pleasure in nothing.

I am thinking about myself as a child, dancing in public, so sure of a world that would protect me. So very loved.

I take pleasure in nothing. I cannot be stimulated enough. I walk and I walk and I walk. Restless at home, sad outside.

Will I feel happy again? When? Stevie Nicks’ ragged voice on silver springs: you will never get away from the sound of the woman who loves you. (Men are fickle and pathetic. Men lie.)

I can’t write anything good about this. My words are trite.

All I can say is that at one point I was a happy dancing girl, and now I am gray as the sky, aging and bitter with nothing beautiful to say.

[itstheinternetofthings]

Since you left I haven't written, haven't had anything to say.

When people ask, I tell them:

It happened like this. I feel sad. I feel angry. Yes, I know it will be okay. Yes, I know it was for the best. I shouldn't be feeling sad or angry, you're right. Thank you for that.

English is a stupid fucking language for anything other than business transactions.

[itstheinternetofthings]

Routines

I am trying o God I am trying

I have woken up early I have journaled three pages I have practiced spanish I have made my bed and done the dishes

I have walked in the park cold and bright and spoken to dogs and spoken to neighbors

I have logged into slack I have peppered emojis I have sent emails I am trying

I have had my ginger shot, my black tea, my honey

When I sit too still and hear the silence of my house I want to die, I want to fucking die. But you can't say I'm not trying.

I invent errands. I go to the gym. I listen to podcasts and I blast trash TV, avoiding that stillness, that silence, that heartbreak.

If the pain could speak, what would it say? my therapist asks me about my headache, or my stomachache, or the stabbing sensation i get in my sternum

gail it wouldn't say anything it would just wail like a ragged fucking animal deep as a well and dry as a bone, without eyes and without mouth

[itstheinternetofthings]

ducks

I am watching The Ultimatum: Queer Love

I am swiping through profiles on feeld, boring looking guys with names like “spanko” and “dom the dom” and I’m lol-ing but also my skin is lifting off my body slightly

I am buying mysterious, small-batch perfume with names like “dauphine” and “lartigue”

I am sucking on a prescription ketamine lozenge

I am having hard conversations every day

Suddenly he needs to have sex with other people and our wedding is in six months. The feeld profiles were my idea but a long time ago, when I was someone different. I feel sad. Like two ducks swimming in a pond and one day one of the ducks decides they can’t live without testing out different waters. He’s out right now, meeting up with someone, sharing experiences without me, and I’m here at my window, typing.

This couple on The Ultimatum is breaking up, but one of them doesn’t know yet, and she’s smiling, thinking they are about to get married. Cruel.

Every day I am waking up early and writing three pages, first thing, before looking at my phone or having tea. The pages are bad, the writing is illegible, but I guess at least I’m writing something.

The summer is hot and wet and green, and I am changing in ways I won’t understand until it’s all already over.

[itstheinternetofthings]

My friend works at a bar in the west village that is known for first dates. I went to visit her tonight, as I sometimes do when it is slow on a Monday/Tuesday, and soon the place was full of explicit early dates, hinge drinks, or meetups with an old friend above which there has always hovered a question mark.

While it is slow she reads pieces of my astrological chart. Leonine in my relationships and angry about my childhood. Yes, I say. Bingo.

We order sushi for delivery; she chopsticks a piece or two in between mixing Negronis. Privately i wonder why Negronis are so popular, being, as they are, nasty.

I complement a man on his vintage corduroy pants, and then immediately worry it sounds like I’m hitting on him, especially when he looks up at me with intense dark eyes and says “they are early 20th century French work pants." I am relieved, later, when a dough-faced woman in a sharp white puffer arrives and greets him for their First Date.

(An observation that here in New York there are of course the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen in real life, but there are also mostly a lot of regular looking women like me who get by on wit, confidence, force, and cool clothing.)

The bar is small and dark and intimate. Counters of porous stone, mirrors behind the artisanal spirits, soft shadows and candlelight. Romantic and anonymous. I think if I were dating I would meet someone there for the first time. I remember the humiliation and delight of first dates, the rage of the heterosexual power imbalance, running into the thick and sticky wall of my own self-loathing. Fucking to prove my superiority, wearing the mask of my bright girlhood. Quenching the thirst of my abnegation bent over the bed, white knuckling the bedsheets. Sex for power rather than pleasure, sex to affirm that I was trash - both. Even the nicest guys on first dates reflected back to me my ugliness.

My friend tells me about her threesome last night, how it was boring until someone brought coke, and how the young person they were fucking was so young -25 - how could they not be submissive. They let us fist them, she said. We dommed them all night.

After two hours or so I leave, take the long way back to the train through the icy sleepy streets of the village, wrapped in my lime shearling coat. Looking into living rooms, listening to hot chip, freezing. Stopping in the Japanese grocery for daifuku mochi, and thinking that this was the antidote, the necessary dose- a long walk in inclement weather, an empty Tuesday night in a neighborhood with winding streets and new faces, and to once more become a solitary and social ravenous creature, alive and shivering.

[itstheinternetofthings]

Turnstile GLOW ON

This is the best fucking album I can’t get enough of it I blast out my ear drums at the gym my body soldered to a machine looking down at Amsterdam and 76th I want to move as fast as I can until my heart is exploding confetti I want to stand on a stage in front of hundreds of people and scream I go FAST I am ANGRY I am unable to control my own impending doom and the unsurvivability of everything I love the fire orange of autumn and the soft grass of spring the power of my muscles in the river the birds in the ramble eating from feeders the scent of my husband rising in the morning the monsoons blooming over the desert the songs I sing with my parents and the water I drink with abandon all of it will die and die and die before it should and I am running as fast as I can on this machine I am screaming with my throat with my body with my bones

[itstheinternetofthings]

Nick said he’s going to build me a real blog so maybe I can stop posting in secret like this, the group joke of my secret tumblr sad girl poetry posted only for the eyes of someone from a long lost era, but Nick has been busy rearranging his brain chemistry and marveling at the wonder of stretching, cuddling, birdsong, and crossword puzzles. At times I am even annoyed by it, his born-again unbridled enthusiasm for life, but I am still in the prison of crippling anxiety, the same one I’ve always been in, unaided by Prozac or lexapro, furtively inhaling ketamine and mixing kratom lattes in search of some kind of relief from being bent over in the kitchen crying at the thought of being so acutely perceived

Incredible what a curmudgeon I am after all, incredible that what I’ve resisted for so long - medication, psychiatric assistance - is now seeming more and more like a good idea. Will I lose my humor, will I bound like a labrador into life? Tongue flopping tail wagging, no fear just cringey sincere enthusiasm and desire to love?

Will I lose my ability to crumble into music, to cry on the train? Or will it simply, as I’ve been told, open a door, the choice to walk through still belonging to me?

Anyway. I’m heading into the office, wearing the scarf I made myself. It is the most beautiful scarf in the world. Last night we spontaneously went to an experimental theater on the east side and saw the immortal jellyfish girl, a Norwegian puppet show about the end of the world. Probably there are profound things I could say about it but mostly what I think of is how mesmerizing the puppets were- not creepy clacking marionettes but something otherworldly and mysterious, like a dream come to life. The electric glowing jellyfish girl sleeping in her tank. The slender disembodied head, it’s graceful roving disembodied arm, reaching out to murder with a single elegant flick of the wrist.

It felt good to get out and see art, I suppose it is one of the best reasons to live in this complicated city. I should do it more. I felt calm after, satiated. I made a pasta dish and we watched the show about the geisha chef and slept deeply, so deeply.

[itstheinternetofthings]

the moon comes home once a year

I love January. It is cold and there is nothing happening. I am knitting a very large scarf and listening to podcasts. Today for example I learned that there was a communist dictator in Romania not too long ago. He was shot in the back of the head the year before I was born. He forced a pro-natality policy on the people that led to a generation’s worth of babies being born unwanted or abandoned. I know so little about the world.

I am going on long frigid walks under bare trees revealing sky and building and moon. I am spending long moments watching my cats. I am starting to plan my wedding - pinning dresses to a board, dreaming about autumns and gold rings and veils. I am exercising: a dance class today; boxing last week. My muscles are sore and good.

On Friday Anya came over and we worked from my living room - me tip-tapping my little emails for my little corporate job while she annotated Italo Calvino for illustration and applied to artists residencies. Around 5 Caitlin came over, sweeping in like a sea witch in velvet and bright purple lipstick, wild black hair fanning her shoulders like kelp. She had never been to my house before and I found I was charmed by her precise diction and raucous laugh. It is good to have new New York friends, these art school astrologers.

We were gathering for a full moon ritual. At the appointed time we went deep into Central Park, dark except for street lamps and the moon hiding behind clouds. I brought us to Ladies Pavilion, the blue wrought-iron gazebo next to the Loch where this year I will be married. At Caitlin’s instruction we gathered leaves and twigs and dried baby’s breath from the ground and built a nest under the gazebo. It was beautiful, breathtaking even, in the darkness. My heart was racing - maybe from too much nicotine? - and I tried to breathe slow and steady.

Caitlin tore a paper in thirds and handed us each a piece. There was only one sharpie so we took turns writing our wishes with our phone flashlights. Then we placed the papers in the nest and burned them.

When we looked up, the moon was out from behind the clouds, bright and piercing. Happy birthday moon, we said. Thank you moon, we love you moon. It was exuberant and holy. We talked about our wishes, looking out over the lake, the city blurring in the water’s reflection.

Back at my house we met up with Tina and ordered Vanessa’s Dumplings. Even Anya ate something. We talked for a long time, alcohol and ketamine, feeling subdued and thoughtful. Anya made a fire using torn up things from the recycling as kindling. We talked about sex frankly. We talked about our fears and our sadnesses. It felt good to be honest. It felt good to be trusted. It felt good to be vulnerable, and receive vulnerability in return.

Now it is tonight and I have made shakshuka for dinner. There is a cat on my lap and I am getting sleepy. Things keep going wrong but it doesn’t matter. I am creatively bereft and often depressed. And yet recently I feel a happiness that is not quite delirious but not far from it either. As though this is the life I always wanted for myself. 

I want to make writing a practice again.

[itstheinternetofthings]

king spa

It’s the first week of January. Nick has been gone since the day after new years, and its gray and balmy outside - creepy, ominous for this-deep winter. I’m working from home, trying to remember what my job is, speaking to no one for long stretches at a time.

It’s incredible how much I don’t care about my job.

Yesterday Tina and Bríd asked me to play hooky and go with them to King Spa, in New Jersey. My calendar was empty and I was lonely, lonely, lonely, so I said yes. It had been three years since I last went to the Korean Spa. It was a thing for a while in LA, remember? Meet up with a girlfriend at the spa for the afternoon, try out a different place each time or stick, stubbornly, to the American-friendly Olympic. Chitchat naked in the mugwort bath. I’d go alone a lot too, usually when I didn’t know what else to do with myself, and I’d feel strange and amphibious and lonely in those pools, trying to focus on my breathing, trying to simply be.

It was better this time. Perhaps it was the friends - I am so comfortable with Bríd and Tina, even though I’ve known them for less than a year. Perhaps also the pandemic flat-lined much of my restlessness and now I’m all too happy to simply lie down in a nice space and exist. Perhaps its also that my body, which used to torture me with its imperfections, now mostly feels like an enjoyable machine.

The single-gender spas are below, where clothes and shoes are prohibited. Up above, we put on our oversized pink shorts and shirts and walk barefoot through various lounges. The saunas were behind adorable little fairy doors - Tina had said, as if Lord of the Rings was set in Korea - and each felt like a unique ritual space. To lie in the heat and feel pre-modern. To never wear shoes on heated floors. To carry no phone, no wallet, nothing except your own luminous form.

The centerpiece was a giant kiln, heated to 200 degrees celsius, inside which you were only permitted for a few minutes at a time. They cook eggs there each day and you can buy them at the restaurant, dark-yolked and smoky (we ate them with sriracha and soy sauce). Inside the kiln - a circle of people, faces covered with towels, sitting silently in the dark primordial heat. It felt like the dawn of time, delicious and painful and holy. My lips vibrated and cracked and if we’d stayed long enough we’d die.

Then the ice room to recover- exposed pipes covered in snow-white frost, two rows of birch stumps on tatami. And the room where you stuck your feet under infrared light to no obvious effect, though “increased metabolism” was promised. The amethyst room, where the round walls were covered in spiky crystals and geodes and I felt, understandably, like ancient royalty.

What you do in these rooms is lie down, or sit, depending on the options.  You sit or you lie and you simply are there, maybe chatting or maybe in total silence. You can, for what its worth, also bring your laptop and/or watch TV. There is a room for everything.

Warm to cool to hot to cold, steam to dry and back again. Resting for a while with a book, taking periodic breaks to order food from the cafe. I was a beautiful slick animal, resting, eating, socializing gently. My muscles soft as pudding. My brain slowly slowing. In that windowless space, it could be any time of day. Part of me wanted to stay forever.

It healed me, or at least partly. I do not feel anxious today, or even lonely. I feel like a person, in an overcold apartment, who woke up and felt like writing.

[itstheinternetofthings]

And what if I just wrote out the stuff I was doing, straightforward and unsentimental and clear?

I have my improv class show tonight. I’m a little nervous, in a good way. I definitely feel like the dynamic in that class has been weird, but how much of that was just me and my own snobbish disdain, my own insecurities? Either way, I’m lying down on the beanbag with the Tems device on my neck. It feels like it’s about to give out at any moment. Also I’m starving.

I leave for Phoenix on Monday. I’m glad to go. It’s becoming that time of year here where things are cold and quiet and everyone goes away. It can be cozy or lonely i suppose. I think since living with nick my loneliness tolerance has decreased. Now when it comes I feel it sharp and desolate; I don’t know how to hold it still.

I guess that’s the thing about being in a couple- i have a feeling of family with me even if I’m far from my parents.

We went to sleep no more with Zach and Michael on Monday. It was beautiful, eerie, my favorite part being the moments where I walked alone in the darkness and felt afraid and unsettled and extremely alive.

I feel weird in that friend group if I’m being honest. If I’m being honest I have a lot more social anxiety everywhere than maybe it would seem. I’m always buzzing and buzzing and restless and performing.

Working on knitting, running, exercising in general. Talking with nick about our sex life, how we want to try adding some other people on occasions. A threesome, or another group sex event. How thrilling it might be to fuck in front of watching eyes. I also said it would be fun to go to Vegas and pretend I was his hired escort for a night. I turned myself on thinking of what I would wear, of how it would feel to have all eyes on me, certain I was a whore.

Speaking of. We are watching white lotus finally. We are doing ketamine again almost every night. Nick does more than me, a lot more. We do it in small doses so we mostly just feel vaguely high, not k hole level or anything.

What will I do once this class is over. What kind of creative outlet will I find? Or will I revert to how ti was before, ignoring all my creative needs and letting myself wither, unravel like yellow wallpaper, or maybe even turn to stone.

[itstheinternetofthings]

What I miss, what I want, is to dance with you high and raving. hyper stimulation simulation. Not you yourself but you the concept - unavailable and gleaming. I want you right at the moment I attain you - not a minute more not a minute less.

In my fantasy we are in Vegas. A mega club. Rolling. We are dancing and dancing and kissing and kissing. We are glittery and bright. Anonymous and specific. A consummation of a decade and half’s longing. We were never for each other, I know. But we intoxicated each other. Me in your eyes, you in mine, not real never fully human. What I want from you is infatuation, obsession, hyper reality, hyperpop. I am being silly, I am getting married, I don’t wish it any other way. But I do wish we had had more. I wish I had said yes to you more instead of being, frankly, afraid.

I miss feeling overawake and overalive. You always made me feel that way. Back when I used to live in LA, find cool new music, wear clothes full of holes that cost three dollars. I miss the nothingness of being 23 and doing cocaine at art galleries and gyrating at the echoplex. The flat endless 36-month summer in the foothills of the san gabes. Pressed against the warehouse wall making out with a Jordan Catalano lookalike, kind enough to light my cigarette. SOPHIE Hudson Mohawk Alice Glass, a dream within a dream.

Who am I kidding the truth is I want to be high all the time and today gray and sober as ever I am craving you, the greatest drug I can remember

I post here when I am longing, longing

[itstheinternetofthings]

during the pandemic I started watching a lot of TV. the first time in my life really - gobbling up one show after another. working all day at a tiny kitchen table, talking myself hoarse over zoom, eager to collapse on the couch and eat Phish Phood and watch The Crown, Love is Blind, Euphoria - everything.

it’s occurring to me that, probably like most people, I haven’t processed the pandemic in terms of how I was affected on a personal scale. not to mention the way in which we were all affected on an interpersonal, systemic scale. how could we? some things are too big to eat all at once.

today, still early, the first day of Fall and another season changing, sitting here at my DIY reading desk feeling inexplicably fatigued and wary. of the changing light and the depression it might bring. of every up and coming plan, no matter how exciting. of the world in general.

i used to have a spiritual practice. it was toxic and cultish but it still brought me a level of joy and peacefulness and presence i hadn’t thought possible. it also gave me, for a time, cool powers - my dreams were prophetic and knife-blade real and in waking life I knew things before they would happen. sensitive like sensodyne - honing my intuition and my ability to perceive. now i spend all of my time reading twitter. 

i would stretch, meditate, work out like crazy. refused to own a microwave or wear clothes that weren’t thrifted. could eat just a handful of calories a day. had a whole different group of friends. its crazy how your primary relationship can change so quickly. just a few years later and your life is not the same, not in any way.

now i watch tv, i read, i scroll. i live far far away in a place that feels like too much for me. nick and i used to meditate by looking into each others eyes and synchronizing our breathing; now we stare at separate computers.

i dont know if something was lost. i know much was gained. but i wonder, i guess, if the discontent I feel isn’t spontaneous, but rather a compilation of several years of isolation and renewal, reworking and realignment, and realizing I’ve never taken the time to mourn nor I have taken the time to envision what I want my life to be like after and within and as a result of - the carnage. I’ve just been existing as if everything is fine and the same.

[itstheinternetofthings]

corporate retreat

friday in central park - I’m so exhausted I almost fell asleep on this big rock. my body so heavy so tired.

I have a coworker who goes running every day even on just a few hours of sleep. she’s whippet-thin, vaguely French, wearing dresses, getting promoted (for the record i like her i’m just jealous). I am a gremlin. Unwilling to work through pain, discomfort, fatigue. 

Austin, Buffalo, Indiana - three cities in as many weeks. Several consecutive late nights at various themed bars - I had forgotten I love drinking. Working and playing and working and -

The Company has replaced God for the average American worker. Your colleagues are your spiritual community. The corporate mission, your values. The founder’s story, your creation myth. I read this in a book about being a good people manager. They said it unironically.

I am shouting at the wine bar (cheugy corporate industrial graffiti core). I am shouting at the beer garden (oktoberfest concept, sausages and wooden benches). It is so hard to be heard. People ask how’s new york and I have to try to answer that. Or, how is being engaged and I have to try to distill my entire relationship into sound bytes. I am celebrating my 32nd birthday drinking two-steps at the honky tonk. I’m too drunk to buy myself a cake. I am popular, in my red dress, in my black. I am the one everyone knows. My conversations are constantly interrupted by another greeting, a side hug, a squeal. I enjoy this. I shimmer in my likeability, my infamy. Stay up all hours, high on chatting. The ecstatic transcendence.

“I don’t know what I want. Only what I don’t want.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Anal.”

Before I can ask “giving or receiving?” we are interrupted by someone’s manager, drunk and sloshing, giving hugs.

Now the social marathon is over and I’m alone in central park. This hard rock. A horror novel. Autumn rising. Mercury’s in Gatorade. Everyone is jogging. No one knows who I am. The silence and anonymity. It’s giving comedown. It’s giving breakdown. It’s giving the solitude and rest I can only tolerate once I’ve pushed myself mentally physically and emotionally to the absolute limit and suspended myself there for days and days and days on end. My cycle of exertion and exhaustion. Religiosity and reprisal. Death and rebirth etcetera, oh Lord our Job, King of the Universe, with Liberty and Justice for All. 

[itstheinternetofthings]

kitty

you tell me the best part of my poem is when i admit i’m nervous. you say, lean into that ragged edge. you don’t say ragged edge, I made that up. 

the rest of the poem is not very good, but you don’t say that either.

you are not a poet, but you might be later. you do not stop yourself creating. you make paintings and software and games and antennas. you build a computer. you have a great idea for a novel. I was surprised, when I unpacked our books, to see all of that poetry.

you say, do you know how many bad paintings I’ve made? how many times I fail every day? i say, you are so different from me. you do not fear to fail. you never think, too old.

i tell you, maybe i’ll take an acting class. you say, yes yes yes. you ask me, will you play me the piano? can I listen to you sing? you do not look at me and see mediocrity, lost opportunities, waste. you see, have always seen, me.

at the park on a saturday you ask me to be your wife. I ask, are you serious? you say, yes yes yes.

kitty, I will play you my little halting songs forever. I will sing to you with my untrained voice. 

[itstheinternetofthings]

21 feb

we facetimed last night with our friend who moved to mexico city. they told us about their long weekend in zipolite, how after just a 45 minute flight they found themselves in a perpetual festival community of queers on a nudist beach sleeping in a cabaña next to the ocean. how one morning they rolled out of their hammock to swim in the sea, left with nothing but a towel, and remained naked all day - through the town, on the beach, taking lovers in the sand, kissing strangers in the waves, until returning to the cabaña at near dawn to sleep.

we want to go and visit. we, ostensibly hetero, with full-time salaried jobs and comparatively regular bedtimes. I feel the clash of who I am. nic, always already wild, is a person who stumbled into stability and is casually ready dissolve it in an instant. me, I am a person for whom stability and skeletons are the only thing i know and any deviation quickly reveals my truth. maybe it’s how I was raised, cloistered and anxious, over-scheduled with activities, a typical suburban millennial high-achieving childhood. maybe it’s my ancestral puritan guilt.

I want to be free. I want to be free. I want to be on a sailboat on an azure sea without worry or responsibility weighing down my mind. I want to be free and know that I am free. Remember my travels in my twenties? remember that feeling? I had all the trappings of freedom and still I felt heavy as a wall.

there were flashes. in the airbnb bathroom in amsterdam three summers ago, as I climbed into the clawfoot tub and I realized that I didn’t want to go home, that I could stay there and be that version of me people sometimes think I am. or last summer at the farm, acid and ketamine, fireflies and stars.

yesterday afternoon I ask nic to tie my wrists to the headboard and go down on me and I came almost immediately, again and again and again. loss of control, surrender. if I am to be who I want to be in sex - restrained, at the mercy of, caressed and objectified, without agency - oh how I dissolve in pleasure, oh how free i can be. my desire comes alive and all I want is to suck cock, beg for it. the incredibly un-cool, un-feminist urge to sub.

where is the throughline. we want to go and visit mexico city, we want to party with the art kids, and yet i can’t seem to find time between obligations to make the trip. classes I’ve signed up for, friends who are visiting, everyone only has just a small window of time in which to make it work. i’m always postponing pleasure, putting off the day when i’ll finally seek out what I want. for years I just had regular sex with regular men - a grunting charade - and even now mostly I maintenance fuck; we kiss and say i love you. today i wake up sick of it and yet I cannot reconcile my two selves, the woman who wants long-term relationships (painstakingly maintained), who wants a good job and an impressive skillset, and the person, queered and snarling, who wants to be ass-up in a warehouse getting fingerfucked by strangers. for Nic, there is no difference - he is a person of continuity and the stable lifestyle we have now is not at odd with his wilderness. for me, it’s as if giving into either side is a betrayal.

we want to go and visit Mexico city, but there is a hetero wedding to attend, and a friend just had a baby, i’m overdue to see my parents, and my friends want to visit new york and take pictures for instagram. the constrictions we place on ourselves in these models of relationship when really they could be anything we want. we could live anywhere we want, however we want.

all the women i know are marrying, taking their husband’s names, doubling down on nuclear families and the promises of capitalism. i am in this world. and yet i circle visions of another.

[itstheinternetofthings]

Books Read 2021

The first year I recorded every title consumed. I didn’t read as much this year as I thought I would, but I did see some really good tv. Maybe I’ll keep a list of that next year too.

Feminism is for Everybody - bell hooks

Early last year I realized my political and feminist education was patchy and  derivative. I read this book through the end days of 2020 and wrapped it up the first quiet week of the new year. I can’t believe she just died as this year closes out. I have so much more to read, to learn, to embody.

Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen

This book was light, fun, kinda stupid. I read it in a three day bender, most of it in one afternoon when I called out sick from work and lay in my sunlit studio apartment bed, suspended between sleep and story.

Sister Outsider - Audre Lorde

I’ve read the essay on pleasure several times now. My favorite essay is the one where she goes to soviet russia and uzbekistan. This woman opened new corners of my mind. Took a really great bath with this book too.

Queenie - Candice Carty-Williams

I fangirl. A bridget jones style with heavy racial justice content. I feel in love with the protagonist, her flaws and her strengths. Also every man in here was completely nauseating and scary. What a world.

The Memorial - Christopher Ischerwood

I found this in a little free library when I went to drop off some old books. It was pretty good, somewhat forgettable, a glimpse into upper class queer english life.

People’s History of Chicago - Kevin Coval

Raleigh gave me this poetry volume years ago, when she moved back from Chicago after finishing her doctorate. It was so much better than I expected, and I was shocked to find out after reading it that Kevin Coval is a white guy???

InvestED - Danielle Town

The year I realized i needed to start investing. I started with this book, recommended by my brother. Nick read it too, and thankfully found it more interesting than I. We did some of the exercises together and eventually decided it was probably better to just throw our money into index funds than to try to beat the market. Also, this author used to fly from Boulder to Geneva for a saturday/sunday dick appointment and then be back in the office on Monday like wtf girl that is next level.

The Makioka Sisters - Junichiro Tanazaki

Beautiful, melancholy, a gorgeous find from the used bookstore in the k-town mall. Four sisters from a dying world. A universe I could just barely imagine.

Homegoing- Yaa Gyasi

Wow, wow, wow, wow. The generations that make us. The trauma we inherit and pass down. Lives lived and paths taken. We carry it all. Just a chapter or a page away. Devourable.

Mating in Captivity - Esther Perel

I find myself recommending this book at least once a month, to couples and singles alike. I reference it constantly. It was recommended to Nick and I by our couple’s therapist in LA, and it gave us a language to communicate about tricky taboo things - uncouth fantasies, desiring others outside the relationship, the diminishing of attraction as intimacy deepens. It normalized a lot of the things I thought were wrong or sinister about my desires. Just in talking about these topics, the fear and claustrophobia of monogamy waned. Read it, read it, read it.

American Sunrise - Joy Harjo

I loved the poems and I loved her love of the saxophone.

Dear Girls - Ali Wong

Not usually the kind of book I would choose, but this was the week we were moving and I was overwhelmed, stressed, and pretty fucking depressed so I was hoping for something that could make me chuckle. It wasn’t _that_ funny but she did talk about the horrors of pregnancy in a way that was new to me, and I think in general this book opened me to comedy as an art form.

Minor Feelings - Cathy Park Hong

Devastating essays. I recently went to the REI in the Puck building to buy a warm hat, and later realized I might have been standing in the spot where Theresa Cha was brutally raped and murdered. 

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot

Turns out the Lacks family hates Rebecca Skloot and this book, but I didn’t find out until months after I finished it. Shout out to the Lackses, those people deserve better.

The Piano Teacher - Janice K Lee

Given to me by a friend. Wasn’t too impressed. Still, a fun portrayal of a party girl in high society hong kong in the years leading up to WWII. Makes me think about how much the colonial era shaped everything. I also like the scene at the end where the blonde english lady just goes all in on hong kong, orders her noodles like a local, and never looks back.

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

A lot has already been said on this, I don’t think I have anything new to add, only that it’s basically perfect. One of the few male writers I really like.

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Forever altered the way I look at this country, at my ancestry, at history and education and identity as a whole. I will never be the same. I can’t recommended it enough.

Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

Nothing like crying on the train even though you already knew that they both die

Fingersmith - Sarah Waters

Holy shit, my favorite book I read this year, plowed through this dickensian lesbian victorian crime drama like it was an ice cream sundae. Can’t wait to read the rest of her work.

Pleasure Activism - adrienne marie brown

I love the project. Her voice irritated me at times but that’s probably my own shit I need to work out. Love the message that collective liberation is the most pleasurable thing there is - and exploring how we can really feel that it’s so.

The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

Ugh, hated this. Made me feel so disgusted, bored, depressed. I know he’s the shit or whatever but just no.

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

More monster. Less Victor. 

Dune - Frank Herbert

I mean it was fine. All the characters were so flat and lifeless, I didn’t really care at all when they died or changed. Timothy Chalamet is the hottest though, worth it just to see him on screen in that little prince suit being so tall and skinny like a sexy whippet.

The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh

Had this on my shelf since forever, meaning to read it and give it back to Olivia. I thought it would be boring but omg what a page turner. Who knew cetology could be so fun and sexy?

Untouchable - Mulk Raj Anand

The uncanny, almost shameful freefall feeling when you realize other cultures and countries have histories just as deeply nuanced, philosophy and politics just as complex, as anything the European and American cultures have every produced, and that as an educated person I know just the barest sliver of what it could mean to exist in this world, of what kinds of questions have been asked. I hope that this feeling continues to unfold and reinforce itself for as long as I live.

[itstheinternetofthings]

slouching towards

this feeling - heavy, slow, flat. extra padding at my hips and belly, as if I’m retaining salt, or made of it. how long has this been going on - since October? since before? only now it’s accelerated, or grown louder. I am not sure if it is a speed or a sound. only that it is, every day, more conspicuous.

crying on the phone with anthem insurance. please it isn’t fair, I need help, I need care. what the fuck is wrong with this fucking system? can you hear me on this recording, you capitalist criminals? shh, shh, the customer service agent soothes me. I’m sorry to yell, I say, I’m not mad at you. I know, she says, I know.

crying on Amsterdam walking home from Knitty City, dark already at 4pm, the day over before it begins. I am listening to frank sinatra; I have never done things my way.

dreading new years, dreading january, dreading my return to work. each day piling up on the next, thick and congested and blursed. All year I had been writing down what I did each day in my slingshot planner, but I’ve let the last two weeks go by blank.

I talk to myself in spanish at trader joes in Duolingo-style children’s sentences. Ahora, tengo que comprar naranjas. Necesito una cebolla amarilla. I am practicing, practicing. I practice piano, I practice knitting. Can’t you see that all my hobbies are just here to keep my hands busy and my breathing calm? That I am creating noise to drown out the ever-faster beating of my heart? It’s 11pm and the void has found me, as usual.

joan didion died, bell hooks died, I fear my friends are dying and I’ll never know without instagram. in fact I am crying now.

I only came here to write because it’s the only generative thing I know how to do. remember when I was a writer, an artist, a brilliant mind? remember when everyone thought I would be someone important, and I thought that life would be great as long as the champagne was flowing and my outfit was cute?

I know, or I think I know, that I am feeling this way because I do not have a vocation, a thing that brings me purpose. I do not have a generative creative practice that reminds me constantly that I am divine, that I am alive. I am not living my right life, at least in terms of what I do all day long. I am not being who I am. 

omg while i was writing that sentence hermes just jumped from the desk to the loft and got stuck and hung there in midair like a daredevil shrimp until I reached him and held him and brought him slowly to the floor. I don’t know what this means but I had to write it down.

I’ve never really done depression; I’ve always been more of an anxiety girl. This slow-heavy, this creature-feeling. I hate it and I don’t know how to get out. I feel the apocalyptic careening and find futurity hard to to fathom, the seeds impossible to plant, the heartbreak and hardship wailing from the yet-to-come.