milestones and other rocks

1. the middle will write itself (unfortunately not literally)

Some small but important things happened since my last post, and it feels necessary to mark them here, because subtle milestones, like subtle angst, have a way of getting lost in the churn of everyday. I mean, they are the churn of everyday, which is why they’re so easy to not see.

I’ve been thinking a lot about units of time. I know what I want in the big picture—love, creativity, and whatever makes those things possible on Maslow’s pyramid. I sort of know what it takes to translate those things into a single good day. Read. Write. Connect with people I care about. Clean some small square of my house and take a walk. (I often don’t do any of these things because work, because life, because phone.) But when I think about the middle range, I tend to panic: What is my five-year career plan? Do I have a five-year career plan? Is it utter hubris to assume I’ll be alive in five years?

One solution—and I’m not being facetious here—is to not think about the middle range. Trust that it will write itself if you work on having good days and moving in the general direction of love and creativity.

The other thing that has been a beautiful balm for the What if I’m doing it all wrong? voice in my head is the IKEA Writers Collective. Toward the end of 2018, a writer named Shea posted in a Facebook group for writer parents that she wanted to finish a draft of her book, and she needed some accountability partners. A group text grew out of it—Shea, Aubrey, Debbie, Jennifer, Hannah, and me. They’ve been, essentially, an antidote to the image of Writer as white man who locks himself in his office at a beautiful wooden desk for four hours a day—and even to my more contemporary image of Writer as multi-platform Millennial who crafts zingy Tweets against old white men and gets an instant book deal as a result.

We cheer every time Shea puts a star for writing five hundred words on the sticker chart she made herself. We weigh the pros and cons of having a second or third kid. We share pictures of messy houses in solidarity or admit, as Hannah did, “I think it’s still too early in our relationship to show you all a picture of my sink.”

It is early, and I’m in the throes of infatuation, but bear with me.

This isn't any of our living rooms. This is IKEA.

Aubrey texted about a dreamy solo trip to IKEA, and we all extolled the joys of childcare and veggie dogs, and wasn’t there like a wholeTV show shot in secret in IKEA’s staged rooms? That’s when we began dreaming of a writing retreat at IKEA, or anywhere really—any place that would understand and cater to the needs of trying to write in the midst of everything else. The churny intersection of the spiritual and the banal would have to look like IKEA, I think.

These five women, all of them really good writers, have given me the gift of not making it look easy. And the paradoxical result is that writing has gotten a tiny bit easier. For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing for twenty or thirty minutes before Dash wakes up. Dash, for his part, has given me the gift of sleeping till 7 or 7:30, which could change at any minute. But I’ll do this while I can, when I can. I’ll take these gifts and run with them and try to trust that when they depart, there will be others.

TFW when your memoir is flowing.

Almost exactly a year ago, I finally admitted that I needed to write the first section of my memoir—all the anger and longing and heartbreak and semi-psychosis that predated cancer. I didn’t want to, but Dan (of our late great writing group that never quite got off the ground) encouraged me to do it. Thank you, Dan. That section exists now. It’s messy and full of holes, but it exists. It’s 112 pages. I have two big sections to go, which exist in the form of journal entries. But they exist too. So I could call that a…draft? For the first time in forever (picture Kristen Bell’s voice singing it, Frozen fans) my memoir feels like a project, not just a weight I’m carrying around.

2. next stop, flip-flop station

I also feel like I pushed through something in my relationship to my job, although that is as much of a work-in-progress as the memoir.

Something is shifting with Dash, too. It’s hard to put my finger on it, but this has happened since he was a baby, where I’ll periodically look at him and see a new person and feel a little shy and shaken, like I need to reintroduce myself.

For the past six months or so, I’ve appreciated that he’s getting more independent, and I think I over-celebrated my ability to do other things while he’s in the room. I became a little bit obsessed with what I could clean or cook while he played with his cars, and I was always jumping into the addictive blue glow of games and socials on my phone. It wasn’t good for me or him, and in small fussy ways, he’s let me know.

I’m trying to listen to him, and to think of this as a chapter in our attachment, where he’s voicing his needs and I’m adjusting because I am attuned, vs. a failure to take care of my kid, vs. choosing a dumb fashion game over my child.

Just this past week or so, I’ve focused on giving him my undivided attention for ten or twenty minutes at a stretch. Those bites—like writing for twenty minutes—are doable, and they add up. As Dash becomes more engaged with his surroundings, he’s also more sensitive to them, and he seems more likely to need a break from the stream of activities AK and I drag him to. He needs to sit under a blanket with me and read picture books, or build a roller coaster, or pretend our kitchen chairs are a bus (passengers include Mama, Mommy, and a lone flip-flop; our stops are Mama Station, Mommy Station, and Flip-Flop Station).

He needs space and breath, and it turns out I do too.

Photo by Roopak Ravi on Unsplash

You’ve probably heard that management parable, about how you have a big jar that represents your time, and you have to put the big rocks in first, followed by pebbles, followed by sand. These geological objects represent your priorities, in descending order. If you fill the jar with sand, you’ll have no room for the big rocks. Homeboy’s head baker once performed a live demo of this at Morning Meeting, using tennis balls and marbles.

I don’t disagree with the metaphor, but I’ve been thinking about how the type of sand makes a difference. Maybe not all the grains of sand can be a returned email or a scrubbed sink. Maybe they shouldn’t all be a stroll through Instagram’s suggested videos, either. And maybe some of the space in the jar needs to remain unoccupied. Just air.

tops of 2018, plus some low points

More mornings than not in 2018, I woke up to a string of insults and imperatives--from myself, hurled at myself before I could bring a cup of coffee to my lips. I spent too much money on coffeehouse lattes, so they came with their own shame, curled like foam on top. I got coffee from gas stations and 7-Eleven, augmenting it with things that left a chemical taste in my mouth. There are too many tiny plastic creamer tubs in landfills bearing my fingerprints. I felt tacky and wasteful. On days I made coffee at home, I felt virtuous, even though it tended to be weak and/or instant, and I ran through portable mugs faster than I could wash them.

The cliche I live by.

Photo by Devin Avery on Unsplash

Even the thing that was supposed to jolt me out of my internal invective to be better came with its own list of ways I could do it better.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an Olympic gymnast so badly that watching other girls execute higher, more graceful back flips gave me almost physical pain. "Oh, Taylor Niemeyer? She's good," I might say of a fellow elementary school gymnast. "Good" contained so much. Pointed toes. Flexible spine. Muscled legs. Moral purity. Otherworldliness.

By middle school, I'd realized that no kid who'd taken lessons only at their local Parks and Recreation, in the same community center that hosted cooking classes and holiday parties, was going to the Olympics. Perfectionism isn't just ambition. It's a horrible awareness of what could be, and everything that's standing in the way.

Eventually I made some kind of life for myself as, I dunno, a queer artist or something? But, like, with a day job and health benefits. To me, the queer aesthetic is questioning what's standing in the way, and who put it there. It's a belief that there are a thousand answers to "what could be," not a single, unachievable Platonic ideal. It's mixing the ingredients of What Is to create a weird but tasty smoothie.

But the part of me that hangs onto those health benefits also hangs onto the idea of the perfect back flip. How can I be a revolutionary when our white supremacist capitalist world has been so good to me?

I went to therapy. I considered these things. I wrestled with them. I wrestled with cancer and infertility and grief and came out on the other side with a belief that I was strong after all. I set my striverhood a little further to the side.

I'm always diving headfirst into What Could Be.

Photo by Eugene Lim on Unsplash

Then I took a certain kind of job with a certain kind of well-meaning boss who invariably wrestles with his own perfectionism and anxiety, and it was like a hole was punched in a container I'd built brick by brick. The tenuous peace I'd found in simply ("simply," ha) being alive and fed and loved and making things was suddenly nearly inaccessible.

I had such a good life. I felt like such a piece of shit.

All of this came to a head in July, and then again Christmas Day, when all the low-grade stress and self-flagellation of the past year crashed into the complicated, banal stress of the holidays. Wrapping six hundred framed pictures of Dash for relatives. Driving from loving relatives' house to loving relatives' house to loving relatives' house to loving' relatives house in a thirty-hour period.

Somewhere between Santa Ana and San Clemente I lost my shit and said really unkind things to AK and scared Dash. And then I did it like three more times. If this were a Christmas movie, I would need to be rescued by the owner of a small-town tree lot who would turn out to be Santa-Jesus. Or, I don't know, maybe I'm the villain, and AK would leave me for the owner of a small-town tree lot.

Apparently there is a movie called Fir Crazy.

If I have a resolution for 2019, it's to rebuild that brick container around my perfectionism, and to tune out the loud voices of perfectionism around me. In practical terms, that means a two-month trial hiatus from verbally shitting on myself. That doesn't mean not admitting my mistakes--but maybe I don't have to beat everyone to the punch.

Perfectionism is egotistical and unhelpful and paralyzing. I also know that art--making it and experiencing it--saves me again and again. As does AK, who does not tune into the same radio frequencies that whisper in my ear. This can be confounding when I'm like "But do you hear it??" But ultimately thank god she doesn't hear it.

All of this is my very rambling, arguably depressing lead-up to my Tops of 2018. Here are thirteen books, movies, TV shows, and podcasts that kept me going and helped me escape:

1. Suspiria: I realized halfway through that I wanted the witches to win. The witches won. Also this movie punches Nazis. 

Me before coffee.

2. You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie: This raw and messy memoir reveals what healing looks like in textual form. I think this is what they meant in grad school by "performative writing." Alexie is hella funny, and also writes about how humor is a defense mechanism.

3. The Dream: This podcast peeled the three remaining scales from my eyes re: capitalism. America is one big fucking pyramid scheme.

4. The Favourite: As they say, everyone is going through something. Queens, concubines, politicians, scullery maids, bunnies. An intense love/hate triangle about power and self-hood, punctuated with just the right amount of strangeness.

I related most to Queen Anne, who wasn't as stupid as she seemed, but could not strategize to save her life.

5. Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug: Beautiful, meticulously crafted journal that captures all my feelings about guilt and reconciliation.

How to be nostalgic without being a Nazi.

6. The Book of Emma Reyes by Emma Reyes, translated by Daniel Alarcon: Emma Reyes was born into extreme poverty and abuse in Colombia in 1919, and bounced between convent orphanages and relatives' homes. Not only did she survive, but she lived to tell her own story with a visual artist's eye for detail and a winking, mischievous take on the world around her.

7. Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam: It takes the writerly equivalent of a neurosurgeon to write from the point of view of a sexually abusive kidnapper in a way that is both sympathetic and unforgiving. Nadzam is that writer.

8. Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation by Ari Folman and David Polonsky: A classic for good reason. Now illustrated, with imagination and humor.

The other Queen Anne.

9. Sharp Objects: Gillian Flynn delivers cocktails of psychology, zeitgeist, and creepy detail. The miniseries version adds oppressively lush aesthetics (think lots of floral wallpaper and creepy dollhouses) and alcohol. Patricia Clarkson is the heartbreaking/-broken mother we all fear becoming. Amy Adams plays a troubled heroine, like Libby Day in Dark Places, whose angst goes far beyond quirk.

TFW your little sis and her brigade of roller bitches discover a toothless dead body.

10. Decoder Ring: Willa Paskin takes deep dives into all corners of pop culture, from hotel art to the "Sad Jennifer Aniston" tabloid trope. Riveting, relevant, and delightfully weird.

11. Faithful Place: Dysfunctional family dynamics, beautiful writing, and muuuuurrrrrder. I loved it for all the same reasons I loved Sharp Objects.

12. Bodies: As suspenseful as a true-crime podcast, except the mystery unfolds in patients' own bodies. Usually women. Usually fighting through layers of medical and cultural bias as well as with what's going on physically. It's a quietly radical podcast that's oddly empowering for hypochondriacs like myself.

13. A Star is Born: On one level, a dramatic musical that throws its arms wide and belts shamelessly. Also a heartbreakingly believable portrait of addiction: The characters truly love each other, know what they're getting into, and find periodic happiness, but it's not enough to make for a happy ending.

it's fine

Unfortunately, I am always thinking about self-improvement. To the point that I am starting a pretend nonprofit called IT'S FINE. IT'S FINE's mission is that whatever is going on is fine. Could we use volunteers and donations and a board? I mean, maybe, but mostly we're fine.

IT'S FINE was born because panic--the concern that MAYBE EVERYTHING IS WRONG WITH EVERYTHING, AND WE'VE BEEN DOING IT ALL WRONG UP UNTIL NOW, BURN IT DOWN, BURN IT DOWN AND START OVER, BUT THIS TIME BE PERFECT!--usually doesn't make anything better.

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash

I'm better at getting better when getting better is a whispered goal rather than a shouted one.

So this is one thing I've been thinking about. At work and in my personal life. Not as much in my writing life, which is the one place I default to growth orientation and/or act like the mature human I strive to be elsewhere.

*

Here's another worky analogy for how I want to be in the world. Bear with me.

I was raised on Microsoft Word and still use it for my just-for-me writing projects. I always thought the goal was to create a perfect document that you could share with others, but not let them touch. You have to hit "save" to overwrite anything, meaning you have to make a conscious decision about what is true, and worth keeping.

Oldie that I am, I only started using Google Docs regularly a year ago. In Google Docs, you work together, and every change is real.

At 826LA, we use the phrase "build it out" a lot. As in, "I've created an outline for that campaign, and I'm starting to build it out." I think we may have borrowed that phrase from Rachel, who comes from the design world. I like it. I like the idea that campaigns/documents/life are this thing you're always building, even if at times it feels like the Winchester Mystery House (which was actually not the work of a madwoman, but rather an amateur architect who didn't have a lot of outlets for her creativity--check out the 99% Invisible episode about Sarah Winchester!).

Mysterious, yes. Crazy, no.

I like the idea that progress is incremental and a team effort. It's hard to explain how I think of teamwork and work, in general, differently now than I did pre-826LA, but it feels more three-dimensional now. It feels both more challenging and more comforting. I want to carry this idea into my personal life and daily habits, where I hope to be less perfectionistic and, paradoxically, better.

*

I'm reading Joshua Mohr's addiction memoir, Sirens, and his relationship with drugs and alcohol feels a lot like (all too much like) my relationship with food, which has not been great lately. Here's a quote that especially resonates with me:

If I zero in on my life, if I scour and stew on any aspect, I'll always locate some benign reason to give up. To fail and flee. So the question becomes, is that what I want? Do I want to end up alone and alcoholic?"

No, of course not.

Yes, of course.

I was raised in the cult of Personal Responsibility (a Microsoft Wordy cult) that half our country is still obsessed with. Hard work fixes all, etc. In a country where corporations have more rights than humans, this is bullshit; meritocracy is the opiate of America's masses.

I try to reorient myself toward the systemic. On a recent episode of This American Life, David Kestenbaum talked about why, as a scientist, he doesn't really believe in free will, and I was right there with him. We are the product of our atoms and our circumstances. No one can really be any different than how they are, or they would be.

But does that make me a person who can't help but guzzle eggnog until I hate myself, or does that make me a person who has a habit of guzzling eggnog and hating herself, but who ultimately stops leaning into self-sabotage and develops some healthier habits for more than a week at a stretch? Either could be written in my bones, my circumstances, my "choices."

But in a plastic cup, and refilled three times.

What is the line between acknowledging the reality of your situation and looking for reasons to fail? As someone prone to addict-esque black-and-white thinking, I think the main thing for me to remember is that there is a line.

Yes, it is exhausting working full time and raising a kid, despite all the help and resources I have. Yes, the holidays are a minefield of cookies. That doesn't mean I have to race ahead of those facts and gain thirty (more) pounds just because. That doesn't mean I'm-fucked-so-why-bother-trying. That does mean the serenity prayer. It all comes down to the serenity prayer.

A friend in recovery told me addicts tend to see themselves as either special or terrible. Another wrote this amazing post about how both sexual abuse and cancer can trigger the same kind of thinking. And even though I'm not an abuse survivor or someone addicted to anything you can quit cold turkey, I'm like yes yes yes.

Photo by Inês Pimentel on Unsplash

Being better--to my body, my soul, my family--means accepting that I am neither special nor terrible. I am average. I need food and rest and time to think, and without those things, I get grouchy, and that's okay. I have strengths and weaknesses. My strengths are special because they are unique to me, but I am not fundamentally set apart from everyone else. This is so boring. This feels like accepting that, after a lifetime of believing I was either a unicorn or an ogre, I am in fact beige carpet.

But it's fine.

the three mothers

1. suspiria/mother of sighs

“When women tell you the truth, you don’t pity them, you accuse them of delusion.” –Suspiria, 2018

Susie is the new girl in the dance troupe, pulled from the flat fields of Ohio as if by an umbilical cord, to a Berlin still catching its breath from the war. The Helena Markos company is a palace of mirrors, where dancers’ bodies twist and break as dancers’ bodies do, to live a story larger than any one ugly foot on one wooden floor. Susie says: More, please.

Sara is an unknowing ambassador to the cabinet of curiosities that lurks beneath the floorboards, with the hair and wrecked bodies and bespoke metal hooks. She is a sweet English rose.

Dr. Klemperer is an old psychoanalyst who does not believe in witches or ghosts, but he lost his true love to the Third Reich. He believes in what a group of people can do, when organized, to other people.

More, please.

Sara and Dr. Klemperer meet over trembling teacups. I think I am supposed to root for them to get to the root of this evil, for Sara to land in some sunlit room, and this knowledge is a kind of sigh.

Madame Blanc is the maestro with no eyebrows or lashes who says: “After the war, there are two things dance can never be again. Those things are beautiful, and cheerful.”

I cannot turn my face toward cheer, and this film won’t make me do it. It is a sigh of relief, this new knowledge.

Susie says: “Why are you so afraid of the mess that’s still to come?”

I am afraid. In the dark theater, I lean into the bloodbath. I crave this world of women as sex and unsex, life and afterlife, intestines and beating hearts, easy as a pear to slice, hard as folklore to destroy.

If you want to see a movie that both features Tilda Swinton and is the cinematic embodiment of Tilda Swinton, Suspiria is that movie.

But at night I transform my fear of mess into the banal, my own alchemy. I have done the reverse before—turned a dull ache into the apocalypse—and I know the ins and outs of such spells. What if AK’s headaches last forever? What if I become only a body shuttling to and from one kind of work to another kind of work? What if my body fails?

We cut our son’s umbilical cord when he was born. His birthmother in the room, bloody. It was magical and cruel, simple and sterile. It wasn’t spaghetti; it was thick, durable, like something from the bottom of the ocean.

2. the dream/mother of darkness

It is not a true crime podcast, but it unfolds like one. Or: It is the truest crime. Our host, from a flat farm town in Michigan, recalls the Mary Kay parties of her youth. The women who gathered and laughed, told stories about tangled pantyhose and a grandmother who wore furs as a child, ate Jell-o, sold each other lipstick.

There are women and warmth and camaraderie, promises of beauty and riches, and this is how the cults get you. Not a pyramid, they say, just a structure that happens to be large at the bottom and small at the top. Guess which part you’re on.

Our host takes us through legal cases and a bit of stunt journalism, signing up her coworker to sell beauty products whose names are modified by adjectives like: perfect, enduring, rich.

I am horrified by this spell in plain sight. Betsy DeVos is an Amway heir. Donald Trump flew to the White House on Amway air. He is made of air.

Flashing gang signs. Someone issue an injunction, please.

The message of every multilevel marketing training is: If this isn’t working for you, the problem is you. You must not be perfect. If you cannot endure, you will never be rich. The message of America is this, also.

I fall for the spell. I know what it is to hustle, in a nonprofit sort of way; I know what is easy and what is not. And yet that makeup sparkles like mica in a gum-pocked sidewalk. The idea of myself in a pinstriped girl-boss suit holds a certain appeal. I was raised on the myth of meritocracy, as American as fat-free Devil’s Food SnackWells.

3. seven/mother of tears

Today I would be the mother of seven-year-olds. Two boys who were only ever tissue and blood. I am only tissue and blood.

A cyst that has not drawn any blood vessels to it is probably benign. I am probably benign.

A headache that retracts with rest is probably benign. A mystery to be unraveled one pill and one yoga class at a time, not a single thing to be attacked with a scalpel. Or so we have reason to believe, even though I don’t completely believe in reason anymore. Even as I say my incantations to the gods of Google.

The mind-body connection is real, but is has been borrowed by the Mother of Darkness, sold as Herbalife and Isotonix. You must be the reason for your headaches, your lack of sales, your dead babies. Do not look over there. Do not look at that man made of air or the pyramid behind him.

How to take a thing that is kind of true and turn it into a zillion dollar quackery industry.

I want to stage a cry-in. Me and all the people fucked so much harder than me, who have learned not to fear the mess. I fear the mess. But for the purposes of this spell, let’s say that I don’t. All of us will summon our salt tears and make a tsunami. Turn the pyramid back into sand. Wiggle our ugly toes in it.

artificial intelligence

Google sinus headache, subcategory mucus
Do not Google brain tumor
When Google autocompletes "do sinus headaches have the same symptoms as"
with "brain tumor," wonder if
this is because sinus headaches have the same symptoms as,
or because others are as anxious and sick in the head, haha, as you
and artificial intelligence knows we are dumb

Google brain tumor

Say all the wrong things
Resent her for dredging up your old apocalypses
Wonder if she resented you when you were sick
Know the answer

Text your friends
Text your doctor friend
Call your sister
Call your therapist
Call your therapist back when the call breaks
up twice

Escalate: in the morning you spoke of sinus and tension
Now, migraines and neurologists

Hell is waiting for the results of an MRI

Crunch numbers
20,000 Americans will be diagnosed with a brain tumor this year
Calculate, add fairy dust, arrive at a .01% chance of brain tumor
in this singular adulthood that belongs to a person you love

Consider adding another child
Consider the risk: more to love, more that could go wrong
Cancel your call with the adoption agency

Pick up your child
Consider his smooth skin, the color
of almost-sunset
and how he deserves so much more
than what you have to offer

Deserve is a dirty word,
to be relegated to the dungeon alongside
Responsibility and Fault

Drive the 710 with slow belching trucks
Watch the almost-sunset behind the skeletons of industry
Listen to The Wheels on the Bus
go round and round and round
as your thoughts expand like the universe
and implode like the universe

Drink cheap wine with your dad
Know that there will be a time when your dad is no longer
Imagine, try not to imagine
When he asks if you have heard about mindfulness
Do not strangle him

Come home to her
She is home
She needs to laugh and you need to cry
Say some more wrong things
Be forgiven

Wake up at 5
Throw your journal in your bag
and begin the hard right turn into Crisis Management
Make mental lists and plans
Plan to put them on paper

Know the answer
These grooves on an old warped record
The joys of middle age: you are strong
you are paper
you are in risk categories

Write this list instead
Cry some more
Teach your phone the truth of a meme you saw:
You never mean ducking

Duck like a duck
Waddle on land, awkward and funny
Swim beneath the surface
like your body was made for this

queering the texts through which we stumble

1. barnacles

“Every time I work directly with students, it helps me do my job better.”

I say this a lot, to myself and others, but there’s a part of me that believes anything that’s too much fun, or too meaningful, must not be my actual job. I had a very vegetables-first upbringing. That analogy doesn’t work, though, because my point here is that candy is nutritious.

As I was packing up to leave the office on Wednesday, Cathy, our Field Trips Coordinator, asked if anyone present had Barnacle experience.

Mr. and Mrs. Barnacle are the fictional husband-wife team who run the publishing house inside each 826 location. When elementary school students file in, the day’s field trip leaders explain that one of their bosses is so nice! Always knitting sweaters for penguins, etc. The other is, well, kind of grumpy. But no worries, that Barnacle is out today.

Then Mr. or Mrs. Barnacle (depending who is playing the curmudgeonly publisher that day) comes booming through the loudspeaker, threatening to fire their hardworking employees for writing such dull tomes as Watching Paint Dry and Eating an Apple.

I had no Barnacle experience, but I was the most available of those present on Wednesday night, and so I agreed to step in for Thursday’s field trip, imagining myself as the understudy heroine in a backstage musical. This would be my accidental big break!

And you guys, it kind of was (except for the part where my life changes substantively as a result).

Kenny, our previous Field Trips Coordinator, said it helped to have a motif, so I decided my Mrs. Barnacle would be a perpetually dissatisfied boss, tragically oblivious to the stunning and generous feats of her exotic pets. Her dog bought her a half-birthday present? Pshh, it was turquoise, when he knows her favorite color is teal. Her giraffe made her macaroni and cheese? Who cares, it had breadcrumbs. Yuck.

The second graders from Gabriella Charter School were a generous audience, and by the time they broke for lunch, I was on a high.

2. glitter and warts

My second performance of the night was with a handful of Foglifter writers, at Akbar, as part of the Lambda Literary Festival. Just as my 21-year-old self would be shocked and saddened to learn that I no longer attend musicals regularly, my 32-year-old self would be shocked and saddened to learn that I don’t go to literary readings regularly. I used to go to so many that it became a bit of a slog at times. I guess the good news is that going to a reading every five or six months makes them much sweeter.

Miah—grad school friend, brilliant writer, badass activist, Foglifter editor—asked five writers to read on the topic of “Queer Sweet Home,” whatever that meant to us. The obvious fit for me was an excerpt from this piece, about my house privilege and the intersections in a neighborhood of immigrants and transplants.

I imagined a Q&A in which I would be called to task for said privilege, for my whiteness, for my failure to be a truly positive force in my neighborhood. I would stand there and take it, because shame is a small price to pay for middle-class subsidized housing, right?

I texted AK: I’m going to try to just own it. I’ll own it like the landed gentry owns land.

I imagined myself adding, during the Q&A in my head, the complicated defense I work through every day: Listen, I know that maybe the most helpful thing a white person can do is, like, move to the suburban Midwest? But I’m queer, and my family isn’t white. Those other parts of the country don’t feel so welcoming. We have friends flooding out of the city for more affordable places, but it doesn’t feel like a very real option. At the same time, I know it’s only my class privilege that makes staying comfortably in L.A. an option.

But when I read about our eccentric neighbors, the Akbar audience laughed. Some of this is a function of reading live—people like to laugh with other people. But I also think it’s a function of queerness. Yes, social justice, but for centuries before we were allowed to demand rights, and occasionally squeezed by the narrow if fascinating pathways of intersectionality, we survived by being subversive. By seeing humor and oddity in hegemony.

Linda Ravenswood (a new favorite of mine, for sure) read fierce poems about pop culture and her own family’s relationship to property. She said re: my work, “Girl, I wouldn’t be ambivalent if someone offered me a house. I would be like, give it to me.”

I felt like she might have taken something from what I read that I didn’t intend, but in a way that liberated me. I felt like to be queer, to queer the texts through which we all stumble, is to free ourselves from the narratives of privilege and lack-of. That might be the sort of thing that only a privileged person would say, or it might be the most radical act of all. Both?

Claudia Rodriguez, another grad school buddy, read bold, vulnerable, hilarious poems about BDSM and butch identity. How do I describe her writing? She grew up in Compton and is fluent in academia. She has a vibe I recognized in a lot of the homies I met at Homeboy, though her content and language are different. It’s like an ability to puff up and perform while simultaneously laughing at the performance. It’s playful and honest.

Terry Wolverton read a piece about her grandmother burning her grandfather’s home to the ground. Yuska Lufti Tuanakotta read a sweet and elegant homage to an Indonesian mother, flipping various immigration narratives on their heads.

What I felt, reading with these writers, was home. It was also queer pride. Not gay pride, but queer pride. The absolute need—a need that so often gets lost in the daily seriousness of fundraising for under-served communities and trying to keep a child alive and trying to pay the subsidized rent I can barely afford—to play. To be weird. To say fuck you. To say yes, and. To say the wrong thing. To remember that I am not (just) the oppressor. Or (just) the oppressed. I am glittery and warty, an angel-witch from a Francesca Lia Block novel, flocking to my birds of a feather.

3. chest cat

Last weekend, AK and I became tías. AK was in the room, coaching her sister while nursing her own sinus infection. (She draped a washcloth over her face and earned the nickname The Masked Doula.) I got to meet Harper yesterday.

Walking into Lori and Brett’s house, I felt a surge of all my old issues: that oldest-sibling, non-bio-mom feeling that something about the world of moms and new babies is Not For Me.

It’s to Lori’s credit, as someone who’s had her own long journey to parenthood, that the feelings dissolved quickly. They were figuring out how to use our old Beco Gemini carrier, and I asked if I could give it a try.

“Of course,” they said, “you have credentials.”

Even though I’ve forgotten plenty since Dash was a baby, I felt a surge of pride. They saw me as someone unlikely to drop a baby! They did not look at my neurosis and fake boobs and see someone hopelessly un-maternal!

Soon, Harper—big for a newborn, tiny for a person—lay on my chest like a cat, pressing away my stress with her warmth.

Art by glait.

I don’t know yet what it will mean to be a tía. It will be different from being a mom. I think there’s something queer about the role, not just because historically there have been many more gay aunts and uncles than parents. In pushing to become a mom, I wanted to step out of the margins; I didn’t want to be a tertiary character in someone else’s kid’s life. It was an important push, my own form of labor.

But now that it’s done, I can, I hope, enjoy what makes the margins special. They’re a low-pressure place where we can all play. Where, no matter how kind and woke a kid’s parents are, other voices are needed. It’s a tía’s job to step in and say, “Sure, but how about this.” To practice a kind of angelic witchcraft.

stress, management

This week I attended my first management training ever, with my coworker Miranda, in a tall building next to Pershing Square. I was excited because I’d heard good things about this particular training, and because management—like so many other parts of nonprofit work—is something my boss and I had hoped I’d be good at without any training or guidance, only to be unpleasantly surprised.

I’m not a terrible manager. I listen and I don’t micromanage, and I have a good understanding of how various tasks fit into a larger picture. But there are so many other parts—clarifying roles and expectations, managing up and across, being proactive instead of just saying “What do we do now?”

I’ve always shunned management culture because I fancy myself an artist or an activist or something. Management sounds so capitalistic and boring. It belongs to the world of khaki pants and TPS reports. It’s for people who can’t just all be cool and get along, and sometimes fight and cry and hug it out.

This is, of course, ridiculous.

William Carlos Williams said: “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.”

It’s difficult to get poetry from management. Yet people suffer every day for lack of what is found there. Management is just couples therapy for groups—a form of clear and fair communication that makes it possible to be in the world with other humans. And we all know how I love therapy.

Look, bizness people doing bizness things. (Photo by rawpixel via Unsplash.)

I’ve been at 826LA one year as of this weekend. For the first few months, I came home with what I dubbed a learning headache. Then we reshuffled our department, and there have been a lot of growing pains. Sometimes I doodled angsty poetry in my notebook during meetings.

Look, we’re all adults here

walking around in our dead-bird skins

tissue paper in our eye sockets.

I’m tired of listening to my self-esteem playlist

every morning while you

light the gas lamps every afternoon.

Sometimes I think I still know nothing about fundraising. Sometimes I wonder if I want to. Other times I imagine myself as both the lever and the thing being lifted, constantly cranking myself to new levels. I’m leaps and bounds from where I was a year ago.

I have a learning hangover. In the past six months, I gained back the weight I Weight Watchered away last year. I never worked late enough, but I was often late to pick up Dash.

That fine line between baby bird and crazy dinosaur. (Photo by Joy Stamp via Unsplash.)

He had literal growing pains—spontaneous and short-lived evening leg cramps—twice last week. At least, that’s what I and the Kaiser nurse hotline think they are; WebMD says they’re nearly textbook childhood leg cramps or leukemia, because WebMD.

He switched classrooms recently and has been a little more clingy, a little more likely to pretend to be a baby bird, a little more likely to pee on the porch, then run inside and announce “I didn’t pee on the porch.”

My 826 predecessor, Carolyn, has always been generous and helpful to me, so it was no surprise that when I posed a question in a local moms’ Facebook group about a baby swing (for AK’s sister, who is due momentarily—stay tuned for auntie updates, y’all), she was quick to offer hers to us, for free.

Despite—or perhaps because of—her general awesomeness, it has been hard not to feel like the Second Mrs. de Winter to her Rebecca. Today Dash and I went to pick up the swing, and I was not surprised to find her house pristine despite the fact that two young children lived there. She was wearing a breezy linen jumpsuit and sorting through her youngest’s books. She was sweet to Dash, and gave me some friendly, practical, down-to-earth work advice. And the swing.

There are no evil housekeepers in my version, and my Rebecca is alive, so it's not really apples-to-apples.

I was just grateful Dash didn’t pee on her floor.

My friend Holly recently introduced me to Amanda Palmer’s song “In My Mind,” which just about sums it up:

In my mind
When I'm old I am beautiful
Planting tulips and vegetables
Which I will mindfully watch over
Not like me now
I'm so busy with everything
That I don't look at anything
But I'm sure I'll look when I am older
And it's funny how I imagined
That I could be that person now
But that's not what I want
But that's what I wanted
And I'd be giving up somehow
How strange to see
That I don't wanna be the person that I want to be

I want to be like Carolyn and also I don’t. I’d like to be a version of me with tidier countertops, who doesn’t sometimes stress-eat fifteen cookies in a sitting, who is a more diligent reader and prolific writer. (I was prolific once upon a time.) I sort of hope/feel like I am turning a corner at work, but I also know I am prone to now-everything-will-be-easy narratives, and that cancer check-up season approaches, which is never easy.

I would like to bring some effective management techniques to my life as well as my work, but I hope the messiness of my learning process adds some nice layers, like the oils in a cast iron pan. Not that I would know how cast iron pans really work, because I mostly cook pasta and pre-made things from Trader Joe’s. That’s fine too.