Archive

Hi, just a note that I thought I had managed to delete my Substack but somehow had not. Please email me for reimbursement if you have been double-charged and I will refund your payment!

Something I don’t talk about much (because I signed an NDA as a condition of my severance) is the job I had from 2013-2014. That was the year that the NYC tech economy started being less fun and more cutthroat. Yahoo bought Tumblr. The people who had worked in high profile tech or blog jobs in the 00s were either rich and established or chewed up and spat out and searching for something new. I talked my way into becoming the lone “editorial” employee of a small startup that made app versions of magazines. I mean, it made the software that allowed people to transform their magazines into apps. The “editorial” part of my job is in scare quotes because it was actually more like sales. (A bigger, more established startup might have called my job “community” or “growth” or “audience.”) I was to convince writers with established internet presences and publications that had no app of their own that they needed an app – for the former group, the pitch was that apps were the future of blogs and for the latter group, the pitch was that apps were the future of print. Apps did not turn out to be the future of anything except apps, which is not this company’s fault. And just to be clear, I’m not going to write anything bad about this company, in part because I am not legally permitted to do that and also in part because Anna Wiener already wrote Uncanny Valley and even though she is 10 years younger than I am and had a different experience in a different city, that book contains everything interesting about my experience. You should read it!

No, I bring this up for a different reason which is that, given my firsthand experience working as a person with print publishing experience among tech people trying to use tech to monetize/reinvent some aspect of publshing, it’s VERY FRUSTRATING TO ME that I didn’t realize much sooner that Substack was not a cool place for us to hang out online.*

I don’t want to support this company with my reputation or (tiny amount of) dollars. Substack has a fundamental flaw that they are choosing not to own or address. They have repeatedly refused to acknowlege that paying some writers to use Substack makes them a publisher. They are simultaneously saying that writers who use Substack are “independent” and that by refusing to make value judgments apart from judging who can make the most money, they are promoting “free speech.”

In other words, under the guise of having no editorial strategy, they are choosing to have the worst kind of editorial strategy. The people who are capable of turning their existing writing platforms into a large paying audience aren’t inflammatory demagogues who sell their audience a simplified worldview that confirms their fucked-up preconceived notions, but a lot of them – inevitably– are. “If your views about whether trans people deserve to exist are too spicy for the New York Times or New York Magazine, we welcome you with open arms” may not have been the explicit intent of this editorial strategy, but it is its inevitable outcome.

Dear subscribers,

This morning I was eavesdropping on the kindergarten Zoom as Raffi’s teacher told the class how to write a personal narrative. Your story, she said, must have some details that make the reader understand what you were experiencing— “It was a hot day at the park” is a better sentence than “We went to the park.” Your story should have a beginning, middle and end. And it should, ideally, start with something called a “catchy lede,” which makes the reader want pay attention. Raffi wrote a story about “two crashes” — him crashing on his scooter a moment after his friend E crashed on his bike. “I hurted my knees,” his story concluded. It ticked all the boxes, and was accompanied by a good illustration. I thought, even kindergarteners can do this better than I can right now.

“Personal narrative” was once how I made sense of my experiences. It was what I did, what I loved reading. I thought that telling the truth could, in the aggregate, change the world. I wanted to champion other people’s autobiographical work and publish it, and I was sure that everyone would agree with me about the writing I found valuable, artful and true and the writing I found phony and gimmicky. I thought that I would get better and better at doing this thing that I loved over the course of a long career. I would write essay after essay and be known as a great essayist.

After a hot streak of several great novels, I have somewhat forgotten how to read again. I’m really enjoying reading Louis Sachar’s Wayside School series to Raffi at night, and I can’t tell whether it’s because life has stopped or because these books are genuinely rich texts - maybe both?- that I had the thought that someone should write a detailed critical analysis of them, maybe … locating them in a lineage that reaches back to traditional Yiddish folktales? (Spitballing because I have no idea, really, what I’m talking about). We just got to the part in Wayside School is Falling Down where a student finally enters Ms. Zarves’s classroom on the 19th story (there is no 19th story. There is no Ms. Zarves.) I love that Louis Sachar mentions Ms. Zarves and the 19th story so many times in the first two books in the series, but does not actually deploy her til the third book. What a genius, seriously! If you have fond memories of these books from your own childhood but have hesitated because everything seems potentially ruined now, I am here to reassure you that not only are the books still good, they are preternaturally gender and race-sensitive and also Louis Sachar has not done anything disgusting that we know of. We do not plan to know otherwise, ptoo ptoo ptoo.

To get to sleep, I’ve been listening to Simon Prebble’s amazing narration of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Have you read this book? It’s kind of weird that I never have - I am a sucker for historical fiction with supernatural elements. Most people are, I think! What could be more enticing than escaping into the past, but without the boring necessity to hew strictly to facts, and with some of the ickier, less fun elements elided by magic? And it’s long, too, like 800 pages. In a that was written around its publication in 2004, John Hodgman describes it as seeming like it could easily have been twice as long. That seems exactly right to me, as a person who mainly enters and exits this book at random points while semiconcious. It’s more of a mood than a narrative. Clarke successfully created a world, and characters, and they seem to just run around in it having various adventures.

I got acupuncture this morning for the first time in a year. Pre-pandemic I went to the community clinic down the block at least once a month, treating my various everyday aches and pains with deep coma-naps under one of those silvery marathon blankets on a cot bracketed by other cots occupied by various needle-filled strangers. For obvious reasons, community acupuncture is no longer an option.

I waited for the clinic to renovate into a warren of little treatment rooms before I thought about going back. Was it worth the discomfort of lying face-down on a massage table with my masked face in the little face cradle? I think “yes,” though it was scary. Not for COVID reasons, more because this was the first time anyone other than Keith and my children has touched me for a long time. I wonder how long it will be til it seems normal to go to the doctor, the dentist, the hairdresser, the nail salon et cetera. I mean, I know some people have never stopped. Maybe one of the reasons that they never stopped is that if you do stop, it’s so weird and hard to get your body to trust other people’s bodies again.

For the first fifteen minutes or so of the session, as the needles were going in, I had to actively fight the visceral urge to leap up, brush off all the needles, throw my shirt back on and run out the door. The therapist burned some herbs near my achy T3 vertebra and I could smell them super strongly through my mask and my mouth briefly filled with pre-vomit saliva. But then I forced myself to imagine the needles doing their magical thing, realigning my energy, sending little subtle coded messages along my nerves. I thought about the dream I’d awoken from three hours earlier, where I’d been interviewing a boring celebrity in a giant beautiful suburban house, and tried to find my way back into it. The next thing I knew, the therapist was gently removing the needles. I had slept so soundly that I’d drooled into my mask a little bit.

I’ve gotten really over-invested in Le Bureau, a tv show that it’s fair to call French Homeland. It’s a spy show with a lot of feints toward psychological realism and scenes where someone at a whiteboard explains which faction currently controls the different regions of Syria to the characters in the room (but really to the audience.) I don’t know why I’m insulting it! It’s a good show! I guess because it’s 2020 (for another few hours) and if you find anything pleasurable you’re supposed to immediately investigate why you shouldn’t enjoy it. Anyway: Le Bureau. It’s the main thing I have going on right now, and I still have two seasons left, so I hope it continues to be a bright spot in the days for me. Recently though there was a subplot in it that threw me for a loop.

(I’m not going to try to do this without spoilers, because I doubt you’ll immediately embark on a 6 season spy show that’s in French and even if you do, by the time you get to this subplot you’ll have forgotten about having read this newsletter.)

So there’s this spy, Marina, who’s come back from a mission in Iran, having been jailed and interrogated and tortured. We saw her survive and escape. Now she’s returning to active duty, but it quickly becomes apparent that she’s broken. At a coffee-date job interview — her cover identity is that she’s a seismologist, so it’s normal for her to get jobs in eg Iran — she thinks a guy a few tables away is listening to her conversation, and she hyperventilates and sprints out of the café. Despite this failure, her bosses let her try again, this time on a mission to Moscow. But at the airport she thinks she sees someone eyeing her suspiciously, makes excuses, and misses her flight as she hides in a bathroom stall, trembling and weeping.

I’m sure I’ve seen PTSD depicted in film and TV before, but if I’ve seen anyone have a panic attack onscreen with this level of specificity, I can’t remember it. Certainly, I felt I had more in common with Marina than with Tony Soprano passing out at the bbq. I hadn’t actively admired the actress who plays Marina before season 3 of the show, but maybe she’s a great actress her performance is kind of flat and one-note, and you can project anything onto her, which means she’s a good spy? The scenes where she’s freaking out are so vivid because suddenly this blank person’s exterior is cracking. I guess the thing the actress nails is the tension of trying to seem okay when you feel like you’re dying.

I’m going to level with you, beloved subscribers — I’m in a terrible mood today. Last night we had neighbors over for dinner on the roof of our building, which was so wonderful and felt so relatively-normal, but I had one too many glasses of wine (so, two) and woke up feeling like garbage. Small mercies: Raffi didn’t wake up having a temper tantrum about nothing and instead very sweetly cuddled with me, then asked nicely if I would turn on Story Pirates if he brought me the radio. He then complained about having to go to school and when pressed about why, said that [Classmate] sometimes “ignores” him. It’s hard to imagine anyone ignoring Raffi for very long because he makes it physically impossible, so props to this kid. Anyway, Raffi went to school. It’s his second Monday of in-person school so far this year. We pray that it lasts and have made peace with having absolutely no control over whether it does.

My to-do list this week includes writing two recommendation letters for former students, mailing Chanukah presents to my family, going over to Ruth’s apartment to see whether or not I’ve managed to keep her plants alive another week, opening the Word document that contains my novel, and doing a double Care and Feeding column so that I don’t have to do any more for the rest of the year. I will be honest with you here in this semi-private setting that while I’ve liked having the stability of a regular deadline, reading through the questions in the CAF inbox is not fun at all. America’s failed COVID response has put so much strain on caregivers, who were already pushed to the their limits anyway by America’s near-total lack of acknowledgment that care work is work. Adding the **holiday season** to the mix has seemed to really bring out the worst in people! Also, people use the CAF inbox to praise the other columnists and criticize me, which is mostly funny (“our language is not inherently misogynistic! Grow up!” someone recently submitted) but also feels more like Reading The Comments than anything I’ve done in a while — I keep my Twitter notifications set to “echo chamber” — and uh, I dislike it. There’s an aspect of this gig that takes me back to the late 00s, when I spent too much time alone and too online, engaging with people who definitely, in Morrissey’s words, didn’t care if I lived or di-hiiiiiiied.

There are other aspects of my current life that remind me of that time, too — I live this isolated single person existence during my workdays alone in an empty apartment, eating string cheese and making infinity cups of tea, trying to convince myself to do yoga but only succeeding in changing into yoga pants. The (huge) difference is that instead of that being my ENTIRE life, it’s my life for 4-5 hours at a time, after which I re-enter my real life. My real life sometimes looks like the montage scene in a movie that shows the characters as they were before the bad thing happened, ie wrestling in bed with our adorable children in their matching pajamas. It also sometimes looks like me trying to reason with a 2 year old as he cries so hard he almost vomits because his brother won’t let him play with the playdoh they both got identical sets of, and meanwhile said brother steals my phone and locks himself in the bathroom to illicitly watch videos of grown adults feigning enthusiasm about unboxing toys on YouTube. All of which sounds, I realize, not that bad, except there is just so much of it, and it’s endless, and there’s no relief from it in the form of, like, a childfree personal or professional social situation that involves other people in an indoor setting. Ever.

So here are my current virtual escapes:

“The windows were large and solemn, and no lace curtains could give them a friendly look. They weren’t windows for looking out of, they were windows to look in from.”

I read that last sentence to Raffi last night and felt that rare penny-drop sensation I get when I remember that, oh right, I love books. For a moment, I forgot about the garbage world of publishing, the sordid marketplace of writing and my own place in it, and I loved reading purely, the way I did as a child.

Dear paying subscribers,

You are so kind and so patient — I’m sorry this is the first subscriber-only post I’ve done so far! I’m really grateful to have you as a subscriber and I’m sorry to have repaid your generosity the only way I know how — by neglecting and rebuffing it and hoping you’ll continue to like me anyway. (I’m working on it?)

This week has been pretty bleh — Keith and I have been taking turns supervising Zoom kindergarten on Mondays, and whenever it’s my Monday I feel like my week starts on the most inauspicious possible note. I always think I will get a lot of chores done around the house, because keeping Raffi on task precludes doing any other forms of work, but then I never even accomplish that. I spent 10-1pm this past Monday intermittently trying to unload the dishwasher while Raffi rolled around on the floor, playing with play-doh with a vehement intensity I know well — the kind of focus a person can only summon if he is actively trying to avoid doing something else. His saintly, wonderful teacher, meanwhile, was successfully getting at least some of the other kids to draw a picture of a lion and do basic addition. I thought about dropping out and unschooling Raffi, so that he could play with play-doh and listen to the Hamilton soundtrack as much as he wants. However, I know Raffi (because to some tragic extent I am Raffi) and so I know that if playing with play-doh and listening to the Hamilton soundtrack was what he was to be doing, he’d find a way to avoid it by doing something else.

Last week I felt ravenously hungry all the time, which was logistically annoying but kind of fun. Usually when I feel anxious my stomach is a mess and I eat bland, sad meals that require as little time and effort as possible to prepare. But for some reason all my addled mind could focus on last week was procuring, preparing and eating delicious food. I ate some weird things and some excellent things, and I cooked a streak of dinners that were actually good, not just edible or edible-plus, for maybe the first time since the pandemic started.

Back in April, when everyone else was in the sourdough phase of lockdown, I was experiencing the total opposite impulse. Big cooking projects that took lots of time in the kitchen were the last thing I wanted to take on, because my kids were with me almost all the time, often trying to kill each other or drawing on the walls or demanding that I cut up an apple, open a yogurt, fill up a sippy cup, you get the picture. Cooking anything I didn’t already know how to make involved keeping the tab of the recipe open in my brain while stopping and starting the process 87 different times. I looked at everyone else’s elaborate baked goods and canning projects on Instagram with a kind of detached, impersonal awe. The mental stamina they were displaying was not in my wheelhouse. My wheelhouse, in addition to … wheels? … contained a large supply of boxed mac n cheese and a stir-fry from Cook’s Illustrated that I’ve been making approximately once a week since 2005.

But last week I had a ton of nervous energy that had no obvious outlet because reading and writing were way out of the question until the results of the election were clear. Enter: cooking! Eating!

The two most delicious things I ate last week were things I definitely did not cook. One was a millet mochi donut from Win Son bakery, still warm from the fryer. As you know I have celiac so I haven’t eaten anything close to a “real” donut since 2011, so maybe if you can eat gluten this wouldn’t be as much of a revelation, but to me it was so good I almost started crying. The texture was perfectly chewy, not gummy, like the best butter mochi cake. Whatever was on the outside had a perfect salty-sweet-umami balance. Maybe it was just salt and sugar and a tiny bit of fishiness from shrimp-containing things also being fried in the same oil. Does that sound gross? It was out of this world perfect. I would like to eat one every day for breakfast with a giant ceramic cup of perfect-temperature black tea.

Can you believe that the first time I wrote about undertaking Cinema Studies with my now 5 1/3 year old son, I hadn’t ever seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, EITHER version? To think that there was a time when some version of the Oompa Loompa song wasn’t playing in my brain! To think that I hadn’t acknowledged the genius of Gene Wilder, or wondered where the actress who played Violet Beauregarde is now! (Please don’t google that, it’s actually very sad.)

Now it’s several months later and Raffi and I have seen a lot more movies, many of which were probably bad choices for Raffi, but again, it’s an ongoing emergency and we have to do whatever we need to do in order to make it through til bedtime (even if watching tv right before bedtime goes against all known advice.) Lately I am pushing my agenda of watching Halloween-season movies, which I would happily watch all year long. I’m not sure why but there’s something intensely comforting about the mere existence of Halloween as a concept this year. And this is coming from me, someone who previously self-identified as a Halloween Grinch! Maybe it’s something to do with how Halloween originated as a festival that normalizes death as part of the cycle of life? Is that too galaxy-brain? It might just be that Raffi is finally old enough to really appreciate spookiness and scariness, to get into the *ahem* spirit of Halloween. Whatever it is, it made me extremely happy in an unalloyed way to be able to watch the kids carve a pumpkin upstate with my dad while listening to an Apple Music generated “Halloween party” playlist that included The Monster Mash.

On Monday night I was “in conversation with” Sigrid Nunez “at” Harvard Bookstore, but actually on Zoom, to discuss her new book What Are You Going Through. In the book, an unnamed narrator goes around talking to various people (and one cat) about what they’re going through. It’s riveting despite being very digressive, and despite its unconventional plotting. Basically — I don’t think this is a “spoiler,” any review would probably tell you this — the narrator has a longtime but not super close friend who’s dying of cancer, and who wants her the narrator to provide company and complicity when she ends her own life. The book is a series of conversations between these two women, and also some others. By the end, everything you’ve expected to happen has happened, but a lot of minor unexpected things have happened, too. It’s not exactly “a stranger comes to town” or “a hero must defeat a monster,” but there is certainly something structural at work that keeps the reader turning pages.

Sigrid said that she thinks what makes her books interesting is the intimacy of first-person narration — I’m paraphrasing, obviously. Basically, she relies on the idea that it’s hard to turn your attention away from someone who is speaking to you directly. Creating an “intimate voice” allows her to eschew things like detailed physical description. In her recent novels, the reader is conscripted into collaborating in building the book’s world, given a minimum of information. Sigrid made it clear that she doesn’t think this is the one true way to write a novel or anything. “The house of fiction has many windows,” she said, paraphrasing a much, much longer about the house of fiction, its infinite windows, and their pierceability via vision and will.

“TV drama series all have a limited lifespan, or else become parodies of themselves - normally within three years.” This is something I read recently in a book about narrative and structure that I downloaded on a whim, and it seems mostly true? I am well into the self-parody years of Billions but that is not diminishing my enjoyment. It is the best worst show I have ever watched.

Billions actively repels any kind of critical analysis because the characters are all so gloriously two-dimensional. If you catch yourself, the day after watching Billions, thinking about how or why something happened on Billions, you are committing fanfiction. This makes it the perfect show for right now because the last thing I want to do is think.

Have you seen Billions? If not, let me back way up. Billions is a Showtime drama about a billionaire (natch) hedge fund manager named Bobby “Axe” Axelrod, who is played by Brody from Homeland. His enemy is U.S. attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), a zealous crusader against financial crimes who always wears suspenders AND sometimes a vest. Inconveniently and also wildly implausibly but I mean, just wait, Chuck is married to Dr. Wendy Rhoades, who works for Axe! She is his company’s performance coach/in-house psychological masseuse, a job that requires her to wear an infinite series of bodycon dresses with cutouts near the neckline and sternly but lovingly give pep talks to Axe Capital employees. The Axe employees are all either clowns or gangsters, with the exception of “Dollar” Bill, who is a clownish gangster. Wendy is played by Rachel Menken from Mad Men (ok, her name is Maggie Siff.) The first season hinges on how on earth Chuck and Wendy will stay married as Chuck’s all-consuming professional life hinges on destroying Wendy’s boss and Wendy’s all-consuming professional life hinges on helping her boss evade her husband/the law while doing all kinds of illegal things to make huge piles of money. The season ends with Chuck and Axe basically singing “Confrontation” from Les Mis to each other. The entire show hinges on the idea that Axe and Chuck will eternally be at war with each other, but are prevented from ever fully defeating each other because of their shared loyalty to and dependence on Wendy!

We needed a toothbrush, bandaids, milk, cans of seltzer, hand soap, and goldfish crackers, so I went to Target. There were no carts available and a pissed-off crowd was gathered near the registers, making sure to stand six feet apart, waiting for carts to emerge. After a few minutes of looking at my phone and milling around I decided to just shop directly into my granny cart. No one seemed to care. I walked through the aisles and grabbed things as quickly as I could, then allowed myself to be shepherded obediently into the shortest of the three checkout lines snaking around the store. I didn’t buy anything I hadn’t planned to. I didn’t linger by comparing brands or prices or reading ingredients, because why would I spend any more time than absolutely necessary indoors with strangers? Everyone else shopping there was doing the exact same thing.

I used to find this kind of errand fun. More than fun - soothing, even sort of blissful. At Target, at an off-hours Trader Joe’s, a Whole Foods pre-Amazon, the suburban Stop n Shop near my father in law’s house, I could happily spend an hour pushing a cart around, maybe sipping a mall-coffee beverage of the sort I wouldn’t usually buy, like a chai or a matcha latte. I’d get toilet paper and a pair of fast-fashion shorts cheap enough to buy without trying on, or a new lip balm, or a coloring book for Raffi. The organized well-stocked shelves of different foods and goods felt like infinite possibility and abundance, not waste. I felt lulled and comforted in these stores. I knew on some level that it was not sustainable or healthy for people or workers or the planet to have giant stores with twelve different brands of hand soap and an entire aisle just for chips and tropical fruit year-round. Of course not. Feeling good in Target always felt like a guilty pleasure, but the pleasure outweighed the guilt a million to one. The minor gifts to myself I would buy there never totaled more than ten or twenty bucks, but of course that adds up. Everything adds up.

I’m not trying to feel nostalgic for pre-COVID Target. We have to dream of a better world where there is pleasure available that’s realer than the ephemeral dopamine boost of buying a new flavor of ChapStick. I’m the last person in the world who’s going to try to tell you what that will look like, or what we need to do to get there. All I know is that we have to dream!

“Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” — José Esteban Munõz,

“What are you working on lately?” Honestly, I am working on forcing myself to do one brief online yoga class every day. I’m working on other things too but this is the only goal I’ve been chasing with any kind of consistency since March. My ability to read and write comes and goes. Sometimes I have focus and sometimes my brain is a sieve that other people’s ideas float in and out of. My own ideas are inchoate and random or nonexistent. Most of my conversations are about the specifics of my family’s childcare schemes and the vagaries of what we’re calling “school”. Most of my spontaneous social interactions are a weird dance of trying not to get way too deep way too fast with someone whose whole identity to me/role in my life is “Jacob’s dad.” Shit is weird, has been weird, will continue to be weird. So for about half an hour a day (ideally!) I take refuge in the controlled world of Adriene, who is always in a serene room in Austin with her three to five houseplants, her yoga mat and her dog Benji.

One of Adriene’s many charms is that she has a class for every need, from “Yoga for Loneliness” to “Yoga for After a Disaster” to “Yoga for Core (And Booty!)” The classes also range from 5 minutes to an hour, so you really have no excuse not to squeeze one in. Also, five minutes can feel like forever. When I was first starting to do these videos I only did ones from the under 10 minutes section for quite some time. Gradually, I worked my way up to one of the 30 day yoga challenges — the most recent one, from January 2020, which explores the concept of “Home.” .

Since July we have been living what passes for a charmed life considering we’re still in a global pandemic, meaning primarily that both our kids have been in full-day summer camp. Tomorrow is the last day.

Every morning for the past six weeks I’ve left the house with just Ilya — Keith drives Raffi to his camp, which is in Bay Ridge! — and walked .9 of a mile to his preschool. We did this same walk every school day of the past year, too, but we also had Raffi with us, meaning that I had to cajole and corral Raffi and sometimes tow his scooter with one hand while I pushed the stroller with the other. Doing this commute with just Ilya is almost meditative by comparison. He’s at that golden age just past two, still content to lie back in the stroller and let experience wash over him, occasionally removing his paci to point out a doggy! or a bird! or a truck! Soon he will be agitating to get OUT, to WOK, and we’ll have to start letting him go on his scooter and everything will take twice as long. Raffi, at this age, could make the three block commute to his first daycare take twenty minutes. Maybe Ilya will remain chill, but I doubt it. He’s already figured out how to loosen the straps.

For now, though, he’s a perfect companion — just present enough that I can’t listen to a podcast, but not a constant stream of too-loud awkward questions and complaints like his brother. We see the same things on our walk every day, but it’s different every day, too, because of the tiny fluctuations in the weather and the foliage and the flowers and the people and dogs who we pass. My world has become so small. I can anticipate every bump in the sidewalk. They repaved Washington and somehow blocked a drain in the process so now there’s a big lake that forms on the west side of the intersection when it rains. The extremely tall maple trees to the east of that intersection are always losing branches in storms, and their leaves are already turning yellow. I read in an article about climate change that maples are not going to last much longer in this part of the Northeast in general. Raffi talks about winter being a time of snow and snowball fights primarily because he’s been taught that in pre-K. It only snowed once this past year. Someday relatively soon we will sell or give away this stroller and then I’ll forget what it was like be constantly pushing a stroller up and over the edges of curbs, finagling the stroller through the entrances to shops. Ilya calls the deli where we occasionally buy after-school Pocky “CHOCOLATE” and the playground “SWING” or “SLIDE.”

It’s the coolest day since spring today. I don’t really have anything I’m supposed to do at this exact moment. I want to eat the entire internet, read every book, write down every idea I’ve ever had. I should pay bills, file invoices and claims, look at outerwear to buy for the kids so they can spend more time outside when the weather cools off, as much time as possible outside, even in the cold wet days of fall. I try to think about something I would usually look forward to, or even anticipate with excited nervous fear, and there’s just nothing there. The last five months have banished the last vestiges of Raffi’s toddlerness; he is five now, long and wire-thin, a kid. All I know about the immediate future is that my children will continue to grow up. Sometimes I wish this summer would never end. Other times, I wish to skip ahead and be far in the future, even if it means sacrificing these final months of Ilya’s baby-chub, his first ventures into three-word sentences. “I did it!” he exclaims, climbing to the top of a play structure, beaming, radiant, happy enough for us all, for now.

Since July the kids have been in camp. I dicked around a lot and then got back to work. Nothing that I’ve been working on is finished yet, except one very short interview that was kind of a disaster on all fronts. I did it for free, sort of accidentally, and ended up feeling like I’d sort of taken advantage of myself. The whole experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I keep promising myself that I won’t do anything, anymore, to be a “good literary citizen” or because I think it might be a stepping-stone to some other kind of more prestigious, interesting, better-paying work. Instead, in the extremely limited time I have, I will focus only on doing work that either teaches me something or pays me fairly. Or both!!

I almost wrote a caveat here about how lucky I am but honestly I think we have all been saying that too much. It’s 2020. No one is THAT lucky. Even these vile UWS assholes in this article aren’t lucky, because they have not learned how to deal with their discomfort except by running away from it, and they don’t understand that the discomfort they’re experiencing when they witness other people’s suffering might be grief, because that would explode their brains, so they process it as anger. Or they’re just evil assholes! I might be overthinking it!!

Anyway: my work! I’ve been really enjoying it, on the days I’m not too fried to do it. I’m trying to teach myself how to do reporting, which isn’t my comfort zone but lately I’m not sure what is.

The week before we went into lockdown I had one of those vertiginous mood plummets that feel otherworldly, as though I’ve been struck down by a curse. I was fine one day, more than fine, humming along full of energy and forward momentum. The next day, being alive hurt. I white knuckled through dropoff and came back to my apartment and couldn’t stop crying. I hated everything I had ever done. Every choice I’d ever made seemed wrong. Most of all, I wished never to have published any writing. Why had I made myself so vulnerable to attack, what had I been thinking? I had hurt myself and the people I loved in ways I didn’t even understand. Waves of pain radiated out of my joints every time I moved. I talked myself through each infinite minute by reminding myself that this was temporary and not without cause or precedent. I had just had my IUD removed, I was experiencing some kind of hormonal withdrawal. If I could take some benzos and nap, Ruth promised, my brain would “hard-restart” and I would feel better, and I did, but the next morning was also bad. I sat on the aisle at a school assembly in case I had to cry or faint or vomit. I got through it and the next day felt tentatively normal.

The day after that was when we all started to talk seriously about whether they should close the schools, and the day after that whatever was happening to me got sort of swept along in the wave of what was happening to everyone. Crisis adrenaline replaced whatever toxic hormonal cocktail had been poisoning my blood. After I finally stopped bleeding from the IUD removal I didn’t get another period for 48 days, so long that I bought a pregnancy test. Then I started to have regular cycles again, with ups and downs that felt bad in predictable, non-catastrophic ways: a spike in anxiety around ovulation, a return to calm with the first day of bleeding. It’s strange for me even to remember that random day of abject misery now. If I hadn’t just had my IUD removed I would probably think it had been some kind of psychic premonition about the coming crisis, but it wasn’t, it was just my defective body doing one of the things bodies reliably do, which is: get sick and sometimes, if we’re lucky, get better.

**

Raffi is obsessed with Lady Gaga right now. Specifically, the Stupid Love and Rain on Me videos, but also and most enduringly the Bad Romance video. He keeps asking me to explain the plot of it, which I can’t because it makes no sense. Stefani, if you want to step in here and explain wth is going on in this video in terms that would make sense to a newly-5 year old, please email me at emilgou@gmail.com. Also hi, I love your oeuvre, thanks for subscribing to this newsletter?? As best I can tell, the video opens with a lot of monsters in white latex emerging from coffin-pods with their eyes covered by latex crowns. Then there is a closeup of some bottles of fancy vodka (?) and in the next sequence some ladies are trying to forcefeed it to Gaga, who has just emerged in a pink wig and dilated pupils from a bathtub in another translucent latex corset. Later, she and the monsters dance towards a man with a metal jaw ornament. She is wearing crystal underpants and what Raffi cannot be dissuaded from calling a “boof-bra” (a bra), also made of crystals. This is intercut with extreme closeups of Gaga’s relatively normal-looking face and also scenes of monster-Gaga’s knobbly spine in a … shower? But she just took a bath? I guess she was really dirty! Then there’s a whole other sequence involving ornate head-to-toe Balenciaga looks (“walk, walk, fashion baby”) and more lingerie, a black set and a red set, and a culminating scene where she marches toward metal jaw man, who is reclining on a bed flanked by taxidermied antelopes (taxidermy, so hot in the 00s!) wearing a polar bear-skin cape. Then the closing shot of the video, MAXIMALLY important to Raffi, features Gaga lying next to the ashen remains of metal jaw guy in bed. Flickering flames are still spurting from her metal boof-bra, and she is smoking a cigarette and looking very disaffected. Why did she kill him, he wants to know, and also how, and also, what is a “bad romance?”

The things I most want — childcare, a larger and cleaner living space, a functioning federal and/or state government that will reopen the city in a way that won’t kill and sicken thousands more people — are not available. But I can still spend money, and sometimes, doing so has provided momentary solace or at least amusement. As my husband (Capricorn, raised in the Soviet Union, frugal to a fault) will tell you, there is nothing I (Libra with Aries moon and Aries rising) love more than throwing money at a problem. In the case of an intractable problem like being trapped in our apartment with our kids for the forseeable future, this has proved slightly more difficult than usual. But I have risen to the challenge. Keith, maybe don’t read any further.

For the kids:

These have provided us with many minutes of fun. I imagine they would be even more of a hit if your kids were older and had more patience for coloring. I now understand the “adult coloring book” craze of a few years back — it is satisfying, or at least not-boring, to get down on the floor and color, especially compared to what I’d be doing otherwise: “sitting there watching and waiting for them to attack each other/the apartment in some hard-to-clean way” and “attempting to leave them alone for two seconds in order to accomplish a survival task like cooking/tidying, with inevitably disastrous consequences.”

Today is the second day of our eighth week of sheltering in place. During this time, Raffi and I have developed a ritual of watching a movie or part of a movie together after dinner, while his dad does his brother’s bedtime. I threaten to take away the movie at least twenty or thirty times a day. I almost never take it away because I need the movie just as much, or more, than Raffi does. It’s not the greatest habit and I’m not actually advocating anyone do this with their almost 5 year old; for one thing, it’s almost impossible to judge what will be “too scary.” After we watched Ghostbusters (2016), which is really not scary unless for some reason you find ghost farts or the waste of Kristen Wiig’s talents terrifying, he said “I’m surprised I’m still alive for breakfast” the next morning. Also it’s just a lot of TV (he also watches TV during his brother’s nap and, on weekends, in the morning before breakfast). But it’s an opportunity to spend time together doing something we both enjoy, as opposed to what we do 99% of the rest of the time (spend time together doing something Raffi enjoys which I do not enjoy, or something neither of us enjoys).

Here are very brief capsule reviews of some of the movies we have watched.

Annie (1982): The best movie ever made, probably? Unless of course you are adopted or know someone who is, in which case it is highly problematic. Her parents are dead! That’s a fun thing to discuss 400 million times. The stuff with Mr. Bundle and Ms. Hannigan is way too sexy, in a way that no kids’ movie would ever dare to be now, and I admire that.

Annie (1999): A travesty with some scintillating highlights. The actress who plays Annie is dead behind the eyes and grew up to be a vet tech, good for her. You’d think Kathy Bates would be better as Ms. Hannigan, but she is unable to rise above the (Disneyfied, made for tv, bowdlerized) material. One bright spot is the Alan Cumming/Kristin Chenoweth Rooster/Lily combo — they do not so much compete with Tim Curry/Bernadette Peters (how could they???) as make the roles their own in a very over the top unhinged way, like they’re in a totally different movie than everyone else is.

Somehow, I’m in the middle of doing publicity for Perfect Tunes. If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you have heard a lot about this book over the past five years. Well, now it’s published, and you can order it online and have it shipped to your bunker. The independent bookstores where you’d ordinarily be able to buy it are closed, but you can still visit them online and they’ll ship it to you. Here are the stores that have particularly supported the book by planning events for the launch. Please buy it from the one that’s closest to where you live, or just whichever one you want! They ship all over the country, usually as fast as Amazon or faster!

Greenlight Bookstore (Brooklyn)

(DC)

Two weeks ago I went to New Orleans. A lot of classic New Orleans tourist experiences — beignets, po boys, muffaletta, gumbo — are off limits to me because I have celiac, and others — staying drunk all the time around mardi gras — are unappealing to me because I get hangovers from two glasses of wine. But I did get to see green lush thriving plants at the butt-end of winter, and experience the thrill of being in an unfamiliar but familiar-from-culture city, and also magic.

I love magic. I love imagining that magic is real. I am interested in all systems of divination and fortune-telling and anything that has to do with the intangible world, however anyone wants to define or describe it. Over the years I’ve visited all kinds of psychics, astrologers, tarot readers, shamans and energy workers. My favorite experiences have been with tarot, which makes sense; lots of writers are into tarot, which is about archetypes, symbolism, and how meaning and narrative are constructed in our conscious and unconscious minds.

It’s fine by me when people are skeptical and don’t want to engage with this kind of stuff at all. For many reasons, for some people, magic will always seem like a scam at best and a tool of oppression and manipulation at worst. I also felt ambivalent about “belief” for a long time and then more recently I decided that belief doesn’t matter. I understand that this is the way some people feel about spiritual practice and maybe someday I’ll get there. For now, I just have a pack of tarot cards and a small library of books about tarot and astrology that I consult when my life feels dull and spark-less. For me, this stuff is mostly a reminder that a whole other world that I can’t explain or describe exists.

I was feeling anxious in New Orleans, for what I kept explaining to myself were legitimate reasons. It was our first time leaving both kids with my parents, and I was having occasional intrusive thoughts along the lines of “what if we both died right now” (very cool, normal, relaxing vacation mindset.) Also was about to be published and was being fact-checked, which was horrible even though the factchecker had a nice bedside manner and understood that it was rough for me to be taken through the specifics of events that had been traumatic.

This winter has been a real festival of minor bodily indignities and ailments for me and my children. As I write this I am suffering from a second bout with viral pinkeye, hot on the heels of the flu I caught from Raffi, who had it last week. I’m still not mentally recovered from the stomach virus that Ilya brought home in November, which resulted in a permanent orangey stain on the rug in our bedroom when Raffi threw up raw carrots (he swore he’d never eat them again, a vow he completely forgot about almost immediately. I’m still not ready.) The goals I had for myself at the beginning of the school year, like ‘figure out what my next book is about’ and ‘apply for full-time teaching jobs’ and ‘get assigned a substantial reported article,’ have taken a backseat to just surviving and doing the baseline amount of work that I thought would be happening “on the side” of those larger ongoing projects. I have felt stymied and foggy and full of self-recrimination, like the fact that I’ve caught every kid-ailment that has traipsed into our apartment must be indicative of some larger failure on my or body’s part. Why can’t my immune system get it together? Why can’t my brain triumph over the weak vessel of my body???

Clearly this attitude is not helping matters, but it’s hard to shake the impression that one is a total waste of space if one is not currently working on some publishable piece of writing that will change the world or at least one’s own place in it. I also live with Keith, who in addition to being insanely hardworking is also sort of taking over the mommyblogging beat. For a solid 2 weeks in December I could not go anywhere without hearing about Keith’s Raffi-rage essay. A friend who lives in Oakland told me his therapist recommended it to him! It was nice to be able to bask in reflected glory, but I could never quite get over the “reflected” part. It was weird to feel like I’d lost control of the narrative of our family’s life, even though I (mostly) cosign Keith’s account. I guess I’d become used to being the one who tells the story.

In the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election I was working on a short, “fun” essay for a food website about what it’s like to watch The Great British Baking Show when you have celiac disease. We did one round of edits and then Trump was elected and it seemed impossible that anyone would ever care about any short “fun” essays ever again, least of all me. I told the editor I didn’t want to keep working on the essay, forgot about it, and basically continued to feel that way about professional first person writing that wasn’t explicitly connected to the crises at the forefront of my consciousness for the next three years.

Then last night I was watching The Great British Baking Show and I started thinking about that essay, so today I reread it. It’s not a huge loss that it won’t ever be published but it was kind of good, and sad! It made me realize how much my celiac diagnosis affected my career trajectory. In the years leading up to it, I had begun to write seriously about food. I hosted a YouTube cooking show in my apartment, inviting authors I’d never met to come and cook with me while we talked about their novels and memoirs. I reviewed cookbooks and had a food blog and volunteered in a soup kitchen. I made cinnamon rolls that tasted just like Cinnabon’s and pork buns that tasted just like Momofuku’s. Everything was going well except that I felt sick pretty much all the time.

I kept doing some of those things after eliminating gluten from my diet, but I still feel bad about foisting some of the things I (gratefully) eat on guests who don’t have any reason to avoid wheat (and rye and barley and spelt etc). Gluten-free baked goods are almost universally inferior to gluten-full ones, sorry to this flan. In some respects, of course, my cooking has improved out of necessity, and I’ve explored recipes from countries where wheat isn’t as much of a staple as it is in Euro-American cooking. But I’m also forced to cook for myself the majority of the time, since only relatively expensive restaurants can be counted on to avoid cross-contamination and keep track of allergens well enough that I won’t get sick from their food. Cooking all the time, especially with kids, has made me much less enthusiastic about cooking, as subscribers to these complaints already know. I also just don’t really look forward to things the way I used to. Like, for example, food-focused holidays, or traveling. I think of the logistical headaches involved in being not hungry rather than looking forward to meals. More than anything I miss the sense of freedom and possibility that I felt back when I could still respond to a dinner invitation by saying “wherever, I eat everything!”

On the other hand, though: I now very rarely experience the shaky, poisoned-gut pain that plagued me for years of my twenties. And I still love thinking about everything that food means and everything that cooking can do. I also still love Bakeoff, even as I understand this love to be slightly rooted in masochism. Then again, imaginary cakes — the ones on tv, the ones in cookbooks and memoirs and novels — are the kind I have always liked best.

Probably my most memorable and best Halloween costume was Courtney Love, because it was part of a couples costume — Kurt and Courtney. My then-boyfriend repurposed the wig he’d worn two years earlier, when he’d dressed up, horribly, as Elliot Smith (horribly because that was the October that Elliot Smith died.) The Halloween party I wore this costume to was also my birthday party; I often used to celebrate my October birthday and Halloween simultaneously. The party was in a friend’s giant crumbly shared Williamsburg loft. At the time I didn’t realize I was Halloween-peaking. In fact, I remember feeling like I had done myself a disservice by choosing a costume that made me less attractive than usual. I had really committed to kinderwhore-era Courtney, not Oscars-dress/Celebrity Skin Courtney. So I had smeared makeup and fake bruises and a bad platinum wig with black roots. I spent the whole night feeling jealous of my most beautiful and glamorous friend, who had just come back from a year in Spain with some Spanish boy-toys in tow, and they were so thoroughly in her thrall that they had dressed as the Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow and Tin Man to her obviously very sexy Dorothy. In retrospect of course we were all so young and beautiful then. I just remembered that Lucy was dressed as Sexy Harriet Miers (allowing me to date this party definitively; it was 2005).

This year, like last year, I am not dressing up at all. The two years prior to that I think I did some token cat-ear thing; those were the Halloweens when Raffi was three months old and 15 months old. When he was three months old, I went to a party full of kids and babies and was stressed out the whole time because my baby was crying. He was probably hot in his costume, he might have preferred to be sleeping or eating and not at a party. We probably shouldn’t have bothered to go but we didn’t know that yet, we didn’t know anything. At this same party there was a woman with a baby the same age as Raffi who had dressed both herself and her baby in black swan/white swan costumes. Her baby was smiley and placid. That I can still remember this detail, of all the things from that period I can’t remember at all, is a testament to my amazing, preternatural ability to feel jealous of people whose parenting-row I perceive as easier to hoe than mine is.

Halloween is tomorrow, but I am already Halloweened out. Last Friday we weathered a carnival of “Spooky Fun” at Raffi’s school, which had the same chaotic, nerve-jangling vibe as the Pumpkin Festival I described in my last newsletter-complaint. Kids everywhere, sensory overload, long lines, tensions running high. Raffi, of course, loves Halloween. He wants to dress up and offer everyone candy. He has grandiose costume ambitions and no concrete plans for how they might be achieved. He is just like me, or more accurately, just like how I used to be. It’s always striking how much the aspects of me that were excised when he was born are more or less reborn in him. I hope Halloween lives up to his expectations, but he’s like me, so nothing ever will.

On Saturday night I burned all the skin of the pad of my left thumb. It was the kind of banal kitchen mishap that happens all the time, especially when you’re cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen. I ran it under cold water as long as I could but then I had to keep cooking dinner, which I did with my thumb always near an ice pack. The top layer of skin turned white immediately and it hurt all night, the kind of pain that registers as slightly more than annoying, slightly less than stop-everything-and-panic. I ate the dinner I’d been making when I burned my thumb, I helped put the kids to bed, and then I passed out, exhausted from being in pain and exhausted from acting, out of necessity, like I wasn’t. In the morning it still hurt but much less, and the top layer of white skin had toughened and died, though the skin under it was raw and hurt when pressed or used (I discovered how often I use my left hand to turn on lamp switches).

On Monday the blister formed then popped (disgusting! and satisfying, of course) and then the dead skin that had been the blister started peeling off. The skin underneath was tender and livid red that day. The next day that same red skin was hard and cracked. The perimeter of the wound got progressively smaller. Today, the site of the burn is hard and shiny but a much lighter color, almost the same color as the rest of my thumb.

It’s so tiny but reassuring that without my having to consciously do anything my body can heal itself like this. is something I tell myself all the time, multiple times a day. But at least in the case of my burned thumb it is linear! Eventually my thumb will be as good as new, or maybe there will be a slightly shiny scar for a while to remind me of the time when, on the eve of my 38th birthday, I picked up a hot pan without a potholder.

The kids had two days off school for Rosh Hashanah. Monday I dropped Raffi off at “break camp” and then took Ilya home and napped during his nap instead of working. It was super relaxing and restorative sleep because I expected to be woken up at any moment. I didn’t open my computer all day except to allow Raffi to watch like three straight hours of kid trash on Netflix after I picked him up. Meanwhile I hung out with his brother and cooked a dinner that was frankly terrible, almost inedible?

I often console myself about un-productive workdays by cooking a nice meal at the end of them, a trait I gave Friendship’s Amy, who once bought expensive pine nuts to make homemade pesto after a long day at her useless blog job. Having kids has really taken the fun out of doing this, though — I can’t take my time when cooking and the results are often critiqued in detail by Raffi, who never sugarcoats his opinion. He will call a dish “discusting” or just stand up and spit his partially chewed mouthful into the garbage. I don’t take the culinary opinion of someone who considers gum to be the ideal food super seriously, but not having a receptive or discerning audience for my work (Keith and the baby will eat anything literally anything except olives) does put a damper on my enthusiasm. I know this is the stage when a lot of people give up and just make box mac and cheese and chicken nuggets and hot dogs all the time, and I do that too, but I don’t want to eat those things (except box mac and cheese, but I see that as an appetizer and would like another full meal afterwards) and I don’t have the energy to make/clean up after two separate meals, even if one of them is just boiling water or defrosting nuggets. So I have continued to make dinner, and I have continued to complain about it. I have complained about it here and if memory serves I even have an essay complaining about it in Charlotte Druckman’s forthcoming Women in Food anthology! Loving and hating home cooking, insisting on doing all of it despite often hating it, etc.

The bad meal was not ’s fault. I had made it before and it had convinced me, again, that Alison Roman is not even close to overhyped; it’s quick, simple, greater than the sum of its parts, and uses a technique you wouldn’t have thought of on your own (quickly marinating the plums and onion in lime juice and fish sauce before adding them, together, to the meat juice and quickly softening them without creating a jammy mush - I wouldn’t have thought of that, at least). The first time I made it I served it with coconut rice, which made total sense with the flavors.

Years ago Jami Attenberg and I had lunch in Williamsburg at a restaurant that no longer exists and then I pointed out the place where I get my legs waxed, Serenity Beauty Spa. At first, she expressed incredulity that I indulged in waxing rather than shaving. I was really not doing well financially at the time, and if memory serves she had just bought me lunch. But she just shrugged and said something like “I guess we all have our thing.” Well, it’s maybe 8 or 9 years later and I still get my entire legs (and “bikini line” and, occasionally, underarms) waxed at that same place in Williamsburg. I always leave it til the last possible moment and when I am really short on time or cash I shave, but shaving feels like a setback when you’re committed to the long-term project of waxing half your body’s hair into finer, softer submission. Also, it’s not that expensive, though of course that’s relative. I certainly had no business doing it in 2011, but in 2019 I feel fine about spending don’t read this Keith $900 annually on hair removal.

Serenity is the final holdout in a group of businesses that used to comprise the stops of my Williamsburg errand day. Ideally this day went: I would make someone get lunch with me, ideally at Saltie (RIP) or Roebling Tea Room (RIP), I would get my legs waxed, I would go to Kings Pharmacy (RIP) on Bedford and restock whatever products I was out of, and maybe also go to the comic book shop on Metropolitan on my way home on the G or get an iced coffee at Oslo. Now that area has been rendered almost wholly joyless, with an Apple store where Kings Pharmacy used to be. I also rarely tack errands onto other errands anymore; every moment in my day is accounted for.

Sadly though I have been in DC so long now that I couldn’t hold out for a visit to Serenity, so yesterday I cheated on them with European Wax Center. The alternative would have been to go to a fancy pricey day spa or a questionable nail salon; I don’t have the depth of personal contacts in DC to figure out the in-between option that surely exists. (I’m sure someone will email me about what it is after I send this out.)

I reread Heartburn on the train back from a weekend in NYC. I’ve probably read it 20 or 30 times and it remains nearly perfect, perfect even in its imperfections, like how the recipes seem kind of tacked-on. The first time I read it I was 13 and I somehow still loved it even though I definitely didn’t understand divorce, the difference between Washington DC and New York City, pregnancy, what children do to marriage, cultural Judaism, or any of the other things it’s about. The description of how cool it is to have breasts that bounce when you walk down the street — because you’re pregnant — really resonated with me, at 13.

The part of the book that impressed me the most this time was how it’s so light and funny but also dark and sad, and how that balance somehow isn’t jarring. It’s full of lines so good that Nora Ephron couldn’t resist recycling them in the romantic comedies she would go on to write and to be best known for. Some of these lines are unapologetically corny, like the one about how New York City makes narrator Rachel Samstat’s heart “do a little dance.” There are plenty of moments that telegraph Ephron’s disinterest in being taken seriously as a novelist, like long digressions into about Rachel’s crazy family that serve no plot purpose and then end with a recipe for lima beans. But somehow by the final chapter we’ve gotten so attached to Rachel that, by the final page, Ephron can pull off a tonal shift that reliably leaves me in tears, even though I know it’s coming. The characters in this farce are suddenly real, and their actions have lasting, crushing consequences. What makes the end of Rachel and Mark’s marriage so piercing is that we’ve just flashed back to their love at its tenderest — the songs Mark sang to her during her first pregnancy, the jokes they made in their everyday life together. But now it’s over, even as their second child’s life is just beginning. “This man is a stranger. Don’t let this stranger see me eviscerated,” Rachel thinks, as she’s wheeled into the operating room for an emergency C-section. The freewheeling structure turns out to have been tighter than we thought. (Something about using pregnancy to structure a novel must have lodged deep in my subconscious the first time I read this book. Actually I just googled and it turns out I reread it as I was beginning to work on Friendship, so probably not that sub-consciously)

The house we rented in DC belongs to people who are less than a decade older than I am, but perhaps in part because my most recent experience with this kind of house took place 20 years ago, it feels to me like I’m a teenager staying in a grownup’s house. Our landlords really have their shit together. Marie Kondo would be impressed by their closets, their labels, the very legible systems they use to manage their lives and the lives of their kids. Everywhere my eye rests I see signs of their competence, and it makes me feel like an interloper and also like a fraud. This is so emphatically not my beautiful house.

The first week that we were here was airless and in the 90s, so humid that if you spent even a minute outside a film of mingled sweat and condensate would form on your skin as though your body was a glass of water. I felt feverish and clammy and my joints ached when I walked, but I still walked everywhere because I don’t know how to drive. I chalked my symptoms up to the weather, to some kind of full body inflammatory stress response brought on by the experience of moving twice in two months. Then the baby got a fever, and then Raffi got a fever, and by Tuesday I had a fever too. I was relieved that I was sick, because a virus is finite and self-limiting. I will feel better soon, I won’t feel this way for the rest of the summer, I told myself.

The houses are brick Colonials built in the 1920s and 30s surrounded by tall old trees and narrow sidewalks sometimes made impassable by overgrown hedges. Occasionally someone walks their dog, but I don’t see a lot of people like me, pushing a stroller over the bumps or walking just to get somewhere. About a ten minute walk away there’s a corner store that has an ice cream counter and prepared foods plus a tiny selection of meat, cheese and dry goods. It reminds me of the grocery store on Fire Island, with its $6 cans of beans. There’s a playground nearby too and I live in hope of striking up a conversation with someone there who will be my temporary neighborhood friend, but “underemployed freelancer temping as SAHM” is not as prevalent a demo in this neck of the woods as it is in my Brooklyn neighborhood, and so far I have only managed some “how old is he?” level chitchat with nannies and babysitters. After camp dropoff if I want to procrastinate or get some coffee I can walk to the best independent bookstore in DC, which is great! I’ve bought and read several books already since I’ve been here. But going to bookstores is kind of a mixed psychological bag for me; the mechanics of favor-trading evident in blurbs and shelf placement obscure the reassuring presence of books and people who like to read them.

One of my Politics and Prose purchases from last week was . It was shelved in new fiction right at the front of the store despite being a graphic novel, which I appreciated because otherwise I might not have seen it and bought it. I first started reading Love and Rockets twenty years ago, in the basement of a suburban-DC-area house not too dissimilar from the one where I’m currently living. The characters in Hernandez’s long-running series have aged twenty years too and are now in their early 50s; in this most recent installment, Maggie and Hopey are leaving their respective partners for a weekend to go to reunion show in Hoppers. Flashbacks of their teen years mingle with scenes at the mostly uneventful gig; not a lot of new ground is covered, but for people who’ve read the series for a long time it’s enough just to attend the reunion vicariously. I always think about how, when I was first introduced to these books, I thought: In pre-online life, liking the same obscure-seeming thing as someone else did loomed so large and was such a source of hope. It’s really hard to convey how that felt to people who never experienced it.

If you have to wake up and then go back to sleep multiple times a night for whatever reason, you might be interested in my latest discovery! Instead of spending 3:30- 4:55 A.M. listening to your own brain harangue you about your past failures, current to-do lists, and the futility of it all in the face of inevitable global climate catastrophe, you can listen to AUDIOBOOKS and be out cold in 5-15 minutes. Specifically, you can listen to the Harry Potter books, though I’m sure there are others which would work for this purpose. My hat is off to renowned British thespian Jim Dale, who does voices and accents for all the characters and somehow simultaneously is engaging enough to distract me from my ruminations about the apocalypse/the emails I never responded to AND ALSO soothing enough that I never get to hear enough of the book to understand what’s going on. Quidditch, usually, or getting told off by Professor McGonagall. It doesn’t matter. Zzzzz. Download one today, thank me later. I’m sorry that this recommendation requires you to put money in the pocket of global megacorporations Amazon and J.K. Rowling, but you can also probably figure out how to take them out of the library if you’re operating on more sleep than I am.

Another recommendation: The Evil Witches newsletter. Somehow Claire Zulkey knows exactly what I am going through parenting-wise and has some wisdom and humor and other people’s experiences and expertise to offer.

As you are probably assuming, there’s been a lot to Can’t Complain about lately. I’m a little bit bored of my own complaining; I’m in that place where I can’t respond normally to a “so what’s new?” from a semi-stranger. The amount of effort and skill required to say “Fine, like … busy! What’s new with you?” requires acting ability I don’t have. Everyone is alive and healthy and nothing is permanently fucked but for the past few weeks nothing has been baseline normal in any realm of my life. Every family member has acted up in some disruptive way — well, not Swizzle, but one of the items on my to-do list is to schedule an overdue vet visit so that asshole can get his prescription for Prozac refilled. All I can recommend to you, the reader who turns to me for recommendations (?!) is that you perhaps consider NOT moving apartments —for the first time in 8 years, with two little kids — and then, a month later, temporarily relocating the whole shebang for the summer for your spouse’s work. If there’s a way for you to avoid that, you probably should.

My almost-four-year-old son is not yet able to reliably shit in a toilet, but he has cleared a developmental hurdle that I hadn’t even thought to hope for: he enjoys reading a book that I would read even if he wasn’t around.

The book is “The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo;” we have also enjoyed its sequel, and are relieved and thrilled that there is a third book in the works, which is available already as a work in progress on its creator’s ! It’s a graphic novel for kids, which is a genre I am coming to appreciate so much right now, since Raffi is too old and I am too bored by picture books, but he’s not quite ready for books that aren’t heavily illustrated. By the time we encountered Margo we had already worked our way through almost every book that Dav “Captain Underpants” Pilkey has ever written and wow, there are a lot of them but also, somehow, not enough??

Real EG heads know that I have been using my vision problems as a too-on-the-nose metaphor for a long time. There’s an essay in my first collection called “The Lens” about (among other things) how I got my contact lens folded in half and stuck up behind my eyelid. In an early draft, my then-editor wrote on the page “Consider Lasik??” Honestly, that was a pretty good edit. I didn’t take it.

Ten years later, I continue to have problems with my eyeballs, and my ability to see things clearly. A couple of months ago I was en route from my home in Brooklyn to teach my adjunct undergrad fiction workshop at Columbia when I rubbed my itchy eye the wrong way and ended up knocking my contact lens out onto the filthy subway floor. Reader, I picked it up anyway and considered putting it back in, because what on earth else was I supposed to do, walk around half-blind all day? The commute is an hour minimum, so I didn’t have enough time to go home and put in a new lens before class. I didn’t have my glasses with me because I never have my glasses with me, does anyone?? I only wear my glasses at home at night or first thing in the morning, and even then I wear my contacts as much as possible because the baby likes to grab my glasses off my face and suck on them. They’re always filthy and the screws need tightening. Also, I hate the way they look and how vulnerable walking around in glasses makes me feel. It’s not a rational thing but I think it probably stems from how late glasses came into my life (my mid 20s). I never incorporated them into my fundamental mental image of myself and now it’s too late to revise what I look like in my mind’s eye to accommodate glasses.

This semester I’m teaching an undergraduate intermediate fiction workshop and I’m trying to be more like a real teacher, writing things on the board and talking about “story threads” and planning assignments weeks in advance. In the hopes of being seen as more serious and scholarly I didn’t ask what anyone’s astrological sign was in the first class. Then I called a student by the wrong name and immediately said “Fuck, that’s like the worst thing I could have done,” and I could tell my credibility was reset at 0. Oh well. My goal is to get really comfortable teaching a handful of stories, so that I can repurpose this syllabus in the future. In general I am finally getting a sense of what works. Sometimes it feels great and other times I am overcome with the futility of these efforts. I don’t mean because writing short stories doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I’m sure it matters just as much as any other kind of work that isn’t “solving climate change” or “finding a cure for childhood cancers.” I mean futility in the sense that it doesn’t get me any closer to having a career, as far as I can tell. It’s very unlikely that I will get a staff teaching job, because I haven’t spent the last 15 years making my C.V. that of a person who gets hired for a staff teaching job. Instead I spent the last 15 years doing all these weird dead end things, such as host an online cooking show and write hundreds of blog posts and thousands of fucking TWEETS and cofound a feminist ebook store/book club/publishing enterprise that even at one point had an app?? When all that time if I’d actually wanted to be a college writing professor, I should have been getting an MFA and submitting short stories to Zyzzyva. Apart from when I was an undergraduate myself, I have never written a short story.

As a way to get back in the habit of doing these more regularly (sorry I haven’t posted in a while!*) I am doing another Favorite Things roundup. As you recall, my last Favorite Things was about The Friend and Cocofloss. won a National Book Award and Cocofloss is still in business, so I guess we know I’m onto something here.

I’ve told Ilya’s birth story so often by now to friends, family, strangers and medical professionals that it’s become calcified, full of bits of shtick. I have a short, casual version, a mid-length version, and a full-length version for birth nerds or people who really care about me or are being paid to listen. It’s hard to access genuine memories from that day already.  At the time I thought it was really dramatic and crazy, like, the craziest thing that had ever happened in my life; it’s a good story with a beat of dramatic tension in the middle and a quick, satisfying resolution. It took a week for it to be eclipsed as the craziest thing that had ever happened in my life. 

We had all been sick that week, the week before my due date, Raffi first, Keith next, then me, as usual. We had a gross summer virus that entailed a fever and a terrible headache. I had the most excruciating headache I couldn’t take anything stronger than Tylenol. I was freaking out, of course, but my midwives weren’t; they were confident that I would recover before I went into labor. I got sick on Thursday and on Friday I started having contractions. I wasn’t immediately Defcon 1 about it because I’d been having contractions on and off for weeks – real ones, not painless Braxton-Hicks. I thought I would probably drink a lot of water and lie on my left side and they would go away, as they had before. But I still called the midwives, and I still called my mom, who’d been planning to drive up from DC with my dad after work, and asked her to take a train and get here asap.  On the off chance that I was going to have the baby I wanted Raffi to be with my parents. I know some people in the home birth community have very joyous experiences of having older siblings witness their births and that sounds awesome if you think you and/or your kid could remotely handle that, but Raffi and I were not about to suddenly transform into calm hippies. He needed to be far from the premises.

My mom arrived, we had lunch and then she left to go pick up Raffi, and I continued to feel like garbage with intermittent contractions and a 101 degree fever – the kind that makes you feel shivery and achey all over. I spent a lot of time in the bath trying not to have a fever and I watched 30 Rock season 3, the ultimate in comfort TV. I ate chicken broth made from bouillon cubes and mochi crackers from Trader Joe’s and drank a lot of ginger ale.  I started to say “ow ow ow” during the contractions but they still weren’t lasting longer than 30 seconds, or coming at regular intervals.  When I started crying because I felt so sorry for myself, though, Keith decided it would be a good idea to call and get the midwives and doula on their way. They all arrived around 7pm.  This part is starting to get a bit blurry; I remember being in the bath when Emily, the doula, came and then I guess putting on some kind of clothes and lying on a yoga mat on the floor of the living room while Karen, the midwife, and her assistant listened to the baby’s heartbeat. They were concerned because the baby’s heartbeat was too fast, and as soon as I heard that I was like “let’s go to the hospital!!!!” because I had a feverish fantasy of the hospital as a place where my illness would be immediately cured, and also maybe the baby would be taken out of me by magic.

Karen was also completely ready to go to the hospital but wanted to rehydrate me with a bag of IV fluids first; she explained that the only difference between laboring at home and at the hospital would be that they would automatically send the baby to the NICU as soon as he was born because I’d had a fever in labor, and that they wouldn’t automatically give me a C section, and that they wouldn’t give me anything stronger for my fever than Tylenol, which I was already taking. Also, she said, maybe my contractions would slow or stop once I was rehydrated – maybe I could have the baby some other time, when I was feeling better. That sounded great to me!!!

Raffi and Keith went to my inlaws’ for the holiday weekend and I stayed home and psychotically organized our apartment to within an inch of its life. “Nesting” is what this behavior is called and I’m sure there must be some hormonal component to the desire I am experiencing, at 35 weeks pregnant, to throw away most of our belongings and put the remaining ones in neatly labeled boxes. But “hormones!” is such a simplistic explanation for everything that women feel, even though hormones are also very real and important. There’s also this: for much of human history, preparing to give birth meant preparing for the not-unlikely prospect of one’s own death. Sorry, just “keeping it real!”

When Keith got back and we had time to have an actual conversation we both mentioned in passing that we are kind of … totally freaking out and feeling unprepared to bring another child into our lives. Like: what? Really? We’re really doing this? Us? Again? In this same third-floor walkup rental apartment? In addition to the child we already have and the other things we have to do with our lives? In this … world?

This of course is not a very comfortable feeling to go around having at the forefront of your consciousness all the time. It’s a lot easier to sublimate it into action directed at things you CAN control, such as what the inside of the freezer looks like.

It’s spring migration at last and this morning I went to Prospect Park with my real-birder friend Nate. Don’t worry: I am not going to describe birds or birdwatching, except to say in passing that best case scenario in the past I have found looking at migratory birds through binoculars to be soothing and effortlessly meditative. The full focus that bird identification requires is like being joyfully immersed in meaningful creative work. It blots out the meta-voice in my head, but in a healthy-feeling way, the way cooking or being totally present in the moment in a good conversation does. (Unhealthy ways: scrolling through social media, watching TV though increasingly I can’t even focus on TV goddess help me). READING A BOOK can also provide this joyous blotting-out but honestly it’s been so long since I had this experience while reading — probably since I read the book I wrote about in my last newsletter, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. I am pretty sure that the problem is my brain and not, you know, ALL BOOKS. I also don’t think it’s just me? I talked to Nate about it a little bit while we were looking for warblers and thrushes in the ravine and he said that he’d been feeling the same way — happy but agitated, a weird combination of edgy irritation and springtime mania. Our bodies are getting the Spring message but our brains are aware of mitigating intel about the state of the world and our country. It’s a lot. It’s hard to tap out or even comfortably zone out for a minute. When I get into bed though I switch off like a machine.

Of course, I’m also 31 weeks pregnant, which is a good excuse for pretty much anything. I feel I’m walking through Jello, which is a great recipe for feeling low-key irritated all the time. Also I live in a city that was designed and optimized for young healthy people with no physical restrictions or encumbrances. If you walk down the street or up the subway steps slowly people will fucking TAILGATE instead of finding their way around you. Often I try to go at my normal nonpregnant pace just to keep up with the crowd and then find myself exhausted and hating myself for caving to the pressure instead of acknowledging my limitations and unabashedly doing what I need to do. Being pregnant is a great rehearsal for being old. It’s also a real empathy-enhancer; some people spend a lifetime being seen as obstacles.

One nice thing that’s happened lately though is that I started going to THE WING to work, thanks to the generosity of Audrey Gelman who wisely decided to neutralize my onetime public Wing-skepticism (I get it, the “Coven” thing, the pink, Chanel, etc, it’s a lot) by allowing me to witness the wonder of A WORLD WITHOUT MEN. At this point though the only negative thing I have to say about The Wing is that if you join it will ruin you forever for any other work environment, because you’ll realize how much having men around ruins everything. It’s hard to explain how much freer I feel there. I had thought it would be like working at Vogue or something, all bitchy judgment and punishing footwear. But while it’s true that some people do bring their outfit A-game (bless them), there is in general a feeling of license and acceptance. It’s nothing specific, it’s just everything — it turns out that, for me at least, the mere fact of having men around makes me feel like I should make myself unobtrusive. When that feeling of having to be on guard all the time is gone, it’s just so much easier to get shit done. Also the bathroom situation is truly A+ — the doors go all the way to the ground, there’s lots of ambient noise, it always smells great, there are trays with Glossier moisturizer and mouthwash and floss picks and menstrual products in every denomination.

Least favorite things this issue: feeling low-grade mania that shades into rage at the slightest provocation. Most favorite things: The Wing, Trader Joe’s gluten free dairy free frozen pancakes, Pixi lip balm, Forever35, worm-eating warblers.

Remember the episode of 30 Rock where Liz takes Comanaprasil on a plane and hallucinates meeting Oprah, who tells her that her current Favorite Things include ponchos and calypso music? Obviously you do but I’m putting this photo here so that, our mutual fond memories of 30 Rock can do the work of being funny for me.

This morning I was thinking, I wish I had a platform where I can share my current calypso and ponchos-level random-ass favorite things. Then I remembered that I do! I also wish I had the ability to put one of each of these things UNDER YOUR SEAT!!!! but alas no. Maybe someday.

1. Cocofloss

   This is $8 luxury dental floss that you can buy online or at Sephora. Depending on your personality and ideology you are either rolling your eyes or already clicking the link. Either way, you should know that this floss is INSANELY EFFECTIVE yet somehow MUCH GENTLER THAN REGULAR FLOSS. I use an electric toothbrush to brush thoroughly and then floss with it nightly and the stuff that comes out shocks me. Like, that stuff was just chilling in between my teeth. Presumably before I started using this floss that stuff was in between my teeth (by extension: your teeth) all the time. It makes flossing as satisfying as popping a giant, ripe, easily-slides-out blackhead. Hope you’re still reading this! I am not being paid by the cocofloss corporation but if they’d like to sponsor this newsletter, they should write to me at emilgou AT gmail. Btw if you, non cocofloss corp. reader, want to write to me you should also use that address. If you reply to this email the emails have to go through Substack via a mechanism they haven’t quite figured out yet.

2. The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

   Please overcome your bias against buying a new hardcover this slim (I have one too obviously) and just give an independent bookstore your $ already, or get this from the library. It’s the most purely pleasurable yet also thought-provoking reading experience I’ve had in … a WHILE. Other things that might be preventing you from buying this universally lauded book by one of our most accomplished and fascinating authors:

   • not being a “dog person”

   • not wanting to read a book about the exquisite pain of being a writer

   • not wanting to be bummed out (“does something bad happen to the dog?” the narrator imagines “a certain kind of reader” asking about 1/4 of the way through)

   I see your points; I also stalled for these same reasons. It’s hard to explain how a book about something so depressing — adopting a friend’s not-young dog after that friend’s suicide, and watching as the dog’s grief mirrors and augments your own — could be so, well, uplifting. I think the sheer beauty of its prose is one reason; even as the narrator (a stymied writer) wonders about the pointlessness of her vocation, every sentence is a justification of that vocation’s existence. If you’ve already read and loved this book, I highly recommend Sempre Susan, Nunez’s memoir of being mentored by Susan Sontag. It gets at something so profound about the way that relationships shape and warp our lives. Also that romances aren’t always sexual. Sigrid Nunez’s perspective is necessary and timely in the same way that Rachel Cusk’s and Elena Ferrante’s are. If this hard sell hasn’t convinced you, read an excerpt.

   (Oprah voice): SIGRID NUNEZZZZZZ! COCOFLOSSSSS!

   til next time,

   Emily

Before I had a kid I thought of taking care of my kid and having someone else care for my kid as a binary. Like I would be able to leave my child and then, for the time he was being cared for by the nanny or sitter or daycare or preschool, go about my life and work without a second thought, the same way a person with no children might.  And maybe some people (generalizing but: men) can do this, or maybe everyone can do it at times – make their children mentally not exist. I remember, very early in Raffi’s life, my therapist telling me that the goal was to have an hour every day when I didn’t think about him.

Today is Raffi’s last day at his first daycare. Next week we’re on spring break and then the week after that he’ll start preschool.  He’s starting much earlier than we’d anticipated but he has really outgrown his daycare, where he’s the oldest and by far the most rambunctious of a group of kids that includes at least one baby who can’t even walk yet.  We had been so happy with this daycare, which is two blocks from our apartment, that we had been in denial about how untenable the situation was for kind of a while, and then the denial caught up to us and we ended up leaving in much more of a hurry than anyone would have liked. It sucks. I have absolutely no doubt that we are making the right decision, but it still sucks.  I’m trying to think of a single instance, in my pre-parenthood life, when I had to make a hard decision that couldn’t result in an immediate positive outcome for anyone concerned, and I’m drawing a blank.  Breakups, I guess. It does feel like one.  Money is involved, and time, and logistics, and feelings.  Another thing I hadn’t thought about much as a non-parent: that paying someone to care for your child – literally, paying someone to have or to convincingly feign the emotional state that enables someone to summon the patience and skill necessary to attend to the physical and emotional needs of your child – places everyone concerned in a vulnerable and deeply weird position. As a culture, we don’t think or talk about this very much because it’s excruciating. The weirdness and vulnerability only comes to our attention when we’re in it, or when something goes horribly wrong.

I have been continuously mentally chiding myself for not getting any work done this week, except the bare minimum amount of work I need to do to teach my class – an especially galling failure because, technically speaking, I’m supposed to turn in a revised draft of my book next week.  Why can’t I compartmentalize – why have I allowed this stuff to loom so large in my mind that all I can do is think and talk about it with other mothers, the only ones who understand?  But finally this morning the realization dawned on me that if I were the kind of person who was capable of that kind of compartmentalization, I would probably be in some other line of work. I am a professional feelings-haver.

I’m beyond lucky that someone else sometimes takes care of my child while I’m busy having feelings and while I’m busy doing work. At the same time, I am poignantly aware that I am one of the very few people this system is working for, to the extent that it works for anyone.  And if it sucks for me, it’s frightening to think about how much it must suck for everyone who’s on the other side of it.