Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

The view from my terrace.  Do I ever have to say goodbye? It's funny how a language comes back in an instant.  At the end of June, I hopped on a Turkish Airlines flight for Greece, and in that course of life, I found my barely used Turkish coming back as I heard the stewardess talking to each other and passengers.  On that flight, from NYC to Instanbul, I was in the middle seat between two dudes taller than me.  They were both the most polite and kind passengers I've encountered in . . . well, forever.  One insisted on helping me schlep my tote bag to the overhead compartment (my bag of medications, yes . . . and that's embarrassing to have that many prescription drugs for two months).  The other made sure I was left a flight bag and water when I dozed off.  In essence, it was a good combination.  I read, slept, and watched some blah movies.  We all did.   As the flight carried on for nine hours, I responded to the stewardess in Tur...

Two years roundabout, I published a little piece on naked yoga, life, dating, and the dances we all do. The zine is now gone, as these things happen, but I have the rights back. As June tries to swallow me whole, with good things and a swarm of busyness I can't fully comprehend, I thought it would be fitting to re-publish this here.  I'm days away from two months in Greece, with writings, books and plans, and a million other things on the fire. Will I end up naked in Greece? In the shower, certainly. Elsewhere? Who knows. This is me, after all, the perpetual Lifetime Movie in the making.  This piece has remained one of my favorites--aside from a novel I'm hunting for an agent on--and as it's crossed my mind, again and again, I still ponder the simplicity of it all.  It was a perfect evening, one that was meant to last for a moment--as so many relationships and vignettes of life do--but it served a purpose outside of its intent.  It reminds of freedoms and inte...

  These days folks are reflecting on the changes we've embraced from the pandemic.  The losses of life and reality and the things we don't need in our lives are abounding.  Aside from the obvious things of more time and less stress, friendships are certainly at the center of this discourse.  I, like so many others, am no different.  What shatters me is how things woke--for lack of something better--and how the endless exhaustion caused within and after has left me.  As I wake in a reawakening world, and I set my feet back into patterns of semi-regularly, I'm left with new losses that can't be memorialized or precisely quantified.   I didn't hide the fact that ten months ago my sister passed, that eleven months ago a good friend died, or that family and friends died from age, life, or COVID-19.  I thought someone was dead, and I learned that he was merely playing dead for me and living his life happy along the way.  He doesn't understand ...

2020. What can’t be said about it? Well, for one, a sense of happiness. The losses of habits, community, and what we thought we needed are one thing. The loss of those we love is another. The first death happened, and I gasped. I kept it to myself and pressed on. When I told people, a few weeks later, the shock hit them . . . a shock for me per se. Mostly, though, there was no acknowledgment. I lost someone, one I had been seeing. On the westside, I moved uptown, and the space and beauty of an apartment were lost as the world froze. As I unpacked my kitchen and posted jokes in a thread about the ice cream truck outside my new place, one of my oldest and closest friends died. Died while we were jesting about the damned ice cream truck. Things that happened with that have stuck with me and soured me. I’ll never mail the letter I had written his wife when it happened, wishing her love and peace. More so, as she is still friends with my mother—of sorts, I guess—and when thin...

It's been a while, is an understatement.  Then again, those who know me remember last year.  2019 entered with double pneumonia and quarantine for a false TB scare, a month later I broke my foot and double tore the plantar fascia, the hits kept coming, and in December I had surgery to repair the foot and ended the year with influenza. Last year tried my soul, nearly killed me, and I was barely standing when it ended. Damn. I shut myself down, and I compartmentalized to survive, to find a laugh, to capture a sight, and to carry-on.  Then, by late February, I was finally coming out of the ashes, getting life back, moving again. I got back into shoes and some heels, made it back to pole dancing classes, but then the world stopped. COVID-19 hit. Well, it came. Hard. First, the suburbs of Seattle--my first hometown--and then it grew. Now, as the world knows, NYC is the US epicenter, and Queens is the epicenter of the epicenter. I live here. I call this ten-story town...

It's been a while it seems.  February, when I was in the throes of a broken foot and a doubly ruptured plantar fascia.  In all this time, I've thought about writing, longed to, and yet . . . I wrote for other places, I wrote for books, I wrote in my mind. I stopped time, in many ways. 2019 has been brutal to me. It's been an unending barrage of punches to the face and gut. As I type this now, I shiver a little wondering what will happen next. Will the universe serve me another blow? What insult and injury awaits me this week? I hold my breath. In the fires of memory, I spent a large portion of August in Colorado. Per usual, I found myself footing myself up and down mountainsides, and most pointedly, I made it 3/4 of the way down an expert level hike in Black Canyon. I didn't make it all the way as lupus and asthma said hello, more than once, and my sister from another mother and father--Jen--and I agreed that wrecking myself to make it up and down was not an...

The snow falls, daffodils bought last week droop from the mason jar long wilted, dried flowers--from the fall--still stand in another mason jar providing another touch of me in this space as dried bouquets have long intrigued me, the lone orchid stands dying as a reflection of my mood and life as of late, my foot aches in the backdrop, and music no one wants to listen to plays.  Sad songs.  Moods and memories.  In the shower, I notice a new bruise on my shoulder.  I wonder when it came to be, where it came from, and why I didn't see until now.  Did I do that in my sleep? Was it someone on a crowded subway? It's the wrong shoulder for my handbag. I wash my hair and forget about it.  Riddled with aches of Lupus and arthritis I do yoga in my studio.  I can't make it out for a run, as my post-pneumonia lungs are still reminding me of things of I should not do, and pole dance is planned for Friday.  I play mixed songs, of a favorite playlist i...