Category Archives: personal history

contact improv

A couple Fridays back I took a contemporary dance class. Inside the windowless studio three floors up from Times Square, you’d never guess that on the sidewalk below, pedicab drivers were trying to sweet-talk tourists into a hundred-dollar ride from the “Six” stage door to a hotel they could really just walk to.

If you’ve never been to dance class, it goes like this: you warm up for a while, maybe for half of the 90-minute class, then you spend the rest of the time learning and practicing choreography. (A “combo,” as you call it. Except instead of having French fries and a refreshing beverage, you have some dance teacher and their visible abs giving you the side-eye because you’re too old to memorize 14 eight-counts in one go. Not that you could do that when you were 20, either, but at least you have an excuse now.)

The last time we ran through the combo, our teacher had us split into pairs and while one person danced, the other improvised interactive movement around and toward them, creating context for the choreographed movement. It was kind of magical and transcendent, or at least it was more interesting than scrolling through my phone, and after we finished the girl I was dancing with — who was probably a decade younger than me, an old crone — told me how impressed she was that I made eye contact with her while we were moving.

Which might have been code for “Wow, that was fucking creepy, old lady,” but I took it as a compliment. I have a core memory from my senior year of high school, doing a contact improv exercise — contact improv is basically what we did in that dance class, except it was in 2006, so we were touching each other without considering whether that might be disturbing to some people — with a girl in my dance class who ribbed me gently about how visibly uncomfortable I was with physical contact. (The “some people” I refer to is me.)

I was nervous around people before being nervous around people was cool. Naturally, that means that just as social anxiety becomes a status symbol, I’m suddenly brave enough to scare the shit out of a 24-year-old at Broadway Dance Center by staring her down at the end of contemporary class.

I had always expected that as I aged, I would start to care less about what people think of my behavior. I mean, I’ve seen those ladies in the red hats. And I thought I’d have to be red hat lady age — you know, toothless, wearing a sweatsuit in public, being troubled by my joints — before I saw a meaningful difference.

But I lost my baseline for appropriate social behavior while I was wasting away in my flat during London’s months-long pandemic lockdown. As I reacquaint myself with the concept of human interaction, I’m also discovering my inner red hat lady.

And yes, I’m writing this in 2024, four years after lockdown and three years after we all got injected with our first dose of 5G. I don’t know about you, but I’m still reacquainting myself with the concept of human interaction.

As the fourth anniversary of my last normal weekend approaches, it’s also the first time in years — and it feels ridiculous to write “years” but it’s been years, plural, multiple plodding chunks of months that oozed by at Miranda Priestly’s dreaded glacial pace — that I haven’t lost myself in scrolling through photos of my life before the pandemic, wondering if I’ll ever genuinely enjoy the world again, wishing I could go back in time and shoot the pangolin or blow up the lab where the gain-of-function research went awry. (Wow, that’s a lot of conspiracy theories in two paragraphs! Someone please propose an idea for how Taylor Swift fits into all of this.)

I remember thinking four years ago that we’d be inconvenienced for a few weeks and then we’d all go back to normal, maybe with a little more hand-washing than we’d done before. Even a year ago I was still waiting for normal, trying to wedge myself back into nine-to-five, business trips, feeling stressed and uncomfortable in my own skin until I could get a glass of wine on board or burn off a bunch of calories on my exercise bike.

I’m not waiting anymore. I’m not waiting to go back to normal and I’m not waiting to become a shameless and unembarrassed person.

Maybe wearing sweats in public made me realize that being comfortable is nothing to be ashamed of. Maybe the fact that I’m already troubled by my joints — and I even had what feels like half a tooth drilled out by a dentist last week! — got me thinking that I’m only going to be alive and spry for so long, so I might as well enjoy it. I can’t tolerate alcohol anymore, and being sober around a lot of drunk people (hello, every wedding, bachelorette, birthday, and cast party I’ve attended in the past year!) is a good way to make being uninhibited feel like something you can do any time of the day or night.

When I was younger I used to play a game when I was feeling especially anxious about one thing or another, where I’d ask myself What’s the worst that could happen? And usually it was “someone ignores my idea” or “I don’t get the part” — or it was “the plane crashes and we die in a fiery conflagration,” which is why I take Xanax when I fly — but now the answer is always “nothing worse than what’s already happened.”

What’s going to happen if I look this strange girl in the eye while we dance together on a Friday night three floors above Times Square? Maybe a pangolin will send an infectious disease boomeranging across six continents and we’ll all die of ground-glass lungs, or maybe we’ll say hello the next time we take class together. What’s going to happen if I quit my fancy job at a startup and decide to cobble together a living ghostwriting bylines for the CEOs of minor companies in niche trade publications? Maybe my old coworkers will think that I’m a failure, or maybe I’ll get to stop imagining that the next job I take will make me less miserable than the one I have now and start actually enjoying my life. What’s going to happen if I admit that I actually want to be a writer and I beg a bunch of literary agents to represent it? Maybe it dies on the slush pile or maybe one of them tells me that she loved the first ten pages and asks me to send the rest.

It’s been quite freeing to realize that I don’t have to wait until I’m eligible for AARP to stop giving a fuck. And it’s even better to stop staring at photos from 2019 like I could only be happy if I could time-travel back there, because I finally feel like I’ve shed my old skin.

hot dog fingers

Author’s Note: I started writing this post before “Everything Everywhere All At Once” came out, but fret not, I can bring it around to Jamie Lee Curtis playing the piano with her toes. Wait for it...

“You can either have constipation and dry mouth, or tingling fingers and hair loss,” my doctor says. “Oh, and brain fog. Tingling fingers, hair loss, and brain fog. Or constipation. And dry mouth.”

No, I wasn’t on one of those E-Trade commercials that have been living rent-free in my mind since the early 2000s. I was at my neurologist’s office, praying at the altar of Big Pharma.

I have recently being diagnosed with “chronic migraines.” This means that I have a headache more often than I don’t, at least fifteen days a month, although to me it sounds kind of Victorian. Like I should be carrying a parasol when I leave my garret.

It also means that I’m now eligible for preventive migraine medication, which is what they call it when insurance deigns to cover a few ancient treatments for seizures, high blood pressure, and depression that, through mechanisms no one understands, also prevent migraines. Maybe. If you don’t mind the Sinead O’Connor look.

But having a headache more than half the time is exactly as awful as it sounds. So I happily signed up to go bald. (Listen, I already locked down a husband. I don’t need hair anymore.)

You make different “would you rather” choices when you’re chronically ill. You make different choices, across the board. Frankly, the whole experience has thrown me into something of an identity crisis.

Based on the books that I’ve been reading since I aged out of Katniss and Tris, I should be proceeding toward my “Can she have it all?” mid-thirties crisis of balancing career and a rich life of drinking wine with my girlfriends. (This is what comes after the toxic love affair with the aging narcissist and the successful escape from the dead-end hourly job in retail. The soundtrack is Wilson-Philips. See also: “Bridesmaids.”)

Instead, I have to carry a parasol when I leave my garret. Or, whatever, wear a baseball cap when I leave my second-floor walkup, because one of my many migraine triggers is sunshine. Others include eating too much, eating too little, the existence of weather, excessive smiling, and, of course, booze.

I can’t believe I wasted so many of my prime drinking years chasing shots of Crystal Palace vodka with Diet Coke. I can finally order a $16 glass of wine without hyperventilating and instead I’m stuck going full GOOP. I mean, I have been purchasing herbs from the Internet. I read a 600-page book about mindfulness.

It’s not the midlife crisis I was counting on. And yes, I was counting on a midlife crisis. I spent what was in retrospect too much of my early twenties reading John Updike and Philip Roth. I was expecting to make a bold and novelistic escape from my harpy wife and troglodyte children. I wasn’t expecting to experiment with how much magnesium I can consume in a 24-hour period without triggering forgot-to-wash-the-spinach-food-poisoning levels of diarrhea.

I wasn’t expecting, moreover, to have to choose between being an ill woman who plasters her walls with optimistic cross-stitch art or being an ill woman who harangues everyone who will listen about how the patriarchal capitalistic healthcare system insists that her illness is all in her head and also her health insurance won’t cover her bespoke experimental alternative complementary integrative medical treatment.

The problem is it is all in my head. Literally and figuratively. Migraine is one of those pesky illnesses that crop up when you’ve been under a great deal of stress for a long time. For example, if you spend nine months trapped in your flat in an apocalyptic City of London while Boris Johnson lugs suitcases full of wine into Number Ten, and your “commute” is moving from one side of the kitchen table to the other, and also, you work for a bunch of lunatics who also graduated from the PayPal school of being extremely hardcore. (As an aside, do not Google the phrase “extremely hardcore.” Yikes!)

None of those things have been true since I left London and my job on the same day in April 2021. They imprinted on me nonetheless. I can’t remember what it was like to live in a body that didn’t surge with fear when I logged in every morning to see what fresh hell had landed in my inbox overnight. I can’t remember what it was like to be someone who had never spent nine months wondering if they’d ever see their friends again.

I keep repeating the very unfunny joke that instead of “long Covid,” I have “long pandemic.” And the primary symptom is that every few days or so, the shadow of pain begins to loom.

I recently read Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Invisible Kingdom,” about her experience of chronic illness. I don’t share her righteous anger at a medical system that isn’t built to serve people whose illnesses don’t respond neatly to a course of antibiotics. I think that anger is misplaced or even futile. (I also can’t believe she wrote an entire chapter about fecal matter transplants without making a single poop joke, but that’s a personal issue, and probably a sign of why I’m not a real author.)

I went to the DMV a while back for the first time in several years and wondered if the entire borough of Brooklyn hadn’t also turned out that day. Judging by the range of flannel, yarmulkes, skintight bodysuits, and Outdoor Voices totes on display, the answer was yes. All of us, curious crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, suffering through the inescapable indignity of renewing your driver’s license.

I think being ill is a lot like being stuck at the DMV, down to the incomprehensible system by which there are thirteen different numerical queues and somehow your deli counter ticket is in the slowest one. Only that’s because you have a headache and everyone else has, I don’t know, a heart attack or is carrying their index finger on ice in a Ziploc bag. In which case, please! Go ahead! I can wait!

The gist of the book is that the author turned out to have a host of rare autoimmune conditions that took years to unmask and required a complex cocktail of traditional and alternative therapies to bring under control. I took issue with the book’s framing: instead of celebrating that our knowledge of medicine is advanced enough that her doctors eventually figured out what on earth was wrong with her and gave her everything from antibiotics to a poop transplant to fix it, the book is framed as a condemnation of a medical system that can’t quite do this on demand, at scale.

To be fair, she makes important points about how the well-known flaws of our healthcare system make life particularly hellish for the chronically ill. (I will put on my Bernie Sanders mittens and demand universal healthcare as ferociously as the next millennial.) But it seems kind of bonkers to think that everyone with a constellation of bizarre symptoms should be able to walk into a hospital and a team of specialists leaps to attention in concert and starts shooting them full of spirulina or whatever. I mean, people are having heart attacks and broken legs here, and there are only so many doctors to go around. I’m just glad I probably won’t ever have to get an arm amputated on the battlefield with only whiskey as anesthetic.

I don’t know. Sure, you could say that I’ve wasted the past three years of my life farting around with acupuncture when I could have been pumping myself full of every migraine preventative on the market, if only BlueCross BlueShield would shell out for it. It would be nice if my doctor had three hours to listen to me recite the history of every time I got kicked in the head during my undergraduate dance career instead of having to help the ten zillion other people who have mysterious headaches and need fifteen minutes of a neurologist’s time. It would be nice if it weren’t the case that each of us is a soul residing within a fragile vessel that doesn’t actually work as well as promised. Life is unfair!

The book also reinforced the sort of butt-hurt-ness with which the chronically ill are expected to dismiss every good-natured suggestion for how to solve their problems. I’m sorry, what?! I have a headache twenty days a month. Please, by all means, tell me about the essential oils and esoteric energy healing practices that worked for your aunt’s coworker’s cousin. I would like to spend my paycheck on them! Let’s all go to reiki!

At the same time, you’re supposed to be put out that people don’t care enough about your delicate constitution. So, like, if someone tells you you should try drinking more water, spit on them, but if they don’t, also spit on them.

I am also supposed to reject the instinct to find meaning in my illness or practice positive thinking. To do either would make me basic. I might as well go buy a pumpkin spice candle.

I read all of this as symptoms of a millennial delusion that a more pleasant and peaceful life for each of us would be in reach if only everyone would just wear their mask on the subway and agree conceptually that oil pipelines are bad juju. Boo, late-stage capitalism, and all that.

It’s totally reasonable that Meghan O’Rourke is righteously angry and not amused at all about the years she lost to illness. I can forgive the woman for not making a poop joke.

What I can’t get past is the implication that this is all somehow someone else’s fault and not the course of fortune’s cruel wheel, or an opportunity to try on a new version of your old life. If Joni Mitchell can sing tenor at the Newport Folk Festival, I can get used to not getting smashed at parties anymore (as if I hadn’t given that up a decade ago anyway, RIP college). All of us are never going to be who we used to be. Some of us start that change earlier than others.

The problem is nobody makes TV shows about all the muscles you pull in your thirties. We all thought it was just going to be workplace hijinks until we died of a heart attack. Psych! Yes, workplace hijinks, but also your knees are made of jelly, and butter gives you heartburn. Have fun for the next seventy years!

Everybody I know has been dealt some kind of cross to bear many decades earlier than we were led to believe we would. The burdens my loved ones carry are unequal. I would insult them by listing them out in one sentence, but it seems that all of us will eventually have to change the ways we live our lives for one reason or another, in more or less dramatic fashion.

But we get used to it. When life gives you hot dog fingers, you learn to play the piano with your feet, right?

Told you I was going to bring it around. Now I have to go figure out how to write a novel in which the classic red sports car of midlife crisis fame is replaced by one of those Star Trek-looking headache devices the people on r/migraine swear by.

there’s no place like life outside your apartment

The other week I went full Churchill on one of my more Covid-shy friends, trying to talk her down from worrying about catching Covid at a distant cousin’s wedding. You know the drill: We shall not flag or fail, we shall dive maskless onto the dance floor. Life is short, and who knows how many more times we will dance to “Shout”? (One million more times, and I also sort of expect that hell will just be “Shout” playing on a loop for eternity. Sorry!)

It was over text, so maybe it didn’t have quite the same effect as Winston on the radio. Also, it was about getting the sneezes from someone squatting next to you during “Shout.” Anyway, you get what I mean, and I already regret tying myself to this metaphor, so I’m going to move on.

As if I’m some post-pandemic paragon of self-actualization. I keep acting like I’m done processing my pandemic agita only to find myself in some new emotional tumble dryer. Once I was done being scared of getting sick — sometime in February, after enough of my giant Q-tips had come back negative that the worrying seemed like a poor use of energy — I kept getting mad at people who weren’t wearing masks in places where they were supposed to be wearing masks. Not because I was afraid they were going to give me Covid, but because I’m the kind of person who gets mad at people who talk in the quiet car. E.g., I’m full of rage, and I probably should have found work with my hands, but instead I’m a coastal elite who inserts commas for a living, so I have to express my rage through other channels (Twitter).

More recently, I was fulminating over whether I should suck it up and stop wearing a mask because the only reason I was still wearing a mask was because I was worried that I would run into my friends who would judge me for not wearing a mask. I mean, the other night I met a friend for a Broadway show and we both showed up with a mask in our pockets in case the other one wanted to wear one at the show. (If you are not a liberal millennial living in New York City, this is what it’s like to be a liberal millennial in New York City. EXHAUSTING!)

I’m intentionally trivializing the genuinely hard process of letting go of a dogma that we perform — or don’t — in public. After two and a half years of reading the weekly Eeyore report from that dude from The Atlantic, who in their right mind is going to get up and say that they think watching strangers laugh at a Broadway show is worth everyone around you maybe contracting an illness that is still killing thousands of people around the world every day? (Well, geez, when you put it THAT way, Ed Yong…)

I’ll spare you all the tortured debate over the ethics of returning to a normal life. What I’m concerned with is remembering how to be. I mean, small talk. Basic human instincts. The things we learned as children that we’re relearning as adults.

Case in point: When I did stop wearing a mask on the subway, I noticed that behind my KN95, I had started making judgy faces at people doing weird things. It reminded me of one time in college at one of our musical theatre cabaret shows when someone whispered to me that I was openly cringing at the person onstage butchering — you know, I’m not even going to say what song they were butchering, on the off-chance they read this, but it wasn’t my finest moment.

Anyway, I don’t condone openly cringing at anyone with the self-confidence to put themselves out there (although really, know your limits). The salient point is that you can cringe at someone at a cabaret on your college campus in Poughkeepsie, but you can’t make judgy faces at someone on the subway in New York City in 2022. People get stabbed for less these days!

The easy thing for me to do after the pandemic would have been what I have secretly been dreaming of doing since I first read “Success is counted sweetest” when I was eight (in a children’s book by Garrison Keillor. Please, psychoanalyze me!): go full Emily Dickinson. Buy a closet full of white nightgowns and never leave the house again. Nobody gets stabbed. Nobody has to remember how to engage in small talk with the woman next to you on the airplane who has been watching Fox News on her seatback television for the past five hours.

Too bad that I live in the era of Instagram and am thus ruled by FOMO. (Also, I’m married to a normal human man who never harbored a desire to be Emily Dickinson, though he did have a pet hermit crab as kid.)

So instead here I am, ready to return full bore to my normal life. One problem: I’m not sure what normal life I’m supposed to be returning to.

My life prior to the pandemic was an adventure. My husband and I were living abroad and I traveled several weeks out of the year for work, visiting friends I had made in my company’s offices around the world over the nine years I spent working there. I had cultivated a “good at packing my suitcase” persona, which was really sophisticated for a lifelong twerp.

So obviously the pandemic itself was a crash landing, to use the most obvious metaphor possible. Then I quit the job left the city where we had been making friends before Covid hit, and returned to New York, a place where the mass media would have you believe there were more dining sheds than people by the end of the Delta wave.

I’m joking that I’ve forgotten how to get on the subway without giving the side-eye to people with the nail clippers out, but it’s more existential than that. I’ve found myself not so much afraid to leave the house, but more so unsure of where to go, what to do, and, most importantly, with whom.

My tagline on Instagram is “living in a body in the world.” It’s a sort of inside joke with myself that’s mostly about not identifying myself with any particular career or location, but it’s also about the life I was proud to have developed as a world traveler and explorer. You should have seen the kind of by-the-block itineraries I planned myself in the cities I visited. Let’s not kid ourselves; I was not clubbing in Ibiza, but I took some (a lot) (too many) (I pay for extra iCloud storage) sweet photos of houses that looked like gingerbread in Bruges and I always knew where to get the most photogenic oatmeal.

Did I doom myself during the pandemic by finally learning to cook my own oatmeal? No, I remember how to plan itineraries for myself. The problem now is that I do not have friends, I definitely do not have friends. And without friends, what’s the point of leaving the house?

This is an exaggeration. I apologize to my five friends for erasing them in the name of humor. (Also, I just started watching “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” — why yes, I am on the cutting edge of culture, as per usual — and I just really needed to work that reference into this post somewhere because the damn song has been stuck in my head for a week.) What I mean is that I had more friends on Zoom than I do in the great city of New York.

One of the rare bright spots of the pandemic was how easy it was to reconnect with all my friends who have dispersed to the four winds, all of us squatting in our dumb little square windows like we were sitting around our precious college kitchen table and no time had passed at all. I forgot, upon returning to New York, that I was not returning to the set of “Friends” or my college campus. (This has not been made easier by the fact that one of my best friends from college recently took a job on our college campus.)

I do have a soul, though, so of course I was desperate to actually see my friends’ faces in person once the world began to reopen and confirm that they still had bodies below the necks. And I was so grateful to see them that during those first few weeks, we were happy to sit out on our balconies in the unseasonably cold April wind, shivering over bowls of takeout ramen, wrapped in every blanket we could find, because we weren’t all vaccinated yet. (Now I’m bitching about the thirty-minute wait at Walgreens and how the latest booster made my armpit hurt. Hey, gift horse, come over! I want to look you in the mouth!)

Now I keep looking at Instagram and seeing all these people out having their hot vax summers with their twelve zillion friends who didn’t forget about them while they were out taking photos of the Tallinn skyline, feeling a little like I did when I was working through my third grade Rolodex trying to get someone to sleep over on a Friday night. The same I age I was, not coincidentally, when I first came across Emily Dickinson and wondered to myself if the white nightgown life would be the life for me.

I guess knowing that at any given time, one of the several dozens of people I follow on social media is out doing something with one of their coterie of friends means that my lizard brain believes that I should, at any given time, be doing something with one of my coterie of friends. (I’m sorry, my five friends. Love you guys!) And I’m sure that social media doesn’t help, but I suppose it’s also just human nature to feel constantly dissatisfied with one’s life. I mean, the Kardashians didn’t invent the name of their television show, you know? (You do know, right?)

A small and very shameful part of me appreciated the pandemic for acting as a sort of social equalizer that made all of my friends into sad little Emily Dickinsons lurking in their bedrooms during primetime. I got to go to bed early every night and nobody gave me shit for Irish goodbying. I didn’t have to do the hard work of being a friend: showing up, reaching out, staying out, being there.

I don’t think I’m the only person who expected to emerge into an idealized version of life. It reminds me a little of showing up to college, thinking I was going to be a completely different person than I’d been for the past eighteen years — and a little of leaving college, thinking that everyone lived on the same superior moral plane where I did now that I had studied Global Feminism and Critical Race Theory (yeah, I took Critical Race Theory in 2010! Who’s the wokest now?!).

So what now? I have the kind of frenetic energy I last had several years ago going through a breakup, when I felt the irrepressible urge to get out of my apartment and do everything available to me. Not the worst thing in the world, though last time I had to draw the line after I ended up watching a prog rock version of the musical “Sweeney Todd.” (Honestly, it was better than it sounds on paper. I swear.)

Now that I have my feet in one place, I’ll be spending less time photographing the Tallinn skyline and more time… well, probably photographing the countdown clock on the G train platform because I’m spitting mad that it’s going to be 24 minutes until the next G train to Church Avenue (the G train, Nermal!). Now is the time to break my terrible habit of failing to take up open-ended social invitations from people I don’t know well because I’m afraid I might bore them by talking about the weather, you know? Might I finally fulfill my fantasy of hosting dinner parties? I expect that in the narrative of my life this will be a time of precipice, one that — as the word implies — precipitates great change in how I live.

I don’t love the visual of a precipice for this moment, though. I prefer the metaphor of a doorway: one that I’m making the choice to open, step out of, and shut behind me, even though I know what protection I could have if I stayed inside, and even though I can’t know what might be outside waiting for me.

pandora’s storage unit

Which, I think, is why I pulled the rope ladder out of the well and put the cover on with you down inside there that time, kind of like sealing you off. That way, there would be no more Mr. Wind-Up Bird around, and I wouldn’t have to be bothered by those thoughts for a while.

Haruki Murakami, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”

I recently came back into possession of the contents of a storage unit that I packed three and a half years ago when I moved abroad. Some of my belongings were broken and others that I swore I’d packed were mysteriously missing, but the things that mattered were there: my Himalayan salt lamp, a pair of bookends shaped like elephants, every T-shirt that my former employer gifted me to make up for the lack of work/life balance, my first pair of pointe shoes.

There were stacks of books that have become more relevant since I first read them in my coursework at Vassar a decade ago: a massive tome on the history of welfare, and the books I read for my critical race theory seminar, a class in which we once, memorably, divided ourselves into fives to drive to some off-campus landmark only to realize that the white students had self-selected into one car and the Black students into another. There were copies of Gone with the Wind and The BFG, and the works of William Faulkner, packed in alongside James Baldwin and Austerlitz.

There was also, ominously, the journal that I kept from 2015 until I packed three suitcases and boarded a one-way flight to Copenhagen, and more ominously, a book whose inscription I’ve thought of occasionally since I was gifted it for Christmas eight years ago by someone to whom I guess I no longer speak, and most ominously, my high school yearbooks.

My husband had a storage unit too and between the two of us we paid an arm and a leg to store, among other things, both a toaster and a toaster oven and duplicate copies of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Bonfire of the Vanities, and a history of al-Qaeda that wasn’t written by Tom Wolfe (if only!). Then we paid an arm and a leg to get rid of the duplicates that don’t fit on our spacious new countertops, mostly furniture, mostly mine, since my husband is older than me by a crucial few years that mean he was onto West Elm while I was still living on Allen-wrenched Overstock knock-offs.

What was left after were the milemarkers of how I got from there to here, and I had to choose what to junk and what to squirrel away in the back of a closet that also belongs to someone else, and I still don’t know what happened to all of my coffee mugs. Good thing I love a metaphor.

A while before I moved, I shipped a few boxes of mementos to my parents’ house. It was more to free up room in my “cozy” West Village studio (read: shoes in the oven) than to put distance between me and any handwritten letters I once received in the mail or, my God, programs from Cal Shakes, or anything else that, should I stumble on it while also listening to “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” might give me an aneurysm, but it was nice not to step onto a land mine when all I was doing was looking for the Playbill from when John Cameron Mitchell tore a ligament reprising Hedwig two decades on.

Having safely stashed the relics of the years I spent getting, alternately, heartbroken and sunburned, I was surprised that my storage unit hit me so hard. I’d forgotten that it wasn’t preordained, back in the spring of 2016 when we were circling around each other warily, that my husband would become my husband. I’d forgotten what it’s like to escape from a crowd of sweating, salivating strangers into the photo booth at a kitschy Brooklyn bar after midnight. But pry apart the pages of a journal or pull a glossy strip out from a pile of Playbills and there I am, a fossil.

Of course I’m under no obligation to keep, for example, the yearbook from my sophomore year of high school, in which I failed to open my eyes for my school photo. Other people throw out old things. I couldn’t possibly. I like — and maybe I’m a masochist — the rush of remembering something I’d forgotten about myself. Things have a half-life that my iPhone camera roll, omnipresent in my hand, can’t approximate.

P.S. I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to urge New Yorkers in need of storage to avoid the company MakeSpace like the plague, unless you actually want your stuff broken or lost. Which, listen, if you don’t want to actively throw away your high school yearbooks but you would also prefer to forget that you didn’t open your eyes in your sophomore school photo, might well be a good strategy/

i finally got something right

9 years ago I had a degree in English and a job selling ballet shoes for barely above minimum wage. I had left Vassar the year before assuming that a job would make its way to me in the way jobs did in the books I grew up reading, in which smart people made livings that were rarely germane to the plot itself. Vassar had a Career Development Office but my vague sense was that it was for people with callings, and I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor (blood!) or a lawyer (paperwork!).

Nor did I bother with unpaid internships in publishing or media; I wanted to be a writer, maybe, but not enough to fetch coffee, and the inequity of being able to afford that made me feel a little grimy. I felt guilty enough that I didn’t owe student loans, and anyway, I liked the dignity of selling shoes. I had liked spending my summers back home at the dancewear store in Las Vegas that hired me when I was sixteen — a dream job for a ballerina who needed gas money — earning an honest living getting my fingers trampled by toddlers in tap shoes.

It was easy to move back home after graduation and get my head on straight before I went back out to seek my fortune. I thought, too, that the people handing out the jobs would be impressed by how my store had given me a set of keys to the place and trusted me to ferry cash to the bank. Surely that was more qualifying than coffee-fetching (someday someone will need to tell me what one actually does at a magazine internship if it’s not coffee-fetching).

Not so much. In 2011, I’d have been better off reading the news than novels set in eras not characterized by global financial collapse. I moved to New York with the money I’d saved and transferred to the dancewear store’s location on the Upper West Side, where the cocktail waitresses who paid for fishnets in stacks of ones gave way to old women with enormous dogs that they brought into the store to wait while they tried on slippers for their adult beginner jazz classes at Steps. I was just one of the army of humanities majors emailing resumes into the void, most better suited than mine for working under a fluorescent light.

I applied for every job under the sun and one after another, they rejected me. Nobody seemed to believe that their job was what I really wanted to do; I remember the woman interviewing me to write copy for an online catalogue of machine parts who asked me if I really thought this was going to be interesting (no, but who would? And Kafka worked at the post office!).

The heavens opened when my sister’s husband mentioned that his company might hire me to write proposals. I knew that at his previous company he’d gotten to fly on some executive’s private jet, so this new one seemed like kind of a step down, but it was Silicon Valley. (That was still a good thing in 2012.)

I was surprised to be hired, and maybe more surprised that I liked it so much that it took me 9 years to leave. 9 years! What happens in 9 years? Six apartments, three boyfriends, one husband. Three presidents. A heartbreak, an eating disorder, an IPO, a pandemic. I learned how to write proposals and run a social media account; I learned strategy and spin. I made some money. I got airline status.

In the photo on my employee badge you can see the faint traces of a sunburn from the hike my dad and I took up Mount Charleston a few weeks before. It had been as humid as it gets in Palo Alto on my first day, and I’d ridden some wretched Peninsula bus to the office. My bangs had puffed up like an American Girl doll and the sleek braid at the back had frayed wildly. Every day for 8 years — until 2020, when no badge was required for me to commute from the side of the kitchen table where I ate breakfast to the side of the kitchen table where I conducted business — I stared at that godforsaken photo and marveled that anybody had thought it prudent to take me seriously.

After months of being rejected as an answerer of phones or an enterer of data, I could hardly imagine that I’d been hired for anything other than my connection to my brother-in-law, never mind the gauntlet I’d been put through. (This was the golden age of Silicon Valley “gotcha” interviews and while nobody asked me how many baseballs fit in a 747, I was told to write, longhand and without reference materials, an essay about one of the company’s products. After, I was sent to lunch with the interviewer, who brought along his hardcover copy of Ulysses. We later became good friends, but that was one indelible first impression.)

I’ve always felt like a bit of a dilettante. I picked up ballet late and was only kind of good at it. I was usually the second string — the understudy — and I often felt that I had been cast because a choreographer who needed a body liked my tenacity or my wit and could choreograph around my inability to do, I don’t know, cartwheels on the left, to name an example from 17 years ago that I remember like it was last week. I was used to accommodations being made for me, and I didn’t see why the job I’d coattailed my way into was any different.

I never quite shook that. Even as my multibillion-dollar, now-public company was handing me things like the Twitter password and managerial responsibility, I was still looking over my shoulder, sure I was one misstep away from being fired. (Deep down I’m still my 22-year-old self; it’s no wonder I still carry my 22-year-old’s insecurities.)

I think it’s still en vogue to call that “impostor syndrome,” but it was reasonable for me to work like I needed to prove myself. I know now that any hire is a bet, especially a kid with raw talent and a strong personality, and it could easily have gone the other way. And I don’t want to be a vest-wearing Silicon Valley wunderbro whose undying faith in himself is religious in fervor.

Two weeks ago I got to perform the rite I’ve long dreamed of: sending my goodbye email. (I don’t know whether this is as storied a tradition elsewhere as it was at my former employer, but I started noodling over subject lines years before I started interviewing for new jobs. I spent a full hour hand-picking recipients for the bcc line.)

It was a real Sally Field moment for me when the responses started rolling in: My first boss called me “an institution.” Not one but two of my teammates did full-body recoils when I told them I was out — though more likely because they knew exactly who was picking up the slack upon my departure. Our COO, whom I have harangued for years with emails about everything I think he should make our company do differently, told me he was grateful for me.

It didn’t jibe with this picture I still have of myself as the sunburned 22-year-old with the Molly-doll bangs, ostentatiously copyediting everything I could get my hands on to prove I had some unique value. I think I thought everyone was tolerating me until they could install someone who actually knew what they were doing in, as if they were my college choreographers settling for a second-tier body and not capitalists with the no-fault ability to fish for something better in a teeming labor pool. I had braced for the nostalgia but not the late-breaking discovery that 9 years ago, I tripped into my calling.

For a moment I backpedaled. These people like me (they really like me!); what am I doing? But I felt like I did at the end of senior year at Vassar: like I was going out on top, and from there, I could see back down to the bottom. My star had begun to fade. My company was the kind of place where you had to constantly reinvent yourself to stay relevant and I did, I lived 9 lives in the 9 years I was there (you should have heard me trying to explain my resume to recruiters when I was locking down my next act), but you can only carve so many matryoshka. I wanted a fresh start in which my baseline was not me, age 22, ruinously insecure yet blithely confident in my own capabilities, a muckety-muck’s kid sister-in-law.

My new baseline has crows’ feet and gravitas. I turned down offers to accept this one and I hardly remember anymore what it was like to sit under the fluorescent lights of an office in Westchester and admit that I couldn’t use Excel. I can nod knowingly back to everything I did these past 9 years, the proposals, the IPO, putting lipstick on this and that boondoggle by calling it a “strategy” and dressing up the failures I performatively take the blame for. I can sort of use Excel.

I’m as nervous to dive into my next job — at a company a tenth the size of my previous one where I’ll be the only person doing what I’m doing — as I was nine years ago. The only difference is that now I know I can fake it ’til I make it, or, more precisely, that I can fake it, indefinitely, just like everyone around me is doing, because all of us were once 22-year-olds who forgot their sunscreen and grew up in a world that wasn’t the one we were promised in books.

any other name

I don’t remember when my name changed. They all called me “Dana” in elementary school. (Well, for a while they called me “Franklin.” I couldn’t decide between righteous indignation and props where props were due.)

By high school I found myself answering occasionally to “Cass.” Upon arriving at Vassar I was assigned an ID number, a mailbox, and an email address composed of the first two letters of my first name prepended to my last name, just like everyone else, except for the unfortunate Smiths and Wongs who had stray letters and even numbers tacked onto theirs and were constantly receiving one another’s email or nothing at all. Those of us with mellifluous emails found ourselves with new nicknames to boot, and thus I became “DaCass,” a name to which I still respond. Sometimes I was “DANACASS,” spoken, or more often hollered, always in one breath without a space in between. Later I got a job and a new email address and now I am “DCass.” Not always, but often. (Thankfully, I shook “Franklin.”)

Last weekend on my walk I came across a Cassland Road here in East London. I was thrilled until I learned that it was named for a financier whose fortune was made in the slave trade. No relation; apocryphally, I know my family name to have originated during World War II when my grandfather, serving in the U.S. Coast Guard, lopped it off of the original Italian name. Phew! But doth the Karen protest too much? My mother’s family changed their name — again, apocryphally; I tend to remember stories rather than facts — from something Finnish with too many consonants to “Wilson,” as in Woodrow.

When I was younger I thought I might one day take my family’s original name. I transposed my teenage resentment of my hometown of Las Vegas onto the foreshortened version. I had a chip on my shoulder back then, a souvenir from visits to centuries-old cities, about having grown up somewhere with a history you could recite in a sentence. (Some years after the Mormons opened a mission to sell the Native Americans on the merits of magic underwear, gambling was legalized. The end.) My name, like my hometown, was manufactured, thus inferior.

Then they started calling me “Cass.” By the time I became “DCass” I was working in Silicon Valley, where in the absence of real hierarchies (“meritocracy”), alternative currencies reign supreme and a nickname or the judicious use of others’ is a clever way to signal your standing. I’m not important enough to be nicknamed by anyone but my closest colleagues, but after eight years in my role I know where enough bodies are buried that every once in a while someone a few degrees removed from me asks if we can talk, because they’ve been told over and over that they have to meet “Dana Cass.” Or I get a “You’re Dana Cass!” after a few minutes of conversation with someone. I startle. Where there wasn’t a history, only one and a half lives of men, I’ve made one.

Last month — please forgive me for having buried the lede here — I got married. It’s a tremendous relief to stop using the word “fiancé,” as I don’t own enough Vineyard Vines to have pulled that off for much longer. Beyond that, not much else has changed, though we did receive several gift boxes and now have a lot of chutney.

I like optionality. I make and unmake decisions rashly; I’ve abandoned several hobbies in my lifetime. Once I inured myself to the idea of sharing my life with someone else, it occurred to me to worry about the person with whom I would share my life. The problem with my first few adult relationships was that I didn’t like any of the people I was dating enough to actually want them around. I liked them on paper, or I liked their apartments, but I never stopped feeling like I was being intruded upon.

I had stopped thinking about my name much by the time I met my now-husband, in 2015. That’s part of the charm of making it to your late twenties: you wear a coat when it’s cold, you find things to do other than fret about having grown up in the shadow of Bob Stupak’s Freudian eyesore. I had other things to worry about, like being a 26-year-old who couldn’t poach an egg.

One thing led seamlessly to another in our relationship. I wanted nothing more to spend time with him. Marriage seemed obvious. I’m an iconoclast, but I’m also a sucker for ceremony, and after four years I felt confident that I had assuaged my primary concern with marriage: Could I be myself, even permanently attached to someone else?

At 31, with my faculties and most of my dignity intact, I’m hard-won. People know me and know of me. “You’re Dana Cass!” they’ve said to me, because they’ve heard that Dana Cass knows where the bodies are buried. I’m sure they’d be able to find me if I changed my name. And wouldn’t that choice, one made with agency, be the feminist one, even if I were just dropping my patronymic for someone else’s?

I no longer have my own bed or my own Amazon Prime account. I’ve acquired my husband’s taste for expensive coffee. I use Reddit. What do I have left that’s mine? Shelves full of diaries. A drawer of unflattering sweatpants that I can’t stop wearing. (Especially not now.) My name, and the party trick of mentioning that I grew up in Las Vegas, a city that’s made and remade itself. So have I.

I’m keeping the diaries, obviously, and I’m keeping the sweatpants. I’m keeping my history, and so I might as well keep my name.

31

I thought this morning about the past year and God help me but the first thing that came to mind — from a year when I got engaged, moved to London, and survived at least the first wave of a global pandemic — was being pitched by a San Francisco ad agency. They took us up to their penthouse into what they called the “Mack Daddy” conference room, a phrase that’s never been said aloud to me before and probably won’t be again, at least not unironically, by a man a foot taller than me with one too many buttons undone. It was unseasonably hot for any time, let alone October, and I had packed for autumn. My coworkers would have been more fashionably dressed than me anyway, but at least I had that excuse. They gave us sandwiches. I eat sloppily and so there I was, dripping hummus onto a turtleneck that I always pack on business trips only to remember when it’s the last clean thing I have left that it really doesn’t fit that well, next to my coworker with the perfect dewy skin who showed up with a chic little backpack she found on the RealReal. I mean, it had fringe, and I was still carting around the dumb Fjällräven I bought when I thought I could pull off the VSCO look.

I will have been 30 the last time that my girlfriends and I gathered around A_____’s Upper East Side coffee table over Chinese food and the cider that S____ had at her wedding that they sell at the Whole Foods on 86th. Is that the right grammar? “I will have been”? I was supposed to go to New York again in March; now one of the girls is pregnant and who knows if A_____ will return to the apartment after she rides out the pandemic in the outer boroughs. Who knows, too, when I’ll be in New York again. I haven’t been on a plane since February. It’s maybe the longest I’ve gone without flying since I left Las Vegas for Vassar in 2007. In December I was listening to “The Daily” while I stomped through Broadgate on my way to the Central Line at Liverpool Street. It was just after that Chinese ophthalmologist died and I was thinking, as I tend to about terrible things that obviously won’t happen to me, “There but for the grace of God.” Well, so much for that.

I’m 31 today and I’ve been getting my eyes checked for some 26 years now — since my kindergarten teacher called my mother to gently suggest that there might be a medical reason that I kept crashing into walls — and I still can’t spell ophthalmologist on the first try. I was a spelling bee champion, too. What have I been doing with my life?

Who needs free birthday spin class when you have a Peloton?

I was a mess on my 25th birthday. I always refer obliquely to this time in my life, the illness, the bad boyfriend, the professional stress, but specifically what was happening was that I had been seeing a man 9 years older than me for about a year, long distance. For the first several months he’d laid it on real thick, carting me to the hometown he detested to meet his family, telling me how special I was, writing me love letters, concocting reasons to come visit me, and then in March or so I guess he realized I was basically a child but instead of breaking it off he kind of tried to ghost me. By June I had also starved myself down to some fifteen pounds less than I weigh now. (For those of you who know me personally, grimacing is the proper reaction.) On my birthday the bad boyfriend sent me this massive, noxious bouquet of flowers with a card I think he’d signed “Love,” though it would have been like him not to. He was the kind of person who, if you were wondering whether he was intentionally fucking with you or just clueless, was always intentionally fucking with you. I got the bouquet while I was at the office, and later at the office we got the massive request for proposals we’d been waiting to “drop” for a contract we’d been told was strategically vital. That launched a month of frantic work during which I grew increasingly religious about my diet and exercise regimen and vacillated between panicking that my boyfriend had maybe dumped me without letting me know and looking back at the photo I’d taken of the flowers for reassurance. I was so tired, but he’s turning 40 next month, which is funny. I wonder if I should send him flowers. He’d probably have me offed.

What have I been doing with my life? This morning my fiancé had laid out presents with cards signed by my favorite stuffed animal that I like to anthropomorphize and the squirrel that has taken up residence on our balcony. For breakfast we ate granola that I made yesterday in between dealing with my latest so-called “fire drill,” a term I hope I never hear again outside of a functional context once I finally get over my Stockholm syndrome and extricate myself from Silicon Valley. I’m still getting the annual barrage of emails from every boutique fitness studio I visited over the past decade offering a free class if I drop in today, even though I’m pretty sure they’re all closed. I almost took my birthday off of my Facebook last night because I’m going to ignore all of the notifications like I do every year, but I’m only human. I want to see that some people who I haven’t seen in years, when reminded of my existence, reach out instead of unfriending me.

I’m almost done with the first draft of my novel. I keep rewriting it. I’m not sure I actually have a plot. One of the museums in Copenhagen has a big block of marble on display next to all of the sculptures and it was the first time I’d thought about how sculpting from marble means chipping away at something that already exists. I have adopted this as my metaphor for writing. “Where’s Waldo” might be more appropriate. Where’s plotline?!

So: 30. The year I sat in a Mack Daddy conference room shoveling a sandwich in my fuddy-duddy face while two modern-day Mad Men tried to sell me millions of dollars worth of… something. Brand? (Eight years ago I was paid eleven dollars an hour to sell shoes.) The year I shared my last soup dumplings with J_______ before a child walks this Earth that will one day call her Mom. The year I learned that surviving a pandemic requires a lot less hustling around a grassed-over cityscape with a backpack than the movies had promised. (To be fair, I do hustle around the cityscape with a backpack more often than I did pre-pandemic, but that’s because I’d rather carry a kilo of flour on my back than on my shoulders and not because I’m armed with anti-zombie kit.) The year I almost finished my novel. Or, if you prefer, the year I didn’t finish my novel. A year in which I didn’t finish my novel. A year in which I didn’t travel to Tasmania or dye my hair purple or starve myself or get a weird bouquet from a fake boyfriend. A year in which I more likely than not avoided covid, although there but for the grace of God and we all know how well that one went for me the last time I said it. I’m begrudgingly celebrating my birthday today because I feel genuinely anxious for the first time about aging — how have I still not finished my novel — but death is everywhere right now, even more everywhere than it usually is, you’ve seen the scary chart floating around this week where covid zooms up past terrorism and heart attacks and even malaria. And the news.

On that uplifting note, I have a fire drill to attend to and a birthday gift from Nutso the squirrel to open. I hope it’s a donation to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

no pomp due to circumstance

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To the second-semester senior who has been unceremoniously dispatched home by the coronavirus, just when you were about to depart on your victory lap:

I often think back fondly on the final weeks of my time at Vassar as the only time in my life when I both truly gave no fucks and was old enough to say “fuck.” I was done with auditions and done with room draw and done with fooling anybody — including myself — into thinking that I was chill. I had made peace with my B average. I’d started eating again after months of mostly not. It was an enchanted and rowdy six weeks during which I made precious, wild memories, did a lot of stupid things expressly so that I’d never regret not having done them, and played at being someone I’d never been before and would never be again.

In retrospect, it was only semantics that made me feel free; things would quickly become just as consequential as they’d been and I sank back into my natural state of being (neurotic and pathologically rule-abiding).

I was very hungover and absolutely not wearing that hood properly.

I hope all of you who have been unexpectedly put adrift can find that sense of freedom within yourselves even without the Senior Week booze cruise and nearly garroting yourself trying to put on your graduation hood. Here are a few things that you might keep in mind, especially as the unexpected time alone (perhaps in a place that you always thought of yourself as escaping) might be sending you into a tailspin:

  1. When great isn’t in reach, good enough will do. This isn’t to say you’re perfect as you are — you absolutely need to be washing your bedsheets more often than you do — but rather that you don’t need to regret having failed to peak during college. I never found my footing in college and by the end of senior year had made peace with my B average and haphazard curriculum. This period of quietude may be a good time to think about what it is that you actually like so you can look for it as you build your career. (I liked writing and persuasion. I started out selling shoes and freelance SEO blogging and later landed a job as a proposal writer. The people hiring me cared that I could write, not about my thesis or whether the classes I took added up to a coherent curriculum.)
  2. The operative phrase is “good enough.” Don’t totally check out (I say, having taught myself to bake bread yesterday while I was nominally working from home). A B average doesn’t maintain itself. Perhaps it will be easier to be productive from your childhood bedroom, where nobody is stopping by to offer you homemade Skittles-infused vodka (an offer you should always decline, as long as I’m imparting my most valuable lessons learned during undergrad). Consider limiting your use of social media to after nine P.M., like I did with Facebook after I graduated so I could force myself through the grind of applying for jobs that didn’t involve touching children’s feet for a living. (Yes, Facebook. Yes, during my spare time I also enjoyed calculations on the abacus and milling flour by hand.)
  3. You aren’t written in stone. Just because you’ve never done something before doesn’t mean you can’t do it now. Just because you do something now doesn’t mean you ever have to do it again. As it turns out, this has always been true and will always be true; it’s just easier to see when you give no fucks. (Oh, and just because you’ve never done something before doesn’t mean you have to do it now, either. I repeat: Decline the offer of Skittles-infused vodka.) There may be few opportunities to try on a new identity while you’re social-distancing, but idk, don’t millennials mostly live online now, anyone? Post a SoundCloud or whatever. A tock-tock. And when the global pandemic subsides, go kiss somebody unsuitable.
  4. One phase of your friendships is ending, but an even better one is beginning. During the weeks leading up to graduation, I gave myself heartburn trying to commemorate and lock down my friendships before I returned to my hometown on the other side of the country from where everyone else was settling. This wasn’t the only reason I staged an awards night for my friends that I called Phi Beta Krappa where we presented one another with awards that were decidedly un-academic, but it was part of it (mostly I was just obnoxiously declaring my lack of fucks given over not making actual Phi Beta Kappa). On the other end of the spectrum, one of my four best friends with whom I lived during our senior year Irish-exited campus during our post-ceremony party while everyone’s families were eating sandwiches on the lawn and I didn’t see her again until the following February, and we’re all still friends. In fact, I just messaged our WhatsApp group to see whether anyone remembered their Phi Beta Krappa award (that’s a no. Some things are too precious to last). Nobody forgot anyone else. We remember one another so well, in fact, that it’s something of a liability at weddings when we’ve had too much champagne and want to regale one another’s loved ones with our favorite stories from undergrad. We’ve now been out of school for longer than we were there, and the memories we’ve made since are even more indelible (mostly because we actually remember them), from the terrible bars of our early twenties to the terrible dates of our mid-twenties to the terrible jobs of our late twenties and now into our thirties, which were going great until… now. There are friends you’re stuck with and that’s foreordained. No early dismissal from campus can get in the way of the awful and embarrassing toast that they’re going to give at your wedding a decade from now.

Above all — know that a polyester gown and a few bad speeches were never going to give you the closure you needed. This transition was always going to be brutal, and I feel deeply for everyone for whom it’s infinitely worse than it was meant to be.

I can’t pretend that I felt as lost and disoriented as the 21-year-olds around the world who just got drop-kicked out of senior year, but I certainly didn’t feel like I was done, ready, prepared, equipped, or complete in any way that I expected to be when I left school. I felt like a failure, like I’d squandered my college experience, and deeply lonely without friends living on the other side of my bedroom wall, and I can only imagine what it’s like to feel all of that and to be battling suburban hoarders for the last of the toilet paper to boot.

So, if it helps at all, here’s a spoiler: You’re not a failure, you didn’t squander your college experience, and it’s actually more fun to be friends with people when you don’t share a bathroom. Graduation ceremonies are boring, booze cruises are overrated, and you already have within you the power to give no fucks. Channel it, and be grateful that you don’t have to embarrass yourself trying to put on that godforsaken graduation hood in front of every boy you imprudently made out with between freshman year and now.

P.S. For many students, campus closing is more than an emotional burden — it’s a significant and possibly insurmountable financial one as well. Fellow Vassar alumni with the means to support students in need can donate to the Vassar Student Support Fund, and I encourage alumni from other colleges to see whether their alma maters are doing something similar.

swallowing the world

“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” — Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Where you were when

When September 11th happened, I was twelve, a couple weeks into seventh grade. The footage on television was terrifying, but my classmates and I had never been to New York, and it felt consequential but not visceral. Our adults kept telling us that we needed to remember where we were that day “when we heard.”

They talked about JFK being assassinated and the Challenger exploding, and I didn’t feel like it mattered much that I, Dana Cass, was plugging in my curling iron in the Las Vegas suburbs when I heard a disarming report on the radio. But here I am nineteen years later, still conjuring the feeling of the bathroom tiles underneath my feet before I ran downstairs to turn on the television.

I’ve had some excellent history teachers who have taught me to properly interpret what I hear, see, and read, and of course now every podcaster whose closet has decent acoustics is out debunking one established symbol of history or another. For a long time, I’ve groused that we flatten history into a series of events that photograph well, and that in doing so we distort our understanding of how we got here and there.

Case in point: I remember Where I Was When Obama was elected for the first time (in a crowd of fellow first-time voters in the student center at Vassar, next to a friend who was weeping into a travel mug spiked with raspberry vodka) and Osama bin Laden was killed (nested amid a pile of books on my last standard-issue twin bed, writing the last mediocre paper of my college career, flipping between Microsoft Word and Safari open to CNN.com, the May breeze blowing through a window whose screen had been ripped open the prior weekend when campus security broke up our party and the attendees fled through my bedroom).

I also remember, bizarrely, applauding a radio broadcast that announced the conviction of Sandy Murphy for the murder of her casino billionaire husband Ted Binion following a trial so lurid it could only have taken place in Las Vegas, from the swimming pool in my best friend’s backyard in 2000, after my mom bought a couple pallets of water from Costco in a perfunctory nod to Y2K but before my next-door neighbor read aloud a poem her parents had been emailed called “How the Gore-inch Stole the Election,” during our morning carpool, and I learned about partisan politics for the first time.

Waiting for when

I don’t remember any one historic moment between November 2008 and spring 2011; I do remember that in 2010, I saw over someone’s shoulder what turned out to be a faux New York Times headline proclaiming “IRAQ WAR ENDS.” I had a brief remember-where-you-are moment before I realized it was fake, though it’s taken until recently for me to understand that the Iraq war wasn’t — isn’t — the kind of conflict that was going to be sewn up with a V-E Day.

(Neither was World War II, but my early education mostly elided over V-J Day and the war beyond Europe more broadly, especially where American moral clarity was in question. If it weren’t for crossword puzzles, I might still not know that Ethiopia was among the theaters in which WWII was fought.)

No soldier would dip a nurse into a symbol of war as something that begins, yes, and is terrible, but reliably ends. Part of me, having been steeped in the American tradition of moral certitude and ham-handed symbolism, is still waiting for that ending.

If it’s not on Twitter, is it even history?

The ubiquity of photography, and the ensuing barrage of images as indelible as the Zapruder film or the billowing orange contrails where the Challenger was supposed to be, has made history even more like a boiled frog that usual. I can’t figure out whether everything is a watershed moment or nothing is.

This isn’t a hot take. Every third person wringing their hands over the advent of social media and the 24-hour news cycle shares this sentiment.

But I — wait for it; this is about to be a real stretch — recently read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (hence the epigraph) and think there’s something to be said for understanding the subtle gradations that color transitions from one saturated moment (Tahrir Square; a Trump rally) to the next, and how the mundanity of individual memory and experience better captures the zeitgeist as it evolves.

My excellent history teachers imparted to me the value of primary sources, extrapolating a cultural moment from individual lived experiences. We’re swimming in primary sources. History is Zapruder and contrails, but history is also a twelve-year-old plugging in her curling iron and a 21-year-old staring for the first time at the war machine in action.

(A few years later, when I was working as a proposal writer for a defense contractor, someone printed that photo of Obama and company in the Situation Room and taped it to my office door with “WAR ROOM” written on top in ballpoint, so that everyone passing would know that my officemate and I were hard at work chasing a new contract for the war machine itself.)

One-to-many

I remember that period in the ’90s when photomosaics became popular. The other week I saw an installation at the Barbican composed of labeled images from the ImageNet database that has enabled automated image recognition. It’s apt to compare the recognizability of a photomosaic (it’s the Mona Lisa! Made up of everyone who came to see the Mona Lisa this year! Etc.) to the anarchy of one arbitrary slice of the modern Internet.

But it only requires some imagination to extrapolate the implications of, e.g., the series of images of besuited men labeled “venture capitalist,” and similarly you don’t have to work hard to roll your eyes at a twelve-year-old white girl in her suburban bedroom who couldn’t have found Afghanistan on a map squinting her eyes shut to fix the memory of Where I Was When the bad men came to attack American values.

And here I am now, passing the “Prepare for Brexit” signs posted at bus stops on my way to my office, having left the US after the morning when I eavesdropped on a businesswoman opening her conference call with appropriate solemnity (“We’re all a little quiet this morning…”) in the airport lounge en route to Japan, where the friendly Japanese man who led us in entirely the wrong direction off the top of Mount Inari shook his fist and said “Trump!” at us fiercely when we told him we had come from New York. I read about Leonard Cohen’s death a few days later in a coffee shop in Shimokitazawa. Does it matter? Do I matter? Time will tell.

try the grey stuff; it’s delicious

I lived with four of my best friends when we were seniors in college. Our chore strategy was that we lived in filth until someone got fed up and rage-cleaned, and then they got to passive-aggressively sulk everyone else for the rest of the week as a reward. Once we decided to clean up the kitchen together, which was great until one of us (not me) opened one of the drawers in the refrigerator to find that the celery one of us (me) had left in there weeks — months? — ago had turned black and liquified. Science, right?!

I think about that every time I find celery in one of the drawers in my refrigerator, which happens days — weeks? (months?!) — after every time I buy celery, because there are no recipes that call for more than a couple stalks of celery, and no grocery stores that sell celery by the stalk. It’s a scam.

I always think, oh, yeah, I’ll eat some celery with peanut butter, finish it off, but honestly, that feels like the kind of weird snack I would have passed off as a treat when I was anorexic, practically high off the fat in the peanut butter while I zealously picked celery strings out of my teeth. In the objectionable corners of the Internet where teenagers trade tips on how to starve yourself, celery is one of those vaunted foods that’s fabled to have net-zero calories because it’s so hard to eat. (Nota bene: These forums are not hotbeds of scientific insight.)

Anyway, there’s celery in my fridge that I need to attend to, but a few days ago I gave my fiancé and myself both food poisoning, and the experience of scraping the offending lentil curry into the garbage disposal a mere day after having spent several hours vomiting it and my stomach lining up was so traumatic that I’m not sure I can open the fridge again yet. Or maybe ever. (Who has two thumbs and is washing the spinach twice next time?! Not this guy, because I’m only ordering takeout for the rest of time!)

Much like emerging from the fog of migraine to discover that you still have arms and feet, there’s something refreshing about the end of a bout of food poisoning. Except when you, say, eat a bunch of grapes in your office kitchen and it’s all you can do to not double over in front of a bunch of hairy boy-children talking about, I don’t know, databases, because the gremlin that’s still living in your stomach does not want grapes, it only wants buttered toast.

Speaking of grapes, and anorexia snacks, I was tickled to read the New York Times’s latest militant screed about sugar. Among the gems were instructions to avoid grapes and bananas, and to replace your morning orange juice with — wait for it! — ice water, but with an orange slice in it. Also, at one point I think they suggested that instead of eating a bowl of oatmeal, you could “savor a whole orange”? It was unclear to me what you should do if you don’t like oranges. Could a person gain the same keen sense of dissatisfaction with their very existence by replacing their morning apple juice with a glass of ice water with a slice of apple in it?

The lady at the New York Times who hates grapes and oatmeal and orange juice would definitely have been one of those ladies who eyeballed me in my building elevator and asked me what I was doing to stay so svelte. Nothing burns calories like berating yourself for not climbing up thirteen flights of stairs, ladies!

All of this is to say that part of me wants to see how long I can let that celery sit in the refrigerator drawer until someone else deals with it, but part of me recognizes that having given my only cohabitant food poisoning recently, I should probably do him a solid and throw that celery out myself if I still want him to marry me.

P.S. I was about to hit Publish when my fiancé walked in and started taking out the trash, and I said “Hey, could you take that celery out of the fridge, too?” I AM THE MASTER OF MY FATE; I AM THE CAPTAIN OF MY SOUL!