This has been happening often: a sincere, abrupt love towards the strangers I so happen to be briefly sharing a space with. An amazement at our intersection, the fact that we are all having a morning at the same time, going through the rhythms of our lives unspoken, side by side. I try to extend it, stretch out the love, make it last as long as possible before humanity makes me roll my eyes again.

Our hands overlap on the rail. We are nothing but each other’s oxygen. Nothing but each other.

My lease has officially renewed, which means I have lived in New York for one year. What is there to say that has not been said before?

I go to work, surrender to the zig zags of underground Union Square, float between escalators, and glide between tunnels. I am spat out in the heart of Times Square. If a panic attack were a place. Stimulation swarm.

I force myself to skip like a child when I get off the train.

This is part of my new philosophy of “flirting with life, because life will flirt back.” To have a crush on your own life. Because what is a crush if not potential energy? The space between what you know/see/expect about a person, a day, a night, and what could actually happen. Pure fizzy possibility.

(I am not someone who thrives with routine, so now that I essentially do the same thing every day, this mentality has been necessary)

I skip past the Starbucks where 50 office sirens anxiously await their respective spinach feta wraps. I skip past the Sesame Street characters, splitting a joint, holding their furry heads to the sides of their bodies, engulfed in a cloud of skunk-like smoke. I skip past the spilled milk and the steamy garbage and the executives and the dancers and the children and the cops and the sleeping bearded men, beneath the AI billboards selling software-as-a-service for large multibillion-dollar enterprises.

These worlds exist in parallel, somehow never interacting, yet only centimeters apart. Somehow, in this city, there is enough room for eternal juxtapositions.

A city is when you take everything, and you put it into one place. Everything that humanity can be, inside a sectioned-off arena.

This whole world is filled with VIP ropes. I have been on both sides. There are metaphysical ropes swinging in the air right now.

Every day, everyone is trying to sell me something, and I don’t blame them.

We are always trying to sell each other something. Moments where I realize, no one is trying to sell me anything, shimmer beyond belief.

We are hilarious creatures, and we are trying our best.

There is a naked man near Bryant Park, and he makes me want to cry.

I am amazed at the sounds of the world, these outlandish systems and contraptions we have made for ourselves…

The bulldozers bulldoze their way through my living room. The neon men polish the penthouse windows from godlike cranes. The slop bowl ingredients wait their turn. The rubber hands are gloved. The sidewalk is cracked. The gum on the ground forges black holes.

I can see the moon at noon!

Everyone is remarkable.

I was asked if living in New York has changed me. Maybe it has. I’ve been around the block. I know LA and Austin and London and Syracuse. I am no small-town gal. But here, the sheer volume of humanity is invigorating, electric, hypnotizing, magnetic…

What is there to say that hasn’t been said before?

I stare down the barrel of cliche, and try to dance around it with my wit. To fool us all that these feelings are unfounded, I lean against the opaque wall of my cleverness.

Is it working?

The kids are collecting data, and getting into crypto, and doing poppers, and wearing tabi’s. Doing witchcraft, upcycling, then sleeping upside down.

The kids are making music out of music that already exists. Carving a place in the world out of a very dense and misshapen pumpkin. The kids are contradicting, creating, and regurgitating beliefs. The kids are blindly intersecting. The kids are hugging in hand-me-downs. The kids are stitching TikToks, committing time theft, and learning to crochet.

So what’s your take?

The kids are feeling real opinionated.

100% agree.

Here I smile. I make myself laugh. I flirt with my own life. I have a crush on myself. I keep secrets. I visit the cats at every deli on my street and kiss them goodnight. I speak their language. The cats, they leaned in and told me what is really going on:

This entire city is run by an underground alliance of bodega cats. They keep the shelves stocked and the trains running. They report directly to Mamdani.

The brothers who own the deli on my street cheer when we walk in the door. I met their mother on FaceTime and communicated without words.

So when asked how New York has changed me, I can say this: I feel much more proximal to that “oneness” thing, you know, that whole “we are all one” thing that they’ve gone on about for centuries.

Crying in public is the same as looking beautiful in public, which is the same as screaming in public, which is the same as galloping in public. There is abundance and plenty, as well as deep scarcity, and both are on display at all times.

A city is when you take everything, and you put it into one place.

Becoming a human being on this little street in Brooklyn with my best friends is a privilege I do not take lightly. Every Sunday, we come together and dance.

Our phones are over in some bush, by the side of the dancefloor…

This collage of a city is holding me well.

The thing is (so far) I haven’t needed bird droppings to be lucky. For the most part, on their own time, the moving parts of my life tend to unfold in the most divine way. I dodge traffic and plane delays. I arrive to the ice cream shop to no line, and by the time I finish getting said ice cream, the longest a line has spawned behind me. Right place, right time.

“You’re about to have the luckiest day!” a coworker chirped innocently. Aha. And it began: my plague of magical thinking. A feeling stirred at the bottom of my stomach, the fear of something jinxed. An irrational overestimation of words and words alone, the weight that language can hold.

I hoped for a lucky day. I knocked on all the world’s wood. Bowed before every black cat. I mended every broken mirror. Threw salt over strangers’ shoulders. I repeated manifestations in little circles. I stepped on no cracks.

When the bird shit on my shoulder, I was leaving work hours early today to make a 7pm flight to Austin to visit my dad and surprise one of my best friends at her birthday party. I have been very into intricately orchestrated surprises lately. Apparently, when the lying is for a good cause, some altruistic means to an end, not even a white lie, more of a shimmering silver one, I am an excellent liar.

I recently planned a surprise party for my boyfriend, kidnapped and blindfolded him and led him to the subway, through us through a series of nostalgic activities. This visit to Austin was also designed to catapult me back to familiarity. The big fat burnout blanket was starting to weigh me down, the unfortunate side effect of having an abundant life, yet also needing space to process and recharge. I don’t know when I’ll get entirely used to spending over 45 hours a week in the same room, under the same lights, in the same chair.

Work burnout makes me miss the kind of “burnout” I would get after, say, a dance convention, where such physicality was in the mix, how embodied, to go from dance class to dance class in these cheap hotel ballrooms with hundreds of mediocre jazz dancing preteens with dance moms fan accounts just like me. A static, stagnant, screen-driven burnout is more a burnout of the soul, not the body. So I yearned to uncoil into Austin land, swing on the swing in my dad’s backyard, drive the old, familiar streets, eat a proper chicken fajita for god's sake.

After going through the motions of the airport drills, I found a seat by the window in the food court. This is when I first received a notification that my 7pm flight was delayed by an hour and a half. No problem. Time tumbled on. I went on a long and terrible stroll through the terminals. And then another hour delay. Then another. I asked an attendant if she thought the flight would get canceled. She told me no, stick it out, that’s what she would do if she were me.

I dug all around for just a twinkle of a gut instinct, but was far too tired for one to break through. So I waited. 7 hours, watching fellow restless fidgety humans, eavesdropping on the clash of entitlement from fellow delayees and cancelees, against the zombie-like indifference from TSA.

My series of delays felt like being at the zoo, observing how people interact in long lines, those who cut in line and interrupt. I tracked how uncomfortable we can be in our own bodies, a circus of nailbiters and knee bouncers. Humans, what a strange and beautiful freakshow we are! I scanned family after family, little hodgepodges of each other’s faces.

At last, as midnight turned the corner, and we were set to board in 15 minutes, my flight was abruptly canceled.

The inner zen that had remained intact for the last stint of time had faded, and instead, a delirious rage bubbled up. I rebooked onto a flight the following morning, 6am, and then spent the next two hours searching for my luggage in a chaotic sprawl of suitcases near baggage claim, as well as playing phone tag with a series of non-human voices at different hotels, just to discover every single room was booked. This is when, “Honey I’m Good” by Andy Grammar, perhaps the most maddening song of all time, a song about cheating, or worse, the temptation to cheat, and then write a horrendous song about it, started blasting from the baggage claim speakers.

Defeated, I go back to Michael’s apartment in Queens, crash, wake up at 4am to the sound of a cat meowing disturbingly on the other side of the window, then go through the ritual again.

Now, this cancellation was something that happened to everyone. Inconvenience happens to everyone. My stakes were not high. There was a woman who needed to get to Austin that night, because her son had just had open-heart surgery. I was not that woman. And yet, I have been coming to terms with something about my brain. Call it fate, call it karma, call it superstition, call it magical thinking, call it OCD. My brain blamed the bird.

Yes, I concluded that the bird was some sort of uno reverse bird. Some little slip-up from the universe that subverted me from the path of least resistance. That perhaps, since I am a lucky person, while others may benefit from bird shit on their shoulder, it had a sort of reverse effect on me. In my mind, everything easily attaches itself to some orchestrated, intricate system. That’s because, so many times, I do feel tuned in to an orchestrated, intricate system that informs all things!

But the blurry line between spirituality, signs, omens, instincts, and random chance, and anxiety is a rather blurry line for me. I’m getting much better at distinguishing between the two. I can even laugh at that voice that says: ha. You got the bad bird.

Because there is no bad bird.

Right?

I flew out of London Heathrow on the afternoon of June 13th. Traveling beside Michael, bending through time zones, I surged through a novel about an orphan evicted from her New York apartment after the city strikes a deal to turn its rentals into Airbnbs. Dislocated, she reconnects with a distant cousin in Gulluck, Texas, and moves into the only house on the market: a massive concrete boot once built for a cobbler. Having shed the prior definitions and containers of her identity, she steps up into the role of town shoemaker. It is a whimsical modern-day fairytale. I like to believe I am also living in a modern-day fairytale.

I love traveling with Michael for many reasons: one being that I do not have to carry anything heavy, and another being that even the most tedious rituals of flying (like removing a laptop from a zipped bag in security, or waiting to board, or stalling on the runway) become frictionless, airy, and swift. It’s just a loving excuse to spend time together. Besides, everything is fun when I am with him. We could have fun rummaging through a dump or counting the wood panels in a ceiling.

Michael and I spent nine days away from New York (to which he would say, “missing one week in Bushwick is like… dog years) visiting my home in London, watching cult documentaries with my mom, stopping by our favorite restaurants, and he finally met my extended family. My great-aunt was turning 80, and we surprised her by showing up at her birthday party at the local pub in St. Albans. There was a band of loud geezers playing Wild Horses and photos of her life strung across the walls. I was in the room with people I share blood, name, and features with. I have never gotten used to that. Family gossip floated through the room in a swirl of English accents.

Later, with Michael drawing soft lines up and down my arm, Gingerman on my lap purring his soft aging purr, my mom in her chair, half-absorbed in a game of Words With Friends, calling my dad in Texas, I felt swarmed with a sense of wholeness and belonging.

Meanwhile, another evening in another realm was blossoming out of my reach. In New York, my friends were watching the NBA playoffs on a projector on our roof, overlooking Manhattan’s skyline. They added photos of the night to a shared album I was part of. I swiped through their memories, smiling, shooing away the lurking shadow of the FOMO Monster, and instead focused on my own situation of familial contentment.

In the desire to be two places at once, we often find ourselves nowhere. Not fully. Not really. I closed my eyes and tried to energetically tap into their cheers from across the pond, like pressing an ear into a seashell to hear the ocean.

I know how much Eleanor both values and needs “collective effervescence,” and the glimmer she gets when she feels part of something far greater than herself. At the Forest Hills Stadium, seeing bands together like Parcels and LCD Soundsystem, her second-hand aliveness makes my heart soar. So that night, as everyone was rooting for the Knicks, I was rooting for my friends. My friends’ happiness is my happiness. My friends’ sadness is my sadness. Our apartment is emotionally porous. There may as well be no walls.

When Mamdani won the mayoral race, we ran up to our sacred roof and screamed and jumped, joining dancing, screaming strangers on other roofs, parallel to ours. Progressive silhouettes in distant golden windows. From my vantage point in the UK, I could only imagine that being in New York for the playoffs was that feeling of unity on steroids. Politics out of the picture, and yet also invisibly illuminating everything. The catharsis of caring about something and caring together. People need that on the most fundamental level. Especially now. Especially in these Divided States.

My honest truth will probably come as no surprise to any of you: I have never cared much about sports. Growing up in the high school football capital of the world, doing kicklines at halftime, attending the school that developed players like Drew Brees and Nick Foles, I was always just pretending to care. When sports come up in conversation, my smiles and nods are so obviously fabricated. I feel like a stereotype, the way I cannot follow along. By using “sports” as an umbrella term, knowing full well that each one is a different experience, perhaps I am missing out on a dimension of camaraderie and aliveness that I simply don’t understand. But I’m not going to force it. What I do care about is people coming together. I care about that very much.

I landed back in New York that late evening. Due to the traffic from the final game of the playoffs (Knicks vs Spurs, New York vs Texas, the city I have the privilege to choose to live now, vs the state I had no choice in growing up, a bizarre bandwagon hodge podge of identities) we were barely inching along the tunnel from New Jersey for hours on end. When I finally returned to my hot and empty apartment, I was hit by a familiar truck of inertia that comes from international travel. Earlier, I was invited to a bar in the Lower East Side with the people I have missed so deeply, but by the time I had showered and settled into my home, it was already the third quarter.

I thought of my mom as she waved goodbye from the door in London. The nausea, the jet lag, the depletion, the exhaustion, the post-vacation blues. It was inching towards 3am in my inner clock and rhythms, so I made peace with the idea of crawling into bed and falling asleep to the game on my computer, leaving my window cracked open, so I could cheer along with the echoes from the streets. My limbs had never felt so elastic, stretched thin between cities, one arm in New York, one in London, then a faraway foot still in Austin. It’s difficult to cheer for anything when you’re all spread out like that.

My night was mostly terrible for one reason: the AC was broken, and my bedroom was 88 degrees. I broke into a hot sweat, dove into a stream of bizarre and shallow dreams, then half-awoke to fireworks blasting outside my window. Wild explosions. Everyone was with their people tonight. This was a moment of New York history. I was here, but I wasn’t really here. I felt so cut off from the music, from the celebration. Then, the less beautiful chaos. People were burning things down and flooding the streets. I considered leaping out of my fugue state and running onto my roof, alone. Running to a bar filled with strangers. Getting an Uber for $100 to meet my friends in Manhattan. Whatever. Just up and sprint into the city’s open mouth. Seize the great something.

But my jet lag was a sort of paralysis. It was past 5 am my time, sweat was pearling down my neck, and I was still halfway in a dream. I couldn’t seem to move even if I tried. Then, the breathing exercises. Was anything happening out there really for me? A Texan in disguise? A sports sympathizer? I tried to channel this restlessness into pride and gratitude for getting to live in this city, and happiness for the millions of people who get to celebrate tonight.

But the FOMO monster was already curled up in my humid bed alongside me. The FOMO monster is truly a hideous sight. So slobbery and selfish and cruel, damn you, FOMO monster! A gray and wormlike figure that slithers up and wraps itself around my elastic limbs. It is particularly insidious because its only superpower is to distance you further from both your own body and others.

When the FOMO monster crawls into bed with you, there is room for nothing else. It puts your phone in your hands and sucks you into reel after reel of other people’s joy. The FOMO monster is addicted to feeling bad. It is the most unproductive of any monster! It gets nothing done, I tell you!

This is when I started to laugh at my own absurdity. Jet lag dipped into delirium. As more fireworks cracked open, I screamed into my pillow. I am still unsure whether that scream was born of joy, anger, or frustration, or was some sort of exorcism of the FOMO monster himself. I sighed. I let myself announce to the sticky room: welp, this sucks.

And in that flash of surrender, I fell asleep.

Now, it is June 14th, a new day. The FOMO monster has released its claws from my clothes, but I still feel little shivers of its residue. I wake early because it’s five hours earlier in my circadian rhythms, before the drunk city awakens. I put on a white dress and bolt out the door, to sidewalks filled with broken glass, pizza boxes, tornadoes of trash, and beer.

Balloons fill the streets, and some strangers are still dancing in the morning sun. Everyone is particularly kind to me today. The barista says my coffee order is an excellent choice for such an excellent day. Two women in orange and blue compliment my outfit and make me smile. I nuzzle into a counter seat at a cafe as more fans stream in: a little boy holding an inflated basketball, jerseys, and bucket hats. The whole city was practically fist-pumping the air. I think of fathers everywhere, sharing a love of sports in their sons and daughters, etching some rowdy history in their bloodline.

So I call my dad and hear the wisdom in his voice. He tells me I belong everywhere.

In several hours, I will be floating in my own bubble of collective effervescence. I will be at my favorite dance party in New York: a little oasis in Queens, a day rave on Sundays, all ages, one disco ball, no phones on the dance floor, familiar faces showing up every single week, turning the community into their own little church. I will see all of my friends again and laugh about the comic misfortune of my night before, and I will tell them tales of my perfect time in London.

And at last, the FOMO monster will retreat into his filthy home underground, somewhere beneath the subway tracks and the sewer. He will rummage through the scraps of the city’s aliveness. He is feeling rather weak tonight, but he feeds on your thoughts of elsewhere. I will have no fuel for him tonight.

Dolly Alderton says, “There is this very good (and horribly confronting) meme going round at the moment about the fact that what all women want is to be described. They want their romantic partners to see something in them that no one else has noticed before, and describe and analyze that quality in depth. They want their friends to know them so well that they could answer the most random questions about their preferences — it is the basis of all those quizzes and games at hen dos and birthdays and baby showers. I do not think this impulse comes from vanity, but a need to be understood by those we love and to understand them right back.”

I bask in moments where I get to share my favorite films, or my favorite authors, or my astrological big three (Scorpio, Cancer, Scorpio), or my enneagram (4w3), or my Myers-Briggs (oscillates between INFP “the mediator” and ENFJ “the protagonist” ), or which character in Girls I relate to (Shosh, I suppose), or which Harry Potter house I am in (Ravenclaw, of course), or what the inside of my brain sounds like (a very fast internal monologue of narration, one voice is my own logical brain, sharp and rational, one is a very random haphazard anxious intruder, and one is deep and whispery and wise, paired with very luminous images and daydreams, some of which in first person, some of which in third…)

The mystery of personality and the strangeness of “self” have always puzzled me. Where is this self located? Where is this self shaped? Nurture, nature, nature, nurture. Toxic traits in the stars. Fates in your palm. Mannerisms, energies, the thing that remains intact.

I have only properly articulated these curiosities of mine once, in my essay Moonsand:

“Between the lines of the picture books, I would write my own stories. I would write fairy tales on cardboard boxes and diary entries on my hands. My second-grade report card reads, ‘Audrey has been encouraging her peers to write stories, and she reads her own stories out loud to the class.’ Perhaps that is home – that skinny thread of consistency that never breaks or trembles, hurtling through the turbulence of time passing. My essence. The thing that has always needed to do this, to translate images and imaginings into words and narratives, the same way the adult chemist used to make potions from honeysuckle in the backyard, or the adult lawyer would put their stuffed animals on trial. When writing about the gap between truth and memory, Sally Tisdale describes, ‘a pearl of self traveling intact through time.’ Maybe we all live there, in our little pearls of self. But Tisdale doesn’t even believe in that. She says that we name and manufacture our identity pearls, and in reality, ‘we are each watching what seems a ceaseless parade of selves.’”

I have always been overly prone to introspection. I find that once you start looking inward, and when you are as obsessed with language & articulation as I am, it can be difficult to stop trying to sift through the contradictions of what it means to be “yourself.”

This game of identity, personality, and becoming is formational and universal, yet our conversations around this topic flatten the depths + confusion of the experience. We are bombarded with aesthetics, labels, and self-branding. Cool Girl, Clean Girl, Dark Academia, Thought Daughter, Literary It Girl, Tech Bro, Cottagecore, Twee, Rockstar Girlfriend. A flood of archetypes that can’t possibly straddle the mystery of self. Neither does our advice, from Just Being Yourself to Going Personality Shopping…

These may be the questions I find the most interesting in life, the ones I want to explore in my writing, the ones I like to explore in conversations, and the ones that will remain as a nagging longing to run off and study psychology.

The Eternal Sleepover

When I flash back to my adolescence, I recall a very specific feeling of delirium that only possessed us girls at The Eternal Sleepover, when conversation would grow hazy and exhausted, secrets would come tumbling out like a landslide, and topics would drift into this almost parallel realm of absolute emotional honesty. My favorite part of every sleepover was this precise moment, a threshold, where time slipped off its axis, and we would lie there in the dark, and we would get So Deep.

As an adult, I often grasp for that threshold in my own adult bed, in my own adult relationship, at the wine bar, at the club. But in these conversations, you have to be sober, you have to be kind of exhausted and kind of exhilarated, you have to be at The Eternal Sleepover, and you might also have to be 14…

The Eternal Sleepover is one of the spaces where the self can exist as a sprawling mess, and where definitions melt away into abstraction. The personality quiz slices you up, the algorithm shoves you in a glass jar, the desk job, and the “what do you do?” throw you into a pit of assumptions.

I wonder how much of the self is a pattern or a subconscious reinforcement.

I am well aware of the times I feel most like myself. Recognizing these moments of clarity is a practice. It is an unmistakable sense of ease and presence. I feel like myself when I am around my closest inner circle. I feel like myself when I am lost in my own writing, sentences tumbling out. I feel like myself when I am roaming museums or bookstores or in the perfect seat at a cinema, or when I am dancing.

I feel most like myself when I am in a conversation that’s really doing that thing that conversations can do, where both parties feel like they’re inventing something, discovering something, or resolving something. It is getting to a point where I am so close with my inner circle, not only are our cycles in sync, but so are our subjective experiences. We might be morphing. I see myself in the porousness of my friendships, the way we are constantly shouting, “I WAS ABOUT TO SAY THAT!” The synchronicities are compounding, and our dreams are overlapping. Somewhere, in the back of a very crowded bar in heaven, Carl Jung is looking down at my friend group and winking.

A Sense of Myself

Please, please, please
Tell me how to be
Dress me kindly with your definitions
Fit me nicely into nothing

Please, please, please
Tell me what is me

A swarm of bees play the old tired game 
of what should we be?
Scorpio, Winter, Water, & Thyme
So, everyone agrees?

Please, please, please
Tell me how to be

Toss me a twig of self to grip onto
in the glorious river of my body
as it sings out of tune
and the sail twists, like the sand
I won’t hold shape for long

Don’t let me disappear 
Bite my shoulder 
Leave a scar 
Lend a comet to my name 
Take the pebbles of my shame
into your heavy arms
Now feel them fall asleep

Until the carousel breaks
     from its eternal orbit.

What am I now,
but a shivering light?

A ball of contradictions
hurtling into one another.

Dancing deep inside
of the cosmic vacuum cleaner.

How strange!
To be anything at all:
A voice box
vibrato 
whisper & a hum
sugar cube
shard of light
last sliver of love.

First, she worked as an acting TA at a summer camp. Rose is a radiant actress with a prestigious acting degree. After the summer ended, she became a barista, where her manager abruptly fired her by saying, “I want to do right by you. I just can’t give you what you need.” So, Rose pivoted to childcare. She nannied for a French family who soon let her go for not being French.

“They knew I wasn’t French when they hired me!” Rose told me. She pivoted again, this time towards a Jewish bakery in the middle of Essex Market. Then came dog walking on the Upper East Side through an organization called Hoochie Poochie, where she met a dog named Rocco who once lived in the Versace mansion, and another dog named Waffles who spent half his year in the Swiss Alps.

Throughout all these minimum wage quests, she was simultaneously training for her pilates certification. Except, the studio turned out to be run by a tax-evading scam artist who allegedly owed one instructor over $6,000 and had switched buildings five separate times to dodge rent.

Today, Rose teaches pilates at a studio that pays $17 an hour and nannies in Staten Island, where the parents write keto cookbooks and the father runs a business selling at-home centrifuge kits. She has journeyed tirelessly through the day-job maze. With every twist and turn, comes another borough, another strange microcosm, another jumpscare of corruption hidden inside the most unsuspecting places.

All of this began to feel like something more than a series of unfortunate gigs. This was shaping up to be a crash course in adulthood under late capitalism, where every institution, no matter how pastel-colored or wellness-branded, seemed to conceal some tiny catastrophe underneath.

Because even after all of that, the most spiritually corrosive job of all was at a little boutique on Bedford Avenue by the name of Pinkyotto.

“It is still to date the worst job I have ever had,” Rose told me sitting criss-cross on our sofa. “Even though I’ve had like 15 jobs this year. I dreaded it when I woke up. I remember begging the time to pass. I never left feeling better than destroyed.”

–

Despite having no retail experience whatsoever, Rose was hired at Pinkyotto on the spot. Earlier, she had dropped off her resume at another small boutique on our street called Female Form. As she passed the store, the signs in the window caught her eye. One sign said they were hiring for a “stylist” role, while another sign advertised a CLEARANCE SALE. Like a hungry moth to a flame, Rose stepped inside.

The store manager, who we will call Hot Pink Hair, took one look at her and said “I like your vibe. Can you do an interview right now?” Before she knew it, Hot Pink Hair had Rose perch on a little stool and write a cover letter in the middle of the shop, sandwiched between racks of polyester mini skirts. Rose started the following week.

Allegedly, Pinkyotto has displayed those same two signs in the door for the last decade. The sale in question consists of a tiny rack of several decrepit polyester garments, marked from an offensive $120 to a still-offensive $70. According to Rose, most items in the store fall in the $65 – $200 range, despite the very obvious reality that these are items of fast fashion clothing marked up to absurd pricepoints.

One day, Rose encountered a girl purchasing a mesh see-through tank top, only to sprint back to the store in a panic because she realized how horrendous the quality actually was. The girl was on the brink of tears exclaiming, “I can’t believe I spent so much money on this.” Luckily, she was able to facilitate a refund, and dodge the Pinkyotto polyester bullet.

When I visited Rose during her shift, she informed me that this was actually only one of three Pinkyottos on the same street. The other two were tucked inside the Bedford Mini Mall. Rose worked at the “Free People dupes” location. The other two were “Urban Outfitters dupes” and “Elevated basics.” The truth was, all three shared the same imported inventory. Rose would often have to run cardboard boxes through the streets, back and forth between the different stores.

“People don’t always realize they’re walking into different stores,” said Rose. “They would look around, confused, then say, ‘Wait, isn’t this also Pinkyotto?’”

What kind of “local store” needs three storefronts within a 0.1 mile radius on one of the most desirable locations in New York. Not to mention, how can they even afford three storefronts to begin with?

“It’s absolutely to have a monopoly on the block,” stated Rose. “Advertising yourself as three different stores so people don’t realize they’re shopping from the same inventory and the same owner is absolutely taking advantage of people who think they’re supporting different small businesses.”

After witnessing one too many of these Amazon Dropship stores, underpaying and overworking recent college graduates who are simply desperate to work, it was time to take this to Reddit.

On r/williamsburg, I found a thread called “Pinkyotto deception.” Disgruntled redditors complained about stores like Pinkyotto and Female Form, the other “local boutique” Rose dropped her resume at. Female Form’s aesthetic is eerily identical, its branding is defined by a minimalist sketch of side boob.

On the quest for a nice dress, I too nearly fell victim to the shop. I wandered inside, running my fingers over a row of overpriced plastic claw clips depicting a donut, a block of cheese, and a caterpillar. Rows of squiggly claw clips in the windows, barbie pink, graphic tees with slogans like “Tits Up,” materials rendered in that synthetic and uncanny hue of rubber and silicon. There was something dizzying about the saturated interior, as if I had stepped into the physical manifestation of an acrylic nail, of a flattened internet femininity.

This particular style, shared by Female Form and Pinkyotto, is especially common. The stores beg for the title of “quirky,” and yet, in their mass-produced haze, are completely stripped of both life and individuality. “Weirdness” cannot be made safe and repeatable in mass. There is no quirk, certainly no personality. Just a simulation of both.

More and more, young adulthood itself feels structured this same way. Algorithms oversimplify interests and personalities into aesthetic shorthand, promising identity and belonging through consumption. Young people are offered these templates for “self-expression,” all while scrambling between unstable jobs, rent, and futures.

I am simply using Female Form and Pinkyotto as examples of a much larger aesthetic phenomenon currently spreading across New York. If this style genuinely brings someone joy, that is more than okay. In many cases, especially when these objects are handmade or created by artists or designers, there is something deeply charming and alive about them. I understand the appeal entirely.

But I am arguing that there is a palpable difference between sincere self expression and what I can only describe as “Amazon Dropship Chic.” You can feel it immediately upon entering one of these stores. Energetically, it resembles the ChatGPT of DIY accessories, capable of replicating the visual language of personality without containing any actual soul beneath it. Of course, this isn’t exclusive to just Williamsburg, or just New York, this tackiness is a tale as old as time, but the prevalence of these stores is getting more and more difficult to ignore.

I believe the first step to free oneself from any scam like this is the ability to label it, recognize it, and therefore make conscious decisions in the other direction. That’s why I am coining the terms: Capitalist Whimsy, Commodified Quirky, Amazon Dropship Chic, and The Curious Case of the Squiggly Claw Clip.

The aesthetic, known as “Dopamine Decor,” feels strangely reminiscent of a freshman year college dorm room, suspended in the limbo of adulthood, grasping for identity somewhere between girlhood and womanhood. Identity breaks through printed Pinterest collages, neon signs glowing “GOOD VIBES ONLY,” pink cowboy hats hung carefully on white walls.

The philosophy behind Dopamine Decor is to surround yourself with objects that spark happiness. Buy a squiggly mirror, buy a lamp that looks like an avocado, buy a fuzzy dice and a smiley face rug and a pillow shaped like a slice of cake. These objects are marketed psychology over decor; purchase as personality, consumption as relief. In a generation floating on the other side of a stunted pandemic adolescence, the aesthetic of girlhood itself becomes something endlessly replicated and sold back to us.

–

The day Rose quit her job at Pinkyotto was a very triumphant day. She was leaving an especially terrible shift, one where her manager stole all of her commission. Filled with anger, Rose cranked down the iron gates, locked them, walked up, and put in her two weeks notice. “I immediately felt 100% better,” said Rose. “Most instant gratification of all time.”

This city we now call home is in a moment of flux, ephemeral for so many, strewn with people from somewhere else who arrive with their luggage bursting with ambition, who frolic through viral frozen yogurt shops, who reinvent themselves three times before stepping back into suburbia’s shadow. Apartments rotate tenants, friend groups dissolve, storefronts rebrand overnight.

The instability creates a particular kind of desperation, one currently cracking and scratching through nearly every neighborhood that struggles to recognize itself. On every side of the equation, people are trying to survive. Pilates studio owners commit fraud to make rent. Twenty-two-year-olds juggle six jobs at once. “Small businesses” disguise imported SHEIN inventory behind cursive logos and overpriced claw clips. Even the dogs at Hoochie Poochie seem to be walking the humans.

Everyone is pulling and getting pulled along at the same time, ricocheting between changing boroughs, side hustles, and identities. Yet somewhere within all that whiplash, something quietly solidified inside Rose: the knowledge that she is capable, resourceful, adaptable, and strong.

“This chapter has taught me this: show up in person, have a good personality, and you can get work. It’s not impossible. You just have to keep showing up,” Rose began. “It taught me no one else is going to advocate for you. If you don’t advocate for yourself and recognize when your worth has been betrayed, you’ll get swept up in the machine. As for Pinkyotto, I think they’re the epitome of what so many places do to overqualified young people.”

“It also taught me that you can have a plan, and it makes complete sense, but this city or this universe is going to rearrange it however it wants to. You have to be okay with that,” Rose continued.

“The last thing this taught me is that I’m capable. I’d never worked with an infant before. I’d never worked in retail or bagels or at a yoga studio. If these people have the audacity not to pay enough, or the audacity to open full businesses when they absolutely shouldn’t be, then I can be audacious enough to walk in there and figure it out,” Rose smiled. “I’ve never felt unequipped at any of these places. That fear that someone else can do the job better is such a fear tactic. No one can. We are all just figuring it out.”

The boy is carried outside and throws his art in my hands. His therapist tells me how brave the boy was during the Feelings Circle today. They talked about the ruthless unfillable gap separating the boy from the rest of the world; about feeling weird, and not knowing why. I stand stiff inside myself and feel I don’t deserve to know this.

Outside the Sideways School, the boy’s blonde bucktoothed friend wraps his arms around him. They don’t know how to look each other in the eyes. “There will always be people who love people like us,” says the friend. They don’t know how to let go of each other.

The buildings in the Financial District are so tall, and the streets so narrow, it always looks like winter, though it’s July. And so is the boy. His name is Jules. He is eight years old. He teaches me to play chess and then chases me with a knife. He leaps from pillow to pillow, because the floor is lava. He screams with his hands and hits with his voice.

I walk him home from the Sideways School to the Bleach White Building on a bleak gray street he calls home. The doorman, Zeus, greets us but never blinks. “I don’t know how you keep up with him,” Zeus sees through me like glass.

“I don’t,” I smile.

To Jules, Zeus does not exist outside of his suit, anywhere other than that door in their building. I don’t exist anywhere but the other side of his small hand. I am nothing more than a new voice of authority, telling him what to do, not to throw, when to step away from the screen. He sits with his iPad so close to his face, it looks like he might fall into it and tumble down some parallel pixelated world. I warn him, if you sit that close to your screen, you might fall into it. He tells me that sounds incredible. That world makes sense to him… all those bright colors.

We wave goodbye to Zeus and open the heavy door to the tall stairwell. Jules asks me to chase him up the stairs. I make my steps loud so he laughs, so he feels like something big is coming. But it’s only me, coming up the stairs, coming straight from my own delicate life, remembering my own nanny, how we painted popsicle sticks and glued them to a plank of wood. How we gathered stale leaves from the backyard, spices from the crooked kitchen cabinet (clove, peppercorn, thyme), essential oils, vanilla extract and a soft swarm of ingredients. We’d make potions, perfumes, soaps and candlewax. How we’d roam through the woods and build labyrinths in the living room.

I remember crying at the foot of my mother’s bed because I too felt off, and I couldn’t explain it. It felt like vertigo from some other life, some sort of terrible homesickness, though I was as close to home as any child could be. I remember feeling like none of these rooms belonged to me, like my hands weren’t my hands. I remember crying at the foot of my mother’s bed at 8 and 10 and 16 and 21 years old, because I was so scared, a fear I could not place or label, a fear with no origin or source. It came from nothing. It came from everything. It came from outside of myself, and yet only from myself.

I remember my certainty that no one else’s biggest problem was their own brain, but there will always be people who love the people like us.

Jules laughs wildly from the top of the stairwell. It’s only me, still, coming up the stairs, making monster sounds. I am at the beginning of my life, I hope. I am at the beginning of my life in this city. I am trying to understand the shape of another funny family. I come from a funny family myself. Now I am taking care of a stranger. I come from a nanny myself. There will always be people who love the people like us.

I reach my hand in his Lego shaped backpack and feel around for the keys to an apartment I know my way around now. Jules reaches for his iPad and melts into some other world, a game where guns are everywhere, like all games for young boys, to destroy is to win. I hear these pounding sounds coming from his speakers. Maybe we shouldn’t play that game, I said to him one day, and he threw his iPad at my head.

I make him a peanut butter sandwich and cut it into little peanut butter puzzle pieces, so he has something to put back together before devouring it whole. I finally pull him away from the screen and try to stitch his scattered mind back together, by holding his hand as we cross the too busy, too loud, too narrow, too dark streets. I lift him in the air. He soars. He looks up and sees a bald eagle, elegant and strong and American. For one second, he feels just like that eagle, free and capable of anything.

Everyone comes to this city to be like that eagle: American, free, larger than life. It’s why all the monopoly characters on the other side of the playground are wearing suits, muttering into a headset that’s built into their head. It’s why the video game is all about war. It’s why I am here, caring for a stranger, so that I can be a writer, so I can try to squeeze the meaning out of everything, even a peanut butter sandwich or an eagle.

Jules and I enter the gated playground, which is actually a cement circle beneath the overhang of broad sister towers. There are hundreds of pigeons that stick low to the ground. We all come here to be eagles, but maybe we’re more like those pigeons in the gated playground, hanging low, fighting over crumbs thrown from anonymous hands above.

Jules tells me that the tooth fairy lives in a castle made of the shiniest teeth she collects, that he cuddles with his friend that’s also a boy, that he would rather live inside of a game, that he loves his mother, that he dreams of running far away, that he wants to keep running until he finally finds the pixelated world, that he hates his mother, that hidden volcanoes are going to wipe out everything, that his monster trucks glow in the dark, that if he was a bird, he would want to be an eagle, even though he knows he isn’t one. A swarm of pigeons huddle together. The boy charges through the birds. They flee, they scatter, they return.

Every day, Jules builds a mountain out of sand then destroys it. He makes friends, then loses them all. He declares “war” on all of his friends, and says he needs me as backup. He says he needs me to fight these children. I say, hey, let’s go get a donut instead.

Jules describes his newest Minecraft world between bites of glazed donut. I zone out for a moment, and try to remember my life. When I was his age, I played in a band. I ate honeysuckle from a grassy wall. I would make my dolls solve imaginary mysteries in imaginary towns, and every time they’d solve the mystery, I would cry in heaps of imaginary relief.

I take him back home. We cross the traffic again and a sharp wind throws a swirl of terrible smells our way: something sour, something bitter, some sewage, some smoke. Zeus greets us again. This building could be any other building. Nothing sets it apart, except for the funny little people with funny little families, in this too loud, too big, stretched out city, which holds a funny little boy, known for his temper and his heart. And, for now, a funny not-so-little nanny, known for her racing mind and heart. But there will always be people who love people like us.

I twist the lock. Jules and I sink into the couch. He puts his whole weight against me. We look out his window into nothing, into just another wall. He tells me how he wishes he had a big green yard to play in. All his dreams look like Long Island.

His mom comes home. I leave their life. Slip back into mine. I will come back tomorrow and next week but not next month. I am here to keep him safe, and in turn, he made me remember my life. After I leave their lives will continue. After I leave, my life will continue. I am at the beginning of my life, I hope. I will be a writer, I hope. Maybe one day you’ll write a story about me, Jules says.

Maybe I will.

Maybe this is that story.

(end)

When I was on my lunch break in the middle of Times Square last week, I saw a small boy wearing the same blue puffer coat that the boy I used to nanny always wore. I thought, for a split second, it was him. I reached into my big work bag and found a forgotten purse pocket, where I discovered a sliver of green seaglass he'd given me to remember him by. Most days, he was distressed and agitated. But one day, he was so happy. It was when I showed him Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

Have been thinking about the fragile, tender dynamic between child and nanny; time spent with the nanny feels like time spent in a parallel universe; the limits of caregiving; what it would mean to be a boy growing up in Manhattan today, with ADHD and anger and confusion and video games and screens.

lovely daydreams to you all

"a poem is a place 
i go. it's safe, 
like an ambulance  
is safe..."
-Isabelle Correa

"...whose performance am I watching?
how many people am I?... What is this space
between myself and myself?" 
-Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“you crave the end of mazes…” 
-Margaret Atwood

I dread the beginning of parties.

It takes me about 30 minutes to adjust to a new room, or to let the room and all its energies, rumblings, and contradictions drape over me. It takes me at least 30 minutes to feel as if I am really in my body, and not hovering outside myself, like some spectral apparition.

Rooms I have been in many times before are typically fine. “Preheated,” my roommate chimes in, when we spoke about what it means to “take warming up to.” Familiar faces are a known sense of safety. I am not referencing safety in the sense of physical wellbeing, but emotional safety, an understanding that I can open myself up and move freely, speak, breathe, and be received.

When I was very young, this gap in time was still the case. A liminal space between two social states of being. My childhood nanny described me as a “very small adult,” who would enter a new scene, withdraw, observe, and process accordingly. Over time, I have come to accept this “warming up” stage as a fundamental part of my being. Something that nothing, not even “faking it til I make it” could offset.

This is what I mean by Taking It All In. I have often wondered if this is something I should “work on” or something I should embrace. A defect or a devotion. There is always so much to take in. In loud and sticky rooms, so much energy is being catapulted back and forth between us, whether we realize it or not.

-

I swing open the door of a party and the chime of hellos echo together. I have not yet had a chance to inhale the space, to understand the frequency of the night. Everything spins. Immediate ease feels impossible.

The mysterious thing, though, is that after those first thirty minutes, once the room has fallen over me and I’ve joined its rhythms, I slip swiftly out of my head and back into my body. Something wonderful takes hold. I grow shiny and comfortable, part of the song, not plugged in, listening from the other side of the wall, or on a train that doesn’t exist. The words exiting mouths of strangers are interesting and I am invested, wholly, finally, present, in the evening.

Rejecting this inevitable period of feeling withdrawn only makes it worse. I will get restless and frustrated and, in turn, even more withdrawn. I recently found myself at a very special and historic party, one where thousands of bright balloons fell from the ceiling. It was filled with a very select few hundred glorious people. The most remarkable disco ball I have ever seen cast radiant purple light upon all these dancing strangers. They were moving so freely, uninhibited, like spaghetti on a clothesline, jazz hands against a velvet curtain, Pop Rocks still popping in the belly of a whale.

As a chronic observer, there is much I have come to feel enamored with about nightlife and people watching: A man with a green mohawk poses in the women’s restroom. An elderly couple catches the light, they dance in the center of the crowd, just as they danced at their prom and their wedding, only now, they bear heavier bones. Drag queens sway with skin like dolls. Someone turns a sharp corner and spills their secrets in my lap. There are women made of birthmarks and tattoos with a pulse. I am Taking It All In. When you take it all in, you will realize that the people who surround you as you dance in the dark are like fire breathing dragons in fishnets.

What does it mean, to be a mind in such a space, waiting patiently to re-enter in its body?

This is My Mind Body Problem.

“Just Be Yourself.”

To me, this is the most nebulous piece of widely shared advice, a massive reduction. To know oneself so vividly, yet not to be able to return to that self, in the environments you most want to remember, is a sort of grief and disappointment I am still learning how to move through.

-

My best friend and I used to call ourselves “The Observers.”

When I was Heartbroken In The Sorority House circa 2023, we found ourselves sitting on the balcony, observing the strange party beneath us, as a cheeky gentleman by the name of “Disco Lines” pressed buttons on an elevated plank of wood. The darty people covered themselves in colorful chalk, paint, smiles, and each other’s sweat. From our vantage point, that unmistakably college scene seemed so distant, miniature, the participants like figurines in the parking lot of our dollhouse. And yet, how many times had we been the ones on the ground floor? The only thing that made that time different was the privilege of sitting together and realizing that we both felt this same indescribable way. She gave me this, years ago, on my 20th birthday.

As her and I continue to exist both deeply embedded in moments, and yet also outside of them, we share beauty in the paradox of observation. Is observation a state of absence, or is it the height of presence?

Hopefully, with more time spent inside myself, as the years roll on and the parties thin out and the space between parties widens and the rooms get softer and the bedtimes fall earlier, these questions of feeling like The Real Me all the time fade away into an echo of my twenties, a product of their time and circumstances.

-

Last night, I was dancing in a living room converted into a club, soundsystems in the kitchen, new friends and old friends grooving and sliding around in our socks. I suddenly remembered a script I once read when I was working for an animation studio. In the strange story, a little bug watched a girl shower from the edge of the drain. The bug was struck by a sheer awe at her humanity. It then lost its grip and spiraled down the drain, falling back into the bug world, where all of the insects were roaming down a street filled with night clubs. The promoters were all praying mantises, trying to sway the most glorious of butterflies to step inside their party.

Inside the clubs, thousands of spiders and ladybugs and beetles and dragonflies flapped their dirty wings to music that cannot be heard in the land of the living, the quiet world above the drain. The bugs were not stuck in their heads.

They are still dancing, underground, as we speak. If you place yor ear close enough to the drain, close enough to the tunnels, you just might hear the buzz.

Establishing oneself as an “expert” or a “force-to-be-reckoned-with” in one’s area of expertise seems to be the primary goal of this new game. But there must be many other nuanced, secondary goals tucked inside the shadows and the subconscious. LinkedIn posts in 2026 are disguised as professional exchanges, but secretly, like most bizarre fragile human occurrences, this is rooted in a very baseline fear. With good reason, we are worried about the future of work, and we are projecting this onto each other, onto this sterile website, trying to hold onto our professional lives, statuses, and illusions of security for dear life.

As people outsource more and more of their thinking and daily frictions to AI, as we lean more on our machines and as our machines grow more intelligent, I believe that our collective primary concern is misplaced. We are being manipulated to feel the perfect blend of worry and wonder about whether machines are becoming “too human.” Anthropic stated that “Claude might be conscious,” without knowing or defining what consciousness actually means. We spiral about what will happen when machine thinking compounds into one godlike superintelligence.

In conversations like these, we always end up talking in circles. There is less nuance as to what lives on the other side of this homogenous colorblind rainbow. We know the end of this story. In many ways, we have prophesied it for centuries, written it in at the end of our films and called it science fiction. We are writing our own story in real time. We always have been. That’s because there is this all knowing cave within all of us. Self fulfilling prophecies are real and obvious. History repeats itself because, until something new is written, we continue regurgitating the same stories with the same endings.

People have spent centuries outlining the dark inevitability of our own creation: that extreme machine and technological intelligence will be our collective end. Now that extreme machine and technological intelligence is not only on its way, but pervasive, like air pollution, fogging up our subway ads, our friends abilities to read or make decisions, our bodies and minds are processing panic and dread in the immediate, when in reality, the future of technology is entirely uncertain, and all we have are the scripts and the stories and the theories we have crafted. It is easier to believe that we are observing a pattern than that we are participating in it.

In smaller ways, this participation becomes visible elsewhere. On LinkedIn, for example, where the self is increasingly presented as something streamlined, coherent, and efficient. The self as a machine. This inner and unconscious panic is at direct odds with the puffy and overstated optimism churned out by people like Sam Altman, who claim that AI will save us from everything, from famine to war to death at all.

“If AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will, then amazing things will be possible…” Altman says. “AI can figure out how to cure cancer…” In another interview, Altman says AI can solve climate change, world hunger, and poverty.

So there are, at present, two stories available. One in which we are undone by what we create, and another in which we are saved by it. These two attitudes coexist and simultaneously inform the way we move through the world, move through the internet, move through real places and non-places, real rooms and backrooms, the way we speak to humans with human voices and the way we speak to humans with robot voices. These attitudes coexist, and what rises up like sewer smoke from the cracks is a low-grade dissonance that is difficult to name but easy to feel.

I find it far more interesting and nebulous to describe what is already happening. Humans are sounding more like machines, and there is no place, (or non-place, because the way I understand it, the internet is nothing but a series of non-places, somewhere to both go and not go, to both spend time and lose time) where this phenomenon is more apparent than LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a breeding ground for outsourced thinking, where ChatGPT regurgitates the same vague insights about the same trembling industries. LinkedIn comment sections are equally as uncanny, strangers say each other’s name every other word, until names don’t look like names at all. “Great insights, Daniel. You and me both, Daniel. Daniel, it really stuck with me when you said…Daniel.”

LinkedIn holds an endless scroll of business takes and corny anecdotes. A missed flight becomes a lesson in resilience. “Here are ten things I learned about business from deciding to cheat on my wife.” “I took a very important VC to dinner. The food? Took hours. Came out freezing. Worst part? A hair in it. Here are five important takeaways I learned about leading my company from deciding not to tip my waitress.”

Meanwhile, titles are inflating and simultaneously their meanings are watered down. Suddenly, everyone is a CEO. Everyone is a founder of an AI startup. Everyone is saying the same things, in the same structure, without really saying anything at all. Of course LinkedIn hums with this frantic, uncanny energy. It’s the perfect stage for projecting career anxiety, while performing certainty about a future no one actually understands. The result is a kind of professional cosplay, where titles are displayed more than they are actually lived in or filled out.

It is obvious that this tone is generated by AI, but less obvious as to why people have shamelessly adopted this tone so unabashedly. LinkedIn has flattened what it means to talk about business, making discourse eerily interchangeable and for lack of better word, cringe.

There is a churning, constantly compounding fear that new technology will take away your job, or more than your job, take away your security, or more your security, take away life as you know it. The response is performance, to puff up your chest. You lean even harder into your work identiy, inflate your ideas of expertise, and polish and polish until you shine with certainty and irreplaceability. In the process, something strange happens. In trying to prove you are not a machine, you begin to sound exactly like one.

The snake eats its tail.

Now, as a deeply optimistic person, my fundamental belief around AI is that we are, as a whole, severely underestimating humanity, making our assessments about its impacts by referencing a very dull sample group. I believe, genuinely, that this is idea that we are all doomed is a carefully crafted illusion designed to bum us out, so that we surrender to big tech, so the United States can win the AI race. It’s much like the space race, except now, the uncharted territory is not the moon, but the big monolithic black box that is artificial intelligence.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s New Yorker article from February 2026, “What is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know Either,” illustrates AI as a black box, essentially, a void. It spits things out, and for some reason, it works, but we can’t see through the box, we don’t really know where these answers, these coherent fragments, these decisions are coming from. It sits there, impossibly humming along, unable to explain itself. The result is a kind of synthetic coherence without origin. The box speaks clearly, but its clarity floats ungrounded. It has no face, no body, so soul, it is an opaque black box with nothing inside it, constantly generating. For some strange reason, we have unconsciously decided to meet it where its at.

I find myself wondering, not for the first time: why are we moving so quickly toward something we openly admit we don’t fully understand? Something with clear costs, ambiguous social consequences, and no shared agreement about its endpoint?

Sitting on my roof, looking out across the water toward the skyline, the answer arrived with a kind of blunt, almost deflating clarity. This is a geopolitical race. The underlying logic is simple, even if it’s rarely stated so plainly: if one country builds this infrastructure first, it sets the terms for everyone else.

For now, LinkedIn thought leadership is an unexpected (but obvious after analysis) symptom of our new space race. Not all of it is slop. Just most of it. Some of it, actually, is very funny.

The best way I could describe LinkedIn, after at least 20 hours of research, is this: people just be sayin stuff.

sweet dreams to you all and thank you for reading.

i promise i will write more about NOT the internet very soon:)

For the better half of a year, job hunting felt more like a labyrinth leading to nowhere. A bleak succession of dead ends. Each dead end looked the same: a faceless, bodiless figure reciting an AI-generated email.

We think you’re great, but after careful consideration, we have decided to go in a different direction.

These dead ends all left me standing there, pigeon-toed, paper-cut, resumes in hand, stuck in the directionless maze, walking in circles, not really getting anywhere at all. I was left imagining this cryptic “different direction,” comparing myself to the inevitable and promising human / graduate sitting patiently on the other side.

The chosen ones.

After careful consideration of my own, I have decided that the most painful part of this dead-end messaging is the word “careful.” I would much rather envision that anyone rejecting me was some sloppy, haphazard, highly uncareful misstep.

Scratch that. The most painful part of this process had to be never hearing back at all. Ghosts, my friends, are alive and real. They go by the name “recruiters.”

There were many things I could take solace in during this prolonged period of career-dread. For instance, this was not only happening to me. This was happening to mostly everyone. This unnerving feeling, this state of desperation, was the story of our time. I was only a product, a symptom, of some economic peril that was wreaking havoc on a whole bright wave of young adults.

As with every confusing time of my life, I could also take great solace in art. I could curl up inside of a story and feel enveloped in perspective and context. If my mission on this earth is to write, and if writing is simply the act of experiencing the world, oneself, and others with great attention, then living, reading, feeling or doing anything at all is, in some way, informing the soul, hence, in some way, informing the art.

I could also take solace in the fact that my parents were remarkably understanding. Boomers and Gen-X parents have been notorious for offering flimsy, unsympathetic unsolicited advice, or stating both obvious / dated truths. Statements like, “have you considered just walking up to the CEO of A24 with a briefcase in hand…” or “have you ever heard of Indeed?” are bound to get your Gen Z child’s blood boiling. But my parents would tell me the stories of their vast, expansive, and unpredictable lives, as well as tales of the family friends in our orbit, what they were like at my age, debunking the illusion of ladders and hustles and rush.

During this better half of a year, I would look around at every adult stomping around this city and marvel at the facts I had always taken for granted: that these millions of strangers had built a life for themselves, a real life, doing anything at all all; that they wake up every morning and contribute; that they are, for the most part, trying their best to take care.

Take care,

I sign off every single email.

Take care,

“I observe the streets of lower Manhattan, the moon, a perfect waxing half of a whole. There are many beautiful people. There is someone for everyone. Look at all these strangers, building a life and sustaining it. It isn’t easy. We are all terribly brave. Even me.”

(from my short story Muse, coming soon)

When my only goal was to get a job, to work, to use my degree (to some degree at least) in some meaningful capacity, and every single day, I was throwing myself out there, in portals, in listings, in attempts, and I just kept hitting a glass door, over and over again, like a bird lacking dimensional perception, I couldn’t help but feel bruised, on the outside looking in. But, this very deep, very rich and tender thing started forming inside me as I would sit back and observe my fellow humans. It was an unwavering, solid, luminous orb of respect. I felt myself harden and soften.

When I first moved to New York, (read: Diary Entry in New York) I was a remote film journalist for a magazine as well as a nanny in the Financial District. But after several months, the magazine went on to delete their movies section entirely. The child moved to Long Island. I went to London, reconnected with both my family and myself

I never realized that life was just this ongoing process of re-centering, straying, and coming back home to yourself. A journey of meeting yourself, losing balance, forgetting yourself, re-meeting yourself, again and again.

There is this wild hunger deep inside of me for a place I cannot return to. I am certain I will return to it in some capacity, but in a different way, on the other side. When I trace the growls back to their origin, I can make out this hazy image of myself as a writing student, at a round wooden table, in Upstate New York or in Oxford. As a group, a team, we are walking through a piece of fiction, reciting lines of these stories that could breathe on their own. We would workshop a fellow student’s personal essay, their words a pure window into their most sacred inner life.

Everything that I do, everything that I say, every choice that I make, every little metric of my assessment of a day, a conversation, a night out, all stems from this same fundamental hunger: to feel connected. To myself, of course. To the world, of course. But to others mainly. I am in this constant pursuit of closeness with others.

When I lean into this hunger even deeper, I realize that in these distant dreams, now, I want to be the professor. I am choosing the stories and listening to the conversations, gently guiding. All of this, the process of writing and teaching, strikes me as the most precious, human, and truthful thing. I realize that as long as something like this exists in the world, no matter how automated or digitized or violent or chaotic said world may be, I am going to be okay. I have found the thing that makes me feel like I am fluttering and bubbling, with thousands of wispy words and questions on the tip of my tongue.

To have found such a thing, and then to have been pulled away from it, was a soreness and a grief I didn’t understand at the time.

So I joined a writing group in New York. I tried to tutor. I freelanced for magazines. I wrote a play in the middle of the night. But over time, all I wanted was somewhere to put myself. If a director said, all I want to do is make movies all of the time, or if a painter, stuck in a windowless room, said, all I want to do is paint all of the time, the natural question would be, what would there be to make movies about then, and what would there be to paint? You can only run around in circles inside your own mind for so long before you need the world again. Meaningful things do not live in a vacuum.

When I was in London, I wrote down in my journal: on January 28th, everything is going to change. On January 28th, I got 3 interesting job offers, 3 potential places to put myself. I ended up somewhere very unexpected: a full time job at a startup media agency. I am working at this agency now as a full-time ghostwriter and content writer for entrepreneurs. I am learning about a space I didn’t even know existed.

My role in this ecosystem is a strange one. My job is to translate. Founders often speak in the language of products, markets, and ambition. The internet speaks in the language of stories. My job is to stand between those two worlds. I am a creative writer who somehow ended up sitting near the engine room of the tech economy, trying to sincerely describe what the people building it think they are doing. Being close to the engine room means you hear everything: the optimism, the doom, the absurdity, and occasionally the unsettling hum of a machine that is growing faster than anyone fully understands.

Writers are always trying to stand where the world is shifting, where history is quietly changing shape. If you want to chronicle the strangeness of your own time, you have to get close enough to hear the machinery.

But there’s quite the moral tension in the startup and VC world: billions of dollars are chasing the next solution or “advancement,” meanwhile basic human needs and problems remain unsolved. So much money just gets thrown around every day. I am tired of the word Billion. Hypothetical conversations about the future has always distressed me. I used to want to shove my head in the sand and insist that we simply do not need any of this. But I don’t think that’s who I am, someone who looks away, or locks myself in a tower filled with only things I can touch. Curiosity has always been stronger than avoidance. I would rather sit inside the theater and observe than pretend the play isn’t happening.

So, I want to attempt to write about this strange era in poetic, emotional, deeply human ways. Something AI could never do is write unconventionally about the way it is making humans feel. I want to write about the internet, about technology, about the strange new psychology it has produced, but how was I supposed to write about any of that if I didn’t actually know what was happening?

At work, with a handful of fun and creative colleagues, I get a seat at the forefront of many fascinating and exhaustive conversations about technological advancement in 2026. We speak frankly about how we think the world will change.

As I try to stay up to date about the uncanny valley that is Silicon Valley, it feels as if people are throwing technology onto problems that are not problems at all, and rather, are just what it means to be alive.

The office has a popcorn machine and a golf simulator and people talk about the screenplay they’re writing during lunch. The room feels more like a college common room than some corporate headquarters. There is laughter in the room most of the time, and the sirens of Times Square bleed in. Every week the conversation drifts toward the big questions. What consciousness actually is. Whether intelligence is something mystical or simply a pattern that can be reproduced. Whether machines will ever truly understand anything, or if they are simply reflecting us back to ourselves.

In a New Yorker article, John Cassidy described that there are two assumptions about AI that go largely unquestioned: “that the new technology is so powerful that it will transform the economy utterly; and that, despite being designed by humans, it’s now a force unto itself, whose progress can’t be reshaped or redirected.”

The strange thing about inevitability prophecies is that they severely underestimate human beings entirely. Sitting in on nuanced conversations about AI day after day, I am starting to understand how quickly the language of invention turns into the language of perceived reality.

I find myself linking these ideas together more and more. It is no secret that the job search for recent college graduates has become a very different game than it once was. For most, it now feels like a gamble, a numbers game played across endless loops of cover letter submissions, where any stable sense of self-worth has to be temporarily set aside.

At the same time, it seems increasingly clear that future generations will not work in the same way previous ones did. Gen Z is already pushing back against the old script of graduating, getting a job, and climbing the corporate ladder for forty years. I know young adults who have left corporate jobs only to feel a bewildering sense of relief returning to restaurant shifts at night and creating during the day. None of us know what the future of work will look like, but if the cultural success of a show like Severance tells us anything, it is that many people are already wondering whether the present model of work has been, well, working either.

As I continue moving through the world, it becomes more and more productive to put aside the judgment hat, the tidy black-and-white simplicities, and lean instead into the nuance and folds of absolutely everything. As someone who has always been deeply concerned, even borderline obsessive, about being morally perfect, I am beginning to understand that it is impossible to walk through life innocent, and all one can do is try, feel, be open, and learn. Then, those neat categories of good and bad begin to feel strangely unnatural.

What I am discovering instead is that everything is infinitely interesting. The more I lean into questions rather than answers, the more my sense of personal identity, my art, my understanding of others, and my grasp of both the present and the future begin to expand. The world feels less like a looming catastrophe and more like something vast and complicated, I feel curious to explore, through any odd job, through any old day.

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
– Simone Weil

Simone Weil believed that attention itself is a form of devotion. This feels like a fresh definition, attention as devotion as opposed to focus. Focus is so often equated with a means to an end, a final product. We focus or pay attention (in school, at work) to get to the other end of something, some sort of task or assignment, or the other end of a conceptual destination.

To give yourself wholly to another person, to a conversation, a book, a film, a chore without distraction or self-interest, was, for Weil, a kind of worship. This pure attention means honoring reality on its own terms, rather than seeing everything in relation to ourselves, our needs, our desires, our restlessness, and our agendas. This kind of attention is rare because it requires us to suspend our ego completely, as well as our sense of time and place. It is all surrendered to the actual moment. It requires us to stop reaching for what we will say next or what usefulness we can offer or extract. Weil says that the one thing you truly need in order to be valuable as a person is the ability to pay attention. To attend to the world is to participate in it fully. She calls the deepest form of attention, “the highest ecstasy.”

A few important details about Weil’s version of attention… Weil believes that attention is not strain or exertion, and is more so the act of waiting and receiving. She also refers to this idea of The Void, as if true attention is like sitting in the void of the moment, without trying to fill it with solutions or immediate interpretation.

She suggests that we need to reconsider the questions we ask each other. Instead of the fleeting and mumbled “how are you?” or the single-eye-brow-raised “so, what do you do?” Weil proposes we ask: “What are you going through at the moment?” or “How is life hard for you right now?” These are the questions that require us to slow down and connect. They open up the door for that special kind of attention to blossom. Let’s say a roommate needs advice about a fight with their partner. Let’s say they sit at the edge of your bed and delve into the sticky textures of their own unique situation. When someone really needs to be heard, real attention is resisting the urge to interrupt or fix.

I have over 17 tabs open right now. I feel my phone vibrate against my leg during a movie, and I am pulled out of it, pulled down, into another world. I feel my thoughts wander and flee. I want to devote myself to nearly everything, but I think my heart is beating too fast.

At my local favorite bookstore, Spoonbill & Sugartown, I couldn’t help but feel a small wink from the world. I’d gone there after interviewing a photographer I admire for an art magazine I also admire (more on that conversation later this week). We spoke about The Social Photo by Nathan Jurgenson, a book about how photography has mutated in the digital age, how we are now bombarded by endless, ephemeral images, and how that constant visual churn reshapes the way we see and live.

After the interview, I found myself returning to an article about Simone Weil. Then, when I arrived at the bookstore, the first two books I saw on the shelf were The Social Photo and Gravity and Grace, a collection of Weil’s writing. These two books that had been consuming my attention all day were sitting side by side, practically kissing.

Does this ever happen to you? A kind of inverted inside joke with the world. Like, when you’ve never heard of an actor, and then you learn their name, and suddenly their face appears everywhere, following you on billboards and every other post and every eavesdropped conversation. Nothing has actually changed in the world itself. The only thing that’s shifted is your attention.

2. on affliction

“Affliction deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things.” – Simone Weil

“Affliction is anonymous. It is without past or future.” – Simone Weil

A very unique and often controversial part of Simone Weil’s life is that she voluntarily left her comfortable teaching position to work on an assembly line in a factory… She did this because she believed that no serious philosophical thinking or writing or teaching about justice, suffering, or labor could be done at a distance. To write about oppression without having felt its weight in the body struck her as dishonest.

So, Weil worked these long, exhausting shifts in French factories in the early 1930s, performing repetitive, physically punishing labor for low wages. The work damaged her health and left her chronically ill. Here, she labeled the factory as a site for affliction, a site where human beings were reduced to functions, rhythms, and errors, stripped of autonomy and dignity by machines, time clocks, and economic pressure. Affliction reduces a person to what Weil calls a kind of “thingness,” a state in which they are no longer treated as someone with a future, a story, or a voice.

Weil’s writings about affliction deeply impacted me, it draped a word over something I had been considering from a distance for a while. I have been trying to write a play since Thanksgiving. It has been very difficult and very out of my comfort zone. It is a dystopian surreal play about work culture, productivity, and our collective fixation on youth and immortality. Essentially, in this dystopian world, everyone works 5-9’s instead of 9-5’s, sending the general population into a normalized state of “thingness,” or dislocation from their emotions, remniscient of the success of Severance.

In these “sites of affliction,” exhaustion makes thought nearly impossible. The self is slowly eroded by repetition and surveillance. Weil’s experience in the factory shaped her understanding of affliction as something that destroys inner life. These disorienting sites of affliction have only changed shape in the 21st century. There is a major difference between suffering and affliction. Suffering is natural, while affliction is unnatural. She argues that the only ethical task is to attend to affliction without flinching, and to look clearly at a reality that offers no immediate comfort.

3. decreation

Everything on TikTok right now feels AI generated, or like an ad, or a “theory.” There is so much circular TikTok chronically online vocabulary that is laughable: Cortisol Face / Orange Peel Theory / Group 7 / Shopping Cart Theory / Let Them Theory / Golden Retriever vs Black Cat Theory … okay, but there is one that actually sets up the framework for Weil’s theory of Decreation. I can’t stand that I am referencing this either, but it’s called the Bean Soup Theory.

Essentially, on TikTok, someone made a video about a bean soup recipe. One of the top comments on this bean soup recipe video was from a stranger asking, “but what if I don’t like beans..?”

The question is absurd because of its randomness. If you do not like beans, then this recipe is not for you. This interaction went on to spark an entire discourse about the modern communication tactic of constant self-insertion. It rarely occurs to people that they may not be the target audience, and the self is always thrust forward. This is essentially just, “whataboutme-ism.”

My favorite cultural critic Jia Tolentino describes this condition in her book Trick Mirror as “the I in the internet.” Online, the self becomes the primary unit of meaning. Everything is filtered through personal resonance, even neutral information. Simone Weil would recognize this reflex immediately as gravity, the self’s constant pull toward assertion. Decreation is the deliberate refusal of this pull, allowing something to exist without demanding recognition.

Decreation is restraint and the willingness to step aside so that something else can remain intact. In a digital culture that rewards loud opinions, Weil’s vision of decreation feels radical. Let soup be soup.

Honestly, Weil’s theory of decreation is much more intricate and theological than that, but that is just one takeaway. What she is mainly saying with decreation is that her version of God created the universe, and then stepped back entirely from it. It is the process of “self-emptying,” or “the process of unmaking oneself to connect more deeply with the divine and participate in creation.” So much of my favorite poetry describes this process of “becoming undone.”

4. to be rooted

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,” —Simone Weil

Weil argues that every culture that has lasted has been rooted, tied to both human and naturally occurring things larger and older than individual desire or impulse. A relationship to land, a sense of ancestry, some sense of the “sacred” or the “infinite.” Cultures survive when they are tethered. This is the angle that Weil argues against colonization from. To rip human beings away from their roots is spiritual violence.

–

I resonate deeply with Simone Weil’s ideas, but it feels important to round this out with another facet of studying her. Weil is not an easy figure to admire cleanly. Some critics argue that her work is too abstract, impractical, and vague to offer real guidance for living. Others point to the contradictions embedded in her life. She wrote powerfully about roots and belonging, yet distanced herself from her own Jewish roots, rejecting traditional Judaism and identifying instead as a mystic. She had a visceral distaste for organized religion as a whole, even as her thinking remained intensely theological. To be honest, I enjoy her more abstract philosophies!

Except, her death complicates things further. Weil died very young after refusing to eat in protest of Nazi occupation. This literal self-erasure as a form of activism is extreme and unsettling to sit with. It raises uncomfortable questions about martyrdom, self-denial, and whether her ethics demand too much of the body and soul.

Either way, in an age of distraction, productivity worship, and constant self-performance, Weil’s philosophy still offers a posture adjustment: Pay attention like devotion. Do not turn away from affliction. Resist the reflex to center yourself in everything. Stay rooted in something larger than your own momentum.

Weil believed this was the only way to remain human inside systems designed to hollow us out. You don’t have to follow her to the edge to take her seriously, but she sure is a fascinating character that spices up what it means to learn about philosophy.

-
Thank you for reading the first Philosophy Mondays! I hope Weil was an interesting character to learn more about. lovely dreams and days to you all

AVW

Sometimes, something is so special that it is not meant to be seen by the world. By the mainstream world. The major portion of the world who lives by the clocks and votes in elections. Us, the disengaged, are far more engaging.

I remember the first time I heard his music. It was like someone was plugging me right into God. It was like being dipped into a river of raw syrupy truth. Truth, you see, is not meant to be experienced by everyone, or else the rules of gravity would fail to apply, and we’d all just be floating and aimless. Seriously. All of the shops would close and corporations would collapse and water would spray out of every fire hydrant and sirens would be ripping through the air every second. Everyone would be sick and free and there would be no more doctors.

I, Jeremy Rhinestone, am one of these truth seekers. I think it’s because I have all this time to think. That, inherently, makes me, Jeremy Rhinestone, better. I can see things clearly because I am less distracted. I get to spend all my time experiencing things. Experiencing music, mainly.

My parents, Todd and Brenda Rhinestone, are not the ‘experiencing things / music’ type. Todd is an accountant and Brenda is a nurse. I am their only child, and ever since The Incident in High School, all they want is for me to be happy, so they obeyed my only request. My only request is to live completely alone in Bushwick, meditate, and seek the golden truth. Todd said he’d cover my $800 monthly rent under one condition: that I call Brenda every Sunday, tell her everything I ate that day, and share some of the thoughts in my head.

Todd and Brenda never understood the thoughts in my head. I think as Todd balds more and more, the more open-headed he gets, the less open-minded he becomes. That’s just a theory I have. I have a lot theories. I have a theory that men and women speak fundamentally different languages, and will never be able to fully understand each other. I have a theory that everyone in the world either looks like a PHINEAS or a FERB. I have a theory that every generation has a small handful of Human Vessels who are the chosen ones of sorts, selected before time to save us all through their gift. I am certain that Samuel Cross is one of those vessels.

I found the music of Samuel Cross whilst twiddling my thumbs in a sterile dentist waiting room on 51st street. I had to take a glass elevator up thirty floors to get here, overlooking the masses of Midtown, the clumps of tourists, the painful flash of advertisements ricocheting off each other.

I was at the dentist because my teeth started feeling like cotton balls. I kept complaining to the rest of the group (Beck, Dylan, and Rob) that my teeth felt like cotton balls every time we drank, or smoked, or did ketamine on the roof, or ate Sweetgreen. One morning, my teeth just started feeling like cotton balls all the time. This is something I assumed would go away on its own, but Beck told me that kind of thinking is how people die. I rolled my eyes. But, at the end of the day, I am not ready to die. I may not be the happiest lad in the haystack, but I have enough to live for: my 3 friends, my studio apartment, my Marshall headphones, my thick tattoos of swords and dragons and crosses, my job at the local record store, draft IPA, walking and walking until my legs knees buckle and give out on me, chuckling at videos of monkeys on my Explore page… things like that.

I have this secret. I have this gut feeling that my life is going to be cut in half. I can’t explain it. I’m going to try. I don’t try enough. I let things be. Here I go. When my mid-thirties roll around, I have this feeling that I am going to be a completely different person. So, I am savoring this identity of being Jeremy Rhinestone, truth-seeker, slow-thinker, record-store employee, because, I have this conviction that he is not going to survive this modern world much longer. My body isn’t going anywhere. It’s my soul. I have a feeling that a new soul is going to drop into my body, perhaps in my sleep. This is a soul that will no longer want to be friends with beck and dylan and rob. This soul will suddenly want to [GET A REAL JOB.] This soul will want to [FALL IN LOVE.] This lurking soul that plans to possess me in my sleep will want to be a father, and one day, I will show my sons and daughters photographs of their pops, Jeremy Rhinestone, at 25, and I’ll throw my head back and say: “I was a different person back then.”

Beck texted the GROUPCHAT that he was doing ketamine on his roof if any of wanted to join. But it was a Wednesday, and I wanted it to feel like a Wednesday. Either this new soul was testing me, or my frontal lobe was betraying me, but I didn’t really want to do ketamine on Beck’s roof that day. I didn’t want to get lost inside the deep caverns of my body, with nothing but their deep New Jersey voices to guide me home. I wanted to feel tethered to time and space and figure out what was wrong with my fluffy teeth. I switched on DND and decided to play a game.

On a quest to find new music in a new way, I decided to type a name into the search bar only using my surroundings. I picked up a copy of GQ magazine sitting on the rack. The shiny paper cut my finger so I put it in my mouth. My brown cargo pants were huge and drew craters on the pilly blue carpet. I closed my eyes, shuffled to a random page, drew my finger down and stopped when the voice in my head shouted STOP! I opened my squinty eyes slowly, lo and behold, my finger was covering the left eyeball of a portrait of Samuel L Jackson. I chuckled to myself, and the round receptionist, Denise, looked up at me through her pearled glasses like I was a delinquent. I typed the name “Samuel” into the search bar.

To determine what last name I should enter, I closed my eyes and scanned the room, bouncing around like a bobblehead. I’d type in whatever my eyes landed on first once they opened. I was having such great fun, you see, I amuse myself greatly, but I also make myself dizzy. I opened my eyes, and everything blurred into a cross on Denise’s neck. I think she thought I was eyeing her wrinkly cleavage, because once my eyes came into focus, she was glaring at me. She pulled her cardigan tight over her chest.

Samuel Cross. I completed the search and could not believe my eyes. There was a musician named Samuel Cross! He only had 250 monthly listeners and one single. An excitement fluttered from the bottom of my spine, a sensation I could only imagine was similar to the way it felt to be an astronaut, locate a lost and nameless comet, hold a star in your arms. It was like meeting a stranger in a dream, but a part of you knew that this wasn’t actually a stranger, and that you physically can’t meet strangers in your dreams. This person was you from a past life, or your best friend, or your father. Either way, in this waiting room, Denise still hiding behind her cardigan, sounds of drills drilling into teeth one room over, in my own private world, I had stumbled upon an answer. Answers are precious. People mine answers like gold, and then try to sell them, and then they become these cheap placid questions again. I would protect every shimmer of truth I was lucky enough to find.

I am so certain that Samuel Cross is the answer, because when I listened to his only released single, TO BREATHE WITHOUT LUNGS, hot tears started streaming down my face, and my teeth stopped feeling like cottonballs, and my eternal headache stopped pounding, and my racing thoughts slowed down. This has only happened to me once before: in the basement on Thanksgiving, when my cousin Billy who got in a car accident at 18 introduced me to Thom Yorke.

Samuel Cross has the voice of an angel and a demon mixed together, the intersection of light and dark, beauty and ugliness. His voice is the ultimate equilibrium state. It is the balance that we are all so desperate to reach. In all of my seven months of working at Indigo Records, of placing needles on records for fellow gentrifying hipsters like myself, of shoving headphones over people’s ears, I had never been so certain that a single song was the truth. I had found my answer. I had found my tranquil certainty.

As it turned out, I had nine cavities. Three dentist visits later, I am all fixed up. I have listened to Samuel Cross’s single 738 times in the month since I found him in the waiting room. I would listen to the single as the glass elevator rose and fell over midtown. Samuel Cross felt like my narrator and my secret. After my final cavity was drilled and healed, soaring over Manhattan one last time, I realized it was time to share Samuel Cross with Beck, Dylan, and Rob. I trusted them enough, and they too are deep-thinking truth-seekers. Right? Maybe not like me. But if I didn’t share my discovery with just one person, I thought I might explode.

When I first moved to Brooklyn, I met Dylan and Rob at a Laundromat turned Listening bar in the neighborhood. All of the laundromats here are something else. There is the Rave Laundromat, Chess Club Laundromat, Poetry Reading Laundromat, Comedy Club laundromat, third spaces on top of third spaces, going viral after viral, compounding on themselves until they are no longer third spaces at all and you need a $300 Membership Card to enter. I only have a membership card to the Listening Bar Laundromat. I told Todd it was for the hot water bill.

Dylan and Rob were sitting at the Listening Bar Laundromat, and I could tell they were hearing what I was hearing. One could argue that everyone in the room was hearing the same thing, but you and I both know that isn’t true. Just because something is playing on the speakers, doesn’t mean everyone in the room hears the same thing. I sat down beside them and we dapped each other up and now we have spent every day together for the last six months. Beck, on the other hand, I met him because he came into Indigo Records and we bonded over his t-shirt and I nearly pounced on him, because I was so starved for a person to call my best friend. We didn’t necessarily need to be best friends. I just wanted to be able to say I had one.

I decided to only share my discovery with Beck. He was laying on the floor of my windowless bedroom, speakers on both sides of his head. His bright blonde hair looked like snow against the black carpet I snagged off the side of the road. I looked at his blue eyes close in preparation, pressed play, then left the room like a ghost. By the end of the first verse, I couldn’t help but peek an eye through the crack in the door. Sparkling tears drew soft lines down his face. I closed the door again, smiling. By the end of the second chorus, I had to peek again. Beck was in fetal position. Sobbing. I re-entered my bedroom, my physical form, and laid down across from him. We looked up at each other, nodded, and then pressed play again, laying side by side on the dirty black carpet, pretending to be anywhere but here.

The seasons were changing. Winter turned to spring much faster than anticipated. Even that rodent on TV said so. By late February, cardinals were singing and yellow flowers freckled the trees. All January, Beck, Dylan, and I sat around listening to Samuel Cross, on the roof, in the park, in our succession of dark bedrooms. Sometimes, we would even hold each other as we cried and sang. It was the best month of my life.

On February 1st, something happened that would change everything: Samuel Cross released an EP, and his 250 monthly listeners multiplied exponentially. I would sit there, watch the numbers crawl up, and try to imagine these faceless numbers discovering my friend Samuel. My inside joke with God. My answer.

I was with Beck, sitting on a stranger’s stoop smoking bright yellow American Spirits, when Samuel Cross released his EP. I cannot explain this, but before feeling excited like I normally do when an artist I love releases more music for me to enjoy, I felt terribly nauseous, swollen with panic and fear. This was a mistake. I knew this would ruin Samuel’s life. I was sweating out a mixture of dread and jealousy, biting my nails off as Beck tried to pull me back into my body. Samuel Cross was going to become a cheap question. He was going to spend his whole life chasing the way he felt before anyone knew who he was. He was going to sleep in bathtubs and bars and beds of shrieking fans. He was going to dissolve at 27. I was the only person who could save him.

By March, Samuel Cross had 376,000 monthly listeners. Magazines were asking him about his bagel order. He was doing these photoshoots in his underwear underwater. He made a music video of him walking backwards on a highway at night. He had a TEAM. He had a publicist and a manager and an agent and he signed to a record label. He put a bloody diamond through his nose. He was slipping away, selling out. Meanwhile, I was exhausted most of the time. I had a relentless cough and my dreams were only of strangers. My teeth were fine, but now, it felt like there was a metaphysical layer of cotton balls simply separating me from the rest of the earth. Indigo Records had it up to here with my calling out sick. What did it matter if they were open or closed? No one actually bought the music anyway. No one was hearing things as they were meant to be heard.

It was Sunday. I was somewhere between awake and asleep, somewhere between daylight and saving, when the vibration of my phone against my head yanked me back into the world. It was my weekly call with Brenda. I imagined my mother on the other end of the line, drinking her chamomile tea in her pink slippers. I imagined with every ring that passed, her heart beat faster, wondering where I could be, if I was okay, if things had gotten bad again. I imagined Todd, somewhere in the background, drifting through the rooms of a house that belonged only to them.

The house that belonged only to Todd and Brenda used to belong to me too. It held my childhood bedroom, untouched. I had navy blue walls and colorful instruments from the Goodwills of suburbia’s past. I can still go back to that place, the place where my fingers were always calloused, where there was paint on all my t-shirts, where elementary music teachers used to smile at me when no one was looking, like I was the only one who could possibly understand. I can still go back to the place where I was special. I can still go back to the places where it didn’t matter. I would sing in the shower and hug my mother. I would jump up and down because there was ice cream in the freezer and superheroes on the TV. I sent Brenda to voicemail and fell asleep, a sleep that could have lasted hours, days, or months. It’s hard to tell. I have no windows in my bedroom.

I wake up to dozens of missed calls from Beck, rubbed my eyes and rang him back.

Yo, I say.
Dude, where have you been? Beck asks.
Sleeping. What day is it.
Friday.
Oh. That’s not that bad.
Have you been sleeping since Wednesday?
Guess so.
Ok, Beck said. Whatever. You’re gonna want to hear this.
Hear what? I grumble.
Samuel Cross is going to be the musical guest on the The Late Night.

I shoot up in my bed. Well, air mattress. Air mattress with a pillow and a sheet. 

When?! I ask.
Saturday night, Beck sighs.

I shoot up like hot oil on a pan and start pacing the living room. How could this possibly be? Last week’s musical guest on The Late Night was a pop country musician named Billy Heartbreak. Is Samuel being coerced? Is he in danger? How could someone as rare as Samuel sink to the depths of such a mainstream, sell-out, crapshow? I run out into the afternoon street and breathe my first breath of fresh air. Slouching boys in beanies cross the street. The twin brothers from the corner deli step outside for a smoke. A baby drowning in her own squishy cheeks rolls by in a stroller, and I swear, the baby flashes me a quick smile. The entire sky is a sheet of cloud, but as I look up, the sheet splits in half, revealing a zig-zag crack of blue, all for me.

It is Saturday night. Samuel Cross is asleep on my couch. I didn’t expect him to snore, but he snores. Loudly. I didn’t expect him to sleep with his mouth open. I wrapped him in my favorite blanket, one from home, straight from my indigo bedroom. He is coccooned in the blanket that held me as a boy: a black night sky with yellow stars.

He was very easy to find. I was expecting more of a struggle. His TEAM doesn’t do a very good job of hiding him. I didn’t like telling him I was one of the producers for The Late Night, and that I needed him for an emergency fitting! I didn’t like lying to the person who filled my life with so much truth! I didn’t like putting the crushed-up sleeping pill in his Fiji water! But I knew he would thank me later.

Samuel Cross is supposed to appear on late night television in 45 minutes. My phone has been dead for 2 hours, but last I’d checked, no one had reported him missing. No one was worried. I knew no one cared about him the way I did. It had always been that way. I had been worrying about Samuel Cross long before anyone knew his name. Outside, the city was warming itself up. Dress rehearsals rehearsed, audience members lined up like sheep. Real people slipped into trains from their offices. Midtown churned on like a machine.

Samuel Cross is asleep on my couch. Samuel Cross is dreaming before my eyes. I am keeping him safe. I placed a glass of water on the slab of cement I call a table near his head, just in case he woke up and didn’t know where he was and needed proof that he wasn’t alone. He would never be alone, and neither would I. I sat on the floor, my back against the wall, knees curled into my chest. After I got him in the car, and I saw him drifting into sleep, I told him the truth. I told him who I was, his 251st and most important listener. He didn’t fight. He had come willingly. That part felt important. When he was right in between awake and asleep, right in between daylight and saving, he mumbled that one quiet night wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Samuel stirs. He shifts onto his side, pulls the blanket closer to his chest. For one moment, I feel a familiar swell of purpose rise up in me, warm and convincing. This is good. This is what it means to care. Samuel Cross will remain forever obscure, protected from the corrupting force of visibility. Every laundromat is something else. The record stores aren’t selling any more records. My friends are falling deeper into their bodies. Todd and Brenda do their taxes. I clear the cotton balls clean.

I wake to a flash of morning sun shooting rays into my face from a glass square. Have I always had this skylight? My apartment is bright and dustless, I breathe a full deep breath from these new healthy lungs. I shuffle into the polished bathroom, look into the mirror, and strangely enough, I like what I see. Have I always had such a symmetrical face? Have I always had so much potential? For some reason, I look in the mirror and I smile because I am alive.

My phone is somehow plugged into a charger in the wall. It is Monday morning. I woke up at 6am, with the rest of the world. My childhood blanket of the night sky is folded neatly at the edge of the sofa. Just then I remember: Samuel. I feel dizzy with guilt! What a bizarre thing to do! To steal him away from his life? His autonomy? Who am I to choose anything for anyone else? What do I want to choose for myself? What do I want to do today? Something new has taken hold of me, a new pattern of thought, a new feeling from the inside out. It happened somewhere in my dreamless, songless sleep.

There is a note from Samuel by the sink.

Hey man, he said. I am just going to forget this happened. 
I don’t want to get you in trouble. 
I didn’t want to wake you. 
You were talking in your sleep. 
You said your soul was leaving your body. 
It gave me an idea for a song. 
This whole experience, actually, gave me an idea for a song. 
Please, take care of yourself. 
I know you think you know me, but you don’t. 
Or maybe you do. Who knows. 

Good luck, brother.

–Samuel Cross

I clutch the note to my chest and then toss it down the garbage disposal. I think I want to get a a haircut. I sit in the chair of the local barber, and I ask him about his son. He says his son never calls anymore, that he has a life of his own. There is a heavy weight lifted off my neck. There is music from another country playing from the speakers. I have never been to another country. I have never been much of anywhere.

I clutch the note to my chest and then toss it down the garbage disposal. I think I want to get a a haircut. I sit in the chair of the local barber, and I ask him about his son. He says his son never calls anymore, that he has a life of his own. There is a heavy weight lifted off my neck. There is music from another country playing from the speakers. I have never been to another country. I have never been much of anywhere.

I bring sandwiches to Beck, Dylan, and Rob. Didn’t realize I had their orders memorized. I knew I could find them on the roof, disengaged.

We’ve been worried about you, man.
You don't need to worry about me anymore.

I ask them for a hug. They laugh. I stand there with my arms open until they dive in. They smell like grease and weed and the past. My best friends are beautiful. They know my name when I forget it. I’ll meet them again, in another phase, another dream, another place, or another life.

I pack a suitcase of the necessities and sprint to Grand Central. I make the next train back home just in time. I’m on my way to my own front door. I’m on my way to hug my mother. I will make her tea, and tell her everything I ate, and tell her all of the thoughts in my new clear head. I slide into the red patent leather seat. Everyone is plugged in, listening to something, hearing their own version of an answer, their own version of the truth.

I take the first train home, and I listen to nothing.

…

That was my new short story The Gatekeeper! With my friends, watching someone like Cameron Winter explode out of obscurity made me think about what happens when people feel protective and prideful over artists they feel as if they discovered. But then, this thought spun out into something a bit more vast. All of these other thoughts attached themselves to this original thought, like music as religion, entitlement, pre-adulthood but post-adolescence, the desire to be special, superiority, ego, frontal lobes developing, and so on!

Thank you for reading and for subscribing to Dream Logic. I have been very caught up in figuring out my own days, life, etc lately, however I have not forgotten about Philosophy Mondays! I have actually been working on my first philosophy Monday essay for 3 whole weeks :) Excited to share soon. Until then, I have many of things that have been bouncing around my mind and my dreams, and would love to share them with you in a series of shorter posts throughout the week.

For now, I am wondering, have you ever had the impulse to “gatekeep” something? An artist, a tv show, a restaurant, etc? How did that feeling play out for you? How do you feel about gatekeepers? None of us are Jeremy Rhinestones. I wonder what JD Salinger would think about our friend Jeremy.

lovely dreams and days to all,

audrey valentine weisburd

We are paying for this in drastic ways. Without the humanities, we are left with a thinned out world that zones out on the surface of things, a world of quantity over quality. A society that no longer values the humanities forgets how to ask the kinds of questions that make us human in the first place.

Cue Dead Poets Society… (predictable choice, I know)

I will never forget the round table discussions of a good philosophy class. I will never forget every early morning breakfast philosophy chats with my dad, big ideas over pancakes. During the pandemic, I was seventeen and full of questions, boredom, and a restlessness that felt untameable. I’d take these aimless drives through the Texas suburbs, coasting past our old houses, old schools, the cliffs where I’d park and watch the sun bleed across the sky.

Parked at a rural overlook one quarantined day, I threw on a podcast called Philosophize This! by Stephen West. I started from Episode 1, 6th Century BCE, and listened all the way through to modern day, taking notes, attempting to internalize these ideas. The truth was, I still didn’t fully understand what philosophy was or how it might fit into a person’s life. I only knew that this kind of thinking itself felt like fresh air. It made the world, and my place in it, feel a little less arbitrary, a little more illuminated, and suddenly, I felt so lucky to be alive, to spend time in a life that now resembled some sort of eternal conversation.

That is how I’ve come to understand philosophy: as an eternal conversation. A round table stretching across centuries, voices throwing questions back and forth. When I look back on the round tables of my college philosophy classes, I recall how not a single lecture focused on a woman’s philosophy. Lately, I’ve been filling in those absences on my own, learning about the women whose work so often escapes the curriculum. I don’t mean strictly “feminist philosophers,” as if women’s only intellectual terrain were womanhood itself. I want to know what women think about being alive, about time, love, power, God, freedom, perception, justice.

Philosophy is the spine of all of my other interests and passions. I can’t think of a single story that has resonated with me without some sort of philosophical backbone. Philosophy is the richness of life, the mystery and nuance of the human condition. So here is my sweet small little tiny offering, as well as my way to keep learning without the structure of being a student. Every other Monday, I plan to publish a short essay about philosophy, and make it surprising, playful, accessible, and apply these ideas to the digital age. Many of these essays will center women philosophers who were rarely included in the courses I encountered. Some will focus on the philosophical background of a certain film I love. Some will unpack the philosophy of something funny and absurd.

Next Monday, to start off the new year, I will share a little essay about Simone Weil (1909-1943) – the absolute queen who inspired me to begin this series at all. If you think philosophy is dry or too abstract, Weil will undo that assumption entirely. These things can be subversive and shocking. This is a woman who believed philosophical ideas needed to be lived in the body, not only witnessed and then written about in cozy classrooms from afar. She threw herself into the warzone. She lied about her eyesight to join workers in factories, risking her life because she believed it was impossible to speak ethically about labor without sharing in the suffering of those who labored. She volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War because she believed that if she was going to try to understand war, she had to stand beside those who were helplessly exposed to its violence. She gave away nearly all her money. She believed attention was the purest form of love, that undivided attention was a form of worship. These ideas of compassion and distraction and attention feel beyond relevant today.

I am excited to start this little tradition! Until then, I’d love to share a little poem I wrote recently. Poetry for me tends to ‘fall out',’ or it just drops, like something falling out of a coat pocket. This one fell out of me as I was running to the train. I was thinking about that idea Keith Leonard described in that poem above, of “where language ends.” Then, I was thinking about the total mystery of selfhood, where exactly the “self” is located in the body. How we can never really know these things.

Things That Cannot Be Held Or Described, Including “The Real You”

I hope you never have to wonder who you are to the point of sweat,
and by that I mean I hope the train always arrives
the moment you step on the platform,
and by that I mean I hope that your hands never feel like knots
swinging from your body.

Sometimes, you’ll spend weeks living nowhere
except for maybe your head.
Nights where you sleep inside of a question,
or a bathtub,
or a raindrop,
or a doorbell,
a faint and terrible ringing in your ear.

You cannot hold a question,
you can’t hold a thought or a dream or a mind,
but you can hold a head,
and you can hold your other hand,

left answers to right
and right answers to left.

I hope you never have to wonder who you are.

I hope you never go looking
for a third hand.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from my last day in London. I have been here for 12 amazing days. Some round-up highlights:

• Saw Hamnet by Chloe Zhao at The Gate cinema in Notting Hill. Jessie Buckley was astounding!

• Saw Bryan Cranston act in the West End play All My Sons, a play by Arthur Miller, what a ride! I have been trying to work on an idea for a play for several weeks now, but seeing this story unfold made me want to read every Arthur Miller play. I was completely blown away.

• Went to the National Gallery and the TATE Modern. Visited some of my favorite pieces of art in London, including Giacometti’s Sculpture, the TATE’s dimmed room filled with plum-toned Rothko’s, The Execution of Lady Jane Gray, etc.

• Christmas day itself, we spent it on a little farm in the countryside with sheep, donkeys, goats, chickens, pigs, and 4 little cousins whose magical Christmas wonder is intact. I am used to tiny little Christmases, but these times with my UK family have been a glimpse of the other side of the metaphorical grass. I think both grasses are nice and green enough from this vantage point!

• Many delicious meals, from Balthazar to Tokyo Diner to an Indian Takeout Curry Christmas Eve x It’s a Wonderful Life.

Time to send you off of course with Jeff Buckley’s “New Years Eve Prayer…”

Stay tuned for Simone Weil and the first Philosophy Monday next week. Thank you for being here! Cheers!

I often think of seeing music and going dancing as a spiritual act, the closest thing I have to worship. The way the body orients itself upward, hands lifted into the air, voices rising in unison with strangers. Everyone in the room is there for the same reason, communal devotion connected toward something intangible and fleeting, sent from somewhere else.

That night, the L train was filled with an unusual influx of twentysomethings making the pilgrimage from (assumed) Bushwick all the way to 57th Street. There was a palpable buzz of anticipation floating through the air. The merch line wrapped around flights of stairs. Mustaches and beanies and beautiful girls blended together into the soft blur of a generation, gathering, knowingly or not, for catharsis.

The Geese hype has become oversaturated in the wake of Getting Killed, with the band heralded as “saving rock,” a claim that can feel exaggerated. Still, there is no denying the rarity of the moment: the simultaneous ascent of a band and its frontman, each thriving in parallel but distinct artistic lanes. Winter now joins a small and historic group as one of the youngest performers to headline Carnegie Hall, alongside Bob Dylan, Tim Buckley, and Laura Nyro. As if that weren’t enough, Paul Thomas Anderson and Benny Safdie were filming the concert in its entirety, lending the night a strange and thrilling meta-quality. Watching your favorite director document your favorite singer, in real time, felt like briefly existing inside a movie.

Winter’s solo record Heavy Metal is jagged and intimate, different from Geese’s higher-energy, head-banging repertoire. I remember hearing “Love Takes Miles” for the first time at the end of last year, then playing it every day that followed. Its timeless and life-affirming bounce contained lyrics which reignited my belief that surprising and poetic language is the most powerful and timeless vehicle of expression. It is the form of communication that sweeps me off my feet time and time again. To be collectively moved by simple sentiments like, “Love will call / When you’ve got enough under your arms… Love will call / Love will make you fit it all in the car…” is proof enough to me as some sort of universal language of resonance.

As GQ put it, “Last night, then, felt a little like a return to church… Has there, after all, ever been anything quite like this? The leader of the band making people excited about the enduring prospects of rock bands, who is simultaneously a solo songwriter making people excited about the enduring prospects of that tradition, too?”

We slid into the balcony, as far from the stage as one could be, legs folded into themselves in the crowded, beautiful hall. Benny Safdie sat directly to our left, PTA on the floor below. When Winter came onstage, he faced away from the audience, his back turned away, until his raw and unguarded voice echoed through every corner of Carnegie Hall. The room hung onto each word, waiting until the final piano note fully dissolved before clapping. At the end of “Take It With You,” my favorite of his songs, he exited to a six-minute standing ovation, before returning for an encore.

To say I was moved would be an understatement. I sat with a lump in my throat the entire night, tears streaming down my face at moments I could neither predict nor explain, as if the music had found a hidden entrance inside me. I felt both possessed and purged, unzipped and undone.

In the weeks leading up to the concert, something inside me had been tightening. I was carrying that familiar early-twenties sensation of being untethered to structure, placing unreasonable pressure on myself to know exactly where I was going and who I was becoming. I found myself measuring my life against others, tumbling down that slippery rabbit hole of comparison. At the same time, the world felt unbearably loud, saturated with senseless violence on the news that seeped into my psyche. These feelings remained dormant, stored somewhere in the body.

After the concert, I felt emotionally refreshed, made new, despite experiencing sadness or representing expressions of pain the entire night. I left lighter. The experience returned me to the final line of a poem I wrote years ago: How else can I ask to be made new? I now understand that renewal does not miraculously take shape after finding answers, but through learning to love the ambiguous, complex questions themselves. Allowing oneself to be moved through. If you were to walk in on me watching Cassavetes’ Woman Under the Influence for the first time, or Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, it would not be a pretty sight.

Both stories submitted me to a tissue littered living room, fetal position ugly cry for a night, and then deep emotional clarity and presence for the weeks to come. On the other side of encounters with particularly devastating art, I always feel more human than before.

In my senior year of college, in a film and philosophy class, we studied Shakespearean tragedies and the concept of catharsis. The questions fascinated me. Why do we willingly watch people suffer onstage? Why do we seek out art that devastates us? In Poetics, Aristotle describes catharsis, from the Greek katharsis, meaning cleansing or purification, as the purging of pity and fear. There were deeper questions that lingered in me, having to do with what I’ll call the Problem of Simultaneity: how can something feel so awful, so necessary, and so refreshing all at once? How do these contradictions coexist so seamlessly?

Catharsis offers permission. It gives us a place to release emotions that have no practical outlet. Art becomes a container, saying, you can put this here. Cameron Winter’s wild lyrics, the strange piano keys themselves, his deep voice all held our feelings that night. To be moved is to allow emotion to move through you, rather than calcify or burrow. I never regret a cathartic experience, no matter how ugly and despite how devastating it may feel in the moment. I will always defend “sad” art, because you are not meant to build a house inside it. You are meant to pass through.

On the corner of Sunset and Genesee, there was always a tent, right under the mansions on the hill, right next to Soul Cycle, right where the fires died out. One time, there wasn’t a tent. There was a white cotton sheet duct taped to a silver pole. Another time, there was a large cardboard box with two dusty feet draped over its thin, brown edge. When I lived on this street, my understanding of the world had swirled into a sheet of marble. Both sides of every situation seemed to blur together constantly. Boundaries, lines, politics, and opinions seemed to blur into the illusive haze of simultaneity. This, and also that. Yes, and also no.

I was enrolled in a summer program where I was supposed to learn how to become the next powerhouse of the entertainment industry. Instead, I learned that said ‘industry’ vacuumed the light from my soul. I was taking a class called “Hollywood: Navigating the Future,” a seminar where we learned which conglomerates were conglomerating and which influencers were influencing. There, we were taught that cinema was dead and movie-theaters would soon be obsolete.

“Does anyone actually go to the movies anymore?” asked my professor, teleporting me back to last summer in Brooklyn, days and nights where time ran diagonally in a dark room with a silver screen, dancing through the streets of the West Village, huddled beneath a broken umbrella attached to the hand of a beautiful boy, running from the IFC Center to the FilmForum, smoking a very skinny cigarette after a Godard screening, feeling stupid and pretentious and alive and enamored by the promise of all the things in the world I hadn’t seen.

“No.” The statistics and fellow students echoed. “No one goes to the movies anymore.” Because America is not the Film Forum or a box of skinny little cigarettes. That is a very small, very privileged handful of people– a niche that I tuck myself into in order to live a life where I can feel stupidly alive and enamoured most of the time. America, on the other hand, is a dangerously fast, dangerously wide highway. The only gas station for miles. With all that roaring, gaping space, all those potholes and ticket prices, of course less people are going to the movies.

After my lecture about the death of cinema, I left my class, drove through the canyons, parked beneath a twinkling marquee, and slipped into a dark, velvet, buttery, sold out film screening. Even in the odds of nothing, there will always be pockets of something. Social fragments of a scattered belonging. This makes for a very beautiful, very crowded, very confusing mosaic.

Tucked behind Beverly Boulevard, I walked through the Fairfax district in a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood. A city within a city. I passed three young girls wearing floral dresses to their ankles and pinched delicate collars. Shards of their conversation lingered in the air as they brushed by. The streets were very quiet, their laughs, self-contained. My nightclub boots dragged along their gumless sidewalks. A world within a world, uninterrupted, until a Cyber Truck plummeted by, blowing wind through all of us at once. The intersection of disparate values, traditions, styles, like treadmills in a line, side by side. The wild friction of it all.

This is the “age of loneliness,” although we’ve never been so connected. A NO TOBACCO sign hangs overhead, while a 15 year old sucks on their neon green vape like a binky. Rainbows of bright glorious people kiss proudly on the streets, while the president attempts to wipe the word “gay” from the archive of the world. Will there ever be a new kind of music, or just a mix of the music we’ve already swirled together? Will I ever see a new color, or just a new shade of the ones I have seen all my life? Will language ever create a word so new it has no past, no echo of a meaning we’ve spoken before?

That’s the thing about Cyber Trucks rolling through Hasidic Hollywood neighborhoods, cigarettes and vapes, Amazon and Erewhon, 16mm and superheroes, Tinder and Tradwives, food delivering robots rolling down the street, tradition, convergence, swimming pools and the whole of the Pacific… Nothing ever dies. Nothing ever goes away. Things are only compressed, added to, layered upon. The first-thing shrinks beneath the weight of the next-thing, but it’s still there, peeking out from the soft, rounded edges of contemporary life.

Part Two: Part One: I Can’t Find My Way Home In This Self-Driving Car (November, 28th 2025)

These driverless cars have a mind of their own, revisiting Austin, TECHxas.

“Stop it, you’re hurting my feelings,” the WAYMO says to me after I call it dense for taking the longest route imaginable. It is taking me to a place where everyone looks the same. I tell my friend a joke, and Elon Musk is the punchline. All the lights flicker on and an electronic pop song starts to play on its own. I am not going to dance for you, WAYMO! I know you are watching. What are you gonna do? Lock the doors and drive straight to El Paso. Leave me somewhere, stranded in a desert, where no two cacti look the same, where no two rattlesnakes look the same. You will leave me there, and then return back to your headquarters, right in the center of Austin, Texas, the city I grew up in and now struggle to recognize its Silicon Valley Skyline.

I speak about the inherent sadness of a city changing, ‘losing its charm,’ shedding its history, and then I move to Williamsburg, Brooklyn of all places. I am aware of this irony, because these days, contradiction is constant. “Make sure you hang out in all five boroughs,” an underage girl lectures me outside of a bar on the Lower East Side, a bar that went viral for only spinning vinyl. Again, irony and contradiction.

“Definitely!” I try to match her energy. “I like to appreciate all kind of neighborhoods, support their restaurants, my favorite places to dance are in Queens, my favorite food is in–” She cuts me off.

“Cool, cool. Yeah, I’ve had some of my worst nights out in the Bronx.” I don’t even know what to say, I don’t even known if she knows what she said.

“Where are you from?” someone asks her.

“Los Angeles,” she replies. I smile and slip into an Uber, or a Taxi, or perhaps one of those yellow taxis that is also an Uber. “Remember, it’s all stolen land!” She calls out as we drive away into the incomprehensible skyline, into the swirl of cultures, and into the rhythm of a city, half falling apart, half coming together, constantly in flux.

Back in Austin, I was coming home for Thanksgiving. My father picked me up from the airport, and then he put his hands away. Now everyone in Techxas puts their hands away. In his new car, he turned to look at me with more than his peripheral, his entire body holding a conversation as the car drove itself. Every now and then, his car would talk to us. He would ask his car questions, and little voice named Rex would have all the answers. “Thanks, Rex. We love you, Rex.”

At thousands of thanksgivings all across the country, concerned uncles are asking their nieces and nephews about Mamdani. At hundreds of thousands of thanksgivings all across the country, drunk aunts are talking about Charlie Kirk. At millions of thanksgivings all across the country, families talk about artificial intelligence, regurgitating ideas they learned from their artificial intelligences, and I think about the linguistics of the word itself: Artificial Intelligence. Intelligence that is fake. Intelligence that is not really intelligence at all. A double negative.

At 2 in the morning, after Thanksgiving, my first night back in Brooklyn, my boyfriend returns from small-town Indiana. He surprises me in bed. I am in a deep sleep, lost in a dream about a city that doesn’t exist. I wake to him holding me like no one has ever been held, like I was the first human he embraced after years of captivity. That’s what love feels like, but it’s also what it feels like to stumble into the unmapped terrain of the human heart. Here’s what I mean: my boyfriend spent the weekend assisting on a photo shoot for TIME Magazine, a cover story about a man in love with his chatbot. He stood inside the man’s house, a 65-year-old who lived with his ninety-five-year-old parents. Afterward, he ate at a restaurant owned entirely by the Amish, where everything on the plate was beige. How about that, innovation and tradition, future and past, rubbing against each other side by side. The wild friction of it all.

Maybe that’s why I can’t find my way home in this self-driving car. Every road feels like it’s bending into the future. Every turn looks like a fun-house mirror, even the ones I grew up on. Maybe the only compass is the people we choose to travel with. The world is glitching and accelerating and contradicting itself at every turn, but in the passenger seat, with someone I love beside me, in a bed at the edge of the world, I remember that these cars don’t have hearts, and these artificial voices are coming from nowhere.

When you come from nowhere, you won’t get very far.

･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆

Jet Lag

How many layers to undress from myself?

Get home and shed a country

A shed in a house
in a home in a town 
in a place where everyone shares a name

My name
the same of yours

I shed myself, 
and now I’m you!

･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･

I didn’t think all of that post-graduate emotional turbulence would knock me out the way it did. Going straight from that Oxford experience to beginning a new chapter in New York made for some inevitable whiplash. At my worst, I am so overwhelmed by the world and by others, that I want to retreat into some little cavern in myself. At my best, I am so curious and in awe about the world and others, that I want to dance, run, fly, talk, and soak it all in. The first month here functioned only as a see-saw between those two grand poles.

･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･

Twentysomething Black Hole

You have therapy at 7 with a faceless intelligence
and tremble in your bed
which is actually a hole.

You wear other people’s clothes,
they fall off your shoulders.

You make junk angels in the junkyard,
carve pumpkins in the spring.

You check into a hotel for no reason,
just to go somewhere else.

You dream for no reason, you dream
though it takes you nowhere.

You stand still on the treadmill of trying,
twist your soft body into difficult shapes to maintain
the perfect shape.
But isn’t the perfect shape
a perfect circle,
and if you looked like that,
you’d never fit into anything.

You walk your laundry like a dog,
and yearn for everything.

You stand stilettoed, cold-footed, pigeon-toed
before a man on a stool guarding the gold bar.

He looks you up and down and says:
You must take something off to enter.
You reach for your belt.
He raises his hand: No
a layer of yourself, actually.
Everyone is doing it.

You rummage through filth for a shimmer of truth
and think you’ll know it when you see it
though every time, it’s different.

You get ahead of yourself.

You tremble in this world
which is the only perfect circle.

And dive headfirst into your life
which is actually a hole.

･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂･ ⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂⋆ ･ ⠄⠂

Now, things are mellowing out. I have enough structure to somehow harmonize me into the folds of the ceaseless rhythm, the wild equation, of this city. Enough routine to bound me to something. I don’t know how long it’s going to last like this, but it’s working for now.

In the mornings, I write about film for Paste Magazine. I get quite a lot of freedom in this job to pitch and write whatever I’d like, but each article must be about movies.

My identity with film has been a funny one. I have my degree in it, but it doesn’t always feel like that, because I am lucky enough to be in love with someone / be surrounded by people who possess such an inherent and natural extensive film knowledge. Michael’s dream date would one room, curtains drawn, a whole day filled with movies, back to back to back. He’s so immersed, the material world just falls away. For me, after the fateful double feature, my thoughts are too loud and too antsy, I need to speak, I need to put them somewhere. I need to put myself somewhere. In a way, writing about film has been a handy way of putting both them and myself somewhere.

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Attention Span, A Pet Goldfish

you have to listen slowly to the breath of the mailman because there are secrets of life tucked into the quiet space between in and out

you are all out, out, out 

but you have to listen slowly to the words on the intercom though they ring out like static and they sound like nothing 

you have to listen slowly to the nothing

or else you’ll miss all the secrets tucked into the corners or waiting on the half side of the hour hand 

you are all seconds, seconds, thirds, & next 

you have to listen slowly to the saunter of your thoughts in a bed that isn’t yours 

in a stranger’s naked room 
you have to look closely at the walls 

see their every scar and pattern

breathe underwater, with your entirety,
goldfish, tadpole, amoeba, 
no one can see you
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I have written screenplays, but I always have to strangle my action lines down, away from a carousel of lyrical ramblings. I have made pitch deck after pitch deck. I co-founded a film production club and produced short films. I see the way people move on a set, the fiery and yet stagnant creatures they become. I think it’s a beautiful thing, but I always feel like I’m watching through a window or a peephole.

I love film so wholly, I don’t always know how to talk about it. Perhaps it’s the arena of my life that I get impostor syndrome from, or the one thing that I let myself love freely without the need to put it into words. I obsess over words. I need to describe everything, but this, I usually let other people do the talking and keep my reactions ambiguous and swirling inside.

But now, this is my job, to share these thoughts and pitch these thoughts in a professional setting. I explored how the American road film, once a symbol of boundless freedom and rebellion, has evolved into something far more fragmented. My essay traces the genre’s journey from Thelma & Louise to contemporary works like The Sweet East, American Honey, and Nomadland, examining how the open highway has transformed from a site of liberation to a mirror of disillusionment. Today’s road films no longer chart self-discovery, but rather depict a fractured America defined by chaos, precarity, and restless wanderers adrift in desolate towns and decaying spaces.

I have also written about the transformative power of seeing Close Encounters of the Third Kind on 70mm at the Paris Theater. In that piece, I recalled my first viewing attempt of the film on a tiny airplane screen. I went on to situate the experience to a larger question of scale, magnitude, and collective experience. I related this back to the heart of Close Encounters, being about communication beyond language, the fragile transcendent connection between beings.

My most recent essay was about the app Letterboxd, but mainly about the way my generation experiences art in the digital age. I put the Letterboxd experience side by side with Sontag’s Against Interpretation, contrasting the way self-expression blurs with self-branding. I explore the app as both a bridge and a barrier to the movie-watching experience, simultaneously. I think with this essay, along with Projections and Reflections: A Childhood in the Collective Consciousness I found the nonfiction niche I want to continue writing essays about: how does my generation experience art and intimacy in the age of absurdity, digital absurdity and political absurdity.

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1. Stream of Consciousness: Turned Inside Out

I am so young. I have nothing but time! I’m all grown up. Where did everything go? Where’d the beginning go? I feel jumpy. Too much caffeine. Pay rent. Do chores. Watch the sink bubble up.

I don’t write too well when I’m flipped upside down.

Everything is so complicated. I go to an overpriced pilates class because I am trying to optimize my body as a product to get closer to some unforgiving standard.

Everything is so simple. I go to a pilates class because I want to be strong and I like to take care of myself.

Everything is so complicated. People, mysterious swirl of good and bad.

Everything is simple. Evil is just some senseless infection.

Only interested in time, movies, books, the sound of my friends laughing.

Everything is simple. Everything has a color, and it will always be that color, even when the lights go off.

Everything is complicated. Is there any color when the lights are off?

Everything is simple. I hear my parents voice on the phone. They love each other so much. They hold each other close.

Everything is complicated. They love each other so much, and they are divorced.

Everything is simple. We are a family.

Everything contradicts itself. Everything is ironic. The internet connects us, delivers us the world. The internet divides us, slices up the world into illegible nothings.

In the reddit thread, someone says, this SSRI saved my life. Someone else says, this SSRI made me literally spontaneously combust. Someone says it does that at first, but then your dust forms back together and you feel amazing. Someone else says, it made me an ogre. Someone else says, it made me a fairy. In the other reddit thread, someone says, this new little birth control device is amazing, you can put it on like nailpolish. Someone else says, the nail polish birth control made my skin glow in the dark.

Anyway. I don’t write too well when I’m turned inside out.

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Other than Paste, in my later afternoons, I have started working as a nanny an eight year old boy. This means I spend a lot of time sitting in a cement playground in the Financial District, the white autumn sun beating down on me. The boy runs in circles and the nanny can’t keep up. This job has had its challenges, but I am learning. I am observing. I make peanut-butter sandwiches and cut them into pieces of a puzzle. We race up the stairs, and he tells me how he wishes he had a yard.

I think about my relationship with everything. I overindulge. I sit on the roof and hear the sirens. Balloons fly in front of me, coming from nowhere. My beautiful roommates put flowers in my room as I return from the big memorial.

I am writing from a room I’ve never entered, in Paris, at a little hotel in Saint-Germain with maximalist wallpaper patterned with giraffes and peacocks running from floor to ceiling. I’ve just completed the creative writing summer course at University of Oxford, and it truly transcended anything I could have ever expected. I have been writing a longer form reflection about it I look forward to sharing, but it was, simply, an unforgettable and life-changing dream.

Instead of going into detail about the program, I am going to share part of the essay I wrote at Oxford during my Creative Nonfiction course. I have been wanting to experiment with writing about growing up in the digital age, but in a way that doesn’t feel heavy-handed or ‘too soon or',’ or (should I say it..?) cringe. Ugh. As Ocean Vuong says (and my dear friend Magdaliz echoed beautifully) as a generation, our fear of being “cringe” is a cage that we built, only hurting ourselves, trapping ourselves, limiting ourselves.

But I wanted to write about the internet as myth, as a gothic and twisted landscape, and also find a way to fuse my lyrical voice in nonfiction through dramatically depicting the absurdity of contemporary life.

David Lynch said it best. I have been floating around the idea of working on a collection of essays called Theater of the Absurd, a book in three acts: 1) the social absurd 2) the digital absurd and 3) the political absurd. These would fuse absurdist philosophies into meditations on the 2020s. The piece below may belong in a larger collection like that, or perhaps it was just a launching point to get these ideas flowing. Either way, thank you for reading, subscribing, and being here today.

In the comments, I’d love to know about your earliest memories of social media.

Projections & Reflections: A Childhood in the Collective Consciousness

I. THE POOL

At only twelve years old, I plugged myself into a collective consciousness that would soon possess my peers one by one. This collective consciousness was an exponentially expanding black body of water, completely still, without one ripple of wind or reality. It lured fragile mortals into its wake. It put spells on us, twisting our eyes into hypnotized scrolling swirls. The water beckoned us in, to lean forward, to hover our bodies over the pool and get lost in our reflections. Finally, it swallowed us whole. Time flattened. Trees were no longer trees, they were representations of trees. Faces were no longer faces, they were illusions of faces. The world rushed by at impossible speeds. We’d spend hours in the parallel upside down world, without ever seeing things as they are. There was access to everything, to anyone, and most intoxicatingly, to myself as I might like to be.

II. THE FIRST POST

My first post on Instagram was an oversaturated, baby‑toothed selfie. I was sipping on a cotton‑candy frappuccino from Starbucks inside of Forever 21. Life was sugary, numb, and awesome. Starbucks was awesome. Corporations = so cool. Filters were fantastic. I could make the world as pink as I wanted, my teeth as white as they might someday be. I could even dissolve the baby fat still softening my cheeks, cheeks that pleaded silently: you are still a child, please don’t thin yourself out. Please don’t buy into these myths that are older and stronger than your willpower.

But nothing compared to that moment when the likes crossed from single to double digits. A change in number, a change in mood. I didn’t understand that my dopamine receptors were getting hijacked. I was twelve, and I was already hooked.

III. THE PROPHETS

Truth is, I was drawn to the screen of projections and reflections before there was even a collective consciousness to fall into. I grew up in the early 2000s, when children’s television was just beginning to metabolize the existence of the Internet. Disney Channel and Nickelodeon both tried to fictionalize the new online world, but no series captured it better than iCarly (2007).

The show followed Miranda Cosgrove as Carly Shay and Jeannette McCurdy as Sam Puckett as their adolescent lives were uprooted after forming a viral Internet webshow. The series had an inherent “meta” quality, a series about the making of a series, young stars growing fame because of a show about unexpected fame. iCarly laid the framework for the phenomenon of one simply going viral for being themselves as they are. In hindsight, iCarly was strangely prophetic, a premonition for how creator culture and content culture would evolve in the decade to come. It predicted influencers, livestreams, and most importantly, the blur of identities between one’s online / perceived / performed self, and one's offline / natural self.

What I couldn’t articulate at nine was how seductive that was, to live in two worlds at once, both inside yourself and outside of yourself, seeing you as others saw you. I was learning about voyeurism, the premise of projecting oneself into the world, and being seen by anonymous swarms of strangers. Sociologists call this the looking‑glass self: our self-image is shaped by imagining how we appear to others. By the time my generation hit middle school, we had mirrors in our pockets at all times. We were getting stalked by, and stalking, ourselves.

My generation of early Generation Z witnessed the birth of YouTube and the first wave of online profiles. This has shaped the way we see identity, performance, and connection in ways no previous generation has experienced at such a formative age. Before puberty, we were constructing pixelated avatars of the people we were still figuring out how to be. Self‑discovery no longer happened in private. It happened for everyone to watch.

IV. WISHING WEBSHOWS

A childhood friend and I outgrew the great outdoors quickly. We launched into a different form of playing pretend, now through the Photo Booth application on my family’s oldest Macbook. In the style of iCarly, we started a web series called “Wishing Webshows.” We put on segments, fake guests, interviews, skits, contests and competitions, both of us secretly trying to outshine the other. We figured out how to build a free website where we uploaded our webshows. Zero views, every time, but that didn’t matter. It was the mere act of tapping into some promise of a collective consciousness, of staring at my own face, of hearing my own little voice, that led me to feel wholly consumed. Each night, I would dream about Wishing Webshows. I would dream about being seen.

After the Wishing Webshows website expired but before the days of Instagram, I would still turn to Photo Booth. Alone, I made thousands of videos, talking to myself for hours. These videos would not get posted anywhere, but it was enough to know I could post them if I wanted to. It was just enough to know there was always a collective consciousness waiting for my contribution, and there always would be.

I made videos like, “What’s in my Backpack,” and “Morning Routine,” and “What’s on my iPhone Touch,” mimicking the YouTubers who were going viral for making content just like this. This process made me feel real. It was a place to put my mess of self. It is important to note that I was an only child and our house was filled with too many ghosts and echoes. After filming these videos, I’d get dropped off at dance class, a team filled with mean girls who would stretch in a circle, and I’d watch myself move in front of an even larger mirror.

Jonathan Haidt calls us “the anxious generation,” the first to go through puberty with a smartphone in hand. Between 2010 and 2015, rates of anxiety, depression, and self‑harm among teen girls doubled. He compares giving a child a smartphone to sending them to live on Mars: untested, unmonitored, fundamentally alien to human development.

Sometimes I wonder what my childhood would have been like without so many mirrors.

V. MIRRORS UPON MIRRORS

As I write this, in a little bookshop in Oxford, England, a city filled with the ancient reminders of time, gothic spires and libraries from centuries ago, a red-haired girl props up her phone on her computer and presses record. She proceeds to roam through the bookstore, picking up a title, skimming the back, putting it down, pretending to shuffle through books as if the phone was not there. She dropped the act and returned to her device, watched the video, and then deleted it. She tried one more time, propping up her phone, pressing record, wandering again, this time taking a different route filled with different angles. We try to pretend our devices are these invisible spectators to our lives, like they’re not even there. But they are there. They are always there, watching, whether you press record or not.

VI. TO LIVE FOREVER

Perhaps everything we do is an attempt to make ourselves immortal. Simone de Beauvoir called the awareness of death a “permanent wound.” Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and John Berger saw photography as a way to resist the withering of time. To accumulate excessive amounts of wealth, a net worth one couldn’t spend in hundreds of lifetimes. To stand atop a mountain of power. Build an empire. Get married. Have children. Pass a name down. Get published. Take photographs. To be young forever. Fillers, surgeries, serums. To leave behind a digital footprint, and craft a profile that will outlive our weary hearts. This is a means of defying the inevitable. We are both cursed and blessed with our consciousness. We know we are going to die. What is someone meant to do with such heavy knowledge?

But that’s just one sinister shimmer of the greater truth at play here. We are also just lonely, and starved for connection. We are also just confused, and want to latch onto an ‘aesthetic.’ We are also just sentimental, and want to remember our lives.

The red-haired girl recording herself catches me staring. Our eyes meet. I smile at her, softly, then look back down at my phone.

I am writing to you beside Gingerman’s loud purr. He is a very big-boned cat, not necessarily a fat cat, just a particularly large one. Nacho, the neighbor’s cat, has just come to visit and is staring me down through the window.

Every day I am asked where I’m from. Where I’ve been. Where I’m going. I respond with the six sparkling cities that tether me to the earth: Los Angeles, Austin, St. Albans, London, Syracuse, NYC. Each one, a colorful thread in the braid of me. I think of the way Didion writes about California, like its oxygen will forever be her air.

One late night in a dark car rolling through Chicago, I sat beside a best friend and future roommate. We asked the group: What’s your city soulmate? She and I often speak of cities as if they have a consciousness of their own. We talk about their identities, energies, character. Asking this question became a kind of shortcut, a coded way of discovering what someone longs for in a meaningful relationship.

I say London is my city soulmate. Because, like I said, here I feel safe, alive, and present. I love that I can walk one street and hear every language echoing around me. It is so vibrantly international, textured with culture. I feel like I’m part of the world rather than witnessing it. In my relationship, I also feel like he and I are explorers of a vast and fascinating world. What a privilege to find a place, to find a person, that makes you feel like the world is expansive and marvelous. Everyone deserves to feel that way.

And yet, that special feeling can be so easy to forget. So many factors can push against that feeling and cause friction. Deep in suburbia, the world can shrink. Around the wrong table, sitting in the wrong circle, the wrong group of people, talking about the wrong things, I can forget. Doomscrolling the news, I definitely forget. Facing a hollowed-out job market and oversaturated industries, the doors to abundance seem locked. It’s a strange time to be alive. I am a person prone to worry, but curiosity is my lifeboat. Every time. To float, just slightly detached, a little unsteady, inside the mystery of it all.

thought: I miss the years when I didn’t hear the word A.I. three to five times a day.

Before I return to the topic of cities, I just want to say: thank you all for subscribing to my Substack. I have not yet addressed any of you directly. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. You didn’t have to do that. No, seriously, you don’t have to be here. You can go.

Just kidding. Please stay. Come back. Yay. Do you want some tea?

I plan to publish ideas (stories, poems, essays, film chats, book chats, music chats) much more than I plan to write about myself. I am trying to get far away from self-centering, self-importance. I just think there is too much “me” and “I” right now (see Jia Tolentino’s essay The “I” in the Internet). But every now and then, I’ll do these little diaries.

thought: they say that in dreams, every character is actually you. a projection of your subconscious. I wonder if fiction works the same way…

I have written relentlessly about Home, how for me, it has been fluid and immaterial (see Moonsand). Contemporary writer Allie Rowbottom says, “The questions in your writing are the questions in your life.” For a very long time, the question in my life was very directly The Question of Home. I was obsessed with all things Houses, Rooms, Spaces. Metaphors and extensions of these things as well: dollhouses, haunted houses, the body as a house of sorts, the mind of a house of sorts. I devoured the book The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, and even wrote a book of my own (check out Daughter of the House).

As far as context goes, I am in the UK for a summer creative writing program at Oxford University that I start on Sunday. I will be living on campus, attending workshops every day. I am so thrilled to have access to those gardens, those libraries, those grand dining halls, all that history. I was born in Studio City LA, raised in Austin TX, and then my dad moved back to Los Angeles, my ‘mum’ became a British citizen, and then my dad just moved back to Austin, all while I was in Syracuse.

It’s difficult to write about college, this self-contained, singular, yet deeply universal experience of stumbling into oneself, without feeling trite or cliche or like one soft voice among a choir. It’s difficult to know where to begin…

Maybe in the communal shower, flip-flops flopping along the fluorescent hall.

Maybe at the crowded bar with the sticky floor.

Maybe in the eye of the Syracuse blizzard.

Maybe with my tears of joy at long office hours with my life-changing creative writing professors and mentors.

Maybe we begin in the hot basement of pink punk bodies moshing into one.

Maybe on the mildewed floor of the student-run stand up comedy show, as young laughter flies through the room like wild birds.

Maybe we start with the poetry salon in my own living room (snap snap snap) or the film production company I founded with my best friends…

Maybe we begin with the fact that all my little interests, and all my scary thoughts, and all my big questions and my inarticulable desires and needs and hopes were magically, impossibly met, elevated, answered, supported, and mirrored by this grand community of beautiful, learning, people who howl with brave ambition.

Or maybe we should start with the city itself.

I moved from Texas to Syracuse four years ago. This was met with a blunt, “Why would you ever want to do that?” To this, I explained that I wasn’t afraid of the weather. I wasn’t afraid of the distance. Their communications school was fantastic. And that one building that looks like Hogwarts. Oh, and Raymond Carver went here. George Saunders teaches there. And Lou Reed was here for a bit. Yeah.

Somewhere along the winding lines and twisted vines of time, Syracuse became my home, a city both beautiful and surreal. It often felt energetically disjointed, fractured, feverish. But I know my perspective was shaped by the insular dissonance of attending a private university on a hill that overlooks a city still healing from decades of economic decline and systemic disinvestment.

Syracuse was once a major manufacturing hub, particularly in the mid-20th century, but like many post-industrial cities in upstate New York, it was hit hard both by deindustrialization and the pandemic. The city struggles with high poverty rates, housing insecurity, and a big fat highway that quite literally segregates the city. The university, with all its prestige and promise, sits perched above it all, physically and metaphorically elevated, offering students a certain kind of curated experience that can feel entirely separate from reality.

I’ve always had a need to know what’s really going on. Even as a child, 7 years old, if the adults were arguing, I’d try to intervene as some sort of mediator. I needed to understand. When it felt like everyone around me went to Bible camp and I was the only one who grew up without religion, I couldn’t let it go. What was this whole thing? What was the truth here? Time after time, I learned that truth is like one of those shiny sheets of paper that changes color depending on the light, or like a creature with multiple faces, or like that blue & black vs. white & gold dress, or like Yanny & Laurel, or like a day that everyone remembers differently. But even knowing that, I need to feel and understand the broader context that can sometimes only be sensed.

One semester, there was a nun who would stand in the middle of the University street and scream through the night. On Erie Boulevard, which could be its own eerie, David Lynchian dreamscape, there are three abandoned Adult Cinemas and a sprawl of seedy chain stores. The weather, too, adds to the atmosphere, long, brutal winters that feel like a psychological test. The city has a ghostly quality, but also a strange, stubborn pulse. A grittiness. A flicker of weird, persistent beauty.

In life, sometimes I will walk past a stranger on the street and quite literally feel their distinct energy punch me in the gut or rustle through me like a violent wind. I do not think this is a unique or original experience. But this same sensation, on a much larger scale, happens with cities. I feel possessed by their energies. And so the last four years, I have been possessed with the energy of the city of Syracuse, a place of paradox and contradiction.

Regardless, I did it, I did that whole “find urself” thing at Syracuse, and I did it with a raccoon in the walls:

Enough about me. I have so many things I want to talk to you all about. But I’m afraid it’s past my bedtime. In this entry, I just wanted to anchor us all in time and space, and offer some context as to where I’m writing from and what this transitional chapter of life looks like for me.

If you’ve surpassed your early twenties or your twenties as a whole, I have to ask the age-old question: What’s one thing you wish you could go back and tell yourself at 22?

My next post is going to be what I call “555 Recommendations.” Five film recommendations, five book recommendations, and five music recommendations.

Again, I thank you for being here. I’d love to know your city soulmate, or even a city you feel inexplicably drawn to.

I hope you all get that fluttery feeling often, whether through reading, watching a film, talking to a friend, or walking down the street, that the world can be vast and marvelous.

Sweet Dreams

-AVW

Millie meditated every single day, if squeezing each pore on her face could be considered meditation. Her mind held no thoughts when she was squeezing, picking, prodding. She would shower at night under horrible temperatures, hoping to scold off her uneven textures. If her skin was a landscape, her grounds were obstructed, subject to drought, rash, freckle and flake.

Millie used cheap drugstore shampoo that was probably tested on animals at the lab on the hill. The lab on the hill sat behind an electric fence. It definitely contained piles of secrets. When Millie was in middle school, she would pass the lab on her walk home from school, and on certain nothing-days, when the sky was dark and falling and she needed to feel something deep inside of her churn, she’d take a sharp detour and stand as close to the fence as she could. There, she would slip one finger through the space between electric bars, then turn around and continue on home.

The bathroom air transformed into an unbreathable hot mist, the mirror a loose blur, reflecting nothing but Millie’s stiff silhouette. Without the shower’s hum, a voice coming from the TV grew audible: a commercial for Heinz new Pickle Flavored Ketchup, an all-inclusive cruise, the most expensive breed of cat food: ‘Cat Sushi.’ ‘Sometimes, I just can’t hold myself back from sneaking some Cat Sushi for myself!’ the spokesperson confessed with a toothy smile.

Millie reached for a mascara stained wash-cloth and carved out a clear hole in the hazy mirror. She curled in front of her reflection, against the cold countertop, inching towards herself until her eyes merged to one. Here, as a brand new creature, as a cyclops, she began her hopeless mission to bring anything hidden beneath the first layer of her skin up and out, to the surface. In doing so, her racing mind would hush, and there was nothing but face, fingers, and a narrow mission.

For the first thirteen years of her life, Millie’s brain produced no audible thought. Her inner monologue was a blank sea. Everything was simple. White noise. She was without the rumbling of constant language separating her from the rest of the world, from herself. There just was. Things just were. Now, she can’t seem to retreat back into that nothing-place unless she’s picking at her skin.

Millie wished that the curse of rumination crept into her life slowly. She wished that whatever omniscient finger on the volume of her consciousness turned the dial with a gentle hand. But no. The hand was very aggressive. It all must have been some sort of accident. Millie woke up one morning with a traffic jam of horrible thoughts, images strange and twisted and stuck in place. She must have been storing all the horrors of the world in some hidden corner of her subconscious, unprocessed, because that fateful morning, they all came flooding in. She couldn’t build a dam. She didn’t have the tools.

The thing is, when Millie’s father was eighteen, he would sing in the shower until the shower sang to him. One day, everything sang back, from the soap to the tile. He had to leave school. Princeton. He was a prodigy, until he was a blank slate. Dozens of operatic voices started latching themselves to him like a multi-headed giant. For the rest of his physical life, Millie’s father lived in and out of hospitals, but really, he lived in a vortex of immaterial reality. In his own messy musical mindscape. Isn’t that where we all live? In our own ineffable mindscapes? The brain is the real house.

Thirty minutes later, Millie’s face was bright pink and each pore on her face's terrain was accounted for. Stepping back from the hole in the mirror, she grew dizzy and her thoughts came rushing back. A fly charged through the vents, buzzing circles around her face. It landed on a green bar of soap. Mllie remembered that terrible fact about flies, that every time they land, they relieve themselves.

She shuffled out of the fluorescent bathroom. Her mother Lisa had fallen asleep watching HGTV. The fly escaped and flew around her mother’s head. Millie considered killing the fly with her bare hands, but that didn’t feel right. Something smarter than her, greater than her, must be watching from somewhere. An ancestor in the ceiling, a God in the walls.

Lisa and Millie loved each other without words. Together, they were stranded in time, hurtling through the dizzying orbits of suburbia. They shared the same aches: for liberation, transcendence, beauty, and wholeness. An unfinished puzzle sat on the coffee table like a broken constellation. They’d lost the top of the box, so the whole pursuit was like chipping away at a vast unknown. It had been sitting there for six months. It might be a safari or a carnival or a street corner in Paris.

Lisa had worked at the CVS on the corner for the last decade. But the world had changed. Texas had changed, San Antonio grew taller, wider, pricier, and she gripped onto their duplex with shaky hands. The CVS had changed, too. Deodorants, razors, sleeping pills, etc. have been jailed, locked behind bars, hidden from the smelly, hairy, tired customers. They had to press the button to summon Lisa. She didn’t sign up for all that back and forth. We just don’t trust each other anymore. We are afraid of each other in all the wrong ways.

Lisa was still rich with desire. She wanted to travel the world on an exotic cruise, meet a group of men in Brazil who would look at her and see her soul, something lustful and fiery and young. She wanted to burn in the sun, melt in the salt, twirl and fall drunk in golden ballrooms. She wanted to float to the top of the tallest ceiling and swing from expensive chandeliers. Lisa wanted to feel free, she wanted to have fun, she didn’t want to live in the space between paychecks, between cashing in and cashing out, beneath the white drugstore light, handling pills, cosmetics, gum, cigarettes. Lisa wanted to liberate herself from both her past and her identity.

The real estate agent living inside of the TV had botox cheeks and no pores and bronzed skin and a deep voice. Her five inch heels clicked through a renovated modern house. Everything in the house was white, glass, and shimmering. It was so boring, as all perfect things are. Lisa and Millie were starved for color, gnawing for a saturated home full of patterns and laughter. San Antonio had been humid, thick, hot and gray for an untrackable span of time. Breeze. Movement. These are human needs.

Millie’s face was inflamed and her wet brown hair was wrapped into a towel on top of her head. She turned off the TV without waking her mother, looked around her quiet, lamplit duplex and wondered if it cared about her. Or if it missed the last tenants. Or if it wanted a botoxed real estate agent to click her heels three times and flip it or flop it and make it sparkle like bleach.

Millie crawled into the usual dent in her mattress. She let the glow of a screen absorb the light in her eyes. First, she played the Zillow game, searching a random assortment of five numbers and scrolling through the listings in that zipcode. For each house in every town’s roulette, she submitted to her imagination, picturing how it would feel to live there. She would choose a bedroom for herself and envision her posters on those walls. She’d check out the street-view 360 and wonder about those hypothetical neighbors.

When the lines of the Zillow Game blurred from exciting to macabre, she watched hundreds of short videos back to back to back, one of them three times, because that video declared, “Watch this video three times so my blind cat can afford eye surgery.” Millie tried to scroll past it but had to return and let it loop, because there was definitely a God in her floorboards or a Great Grandmother under the bed looking up at her, waiting for her to scroll back up and save that kitten.

The next video was sponsored by a vitamin that erases every odor from your body. A red haired girl with a lisp said she woke up with no morning breath, no cardboard taste in her mouth anymore. She doesn’t even have to brush her teeth, she said, but does so anyway. She still sweats, she said, but it’s really just liquid. There’s no kick to it anymore. I’m odorless, she said. Tasteless.

Millie shuffled through the bombardment of streaming services, options, and “Originals,” before finally choosing a film about the last two people on earth. She liked the idea of a new Adam and Eve, the start of a fresh human race. As the new Adam and Eve kissed, Millie was reminded of the inbreeding such a phenomenon would require and had to turn off the movie. She switched to YouTube. Architectural Digest. Dakota Johnson didn’t blink, but she reached her fair hand through the twinkling screen and pulled Millie through her “Serene Midcentury Modern Hollywood Home.” Everything felt deep, real, and warm, like chestnuts, mahogany wood, rich brown hair, polished instruments, and well-worn bookshelves. Millie fell asleep on Dakota Johnson’s floor.

This was a shallow sleep because it wasn’t real. Millie woke in her bed in the middle of the night. Her pillow felt like bugs and her skin like pins and needles. She decided to breathe in a square, in for four, hold, out for four, hold. But the square couldn’t hold shape, it warped and spiraled. It’s loud for everyone, Millie remembered. She isn’t doomed. There is no fate. There’s only choice. And she will make wonderful choices. The best choices. She sent all of her thoughts to this little dark point between her two eyebrows. At that focused point, disorder stirred, and the rest of her head was flooded with truth. Vast and solid truth.

The truth was that, one day, Millie’s mind would buzz with wonder rather than fear.

The TV still hummed from the living room and Millie floated into the space. Lisa slept in her recliner, her breath steady, lips half-smiling, feet hugged by fuzzy socks. HGTV sold hope in the shape of squares, in the shape of living a better life in a better box. She clicked off the television, letting a rare silence drape over the scene. Until, the fly returned, appearing twice its size, a gargantuan horsefly. The manic fly landed on Millie’s forehead, in the space between her eyebrows, where she held her rampant thoughts. He opened the gate, and they flooded back in. The silence fell, fear and language swelled. The fly launched off of her and landed on the remote.

There is a God in the walls and a great grandmother in the floorboards. There is a king in the TV, and a philosopher in the sky. There is a great judge in every room. There are only choices. Millie will make wonderful choices. She winked at the God and the great grandmother, the king, philosopher, and judge, before lifting her hand and swatting the horsefly with a bang. He flattened, spilled, and disappeared, returning to everything. Millie looked at her mother and saw a child. We are all children we sleep.

In a dream, Millie found the top of the puzzle box buried in the front yard. With a strange and certain conviction, she dug a deep hole in the ground, and there it was. Tears of joy streamed down her smooth, poreless face. The bigger picture was more beautiful than she could have ever imagined. Millie cradled the top like a newborn and called for her mother, who rushed outside, barefoot, blinking in the sun. Lisa squinted at the image, then threw her arms up in the air, overcome with relief.

They embraced each other in a hole in the yard for a small perfect freckle of eternity.

Birds at Doors

Homesick again.
Not sick, but a gnawing
knocking
remembrance.

Like a cat 
with a bird in its mouth
at the wrong door.

Where is my door?

All I have are months worth of Other People's Paradise.

Pair of dice,
pair of hands,
pair of socks -
all wrong.

These drawers hold nothing of mine.

Now what have you done with my pile of birds?

"Boxed them up. Threw them from the wing 
of a plane, and let them land where they land."

Wherever that may be, a boy 
will appear and invite me 
to the party.

"What party?"

The party of the rest of his life, of course!

He's so happy that I'm here,
Sick and all.

Dancing in a Warehouse

Let’s go over there, or over there, or somewhere else.

There is a man pressing buttons, 
making sounds that scratch and bite.
Let us jump into the neon lanterns, 
into the new moon. 

Something big is happening, 
on a cosmic level,
on a chemical level, 
and it might be amazing, 
and it might be terrible. 
This music sounds like screaming silverware,
and it might be terrible, 
and it might be amazing.

We can go over there, or over there, or somewhere else.

Are you still feeling?

High or low?

Are you still in your body?

Or did you trade with a stranger?

Did you swap your soul with the genderless silhouette
standing in the center of the floor?

We’re just slithering along, aren’t we?
Through the garden of the present,
where anything goes, 
because everything has already happened,
Since now we all know
that the greatness of our sadness
and the sadness of our greatness
bear no more significance 
than goldfish bagged at the fair.

The ferris wheel keeps turning.
From the top, I can see the swirls of youth
ripping through the night like a jaguar.
Somewhere in Brooklyn, over there,
in the belly of a rave, two androgynous
gazelles are kissing, sharp and smooth,
like razor blades rubbing against the morning sun.

Tucked out of sight, over there or somewhere else
My ancestors are listening in…

Oh, how they’ll never see the neon of today,
How it burns
like a great blue electrical fire.

Somewhere, my future daughter

is coming of age.

For now, I’ll watch my birth control spiral 
down the drain

Good morning, my vices
Good morning, dead flowers
Hello to the salt and the heat

Hello to the estrogen,
the extra estrogen
swimming through my bloodstream

I do this for you, for me, for us.

Hello future daughter!
You starseed, you dandelion, you
I am your half, your mirror, your fate

Tell me,
Do the walls of your mind
look at all like mine? is the paint
chipped? Do you feel
confused and seduced 
by the bottom layer?

Is its color a shade you cannot describe?

I will teach you to read
the color of that wall
I will show you how to sift
through the knot of your loneliness,
teach you how I find comfort
in its strange textures

as the color fills your pale hands.

You tell me how you wish
your hands weren’t so full,
‘how can something invisible
carry so much weight?’

Nevermind all that!

Tell me about the clouds
that tempt you
Tell me about the drugs
you try
We can sit in a pile of sugar
and talk about desire,
Its stitches and valleys and ropes

We can speak about our hormones –
my inevitable pause, and 
the estrogen, the extra estrogen,
swimming through your blood.

When your favorite words 
in the english language become
“I understand,”
we can sleep in the rain, 
find a puddle to float our heavy heads,
become the flowing water that our bodies
yearn to be

Somewhere, we can cry in the bathtub 
and watch the pills spiral 
down the drain.

The Portals Are Waiting For You & Your Resume

There are thousands of them,
waiting to put you to work—
you young thing, you impossible combination,
you list of special skills.

So we stand at the brink of the falls,
hand in hand in
cap and gown,
our new bodies,
with these new heavy brains
swollen with memory and instruction:

Like how to wrap a nice gift the way your mother always did, 
tight and secure with spirals of ribbon.

How to magically transform
two socks to one ball
ten rooms to one home
How to learn and forget 
a language or three.

How to be a real thing that wakes,
Dresses, cleans, saves, shops, shaves,
Cooks, chops, main/
tains, mourns, misses, medi/
tates, moves swiftly through the maze 
with a pleasant expression, either way.

Slippery time on a slippery earth,
we are skating headfirst into more.
More paper, more lists, more clocks,
more handshakes, firm, real.

There are thousands of them
waiting for you,
hands, I mean,
futures, I mean,
spectrums of you
on the other side of the vast rushing falls.

Toss me a twig of self to grip onto
in the glorious river of my body
as it sings out of tune
and the sail twists, like the sand
I won’t hold shape for long

Please, please, please
Just tell me what to be

Don’t let me disappear 
Bite my shoulder 
Leave a scar 
Lend a comet to my name 
Take the pebbles of my shame
into your irreplaceable arms
now feel them fall asleep

Until the carousel breaks
     from its eternal orbit.

What am I now,
     but a shivering light?

A ball of contradictions
     hurtling into one another.

Dancing deep inside
     of the cosmic vacuum cleaner.

How strange!
To be anything at all:
     A voice box
     vibrato 
     whisper & a hum
sugar cube
shard of light
last sliver of love.