For Your Scroll
Pill moms, sex stores, and The New York Knicks
I have been living in New York for almost two months now, and I feel like I have returned to myself. Anyone who has experienced low-grade depression for much of their life knows this experience. I feel like I had been experiencing things somewhat blankly, living life like a person slightly dissociating on a carousel ride, someone observing the horses go up and down but maybe not joyfully, maybe instead staring off into the middle distance, the twinkling lights blurred by their unfocused vision. Now I am riding the carousel like my son, grinning so big it seems almost manic. I am a finicky plant. I need more than just water and light to thrive. I need unfettered access to excess, to things! Things like pecan praline lattes and shoppy shops! I need to be surrounded by multiple forms of public transit and by people with silly haircuts and fine line tattoos.
I feel creative again. In a note on my phone, when feeling this immense creative energy course through me, I wrote: “In the bath after door-dashing ice cream from two (2) different local establishments, and I have been scrolling on YouTube shorts, and I will say the way this strange concoction has me feeling more creatively juiced than I’ve ever felt. Too-hot-bath + $45 (with tips + fees) of ice cream + ASMR slime wax cracking videos on YouTube Shorts is an equation that has me ascending the corporeal form. I have plugged into a field of higher consciousness. I am Joan Didion riding a surfboard through a Tron-like cyberspace.” I posted this on Instagram, feeling an urge to put my writing out there!!! I considered starting an Instagram called Bath Thoughts. Several people assumed I was high. My father-in-law asked if I got LSD sprinkles on my ice cream. Sorry, everyone, not high, it’s just that the city is my muse, and I feel the desire to pursue the arts again?! Yes, posting a note on Instagram stories is “pursuing the arts”, alright? Writing in the notes section of my phone is the digital age version of Jane Austen dipping her quill in a pot of ink.
I am working on a few longer-form writing projects, and focusing my attention towards those has made me less inspired to post on Substack, but I still feel this intense need to keep to some sort of publishing schedule, even though this is, objectively, a hobby. My anxiety around this Substack is like I’m on deadline at The Times, that I finally have access to the redacted parts of the Epstein files, and my editor is on my ass to nail the piece. This is all to say today’s post is not really an essay, but more of a long preamble to a series of bullet points and links. Which is what the people probably want more than nuanced takes on motherhood in the digital age!!!
I am considering getting a linen sleep dress to lounge around my apartment in for the summer. The vision is a Victorian romantic lead roaming the halls in the dead of night with a dripping wax candle as her only source of light. Or a Victorian widow sleepwalking through the moors, searching for the ghost of her husband. Imagine this linen sleep dress covered in mud after some sort of mental episode! I could not wear this to bed (imagine all of the gathering of fabric), but I like to have various tiers of comfort, various lounging options. Think of this as a chic muumuu. This dress is the costume for a character whom I like to call: Pill Mom. The other night, my sister-in-law was over late (8:45 PM) and saw Pill Mom come out. She comes out of me when I am overtired and slap-happy and start acting like I’ve crushed Percocet and muscle relaxer into a jello cup, like the mother-in-law in Yesteryear. Lamely, I am mostly sober, just loopy from parenting two children all day. I am thinking this or this.
I am frothing at the mouth to take a trip to Japan, but with the aforementioned toddlers in my care, it’s going to be a minute. To scratch the itch, I went to Japan Village at Industry City in Sunset Park. Interestingly, right next to Japan Village were not one but two surviving adult video stores! I thought those had gone the way of the dodo, but I guess Luddite perverts are alive and well in Brooklyn. Curiosity got the best of me, and I did go into one, and I will say the gentleman tending the store did not seem very “sex-positive.” I feel thankful I did not have to run into any patrons. I took in the sight of two disembodied silicone sex-dolls and high-tailed it out of there real quick, sidestepping my way over to my intended destination. The bottom floor of Japan Village is a food court with different stalls selling things like onigiri, bento boxes, matcha jellys, udon soup, and Oyako donburi. There is also a manga store, a stretch of photobooths, claw machines, origami classes, and so on. Bury me at Japan Village.
The Knicks are in the finals, and obviously, I’m a huge fan. Here’s what I can tell you about the New York Knicks: Jalen Brunson is on the team, as is Karl Anthony Towns. Timothee Chalamet is fangirling! I am getting a lot of fan-edits of Jalen Brunson on my TikTok, including one that sampled the Hamilton song: Look around, look around, how lucky we are to be alive right now! This one I watched multiple times, which maybe tells you more about my appreciation of Lin-Manuel Miranda than it does of the Knicks. Have I devoted any significant portion of my life to Knicks fandom? No. Have I watched a single playoff game in its entirety? No. Do I appreciate the game of basketball? No. I like going to basketball games more than other sporting events because of the fun things they do during ad-breaks, like the t-shirt canon and making ordinary people embarrass themselves trying to make three-point shots. But! I am a huge fan. And I need a retro Knicks sweatshirt. Bad. I have a Knicks hat I wear, and I love it when people start talking to me about it. I’m usually able to pull off two convincing sentences about the team, but if we push it to three sentences, things start to fall apart a bit. Once we get into three-sentence-territory, I have to admit that I’m more in it for the merch. I like to be a part of things, sue me! I would like this, but it is almost three hundred dollars, and I have to look inward before spending that amount of money on a wind-breaker that isn’t Gore-Tex or whatever. Also considering this t-shirt.
My husband and I had our fifth anniversary last week. We had friends and family watching our children all day, and it really was an excellent day. We got foot massages in Park Slope, took the train to the Lower East Side and bopped around. We popped into shops, got pastries at a Taiwanese bakery, took photos in a vintage photobooth, took the train home, and then biked through Prospect Park and got dinner at Sofreh. For our first anniversary, I was pregnant, we booked an Airbnb in the Catskills with a broken air conditioner on an unseasonably hot day, leading us to drive to Albany (a dystopian landscape where people were burning shit on the sidewalk), where we stayed at a Hyatt that was almost fully booked because the Long Island Medium had a sold-out show downtown. People kept assuming we were there to see her, too, and seemed disappointed when we alerted them we were just here for our anniversary. In fairness to them, why would anyone spend their anniversary in Albany? On our way out of the hotel, Cy shattered a massive mirror with a luggage carrier. I cannot imagine the Long Island Medium would have the best news about what that symbolised for our marriage. Luckily, five years in, and our luck has not been as bad as it seemed that day was telling us it would be. We have figured out better ways to spend our anniversaries. I said to him that it was as close to my version of a perfect day as I could imagine. With you there, I clarified, there are other versions of perfect days where you aren’t there. Five years in, and you can really be honest with your partner.
This is a candle! 
These are all candles! 
This is the candle I wanted the most, but my husband gave me a pained look like can we not get the 45 dollar wax rotisserie chicken right now? I would have never planned to burn the candle, but I am curious if you burn it if it smells like chicken. Now I can only wonder. Ok, bye!
It just took three plus years of parenting to return to myself! xoxo
