It’s normal to be scared of doing new things. Human history is littered with evidence of the danger of trying. Think of how many suffered while unlocking how to eat an artichoke. I choose that example because many more important breakthroughs involve body horror beyond comprehension. We try and try and try and have tried, long before any kind of safety regulations were put in place. That’s how we discover.

In my time writing this Substack, I obviously have tried many new things That was the point. None of them were that alarming, because I’m not a naturally brave person. While we’ve established that fear is necessary because danger is real, it’s hard not to put judgment on being afraid. Will I never be brave? Am I not able to overcome my lizard brain and rise, lofty and powerful, above its pathetic terror? Will I ever truly live? Big questions that I frequently put upon small things. Smaller even than the artichoke.

It has taken me a long time to do 39 new things. This is my official 39th entry, coming years after I began this project. I believe I reached 39 things pretty quickly, but thinking about and writing about them was far more demanding. And many of the new things were either too small or simply paid for with money, which sort of underlined how much is available to us only via cashflow. That stymied me a bit. Yet here we are!

I am not a scientist. Nothing about this experiment proves anything. I can’t say it has made me a better person, though I hope I am. Maybe I’m worse. You can decide after reading this last new thing I did: riding a jet ski. It was the first New Things that really, really scared me.

Riding a jet ski was something I agreed to do, with many caveats. I did not want to do it at all. Shooting through space at a high speed on a vehicle that can easily turn over, blast air up your asshole to explode your intestines or shatter your spine, is not something I was excited about. I am trying to be conscientious about how to frame this story, because it involves a long time friend, someone I would have considered amongst my closest friends, who utterly betrayed me with this jet ski. The jet ski was part of a film shoot. He wanted to film something on the jet ski which would star me, which is a flattering ask. I love to act. I love to be asked to act. I love to be trusted with other people’s work. I hate the jet ski.

Our communication around planning this shoot was an absolute disaster. I don’t know what his perception of it was, but I do truly believe I made two things clear: One, I will absolutely not go fast or far on the jet ski. Two, he was completely welcome to film the short with someone else. Either someone brave or someone not afraid of jet skis. I thought the first condition was agreed upon and the second dismissed. He wanted to do it together. Okay.

The end result was a fight in the middle of the ocean, during which I cried. Hysterically. Genuinely. My body could not do what he wanted to do, which was travel for thirty minutes to a distant pier with the engine wide open. By 15mph, I was shaking in terror and the jet ski can go much, much faster than that. It would have to, if we were to get to the pier he’d planned on. Again, a plan I completely misunderstood or did not have clearly explained to me, depending on your perspective. His or mine.

Listen. I have tried so hard over the years to have the approach adolescent boys do to their bodily integrity. Try anything! Fly in the air! Ride an office chair down a highway with a pot on your head and roller skates on your hands! What’s the worst that can happen!

No. We are all born under different stars. Maybe it’s the gendered socialization that teaches young girls that their physical form is under constant attack. Maybe I’m particularly clumsy and a dweeb. But anytime I risk, I pay. I fall on my tailbone on the ice, I catch my finger in the door, I twist my knee running across the grass. As a result, I’m always considering how I move through space, how each step runs up my leg to my pelvis and back, how my arms swing and balance me, how my head turns on its swivel. Carelessness has a price. I am pretty sure that a long ride on the jet ski at 60mph would have cost a lot.

It’s also just a personal policy I have — and I know this will be controversial — that I never ever want to do something dangerous that a man has suggested.

Maybe one day I’ll write a play about the fight we had on that jet ski, floating together in matching wet suits and goggles as a police officer yelled at us through a bullhorn to get away from the shore. I’ll withhold most of the details now even though I don’t think he will read this. Every relationship has points of strain, the joints that are worked too hard over the years, perhaps never fully recovered. And then one day—POP! It goes. And it never moves the same again.

My friend and I have often had conflicts over what we expect of one another. Expectations are the great challenge of connection, those spoken and unspoken, and I wanted to be brave enough to live up to his expectations. I also didn’t want to die or become maimed because his expectations were unreasonable and fundamentally stupid. My fear was well-founded, even if nothing too bad would have happened. He had never been on a jet ski either. The pop came for me when he ignored my pleading and went faster. That’s when things really collapsed, emotionally.

Admittedly, my friend had fear too. His fear as a director was that the close-by pier where were bobbing would not allow him to fly a film drone. I insisted that we try or stop what we were doing and go home. This was actually a compromise from when I was crying and shaking. So, we tried.

Though the police were yelling at us to back up at regular intervals for the rest of the shoot, they never noticed the drone or did not care. We filmed and I learned to guide the jet ski in slow (very slow) figure eights at a cop-approved distance from the nearby pier. And my friend faced his other great fear: the ocean. I didn’t know this, but he’d written the script specifically to confront the ocean, even adding a moment where he slides off the back of the jet ski and into the depths. We just weren’t on the same page about this film shoot being exposure therapy.

For the record, I like the ocean. I have a healthy respect for it, but it brings me pleasure to look at it. It brings my friend sick dread. Which is what I feel on a jet ski. Even after I got used to it at a slow speed, it was very loud and threw hard splats of water into my eyes and mouth. This is not how I choose to commune with mother ocean. I am not shredding lines though her belly. I’m playing gently along her edge, like an infant, or making rare forays across her delicate surface in a silent kayak.

The filming finally ended and we made our slow, steady way back past the long jetty and twisting marina. My nervous system was still jangling as I directed the jet ski back onto its trailer. I remained a mess as we arrived at a restaurant for margaritas. I drank two of them and my friend paid.

If there is something I’ve learned about doing new things, it’s that they churn up new knowledge about yourself and other people. I can never go back and not know about that crack in our relationship or that I will cry to get out of jet skiing. Maybe I wouldn’t cry the second time. I’m choosing to not find out.

I wanted my last entry in 39 things to be inspiring and about the power of trying, because it is so so powerful and worthy of our time and energy. It’s the stuff. Do it. Alongside the new things, I will now urge people to embrace the importance of doing the same things. I would have finished these posts much sooner if I’d consistently written every day, for example. I might have gotten braver through repetition and been ready for the jet ski when it arrived. Not sure what I’d have to do to prepare for that mentally, but there must be a way.

On that note, I’ll share that today I went surfing. My very first new thing was about surfing, and here I am, two years later, still fucking awful at it. And I plan to do it again. It is an old thing that still feels new. That may be the most beautiful Thing that there is.

• This is my last official entry. Thank you to people who read this blog as I did it, especially because I was so godawful about updating.

• My style of writing and thinking isn’t very short-content friendly, it’s kind of millennial-dated personal essay stuff. Since it’s my own blog, I’ve indulged in that.

• I do intend to keep doing new things and writing more about them here, until the internet crumbles. I make no money from this and I don’t plan to try to. If you have enjoyed these posts at all, please share, recommend, comment, or like, so they’re circulated. That means a lot to me and is encouraging.

• I hope everyone is doing good and doing new things and growing every day. Talk soon ❤️

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Right around my birthday this year, I skipped a period for the first time. I turned to my mother for reassurance, expecting some perspective on what would surely be a long, slow, piecemeal goodbye to my fertile years.

“Yeah, your grandma just stopped getting her period one day when she turned 40, maybe that’s it,” she told me.

Most people who have crossed some thresh hold, like menopause or divorce or losing your virginity, tend to look at the people panicking behind them at the line with a little mockery or carelessness. Obviously, life continues after passing these signposts, so why are you making such a fuss? They so immediately forget their own angst as they made the transition. I find it annoying even when I do it. And I also hope that’s what death is like: once it happens I won’t understand everyone still agonizing over the inevitability.

But right now, I’m fighting the idea of running out of periods. For as much as I’ve hated having them my whole life, I was absolutely insane during this no period month. That might have been the dysfunctional hormones as well, of course, but it did seem psychologically hard. I know there are some people who will not be able to relate to this because their menstrual cycle is a bit insouciant and unpredictable, but mine has always come very regularly and more frequently than even God intended when he cursed Eve.

In the year preceding this vacation month, it had arrived a couple days early and a couple days later a handful of times, which was a warning that *things* were changing. But as I reached the end of the outside range this round, I started to panic. Every trip to the bathroom was like waiting for the jury to read my verdict. Woman? Or Crone? And each time, the toilet paper announced in a booming voice, “We find the defendant DRY. DRY DRY DRY.”

By day 33, I was texting every woman I knew over the age of 35. Had they? What happened? Will I? The questions aren’t exactly clear because you don’t really know what to ask. I think this point has been made by many health practitioners and has become a pretty popular talking point on TikTok (on my middle-aged algorithm anyway), but you really spend far more time in life after your period than before and yet we scarcely hear boo about it. Aside from the tidbit about my grandmother’s magically disappearing menses, the only thing my mother ever told me about life after your period was this:

“Everything seems really gray. Like there’s no color.”

As you can imagine, this has not been a very exciting thing to look forward to, though I did. A lot. Until now.

As the weeks turned in a month and then six weeks, I actually felt anything but empty. I was swollen, moody, irritable. I had PMS that never went from pre- to post. I sort of pictured my uterus as one of those pieces of fruit that looks ripe and ready on the outside, but when you cut it open the pits have stuck to the rind inside and there’s no meat to chew. No juice. It was left too long on the vine.

That’s really the crux of it. My seeds have never been fertilized. This isn’t really a post about having kids, so I won’t dwell on it too long. But you can’t not talk about it when you’re talking about The End of Periods. I have never had a child nor been pregnant. I don’t even know if I could be, because I’ve only tried not to be. I haven’t longed to be a mom nor did I feel like I would never accept that responsibility. It just didn’t happen by accident and I never was with someone to plan it with. To do it now, Indiana Jones grabbing his hat under the door-style, would require a series of decisions and expenses I don’t think I have the capacity for.

And yet. I do sometimes see them. A child or more than one, almost in my peripheral vision. People waiting to step into my direct line of sight, where I would have to see them every day, forever. Or maybe they’ve just passed into the rearview and will soon fall so far behind me I won’t think of them anymore, not even when I’m very old and it would be very nice to have a strong young person checking on me semi-regularly out of filial respect and/or guilt.

Either way, you’ll have to take my word for it that I wasn’t really agonizing over children as much as some would think. I was much more scared about what this would mean for things like my hair falling out, the texture and elasticity of my skin, my teeth, my eyesight, my mind. A lot of scary things can come with the end of your hormonal cycle and I have had plenty of evidence over the years as to how that cycle transforms my appearance at the very least. Would I never again look as flush and lovely as I do on day six? Would I always be as agitated and full of hate as I am on day 23? Will I be plagued with brain fog and deteriorating joints and exhaustion so profound I never dance again?!

I remember my other grandmother, whose period I know nothing about, dancing at her 50th wedding anniversary. It was an enormous affair in a Coney Island banquet hall and she hired a man named Johnny Calypso for music, an octogenarian who played all the hits of her day on a semi-automated keyboard. I was incredibly hungover and didn’t dance much, but I remember watching her in her dress suit urging her friends to join. She could not sit down. And she complained of how sore she was the next day for years afterwards.

This post is being written from a small farmhouse in France, owned by my friend Martina, who turned 50 this year. She has run out of periods and is repainting a vintage croquet set she bought at a flea market in the shade of her barn. We are going to learn how to play on YouTube later. She’s unbelievably beautiful.

So. The days passed. My period didn’t come. Not when I went to Mardi Gras, thankfully. Not when I went to an acupuncturist who I was hoping would give me some sort of herb to send it shooting out of every orifice. Instead, he pinpricked my knees and neck and applied suction cups to the wounds, which did get some blood out of my body. And it didn’t come on my birthday, which would have been poetic.

It came almost a week later, a day before the massive dance party I’d organized with a bunch of friends to celebrate all our birthdays together. I have never been so surprised and delighted to see that touch of pink that quickly started running red. I shot up from the toilet, exultant, tearing up, shouting and scaring the cat. I wanted to wander the streets with the same joyous reprieve as Ebenezer Scrooge awakening on Christmas morning and yelling, “You there! Boy, what day is this?”

Period day! I have another chance to get it right!

An hour of ecstasy was followed by bleeding so heavy I wondered if I should go to urgent care. I had been full of juice all along, every heartbeat was squeezing more out. The main concern was again if I would be able to dance. For the big event, I plugged up, put on a pad big enough to qualify as a diaper, and took enough Ibuprofen and Midol to soothe a horse womb. I felt horrendous, but alive, which is often what feeling alive means. I danced through the second most anticipated period of my life (coming in after the very first one) and I hope to dance after the last, whenever that is. Now I kind of expect each one to be.

That is a symmetrical idea to end on, but a dishonest one. I think I’ve barely dipped a toe into what’s to come with aging. My actual ending hope for this story is I will live long enough to see it all and approach the changes with enough grace that my future self doesn’t look back at the flop-sweat panicked and hysterical version of me at the thresh hold with too much pity. May she simply embrace it all as a new experience.

• A book recommended to me after I texted everyone I know:

• Hormone Repair manual by Laura Biden

• They actually all came from my friend Robin Randisi and I highly recommend her as a functional nutritionist for anyone looking for support, you can follow her here or check out her website here.

• And here’s a podcast from another recommended author that I might start listening to the new time I’m terrified about aging. At the moment, I’m going to play croquet.

• Okay, what’s going on with your body?

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As a tall girl, I was forced to play on a coed basketball team, which was pretty much a disaster from start to finish. Coed teams have gender ratio rules, but nothing in their structure to change the biases of a middle school boy. Though I was bigger than most of them, my memory on the court was of the fellas circling around me at all times, opening and closing their ranks to avoid rather than engage.

As an adult, I am no longer considered extraordinarily tall. I have still played basketball occasionally for fun and once in an amateur league where we won the equivalent of a Miss Congeniality award and a $200 gift certificate to a local bar. One of the girls I didn’t know bought us all Fireball shots with it and then left. Sports are good for people when they’re not taken too seriously, but most people who enjoy sports are very serious about it. Activity is fun and camaraderie is great, but I tend to find those things separately now.

In September, I stayed with a friend who had impulsively purchased a ping-pong table. She then got incredible at table tennis. She could not get enough of it. I was nowhere near good enough to be real competition for her, but I buckled down and really tried to meet her in The Zone, which is where you go when you lock in. We then played badminton. I played badminton a lot as a kid as well, at the community garden next door to my house. It was so so fun and still is, but I was moving up in the world of hitting a thing with other things. I have now, three months later, landed on tennis.

Tennis in New York City is a very exclusive club. Compared to other group sports, there is a much higher cost of entry and a much smaller group for every game. Theoretically, one day, I may be able to play doubles. But for now, I have only coaxed one person into playing with me regularly and I think that they will soon surpass my skill level and look for someone more challenging. In the meantime, however, I have adopted it as a sport I want to play consistently and improve on. I have taken a lesson. I have bought shoes. I have a racket. I call it Red Robin, though not out loud to anyone.

Another thing about tennis is that you need a permit during the regular season to book almost any court. Certainly any free court. But even courts that cost $50 an hour and up are being fought over. I’ve played at 10:30 PM, the only slot available, which is insane. To play outside, I waited until November arrived and the official permit season was over. Then I rolled out of bed at 6 AM to go sign up at Fort Greene park. Around 6:30, a man who did not seem to work at the park at all arrived and pinned a printed out sign up sheet to the gate, then skipped off. Everyone already waiting lined up politely to pick their time slot. It was a long line. This was in November. I can’t even imagine what the scene will be like in spring and summer, when I will also have to get a permit—without that, you can’t sign up at all.

Now that I am interested in tennis, I see it everywhere. Young men and women carrying their rackets on the train. The random guy who explained the sign up sheet to me and who is always lingering around the courts. People posting about going to games and tournaments. A new hobby really does open up your world by revealing it to you from a new perspective. I play tennis. Lots of people play tennis. They are all around us, pretending to be normal.

Do I like tennis? Honestly, no. I am not good at it. Ping-pong is much easier to improve at quickly, because there are fewer demands on your body. The balls and paddles are light, the amount of running is considerably less. With tennis, I’m always sprinting or galloping backwards or watching the ball fly over the fence when I pop it too hard. Again. The scariest thing about tennis is how often I don’t connect with the ball at all when I swing. It has started to make me wonder if I have something wrong with my brain and I don’t want to think about that. And yet I must. For tennis.

I have my hobbies and they are performing and making things that accumulate in drawers and cupboards for no reason. The ephemeral and the concrete. Tennis is more in the ephemeral category, I suppose, though it leaves behind skill (questionable that performing has done the same). It has also just been new. It’s exciting to do something new, really do it, and really try to keep doing it. Considering it’s the dead of winter and I have plans to play this week, I’d say I am being more consistent than anyone would have bet.

It is also a nice sport to do with a friend. It’s almost parallel play, though you are trying to influence one another. I get to hang out with a buddy and not really make conversation or work too hard to make it fun or figure out what to do next. What we are doing next is quite clear. We are hitting the ball back and forth until we have to stop. We are feelings the sun and the wind. We are crunching the leaves. We are sweaty, we are tired, we are happy. Sport.

• Please do not adopt tennis as a sport, it’s hard enough to get a court already.

• JK, do it and then play with me.

• I’ve taken no photos or videos of me engaging in this game, this is my coming out post. Thank you for reading!

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When I was 11-years-old, I spent a month going to day camp while staying with my uncle and aunt in one of the nicer parts of long island. During the day, they worked laying tile and as a masseuse at the fanciest spa in town, respectively. I’m not sure where my mother was, to be honest, and I would not have been able to stay with my dad who was either firmly ensconced in his bachelor’s studio apartment or living briefly with one of his girlfriends.

Camp was very tense for me, because I’m a real freak when it comes to making friends, even now. People find me fun and interesting at first, only to sense something is not quite right after one too many conversations with unwavering eye contact. I think I am just a bit too needy. With age, I have gotten slightly better at disguising this, or have met more people tolerant of it, but was not at all capable either defense as a pre-teen. So I went from being incredibly popular to being accused (erroneously!) of peeing in the pool within four weeks. Yes, I too have suffered the TRAUMA of being unpopular.

The summer ended with a sailing lesson on a small Sunfish. I remember very little about the sailing part of the Sunfish and mostly only have a vision of the end—a brightly colored sail turned pastel by the hot sun behind it, bearing me down, down, down into the town’s little lake and holding me pinned under the water. Therefore, technically, I have been taught how to sail a boat and I’ve been on other boats since, but that is all I recall of my lesson.

My decision to go to the Hudson River Community Sailing School for a grown up lesson I paid for with my hard earned adult money felt quite different. There were a few similarities, though; much like camp, I didn’t quite fit in with the group. I was the only woman who arrived for a lesson that morning and the teacher was a man too. The school is clearly part business and part volunteer organization, which means there were a lot of people randomly walking around, locked into tasks it was hard to understand as an outsider. It took a while to even be sure who the teacher was, especially as more dudes kept showing up for the lesson who could have been him. He was a guy who I will not identify by name, however I will say that he adopted a nickname that was completely unexpected for his first time. As an example, it was like someone being named Maxamillion and going by Ion instead of Max. Later, when he told me his last name, I realized this was because his full name is the same as a pretty famous actor and I will be thinking about that for a long time.

As we waited, another volunteer or perhaps a manager or even the owner of New York City harbor entered. He mentioned the Billion Oyster Project, which was exciting to me as a fan, and then pointed to an empty tank.

“Someone must have been hungry. We were growing oysters in here and they disappeared.”

Someone would have indeed had to have been hungry, because as cool as BOP is, I would not say any oysters I’ve seen them grow look safe to eat. I hope wherever the eater is, they’re okay or a sea lion.

“Ion” gathered the small crew of beginners in one of the rooms in the large riverside building, which had all its doors and windows open, creating a cross breeze that made it feel as though we were already aboard the ship. On a white board, he moved around magnetized wooden boat shapes, explaining the two sails of the Bermuda boats. The port and starboard. The basics. I have retained very little that I could verbally articulate. I could Google it right now, but I won’t.

Still, I am undeservedly confident that I could recreate the sailing movements again if I were on a boat of the same approximate size and style. This is what I want. I wish to be part of the machine that flies across the surface of the water, that tilts and groans and shoots up spray. I want to be the thing that floats and speeds and passes by the coastline, wondering who lives along the shore and never knowing.

We were taken to the Bermuda boat in a little dinghy with a motor, carefully sliding in and out of it. No one fell in, thankfully, and no one fell off the sail boat either though there were times it tilted to the side so far you could stretch your fingers across the wet surface gliding by behind you, almost dipping in your ass cheeks for good measure. The men getting their sailing lesson were all incredibly nice. A few were very young and obviously wealthy. One was a dad who had a son taking sailing lessons somewhere else. Ion was from Louisiana.

The boat tacked back and forth along the Hudson, first moving uptown. Towards Jersey and away, towards Jersey and away. Much of it was tedious, because the wind was low. The sun was so intense off the water, I knew my eyes would burn through my cheap sunglasses. Ion told us when to change course, knowing where the depth by one side or the other suddenly turned shallow. He seemed quite bored, which makes sense. Unfortunately, when we follow our passions we often end up with jobs that suck the magic out of them. For all of us students, there was a great deal of magic in gazing up the mast, watching the sails fill and pull us along, peering into the windows of other boats skipping across one another’s wakes.

A lot of my posts are about things I’m doing for the first time that I am paying for. The world in general is very expensive and gets more expensive everyday and sailing is on the high end of special treats. I cannot afford a membership at the sailing school and have been trying to get in there as a volunteer in exchange for lessons to no avail. The volunteering situation appears to be complicated and Ion did not respond to my email about it. I finally got in contact with a coordinator who ghosted me. My plan for the spring is to just show up every day and wait around until someone gives me a job or lets me on a boat, even if I have to snack on putrid oysters.

BUT. I want to say this about the money thing: that being able to afford experiences is a privilege, absolutely. And anyone saying, “Just do it” about a new experience that costs money is probably glossing over that. However, I have personally been able to afford to buy this one introductory lesson for some time and it took me so so so long to do it. Why? Now it is done and I’m glad.

Embracing a new experience is never entirely about practical matters or economics, I am certain of it. Sometimes we really want something, something we can have, and can’t quite reach out for it. Especially a new thing that will unsettle us. I had to go to a new place, far from home, amongst strangers, and move across a completely unfamiliar element, guided by invisible currents above and below. It was so easy in the end, yet so hard to even try. I know there are people who don’t think about things this way. But many folks do and this is for you. Being open to new experiences is scary in a way we both understand. Because being open to good leaves you open to bad as well, of course. There are so many strategies and habits and shells I draw into to avoid the bad I already know, the maneuvers that make it all tolerable. The love of guaranteed mediocrity over potential misery is powerful. Days and months and years can pass moving from one theoretical safe space or activity to the next and it becomes harder to place our feet outside these grooves as we age. They get too deep.

One sailing lesson has not saved me from this and one more person telling you to “Just do it” will probably not save anyone reading the words either. I will still say, just do it. There is a river and it bends and we don’t know what’s on the other side. That’s wonderful.

• Wow! Been a long time and it’s almost my birthday AGAIN and I haven’t even finished 39 new things! Horrible. And yet I will. And yet I must. I have like, two more things to do.

• Help! What should I do!!

• Should I keep going past 39? Totally a failed conceit anyway, may as well!

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Most of the stories we tell about ourselves begin in childhood somewhere, perhaps in a dark corner down some small twisted path we can’t revisit as adults without experiencing spiritual claustrophobia. Others start in wide open fields of experience, spaces where anyone watching from the outside could spot the story’s conception from a mile out. Growing up often involves unpacking these moments in the hopes of finally releasing them. Or we just repeat the stories over and over: maybe this time it will all make sense and thus turn out differently, even though life only moves in one direction. Towards the end.

I have a lot of compassion for everyone going through this and even for myself when I am doing it. But this is a lead up to say I find stories about other people’s mothers and the weird wacky things they do very boring. Yet, I also have a mother, a mother I talk about all the time. She is truly weird and wacky, not like these other run of the mill narcissist moms or overbearing moms or hippy-dippy moms. A unique character who has shaped and warped me in so many ways that I am certain when she is gone, my last anchor to this earth will dissolve and I will float away myself. It’s different, for us.

Despite the fear I will lose my mind when she dies, we spend a lot of our time together arguing. This may never stop, until I say something unconscionably nasty to her as I’m holding her hand on her deathbed and she flatlines. Or vice versa! However, I have been trying to deliberately do things with her that create some nice memories to balance out the discordance. Kayaking for the first time together was perfect for this, because we could barely hear one another on the boat.

I kayak frequently because I love boats and water, but I had never gone kayaking at Brooklyn Bridge Park before and definitely not with my mom. I would not have thought to do it at all, except we passed by Pier 4 one day this June and it turns out it’s free and you can sign up online for a 20 minute spot. 20 minutes is plenty, because the area is fenced in by strict boundaries and several safety kayakers in green boats, wearing red vests and a look of serious determination. It’s also just about as long as my mom’s attention span.

Full disclosure, I frequently volunteer now with the local boathouse we went to, helping people in and out of their life vests and explaining that we don’t recommend taking your shoes off, but yes, they will get wet. And I’m often surprised by how many adult people are coming to kayak for the very first time in their lives, many of them obviously terrified. That bravery is very touching and sweet and it feels good to facilitate it in even a tiny way. I find myself getting kinder, softer, more patient, even to the people who are rude and annoying. There’s no real reason to do a hard thing you’ve never done before like getting in a kayak, and yet they do. This change in my personality does not last long after the shift is over.

My mom was not nervous. She loves boats as well (it’s genetic and astrological I am sure), but would probably not have the strength to locomote one on her own. I sat in the back of our two-person kayak, because that’s where the stronger rower should sit. She held her paddle in her lap as I pushed us around in a loop, back-and-forth, clockwise, counter-clockwise. There were single kayaks, but many more doubles in which an adult sat behind, filming their child attempting to row in front of them. I did my best to not run into them as the oblivious moms and dads let their infants ram at us.

This is emblematic of my relationship with my mom, a perfect physical manifestation of one of those stories I tell about myself: I take care of my mom. She does not take care of me. I take care of me. If she is happy, I am happy. If I don’t make something good happen, nothing will. If I am not vigilant, something bad will come and get us. The end.

She was unaware of these thoughts as we were on the kayak and I could tell from the relaxed posture of her body that she was day dreaming. The Manhattan skyline glimmered silver and blue, streaks of light breaking through the buildings to traverse the water in long steps. It was a hot day, but on the water there’s a convincing breeze that makes you believe you’ll always be cool.

My mom began to fiddle with her oar, before calling back something I couldn’t hear.

“WHAT?” I yelled, leaning forward.

“Let me try, I want to try,” she repeated.

I moved us to a relatively empty section and loudly explained which direction to hold the paddle, then which way to push the water, as she guessed wrong. We started to move a little, mostly from my previous momentum, but rotating was out of the question. A safety kayaker swept up to us as my mom started to make a break across the buoy line.

“I’m turning around! Turning around!” I told them, pushing the paddle deep on the left to move us right and back towards the shore. The volunteers helped us out of the boat and I hooked her arm through mine as we made our way back to our bags. I was very surprised to see she had planned ahead, packing dry shoes and shorts to change into. My own ass was soaked, the price you pay.

These excursions I go on with her, I think of them as “airing out mom,” and feel if I don’t do it she will sit and molder in her house. That’s not true, like many ideas I have. She is quite good at making new friends and finding reasons to keep living, two abilities I pray to maintain as I age. So I’ll be honest, I’m airing myself out, at least mentally. Blowing the cobwebs and dust off old memories and perceptions, trying to see if there’s another way to look at things, other perspectives to uncover about the past. Perhaps a fresh river breeze will blow all of that away entirely and then move us both in another direction.

• Volunteer! Go Kayaking for free!

• If not there, you can try here.

• Or just search “free kayaking” because New York is a place with a lot of water around it and thus a lot of water-based programs.

• Where else should I take my mom for minimal stress?

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While planning to visit my friend, Robin, who has been living in upstate New York for a few years now, she suggested we go on a bird watching walk. I responded, obviously, by saying that I’ve been “really into birds.”

“Everyone is it seems,” she replied.

“I think it’s just our age group,” I told her. “The Parasites have hatched.”

Whatever it is that happens to your brain that makes you very interested in birds, I’d say it was triggered in me about seven years ago. I like to look at them and listen to them and I spend a lot of time thinking about them. I even made a little documentary about the Wild Bird Fund that was never released, though it did give me an opportunity to meet a number of very tame birds in close quarters. While I treasure those memories, I have for some reason never actually gone bird watching with a pair of binoculars. I think the barrier to entry has been buying binoculars.

Robin has so many pairs of binoculars that she had one to lend me and one for herself and one for her partner, Josh. We each took our set and got in their car and drove off to the bird watching meet up hosted by the Columbia Land Conservancy. I’m not a land owner or home owner and will probably die without those experiences, so my understanding of what the CLC does, and how, is hobbled by that. They are a non-profit that manages public properties in upstate New York where people can hike trails and they are basically attempting to hold land in a trust to limit development. This seems like a good thing, but one thing I’ve learned in this life is that debates over land use will always have something going on under the surface. I don’t know what is going on under CLC’s surface. Perhaps nothing. I’d certainly prefer land where no one can build housing, but based on some rumblings on this singular birdwatching walk, that can be a real pain in the ass for folks who already have homes on the protected land.

Anyway, this walk was on the land of an older architect who asked us not to take photos of his home and collection of off-grid cabins, which he rents out to some very lucky people. The Taghkanic creek goes through his property at a point that is not very wide, yet wide enough to split around an island covered in saplings and ferns. There was a thick tree line splitting two sloping meadows and that’s where our attention was mostly turned.

After speeches from at least five different people associated with CLC, the property, and the spirit of birds everywhere, we starting walking in a shambling line behind our guide, a farmer and ornithology enthusiast. The guide was extremely informative and I remember almost nothing he said. Here are the birds I saw:

-A turkey vulture

-An oriole

-A woodpecker

-A bluebird

-A swallow

-A yellow warbler

-A catbird

The first few birds I saw were a bit fuzzy even if they were magnified. I was starting to worry about my eyesight and general cognitive health when I realized you can adjust the focus via a rolling wheel at the center of the two adjustable sides. This may seem very obvious to you, Reader. It is not!!

Once the birds looked crisp and detailed in my view, I found I still preferred to look at them with my own eyes and with less clarity. Through the binoculars, it felt a bit like watching them on TV. I wasn’t with them like I was when I was aware of myself in the field or beneath a tree. The smell of the meadow, grass and blossoms, fresh leaves making me sneeze and my eyes itch—the scent made me a creature, the soft touch of wind stirring the sleeping animal within, daring it to take flight. I wanted myself and the birds to be the same, on the same level, even though I can never go where they go.

Because Robin, Josh, and I were approximately 20 years younger than most people in the group, we kept ending up at the head of the line. I walked for a while beside the property owner, trying to chat him up. My one real goal was to get invited into his house, which I failed at. He was an aloof man and married to another man, so there weren’t too many points of entry. When the yellow warbler alighted on a branch, I offered him my binoculars so he could see. He accepted, the pull to see a bright feathery being the approximate color and shape of a lemon proving too strong to resist. He handed them back after a moment, saying gruffly, “Beautiful bird.”

Finally, he loosened up enough to complain to me about development on the other side of the hill, and a proposed subdivision of that nearby property. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I nodded attentively, dreaming about how nice his tableware probably is. I bet his towels are so thick and fluffy. He probably has decorative glassware on every table.

Another thing about upstate New York is that it is full of ticks. One of the other CLC leaders who spends a lot of time maintaining trails kept wandering off the paths and into the grass, returning with tick-covered legs. Robin’s greatest fear might be lime disease, so every one of these displays was skyrocketing her anxiety. We had all tucked out pants in our socks and sprayed ourselves down before heading to the walk, but here was this man who was absolutely in love with carrying ticks around on his legs. I’ve actually had lime disease before, so I wasn’t too freaked out, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

We reached the property’s personal waterfall, which wasn’t huge, but not a lot of people own waterfalls at all. Then the tour came to an end and we headed back to Robin and Josh’s house to lint roll ourselves for bugs carrying blood-born illnesses.

I’ve been thinking even more about birds since this adventure, though I have not yet purchased a pair of binoculars. A few weeks later, in Fort Greene park, I saw a bird I’d never seen before. It was small and wearing a black raccoon eye mask with a yellow dickie. It had grey wings and flew past me as I was admiring some delicate lavender irises that had recently bloomed. Bird watching for the casual enthusiast is mostly about noticing. You’re asking your brain and your eyes to pay attention to things you probably wouldn’t otherwise. The more I notice, the more I am able to perceive things I couldn’t imagine before. Curiosity conjured the little bird and it flew away quickly, lost again in the green.

I went home and used the internet to identify it, by which I mean I searched and couldn’t find anything and then one of the many bird accounts I follow randomly posted a photo of it: a common yellow throat.

Then the next day, I saw the yellow line of a bird’s tail disappearing into a bush: a cedar waxwing

.

There are more birds to notice now than I knew existed.

• Gentrification in upstate NY (rural gentrification) has been an ongoing problem exacerbated by the pandemic, especially caused by people with second homes who leave their unoccupied much of the year. If you don’t have a second home there or a first home in NYC, you might not have looked into it, but it’s interesting.

  

• You don’t have to go anywhere in particular to see birds, but the NYC parks department has a lot of bird related events. In fact, more people should be looking for free fun stuff to do on the NYC parks department website. Period.

• Anyone seen any good birds lately?

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There is an urge in most of us to gamble. Taking a chance is exciting and the reward for winning is mind warping exhilaration and possibly money. Losing, which we can’t conceptualize until it happens, is agonizing. You risked and lost—why did you risk what you had?? You could still have it if you hadn’t risked. Now it is gone. Gone forever.

I’ve been to a casino before, I’ve even been to Atlantic City before. In Vegas, I tried the coin slots which no longer feature the iconic pull-down handle I’d grown up to expect. There’s no slots or coins either. It was very flashy with lots of lights and sounds and I lost a few dollars via some sort of paper transfer and then walked away. In Atlantic City, the first time, I was a kid and could not participate in any gambling and also had an ear infection. When my friend Bill invited me and some other pals to Atlantic City for a birthday party, I hoped to have better experiences. Ear infections were of the past.

I’m sure for residents of the boardwalk-lined town, there are many charms and underground hangs and communities that have some appeal. As a visitor, Atlantic City seems like a place where it is very hard to live, especially in the dead of winter. It was raining and dark, even at midday. Not that we saw much of the day. We mostly saw the long floor of glimmering machines and bright tables, filled in sparsely with what I came to think of as Bizarro Disney Adults. Casinos are their thing and they wander back and forth in comfortable pajama sets and beanies, carrying massive drinks and snacks in themed buckets. Some of them are a bit more formal, in short-sleeved button shirts and gold watches, carrying wads of money that seem vaguely criminal. This is probably my naivety. Maybe it is very normal to go to the Hard Rock casino in Atlantic City with more cash than I’ve ever seen in my entire life grasped in a single hand. This was a new experience for me, after all.

I do know that what we were doing was not normal, based on the reactions we received. Per the invite instructions, everyone had dressed up for the night, like we were cosplaying Ocean’s 11, except with women. Four of us got ready in our shared room, where we had a partial view of the ocean and a grander view of the walls of other hotels. Their windows reflected the water, extending the horizon. The buildings looked like they were waiting, staring out over the sea with rows and rows of glassy eyes. If no one else had been downstairs, I would not have been surprised. Indeed, there were many moments that evening where I wandered away amongst the machines, all lit up, pinging, poinging, calling to no one, like vivid male birds in the trees whose mates have gone extinct.

I didn’t know it yet, but I was about to be very ill. The illness would creep over me the next day, starting with a sore throat, but at that moment I was just extremely fatigued. I snoozed for a bit before dinner as the others went to explore. I love a hotel room. So impersonal and cool, humming with electricity yet dead silent, punctuated by shrieks and stomps in the hallway flushing your body with reactive adrenaline. Both neat as a pin and utterly disgusting when you consider everyone who has passed through, touching the surfaces, grinding on the couch, sneezing into the hair dryer. When I could snooze no more, I used the little single pod coffee maker and tried not to think about what some sicko might have done to it.

That night, I wore a skintight red dress that honestly wasn’t very flattering, but it was the most appropriate when I looked around at my cohorts, who were obligingly glamorous. We had dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe. It seemed like the staff didn’t know what to do with a dozen people at once. I ordered a single cocktail and it had approximately three shots of bourbon in it. The food was bad and overpriced, but the drink made everything just fine.

The tension between what we have and what we imagine is in our reach is a delicious tug. What I like most about doing new things is that you often encounter people for whom that thing is old, worn out, and dull. You will encounter a lot of people like that at a casino, yet they return because gambling is an addiction. I have no judgment about that. If I lived closer to a casino with affordable table minimums I might be addicted to it as well, but instead I’m addicted to my phone and processed gluten. Whatever keeps the dopamine flowing.

I don’t know enough about Atlantic City to give a very detailed history about it, so I will just make some general observations. One is that casinos began operating there in the late 1970s, before which the place was very similar to Ocean City, Maryland, or other destinations popular for family vacations, before affordable air travel and the cultural domination of Disney parks. Once casinos were allowed to move in, they took over. It is very much debated if AC was a safe, wholesome place before casinos, or if It was revitalized by new business and new revenue. I would guess that like many cities that exist on the edge of where earth meets water, it was a mixed bag. Casinos have some obligation to reinvest in most of the places they operate, but not an enormous amount. Per the Atlantic City Free Public Library:

The state's 8 percent tax on casino gross revenues is devoted to the Casino Revenue Fund which funds programs that provide resources and services to disabled and senior citizens. Casinos are also required to invest 1.25 percent of their gaming revenues into projects screened and approved by the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA). With a mandate to revitalize urban centers throughout the state, CRDA has funded a wide array of infrastructure, housing, economic, cultural and social development projects. The CRDA has invested more than $1.8 billion in these projects to date.

$1.8 billion sure sounds like a lot, but that is across about 45 years. And yearly revenue from even one casino is enormous. PlayNj reports that total revenue for all the casinos in AC in 2024 alone was $22,042,923,392. That’s such a big number that I am wondering if I’m just misunderstanding the report…but I don’t think so.

I’m only bringing this up because I have been thinking a lot about how big business often takes far more from a community than it gives and the casino business is more nakedly predatory than most. Perhaps that’s why they’re pushed to the edge, to places already struggling and underfunded, with big promises of a reward in exchange for a lot of risk. Relevant to that, Thor Equities is pushing through an initiative to build a casino on Coney Island, and they are close to succeeding. The photos and plans for the place are horrifying, at least to me, who has appreciated the boardwalk on the edge of Brooklyn for my entire life exactly as it is. A few months ago, I attended a public hearing on the matter via Zoom, which was filled with protesters arguing very persuasively that the addition of this casino would only make the community unsafe and destroy landmarks that have made the area what it is for a hundred years. There were also some naysayers, also claiming to be from the community, who saw Thor as a godsend, injecting money and possibilities into a neglected neighborhood ignored by the city except for when the good times are flowing. But, from my POV, even the people who seemed convincingly sincere in this belief had very little in the way of specifics. What, exactly, would the casino do besides attract yet more tourists who leave after getting wasted and trashing the place, all while pouring money into the pockets of people obligated to only reinvest the smallest fraction of their profits into the streets supporting their enterprise?

I digress.

The night of Bill’s birthday it was raining and we walked in our finery to the casino next door, even more abandoned and grim, but somewhat darker which was a relief to the senses. I entered with about 3 dollars and left with around $120 after learning how to play Blackjack. It is kind of a perfect mix of strategy and luck, which keeps it engaging. In this scenario, I was the tourist who got somewhat wasted. I did tip out the dealers, who had walked me through the rules of the game. I did forget to tip out the waitress, who started bringing us free drinks after people began losing money. Someone else remembered, thankfully. But that is the system: you spend on the tables, and tipping culture is supposed to take care of the rest for the employees who keep the dim tables running. I very ignorantly did not understand this before witnessing it.

It was surreal to take my winnings in the form of chips to the casino’s bank window and change it in for dollars. Free money! It felt huge, but was a pathetic sum to the cashiers, who must see all kinds of things I can’t comprehend. This exchange, more than anything, made me want to crouch on the floor of the casino like a bug for a month, a year, an eternity of observation. I wanted to know how depraved and sad and wildly fun it could get. An alternate life sprung up of playing games and knowing names. But I pocketed my winnings and went out into the rain again, choosing my actual life.

A casino with only machines would undoubtedly be a perfect investment, but I guess it just doesn’t quite work the same. The pull of connection is present at the casino, like it is in our phones when we scroll, hoping for a message or notification or even a blow up fight on Facebook. As AI and ChatGPT have spilled out onto every social media platform, I have found my interest dwindling. I don’t want to have a conversation with no one, even if that’s what I get tricked into doing from time to time. And I think most people go down to the tables in the hopes of some understanding and mutual regard exchanged across the worn velvet.

At our table, an older man sat alone before we joined. At first, he was withdrawn, quietly tapping his knuckles to pass or flipping cards, chips falling loosely from his hand as bets were set. Gradually, our presence revived him. Maybe it was the younger women in tight clothes, but I think it was just the energy of other people, which is the thing most of us are actually looking for on a night out. Anything that minimizes humanity is a dead end.

The next morning I woke up early and ate a very disgusting breakfast alone, looking down over the escalator. Then I walked outside onto the boardwalk, where it was still lightly raining. I found a path onto the beach and down to the water. The sea foam was filmy and dotted with plastic. The Ferris wheel, which had been lit with rainbows the night before, was now as cold and gray as the ocean. Shortly after, I got in a car home with no ear infection, only a cold that left me feeling coated in misery and regret for a week afterwards. I desperately wanted to play Blackjack again, a feeling that wore off eventually, but could be easily rekindled.

• I brought back my Substack in part to share this: Coney Island may be rezoned so it can be turned into a casino. I recommend reading this post from No Coney Casino to understand where the process is at.

  The summary is that the process has moved onto being a City Council Vote, relying on Councilman Justin Brannan, who is running for New York City Comptroller this year. I urge all New Yorkers to engage on the issue and on other City Council issues. You can follow the CI process on the NYC Zoning Portal and should follow No Coney Casino for updates.

  
  Is this a small issue compared to the many massive and horrifying political issues facing our nation? Yes. However, many of the larger cruelties we see everyday begin with these small degradations and the flow of money and power up and away from communities into the hands of developers. If not Coney Island, care about something else small. It may get bigger very soon!

• Please share any local issues you care about in the comments and also any other new things I can do. I’m trying!

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Since Fleabag season two, seeing a wild fox has taken on a significance that I don’t actually understand. I get the priest, and the love story, and that how we choose to express love is one of the most important components of feeling it, but I don’t get the symbolism of the fox. I could probably Google it or read posts on Tumblr, but I choose to let the Fleabag fox remain a mystery. 

Real life foxes have remained a mystery to me as well. I felt as though I had seen one, since they have a lot of representation in media. There are especially a lot of foxes on social platforms, where fox rescuers post all the cutest, softest, giggliest examples of the species, usually saved from a pelt factory where they’re bred to be as friendly as dogs. A wild fox naturally has a disposition more like a cat. They’re meant to be sly, canny, quick. A fox that roles over to show you its belly will be made into a coat.

A weird thing happens in life where sometimes you think about something for the first time and it’s like you’re asking the universe a question. And then shortly after, the universe answers. For example, when you learn a new word and then start hearing it everywhere. This is the most basic formula for the Universe’s question-answer pattern. But I thought to myself, “I’ve never seen a fox in the wild,” and then a few days later, I saw one. I asked the universe for it without intending to, and it came.

So I didn’t plan this as a first time experience, but the experience found me because I was open to it finally happening. And I did encounter the fox in a scenario with many elements of the hero’s journey if I do say so myself. It began with dinner at a pizza place as many things do in Europe. There is a pizza place almost anywhere you go, for the sake of touristic palates. Not sure what regional dish you can stomach? How about a margerita pizza? It’s what was available in Eguisheim when many other things were closed late on a Wednesday, a town voted most beautiful in Alsace in the early 2010s.

I got there by bus from the town I was staying in, Colmar, which is slightly bigger and slightly less picturesque and has a reliable train station. The bus was fast and cost two Euros, but the schedule was erratic and after the pizza it was unclear if there might be another. Sometimes I get very weird about spending money while traveling. I could have gone home in a taxi for less than 13 euros probably, but got it into my head that I could walk. I should walk. It was financially responsible to walk across an hour of unfamiliar countryside in the gathering dark.

It was not totally insane. I asked my very handsome and genial waiter if he knew the area well and of course he did. I showed him the route on Google Maps and asked if it was safe—as in, no highways.

“Oh yes,” he answered, adding, “Most people don’t know, but you can walk anywhere in Alsace with no highways.”

With this stupid decision made, I headed down the pretty street, walking in the wrong direction. When I was turned around again, I found the road leading out of town. The gorgeous timbered homes faded into average single family suburban houses with normal TV antennas and laundry lines, and then those turned to grass or fields of grapes. At the end of this, I came upon a roundabout which was not technically a highway. It was also not very welcoming to people on foot, so I used the power of two glasses of pinot gris to skitter across in between zooming cars. 

In a break in the tree line, a walkable road appeared and I believed myself safe. For another thirty minutes or so I walked past meadows and corn fields and all kinds of pastoral delights. There was no one around. At times the road was paved, at others it turned to rocky dirt. In places it turned to grass before picking up firmly again behind a hedge. It ran for a while under the electric lines.

But it was very clear where the road ended: a fence where there was no fence indicated on Google Maps had been erected. It was barricaded further by a wall of thorny blackberry bushes. I ate a few sour berries and pondered what to do, the seeds sticking in my teeth. To my right, another road went in the wrong direction. On one side of it was a mown hay field and far in the distance across the hay field there was a road going the right direction.

If you have never walked across a dry hay field, let me say, it is not as fluffy as it sounds. It’s like walking over a lawn except every half inch there’s a sharp stick poking out of the ground. They do crunch down a bit, but crossing over this texture took so, so long. I was swaying like a weeble wobble. I was sweating and anxious. The unexpected fence was guarding a small row of farmhouses to the left of the field and I kept expecting an irate farmer to pop out with a shotgun even though this was France and they probably don’t have one. Maybe worse would have been a camera phone, capturing the American tourist trespassing and moving like a Martian discovering Earth’s gravitational force. It was so unpleasant, I paused a third of the way through and considered giving up even though going back would be approximately as bad as continuing on.

Just then, a dark red animal popped out of the ground and cantered casually into the adjacent cornfield. I don’t think it actually looked at me, but I had the sensation I’d been given a contemptuous glance.

“What are you doing here?” its narrow shoulders asked, before forgetting me entirely. The fox was thin and dense and full of life, like wild things are. 

The image of the fox burned like a little flame in my brain, powering me forward again. Stomping on and breathing heavily, I remembered the movie Vagabond by Agnès Varda where a girl dies in a French hayfield and laughed, thinking, “I’m about to do a Vagabond.”

Finally, finally, finally, I reached the road and enjoyed a stretch of normal walking on a sidewalk that took me through the less touristy side of town and then through Colmar’s train station and to my hotel, where I ordered another glass of Pinot Gris and sat outside, considering my decisions. Then I thought about all the quiet burrows where creatures curl up, dreaming yet attuned to the encroachment of footsteps above. 

It is almost unbelievable that the fox and I are of the same world. I’m sure anyone reading this who grew up in the country will find that a ridiculous statement, but if they searched their own personal histories they would find their version of the fox. Something that lives in a way that you could only have an encounter amidst some surreal and absurd endeavor because the normal course of your life would never bring you into alignment with it otherwise. If you’re thinking of whatever that thing is, multiply it exponentially, because that is how many unseen, unknown things there are; the creatures, delights, and horrors around every corner that we often miss by taking the same safe route.

That said, I would not recommend doing a Vagabond. For legal reasons. 

• I looked it up and France has a population of 300,000 wild foxes, which seems low. But it is on par with Canada, a much bigger place. So if you see a fox in Canada, you are really having an unlikely experience. Start measuring all your experiences in Canadian Foxes.

• Foxes everywhere are moving into urban spaces as their wild habitat is decimated or trodden upon by oafs. Which made me think of Anne Clark’s tweet about Paris banishing wolves.

• And interestingly, in 2017 they were back:

"We are certain that there are three in circulation since April last year, one couple and another lone wolf," Manoël Atman, the president of the wolf-watching group Alliance avec les loups, told The Local. 

Atman together with the another wolf-watching group, the Observatoire du loup, told Le Parisien newspaper that the wolves were roaming across the departments of Yvelines and Essonne, while another was in the nearby Seine-et-Marne. 

The research groups, which include geographers and biologists, have collected evidence including reports of characteristic wolf howling, sightings of paw prints, and the discovery of wolf droppings.

• Oh, to discover wolf droppings in Paris.

• Seen anything surprising lately? I love cryptid stories.

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There have been two times that I have opened a fortune cookie and received the message, “Beware the Lost city of Knossos, Doom Awaits You There.” 

Receiving the same message twice in a fortune cookie isn’t that unusual, but this was so very specific. Knossos isn’t a lost city. People know exactly where it is: Crete. It is the oldest known settlement on the island and remains a pretty popular tourist destination on the outskirts of Heraklion. You may have never heard of it or thought you knew about it, but you do. It’s where King Minos lived and where Daedalus built his maze for the Minotaur to roam and eat youths. So it’s not lost, but it’s not really a place where people live, and the people who did live there have left behind ancient stories that absolutely fill the area with doom-like vibes. 

When I planned a trip to Crete, I noticed the location of Knossos and remembered the funny fortune cookie coincidence. I am horribly superstitious. It is a part of being spiritual without religion. So I decided not to fly into Heraklion and bought a ticket to Chania instead. It is the other major city in Crete and as the budget ticket plane touched down on the ground at an impossible angle and speed I wondered if I was still playing it too close to the line. Once the door was open and I could get away from the tube of terror, my fears felt silly. I passed by a man crouched on the ground sobbing from a panic attack caused by the landing, his girlfriend patting him across his shoulders like a dog. 

The airline had insisted I check my giant backpack. When I retrieved it, the thick waist belt was gone. Into the ether. Every year when I travel I bring a smaller and smaller bag and this was my attempt at going without a proper suitcase. Yes, I’d reinvented backpacking through Europe. Without the belt, this became much harder from a purely physical standpoint. No matter how small the bag is, it’s too heavy. I’m not a snail and I have not evolved to carry all my things on my back. Even in that first human habitation on Crete, a group of 25 people perhaps, they built themselves mud shacks to put all of their nets and bowls and trinkets into. 

The weight is a challenge I enjoy meeting. Traveling forces me to constantly reassess the line between comfort and necessity. As a recovering pack rat, this kind of introspection helps when I’m back home again. I get sick satisfaction from using everything I have until it’s down to the nub or a collection of embarrassing threads once called underwear. I aspire to Spartan discipline (aesthetically only), but inevitably the joyful explosion of stuff happens; the window sills are lined with plants with leaves curling out in exploring tendrils, cups overflow with loose change, notes, pens, earrings, bandaids, chapstick, pretty stones, fabric butterflies, gym gloves, keys, beads, gum, whatever. On the floor, belongings just pile up: the portable hammocks, macrame that needs to be returned to the hardware store, ceramics everywhere, things I’ve made or intend to make any day now, 15 pounds of red clay molding in a bag, an at-home laser hair remover from five years ago, a rug cut in half with the intention of hanging it on the couch to protect the couch from the cat, but of course that doesn’t work. In the kitchen are bags of spice and beans and grains all waiting to become food and getting lost under one another, hibernating. Before oats become oatmeal they are asleep. 

The closet explodes with chic jackets it’s never a nice enough occasion to wear, suitcases I’ll never use again because of the whole packing drama but keep just in case I need to roll something somewhere, smaller gorgeous leather duffels I inherited from my late uncle who clearly was obsessed, high heels I don’t put on because I can’t run away from danger in them, and a pile of sheets and towels that have solidified into an impenetrable hunk of musty fabric. The dresser overflows, there are wax earplugs getting smooshed underfoot, I’ve knocked down the box fan again. Stuff stuff stuff!! 

The stasis of home, of habit, can be so suffocating, because it isn’t fixed at all. It’s growing all over you, a vital reality full of change, cultivated by your constant presence and attention. When I leave my home, it wilts in importance as do my things, which I scarcely recognize when I return to them. Who bought this? Who used this? Who am I? Things?

I meant to write about Crete, but I’ve been caught up in thinking about what we try to find through movement that we can’t find being still. I do know that when I arrived, it was the first time I’d been able to be in one place in a way that can be called “relaxing” in many weeks. All I wanted to do was sit in a beach chair and get absolutely loaded. My hotel room was owned by an older man who wandered from reception desk, to the tiny attached restaurant, back and forth all day. On the table by his desk were an assortment of books in different languages and I picked up one in English by Danielle Steel. I’d never read a Danielle Steel novel and it was not what I expected at all. The story started with a wildly age inappropriate relationship and ended with Nazi collaborators. Lots of twists and turns. 

I crossed the street, passing through a bar to the beach and sat on a lounger. The bartender brought me a glass of wine and I ignored Danielle to watch the sunset. There was a large island off the coast, which changed in texture and color all throughout the day according to how the light slanted across it or touched through the clouds. 

“Doom awaits you there,” I thought. I had all my things around me to make the moment: the chair, the wine, the steamy romance. The beach, above all else. The ocean sucked at the shore, drawing in material, shaking it and resetting it into a new form entirely. Nothing stays the same shape, here or there. 

• Currently having a Fruit of the Looms Cornucopia moment because I would have sworn up and down that Danielle Steel’s name is spelled Steele. But the book I read is called Crossings, and if the rest of her work is even half as insane she totally earned her status in the romance genre.

• And this desk built to look like a stack of her own books:

“Dead or alive, rain or shine, I get to my desk and I do my work,” she said of her practice. “Sometimes I’ll finish a book in the morning, and by the end of the day, I’ve started another project.”

• I love interior design and seeing inside people’s homes even though mine is a disaster. Please tell me what has changed your space, either to make it feel more manageable or in a way that brings your joy. Or both??

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Being able to cook is a hotly contested topic on the Internet, which I find very exciting. Like everyone who is poisoned by constant social media discourse, I need a slow drip drip drip of the antidote, made from the same venom. Low stakes issues that trigger high emotions are often the best mix of aggravation and meaninglessness. But if you have no idea what I’m talking about, allow me to summarise some of the most popular points about cooking on X, concurrently known as Twitter.

1. Everyone should know how to cook.

2. No they shouldn’t.

3. Being able to cook is a sign of privilege/classist.

4. No it’s not.

5. With grocery prices this high, it’s cheaper to eat take out.

6. No it’s not.

7. Ordering Uber Eats is Praxis.

8. No it’s not, unless I’m doing it.

I don’t have an opinion about this for anyone except myself. Whether or not people know how to cook is their business, just like whether they floss before or after brushing. I hope they floss at all and if they don’t that’s unfortunate for them. From my personal experience, however, I grew up not really knowing how to cook because I was a heinously picky eater. I ate chicken, bread, corn, broccoli, tofu in margarine, spaghetti with cheese and butter, French fries, most fruits, and ice cream: chocolate or green tea. I would drink miso soup with rice if there was no scallions or seaweed in them. I was terrified of seaweed or floating green things in soup and in the ocean. I was afraid of flies buzzing around the ceiling fan. I was afraid of cockroaches and crickets and butterflies, too. Sometimes when I think about how terrifying being a child was, I feel so brave to have done it.

By the time I was in college, a lot of these fears had receded, thankfully, or they were channeled into questions about life, the universe, and everything. A friend from Massachusetts, a wealthy friend if that matters, was a great cook. She made eggs and I was too embarrassed to admit I don’t eat eggs so I ate them. Peer pressure is good for some stuff. Now I eat eggs almost everyday! Is that weird? Am I a freak? Are eggs my friend?

Eggs opened the door and soon I learned to not only eat new things, but cook them, too. Now, I’m a pretty okay cook. Some of the things I make are great. But I do encounter strange holes in my abilities that seem very simple and which I might have learned at an earlier point in my progression with more guidance.

My mom is not a good cook, which she claims is because I was a bad eater, but there’s no way in hell that’s true. Her favorite dinner is eating chocolate chips out of a chocolate chip cookie and then putting the leavings back in the bag and the bag up on a shelf. She once packed me a lunch with pretzels she’d already licked the salt off of. I wish I could say I didn’t eat one before realizing. She once brought me a red onion as an after school snack, handing it to me with a big smile in front of all the other children and their aghast parents. She thought it was an apple. If I sound resentful, I’m sorry, but you can only open so many bags of cookies to find they’ve been de-cookie-fied before a relationship sours.

Her mother was a decent cook, so I sense pointless rebellion. I have also inherited her spitefulness and angrily respond to things in ways that only hurt me, too. My great-grandmother was a professional cook, working in the house of someone who presumably didn’t know how. Her husband was their chauffeur. My mom can’t drive either. What does it all mean?!

Nothing! Except it does make me think about recipes and how the flavor of something can become a part of your family history. Now, I know the recipes did exist at one point—I remember my grandmother describing how her mom would hang Christmas puddings from the ceiling—they just didn’t make it to me. I have never been able to recreate the taste of my grandmother’s mashed potatoes, which were 90 percent butter. Obviously, my mom couldn’t make them. I don’t have children, so there’s no one I’d pass the butter-to-boiled-spud ratio down to anyway. So a lineage of taste ends, perhaps for the better. 

This past year, I decided to tackle one of the biggest holes in my cooking knowledge and make a salad dressing. It is actually absurd how hard this has always been for me, especially because it became so easy as soon as I decided it was time to really do it. It was suddenly important, because I wanted to eat more salads and dressings are expensive and go bad or are full of oils made in a mown down rainforest. I had a roommate in my twenties who made the best salad dressings and I remember her leaning over the Kitchen-Aid, adding in vinegar and onions and bits of carrots, sampling it and shaking her head or confidently spooning it in a jar. It did seem like alchemy and when I finally decided to figure the magic of salad dressings out sometime last fall, I understood that our limitations are often solely mental.

Here’s the salad dressing I make now after about fifteen minutes of Google research:

2-3 tablespoons of olive oil

2 tablespoons of vinegar, I like red wine

1 tablespoon of honey or maple syrup

A teaspoon of Dijon mustard

Sprinkle of garlic powder

Salt and pepper to taste

A squeeze of lemon if you’re nasty

Shake it up and it oxidizes and looks all syrupy and good. Lasts for a week and usually makes three servings. Ta da. If you want to be fancy, add fresh herbs or chopped shallots, though it won’t last as long. 

The point of this story is that if there is something you have been putting off learning how to do or figuring out, do it today. I bet it’s much easier than you think it is and I bet it will change your life. My salad dressing has changed mine. And though it will not be passed down from me to my descendants, it will perhaps be circulated into someone’s leaves who is reading this. I can think of no greater honor.

• A friend ate my dressing and called it “zesty” and “very French.” So there ya go.

• I went to double-check that line from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, but turns out it should probably be attributed to a translator, John Anster. But you know what? Still great advice:

Lose this day loitering—’twill be the same story
To-morrow–and the next more dilatory;
Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting o’er lost days.
Are you in earnest? seize this very minute–
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it,
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it,
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated—
Begin it, and the work will be completed!

• Salad dressing inspired me to make good guacamole, also one of the simplest recipes I have fucked up consistently for 20 years. Any other great simple recipes out there that you can recommend? What else have you learned lately that has changed your life?

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CW: Body stuff, weight loss stuff

I hesitated to write about this, partly because I’ve clearly abandoned this project for a few months and partly because it wasn’t an action I completed until AFTER I turned 40. But I think the before 40 conceit is out the window at this point. I will not admit to failing to do 39 new things. I will admit that I remain the same sluggish, casual person I was at 39 and 29 and 19 now that I’m in my 40th decade. I’ve always loved to put things off, to quit, to lounge, and to dreamily stare into nothing more than I like doing just about anything. Everything I’ve ever accomplished has been done by pushing relentlessly against my fundamental nature, so in a way I am the hardest working lazy person alive. A Sisyphus shoving against my own personality. When I end up back at the bottom, failing to do what I’ve set out to do because I’d rather sit in a hammock and think about bugs, I must start the process of writing or whatever all over again. Accepting this is good. Learning to begin again is the basis of every morning

And that’s why I am proud of this one—I actually finished a weight lifting program. Unfortunately, I look almost exactly the same and everyone I try to talk to about lifting is visibly unimpressed by my mid physique. I say unfortunately because I know we’re living in a Time where Ozempic face is de rigueur. It’s quite a trip being 40 and a woman right now, because the horrific heroin chic of the nineties and low slung jeans of the early aughts is back in such full force it’s like the decades of body positivity messaging were never even conceived of as a possibility. Celebs just keep showing up looking “stunning” according to Pop Base, magically 40 pounds lighter from eating turkey sandwiches and going on long walks. The lying is insane, not only because it’s so transparent, but because it’s so cowardly.  And yeah, it’s bad for society. There, I said it.

If you don’t spend time on TikTok or social media, you may not be aware of what a trend weight lifting has been for women the past few years and what a hard turn the algorithm recently took away from heavy lifting for functional muscle mass towards degenerative childlike slimness once again. Exercise and weight loss are so inextricably linked in our culture that most people can’t think about one without the other and not to sound paranoid, but it’s an evil conspiracy. Because exercise can make us strong and not thin, it can build muscle that protects from cancer and osteoporosis and not make us thin, it can increase your stamina, lift brain fog, prevent dementia, help your hormonal balance, improve your mood by decreasing depression and anxiety, prepare you for survival in a zombie apocalypse—and STILL not make you thin. And yet, right now, if a form of exercise isn’t making people thin no one wants to hear about it. Instead, we’re asked to chase a body composition mostly only available to people just out of puberty or on drugs, a shape that will make us more tired, deteriorate our strength, and exhaust our minds. 

Okay, you’ve heard it all before. We all know, even though we are currently pretending we don’t and it’s actually so cunt that every pop star is gaunt again. So, what about that weight lifting program?

Over the years, I’ve exercised on and off and from like 2020 through 2023 it was mostly off. That sounds like a long time, but with a Pandemic and releasing a book and then wandering aimlessly, my physical self was not my priority. It probably would have been better for me if I had made it one, but I didn’t. Oh well. Start again. Especially when it comes to exercise, because it does add up. Years of biking have made my thighs strong in a way that doesn’t match the rest of me, for example. The cumulative effect of what we do for ourselves can be lifelong. In September, the cumulative effect of fucking up my left knee took me down and one morning I just woke up unable to walk on it. That’s what made me return to the gym after a few weeks of icing and elevating it back to semi-normalcy. Because the cumulative effect of neglect can also be very powerful. You can do nothing and your body will find a way to do something to wake you the fuck up. 

After three months or so of just doing random stuff with dumbbells and weight machines, I followed a fitness influencer named Jessica Bickling who is a body builder. Her goal is to put on lots of muscle, which is not the same thing as strength necessarily. That’s the most confusing part about weight lifting that I don’t think most people know. You can lift weights in a range that will build muscle size and you can lift in a range that will build muscle strength and someone with smaller muscles can be stronger. I don’t really understand why, but if you pay attention to the variable body shapes of different athletes it becomes more comprehensible. Our bodies adapt to what we ask them to do regularly which is why a guy training to do shot put can throw a heavy weight much farther than a guy training to make his arms look big. So lifting extremely heavy amounts briefly and regularly will make you stronger to support that movement, but won’t necessarily stretch your muscles fibres in a way that dramatically increases size.

I’m only saying this because my goals with my body are not to look like Jessica Bickling, who is a beautiful woman dedicating her life to getting big and selling weight lifting programs to people who admire her. Understanding a little more about weight lifting now, I can see she has planned her program for women like me, not women like her, who already know what they’re doing. It was five days a week, two days for upper body, two days for lower, and one full. Some of her exercises were really satisfying and some felt like they did nothing, which was interesting for me as well. I liked discovering what felt good to do and what felt like a challenge I could meet. She also structured the program to increase progressive overload, which is what the experts will tell you builds muscle. Lifts got heavier and more intense. More challenging. They have to, because if you are consistent you will get stronger before you know it.

Five days a week is a lot and I didn’t really think I would do it, but on afternoons where I felt like a massive loser who can’t accomplish anything I could at least toddle over to the gymnasium and pick up something heavy and put it down again. Some types of exercise stress me out mentally, but lifting doesn’t. It’s just so methodical. You lift an object a certain number of times and then you’re done. There’s no one screaming, “faster! harder! get it girls!” At the top of a classroom. You don’t have to be particularly great at anything, graceful or flexible or capable of great endurance, just to get started. Having a program someone else designed makes the number and type of exercises you do their problem, not yours. When you get through the list, you are done. 

My mother has two sisters and all three of them have various maladies related to very thin bodies and bones and terrible balance and destroyed cartilage. One of them was on medication for her osteoporosis that made her bones even harder, which then made them less flexible and prone to breaking. Over the last ten years she’s broken her wrist, her femur, and her back just by slipping and falling. I think young people imagine you go go go through life and then suddenly you’re done and lay down in your bed and smile and slip away. No! It is far more likely that you will start to break down and potentially face years and years in and out of rehab centers, increasingly less mobile. And this is supposed to be a normal price to pay in exchange for looking gutless in Calvin Klein. Don’t let them take your bones. Don’t let them take your muscles. 

Anyway, now, I actually love going to the gym and reading about what people do there and their goals. I think it’s so interesting and I know I am boring the hell of of people when I talk about it, especially because as I said I look exactly the same and they clearly think I’m a fraud. Why would anyone do anything that no one else can see?? Aren’t we all on this earth to be perceived?? I am stronger, even if only I will ever know it. My knee is vastly improved. And I stopped taking Wellbutrin. Something has happened, something so transformative that even I, a 40-year-old quitter, finished a 12-week written exercise program for the first time and then continued on my own to go to the gym and lift weights—though I now only do it 3-4 days a week. I’m not Hercules. But I am going to head over there right now as soon as I’m done typing this and looking at my phone a bit and then watching these little sparrows roll in the dirt by my picnic table where I’m typing. You can’t change too quickly, but you will change inevitably. 

• If you are interested in weight lifting there is a lot to learn, but it’s not complicated. Fitness influencers simply make money off of complicating it a lot of the time. SO the learning is just understanding the basics through all the noise. Happy to answer any questions people have if I can, I am always learning more, too.

• Some people I follow:

-Jeff Nippard: he is a for real body builder and takes steroids, but he breaks down basic aspects of lifting in a very simple and science based way. I’d look him up on YouTube for more long form explanations.

-Ariel Yu: She does very simple videos on Instagram explaining form and what part of the body you’re working out which is helpful.

• I didn’t talk about mobility in this because it’s something I am working on building a better routine about. I stretch before every lift, but I could do a lot more mobility exercises. Don’t neglect your joints and flexibility. Treating your body holistically is beautiful and I am trying to every day.

• From Shari Dworkin and Michael A. Messner, explaining that fitness magazines tend to work as a salve on individualistic concerns: “The kinds of individual empowerment that can be purchased through consumerism seriously reduce women’s abilities even to identify their collective interests, [leading to] a radical turning inward of agency toward the goal of transformation of one’s own body, in contrast to a turning outward to mobilize for collective action.”
  

  Is my lifting diatribe falling under this same condemnation as weight loss consumerism? Yes. But I will stand by the idea that if you are going to spend a lot of time on physical self-transformation over societal transformation, it better be something that actually benefits your mind and health instead of hurting them both.

• What do you think? How’s the gym? How are your hips?

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The first time you do something can be the most exciting, but it can also be the worst time because you don’t know what you’re doing. This obviously applies to sex and to going to Mardi Gras. Travel brings me much joy, but I’m still a bad planner. The best part of planning for me is looking at a map to see how close things are and then at some photos to imagine myself in the photos. The end. I can’t say how often I’ve arrived at a place only to Google search what there is to do there. It’s very bad and I’m trying hard to change. So even though going to Mardi Gras has been something I’ve wanted to do for actual decades now, I basically did the exact same thing once again, arriving on the very last day of a celebration that had been going on for weeks.

I am very blessed, however, because I was accompanied by three people who put in a lot of work to make sure I went certain places at certain times, particularly my friend Rebecca who arranged reservations at restaurants and tour guide trips and all sorts of things a vacation needs if it’s going to be more than wandering new streets. That said, wandering during Mardi Gras would be enough, because there is so much to see and do without any agenda at all.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—tourism is inherently rather evil and I am unlikely to stop anytime soon and I am conflicted about that and nobody cares. My inner conflict is not a sufficient penalty for my engagement in it. I assume hell will be there waiting eventually. I also kind of assume that if I live a long enough human life span, I’ll see a time where it’s not really possible to travel with the ease I can now, for a multitude of reasons, most of them apocalyptic. So, here we are.

The night before Fat Tuesday, I arrived and had to get across a parade to my hotel so we could then head to one of those dinner reservations I had no part in making. I wish very much I’d appreciated the long time I spent waiting behind a pissed off crossing guard, because it was one of the more spectacular parades I was able to catch, but I was so stressed out about time. That’s the issue with reservations, I’ll say, versus having no plans. Giant floats passed, gorgeously constructed, dancers, drum lines, musicians, and flambeaux, which are pretty spectacular if you’re unfamiliar with them. I was! And surprised!

We did make it to the restaurant a half hour late, only to find that the hostess was wearing beads and was completely unconcerned with tardiness, saying, “Relax, it’s Mardi Gras!”

It was. Whether in a parade, or beside one, or in a tourist trap restaurant eating red snapper soaked in butter, it was Mardi Gras.

The whole celebration settled across everything in the city, slowing traffic, making drinks sweeter, flames brighter. I am in no way qualified to wax poetically about the culture of New Orleans or anywhere in the south, but I do think that it reminds me of New York in that it is a place layered by so much history that the past zips around like a current of electricity, forming a ghostly grid under everything you can see with your eyes. There’s a lot of tension, like something very exciting might happen at any second, but maybe you’re just stepping into a spot where something very exciting happened long ago and you’ll never know what it was. And it clings.

The next morning, we bought beignets and walked to Bourbon Street, which was about as crowded and full of costumes as you might expect. While we did eventually get drunk, we were not to begin with and it was still intoxicating. One thing I found very surprising is how age inclusive everything appears to be. Young people, families, elderly men and women, were all out in the same spaces, dressed up and throwing and receiving beads. The first string I received was from an old, very drunk man in a wizard cloak who insisted on kissing my cheek. Ordinarily, that would be a no for me, but I was carried away. And yes, there are also old men up on balconies who refuse to throw beads if you don’t show tit, but there were very few of them and it was fun to flip them off and then walk two feet and get your beads from somebody else. 

Mardi Gras is a very unique celebration, though it has something in common with all the best collective events—there is a lot of time for meandering, just the way I like. It goes on and on, and you can dip in and out. We got hungry and found a bar that would later figure into a horrific true crime story a tour guide told us. But before hearing that, it just seemed like a lovely neighbourhood joint filled with people having an incredible time. My friend ordered something that looked like a stew, but there was almost no seating. It is hard to eat stew standing up so we all dispersed to different spots around the busy establishment.

I stood on the corner with a sazerac, soaking in some of the late afternoon sun. It was a chilly week in New Orleans, which stupidly caught me unprepared, just like the flambeaux. What I think were oak trees blew back and forth down the avenue, breaking the golden light into piebald patterns. Something I like to do when I am alone and thinking and a little buzzed is say to myself, “This is a nice moment to be in. Here I am, in it.”

I said it to myself outside on that corner, watching the light and sipping my drink and feeling smugly satisfied with myself for making the journey. By saying it, I’m setting that moment outside of the loop of time, forming it into a little island of experience I can revisit. I can always be there even when I’m here. It is always happening. There I am, in it.

• I found out later you’re supposed to tip the flambeaux but they were really moving very fast.

• I always try to include something interesting I learned down in this section, but there is truly a never ending amount to know about Mardi Gras and New Orleans that it seems a bit silly to pick and choose. But I do find the history of the krewes particularly fascinating, so if you want to read a little more, do so here.

• If you are very familiar with the experience of Mardi Gras, or other Carnivals around the world, I’d love to hear about it.

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One of the hardest parts of growing older, aside from people you love dying and winter disappearing, is that the daily amount of time you spend on maintenance increases every year. To be 100 percent you soon need to start giving 110 percent. Eventually 110 percent only yields 90 percent results, so you up it, working harder, moisturizing more, adding fiber into meals where it doesn’t belong for the sake of your gut. God forbid, flossing. Soon, giving it your all gives such diminishing returns that being at only 70-85 percent starts to feel like good enough.

A glimpse into this phenomenon is available to anyone who has invested heavily in the trappings of femininity, which is largely about maintenance. Once you start doing any new thing to change your appearance, it will most likely require constant updates, like Zoom. You can give up a behaviour, like dying your hair for instance, but that means living through an awkward growing out stage where everyone can see how you’ve abandoned effort. Well-adjusted people can handle that, however I assume most of us are not well-adjusted.

I have fallen into the vanity/maintenance trap with a lot of things. I’m only saved from stuff like constantly getting my eyelashes filled in because femininity is uncomfortable to me. This is something I’ve tried very hard to correct because no matter how neutrally I dress I know I am perceived as a Woman with a capital W. I don’t hate being a woman, some things about it I love, but it feels like a costume for me most of the time and one that doesn’t look quite right in the mirror. I know what other people see, but what I see is a pigeon wearing peacock feathers when I get dressed up or wear makeup or put on jewelry.

Aside from this discordance, I’m also incredibly sloppy, clumsy, and inclined to sit in dirt. Most of my shirts have stains in the crevice between my breasts where food falls. I wear clothes until they’re threadbare, except for anything that needs dry cleaning which I’ll wear once and then forget exists because I’m not going to the dry cleaners for anyone. I like to dress as though I might have to hike over a mountain for safety at any moment, and that is not a mode made for fashion.

I’m trying to paint a picture without anyone accusing me of being a misogynist because we’re at a strange cultural place when it comes to feminism where suddenly it’s more important to seem supportive of Barbie than to support a local domestic violence center or something. It’s great that women are embracing femininity as a way to reclaim fun, identity, and cultural practices that were rejected in a reactionary way many decades ago, but horseshoe theory is very real. It’s kind of coming back around again to a place where not doing your makeup is unacceptable and it’s making me feel insane. This is a long preamble to saying I got a gel manicure (lol) for the first time, because it’s hard to explain why this was significant. It’s not, of course, but it was a strange experience for me for all the reasons above and it continued to be a strange experience as it grew out. It looked bad.

The place I picked is known for doing pretty cool designs and I wanted to choose something fun because it would last, but the communication wires got crossed and it just turned out a glossy pale pink. Oh well. I have had regular manicures in the past and there’s usually a lot of soaking and moisturising and oiling all over the cuticles. It’s a relaxing process. My gel manicurist did none of that. She grabbed a grinding tool and took away my cuticles with it entirely, until some were bleeding and they were all inflamed. It’s funny when you go to any kind of salon service, it’s very easy to just lose your voice. The person administering to you is doing something so intimate to your body and it feels like a huge thing for them to deign to do it at all, how dare you criticize them like some sort of Karen from hell? And if you’ve never had whatever the service is, you don’t even know what to expect because people don’t always discuss these things in careful detail. Like, we all go to the bathroom, but do we explain to each other how we wipe? And so my cuticles were stolen before I knew what was happening and then it was too late. I gritted my teeth and applied Neosporin when I got home.

A few other things I didn’t expect: how hot the little machine was frying the gel material into place on my nail. I kept thinking, there’s no way this doesn’t cause cancer. And I imagined all the people doing this on a regular basis, and the manicurist in front of me inhaling the fumes all day long as she cooked people’s fingers. There’s a lot of stuff we do that could be causing cancer in us right now, many of them out of our control, like drinking microplastics. I dye my hair a lot and it definitely doesn’t smell like not cancer when I do it. So we’re all just kind of choosing what risks to take for vanity or pleasure or obligation. 

As my nails grew long, I did enjoy how falsely strong they felt. It was fun to clack them against stuff, vamping like Cruella De Vil for an imaginary audience. I do think gel manicures perfectly encapsulate what I started this story with, about how maintenance takes over more and more of our lives. The gel really fucks up your nails, especially if removed incorrectly, leaving them rough and splintered. So to maintain you have to go again and again or just reveal your battered fingers. That is what I did, picking them off like a little gremlin weeks after I should have had them professionally soaked off, flicking the opal shells under a table as I chatted with friends over drinks. Then I cut them short again, the tips of my fingers tender after being shielded from the world for almost a month.

Choose what you invest in wisely and make sure to ask yourself if you can do it over and over. Because that’s life, baby.

• Should have gone for something like this:

• A lot of the new stuff I have done is stuff like this, where I can just go pay to get a treatment, and I think I’ve done most of the big ones if anyone has more obscure stuff to suggest.

• Or a good manicurist, I think I could gel up again for a special occasion. Anyone getting married soon?

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As I’ve written in this very newsletter, I have terrible taste in music. Is Liz Phair good? Or is she bad? I’ve seen tweets from respected tweeters that indicate both. Could it be that she is good to those people for whom her music conjures a very specific point in their timeline, an era of dramatic desire and poignant loss, or just a time when they were young? Truthfully, I suspect most music considered good is more about optics and association than its actual quality. Sorry! Not a popular opinion, but it is the one I have. 

As a teenager, I had some of her songs on a mix tape a friend made me and which I listened to obsessively on a trip to Florida. That plane ride was the first time I ever experienced fear of flying. It hit me hard and out of nowhere. 15-years-old and I was throwing myself down on the carpet in the boarding bridge, sobbing in terror. I think I’d just seen that Tom Hanks movie Castaway, which contains a very vivid crash sequence. I was so hysterical, my mother wonderingly told me later, “It was the first time it really seemed like you were MY daughter.”

She tried to shove some sort of pill into my mouth to make me shut up, but having recently had a horrible acid trip I was marginally more afraid of drugs than flying. Listening to that mix tape kept me calm. I don’t think they had in flight entertainment then, at least not the free kind. When I returned to NYC, that same friend burned Liz Phair’s whole album, Exile In Guyville, for me and I listened to it over and over as well. For some reason, I especially loved “Divorce Song,” even though I’d never been divorced or married and still haven’t done either. The song is about loving someone deeply and still being unable to communicate in a way that isn’t excruciatingly painful to you both. My gal pals also loved “Flower,” because the lyrics gave us an excuse to shriek about sucking dick, something most of us hadn’t ever done either. As an adult woman, I’d say the song really is best for the moment before sexual knowledge, when all you have is unfulfilled and overwhelming lust. Or teen hormones.

Despite this fanatic listening, I would never have made an effort to see her in concert if someone hadn’t randomly posted on Instagram that they had an extra ticket. Buying concert tickets, especially for popular artists, has become so convoluted and insane I can’t believe anyone ever does it. Sending a Venmo and showing up where I was supposed to was the best I could do and thankfully it was enough. The show was at Kings Theater, which may be one of the most gorgeous venues I’ve ever seen in Brooklyn, or anywhere. Here is where I regretted my philistinism; perhaps if I cared about things like buying concert tickets I would have come here much sooner. The girls I was technically seeing the show with met me outside. They were warmed and bonded by alcohol and the fact they had planned to go together. I was just there, filling a seat, trailing behind and taking in the scene. The vaulted ceilings, rich red curtains, the carved stairwell. It felt sort of like looking at the Pyramids and knowing humankind will never create anything so good again.

Then, a few feet away, I saw someone I knew. A girl from high school, one of the group who used to yell “I want to fuck you like a dog I’ll take you home and make you like it” with me during late night sleepovers. I remembered playing my burned CD in her CD player, the light streaming into her bedroom and reflecting rainbows off a mobile made of free AOL disks. I remembered my horrible acid trip which happened at her apartment on Halloween, surrounded by a dozen other kids tripping their balls off. We weren’t particularly close, just in the same friend group, and her parents’ apartment was the place where we would go when we skipped school or wanted to drink or do drugs or get fingered. Every group has one house like that where they can go when it’s time to be bad, and that’s where we went. The night of my acid trip, I sat in her bathtub at 5 in the morning, black pomade melting down my face while her mom and dad slept four feet down the hall.

She is now a nurse and seems to be fairly successful and grounded in life, no matter how harrowing my memories of her household. We recognized each other, even though I was in a mask, and walked over to chat. I think I was being weird and that I’m weird in this particular way often, but I don’t know what I’m doing. I only know other people are reacting as though I’m acting weird. So, if we’ve met recently and I was weird, can you drop me a line about what I was doing exactly? She seemed uncomfortable. To me, it felt like a circle coming around, the feeling that life loops and will bring you back to the same places and people eventually in this beautiful, frustrating way. I tried to express that. Maybe that was the weird part. She escaped me and I wandered back to my group, which had formed into an event tighter knot that I circled around like a satellite.

It was getting to be time for the show. Our seats were in front of an aisle, which made it seem like there was more space and was nice. The opener, Blondshell, sounded so 90s it wasn’t even funny. I was mind-crushingly sober and everyone around me was rowdy and smelled like beer. But in the end I was glad, because at a certain point while Liz Phair was singing I cried and it was only my own body responding with a Pavlovian release of chemicals and hormones to the music, bringing me back in time. Just not quite far enough to warn my teen self not to drop acid.

• Hi to readers old and new. I’m sorry for the long delay, I’m sure you have been desperate to read 3,000 words of my diary a few times a week. I was celebrating my birthday which inevitably led to illness. I plan to continue through 39 posts, all things I did before turning 40. I also plan to keep doing new things and maybe will write about them if it seems like people are still opening these emails.

• If you enjoy them and have a Substack, re-stacking quotes in the app seems to be a great way to find new readers and I deeply appreciate anyone who has done so. TRULY!

• Are there any opinionated readers who would like to see more of one thing or the other in these posts? More researched history relevant to the story? More anecdotes about drugs?

• This is Blondshell:

• Who would you cry if you saw them in concert today?

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A few summers ago, I was in a pool with a man ten years younger than me. The pool was in the center of a massive apartment complex and it was a Saturday night, so the usually abandoned facilities were full of people having little weekend gatherings. There were BBQ stands smoking, people out on their balconies looking over the water, folks steaming in the tiny hot tub. One group had set out lots of food and were mixing drinks and talking more and more loudly from the cabanas. The radio was getting louder, too, playing Kesha’s greatest hits. It looked like a birthday party.

“There’s something wobbly about people in their mid-thirties,” said the younger man, observing them. “They’re like fawns learning to walk in a new demographic.”

A bit taken aback, I replied, “Those are my people you’re talking about.”

He was trying to sleep with me, so he answered with something reassuring about my eternal youth. I walk like a massive, confident deer. But I thought his comparison was apt—we are always learning to be the people we are growing into and that involves a lot of stumbles. Not to be morbid, but I think we are learning to not only live, but how to die, by which I mean learning how to not make the fact that we die the key motivation in all our decisions. Death can only be the mildest flavour in a well-lived day, as subtle as the brush of vermouth on the walls of a martini glass. Just enough to make you embrace possibility.

Actually, now that I’m remembering this conversation, I think that younger man also said something like that as I tried to explain what being close to 40 felt like. I said, it was like you can see all this time that has passed and you’re like, well, that’s done and I won’t get it back and the next chunk of time will likely pass really fast, too.

“So, like you’re closer to death?” he asked. 

When I’m 50 or 60 or getting my Happy 130th birthday zap from our AI robot president through my neural pathway feeder, I will feel very ridiculous about feeling old at 40. Actually, in many ways I don’t feel old right now. I have a memory from childhood that I think of as “waking up,” a morning when I opened my eyes in bed under a green felt blanket in my parent’s house on 12th street and was suddenly myself, this soul with a persistent inner monologue of observation and reflection. I had memories from other days, I knew where I was and who I was, but I had not been There before. And the voice that greeted me as myself that day is the same one inside right now. Ageless, annoying, eternal.

The biggest mental difference at 40 for me is that I’m no longer waiting for life to start. Childhood, teens, twenties, those decades I spent expecting something to arrive and start the action and show me who I would be and what I would do. I was anticipating the hero’s journey without realizing it, and while things did happen, they mostly had little narrative trajectory. When I think about “time wasted,” I am usually thinking about how I lived in anticipation instead of action, even as I recognize that I was only capable of what I was capable of at the time. If there is anyone younger than me (or older) who knows what I am talking about, I encourage you to stop waiting immediately. Nothing is coming except the end, but there is plenty of stuff for you to go towards.

My other observation of aging makes me sound like a self-righteous old crank, too, and it is that we should all grow the fuck up.

My generation, the elder millennials joining me this year at the big four oh, is a very infantilized one. At times, this was against our will in accordance with world-altering circumstances that cut off development at the knees. I have, however, undeniably seen many of us respond by embracing babyhood, clinging to it, and demanding not only that we have all our nostalgic comforts, but that everyone around us validate and applaud us for it. And I’ve done it myself! There are so many things I took so long to learn, to investigate, to try, to leave behind, because it was too uncomfortable to do otherwise. And why shouldn’t I find some comfort in this harsh reality? 

I now find this tenderly guarded helplessness really boring even when I’m trapped in my own ridiculous cycle of watching the same TV shows or getting sucked into Girl Dinner discourse on Twitter. Because I’m not a girl anymore and that’s for the best. It’s an absolutely amazing thing to grow up, to mature, to have responsibilities and obligations, and so many histories. To sort through piles of clothes and get rid of the jeans you’ll never fit into again, to find an old baby shirt at the bottom of the pile, smile, fold it up, and tuck it away. It’s fantastic to stack your old deranged journals on the shelf, to appreciate the taste of olives as your sweet tooth fades away. I’m an adult who can do things and make decisions and be exhausted by having to do the dishes again. That’s nothing to hide from and the more I face it, the more space opens up around in front of me. Life is not as cramped when you’re not trying to freeze in place. There is so much grace and beauty and amusement in getting older and the art is doing it without calcifying at a spot in your timeline, refusing to take another step.

I’ve really appreciated this newsletter as a way to make myself oil the joints of experimentation. And for the unrecorded record, I did do 39 new things, I just didn’t get my ass to write about them in time for my birthday. Too much time spent having fun, I guess. But I will keep writing about them and do even more things, uncomfortable things, especially once spring is here and I can go hang-gliding. Feel free to keep reading or unsubscribe. Thanks for making it this far, and I hope you’re doing new things and I’d love to hear about them. Discovery is wonderful when shared.

Anyone reading this, and me, are just individuals with only so much influence and plenty of limitations. Collectively, we are stewards of the world. I feel a deep personal failure when I consider how I’ve not taken up that job and hopefulness when I plan ways to correct that in the next four decades. Action! Adulthood! Aging! Yes, I turned 40, and it’s a new thing that I really recommend doing if you get the opportunity.

• What makes you feel like a grown up in a good way? What are you looking forward to as you age?

• P.S. I really am so sorry for falling behind. One of the new things I did was go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and it completely derailed my life. Worth it!

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At one of my grandfather’s nursing homes, they continuously pumped music from the 1940s and 50s into the courtyard. It was probably intended to be comforting to the residents, but was more of a soundtrack to depression. The building complex in Williamsburg where I went to get my Gua Sha treatment was one of those complicated pieces of modern architecture where there are indoor and outdoor staircases, sunken patios, an open air corridor, and no clear entrance. In that corridor there was music from the 2010s playing in a way that made me think of that nursing home and deduce that this must be where millennials come to die. 

Gua Sha is a traditional Chinese medicine practice, and the woman who performed The Act was an acupuncturist. However, in every story I’ve ever heard about a professional Gua Sha treatment, the description involved pain, redness, and even lengthening spines. So, I might need to do this a few more times with different people in order to reach some personal consensus, because this professional gave me the gentle touch. I didn’t expect it. I believe she was Russian and she spoke to be in a very blunt way that usually prefaces rough treatment. Her manner was abrupt, but her care was tender. The second I walked in to her private office, she demanded I take off my top. Happily!

Once I was topless, she asked what I was hoping to get out of this treatment. Unlike acupuncture, Gua Sha is something people can more or less do at home, so there has been an influx of influencers appropriating the practice for content and views on social media. Most of them have actually had fillers, though I am not the cosmetic procedures police.

But I have been touched by the algorithm. Even though I know better, I did hope the treatment would have some effect on my face, perhaps changing it into a better one. In reality, it’s not something that will give you a chiseled jaw or magically fill your under-eye hollows. It drains the lymphatic system, or at least the part of it on your head and neck. That might make you look less puffy, but catering to vanity is not the goal so much as overall circulatory health. I still wanted to try it, because having your face touched feels good in the right context.

I did not think it would be acceptable to tell her my reason for being there was “to turn back time” or “I like being touched hehe.” Instead, I said that I wanted to see if it would help with my sinuses, admitting I have allergies. That is true, however they don’t start ruining my life until early March.

“I have a needle for that,” she told me drily. When I asked how much this needle cost, she told me it’s not included but she doesn’t like when her patients suffer from allergies. I was getting the needle for free.

It’s slightly shorter than a thumb tack and currently embedded in my right ear, held in place by some incredibly powerful glue. I’m supposed to leave it in for ten days, at which point my debilitating spring allergies that have slowly mutated into an oral allergy to all the best fruits in the world will be gone. Do I think this will work? I have no idea. But I’d try most things at this point. I’d pay lots of money directly to some sort of No Allergy Subscription. I’ll definitely take a free ear needle.

After she located the right puncture point by having me hold a metal rod in one hand while she poked the ear with another metal rod at the end of a wire, it was time for the Gua Sha. I laid down on a table that was radiating heat at an almost unbearable level. I tolerated it until she got up to put a heat lamp on my front, so I’d be evenly cooked, at which point she turned everything off at my request.

Trying to do all these new things, I’ve become quite self-conscious about how easy it is to BUY new experiences and how many of the things I’ve found to do are a form of pampering. I feel lazy and gross about it—yet it’s also afforded me “permission” to do the things I’ve considered doing for a long time. As I’ve gotten older, a lot of those fantasies have been focused on maintaining a youthful appearance without invasive surgery through some special application of stem cells and Vitamin D rays. Unlike everyone who has come before me, including the richest most well-connected people in the world, I alone shall defy both aging and, ipso facto, death.

The doctor swept her flat white Gua Sha tool up and down my face and neck after applying some sweet smelling cream. As predicted, it felt divine to have the cool edge of stone rubbing my cheeks and temples. I kept waiting for her to put her back into it and pop some blood vessels; she persisted in treating me like the most fragile porcelain, or perhaps a bloated beached whale about to burst.

I did not look different afterwards. I do not know if I would keep paying someone to do this. I do know it could not possibly be the same if I did it to myself.

When I got up, feeling snoozy, I put on my top and looked out the window into another wing of the crazy building. Floor after floor was completely empty. For a few moments, I imagined I’d just experienced a luxurious spa treatment right at the end of the world, when everything is crumbling yet folks are still going through the motions because there’s nothing else to do. Sweeping, gentle, tender moments at the end, with an easy listening soundtrack.

• This article from 2021 covers why the practice got so popular on TikTok in particular around quarantine time (everyone was at home and feeling the slow march of time). And there is also a list of AAPI-owned brands if you want to buy a tool to use at home.

• Dr. Eileen here is demonstrating in this video that you don’t have to drop a lot of money on a tool either, there are things to use on hand that can work for scraping therapy. The soup spoon was very popular for demos as people shared what historically got used in their families.

@anew.acuGua sha/scraping therapy 🥄 is one of the oldest tools in Chinese medicine and culture. It helps decrease inflammation and regulate oxygen exchange in the lungs. Try this technique to help you breathe better. #asthma #anxietytips #anxietyrelief #breathe #breathingtreatments #respiratoryinfection #sorethroat #remedy #diy #tutorial #sinusrelief #congestion #learnontiktok #TikTokTaughtMe #TikTokPartner

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I dressed up for Sleep No More, and I’m now pretty sure that the people working in the bar serving as a holding cell for guests are instructed to comment on people’s outfits. Three different employees said something about the sparkles on my shirt, in a very similar tone. It made me hopeful that once inside, the same shirt would attract a performer and I’d get to have one of those elusive one-on-one performer interactions I’ve heard so much about. Sadly, this was not the case.

Both the people I went with had them, however, though I didn’t know that until after the show three hours later. I am still horribly jealous. 

If you have somehow never heard of Sleep No More, a New York theater institution soon to close, it is an interactive play set up in the McKittrick Hotel. Guests wear masks and wander through many floors of rooms with different themes, and sets that change as the performers follow their pre-determined routes up and down stairs. Also following the routes are crowds of people trying to understand each character’s storyline, the performer at front leading the group like a mother duckling. You can go dozens of times, more probably, and see a different part of the story, which is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Unfortunately, I somehow managed to not see any storylines. Readers, I do not know what is wrong with me, but for almost the first hour I saw no one except other masked guests. I fell asleep for a little while on a bed in a big room decorated like a psych ward. Sometimes a group would rush past me as I wandered, but it felt beneath my dignity to run after the the train of joggers. Later, my friends told me that this night was far more crowded than they’d ever seen, probably because the show is about to end next month. Yes, I’d not gone all these years and like everyone else I was rushing to catch it before it was too late.

A lot of my experience of Sleep No More was like walking through a touchable museum of the macabre. One room I visited several times, a place hung with plants and filled with boxes stacked with jars, a Witch’s apothecary. I imagined living there, and being that witch and I enjoyed it. My own little play.

Bored, I kept going into darker corners. The first time I walked through a pitch black hallway, my heart was pounding, anticipating a jump scare like on a Haunted Hayride. Nothing happened over and over, so soon I was walking casually into doorways and around corners filled with nothing but the sound effects of ghosts moaning. 

The first “performance” I saw was through the holes of a shed. Inside, a nurse character was with someone I thought was a guest who had their mask removed. I couldn’t see the nurse’s face, only the guest as she listened. The guest was very beautiful, with big dark eyes and long hair, perfect skin. She was almost too beautiful and the words the nurse was whispering to her played vulnerably across her face as I watched like a creep from outside. But she was dressed in a very modern outfit, and even had the telltale strap of a locked phone purse that many of us were wearing. Then the nurse stood and the way the guest reached out to her read as fake to me, like she was an actress as well. And I felt disappointed, like the thing I’d witnessed on her face that I thought was real was not, which should be expected at a play. Yet it was sad that it was fake anyway, somehow. 

But then later, my friend Paris told me they had a one-on-one interaction with the nurse as well and they described more or less what I’d seen through the shed wall. So what was real? And maybe that’s the more interesting part of the show, and rare to see.

We were initially escorted to the play via elevator, where the operator warned us that not everything is “as it seems.” There are rumored to be many secret rooms, which quite a few people have seen. But there are also not-so-secret rooms that people don’t seem to enter much because of traffic patterns. I walked down an empty staircase and then through a door marked “Electrical.” It was indeed another complicated set piece inside, leading to a huge empty ballroom. I was standing there alone when it flooded with people chasing some of the cast. The actors enjoyed a scene up on a stage that was set with a banquet table, moving in slow motion through a bacchanal, covered in blood. 

It went on like this. 

Before my performing energy started going towards improv (sorry! It’s true!), I did a lot of experimental theater. I don’t talk about it a lot unless I’m drunk, but it was a bizarre social circle. Some of the men were predators, as you’d expect, some of them I still see in the occasional role on critically acclaimed TV shows. Everyone was very self-important and charismatic. There were a lot of frequently employed tricks to make something art instead of behavior. Flashing lights, long waves of music that lulled you past tedium to hypnotic ecstasy. But the best trick of performance that anyone can use and that I think is relevant to all life is that giving an action your complete undivided attention makes it compelling to watch. Attention is so powerful which is why in the past 20 years there has been such a social project of siphoning it away from people, fraying it, dividing it, stealing it. If you want to change your life, take your attention back. Track where you are putting it, who you give it to, who you want it from. Much of my attention goes into my phone and that’s a big problem for me. It’s a joke how much we are on our phones, but it’s also really not. 

Anyway, at a play where your phone is locked in a bag, your attention is necessarily elsewhere and many of the actors at Sleep No More are putting their whole attentionussy into the smallest behaviors. I watched a hotel clerk carefully fold a playing card into a paper boat and it was enthralling. I wanted to be in the shed with the nurse, I wanted to have a hand reach out and sweep me away from the crowd because I wanted some of that gorgeous attention that only a theater actor working one of the greatest NYC gigs available in 2024, and who is about to be out of the job, can give. 

By hour three, I was running out of gas. My strategy became going to places that were empty with comfortable seating and then waiting for whoever filled them. Back in the ballroom, a couple was dancing to the song “Moonlight Becomes You” by Bing Crosby, and the woman was obviously a trained dancer and the man was obviously not. As they finished and parted ways, the groups with them split in either direction and I stayed sitting against a column. A man in a white t-shirt, jeans, and a guest mask approached me at the back of one line. His arm reached out towards me, slightly to his side. The gesture was like you might make to tease a friend, so I thought for a second he knew me and I just hadn’t recognized him. His hand got closer and closer to my body, my chest, and alarmed I swung my own arm up to block him, hissing, “Get the fuck out of here.”

His hand dropped before we touched and he kept trailing forward, then turned and whispered, “Sorry!”

What the hell was that? I don’t know, but I didn’t like it. It was not welcome attention.

Shortly after #MeToo became a national issue, the performers at Sleep No More attempted to have a reckoning with the widespread sexual harassment at the show. Though I didn’t catch them, there are scenes with nudity throughout the play, and there are a lot of isolated corners where performers are absolutely susceptible to creepy guests who get off on having their faces covered. Theater is itself an institution that is ripe for abuse. And the world is full of people who are not turned on by sex, but by the power rush of taking advantage of others against their will for their own gratification. I’m not sure if anything changed after some of the brave employees came forward about their experiences, but I did feel like I was catching strays as a random female guest, so I’m alarmed for them.

The play is ending, so the matter is theoretically resolved. There are rumors of a similar production taking its place. Would I go? I think the ticket price is high and for the production values it should be. It’s also still lower than a lot of Broadway shows where you sit in one spot the whole time. I don’t know if I’d say that it was worth the cost in terms of actual fun, at least for me. On the other hand, my friend Amanda shared that she’d been taken to a secret room by the Taxidermist, who fed her a sugar pill shot full of green dye. If that had happened to me? I might be a convert.

• Here’s the report from 2018 about the harassment and alleged assaults.

• It me:

• This experience has made me want to go to more theater, especially the weird stuff, so any recommendations are welcome. Seen anything you loved lately?

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There are some NYC tourist traps you will easily fall into through the course of 39 years here, but the Statue of Liberty is not one of them. I do not have to pass through it for work and they don’t sell candy there, unlike the M&M store. I also don’t have extended family visiting who want a tour guide. My family is small and mostly in New York already, plus pretty elderly. I haven’t done a survey, but I assume everyone who has wanted to go went before I was born. 

I bought a ticket to go to the crown on a rainy afternoon in the middle of the week before school lets out. I’ll tell you right now—I did not go up to the crown. 

There were so many steps to the journey, within the statue itself, but also to reach the boat there in the first place. In fact, I’m going to include a little map and some SEO in this post so people looking to go can more easily find functional instructions. The port for the boat to the Statue of Liberty is in Battery Park, but you have to physically get your ticket after buying it online inside the Castle Clinton Museum.

That took me a while to figure out and then I dropped my ticket in the bathroom at the Castle and had to go back and look for it. After passing the ticket check, which is separate from the ticket booth, you go through the first leg of security, a truly bizarre liminal space. It almost looks like airport security except there’s no clear designation for where to go after you’ve gotten the pat down. You are no longer their concern, figure it out, asshole. Everyone did want to know if I was wearing a belt, I guess in case I tried to choke out Lady Liberty. Not without your consent, ma’am.

You are allowed to bring a knife, but only if it falls within a specific size range.

It was drizzling and the river was covered in a fog so thick it had a personality, perhaps even a sense of humour. The Statue and Governors’ Island and Ellis Island bobbed around in the murk. The crowd seemed big to me, but I’m sure at peak times it’s absolutely soul crushingly horrible.

There was plenty of room for us on the boat, which was followed by a bunch of different birds hoping to eat tourist scraps. I saw ring-billed gulls, sparrows galore, and a lone cormorant. I decided to stand out on the deck, hovering in a corner and enjoying a quiet moment alone. I wondered why no one else was jockeying for the position until we started off and the loudspeaker blasted to life right in my ear. I did the exact same thing to myself on the way back, standing in a different corner that also had a loudspeaker I didn’t check for. The recorded message was some nonsense about America and very peppy.

The boat makes a long loop around the statue, pulling into a port on the far south side. I don’t know if that is on purpose to give viewers a more dramatic first look at the star of the island, but it works. I have obviously never seen it so close and you know what? It’s cool. It’s a real big statue of a lady with beefy forearms and she looks rad coming out of the mist.

Her proportions are surprising. She seems both huge and smaller than you’d guess after placing your memory of her outline on the horizon against her actual scale by your side. The mind can’t balance the two pictures out.

When we disembarked, I wanted to be as efficient as possible, so I watched to see if everyone waiting to get on board to leave could fit, judging how soon I’d have to get in line to get home. Then I sped walked to the pedestal. Again, security to enter the statue is weird. They want to double check belts. Yet, you can bring liquids that convincingly look like water inside. Sadly, I really was carrying water.

There are a lot of steps up through the base, however, I think they make a real meal of telling you exactly how many. It’s more of a psychological pressure of having to take the stairs than a really abnormal number of stairs to take, if you know what I mean. Places for people to have panic or heart attacks are marked as “refuge” spaces, which is even more alarming.

When you are up as far as you can be without getting into her body, there’s a balcony to check out the view. There were a lot of kids running around in the narrow walkway and a couple who seemed to be on a first or second date. The islands dipped in and out of the white, sometimes some ghostly trees, sometimes some industrial buildings making a haunted appearance. There was a lot of construction going on below, and little green. The lawns were mushy brown for the season, the branches bare. The light was gray in the most unflattering way possible as my selfies later confirmed. 

I went back inside, where the parks department guards had just changed shifts. If you buy a ticket to the crown, you are given a bright pink wristband that you must put on in front of the ticket teller. The guard cut it off as I crossed into the next zone, up a small flight of stairs which I expected to continue as it turned onto a platform. To my unpleasant surprise, the platform revealed a different staircase, a thin spiral rising up from my claustrophobic nightmares. Now, sitting comfortably on my couch, it’s easy to see I should have sucked it up and climbed, even though it would have just been the same view through a smaller peephole. At the time, I felt like quitting was the best choice and exited through the down staircase. A different guard, who saw me enter on the other side of the pedestal moments earlier, made no remark. I’m sure it’s a common occurrence. 

Down all the many stairs I went, past the refuge areas, and out through the turning gates. I reached the pier right as another boat arrived and found the special deck corner for the ceremonial deafening.

The boat home stopped to pick up more tourists on Ellis Island, so now I have been there for the first time as well, entirely against my will. The place only ran as a federal processing center for immigrants from 1892 until 1954, despite its enormous NYC reputation. I have looked and seen someone with my great-grandmother’s name who arrived there in 1922 on the Oscar II. Unfortunately, as a callow youth I never checked with my grandmother if it was her and now she is dead. On the other side are about 44 Lutkins and I can only imagine I am related to all of them in some capacity. I believe one of them is my great-grandfather in 1930; again, I’m not sure.

I wanted to write something concise and pithy about American exceptionalism and how well-encapsulated it is by the narrative around both the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, but I think this newsletter might be too stupid for that.

Finally, finally, we arrived back in Battery Park and I dragged myself painfully home. The next day I was so tired I felt like throwing up. I now think that the Statue feeds off the souls of visitors and the whole ploy of making it a tourist spot it to keep the demon full. Otherwise, she’ll climb down and wade across to Wall Street and set her torch to the bull.  

• Daryl Dixon seeing another version of the Statue of Liberty in a zombie destroyed Paris.

• The statue in Paris was given to France by America three years after they gave us a bigger, better one. As described in Atlas Obscura:

The statue itself was given to the city of Paris in 1889 by the American community in Paris to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution. In characteristic American fashion, the statue was officially inaugurated on the Fourth of July (a date not at all associated with the French Revolution) rather than Bastille Day (a mere ten days later, and often described to the uninitiated as the “French Fourth of July”). To be fair, the inauguration was presided over by French President Marie Fran­çois Sadi Carnot, who probably had other things to do on Bastille Day (also, the statue’s tablet bears the date July 14, 1789, as well as July 4, 1776).

• I know it’s propaganda, but Emma Lazarus’s poem still kinda gets me…too embarrassing to admit??

• Was I right to skip the crown?

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Though I have some semi-famously gone on many dates, I’ve never done speed dating. It is an activity that has been heavily featured in movies and TV shows about swinging singles, which makes it seem easy to access, but the reality of actually signing up to do it is very different. When I’ve looked into it, it is is hard to find events that fit my age range and interests. They’re often expensive as well, and there’s something about straight speed dating that makes me envision 50 women circling 15 finance bros. Unfair? Too bad, this is my newsletter.

The Bush, a venue that self-identifies as a “Dyke Bar for all of the queer community,” posted on Instagram that they were doing a speed dating event for people 35+ and I was sold. It ticked all my boxes and cost less than $20. The night it rolled around, I was less convinced, even though I already had a ticket. It was rainy, The Bush is in Bushwick. Crossing from south to north Brooklyn is a psychological barrier more than a geographical one. So, thank you to this project and my ten active readers, because it was the thought of all of you that made me put on my sexy boots and go.

The bar space is set in a large room that people familiar with Bushwick can easily imagine. It has the shape and high ceilings of a converted garage with a huge window front that they have discreetly hung with banners to block curious viewers. There are lots of picnic tables and a banquet, as well as an actual bar built along one wall where a few couples were already sitting. Because of my pathological timeliness, I was one of the first people there who was not already on a date. There were two gender neutral bathrooms, one of which was explicitly labeled as being for “pee pee no poo poo” which I avoided. I don’t make promises I can’t keep.

As more speed daters trickled in, making eye contact became quite charged. Everyone was scoping out their potential five minute dates. There was a rum special, which I ordered and which was heavily flavored with essence of banana. The host greeted me as I shuffled though name labels, telling me we would get started soon. This was not true, but I ended up on an unofficial date with another gal who stood by my bar stool up until the event began. She was very smart and thoughtful and interesting, which is something I can say about everyone I spoke to that night. I was going to add that would not be the case if I was being rotated from straight man to straight man, but I honestly do love and enjoy a lot of straight men I know. Friends I have cultivated, people I respect. The main difference is that it is very rare that a woman treats me like I’m not a person, an attitude I do get from men, especially on dates. While not everyone I chatted with was interested in me or even someone I would want to talk to much myself, none of them looked at me like I was an NPC with boobs and I appreciated that.

The host finally announced that the speed dating would begin and started herding us into some kind of formation. It took a while. I decided to make an executive decision and sat across from Deb, who had been alone at a table for a bit. Unknowingly, I’d taken the side that would not be moving, which meant every round a new person came to my table. It made me feel like an interviewer, receiving each prospect and going through their CV. Speed dating is A LOT of talking and I enjoyed it. I do like meeting new people and there was the safety net of knowing it would be over soon and I could meet a new person if this one wasn’t working out. 

I’d say the flaw in this particular speed dating event is that there was no way to progress to a real date without demanding someone’s contact within a very narrow window of meeting them. My understanding is that speed dating usually has some option to give the organizer names of people you’re interested in and if there’s a match, they let you both know. Maybe I’m making that up, but it really makes the most sense. Here, all was chaos. 

Deb and I broke the ice. She was probably in her early fifties, and made a joke about how she’d been alone at the table due to ageism. Fifties might be out of my age range, never say never, yet she was an attractive person and I’d say we have a lot in common. But she soon told me of plans to go to a wedding where her very first girlfriend was getting married, and about other plans to do a Magic Mike routine as a gift on the big day. It was a surprise for the bride. And she’d never met her ex-girlfriend’s future wife before, so this would be their introduction. This is wild to me on so many levels and I was somewhat relieved for this unknown couple when Deb admitted a knee injury might stop her from doing her dance. I might not be gay enough to understand this whole dynamic, but I think I know a power move when I see one.

We switched off and I met a slew of people: a musician from the Bronx, a gal from North Carolina with a podcast who looked at me like I offended her by being there and didn’t ask a single question, an oncology nurse, a high school teacher from Queens. Most folks seemed to be single, though one woman was in a relationship with a man and looking for a new girlfriend after splitting with someone who didn’t quite fit into her primary relationship. We were not a fit.

I think I expected mostly Bushwick queers, but there really was a mix, probably because of the repeated talking point that finding events that are age appropriate for older queers is not easy. I chatted with a woman who told me she grew up Orthodox and married at 18, and then discovered her first lady love in a Zumba class. Then my last date was with a very serious French surgeon who was in the U.S. to do research for a year. There was the potential to get back to surgery and make a lot of money here, but she admitted she felt disgusted with the American healthcare system. She was probably one of the most compelling people I spoke to that night, which isn’t a knock on anyone else; at times, the moment is just right for a conversation you’ll think about for a long time afterwards.

She did not feel very interested in me, I discovered. It was my last date, the karaoke machine had come out, two people were dueting in the back on “Shallow.” What the hell. I told her I’d probably be in Paris in the summer if she was and maybe we could meet up. Politely, without anything being said directly, this was declined. Look, she’s a surgeon. She can do better and I respect that.

On the other hand, if the speed dating hosts had a better system in place, I would not have had to look anyone in the face while being rejected. Ultimately, it builds character. And I’ll admit, I ducked out before a couple of ladies who were lingering could approach me. Not because I wasn’t interested, per se; mostly it was because I was talked the fuck out.

I caught the bus home in the rain and stopped for some emotional support cheese puffs at the deli. There, I had the best encounter of the night, when their cat Oreo stomped out meowing and demanding pets. I truly thought he was dead, so it was a great finisher to an evening of new experiences.

• Support The Bush, we need it.

• I’m doing this at every wedding I’m invited to from here on out.

• Would you ask someone for a second date at a speed dating event? How did you get so brave?

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If you’ve ever had the experience of starting to do something and immediately knowing it’s a bad idea but it’s too late to turn back, you will know how it felt to go to Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club in Mykonos. It reminded me of a time I agreed to go with a friend to a pumpkin patch, not realizing she was bringing a whole bunch of other friends and their kids and it was a three hour drive. I jumped out of the car at a traffic light before we left downtown Manhattan and ran for it. This was not an option for me once I got into the car on the Greek island, because there seemed to be no stop lights for miles and it was way hotter than New York in October 2005. 

I had landed on the shores of Mykonos with a large group on an expedition from our writer’s retreat, and the crowd scattered in different directions once the gang plank went down. We were all somewhat naturally paired with our roommates, and myself and my roommate Joanna had been chatting with two other roommates, Katy and Halley, who were both extremely excited to get to Lindsay’s beach club in a way that was a little baffling to me because I have never seen the show. They kept quoting her, I assume, and from what I gathered, Lindsay used to really love Mykonos and had a number of catchphrases about it.

We had already all spent several hours in the completely shadeless Delos, an island that serves mostly as a museum of Ancient Greek art and architecture. I’d enjoyed that time wandering alone under the blazing sun, pushing my way through flinty bushes, scrambling in and out of holes, all while wearing a sweat-soaked sundress. I finally found a grove of cypress trees to collapse into for ten minutes before we got on the boat the chic party island across the water. Coming up the pier, my body was swollen with heat. Like a mirage across the asphalt, Katy, Halley, and Joanna gestured to me as they got into the car that magically arrived to pick them up. The Beach Club was on the other side of the island, so to get there and back before the boat returned for us, we’d have to leave right now. There was no time to think. My brain was not involved; yet even as I consensually got into the car, my heart said no.

Now, I did not watch her show, but I will not pretend for a second that I know nothing about Lindsay Lohan. She is just a couple years younger than myself and exploded into popularity around the time when I should have been too old to be jealous, but was not. She was hideously tormented by the media and gossip mill, including the coverage of an incident of domestic violence that actually took place on a beach in Greece. And she iconically dated Samantha Ronson during a pretty homophobic era of time where very few actresses were publicly out—I still remember when she casually admitted they’d “been together for a while” in response to a seemingly innocuous question about their tumultuous relationship. Now, Lohan is married and has probably given birth to her first child. She was pregnant a few months ago and time is linear. She is living, I believe, in Dubai and she had a stand in kiss Chord Overstreet in her return to the screen in a 2022 Netflix holiday movie. I’d also like to share her viral Cameo in which she was paid to come out on behalf of a youth to the youth’s parents, and ended up offering a little life lesson instead.

@shhlanaReply to @olivialaliberte #lindsaylohan #lgbt #bi #queer #comingout #fyp

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All of this to say, Lindsay Lohan is a complicated person and the wisdom she has was hard-earned. However, after being to her Beach House, I do not think she is keeping up with her responsibilities to the property.

The driver’s reaction to the destination name was my first indication that my rising sense of dread was justified. A flinch, an inner grimace, a hint of amusement, a silence. I’m not sure what it was, but if I were him, I would have warned us not to go. Except he was just making his buck off the summer tourists and I’m sure we were not the first group of sun struck women hoping to be star struck at Lindsay Lohan’s Beach House that season, or possibly even that day. The ride itself was interesting, climbing up the hills and then down them again to the water on the other side, passing row after row of white houses with blue trimming, which he explained to us was mandatory. He also tried to share a bit of information about upcoming elections in Greece. He tried. And he laughed when we pulled into the long parking lot to the beach house and I observed that several of the palm trees were dead which was “not a good sign.”

Another bad sign were two enormous cattle standing around the entrance, with massive horns, chewing on I don’t know what—the ground looked entirely dry and without nutrients. Who did they belong to? Where had they come from? Where would they go? I’ve passed random flocks of animals in the country, but they were not a flock. They were two cows, alone, in a place where lack of care oozed across the landscape. 

We got out of the car and the driver sped off, leaving us to walk the twenty feet or so to the entrance. It only took that distance to understand the Beach House was closed, though a few very young people in uniforms darted furtively in and out of the place. The beach chairs were stacked, the bar lights out. When asked, they had no idea when they’d be open again, not just that day, but ever. If I’d put any thought or research into this adventure, I would have read this post from way back in 2019 that said the place was closed or a “pile of rocks.” 

This is total conjecture on my part, but it really reminded me of other enterprises I’ve seen around New York where a very rich person with no business acumen is at the helm of some project and they’ve appointed all their friends to run it and everyone is so disastrously incompetent, but the gravy train is still running so they’re gonna ride it. Like, these kids from the island or Athens are just hanging out there, using the pool, having sex, and doing what drugs are available until the local authorities have the time to officially shut it down. And more power to them! But they were not willing to risk us disturbing this delicate mooching balance and chased off an attempt to at least take a photo together in front of the sign.

By now, I was so hungry, thirsty, and hot, murder was the next thing on my mind. Far down the sand, there stood another beach house of some kind, this one buzzing with people. We approached and the hostess received us in a way that suggested ravenous, dehydrated Lindsay Lohan fans make regular appearances there. While traveling is expensive, I had mostly found prices for food in Greece more than reasonable, but not at this place. Here was the club for people bored of what the private chef is cooking on their yacht. Bowls of lobster pasta for close to a hundred dollars, sandwiches in the forty euro category. Tolerantly, they allowed us to order several sides of fries and ice water. We sat in a row, looking out at the water, steam rising above us.

Looking around at the rich people, I thought about brands. Gucci, Birkin, Louis Vuitton, these are all red herrings. The real rich people fashion flies under the radar of notice unless you’re in on the secret language of stamped leather and wrist charms. I didn’t recognize a single bag or designer on anyone, but I knew they were all so, so wealthy and connected and communicating exactly how wealthy/connected they were to one another at a frequency I couldn’t hear. While Lindsay Lohan and her husband are undoubtedly rich, Lindsay at least was a different class of person, someone who had to make a loud spectacle of herself to build her beach house that was now falling into disrepair.

Or maybe not. Michael Lohan was a commodities broker after inheriting his dad’s pasta business (????) and her mom Dina had the time and money to be her “momager,” before they both glommed onto their daughter’s early success in lieu of productive work. She may have been able to buy property in Mykonos without ever pretending to be her own twin.

After the water and fries were drained, we got the hostess to find us a car back across the island. I got into the front by the driver and he asked for a name, mistakenly thinking we were staying at the hotel and charging the room. I didn’t process that, only thinking how my own name is such a hassle to spell and explain to strangers. So I said my name was Joanna, because there was someone named Joanna in the car and most people can spell that name. Then he asked for a last name. So I gave her last name…in the backseat, the others ladies started to giggle and that, plus the whole escapade, finally broke me and I started to laugh so hard I thought I was going to be sick. Later, they would tell me it sounded as though I was making up a name like a soviet spy seeing objects. 

“My name? Uh… Car... Car Windshield.”

I felt bad if the driver thought we were mocking him, but it was just one of those moments that is so funny for no reason that you can’t control yourself. Eventually, he gave up and drove us back to the boat to get us the hell off of his island.

• Looks like the baby is out and the postpartum underwear is on:

• Someone wrote to me that they thought I was in Greece again. I am sorry to destroy any illusions, but I am writing about new things that I have done in the last year since my 39th birthday and not necessarily in chronological order. However, as crunch time approaches, I am desperately trying to fit in new things I didn’t get to. No matter how much you age, procrastination rules.

• Though if anyone wants to fly me to Greece in the next four weeks, I’m willing. I’ll even check out the beach club again. Who knows, maybe it’s under new management.

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