I am a big fan of the ceremony of reality competition shows. Never before have the sort of things they take just the most seriously ever elicited such solemn reverence. We just accept that there’s something called a “rose ceremony” with no question. Of course there is. You’re given a rose and then you pick out a boy. The women are all wearing evening gowns, I can only guess because they know their connections are so tenuous that they feel looking like a particularly sex-positive prom queen one last time could be what really locks it in for them. They make the women struggle with pinning the rose on the guy’s shirt. Oftentimes, the giving of said rose was strategic in some way (this is, after all, a game) so there are a lot of awkward close ups of a woman stabbing a man she’s potentially repulsed with a tiny sword for the world’s longest 10 seconds.

I love it.

I love Top Chef when they have a high stakes challenge on deck and they tell them to draw knives from a knife block to pick teams, or decide the protein you get to work with, or the order in which they get to kiss Tom Collichichcioo’s ass (dummies, everyone knows Padma Lakshmi was always in charge of all of everything.) When they say “draw knives” there’s this wonderful little bit of sound design they drop into the shot which is the sound of knives, ostensibly being pulled out of the block, but in reality sounds like they are slicing against each other, like two chefs halted dinner service for a quick dual. It is both menacing and incredibly satisfying. Then one by one, the chefs step up to the Knife Block of Truth and take turns pulling out enormous knives with words printed on them that determine their fate.

Roses. Knives. Every show has their little ceremonial moment, and it’s been this way since the dawn of Survivor.

Tribal councils. A backstreet boy clone with a soul patch that can only be described as infuriating filling a modest New Jersey neighborhood with strangers yelling “Move that bus!” (Makes me cry every time btw.) Girls not just saying the word “yes”, but instead reciting the phrase “I’m saying yes to this dress!” like a hungry robot because that’s the deal and they want nothing more than to spend the entirety of their 15 minutes of fame fighting with their mother while buying an criminally overpriced white dress on basic cable.

Anything like this, anything with a slight structure and a fun enough premise, and I am in, substance be damned.

I would like to try to work some of that ceremony into my life. I could just hold on to all my mail for a month and once a month take two xanaxes and open it all at once. Or at night when I’m flossing, when I get to each tooth space I think of something I’m grateful for. There have to be ways to have more ceremony in one’s life without summoning the dead, or drinking something that tastes like dirt and drugs and potentially coming to in the middle of an Erewhon. Crystal-free ways to make the day feel weighty. Significant. Becoming a tea drinker could probably do the trick. But I just far prefer the taste of bean water to leaves water, and if I do both my brain might explode.

I do think it’s a good idea to lean more towards being grateful. If you can, you know? Only if it feels right. But if you can’t be grateful right now, or ever, I think that is completely valid too. This world is a mess. People can treat each other really poorly, not me of course because I’ve never hurt a single person, but other people. It can get dark, and being told to scrape around at the bottom of the barrel for feelings of gratitude has to be so exhausting. Stop scraping, girl. Just come sit down over here and we’ll have an undercooked chocolate chip cookie and watch some Top Chef.

As I write this, I’m watching two extremely muscularly endowed guys remove my belongings from my apartment, piece by piece, at an impressive pace, plucking bags and boxes off the pile one by one like they weigh nothing and require very little effort to handle.

As I do my best to stay out of the way, I am itching to help, not because I think I’m actually going to be a particularly useful addition to the team but because of the intense guilt I feel when watching other people work while I stand around. This is a stipulation of the moving company, me not touching anything, but still it feels awkward to tuck myself into the one corner of this apartment that isn’t covered in reusable crates and furniture and ignore them.

I was stressed yesterday, stressed about getting everything packed and tossing or giving away anything I didn’t need anymore. But today I am just grateful that I am in a position to be paying someone to handle the actual moving process.

I think back to the many, many moves in my adult life where my best (let’s be real, only) fiscal option was to rent a UHaul and do the work myself, usually with the help of a single friend I had roped in with the promise of shitty pizza and craft beer should we survive. I would dread this process, not actually doing the math to count the number of stairs I would have to descend and climb but knowing in my soul that it was going to be a metric fuck ton. The only one of my many previous buildings that had an elevator was my apartment in Boston, which had one so obviously old and shitty that I regularly opted for the stairs in my daily life, calling it “built-in exercise” but really just trying to avoid spending time stuck in an elevator shaft.

All subsequent abodes were stairs only. I remember moving our old keyboard from apartment to apartment-a full sized Yamaha electric piano complete with weighted keys that resulted in the keyboard weighing about the same as I did. I remember the assembly line churn, up and down, grabbing neatly packed boxes to start and ending the packing of the truck by grabbing individual stray items too big or awkward to have been placed in a larger receptacle.

After driving the four blocks to my new place (since I moved to New York in 2010 I’ve always lived within a two square mile area in Brooklyn) we would immediately have to reverse the process. I hated it. I hated it so much. There was something so uniquely agonizing about doing a ton of manual labor, especially when you would need to turn around and immediately undo all of your work.

Once a move was complete, I’d be overwhelmed with euphoria at a job (well?) done for about two days, at which point the process would be violently punctuated by the onset of searing pain in muscles I’d forgotten I possessed since the previous move. In between moves, you sort of forget how miserable it is. Sort of like how women are biologically programmed to forget the agony of childbirth in order to ensure that the human race survives long term.

Growing up, my parents ran the Rehoboth Summer Children's Theatre in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, which meant we moved down from Philly to the Delaware shore from June to August every single year. With five kids and a mom who loved to cook and didn’t want to be at the mercy of the inevitably nonsensical kitchen tool collection of the average rental property the packing and unpacking of the car on both ends of the move each year was a herculean task, one that I dreaded participating in come the beginning or end of the season. My dad was an expert packer, perfectly tetrising each item into our two cars, to the point where every inch of space was used. When that meant that we couldn’t see out the back windows, we forged ahead. Driving visibility was a small price to pay for having every single one of our Beanie Babie with us for the summer.

I’m thinking, now, about the day I moved into this place, September 1st, 2019. My first place by myself, my first place where I was in a position to hire movers. Or, more accurately, mover singular, a scrawny but shockingly strong guy. Once he had deposited my meager amount of personal belongings in a neat pile in the center of my 300 square foot studio apartment. I remember sitting on the floor, looking around my new place and being so overwhelmed by the idea that this was all mine. I remember the specific scent of the Mrs. Meyers all purpose cleaning spray I used to wipe down a few surfaces in the apartment. I’ll forever associate that scent with this place.

I have loved this apartment, truly, to the point of feeling an unexpected amount of emotion around dismantling the home I created here. This was the first time I could put my decorative stamp on a space without running my choices by someone else. I rearranged the apartment three or four times over the years in order to find the best way to use the tiny space. I had parties here, little ones, where people were packed in sardine-style but parties nonetheless. I got sick here, I cried here. I accomplished things here, and I failed miserably. I was disappointed and at times felt extremely lucky. I took countless baths, tackled complex baking projects on the oddly large kitchen island, moved furniture around a few days a week in order to make the space for YouTube HIIT and yoga workouts. This was where I got to know my dog Ruby. I got through the darkest part of COVID in this one tiny room, something that in retrospect seems crazy but was taken one day at a time in this place that was, above all, mine. I painted half of one wall purple, on the diagonal, requiring me to get trigonometry involved to determine the perfect angle to bisect the TV hanging on the wall. I enlisted help installing peel and stick wallpaper to a wall, an art deco-style print of cream-colored cranes on a blue green background. Wallpaper that was almost too easy to pull back off the wall when the time came. This is where my life first started to even out. This is where I started to find some peace. It was my first real home.

I am ready for a new home. So is Ruby. I’m ready to not have to move multiple pieces of furniture to work out, to actually get a dining table big enough to have people over and allow them to be comfortable. I’m ready for a full-sized fridge and oven, for closet space and room for Ruby to wander around. I’m ready for new paint colors, a new bath mat, some new dessert plates and sponges. I’m ready to be a little closer to an affordable grocery store. I’m ready to have a bedroom with a door that I can close. I’m excited to pick a new scent of cleaner to forever link to the new apartment and get some new routines in place. But once I turn the lights out and leave this spot behind later today, I will pour a little bit of my cold cappuccino out on the sidewalk in appreciation of the 300 square feet which was so good to, and for, me.

February 25th:

Listen. I always knew that going on a trip in this global moment would put me at risk of catching the Spicy Flu ("COVID" is full-on Voldemort when you're on a ship stuck in the ocean with 150 other passengers.) I oscillate between this understanding making me feel better and worse as I spend day two of three of mandatory isolation in this tiny cabin on a ship in Antarctica fighting my second brutal bout with The Spice.

I gave myself one day to actively feel sorry for myself, yesterday. Maximum wallowing. I had been feeling sort of shitty for two full days already, pushing myself to go out on landings and Zodiac cruises and ignoring the blinding headache as best I could just to make sure I was able to experience Antarctica. I had worked too hard to make this trip happen, I could recover on our trip back to South America. And at first I could reasonably explain away the symptoms as a cold. I even took a COVID test that I had brought after 24 hours of feeling terrible and was so relieved to get a negative.

Unfortunately after a third full day of feeling crappy on a vessel whose passenger makeup is at least 50% on the sooner side of elderly I felt the need to do the responsible thing and see the ship's doctor. Doctor Anne showed up at my cabin door yesterday morning, masked up, with practical shoes and the efficient manner I tend to prefer in people. She whisked me downstairs to the "hospital", a suite of two tiny, unadorned rooms on deck two, usually inaccessible to the ship's guests. After taking my vitals, she performed the ritual we're all so familiar with now- an all-business cotton swab jab to the lower brain via the nostril. There was no immediate negative, so she grabbed some Sudafed and throat lozenges and said I should be good to go. Right as I was getting up to go, though, a second glance revealed the tiniest sliver of a T line on the test. Doctor Efficient shook her head and motioned for me to sit back down. "Welp. It's faint, but that's a positive." At which point, like the grown up that I am, I burst into tears, those special uncontrollable tears that I only get when I'm frustrated.

So now I'm confined to this cabin for another two full days. Once these three days are up, we will be making our way back up toward Argentina. The active excursions will have wrapped up around the time I'm released from my cell. My trip is effectively over.

I don't think it's hurt that I spent the meat of the OG pandemic phase stuck in my studio apartment. I'm well-versed at this point in making the best use of tight spots and battling wavelettes of claustrophobia.

As I suggested, the demographic makeup of the passenger pool skews older. Many more people are in their 70s than I anticipated, although it makes sense that these would be the people with the disposable time and funds to make something like this work. It's an international group, with larger contingents from the US and Australia, but plenty of folks hail from smaller countries.

The actual Antarctic experience has been as incredible as I anticipated. We set off from Ushuaia, Argentina. The town of Ushuaia, at the bottom tip of Patagonia, has proudly branded itself the End of the World. One can even get a souvenir passport stamp declaring that you have visited this superlative destination in case anybody doubts your claim. That said, it's also where you get on a boat to Antarctica, which is the... end of the world? Like most things in the meaty part of life, the finish line stays put until you almost reach it, then in the final stretch it up and moves itself, in this case to Antarctica. I would imagine once we hit the lower continent that the "end of the world" will shift yet again. The curse of an allegedly round planet.

The first two days were spent at sea crossing the Drake Passage. Having never been on a ship of this size for more than a few hours I was nervous about the potential seasickness this area of the ocean has a reputation for inciting. Per Doctor Anne, I took preemptive Dramamine and, luckily, was fine. Great, even. At night, the hum of the ship and the rocking actually seemed to help me sleep. Where sleeping on the boat at other points of the trip was accompanied by a nice, mild cradle effect, the Drake's convulsing was that of an anxious mother, which for some reason felt natural for me.

Not all of my fellow passengers fared as well. For the first few days, a large swath of people lurched and tripped around the ship with little circular motion sickness patches behind their ears, which I can only assume doubled as their Matrix hookup.

We're roused each morning by our expedition leader Shane on the ship intercom, with a "gooooood morning everybody" usually between 6 and 7AM. In any other set of circumstances, I would hate this ritual, but this was not a trip for sleeping. At least, not until my immune system kicked into high gear.

Shane is exactly who you'd expect to lead polar expeditions- a burly Canadian in his 50s with a robust beard and a series of well-worn quips busted out casually at each milestone. The kind of dude who uses "yesteryear" unironically.

The intercom sound is remarkably clear. It's funny what differences hit you hardest when traveling. Like I noticed in Buenos Aires on my two-day stopover that most of the human outlines for pedestrian crossing lights have feet. It makes sense that it WOULD have feet, the whole point of the signage is to indicate that you're welcome to use your feet to cross the street. But we didn't have time for feet in NYC, I guess. I imagine we're just expected to be grateful ours have heads.

Good ole NYC. I guess my primary relationship with intercoms in the years since grade school have been with the "announcements" on the New York City subway. MTA intercoms are known for spewing a veritable rainbow of noise and not much else. On a good day, you can make out the occasional word, but it's rare that you're able to glean all of the pertinent information from the chaos emanating from the world's oldest speakers. Shane's soothing Canadian voice, "aboot"s and all, delivered via a crystal clear connection, has been a welcome intrusion in comparison.

We woke up the morning of the third day at the entrance to the Lemaire Channel, a narrow waterway that couldn't have been a more representative, breathtaking intro to Antarctica. Looking out my port-side window, I saw large rocks jutting out of the ocean, huge chunks of ice drifting in the water. Everything was white and black and teal blue.

Through the multiple panes of glass in between me and the outside of my cabin it looked fully fake. Like someone had blown up a NatGeo pic of Antarctica and taped it neatly over my porthole window. It wasn't until I brought my first cup of coffee out onto the deck that I really started to feel the spirit of this place settle in.

One of the hardest things to overcome on a trip like this is just that. The sensation that your surroundings aren't real, that you’re not actually seeing something directly. I have guesses as to why this detachment- the easy access to photos of Antarctica on the internet, my previous encounters with penguins at SEVERAL East Coast zoos- but at each moment of intense beauty I have to actively remind myself that I am actually where I am, I'm actually seeing what I'm seeing. As it is. That it's all real and that I'm unlikely to be where I am ever again. I'm feeling a lot of internal pressure to do my very best looking at everything so I can really take it with me.

Our general rhythm has been to do two locations a day; one landing and/or Zodiac cruising locale in the morning and another in the afternoon. We're divided up into four groups (I belonged to the "Penguin" group) which dictated the order of disembarkation to avoid a stampede getting to the Zodiacs. Incidentally the idea of a stampede of penguins is positively adorable once you've seen them move IRL.

Each morning and afternoon, Shane, or one of the other expedition leaders, would announce when it was time to leave the ship and we would start the process of gearing up. The first few times I prepped, it was a bit arduous. A few days in, though, it felt almost meditative. I got it down. Merino wool leggings and a Merino wool top, with another pair of fleece lined leggings layered on top. A fleece jacket, the bright yellow Quark Expeditions parka. A gaiter, a hat, sunglasses. Glove liners and waterproof gloves. Waterproof pants which were deemed mandatory to ride on the Zodiacs, the reason for which became obvious about four minutes into my first ride when a single wave crashed against the raft, the water bouncing up and over the pontoons and raining down heavily on all ten of us.

Two pairs of thick wool socks topped off with loaner waterproof boots from the expedition operator. Life vest. Dry bag with extras of much of the above, plus water and lip balm. The key was picking the perfect moment to get ready- too early and you risk overheating in the hallways of the ship, too late and you're tripping over yourself as you rush to the gangway to board.

I'm finding it extremely daunting, trying to describe the visuals of this trip in a way that hasn't already been used to death by writers, poets, or their modern equivalents, travel influencers. The world around us was just so peaceful. The visuals were striking, no big shocker, but the feeling of stillness and quiet were what made it feel so foreign. There were many moments I was able to embrace that stillness. There were some moments where I found it eery as fuck.

The best experience I had was in Neko Harbour on a sunny, windless day.  The harbor is surrounded by an almost perfectly round ring of glaciers and rock. It wasn't particularly big, but the static water acting as a huge round mirror made it look much more so. Which, for what it's worth, is also how you trick people into feeling like your apartment is bigger than it is. It was cozy, as cozy as a chilly divet in a mountain range in Antarctica could be.

I've never found sighting wildlife easier. Without the wind, what I was seeing through my eyes was like a single frame of a movie pulled out of sequence. Your eyes would scan the water and any flicker of movement was a seal, a penguin, a humpback whale. If a humpback whale popped out on the street in Brooklyn near me, I'd probably assume that the commotion out of the corner of my eye was just some sort of obese rat and keep walking.

The water was a perfect teal. #0C628C at, like, 75% opacity. We came across an ice formation that looked like a pile of lovingly stacked blocks of ice that seemed to glow like kryptonite from within. The sky was the kind of blue I tend to roll my eyes at. Like you're ammmmmazing we get itttttt.

Groups of Weddell seals lounged on the ice so we cut the engine and let our Zodiac drift toward them, getting within a few feet, close enough that I could have easily reached out to touch them. At one point a seal popped its head out of the water right next to me. I thought I was going to Antarctica for the penguins but I have fully fallen in love with the smooth, adorable blubbery monster that is the seal. They are undeniably cute, watching them do the worm across a slippery perch never stopped being friggin hilarious, and their commitment to lounging around is inspiring.

After cruising, we headed toward land. We'd done other landings but this would be the first time we set foot on the continent of Antarctica. As we gained speed, the noise from the Zodiacs sounded twice as loud as they normally did bouncing off the mountains. Approaching land, I saw a huge white wall of ice and snow rising from the ground at what seemed like a right angle. I could make out what looked like a trail through the snow, with some black dots sprinkled on them. As we got closer, it became obvious that the dots were, in fact, people from our expedition, and that I too would be expected to hike up this ice wall death trap.

The landing site was a Gentoo penguin colony. At one point on the hike, our path intersected with a "penguin highway", which are exactly as precious as they sound. We had to pause and wait for the single file line of wobbly birds to cross our path before we could continue.

This was the kind of hike that people who just say they like to hike but they really like to just sort of have a stroll would not be into. I'm not too proud to admit that it kicked my ass. I did it, but it was a toughie. At times I found myself needing to stop and put my hands on my knees and lean over and take multiple deep breaths and feel like I'm being visited by my ghost of Christmas future. I reluctantly took the walking stick that was offered to me at the base and that was one of my better decisions on this trip.

When I reached the top, though, the wind was once again knocked out of me by the beauty. It was just one of those heady, never-again moments. I took big gulps of actual fresh air, gazing into a cauldron of seals and whales with the sun shining softly on my face. Somehow the camera could sense how very complete the moment felt. The pictures of me from the moment were extra flattering. In this moment I couldn't have been happier or more photogenic.

I did take a lot of pictures, for me, at least. My usual M.O. is to try to live squarely in the moment which sounds great and all but means I perpetually neglect obtaining photographic evidence of my adventures, big and small. I often figure someone else will capture what I need. In this case, I had the wherewithal to know I shouldn't count on others to document such an important experience so I did manage to get some of my own.

The range of comfort with technology on this expedition has been wide. When it comes to photography, there's the SLR crowd, the ones with bags full of different lenses, some comically big. There was the New SLR group, the people who clearly had borrowed someone else's SLR, always intending to take an online course in what the buttons do but never actually getting past that first article about exposure settings. The vast majority of this group had abandoned their technical albatrosses within the first couple of days in favor of their phones.

We have an expedition leader who specializes in photography who gave a talk toward the beginning of the trip, and he did a fantastic job of meeting people where they were. I was in the last, biggest photographic group, which was the iPhone faction.

I gotta say, the iPhone really got me through on this trip. Praise be the ghost of Steve Jobs. What a magnificent little box. It consistently had my back- photography-wise, COVID-wise (I was #blessed to have access to the NYTimes Crossword puzzle archives in my time indisposed.) I did more or less completely detach from the rest of the world. There was a single mediocre paid internet option so I took the opportunity to exist for a while without it. It was definitely manageable, and at times outright euphoric, and the only time I really felt myself missing internet access when I was discussing something with my new comrades and we reached for The Web for a confirmation of a hypotheses, or a tidbit of missing information, and realized we were grabbing at air. What's the average width of the fluke of a humpback whale? Who is currently in power in Indonesia? When, exactly, did Brittany Murphy die? It was when I was in college for sure because I remember hearing about it in the stacks of Trident bookstore on Newbury St, the place with the cafe where I tried avocado for the first time. 2008? 2009?

February 27th

It's currently the last day at sea. We arrive back in Ushuaia tomorrow morning, early. It fels like end of summer camp, in that I have to say goodbye to a bunch of people I like, which sucks, but I get to sleep in my own bed soon, which honestly is all I ever want.

I was lucky enough to fall in with a group of lovely people early on. Their unconditional friendliness was refeshing and their restraint was, frankly, moving- they graciously minimized the amount of horror they expressed over the state of America despite the wealth of ammunition available to them once the country comparisons that inevitably happen within an international group started. They were accomplished, kind and, most, importantly, they could hang. During my isolated stretch they slipped notes under my door, and left me chocolate. When I finally emerged, our group of gurlz had picked up another person, a guy, who I like to think had been hearing my name constantly at the breakfast table the previous three days, wondering “who is this magical Rose they keep talking about?" but in reality was probably just a little confused when I confidently sat down at the breakfast table across from him like I'd been there all along.

To the crew's credit they're doing their best to make sure that these last two days in these Drake marine conditions feel festive. Our dining room is run by an overwhelmingly enthusiastic man named Johnny who likes to call any group of two or more women "beautiful ladies". A new acquaintance pointed out that he gives Armand from the White Lotus energy and now I can't unsee it. The same acquaintance shared that she had seen Johnny yelling at the staff when he thought no one else was around. I anticipate seeing him fully implode in the remaining 16 hours of this boat trip.

Last night Johnny made a weirdly emotional speech thanking all of us for giving them the opportunity to serve us, which made me just the most uncomfortable. Then he beckoned for the entire kitchen and wait staff to come out from the kitchen and they sang, I shit you not, Leaving on a Jet Plane. Along to a backing track. A full bar ahead of the music for the entire song. All I could think about was how much I would have refused to sing this random super romantic song to the entitled people who have been yelling COFFEE??!?! at me for the better part of two weeks unless it had been discussed and articulated very specifically in my contract. Does that make me lame or just an uber-jaded veteran of the working world? Both, prolly. I kept thinking about Jan in The Office singing “Son of a Preacher Man” as a lullaby to her baby. It was nice if you don’t think about it too hard.

I won't be able to explain the net effect this place had on me properly when people ask. I just have to accept that. I keep using lame words like “awesome” and “incredible”. Gag. It’s like when I have to explain my tattoos- the interest is totally reasonable but there’s no way not to feel kinda lame explaining why I etched a croissant into my forearm (actually that one’s easy, I love croissants.)

A person or two has suggested that I'm “brave” for having gone, but the truth is just that over time I've become a person who understands and accepts that fear and discomfort (of the Drake Passage, of making new friends, of getting eaten alive by a whale and then getting expelled via the blowhole) are the price of admission for a full life.

xoxo Rossip Girl

PS: I also get called brave for my haircut

PPS: If you’d like to check out a reasonable number of photos and videos of my trip, you can find those here.

I have been spending actual real time worrying about what my neighbors think of me. So if there was ever a question of my damaged-ness we can put that to bed.

No, so, ok. So I'm leaving for Antarctica in three weeks. You're correct, it is extremely cool of me to do something like go to Antarctica. I sort of wonder if part of me planned the trip just to get attention. If so it was a really genius plan because people are way into it. A friend of mine told me that he's been randomly telling other people unrelated to me about how I'm going to Antarctica. Of course he isn't crediting me in his appropriation of my coolness which is extra not cool but I sort of love the idea that the legend of my financially-irresponsible solo bucket list trip is bouncing around the mean streets of LA.

Everyone has so many questions about it, ranging in topic from frostbite to polar bears (incidentally not found there) and ranging in quality from genuine questions to literally insanity. I say something about it on one of my dating profiles (because of course) and the responses I've gotten have really run the gamut. One guy told me not to forget my shoes, and added a winky face. Without the winky face it would have passed as a joke- a weird, bad joke but a joke nonetheless. But then, with that winking face, suddenly I found myself wondering… is “forgetting your shoes” a sex thing I’ve never heard of ever before? The mental whiplash felt physically painful. “Hey baby- why don’t you come over and forget your shoes tonight.” I mean I don’t not get it.

Seriously, though, let's be serious. I'm going to Antarctica because I want to see it. I don't want to feel limited, or stuck. I don't just want to hear about everything, I have to do it. I wanna see a place we haven't fully fucked up yet while it's still there. I want to experience the quiet. It's never quiet here. I love New York, I do, but it is NEVER quiet here. One of my earliest memories of NYC was when I was about 12 visiting a friend who lived in Manhattan and I stayed overnight with her somewhere in the Upper West Side and a car alarm went off and stayed alarming for like 4 hours and I just stared at the ceiling listening. I don't even remember being that upset, everything about the city felt so grimy and miserable but more importantly it felt real. Like I could grab it in my hands and make into something that was all mine. I could never hold the suburbs in my hands. The suburbs are a slippery asshole.

The car alarm was classic New York- welcome to our great city, fuck you.

But I digress, as per my M.O.

One of the things about going to Antarctica is that you need all sorts of gear. Luckily I signed up for this trip about a year in advance so I had some time to start gathering the merino wool socks, and the waterproof pants. But I'mma be real with you- somehow this bitch crept up on me. So now I'm panic buying everything that haven't been able to make a decision about, all of the options, knowing that I'm going to have to spend a full day before I go returning everything I don't actually need. It's a strategy, maybe not a good one, but I don't have a lot of time to work with so I'm going with my gut.

The problem has become, though, that I get... a lot of packages. Like a lot. So I'm tempted to text the neighbor group chat (it's a small building) and caveat my deluge of presents properly so they don't think I'm just going through some sort of manic phase. There are two problems with texting them though. One is that I really should be the kind of adult person who doesn't care what her neighbors think about her At. All. The second is that I already did this exact thing about my Christmas shopping like a month ago.

I sort of abuse the neighbors chat, but not really and it seems like they find me charming, she said cluelessly. There were these two envelopes that were COVERED in writing with multiple addresses on them, half ripped open sitting on our stairs for AGES. They looked insane and so after a month I decided that it had been enough time for me to take them and open them and find out what was inside of them. So I texted the neighbs to ask if they thought it would be ok at this point if I took them because I couldn't handle my curiosity anymore. FWIW I had resounding support. Then I made an awesome joke about the risk if I disturb them that we'll find ourselves in a Jumanji situation and then the conversation petered out for some reason.

I know I have a need-to-be-funny thing. I'm sure it's from somewhere deeply unhealthy but I like making people laugh. As an adult I've been told that I'm a "positive person" multiple times (which is what makes me laugh) but the reality is just that I think nothing really matters much so we might as well try to make things nice and pleasant as we run out the clock.

Occassionally I'll drop a funny comment into one of the HVSCs (High View Slack Channels) at work but it's not often. You gotta nail the shot and walk away. I know how obnoxious people who find themselves funny usually are, and I know I’m not immune to that so I try to be strategic about where and when I throw something out there. There's one other guy at work who I've never actually met face-to-face before in the almost two years I've worked at my company who is operating on my wavelength. Funny, but selective about when he pipes up. Sometimes the stars align and we both comment on the same thing thus compounding our individual contributions to the vibe. Chefs kiss.

As always there's more to say, but I'm trying to learn how to do aim to do things GOOD ENOUGH and not THE BEST EVER so we'll leave it here.

Rose

PS what was in the envelopes:

• No written note in either

• Envelope 1:

  • A tiny plastic dime bag with zero drugs in it but a single carefully folded $1 bill

  • End of list

• Envelope 2:

  • 15 lottery ticket print outs and the receipts for 4 of them

  • A single pill in a blister pack labeled Panax. According to the literature printed on the back, the pill had weed AND ginseng, and you’re explicitly instructed to take it 3-4 hours before sexual activity.

In October I turned 34. definitely not a big milestone, but the day after I hit 5 years without drinking.

As the legend goes, I woke up the day after my 29th birthday with the kind of hangover where you're mad AND sad and also your physical body is failing you, and said to myself "I need to stop drinking.” Then if remembering correctly, I ordered a burrito on Seamless and stayed in bed the entire day thinking about what it would mean to actually do that.

I'd definitely thought about quitting before that. I knew that I had almost freakishly strong willpower when I was really serious about something but before that day I just wasn’t really ready to say that I was done forever. On that particular day, I tried something new, framing it simply as an experiment- what would happen if I just... stopped. For a while.

To be honest the pro and con list for taking on this experiment was hugely lopsided. The only real potential downside was that I'd have to go on first dates without drinking, and if I'm honest I was right to be dreading that, but I still do it. I did think it through. This was going to be annoying at best, I knew from that moment I’d be constantly having to turn down alcohol in pretty much any social gathering and be expected to explain why.

Before that day, I repeatedly placated myself with the idea that I wasn’t a classic alcoholic. It was never an issue of volume, or even frequency. I never showed up to work drunk, or found myself craving alcohol in the morning. I never got wasted more than once a month. But if I ever opened a second alcoholically gifted beer it was a guaranteed brown out. None of this should have been shocking. You take someone who gets completely depleted by other people but still needs them to like her at any cost, and you add a love of IPAs and a maintenance routine of Wellbutrin, Seroquel and Trintellix, and you get what can only be described as a ticking time bomb. It honestly would have been mind blowing if I didn’t have some level of a problem with alcohol.

I’d gone through periods of "cutting back" but it was always so stressful trying to decide exactly where the line was. What if I just took it off the table completely, so to speak? What then?

From my perspective, I was a pretty pleasant drunk, never actively mean or angry. But I was careless with my words, and with my actions. I hurt a lot of people over the years, and embarrassed myself more than a few times.

For whatever reason I woke up that morning and very suddenly realized that I could actually do something to make sure that never happened again. Embarrassing myself is one thing, God knows I do that sober, but I just didn't want to be the person who hurts people she cares about. My having a social crutch wasn't more important than the happiness of the people I love, or might one day.

I don't actually get upset when people ask me why I don't drink, it's a fair question, but I do feel awkward and bored giving them the explanation. I feel almost like I'm letting them down. It's not a good story; there was no organized intervention or night in jail. In fact I even feel a little weird here calling out the fact that 5 years have passed. It's a milestone, and I'm proud, but it was also just something that I had to do, like breathing or not eating cake for every meal, and talking about how long it's been tends to remind me how much further I could be in my personal life if I hadn't let myself off the hook for the preceding 29 years. I knew better. I knew in my gut that I was better than I was presenting.

I don’t have to be a perfect person. I tried for a long time and it turns out all those people saying perfection is impossible were 100% correct. it is not. I’ve more or less come to terms with this but I do just need to feel like I’m clawing my way forward, always getting better, even if it’s aggggggonizingly slow.

An open letter to Johnny Knoxville:

I wanna start by apologizing. This letter is coming like 20 years delayed. I remember all the boys talking about Jackass and almost instantly concluding that I wasn't the target demographic. The information that never made it across my desk at the time was that you were a *total fox*. I'm a little pissed, to be honest. I like to be kept up to speed with things.

But here we are. Message received. At the age of 34, I'm hanging my head and admitting to having a celebrity crush. It's shy of a full on parasocial relationship but it's not a secret that you fine. Did I tell you I love you letting your hair go gray yet?

I love that you were a writer, I love that you did it in a magazine. I used to love magazines, they were a total luxury, something I could never make a real case for my mom to spend money on, but every once in a while I get one and devour it.

I can't imagine we  have much in common. I've mostly tried to avoid bodily harm over the years. But we're both alive, and you have crazy stories, so I think maybe you came out ahead.

You shouldn't let the fact that I haven't broken a bone make you think I don't live a dangerous life though. My strategy has been to go a little smaller with it, try to incorporate little moments of defiance where I can, quiet moments to remind myself that I do have some control over the events in and around myself, that really add up.

Like, for example: at the end of every work day, with my bag already slung over my shoulder, I walk, head held high to the fridge in our open plan office and take out a La Croix. I pop it open, then I walk back past everyone and leave. No one actually cares that I take an extra passion fruit flavored seltzer for my commute, but they see me. "She must not give a fuck," they think, astutely.

Of course the little show is backed up by my being excellent at my job. You seem to be great at yours, as long as number of medical emergencies hasn't been a KPI.

Let's see, what other daredevil behavior is there in the rotation?

When a woman is working from the opposite end of the clothing rack toward me, I always play chicken, and I never lose. I just keep moving closer and closer toward the middle, waiting for her to give up. They always do, eventually. I'm usually quick to apologize to strangers when they step on my foot, cover the guy who forgot his wallet at the coffee shop, ask them where they got their shoes. But in that scenario, I always feel the need to assert that I have every right to be at this Alo Yoga and that you can move.

A celebrity crush. It's mortifying. I'm too old and cynical. At some point I had decided that if civilian men were behaving like they're famous, then the famous men must be actually unbearable, and the incredibly average guys around me have been especially embarrassing lately.

But then, 20 years late, I saw who “Johnny Knoxville” actually was: how he talks, what he says (and you act now? who knew!), all topped with a head of snow white hair a k-pop star would pay a full time colorist to maintain and I gotta say it's really working for me.

Keep up the good work,

-Rose

I feel like we’re just born, we connect and disconnect our devices from different speakers and then we die.

My airpods are doing this thing where sometimes the right one just doesn’t work at all. When it does that, I have to do this five minute dance where I put them both back in the case, then I put the right one in my ear and wait for the “you’re connected” sound (which incidentally is the most satisfying sound to ever exist, followed closely by the Netflix sting) and then I know that shortly after the L one will then connect. I do that process over and over until the time it, eventually, works, usually somewhere between 12 and 15 times.

There’s probably a super easy way to fix it it, only a few keystrokes away. But sometimes I find myself just sort of accepting everything, even when I don’t have to. A couple of days ago I finally added my most used expletives as shortcuts in my phone keyboard, because for YEARS I have been trying to type them and getting corrected automatically. Years. I’ve just been a very tiny bit of annoyed for YEARS, which honestly adds up to a large amount of annoyed. I could have done this at any time. I knew it was possible. But I wasn’t sure EXACTLY how, and I didn’t want to have to do something hard like google it. I will bend over backwards to avoid doing a little work to make my own life work a little bit better. I will, however google things like “Industry season two finale.” I did that immediately after I watched the Industry season two finale to find out from the internet if I liked it.

I love little nuggets of wisdom. I prefer to get all of my wisdom in a nugget. I need a takeaway, a task, a next step. I often shower at night, and when I do, I have to move all of my nighttime supplies from the vanity mirror cabinet to the side of the bathtub. My face wash, floss, toothpaste, toothbrush. Just moving these items back and forth, back and forth. And then, out of nowhere, it hit me that I could buy a second set of items. I mean I make six figures, I can buy a second tube of toothpaste.

I’ve decided that I’m going to try bringing an agenda to my therapy session every week. There are multiple reasons, and they are:

• I want her to like me too much so I find myself self editing. I also won’t let myself cry when I obviously need to in front of her but that’s a separate, if closely related, issue.

• I cycle through about three topics and I keep them at a high level for as long as possible which is very much not the point of therapy

• When you’re reading off a piece of paper you don’t have to make eye contact with anyone

A relationship with a therapist is a weird one. If you think too hard about the whole concept of a therapist it starts sounding totally insane. You pay a person who is unrelated to you to listen to your bullshit and tell you who’s fault it is. For what it’s worth, it’s usually mine. I made sure to get a therapist who would be honest with me. Like if we’re gonna do this, let’s do it.

I had a friend a while back and all he wanted was a dog, and he brought it up literally every single time we hung out and one day out of the blue I suddenly had had enough so I was met with a choice- completely lose it, yelling at him to just get a goddamn dog because you’re 34 and you have a steady income and you don’t need your mom’s permission, or don’t get one but then stop talking about it OR I could just sorta stop hanging out with him. So that was the end of that.

Have the hard conversations. Get the dog. Or shut up about it.

*mic drop*

I been watching a lot of Nathan For You lately. I'm feeling sort of numb these days which works out great. It takes the edge off of the wonderful extended cringe that is the show.

I love love love it, and I have a massive crush on Nathan Fielder in a way that feels completely out of my hands. I always like the funny ones. Funny’s hot. I mean the ones who are actually funny, not the ones who declare their own incessant shit talking "funny" and then ask why you can't take a joke. I mean the real life, honest-to-god funny ones.

Now I know what you’re thinking- Rose, are you attracted to him because he’s funny or because he’s famous? It’s a good question- experience has told me that I don’t need them to be any real level of recognizable. But to be fair, if others also find a guy funny, that's only ever gonna help.

While I love the show, I can’t help but ponder how the people feel about how they're ultimately portrayed on the show, and, almost more importantly, why they EVER agreed to sign the appearance release I assume was hastily shoved in their face. I like to flex my limited legal skills at work just to keep my contract reading from getting too rusty. I need to make sure I don't end up getting sweet talked into agreeing to be on TV, or into doing anything I guess, while potentially relinquishing my control over the details. Even if I thought for some reason that I would be portrayed in a sympathetic way, are those the dice you wanna roll? Everyone ends up looking terrible on reality TV. Everyone. Hard pass.

Calling it empathy is maybe a stretch but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel anxiety on the subjects’ behalf. I just know that I, Maureen Rose Seyfried, hate the feeling when the rules have abruptly changed. Think about how you’re feeling right now. Sit in that feeling of shock and unease over it just now becoming clear that Rose is actually my middle name, not my first name like you’ve understandably assumed from the beginning. Unsettling, no?

I like to know that even if I'm failing, that at the very least I understand what led to this moment of failure. I'm familiar with the yardstick. So it triggers a lot of inner turmoil when it becomes apparent that the rules I'm playing by are suddenly altered. Up is down. Light is dark. Avril Lavigne is still relevant. It's fucking chaos.

That's what it feels like right now dating. Like everything's changed and I just don't get it anymore. I did, at one point. At least I think I did. I could pretty confidently gauge how interested in me someone was with a low margin of error, based on standard things like their overall behavior and their words, and the effort they put into getting dressed when they knew they were going to see me.

But now it feels like all bets are off. First dates cancel on me while I'm on the way to meet them. I'll have an amazing date and never hear from the guy again. A while back I went out with a guy who was leading really strongly with the whole "I don't play games" brand and very explicitly stated multiple times that he's always up front about his feelings. We had one of those first dates where everything felt good, no awkward pauses, physical chemistry. Not a Trumper. When I got home, he texted me, proactively offering that it was one of the best first dates he'd had in a long time. And that was the last time I heard from Matt. Back when the phone was attached to the wall, in olden times, I can only imagine this would not have flown. It's a new phenomenon, the extreme disposability of new connections. It's like we've all given up before we started and it makes me a little sad and a lot tired.

I don’t feel rejected, exactly, and on a higher level I know that all of my primary sources are bullets dodged. And it isn't every guy. But I just feel like I missed one practice and when I came back they had changed the team name and colors. And the location of the match. And the sport. And I'm just expected to stride onto the field/court/beach and confidently play a new game they invented while I was walking out across the rink/track/pool (like Jesus.)

Just now I was unpacking the contents of my tote bag, the tote itself some secondhand swag from my sister's company.

I'm on a bench outside of Prospect Park, me and Ruby. "Why not inside the park" you ask? Welp because my little trooper freaks out when she hears any game with a ball in it being played. I guess it doesn't even have to be a ball, it could be a frisbee that someone insists on catching too loudly. Kicking anything is unacceptable. Just any abrupt sound. She can walk past jackhammers without any outward acknowledgement but my coffee maker clicks on every day at 6:30AM and she is visibly not a fan.

Anywho I was taking out all of my chill out on a bench supplies and I looked down and realized that, like, everything I have is purple.

Naturally I panicked. There's room in the world for the girl whose whole thing is being really into purple but it's not who I am. I'm too cynical. I've seen things. The purple girls are always genuinely really sweet, and they usually had some sort of equestrian interest, anything from My Little Pony to competitive dressage. I like a good monochrome moment but purple lovers don’t just think purple is the best, they don’t officially recognize the other colors. They’ve even proposed legislation to stop teaching the other colors in public schools (the purple lobby has a huge amount of influence with Congress.) That’s not true but crazier things have happened in our government in the last six years. No other color inspires this much singular obsession. I was never able to sustain any sort of a fandom on any material level. It can’t be true, that I’m a purple girl.

But maybe the call is coming from inside the house, you know? Maybe it's just time for me to stop running. The evidence is pretty damning: the towel I brought is purple. And so is Ruby's water bowl. And my foam Birkenstocks, which I cannot recommend highly enough to anyone who asks and lots of people who don't. Now that I'm thinking about it- I just got a lilac dutch oven a couple of weeks ago, my day-to-day bowls are a deep violet, and while we’re listing things, a large portion of one of my walls is a light purple.

Every time I think I know myself, even at 33, I speedily realize I don't. I‘m just livin’ for those brief moments after enlightenment before reality sets in.

I remember the moment I realized that everyone in Seattle owned a head lamp. It was raining (superfluous?) and we were packing my friend’s Subaru for a hike outside of the city, a getaway from the freakishly clean streets of Seattle proper and the chilly passive-aggressive tentacles of the Seattle Freeze.

Seattle is an undeniably nice city, so of course I didn’t trust it from the first day. There’s a lot of smiling at strangers which is a general policy I can get behind but not, like, every stranger. Be reasonable.

Going to Seattle for what ended up being less than a year was one of those decisions that to this day I just can’t fully explain. It’s in good company, with my taking out 100K of student loans to go to music school, my getting my tongue pierced in the basement of a mall in Thailand when I was a teenager… things I don’t technically regret but only because my brain has successfully suppressed my ability to regret things almost entirely, the result of a well-meaning if overzealous coping mechanism (wanna switch brains with me yet? Just say the word.)

I just sort of ended up there. I came out of college MUCH less sure of where I wanted to go in life than I was that first day, excitedly moving in with two strange guys in a shitty apartment in Back Bay. I was gonna be a high powered music industry executive, A&R maybe or music supervision for film. I left with zero clue about what I actually wanted to do. I had spent so much of my life kicking and screaming, working hard to be taken seriously as a kid, fully intending to take by force the opportunities I wasn’t handed, always focused on the next stage, the next adversary to vanquish. But I always felt hamstrung, like I was just perpetually on other people’s schedules and I could never get a good explanation as to why.

Now I’m sure my therapist would have some feedback on my framing but the point is that when I was finally out on my own things just felt… open. Not real.

In a lot of ways I still can’t picture what’s next. I can imagine possibilities, wildly different from each other, versions of *happiness* that are equally elusive, but none of my plans feel particularly dependable.

Right after school there was a thick fog between me and my future so I made a decision, and that decision was Seattle.

So if I understand it correctly every newborn baby in Seattle is blessed by a lumberjack, their foreheads brushed lightly with a sprig of evergreen, and then they are issued a head lamp. Everyone’s got ‘em. And I do understand the functionality. It’s just that it’s a piece of equipment I had never thought for more than 500 milliseconds before.

Speaking of which the contents of the average trunk of a car in Seattle is a vibe. Head lamp. Dehydrated food. A flare gun. Kettlebells. A rain water filter. A slack line. You stick your hand in there and you just can’t know what’s gonna happen. It’s like a crunchy grown up version of the treat bowl at the dentist. You might never see that hand again.

While I don’t have a car, my own personal collection of equipment" is similarly a melange of objects that paint a picture. A night guard to counteract the effect of channeling my annoyance with other human beings into Olympic level grinding. A cheese grater. A pedicure tool, which is just a second cheese grater (skaters’ feet are gro$$.) A stand mixer so people know I bake and care about others’ opinions. Matte black so people think I got it for the baking alone.

Prescription drugs, which to my dismay are essential to keeping my mind in a reasonable place.

This little tool to pluck hairs off of your face that I can use while I watch episodes of Seinfeld. A monthly Metrocard. My skates. Sunscreen.

I did start crossing off items on the To Buy list for Antarctica. Merino wool leggings, fleece mid-layers. I’m thinking a lot about which color hats will make the statement I’m looking to make when paired with the bright yellow parka that everyone’s issued. I’m already wondering where I’m gonna store a huge yellow parka when I get back. It reminds me of my Rotary blazer, the one issued to all exchange program students around the world. It was a unisex blazer only in that it looked horrific on you no matter your gender identity. It made even the hottest South American teenagers look like they ran a funeral parlor in 1960. But we all had one, and we expected to decorate them with physical objects from our year abroad. I’m 90% I used a clothes pin to attach a hacky sack. The kids are my school played a game called takraw which was basically volleyball using your feet and a rattan ball. When I broke out my hacky sack they called it “takraw falang” which of course means “white person takraw” or, weirdly, “guava takraw.” Turns out we white foreigners share a Thai name with a piece of fruit. My nickname was Dang Mo which meant “watermelon.” Kids would try to tease me, saying my parents must be pineapples.

I was always charmed by Thai kids being what they considered mean. Thai people max out at fruit humor. I’ve been told to fuck off by more than one American child.

There’s this scene I remember from Sex and the City. There are a lot of scenes I remember from Sex and the City, but there’s one in particular I think of at least once a year. Carrie’s sad because of course and it’s a scene of her alone in bed, then she gets up and opens a wardrobe and pulls out a blanket. The whole thing is accompanied with a classic Carrie voiceover where she couldn’t help but wonder something. In this case it was her waxing poetic about the first cool night after a summer of hot ones in New York City, and how magical it felt to grab a blanket and get high and watch Netflix and order Levain cookies on Seamless. That might not be it exactly, it’s been a long time since I’ve actually seen the scene, but some version of that weirdly pops into my head every year when the heat breaks for the first time. Summer’s not over but we’re coming out the other side of the woods.

As previously shared, I watched Sex and the City all the way through during the year I lived in Thailand. I crossed the Burmese border and bought a set of pirated DVDs. Baby’s first binge watch. The DVDs would play but every once in a while they would just emit a piercing noise and the video would freeze (some attempt, I imagine, to prevent the very piracy I was in engaging in) and I just accepted that when that happened I’d have the start the episode over.

I gotta say, my first time through, I loved it, but for a weird reason- I wouldn’t realize until later in my life how much I actually wanted an incredible, Carrie-Lite NYC life. At the time it was almost exclusively because it was literally anything in English. It could have been Ren and Stimpy, or 7th Heaven. It could have been corporate training videos. I took learning Thai really seriously (to the point where I can still form some sentences, even 15 years later) but it was full time, no other options, so when I did get to hear some English I would just let it wash over me. Compared to Thai, English is just… extremely shitty sounding? And the potty mouths on those SATC ladies. I was funneling the verbal garbage into my ears and could not get enough.

Anyway. The weather has been what can only be described as stupid good. Freakish. I’m starting to get those people who think we’re in a simulation. I wish I could freeze time. I mean I don’t, I want time to always be marching forward because I can’t do all of this forever but I can’t overstate how beautiful the combination of 75 degrees and a gentle breeze actually is. My sister tells me that’s what it’s like in LA. Maybe I should move. I don’t love driving. It’s like blow jobs. I don’t love doing it, but I’ve accepted that it’s part of life. I knowwww I’m such a Samantha.

As has been conveyed if not expressly stated, I have felt like an adult from a young age. This has mostly been fine with me. I’ve never been nostalgic about high school. I don’t have any fun stories about any childish antics.

That said, there was one teenage stereotype I just couldn’t avoid and that was being boy crazy. It was rarely a guy who was my age who held my attention, I usually went for the old and inappropriate, but regardless of the target my crushes would be all-consuming.

Despite most of my crushes being on real people I knew as opposed to celebrities, nothing happened with 85% of the crushes. But that almost wasn’t the point. I just loved having them. I loved taking virtual strangers and picturing what a shared future could look like, trying to dial in as much detail as possible with the minuscule amount of intel I had managed to gather without social media as a resource. I loved having something to focus on other than the agonizing way I was living my life, which was entirely to get into a “good” college. The churn of AP tests and choir practice and dancing like a monkey for teachers who previously taught my brothers (“Thrilled to have another Seyfried! Evan was one of reasons I became a teacher”) was relatively joyless on a day-to-day basis. To have a crush was to make my days a series of little thrills every time we crossed paths in the hall. They would eventually peter out, always, but each was enough to sustain me for a while, enough action to keep myself cogent, enough to avoid my collapsing in on myself like a boring, dying star.

When I finally got to be fully in charge of my life, crushes became less of a coping mechanism and more actively fun and real. There were years where it felt like a crush could actually turn into something real if I made the effort to use a little elbow grease.

But recently I’ve lost the ability to have a crush, and I’ve been dealing with way more grief than I could have expected. It just sort of drifted away over the couple of years, growing fainter and fainter with every painfully awkward first date, every second date with a dramatic reveal (voted for Trump, thinks all lives matter (they don’t by the way), only eats orange food). I’ve reached a level of cosmic exhaustion, where my certainty that I’ll never locate a true partner is less of a “woe-is-me” thing and more of a scientific conclusion to a lifetime of experimentation.

I know too much. Incidentally whenever guys describe themselves in app as “curious” it causes a really unpleasant physical reaction deep in my body. I’d like to know a whole lot less. I don’t want to know that we eat like eight spiders during our lives while we’re sleeping. I don’t want to know about the potential good I could be doing for the world by adopting a vegan lifestyle. I don’t want to know all the very specific side effects of every anxiety medication on the market.

I do also know that I don’t want to be where I am when it comes to my love life but the outcome does makes sense if you see the amount and quality of inputs over the years. Compounded with my crushiness (crushanity?) breaking it’s not looking promising.

They can’t always be uppers.

Guys. Kim and Pete. I’m so bummed, I really thought those two were gonna make it despite both of them individually being known for cycling through partners notably more than the average celeb.

So there are like five dog/human combos that I see on a super regular basis walking our dogs in the morning and I haven’t introduced myself to any of them. I always leave the apartment all cocky, like “today is the day for some neighborhood networking’” Then you see them come around the corner and you’re like “you know what everyone deserves total privacy while waling their dogs in the morning.” Hear me out. We’re all at our worst during the morning walk- it’s a lot of sweatpants for me, joggers if I’m feeling fancy. My hair is always standing straight up from my scalp in a valiant battle against gravity. There’s about a 50% chance that I’m wearing a bra. It would make sense that there’s an unspoken agreement that we are not to acknowledge each other’s rock bottom state.

But I just signed the lease for another year of this place so maybe it’s time I get to know them? I guess? The ladies I’m less concerned about they are adorable and they give me real smiles when we pass by but I’m always stressed out trying to make friends with a guy because I worry that he’s gonna think I’m hitting on him and that’s always a whole mess.

I’m almost definitely overthinking this. But I’m also trying to go out more, put myself in the occasional uncomfortable position for the sake of growth. Or something. My therapist gave me homework, to “look into networking events and speed dating” and like the obedient little student that I did. I mean I got as far as looking into it. And every option Google presented to me looked worse than the last. I actually looked to see if there were events for Berklee Alumi, then quickly came to my senses, remembering all of the guys I dated in college… I just couldn’t see myself marrying a slightly older version of any of them.

I’m just sort of hanging in the balance, doing all the things but with zero energy behind it. Swiping’s not fun anymore right? The mechanic itself is still sorta fun but then it’s just a sea of faces and cars and tigers.

A feeling that I find myself having over and over, not just recently but for as long as I can trust my memory, is that I’d like to go home.

I mean it figuratively- I do feel a yearning to find a spot amongst humanity where I feel safe and fully secure, a state that maybe I’ve always known but has periodically escaped my grasp due to things like emotional turmoil, insecurity or my infrequent but regular bouts of hangeriness (hanger?)

But more than that I feel it literally. I just, like, want to go home.

Home, a physical place that always stays exactly the way I left it. Each pillow and utensil stays put, in the spot where I decided at one point that it belongs, temporarily or forevs. A place where no one asks me a single question. A place where I control the music selection and volume. Where anything that catches my eye can be changed without the express permission of another human being.

I’m not huge on Going Out as a concept. It always feels like something easy to agree to with a required follow-through that later feels entirely unreasonable. To have an entire day and then expend the energy to get cute and travel to a new location, often in a different borough, to go out at night, feels like a whole thing. I want to want to. I do. I want to get really excited by the prospect of a crazy night out. But my age and my lack of drinking ensure that I’m starting off with energy and enthusiasm deficits, which are compounded by my non-negotiable requirement of 10 hours of sleep a night and mild attitude problem.

I remember saying, at a younger age, to friends who were dragging their heels when it came to agreeing to plans that if they just got up the energy and met up with us that they’d be glad they did. I now know that this is not a reliable statement. It’s often the case that me and my wedges teeter up to my group outside of whatever mediocre bar in the East Village and, despite the fact that I MADE IT, the fact that I’d like to go home, immediately if possible, hits me with great force.

It has nothing to do with the quality or number of my friends, whom I love. But it can’t be overstated how much introverts like moi get their energy completely sapped by even the quietest, most well-meaning people in our orbits. Making small talk at all is painful for us, making it seem like we’re actually enjoying it requires a level of concentration unheard of outside of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

I actually love other people, I truly do. I enjoy being part of a lively debate, having an extra set of hands for assembling furniture, and trading dumb puns and flaming hot pieces of goss. But I find the prospect of being alone truly idyllic, an existence so Eden-like, so completely comfortable, with water features and flowers that smell amazIng and a sun that doesn’t burn.

Some of it is directly tied to the specific activities I find myself participating in. Each year, the Rest Of My Life feels more urgent. My remaining time feels compressed, which tends to make watching bad live music more painful than ever before, at times to the point of calling it midway through a set. 

I’m much less interested in doing things that I already know I won’t be good at. I have accepted that I can’t be incredible at everything (stop laughing, I have) but at 33 I have tried an excessively long list of activities and experiences and I simply do not feel the need to broadcast widely how much I can’t make contact with a tennis ball. In a “free society”, I refuse to find myself in middle school gym class again.

One exception to the outing ambivalence are food-focused quests. I’m gastronomically enthusiastic, and am trying new things nonstop- mochi donuts. Vegan donuts. Savory donuts. Sometimes I even eat something that isn’t a donut. I’m always down for a food-centric plan. We can all focus on the items we’re consuming, which lubricates conversation with new people (“This muffin tastes bad”) and there is usually a well-defined endpoint to the ritual which makes a graceful exit way more possible.

On the flip side, I was once taken to a Mets game. I had a great time for the first inning, but it turns out there are like nine of those in a game. “But how long are the innings? Like 15 minutes?” you’re probably asking and the answer is no one knows so just sit there and watch the world’s slowest sport. I don’t even like to agree to open-ended things that I know I’ll fundamentally enjoy, so sitting at a baseball stadium, not drinking, not knowing when I can bounce was highly unpleasant.

I remember when I was a kid my parents used to take us to lots of different classical music concerts. I remember thinking that while that wasn’t the kind of music I listened to when I had the  choice, going to a concert was a fun change of pace, a nice opportunity to do something different. But then I would sit in the uncomfortable velvet chairs in the balcony of the Kimmel Center and all I could think about was how straight my back was, how cramped my legs were... my discomfort was all-consuming. If someone had given me an out mid-way through I would have taken it no questions asked. I just remember thinking that kids would be way more interested in classical music if we could listen lying down, sucking a milkshake out of a Camelbak with maybe a nice breeze blowing through our hair. It’s similar to how I feel about heterosexual women and casual sex- we’d be way more down for it if we could all agree to a five minute period starting from the moment a strange guy shows up in your apartment during which you can opt out of the hookup no questions asked and they can’t give you a hard time or murder you. And while we’re discussing societal norms, why can you only bum cigarettes? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could bum other objects? I’m not even sure what objects would make sense but it’s a such a one-love tradition. The point is- why aren’t we re-writing the rules here? Things don’t just have to be this way.

Instead, there I was, pulling at the sort-of fancy shirt I wore that didn’t quite fit me perfectly, trying not to breathe too loudly, counting down the tens of minutes til I could go home. No matter how much I enjoyed the music I found myself wondering if I concentrated enough if I could set the building just a little bit on fire, just on fire enough to stop the show and free me from my upholstered straight jacket.

In a larger sense, I absolutely have a general anywhere-but-here feeling, at least I did until moving to New York. I’ve had countless different roofs over my head but the concept of “home” has been a bit elusive. Even when I go home now, it’s not that it’s reliably an actively enjoyable setting- it’s just that it’s still and predictable and has my snacks and no one is expecting me to entertain them, not even my weirdo dog. I do think there’s value to pushing yourself to do cool-but-scary things, but going home can be an empowering act and I’m all about empowerment. You go girl.

My personal life has been even more stagnant than usual (and it’s usually a snoozefest at best.) Lemme tell you, it’s pretty wild never having had one relationship last more than two months in over 34 years of being alive. That’s 18 years of dating.

But once you get yourself into a position like this, and I do blame myself almost entirely, you find yourself wearing your Difficult Match team jersey proudly. Counterintuitively, you actually end up getting pickier and pickier over the years. It’s hard not to thrill at the fact that you’re 100% sure you avoided some unbelievably toxic relationships. And frankly, when you revisit each individual moment that could maybe have led you out of this valley of singleness, which your brain does every time you get too happy, if you’re being honest you would probably go back and make the same decisions. At least when it comes to relationships after 25. You had a real asshole phase from the moment you graduated* until then. It took you a while you understand that multiple people think you’re a fox and during the extended journey to enlightenment you figured, naively, that no one could possibly care enough about you that they’d get materially hurt when you were fully careless with their feelings. Oops.

*from elementary school.

I’m currently doing a kind of a flaccid Eat Pray Love, a mishmash of fleeting moments of inward reflection and cacio e pepe.

One of the things that brought this on was dating a guy (I KNOW ugh puke) who was very careful to say that isn’t SURE 9/11 was an inside job but that there were a lot of fishy things about the whole thing. He had some things going for him (cute, nice, freakishly punctual) but when it started to fizzle I sure did let it. I mean 9/11 was a terrorist attack.

Per the above ever increasing stringent-ness, I’m realizing that I need to be even firmer with my dealbreakers. It’s not that I feel like there’s a ticking clock but I just don’t have the spark it in me that it takes to humor the mediocre anymore, waiting patiently for them to bloom into something that doesn’t want to talk about the temperature at which steel melts. Up until now my age range on Hinge has been more or less wide open. There have been very few immovable dealbreakers. but I clearly need to start drawing some lines. I’ll keep the existing nos - I’d never date a conservative, or someone who considers themselves “moderate” for example (because there are two sides rn and I’m gonna need you to pick one) but there are other things at this level of importance that I need to start taking stock of with potential boyfs. I need to consider some of the other larger life choices that may be incongruous with how I see myself living my own live. Like I don’t think I’m going to want kids but I’m not sure I want to date someone who’s not even open to the idea. I don’t know what I think is going to happen, that I’ll wake up one day and suddenly feel like I needed to procreate, but I’m not ready to shut that door. Although ugh kids.

Anyway, so I’ve been feeling a certain way, sort of tentatively powerful, ready to start a new phase BUT I'm not rich and I can’t fuck off to Italy so I made the most drastic statement I could without putting my ability to feed myself at risk. It just made sense to cut all of my hair off. It was time. I always come back to a pixie cut, even after 2-3 year stretches of pretending that a standard issue haircut is ever gonna work for me. My bone structure is just too damn good. I always know it’s time when I start having dreams of Summer from The OC and Zoe Kravitz and Natalie Portman. Zack Braff usually makes an appearance. “Get this haircut… it’ll change your life.”

And it does. Every time I get it, it does change my life. Or more accurately, it changes it back, back to the most untainted edition of me. I tend to feel like I’m hiding behind my hair whenever I can actually see even a few hairs in my periphery. There’s just something a little homeschooled about how longer hair looks on me. I’ll admit that my loyalty to short hair is definitely bolstered by a bit of run-of-the-mill rebellion, nothing out of the ordinary amongst those raised in the suburbs of <insert big city name here>. It just makes sense for me. My mom had short, dark hair when she was younger. Hers was gorgeous, black, curled. My hair is always fine but usually needs a little extra help to get where you want it to go. I had a bobby pin fall out of my pant leg at the office last week.

I always thought it was so pretty, short hair. Like really short hair. The bob really doesn’t do a ton for me, it never has. I’ve suffered not insignificant trauma from 14 years of cuts at the Hair Cuttery, the Flourtown, Pennsylvania chain that specialized in (read: could only manage) a bob that made even the smallest child look like a middle-aged divorcée tryna get her groove back. You’d clinge to even the smallest hope, that maybe this was the year they were going to give you hair that even just looked like everyone else’s. Your bar was so not that high. But you also knew in your heart it would never happen. You knew going into it that you were never going to actually get what you asked for, so you’d cross your fingers and try not to cry before it was time. There was no quality assurance happening at the Hair Cuttery. No one ever seemed to be in charge. I guess it could have been that they were a hair collective, a little slice of cosmetic socialism in the strip mall, but that feels unlikely. I still feel like some of them got off on making children realize for the first time how unattractive their physical body could be. You’d look at yourself in the mirror as soon as you sat in the chair and bid your current self goodbye, because whatever they did end up doing you knew you wouldn’t even resemble you.

To be fair, the first time I chopped it all off was a similar experience, that feeling of not recognizing myself. I cut it short for the first time at age 16. Fresh off an eyebrow piercing. I had some momentum going and it just felt like a logical next step. When I did see the results, I remember my heart stopping for a second. Not because I didn’t like it, but because it was a completely different person looking back at me. It didn’t take me very long to realize that I was actually seeing myself for the first time.

I think of myself as a pretty decent person, at least outwardly, but when I’m asked if I think someone could “pull off a pixie cut” I refuse to lie. No. You can’t. Sorry Jen this is something just for me for once.

Hope you’re all stayin’ cool and healthy and liberal out there.

PS: I had the most magical experience I’ve had, if not in my life then in a long while a couple of weeks ago. There was this bake sale for reproductive rights on the most beautiful street in the West Village. They got big chef names from the city to contribute one kind of baked good each. It was exactly 72 degrees out, the sun was peeking through the canopy of trees across the whole block. I had bought 10 tickets the moment they went on sale (I am committed to my love of baked goods.) We wandered around with a pink cardboard box for our loot, sitting on a curb halfway through to make some more room in the cardboard box. It wasn’t too crowded, everyone was extremely friendly. It was what I can only hope heaven is like. So I guess there’s the eat.

2021, am I right.

It's been a year, I guess. I don't know. Now we're having a new one, 2022. The names of years feel less important these days. Like what even is a year bro.

A lot of this year was some real teeth grittin’ bullshit. I mean COVID really did stick the hell around. The broad strokes of my life were pleasant this year, and I acknowledge how lucky I am for that. However, to make sure things weren’t 100% great, the universe dealt me a predictable hand consisting of all sorts of small and medium inconveniences and frustrations.

For example, I had a very new experience a couple weeks ago and that was accidentally setting my fingernail on fire.

I'm not sure why I felt the need to specify "accidentally" but I want you to understand the shock I felt when I let the lighter go out and looked down to see a flame still coming from the vicinity of my digits. It felt like a momentous, if bizarre, milestone- my nails have grown long enough that they can be on fire without me immediately noticing. While they are my real nails, they are coated in multiple layers of UV hardened gel, which makes them impervious to anything, I thought, until I got flames involved. I love my nails. I love that they are construction-grade tools. Needing to be overly cautious of open flames feels like a small price to pay for getting stickers off of things 250% faster than I used to.

I love the sound they make when you type. I love that tapping a single finger on the counter is audible. It's the best of all the subtle indications of boredom. I was always a small-yawn-with-a-hasty-apology-where-I-tell-them-it’s-not-that-they’re-boring-me-I’ve just-been-working-a-lot girl but this is much sexier. Speaking of which, I love the way they look when you're holding a can, or an iced coffee. Makes you feel like you’ve traveled back in time to 2006. You wonder how putting on a shapeless Olsen-esque frock and slipping a tacky handbag over the arm attached to those nails would be received in 2021. I mean, I’ve seen it work, but only within the confines of the Selling Sunset cast. These bitches wear non-ironic logos on their clothes and the highest heels they can buy on the black market and while most of them are terrible people they really rock these things that I would personally be horrified to wear. I bow down to them, and simultaneously, I’d like to make it clear that am available to adopt Christine’s baby if you can’t find anyone else because she should simply not be a mother.

I admitted to myself this year that I like to buy expensive things LEMME FINISH I like to buy expensive things in order to artificially tempt myself so that I can feel really good about myself when I decide not to spend the money and ultimately return all of it. It's perverse. The people at the Free People a block away from my office know exactly who I am and I gotta give them credit for still being absolutely lovely to me. I guess they don't care, it's not coming out of their paycheck, and every minute they spend helping me return something is one they don't spend helping the high-maintenance women of New York pick out mega expensive clothing that makes them looks like part-time yoga teachers with shitty taste.

I hate, but I‘ve accepted, that I love pumpkin spice stuff. Come fall in New York City, me and my comrades appear on the streets wrapped in something plaid we saved up for from Anthropologie and we buy everything we see that's pumpkin spice. I’d love nothing more than to buck the stereotype but I simply can’t. Trips to Trader Joe's become a nightmare for me. The second the weather turns I don't have enough room in my reusable shopping bags for milk or coffee for all the pumpkin Jo-Jos and brioche (and probably something gross like pumpkin tuna, I am powerless.) We brew our coffee with a little bit of cinnamon. We don't actually buy the candles that smell like baked goods because there's no way that wouldn't get old after 15 minutes but we sure as hell stop and sniff them in appreciation whenever we come across one in a store.

I’ve been spending some time this year watching beauty tutorials on YouTube, a new mid-pandemic pastime. I’ve always really liked messing around with makeup, but it’s always been to wear bright colors, be ballsy, MAYBE attempt to enhance something I’ve already got. I’ll wear a vibrant wash of color to look pretty, and if I also shock my enemies into a confused retreat then good.

The idea of using makeup to fix some sort of facial flaw is exhausting and I’m uninterested in it. It’s entirely possible there is some detailing work I could do to make me a more beautiful me but I just can’t go down that road. So, while I've been hearing about foundation for as long as I can remember, I have worn it basically never. When I could've used it, circa age 16, no one had really told me how. I lived in the eye of a storm of hair scrunched within an inch of its life and coated with gel to make sure it would break in half if we ever needed something sharp really fast, like for example the zombie apocalypse. Unfortunately, come the apocalypse I'm pretty sure I'd have a difficult time telling a carefully nonchalant Danielle circa 2006 from an actual zombie. I understood it in theory- it was something you put over your face to make it look as close to as perfect a canvas as possible. But before science caught up to women's beauty standards, it was better in concept than it was in actuality. My young adulthood took place in a sea of faces with makeup 2-3 shades darker than their neck. Viscous liquid, applied with a little brush, pooling in the sad crevices around your pimples, actually bringing more attention to your imperfections. I bet this is about the time of life when other people started popping pimples. You could just pop it to get rid of the redness and cover its deflated carcass with your Covergirl. I've never been a popper. I'm of the opinion that pimples are a medical thing, and I am not a doctor. I wouldn't do my own heart surgery, and this is on the outside of my body and gets right at the heart of my vanity. Surely I would make things worse.

A couple of weeks I thought to myself "I should try foundation." Now let me be clear- my face is fine. Good even, sometimes. I get the occasional pimple but they are the exception not the rule. But I must have realized that it'd been awhile since I disliked something about my body so it was time to pick a new target, and my face was just, you know, there. So I picked up something recommended by the single makeup artist I actively follow on YouTube (despite a year at Conde Nast I still only subscribe to four channels) and a Beauty Blender, which is something that was just called a sponge back when I was a teenager. So between my sunscreen and my primer I applied what was billed as a "light coverage" foundation.

I diligently put it all over my face for a full week. At the five day mark things started to go downhill. My skin has always had what I feel to be an appropriate amount of attention from me- daily care, but no crazy 15 step routines. It was shocked, therefore, when I started plugging up my pores with something I got with my Beauty Insider points. I don't even know what liquid foundation is made of. I assume anything that came from nature is there for scent purposes. I didn't even care, I just put it on. And my skin was not happy with me. It spurned a breakout the likes of which I hadn't seen for years (#blessed). Never. Again.

Toward the end of this year, I started doing some copywriting work on the side for a creative agency. I’m constantly talking about trying to have more of a work/life balance and so I thought the best way to work toward that would be to pick up freelance writing work in addition to my full-time-plus job.

Seriously, though, it’s been extremely cool. Copywriting is like a puzzle, it’s an exercise in concentration, in logic, in creativity and patience. It reminds me a lot more of former life as a sound designer than it does my current full time job. I genuinely love both. See above re: this year really not being so bad.

I’m not big on New Years resolutions, which I’m sure I’ve expressed before. I generally feel like if you need to wait for a specific day to make a change in your life, you’re probably not ready for that change. That said, it’s undeniably a nice moment to put some thought into what you want out of the next year. Most of these things are Beeswax, Not Yours, Inc. but in case you’re interested (you did make it this far), here are a few things I’d like to do:

• Write more fiction

• Continue skating

• Plan, and save for, a 2023 trip to Antarctica

• Make the perfect croissant

• Continue to keep the fucks I give to a minimum

• Make out, like a ton. Agnostic as to whether it’s one person a lot, or a lot of people

I have lived in a studio apartment on Sterling Place in Crown Heights for two years, almost to the day.

Two blocks away is a relatively new, empty building and a Union Market is going to open there. The big, beautifully designed window coverings with 3 feet tall peaches told me this.

It's been "going to open" there for some amount of time greater than two years almost to the day.

Now logically, I know there isn't going to be a Union Market. If I'm being honest with myself, I knew there was never going to be one. I'm not sure Union Market was even involved in the manufacturing of the very nicely artworked window wraps. One of the slicker real estate brokers in Brooklyn must have done a inspired cost vs benefit analysis and had them printed special order from a Kinkos. It turns out you don't actually have to produce the grocery store, it's enough to promise it for multiple years to the car-less, knee-pain-having prospective apartment hunters looking at the grocery store situation around an affordable apartment and sadly realizing they were in one of the fabled voids in between proper options in the outer boroughs. In the end, it's a bodega life for us, and this is, of course, totally fine. At this point my conscious brain realizes it will never appear, this oasis in desert. But a tiny part of me holds out hope.

Having a good grocery store nearby is pretty ideal if you cook, like actually cook, the kind with frozen leftovers in Tupperware labeled with the date in dry erase markers. The kind of cooking that you end up doing because you stopped getting your $5/month allowance the moment you were old enough to get a job. I'm not saying that all people who's parents randomly gave them money into their 20s are bad but I have not met one single person in the city whose parents didn't financially support them who wasn't fucking awesome. It's something I'm proud of, especially now that I'm more or less on the other end. I can't wait to not give my future kids money, even if I have it. Especially if I have it. I’m gonna be real mean about it.

I've been watching a pretty terrible Spanish show called Valeria that's like a slightly updated Sex and the City with the most unlikeable characters I've ever come across. They are all selfish, irrational, and annoying. I can't stop watching it. I've just been enjoying popping open a seltzer and absolutely hating these women. I don't like what it might be saying about me, that I apparently derive some amount of pleasure from hate(rat)ing. Hatred has always been so clear to me, rare, but extremely clear when it happens. I don't know of any other emotion that I feel I can reliably identify. Most of the time I can't assign a name to an emotional state on the spot. I have answered the question "how are you" with "meh" at least 80% of the times I've been asked.

Last week I tried two new things. Not a record by any means, but I’d be lying if I said I averaged more than a quarter of a new experience a month since March 2020.

One was Equinox. It is the most beautiful location for the most beautiful people in the world to pay to stay that way. It was a delicately floral-scented yuppie labyrinth, meticulously cleaned rooms in which people move their bodies in weird ways to not get fat, and if their heart is a little healthier afterwards too then that’s fine. I don't belong to Equinox, financially or otherwise, but I toootally get it. It's like if our cave man ancestors are gonna be horrified by the fact that we do HIIT workouts just so our asses look slightly more awesome why not do them in a place with Kiehl's products in the bathroom? Oh, the cost is why not? Huh. Equinox, as I suspected, is just a broker for the devil.

I do have a friend who's been trying it on for size. We met for a class, which I thoroughly enjoyed, mostly because the instructor's name was Clayton or Braydon or Blaxton or something and he was… not enthusiastic to excess. That's a rarity, finding someone to lead a workout class and not make you want to slam your head into a wall for all the affirmations screamed into your poor red sweaty face. I like when they limit their instructions to how to do the exercises. I happen to believe in myself most days, but even if I didn't, do you think that yelling at me that I should over a club remix of Lizzo would be the thing that sealed it?

The other thing I tried was nonalcoholic beer. We posted up (I will never be able to hear the phrase "posted up" and not think of Dennis Reynolds)(frankly I  will never be able to hear anything without thinking about a scene from Always Sunny, The Office, Gilmore Girls or 30 Rock. It's a goddamn first world affliction and I’m yes, I’m properly ashamed) on her Upper West Side stoop after our pilgrimage and cracked open a bunch of different cans of start-up brewed Beer Taste Without The Beer Feeling. It's having a moment right now and we wanted to see what the big deal was.

The prospect caused me a little anxiety to be honest. I haven't missed drinking for more than 14 seconds at a time since I had my last drink the night before my 29th birthday. It has been one of the easiest hard things I've done in my life, and I'm very grateful for that fact. Drinking a beer again of any kind could feasibly jog my memory and, I dunno, make it more difficult? Set me off on a bender? I'm honestly not sure why it made me nervous, I wasn’t prone to benders before, but the truth is, I love the taste of beer. I love it. It was a big hobby for me for a while, I brewed my own and everything. Of course the beer I brewed was gross, but I did it. Then I uncharacteristically abandoned it as a hobby because sometimes you gotta leave your cloudy, disgusting beer behind and move forward, ya know?

But I loved it this new generation of 0% ABV beer. My mind was wholly blown by the hipster virgin beer that we sampled on a stoop. It tasted like beer, like actual beer. It looked like beer too, all yellow and fizzy. I know making the liquid yellow is not the hard part of brewing beer but still. They didn't cut corners.

I'm excited to add it to my mocktail bar shelf which, I'm ashamed to say, exists. Right now it has La Croix, Bloody Mary mix, small batch kombucha, cans of pineapple juice and coconut milk and a single ginger beer. I also have this purple bottle of lavender soda that was in the basket of stuff my old job gave me when I left. Not the one I left two months ago, the one before that- it's been sitting there for a year and a half. It's sat there untouched for this long because while I love its beautiful violet color, I can't think of anything that sounds grosser than lavender soda.

I inexplicably have 1/3 of a huge bottle of rum there too. Genuinely have no idea where it came from, or why so much is missing. The amount of rum I ever drank was directly proportionate to how much time I spent hanging out on a beach, and I live in the middle of mid-gentrification Brooklyn. I don’t wear flip-flops outside my house for fear of stepping on broken glass and involuntarily sacrificing a toe to the family of rats who hangs out beyond our recycling bin.

The third thing I’ve done recently, though not in the last couple of weeks, is start a new job- not just a new company but a brand new, shiny set of expectations and deliverables, and a never-before-used title, though as I get deeper and deeper into it it feels blissfully like a mashup of the interesting parts of multiple jobs I’ve had before. It helps that team I’ve joined is only four months old itself. All (three) of us are in similar positions, if not within the power structure of the workplace, then in the inevitable social, let’s all get to know each other part of being employed.

The most mind blowing thing about being physically attacked by a guy is that you feel weird telling people what happened. Not because you're embarrassed per se, but because as a woman you're hyperaware of accidentally making too big of a deal out of the things that happen to you, thus, possibly, annoying others, the highest of crimes. When you do say it out loud, you do so plainly and you hear yourself sounding inappropriately at peace with the whole thing. You coin the phrase "low key assaulted." The people you do tell look to you to figure out how to react but because you've just mentioned it like you were sharing what you had for brunch. They don't know what to say. You hear yourself talking and suddenly you're wondering yourself if it was really that bad. The girls on your two most frequented text threads ask if there's anything they can do and you accurately answer, "I don't know."

It's wild.

It felt like a big deal in the moment. When he grabbed your ass, your initial reaction was to yell "don't fucking touch me," so, you did. Loudly. But in your righteous fantasy world that was enough to scare the men away from you. When, in very real life, he came back with, "Or what?" and hit you, hard, right where he'd grabbed while moving in even closer, you realized how bad things could get and a wave of fear washed over you. His eyes were blank, his mouth was foaming a bit in the corner. While he hit you again, he kept up a string of words under his breath. You caught "bitch" and "get laid" and "or what" again when you told him to leave you alone, this time with much less indignant energy behind it.

48 hours later, you're already questioning the validity of your reaction, googling "what is considered sexual assault?" Vacillating between "a big, scary man attacked me a block away from my home and I'm 100% certain this wasted guy would have hurt me even more if I hadn't recovered enough in the moment after he hit me the second time to understand that I needed to run" and "I'm overreacting, I managed to run, I'm fine, maybe I should eat something, I think I have some Triscuits somewhere."

You kinda almost cry a few times but you can't follow through. Your eyes get kinda damp and you get that headache you get when you're about to cry but you can't, because you're a girl and you've trained yourself to only ever cry in your office bathroom. Silently. You haven’t successfully cried since Feb 2020.

Actually expelling tears would probably feel good but to be honest you've always found it kind of performative in most cases, and remember, you don't want to make a bigger deal about anything than you need to. You google "what should you be feeling three days after a hostile stranger enters your personal space and refuses to leave.” You're overwhelmed by the number of results.

You think a lot about the #metoo movement. You realize that while you've absolutely been verbally attacked, and chronically minimized at work, and buying the razors that are more than the dude's razors because they're pink and smell like lavender since you were 12, you've never been physically touched. There was always a bubble, and you were always, lezbereal, irresponsibly confident in its impenetrability.

You've successfully avoided blowing someone for a promotion, which had you feeling pretty good about yourself. Now you've been researching personal alarms to carry with you when you walk your dog after sunset. You wonder if an alarm would have had any effect on him. You drink six cups of coffee, get worked up and consider rallying your fitter girlfriends to go find him. You could take him as a group- you’ve all done a lot of HIIT classes over the years. Should you, like, start packing a knife? Do you have the personality for it? Maybe a little paring knife, the smaller one from your knife block you don't use very often... maybe a switchblade would be better, and easier to carry... would you keep it in your sock? You'd almost definitely stab yourself and bleed out on the sidewalk before you'd disable a predator.

Mostly, now that you're safe, it's fucking disappointing. If you're really being honest you knew you weren't going to escape New York without being physically violated in some way and it's coming up on 10 years. But you wanted your neighborhood to be one where that doesn't happen. You were happy in the bubble. And for it to be burst just so some incoherent asshole with crazy eyes could feel your often touted superhuman ass is just such a goddamn bummer. That's the only way to describe it. A massive, massive bummer. A fucking shame. Humiliating, and terrifying but also inconvenient, annoying and boring. Lazy. Do something more original, you know? And don’t touch me while you do it. Stand a respectable distance away and insult my mother using 1950s slang. Rap at me aggressively in Korean from 15 feet. Why do you have to make it sexual? So much porn exists. In fact- flag me down and ask if me if I have any free porn sites to recommend. I can't promise a cheery response but I'd bet it would satisfy your urge to be a creep without putting your gross hands on me.

I guess, if you’re taking stock of your feelings every hour on the hour and averaging them, you're ok. I mean, you are. It could very easily have been worse. The only lasting physical effect you have is a legitimately sore butt but you've done enough squats in your life that this isn't out of the ordinary. Maybe this post is making too big a deal of this, but you've already formatted it, and how many peopler read this blog. really? You google "best breakfast sandwich in Crown Heights" and, even though you're pretty sure it's Monday, you climb back into bed. Everything is both fine, and awful, and you remind yourself that you're a woman, and that this is nothing new.

I figured, on some level, that he was pining for me.

Maybe pining is a strong word, but I assumed, surely, there must have been a tiny it of a spark remaining in his heart. He had kept the postcard, after all. After five years.

Just to be clear, because I feel like the details are important, this was not a postcard I wrote to him. I don’t really do postcards. Even when handwritten correspondence had a more significant role in a person’s life it was rare that I went to the trouble. Letters and cards in general were pretty painful, as a lefty, no matter how much I squirmed and contorted the side of my hand would inevitably land directly in the fresh ink, smudging it terribly. Inevitably it looked like I had spilled something on it, so I always felt self conscious when handing over a hand-written page to someone. When you combined that with my inexplicably abominable handwriting, I ended up with written documents that were ugly at best, completely illegible at worst. I'd turn in my homework and sort of wince in apology as I dropped it into that metal bin on the teacher's desk.

I was an early adopter of word processing programs. A disciple of Clippy. A Corel WordPerfect-ionist, if you will.

This was a postcard he had written to me. Apparently he had gone as far as addressing it, and putting a stamp on it. He had written it from Belgrade, which is where he grew up. I wish I could place the writing of the postcard on a timeline of the periods we went through. It came into being in 2015, which would have been about two years after we met. Was he divorced by then? I can't remember. We never did close the gap, but there were definitely moments where we moved in similar directions, on similar planes. We've both been on the NJ Turnpike this whole time, but never at the same patriotically named rest stop. Frankly, if this metaphor is truly perfect for my relationship history, I've been wandering around the James Fenimore Cooper rest area for about 16 years.

So he wrote it, but why didn’t he send it? Was he afraid to seem vulnerable? Did he articulate his feelings and have second thoughts about sharing them? Did he, in an emotional moment while walking on the river that I'm sure runs through Belgrade, feel the spirit move him to pluck a postcard from a stand in a tiny stall for tourist gifts and bare his soul, using a pen loudly printed with a picture of Belgrade Fortress? Did he find a bench somewhere, pull out a book to write on, and carefully consider every word as he articulated what he had been meaning to say to me?

The postcard had a picture of a bridge on it. A nice enough bridge, I guess. I can appreciate a good bridge. I learned the other day that the bridges I thought were suspension bridges are for the most part actually "cable-stayed" bridges. Like the Golden Gate Bridge. We've been lied to this whole time.

Bridges are actually one of my favorite shitty TV editing tropes- when the action is moving from Manhattan to the outer boroughs, they splice in quick pic of a bridge to emphasize how very far away Brooklyn is, emotionally, and depending on the show, socioeconomically. It's rarely a real bridge that exists in New York.  I've biked on them all, which makes me intimately familiar with them and I can spot a foreign bridge. But it doesn't matter. The gist is gotten.

Oh so the postcard- on the flip side, he had written the following:

Belgrade was so much fun. This trip was awesome. Like this bridge at [sic] the front of the postcard. Well, Almost. Hugs.

It’s amazing how the structures (the bridges?) you build in your head can topple instantaneously. 

Why did he save it?  Because he’s a guy who doesn’t throw things away. I’m so deeply someone who tosses things that I can’t make a great case for keeping that I forget that many don’t function that way. If I were to keep a postcard I had written five years earlier and never sent, it would be because there was a Reason, some attachment to either the piece of paper or the words on it. When he did give it to me, he seemed excited to hand it over, like it had some value, but I guess sometimes a postcard is just a postcard.

My whole life, in addition to feeling bogged down by People and Emotions, I've been perpetually bogged down by Things. A long time ago I just decided that I was going to throw away birthday cards from anyone I assumed I would get another one from at some point in the future. I have every intention of keeping the one that I'm relatively certain is the last one you give me (due to your imminent demise or mine.) You'll find my dead body in my fabulous apartment clutching that last card, heart thoroughly warmed prior to it stopping. But for now, I'll give it a good read and then wait until you leave to put it in the garbage, or in the recycling, depending on how I'm feeling that day about whether cards with glitter on them are recyclable, which lez be honest is always a game time decision.

It’s not exactly the same thing but I will on occasion keep little tokens of experiences I’ve had with the guys I date. I’ll save a ticket stub, or a receipt from an early-on date, something small, on the off chance that we fall madly in love and I need something to talk about during our engagement party. Inevitably the shiny illusion of compatibility fades shortly after, and I unceremoniously dump the deli number, or the post-it note note straight into the trash without a ton of feeling. When they’re just objects, they mean so little to me. Marie Kondo stole all of her tricks from me, except for the spiritual stuff, which I feel is superfluous but that is neither here nor there. I hold on to these little reminders because I know of their potential, but when that potential is unfulfilled I have no problem tossing them.

The harder things are the items that do fulfill that potential, or were designed to be deeply important from the get go. There are very few of these for me. A book I made of all of the emails I exchanged with someone I had a really lovely but confusing year with. A keychain that was the perfect weight, a metal design that someone brought back for me from California.

For a while after I got it, I would wrap my hand around the keychain in my pocket whenever I was feeling unsteady. I hardly think it was magic but the little surge of energy from knowing someone had specifically thought of me, missed me even, while he was gone was enough to take the edge off of an anxious moment. When our paths split and I walked away from him, I made myself throw it away. I have moments when I regret getting rid of it. But I guess we didn’t end up together it's one less thing to include when I'm getting my next moving company estimate. And the only things more NYC than moving a ton is being spat on by strangers (RIP) and… bagels?