Am I asking too much? Is there a way for me to realign what I want out of a career, even if that means being okay with picking up other people's lunch every day until I die? At what point should I admit that I am not a strong enough writer to make it a career? Or do I just need a thicker skin?
Toast! I have returned from New York and Hamilton a changed person, a better person, which may sound like unforgivable hyperbole but is the absolute my-hand-to-God Truth.
Adopting the label of “polyamorous” comes with enough raised eyebrows. When I am ordered to give something like an impromptu PowerPoint on “what that means,” the owners of the raised eyebrows are inevitably sorry they asked, as the confusing addition of “solo” requires its own entire presentation.
This may well be where my nervous breakdown will come: here, in this IKEA. Today I am a fake writer writing in a fake office at a real desk, model name KLIMPEN/LALLE. Its main characteristics are whiteness and modesty. Its chair is rather uncomfortable, but IKEA isn’t paying me to be here, so I don’t have to be anything but honest. The Amtrak residency, this ain’t. To be clear, this IKEA is open for business.
Maybe this has happened to you. You take the sheets out of the dryer and there’s something wadded up inside a big sheet. The big sheet has twisted around it, creating a large, round pocket filled with whatever is wadded up. As you start to untwist the sheet you think, “What if this is a human head?” Then you stop untwisting the sheet because, although chances are it is not a human head, if it…
I had never been to Connecticut before. I find the entire East Coast unsettling; everything about it is just a little bit wrong, like the landscape in a nightmare. I had to be periodically reminded of the location of (what seemed to me like) perpetually shifting city-states that continually switched positions on the map as soon as I glanced away ("Boston is north of New York City?"). The ocean was on the wrong side. How could I…
