lash egg
the purpose of a system is what it does
I’d blame it on my ankle, but I’d stopped writing long before the fracture. I keep journaling a few lines in a 5-year book before bed, taking my little notes in my phone, writing diary entries in the margins of my day planner that I imagine transferring to something else someday. That thought is embarrassing. Everything feels embarrassing.
I am kinder to myself as a drunk.
I have a low tolerance for grandiosity and posturing. I see it everywhere, puffed-up personal narratives and condescending, self-evident commentary and glib opinions.
At a summer camp, we were told this was the way God looked at us when we sinned: like puppies licking up our own vomit.
If it’s meant to be protective, it’s not working. My defensive obfuscations. My pouty self-regard. Faux-intellectualism badly masking the fear that I missed something essential while everyone else was in school — as if they sat fifth graders down in health class and presented a list of rules and principles no one thought to fill me in on.
Your goal in those time periods is to help your dog comfortably and safely acclimate to new stimuli and their environment! You can do that by minding these 7 tips:
Don't force your dog to engage with things that scare them
Let them explore at their own pace
Reward your dog often
Keep training sessions short and sweet
Stay calm and confident during training
Take counterconditioning training slowly
Make socialization a fun experience
I scrolled past an image on the internet I couldn’t immediately understand. It looked like a small yellow potato, cut in half. On the inside, a strange pale whirl. The woman had found it in her hen’s nest. In the lower part of the caption she had inserted an edit: she had a degree in biology, and she had kept chickens for many years. She did not understand why people felt the need to be so argumentative and cruel.
A lash egg is the expression of a type of bacterial infection of the duct where the eggs come from. I did not research further. At risk of facing the repercussions of ignorance she did, I don’t want to know anymore. Imagine a baby latching to the breast, and receiving blood instead of milk.
If you’re thirsty it’s already too late.
When I got out of my first meeting at my new remote job, I found my dog Mary chewing on a disposable razor. She’d broken the head from the stem, and the flat of the blades (three, with a moisturizing strip) had deep indentations in them from her teeth.
I hardboiled six eggs yesterday. I made egg salad with two and deviled the rest. I served them to my boyfriend with raw kale splashed with lemon juice. The kale — he’d brought it as an offering from the farmer’s market I couldn’t attend on crutches. I knew raw kale would be a bitch to chew, but the dense stems had a smokey flavor I wasn’t expecting. He ate most of the eggs and a stalk and a half. He had just taken Mary running.
Earlier that day we had created an audition tape for a reality show. It’s not often you sit side by side with someone and pitch your unique selling point. We’d traveled often, and solved challenges with humor and grace. We had the passion and the drive and believed we could win. Is that enough of a button on it at the end? He said. We struck a pose back to back, and I pressed my hands together; a forgotten middle-school era instinct, accidentally extending both thumbs instead of my index fingers. There was a lot of makeup over the eye Mary had bruised when I peered in her mouth, looking for blood.
My grandma also got some mileage out of her looks in her youth, once stealing her handsome young philosophy professor from his wife of only 6 months. He died at 88, after almost 60 years of marriage. My grandmother said she’d never date again. ‘I’ve always preferred older men.’ She told me one breakfast. ‘But there are no older men left.‘
I’m scrolling. A girl is videoing herself stabbing something with a kitchen knife, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing. Between flashes of the blade, a red line appears opening the side of one nostril and bisecting her brow bone. A dark drop falls on the table before she realizes what she’s done and she opens her mouth towards the camera. I’m scrolling.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
I’m not well. I don’t know how to even begin to be. Everything is so overwhelming, even the thought of sorting laundry, or doing the dishes, even taking a bath paralyzes me with the fear of failure or injury.
The tech said that if my splint gets wet my flesh will rot. And I saw the picture of the bones in my ankle — I don’t want to scramble them any worse than they already are. I lurch across the room on one foot like a broken toy, arms reaching or else bracing my breasts, foot folded in like a flamingo’s. My dog is shut away in the front of the house, probably hurting it somehow. To Mary, all underwear is edible. A cat persistently calls from upstairs.
In 6th grade, when I had joined the rest of the society, my health class teacher asked us to score our self-esteem on a scale from 1-10. When it came around to me I said 4, too green to lie. She paused and said, ‘Well, I like your shirt!’ It was the XL tie-dye t-shirt I allowed myself to wear twice a week because it hid my boobs best. It was always cold in public school. No one seems to think about self-esteem anymore.
I used to talk to myself in the laundry room, the woman I thought I’d be in 20 years. She was a young woman in a smart haircut and heels, who would listen kindly, slightly impatiently, secure that she was loved and belonged in this life.
‘I quit drinking for a year before, so I know I can do it. This year the challenge is to not spend the whole time complaining about it.’
I smiled over my coffee, expecting my friend Jen to take me up it. She surprised me: ‘Oh come now. We can’t be expected to let go of all of our vices.’
One of my most annoying traits is I think I know things I can’t. On a long dry road on summer in college, when my friend offered me the nozzle of her camelback, she told me I must bite down on the nipple to suck the water out. I tried, but a shock ran through me so intense that it popped out of my mouth. In another run-in with a portable water apparatus several years later I had the same experience. We had been taking drugs that first day, but this time I was at a therapeutic retreat, clean as a whistle, and my internal feedback system sensed the same danger. It ran through me like lightning.
However, I also imagine I remember what it was like the be a man, making a game of flushing the toilet with the end of my stream of piss. I feel a vague awe around heavy machinery. I’m only a little gay, but it’s easy for me to see women as objects, like a painter closing one eye to 2-dimensionalize a landscape.
Sometimes I believe I can read other people’s thoughts, and that I know things about strangers just from looking at them.
After Mary chewed the razor, I knelt in front of her and forced open her mouth. I saw no blood, just darkness, and then there was the feeling of her teeth closing on my own mouth and cheek. The bruise under my right eye makes me look especially tired, but on the other hand, I have an injectionless fat upper lip. It’s a pleasure to smooth lipstick over it.
A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping.
When I was younger, all the beauty I perceived was third-hand; I was jealously possessive of my tenuous identifications with elements of culture and style, trying them on like plumage. The imagined tastes of whoever I was targeting were the closest I came to the shallows I would experience later, outside of the spell of love.
The potential you see in other people isn’t real. it’s a projection of what you would do in their place.
I planned on succeeding with the rest of them, like we always have. Back when we could count on the men to, if not fill our need for love and loving, be the shadow that blotted out our ambition while blocking the rain off of our babies’ heads.
tears of grief tears of change onion tears laughing tears
Where my constellations of house pets make up externalizations of me, a child seems like a reduction — a carving out, that then leaves. That feeling when you’ve forgotten what you went looking for, but go on looking, convinced you’ll know it when you see it.
Make peace with not having control.
Allow yourself grace for imperfections.
depression: living in the past
anxiety: living in the future
Depression is like the perverse twin of (similarly toxic) nostalgia: a retroactive anhedonia which obliterates all memories of comfort and pleasure. Anxiety is projection into the future based on the same flawed logic. There’s a superiority felt by people in this state; they think they are canny enough to know something the others, in blissful ignorance, don’t. Instead, they are missing a huge range of information, are suffering a blindness, like the blindness in a moment of intense pain. They say in the present there is peace, but only in the absence of pain. In the present, suffering, there is nothing.
After Mary bit me, I laid in bed and cried and cried. She came to visit several times, jumping onto the bed to try to make me play. I pushed her away brusquely, hoping she could see how much she had hurt me. When she was finally still and I looked up, her black eyes showed nothing, just the fixed look of vague concern she was born with, markings around her eyes like the shadows in a skull.
I wanted to tell the woman I knew it all already. I wasn’t a card-carrying friend of Bill, but I was an alcoholic. I knew about naltrexone, the Sinclair method, the 12 steps. I knew about DTs and alcohol metabolites and what it does to your face. I knew not to worry; that cravings typically only last around 19-22 minutes. Only on occasion, 22 days, or 22 lifetimes, one after another, trying to finally get it right. Meanwhile, the bottle sweats like a teen.
a body angered to the ground, alive and well and tangled in parachutes, in the attic of an apartment in London
bedtime hoops:
what was your favorite part of the day?
what was the worst part of the day?
do you have any questions about your day?
did you show love or kindness today?
I’ve somehow applied a Barbara Walters blur to everything perceived through my left eye. I can even see it in the mirror, sitting on my pupil. There’s a dot of some cosmetic stuck to my new contact lens, fresh out of the plastic packaging this morning. It’s probably my tigergrass complexion balancer, a claylike suspension that is green until warmed by your body heat enough to turn beige which the creators, naturally, assumed would be the skin color of the ones on Instagram trying to combat redness with industrial-grade suspensions served in tiny glass canisters like baby food cups.
If skin picking didn’t exist I would have invented it.
I keep being served an ad for a meal kit service. It shows a steaming potato being cut, and melted cheese gushes out of it. At first, I always think it’s the lash egg. I don’t remember how to turn this suggestion off. I don’t bother to learn.
She trains me in the pleasure one feels neatly completing a handwritten form. Her voice is low and monotone with a bored southern drawl, but her laugh is delightful. She laughs like a child. A butterfly of sweat between her shoulder blades.
What will I do once I become the person I thought you were?