Archive

me in 2009 & 2022 probably listening to these songs

my mom and my aunt at the latter's quinceañera, 1988

cw: mental illness, alcohol, drugs, death

my abuela in her university graduation photo, 1957

cw: mental illness, drowning, medical

approximate representation of anyone listening to "Both Sides, Now"/ Love Actually (2003)

Somehow I missed last week and it kind of makes sense. It was so hot and my brain fully liquified in the heat and the *waves arms around generally* everything else happening in the world. I feel like I've said that kind of thing a lot in the last few years, we all have, and I keep waiting for a time where that's not the case or perhaps less the case but the world does not seem to be cooperating even a little bit—we will do what we can.

happy bastille day, or as i like to call it, happy guillotine day (thanks to da share z0ne for this timely beauty)! this is one of those "taking in more information" weeks more so than a "producing coherent thoughts" week so let's see what's been filling up this brain. let's fucking go!

yes, i love camp and i've watched rob zombie's the munsters (2022) trailer but i'm not feeling it. i am extremely feeling one miss aubrey plaza becoming a criminal to pay off her loans because... relatable.

listen: florida

To be honest, I hadn't planned on taking a trip this summer, especially not on a plane. But pretty soon after my school year was done, I had so much come up for me emotionally that made me think about taking space—from Ian, from my apartment, from the city I haven't left in 2.5 years but honestly mostly for myself. Once I started thinking about it and talking about it with my doctor, I realized this is the time: I'm quadrupled vaxxed, the biologic I'm on is proving to be the least immunosuppressant one in terms of getting COVID, so I'm less high risk than we previously thought. It was also made clear that this was a good window to somewhat safely travel and make the trip. The practical reasons were there but the strongest driver for me was that my heart felt ready to take this trip. I haven't been home since 2019, which was the last time I saw my abuela before she died from COVID in summer 2020, and I was itching to be in the place I grew up. So I bought a plane ticket and made arrangements with my good friend to stay with them and began thinking about everything I wanted to do when I was there.

Hi from paradise. There's no YE this week or next—I'll be back in your inbox on Wednesday July 6th. Be well and enjoy the sunshine.

still from Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000)

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free. —Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

listen: summer 2022

Sometimes I struggle to write here or anywhere and I like to think I'm writing a letter to someone I care about.

Joan Mitchell, Row Row, 1982

Did you know that there's two types of shame? Appropriate shame is what you feel when you are scolded as a child before doing something dangerous in order to keep you safe and teach you a lesson; this shame is useful because it imparts a lesson. The key to this kind of shame is that there is supposed to be an immediate repair where the parent attunes to the child and reinforces that they are loved and safe and didn't do anything wrong. Core shame includes the first part of appropriate shame without the repair—more than that, it's the repetition of that first part even when it's not called for. There's no attunement, no repair, no gentleness, nothing but the shame instilling that the child is bad, that they are the problem. It becomes a brain's operating system, running the same program over and over in every situation: "This is your fault. You're not good enough. There's something wrong with you. The way you feel is wrong." There's no uninstall on this program but there are patches. There's awareness, there's repair, there's reexperiencing that can be done with a safe other. You can work to override what you were shipped out into the world with; you don't need to annihilate yourself just because someone fucked up your install.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

*This contains spoilers for the first season of Yellowjackets, reader beware*

Are you one of the many people obsessed with Showtime's Yellowjackets? Were you a teenage girl at some point in your life? Are you now years removed from that time in your life and still processing the liminal existence of those years? Welcome.

the author in NYC, c. 2010

cw: abuse, sexual assault, violence, cruelty

listen: love notebook #9.5

cw: death, illness, 9/11, mental illness

listen: two of hearts

My aunt was the focus of my earliest stories because I was absolutely mad about her. She was 13 years old when I was born and we were closer in age than she and my mom were as sisters. I called her Tata from the time I was a baby well into adulthood because tía didn't stick for some reason. Her nickname for me from the time I was a toddler was chicle: Spanish for "bubblegum" because I never ever left her side and followed her around everywhere. Once she picked me up from preschool and let me sit on her lap and steer as we drove home listening to 80s freestyle; this directly led me to think driving was very easy and to attempt driving my abuelo's van by which I mean I turned it on, put it in reverse, and waved to my grandparents as the van rolled backwards down their driveway into their neighbors' driveway across the street. I banged up the neighbors' garage door but I didn't have a scratch on me to my grandparents' relief. When they asked me why I did that, I was casual about it.

for teenage girls—past present & future, some of whom i got to know, some of whom i didn’t, some of whom i’ll still get to know—but especially delaney, eloise, araluen, ines lake and me, anaïs marie, once upon a time. especially the .

cw: lgbtq, HIV/AIDS, death, grief, medical, tattoos

People don’t become what they were brought up to be, people become themselves. —Sarah Schulman,

My loneliness is killing me. — Britney Spears, “Baby One More Time”

Besides glimpses where I saw behind the curtain, I got pretty much everything I wanted when I was a kid. I was lucky but I also didn’t want a ton in the big picture; my favorite thing to ask for when I’d get good grades was more books which my family always said yes to. Our Christmas mornings were big with lots of gifts for everyone but so much of it wasn’t asked for as much as my mom thought this was the way to show love, to fit in and really be American. I was an only child with five American Girl dolls (with matching wardrobes and furniture, of course) because every year had to be outdone by the next one. I was just given stuff I didn’t need and sometimes didn’t even want. It created desires where there weren’t necessarily naturally any—created the idea that you needed stuff, specific stuff, to be valid.

Admitting that the real is absent, that our lives can only be experienced in the past tense, and that the foundation of home is disrupted by the opposing fluctuation between the desire of the present & the perishing of the past, exile then emerges as the grounding mode of consciousness. —Dylan Trigg, The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny

cw: money, mental illness, addiction

my dad in Camagüey, Cuba, 1958

My dad was born seventy years ago in Camagüey, Cuba on St. Patrick’s Day; my maternal grandparents and mom landed in the United States on their Freedom Flight on what was my dad’s 15th birthday. Neither of my parents came from families wealthy enough to flee Cuba during the earliest years after the Cuban Revolution, the Golden Exile as it’s referred to now, but my six-year old mom and her family were solidly middle class and able to get onto one of the many Freedom Flights that went from Havana to Miami five days a week. My dad wasn’t as lucky. His parents divorced when he was young, a year or so before the revolution. His dad left the city, his mom took his older brother and younger sister in the divorce, and for some reason my dad was left to be raised by his maiden great-aunts. He doesn’t really talk about his childhood a lot and I get it; I didn’t talk about my childhood for a very long time.

He wanted to be a physical education teacher but he was assigned to study medicine by the government. He did well but he also didn’t like it; my mom once told me she understood why he didn’t try to make that his career in the US once she saw him almost faint at all the blood during my delivery. He loved what he could get his hands on of The Beatles and Rolling Stones and he played an old set of rusting drums in a band with his friends.

cw: money, abuse, corporal punishment, class

I was four years old the first time I really ever thought about money. My parents took me and my six-year-old cousin to Disney World for the weekend in my grandparents’ van. My cousin and I folded the back seats into a bed and laid on our stomachs looking out the back windshield as my dad flew up the turnpike. We spent the first day at Epcot, a night in a Days Inn, and the second and last day at Magic Kingdom. This second day became the stuff of family lore, something everyone told with a laugh, including me for most of my life.

The details were mostly the same: in Cinderella’s Castle, I saw a pointy hat with ribbons hanging from it and I fell in love. I wanted, no, I needed it. I showed my mom who took a peek at the price and immediately shut the whole thing down.

When I’m restless and can’t sleep, I get out of bed and make myself a grilled cheese sandwich. I wander into the kitchen and put a frying pan on the stove to heat up while I gather ingredients: butter, bread, cheese (yes, I prefer mayo to butter for a grilled cheese but no one has ever woken up in the middle of the night and thought mayo might be comforting). I use more than one slice of cheese because I take things like sandwiches in the middle of the night very seriously. I also mix up my cheese selection: cheddar/swiss/American, gruyere/jarlsberg/American, cheddar/gouda/American. There has to be one slice of American cheese right in the middle to give it that magical ooze when you cut the sandwich in half and pull apart the triangles. The cheese has to seem like it cannot bear to be apart from its cheese comrades.

I make this snack on one leg like a flamingo, one foot resting on that area where thigh and knee meet. I have a stable center of gravity which means I can rarely be knocked over but I’m constantly betrayed by my own clumsiness. I let the sandwich turn golden brown on one side before flipping it with a spatula, letting it become a miniature pocket of melty goodness on the inside. You’ve got to be patient. Soon it is ready and I put it on a plate, cutting it diagonally as soon as it’s done. I do not sit to eat it. Sitting would make this a meal and this is something much more restorative than a meal. I stand at the counter and pull apart the sandwich, catching dripping cheese with a swoop of my neck. I shift my weight on either foot as I eat it slowly; it is perfect. I drink exactly half of a glass of water before going to bed. If I don’t feel better about whatever was on my mind, at least a blend of carbs and dairy will lull me into what I think is restful sleep.

I tend to do this alone, not because I haven’t made a grilled cheese sandwich for someone else in the middle of the night but because it’s always been a time where I can just really be alone, armor off. I spent so much time in the past circling another person and never really letting them in. I’ve let people hold me, hug me, kiss me, make me laugh, have sex with me, talk to me and I wonder if I was ever entirely there. Lately I have the feeling of being present for the first time in a long time, as if I’m in on every inside joke that I didn’t even know existed until recently. I can think of people who have held me and put their hands on me, people who had no idea they were holding little more than a hologram of a person.

my mom in red pants in Mexico, 1979

cw: death, grief, moms, complicated grief

cw: alcohol, drugs, SEX

Listen: Love Notebook #3.5