I don't remember the winter too well. Or, rather, I don't remember the sequence of events. I don't remember a timeline, just disconnected flashes. Honestly my memory is spotty in general and it doesn't usually matter too much, but it does seem to matter that this feels less like routine "not routing information into long-term storage" and more like ( Read more... )

Pretty much all you can do, right? I got laid off last week, a combination of belt-tightening and my growing insistence on some bare semblance of work-life balance and sustainable scheduling. It's tempting to lay out how fucked up that place was, but I definitely signed an NDA (totally normal and innocent thing for a company to do, BTW, totally ( Read more... )

The surest indication I have that I'm ridin' for a fall, anxiety-wise, is when I'm ruminating on what the fuck I'm, like, doing with my life as if I'm going to escape the imperceptibly yet steadily rising tide of animal dread that's crowding me onto an ever-narrowing sliver of sanity with one brilliant leap of insight. Very much points for trying, ( Read more... )

The surest indication I have that I'm living a pretty privileged life is that I have the luxury of wondering what I'm supposed to be, like, doing. Not necessarily in the day-to-day; I've got a job to go to and lots of stuff to do there and then there's chores and eating and sleeping and washing and all that, of course. I mean doing doing. Or maybe ( Read more... )

Tonight was the first time in a while where I felt a sense of being one of the people in Chicago. Watching from my seat on the bus as it lumbered west, I saw other humans with silly hats clustered in lit-up hotel lobbies, or in front of them smoking and shivering a little, underdressed in finery. There was snow dusting the planters and sushing the ( Read more... )

The other day I spent a few hours in the pastry kitchen at my job. A good chunk of my training has comprised these sorts of rotations through different departments; culinary, front-of-house, retail, even a stint in the dish pit as part of the support team. Though my actual work is administrative it was deemed important that I get a sense of what ( Read more... )

I’m writing this from a king-sized bed in a hotel Beverly Hills, and it’s a testament to how far I’ve come that I’m able to brag, humblebrag, and complain about it. The day I’m able to have an upper-middle-class experience without having to run it through every piece of coping mechanism machinery in my brain will be the day I’ve made it or possibly ( Read more... )

The weather is just dithering, sort of hovering in the 30s and 40s halfassedly, gray gray gray. All the leaves have been leached of their color, even the maples; two weeks ago it was just as dim but the trees were still bright, somehow inherently luminous or perhaps privy to sunlight from some other dimension. It was uncanny, almost vampiric, and ( Read more... )

It was...his teeth, maybe? The scrubby beard with a single large flake of dander dangling from the end of a hair. The early 2000s down-at-heel-ness that matched his enthusiastic mini-tirade about George W. Bush. Most likely it was the way he smelled; cummy, for lack of a better word, congealed and musty and somehow deeply wrong ( Read more... )

Summer is surfeit, for sure. I've been cramming all this work in, all these new things, learning about rocks and reading books that I wouldn't normally read and learning how to be with people and feeling my feet on the ground the whole time. Meditating and pretending to be a dragon, no really, and imagining every person I see on the train with a ( Read more... )