You become a pack animal if you’re going to be out of your house for any length of time exceeding three hours. This problem is compounded if you are trying to save money or exercise, because it increases the amount of stuff you’re schlepping by orders of magnitude. Today I am working only one of my jobs (well two, if you count the fact that I can do some of my PA stuff from my laptop at Job 1) and I brought with me three bags. Between my backpack, my tote bag full of gym stuff/my lunch and breakfast, and my purse, I took up two seats on the train. This is why I leave earlier than I need to–so I can have a seat and not worry about the delicate Tetris situation of getting all my stuff wrangled onto my lap/onto the floor (but resting on my shoes, so that it doesn’t actually touch the disgusting grimy floor of the subway car.) If you’re trying to save money by either making your own coffee or, in my case, getting it from the cafe where you work for free, one of your hands will be occupied with a reusable cup of some size and bulk. This prevents the easy reading of a physical book, so you need to make sure you have something loaded onto your phone for entertainment purposes or else you’ll be left alone with Your Own Thoughts.

Whenever I see people on the train without a big bag I think: do you have so much disposable income that you can buy yourself lunch out every day? Do you work at one of those magical unicorn tech establishments where they feed you for free in exchange for your fourteen hours of labor? Are you one of those Truly Better Than Me people who can work out at home before leaving for work? (I can never manage to get up early enough to swing a morning workout.)

Anyway, all of this is just to say that I walk around New York feeling like this lady :

For the tens of folks reading this you may have noticed that I started off July full of vim and vigor and excited about my July Challenge, which I have not updated since the 2nd. That’s not to say I haven’t been making an effort in the areas that I outlined. I have–not as much as I might, but not as little as I feared. I’ve gotten quite a bit of writing done. I’ve moved more, if not as much as I’d hoped. And I’ve made a non-zero number of social media posts.

One area where I have made a particular stride (I hesitate to say strides plural) is that of conquering Avoidance Mountain. At least, one little peak of Avoidance Mountain. To belabor the metaphor even further, I’ve attained Base Camp on Avoidance Mountain.

Booyah. I have no unread messages.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve gone through about six years of email and identified receipts, important documents, and a whole pile of shame. I’ve declared amnesty on a lot of this–a key component of Inbox Zero, if you’re familiar with that. I’ve had to admit that too much time has passed to respond to some of these. I can only mark them read, hang my head in shame, and resolve to do better in the future.

This feels like a very silly thing to be excited about, but I am. My unread count has been hovering in the low thousands for a while now, and it’s been an enduring source of stress, even as I am aware (and found out) that 95% of the emails I purged were come-ons from startups that don’t exist anymore or notices that my credit card bill was due/paid/coming up.

So, onward!

I’ve been dog sitting for the past week, hanging out in a beautiful apartment in Inwood and spending lots of time on the train going back and forth for various gigs. Amid the death of Reddit being reported everywhere to my Many Thoughts about reading Robert Gottlieb’s memoir, I had an overriding thought today: I miss blogging.

I really miss Livejournal, with its beautiful nested comments and privacy controls for individual posts. I never really took to Dreamwidth, its non-Russian successor-I mostly use it for Get Your Words Out! checkins. More than anything, I miss when I could just write a bunch of crap on the internet and not think of it as a sales tool, as promo, as content. I was reading through my old blog and there is some good writing there, but there is also a lot of junk, which is great. I spend a lot of time worrying about my Substack newsletter, A Faster No, and whether or not the content I’m putting out that week is engaging. I hardly get any comments, and I don’t know if that means I’m doing something wrong.

But with Steady As She Goes and this blog (to a lesser extent) just started out as me typing. My silly little blog, full of my silly little thoughts. And I thought why wait for Friday to post some silly thoughts about Asteroid City (which I saw yesterday) or the enduring beauties of Midsomer Murders. Or some of my favorite quote from Avid Reader. It’s my blog, dammit! And I’ll repopulate it if I want!

Avid Reader

It takes a special kind of dyed-in-the-wool nerd to arrange to receive The New York Times at summer camp, something Bob Gottlieb did in 1945. That’s how he learned about the bombing of Hiroshima. He was a member of three lending libraries (where you had three days to read the book before returning it to the drug store) and was obsessed with bestseller lists, making sure to read everything that hit it. Reading his memoir is like getting a blueprint of how to create the perfect editor: get them started reading early (in his case at four), have them read widely and voraciously, and then make them temperamentally unsuited to do anything else. It’s a brisk read, about 350 pages, and if you’re at all interested in the history of the publishing industry it’s a must-read.

Asteroid City

Wes Anderson is an incredibly memeable director. There’s a whole tiktok trend where people make videos lovingly (and not so lovingly) mimicking his signature style: characters in the center of the frame, small movements or adjustments of aesthetic objects (usually vintage-looking) and stylized, almost flat line delivery. Abby and I saw Asteroid City in theaters, which was a joy. I have really missed going to movies, and after looking over after each preview and saying “I want to see that” I have the feeling I’ll be in a lot of them this summer.

Asteroid City is a weird little pastel nesting box of a movie–a movie that is a play within a tv show about the making of that play. It’s in color and in black and white, in several different aspect ratios, and packed to the gills with every actor Wes Anderson could get on board. Abby and I had one disagreement after–she thinks that Bill Murray, currently embattled, was meant to play the Tom Hanks character, and I argue that Bill Murray couldn’t have played the role well. He’s just too weird. (That’s one thing we did agree on–more than anything else, Bill Murray sounds exhausting to be around, and thus his cancellation is society saying “Too much. Stop.”) Apart from the meta structure, the story is fairly straightforward; a widowed father (so recently widowed that he has not, at the start of the film, figured out how to tell his four children that their mother is dead) arrives in Asteroid City to participate in a science convention for teens. Also come to town are a group of schoolchildren and a Hollywood starlet whose daughter is in town for the same convention. During said convention, an alien appears, and the town is locked down.

Is it bad that I didn’t think of the Covid lockdowns watching Asteroid City? It was too pastel, too bright, too chatty; my memories of lockdown are colored by anxiety and interior lighting in contrast to the airy, flat color of Asteroid City’s fake southwestern vistas. (Shot in Spain, apparently. Spain via a different dimension.)

Twenty-four hours later and I’m not sure how I feel about Asteroid City. It was fun, it was funny in parts, it was very (unexpectedly) moving in others. It made me want to wear more long skirts. It didn’t have the elegant melancholy of The Grand Budapest Hotel, or the moving and complicated family dynamic of The Royal Tenenbaums. But there was something about it that has stayed with me, and I think I may be going to see it again.

It’s funny–I’ve turned away from writing this blog post several times because my attention span is shot. I got one of those screentime alerts on my phone earlier today–the number of hours I spend looking at it is shameful. I want to read more, write more, and do more, and the hours I spend on instagram and tiktok definitely aren’t worth it!

Reading: Witch King by Martha Wells (page 94/414)
Writing: working on the sequel to Marrying In (Marrying In 2: Electric Boogaloo)
Listening: “Don’t Recall” by KARD
Watching: Midsomer Murders S12E04 “The Glitch”

I just finished reading J by Howard Jacobson. That little strike through on the J should really be two lines, as per the book, where any word beginning with “j” also has the letter stricken through. But I can’t figure out how to do it on WordPress.

J is set in a world where something Has Happened – WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, is never clear in the book and is always referred to in the hypothetical. But whatever it was has caused society to turn to a great forgetting, a turning away from memory and identity so that whatever happened won’t ever happen again. This great societal effort is failing, though, and strange outbursts of violence are seizing the country anyway – we are aware of this from the beginning as Ailinn Solomons and Kevern Cohen begin their strange, tentative relationship.

It’s a love story, and it’s a dystopian novel, and it’s a novel about anti-semitism, but nothing is ever addressed head on. In J there aren’t any grand revelations or explosions, there is no courageous resistance against an oppressive government. WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, was a collective act of violence so great that to speak of it is an act of unimaginable illegality – the genius of the way this illegality is structured is that nothing is banned, so much as just not done. This elliptical style might turn some people off but for me, it made for a disorienting and almost elegiac reading experience; a sense of sorrow for things barely remembered, the knowledge that we as a society have done things that we shouldn’t be proud of and for which we should apologize, suffused every page.

So, I highly recommend! Go buy it and read it. And then tell me what you think.