I’ve been thinking a lot about money and wealth and what kinds of optical purchase we are allowed to put on our happiness. I make much less money than I did when I had a full-time job writing copy and flattering the comedic affinities of a rapper who wanted in on the wearable tech game after seeing how much Beats was worth. When he found out I was a comedian he suggested, strongly, that we film some sketches together for the brand. I wrote scripts that he completely ignored, walking onto set and doing whatever he wanted. I wish I had figured out how to save those videos.

Now I sleep late, sometimes all day if that’s what’s called for, I wear whatever I want, I read, write, perform; I dare myself to come up with bigger projects and to ask for money for them. I have a thrifting problem. I regularly interact with artists who have achieved such a level of self-regard that I am shocked whenever I encounter a neurotic self-sabotaging person who has mistaken crisis for creativity, even if I happened to be that person a day earlier. I am rich.

The gift of being an art-critic-cum-comedian is being able to play pretend for real about things that matter to me so deeply they must be held with a light hand. The critic in me sees too much, plots systems and tracks movements in real time, and would be paralyzed as an artist if not for my clown, who is happy to admit to her desire and play a part to get it. A year into taking tennis lessons, I still didn’t have a handle on my forehand (sources say I still don’t). It’s the follow-through, the drama of the swing that must end over my shoulder that felt like too much. It wasn’t registering. Or rather, what my body was doing was about three leagues behind what I pictured it actually doing. “Up!” my coach would yell, '“arm UP!” over and over until I said FINE HOW ABOUT THIS and did my best impression of a grunting tennis pro.

“That’s it!” he said “that’s the one. That was perfect.”

“Well I was making fun of it” I said.

“Make fun of it if you have to.” he replied.

• A lot of good things have been happening in the wake of my interview in The Whitney Review of New Writing and that gives me hope that vibes + intellectual rigor can coexist. It’s print only but contains a more in-depth discussion of what I touch on below.

• I did a very long, very fun episode of Straightiolab where I cried while talking about my path to discovering comedy. Perhaps a first for them, unfortunately not a first for me˚˖𓍢ִ໋🌷͙֒✧🎀༘⋆

• Finally able to announce I am in the cast for Camille Henrot’s first performance commission Commedia dell’arte. I’ve been in NYC rehearsing since mid-June and we’re psyched as hell to premiere the play in Aspen next month.

• I am doing ONE performance of my own in New York on July 12th. I don’t know if I can share deets but follow Invisible College for announcements.

I once met a professor of Affect Theory who told me he’d never been to a comedy show. It was at an art party in a treehouse and the host was serving lines of cocaine on the screen of his iPhone 11 Pro Max. “How can you teach affect theory and never go to comedy shows?” I said. He shrugged a took a swig of beer. The iPhone was held out like a tray between us and I pushed it away. “Well,” I said, “you know nothing about life and your work is a sham!” It was a hyperbolic statement, but a sincere one, inflated only for the sake of lending my judgment the air of banter—he would have known this if he’d ever been to a comedy show.

I thought comedy was my exit from the art world. Not that I was seeking an exit per se but I assumed that these endeavors were incompatible, made a choice, and am surprised, still, every time I am presented with an opportunity to perform, make work, write, present myself in that context. It’s no secret the market is in freefall. Collectors aren’t buying objects, institutions are leaning on programming, galleries are presenting plays, I do stand up in performance spaces—I AM LOVING IT. Live performance fucking rocks. But underneath the official script about the importance of embodiment and I guess, humanity or whatever, there is subtle griping that everything is too “vibes-based” and it’s hard to parse, critique, take seriously, figure out what even counts as art anymore, as opposed to content or entertainment. I feel crazed, but I don’t feel implicated: I’ve spent eleven years now honing a craft that is explicitly about the finessing and maneuvering of vibes (have you ever heard Joe Rogan describe stand up like that?) but I would be horrified if everyone operated this way. I also think art people, sealed as they are from, er… well… working class forms of performance… are easily entranced by vibes that originate from outside the art world. Don’t fucking kill me. Do you think I like being self-aware and embodied at the same time? It’s hell. It’s been absolute hell to machete my way into a career path where I get to call forth my greatest intellectual powers and my dumbest physical impulses. Sometimes at the same time.

The Vibes probably are out of control. I don’t think the the answer is to read about vibes, or take Affect Theory from a rando who doesn’t go out. Go to the actual circus and tell me that doesn’t complicate your appreciation of performance art. Go to a stand up comedy show and tell me it doesn’t lower your threshold for tolerating poorly-handled vibes in other contexts. The last time the world was in a state of such flux we got the de-skilling of painting. Maybe right now we’re in the middle of a Great Deskilling of Vibes. It’s okay. It’s just history. It’s our job as the audience to make sure the impeccable ones still rise to the top.

Anyway, I lied. Of course I did coke off the iPhone.

muah! 💋

Christina

That’s the business. Someone’s fairytale casting is always someone else’s broken dream. My role was already semi-cast when Camille and I met in Paris last spring. I had just dropped out of clown school after wrapping up a section on commedia dell’arte (part of the actor’s development in commedia is to “find your mask” but somehow I ended up finding Colombina, who doesn’t wear one). Camille started following me in Instagram. I DM’d her so say I love her work. She said she was going down the wormhole on my stuff and asked if I was based in New York. No. Could I send her a tape? This role is a weirdly good fit. The play is a Postmodern commedia dell’arte. I managed to film a self-tape in my friend’s Parisian apartment (read: impossibly small studio) with my phone balanced on a pile of books and boob sweat pooling through my stupid fucking trendy Paloma Wool tube top. They all loved the tape, but the casting call was for local talent only. Is there any way I could get to New York for a live audition next week? I had to fess up: I wasn’t even in the country.

“I’m in Paris” I said to her on WhatsApp

“I’M GOING TO BE IN PARIS NEXT WEEK” she messaged back. We only had a two-day overlap. The city was a sweaty dump but we managed to meet for dinner and the following day I auditioned for her in the lobby of her mother’s apartment building. And voilá. There was a protracted period of negotiations regarding exceptions to be made for my travel and housing, during which time I left my manager, started hormone therapy, injured my knee, and thought everything was falling apart.

I’m here now, in a nice apartment with a big bouquet of roses from the production, having spent my first weekend tanning ass in a hotel while longer-term housing was being prepared. This is my first time traveling as an actor and I’m afraid of getting used to it. How you travel for work will tell you exactly how your career is going, or at least, to what degree the culture values your particular flavor of cultural output. (Sidenote, my latest review for Frieze is up).

The first time I came to New York as a comedian, I crashed on a comic’s couch and ate dollar slices three times a day1. When you are professionally hosted as an art writer, you might get a hotel, but more likely than not you’re going in on an AirBnb with three other writers in order to to do an assignment that won’t even cover the Ubers you take to the fancy dinners that are your unofficial remittance. If salmon steak and tiny potatoes could pay the rent I might have never pursued my real dreams at all.

What is acknowledged when you are traveling as an actor, is that you are lending your whole self to the production, your literal body, but also the subtle body of your presence of mind and various psychological states. The care that it’s given not indulgence, it’s a line item. I try to remember this when I feel shy about asking for things. I think about this quote from Anna Deavere Smith’s Letters to a Young Artist:

Part of that indulgence is giving myself permission to not take on any other work during the production. This is VARY HART for someone who speaks three languages and hasn’t learned “no” in any of them. But I’m doing my best to do less. I can’t resist a few hundred dollars being wagged in my face like a salmon steak to a starving dog—I do have a per diem but apparently it’s for food and not shoes. The very last writing assignment I’ve allowed myself is about the appallingly slight Marilyn Monroe exhibition at The Academy Museum for the KCRW Arts Newsletter. One of the more personal observations that made it in was this:

What I have found, in my double life as a writer and actor, is the former begets a kind of invisibility, while the latter is all about being visible, and it feels like my heart and brain are in a constant state of break.

Which roughly translates to HOWLY SHIT Y‘ALL LUCKY I LOVE WRITING COS OTHERWISE I AIN’T EVER GOING BACKKKCKC

muah! 💋

Christina

Dossier of Doings

Aesthetical Relations Revised & Expanded is out now from Asterism books. Limited signed copies are on my website

Ariana Reines did a mondo generous interview with me for the latest issue of The Whitney Review

I have a big essay in the Clowns anthology from Dopamine Books, out now from MIT Press

I have limited offerings for comedy and editorial coaching over the next couple of weeks; after that I am closing up shop to focus on rehearsing a play this summer

I love you

(it is).

We can rebuild. We have the technology.

I’ve drafted four handwritten letters to my boyfriend’s mother (my common-law-mother-in-law?) for Mother’s Day. Every day last week I’ve woken up sicker than the last and too tired to walk to the post office so I tear the letter up and write another that includes fresh apologies for the delay. The effort of writing it depletes the energy needed to deliver it and I fear I may be caught in this loop until Mother’s Day 2027. I forfeited two tennis matches in my ladder league this week, plummeting dozens of spots overnight. A ladder league is like a shark; you have to keep moving or die. I am on strict bedrest until 3am Saturday when I will leave for my 6am flight to New York.

Bedrest is the worst when I’m on the upswing because I get bored and start to do things like rearrange the storage closet or mealprep a bathtub’s worth of lentils or rewrite a Mother’s Day letter (fifth time’s the charm). But I’ve been on this merry-go-round many times. My body taps the brakes and I know I am overdue for some boredom. I’m tweaking my show for Sunday, getting real sleep, hanging out in designer sweats. Everything is good and I don’t know what to do with myself. Last time I tried to get bored I catalogued all of my diaries going back to 1999. I found an entry from August 2002 outlining my “Lifetime To-Do List,” which was, in its entirety:

-write a book

-be in a movie

-have long hair

-weigh 115 pounds

I have been uniquely blessed and cursed (blersed) by the universe offering up exactly what I ask for. Having checked off all these boxes, the last one due to cancer, “I think,” as my therapist said “you’re going to have to get some new dreams soon.”

Here’s to finding fresh complaints.

Dossier of Doings

Sunday May 17th - MODERN TIMES comes to NYC for one night only. I will have books and t-shirts for sale and good vibes to give for free

Aesthetical Relations Revised & Expanded is out now from Asterism books. Limited signed copies are on my website

I have a big essay in the Clowns anthology from Dopamine Books, out May 26th and edited by Michelle Tea

If you didn’t preorder, get one tonight at Stories in Los Angeles. 7pm sharp! I’m bringing champagne. My publisher said she’ll bring croissants. Jamie Loftus and I will performatively praise one another and Slavoj Žižek1 will be let out of his cage to interrogate the écriture féminine of it all. I feel sheepish celebrating a re-release. I’m proud of the new essays; they make the book complete. Mostly I’m relieved to get a more digested edition of this out in the world so I can pivot to the next one. I have three starts and the idea of choosing one feels like death but thems the breaks. I’ve changed so much in the few years since its original publication, writing more of it felt like a bridge into fiction. The narrator is more of character to me now than anything else. That’s how the milk of non-fiction curdles sometimes. I don’t mind.

(Does non-fiction really age that badly? or does it just slowly become fiction?)

The first edition of Aesthetical Relations went up in flames in the Altadena Fire. If you have one of those, hang onto it, I guess. I like this one more because I added six new essays that can’t be read anywhere else.

It also has a new author photo, which I am very proud of.

May 17th I’m popping into NYC to do my solo show MODERN TIMES at the launch party for Whitney Review issue 007, which features conversation between me and Ariana Reines. Whitney generously invited me to perform. times NY is providing the space and tech. Everyone has been extremely sweet and chill. NYC lit scene on point. No notes ❤️‍🔥

Mark your calendars: June 8th I will be doing MODERN TIMES in Los Angeles. I booked an incredible job this summer so this will be the last MT on the books for a little while.

I’ve started to do that thing my mother did where I push the heels my palms into my face and look in the mirror; a flash facelift, if you will.

I used to work with a creative coach that told me I was “afraid of being seen” and that’s why I don’t post content as often as I should. There is an entire industry of internet healers who believe that posting online, a lot, is the best way to get to know yourself and to train your nervous system that it is safe to be seen. My nervous system is occupied enough maintaining eye contact while I orgasm—with the lights on, no less.

Maybe it’s true? Podcasts freak me out because they have the immediacy of an oral tradition but the permanence of a literary tradition: things said off the cuff are suddenly atrophied as the Gospel of your worldview according to strangers who feel the need to have a one-way conversation with your image. (Whenever I find myself halfway through a paragraph-length comment on someone’s reel, I know it’s time for bed/food/literally anything else, and my instincts are correct, because, from the other side, I find long-ass comments to be a bit losery and amusing. Seriously. I have more respect for violent DMs and crazed emails. Don’t perform your disdain. Mainline it to my eyeballs only!)

I have suffered, a long time, from a pathological need to be liked. What I’ve found is that need has in no way spared me from intense dislike that has been swirling around me for decades. To grow in visibility is to embolden people to be more publicly hostile. To grow as a person is to lightly enjoy it. I recently made enemies with a gallerist over a hypothetical review. I said I would do it before confirming the rate with the magazine. That was my first mistake. Once told, the magazine said we understand if this is a dealbreaker for you. They handed me an out and I still said yes, because the show was quite good, and I felt bad no one had seen it, and I wanted to do good by my gallerist friend. I thought it was a win-win, pleasing two people at once, until I realized that I myself was not pleased. I was not pleased with squeezing in a piece for pennies per word in between travel and live shows, I was not pleased with the pressure placed on my poverty-wage intellectual labor to help “open a market” for this artist in Europe, and I was not pleased with cancelled flights that created even more pressure to file the work in too short a timeframe. I decided to try disregarding the money altogether—how could I make it pleasurable, how can I enjoy this work for its own sake, as I so often have? The answer was, at that point in time, I couldn’t. To do so would mean with each sentence I’d be gathering resentment toward the magazine, the artist, the gallery, and myself. So I did an incredibly unprofessional thing I’ve never done before: I pulled out. And it was quite pleasurable 💦

I emailed the magazine and apologized for backtracking. I texted the gallerist and acknowledged the disappointment. The magazine said nothing. The gallerist fired off some choice four-letter words to describe what I “have done." I was aghast. I knew what I “have done” was unprofessional. The texts I received in response to it, however, vaunted the unprofessionalism to new heights that I’ve never experienced. And I used to do drugs with gallerists. So I leveled up and called them a “cruel idiot,” among other things. I am now banned from the gallery and their life.

When I called my writer friend, she said “congratulations. No one gets anywhere without making enemies.”

For long time I wanted to believe that wasn’t true. But at some point, you will fuck someone over without even trying, only because you’re trying not to fuck yourself over. Did I do the right thing? Probably not. But I am enjoying previously unplumbed depths of self-regard in being amused at the vitriol that greets honest folly. I find intimacy with myself in being okay with it. And in being okay with it I find intimacy with those who truly love me, even as they maintain eye contact while, for unrelated reasons, saying something like “you’re acting like a bitch right now”—with the lights on, no less. Because in that moment I know I am acting like a bitch. I am seen 🥰

I have a lot of trouble feeding myself properly, and the problem has not remedied itself by spending hours of my one wild and precious life watching YouTube videos of other people properly feeding themselves. I purchased a book called The Archetype Diet and tried to learn about the connection between my eating habits and my self worth. According to this book I am a WONDER WOMAN. Nice! Apparently I feel I am only as good as my achievements and I don’t know how to receive! In practical terms this means I often forget to eat because I work a lot and then make up for lost time with convenience; eating garbage, and prolly too much, and probably too late at night. If I’m writing I can go to 2 or 3pm before noticing I haven’t eaten yet. It’s cute in college, and it’s okay for writers to be kind of misshapen and unhealthy; becoming a comic and and actor was the biggest referendum on how unsustainable my diet was, if I wanted to keep working at all. The Archetype Diet has been helpful in terms of habit—I do deserve to have a sit-down lunch with utensils and a napkin no matter how far past the deadline I am!—but there is a woo-woo element made up of Yogic and Jungian principles that I find hard to recommend with a straight face, even if gravitating toward yellow foods does help support my third chakra. When I told my boyfriend about my flirtation with the diet he brought me home a yellow bell pepper and a basket of yellow cherry tomatoes. I wanted to put them in a vase.

I developed The Artist’s Chow while looking for a way to use up the last of my kimchi (every artist needs to keep a giant tub of kimchi in the fridge to snack on). I’ve tweaked it over time to be more flavorful and require minimal chopping—zero chopping if your kimchi is pre-cut or you’d rather keep it in big chunks. This is also a good dish to make when you’re on your first residency and have to make your own food in a giant communal kitchen and your cooking needs to serve you better than Cookie Crisp and microwave mac n’ cheese cups.

We’re overworked, underfed, underpaid, and pressed for time. Here’s what you’re gonna do.

The Artist’s Chow

serves 3 - 4, or one for two days

time: about 20 mins, I swear

You will need:

• ½ lb of pasta, ideally bowtie or elbow

• 1 cup kimchi

• 1 can chickpeas

• 2 cans tuna

• at least 1 big ol’ fistfull of kale

• 2-3 tablespoons of Sambal Olek

• 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil

Chop the kimchi into small pieces on a large plate, making sure not to lose the juice. Put on a big pot of water to boil for the pasta. While the pasta’s cooking, heat the olive oil in a separate pan on medium heat, then add the tuna and chickpeas and scoot them around until warm. Add the kimchi and kale and scoot that all around until the kale is wilted from the kimchi juice and everything is heated through (kale wilts down a lot, you’ll always need more than you think). Drain the pasta and add it to the pan, mixing well. Add the sambal olek and mix well, adding a drizzle of olive oil if needed. Serve immediately.

This is the ideal iteration of The Artist’s Chow, but depending on what you have on hand you can use less pasta, sub cannellini beans for the chickpeas, spinach for kale, or gochujang for the sambal (I say this last part with caution, I vastly prefer the sambal). If this sounds like fitness gruel that’s because it is. It’s also surprisingly tasty, quite good the next day with a fried egg on top for breakfast, and you can help yourself to seconds without blocking your chakra or whatever.

I would add pictures of my latest batch but I just finished it this morning. If you make this please send photo evidence. This is the best I can do:

muah! 💋

Christina

Here’s to whatever you’re not dreaming about quite yet.

Muah!

Christina 💋

• I figured out (my) personal style. I admit I follow an inordinate amount of TikToks and Substacks about this. I enjoy the freaky ones for general Fuck-It inspo, and when I turned 40 I sought out more “practical” accounts to figure how to put shit on my changing body. Turns out my body is fine, and I do know what I like. My local coffeeshop (which I LOVE by the way) is such a copy+paste of calculated understatement people actually look up from their laptops when anyone enters wearing color. Anyway, if you want to zhuzh up your day-to-day, stop wearing jeans and see what happens. You’ll probably unearth some unexplored aspect of your own taste. I stopped wearing jeans for practical reasons—good ones are expensive, vintage ones need tailoring, trendy ones require rotation, it’s hard to look hot in them when your torso is mush—but the number of compliments I received went WAY THE FUCK UP when I started wearing army pants, sailor pants, swishy trousers, overalls; anything but jeans. These $30 vintage pants are changing my life. I checked the tag and they are part of a Karate gi, but I’ve never seen ones with sailor lacing and stripes.

• If you’re at The Grove, you should actually over be at The Original Farmer’s Market. A Phil’s Deli burger and trip to Sticker Planet is my go-to inner-child-restoration treat. The Vintage Menu Art stall is a great for cheap gifts and image sourcing, with the prints ingeniously sorted by both region and content; my mans bought several lobster-laden prints for his mom and a print of two lovey tigers for us. I will probably go back for the La Cucaracha Cocktail Club list, and the Warner Brother’s Studio Café menu; the latter includes a facsimile of notes scrawled on the back, logging which movie stars were spotted that day. Everything is online but it’s much more fun to root through their stacks.

• (Do you like style content? Are there boys here? Do you have a style question for me? Getting dressed has been fun lately and I’m willing to invest in a real outfit mirror to celebrate my fabrics with you).

• I’ve noticed some recent negative reviews of Miranda July’s making their case known before the critical party winds down altogether. My takeaway is that All Fours is The Sorrows of Young Werther for girls. Goethe’s 1774 novel has been credited with intermittent waves of “copycat suicides” from young men inspired, in a way, by the protagonist’s central act of self-abnegation. July’s 2024 one seems to be a book that makes coupled middle-aged women “blow up” their lives, or at least fantasize about it, and this is the basis for both its praises and criticisms. I would love to read a take from someone who doesn’t feel personally validated / attacked by it an will engage the book on its own terms. Someone else on here asked what is the defining take on all this hetero divorce / non-monogamy lit, so here goes: for most women, sexual energy is very close to creative energy, and sometimes we need one kind of crisis to tend to another, but also it’s important not to mistake one of those crises for the other.

• I organized 26 years’ worth of notebooks. I am not only on nodding terms with the people I used to be, I take them out for lunch and ask them how the hell they’re doing.

• I have shows this week! Starting tomorrow (10/30, possibly today for you) at The Laugh Factory in Hollywood, then High Note Comedy in Santa Monica immediately after. On Friday (Halloween!) I’m doing Stand Up & Clown at The Elysian

• New writing class for the new year. More soon 💋

There is an incredible roundtable with Estés, Toni Morrison, Jessye Norman, and Judith Weir (moderated by a respectful and ever-so-slightly unnerved Charlie Rose) available on YouTube. It’s some of the only video footage available of Clarissa online. What’s remarkable to me is not the content per se, but uh, well… they don’t talk over each other so much.

Have a good night 💋

Christina

I’m collecting stuff. A lot of my projects start as image albums on my phone. I collect screenshots of things I’m reading, quotes by famous artists and authors, etc. WET CRITIC was incubated as an attempt to assemble images of famous critics in their bathing suits. The problem is there wasn’t enough. I found one of Joan Didion of course; Clement Greenberg in a soppy woolen one-piece was a coup; and inexplicably, Susan Sontag in a bear suit.

My favorite thing right now is collecting quotes about critics, especially negative ones, and especially in stupid memeable formats like this which are all over Facebook:

I’m interested in the way images move through space. Images a social relation is not new, but The Spectacle as monolith leaves little room to talk about how the social relation of images is often funny and losery and intimate. Generally, the people who share image-quotes against critics are bad artists, which makes sense given the enduring stereotype that critics themselves are failed artists, too cowardly to even try. Hence, a critic is even worse than a bad artist. The gambit here is that by sharing this sentiment you risk obliquely labeling yourself as such.

I really don’t answer to this stuff. It has no place in the system of art that I work in, and more often than not it’s negging as a bid for entry. Creativity is free and above reproach. That is true. But I realize that by refusing to engage I am reinforcing a view that art belongs everywhere and criticism is merely a subset of the creative world. Then I came across the work of Kenneth Burke, a much less-quoted poet and essayist who wrote just the loveliest thing I’ve ever read:

It’s the title of an essay seemingly about about fish. He goes on to say that a fish “may even show by his wiliness[…]that he can revise his critical appraisals” when learning how to differentiate between bait and food.1 This learning is form of visual literacy even more primal than expression. Therefore, before we are even artists, we are critics. My world is so vast. I weep.

So. In the spirit of bad artists sharing pixelly memes against critics, I place the following meager offering on the hearth of the world wide web.

muah!

Christina

•getting winged eyeliner right in one flick

•sex upon waking

•a square of sunlight on the floor

•falling asleep on sand

•being read aloud to

•a bite with every part of the dish in it

•when a book fits perfectly in my purse

•Hegel, one sentence at a time

•dogs cuddling unprompted

•sitting quietly alone in a green room

•the flutter and settling of post-performance high

•peeling a lychee

•driving my convertible

•my boyfriend driving me in my convertible

•silent eye contact with a stranger in a public place when a third-party starts acting up

•watching friend-couples at restaurants

•flirting with the elderly

•soda fountains (2/3 coke zero 1/3 plain soda water + slice of lemon)

•knitting in public

•the second week of dance class when I get the choreo right

•being just a little bit of a bitch. sometimes.

One thing writers need to constantly do is take the piss out of themselves. I became a comedian because I took being a critic so freaking seriously, yet deep down I knew some essential part of me, a little girl in a dolphin costume screaming and clapping with delight,2 was being choked of expression, and some outlet needed to be punched forth with her little ravioli hands.3 That turned out to be true, because I love being a comic, but building up high buttresses between my beloved disciplines did not necessarily help one thing or the other. I feared being illegible, which is fashionable only insofar as it will never quite be the case (there is a swath of upper class artists from good families who love to abdicate The Self, or proclaim illegibility, within the coddling containers of legacy media—someone from Spectrum just knocked on my door brb).4 Being a deliberate misfit was a cover for fear of belonging (this is actually much scarier). It wasn’t until I let my loves hang out—hang out as in together but also as in dripping off me in a haphazard way—that I became legible as the thing I always wanted to call myself (artist) but came to in a roundabout way (writer, actor, critic, comic, clown, other c-words as well). Touching numbers helps. I have a GoogleSheet cribbed from a finance influencer that has become the cornerstone of my administration. I put in how much money I’ve made each month, create a category for each payment, and Sheet, as I call her, creates a pie showing what percentage of my money comes from where. The triangles are different colors and everything. The wheel of a full-time artist, bruising shades of mauve beneath the blows of my labors.

Every question in the class was something like how do I do this when the reality is THIS, or but I need this as a person and THIS as an artist and they don’t hang well and the answer is, yes. Lots of what we do is not going to go with other things we do. Marion Woodman calls it “holding the tension of The Opposites.” It’s knowing the thing that is most dear in my life is only valuable the more I flush it out. Writers have a rull problem doing it for free. I didn’t fatten my wallet until I grasped the freedom of writing for no one and no reason at all. I used to treat money like leaves and words like dollars. It’s the other way around. The class was full of writers and comedians from across the spectrum of productivity who knew something in their butts needed to be unclenched. I needed it too. I asked them: when you take a dance class, do you go home and think I better not dance alone in my bedroom because dance moves are precious and I need to save them for later when they’re perfect and viewable??? Yes, sometimes dance moves come together in choreographed pieces that make people go oooooh you must be dancing all the time. And my best writing advice is, you fucking better be.

Neither had parked for the market.

Neither was a market parker.

Landon looked at Lilith and thought to himself Look at that little bitch Lilith, looking at me sidelong through her lengthy lowered lashes. Lilith’s lashes were indeed lowered, and at length. A lengthy-length the limerent Lilith leveraged toward her lanky target. Lilith’s liver nearly burst with longing. Lilith would have liked then to lick Landon on the lips, and other places as well.

Lilith limned the limits of Landon’s consciousness, sticking and picking and poking at his mind like the poky prickly balls that fell from the trees and popped under lanky Landon’s premium-branded sneakers. With Landon lost in thought Lilith loped across the Lucky’s lot, but along the way she lost her lovely valor, turning suddenly laconic as she touched the tips of his premium-branded sneakers with the tops of her tap shoes. Her lashes lowered even lower, followed by her lovely head.

“Look Landon,” she said “I love you.”

Landon looked. “I know you do, you little bitch.”

It would be their first of many kisses.

If money is energy, I wasted both.

Romantic poets used the lute as a metaphor for the human soul—a beautiful instrument that is mute until “by the desultory breeze caressed.”1 The desultory breeze here symbolizing like, a spiritual force.

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• The trench-coat and ballet flats thing is for old ladies and self-conscious expats with normal jobs. It’s the West Village Girl of Paris. It’s fine. I wear these things in the states and I don’t need to look cool when I travel (presentable is enough of an accomplishment) and I don’t have much with me anyway since I came from clown s…

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How to Bake a Cake in the Digital Age came out one year ago. On May 8th I’m hosting a little online forum called Let Them Eat Questions (webinar makes me throw up in my mouth) on the spiritual and logistical gymnastics of making comedy as an interdisciplinary artist. …

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