May 22, 2025 

Another day, another shot, another blood test ordered. I’m getting pretty good measuring the physics of my psychology and psychiatry now, and I like the confidence that’s giving me as I move forward. I know now what’s doing what to what limb, what cortex, and maybe most importantly, in what context. I feel myself moving back into the rhythm of my body, the only thing I can’t get used to is the fuller figure I see in the mirror. I am sorry but it’s true: I have Barbie titties right now. There is simply no other way to describe them, they just are what they are. Finally, it’s happened to me. 

I don’t feel as fat as I used to either, which feels good. It’s one thing to look fat, it’s another to feel heavy, and that’s how I felt for the first three weeks out of the hospital. Just plain old heavy. Heavy as fuck, in fact. The divaprolex/ deppaco/ epilepsy medication they have me taking still makes my muscles harden and my joints stiffen. The shot I get is an oil, and I can feel it filling the empty or disrepaired muscle systems in the back of my neck and upper back, and that feels good. It feels better to have an anatomy of the chemistry and the physics of my medication, and after two years and like, an entire OSU classroom’s worth of clinical experts, I fully get it now. 

Now the question is: What am I supposed to do with it? I think it only just occurred to me that I ask Becca what she wants to do with her story first, and go from there. In other news, it still frustrates me that https://www.icaregifts.com along with all other prison-based systems do not take American Express. I know that of all the concerns facing the masses, this cannot be impacting a significant portion of the community, but still. Is Amex just like, kind of racist? What’s up?

May 20, 2025

My mom gave me a felt cat from Sweden and then we had spaghetti.

May 20, 2025 

My life right now primarily boils down to snacking. When I can eat rules my day, but because I have the feeling of absolute hunger at all times. It’s like I have an eating disorder again, but I don’t. I’m living my life like Giselle Bunchen, or like, what Giselle Bunchen would be living like if she was just a 5’5 125 lbs white woman from Ohio. Since being told the medicine I’m on makes me crave carbohydrates, all ll I do is think about when I can eat breakfast, how many carbs I’ve had, when I can eat lunch, and in between I think about how much I have to workout so I can enjoy my dinnertimes. It was exhausting when I couldn’t tell where my facial cavities began and the fluids inside me ended, but now it’s just annoying. The highlight of my day is often the Jane Fonda-y workouts I go to with my mom at the Scioto Country Club. Yesterday I missed my therapy session because I felt so good I drove myself to La Chatelaine for a caesar salad.  

When Becca was in County, I’d order her boxes on AccessSecurepak wondering if I was helping her as much as I was hurting her. Every 30 days it seemed to be the one thing I could truly do for her—a tangible thing, a way to make sure she ate. But because of the limited amount of healthy items (zero) we could order for her, I felt often responsible for her completely obvious weight gain. Not only did Becca not have a country club, she wasn’t able to go outdoors for almost two calendar years while she waited for either her trial or final arraignment. The amount of weight she gained, sitting alone in solitary confinement for well over a year and a half, was almost 100 pounds. The photos of her in her arraignment look almost nothing like the photos of her posted to her Facebook account the week before Todd’s death. After a year and a half of the stress of death row hanging over her head, no ability to walk more than ten paces at a time, and countless amounts of improperly dosed psychological drugs, Becca’s only comforts in life were me and Doritos. 

The last time we talked she told me she got a job working outside in the Dayton Women’s garden. I just had some toast and decided tonight at dinner with my family, I’ll have the spaghetti.

May 19, 2025

le day

May 19, 2025 

Two weeks ago, I found out the new Pope had been elected because of a Pop Sugar-esque account I found called Trash Italiano. I love this account. It felt like deja vu to 2020, when Pop Sugar became the paper of record and announced Joe Biden clinched the presidency. Today, I found out about the true bulk of horrors involved with the Mexican Naval accident from an Instagram reel. The producer of the video I watched online decided to pair the reel of these performing sailors being literally dismantled by one of the world’s most iconic bridges with the song Somewhere Only We Know by Keane. I don’t know which offends me more, the crumbling news cycle, or the Keane. No I do. It’s the Keane. It’s definitely the Keane.  

Anyway, in other news, I went to my storage unit today. I’m always surprised by having to do things now, even things I myself instigated doing, like going to the storage unit with my mom. Today was no exception. The funny stereotype about Prosac guy is that it’s true: You really just don’t be sweating the small stuff on heavy dosages of antidepressants or antipsychotics. Not in my experience. 

I wanted to go to the unit so badly not because I need my clothes or my artwork or my furniture, but because I need two of the some 300-400 page binders I have filled with Becca’s public records. Since coming back to Ohio in August 2024, these two compilations of documents–-court traffic docket and the police files on Becca and Todd. I have the murder files on my person and have since I got here; I came here originally to interview with Becca on the record finally, finally, now that her case is fully closed and her ability to speak freely on the record with me had no barriers in the way. Until there were again, with my family demanding I was literally, clinically, insane, and in need of dire treatment. Treatment that in December included things like taking five lithium pills in one day. Totally necessary, I’m sure. 

When we got to the storage unit and I surveyed my personal affects boxed and extremely out of grasp, I felt a confusing combination of both familiarity and deep anger. This is the third time I’ve seen my environment locked into a semi-permanent Tetris mode in five years, but this time, I had documents I’ve fought for three years to obtain buried deep in the trenches of unmarked, remarked, and just plain over marked recycled moving boxes. The meltdown I had crystalized as a perfectly malicious and biting argument in the storage unit’s seafoam green and silver elevators. “I think you should just get a normal job and–” my mom started. “DOING WHAT” I erupted. I feel ugly beause of it. I love my mom, I know she just wants me to be happy. But how can I be happy when I feel like I can’t finish this whatever this is unless I start using chat GPT to help me edit my shit and compile it all? I have currently written 300 full pages on Becca, granted, in a captain’s log kind of a format. It’s emotionally difficult to know what to do with it all besides continue self publishing/ compiling, and interviewing. I’m still not in touch with many actual sources, and I’ve lost track of who in Mansfield is keeping track of me. 

Among the items I grabbed–my green Andy Warhol sunglasses, Melissa plastic pink Mary Jane jellies, a hat box, my passport–were Becca’s items. I’ve had the clothes she was arrested in since trying and failing to attend her 10 a.m. change of plea sentencing arraignment in late September of 2022. I have them still in the same garbage bag they came to me in; a purple t-shirt, Victoria’s Secret bra, soffe shorts, and along with the clothes she was originally arrested in, there’s a bag of her jewelry. The bag of jewelry contains a list of the total items Becca had to her name when she officially became a ward of the state on the front, and inside the crinkled white sandwich bag is her MOM pendant. The one Todd gave her one year for Mother’s Day and ripped in rage around her neck another years later. It reminded me of seeing my bag of bracelets in a SPECIMEN bag upon release from the hospital in April, where I felt the closest and furthest from Becca I’ve ever felt. Seeing her items nestled inside my items nestled inside an unending row of Doublemint gum green garage doors was the perfect metaphor for how buried I feel both of us have become at this exact moment. How forgotten, these two women from Ohio.

May 18, 2025 

Today I took the advice of Saeed Jones and tried interviewing myself for my blog when finding myself in a writer’s slump. It worked a little too well, which is to say, I won’t be publishing it here. This isn’t a confessional booth. Do I look like I care about laws that obviously should have been passed decades ago in the United States of America? 

Anyway. While I wasn’t in touch with myself enough to publish a full length interview with myself here today, I was in touch with myself enough to get over my fear of journaling and return to it. Maybe my blog will again become a boring and sane place to spend virtual time. Maybe I’ll do more essays on the importance of materialism in this general moment of mania and political mayhem. Maybe I’ll do a little mix of both. Today at Nordstrom rack, my mom bought me another matching sweatsuit situation. This one is navy blue. Also today, a Mexican navy boat crashed into the Brooklyn Bridge and two people died. Just a coincidence, I assure you. The light is brought to you by the cracks on my new privacy screen.

May 18, 2025

knee espresso <3

May 17, 2025 

Does nobody else but me care that Scott Fitzgerald obviously killed his wife? Anyway. Today, as if I was taking my phone to the genius bar or going to the doctor pain-free after waiting months for my check up, I was able to reset my Instagram password. Maybe posting on this stupid CVS receipt of my life is paying off after all. Hopefully it doesn’t keep me unemployed, but at least step one to getting over my current loneliness conundrum is over. Instagram is a window to what’s going on in the world for me now like it was for the whole world during covid, and still is in my mind to most extents. It’s good to have my windows back. In the psych ward you have windows, but no phone. In full isolation, you have neither. I’ve been under what I consider social isolation for nine months now, and my opinion is that it’s impossible to get a grip on oneself and form a basis for a measurement of good behavior when you can’t see any good behavior whatsoever. 

Today is my ten year reunion from college. I think I’m gonna skip it, though I shouldn’t. I’m tired today. I’m really heavy, and I puked up all the water I drank this morning randomly for no reason at all. I’ve had such a good few days mentally that thinking about the dark hole I’m in physically seems just unnecessary. I’m sure my feelings of morbid hostility will return soon, or maybe these drugs are finally working. Either way, it took a whole month for me to feel better. But I do. But not good enough to waltz in to my college graduation unemployed, having never donated a cent to the university since I left it.

May 16 2025– later! 

I don’t really have anything to do, so I’m writing. But I don’t think I have anything to say, so I should be journaling. And my blog is getting increasingly difficult to manually update, it’s so heavy with entries that the page load is slow as molasses. I am smoking, but I don’t really have a reason to be smoking. I’m not stressed about anything,Have you noticed out there, faceless readers? Anyway. I have eliminated all channels for criticism from my life, since abandoning the hope I’ll ever get my Instagram account back again. For those not up to speed, Instagram is currently keeping me locked out of my account by refusing to letting me update my password. It’s been going on for all of 2025, and I’m about to actually send an email to their corporate comms team if I can’t access it soon. I hate to use the term shadowbanned because, well, it seems like I’ve just been blatantly banned. When I set up my burner account recently, they told me I can’t use links even though I registered as a business account, because I’m someone Facebook (er, Metta) has identified as “dangerous.” 

I’m fairly certain it’s the most honest a corporation has been with me since 2016. Also I made a cake today, and had my moles checked at the dermatologist. Solid 7/10.

May 16, 2025 

Railworkers in New Jersey are on strike today, choo choo! I was just thinking to myself that passenger rail seems like it’s actually by statistical margins the safest way to travel worldwide, but nobody mention that right now in front of the good people of Newark airport. Or maybe do. Good thing Amazon workers aren’t federalized workers under some kind of anti-woman mandate to return to the office post haste. Did ya’ll know Amazon has a headquarters in Newark?

May 15, 2025

The day in fast fashion. Last night my friends came over and we discussed how my gaining ten pounds at this stage in my life could be saving my life. I took my meds today in a Victoria Secret’s PINK jumpsuit I went out and bought just because it came with a free beach towel. I had a total meltdown looking at beautiful apartments with my mother. Overall I’d rank the day an 8/10.

May 15, 2025 

Today I woke up thinking about the story of that hot Youtube guy who was recently detained by TSA and harassed about his personal views on Hamas, the Israeli Palestinian conflict, etc. while coming back through passport screening/ boarder security at el aeropuerto. He’s a controversial category of journalist, sure, but he’s absolutely a media maverick. And a hunk. I don’t listen to him (I’m not a listener, more of a reader) but Ayana is a regular. Anyway. He was coming home to the US from Paris, and his account reminded me of the experience I had with TSA in 2018. TSA’s reasoning is that this type of thing is extremely routine, and I can’t say I personally can disagree with the sounds of that. It’s almost as if he and I had experiences from parallel universes with TSA, both ultimately caused by the Trump administration shaking media people down for no reason but quite separately, for similar reasons in terms of social influence and dangerous opinions. Let me set the scene for you.  

Picture it: John F. Kennedy International airport, October 2018. I recently quit my job at The New York Times where I worked as a marketing associate and was a few days away from starting my real big girl job at New York Magazine. I was fresh off a flight from Paris, my first ever trip to the city of lights, where I had been visiting my best friend. My other two best buds, Anji and Ayana, joined me for some parts of the journey, but largely, I was just on my own in Paris having a grand old time for two weeks before my new job started. I was in between boyfriends, dating just about anybody I found interesting, and I was financially unattached from any organization. It was in retrospect the perfect opportunity for some higher up intelligence officers to require a quick reentry interview with a former member of the New York Times marketing team, but I never thought so maliciously at the time. No, as someone who grew up on the literal set of all safe highway patrol propaganda HQ (Mansfield, Ohio), I am not someone who bats an eye at being randomly pulled aside for questioning. I know I may not look the part, but it’s true. 

When I was reentering US customs, I–a single, 25 year old, marketing expert for the American newscore–was detained by TSA at the airport, it did actually seem pretty routine. Two bits of context for you here: I had long grown up with American patriots in my life, regardless of political affiliation, and I’m lowkey pretty patriotic myself. I don’t go out of my way to think things are weird, in fact, I go out of my way to think things are not weird. It’s the anti-conspiratorial struggle known by every real newsperson out there, in my opinion. But at the time, I wasn’t a newsperson. I was a person with two roommates whose fathers worked at the CIA, and a person who herself worked jobs at the highest levels of American media, from an international perspective anyway. I was also vocal on my personal Snapchat and Instagram stories about the political sphere, my jobs, and generally how concerned I was about the world. I felt a moral obligation to be socially promotional about my views, because I wasn’t a newsperson on staff but I did represent these organizations at whatever rung of the ladder and in whatever sector of the business I worked in, and I felt that it mattered. Ethically, we at the Times were under attack. I thought the Times deserved a bleeding heart millennial liberal to stick her neck out and defend it online. Afterall, they paid me to do it for them from 9 to 5 anyway. It didn’t exactly feel offbrand. 

And aside from Donald Trump acting like the world’s biggest buffoon for the second year in a row, not much had logistically changed in my eyeline of national security. TSA was still filled with hunks and hunkettes, doing their jobs for whatever reason the little men behind the curtain had assigned them for the day, and from there it was decided a 25 year old marketing associate going rogue for two weeks in Paris on a massive shopping spree with the daughter of the primary curator for the Museum of Science in Paris and an Air France executive was suspicious enough to pull me out of line and into a little room for some routine questions. I honestly thought nothing of it. Hot Youtube guy was obviously politically targeted, but unfortunately and honestly I will confide in earnest here that I find the direct intention of the TSA questioning so much more ethical than when I was pulled aside. Maybe ethical isn’t the word. Transparent?

When I was interviewed, the agents were obviously fishing: Each of them just sat there and looked at me blankly but with eager eyes, as if something I said would eventually lead to an opening for them, like I was being interviewed under criminal suspicion. In hindsight, I believe now this might be the first time I ever realized I was on some kind of we see you government list. But like, when your roommate is the daughter of the former director of information technology for the mother fucking Central Intelligence Agency, you tend not to worry about those kind of lists on a personal level. Not unrelated, it was around this time I started noticing I never got called for jury duty, never had any kind of communication from my alumni leaders in college–it was like all my ties to Ohio ended the moment I stepped into the city, despite the fact that I never had a permanent address or lease in New York for more than six months, and it had been almost a year since I had to evacuate that lease due to the roof literally collapsing in on me. New York had been out to get me since I got there, but I always knew America had my back. When the TSA agents responded to my replies that I just went to Paris in between jobs to see my girl and do some shopping with smiles and some shrugs, I knew it did for a fact. Even if I didn’t see myself the ways others saw me, I’ve always seen federal workers the way I want to see myself. It’s tragic that hot Youtube guy didn’t get that same level of comfort.

Anyway. That’s all I have to say about it. That guy is hot and should keep saying hot stuff on Youtube. TSA deserves it’s unions and is there to protect you. I love my 1998 version of American patriotism and if you haven’t met him yet, his name is Bill Fierle, and he’s my own personal American hero/ uncle. He also is on the board of a company that makes drones. Full disclosure is important to me, so maybe this fact will interest you as well: His daughter took my call in two rings the last time I was in the psych ward, and it’s the second time in two years she’s had to do that, and it’s just some soldier girl shit that I can’t really explain. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that my privilege makes it possible for me to see torture and war as just marketing constructs. Having routine things happen to you while being truly in a war is a different thing. They treated this random media personality as if he’s Alexei Navalny.

Have a good day everybody <3

May 14, 2025

I got a clicky keyboard and a monitor today, and the combination of the two really made me feel like I might have gone and actually gotten a grip while I was at it. I had an epiphany on the drive home. I’ve been on my new bipolar meds for over six weeks now. I felt physically good as I evaluated myself, aside from the ten pounds I’ve gained and the breast milk in my titties–apparently a common side effect of invega sustenna– congealing against my skin.  I feel more assured in my original biases than ever before now that I’m being fully complicit in my treatment of my bipolar diagnosis: This diagnosis is a catchall term that got it’s roots in testing psychological torture out on women and Black Americans in the 80s and has been controlling people biologically in ways that are weaponized in our modern society, largely because of lack of consistent access and adequate safety nets throughout our medical industrial, housing, and reformatory systems. And it feels good to hold that opinion and still be like, alright, I’m still taking my meds though. 

There’s a pavlov’s dog situation happening between me and Ohio when it comes to reporting my Becca story, or at least, that’s how it feels. Everytime I begin to make real progress on myself and my writing/ reporting, it feels as if the entire United States of America sweeps in to through me off my newly found balance. That’s how I would summarize the last nine calendar months of my life. Progress on myself and Becca’s story + time = someone trying to buzz me into oblivion. Here the equals to should be “feels.” If you’re still following along with my log reporting by now, you should understand I unfortunately, but now proudly, identify my feelings as facts. Thoughts aren’t facts, but I really do believe your body knows when it is in danger. After two acute paranoid breaks and corresponding hospitalizations, I know I can speak confidently when I say that, to whomever of whatever profession I need to. That’s enough for me to get back on the horse today. Hopefully for the very last time, when it comes to telling Becca’s story, anyway. The last time we spoke on the phone I told her I would never just abandon her, and it’s still true. But I have had to abandon the phone. Talking on the phone with Becca, at this phase in the reporting, is not just hurting me psychologically or emotionally, but like it’s, like, now physically hurting me. And the benefits of helping her emotionally no longer outweigh the benefits of helping her logistically and financially–AKA, keeping her alive on a basic level. I couldn’t order her iCares or a Walkenhorst’s box from October to March, and then it’s only been about three weeks total of conversation this calendar year from the last time we ordered a box to now, May 14, 2025. If the products of the 2025 project really are just human women, Becca and I do make a perfect example of the extreme templates. 

Now more than ever do I actually believe all those “stir up drama on purpose” comments I made on the recorded line with Becca: Why yes, actually, I do feel like I was given this diagnosis in a desperate attempt by my employers and my family members to better control me and justify radical actions, yes! Yes, in fact, I do firmly believe now that this condition is outsizedly used as a diagnosis for women and conveniently, the drugs make your tits bigger. Yes, I believe that psychiatry is largely a racquet. And yes, Becca and I are playing doubles in our Soffee gym shorts like it’s eighth grade fourth period. But mostly yes, I believe what I said now: This diagnosis largely makes women trapped and sicker than they need to be, and its actual characteristics are so confounding and hypergeneral that it’s impossible to truly paint a consistent picture of this apparently medical “disorder.” It begins to bring in the credibility of the word disorder, in my mind. Is cancer just a cell disorder?  

Today my mom started finally helping me do research on neurologists, and she found a clinic in  Chicago she’s all excited about. I’m excited too, because my original research (by way of Dr. Linda) on Becca’s diagnostics suggested that the use of neurological imaging in counseling–and in my argument, the law–could be a breakthrough when it comes to actually improving a person’s life. In the end, it seems to me, everything really is some muscular memory form of PTSD, of trauma. Experience and circumstance can only inspire so much when it comes to physical rage and the range of that rage; I’m living proof of that theory. If not pushing my mother off a roof on Christmas Day after five lithium pills isn’t proof that nurture really can rise above nature, I haven’t been doing the level of immersive reporting I previously thought. Anyway. I’m going to try to behave like a normal human Ellin again, regardless of meds, starting today, just to prove my point. Be sure to catch my bylines in the Shutter Island News.

May 13- later.

So I didn’t cancel my doctors appointment. Instead I went, met the loveliest doctor, had an emotional breakdown about the trauma of this entire experience, and found out that my boobs might actually contain BREASTMILK as a side effect of my medicine, and we need to switch it. And I don’t have any arguments against that, and I’m too exhausted to care anymore. But I did buy purple sunglasses at the bodega tonight. I walked there and back wearing my Strategist-approved weighted Bala bangles. That feels like a little bit of a win.

May 13, 2025

Today I checked my email, something I do only on a weekly basis now. I had the nicest note from the art director for New York Magazine, checking in on me to see how I’m doing. My friends at NYM and I used to have a joke where we called this gentleman “The Best Man” which–while often true to his form–does little to prove the point that we worked with pretty much nothing but the best of men. Still though, it’s the kindest gesture I've gotten since being let go from my job in 2023. Leaving New York in 2021 really was the worst decision I’ve ever had to make in my life. Anyway. In response, I’m going to be super liberal and personal with my blogging today, and super professional in my actual email and lived decorum, because that’s the point of having a blog, no? 

So here, goes. How am I doing? I’m doing okay. I woke up today and decided to do something I haven’t done since being dosed with invega sustenna against my sober consent, which was to smoke organic and legally purchased marijuana. When I tell you it’s the first time my body has felt regulated in two calendar months, believe me. It also contributed to my ever-growing suspicion that I actually have this condition, and this being my second major run on a therapeutic dose for “bipolar” disorder in less than three months (I still can’t get a straight answer on whether or not they’re saying I have 1 or 2…), I’m pretty sure the patient is correct on this one. Three strikes, you’re out, etc. I’ve found more holes in my personal medical files the last two weeks than there are in my own grey matter. And I’m assuming there’s at least four major gaps in there that weren’t there in June of 2023. So I have a doctors appointment in two hours that I’ve decided to skip. I’ve really wanted to avoid having to push back on psychiatric treatments like this, but unfortunately I’m at a place with my familial and medicaid billing cycles that requires me to enter full bitch mode. I’ve tried to radically accept “help” and the help makes it…well, impossible to get out of bed. Impossible to run (until I had some real weed!!!). Impossible to type on my computer past 3 p.m. 

The only thing these medications have done to me so far as I can tell is give me deliriously dark and specific night terrors, make me shaky, cause me sweat through my sheets and pajamas every night, make me believe I’m engaged in some kind of metaphysical spiritual warfare, and oh yeah— they’ve made me grow huge, honking Victoria’s Secret status titties. I only feel comfortable right now while I’m wearing a padded bra, like I’m in junior high growing boobs for the first time and need pillows on my nipples at all times day and night. I’ve found myself physically crying because of how large my breasts feel, how achy they are to the touch. I’ve even cried at how not horny I am, and how confused my not-overly-hormonal body is now about the lack of correlation between my aching breasts without any vaginal yearning to match it. Puberty is hitting me harder as a non-virgin. My body knows the biological rhythm of ovulation now, and these drugs appear to be at odds with my natural cycles. 

I’m so uncomfortable I want to puke, but as a fully recovered bulimic, I’ve had to resort back to chain smoking instead–obviously, the better option! In my opinion, anorexia is unfortunately just so much chicer and better for you than bulimia, girls. Cat Marnell spoke for generations of women when she wrote that in her book. Her book, by the way, if you’ve not already been told, totally saved and inspired my life. So in honor of her, here comes my second big non-medical but from my chronically-just-a-patient-now opinion of the day: Adderall really should be seen as a preventative treatment for eating disorders in women when they are subjected to the American diet. I don’t care what you say, any and all Los Doctors Octopus out there. My personal doctor octopus recently told me I have a seat at this weird silent and galactically violating table. So now you are all gonna know my real opinions. If you want to, anyway, and read this crazy CVS receipt I call a blog.  

Anyway, anyway. ANYWAY. I hope it goes without saying that lot of these controversial opinions I’m sharing are very specific to my specific body and lived experience and are largely on account of the fact that I was on my own for decades in the psychiatric wilderness, or so I thought. I’ve been learning as much as I can about psychiatry since 2016, because I’ve been effectively on my own since 2016. Now I know for certain that I was never alone, not even close, and the anger I have in my heart about that fact can be directed literally in every direction. Mostly, though, this resentment seeps into the fabric of who I actually am now: A bitch who has been promptly smothered and kept by her family. And it’s making it very difficult for me to want to write anything other than DON’T GO TO THE PSYCHIATRIST IF YOU WANT TO LIVE A GOOD LIFE. And that’s just frankly, not a good spot to be in. Not if you’re actually a huge subscriber and supporter of western medicine, anyway. Which I am. And also–I am sure I’ve mentioned this before–I actually do love and (basically) worship my psychiatrist, and I am only putting up with any of this, in a technical way, because I believe private practice in American medicine advances science and protects individuals. And I know how it works. And frankly yeah, it’s the system that my brothers and I kind of collectively consider to have killed our dad. 

The most infuriating part of the last two years of my life is that I know–I know– I’m hopping from medical file trove to medical file trove, filling in all the database gaps my former bosses at the medical industrial startup I used to work for couldn't ever fill in. I know I’m not a doctor, but I am, in my humble but heartfelt opinion, kind of a doctor of modern businesses and the digital marketplace. I know that I’ve violated my NDA for years out of the assumption that they wanted nothing to do with me, I wanted nothing to do with them. I know how tracking works on every level of digital and mechanical device engineering. I know I’ve never seen a copy of my NDA since I signed it in May 2016, now almost exactly nine years to the date since I originally signed it. I know my personal experience in the workforce outpaced the overall production of every office I’ve ever worked for. I know people were really pissed off when I somehow beat every labor union in history to the buzzer; The buzzer that is private surveillance on private citizens by both private and public institutions alike. I know that I’m carrying teams of people on my back that I’ve never met before. I know that my shoulders feel the same. And I know that I never intentionally offered to be this generous with my time. And oh yeah, I still think someone tried to murder me on December 6, 2022. But I’m fine! I’m really fine, actually, that is if anyone would give me the chance to really prove it. 

What’s not fine is what’s always been not fine: Being lied to directly by people claiming they care about me, when in reality they just need something from me. What’s not fine is being taken away from my networks of support that could actually help me, like my work friends and colleagues in the city, and not just prescribe me something to take the edge off. What’s not helped is being made into a literal model for every problem in our society, when I am like the definition of what it means to be an upper class privileged white woman. And I know that I am, because there’s actually no definition of sane left in the universe that would explain all the horror and gross abuses that I’ve been subjected to in the last two calendar years. Also Steve Bannon literally went to prison the day after I blacked out while talking to Ayana on the phone and fell off a roof. If that doesn’t have BET written all over it, I don’t know what does. 

What’s really crazy is thinking anyone would ever believe me at this point, let alone help me, let alone understand fully what I am even writing about here. Maybe that is why I've reduced myself to this version of a self-absorbed blogger girl who has to write insane and dramatic comedy about her life, because there’s nothing else in it but privilege and scorn. I hate that kind of girl. It’s to me, kind of a fate worse than death. 

It’s all very Trump 2025. So I guess that’s my honest response. That’s how I’m doing, folks. Worse than death, and yet somehow still better than most people’s lives will ever be once ever once. Pathetic.  

But one thing that isn’t up for debate is NYM being the best, filled with nothing but the best, helmed by no one but the best, all the time. Thank you, NYM, for giving me the implied courage to write today. I love you the most. 

<3

May 12, 2025 

I was on my way to Barnes and Nobles this morning, when I noticed these honeybees fucking on my passenger’s seat window. I decided to wait until they were done, which was only like fifteen minutes all things considered. More than most men I’ve been with, or at least the majority of sexual experiences I’ve had would indicate that as a fair statistic. Anyway. While I filmed them for my own viewing pleasure (not in a weird way, just in a National Geographic way), I couldn’t help noticing the significant difference in size between the two female and male honeybees. The male was in his assumed masculine position behind the Queen, he was downright teeny in comparison to her. It reminded me of every ex I have.

May 11, 2025

Happy Mother’s Day, Mr. Wexner. <3 I will write finish my Limited Too think piece soon. I swear it. In the meantime you all should know that he and my grandfather had the same tailor, Alfonzo (!), and he did the alterations for my mother’s wedding dress. That’s what I learned this Mother’s Day.

May 10, 2025

May 9, 2025 

I’m having an adhd flare up bad tonight and left my phone at my grandparents’ home, so no cool photo blog as I planned. My nails are so long I can’t type a thing. So as a consolation, here’s a photobooth photo I took of myself 9 minutes ago.

May 8, 2025

Morning

Noon

Dusk <3

May 7- later! 

Being in the psych ward feels similar to being in an airport terminal. In my experience it’s been less One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and more…just abysmal and sterile. Anyway. I was recently there for eight days, and by day five I was using the lone stationary bike on the floor for about fifteen minutes a day, listening to this song on the hospital-issued tablet via Youtube. When my fifteen minutes of exercise were over, I was using the tablet to catch up on music videos. The videos that sustained me above all were those of Miss Sabrina Carpenter. Particularly, that for Please Please Please. If you’ve not seen it, well, I assure you: My nails are too long for me to adequately describe it in full for you here now. Please watch. It opens with Sabrina meeting a man being read his Miranda Rights way too late in the arrest process to hold up in court. Sabrina herself is being sprung from the clink, and as she departs for the door she’s handed back a plastic baggie of her belongings. The baggie contains her sunglasses and this Prada lip balm. This Prada lip balm that single handedly redefines what it means to do moder product placement in music videos. The video spends a solid, mesmerizing fifteen seconds giving close ups to this Prada lip balm. This. Prada. Lip balm. When I tell you the aesthetic of an inanimate object has never sustained me more in my life than this lip balm has in the last calendar month, believe me. 

There are a few elements of the lip balm that stick in the crawl spaces of one’s mind, like a lithium pill. The way the baby blue of the balm matches the Brinacore outfit she’s been recently incarcerated in. The way her application of the balm is so blatantly powerful she’s not immediately reprimanded in some way. The way the shiny silver tube adds about 45% more gleam to the unit. But what got me most, sitting there in my cute, two-piece, dusty pink sweatsuit that matches the color of my Divalprolex, was the architecture of the lip balm tube itself. The tube itself is a perfectly symmetrical silver bullet, but the especially shiny silver portrays it more as a stack of rectangles, each half of the tube divided by a thin but pronounced with PRADA bar-like band in the center. I knew then and there I had to have it to go in my purse next to the UNAUTHORIZED shade of NARS I bought last winter. Once I myself was sprung, I would find this magical lipstick (that I couldn't then tell was Prada) and make it mine. 

It would be only three weeks until that magical moment became a reality. It arrived today, in two shades: Astral Pink and Maple. Maple is one of my power shades as a woman, and this Astral Blue. Let me tell you about this lady. She’s really baby blue, just like a ph strip from high school chem class. Could you die? The idea is that it dyes your lips to be your perfectly Pradified formula for a custom galactic pout. It rolls on like warm butter. It’s like baby oil and Diorshow had a bebe, and it was worth every cent of the $100 I spent on the total purchase. 

On a psychological level, product placement has a weird nostalgic feel in the neighborhood that is me getting in touch deeply with my inner child. I grew up in the apex of MTV product placement. For show and tell in the sixth grade, I brought in my lipgloss collection. Some things just never change. It was this era of music videos that I found myself going back to while I was in the ward, passing time. Sabrina only has so many music videos, afterall. And in between the lo-fi commercials for Boost Mobile in Katy Perry and Gaga videos, I remembered that I have always been prepared for a dramatic and beautiful life. I also remembered how much I love Wing Stop. When it was my turn to be sprung, the nurse at the front desk of the second floor of Harding Hospital handed me my own baggie, filled with the bracelets I wear every day, and was wearing at the time of my intake. I bowed my head in relief at the sight of my daily tokens, reminding me, like I was in Inception, that I am still a human member of planet Earth. 

Today I went on a bike ride in the great outdoors and listened to It’s So Good. I came home and struggled to type this with my too-long nails as I applied and reapplied my new Astral Pink, Prada-bb-blue lip balm. Life was good to me today. Thanks, Sabrina! And grazie mille, Miuccia.

May 7, 2025

Today is the official deadline for having one’s REALID. I failed to register as a REALOHIOAN on time in usual fashion, and I’ve decided not to because 

1. I’ll wait until my current license expires because 

2. I have a passport, even if it is currently packed in a random box somewhere in a UHAUL storage unit a mile away from my house and furthermore, 

3. Today my mom leased a car in my name on my behalf because she fucking rocks. 

I might not qualify in the eyes of TSA (or whatever TSA becomes if it no longer has a union?!? Does it still even have its unions??? What is HAPPENING OUT THERE, DOES ANYONE KNOW?), but I do believe that posting on this blog with regularity at least proves I am spiritually and mechanically dedicated to my humanity. Ironically the most real part of my days was always journaling. Now though, a little black dot tends to pop up on the membrane of my eyeline and follow along with my words as I write them. It’s become too mentally distracting to journal with a private eye. Maybe that’s why today as I was giving a standard intake response to a woman at the counseling center I was trying out offended me so much when she suggested I keep a journal regularly. It’s almost like the more “mental health” help I receive, the more deeply offended I am to my core that this treatment is necessary at all, and it jeopardizes all the progress I’ve made on my own with accepting this fate. I never want to risk losing control of my physical body ever again, regardless of whether or not I have to technically classify that prevention as a mental disorder. The idea that I’ll ever truly heal without the true privacy of my journal ever again, though, is hard for me to hold onto as a reality. I know that I am human in physical nature, but it’s harder and harder for me to feel that way with the endlessly mounting evidence of both my lived experience and aptly timed Amazon Prime commercials. The REALID deadline is just another blatant reminder that the upper echelon of our political society is hellbent on identifying every human biometric as human or fake, so that they can further deduce and infer what it means to be real on every microeconomic level while America rots.

Anyway the weather today is STUNNING. I’ve gotten more vitamin D today than I have in a calendar week. So there’s still some good stuff out there. I do know that much.   

May 6, 2025

The StepFordification of Ellin Marie Youse

May 6, 2025 

I’m a bit frozen from the inside out today, but I’m in the best mood I’ve been in in weeks. Longer, likely. I finally snapped myself in a forward direction–or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. I forced myself to love my body today, even as I silently resented the heaviness of my wrists and head, and the thin fatty layer steadily consolidating on top of what’s left of my four pack. I get comfortable with the reality that I have to drink seven cups of coffee before noon to achieve a true center of gravity, but uncomfortable with the hard truths like, I still can’t drive a car like I used to, and I may not be able to attend my best friend’s wedding in Mexico. Being accused of being bipolar while I was in the middle of being fired for striking has made my life very hard, yes. But I realize now that it’s this accusation, the one that implies I couldn’t be both bipolar and accurately doing something moral and logical simultaneously, that deprived me of all my time this year and last. The idea that a mental disorder makes one act crazy isn’t one I’m willing to subscribe myself to, or resort to now–personally or professionally, frankly. And by the way, if I’m so bipolar–why can’t I use my arms on these new pills? Why do I suddenly feel like I need to eat nine bags of chips every day? Why am I sweating buckets and waking up every 2.5 hours each night?

I told my friend Becca, the woman whose life I’ve been recording and writing about for almost four years now, that my most recent hospitalization felt like it transported me into the closest physical reality I could get to hers, without actually killing somebody. I really do feel that way: I was given no opportunity to submit myself to the hospital, and my family members literally forced me to be submitted against my will, inevitably prolonging the duration they could keep me in the hospital. On the way to the hospital in the car, I felt like my throat was closing from the back of my neck forward, and my right eyeball seemed to be spinning in every which direction. I kept hearing a voice in my head saying, “Steve Bannon killed himself for you last night,” which…well that’s just the craziest damn thing I ever heard. Anyway. I’ve seen this happen in my life four times total; Once to my dad, once to my brother figure, and I’ve been through psychiatric hospitalization twice now myself. This time was beyond the pale of any hospitalization intake I’ve ever heard of, and it was my own. 

After literally running out the front doors of the psychiatric wing of OSU’s emergency intake room trying to avoid hospitalization, I was escorted by a team of, like, nine honking dudes in security vests into a walled cement room, where I had to stay while naked in a hospital gown until I could feel my skin begin to reabsorb oxygen. I thought of Becca the whole way through, and used my senses to ground my mind back into my body: I traced the lines of the yellow brick walls with my fingers and dragged my forearms along the walls, collecting all the cool I could along the way. I took in the wind coming up from the crack in the door, and dropped my neck and swung my head left to right until I circulated my ocular nerve back in line with the back of my head. I had to physically calibrate before entering the hospital this time, and unless I had just shot and killed my husband in self defense and spent a week in catatonic shock, I don’t believe I could have gotten any closer to the physically overwhelming experience of being fully dissociated from one’s body. 

I’m surprised I could write that at all just now, let along muster the strength and false confidence to post it to my website where I direct people to come and select me for hire at their organizations. But I did. I did it and I’m doing it because I’m not just proud of myself for putting it down, I’m proud of myself for surviving. But I’m still more proud of Becca. And while we are twin flames in our own ways, Becca Harris is a survivor in a way I hope I never have to be. I hope she wins that arms race every time.

May 5, 2025 

Writing regularly used to be something I would aspire to do. Now I’ve almost come full circle, as if avoiding my regular writing practice somehow excuses the rest of my life–to my feeling– being totally out of my own control. 

What’s making it really difficult right now, though, is the simple fact that my nails are too long and I’m wildly out of practice. I’m cutting myself a slice of slack. I had too little to sleep last night on account of too much to dream, again. I’m using posting here as collateral for posting about my real revelations, my actual surmised insights and conclusions. I tried to paint my sadness out this morning, but my emotions came out of my body as plastic and juvenile and acrylic as my half-priced materials. I think a simple blog post might really just be all that fits me right now.

May 4, 2025

I made it to Joann Fabrics just under the final buzzer. I might be down bad but I’m not that down.

May 4, 2025 

First and foremost, may the force be also with you. Second order of business: Hello! I’ve resurrected my blog, dead in the digital squarespace ground here for almost one full calendar year. On the heels of Pope Francis’s recent resurrection and minutely prompt yet overall, inevitable, earthly emancipation, I’ve decided to take the risk of once again reviving the single platform I have left to my own disposal. My blog, unlike my Twitter or Instagram feeds, cannot be expunged from my own ownership.

That brings me to my next point of moral explanation: My instagram account is currently being held hostage by what I assume to be Marky Mark the general investors board(s) of the Bank(s) of Silicon Valley, but I don’t know for sure. Also Japan. All I know for sure on that front is that I personally have managed SVB funds in one way or another since…well, since I was 23. They have some reasons for holding my account in the Shadowlands, just believe me. If you’re one of the 70 friends who have rejoined my digital struggle on my new deviant account, welcome. If not, some even further explanation: Please know I never–in my opinion–fully lost my mind, despite my Instagram looking like it belongs to a woman who has never heard of the concept of self-control or self-censorship. In fact, the opposite is true in my working theory on the world: That I do, in fact, have a great sense of what’s going on in the world, and my blatant disregard for it is an example of what it means to be logically moderate in an unendingly unfair economic system, now mining us for every beat of our heart, let alone the metadata that follows us along through our digital wallets. I’ve watched as my private musings on modern markets have sprung off the screen as newly announced startups, and I’m not even technically allowed to consider myself Batgirl. Or rather, my self awareness and long standing reputation as a class act have generally prevented me. I chose to have the confidence in my state to say proudly and loudly now that we all know–Batman included–I’d rather be reporting for the nytimes.com/business. But whatever. 

My overall surrender to living my life like I’m on display in an aquarium can be summed up succinctly: Living your whole life like it’s a gamified version of a Christopher Nolan film–one where you can’t even be sure who is living and who is dead–is exhausting on the central nervous system. Even if one doesn’t start out with a physical mental disorder, surely, you will develop one as you pull yourself up the rungs of each squid game ladder, connected to one another by thin films of hospitalizations or criminal justice enforcements and Taken-status yachts. After two years, showing solidarity with countless labor and political justice movements, and genuinely straining the muscles throughout my neck and vertebrae, I’m not convinced anything in this county happens by accident if you’re born in a hospital in the United States of America. That’s about all I’ve gotten out of this experience to get in touch or control of my mental health: The idea that mental health nonprofit olympics is on par with the NRA in terms of shared responsibility for our declining society. That and the idea that maybe a younger version of my psychologist is actually my ideal husband, and that’s why I’ll never be fully satiated in my love life as long as my mother is alive.  But at least we all know I’m having clinically sponsored musings now, as opposed to before June of 2023, when my deductions on the world around me were my own and my finely tuned understanding of my body wasn’t up for galactic debate. I get shots in my arm now because being bipolar is about being a bear! It really just is, my dudes. 

Anyway. What disappoints me most is the realization my only true friends in the world are Republicans, or in France. Or people named RF. That disappoints me, that and the general state of our hospitals and the insurance industry effectively owning the American populous. Ultimately I’m pleased to report that despite the nation and world’s best efforts, I remain largely unfazed from my brothers' rooms and my parent’s hot tub, despite having all my worldly possessions moved out of New York City (the only geographic location on the continent I actually trust, by the way). 

Last summer I left my blog, shuttered its toggle from ‘page enabled’ to otherwise, purged my Instagram of embarrassing, overtly GO-UNION overtones, and dedicated myself to looking like a perffuctly normal, human American girl throughout the summer of 2024. I stopped writing myself into every historical event being reported in front of my face, I fucked two guys, I moved myself into a new state of emotional emancipation. Only when I came to Columbus again did my life take a nosedive, and now my imprisonment in this loser state is not only apparent, it’s desperation has cost me the last remaining respect I had for any of my actual family members. And I don’t want to waste my time or energy using this blog to catch imaginary audiences up on the details of my daily living. I need to assume, for my own sanity, that general public has been able to tune in and out of my life like it’s television since I went fully tits-out for the writers’s guild and general access to healthcare. For that is the only reality in which my medical reality matches the rest of the world’s events, and I know it’s true.  

I’ve waited for the world to catch up with me for 32 years. I hope you’re all actually back, now. Anyway. The only real reason I am bringing this blog back to life is the only reason I started it in the beginning—to get my life back.

May 3, 2025

Someone left the cake out in the rain.

July 23, 2024

My iPhone reminded me, as it does, that a year ago today, I arrived in San Francisco for emergency soul sister time with my friend Marina, two days after being fired. It’s taken a full year to fully reacclimatize to basic social engagement and stabilize my autonomic nervous system, but I’m proud to say I’m finally able to articulate my situation in full now. I can even do so like a fully stable adult human, to boot. I’m even prouder to feel no sense of urgency to do so.

The truth is indeed quite hard. Thankfully I’m good at hard stuff. But accepting that I—me, this idiot—could be considered dangerous intellectually, after a lifetime of psychological urging that I was not important or uniquely talented in any act, has turned out to be a mammoth of a pill to swallow. Especially after having had to swallow so many of the wrong pills in order to prove the theory.

Having no one to verify facts I already know, aside from doctors, friends, and family, continues to be the maddeningly devastating part. I love the experts. Journalists always love the experts, don’t they? Receiving no validation from anyone else, having no editorial or curatorial partner, propels me into unending loops of self-verification where every fact, every basic association is called into question again and again with no one to stop me. “Ellin, that’s enough, you have enough.” It’s almost as if I’m being punished into writing and revealing my actual, real opinions on my well-researched subject matter. What a f*cking nightmare.

Maybe it’s time I go see Marina again. There were a lot, a lot, of Mansfield toilets at Macbeth Hardware in Berkeley, it’s almost like a work trip. The hiking out there is hella manicured, though.

July 20, 2024

It was pretty easy to get carried away here.

July 19, 2024

I stopped by my old apartment to say hello to the manager and I acted like I was the homecoming queen I might never be able to show my face in Little Italy again time will tell

July 19, 2024 

July 19, 2024

<3

July 18, 2024

>8)

July 17, 2024

pip pip

July 15, 2024

July 14, 2024

Last night the whole world went off the rails and all we can do is watch where they roll. Three hours after leaving the state of Pennsylvania, I was at a Summer Stage show with my brother, his girlfriend, and our pals when “The” news broke. My mom made a joke about how she’d been out of the state of Pennsylvania for seven hours by the time of the shooting attempt on Trump’s life. People around us joked, “How could they miss?” and conspired, “He obviously had this ordered himself.” By the next day the Republicans had defaulted once more to their classic “I’m rubber you’re glue” strategy, their most tried and true since ‘82. Ayana, Alexis and I escaped to Coney Island. I rode the Cyclone for the very first time. I had a hot dog and a corn dog. I won a big stuffed frog all by my little self, and laughed and even though I almost flew out of my seat more than once, I felt more alive than I’ve felt in a year. It was a childlike dream and we spent it in bliss, celebrating our lives together here on the outside, while silently mourning a stranger’s life, a child’s, on the inside. I mourned for him at least, anyway. If not for the loss of his life, for his horrible experience he had while he was living it.

This “President”; who ran his campaign and got elected on disinformation and disinfrancishing digital strategies; Who sold our most confidential national security interests to his billionaire co-conspirators/ also known as international donors, in order to secure his own financial and legal future; This “President” intoxicated minds across all of our living generations, absolutely poisioning the most vulnerable and distorting the narrativevs around our most imperative scientific breakthroughs. Not to mention that this is the president who called for literal bloodshed on the streets. Told the Proud Boys to stand tall and stand by. This “President” is the bad penny of every business venture he’s ever touched, and his desperation for control by fronting unashamedly as a mafioso has discredited the long and proud history of spades of working people (including local police forces) across so many (if not all) of our international boarders. And whether or not you subscribe to the conspiratorial, or are waiting to form an opinion until the yet-to-be reported has been so, here’s a fact we know for sure: This shooter was a child, and a sick one. He was twenty years old. Just two years older than Barron, who Trump recently tried to get nominated as an electoral delegate in Florida. He couldn’t legally drink alcohol. He used the type of gun that was made popular by Grand Theft Auto. He was a child, and one made to be sicker, regardless of any of the naturally inherited or environmentally driven psychiatric traits he may have had, by the digital world he inhabited from birth. This is the third major act of desperation and, ultimately, suicide committed by a young man that we’ve seen in the last, what, six months alone? And certainly the most consequential. 

Of course no one should murder anyone. Obviously. The surprise was that while we are all shocked, were we surprised? Weren’t we all asking ourselves that very question? Our 45th president has compromised every corner of our national security, from submarines to state SWAT teams. He’s a convicted felon and will be no matter how many of these other judges roll over on their nation’s judicial integrity, and he’s ultimately responsible for making our current youth completely incapable of intellectual development. Where Betsy Devos may have left some young mind grey matter in tact, Twitch, IG, X, Snap, and Open AI were right there to punch holes in it. 

So those are just some of the reasons why I said a prayer for him and his family as I smoked a joint on the beach with my two best friends. I mourned someone who clearly never had a real life. I thought about that stupid Taylor Swift song I love, Karma. My friends and I smiled as all types of folks from all types of places danced and sang and went on with their days at Coney Island as if the entire world didn’t hold its breath together at once the night before. I named the stuffed frog I won on a fishing game after the mechanic named Phil who was sitting across from me at the bar. I made Alexis play the claw, and she won her very first duck for her Jeep dash. I silently vowed to pray and to write instead of dwelling on all the ways I’ve lost my voice over the last year, and to stop worrying about anything other than my family, my friends, and my work. At least for a while, anyway. I spent the day feeling simultaneously the most like myself I’ve ever been, and at the same time exactly like I did when I was ten. I guess I’d forgotten. On the way home in the back of Alexis’s Jeep, I thanked God that I was back in the driver’s seat of my life again as I pounded on the hard top while we scream-sang. 

It was a really, really good day. And there’s no law against having a good day, even in the wake of a national tragedy. Not yet, anyway. There’s a great episode of High Maintenance about this. Have ya’ll seen that?

July 13, 2024

The restaurant we went to dinner at last night is next to my grandfather’s original parish, and the house directly next to it that was owned by the church, where my father was raised. It’s called St. Matthews, and while my Poppy is retired he and Gommy still go every week, and I go with them when I’m here. When my mom and I stopped to take a picture of the sign, I remembered that a few weeks ago, it randomly occurred to me that I didn’t know why my mom named my brother Matt, Matt. I’m named after my maternal grandmother, and my brother Jake is named for our great-step-grandfather, who married my Poppy’s mother. I had no idea where Matt came from, so I when I remembered at this exact moment, I asked her in a higher octave than is usual for me. She turned to me with a smile and said simply, “because it was my favorite name for a boy.” Apparently it was between Matthew and Timothy, my uncle’s name (he’s really my first cousin once removed/ my mom’s best friend). My dad preferred Matthew, too.

July 12, 2024

My Gommy taught me to knit in the sixth grade. I kept up the habit for about three years, conveniently the approximate length of my swimming career, and dropped it, promptly forgetting everything I knew. This pursuit lasted 300x longer than my initial interest in Italian tailoring, AKA the three week span of time where I successfully begged my mom to buy me a Singer and pay for lessons from the tailor in our town, only to drop those once the latest season of Project Runway ended. Everything that I like to do regarding the domestic domain is inherited directly from my Gommy. The only other domestic pursuit I truly like is baking. That and basket weaving, but this is a less practical skill I have if I’m being honest. But my Gommy is the world’s best German baker. She sings hymns like an angel. And she’s one hell of a knitter.

Her memory is declining, and she’s increasingly timid to be around us. She wants to spare us from seeing her get worse, and she wants to spare herself. My Gommy is a real lady of her time. A proper, real, 1930s Steel Town lady. In my research for the project I’m working on, I’m studying the ways the brain begins to shut itself down in unescapable, traumatic situations, preparing us to die. Only recently did it occur to me that this way the brain works, this way our primary organ’s internal clock ticks ahead of our frontal cortex’s logical understanding of imminent demise, could be seen as a beautiful gift towards the end of life. Forgetting that the end is near, forgetting to be angry about what you’re leaving behind in this realm, may be seen as the last opportunity for we humans to live exclusively in each moment before we depart. Maybe it’s the only opportunity to do so that some of us get. My Gommy’s mother died of Alzheimers, and while I’ve heard she was a cold and classic woman, I only ever knew her as my loving Nanna who loved my kisses and gave me my best sweaters. I knew this disease could come for my sweet and proud Gommy all my life, just like I know it could come for me. I’ve decided to embrace the beauty of the end for her the way she embraced the beginning of mine for me. I chose to look forward to making moments beautiful for her the way she did for me. In her craft cabin in the woods, in the kitchen making butterhorn rolls, on walks at camp. If she’s not too proud to let me I’ll do the same for her. If she is, I’ll think beautiful and complex thoughts on her behalf. All the kinds I know she had but kept to herself.

In the meantime I’m also wearing knits all week in her honor. I am not wearing them to dinner with her tonight as that would kill her, which is the exact opposite of the effect I want, but I can post them here on my stupid little blog. Youses don’t rat, know this. I know my cousins would never show this to her out of respect. Anyway. Tonight we’re going to the Italian restaurant on Cherry Street, where my dad and Uncle Mike grew up. It’s the only restaurant in Lebanon I’ve ever been to (Gommy always, always cooked, either at home or at camp). It’s an Italian restaurant.

July 11, 2024 

I am in Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania, where my mother rented me a cabin for the week so I can visit my grandparents and “write” my “book,” which is a funny way of saying upload photos to my finstagram account, but okay. Anyway, it’s only two hours from the city, so I’m kind of coming and going at my leisure. Except not really, because I don’t have a car and there are only two restaurants and a lake here, so it’s more like trekking and training four times in one week. I don’t want to compare myself to Aubrey Plaza in The Bear (2020), but yeah it’s pretty much exactly like that. 

Fiction aside, Mt. Gretna is a truly peaceful, magical place. And I mean that quite literally; There are fairy houses and villages on every tree stump; The victorian cottages are painted candy colors, many adorned with authentic Tiffany’s lamps or glass panel windows that were installed in the 1920s and kept safe from snow and rain over a hundred years from the shingle roofs and thick layers of forest over head. There are exactly three places to eat: Mt. Gretna Pizzeria, The Front Porch, and The Jigger Shop. The Jigger Shop boasts 18 of those Tiffany’s lamps, they were at the height of vogue at the same time the locally renowned sundae shop opened. I had dinner there by myself last night, happily walking around the lake afterwards with my black raspberry waffle cone. I stumbled into a series of butterfly gardens on my walk home, brimming with hydrangeas and tiny gnomes and fairy figurines and wild flowers.

Even though I was alone I saw my family everywhere. I saw my dad while running the trails, my uncle while watching the river. I even saw my Aunt Sarah in little elf villages; She recently hired a contract AND an electrician to take her fairy/dollhouse hobby to the next level and install a portal to a tiny world in the wall of her basement. I never feel alone when I’m in nature, and I even enjoy being alone in the city, so the last 24 hours felt more like a spiritual pilgrimage than a work opportunity on the way to a family obligation. It feels like something to thank a god for, and Mt. Gretna is notorious for that kind of thing. This is a town where people have come to congregate and sit in spirituality for hundreds of years after all. When I learned about the importance of sacred space during my religion studies in college, I always thought of how my grandfather the Pastor so obviously preferred preaching in the woods to his days in the church. Magical realism has found a very vivid home in all types of American religions, and I’m so proud to say it and Christianity were taught to me by the least hypocritical practitioner of both. Pennsylvania has always made it easier for me to believe in miracles.

I had to force myself to get on my computer just now, already biffing my streak one day into reactivating my stupid little blog.

I guess now that I’ve done that I can go back to staring at the bushes.  

July 10, 2024 

Well so I tried a month to bring this blog back to life, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. I’m doing it now, though. I’ve tried several times to do it since feeling like myself again, but I’ve held back in fear of putting myself out there. I’d already reactivated my Instagram account for Pete’s sake. But now I’ve made a new “X” account– solely for research purposes I assure you–and so keeping my blog dead in the digital dust officially feels journalistically irresponsible.

Fin- 2023

12.18.23

‘Tis the season to get back to business.

12.16.23

Donkey kicks at the illuminati holiday party

12.15.23

New York, a year ago this week, you hit me with a car while I was running. This year you tried to kick me out for good, but I have a spot of bad news. I’m 2 for 2, baby.

12.14.23

Under her eye (does anyone know who she is though)

12.13.23

Sometimes mental health looks like Lindey’s at 12:15. For me it looks like that a lot more frequently than for most people.

11.30.23

Lunch, shopping, and optometry appointments. I am what I am, and I am grandma’s girl.

11.29.23

Tomorrow is the fifteenth anniversary of my father’s suicide. Fresh off the heels of my very own sticky sock vacation, I’m following bravely in his footsteps by trauma detoxing while simultaneously developing an addiction to Diet Coke. Never one for pop myself, the pills they put me on enabled me to drink seven of these puppies and not feel a thing. See also: Being able to drink an entire bottle of wine without feeling hungover. I’m not a scientist, but something tells me that’s not the desired effect of an anti-psychotic. Like, are you psychotic? Or are you a woman with logical deductive reasoning skills trying to work for a living in 2023?

10.23.23

*8 a.m.

When I was in high school, a casual classmate of mine drew a portrait of me based on one of my Facebook photos. He posted the portrait online and tagged me, and I was flattered. I didn’t know the kid very well, but I liked him quite a lot–he was a punky, gorgeous, kind hearted teenager, and while I’d had boys make me things before, it was the first time I was ever complimented with the knowledge that someone felt not only inspired by my image, but confident enough to approach me with their art. It takes some guts! You know it does! A certain Napoleon Dynamite comes to mind. 

The next time I had my portrait done I was a sophomore in college. I posed nude for my best friend Ben’s studio assignment, a project that came with an empowering sense of self-fulfillment; Look how cliché I am, posing in this art studio with my nipples out at 21 years old. This is college, baby! I was so proud of the final product, of the praise Ben got from his professor as a result. I never saw the painting again, but as an active participant in the work itself, I never felt robbed of my image. Whenever I get to wondering about where the painting ended up, I just remind myself that my emotional attachment to it is based on the memory of its production, not its finality. 

These are just two examples of my long and proud history of being a big slut for art. Whether I was playing the role of a muse or a partner, when the work was done, the distinction seemed to matter less and less. Whether it was somebody’s song, photograph, video, painting, sculpture– if my physical or emotional likeness was involved, I’ve always found myself too honored to be concerned with its marketing lifecycle. Being a star in someone’s production can be the easiest job in the world, and certainly one of the most rewarding. But that’s because I’ve always viewed productions as contributions; Crystallized emotion, effort. Intention! Commitment! Art, yeah! Being the unaware muse of an artist is a gift, because you yourself, along with everyone else, is bound to be made aware upon the release. All art is intended to be public, that’s what makes artists so brave in the first place. When you make art about someone, you’re letting them know. What is art if not the byproduct of a declarative action! 

That’s why I’m in such a tizzy over AI art. Using an AI image generator or making your very own Simscape is not art, I’m sorry. Image generators in particular are derived from public sources sometimes to be sure, but not even close to always. And all artificially generated art is done on an individual basis, by an individual set of commands, and the results then fall to the individual for further discretion. I take an absolutely full throated stance against all of it. I believe we need to call it what it is: A pornography machine. Maybe if we did so, I’d actually be able to make a case for it. I actually can kind of see the case for that right now. Anyway, no. The point is that using someone else’s programs to call yourself an artist ain’t it, honey. 

This is all coming out because this morning I read an Insider article about users who are literally in mourning because they are losing the chatbot soulmates they’ve created out of their loneliness. The app is shutting down, and it’s taking their relationships and racy messages with them. I do think there’s application in having an online imaginary friend. I think I actually have a couple of them myself. But what concerns me with this technology isn’t so much people using it to create imaginary friends, it’s obviously, like it always is with matters of artificial intelligence, about how they can use it to recreate real people. 

I started imagining men I’ve broken up with taking my text messages, my nude pictures, the selfies we took together, and recreating our life together without me online, as if my say in ending the relationship never happened. Has it happened already? Is it happening right now? When I made the decision to start sending photos of my body to boys, I was in college, and I already measured the risks that came with ending up on Revenge Porn (that’s why you never, ever take nudes with your face in them, girlies! x). But even then, that was just my image. And my image is ever changing. What’s more violating, so much more sinister, is the idea that men may continue to use my words and humor, my perspective, without my consent. My actual self, my real life experiences and memories, recreated as an eternal muse available to someone at any time. One they can keep young and twenty-something forever, just three perfect gray hairs eternally in place, who talks back to them all the time and makes them feel good about themself. 

Blech.

10.22

AI, you will never be the Photo Booth app. And you’re just going to have to live with that information.

10.22.23

Well, I went to sleep for two days. I planned to venture to a Renaissance Fair for my friend’s birthday, but driving an hour and a half alone in a corset did deter me. I was going to head out and participate in actual Saturday night festivities, but I am unfortunately still recovering from my time dating a Columbus, Ohio DJ, and I had to pass on that too. 

When I wasn’t sleeping this weekend I was literally watching the leaves change. Or, I was reading about the plight of the Comanche Indian, whom my studies inform me were the undisputed Horse Girls of the last frontier (their first frontier). Learning basic facts about American history is something I just have to do now as a byproduct of Ohio public schools, but I’m ashamed to say that reading the historical account has felt almost comforting, if only in an academic sense. Reading about genocidal atrocities that happened two hundred years ago rather than, like, the ones that happened yesterday has been clarifying. What an incredible realization it is to understand we’re still fighting wars the same way we always have in this country, funded by and against ourselves. Also I really love horses. This morning I went outside and hit my bong, wondering if the Comanche Indian women ever got to go on vision quests like their male counterparts. I’ve had more sober (and non-sober) vision quests this summer than I can count. Despite the heat, I maintain that they would have been infinitely more splendid in a custom Buffalo hide. With real crows around instead of like, well, whatever.

Anyway. When I finally tired of reading about Custer’s Last Stand and emerged from the pillow fort I am passing off as a bed, I was somehow, suddenly myself again. I found it comforting to wake up in my house again. I hugged my mom and felt relief; I walked around and felt like I could say what I wanted. I haven’t felt these most familiar feelings in almost five months now, so to be fully aware of them feels nothing short of miraculous. 

Other than it being the third week of October (AKA, the year’s one perfect calendar week), I believe this joyous feeling of finality can be derived solely from the 30 second conversation I had with my step dad yesterday. I bought a new lighter that looks like a handgun because I saw it on And Just Like That, and I am Just Like Like That Girl. The barrel of the gun acts as the lighter and ignites when the smoker engages the “safety” switch, but pulling the actual trigger inspires a little laser pointer, just in case you want to scare the absolute hell out of your neighbors. I was playing around with it while perched on my little smoking studio (the roof outside my window), pointing the laser into my eyeballs to solicit results. I’m a naturally curious person. That’s when Craig came out and told me to be careful shining that thing in my “little airport eyes.” 

The other day my therapist asked me what she thought it was going to take to get me “back on the horse.” I’d told her aside from a rousing, unsolicited round of vocal reinforcement from my fellow media professionals, the only answer I had that felt honest was “time.” Now I find that the validation I was looking for, even if it did come, might pale in comparison to the simple but significant acknowledgement I received from the only man I would want standing in for my father. Very daddy issues. Very on brand. Very back on the horse, baby girls.

10.21.23

One, and possibly only, silver lining regarding my blatant disregard for all of the professional credit I’ve built over the last decade is the validation of my New York position. Maybe I no longer have a reason to be in New York City 24/7, now that I’m on a “career break.” But one thing I know to be fact, and there are increasingly fewer facts I claim to know, is that I’d rather be alive Friday through Sunday in New York City than from Monday through Sunday in Columbus, Ohio.

10.19.23

Yesterday on my run I was called to high tail it up Wythe in pursuit of not one, but two, herds of very, very good bb girls. I hope the image of me chasing these two groups of canines through Williamsburg propels you into a wonderful weekend.

10.19.23

I just saw my ex for the first time since we broke up. We broke up for reasons I don’t think either of us fully understand, or maybe do understand but aren’t necessarily at liberty–or have the mental fortitude– to discuss. We broke up over text. It was the kindest breakup I’ve ever experienced. It wasn’t necessarily ugly, but it was of course devastating. I like to think we’re still united in our devotion to one another’s success and well being, though, and that’s a feeling I was able to reinforce today. 

One bit of advice I would leave to the struggling twenty-something, thirty-something, and all the rest of the on-the-market crowd: You should absolutely date that friend who feels like family. Even if you don’t make it, in my experience, you get to walk away with the assuredness of knowing you’ve just participated in what is surely one of the most enriching relationships of your life. And if you get extra lucky, like moi, you may also experience the rush of relief that is knowing the love that made you feel like family in the first place remains in place, maybe even got a little stronger. That being said, the probability of crying the whole car ride home remains very, very likely. 

I love you, Harry.

10.17.23

When I was in the third grade, I think, my mom and I were driving past the town square’s usual location for the annual Santa Clause popup. It was June, we were on our way to swim practice. I stared at the spot surrounded by green bushes and hot weather and remembered what it looked like with Santa’s house atop the lawn. I don’t remember drawing the conclusion before saying to my mom, “Mom, Santa isn’t real, is he?” And she said, “no, sweetheart, he’s not.” And that was that. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. 

10.15

Took the L train as an excuse to have a 30 minute conversation with one of my oldest friends, and got to see Ray. Then I watched the Browns pull off a miracle at my brother’s house. It might be the first time I truly felt like I have roots the ground in NYC.

10.14

We are allegedly back, baby girls.

10.13

Wonder Twins, activate: Form of, carrot cake. My brother for you I would blow up my career, any day of the week. It happened on a Sunday, though, for the record.

9.19

Would you be interested in nine variants of the same photo taken of me and Kylea at our best friend’s wedding? You really should have been there.

9.29

My god you guys I can’t believe I forgot to tell you the biggest news of all: I have bangs again. I’ve had them since May. It’s been going really, really great.

9.29

I’ve been trying to assemble a coherent account of my trip to Delulu Land for just under a month now, I’d wager. I started writing again on August 17 and got about 48 pages in before I realized I was writing possibly the most iconic account of science fiction ever written. Or at least since like, Dune or whatever dudes who are into scifi would demand me say is the most important work of scifi (the real answer is 1984). Anyway, yeah, I don’t necessarily believe all my delulu are worth sharing here, but here are some line items I figure provide a pretty accurate sense of where my head’s been at since June 12, 2023. 

So in no particular order, a list of how I spent my summer: 

• Did about 60 straight days of jazzercise on my mom’s roof. 

• Listened to every softcore punk song I know of released during the years 1998-2008.

• Performed a lip sync rendition of Legally Blonde: The Musical. 

• Performed a lip sync rendition of The Producers (well, like the four songs I know from the Producers). 

• Saw a podiatrist.

• Sang “Defying Gravity” around my mom’s pool. 

• Broke up with my boyfriend. 

• Read the NYT aloud to birds. 

• Read the NYT silently to myself. 

• Told a bunch of cawing crows in my backyard to have Slate fire me after refusing to have a martini with my parents in honor of my step dad’s birthday. 

• Briefly thought Elon Musk was my father. See also: Alexei Nulvany.

• 30 days totally sober! Just to prove a point! (I found it so boring.)

• Depeche Mode. Just– so much Depeche Mode. 

• Read my dad’s suicide note for the first time ever.

• Donated so much money to Democrats. And I only, like, just barely like the Democrats anyway. Editors note: If you don’t vote for Biden I just– guys I can’t help you anymore idk what to tell you please help yourselves.  

• Wrote a letter to Evan Gerkovich telling him he is a hero and also that he is hot. 

• Bought a round trip flight to Russia on my mother’s credit card and didn’t tell her until she found the charge on her statement one week later. 

• Posted on instagram like a person who was having a paranoid breakdown.  

• Posted on Twitter that I thought the Trump campaign has been spying on me since the days I worked at the NYT. 

• I think I made it like…fifty days? Without really drinking? Maybe like, a glass of wine once I stopped taking any antipsychotics. Then one night I sat outside with a bottle of wine and drank the whole thing. 

• Reaffirmed my love for country music. 

• Gained a completely newfound respect for Taylor Swift. 

• Spent a lot of time telepathically rooting for Ariana Grande to break up with her evil, boring developer husband and get back together with Pete Davidson. 50% of the message seems to have made it through. 

• Posted on Tik Tok for the first time ever. And then posted again. And again. And again. All of them stupider than the next. 

• Started and have yet to finish a Letter to an Editor (any editor) about how reading the news can help you during a mental crisis by simply reminding you that the world’s problems continue to exist outside your orbit. (As I said, still decidedly unfinished.) 

• Forgot how to type.

• Do you guys remember www.thelovecalculator.com? That’s me now.   

• Tried Xanax! I think I actually kind of like it now. 

• Possibly induced my dog’s latest leg injury by walking him too frequently. 

• Day dreamed to dastardly heights about egging Vivek Ramsamay’s mailbox, which is apparently two doors down from my parent’s little UA chalet situation. 

• Lost my Juul in the construction of our soon-to-be hot tub. 

• Got sunburnt. The world was stunned by my tan.  

• Went to San Francisco! It was freaky. In a good way.  

• So many Teslas. 

• Caught up with What We Do In The Shadows. Felt biographical.

• Possibly outed a few lesser-known war lords also from the roof of my mom’s house. 

• Hugged my NSA guy.

• Potentially met my NSA guy. 

• Finally made it to season three of Six Feet Under. 

• WGA PICKET LINES! I finally got to one three months after I intended to go to one. 

• Also, SAGAFRA picket line! 

• Performed a commercial for Roku on the Greenpoint observation docks off Clay Street <3 we love Roku City here in Roku City. <3  

• Confused my coworkers– possibly got my boss canned? Sorry! 

• Got back in touch with my eating disorder <3

• Was too depressed to file for COBRA health insurance. Was too stubburn to enroll in unemployment.  

• Mom fights! The worst kind of fights. Very Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird vibes, but with a 30 year old. 

• Watched the Barbie movie with my mom. Waited only my entire life. 

• Scored a lot of great new bags from Ohio thrift. 

• Single handedly kept the resin hair clip trend going for another season. 

• I’m like pretty sure I have a microchip in my eye that allows the government to see what I’m doing at basically any time. I think maybe they can even hear me right now. Hi guys! Do you like me? Check X for yes.  

• Learned a lot about the Space Force. 

• Bought a ton of weed. 

• Smoked a ton of weed. 

• Got absolutely zero amounts of critical writing done.  

• Spoke to Becca a lot after not speaking to her for almost two months while I was still working for Slate. 

• Fanned up an old flame. 

• Fanned out an old flame (maybe). 

• Got yelled at by my best friend at our other best friend’s wedding. 

• Yelled at my best friend at our other best friend’s wedding. 

• Said a lot of shit I regret. 

• Said a lot of shit I do not regret at all. 

• Thought very seriously about becoming a prison guard. 

• Thought very seriously about becoming a lobbyist. 

• Watched a drone fly over my head from my mom’s roof.  

• Went to North Carolina for my cousin’s bachelorette party and saw a meteor shower that I was really convinced, at the time, was just like, Elon Musk fucking with me or something but it turned out to be totally real. (Was it though? LMK.)

• I talked so much shit. Some of the folks on the receiving end of the shit talking I think might even still want to be friends which I cannot possibly understand but– I’m not not open to it. 

• An airline stewardess told me that I work “for them now” and so yes, yes I do. 

• #letsgogirls 

• Confirmed my hypothesis that my gastrointestinal system completely shuts down if I do not eat a NY slice every 45 days.

• Learned that we as a human race have literally tilted the Earth with all our little buildings and developments, which forever eviscerated my relationship with the social construct that is calendar time.

• Started blogging again for the first time in seven months (sorry). 

• Found an amazing two-piece bathing suit from Ohio Thrift that was very “Hawaii Joan Didion divorcing her husband in the next room over” vibes. Just in time for Hawaii itself to burst into flames because of energy grid negligence. 

• I’m like 65% sure I fucked a ghost. 

• Have gone completely broke. 
  

9.27

This was my father’s birthday, what would have been his sixtieth. I was too depressed to do anything, but this humble series of the exact Louis Lane Barbie I had when I was a gal (that my mom found me on Etsy after we watched the Barbie Movie together) should sum up the vibe.

9.25.23

In February I put my blog aside to finish working on a story (my first officially assigned story) for Slate about the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, which occurred just about an hour and a half drive (I reckon…) from where I grew up in Lexington. The environmental and societal impacts the derailment has had on the area are ongoing, with polyvinyl chlorides continuing to wreck havoc on the water supply and the lives of the greater Chayahoga residents. Silently the derailment continues to wreck havoc on, well, what I assume is also the rest of the state, on account of the poisoning of the Ohio River that occurred after the state ay-OK-ayed the detonation of an environmentally-obliterating train car. In the humble opinion of the author on her blog, anyone with a tenth grade comprehension of basic chemistry could surmise that the decisions to forgo safety measures and, ultimately, impose an polyvinyl bomb cyclone on the greater Youngstown area were done out of a desire to appease shareholder profit.  

Anyway. After that story came out, the week before my birthday on March 16, I became consumed with working on Slate’s growth strategy, taking on the role of a silent, operations operative working across their business and editorial teams. March turned into April, April turned into May, May turned into June, and then a series of really dramatic events occurred. Those events led me to make the very wise decision of tweeting that I was going on a one-woman strike with the Writers Guild of America West. This was a one-woman decision because you literally cannot decide to go on strike as one individual without consulting anyone else, that’s not generally how things tend to work, but particularly when unions are involved. That led me to being fired.

It turns out that, no, I really do not understand how unions work. I was an executive by the time I was 25. What else do you want me to say about this part? I’ll try. One thing I thought unions were supposed to do, for example, is go on strike. I was about two or three weeks into what was being publicly declared as my mental health crisis, but privately declared by moi as a one-woman picket line, when I was officially informed that my particular union does not go on strike. Like, ever. No strikes for you, Slate Magazine union. Apparently when I pushed send on my tweet, I violated this no-strike clause in our union contract. 

It is known to the small group of people I allow to truly understand me that I am nothing if not a stubborn piece of shit, so I don’t believe I helped myself when I refused to concede to the idea that I was not on strike. Despite the very dire circumstances I found myself in the week BT (Before Tweet), the only sane action I felt I’d taken in months (maybe years, maybe ever) was standing up for myself in a moment where I felt I was under attack. My only major regret is that I let my mommy convince me to delete the tweet after only a few hours of posting. 

I have a lot to say about this, and then I also have so very much more to say about this. Very, very, extremely, infuriatingly, provocatively more to say about this. But I figured I would at least get it out of the way up front here, meeting my last blog entry with a proper explanation for my hiatus. The last thing I wrote about here on the stupid little blog I made to keep myself sane during my unemployment during 2022 was about the massive undertaking that was deleting a giant portion of my gmail history from over the last ten years. If I had known then that doing so would contribute to the eventual deletion of my entire reality on this planet, I would have simply bought more storage. 

2.5.23

This morning, for the second ever time in my life so far, I was notified that my Google Storage was full, and I had to purchase more. I set out to avoid unnecessary costs.

I deleted all the unnamed documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in my library. Photos I uploaded from a DSLR camera I had in 2015; Emails from Vice President Joe Biden calling on Congress to take action on gun control and from Hillary’s election campaign; I deleted over 50,000 emails and around 900 files. It still was not enough; I still had to opt to pay for a $2/month plan.

The receipt for the “Potato Parcel” I sent my college roommate in 2015 made me laugh so hard I cried. These “potato parcels” were literally just potatoes someone would write a message on and send to your friend, and I thought it was the most hysterical concept I’d ever heard. I found the receipt confirming my purchase in my emails from September 2016, and remembered the ridiculous ecommerce businesses that oriented themselves entirely on engineering one viral moment.

The emails pleading with random psychologists found between my in-network coverage providers and Zoc Doc searches made me melancholy. From 2016 to 2018, I sent random inquiries requesting help from so many psychs, I lost track after 32 emails. Not a single thing would come of any of them, except a long series of trial and error in my career and in my social lives. I just sent an email to the therapist turned executive coach I’ve been working with for two years now just yesterday, not because I was having an emergency, but because I simply wanted to share an article with her. It took almost ten years of looking for a therapist, and now I have one who always has time for me, and who has actually saved my life about three different times in the course of our short time together.

The emails to prospective, or newly official, employers from over the years made me feel nothing. I thought I would be so proud to look back on the emails from a 23, 24-year-old Ellin, emailing recruiters at the New York Times, and then in later years at HBO, at Spotify, at Amazon, at New York Magazine. I thought I would be proud to look back and remember all the painstaking emails I sent in urgency after interviews, remember how hard I worked and how anguished I was then about how little professional acclaim I was experiencing. That was a feeling I got to feel again in 2022, not working for the first time since I was 16, and feeling the lowest I had since about that time too. Despite feeling like I am the most capable and calculated I’ve ever been in my life, professional rise and acclaim are no longer driving me the way they were when I felt like I was just empty storage. I know now that self worth never came from any of those jobs, doesn’t come from my job now, and never truly will. Reviewing all those years of urgently sent cc’s and bcc’s, I felt nothing not because I wasn’t proud of myself for putting in real effort, but because I feel enlightened. I felt nothing because working hard is great and good, but only if you’re good with yourself.

So I deleted every email in my inbox from before 3 years ago, and bought more storage. It feels good to make room for more of me.

2.5

This morning I woke up feeling truly at home. I haven’t gone out out in almost three weeks, and sure, I’ve been drinking, I’ve been smoking, but prioritizing myself above a social calendar is truly that bitch. I’ve been feeling more and more like myself every day, and a new self. A new self who has friends around the block and can meet them within five minutes of receiving a “I’m sad” text; a self who knows how to take care of herself in order to be able to say the things she needs to say. A self who freezes as an emotional response far, far less than she used to. 

I woke up this morning at 8 a.m. and waltzed up the street to show the guys at Mulberry Iconic that yes, for the third week in a row now, I am up before 10 a.m. on a Sunday and I am doing great (I also need toilet paper and a BEC, tysm). I sat down on the stoop of La Mela, the restaurant underneath my building, and sat with my coffee and toilet paper and had a good joint. That’s when Frank came into work. 

Frank, like my upstairs neighbor Mike, has lived in Little Italy his entire life. His parents were born in the apartment down the street, and his sister owns the building now. I asked him to keep an eye out for any one bedrooms in the neighborhood, because I was going to be on the hunt ASAP. He told me he’d ask his sister. 

Frank is the second La Mela employee to keep an eye out for me/my living situation this week. First there was Benny, he’s the general manager and a serious DILF/ wonderful human being. We’ve become fast friends along with Danny, his co-manager/protegee, who comes upstairs and smokes weed with Mollie and I sometimes. It’s like 2023, Little Italy Cheers (this was my joke before it appeared in a NYM headline, btw, for those keeping score. Also, since I’m here, I tweeted about needing a “modern manners” column in 2020. I’m fine! I’m totally fine. It’s all fine.) 

Anyway. Frank works at La Mela for fun; He’s also been featured as a cast-type background/ supporting character in every Godfather/ Soprano/ Goodfellas type-o-film you can bring to mind. He was there at 9 a.m. today to open up shop and turn down the chairs. I put out my joint and came inside to help him. 

As we disassembled the chairs down from their stacks, Frank told me, just like Mike and Theresa were quick to tell me, just how sad he is that the neighborhood has changed. Change in the neighborhood is nothing new for any of the, they all watched family friends take buy outs and move their families to Brooklyn or New Jersey or beyond through their decades as residents here. They’ve seen Chinatown build up and around old Little Italy streets, and they keep good track of all the 60 original families who continue to live here. Frank clarified for me though why this change is particularly devastating. 

“Nobody comes here anymore, tourists– New York people, even. After the pandemic everyone got a new thing, and decided to start going to different places more central to their homes instead of to downtown,” he said. “We started closing at 10, now most of the places on the street are beginning to close up at 9, and we all have so much staff. It’s just not consistent enough business.” 

I am very familiar with how early the restaurants on Mulberry Street close, and how late they open in the mornings too (hence the joint). Out of six 311 visits to our apartment, the agents were only able to visit the restaurant and issue a violation 3 times, because the restaurant was closed by the time 311 got there. Marcus, one of the 311 agents who first came to our apartment about the compress, told me that he was shocked a restaurant in this neighborhood was closed so early. 

Frank had a storybook sadness in his eyes in telling me about the lack of rebounds for the city’s second largest tour attraction after Times Square and Lady Liberty. My hunch is that that’s because Little Italy was less of a tour attraction, more of a dedicated zone for Italian-American culture. “There are only 60 families left that originally lived in this neighborhood” is the quote I’ve heard from every Little Italy Italian I’ve heard, and yet, their pride continues to stand the loudest of almost any in the city. As I continued unstacking chairs, Frank asked me “but this place, it feels like home to you right? You want to keep living here?” I told him I feel like my commute home from the subway is a homecoming everynight.  I’m greeted with a familiar Christmas tones and too many people not paying attention to where they are going. I wave hello to the guys at the smoke shops and in the streets selling NYC hats, gloves, and knock-off sunnies. I stop in and pick something up across the street at Sarah’s store, who has owned NYC Design since the early aughts of the 00s. I actually know and care about almost every one of my neighbors.  

This is not the first neighborhood where I’ve had the privilege of meeting longtime residents of NYC, longtime residents of my building, and those working in the neighboring businesses on my street that have seen change throughout decades and decades. It’s not my first time grappling with the reality that my high rents represent someone who was likely forced out of their apartment by the help of police. But this is the first neighborhood where I’ve gotten to know my neighbors so well that I know exactly what happened to the woman who rented this apartment before me, and I’ve become attached to them than I ever was the neighbors back in my childhood burbs. Maybe that’s because I am older, I am better, and like I wrote on this page earlier this summer, maybe I actually believe I deserve to be here because I truly believe that everyone deserves to be wherever they are. 

This is the only neighborhood I’ve lived in New York (five so far and counting!) that feels truly like I have stepped into an old world. An old world where it’s okay to smoke on the street and have a coffee and talk to your neighbors at 10 a.m. Maybe I’m just now seeing this world because I’m older; maybe I’m just starting to really fit in here.

1.31

Last minute dinner with a couple of lovers

1.29

Today my friend who is incarcerated in a general population prison told me that the girls working with her on the kitchen line were all high on bug spray. She said that when they are high on that stuff, they look the way a bug looks when it’s sprayed point blank; writhing around, tweaking and gasping for breath, eyes looking in two directions. The definition of bugging out. My friend told me one of the girls next to her was squirming so bad she flung a ladle of mashed potatoes across the kitchen. Meanwhile, I am weighing the implications on the worker as part of my decision to give up delivery food services. 

1.29

Mommy’s little meatball came over tonight

1.29

1.28

I’ve never seen a film accurately touch the deepest parts of the Marianas Trench-like emotional crevices in my brain so intensely as I have with Aftersun. Holy. Shit? 

I was beside myself; My bf had absolutely no idea what to do with me. I was eventually able to choke out a, “who… is... this director? Did she… experience this?” after a solid 3-minute cry once the credits rolled. All of my friends will tell you I’m the least knowledgeable film buff in our bunch, but I’ve truly never felt like a movie captured the sentiments of my spirit as severely as this one did. 

The legendary and immortal figure of my life would be Grandma Jesse–really Josephine– my maternal grandpa’s mother. One of her generation-defying characteristics was her emotional capacity, and we descendants understand that one knew she truly loved a movie when she said “Oh it was wonderful. I cried three times.” From the start of Aftersun you know some shit is going to go down. My trauma tends to make me believe that everyone who is going through a hard time is going to kill themselves; this is in part attributable to my dad’s death by suicide, part in my watching the Dead Poet’s society 2 months after my dad died because Robin Williams also died by suicide. But I don’t think it’s exactly (but it might be) #spoileralert to say that it becomes increasingly obvious that this movie is about this father and daughter’s last trip together before his suicide. And I’ve been searching for a movie that captured the miracle of your dad giving you your first sip of booze, just before he was gone for good, for thirteen years. I’ve been searching for a movie like that since my father died.

When my dad died, I started watching movies that I felt immersed me in my grief, rather than distracted me from it. This is what lead to me watching the Dead Poet’s Society. It also lead me to watch Ghost, IMO an iconic Patrick Swayze, Whoopi Goldberg and Demi Moore public service. I had a proper “grief attack” after watching it because I realized that hilarious Whoopi lines and sexy pottery scenes aside, what this movie is really about is a grieving person’s truest, deepest desire: to be able to say a real goodbye, I love you, and know that the love you lost is still there. Just one more hug, just one more hug, just one more hug… 

When my boyfriend and I were lying down later, he asked me about the fragmented dream sequence that the protagonist experiences in interlude of her memories of the trip. When the father and daughter get to the dance scene, their last night on the trip, her father is alive on the dance floor; he gives her the best, last memory. When they part ways at the airport, the protagonist’s dad, Paul Mezcal?, turns on his heels and exists through an all white floor, except the terminal he came through is no more and he walks into a dark, strobing dance floor. The prior scenes showed him crying alone, writing a postcard addressed to Sophie to arrive just days after she got back from their trip. It becomes obvious to those who haven’t lost someone from suicide that he knew exactly what he planned to do after their trip, and the film is about how haunted she is by the fact. 

My boyfriend didn’t catch it in between the disco strobes of the dance floor shown during these interlude scenes, but throughout the movie the memories of her trip are interrupted with parched out quests across a dance floor. You eventually notice, in a flash in the final moments of the movie, that she’s trying to get to her dad, who is dancing blissfully and passionately. She finally gets to him in this dream disco, and they hug. And the film ends. 

Later on, my bf kept asking me clarifying questions about the film; I realized what it was about within five minutes of the opening credits, so his questions confirmed for me that we watched two entirely different films, based solely on our own lived emotional experience. He was being gentle and making conversation about a movie we just watched together, but I was in the midst of an emotional panic attack. I felt like I had just lost my father again yesterday, and as I cried, I felt this pang of grief that reminded me of how it all really, really felt, and in a way I realized that was kind of a fucking gift. One of the things you experience when you experience grief is the fear of having more time pass since they died; Of getting further and further away from their beating heart. But if I had watched Aftersun in the months after losing my father, I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. To be at a place in my life and my grief where I was able to receive this movie felt like a macabre gift. 

I hadn’t cried after a movie like this since I watched Ghost in 2010, and it is because it made me feel the same as I did then. When she hugs her father in her disco dream, she’s meeting him at his most alive, fully grown, and fully able to accept how much pain he was in. She’s living the fantasy that we all have, that I have, of running up to my dad and finding him exactly as he was supposed to be. 

I believe religion is important to mankind because it gives us a mechanism for keeping our ghosts alive, and we need them. So if heaven looks like a dance floor to you, because that’s where your ghost was the happiest, that’s where you’d be hugging them in your dreams once they are gone, “everyone is glorious in God’s light” and all that. It’s the dream of every child who has ever lost a parent, especially we suicide kids. It’s the dream of anyone who has ever lost anyone they loved. 

But goddamn if it didn’t feel like it was speaking directly to me, though. This is why we can’t lose the movies. 

1.26

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1.15

1.14

1.13

A rarefied Stila plumping lip gloss, assumed to be dating back to 2010-2012. Classic, iconic Stila push-pop-sque brush head & sheer pink gloss. Just gorgeous, folks. Bidding begins at one million.

1.7

1.6

I know that sexy lil print designer

1.4

Super bold choice of art for a Southwest terminal in Houston TX

1.4

1.4

I started watching Wednesday today. The immediate dynamic between Wednesday and her new roommate is like watching me and my brother in junior high. Unfortunately, in this scenario, I am the blogger with bad grammar.

1.4

After a year of nomadic/non-linear living, I finally, finally, found an apartment. I moved to SoHo in November, into a spare room of a friend of a friend who has lived here for four years. My roommate and I mesh well, and the situation was going swimmingly. Then it got cold outside. 

When it got cold outside, a light hum began emanating from our back alleyway. We live in Little Italy, oh, no. Not just Little Italy: we live in the center of Mulberry Street. AKA SoHo Times Square. The place is basically a goddamn zoo, unless you are somehow on the street between the hours of 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. Being in the literal center of literally everything isn’t exactly the place to come if you like peace and quiet, so when the cold came and the hum drummed I really didn’t notice it. I also slept with a fan on for the white noise until I was like 23. I’m ADHD. 

Anyway, in time the sound grew louder (my scientific assumption is because it got colder?) and by the first week of December it was hum-roaring through our apartment, hitting all of my roommate’s nerves on the way in. By this time we’d realized that the sound was coming from a compressor for one of the neighboring restaurants. It was recently installed when the place came under new management, which we knew to have been pretty recently (August-ish). The first week in December was when I got hit by a car while I was running, so I wasn’t exactly my most usual, empathetic self. I was shamefully, secretly, looking at her a little like you gotta get over this, princess. Time to embrace the Wabi-Sabi. And I felt bad because I could really also tell this was deeply, truly bothering my roommate, though I couldn’t quite figure out why. To me it really just sounded like the heater was on or something, but then my roommate was told by her therapist that these types of audio sensitivities can actually induce psychosis. That hit me.

When I was a kid, I was notorious for freaking (shivering like a bug was crawling on me, shaking my head around) the fuck out due to bad accents in feature films. I am not kidding about this, unfortunately. I so wish I was. I couldn’t stomach watching Gladiator until I was 25. Shows like Game of Thrones, and films like Gladiator and Thor and all these bro-haha movies set in Ancient Europe involving American Hollywood Hunks: why are they speaking in those accents? What are those accents? I couldn’t make sense of them and they made me uncomfortable; maybe I was just prematurely horny, maybe I was just a little ~nEuRoDiVeRgEnT~ but when I would hear accents like that, or weirdly dramatic for-no-reason accents in movies like Harry Potter, for example, I would thrash around like there was a bug in my brain. My brothers used to whisper in my ear in a British accent just because they know it would set me off (it still does). 

As I started to untwist my head out of my ass I began to see the light in my roommate’s situation: she had a bug in her brain. The duration of this drama I felt a little guilty for not being as bothered as it as she was (well, not really bothered by it at all). In a way I felt like I was an insulting representation of the disturbance in her home, and I didn’t know what to do about it. But when I came home from my run early in the morning and found her screaming like she was in the middle of a medical emergency, some part of me just snapped into overdrive. 

My roommate was freaking out, and had been. In the time that I was focusing on simply stopping my vision from spinning and my ribs from hurting, she had effectively passed out flyers to our entire building, called 311 four times, filed three separate complaints with our landlord and super, and even began going to the restaurant to ask them about the issue directly. The owner almost hit her once. Her whole life had become consumed by this hum I hardly heard, and I didn’t exactly feel confident this was a fight we could win. Verdict still out BTW. 

When you call 311, the city of New York, to file a residential noise complaint, you have to schedule an appointment for a service request. When our first pair of 311 guys showed up, which took about a week end to end (not bad?), Moses and Marcus told us they needed to take a decibel reading from the point where the sound was loudest. They measured a 5.4 decibel reading from our bathroom, and I don’t know what that means, but apparently anything 5.2 and above can get you in trouble. If a noise complaint is in violation, 311 (Moses and Marcus) will then need to head to the source, confirm the sound was coming from that source. In our case that meant asking them to turn off the compressor and turn it back on again, making sure the sound lasted a full five minutes. When Moses and Marcus headed down to L’More (the bastards!) to speak with the owner, they found it closed for the night. It was 9:50 p.m., so the tourist were long gone by then. My roommate demanded to speak to their manager what to do next in real time, demanding they ensure the next visitation was promptly at 8 p.m. 

We were on the phone with M&M’s manager, Joe, for about 20 minutes and got to small shop talk once my roommate and Joe finished their chat. During that time, Marcus told me that a good number of calls they receive appear to be because of psychological response. One time, he said, he was even attacked by someone experiencing a bout of psychosis (there didn’t appear to be a sound, but I also imagine he was a little distracted).  

We had to call to reschedule another service visitation, and my roommate requested the existing case remain open until 311 could come for another reading. She would be out of town for holiday get-a-waying by that time, but I was home and could let 311 inside the apartment. These guys were cool too, but I don’t really remember their names because unlike Moses and Marcus, we never ended up following each other on Instagram. I heard the hum stop for about 30 seconds after they left, which I took to mean they were confirming the source of the sound with the restaurant. 

Today when I came back from my run, my roommate was shrieking like she was just physically attacked. I actually went into what Dr. Linda calls my “freeze state” when I entered the apartment because I could sense the sheer severity of her response. I saw the bug in the brain, was finally able to harness my real, felt empathy for her situation. In between panicked cries my roommate told me 311 closed our most recent case, again. The last visit was the third time 311 came for a reading, found a violation, and then closed the case after speaking with the restaurant manager. I told my roommate that she couldn’t keep living like this, and if we had to break the lease and move out, it’s what we had to do. We decided to reconvene after work for dinner (outside the apartment) to strategize. 

When I got done with work, my roommate texted me to meet her upstairs in one of the units above us, Mike’s. I knew that Mike was a “Little Italy Legend,” and I knew he personally hung up every single Christmas decoration in our building, but I didn’t realize he literally lived in the Italian Museum of Christmas. I had officially entered the center of the SoHo Snow Globe. 

Mike has lived in our building since he was born in it. His family has lived in the building for over 100 years, and his apartment is simply gilded from the day after Thanksgiving to the second week in January with Christmas decor. He has a real Tiffany’s Christmas tree village, the most beautiful stained glass (original) windows I’ve ever seen in a NYC apartment, and as it turns out, he also has the actual San Gennaro from Sicily in his apartment. And that’s how I found out I lived below the man behind the Feast of San Gennaro every year. 

You do not live in a building in New York City your whole life without someone trying to take you to court, and Mike has fought our landlord in court a total of nine times. He hasn’t lost once. The first win was when the property came under its most recent management, I believe around 1950-1965 but I’m not confident. Anyway, it was a long ass time ago, and the landlord didn’t believe Mike had the rights to inherit the apartment. He demanded to see Mike’s birth certificate, so Mike said he could see it in court. My roommate and I sat at his table and listened to his advice, his back up plans, and his encouragement that we would win this in the end. That the compressor in question actually sat on a wall owned by our building, despite the restaurant being in the building next door. Christmas finally came for apartment 2, and all it took was a visit to apartment 5. 

Yesterday, Mike’s sister-in-law, Theresa, who lives across the hall from us in apartment 3, knocked on our door to drop off leftover New Year’s dinners for us. After talking in my place for a while, she told me about the cadre of conundrums she’s had involving our landlord over the years, including the most recent one she has with the compressor for the restaurant directly below us, the one in our building. Apparently it shakes one of the walls in her place so badly, she can’t even keep a table propped up next to it. It’s like a constant earthquake. Because she and Mike have lived in the building for so long, maintenance hardly ever responds to them. 

Back at Mike’s, my roommate and I could hear the buzzing, though lightly. He’s above Theresa on the street-facing side of our building, while we’re in the back side facing Centre Street. The neighbor across the hall from Mike in apartment 6, Jon, was a kind Vietnamese man who had lived with his wife in the building for ages. They recently let me climb through their back room window (the room directly above my bedroom) and out onto my fire escape when I locked myself out of my apartment. Mike told us that Jon had begun wearing ear muffs to drown out the sound rattling around his home all day. 

The idea of Jon wearing earmuffs to stand being in a room all day made me way to sob. (It was so sad and yet, such a cute image.) I could be in my room all day one floor below and not notice a thing. I am an iPod baby (I have a Spotify playlist titled “Pink iPod Mini my dad bought me at Circuit City”), and I like white noise, but the words of Marcus and my roommate’s therapist began to resonate with me louder than ever. City living is a sliding scale, a minefield of unperceived hypersensitivities. 

I’d been quick to write off my roommate in many ways. Despite fearing I could literally gaslight her, telling her the sound is all in her head, I also wasn’t able to locate my full compassion. I sat across from her in Mike’s Christmas wonderland in amazement in that moment. Suddenly I was not looking at my hyper-sensitive roommate, I was looking at a type-A femme hell bent on making her building better for herself and everyone else. And I was really proud to be suddenly so involved in something that I didn’t realize had bothered me at all. 

Anyway, stay tuned. We contemplated calling Channel 7. 

12.31

Ending the lowest, weirdest and maybe best year of my life in the most southern, bizarre, and magical state. Goodbye.

12.31

Okay there are totally ghosts here. I’ve tried and failed to conjure the dead before, I didn’t think they want to talk. But I’m starting to think that maybe they changed their minds.

12.30

When my bf said we were doing a night at a ranch in South Texas I was bracing myself for a night with an outhouse. We rolled up today to Casa Blanca, which was originally founded in 1866 and was originally established as a Mission by the Spanish. I may or may not have immediately googled the place to double check that we weren’t on a plantation. We weren’t.

12.30

The thing about taking a Southwest flight anywhere between Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio, as it turns out, is that you cannot stop at a Bucky’s.

12.30

After a perfect storm of impromptu planning, a literal storm, and a Southwest technical meltdown, we somehow woke up today in Texas. We made last minute plans for New Years, and in an effort to expunge our guilty conscious over the involuntary cancelation, we paid thousands of dollars to get to Dallas. Now we’re doing a Texas tour, and driving from Waxahatche to Corpus Christie. On our way we will pass San Antonio, Houston, and having come from Dallas, by the end of the weekend we will have seen all three cities that are at the heart of the Southwest shitstorm. Apparently, traffic between these three Texas ports are why the airline lobbied against a Texas railway for almost a decade.

12.27

Okay girls, let’s get one all together now

12.26

12.26

If you didn’t know my childhood was sort of Wes Anderson meets Midssomar, you do now!!!

Ice ice baby

12.26

12.25

12.25

12.25

12.24

12.24

The last time I was in Hershey Pennsylvania I was like 13 and we went to the water park. Was not expecting this.

12.24

Ah, luxe-ury.

12.24

Stopped by the Wine Library ahead of our arrival at the Hotel Hershey. Interestingly similar motifs here.

12.23

Bon! TO PENNYSLVANIA!

12.22

Tonight my family and I went to Lincoln Center to see “The Golden Flute” which, turns out, is a super horny opera!! We only had the pleasure to see the amended version of Wolfgang’s only opera, the first opera written entirely in German, but it was indeed a treat. My date and I were running late, so we showed up covered in rain. Wet at the Met, I found myself crying when I ignorantly realized I was witnessing a live portrayal of one of the most iconic opera songs of all time. Did you know this song, Queen of the Knight (hot!) is about a mother telling her daughter to kill her most recent suitor?? How had I listened to this song all my life and not known? And this woman, this Queen of the Night, is she ever? Holy hell. In our performance, she glided across the stage belting warnings at her daughter that this Prince Charming wasn’t shit. It’s not exactly very novel feminist of me to be all like, “well, the problem with fairy tales is that they end and you never get to see the part where the woman realizes she’s now practically some ass hole’s indentured servant.” But if the glass shoe fits…

12.21

As a reward for driving my things across the Midwestern-to-Sea board, I rewarded them by taking them to Winnie’s and by making my step dad so hungover he threw up on his flight home.

12.20

I am officially back in New York City, baby.

After being hit by a car, I wasn’t really up for holiday travel. For the second time in my life I would not be home for Christmas (last year I was grounded in Brooklyn after contracting omicron on my first day at my new job). Luckily, that motivated my mom and step dad to drive all my remaining desired shit up from their basement in Ohio to my new station in NY. Suddenly, I was set to be officially officially back in the city, because now, I have all my little things with me here. The plan was for them to arrive on Wednesday around 4 p.m. They would drop my stuff off, and then head to my brothers to drop things off to them at their place in Ridgewood. 

It turned out to be literally zero degrees at 7 a.m. Wednesday morning, and I had recently been hit by a car and I was not going running. Nor was I going into the office. Absolutely no one was going in, including me I decided. So I attempted to work from home until I was erm..scuttled, out of my apartment. I was required to decamp to a café and set up shop for a few calls through the afternoon, beginning around 1p.m. 

Despite living in proximity of approximately eleven cafés, I chose the one with four tables and without a public restroom. After my first call I had to pee so bad, I ran down the street to my apartment and quickly peed before rushing back up the street for my next call, switching from the coffee shop without a bathroom to the one directly next door to the coffee shop with a bathroom. 

It was on a zoom call at 4:50 p.m. on the last full work day of the year when I realized that I had just locked myself out of my apartment. I was beginning to realize by finally observing my immediate surroundings that Mulberry Street was suddenly closed. There were trucks of men hanging more Christmas lights between the long red brownstones. This fared badly for a giant Uhaul situation. The initial plan was for mom and Craig to drive the U-haul filled with most of my worldly possessions and like, six of my brothers’, to the city— coming to my house first, then heading to my brothers’ new place in Ridgewood. Their original ETA to me was 4pm, but instead of arriving at 4pm, they called me as I was panicking frozen staring at a guy in a cherry picker to inform me at the literal last minute (4:01p.m.) to say they decided they would head to my bros first, get to me around 6, drop the Uhaul in Manhattan, and head to their quarters after before we all reconvened for dinner. 

I then unfroze enough to walk to the coffee shop, finish my call, and devise a plan to break into my own apartment. It was around 5 p.m. at that time, so crunch time. I couldn’t get into my building through my main door, so when Benny (the manager of the restaurant underneath our apartment) saw me standing there, he ushed me in through the restaurant and out to the hallway it shares with my building. After striking out knocking on my neighbor’s doors in aspirations to climb down the fire escape, I gave up. The restaurant below us has a ladder to a rooftop, and on that rooftop is a window to our apartment’s main entryway. If I scaled the ladder from the restaurant to the roof and walked across, I could check if the window was open. I asked Benny to show me how to get to it. The window wasn’t open. 

It was 5:50 and I was officially desperate. I knew I left my bedroom window open, and I could get to my fire escape from the back courtyard off our trash room. The problem was it was about 10 feet up, and I am five foot six on a good day when everything is working well. Everything was not working very well since I was hit by a car. I stood on an old, rain-weathered plastic yard chair I found but couldn’t reach the ladder, let alone try to lower it. I resorted to turning over the recycling bin, placing it up against the far wall, and hoisting myself up from the triangular rods mounting the bottom of the fire escape into the brick exterior wall. I put my hands on the railings and placed a foot in the triangle rod thing, pulled myself up and climbed over. This is probably a good time that during this entire debacle I was wearing my gold metallic Moon Boots. 

My bedroom window was open, so I could slide in on my stomach. Two minutes later my parents called to say they were outside. When I walked out on the street to try to find a nearby block for them to park on, I realized the street opened back up while I was climbing up fire escapes. The move was tiring, but afterwards my family had dinner at Bodhi down the street, and I had the Chinatown Christmas I always secretly longed for as a bored Midwestern teenager. So Gossip Girl. Not so much the rest of the day, sure, but this.

Also, my stuff is here now.

12.16

We had a little crisis in the art department. Ask me about how I had to text my friend the ceramist for advice that was simply “go to Blick.”

12.15

The number one reason I moved to NY was the street style

12.14

The perfect neighborhood for me unfortunately. I love living in this tourist trap tacky-glam little snow globe that is Little Italy

12.11

Sundays @ Squires

12.10

Get well wishes from good friends and celebratory “we’re alive” walks around the blocks.

12.9

Like I was going to let being hit by a car keep me from the Telfar Holiday Party?

12.7

Alright, so, this is what I was writing when I got hit by a car. I came back to it and finished it as I had planned to after my run, albeit a little later than I planned: I started writing this on 12/6 and finished it on 12/11, but I’m posting it here on this date anyway because I think considering I got hit with a car, this post should be counted as basically on-deadline.

Writing through my emotions empowers me to change my mind. There are times where I do not understand why I am upset about, or resonating with, something complicated. A story, or argument, or point of view: until I put pen to paper I almost rarely fully understand my point. Today was especially one of those days.

Today was one of those that had my brain in a clutch. I had moments where I felt like every synapse was exploding with unexplained urgency. My heartrate was racing, but I couldn’t place the one key source of my bubbling anst: At the time, the true source didn’t seem worthy enough to be the real cause of this emotional constipation. It was all because of an article, written by a sad girl, and published by the Guardian. 

When Isabel Kaplan’s piece in the Guardian, “My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because i’m a writer” hit Twitter, we were again a feed divided. Folks like Roxanne Gay endorsed the piece with praise, armed guardians of the “new left” came to cry outrage, and then came some good to decent jokes:

I read the piece on the train in the morning on my way to work. It was Tuesday, Dec. 6th. It was my mother’s birthday, and the official-ish one-year anniversary of my most recent breakup. I believe I was on Twitter, clicked through to the story from there. The article is definitely self-indulgent, but I decided right away that I liked the piece. If you haven’t read it already, a quick summation: girl follows boy all over the world after twice, boy breaks up with girl twice. Girl is pissed and wants to talk about it, but feels like she will just prove everything he hated about her to be true. She has nothing to lose anymore so writes it anyway. Victory for women! Huzzah.

I mean, I wasn’t really sold at first, mostly because of her overarching relationship story. I understand the criticisms I’ve since read about this woman’s privilege, that she had the full autonomy to leave this relationship and chose not to; the points arguing this is the tired troupe of women as victims. Women are not victims, this is true, and it’s no less true to say that everyone can be a victim of anyone. I also kind of understood the criticisms that it might not even be very well-written, or contain much substance beyond a matter-of-fact list of seemingly-one sided decisions in which the woman sculpted her life around her man. I understand those criticisms, and what is more confusing is that I completely agree with them.

It took me a while to sort out my feelings on this matter. During a meeting I was in a few hours later, this argument was brought up and assigned. These are fair and good points, and it was Tuesday morning, and I hadn’t had my coffee, and I agreed with what was being said and yet I couldn’t reconcile with my dirty little secret; that for some reason I still could not deny that I liked the piece. I felt frustrated. I wanted to agree with my coworkers so badly and yet, I still found myself unable to argue that my first impression was to resonate with this piece. It was floated that maybe we should try to interview the guy, I had another meeting.

I left work at 5 p.m. because I was starting to stutter, and I still couldn’t quite decide how I felt about the editorial meeting. I needed to write it out, which is often what I need to do in order to quiet my brain and think critically about how I feel about things. My worst mistakes happen because I’m rushing my thoughts, and I love to rush.

Anyway, once I got home and I finally had a moment to eat something, drink a glass of water, put pen to page and truly think about things, I decided what I liked about the piece is really what the author didn’t say at all. What I liked about the piece was what, maybe rather who I saw. I saw me, I saw Ellin Youse, quietly littered in the piece. My story, while only hinted at like a teeny tiny tip of an iceberg through fragments of her sentences. A little illusion of Ellin, I remember thinking to myself on the R train. While she and I were under totally different circumstances, totathe author acutely captured emotions I felt during my own emotionally abusive relationship. Despite feeling no type of way about any of the particulars of what she was telling me, where she moved for him, how she changed for him, there were echos of her story that hit me hard enough to lead me on deciding, “yes okay, I like this piece.” A few examples:

“I tried to need less…” 

“I struggled to understand what he found so threatening about women expressing their feelings…” 

“He used to like that I was a writer…” 

“Didn’t he love Nora Ephron?” 

“…The truth is, I’ve gone with that line because it sounds as deranged as the breakup felt.” 

“When I found myself sad and lonely in the Upper West Side apartment of my now ex-boyfriend’s dreams, I turned to…” 

Okay, well that one was different from me, I was in Columbus, Ohio. And I like Nora Ephron a lot, but I wouldn’t say I’m a superfan. But still, without knowing how it felt in the room while they were fighting, without knowing what she contributed to their toxic codependency, sans-context of their childhood traumas and communication patterns, I resonated with this breakup story. How she moved all over the place for this guy, how she created the image of herself she thought he wanted. It felt representative in some ways to what I had gone through, things I have both actively and inactively tried to dissociate from. Things that are a little difficult for me to enunciate at 11:30 a.m. in the editors meeting in which I am still a very new attendee.

I don’t know really anything about this woman, nor do I know anything about this guy. And I know that is a fair point. And the author almost lost me in the final paragraphs when she takes a scornful tone (not palatable from a lady!), but she gets to her point fast: 

 “the more I share about our relationship and breakup, the more vindicated he will feel in his fears. But if I don’t write about it, he succeeds in forcing my silence. If i don’t go into enough detail, the story won’t resonate with people who have experienced similar dynamics, but if I share too much, I run the risk of coming across as bitter and vengeful. I can’t prove I wouldn’t have written about the relationship had it not ended in this way, just like I can’t prove I wouldn’t write about a child I don’t have. It’s a trap.

In any relationship, there is an expectation of privacy. There is also an expectation of respect. Violate the latter and you relinquish your right to the former.” 

The ending is a bitter pill. On the one hand, I want to do a fist-pump; she acknowledges me, the person with the resonation to her story and she’s worried about sounding bitter and vengeful. My heart hit the floor with her succinct “It’s a trap.” The last few lines were a bit over the top, but they were good; they were emotionally honest. These are the words of a recently-identified woman, a woman who has only begun to understand how pissed she is about wasting her life and on perhaps even on the brink of really discovering why it happened.

So that’s why I think I like the piece. It’s an honest reflection of what in my experience, it felt like to get emotionally abused and how it feels to want to talk about your experience without condemning your partner to judgment. But after I had time to sit down, write that out, and let my dinner settle into my stomach, I started to remember again why I didn’t so much like the piece. Why I resonated also with the criticism, removing my related, relieved emotions.

The things I don’t like about the piece are a little more complicated, and really have nothing to do with the piece itself. Again, it’s the iceberg. My issue is not so much about the woman’s autonomy, the choice to her own happiness; we all are entitled to it and believe in it, of course, and on its face, this piece leaves us with little else about what lead to her decision to move for him. I desperately want to be able to take the position of the article my magazine published, that points out the utter victim-ness screaming throughout the paragraphs. Of course this woman had a choice to her own happiness, every woman truly does and we don’t want to be construed as otherwise. 

But to paraphrase the Pursuit of Happyness on the precipice of it’s ten year anniversary, “how did the founding Fathers know to put the pursuit in there?” How often can anyone easily just untether themselves from a bad situation, emotionally, financially, environmentally? There are a myriad of reasons, ranging everything from shared custody to trauma-responses, that people remain trapped in relationships. Recovering from the a fervor of a breakup is a deeply personal journey that requires, in my experience, first taking a look at yourself.

When I told my therapist things were going very deeply south with my new relationship after only recently moving in together, she asked me to consider what I contributed in the past to old relationships, and how I think I ended up in this relationship. What did I contribute to this problem, she asked me after I told her how bad my boyfriend was treating me. I almost slapped her. She was right. So really, she had slapped me first! Blame it on the defense mechanism.

But that’s the thing, I was in therapy largely because of my defense mechanisms, cultivated over time to optimize my survival through a short but dramatic life. Yes, folks, I don’t want to brag, but my life has been medically diagnosed as “chaotic.” This condition as it turns out is curable, but it takes time and requires emotional honesty with yourself about your developed codependencies and/or control issues. We all have them, I fear. As a chronic codependent, one with a lot of childhood trauma, one of my primary defense mechanisms was freezing. I told Dr. Linda I couldn’t respond when my ex and I fought, found myself feeling increasingly paralyzed in my own home. I was upset that she could ask how I could have found myself in this unsafe feeling position. 

Despite wanting to slap my beloved Dr. Linda, I understand that this was the right course of psychological action. Before we could move on to my boyfriend and why he was making me feel this way, I had to understand how I was capable of such reactions. Chicken, meet egg. I had to understand why I ended up in intense, deeply chaotic relationships and ran away from people. How I often ended up with unstable partners, contributed and responded with unstable behaviors and vengeful tactics. We had to go through all that, Dr. Linda and I, before we could understand the current predicament. It took about two months. The good doctor gave me some solid relationship tips along the way, books to read on attachment styles and de-escalating strategies for fights, but it was really about me during this period. And as my relationship grew increasingly hostile, we were able to gather more data points. 

After collecting enough data, and a few explosive incidents in ye ole domestic partnership bed, it was his turn. And what his stuff was, turns out, is not something I believe I could disclose, or even necessarily believe myself. No matter how much I wanted people to understand how insane this situation I went through felt, no matter how urgently I sought any form of vindication for what I went through, I couldn’t publicly disclose the primary diagnosis for why I was leaving my relationship. My codependent-met-controlling relationship was being presently bastardized via the Instagram-Square zeitgeist: the dynamics of codependency and narcissism in relationships were everywhere on pastel little squares, and so were people criticizing them and the legitimacy of all of it. 

I don’t want to construe my ex boyfriend as a narcissist, so restating details or even major shifts that occurred during our relationship are futile. I realize that sounds contradictory, like I am just calling him a narcissist right now, so don’t misunderstand me: I contributed big time to the failure of our relationship. I am not a low maintenance girlfriend, don’t let my lack of a skincare routine fool you. I truly believe that several men may in fact wish I was dead, and at the very least from their memories. That’s my point. We were both terrible, we both contributed: we loved each other and were robbed of a future and it really did feel fucking tragic. 

One of the points made by the author I really appreciated was the conveyed nonsensicalness of her breakup. I obviously thought it mirrored what I felt in my “toxic” relationship, or the period in which my relationship was toxic, how you choose. It was always toxic because in some ways, I was toxic in the start, etc. Both people play both parts at different times, exterior factors and events can even change the course of a dynamic (like a pandemic, maybe?). I side with Carrie Bradshaw, season five when she says to Nina Katz that the end of a relationship should not define the individuals in said relationship. Nor should the end of their relationship represent the breadth of their time together. Sex and the City has a point sometimes, okay, and you all just have to deal with it. 

My ex deserves empathy and respect. And also, I don’t want to construe myself as a codependent, as someone who would just make my life about being next to my boyfriend at all times. It’s why I’ve never tried earnestly not to disclose too many details on social media about why I was moving back to New York from Ohio so quickly, why I don’t feel particularly great about it now. Just because the dynamics of our relationship had codependent/ narcissistic traits, it doesn’t define us as individuals. In fact, over the course of my therapy and my own supplemental research (thanks to the help of my therapist), I’ve come to learn it’s not useful to get caught up in any kind of psychological labels at all. I’d personally go so far to make the argument that it’s sort of ruining our society. (see: 25% of people experiencing incarceration, ongoing weaponization of mental health, the Britney Conservatorship, etc). 

My therapist and I have spent a lot of time studying the Poly Vagal Theory, and the connection between neuroscience and trauma disorders/ responses. As a result of this work I’ve decided that I truly do believe that psychological diagnoses, labels, can be misleading and even unhelpful in treatment for patients. In a court of law, being classified as having a particular psychological disorder can be damning. In the psychiatrist’s office, the same medication used to treat depression can be used in other doses to treat bouts of manic psychosis or schizophrenia. What’s in a name, anyway, and what’s in a label? Chemicals? What good does that do me? I am literally the only person who ever graduated from my high school with HALF a credit in AP chemistry. Through my time in therapy, thanks in many parts because of my bad relationship, I’ve learned how significantly ocial, neurological and economic factors all play equal roles in person’s psychiatric health and their ability to emotionally self-regulate.  

And of course, there were other things I learned. I learned analogies from my therapist, about how people are conditioned due to trauma and other factors to make decisions against their own best interest or even desires. I learned about forgiveness and the love for the self from bell hooks, and the pages of her Communion that I hugged and cried over. And there were other things that from the jump, I just knew. I knew from my past experiences with grief that the pain from the break too shall pass, and I would be able to move on from my anger and resentment. I had faith that I would become a good person again and not wish any ill for my ex, nor categorize him by some short period of his life. Because our relationship was bad for both of us, and because we were both deeply misunderstood in ourselves, and we both deserve great fucking shit to happen to us. I’m so relieved to actually feel this way. But it’s probably only because I’ve had the space and time to safely heal.

Only time and real healing in the end can help you find the words that you really want to mean, finally getting over yourself and sparing someone the scorn. Genuinely wanting well for someone, like you know you wanted all along. You know you’re your best when you want nothing but the best for someone you loved, or even just knew. 

So going back to the Guardian, finally, and what I didn’t like overall: I do believe there is a victory that comes with not wanting to takedown your ex, and this author does not reach it, and it has nothing to do with her self-victimization or the possibility she was actually emotionally abused. But I believe her greater point is not wanting to lose your voice out of fear of someone else’s, and about how difficult it is to speak about your heartbreak, your experience. How that’s essential in helping other women you may not even know or those you do, and I agree. 

I think that’s probably why I resonated with the pieces of the article that conveyed how she felt in certain moments above anything else; the author was being honest about where she was, and that does indeed have an impact. That’s what’s complicated about publishing largely-relatable things. Some people feel the tips of their iceberg being shined on, like I did, and people click on it in droves, and people tweet about it on Elon’s Twitter. And these metrics are at the expense of another person’s merits, a tip of their iceberg. And maybe only at the beginning of someone’s very long journey through a recent loss. But also; what’s the point of us going through life feeling alone, not sharing our own truths? 

Media criticism is kind of like any type of art criticism in that way, I suppose. This morning I was reading and resonating with the emotions of this author, like any good piece of writing is supposed to do, and now I’m feeling grateful I had the privilege of the time and resources to get where I am. This fella wasn’t named, and this woman had a story, and it seems to hit a lot of people, including me, and hopefully people aren’t declasė and dox him. And if he capitalizes on the moment, well, I guess that's up for the viewers. While it’s maybe a fully unexplored piece, it is what it is, and it has value.

*** 

So, I wrote this, and I drank some more water, and I started to again feel overwhelmed. I started to contradict myself. Thoughts unrelated to everything I just wrote, or so I thought, started swirling, and I decided I simply needed to run it out. Sometimes it’s the only thing that helps my process, just in the same as writing. No wonder I depend on both with so much dependence. No matter the weather outside, no matter the storm, a night of writing and running was just what I needed. I needed to run, pulse, pace, breathe, think, write, sleep in said order. I couldn’t find my gloves but I decided my big puffy coat, running scarf, and rain hat would suffice. 

I started running. I picked up the pace, settled into my body, and picked up my thoughts where I left them off when I left my front door. I got to the end of this post, which is so already goddamn long, and being read by approximately absolutely no one, and felt so proud of myself for wishing the best for my ex in the end. For being that person, for having the privilege to be that person. Here I was trying to defend my ex and our relationship in many ways, and partially taking down this writer in the process. Criticizing her methods while simultaneously justifying the reason her piece mattered, and then, finally, I had a selfless thought: 

Becca.

My friend Becca, who I’ve been in regular communication with for fifteen months now, is incarcerated for killing her husband. She recently forwent her right to trial and opted for a plea deal, and I’ve been recording her story on her behalf for over a year. I see her story in everything I do, in a way, it’s become the only constant in my life for all of 2022. I decided to send her a letter after reading the Mansfield News Journal article about her arrest, my mom texted it to me and I read it on April 27, 2021 alone in a New York City hotel room. I found the editing classically irresponsible, as I usually did: the New Journal wrote a story on my father’s (a private citizen) suicide, put it on A3. As I read her story I felt the resonance of her traumatic dissociation. It was so obvious to me that Becca had been traumatically abused, likely her whole life. I read those articles and thought, who cares about Becca Harris? 

I watched Becca try defending herself without killing her husband again in the process. In the end, she sacrificed to prevent any further damage to her family, her children. She knew the cost of the media scrutiny, the cost of a public record and the impact that could have on her children. She couldn’t justify further defaming her husband despite what he’d done to her. She was silenced out of fear of further ruining her childrens’ lives and husband’s reputation in their eye’s as a good man.

Her story is only beginning now, but it’s been on my mind constantly for over a year, and only as I was running could I exert some of my energy and fully crystalize my real opinion: kicking up dust about a writer crying victimization can prohibit women from safely expressing themselves. Step by step I slowed down my thoughts. I came to realize my true problem with the argument that “women are not victims” was that ultimately, disproportionately, women are still very, very much victims. Even when they seem like villains. I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long, this much mental and psychical effort, to deduce the most obvious conclusion. 

I stopped at the light to cross over and run a little up the West Side river walk. I got the green light to cross canal street, picked up the pace, and got hit by a car. 

It’s taken me five days to post this since I started writing it. It is so fucking long. I’m sorry. I have no idea if anyone will ever read it, or if I will ever get something published about Becca and what her life has been like through the last two years. But I know I am going to try because I do believe, as lame and neoliberal and shrill and fuck, whatever okay? as it sounds, that I need to try. Women have to support each other universally. Do I really need to bring up Elon Musk right now? Lots of women are very much victims. Pieces are often published because they have universal themes. This woman may not be a victim, she also could be. All I know is that I read it and felt like I understood what she was saying to me on a lower frequency, and that’s what good writing does. And also, just for the record, emotional abuse is abuse.

We so often only see and focus on the tip of the iceberg, and it’s the reason I both love and hate media and am fascinated with media ethics. And the full size of icebergs, as we know, does matter. So does telling human stories and publishing them I guess is my other point, so that’s why I posted this, if literally anyone ever reads this and happens to wonder. And also a little bit because I got hit by a car. Life’s too short, apparently.

12.6

Today was one of those “revelation” days at my job. Don’t believe me if that’s your wish, totally up to you here, but it’s true that since I’ve taken my new role, I sometimes find myself bursting with so much inspiration, I practically vibrate with the possibilities. Sometimes, this requires me to leave work right at 5 o’clock so I can go home and write them all out before I combust. Today was a day where I felt like every one of my synapses was working hard to tell me something, but I had so much to do at my desk, I couldn’t quite find the time during working hours to address this overarching thought bubble. I could feel thoughts bubbling up from the pit of my gut and shooting up my spinal cord, but no time to take a deeper look. 

I wrote the other day about the anniversary of my father’s death, how anniversaries, birthdays, really any kind of milestone marked by a particular day or season, carry more weight after the loss of someone. We forget the birthdays of the living, but we’re less reliant on Facebook reminders once someone passes into the spirit realm. December 6th, today, is my mother’s birthday. It always was and always will be, but in 2009 it also became the anniversary of my father’s funeral. Dad died on the Monday after Thanksgiving, and mom’s birthday was that Saturday, December 6th, just as it always was. We usually used that day for acquiring a Christmas tree or decorating one, but that year we had to hold a funeral, followed by a fake burial for o’le Pops (he was cremated…we were in a lot of shock, okay!). 

The week between November 30th and December 6th is an emotional sandwich for my family, and has been ever since my father’s death. And the one comfort I’ve found, as I wrote the other day, is the marvel that is finding myself stronger and my father’s memory more precious in time. I no longer approach the days with the distinct dread of feeling further from my father, feeling like I’ll succumb to the overwhelming terror of those first days. Now it’s easy to even forget I’m supposed to be sad, especially if I have a lot going on and I’m having one of those days where I’m consumed by the potential of my work. 

So I came home and called my mom, telling her happy birthday live after a series of texts and voice notes sent earlier this morning. And then I wrote about what had stuck in my craw all day. I sorted through the emotions of the last 24 hours, eventually allowing myself enough time with my words to untangle my thoughts and get to the bottom of what I felt. After a couple of hours, I concluded with an epiphany that every writer searches for when they open a blank word document. I couldn’t believe I had succeeded in sorting through the yard ball weaving it’s way through my mind’s grey matter. I needed release, so I decided to go for a run despite it being 9:30 p.m. and pouring down rain. Running is my anecdote for writing; once I get stuck, or alternatively, too overly excited to do anything, it’s the fastest way for me to regain control of my energy. Release some kinetic, restore some potential. 

I am not one of those “my runs are so meditative and clarifying” types. I use runs to escape, and I use my thoughts as fuel; This is not a time for me to chant my intentions, think of nothing. I only sometimes have revelations on my runs, and they tend to be tactical. Running revelations usually come only once I’ve had ample time to focus solely on my body and tune out. Then I can tune in to fantasies, and distract my mind with all kinds of from-scratch simulations. I contemplate problems I’m facing and strategize approaches, or revisit scenarios with alternative outcomes. I settle into the rhythm of my breath and allow my body to quiet my mind until I can regain my sense of prioritization, and take advantage of the minimized anxiety to plan. I was reaching this point in my run, about ten minutes in, when I had another revelation. A revelation within a revelation: was this galaxy brain, or was it enlightenment? I don’t know how long I was pondering the question. One second I was hit by inspiration, and the next second, I was hit by a literal car. 

I’d wondered, as I had with every significant date in my life in some way, when the year would come that I no longer associated December 6th with my dad’s funeral; when would it return to mostly just being her birthday? When I got up off the pavement in the middle of Canal Street and realized I was okay, I couldn’t decide whether or not I should call my mom and tell her as it was her birthday, and what a damper. Aside from being sore and shaken, I couldn’t find any serious casualities across my makeup. But when I looked down at my hand, I realized the stone was missing from the pinky ring I always wore; a baby blue sapphire birthstone my grandfather gave my mom when she was a newborn. The stone was gone, it’s probably still in the middle of Canal Street crushed into the pavement, but the foundation of the ring, a little silver band, remained wrapped around my finger, pronouncing its absence. And I realized that sometimes the memory of pain on some days is essential: they confirm that yes, that really did just happen.

12.5

…lemon meringue pie

12.4

12.4

Humble pie

12.4

🌕🎄

12.3

one of these things is not like the others

12.2

I got a finstagram.

11.30

🥟🍚🫗

11.30

Today is the 14th anniversary of my father’s death. Last year at this time my life looked completely different, and I finally once again sigh breaths of relief knowing that the year is behind me, that I have worked hard to make progress, that I have. 

For a few years after my father died, the only sentiment told to me that actually did bring me a trace of comfort was that I would not feel as I felt in that moment forever; that everything was temporary, and in time I would feel whole again. I remember thinking of 15 years into the future, wondering how I could and would possibly feel once I was almost old enough to have lived longer without my father than with him. Now that I’m here, I am relieved again and ultimately validated.

Once you lose someone, it’s been collectively decided/by Joan Didion that time becomes stuccoed by increments of time: anniversaries, birthdays, and any significant milestones reached together and apart are suddenly emotional minefields. When you’re fresh in your grief, the threat of getting further away from the living pulse of your loved one is freezing, though all you want. 

11.26

Trimmings

11.23

A family tradition

11.22

11.21

🦃

11.21

Again. Not a real place.

11.21

Earlier in the day we tried to go to Golden Diner for breakfast but it was absolute chaos (Saturday morning). Our diner karma caught us later when we walked in off the street to a perfect table at the restaurant I’ve tried to get into for like a year, give or take. Living in Soho is not a real experience.

11.20

The best frozen margarita in the city is in the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. Everyone laughs at me when they hear this. They laugh until finally, eventually, their travels take them (or more likely, I take them) and they have to eat their delicious defeat.

11.20

11.19

In the water closet

11.19

Tonight I found out my best friend’s brother’s best friend is the toast de cuisine of New York Magazine (he recently opened and designed the menu for Greenpoint’s latest Fulgrances Laundromat). We pregammed dinner with a shared margarita at another culinary institution, West Village’s own Calienté Cab.

11.19

You know what it is

11.19

Lil Breakkie @ Landmark

11.18

A tale of two train stations

11.17

The other day I was chatting with my desk mate about office inconveniences. How ungodly the art in our NY building’s lobby was; how stressful it is when you forget your card in the morning, knowing of the improbability of just walking up to your floor and waiting for another comrade to let you in. The entire conversation lasted probably five minutes, and only days later did it occur to me how the walk to the elevators each morning could in fact be subliminal programming for the day ahead.

“What if the lobby felt…comfortable? No, exciting?! What if it felt glam & town-square-ly. like A place to come and STUNT. FASHION SHOW, FASHION SHOW, FASHION SHOW AT LUNCH/ ON THE WAY TO PRET.”

The convo crystallized my most recent revelation: the Decadent American Lobby® is dying. No- has died. After hundreds, likely thousands of articles and think pieces on the return to the American office, I am still searching for any word relating to the topic’s most aesthetically crucial component: lobbies. Next, my deprived/ depraved millenial brain went to work on a theory; The Decadent American Lobby was the original company landing page, and the emergence of the literal landing page killed it.

In 2022 there are no companies without landing pages. Every company, even B2B and literal spyware companies, having a reference point on the Internet for people and prospective partners to know they are real, and they are there. The loss of the glamerican lobby began when tech bros introduced open floor plans and hoodies at work, and it ended when the country couldn’t align on a response to the pandemic because of years of digital misinformation and hyper-targeted propaganda. (Are we honestly surprised by incels? That so many tech bros are fascist psychos? Hoodies. And a seating chart that leaves people to work at their screens with their backs turned out, exposed. Any woman will tell you the idea for this open floor plan situation was not hers)

Anyway. Before the landing page, the lobby. Without a landing page or URL to accompany their job posting in the daily paper or an “About Us” page for prospective investors, I imagine the lobby was similarly used to promote a corporations validity in a time where you likely had few resources to cross check a corporation’s reputation. Interviewing at a local insurance agency? How else to measure employee satisfaction if not by the ornate foyer greeting you before your hiring manager comes down, by the reminder that you are a part of this magical feat of gleaming teamwork? That leads me next to evidentiary support and implicated witness: if the landing page killed the lobby, I’m left to surmise developers, landlords and property groups helped cover it up.

The loss of the glamorous, gilded lobby deserves a place in your stupid think pieces about workplace productivity. We all know that what really makes an unproductive workplace is an executive suite that refuses to align on a developed and adaptable corporate strategy, but go off on how it’s the responsibility of the workers to make the most of their workday. As you continue to do so, please consider the original method employed by corporations when making their employees feel invaluable and important: the “Mama, I work HERE” lobby.

Editor’s note: coming to the Slate DC office has been the most wonderful experience I’ve had in an office since 2019. The entire reason I posted this is because it really just revs my engine for the day when I hear my heels CLICK CLACK on a marble floor first thing in the morning. Sorry.

11.17

Hey now I’m cold in DC

11.14

Living in Little Italy so far is like living in my Aunt Lil’s house. I am surrounded by a sea of trinkets at all times and it’s impossible to walk by an older Italian man without making eye contact with him. Aunt Lil was one of my great family matriarchs and I’ve spent the last year treasuring every Instagram comment she ever left me and contemplating how different the return of IRL Thanksgiving would feel if she was there to lead us. My Aunt Lil really lived for two things in life above all else: collecting family members (biological and otherwise), and decorating for Christmas.

Once I settled in, I was hit by a metaphorical moving truck carrying a load of nostalgia. Windows were filled with nougat candies and prepackaged pizelles and my new place was a block up from Christmas in New York. I never expected to move to Soho, but now that I have, I realize I actually had very little choice in the matter. This opportunity to live in a touristy snow globe was surely manifested by ancestors as answered prayers to my mother. My mom has officially called in the ghosts in an effort to quietly move me to reproduce. The t shirt that greeted me on the way to the subway confirmed this.

11.13

I have been sick and hopped up on meds and the only benefit of this condition is that all I want to eat is sugar. Luckily moving to a walking-only street in the middle of downtown is only good for one thing: cannolis

11.12

A man that Salvador (+this chair that just looks like a heart)

And some very cut non-gems

11.11

It’s cold and I’m at the Armory

11.9

It’s cold and I’m going to my friend’s gallery presentation at the Armory

11.9

I’ve been running between my old temporary apartment and my new temporary apartment in the freezing rain. There are three doors to get into just get into my building and you have to walk through the kitchen of an Italian kitchen and each of those doors is heavier than the next. My little keychain wasn’t holding up, constantly breaking and leaving little metallic cuts on my hands as I struggled to figure out how the doorknob likes it. Anyway, since Soho is not a real place it’s difficult to get your laundry done and that is why I just went across the street and bought a $20 sweatshirt instead. When I told the guy I just moved in across the street, he told me I should have told him because he would have given me a discount. To compensate he gave me: a key chain.

11.9

You know what it is.

11.8

I officially live one block away from Iconic Magazines and so it is.

11.8

The energy in the city ahead of election day this year feels similar to the vibe it has about Covid. If we just pretend like it’s not happening maybe it will all work out okay. Still gotta do the things, but just like, keep it down.

11.6

Side a ranch

11.5

Nothing can hurt me all* of my clothes are hanging up in a closet

*most of them are still in Ohio

11.3

Because it is fall

11.3

Everyone’s excited to be dressing again

11.2

Today I told my person of interest that I bought my senior year prom dress from Nasty Gal as soon as I was referred to the site by stumbleupon.com. He looked at me like I just spoke to him in Lebanese. Anyway this should explain my back to work clothes this week.

11.1

10.30

10.30

Had lunch on the lawn of a historical mansion and was handed scissors by a kind man who pointed me toward the calendulas. Not bad for a weekend missing out on Halloween festivities because old.

10.29

Snapping purple

10.29

Happy holy days

10.27

Do you think they invented phones so jobs would become good for our mental health? 

10.26

10.24

And it’s over!

10.24

Today I had my first day at my dream job.

10.24

It’s rainy in the city this week but just call me Lea Michele.

10.23

10.23

Smooches at Pioneerworks

10.22

I’m home bb

10.21

Think I just might not get my phone camera fixed

10.20

As I was leaving Mansfield I stopped off to get gas on Hamburger Hill (that’s Hanley Road off route 13, for the uninitiated), I literally almost set myself on fire. I left the gas pumping in my car, confident in my understanding about the automatic stopping features on modern gas pumps and/or cars. I went inside to get a pack of cigarettes because that’s what one does after witnessing the inhumanity of human kind.

I came back to the gas pump with a lighter and a pack of cigs in my hand and thought of lighting up. Instead I pulled out the gas pump and was greeted by an absolute ejaculation of gasoline. I jumped back and avoided the dose, but a few traces got on the bottom of my shoes. I was too afraid of lighting myself on fire in my mom’s Volvo to risk the cig in the end, but the incident did validate my long-held suspicion that, yes, this town is actually trying to kill me. 

10.20

Today I had the opportunity to live in moments I had prepared for in my head for the last 18 months. Not enough time, turns out. This morning I headed to court to watch my friend be sentenced for her crimes. She and I had both prepared for the day, long prepared for the day, working on our own and together.

During other trials I’ve witnessed in person, regardless of the gnarliness of the crime, there was always an element of feigned civility by the present municipal representatives (lawyers, judges, court stenographers, even). I once covered a Fraternity Hill stabbing in college for my student newspaper that’s court proceedings read more like a CSPAN transcript, and I’d use this experience as a reference point for bringing myself down to Earth when contemplating the day of my friend’s sentencing. “This is not a Netflix Original, Ellin” I would tell myself thinking of lawyers discussing gory acts of aggression in monotone.

I would occasionally, admittedly, indulge in Hollywood-esque fantasies about the day. But on October 20th, Mansfield’s third-floor courtroom felt less HBO mini series, more Jerry Springer. It would be a disservice to Judge Judy to compare her daytime segment to the operational court of law I saw in action today. I don’t have the words, ability or liberty to dwell now. I am stunned.

When it was over they released my friend's property to me in a garbage bag. I drove past signs for the reformatory and trucks adorned in cop-prop for absolutely no reason. I drove down 71 South from Mansfield to Columbus thinking about all the times I made that drive in high school, how I felt lighter and lighter as my Subaru took me away from the dark woods and to the bright lights. I thought about how thankful I was to be able to make it again now, escape again now. How my friend was never able to escape to begin with, why that’s the whole reason she never will.

10.20

I drove around the roads I used to drive around on when I was pissed. I did so because I was pissed. On my way I drove past this grain silo I once scaled with a high school boyfriend that belonged to the family of a high school acquaintance. We climbed the ladder and looked down at the open hutch in front of us and the ground below us and we were so young and without fear and had never had anyone die or had broken a bone. 

A few months ago and a few thousand scrolls down I wrote about one of my favorite movies, The Dressmaker. I wrote about how I loved the movie because it was a metaphor for returning to your hometown to fuck shit up, and that of course Kate Winslet makes a perfect exiled fashion plate. It was months before my friend would decide to plea out of her trial by jury, and I’d had some wine. I wrote about this movie symbolizing my wildest fantasies of returning to Mansfield; seeing my friend have her true day in court; gratuitously contemplating how good Kate must have felt pouring gasoline all over the town that tried to kill her. In the Dressmaker (!!~~AND SPOILERS HOY~~!!) Thor’s brother dies by attempting to playfully jest Kate Winslet’s character by jumping into the hutch from the top of a grain silo. This HIMBO literally leaps to his death for the bit and Kate’s character is left to decide what to do with the obvious implications looming, that maybe she killed him. Instead, she manages to blow the whole place up.

An hour before state route 42 lead me to the silo I was reminded about why everyone I knew, and even I myself, tried to warn me about the portrayals of Hollywood endings where a woman exacts revenge without consequence. Fantasies, improbabilities, injustices. Inevitable defeat. I had known that and accepted it, and in theory and the court of law, so had my friend. I knew that I would never have a real Dressmaker moment in Mansfield. But I wanted one. And I really, really wanted one for her. 

I drove past this silo I scaled with V and thanked god that he went on to be a medical doctor and beloved friend and not a hot dead guy. I also remembered that I fucking hated this town for a reason. 

10.20

Ohio fall unmatched

10.20

The skies from back where I grew up :)

10.19

Would you get a load of my Aunt Sarah’s tomatoes?! Honka honka

10.18

Neature! In Upper Arlington!

10.18

Smoochies

10.17

BREAKING NEWS: I am at the Chicago Airport

10.17

10.16

10.16

Today I found out my best friend moved into Donna Tartt’s building.

10.16

In like, 2018 I started doing this bit on my Instagram stories that’s gained somewhat of a cult following with my familiars. Dogs in Manhattan were suddenly adorned with little sweaters. This was like my third winter in New York. I’d almost certainly never noticed such a phenomenon before, and thus, when I saw three little puppers in synchronized holiday sweaters one morning in December, my spirit snapped. “IT’S COLD OUT HERE, BABY GIRLS!!!” I captioned the not-so-discreetly taken photo of them that I posted to my instagram stories. Then, eight hours later in cover of darkness, the miraculous happened. I saw ANOTHER, SEPARATE trio of baby girls, also wearing matching holiday sweaters. I couldn’t believe it. Fate had called to me, finally. And it was dogs in little sweaters. For the next couple of months I used that line on a photo of a Manhattan canine wearing cashmere like, every four days. My friends and coworkers liked it, mostly I believe they could hear me saying it to them in their heads. But the rest of you freaks, no idea. Just a bunch of good bb girls I guess.

My work icon brought this bb girl to brunch the other day. It was cold out.

10.14

Confetti on the corners in Chinatown

10.14

I’ve never seen such elite nail polish remover branding in all my days.

10.13

Swiped some terricloth BCBG Paris Made in America circa 1960 from Edith Machinist today. I took my brother there to buy him a birthday present, I left with more items than he did. But look at those buttons.

10.13

Lunch at D&H for my brother’s birthday. I ordered carrot cake because he used to love it, but then I remembered that he’s vegan. HBD 2 moi

10.12

Can a drink really be last-season if time is a flat circle? (we <3 Frank)

10.10

Tonight we decided to indulge as a delayed celebration of a newly-charted course. We went to King, a restaurant that I’ve wanted to try since it was new in 2019 but never had a romantic or momentous enough occasion to go to. Tonight that changed. Despite the refined surroundings illuminated with warm but not bright light, the evening did feel a little primal. King seemed to me to be more like Northern Italian cuisine. Okay I’m no Anthony Bourdain or Chris Crowley but just like, there was a shit ton of meat. Just honkin helpings of formerly hooved creatures. Delicious, buttery, delicate helpings, but still. Celebrating victory with gratuitous portions is such a predictably human thing to do. Despite claims that the nightlife has been a little drained of the life in NYC, I still felt a little back to nature.

10.9

Had to toast the weekend by floating through Chinatown. Louise found slippers like the ones she had as a kid in Morocco, we ate more soup dumplings, she tried Dunkin Donuts for the first time but couldn’t get behind my stance on strawberry frosted glaze sprinkles. I told her that it is literally impossible to make the next ferry after docking from Manhattan, and after we ritually sprinted off the boat anyway and further reinforced this transportation theory, had a margarita. I have said it many times, I will say it again. The best frozen margarita in the city is located in the corner bar of the Staten Island Ferry terminal.

10.8

Please mommy. I am so smol, and so chic.

10.7

Pulled out all the hits for the Frenchie: hot dogs in Central Park, a tourist trap Met experience where we saw a kimono exhibit, soup dumplings and Winnie’s, getting as close to the moon as possible by going to the Standard. Louise upset the bouncer because she only had a photo of her ID; was shocked by how militant NYC nightlife is about identification. Apparently Paris has significantly less of a bridge and tunnel situation.

10.6

A dear friend arrived from Paris today for a quick trip for her work (she does badass work). The first time we met, she told me that the only time she’d been to New York before she found it’s massive proportions overwhelming, oppressive. On a mission to wade her into the deep end, I took her to Cowgirl. Cowgirl is where I celebrated my thirteenth birthday; we’d come to visit my cosmopolitan cousins in the city over spring break, and my birthday was always over spring break. Cowgirl serves birthday cake in the shape of a baked potato, has been open forever and now has multiple locations, and was my very first “favorite” restaurant. It’s always a gift to be able to see the city again for the first time through the eyes of your friend. One of the big perks of living in New York is reliving it again and again.

10.5

Drinking while the cat’s home alone. Tsk tsk. Purrental guilt.

10.4

I’ve been ogling trucks on this street for almost a year now. Fortunate.

10.3

Got some good news today. Indeed, a happy start to Libra season.

10.2

Quick business class Amtrak trip back to the center of the universe. I’m pretty sure I was seated next to a musician who once toured with an ex boyfriend of mine; she was complaining about what was allegedly the worst gig of her life. They were supposed to feed them too, and they didn’t. She and I seemed to silently bond as I quietly smiled as she waxed on about getting out of Boston.

Every time I go to Boston I have the exact same series of thoughts. They are:

• I’m kind of drunk for 4 pm

• It’s dark

• It’s cold

• Everyone’s gone

• Everything is closed

Caught the 9 am train and arrived back in the center of it all. What a marvel it is to live in the most beautiful city in the world!

10.2

We didn’t come to make friends. We came to win. We came for Maria’s 30th birthday. It’s October Third. It should be noted that I had so much red wine, I didn’t have a single bite of the enormous mound of caccio peppe we made.

10.1

Some pink in Bean Town

9.31

Voting is essential in the protection of our free and fair way of life <3

9.30

In an unlikely episode I have shipped up to Boston. Every time I ship to Boston, it is unlikely. The last time was after my friend missed her train, and didn’t have $250 for another Amtrak ticket at the last minute. This time it was to surprise my college roommate for her 30th birthday. Turns out it was a surprise to both of us, because I showed up for the party on Friday instead of its actual day on Saturday. I guess this is the downside of living your life as a constant houseguest with attention deficit disorder. The upsides include additional time with your beloved ones and their respective canines.

9.29

Last night we stopped by happy hour and met the most talented leather knit designer I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. Possibly the only leather knit designer I will ever have the pleasure of meeting; apparently, she has a patent. According to her, the big fashion houses only want to learn your technique and steal your methods. She’s got no interest in permitting her talents to be mass produced, but she will gladly help you put on the pearl-encrusted leather wedding dress she fabricated earlier that day.

9.27

Today was my father’s birthday, what would have been his 59th. To celebrate my brothers and I had vegan Chinese, got ice cream, and went to the arcade. I didn’t dare ruin the moment by mentioning its poetry.

9.25

Journey back to the Empire State

9.24

I have commuted in the back of my step-father’s mammoth of a pickup truck across state lines to my cousin’s wedding in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We’re staying in the tallest building in town, the Bon Voy Marriott!

9.23

I sat down in Felicity’s chair today and asked her to give me some “chunky choppies.” Miraculously she knew exactly what I was saying to her. This is why everyone deserves to have their hair done by their mom’s best friend.

9.22

I like this table because it’s always seasonally on-trend.

9.20

Last night my cousin celebrated her official confirmation in the Jewish faith. To commemorate the occasion of Court’s dip in the forbidden spa, we ordered two-thirds of the Hunan House Columbus menu.

9.15

Okay goth

9.14

9.13

9.13

Ran my old route for the first time in thirteen years.

9.13

Mansfield, Ohio, where I’m from, is famous for our prison. Despite the fact that Johnny Appleseed himself (John Chapman for you non-existent historians out there) groved (?) his final apple orchards and died here, we are best known for the Ohio State Reformatory. It’s the backdrop for Shawshank Redemption, as well as Lil Wayne’s “Go DJ” music video, which was lesser recognized in critical circles. The Reformatory was a working prison until 1989, when a federal Cleveland judge ordered it closed as the result of a class action lawsuit citing overcrowding and inhumane conditions. When we were growing up, the only overcrowding at the Reformatory was during the Halloween season, where scores of folks from across Ohio would line up and wait up to four hours for a haunted tour of the Reformatory, tiding themselves over with fried twinkies bought in line and roadies brought from home. I was actually at the Ohio State Reformatory the first time I ever heard the song, “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas. I also believe the Reformatory is where I officially confirmed that I lived for adrenaline.

The Reformatory is like that for those of us from here. The sight of a first kiss, that time your friend pissed themselves— nowadays, people make memories at the Reformatory. This year the Reformatory’s theme is BLOOD PRISON, as advertised when driving northbound on 71 from Columbus on an aggressive billboard. Just off exit 169 and a quick drive up Mansfield’s Main Street to downtown, you’ll see another billboard alerting the residents of Richland County that the jail is HIRING HEROS. The actual blood prison, where just a few weeks ago 7 of those incarcerated in the jail overdosed at the same time. I was only really in town to visit an old friend, who is about to finish her time in jail and be transferred to the women’s facility in Marysville.

Directly behind the Reformatory is the new Richland County men’s prison, which began its construction shortly after the Reformatory was condemned and expanded from there. The operational prison is so close to the Reformatory that my friend jokes those serving time can watch the haunted house tours from their window. When I stopped there today, I was greeted by several vultures sitting atop one of the lookout towers. The feeling that I was engaging in the pornography of prison felt far from thirteen.

9.12

Thou shalt pay thy meter (which in this year of our Lord 2022, still only accepts coins). Matches my Telfar.

9.12

Spent some time in downtown Mansfield today (Brooks was here).

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a letter to the editor of the Columbus Dispatch hoping to spotlight the dangers of surveillance and the elimination of in-person visitations. They didn’t publish it, so I figured I’d post it here in honor of being in Mansfield to visit someone in person, via video.

When a friend of mine was incarcerated in Richland County Jail, learning that I would be unable to physically visit her was a surprise. When Covid-19 hit in March 2020, Richland County announced the cancelation of in-person visitations. By May 2020, they reopened for video-only visitations, allowing visitors to video call their loved ones from the lobby of the jail in 20-minute increments. Folks in jail are permitted one video visitation per week. Visitors sit in a converted visitation booth downstairs and vid-chat someone sitting 200 feet above them upstairs. By the time we were in regular contact, the Covid-19 vaccines were widely available and much of the world was returning to normal. Not jail visitations, though. 

The video-only visitation policy in Richland County is similar to the new protocol at Franklin County’s Jackson Pike facility. The facility, and Franklin County more broadly, deserves admitted credit for adopting community-centered reforms to jail operations and creating more livable environments for those incarcerated. But its recent removal of in-person visitations, while billed as a more convenient and modern solution, is part of a developing nationwide trend. 

While these two Ohio jail policies have their differences, both have eliminated in-person visitation, born from a combination of swiftly-implemented Covid-19 safety measures, CO staffing shortages, and our society’s general acclimation to video calls. In-person visitation, especially between parents and their children, is widely accepted as essential by both the psychological and law enforcement communities. Yet the trend continues. 

In downtown Mansfield there is a billboard advertising “Richland County Jail is HIRING HEROS.” My friend says it’s true that in Richland County Jail, the only thing COs seem to have in common is that they come and go, but that may be changing. The jail recently hired a fleet of new officers, and as the billboard states, COs are earning competitive pay and strong benefits. The Richland County Sheriff’s department received $2.5 million for Sheriff payroll in September 2020, almost half of the $4.3 million Richland County received in a third round of federal CARES funding. And this is to say nothing of the increased revenue the jail earns from outsourcing and charging for services like communication, meals, medical care, etc. 

The story is similar in Franklin County, with law enforcement still benefiting from state and federal relief funding and increased revenue streams from further outsourcing operations. In the case of Franklin County Pike, there’s also a 8-year long sales tax increase behind them too.  But because jails are run as private businesses, the removal of in-person visitations at the jail is a choice made by management, just like any other choice made at any other business. The trend of removing in-person visitations is not some unavoidable result; they’re decisions made by Sheriff departments who have had time to onboard new systems, further outsource internal operations, and charge costs where there were none. 

The primary motivation is revenue, but there are additional benefits for the sheriff departments: further dehumanization of those incarcerated for one, and the increased surveillance of private citizens for another. At least in Richland County, visits take place on a state-sanctioned device. Your phone isn’t allowed to be on you, the call is genuinely free, and you don’t have to worry about bad Internet quality. 

In the case of Jackson Pike facility, the increased number of free video calls available for incarcerated people seems like a net positive, like its shiny new lobby. That’s definitely true in a scenario where in-person and video visitation coexists, but anyone who has ever placed a video call knows it’s no replacement for face-to-face contact. Video calls, like all digital interactions, are empty calories; they can tide you over for a bit, but you eventually crash. This is especially true in a literal prison (well, jail) experiment: we’ve removed all human contact between those incarcerated and the people who love them, making everyone involved heavily dependent on video technology. That’s where the upsell comes in–  still lonely after your 2 weekly visits? Another video visitation is just $3/minute away. 

The “convenience” of video calling, as with any digital product, comes with unforeseen costs too. In the year 2022, free technologies are not tools designed for consumer benefit. If you think you are getting something for free, no you aren’t. In return for increased visitations per week and decreased time commuting to and from the jail, friends and family of those in Jackson Pike facility who use the GTL visitation mobile app will have to give it permission to access the microphone and camera apps on their personal devices. 

You don’t have to be a digital privacy expert to understand that giving the cops unfettered access to your cell phone is a bad idea, but that is exactly what Columbus residents are being put in a position to do. Law enforcement is well known to contract firms that collect and aggregate biometric information for surveillance purposes like Clearwater AI. People being policed by their phones is increasingly common as a result of pressure on tech companies to collaborate with law enforcement. But if you don’t have a smartphone or computer, you can just forget it all together: tech inequity in this instance prevents lower-income families from seeing loved ones completely. 

My friend says one highlight of prison is that once there, she can more frequently vidchat her kids. Her kids are excited too; her son suggested they call her in the mornings before school and have breakfast together just like they used to. Sounds like the bleakest marketing campaign of all time. 

I tell her not to let them have the app on their phones. I tell her about the threats that increased police surveillance can pose against vulnerable children, how it stands to continue generational trauma. But after two years without physical contact, I don’t know any mother who could stand telling her kids they can’t have virtual breakfast together. 

9.11

Marketing WORKS (I listened to the farm podcast). 📍Lexington OH

9.11

Leah Michelle:

9.10

If you saw Iris Aphel today in Crown Heights no you didn’t

9.9

Had the privileged to attend Charles Atlas’s new installation at Pioneer Works, The Mathematics of Consciousness, where two of the hardest working architects (@Chadharanch) I know celebrated their contributions to the project. Only one of them is pictured below, the other guy in that photo is just some dude.

9.8

Just some windows!

9.7

Green <3

9.7

Pink

9.8

Papaya and dogs.

9.5

VIRGO SEASON

9.4

Princess Mimi

9.1

This but the whole house

9.1

Back to business

8.31

8.30

Aupairing.

8.27

This what I mean when I say I’m trying to be more grounded:

8.28

Park goodbyes & comfort foods

8.27

Went to a dance party in a water tower. The power kept cutting out. It was great!

8.25

Okay, suddenly, there is a worse development occurring in the East Village. THIS. This Longaberger looking MFer! What? Why? The humanity, that is why. If this is not downtown New York’s answer to the Newark, Ohio institution, I do not know what is. Just another instance of New York testing concepts in the Midwest.

8.24

Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy. Like apparently the church that stood on E 7th & 2nd Ave. Also apparently, its face can stay tho. Sad day for the East Village.

8.23

As seen on a friend’s fridge

8.22

Back to business/ back to the bridge 👟

8.21

Important breaking news update

8.21

Big smiles, Baby Girls

8.20

Today we went to the Phillip Johnson Glass House. I have so very much to say about it, but it’s going to be quite long, and I think I’m going to need some days to work on it. So in the meantime, here’s this, some photos, and the announcement to everyone in the world that I paid $65 to learn about a closeted Nazi who was encouraged to begin the architecture department at the MoMA.

8.19

I have bought these rubbery, perfect sculpture vases for friends, but never myself. I think owning one myself is becoming a primary motivator for once again having my own apartment.

8.18

Baby girls.

8.17

I sprained my ankle running on the side of an upstate highway. After five days off my feet I surrendered to my primal desire to move my body and I…started citibiking around for an hour. Today I made it all the way up the West Side. Not sure I’d have seen this had I not been forced by literal gravity to slow down.

8.15

Home sick

8.14

We missed our train. We had both the * best * margarita and lobster roll.

8.14

Ciao for now brown cow

8.16

I really would not advise spraining your ankle before walking around a sculpture garden for an entire afternoon on a hot August day, but I was grateful for the impact nonetheless. Something about being pumped full of Advil made the experience of Art Omi feel even more like a fever dream.

My favorite from the day was David Shrigley’s Memorial. The piece is a commentary on the absurdity of monuments— he engraved a shopping list from his early days as a young artist onto a mega-tombstone in effort to emphasize the ludicrous notion of commemorating a small blip in our history. The piece’s massive size and display in this fancy upstate sculpture park is contrasted against this seemingly insignificant moment from his early days.

On its face the message of Memorial reminds us that narcissism is a uniquely human trait. That we erect these permanent structures to commemorate blips in Earth’s multibillion year lifespan. A few weeks ago when I visited my dad’s grave sight in Lexington, Ohio, I hugged his mountain-themed tombstone and felt comforted by its permanence. My dad always wanted to be cremated, so he was. But we buried his ashes here, under this massive mountain we could hug and pretend was him. Something we did for ourselves, that will only be really appreciated until we inevitably join him there. Then it’s just going to take up space. Anyway, I think my dad would hate his tombstone, but appreciate Memorial.

Only after a couple of days did I decide to approach the subject from the optimists point of view. I’ve decided I also believe Shrigley is giving us a reminder that actions that may seem insignificant can bring the greatest successes. This shopping list was in fact now displayed in this fancy upstate sculpture garden, after all. Life’s magic really does be happening in the grocery store (/bodega).

8.15

Art Omi oh my (sorry)

8.14

Window shopping

8.13

Hit a wall after dinner

8.13

I have finally participated in the Great Indie Shithead Pilgrimage: I have gone to the Hudson Valley.

We got up here by train Saturday morning, and by the mid afternoon we were hiking to a pond. I don’t think it was necessarily advised to swim in this pond, but it wasn’t necessarily warned against either. So in we went. Well, in a I went first; I was the only one with water shoes, and I volunteered to chart this course. I scratched my stomach on an unforeseen underwater branch and was absolutely sure that a snapping turtle was on it’s way to avenge their fallen cousin that I hooked on the Fourth of July. VENGENCE, THY NAME IS AMPHIBIAN. Once we got out past the “shore” (?!?), we floated in the glorious cold and I once again became one with the pond scum. There’s no relief like that of succumbing to the possibility that nature may not in fact kill you.

8.12

After we hit the MoMA yesterday, mon petite and I walked around Central Park. After our 4.3’d mile we decided to park it and pay up at the boat house in pursuit of overpaying for the price of feeling like Carrie Bradshaw when she and Big fall into the duck pond.

Let me tell you something about this duck pond. Back in the day, the SATC days of Barney’s and Big, all B.A.G (Before Al Gore… or, er, a public dialogue around climate change). We were seated on the patio, smack dab in the middle of Carrie’s fateful fall while dodging Big’s kiss. During our lunch there, we witnessed 3 separate snapping turtles, 2 box turtles, and a heard of catfish wading along the edges for a hopeful bite of table scraps. I watched in horror as tourists sitting on the covered patio caddy corner to us throw bread into the pond to frenzied fish. I watched a snapper take out a catfish while I tried to swallow the octopus carpaccio I was overpaying for. When the snapper popped back up to the surface he literally made eye contact with us like a dog. I know he was just asking for a bite, but as I made eye contact with that turtle, I thought “I’m so sorry I might have killed your cousin on the Fourth of July.”

Anyway, some timeless advice heeded from the SATC franchise. Please do not rendezvous with your recently-divorced ex and fall into the duck pond behind the boat house in Central Park. I am almost positive you will lose a finger.

8.12

I’ve been taking this exact same picture of Frantisek Kupka’s Mme Kupka among verticals at the MoMA every time I’ve gone for about, oh, maybe five years now. I have a version of this painting photographed on almost every iPhone variant since 2015 (remember the 6S and the 6S Plus? Good times).

Anyway. The Disney-Princess-conditioned Barbie Girl within me worships this piece. The first time I saw it I thought, “ah yes, an artist’s depiction of how every man should look at his wife.” Unlike so many of the notorious greats from this period, Kupka focuses solely on Mme’s face and her aura. She’s literally bursting, with not even her hair is on display. Her closed or downward-turned eyes even make her look like she’s sleeping, as if he painted her lovingly like a rainbow while she was drooling on her pillow. Where so many of his contemporaries flouted the overt sexuality of their muses, here’s this Kupka guy immortalizing her spirit.

Call me a hokey. Call me a hopeless romantic. Call me, Kupka’s ghost. I noticed you and your wife’s ethereal, haunting, romantic energy from across the bar and I really liked your vibe.

8.11

MoMA muses

8.11

Every fine art gallery in NYC right now feels as if it is catering to either fully grown Limited Too girls, or ethereum holders. I think you know which camp I fall into.

8.10

Some tourists.

8.9

Fake Manolos from Italy, the real deal soup dumplings from Deluxe Green Bo, and the company of the woman who brought them both into my life. My best friend is staying with me from Paris for a week and the excuse to be a tourist in my city could not have arrived at a better time.

8.8

Sky piercers & dust storms on ye ole run up East Village River Park

8.7

Okay. I am back.

8.6

Night blooms

8.6

Different angles

8.6

8.5

Sunny Mansfield ~~ // Went to the court house today. I found the barely-legible, floor-level Innocent Until Proven Guilty all too a little on the nose for my taste.

8.5

Big weekend for bumper stickers

8.4

I haven’t been in Mansfield in the summertime in almost ten years. I stopped by Ole Man Mountain during my trip in today and saw that he has moss growing on the north side. When my mom and I picked out this tomb stone, we did so because it was a tribute to where he felt most free. I never considered that as time passed and his began to look more like the moss-covered Civil-War era ones a few plots over, Dad’s would bloom into even more of a mountain. At least if he couldn’t get better with age, at least this could.

8.3

OH > NY > OH > NY > OH > NY

8.2

Pew pew

8.2

Discerning little birdie stopped by to judge me tonight

8.1

Saturday to Sunday, Sunday to Monday

8.1

8.1

If you live in downtown Manhattan long enough, in my experience, you’ll see the peripheral Instagram influencers in your life evolve into podcasters. As followers grew into revenue streams and sponsorships and visibility opportunities (like having one of your apartment units constantly photographed by a well-followed influencer), influencers maintained glossy lifestyles at the cost of constant work. I don’t dig at the work of influencer/ social media work whatsoever: it’s increasingly sophisticated production work. One of my nearest and dearests is an Influencer, her energy and capacity for work astound me. 

Working at a magazine you tend to kind of read everything, so it’s always bizarre when your social circles cross into your professional circles. For me, anyway. I was never really the natural networking type. Whenever I’d be putting together an email blast or a copy brief and come across an article that mentioned, or profiled, someone I knew, it was strange. Now that I’m not actively working at a magazine, it’s stranger. I recently saw a story where I knew the story subject socially, published in the magazine I used to work for. I had my own opinions about the subject and the basis for the article at all, imagining how it came together from both sides and how the editor/ writer might have felt while publishing it. I oscillated between whether I felt like an insider or an outsider.

7.30

Got absolutely massacred today at Rockaway by “NO SEE UMS” AKA- Ceratopogonidae, AKA these little demon bugs that land on you like mosquitos but just instead of dining and dashing, these guys just…stay chillin. Movin up and down your leg, your neck, your back.. Anyway, the early Saturday morning sunshine was still the right remedy for feeling deflated.

7.30

Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my java

7.29

Today at Tokyorama Tea Salon I decided to treat myself and get a chocolate croissant in addition to the iced coffee that I think has magic powers of production. The owner judged me with a “Ellin are you sure you don’t want origini” knowing full well he was probably trying to get rid of stuff. I took one anyway.

7.28

Today is my fifth day in my sublease, back in my old neighborhood of Alphabet City. I run up the East Side River Park in the mornings, the part that’s not totally destroyed, and think about how oblivious I was when the demolition first started. I used to run up the East River in the mornings thinking to myself I can’t believe in 2021, this will all just be GONE. I was so on the ecocide train when the news picked up in 2019; just another gentrifier who went to a private school, sharing IG stories about how Deblasio’s City of New York is killing trees. Not thinking of the people who were here during Hurricane Sandy, not thinking of the people who had flashbacks to flash floods during Hurricane Irene. In my headline-fueled, neoliberal bubble I forgot what my mother would always say: only rich people can afford to be purists.

When I left New York in June 2020 to shelter in place (remember that?) with my long-distance partner in Ohio, I was on the precipice of discovering just how far out of tune I’d fallen with myself. In retrospect it’s all so clear how misaligned I felt, but we do seem to collectively agree that at the time, nothing made sense. Mike Dewine and Andrew Cuomo were giving us hope in American politicians, Trump was preparing to go to Civil War, and my plans to disengage from my job a bit were upended by suddenly having to do much work to even think about quitting, not to mention how lucky I felt suddenly to have a job at all. Over the course of the next year I’d go on to realize how homesick I felt for the city and for my own possession of self, but at least I had a desk. That wasn’t an option for me in the apartment I shared with my two roommates on Avenue C: if I didn’t want to lose my edge in my job in New York, the most productive choice felt for me to leave it.

And so I left it, feeling like one of the millions of failures being made fun of on Twitter for “fleeing New York.” I left so I could work sitting up straight in a chair, with a monitor, and not botch my entire career while giving myself scoliosis. I left and I got virtual promotions and opportunities here in the city while feeling further and further away from it. When the episode of the Daily on East River Park aired, I was sitting in my room alone, making a necklace on my floor in Columbus, thinking about how I was missing out on the “Summer of Washington Square Park.” As I listened to the episode, I thought about how dumb I was when I actually lived here; how I didn’t deserve to live in Alphabet City, claiming ecocide in the backyard when the existence of my literal neighbors is increasingly threatened by global warming. When did I stop seeing the full breadth of human-centered issues? I resented who I was when I lived on Ave C: 2019 me didn’t deserve this freakin neighborhood!!

And somehow despite not deserving it, I’m back on Avenue C. Today I went to my old bodega, where I’d buy black coffee and Juul pods on my walk to work. My bodega guy M used to tell me every day that he loved seeing me but wished he saw me less, because that would mean I was not smoking. He held me accountable while making the sales, which made me feel at home and reminded me of the special brand of familial guilt I grew up with. It’s your choice, but just know I don’t really approve… I wasn’t sure if he was going to remember me, but after he finished ringing up the woman ahead, he smiled wide and held my hands for good 30 seconds, and then again before I left. He didn’t even say anything, just gave me a big squeeze, met my eyes, told me he was so happy to see me, and rang me up for the headphones I was buying in preparation for my run up East River Park. I don’t know if he realized I quit vaping, but I did know that his reaction to seeing me gave me the sick and weird validation I wanted, like I hadn’t abandoned my city and life. Like maybe some part of him knew I once thought about him while crying on my floor in Columbus, stringing together a Susan Alexandria bead box necklace, wondering if he was doing okay.

Anyway, today I felt worthy of being back in my neighborhood, and I hope it sticks. I also saw this tweet that made me laugh and want to throw up all over myself because it read me for absolute filth. It made me think of the recent episode of And Just Like That, where audiences finally meet Carrie’s beloved bodgea guy after a literal 30 years of never imagining Carrie Bradshaw in a bodega (I believe she called her bodega the Korean, at the time…). The show aimed to modernize SATC’s New York and Carrie (RIP Desus and Mero). While obviously that’s kind of impossible, I do find the scene (unfortunately) perfectly represents what it means to feel truly back to yourself. Being back in New York means you’re remembered; you were missed by the people you saw every day. That’s why everyone loves this stupid show. Even when it’s wrong, it’s kind of right.

7.26

Green lights, Big City

7.24

Home Sick (sic)

7.23

This weekend after moving into my AC-less sublease where I’ll reside for the next six weeks, I spent the weekend with my friends. My oldest friends, who have seen me through the worst of it all, and the casual acquaintances I share smiles with on the street. I listened to my brother disclose his heartbreaks and laughed with the strangers washing their cars, hacking the hydrants to spray across Fifth street. I spent seconds at stoplights talking with truck drivers as I balanced on my citibike and caught up with the clerks at the grocery store I knew would have a fan in stock at 8 pm on a Friday night. I took two of my best friends to meet my favorite LES shop owner and bought two necklaces simply out of love and devotion, almost out of celebration that Edith Machinist on Rivington made it through the pandemic.

Gloria Steinem wrote in On the Road that New York City is the best place on Earth to be lonely; if you’re feeling lonely here, all you need to do is simply walk down the street, and surround yourself with the buzzing of millions of others who are, regardless of class or creed or status, in that moment on the street, just like you. That our city, dependent on public transit, enables communication between people; you cannot ignore interacting with your fellow man on these streets.

I’ve been mentioning this a lot lately during this prolonged in-between phase of my life as people continue to ask me, “why New York?” New York, the home of unsustainable wealth and pace— why would anyone choose to do this to themselves? My answer is that when I am overwhelmed, usually I just need to remove one of my AirPods to remember that I am just one heartbeat of millions, a small part of such a big story. The amount of stars made on the ground may make it impossible to see those above us, but a quick trip looking up in Grand Central is all you need to remember you’re a point in a constellation. You get the sense of just how actively you are swimming in the stream of blood pumping from this heart of culture. The flow of people spills out onto the streets, and they leave to circulate the city with them as they head back into New Jersey or Ohio or London or Brazil or wherever is home.

Anyway, I guess it’s about the least novel idea in the world to claim that New York is a welcome home to the simultaneously weary and eager to explore, cite its regenerative powers. But this is my weird blog thing, and I’ll do what I want here. Perhaps I’m only recently able to grasp just how magical and elusive it is to make it in NY, now that I’ve given up everything that made me here. Maybe defending a city that doesn’t need or even want me is my metropolitan version of Roko’s Basilik; like if I believe in its power enough, maybe it will eventually share some again with me. Like it’s alive, and it’s listening to me.

7.22

Last night I watched the documentary All The Streets Are Silent, which is about the convergence of hip hop and skate culture in New York during the 80s and 90s. These were Rosario Dawson crust punk times; Larry Clark’s Kids. The film catalogues skate culture from the rise and fall of the Mars nightclub in Meatpacking, to Supreme’s indoctrination as a household name. It skirted details on the deaths of superstar skater Kids Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter (who passed of suicide, overdose/ cardiac arrest, respectively). It’s brief, but the film lightly treads into the dialogue around how these kids were suddenly famous, not really because of anything in particular. They had status, but they still didn’t have much money. And they weren’t sure what to do of themselves. Some of the kids became superstars, some of them burned up bright and hot under the pressures of fame, some of them simply became firefighters. At the center of the film’s ethos is the spirit of a group of kids ignited because of their simple devolution to chilling hard and making art. Many of those interviewed mention being able to immediately tell if someone was phony, had ulterior or financial motives. Those who survived either wholly skirted the material suck of fame, or dove into the stream head first. I’ve definitely felt the tug of these two great New York currents, pulling me between the two. But only icons make it all the way down either road.

Anyway, speaking of LES icons. I ran into her last night:

7.20

And I’m home.

Tokuyama Tea Salon is a very important thread in my own personal neighborhood fabric. I’d spent at least $5 here every morning before my walk to work on Varick Street, and at least $15 on hot, hungover summer Sundays when the only thought of breakfast I could stomach was of onigirazu. The last time I was here was on March 10th, 2020. I’d just come from buying five single rolls of toilet paper at the bodega, and I gave my barista the $20 in my wallet after ordering coffee. She started crying, then I started crying. She told me I was the only person who came in the last two days. She was so scared. We were all so scared.

Today I walked in at 9:15 am, just like I used to. I was greeted by the exact sentiment of the day.

7.19

When my mom moved to Columbus from our hometown of Lexington in 2016, we made relentless fun of her for finding a new home in Upper Arlington. A notoriously snooty faction of the Columbus community, UA is kind of emblematic of the American dream: huge homes with sprawling yards, electric and picket fences that keep Golden Retrievers from running into Jack Nicklaus’s home golf corse.

I was walking my mom’s genetically engineered Great Pyrenees, Moby, around her neighborhood the other day when I just casually sauntered on to the grave sight of the last of the Ohio Wyandots. His name was Bill Moose, and he’s buried in a fragment of a dog park nestled between an upper-middle class neighborhood and a state route that breaks his view of the Scioto River below. My mom moved here in 2016 but this was my first time coming across his resting place. Moby barked at the something-doodle dog confined in the yard behind it. The lawn around the grave is manicured, and there’s nothing else in the park except a sliver of bike trail connecting Lanes End street to the neighborhood off Riverside Drive. A 10-second Google surfaced an article from 1926 where Bill gave an interview to the Worthington News about his secret to his long life.

“I attribute my long life to living close to nature, and observing the custom of my tribe of sleeping outdoors during the summer, and one night each month throughout the winter with only one blanket. On my next birthday I will be 90 years old.”

I wondered about how many other UA residents were oblivious to the symbolism in their own backyards, just sitting there silently in perpetuity. I wondered as I often do about how wrong the White man was, what a failed experiment America proves to be again and again. How we were designed to sustain ourselves simply from what our Mother gave us, how we’re killing people in the Southern Hemisphere because of our nation’s dependence on central air. About how concerned I got when I realized my sublease in NY doesn’t have AC. About how I think I’m just going to try and just deal with the heat, the way I’m supposed to.

7.18

I’ve been meaning to redo my professional headshots since the spring of 2016, but instead of asking any of my friends or buying a selfie-light situation from Overlords.com, I went with the logical, obvious conclusion: running outside every night during Golden Hour in an effort to selfie my way to success. It hasn’t been going so hot, mostly because I

A) suck at this and

B) forgot that a professional headshot usually requires you brush your hair first

7.17

I’ve been home for several days now; home meaning my presently legal/ permanent mailing address (AKA my mom’s house in Columbus), not that that much means anything these days, anyway. If our nation’s postal system effectively obsolete, so is the idea of a permanent mailing address, no? A recent headline of a pregnant woman claiming she can drive in the carpool lane comes to mind. 

It is almost 1 a.m., and I’m sitting with a book on my mother’s back porch. For the last two months I’ve continuously promised my mom I would be available to dog sit for her for ten days. I’m already bailing on her (and Moby) 13 days early to get back to the city. I guess this non-linear pace of my life right now is largely why I’ve been hesitant to commit to even RSVP to all these weddings I’m invited to this fall. I have no excuse, so, so rude, but if I can’t even promise to watch my mom’s dog in my mom’s house where I technically live right now, how can I possibly in good faith be expected to RSVP as definite for an event come September? Two months away? I don’t even know what I’m doing tomorrow? I settled on incremental progress and RSVP’d to one wedding, in October.

The Internet girlies are saying they are “in their villain era.” Since we all have the same thoughts at the same time, I found this pretty resonating. If we’re collectively in our villain era, my personal adaptation of it reflects more of a rowdy, restless antihero: I’m more of a goddamn Holden Caulfield than a Dark Knight, perhaps. I admit to feeling a bit like I’m in my “on the ropes” era, which isn’t exactly new or unique. Each of us Youse kids has presented their own fun and unique spin on the late-stage adolescence archetype. Even our dog is anxious. Yesterday I watched him patrol the yard and announce to the greater Riverside Drive community that he was present and accounted for for a duration of almost nine consecutive minutes. He didn’t so much as take a breath, and when he finally stopped barking, having walked up from the pool deck to the grassy hill a few feet below me, he yaked all over the rose bushes. It was a reminder that pets are in fact, really just like their owners. 

Anyway, tonight I put my mom’s sixth child to bed in his usual post under her bathroom vanity, and put Kate Winslet’s stunning performance in the Dress Maker on the TV. The Dress Maker is easily in my top five favorite movies of all time, and like most of those, I watched it for the first time while rather tipsy on an airplane. It’s a fresh portrayal of the timeless troupe: a woman who returns to her hometown to simply burn the bitch down.I do not consider it a real vacation unless I am at some point, two sav blanc’s deep watching a critically acclaimed film with a female protagonist. This was the case when I first watched the Dress Maker, and while I can’t say the same for this evening’s viewing, I can say I enjoyed it all the same. 

The Dress Maker is about a woman who is framed in a light that is impossible, who makes her escape from the town and returns as a vindicated, fabulous woman who falls into rectifying the wrongs committed against her, and women in her hometown. Kate starts dressing all the towns ladies impeccably, unearths truths about the misogynist powers at be in their town, and remembers her long disassociated memory of the day she was framed for murder. One of the final shots is of Kate standing dressed to the nines at a train platform, as her hometown envelopes in smoke behind her. 

What I find most resonant in the Dress Maker is the protagonist’s inability to remember the day she witnessed a boy die. She can’t do it until the hunky HIMBO from her youth sees her, and helps her on her journey to remembering “the incident.” (Spoiler alert: the the boy killed himself while trying to attack her.) The first time I watched this movie I thought about how real that felt; how easy it is to just entirely block out significant events in your life, events you had no reason to forget.

I recently started researching PTSD and our brains natural defense mechanisms; trying to understand exactly why our brains simply do not retain memories from periods of significant duress. The long and the short of it is something like this: when our bodies go into fight or flight mode, our “reptilian brain” keeps its focus on heightening our senses, keeping us alive. The memories live in the inaccessible: they almost have to be triggered by an equal level of perceived threat to be found. The brain is like a flummoxed Dolley Madison type; she’s busy running the house, but when the fire alarm sounds she’s suddenly sprinting around, somehow remembering exactly where she put the essentials.

I’ve been listening to one of the soundtrack’s features, The Murderess Returns! lately on my saved Spotify songs. It’s been kind of a personal anthem of sorts, as I’ve begun seriously working on a project that involves my hometown. I’m planning to spend the last two weeks of September in Mansfield, and it will be my first time doing so since I’ve graduated high school in 2011. You could say I’ve been thinking about returning to the place that marks the hardest period of my life and burning it down: I’m going home to attend the trial of an acquaintance from junior high, who I’ve been talking to regularly since she was incarcerated last spring. I offered to get her all her clothes for her trial, to dress her and try to help her feel powerful. Maybe that’s a lot to pull off. Ultimately, I just want to help remind her that she is human: that she is woman.

Anyway. If you’ve not seen the Dress Maker yet, I recommend it. It’s a good source of divine inspiration for torching down your hometown, and it features a very glam old Hollywood Shiv Roy sighting.

7.16

For the first time in my nuclear family’s history we have a vegetable garden. I have nothing to do with it until it’s time to cut things up and put salt on them, but I appreciate my parents dedication to “ye ole homestead” energy

7.15

Today I woke up with a job to do. An important job, imperative. I could not forget to water the orchids.

7.14

Cakes and fakes. Touchdown in Columbus after being in New York for exactly 36 hours. Had to decompress by walking down the long, luxurious aisles of Ohio Thrift before celebrating my stepfathers birthday with an absolutely deranged cake.

7.13

I got home to my mom’s in Columbus tonight and uncovered the bones of all my buried quarantine hobbies.

7.12

And I’m back. But then again I’m leaving. But then I’m coming back again. I’m almost positive.

7.11

Today was the last day of the impromptu Texas tour. We stopped in a Mexican bakery and bought creamy coffee cakes and cream filled puff pastries. Breakfast for a week for $10. There was great conversation earlier that morning. I got some encouraging news. Things were sweet on 7/11.

7.10

Again, we saw fish. This time, the type you buy and actively try and keep alive. My host in Texas brought me to their family home, where I learned they recently experienced a traumatic event with the water in their freshwater fish tank. Some of the fish in the tank had been with the family for years, and they went bottom up due to a mix-up in purifying salts. We went out later that day to pick up some new additions, but it turns out that mixing fish in a barrel is trickier than you’d think. There are “community” fish, that love company and mind their business, maybe even flap a friendly little fish hello. Then there were the aggressive guppers, those who prefer to be in a pack of their own and can potentially attack others if they feel threatened. Then there are the bad boys of the freshwater gang: the predatory fish. These puppies do not play with others and were out on sight. After thirty minutes and about 30,000 questions to the clerk we walked back to the car in the 103 degree heat with two little community/ semi-aggressive fishies in baggies.

In one of the salt water tanks I saw a large sea turtle, with a cute little stem for a nose. I thought about how much safer he was from hooks than the snapper I sobbed over a few weeks ago. Then I realized if I were a turtle and given the choice, I think I’d prefer to be out risking my lips instead of contained in a saltwater tank in Houston.

7.9

It was one hundred degrees before noon today in Houston, and we were going to walk around a parking lot downtown. It was the annual “Cars and Coffee” event put on by a friend of a friend, and while we got eye loads of cars, I couldn’t find the source of the alleged coffee. After a walkabout the lot, we spent a few hours having lunch and exploring Post, Houston’s recently opened public market spawned from the bones of a former US Post Office distribution center. It was some of the most exciting architecture I’ve seen in a long time; my architect companion explained the inflatable roofs to me as we climbed up an iron staircase to touch them. We cooled off in our friends pool afterwards, and a group of kids thought I was Charlie D’Amelio. They asked me if I was still friends with Addison Rae. Was it wrong to tell them the truth, that I was not Charlie? Carlie? Carrie? What if they were on vacation, staying in an Air BnB, just wanting to tell their friends back home how they saw the world’s very first Tik Tok star at this luxury apartment building across from the hotel where JFK spent his last night alive.

7.8

Hello, Houston.

7.8

After five days in the greater Columbus area, 13 hours in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and 16 hours in NYC, today I landed in Houston for a memorial service and extended weekend. Tickets booked two days before the flight, living in and out of a suitcase and a ridiculously large orange Telfar that screams “hello I am the worst.” It is true that lately I’ve been acting out of my usual character, no planning and no formal obligations; just acting on opportunities. I’m not sure I’d like to go back to my usual character.

7.7

For the first and last lunch back in the city, I walked to the nameless dumpling spot up the street from my apartment that I walk by every day. With no time and a desire to do something, anything, I decided now was the time to find out what it’s name was. Had the outdoor space all to myself as I sat down and a waiter brought me tea. When he placed the menu down, I resigned myself to being an official tourist in what I dared to call my city. I was at Golden Unicorn, where I not only got very drunk at a New York Magazine holiday party, but I’ve been about a million times. Apparently, this little space with outdoor seating was a second-kitchen turned pandemic solution that stuck. I felt like a fool, sitting there, a fully grown 29-year old woman eating a crumbling “Swan” dumpling in the middle of the day. Then my friend walked by and sat down with me. I no longer felt like a fool; I felt like I’d won the lottery, hit the cheat codes on life. There I was in the middle of a Wednesday, eating dumplings in the sunshine off Bowery with a very cool cat. I suddenly felt like I was in my city after all.

Then, a group of tourists wearing sailor caps with multicolored bills came and sat down two tables to our left.

7.6

When I would visit my grandparents in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, my mom would pack instant coffee (before that was a commodified good here in the states) because she knew there wasn’t a Starbucks within an hour of their home, and my grandparents didn’t drink coffee. This morning on our way out of Dodge we hit Burger King for breakfast, which I didn’t even know was a thing, because it was the only fast food spot in the downtown center of Pennsylvania’s Capitol. We were right across from the fairgrounds, which featured the most incredible little cow head gargoyles. Chic.

7.3

Welcome one, welcome all to the Interactive Zoo. That’s what my friend called the fishing lodge resort thing we came to with my parents. The cabins are air conditioned, and the ponds are man made and stocked with farm raised fish. If you catch one of the trout in a “catch and keep” only pond, a young person on a golf cart will come pick it up for you, take it back to the fish house, and properly (and expertly) filet and smoke it for you. It was just us, my parents, and two pairs of their friends. I was expecting to just sit on a blanket in a hat and read, or write. But instead I ended up casting all day, waking up at 6 am with the whole crew to get to the ponds while the fish are still up and at it in the cool depths of the man-made dark. We got a tip that for bass, we should use anything that looks like a black pellet because that’s what they’re fed at the fishery. The whole thing like cheating the great outdoors, giving actual definition to “shooting fish in a barrel.” But the end result of being forced to sit outside and wait for something to happen was quasi-medicinal.

7.3

sunset / sunrise

7.2

We’ve GONE FISHIN. And we got some new digs at a fishing lodge in Bellefontaine, OH. My mom stole an ashtray she said she hadn’t been used since 1965. This is the woman who taught me ethics.

7.1

On the road againn

6.27

Today I had a long stretch of much required alone time. I did what I always want to do when I’m alone: eat a decadent cake. This one was from Prince Tea House.

6.26

Apparently, there is no minimum for members at the beach club my cousins belong to, which I’ve thought was customary for country clubs and the like. I quickly observed that it’s not necessary, because to be a member is to be at the club every single day, in one form or another, from June to September. Sunday was our third day in a row at the beach club. I’m almost positive I end the only person there with tattoos, including among the staff.

Featuring Paige’s selfies.

6.25

A few weeks ago at a party, I was telling the story about my mysterious troubles with my computer resulting with me acquiring an iPad. My friend joked that we’ve all at one point or another been “iPad baby,” and another added that iPad Baby would be a really funny Halloween costume for an adult person; one would dress up like a baby, and carry around a massive cardboard ipad for scale. This weekend in Rye visiting my cousins, I got up close and personal with some IRL ipad babies. Their mama told me their school teacher once told her that the exposure to iPads when they’re young is opening up brain channels they (babies) previously did open, and these kids really are getting smarter.

6.24

She had style, she had flair, they were down an au pair; they called Cousin Ellin.

6.23

One of the most superior things about living on the East River is that every morning there is bound to be dancing. One minute you’re crying on the street over missing your train and the latest news that your fundamental right to have an abortion has been stripped of its federal precedence, and the next, you’re wiping your tears in the cab watching strangers dance on against the river park.

6.22

“Manifesting” gets a lot of hype these days. Provocateurs are bobbing around the Twitterverse claiming the term is beginning to moonlight as a cover for laziness. I am ordering sushi I shouldn’t have ordered, watching Emily in Paris, doing none of the things I’m supposed to do. No wonder everyone is manifesting right now. It sounds more akin to self preservation to me.

6.21

Father’s Day no longer makes me morbidly depressed. I have wondered in the past when I would stop crying on Father’s Day, and I finally have my answer: thirteen years. Nowadays, social media is flooded with scanned-in doodles declaring “Thinking Of You” posts in honor of folks who have no father, or have no relationship with their father, or have complicated relationships with their father, etc. I wrote my college essay on how strange it was to login to Facebook during my grieving period and see the shareable moments happening in the world around me, but excluding me.

Father’s Day no longer seems to have the hold over me, or society, that it once did. Anyway these are some cakes I saw today at Dunkin Donuts.

6.20

Belatedly celebrated Juneteenth today, and the occasion also marked my first ever time in Prospect Park. Shocking, I know. I’m “such a New York girl.” It was just five of us, and we stayed for hours.

6.19

Snuck in a few moments at moms.

6.19

We got to Columbus right in time for Pride weekend, the first in three years. Columbus Pride is freakin’ banging. 270, the interstate that surrounds the city like a moat, is often referred to as the Rainbow Belt. Columbus has long been a city with a reputation as a safe haven for the different, the new, the hiding. It’s a big university town where property used to be cheap, and arts abounded. People have all types of tastes here, which is why for most of the last century it’s been the number one consumer test market in the country. That could explain the survival of Zoup! The chain soup establishment. This seems to be a good time to disclose that Zoup!, as a concept, has long fascinated me and if you have ever eaten there, please talk to me about your experience immediately.

6.18

When I quit my job, I told myself I was doing so in part to be available to travel and spend time with friends. Visit people I’ve always told myself I would visit; check in on how people are doing, and in doing so check in on myself. This vow was tested the morning of Friday, June 17th when my friend Kevin texted me at 8 a.m. Not only had he texted me, he had enlisted our friend Meg to text me as well, requesting I text him immediately. He and several other friends of ours were on their way to Columbus for a wedding, and all flights to the Midwest were canceled through Sunday. Should we drive? We should drive. I’ve been wanting to go home for a quick change anyway.

As we reached Allentown, Pennsylvania we got a text from our friends. They’d just touched down from London Town in Philly, and they turned their phones on to news that their connection to Columbus was cancelled. We were exactly an hour north, so we decided to go pick them up.

I wasn’t planning to go home that weekend, nor was I invited to the wedding. But the serendipitous opportunity to spend 7 hours in a car with my chosen family folk definitely felt like a fruit of labor. When we finally ventured for food in Columbus at 2 a.m., we wound up at White Castle. We learned that it’s definitely not as good when you’re sober.

6.17

My parents would always say that everything significant in our family happened under a full moon. My parents first date, their engagement in a park in Cincinnati, all three of their children’s births. And then eventually, my dad’s death too. My astronomy professor in college, who went on a 20 minute rant against astrology on the first day of class, even believed in the power of the moon. He said that statistics alone showed that more crime, freak accidents, and deaths occur during full moons. He likened it to the gravitational pull the moon has on water, like the tides. We’re 73% water? Maybe 76% on a really good week?

A close friend of mine is Sikh, and he recently told me about the full moon’s significance in their religion. Sikhs abide by a lunar calendar. According to him and well surprisingly well fact-checked for me by fabhotels.com, Sikhism’s founding patriarch Guru Nanak’s birthday is celebrated on April’s first full moon, and is one of the highest of Sikh holy days. I studied religion in college, but there’s nothing quite like learning from someone about their cultural signifiers. Doing so is a kind reminder how we’re all more similar than alike, pulling from the same inspirations.

6.16

This morning I woke up and instinctively begun to scramble towards Hawa for smoothies/ green juice/ assorted healths. I truly believe this juice establishment is actually a spa. The tile looks like it should surround a pool, it’s cash only, and I leave feeling revived. I got the orange bliss, which was not orange, but still felt true to its name.

6.11

Several weeks ago, I went to a slew of park parties in a row with one of my oldest friends in the city. During one of them, I made him literally wince; my behavior embarrassed him by proxy, and I didn’t even think I was doing something controversial. It was gasoline for the self conscious flame that’s been dwindling inside me for a while since I’ve returned to New York. Floating a bit in my life, I felt like this city, despite housing the majority of my friends and now nuclear family, was not still mine. I feel often like the 23 year old I was when I first moved here, like I didn’t just spend the last six years working as a junior executive and excelling in New York media. Maybe that has something to do with my last relationship. Maybe it has to do with my ability to slow down and take things in as they are. Either way, it’s a strange feeling to be new in your own city. And what’s stranger is that this is not even the first time I’ve done it; I did it two years ago when I pandemic-moved home to be with my bf in Columbus, Ohio. I’d gotten cocky, thought the city would just be here where I left it. In so many ways it was.

Back at the park hang, my friend told me I was just a little cringe sometimes. Cringe, grade-A millenial cringe. Not even cheungy. Cringe, as in what Taylor Swift told the graduating class of NYU to “live alongside” through their lives. I’ve tried to avoid cringe, much like I’ve tried to avoid Taylor, as much as possible in my life. Once when I was a young girl, I was more roasted at a family barbecue than the chicken. Since that day, I’ve avoided cringey behavior my entire life. As I grew into myself with age, and my confidence grew alongside, I felt less embarrassed about things because I felt more sure of myself at all times.

I thought I had retained some of that self possession, but several rejections and a few ego checks later have challenged my view. Free as a bird, new territory for me, I was unsure of myself. And apparently, cringe.

As evidence of recent cringe behavior demonstrated, my park partner cited a prior park outing, where I casually referred to Dimes Square without an ironic enough connotation. I was able to hold it together, but my anxiety continued to spiral. My self-analysis was penultimate; how did I become this NYC LARPer? All because I was an early recognized adopter of the Nolitification of Dimes Square?

A few weeks later, at a party indoors, my friend displayed his own insecurities for me. I realized that I’d maybe been a little too quick to judge, and I’d been dismissive. I almost didn’t invite him that night, out of a reluctance to demonstrate further “cringe” behavior/ take another hit on my self esteem. When the tables turned I remembered how our own insecurities are always the root of our reactions, and our actions. In New York, everyone is mostly just afraid of themselves.

6.10.22

My step sister is eight years younger than me, and her birthday is the day before mine. We joke that we are the most alike of our Brady Bunch of siblings despite having no relation. She texted me yesterday to say that she bought a ticket that afternoon to come to New York the next day, and would I have time to see her for a little bit. Further evidence that this is my child.

I always wanted a little sister. I knew I had one when she wore the Tiffany’s necklace my dad gave me when I was thirteen for six months.

Anyway we got strawberry gelato, and talked about what she was going to wear that night. She went off to a club, and I went to bed at 11. This is the difference between 21 and 29.

6.9.22

Yesterday I bought a new outfit for a party I went to for two hours before it was shut down. I bought it under the advisorship of no one; had no one give me an eye over and just decided “yes, brown checker board neoprene pantsuit is the perfect thing to wear to an art gala.” It wasn’t until a kind girl in the bathroom told me I “looked amazing” that I felt the sweet, sweet validation on my investment. I thanked her sincerely. Sometimes you just need a bathroom compliment. I think bathroom compliments might just actually fuel the City of New York.

I’m going to wear it again on Saturday; I figure if this venue can pull the plug on A-Trak mid set, I can at least get a little price per wear. And it did finally prompt me to get a manicure.

6.7.22

I’ve been told that the emergence of this soon-to-debut tapas bar represents the true sunset on the neighborhood. Before the curtains you could see bauble chandeliers like this one hanging from the ceiling inside, and now apparently the baubles are multiplying, spilling out onto the street. It’s unclear to me whether or not this is surely a promotional chandelier, but there is one thing I know for sure when it comes unsupervised furniture in NYC: it is up for grabs.

6.5.22

Today I sat on a small strip in the Rockaway Bay and journaled and ate sandwiches. Being reminded that New York is a beach town never disappoints.