reminiscences - Tumblr blog

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playing some summer doldrums music over here

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I was going to work about a year ago in the production van. I had this really great Teamster driver who would pick me up, and we had very similar musical tastes, and there's a really good radio station in New York called WFUV which is the Fordham University radio station. I had never heard of Big Thief, but this song came on the radio. You don't have to know an artist to just know that they're great from one song. Just immediately I was like, ‘OK, this is incredible. What is this? Who are these?’ And the DJ went right into another bunch of songs after that, so I got on my phone and tried to find the playlist on their website and I couldn't. Then I called the radio station and got in touch with somebody, and they emailed me the song. Because I had one of those moments when I had to know who that was. I had to investigate further. I haven't gotten to see them live yet. I don't know if they're originally from Brooklyn but I think they formed in Brooklyn, or at least have been playing there a lot. But just a great new band, really original, and amazing lyrics.

Michael Imperioli, talking about the song “Not” by Big Thief

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i asked larissa if we could pick up some dumplings from 88 lan zhou before it closes (RIP!!!) and she was like "yeah how many? i'm thinking at least 100?" i cannot imagine having a different and somehow better person in this apartment to ride out the pandemic with

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Ever just read a paragraph that is so comprehensive and furious? (Ed Yong for The Atlantic).

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i saw anna in the park yesterday. the last time i saw anna in person was the day we decided we were going to quit our jobs at [redacted website]. 

“they RATFUCKED us,” i thought i whispered as we got on the elevator in the office after an unsatisfying conversation with human resources, in which they offered us [redacted sum] if we signed an NDA before we quit. anna claims i used my outdoor voice when i made this proclamation. we walked out of the office together and got in a cab. that was last january. 

i have had so many phone calls with anna over the past year and a half. in some of them, she’s panicky and i’m calming her down and telling her everything is going to be fine. in others i’m having a bad time and she just listens to me. the calls usually devolve into 45 minutes of shooting the shit, both of us breaking up in laughter by the end and neither of us wanting to actually hang up. “you’re the only person who i always answer the phone for,” she told me a couple months ago when i called her after i moved, and it was the greatest compliment. you can’t understand the specifically weird thing we went through together last year when we quit those jobs—i feel like we both got hazed but in a way nobody really gets, and we’re just stuck together now because of it. trauma bonded. 

i met anna for the first time when i was a college senior. i was visiting the city with a bunch of people from my mag journalism program at syracuse, and we went to hearst for a morning to visit some alumni there. we saw nate and eric (and ben, but i didn’t know him yet) at esquire, and then we went to cosmo. the woman in charge of cosmo at this point was a girlboss who seemed kind of mean, so i wasn’t really interested in what she had to say, but they brought out anna to talk to us too, and she was hilarious and self-deprecating and cool. i thought, what do i have to do to get a job and a life like hers? the next time i met her, we were briefly coworkers.

some topics we covered yesterday, sitting under a tree in prospect park (anna juuling, me drinking an enormous vat of ice water with my new tattoo still covered up): jameela jamil and munchausen’s, what kinds of chemicals i should avoid putting in my hair so i can wear it curly and have it look good like hers, horrible people on the internet, wasting our 20s on horrible older men who were bad to us, how anna never wants to have a job and would rather simply phase into retirement, how bisexuality feels like an identity that’s impossible to perform, coding bootcamp, the best restaurants at brighton beach. who knows when i’ll see her again. i hope soon. i do know i’ll probably call her at some point in the next month to say hi and she’ll answer on the third ring. 

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r we still doing GPOYs on here

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we were walking west on fulton on thursday night from chase’s apartment in clinton hill back to my apartment in fort greene (there is really not much to do beyond walking around this summer; a great deal of my time over the past two months since i moved has involved walking one way or another down fulton street, either to emma’s apartment, or kate’s and tyler’s, or chase’s, or a bar). we had met earlier in the night on the corner of vanderbilt and fulton and had gone to diamond reef and had too many drinks and then went home and got high and hung out with merle (cat). everything we do feels nice and new even when we go to a bar i’ve been to four hundred times. 

i made him watch the trailer for first cow, a movie i wish i had been able to see in theaters, which he clearly spent two days thinking about because i returned from the beach to this text today. the plot of first cow is not immediately apparent from the trailer.

anyway, after he put some bread he baked in a tupperware for me and after i said goodnight to merle chase walked me home, around midnight. it was starting to sprinkle. i hoped we’d beat the rain. he doesn’t have to walk me home, i’m an adult and it’s an 11-minute walk, but it’s just a thing we do at this point and i like that he does it. we were waiting for the light at vanderbilt and fulton, where we’d met earlier in the night, and we were looking across the street just as something terrible and indelible happened: we watched as the back end of a car turning north on vanderbilt clipped a motorcyclist going straight through the light east on fulton. in my brain it happened in horrible slow motion: the car and the bike make a cracking noise as they collide. the driver is in the air. then the driver is on the ground. then a woman is screaming. chase grabbed my shoulder and after several seconds of shock he pulled out his phone and called 911. so did four other people. the woman got out of her car, not the one that hit the guy, and started talking to the motorcyclist. so did a handful of others. he was extremely bloody but thankfully also extremely alive and conscious and trying to stand up, which did not seem advisable. should we...stay? we saw it happen, maybe we should give a statement. giving a statement to the police, is that helpful? i asked. chase was like yeah, that makes sense. the rain started falling. the dispatcher on the phone transferred chase to another dispatcher. how many dispatchers did we need to get a fucking emt over here? the dispatchers were asking questions like how old is the man who is injured? how tall is he? which did not seem terribly relevant or even like questions we could even guess the answers to. 

there was now a group of a dozen onlookers standing close to the motorcyclist. everyone was trying to help and nobody knew how to, because none of us were doctors and nobody wanted to touch the guy and inadvertently injure him further. and we were across the street, the furthest away of any of these people, the least capable of helping, both of us i think feeling a little gross about rubbernecking on the sidewalk. as soon as chase hung up on his second useless dispatcher an ambulance pulled up and two emts started getting the guy onto a stretcher. another ambulance’s sirens wailed a ways down fulton. a dozen other people saw exactly what we saw, and after some deliberation we decided we probably didn’t need to stay, we hadn’t done much to help and couldn’t be of any more help than the more-involved onlookers. we were five blocks from my apartment and we walked the rest of those five blocks home in silence. by the time we got to the park near my apartment it was pouring.

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July 2020 in playlist form

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i think it is PRETTY OBVIOUS that this song is about someone who is now married to the hot kushner brother

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Most of the things I had planned this summer didn’t end up happening, but there is something I hadn’t planned on that DID happen. And that thing is my 8th studio album, folklore. Surprise 🤗Tonight at midnight I’ll be releasing my entire brand new album of songs I’ve poured all of my whims, dreams, fears, and musings into. I wrote and recorded this music in isolation but got to collaborate with some musical heroes of mine; Aaron Dessner (who has co-written or produced 11 of the 16 songs), Bon Iver (who co-wrote and was kind enough to sing on one with me), William Bowery (who co-wrote two with me) and Jack Antonoff (who is basically musical family at this point). Engineered by Laura Sisk and Jon Low, mixed by Serban Ghenea & Jon Low. The album photos were shot by the amazing Beth Garrabrant. Before this year I probably would’ve overthought when to release this music at the ‘perfect’ time, but the times we’re living in keep reminding me that nothing is guaranteed. My gut is telling me that if you make something you love, you should just put it out into the world. That’s the side of uncertainty I can get on board with. Love you guys so much ♥️

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been listening to orville peck all day and just discovered his cover of the dixie chicks’ goodbye earl, my favorite song about murdering your best friend’s abusive husband.

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today was a tennis day, which means i set an alarm for 6:40 am last night before i fell asleep. i woke up and walked across the street to the courts and was delighted to see they had replaced the piece of rope suspended across the two sides of the net with an actual tennis net overnight (phase 4, baby! we can go to the zoo and play real tennis at the south oxford courts!). a woman biked up and was also incredulous that they had replaced the rope with an actual net. standing six feet apart, we marveled at the net, and also looked disdainfully at the other side of the court, where a paltry yellow strip of plastic remained suspended with twine, forming a makeshift net. 

then tyler and kate showed up on their bikes, and Tennis Karen let us be. tyler is literally a tennis coach and you can tell because he spent an hour very helpfully instructing me and kate on our forehand volleys and saying things like “nice swing kate” and “good shot maya” and “fuck yeah dude” very enthusiastically. tyler and his bag of tennis balls were on one side of the net, and kate and i were on the other side. tyler would serve kate a ball, and if kate hit it back in a way that tyler could return the ball, he hit it to me, and i hit it back to him. then he would serve me a ball and we would do the same thing. we did this until we ran out of balls, and then we collected all the tennis balls like two dutiful golden retrievers clad in outdoor voices athleisurewear and did it again. then we ran a drill where kate would start at the back line and tyler would hit to her and she’d have to return it, and then she’d run up to the service line and do the same thing, and then tyler would hit her a ball at the net and she’d smash it. then i did the same routine. 

in my ideal world it would be 75 degrees at most during peak daylight hours and we could play tennis at 2 pm, and emma and jaz could come watch us and eat a charcuterie board, but for now i like the solitude of the mornings when it’s too early for anyone else to be at the courts yet and our only audience is an old lady in the grass doing tai chi. 

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today in my group text i started with demo and erin (i met demo, appropriately, on tumblr 10 years ago and i met erin at a media happy hour where we established that we were both from the same part of pennsylvania) we were talking about how none of us are good at remembering like, anything. 

i can remember every stupid thing about my first year in new york but the years where i’m 23-27 all blend together in my head. but that first year was perfect: i was experiencing everything happening in new york for the first time, and it was that thing where none of it was new new, they were just new-to-me experiences that other people had all experienced dozens of times. 

i moved into my bedroom in bushwick off of the wilson L labor day weekend 2014. i had been living with my mom’s family in the rockaways that summer, and my mom’s cousin ed dropped me and my stuff off in bushwick. “this is where you live?” he asked incredulously. there was nothing wrong with the apartment, i just think he hadn’t been to bushwick in years. the apartment itself was something of an artifact: it was a two-story, two-unit building. the 90-something-year-old landlord lived with her family on the ground floor, and our three bedroom apartment was on the second floor. it was a three-bedroom place; it hadn’t been renovated in years. the paint in the unventilated bathroom peeled, the kitchen was enormous by new york city standards, and the living room was between the two other bedrooms, so i always had to walk through someone’s room to watch tv. 

the lease on the apartment belonged to emmy, who was a year older than me and went to newhouse before transferring to the new school. she was an unpaid intern at a photobooth startup whose offices were off the jefferson L, near cobra club (instead of waiting in line to pee at cobra club, we’d just walk across the street and use the bathrooms in the photobooth startup’s offices instead). her parents paid her rent. she smoked more weed than anyone i’d ever met in my life, and my college friends were comp sci majors who sold weed as an extracurricular activity. she had the biggest bedroom and a cat that routinely hissed at me. our other roommate brooke was once emmy’s best friend; brooke was in my year at syracuse. she worked at a boutique in carroll gardens owned by the real-life equivalent of jan levinson-gould on the office. brooke’s room was also big, and mine was small, but i had the only closet and my rent was $425 a month (the landlord clearly was unaware that the neighborhood was turning over; these days, the rent on my bedroom should be closer to $1000) so it was fine. 

i was never much of a weed smoker in college. i just wasn’t very good at it. and then i moved to 1337 bushwick avenue and i started smoking out of emmy’s bong whenever she and brooke would smoke. the railroad living room always stank like bongwater because there were no windows and the doors were always closed. brooke and i would get really high and walk over to the popeyes under the Halsey J, or order burgers from ridgewood eats. i am still not very good at smoking weed but brooke is still one of my favorite people to get high with.

here are some things i learned about and did when i lived in bushwick: doing all your grocery shopping after work at the trader joe’s on 6th avenue; getting off the L at bedford, grabbing falafel at oasis and walking all the way back to bushwick; the concept of a non-suburban target at atlantic terminal; parties in warehouses that had been converted to apartments; going to shows at shea stadium; standing on the balcony at shea stadium; going to union pool with emmy and expressing mild horror as she peed right on the outdoor patio by the taco truck; listening to cloud nothings on every commute into the city at 7:30 in the morning; riding the J train just to see what above-ground looked like in brooklyn; my college boyfriend coming down to visit and not having any idea what to do with him so we went to the comic book store in union square and got ramen and otherwise sat around counting down the hours until he left again; getting my full-time offer after working as a de facto reporter on a $13/hour rate for five months; getting coffee in bushwick at AP Cafe (now closed) on troutman with annie and asta to celebrate my new job; having pizza and champagne at my friend liz’s apartment to celebrate my new job; going to taco bell in union square with emmie (different emmie/emmy) to celebrate both of us getting our job offers on the same day; being extremely single in new york and dancing on an elevated surface at tandem (also RIP); uber rides home from fort greene to astoria on saturday mornings. it took so little to make me happy in new york that year. on a friday night if i came home after work, put on a bodycon dress from urban outfitters with my faux-leather jacket and got to sing at least a couple songs at karaoke at cobra club or slip into a party at house of yes without paying a cover i was content. our nights always ended the same way when i went our with brooke: we would go to bushwick pita palace, eat our falafel in the restaurant, and then take a car home. the idea of taking a car was also new: syracuse didn’t have uber, and we didn’t have the disposable income to make it habitual, so it always felt like a decadent treat when we’d have the car carry us a couple miles down bushwick avenue at 2 am. 

i never signed a lease when i moved in. this would eventually work against me when emmy informed me the day before i went home for christmas that another friend of ours, ben, would be moving into my bedroom in five weeks’ time. i felt like emmy had been thoughtless with sharing this information with me, a person who clearly did not have any sort of upper hand in a situation where someone older than me who’d lived in new york for years and who wasn’t paying her own rent was dictating the rules. 

will, my college boyfriend, was moving down to the city in about a month’s time anyway and the plan was for him to stay with us for just a little while while we got our shit together and found a place; emmy sort of just expedited that process. still, we had an acrimonious end to our friendship. we didn’t speak the entire last month i lived in her apartment, and the night before i left, she threw out all the food in the fridge that was mine. something else happened to the apartment around this same time in december 2014: it was invaded by houseflies. at first there were just a couple, and a flyswatter or some fly tape got rid of them. but then they multiplied. there were 20. then there was 100. then i had to eat all my meals in my bedroom with the door closed to make sure the flies wouldn’t come in. something was rotting in the walls. i think it was the wood itself. we moved out on february 1, into our new apartment in ridgewood, and within a year, 1334 bushwick avenue had been knocked down. the apartment had become unlivable. i drove by it a few weeks ago on my way back from the rockaways with my friends, and in its place they’d built a new apartment. if you hadn’t known it before, you wouldn’t know it changed at all.

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By virtue of their sheer numbers, millennials are revealing that much of the American way of life is no more permanent than the baby boomers who codified it. If you were one of those geriatric businesses, you would rightly see millennials as an existential threat — even as they continued to see themselves as powerless, completely battered by the world their elders built for them. At the heart of every online dust-up about millennials is a possibly unanswerable question: To what extent does a generation shape history, and to what extent is it shaped by history?

How Much Power Do ‘Millennials’ Actually Have? by Willy Staley, The New York Times (via)

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this weekend

was definitely the closest thing i’ve had to a normal weekend since march. 

we celebrated emma’s birthday on thursday, at the wine bar in clinton hill where i had my birthday party last year. it was just the three of us, me, emma, and kate, and nobody else was even there at the bar, really. just three idiots drinking three bottles of wine and impulse-buying tickets for opening weekend at the bronx zoo. 

here is the thursday night look, along with my dumb little susan alexandra bag i bought last week:

friday i mostly slept off my hangover and felt horrible and anxious all day and then daniel and i watched palm springs, which i honestly had low expectations for, but it was exactly what i wanted it to be: short, aesthetically pleasing, just the right amount of cynical time-traveling andy samberg, soundtrack featuring kate bush. 

on saturday kate and i made cupcakes for emma (chocolate cupcakes with a rosemary buttercream) and carried them over to golda so i could buy a bottle of wine for emma (the same wine that i paid [redacted dollar amount] for at petra at kate’s birthday in january) and overheard the co-owner of a franklin ave bar we really liked make a very unseemly comment about a Black woman walking by the bar who was saying something about BLM and police brutality. this bar, which sits on a heavily gentrified street in bed stuy, has not made any sort of public comment about the police brutality and BLM movements. we had a long discussion about how to handle what we heard—we kind of couldn’t believe that the co-owner felt so comfortable saying something like that in front of a bunch of strangers—but ultimately we decided to handle it privately, and kate ended up writing an email to the bar about it today.

emma’s park picnic for her birthday was perfect—friends all showed up, and even my sister and her roommate stopped by. we drank orange wine and pet jaz and gabe’s dog moose and absolutely did not come into close physical contact with anyone. eventually i left the park with a friend i hadn’t seen in months and we walked back towards fort greene and caught each other up on our lives, which was so nice.

i started “seeing” “someone” last month and instead of doing our usual thing of bar-hopping and getting to-go drinks and food last night when it was 300 degrees outside we hung out in his air conditioned apartment and drank two bottles of natural wine and pet his cat and ordered thai food and watched most of a full season of entourage, which is all i would want from someone during normal, non-pandemic times anyway. 

today i did some work in the morning and then went to wegmans with larissa. that grocery store absolutely sucks—it’s like 65% instacart shoppers and nothing is in stock and the store is too crowded with people in a way that makes me feel so uncomfortable so everyone there, shopping for themselves or for others, are all just sort of vultures circling the charcuterie display—and it is only my wegmans brand loyalty that keeps me coming back. then i came home and napped and watched five episodes of i may destroy you, which has, appropriately, destroyed me.

it’s very hard not to have a weekend like the one that’s currently slipping through my fingers and be like “better enjoy it, this is as good as it’s going to get this year! remember this when you’re spending all day inside in december again!” i talk about this literally every week with my therapist, who assures me that she is talking about this with all of her other clients too. tomorrow i’ll go to work and stay inside all day and not get my steps in or see anyone, but i needed a weekend like this to remind me that not everything has irreversibly changed this year.