Bread and Bread

Photo by Ben Dutton on Unsplash I'm writing this from the lobby of the Seattle Convention Center, which is strangely beautiful for a convention center. Escalators going up to the sky, flanked with warm wooden stair-seats that look out over Downtown Seattle.  Somehow this is my first post of 2023. Time is a motherfucker. I'm here with C.C., Dash, and Joey for four and a half days of the AWP writers' conference, smashed together with a family vacation. I desperately needed a change of scene. I think we all did. My Great Mental Health Relapse of 2022 hitched a ride to 2023, despite nothing bad happening. I'm going to therapy, doing EMDR, taking more Effexor than I was before, but it's been hard to shake the feeling that something terrible is around the corner, and that feeling becomes its own trigger. Am I afraid of doctor appointments, or am I afraid of how afraid I get of doctor appointments? It's like "live in despair for a week" is an item on my to-d...

Last night AK and I binge-watched the first three episodes of Friends from College , a Netflix comedy starring Keegan-Michael Key, Fred Savage, and Annie Parisse as, well, friends from college whose lives get re-intertwined when they all end up in New York. Keegan-Michael Key is Ethan, a literary novelist in search of commercial success. Fred Savage is his agent. Annie Parisse is the woman he’s been casually hooking up with on out-of-town visits for twenty years, despite being married to another college friend, Lisa (Cobie Smulders). The show is clever and real, despite some loopy plotlines (replacing a dead bunny, writing while high, etc.). I enjoyed many literal lols, like when the group tries to figure out whether Marianne’s (Jae Suh Park) experimental, cross-gender production of Streetcar has started or not. Having a creative crisis in a very spacious apartment. I also paused the show a handful of times to nervously ask AK things like “Do you think I’ll ever publish anothe...