March 2025 Snapshots

Mitchell’s change purse

Our new normal. The water jug is the third in our polyamorous relationship. Frankie likes it to be there so he can push back against it, or wrap himself around it. If the water jug isn’t there, he stands on the blanket (which was Hope’s blanket) and stares at the empty spot and then looks at me, and I swear I can see him asking, “Hey, where’s that thing I like?”

Watching Supernatural under these conditions is something I’ve needed to get used to.

Cousins.

Two laptops in a hotel room. So much time in hotel rooms in the last couple of months. I love it. Especially when it’s paid for.

Out at this new place near me, having a blood orange margarita and reading The Bad One, by Erin Tyler. More to come on this one.

I got Frankie in November 2024. After a period of adjustment, where he wandered around nervously and alert, and struggled mightily with massive food anxiety due to starving on the streets, poor guy, he settled into the rhythm of being with me. He’s chilled about food. He leaves kibbles in the bowl because he knows it will be there when he wants it later. My heart!! He is my shadow. He loves being next to me on the couch. With the water jug, of course. For some reason he found my bedroom a little alienating and he didn’t like it when I went in there. He’d stand at the doorway, meowing urgently at me, like “WHAT ARE YOU DOING.” To compensate for his alarm, he’d only come into the bedroom to tear it apart. He knocked my jewelry box off the dresser. He attacks the curtains. He tiptoes along the shelf where I have precious things (to me) on display: photos, the china cat my niece Pearl gave me. He bats at things with his paws. He can’t calm down. I’d turn off the light to go to sleep and I’d hear him tiptoeing around, attacking the dresser legs, clawing at the side of the bed, and I’d finally have to get up, usher him out of the room and close the door. He would stand outside the door, meowing in protest. I’d love it if he’d come and curl up with me and sleep next to me but … About 3 weeks ago, I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in his normal places. It’s weird because he’s always there, underfoot, lying next to me, etc. Finally, I found him. We’ve had a breakthrough. He comes into the bedroom on his own for private naps. He now goes to sleep right next to me, pushing his body into my chest, probably imagining I am a water jug.

I sit at my desk in my back study working for hours. Writing for hours. Sitting until my back aches, even with all the pillows and “tush” padding I have on my chair. Hours disappear. I’m feeling tapped out but I have to dig deep for more, because I have to keep going. “Weekends” have no meaning. Every day work has to be done. This has been my reality for months. Since the fall of last year. I’m so exhausted, and it’s been a struggle to find it within me to keep going, especially with the political nightmare right now, as well as my family situation which takes up so much time (time I of course am willing to spend), and also just feeling torn because I want to be with my family all the time and I miss my friends. This too shall pass. It’s crunch time. For a while I worked on the couch, mainly because Frankie was now a factor, and he curls up next to me all day as I work. It’s comforting, his little warm body pressing into my thigh (and the water jug). But I needed to move to the study, just to formalize my inner relationship to my writing, and keep it professional. (Being a writer is weird. You have to play mind games just to keep going.) Frankie saw this as a betrayal. He wandered around the first day I worked in the study, getting into mischief, knocking things off shelves, meowing, constantly pulling my attention. I then moved his cat bed into the study, right below my desk chair. Problem solved. Although I’m sure it’s not entirely okay with him. Maybe I need to put the water jug into his cat bed.

My relationship to being a woman is sometimes rocky. I wouldn’t have it any other way, don’t get me wrong, but gender norms affect us all. I broke free when I was a little tomboy kid and never looked back. Thank you Tatum O’Neal/Kristy McNichol/Jodie Foster for leading the way in the scrappy-tomboy 70s. I mean, this is how I dressed at age 10. Bless my parents for not making me wear a dress. I came of age in the fluid New Wave era, so dressing in suits just wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t the only one. I wore sneakers to my prom. Big whup. But there’s a dark side. Real dark. I’ve been getting into painting – and thus growing – my nails. I bought a whole kit and everything. I spend time on it. The polish is chipped in this picture so I’ll have to fix it. There’s a kind of woman who doesn’t feel like an imposter when she wears nail polish. I’m not one of those women. Reviewing films is actually a form of autobiography. I can’t be more clear than I was here. Feeling like an imposter doesn’t mean I don’t like wearing costumes. I love costumes. I don’t have a “style”. My default style since I was 9 years old is Harriet the Spy meets Peppermint Patty. Anything deviating from that is a costume. When I used to go out all the time I’d be like “okay who should I be tonight? Biker chick? Gibson Girl? Courtney Love? Gena Rowlands?” My favorite hair-cut ever was the buzz cut I got in grad school. I wondered why I had never shaved it all off before. I felt so much like myself. Having long painted nails doesn’t feel like me and maybe that’s why I like it. I look at my hands and go, “Oooh, pretty!!” Like it has nothing to do with me. Small pleasures.

One of the biggest perks of my small apartment is that there is actually room to move stuff around or re-organize the space if I feel I need to. I’ve spoken before about talismans: one of the things I love to do is to surround myself with what I call my talismans: objects that have great meaning to me and connect me to the continuum of my life. The music box (that no longer works) given to me by my grandfather. The shelf of Irish books inherited from my father. The little glass ball with a suspended doohickey inside that my friend Brett gave me: you dangle it over a light and the doohickey inside starts spinning. He got it at a science museum. He’s dead now. Once upon a time he was one of my favorite people on earth. I have so little of him. But I have the talisman and every time I look at it I think of him. My crappy Lucy Maud Montgomery paper backs have been with me since high school / college. I never got new copies. I don’t care for some of her books. I will never read Kilmeny of the Orchard or Pat of Silver Bush again. But I can’t get rid of these talismans, never! I have a collector’s mindset. I want my things to be together (as though they have an interior life). I need them all to be lined up, together. I don’t keep every book, and some books come in and out of my life and there’s no need to keep them with me. But Lucy Maud? I need her to be “around”. I got new shelving for my physical-media (i.e. DVDs). The Criterion Collection was starting to look haphazard, piled up, a mess. So I put together new shelving for it, and it fits on the little wall underneath one of my sharply slanted ceilings. (My apartment is basically in the roof of this little beach house). By making room for this collection, I opened up space in the other shelves, the ones in my little study. All of my children’s books, which I’ve had since I was a little child, have been in the back of my closet since I moved here. But I want them out. They are talismans and even if my eye just floats by the shelf, it gives a sense of well-being to just see them there. So I made the transfer yesterday, piles of books out of the closet into the little empty shelves. I had to organize everything, of course, and alphabetize, and choronologically line it all up. Flashback to the catastrophic move Mitchell and I made from one apartment to another in Chicago: we showed up to move in and the hungover guys in our new apartment hadn’t even started packing up the place. We had to wait around the whole day to move in. My friend Ann Marie was a fellow Lucy Maud obsessive (“I always liked Sophy Sinclair,” she said to me early on in our friendship. Sophy Sinclair is a minor MINOR character in Anne of Windy Poplars, and when Ann pulled HER out by name, I knew we would be friends). She showed up to help with our move, because when you’re in your 20s you help each other move. She set herself the task to organize my books. We are so alike. At one point she sat on the floor surrounded by my stacks of Lucy Maud books. She asked, “So I’m assuming you want each series to go together?” “Yes, please.” “And what about the stand-alone books? Do you want those by publication date?” Slightly ashamed, she knew me so well, I said, “Yes, please.” So that’s also what I think of when I look at my Lucy Maud collection. Yesterday, I sat on the floor and organized the books, lining up the Anne books, the Emily books, the Story Girl books, the “Pat” books, and then I put together the stand-alones, the short story collections, etc., checking the publication date. I’m a leopard. These spots won’t change.

It was arranged by TPTB to screen a movie for me – specifically – and the only people there were 1. me 2. the studio liaison 3. the projectionist. I have had “personal” screenings before, as a member of NYFCC. If I didn’t see something, or missed the screenings or whatever, then TPTB want to do whatever to make it happen, just because every vote counts. I saw The Zone of Interest that way. I couldn’t get to New York, I wasn’t at 500 festivals last year, I just didn’t see it. Clearly it was going to be an important film so TPTB asked me what movie cineplex was near me. I told them. It’s the AMC theatre which has existed from before I was born probably. So this is the power of these studios: they “made a call” and rented one of the smaller theatres just so I could see Zone of Interest. I took a friend. He and I were all alone in one of the smaller theatres. It was surreal. He brought a flask. Which was appreciated. At any rate, I had another one of those this month but at a screening room in New York. My hotel was half a block away. It was extremely last minute: “Hi, can you be in New York tomorrow” (text at 4:30 pm the previous day). This project is nearing its completion and shit is getting BUSY. But there was something beautiful about checking into the hotel 5 hours later that night – I moved FAST – taking a pre-bed shower, sleeping like a BABY – I always do in hotels, I spent the next day working, sitting on the bed, ordering food from my favorite nearby place to come to the hotel. Later, I walked half a block to the screening room where I could finally meet the woman I’d been corresponding with. We emerged later into the cold night and talked about the movie, standing on the sidewalk. The hotel was so close, I could just slip back in. Woke up at 5:45 the next morning to take the early train back. To home. To Frankie.

Reading
The collected works of John Keats. I am VERY familiar with his most famous ones, and a couple – like On Melancholy and On Autumn – are among my favorite poems of all time. They’re like friends.
Karaoke Culture, by Dubravka Ugrešić (happy birthday)
The Bad One, by Erin Tyler: she used to have a blog I adored called The Bunny Blog. I still miss it. Will be writing more about this book.