A Gambler's Line

Deep down I knew I wouldn’t get far trying to lie my way through the DMV, but I did think I’d get past the door.

In June, at the prospect of studios reopening amid a health crisis, and three months ahead of my personal schedule of goals, I bought a car. Technically it’s a lease, but it’s mine and it’s brand new and it’s the first car I’ve had since I sold my old Corolla to my parents and moved to Boston in 2011. I spent nine years as a pedestrian in two cities with terrible transit, one with more sidewalks than the other.

I walked into the dealership and told them exactly which car I wanted and then I bought a different one, although it was mostly the same, just a smaller model. Who am I driving around, really?

“I have a question, though,” I said to the salesman, Terrell, who insisted I call him T, before we traipsed back out in the sun, both of us sweating through our masks. “I have a Massachusetts license and the DMV is closed, so is that a problem?”

“Oh,” T said, his mask slipping down his nose. “I guess you can’t get a car.”

“Oh,” I said, shrinking back toward my roommate’s car that I had borrowed yet again.

“I’m joking,” T said, genuinely worried at my gullibility. “It’s fine. As long as you have a license at all.”

If you freeze-frame this, just know I had every intention of switching things over in the days before this moment. I even had my mom send me a screenshot of my birth certificate so I could start an online account with the DMV and get the ball rolling for when they allowed me to visit once again.

My base flaw, worse than my impatience or my utter incapacity to reason with electronics, is that I always think I’m right. In my defense, I am usually right, so it’s a difficult beast to tame.

Deep down I think I remembered my license expires on my birthday this year, but maybe I was sure things would be more normal earlier on in the timeline of this insanity. Anyway, my birthday is in less than two weeks and I have no idea what reminded me of any of this when I bolted out of an Instagram haze and fell into thirty minutes of panic.

I went back into the account I started with the DMV, only to find it had been erased since the website had updated in the meantime, and in that time they had also opened in-person appointments. I booked one. For today.

There are two lines at the DMV in Los Angeles, one for people who made appointments, and one for the plebes who take their chances of standing in line. The roll-the-dice line is always wrapped around the building. I drive by this office every day and never have I ever seen a line that doesn’t reach the street behind the back wall. The lines go in opposite directions and there are two employees heading the front doors, one at the front of each line. So when the lady in front of the opposite line starting yelling at me, I was very confused.

“YOU, next in line, I’m talking to YOU.”

“Me?” I pointed at myself like I was on a Jumbo-Tron and not being scolded in public at the hellscape of all locales.

“You,” she loudly complained as I made my way over, across the signage, and now standing directly in front of the long line of people clamoring to be where I wished I wasn’t. “What did you think I was doing, yelling for you? Just not paying any attention.”

She wasn’t letting this go and I tried to make eye contact with the only other person heralding the entrance, hoping he’d intervene on my behalf. He was wearing a Lakers mask, and I love basketball, maybe he could sense that from where I stared at him underneath my hooded sweatshirt. Probably this seemed more menacing than I meant.

“I thought you were for this other line,” I said, but I said it like it was an obvious thing.

“Do you have an appointment,” she asked, even though I came from the appointment line, and this too seemed like an obvious thing.

“Yes, it’s this number,” I pointed to a handwritten digit sequence in my paper planner because I am an ancient kind of person, but she didn’t even look at it.

“What time is your appointment for?”

“Ten.”

“TEN?”

I felt shamed but it was 9:52AM so I’m not sure what time I was supposed to arrive.

“Do you have all your documents,” she asked, and this is where I should have come prepared with running shoes or coffee, so I could have made a break for the inside.

“Yes?”

“What do you have?”

“I have proof of address, a social security card…” I trailed off, hoping for the best.

“Do you have a birth certificate or a passport?”

Back in June, when I was gathering things preemptively, I grabbed my passport with a vague sense of dread, flipping it open with a more acute sense of dread. It expired in 2019. The passport renewal process through COVID has been one I wanted to avoid, so I did, and promptly forgot about it until two weeks ago when I made this DMV appointment. I was hoping that since literally no one will talk to me on the phone, if I just showed up in person I could get some answers about what to do when you move out of state and the birth certificate office can’t mail you anything because they’re closed, and the passport renewals are running a literal six months behind, and maybe there are some COVID-friendly exceptions because maybe someone has some humanity or at least more patience than I do with this god-forsaken website.

“So…”

“So, you have none of the things you’re supposed to have. There’s nothing we can do for you at this appointment. You’re telling me you couldn’t find the information on the website and I’m telling you it’s all there and you just didn’t look at it.”

“I just want to talk to someone to find out what to do when the records office says it’s four months to order a copy and the passport office says six months.”

“It’s not the city of LA’s fault you didn’t do this in time. LA is more populous than Indiana and we figured out our backlog and you’re trying to tell me Indiana is still shut down from COVID when we are fine now.”

“I’m not here to argue with you about the disparity between states,” I said, at the front of a line of people taking a risk to wait in the rain on a Monday morning just to have a similar conversation with this gatekeeper. Maybe not the hallmark of smooth operations.

I have worked in customer service for most of my life and I know that generally, people are assholes. The guy three people behind me at that very moment was refusing to put his mask on to talk to an employee.

“Oh, well, maybe I have a germ somewhere in my coat that might come out or something,” he said, flailing his arms in a circle as he made a big show of not knowing which side of the mask was the top.

It was now 9:54AM and I’m sure I wasn’t the first problem child in the line. I also know it was kind of my own fault. I know I think I’m right, and bear with me, but here’s one more time: Not everyone should be in customer service. Because most people are assholes and if you come into with that as your frame of reference, then ALL people will be assholes. Including me.

She handed me a piece of paper that listed all the same information as the website, which of course were all the obvious things. What I wanted was for someone to talk me through my next steps in a way that seemed possible, not berating me in front of the building like I brought a dead rat to the door instead of an old passport.

I sat in my car and called to make another appointment, hoping my birth certificate would arrive by the time I could get there again, but no one answered. I think deep down I knew I belonged in the gambler’s line to begin with.

Chaos Muppet

It should come as some relief that fucked up dreams are the collective consciousness of this pandemic, but it does not. Relief would be waking up rested, and not, as one finds oneself this morning, in a pit of night sweats and despair.

This - the business of existing - should not be so tiresome, I think, choked with blankets as I slide headfirst off the bed.

It is.

I have taken to sleeping upside-down and over the covers because a month or seventy-two weeks ago as it may be, however far into these endless days of shelter-in-place, a hefty spider unabashedly scrambled across my pillow and very near to my face as I lay scrolling about on my phone. It made a scratching sound on account of the weight of its sturdy legs on the brushed cotton sheets, and then I lost track of the spider entirely when I tried to convince it to run toward the door. It, or, “Wilhelm,” as all spiders are named, instead took a detour to the wall behind my bed where it will probably live forever and get quite fat on all the bugs I’ve scorned before.

So we’ve worked out a deal wherein I leave the lights on, I don’t use any of the objects I’ve seen him touch, and I try not to move in my sleep, and Wilhelm gets the run of the place. It’s not a great deal for me, but I’m not a keen negotiator.

And with this, I have become increasingly worried about taking up the mantle of an Order Muppet. As in, not the Chaos Muppet I know I am at heart. Chaos Muppet Theory is something I read several years ago and have never been able to shake. As with most things-Muppets, it both explains something non-Muppet in a way I never would have heard otherwise, and also speaks to me on a deep, personal level.

[See also: the song, “Tenderly,” which, as it turns out, was NOT written to be shout-sung on a singular note.]

I blame the nightmares and the not sleeping-right-side-up, but I suspect my toddler-sized attention span has to do with all the screen time and working every single day. Not like eight hours of typing sort of work, more like rolling around on the floor in front of a camera while shouting out instructions for correctly rolling around on the floor, which is just as odd as it sounds.

Occasionally the screen time is less about me, staring at my own face and wondering at the angle of my head, and more about the interactions with others in the screen. What is the appropriate amount of time to scan the gallery of faces before you answer a question? In the world of before, with real faces, one can gather a lot of information in a short amount of time. This is to say, I am usually quick to answer things. I’m what you might call a “good student,” or “annoying.”

I say this not to be self-aware, but because I can usually beat out the men for a hold on a conversation. In my new online world, however, I, and every other woman in the room, are slower on the draw. The men answer first, for longer, they take up all the space on the screen. This is by far the most unscientific un-study of all time, but my suspicion is that the lag time is the subconscious women’s work of scanning the room that we can’t do in the virtual realm. What I’m used to, as an affable Order Muppet, is to make quick eye contact to see who’s ready to answer and how fast I have to be or who might have a better or more disruptive perspective to allow for, all in the span of a flash around the table. And the men aren’t doing that. They never were. It’s just more obvious now because here I am, fumbling with the fuzzy internet connection and the dog noises and the chaos of flat figures and I lost my entry.

At which point I usually shut down and get quiet instead of what I’d like to do which is rage loudly in a shout-singing match to a Nat King Cole song.

In the worst dreams, regardless of plot or themes, there’s usually a moment wherein I’m trying to scream at the top of my lungs, and it doesn’t work. The words are wrong or I’m not loud enough, or something is stuck. Whisper-shouts when only a prickly soprano note will do.

It’s a little too on-the-nose, don't you think? The same way dreaming about buying Lysol wipes is a little too real, but that happens too so I’m not really in charge of the script here.

There’s a duck who lives outside my apartment who laughs, but only at night. That raspy voice that ducks have, but instead of a quacking sound, it’s, “AHAHAHAHA.” It, or “Mervin,” as ducks are named, is mirthful really. Like he’s hosting a party and having a time at it with all his favorite friends. It makes me hopeful to be near my people again sometime. Away from the flatness of the internet and the ever-present Wilhelm. You know, Order Muppets need a Chaos Muppet as their foil. A resistance to bring them into the fold of dynamism. A change agent.

And this is where things get interesting, or at least more relevant. For one, Chaos v Order speaks to this sense of duality as a constant and vilifying structure that we can’t escape. And within this, or for seconds, it speaks to an agent of change as a predicated process. An ordained, prescriptive thing.

We, as humans, like to have meaning, even if the meaning is absurd or terrifying. It’s the reason we have religion, various addictions, and trouble with the concept of time. We, as not-computers, do not do well with randomness. When random things happen that we cannot explain, we ascribe meaning to it in the form of, “everything happens for a reason,” or “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” There is value in the ability to learn from anything, or to apply a sense of wonder at even the abject terror of a time. But here is where we are foundering as a society right in this very moment: when an accident of pandemic proportions occurs, there is no actual blame to cast.

Let’s be clear, there are true failings on the response side of things, and there are many ways this could have been handled better, but much of what we are seeing on a personal level is that we, as humans and not computers, cannot quite get on board with the randomness of it all. It MUST mean something, it must have come planned from someone, surely someone is wrong somewhere and we can pin all the chaos of this on the blame over there. Contain it. Make it make sense.

It doesn't make sense. It’s chaos.

Does this make us collective Order Muppets? Are we a whole society of Kermits, sighing heavily and buying into cult theories about shadow governments? No. We, as humans and not actually Muppets at all, are not Order v Chaos. We are Order AND Chaos. Both. Constantly and all the time. We change our makeup and our pants and our minds. We have our favorite foods and TV shows and phrases we like to say. We have our routines and sometimes we need a little shaking up. Or we do not like being told what to do even though a little structure keeps us productive. We’ve been thinking about ourselves this whole time as if we are paint when really we are light. We are the combination of everything without measure, and even in the darkest of despair what we are looking at it is absence. We cannot make sense of negative color; It doesn’t mean it cannot be.

It is tiresome, this pandemic, with the endless, amorphous weeks, fever dreams, and general doom. It should come as some relief that we are all so similarly deranged and dissatisfied, but it will not, because we are dissatisfied and exhausted from all the fever dreams. Our only non-Zoom friends are Mervin and Wilhelm and they are agents of delusional stasis. But somewhere on the other side of this current is a place of more “and” than “but,” less of the binary and more of the well, more.

Then you and I came wandering by

And lost in a sigh were we

The shore was kissed by sea and mist tenderly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywWZlMPko-Y

Yes, And.

I fell on my head and the world broke, or at least that’s how it feels. 

Each of these things are true:

I fell on my head. 

The world broke. 

It’s the “and” that makes a difference I guess. 

I woke up to six firefighters. One of them had my legs, one had my left arm. Two of them held the door of the coffee shop open, another was just above my head, and the last one was just a voice from somewhere over by the napkins. 

In one version of this I woke up in a puddle of coffee, but I don't know if that’s the reliable version. I do know that I would smell coffee on my skin and in my backpack for the rest of the week. 

They, the firefighters, want me to go to the hospital. They say I have a cut above my right eyebrow that might need stitches. 

“Stitches?” I say accusingly. I don’t feel any pain. There is no blood that I can see. “Can’t I just go grab a band-aid at CVS?” 

“We can’t leave you here laying down on the sidewalk. We need you to at least be able to sit up.” 

“OK,” I say, sitting up. They help me. I am hooked to a blood pressure cuff. It reads 75/50. I feel sick, but not in my stomach. It feels like my throat wants to vomit and the rest of me is unconvinced. 

One time I thought I had been drugged. Another time, after a run, I sat down on the floor of the shower and thought about what would happen if I just left the shampoo stay in my hair, forever and ever amen. 

Most of the time it’s on a plane. 

I had started watching “Hidden Figures” and ordered the pink sea salt popcorn from the touchscreen. It was a redeye because I don’t like to waste time in the air, but it had been a busy few days in LA before I officially moved there and I probably should have caught up on sleep instead of snacks. Tequila and dancing in West Hollywood plus one male go-go dancer who pulled me aside and asked for my number, minus the In N Out I got after an audition, divided by the rental car I dropped off near the airport where I almost lost my housekeys and somewhere in the math of this I figured it must have been food poisoning. 

Halfway through the popcorn I started sweating. Sweat in between my toes and all through my hair. Dripping off my face like it was August in Indiana on the porch before it rains. I stripped off my sweater, stuck my face in the donut of my neck pillow and breathed through my mouth. 

Everyone was asleep; it was a redeye after all. I spit imaginary bile out of my throat because it seemed like it would help if I could just be sick. If I could get it out, make it real, commit. Just.

I fell asleep. Woke up freezing with hair that smelled like sweat and a still-dizzy feeling in my neck. Otherwise I felt fine. 

This is how it happens, until it happens in public where people are awake. 

The firefighters had been at the front of the line when I walked into the coffee shop, and there’s usually no line at all. Just me and the barista who seems annoyed that it’s me. Instead, it was the day before New Year’s Eve and the whole world had time for an afternoon break. 

The guy in front of me was wearing a baby who he talked to in a baby voice and I can only imagine if the baby had an actual voice it would be to tell the dad to stop. 

“Are we going to get gingerbread cake? Are you excited about gingerbread cake?” The dad sang as he moved the baby’s arms around the way I used to do to our poor cat, Rebecca, who I named a person name because I wanted another friend. 

The baby drooled. The baby did not have teeth, nor could it have gingerbread cake. The gingerbread cake charade felt like it was for my benefit, as a person with teeth, but I was annoyed that the baby was being used in the process. And I was starting to feel too warm. 

I took off my jacket, but it didn't help. By the time the dad puppeteer had reached the counter, I was wearing a tank top, carrying my sweatshirt, jacket, and backpack. 

“How’s the gingerbread cake?” The dad asked the barista. “Is it good? I bet it’s good.” This last part he said as the baby and bounced its arms again. 

Sweat pooled, cold and unhelpful, under my hair and along my top lip. If I could sit down before my neck decided it didn’t care to carry my head, I could wait this out. The dad wanted me to smile and wave at the baby and the prized cake but I gave a troll’s grimace and held the edge of the counter as I placed my order. 

The guy behind me was standing too close. Everything was too loud like it was happening inside of a metal barn instead of these brick walls. The card reader wasn’t working but I didn’t see because I had crouched under the counter in a tiny squat. 

“Have you seen the Mandalorian yet?” The tall guy who had been behind me asked the barista who had moved on to this man’s order. This guy now effectively blocked me into my little spot under the counter. 

“Yeah man, I finished it in two days,” said the barista to the man. “Oh it looks like it didn’t go through.” This, to me.

I popped back up from my squat to try the card reader again. There sat my coffee in my reusable mug, a glass water bottle I had decided on at the last second, and beyond that a conversation about Disney+ as a concept and a revelation. I crouched back into my squat. 

“Hey, she doesn’t look so good,” said someone farther back in line. 

“It happens sometimes,” I mumbled. “I just need to sit for a second.” 

“Yeah, Disney+ is blowing Apple TV away,” said the tall guy. 

I knew if I could just get outside, there would be benches and I could sit with my head in my hands and let my neck be weak and think about spitting into the void and this would subside. 

“Did you see the new Star Wars movie,” the barista asked the tall guy. 

I made a break for it. I grabbed my coffee, the water bottle, all my articles of clothing slung on my arm, my backpack half open in the crook of my elbow, and headed for the door. 

And then I woke up. 

Eleven external stitches, four internal, a fractured brow bone, and a concussion. The firefighters insisted I go to the hospital, which I did - albeit strapped to a stretcher in an ambulance by said firefighters - and at the hospital I learned the cut above my eyebrow actually went down to the bone, and could not, in fact, have been closed by a band-aid from CVS.

After about ten days, the concussion symptoms lessened. The pulsing sensation throughout my eye socket has now gone down considerably, although I did a headstand last week and then my eye twitched uncontrollably for a whole day so I’m not quite right yet. And there’s a second or four every day where it feels like the world splits open. 

One time I was reading a news article and it looked like the font was crooked and offset all over the page. Another time I thought we were having an earthquake in the middle of class but no one felt it. But most of the time it’s like a quick flash, the fabric of the air ripples, and I wonder if this is all pretend. 

I fell on my head and the world has broken and it keeps breaking for those four seconds every day and it cannot possibly be real that we are in the middle of a pandemic with a mysterious disease that spreads silently and exponentially and if this is how the world ends then maybe I never really woke up that day on the sidewalk at all. 

A concussion jostles your brain and alters your reality and it’s been most helpful to talk to other people who have had a head injury. But none of them had one right before the world broke so I don’t know about the part where I feel insane. 

“Your scar looks so good, I can’t even see it,” they say. 

“Thank you, that’s because I went to the plastic surgeon,” I say, which is true. I’m missing half my fingers but I still don’t want to look like the knockoff Harry Potter figurine they sell at Big Lots, and that is where I was headed after the ER. 

The ER doctor leaned in close when she met me. 

“Are you in the industry,” she whispered. My first thought was bartending, but this isn’t Boston and that isn’t my industry anymore, and I’m just some girl they found lying on the concrete.

I frowned.

“Are you an actress,” she whispered, but louder. 

“Why, cuz it’s my face?” 

“You haven’t seen this yet, have you?” She took a photo of my gashed open forehead with my phone and this is when I realized where the headache I’d complained about was coming from.  

The morning that they detonated a device at the end of our street is when I found out we were on lockdown. After the Boston Marathon bombing, we spent the week surrounded by SWAT teams, and road closures, and altered hours. I lived eight blocks from the first blast site, and that Friday morning, when they found another device and the city shut down and the manhunt started, I had exactly one bag of chips and a six-pack of Downeast cider in the apartment and no way to leave. 

Three weeks ago, when the first murmurs of lockdowns came up, is when I started my quarantine shopping. I don’t have a car and canned food is heavy and I will not repeat my food choices of 2013 if I can help it. It’s all quite weird and overwhelming if you look too far ahead, but the steps to get to the future are the only things we can count, and so I have a bunch of chickpeas and some cough medicine. 

“I’m so glad you’re ok,” I am told, but I don't feel ok. I feel like I left something there on the ground or in 2019 or back on the plane. I am sorry I pretended to be fine, that I pushed through and went to work in the way that we are all discovering is unsustainable now, but the things that make me me are the very same things that made me think a band-aid would fix the whole ordeal. 

“You passed out on us twice,” the firefighter holding my feet says, but I don’t remember either of those times. 

I remember the coffee in streams around my head but sometimes I remember being face up and sometimes it’s down. I hit both sides of my head somehow but I don’t know where. No one was watching and they can’t tell me. 

The glass water bottle is intact. It survived the fall and no one can tell me why and I never actually got my coffee. I have so many questions and there are too many lucky things about this story but now everyone is scared and everything is wrong. 

I don’t feel pain until it makes me sick.

And. 

Now the world is broken.

And. 

I don’t know where you find stitches to save humanity at CVS. 

More Than An Hour

“You have one hour to write something profound” does not seem to be working on me.

I have been actively trying to be less productive, which I’m either succeeding in, or it’s absolutely counterproductive in that I am working more furiously on working less.

In an effort to enjoy my life I have been letting myself play solitaire on my phone when I know I don’t have deadlines, to sleep in on my days off, and to not write when I don’t have anything to say.

As it turns out though, I only have things to say when I make space for them to turn up out of the corners of the room, and with no space for thinking or adulting, it’s dust bunnies and laundry goblins running around over there.

Two weeks ago, I subbed all the classes I like to take and ended up desperate for someone to tell me what to do with my body. And so, scraping the bottom of the barrel of options for a girl in the rain at noon and without a car, I bought the two-week intro special at the yoga studio down the street from my apartment. A place I’d been ignoring for two reasons - one, I have a hard time paying for things I get for free, and two, I did not know where the entrance was.

I wish I could tell you, dear reader, about the transformative power of these classes or the magical teachers I found there, but alas, they were, as most of us are, lovely but common. What I did find, what I didn’t realize I needed so well, was a complete and utter aloneness. An invisibility cloak, weighty and warm. With pockets.

While I wouldn’t trade the studios where I teach - where I have connections and a sense of community - for anything, there is something whole and necessary about being a mystery and a non-entity somewhere in the world. A place with no expectations or qualifications or small talk, where no one knows your name. An inverted “Cheers.” Too much of anything is a discomfort, and I realize how bizarre it may seem to want to disappear into the incense smoke of the ether, since the root of most troubles is not being seen in the first place, but imagine, if you will, what happens when things are unfamiliar.

The gold wall on the west side of the room? It looks like the south wall of the old Back Bay Yoga with the railing, where I liked to put my mat by the windows and watch the snow in the winter. I went on my days off from bartending when my feet felt like they had been transplanted from a corpse and I had to train them to be live feet once again.

That song at the beginning of class? I heard it once in class in New York, at the place I used to plop my stuff right when I got into town. And again at my neighborhood studio in Chicago where I would practice on Sunday mornings no matter what, and often at the expense of sleep and exciting plans. When my hair smelled like cigarettes because you could still smoke in public and my life was full of bar shifts, angst, and Febreze.

I can hear the rain through the windows and the sound of the street and I miss you and I’m sorry I didn’t send that email back but I don’t know what to say and I don’t know if I would recognize all of those types of me if I walked by them today.

Something is new so we throw it next to something else and compare it. We categorize it, fill in the blank spaces with something we know. And what I think I know is so strange and muddied up and full of memories I didn’t remember until there in the corner is Kali with half an arm and suddenly I am bubbled over with the scent of a man I thought I loved for a few months in the cold.

Here in the corner by the window I train my heart to be a live heart once again, I guess.

I have things to say and I have to force myself to find them, peeking out from under the pile of dirty clothes and half-finished projects, and I think it might take more than an hour.

Distractify

If you are a yoga teacher, or have been in a yoga class at any time in the last decade, you well know the sound of a metal water bottle crashing triumphantly to the floor, the sacrificial divas of lost balance and forgotten edges.

About three months ago, after Savasana, I started saying, “Be careful of what’s over there, but roll over to your right side.”

I figured it was worth a shot to remind people, not of where the edge actually is, but to consider where it might be.

The day before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, Henriette Caillaux, the French Prime Minister’s wife, was acquitted of murder four months after she shot and killed the editor of Le Figaro newspaper, Gaston Calmette. Her exoneration was donned as an explicable crime of passion, an act of sacrifice on behalf of her husband’s honor, and of course, due to her condition as a woman, emotional instability.

The story dominated French news and shared front page space in the newspapers with the Archduke’s demise, of which set in motion all the wheels that turned toward global panic and outright war.

When World War 1 began, the French populace had been distracted for months with the sensationalism of the Caillaux drama.

We are not new to distraction or media sensations. We, as humans, are easily excitable even when we think we’re focused on the most incredible, indelible, and important story at hand.

I read about the precedence of the Caillaux story in reading a narrative nonfiction book on the life of Claude Monet, who himself was wrapped up in the drama and did not see the outset of war as a realistic possibility. A man of means, when the war did break out, he was mainly concerned with rations of meat, alcohol, and gasoline in order to fund his lifestyle of breakfast wine and canvas-buying jaunts.

Of its own accord, the Caillaux trial is fascinating and strangely relevant. Only when it is placed in the context of history does it sound more like trivial, dangerous, self-serving news coverage than a comment on the legacy of patriarchy.

Which begs the question - where are we distracted now?

Even if we are not careening toward outright disaster, which seems highly suspect if not generously optimistic, what of all the optional disasters is it exactly that we will crash into, head-first and with all the warnings we’ve read about, only below the fold?

It’s been three months, and zero water bottles have crashed to the floor. I know it sounds dramatic, but I teach an average of 18 classes a week, so it is, actually, dramatic. All anyone needed was a gentle reminder. Nothing scandalous, nothing calling for too much attention, and certainly any bottle casualty is an accident. Just a quick nod toward where one might be in space at a given time. It seems like we might need this more than we know.

Rabbi

29/30.

Apologies if you have lip fillers, but they make everyone look like a Mrs. Potato Head. One in a long list of trends I do not understand, especially in LA.

As someone who only occasionally has a sense of style, I have figured out a hack for dressing in this city: take what you think is a good idea for an outfit, and swap out one piece of it with a completely random item.

Tonight I wore yoga leggings, a jean jacket and Vans, but instead of a shirt, I wore a sports bra. Ta-da! Fixed it.

One time I was on the MTA in NYC and a lithe girl wearing one of those medium-wide black hats was blocking the doors. An older gentleman got on and asked her, politely, to move.

“Sorry,” she said.

He looked up at her, in her boxy sleeves and purposely under-done makeup and he blinked, asking:

“Are you a rabbi?”

I snorted outwardly so it sounded like a cough, and then it made me cough, and the would-be rabbi glared at me which is not the level of dignity I would expect from a clergy person.

The first time I saw models in real life was in Paris in high school. Someone in our group was shopping for a prom dress in some high-end stores and the rest of us tagged along because we did not have parents who would pay for such things. As Jen tried on her third, black satin number, I ditched off to the Louvre with my friend Chloe to see my favorite sculpture for the second time.

They were staging a fashion show on the floor under the glass pyramids, and two of the models walked by, all legs and hollowed out eyes, moving with the grace of giraffes and the width of paper dolls.

“When they put makeup on they’re stunning,” my friend Chloe said.

“They look dead.”

“Yeah.” But she said it in the wistful way.

My friend Kyla recently did an Instagram story series spoofing beauty routines where she held up normal items and gushed about them and then stiltingly used them on-camera.

“This is the most AMAZING face cleanser,” she said, holding up a Dove bar. “I think it’s like five dollars in select drugstores, but you can get it for cheaper if you buy in bulk on Amazon.”

It was one of my favorite things to happen on social media this year. I have nothing against the construct of social media; anything can be corrupted, subverted, made to be a shallow and divisive thing. There are bad people just as there are corruptible teachers, selfish drivers, and marauding rabbis. Where you fit, who you are, how you put the good in, that’s what crafts your experience just as it shapes the reality of the thing itself. I’m not going to get lip fillers no matter how many beauty bloggers talk about it. I do have an idea for a Mrs. Potato Head IG live though.

Blaq Mask

The label on the “blaq mask” said to check the website for instructions, and this is why it took me two months to try it because that seems really inefficient, and fuck you for not printing it on the bottle like responsible humans.

The website, in turn, has six simple steps, one of which is, “gaze at your fine self in the mirror,” so, five.

I don’t know where I get this from, except I do and it’s courtesy of my dad, that I can’t be bothered with printed instructions. I read them and immediately forget key elements like numbers and all the words in bold. If I’m cooking, I will read the same recipe 47 times to make sure I didn’t forget a step, and then realize I used a full tablespoon instead of a teaspoon of something important.

RIP pumpkin muffins, 2018.

Step number three of the famous charcoal face mask trending on social media is:

“Apply an even layer to your t-zone areas, avoiding the lips, hairline, and brows.”

Check. If only “t-zone” meant “your entire fucking face.”

As I swiped more of the staggeringly shiny goo on my cheek, I had a quick thought to how I hadn’t seen any photos of anyone covered in full on the website. Initially I had assumed this was due to the striking resemblance to black-face the company would rightly want to avoid. Especially as the bottle had a “share your selfie with #blaqmask” that I cringed at. But upon second look, all the models had a swift, fallen-Zorro-mask look. A quick strip across the nose and upper cheek, which even with my zero-sum skills at personal care I know is not the t-zone. That’s a minus sign.

I sat on the edge of my bed, watching paint dry, and googled more info, and there I found the video of poor Joanna, who put the mask on her whole face and then uploaded the sordid affair to YouTube. The deal with this experience is that the substance shrink-wraps to your skin so that what was once gooey tar is now duct tape and you are freeing yourself from a hostage situation. Between Joanna’s screams I took a look at my own face and cursed my impatience while also remaining impatient at the whole ordeal.

It started well enough, even if it was way less satisfying than advertised. How do such fresh-faced models have so much gunk to pull out of their pores? I got nothing. Some extra skin, and then some skin that wasn’t so extra and I would have preferred to leave it on my face.

The actual t-zone area came off with relative ease, as did my chin. Then I got to my cheeks, and the ghost of Joanna past came right up alongside. If you knew your bikini wax was going to look as bad as it felt, you wouldn’t get one, right? This is my FACE, I thought as I pulled patches of black strings as far as they would give, watching the meat of my cheek strain from the force. Finally, I had long seaweed strips hanging from the sides of my head when I gave up.

Since I had actually followed step one (apply a patch test in case you’re allergic,) I knew that the mask came off with warm water when it was in goo form. Which surely it would go back to with enough warm water. I let the tarry fruit leathers melt off in the shower, wondering why Joanna didn’t just do that too. Or why they didn’t add that to the instructions, but again, logistics did not seem to be the strong suit of the company.

Anyway, my cheeks have an enviable rosy glow, and I’m basically a beauty blogger now.