Warm and green here; time speeds up at this time of year and it feels like we’re careening into summer.

- Is a Baby a Luxury? (Mira Ptacin at Guernica)

I immediately called the department—surely they must have looked over the fact that I was carrying an unborn child who needed medical care, and couldn’t afford to purchase health insurance—but my explanation was greeted with a dry, breathy laugh, followed by, “Just because you’re pregnant doesn’t mean you get healthcare.”

If the United States truly prides itself on family values, why is it nearly impossible for so many of us to care for our family, starting with the most basic care of all?

When I first moved to England people on both sides of the Atlantic used to ask me what I liked best about living here, and I would respond, in a sort of joking voice, “the NHS!”, but, really, that’s my answer, or one of my answers, anyway.

- Everything in This City Must (Alexander Chee at The Morning News)

In both situations, Dustin’s status as my domestic partner, certified by the city of New York, counted toward his immigration status with the German government, and despite gay marriage per se not being legal here in Germany, I could include him; he could be with me. You could almost call it a small thing except that he is half of my life.

I think of it again as I sit on the Lufthansa flight lowering itself into Newark airport, and fill out the U.S. State Department visitor card. I sit beside him on the plane and next to the question “How many members of your family are you traveling with?” I write “0,” because our relationship isn’t recognized that way by federal law, and can’t be.

The legal protection the German government gave our American relationship is gone, now that we are back in America.

- On a Personality Trait (Jean Hannah Edelstein)

It reminds you that probably the reason you left, or the reason you’ve stayed away for so long, is that it can feel easier not to fit in to a place where you’re not from, than to feel that you didn’t fit in to the place that you are.

Short, but good – and very apropos of certain themes in the two articles highlighted above, too.

- Feels Blind (Emily Gould)

What made my first year of full-time freelancing so happy, besides not ever having to ride the subway during rush hour, wasn’t anything specific about what my workdays were like. I wasn’t accomplishing much, I was wasting a lot of time, and a lot of the time I was bored. Most days, my work did not go well and I felt dejected about my actual writing. But I still felt good and hopeful, because all these potential paths seemed possible. Everything seemed possible.

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More like “what I read over the last few weeks”…

- On the Road (Maria Bustillos at Aeon)

Dropping into the Central Valley from the mountains surrounding the Tejon Pass is like breaking open a petit four, getting past the glossy, pretty exterior: inside is the cake. The urban surfaces of California are what we see in movies and on TV: slick, manufactured, shouting, cajoling, bamboozling, seducing, ready to sell you something. And then the confected beauty of the city gives way; now the land reaches far out to the sky. Your ears pop from the pressure change, and a sign advises you that the next gas station is 19 miles off.

- Dove “Real Beauty” Redux (Autumn Whitefield-Madrano at The New Inquiry)

The beauty industry has a stake in keeping women in the space between desperate unhappiness with our looks and bulletproof self-esteem. A consumer who simultaneously believes that she is beautiful and not-beautiful makes for a better consumer.

- The Impossible Decision (Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker)

But, talking to my students, I’m aware that there are too many unknowns. There are too many ways in which a person can be disappointed or fulfilled. It’s too unclear what happiness is. It’s too uncertain how the study of art, literature, and ideas fits into it all [...] And, finally, life is too variable, and subject to too many influences [...] I’ll give advice about grad school if you ask me to, and I’m happy to share my experiences. But these bigger mysteries make the grad-school decision harder. They take a career conundrum and elevate it into an existential quandary.

- The Amanda Palmer Problem: How Does a Cult Musician Become a Figure to Be Mocked? (Nitsuh Abebe at Vulture)

It’s damnably difficult to carve a private audience out of the open web, and the artist reaching out to fans is, ultimately, not necessarily any different from a commercial entity reaching out for sales, market share, and the kind of customer engagement that nets Applebee’s enthusiasts the occasional free appetizer coupon. It just depends on if you like Applebee’s or not.

- Waiting to Be (Sarah Menkedick at Vela)

It feels like waking up on Sunday morning and drinking your coffee and longing for something concrete even when you know that what you do will always operate in a liminal space of unknowing, unknowing if what seems like success will turn quickly into failure or vice versa, unknowing if what feels right to you is right, unknowing what you are searching for exactly, unknowing your next move, unknowing why you keep doing this when there are so many other things you could do.

- All Cozy Now (Christopher Kempf at The New Inquiry)

In the work of Hardt and Negri, the metropolis is the common body of the multitude. The city we live in, lives in us.

The same is true for the city we run in. What makes the marathon such a fundamental event in the life of a metropolis is that it takes place in the same public spaces we occupy every day, transfiguring those spaces into sites of generosity and of sudden, serendipitous friendship. Marathons don’t take place in exurban arenas or in locked-down, hyper-secure stadiums, but in the same streets on which we drive to work, the same parks in which we play, the same campuses where we attend classes together. This is the public sphere. This is what was attacked that day. And it was this— the love of the common— that, like thousands of runners trying to access a single, central server, became obstructed by an unanticipated glitch in the system.

- Rudeness as Resistance: Presence, Power, and Those Facebook Home Ads (Whitney Erin Boesel at Cyborgology)

What if we take the physical co-presence of all that Facebook content a little less metaphorically, such that the three characters are present (and joined by their friends) rather than “absent” when they take out their phones? It doesn’t fully hold up, of course, in part because much of what comes to life seems not to be the characters’ friends, but the document artifacts of the characters’ friends’ experiences. Still, consider each “like” a character taps out as turn-taking in an ongoing, asynchronous conversation that takes place both with and without words. Consider that, for each character, his or her friends really are present, even though they’re not physically co-present. Suddenly, these three scenes look a lot less like people getting sucked into demonic glowing rectangles that take them away from the real world, and look a lot more like people simply being rude as they fail to manage conversations with several people at once.

- The Privilege of Fucking Up (Sarah Nicole Prickett at Hazlitt)

A friend recently tried to console me by saying that I’ve failed at more things than most people have ever tried. Most people, I said, try more honestly. Most people do not owe so much to those who believe in them. That is another privilege we don’t discuss: The unrelenting luxury of high expectations, and with it, the chances to fail.

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There are, Andrew Cohen writes, “millions of men and women wandering around America today who spent some of the best years of their lives in and around Boston…Even if we can’t say we are ‘from’ Boston we surely confirm when asked that we are ‘of’ Boston. It remains in our blood”.

And now all these little love letters to the city are cropping up (and not just from men and women wandering around America; “I loved that city,” writes one Australian) – blog posts, articles, tweets. I too have been thinking about Boston, all week, obviously, but especially today. I know it’s basically meaningless to express affinity in a time of crisis or distress, but as someone certainly not from Boston and equally certainly of it, I’m glad nevertheless to see people expressing a kind of indiscriminate and generic affection for a place, for this place particularly. I like the shared ownership it implies, even when everything is still happening and confused. Even if, like me, you left, and the city’s just a network of distant memories now (not all good, but all essential), they’re our memories.

I have nothing new to add. I lived there between September 2004 and December 2007, my tenure framed by two big Red Sox wins. Sport was casually central to my life there; I spent countless hours in the gym or at my boyfriend’s tennis matches or studying against the backdrop of televised baseball games. I used to hang around on marathon Monday, watching the post-race runners all wrapped up in silver blankets. I watched them eat, drink, laugh, cry, vomit, hug: messy, noisy, leaky enactments of humanness. I used to think they were pretty stupid, actually: who would want to do that to their body, to train it and test it like that? But I admired them, too, more than I care to admit.

I used to run in the city myself. One hot summer I lived alone in a cramped apartment near Fenway, across from the Fens and Clemente Field, where there always seemed to be people playing cricket (I’d never seen anyone play cricket before that summer). When it wasn’t so oppressively humid that I couldn’t stand to be outside I’d run around the track, or else through the shaded park – often at dusk, when everything was blushing pink. Once, running stupidly at midday, when the heat was at its worst, I was struck in the side of the head by a passing bird, which left a smattering of down feathers smeared across my cheek; I was revolted and cut the run short to return home and shower. Another time, I was wearing a grey Harvard t-shirt that someone had bought for me and a man shouted as I ran past, “you don’t go to Harvard!”, and he was right, I didn’t, and I hated that he could tell, or that he’d made a lucky guess. When I played volleyball we used to have dawn workouts, running circuits around the Boston Common, falling to our backs on the damp grass and doing sit-ups, followed by squats, followed by this or that, admiring the serene old men doing Tai Chi while we sweated and struggled for breath. When I lived in Kenmore Square I used to run down Beacon Street or Comm Ave, up Beacon Hill, just seeing where things took me, finding convoluted ways to lengthen the route. I liked this run because I could do it in the dark, and it was heaven on a cold late-October night, with the smell of decaying leaves and smoke heavy in the air, and a warm glow coming from the kinds of Back Bay townhouses I dreamed of someday inhabiting but knew, deep down, I never would.

Mainly, though, I used to run along the river. I usually just did a nice easy three or four mile loop; I could do it in the mornings before class, or on the weekends, even if I was wickedly hungover and dehydrated, because I was still so young that my body hadn’t yet learned to protect itself from its own abuse. There was something pleasurable about doing that run when I was hungover, actually: it made me feel unreasonably defiant and able.

It was only a few months ago that I first encountered this passage, from Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

As I’m leisurely jogging along the Charles River, girls who look to be new Harvard freshmen keep on passing me. Most of these girls are small, slim, have on maroon Harvard-logo outfits, blond hair in a ponytail, and brand-new iPods, and they run like the wind. You can definitely feel a sort of aggressive challenge emanating from them. They seem to be used to passing people, and probably not used to being passed. They all look so bright, so healthy, attractive, and serious, brimming with self-confidence. With their long strides and strong, sharp kicks, it’s easy to see that they’re typical mid-distance runners, unsuited for long-distance running. They’re more mentally cut out for brief runs at at high speed.

He’s describing a run he took in October 2005 – so I could have been one of those girls, maybe. Except that I’m not blond, I was not a Harvard freshman, I was not particularly used to passing people, and was fairly used to being passed. Still, I was there then, running then. I tried to run all through the year, but couldn’t manage it in the depths of winter, when it was simply too cold to derive any pleasure at all from being outside, and anyhow I liked it best in early Autumn, when the leaves would start to fall and the wind came off the river and made you feel like this really was the prime of your life, anything was possible, anything might happen.

Boston always made me feel like that; it’s why I moved there. I didn’t care much about what university I attended, or what I studied, for that matter – I just wanted to be there, in that city.

I haven’t been back since the winter I graduated. I left in a rush, in the frigid aftermath of a blizzard; my English boyfriend helped me pack up my studio apartment in the North End and ship all of my things to England over the course of a weekend, and I took an uneventful final exam, and handed in my senior thesis, and that was it, I was done. To celebrate our early graduation, some friends and I took a cheap bottle of bubbly down to the Boston Common and drank it waiting in line to go ice skating; a few days later we all left the city for good, or for now. But we are of it; it remains.

*Haruki Murakami

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‘Well in our country’, said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

1. How to have a panic attack

The most important thing is not to panic.

Some people will tell you that panic is essential. Do not believe them. Sure, you could have a panic attack in the fast lane on the 405 freeway and have to pull over onto the hard shoulder, while traffic goes whizzing past and the misty LA light starts to fade. You might stagger into a hospital, gasping and wild-eyed. There might be tears, flailing, falling. These things might happen: but it’s just as likely to be slower, more subtle. Maybe you won’t even notice. Maybe years will go by before you identify the feeling as something significant.

Lie in bed, on your side, facing the wall. Maybe you’ve taken some yoga classes, maybe someone once tried to teach you to meditate, and you think you can trick yourself into feeling calm. Feel dizzy anyway, maybe because all those times you were “meditating”, you were really just napping in the presence of incense. Feel your heart racing. Wonder if this is what dying feels like. Keep wondering this. Tell yourself that you would know if you were dying, in the same way you know if you’re about to vomit or when you’re hungry or tired. But you don’t know. Worry that you don’t know: is it good or bad that you don’t know? Is not knowing the same thing as knowing?

Wake up in the morning pleased and surprised. Go to bed the next evening not knowing if you’ll survive the night. Repeat until something more interesting happens in your life: you get drunk for the first time, you get a C on a calculus exam and have a meeting with a stern teacher who expected more of you, you get into college anyway, you spend two hours after the prom making out with a boy you didn’t even know you liked, you go to Europe for a month, you move across the country.

2. How to talk to doctors

Go running every day. When winter sets in and it’s too cold to run along the river, start spending your evenings at the gym, which is in a humid basement with a sweat-stained carpet and flickering lights. Run fast, but never very far: your usual distance is four miles on the treadmill, and the funny thing about this is that even four miles later you’re still standing in exactly the same spot. Play your music loudly and try not to look at the television screens flashing news at you. Lift weights sometimes, just the lightest ones, in an attempt to tone your arms, which is something you’ve read about in magazines. Lie on a purple mat and do a few sit-ups and wonder when you’ll start to look like someone who goes to the gym.

Then, at some point, late one evening, begin to feel a pain.

“What sort of pain?” the nurse in the campus clinic will ask you, when you arrive for your appointment and tell her you think you’re going to die.

Tell her you don’t know what sort of pain. Pain, in your chest. That can’t be good, can it? She’ll take your blood pressure, say it’s good. She’ll say you’re a healthy young woman. She’ll want to know if you do any other exercises at the gym. Any weight-lifting? she’ll say.

Tell her: a bit. Not very much though, can’t you tell? You’ll think this is funny, because you’re still pretty scrawny, or at least your arms are. But she won’t laugh; she’ll just say, without missing a beat: well, you’ve probably just pulled something.

Tell her you don’t think you’ve pulled something.

She’ll ask if you have any other symptoms. You’ll say, restlessness, inability to sleep, palpitations – only you won’t know the word for palpitations, so you’ll just say, my heart feels funny. You’ll tell her about that time you went to the ER for something that turned out to be nothing and the attending doctor said he thought you had some sort of heart murmur, and that you should ask your family doctor about it, but you didn’t have a family doctor because you were not from around here and your insurance didn’t cover things like that, so you were asking her about it, now, months later.

She’ll absorb all of this. She’s in her fifties. Maybe she has daughters of her own, college-aged girls. Maybe she thinks you’re crazy. Start to wonder if you’re going to be late for your 3 o’clock class after all. Is this the sort of thing you can get a doctor’s note for? Imagine visiting your professor during office hours, saying, I’m sorry I wasn’t there to discuss Discipline and Punish, I was keeping an appointment to announce my impending death.

Finally the nurse will say, alright, fine, I can refer you to a cardiac specialist. He’ll probably do an EKG, she’ll say. But I still think you’ve probably just pulled something, she’ll add. You have no idea what an EKG is but you’re happy to be taken seriously.

Go home. Look up “EKG”. Start to worry.

Tell your boyfriend that they’re going to hook you up to a machine. A machine! But he’ll be asleep, so you’ll mostly be talking to yourself. A machine!

Arrive at the clinic wary but fully intending to go through with this thing, to find out once and for all what’s wrong, or not wrong, with you. Sit in the grim waiting room. Take stock: note the 70s brown carpet, the dirty yellow walls, the hazy late winter light trying to push its way through greenish-tinted windows. Note that nothing seems very clean, even though nothing is obviously dirty. Keep thinking: oh my God, I need to get home and have a shower. Wonder if heart disease is contagious. Reach for your hand sanitizer; rub the gel between your palms. Wonder if the people working here really work here at all, if the other people in the waiting room – quiet, like shadows – really exist outside of this space. Wonder if you’ll emerge as the same person, or if you’ll emerge at all. When the doctor calls you in, don’t tell him about the heart murmur or the palpitations (you still don’t know the word, and you can’t tell a doctor – a cardiac specialist, no less – that your heart feels funny), just that you’d had a bit of pain in the chest area. Play it down: say, my chest, maybe my shoulder. The nurse thinks it’s just a pulled muscle. The doctor will do some poking and prodding and ask a few questions and in the end he’ll say exactly what you want him to say: that he thinks the nurse is right, you probably pulled a muscle lifting weights at the gym. And because a doctor has said it – even a doctor with an incomplete picture of an incomplete problem, in a dubious clinic populated by ghosts and shadows – it’s okay. Buy a new pair of running shoes on the way home to celebrate.

A few years later, realize that you can Google all your symptoms. Learn the word “palpitations”. Feel immediately better: as soon as you find a word for something, some evidence of it existing, being a thing, it becomes easier to deal with. Visit your doctor. Try to tell him what you think is wrong without actually describing anything: say that you want to do something about the physical manifestations of your anxiety. He’ll think you mean diarrhea, so it will come as a big relief to both of you when you can laugh and say, no, no, heart palpitations, things like that. Things like what? he’ll say. Do you have any other symptoms? You’ll say, Not really. Well, dizziness at night. Sometimes nausea. Shivering, uncontrollable shivering.

Any shortness of breath? he’ll say.

No, you’ll lie.

Fill the prescription. Forget, for years, that you even have this problem. Let it become something that’s past: and forget about that Faulkner quote you once read, the one that says, “the past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” Forget what any of it feels like, so that it can seem new each time it resurfaces.

3. How to fool yourself into thinking you look like a grown up

Get a job, preferably one that you hate, though you could settle for one that you just find boring. Commute. Start to become one of those people who shouts at pedestrians when they walk in front of your bike and realize you’re not angry because someone could get hurt: you’re angry because you’re in a hurry, and you were going at a good clip, and they’ve fucked with your momentum.

Make photocopies and send emails. Become one of those people who distributes agendas before pointless meetings and uses the word “pipeline” regularly. On your lunch break, take a walk and wonder why everyone else looks so much happier than you feel. Catch a glimpse of yourself in the darkened window of a recently-shut shop. Think that you look pretty happy, actually, and that your expensive new haircut certainly looks expensive, or at least it looks expensive if you know how much it cost, which you do, because you paid for it.

Pay your rent. Pay your phone bill. Pay your other phone bill, even though you haven’t used a landline in about ten years. Pay your gas bill. Pay your electricity bill. Pay your credit card bill. Pay for your gym membership. Pay for your groceries to be delivered to your house in the evenings because you just don’t have the time during the day anymore. Go to the bank on a Saturday because you just don’t have the time during the week anymore. Discover that you’re not going to have enough money to pay your rent and your phone bill and your other phone bill and your gas bill and your electricity bill and your credit card bill next month, even though you have a job that you hate (or at least a job that you find boring). Start to dream about work: compose emails in your sleep, look for solutions under your wilted pillow. Wonder if you’re doing it right. See: 1. How to Have a Panic Attack.

4. How to actually be a grown up

Don’t.

5. How to not feel jealous of people who are fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished, and more interesting than you

You could try telling yourself that they’re not fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished or more interesting than you, but you probably won’t believe it, even if it comes from your own trustworthy mouth. Start to resent yourself for trying to deceive you: you don’t deserve to be deceived, even if everyone else is fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished, and more interesting than you. How dare you do this to you! How dare you!

Go to the pub. Sit in the corner. Have a drink and scowl at everyone. Feel marginally better, in an “I feel worse” sort of way. Go home. Go to sleep. Dream about something boring, like buying groceries. Wake up. Think about how everyone else probably has better dreams than you do. Slide into what’s commonly known as a funk, but know there’s nothing common about it: you’re the Queen of Funks, and this is the Funk to End all Funks, and if nothing else – if nothing else! – you can be a superlative failure.

6. How to get out of bed in the morning, even when you don’t want to

Find someone you love who loves you back and will make you a bacon sandwich but refuse to bring it upstairs, even when you say that there is no point in getting out of bed and you’d rather starve because frankly starving would be more interesting than not starving at this point. Wait a few minutes for the smell of bacon to climb the staircase and enter the bedroom. Decide that you’re still not happy with things, that you’re resolutely unhappy, in fact, but that you may as well go downstairs and have the bacon sandwich, as it’s there, because no one else is going to eat it, and it would be a shame to waste a bacon sandwich.

7. How to feel more productive

Stop reading things you don’t want to read. Even that. And yes, if it helps, even this. Also, add things you’ve already done to your to-do list. I know it’s cheating but it still feels good and it will always feel good, no matter what they say.

8. How to feel smug

Don’t own a television. Don’t own a car. Don’t tell people that it’s mostly because you can’t afford these things.

9. How to avoid awkward conversations

Don’t talk to anyone. Ever.

10. How to avoid feeling lonely

Talk to people. Often.

n.b. This originally appeared in GENE 01 last year. Some of it’s fiction. Some of it isn’t. Its alternative title, in my head, is, “It Would be a Shame to Waste a Bacon Sandwich”.

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I have an essay up over at Vela called “The Purest Form of Play”, on swimming, time, practice, play, artistic/athletic discipline, and other things. There’s also an interview with me on their blog, where I talk about my book, what I’m reading, and the eternal pre-tweet question: “am I doing this as an academic or a writer or just a girl sitting in the pub with her boyfriend, Instagramming her burger?”

Here’s an excerpt from the essay!

I’m fascinated by the act of swimming. I use that word act deliberately, in the hope that it connotes the theatrical; I’m interested in the performance, the pool as setting, the costume, the rituals, superstitions, repetitions. Swimming laps, maybe, is like learning lines. Sometimes, when I’m swimming, I slide out of the role of participant and into the role of spectator. If I’m resting at the wall I’ll rest too long, just watching. When the dogged university swimmers are doing their laps, jaded but youthfully energetic, or when there’s someone in the next lane over who’s just really good, who wears years of hard practice particularly well: I admire the fluidity and fluency of their bodies in water. I strive for this fluency myself, even though I suspect I’m past the point of ever being able to attain it.

I like the mask, too. It’s odd to feel that wearing practically nothing–a tight black suit, cut high at the leg, a silicone cap that hugs the head close, goggles that press rings around the eyes–is a protection, a way of preserving anonymity, but it’s true: no one can see me when I swim, at least not the way they can see me elsewhere. I think some people are self-conscious about squeezing into swimwear, flattening their hair and ears, showing skin usually reserved only for lovers or doctors. But I like it. I like the way I look in costume: which is to say, not entirely like myself, or rather not entirely like the myself I’m accustomed to seeing every day, the myself I’m constantly, vainly giving sideways glances to in mirrors and darkened windows on half-empty streets. I look like–someone. Just someone, someone who might be anything at all: renowned or habitually ignored, rich or poor or whatever. There are no particular clues to identity. The face, washed clean, is left to speak for itself; you don’t know the color of my hair or that I only ever wear lipstick if it’s red and expensive (Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent), even though I can barely afford to buy groceries most weeks. You don’t know what I do or don’t do for a living or a not-quite-living, who I’m with or not with, where I spend weeknights drinking after I’ve been swimming, where I come from, what my visa status is. You might intuit certain things from the fact of my being here at all, but you can’t see those things, or any evidence of them on my person. And I can’t see you.

You stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people that you may see in other contexts every day, but how would you know? I wouldn’t recognize anybody that I see regularly at the pool outside of the pool–I only know them from the color of their caps, their distinctive or admirable strokes. Out of water the stroke means nothing–it’s like a tattoo that disappears when exposed to air. But this is how I know these people, this is how we know each other.

Read the full piece here…

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