notes from september
flopping, dancing, dooming
Sometimes you have to acknowledge a flop era before moving past it. My life has gotten harder since I moved to the East Coast in most conceivable ways, and this came to a head in the middle of the month when I: cried on the phone for an hour, said a bunch of stupid things in class, became violently ill, drifted in and out of consciousness while 30 Rock blasted from my laptop for hours, vomited five times, cried on the couch of a sports therapist’s office. In short, I felt broke, chopped, and foolish. It is occasionally cathartic to raise up your hands and accept the truth: I’m flopping. Nothing is going right. The words I am saying and writing are garbage, and this fact has nothing to do with my intrinsic value as a person, writer, or friend. What’s happening to me is as natural as the leaves falling, as the second hands clicking away on an analog clock. Everything turned around again after my week of Flop. Friends visited, paperwork got processed — most importantly, I saw Hadestown.
September notes:
The best part of living in New York is no longer feeling tethered by invisible string to a car. No more waking up in the middle of the night because I forgot street sweeping. No drop in my stomach as I approach my vehicle and check whether the passenger window is still intact. No rerouting my walks to double check that my Corolla, parked two blocks uphill, still exists. Instead, I lug two loaded bags onto the subway, straps cutting into my shoulder and sweat fogging up my glasses. This is the life God intended for me and every pure-hearted soul.
This month, I started taking a modern dance class. The class is in the basement of the gym, so that the ceiling shakes whenever a weight drops onto the floor above. My teacher plays “Porcelain” by Moby on her iPod connected to a boombox as I writhe around the floor with eighteen-year-olds. As my hips creak and ache from spinning on the ground, I feel tapped into the choreography scene of Frances Ha, my favorite.
I received a fortune cookie last week that read: “Embrace emerging technologies for innovation and productivity.” I immediately rebuked it, ripping up the slip of paper into tiny little pieces. I type “-ai” at the end of every google search to exclude incorrect and unwanted Gemini slop. I choose my own destiny.
One thing I am enjoying about grad school is embracing Process again. For the past few years, I’ve been trying to churn out stories and get them published as quickly as possible. I am working on slower, more dynamic projects now without feeling pressure to deliver immediate results. Starting to think that maybe, just maybe, the process is the whole damn point…
I’ve taken barely any photos since I moved, only health-anxiety-induced flash pictures of blemishes on my skin and screenshots of webpages. The photographic evidence of my life is that of a hypochondriac who never leaves her room. There’s a certain amount of truth in that characterization.
Following up on this year being for the Love of the Game: I love the 2025 Golden State Valkyries for ever and ever. I love them so much that I have spent money on some truly bizarre pieces of merchandise. I fear that the 2025 WNBA Finals matchup is a sore spot I cannot speak of.
My parents visited me last weekend, and my dad could only remember the first letter of each name he learned. Walking through Williamsburg, he asked, “So this is Winchester?” Every time we approached a street with more than a couple businesses, they asked, “Is this downtown?” It was not downtown. It was Prospect Heights.
I saw One Battle After Another this week, and although I liked it, my hot take is that we probably need to stop making white supremacists a punchline. Or, maybe, the situation has evolved past the point where making them into memes or bumbling comic relief is appropriate. Maybe I’m feeling pressured to have a Take. Anyways. Four stars for the score, which I’ve been listening to daily ever since. I enjoyed reading this review. Perfidia Beverly Hills is an awesome character name and Chase Infiniti rocks.
Of course all these observations are trite in the context of what is happening and who is disappearing each day — it’s this precarious (and so privileged) juxtaposition of small personal joys and the ever-present dread for what is done each day with my taxes and in my name. What to make of the dissonance of listening to my doom-inspiring podcasts about the Supreme Court while on my way to meet up with a new friend? How to try to get sleep while praying for safe passage for the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza? How to witness the moment without numbing yourself to the routine cruelty, without wasting breath preaching life to a death cult? How to minimize harm and live a principled life? I’m not really sure. I guess we are supposed to spend our whole lives working out these answers.
Recommended Reading:
From Assata: An Autobiography
For class I read The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm, and I thought it was fantastic and perfectly articulated why I stopped wanting to be a journalist sometime in college.
A passage from Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation that I have been thinking about constantly as I am writing fiction:
