The divine comedy

Many, many years ago, when community management was barely a thing and I was in the vibrating potential of my 20s, I went to New York to provide live social media coverage to a major advertising awards show. The bloggers were all put up in a fine hotel and given access to rare and special people to facilitate our coverage.

But things started going wrong almost immediately before the first day of work. I can't remember all the details. My wireless internet router didn't work, my Macbook Pro failed me and the Genius Bar took it away and said it would be out of commission for several days. I provisionally bought a new computer which they told me I could return after the week was over, minus the return fee, which I chocked off as a rental fee.

I didn't know New York that well, and barely had the funds for these emergencies. All this running-about, trying to get my shit together before the event started, was taxing. But finally it was done, and I got to my hotel and touched the key card to the door. It didn't open.

That is when I pressed my head to the wood and burst into tears.

It happened that, in the room next door, a housekeeper was just coming out. She dashed across to me with a look of alarm and buried my head in her copious bosoms.

"He hurt you," she said with conviction. "I'm so sorry, love, so sorry he hurt you."

I relaxed all my weight into her and kept on crying. It didn't seem important to correct her. In a way, a he did hurt me: Steve Jobs.

I blubbered about my door key and she sorted me out and ushered me into the room, tut-tutting the whole time, tucking me into my bed like a little rolly-polly.

The rest of the week went fine. But thereafter, I had the strong feeling that I was on the hotel's suicide watch. I came home every day to a pyramid of chocolates and handwritten notes from housekeeping. The staff kept calling to "check in." In the midst of all that stress—the week did not turn out so great in the end, though it had nothing to do with my work, nor anything I could have done—I felt loved and held by strangers.

This is how I feel at this moment. I'm standing at the very edge of a private endeavour I've poured months of myself into. It twisted my life around, made things chaotic, and at the same time I kept encountering people—improbable strangers and professionals—who seemed destined to help me succeed. Kisses from the universe.

Now we're nearly at the end, and success does not look like the most likely possibility. The grief sits heavy on my heart. There's one last salvo, then few remaining paths. It will be over, and the machine will simply stop.

Discovering what we truly desire, and why, is a transformative act. We spend so much of our lives being encouraged to measure and temper our desires against the societies and norms we grow up in; to deviate from this single-mindedly, in the pursuit of what we alone want, is a radical thing.

But desire is not equivalent to entitlement. You are owed nothing; the universe is not a meritocracy, and I'm not even convinced that a meritocracy is an ideal. Desire is merely a compass. You follow the direction where your heart beats loud and strong, and that's important; it vitalises you.

I have finally arrived at the place I've struggled with finding for the past three months. I cannot control this outcome. It has nothing to do with me "rising to the occasion" or "meeting the challenges." This is not a gauntlet for the gods. From my vantage point at this moment, life is playful, our time here a series of games. We learn things or don't, we feel things or don't; there are no wrong answers, only experiences and new possibilities, and all that enriches the cosmos. 

It's about us, sure, but we can't forget the macro sense of who we are. My life is about me insofar as that I'm living it, but I extend beyond my body. 

I am kapwa: I am me and you, me and the community, the community and the environment. I extend to my interactions, known or unknown, and cannot be divided from this fertile, murky mess in any meaningful way. So this story can only be about me in that sense. It's me as the cosmos, not me as a small slice of anxious ego wanting a happy ending from a very narrow spectrum of perspective.

I brought up the story of that woman and the hotel because it's on my mind. It feels related to this moment. Over the course of this project I've met with many forms of chaos, but also many people that, for a multitude of reasons, I believed were signs I was on the right track, and a "positive" outcome to this project was meant for me. They were strangers who became friends and they fought for my interests and still do, or spontaneously reassure my fears without me asking them to, or answer questions I didn't know I had, seemingly making the path clearer ahead.

All this time, I thought this was about me getting the right ending. But this isn't about the ending at all. It's specifically about those interactions. All those years ago at that hotel, everything went wrong but I felt held by strangers, cradled by the universe. I feel this now: As the project slowly unravels in front of me, as hope begins to rise softly from her chair and move toward the door, I realise I'm not alone in this room, have never been alone.

I am still held by strangers. I am still cradled by the universe. And this says more about my value to myself, my value to everything, than securing the fucking outcome. Though losing it, to be frank, breaks my heart. 

I can feel it: softening me, making me more malleable, relaxing my muscles with the grief. I bury my head in the copious bosoms of the universe. May I be worthy of the gift of the hands that go on holding me, and moulding me.

It is beautiful to be here. 

Fitful hibernation

I'm on a complicated journey. It's entangled in my feelings about capital and exploitation, and a newfound fear about whether I can continue to sustain myself—to make money, as if from air—as I've done for almost two decades.

I've changed, but the world has also changed.

This past month or so in Paris energised me, as it always does, a wolf mother feeding a prodigal cub. I activated myself for work in ways I haven't in two years. I began new projects, started turning the wheels on a different kind of life that will cost more and demand more of me. I barely slept. 

In those weeks, which slid by like water—and despite the challenges, which were numerous and insane—everything seemed possible. I seemed possible.

But now I'm back in Italy. However long I run the fire—and I've become so good at igniting it, nurturing it, feeding it and cleaning it—upstairs it remains cold as a marble tomb under night air. I can see my breath, even wrapped under covers. It is hard to crawl out of bed, to initiate the day. It is hard to do anything but tend fire.

My mobility, of course, is also not what it is in Paris. As long as I don't have a car here, I'm limited. The nights are longer, solstice having passed. I didn't mark it, but watched the sky go darker earlier. I spend the nights on the phone with banks, trying to sort international transfers, paving the way for new things.

We are in the lee of holiday time. Everything grinds to a halt; I shouldn't fret, that's what this time is for. It's Hekate's time, Crone time: A moment reflected in our days by the auspice of night, in our months through menstruation, and in the year with winter. Like all animals, we slow and recuperate energies for waking time, waking season. Sugar and water will once again rush up the veins of trees.

When I walk across the garden for firewood, I become aware of the stillness of the plants, and of the careful coverings Demo's father placed over the crops and the external faucets. The chickens no longer squawk. Everything is sleeping. Braced against the cold, I do my yoga—stilling my racing heart, trying to locate quiet as I listen to my body. Where are we aching, where is it tight? I refilled my private apothecary, combining oils and plants for muscular pain, nail fungi, lip balm, mouthwash, moisturiser. 

Constant movement but still I feel that anxiety, that all the energy I whipped up in Paris will somehow snuff out beyond reach and beyond reignition. That the hope and possibility I felt were contextual and temporary and now I'm back to stillness, waiting for a new life to begin while uncertain what to chase, or whether to chase.

I oscillate between offering services to people and wondering if there is anything, really, I can or want to offer. In a matter of days I've again lost my sense of fit. I drink peppermint tea mixed with cacao, filling my body with familiarity and comfort. I make porridges, alternating between salty and sweet.

In the night I'm fed by offerings: Thick stews Demo prepared, cool bean-based mixes his father set on the doorstep, one morning when I hadn't yet found the courage to face the chill beyond the sheets. My life here is quiet and almost maddeningly calm, and I think again about how, during our time together in Paris, Demo said it was hard to sleep because my relationship to time is different, I vibrate with stress, it rolls off my skin and permeates space. He's contemplating changes, too, to ease my back and forth swinging.

Eventually I will adjust, like always. I need to find a way to make peace with these dynamics and move forward regardless of where I am, locating equilibrium between these two selves, which can no doubt serve whatever I decide to do in their own way.

"What's happened with your PhD?" my Italian instructor asked pointedly.

"Nothing," I answered. "It's too expensive and I can't take it on right now."

He frowned. We talked a bit about where I could look in France. "France would be easier, and cheaper," he said. I told him about my fear of complex writing in French, even after all these years; he said he wrote his PhD in French while still learning it. "Some things I would say better today, other things not," he said. Then he shared his own anxiety: Next year he'll apply for a fascinating programme in California, one that excites even me, and he worries for his English.

I laughed. "I can help with that," I offered, and he smiled. I know he won't take me up on it but I also know he's glad that card is there. We like each other and share affinities. That I found an Italian instructor as taken by mythology as I am doesn't feel accidental.

I'm going to read, and do some handwriting—things I haven't done in weeks, so taken was I by the tides of Paris and what I've been needing to do there. The fire has finally caught, so I can step away for awhile. It wouldn't be right to say I don't dare to hope; rather, I don't have to hope. Instead I have to wait, slow down and reflect. I will need this rest for what's to come, whatever it is.

I think of the woman who married a bear. It burst into her tent, spiriting her away, locking her in his cave just in time for hibernation. Beside him, she falls into deep slumber; sometimes, in that time out of time, she wakes in the dark, her tummy a sharp hollow, and pokes him sharply. He groans and gives her his paw, from which she licks thick tears of oil. Just enough nourishment to fall back into sleep until spring, when she wakes as his wife.

Pendulaire

14 novembre, 2015.

This is a love story.

My entanglements, my worries, my fears. My swinging back and forth between Friuli Italy and Paris—une vie de pendulaire. Returning to Paris just in time to remember November 13: The day I got married. It rained, Romain went home to take a nap, I bought perfume.

I took my cousins to dinner at Le Depanneur, minutes away from where I now live. Back then, it was on the other side of the city. When it all came crashing down, we caught the last Uber back home, with a driver who panicked midway and tried to kick us out of the car. "Je me suis mariée aujourd'hui et il ne répond pas au telephone !" I shouted. My voice cracked. He was silent the rest of the way.

The days that followed. Romain’s early-morning grocery shopping. Trying to get up to run, sitting in the dark in the hallway for an eternity, playing with my laces. Something in me had slowed and become fearful. Cousin Dave messaging: “Time to come home, lol?” 

The recoil I felt.

How a guy who raped me was the only person I wanted to talk to, the only person who struck the right chord. It was the most peaceful and forgiving conversation we’d had, and our last.

I recently considered leaving Paris for good. Sustaining this life divided is tough. I feel like giving up. And every time I go back and forth, it’s not only me who has to adjust; it’s Demo, too. It stretches our elasticity, wears us thin even as it makes us burn for each other again.

But then I came home, back to my city, after midnight. Paris was wet and slick from recent rain. The pavements were shiny black and the air smelled clean. (Also: cigarettes, and in the metro, piss.) The winter lights string stars across the city, glimmering between buildings. I can’t see Orion here, I can’t see Gemini, I can’t see the moon. But I can see the cobblestones under my feet, and the red sky that first seduced me.

I poured out water and wine, let it bleed into the crevices of the concrete. Paris kissed me back.

She is my oldest and most enduring love. She took me as I am, made space for me; I started a company here, married and divorced and cried, made friends that became family because I had none here, and needed  that. As we get older, I see how important these ties are. How many secrets have been accumulated and honoured in the girl group, how many struggles divulged over whisky and cigar smoke in the guy group. We hold each other close, witness one another’s lives. We need each other in a way that is visceral.

What a strange thing, to have fallen in love with a man who loves me exactly as I am—Demo of the autumn eyes—and whose first declaration to me, witnessed by the mulberry trees of Tricesimo, was “I’m going to die on this land.” What a Hermean thing: A heart divided, inevitably, between loyalty to a land and loyalty to a man as bound to his earth as if it were part of his own body.

It’s beautiful and sad. It’s sublime: To experience love here, to experience love there, forever laced with an ache. Humans are slow data delivery devices; we are bound by space and time.

So I have to hold them both, carefully, at once. But to touch either of them, I swing: back and forth, back and forth, whatever the cost. Pendulaire. It's a good destiny. It's one whose cost hurts, but this is also how I know it matters.

A pointless story

When I was about five years old, we lived in a small apartment on a street called Sierra Road, which I always remember as a mysteriously contoured woman with flowing hair. 

It had stairs. I placed a plastic fish on the floor, then went upstairs, sat with my legs swinging through the bannister directly over the fish, and released the end of my jumprope. I did this for several afternoons, waiting patiently to catch the fish.

My father walked by downstairs. I heard him laugh. There was some bustling, then a violent tug on the end of my line. I looked down. Nobody was there. I pulled up my jumprope. My fish was tied to the end of it.

For a long time I was convinced that my experiment worked and I had effectively caught the fish on account of my clear understanding of how fish are caught, nourished by patient men on television. I told my parents; my mom congratulated me warmly and my father just laughed for reasons I didn't get, but in any case I didn't care.

Time went by. I realised I could never have "caught" the plastic fish, it being inert and me having no bait, so I decided it was magic. "God," my mom said. This seemed viable. Someone once pushed me into a fountain and my mother said it was the devil, so it tracked. Later that same day I found a squashed banana I had forgotten about in my backpack, further proof that the devil existed, and thus the divine spectrum upon which he resides.

More time went by. I mostly forgot about this event, and maybe things would have ended there—with me thinking this was divine intervention. Then something made me remember it again, I don't know what. It was only then, years later, that I saw it must have been my dad tampering with the line, because he doesn't respect my the scientific method. It also explained his mysterious laughter and the violence of the tug (he never quite got the measure of his own strength relative to ours).

The end.

Things I'm trying right now

I just need to put this list somewhere, and here's as good a place as any. 

Things I'm trying right now:

• Seed cycling. This is meant to naturally balance hormones at different moments in the menstrual month, and accompanies other food choices that should be favoured to reinforce this, but the seed bits are easiest to remember. I'm getting this from a book called Eat with the Moon, which is mostly a cookbook but explains seed cycling in a For Dummies kinda way that's sufficient to kick me off.
• Managing my hair in an Ayurvedic manner. Okay, that's a big way to convey the small lazy thing I'm doing. I'm just massaging my head more, and also moisturising with coconut oil for just a few hours once a week instead of overnight, to avoid what the lady I'm following on Instagram calls "abuse." It feels like it's working. Basically I'm just trying to stress my hair out less.
• Putting my shed hair outside, for the birds. I've been doing this for awhile. It feels like a subversion. The thought that my hair is helping make nests, or even provide nutrients to natural space (if it finds any), is a good way of remembering that my existence mattered today. It's a vote for a different world.
• Kundalini yoga? Sometimes. Not lately. 

Things that are harder to do right now:

• Barefoot walking. I started this in Devon, but now I'm back in Paris and it's complicated.
• The professional gig stuff I've spent the last 16 years doing. I'm different now. I'm not sure how that happened, but it did, and I'm glad. I can't do this anymore. 

Things I should be doing, come on Angela, you're at gunpoint:

• Working.
• Completing my family project.
• Re-reading The Homeric Hymns and Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (both for school, not that either of those books require a justification to reread).
• Prepping my dissertation proposal, which is due NEXT WEEK ANGELA COME ON
• Prepping my PhD proposal, which still requires a lot of back-and-forth before it's turned in END OF MONTH ANGELA COME ON
• Advocating better for my own creativity. I'm going to buy watercolour paints today. That counts, right? Like, in a kindergarten way. Not to hate on watercolours; I meant in the sense that it's a way of appeasing this need to advocate better for my own creativity without actually doing the things I know I should be doing to advocate for it. But I'll get over this. I have to, otherwise it'll be gig work all the way down. 

My profession has been good to me. More than good. If I hadn't changed, I'd be happy to go on doing it into infinity. But I've spent the last few years reconnecting with desire—initially, letting my desires dilettante around. Then nurturing the ones that stuck, until a few grew strong and sharp like knives, and cut my spirit out of my skin. I realised she's strong and wild, and has a lot of desires. It's a compass I can follow the rest of my life. And I have much terrain to catch up on, those years I mostly kept her in a box under Persephone's throne.

For awhile I had to demonstrate that her function in my life was not to support me in the market; I would love her, and prioritise her, anyway. But now I've initiated into a different relationship with her. Now I want to marry her. 

I'm making this sound more woo-woo than it is in practice, which isn't to say it isn't still woo-woo:

• Part of prioritising my spirit is understanding that cleaning my space, including bed-making—something I've had no fucks available for in the past—is a way of administering to the altar of myself. 
• As a person who now lives between three places that speak three different languages and, in fact, host three different Angelas, maintaining stable rituals between all three, however small, is work I'm taking very seriously.
• My days are no longer organised around what I do for work. They're organised around relationships—to myself, to my space, which is alive and in constant conversation with my body; to the people around me; to past and future. I've spent most of my life shirking all the big-deal stuff to run on the treadmill of an abusive capitalist system that's incentivised to separate me from my desires and keep me working until I die. The Nap Ministry is right: Rest is revolution, and that's my priority now.

To clarify, I love what I do for work. It's my relationship to it, or rather my relationship to the market's treatment of it, that became corrosive. I've also expanded my sense of what work is. The work that's important in my life is a lot bigger than what I do for money. And it is increasingly my suspicion that what I do for money is not the most important thing I have to do in most moments. 

The latter discovery isn't something our market is designed to value in any meaningful way. And that's a problem, because market value has somehow become married to our intrinsic value in the larger social world.

So I'm uncoupling this stuff. I suspect a lot of people think this is a midlife crisis of some kind. That's okay. We're all trying to get a grip on different things. There's room for all of it.

"If you love Jesus..."

 I’ve been thinking about those chain letters from the early days of the internet.

“If you love Jesus, don’t be ashamed to proclaim it! Send this to 10 people…”

I used to take those letters really seriously. I had all these thoughts, like, Wow, I really do feel hesitant to send this around. What differentiates me from Judas, or Thomas, or Peter? For awhile it felt brave to forward them. I was proving something to myself—that I wasn’t afraid who knew I was a Christian. I’d say it loud and proud when called upon! All that kind of nonsense.

Those chain letters migrated into social networks alongside us. I still get them from time to time, in new variations, from religious aunties, usually, in the Philippines. They slide into my DMs, utterly disinterested in me, strangers really, unless they’ve got a holiday GIF or a chain letter to bomb me with. I started removing them from my contacts. Blood and shared names don’t mean relationship.

The internet still functions like in the early days, but faster and more efficiently now. Social media amplifies our every writ thought and emotion, finding traction for them like a magical loudspeaker, locating more sympathetic (or antipathetic) readers. Lately I’ve been feeling pressure to say something about myself—reveal a position, make some kind of stand. About vaccination, about magic, about animism, about science and technology, about my work, about the latest race killing, about Asians supporting Black brothers and sisters, about what people get wrong…

And there are new pressures now, memes that ominously read, “We are taking note of your silence.”

I get it now, about the Jesus chain letters. Sharing them with ten people doesn’t mean you’d be more likely to hide a Jewish family during the Third Reich. It doesn’t mean you recycle, or that you’d reach out to help someone having trouble in the street. It didn’t mean you pray, refuse to masturbate, take communion. 

Really, it was a pressure game: if we push this button inside you, do you comply? Will you go on amplifying beside us? Are you in or out?

That’s what so many of these hot takes feel like on the internet. It really doesn’t matter what you say, or how often you say it; everyone is saying too much, thinking it’s important in ways most would be hard-pressed to explain if asked. No one is listening much. They’re all just waiting their turn to show whose side they’re on—for you, against you, seeking to educate you. We are just itching to clarify our positions on the broader stage to other actors on stages.

But this isn’t the move. It isn’t really a move at all. It’s just forwarding the chain letter.

It matters more to know when to speak and when to act, and to speak and act when it counts. Sometimes we’re going to fuck up, to misfire, to fail to read the nuances of the moment. It’s all right. It’s part of the messiness of being human.

It’s not that I don’t think the hot takes matter. Sometimes they’re good therapy and expiation. Sometimes you learn something, find the words for something you’ve suspected and felt, but didn’t have time to fully think through. Some of that stuff needs to be said, and needs to be read.

Sometimes they just seem designed to make a few targeted individuals feel bad about something. Mobile, viral Puritanism.

I don’t think the idea of hot takes matters as much as anybody thinks they do (assuming anyone does). Sometimes even clever, thoughtful people get addicted to them, convinced it’s part of the service they provide to the body public; another product, then, to reliably get out the door on time.

Most of the time, I don’t think anybody needs me to weigh in on anything. This is not a lack of confidence, or some kind of judgment call. It’s also a way to conserve my energy, to save it for what I think matters, and when it does. I often find that the private moments matter, between me and one or two other people. You have time, then, and space, to exchange on the nuances of what you’re saying, to think it through, to change your mind, to change someone else’s, to add to each other’s inner constellations.

The larger stage, the broadcast platform? Less so.

It's helpful to remember when I believed in the Jesus chain letters—oh my God, I need to share this or I’m just as bad as those fallible disciples! It was an immediate reflexive reaction to what I thought was a moment of conviction, but what was actually a transparent and childish social pressure play. The chain letters had no meaning. They delivered no value. They won no souls to Jesus. Their entire function was to go on being passed on, ostensibly until every person on earth had seen them and meaningfully interrogated themselves (or deleted them, thereby dooming them to hell, I suppose, where Judas would be waiting to weep with them).

These days when I feel a hot conviction to say something—and truly, it’s constant, practically a plague—I stop and ask myself what my motivations are. Quite often I find that the motivation is something to the effect of, “To show where I stand!” 

And that’s when I know I’m 13 again, knee-jerk reacting to a chain letter that’s just gotten subtler, more insidious.

Such a Lonely Word

In Paris, the weather is strange. For a moment it is sunny, then it will rain torrentially, like now. It feels like an expression of inner climate: Murky, uncertain, unstable.

We still live under a curfew. But stores will open soon. Restaurant terraces are being painted, preparing for public use after over a year of stagnancy. Next month, tourists will be welcomed back into the country and into our neighbourhoods, though most adults probably won't be vaccinated until deep into summer, maybe fall. 

Whose shitty plan was this? If this had been my job, I'd be fired. I'd be arrested.

I scheduled my vaccines. By July 15 I'll be clear. Still, I will probably miss my school gathering in England in June, not that the vaccination would have mattered; France is an amber country, so I would've still required a test to enter, a quarantine, then testing twice a week for the duration of the trip. It doesn't feel worth it. But maybe it doesn't feel worth it because I'm not interested in doing anything.

What are you doing this summer?

There is no more Cannes four times a year, no more family vacations with my in-laws. All my friends have spread out, into the countryside or back to their own lands. There is nowhere, really, to go, not with any meaningful clarity. I cannot go to Sark to play in the wild.

I have trouble sleeping at night. I can't seem to quit smoking. I shuttle from bed to computer to kitchen to computer to kitchen to bed; I can feel the furrows under my feet, in this small space, which is a haven but also so tightly contained that it seems impossible that complete cycles of life are occurring inside it. I work, I edit, I interact with people on screens, I occasionally get good feedback and new gigs.

The work and the life I designed were all my choice and I like all the people I interact and collaborate with. But I am listless, avoidant. I want to sleep. I feel trapped. Yet there is also nothing I'm interested in doing outside anymore—outside, where 90% of my life used to take place, even without cross-country travel. I have walked the length of Paris multiple times, at multiple hours of day or night, my legs hard and firm. I did not worry much about my weight, or the interesting new wrinkles blossoming around my nose and forehead, now so visible in all the Zoom calls.

My face never used to do that before.

But now my life is mostly this tiny home, in this tiny neighbourhood, which will soon flood with tourism.

The Americans are texting and messaging. They are making plans to visit; am I available? I find it overwhelming in a way I can't describe. They don't know what it's been like here, seem vaguely puzzled when I talk about how we haven't had bars or restaurants for over a year, we've gone out with special hall passes and are still living under a lockdown—still, even now. There is a part of me that feels an obligation to rise to the occasion. Another part of me doesn't know how to live in this world anymore.

The aggressiveness of the vaccine situation scares me—how the US, UK and Israel are treating it as a kind of silver bullet, "Okay, get vaccinated, RETURN TO NORMAL." All this pressure trickling down onto people whose pay has been sliced, whose lives became more uncertain. Commercial rents went up from the first lockdown onward. Normal was already difficult for most people at the best of times; now the upward slope back to that is steeper, more treacherous. 

What is normal? 

I have barely been able to process the changes I underwent, a menagerie of dramatic transitions. It will be years yet before we even understand the psychic or physical impact of the larger collective arc, this big strange time we all lived through and braced ourselves against together. Not only the pandemic but the rage. The lies, the confusion, the fights for power, dominance, money, land, right of life, control.

I'm so tired all the time. Is it my body needing rest, or is it depression? Do I give in or withhold?

A part of me thinks I should sit with these feelings: work with the murkiness, reconstruct my solitude. We are not good at things that don't fall on a binary, at not being pushed toward a touchpoint or a goal. I do not want anything anymore. Maybe that, too, is a depression signal. On the other hand, what a strange metric: When did we decide we needed to want things as evidence that we are okay? There is something insidious nested inside that idea, and I don't trust it—something opposite from the state of simply being. 

Do I give in or withhold?

I am not not engaging. I do the work, one small thing at a time; respond to emails, take calls, engage in some hollow simulation of negotiations. I spent five days in Brittany with some of my best friends, witnessed how they have become parents, relished in the beautiful trappings of our lived-in adulthood, how multiple grownups in a space just know how to do things to keep a community going: setting tables, chopping vegetables, flying kites and reading stories with the kids, loading and unloading dishwashers. Then, at night, we can still drink too much wine and laugh until we cry.

I came home and had a cracked tooth filled at the dentist, scheduled another appointment. I cleaned my teeth and let them lecture me about smoking.

"I should quit smoking," I sighed.

"I should also quit smoking," my dentist sighed.

"The trouble is, I like to smoke," I said.

"Me too!" He laughed.

I finished a book, began another. Started a series and gave it my full attention. Returned emails. 

I was relieved to be back home, in my own bed, accosted by my apartment's sweet smell, as if some version of me had still been there, filling the space and lighting incense or switching on diffusers or spraying cedar into closets and patchouli on sheets, even though there was plenty of evidence of my absence: A bouquet of mint, wilted and dead, beside the still-flourishing orchid. The olives whose water grew mould spores. The tomatoes gone soft, too tender to cut clean. On Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, people are still talking, conversations in the air waiting for me to return to them. I wrote riddles, published other people's work, played with the internet.

There is a kind of electric live aroma coming out of the trashcan, which was too empty to change before leaving, but I should have anyway. All kinds of strange stuff is mixed in there—organic, wet, pulpy. Stuff that would be happy in a compost, but we don't have one of those, so instead they rot in bags, of use to no one, the life they could sustain unrealised, annulled. Somewhere in the world, those bags are just piling up, smoking from the inside.

I itched to write on the train, and wrote a little. Back at my desk, or belly-down in my bed, I did not want to write anymore. I feel, instead, an immense loneliness, larger than being alone. I have a letter to send that I still haven't sent.

The life I designed, in this context, feels like a holding pattern. I don't know how to make it not feel like that anymore.

Always, Never

"Always and Never are countries that don't exist," someone said recently, probably in a podcast. And yet they are the countries that so often compose the language of early love. I will always. I will never. Always, never, always, never. So too for love at the end of its rope. You always, you never. I always, I never... 

A swing of promise, then reproach. 

Not a Medical Doctor

Me: I've been a little stressed. It's better now, though. I'm fine.

Cousin Kyle Who Just Had a Baby: Angel, you need to come back to the Bay. And when you come, I want you to do something. I want you to spend a few days with us, and just... just allow the baby to work his magic on you.

Me: Are you seriously talking about your weeb like he's a dream vacation? Like, a few days barefoot on the beach and I'll relax, except 'the beach' is the baby smell wafting from his tiny skull?

CKWJHaB: YES! No regrets. You're gonna see. You'll see for yourself. Also, when we get off the phone, I'll send pictures of the cartoon face he made while taking HIS FIRST BATH.

(He really did. It was a cartoony face. My cousin is high on the best drug in the universe—the drug of progeny. I love it, partly because I love him, but also sociologically.)

Compliments Between Grown Women

Me: You're so good with herbs and pickling and experimenting with all kinds of culinary things. You would make the best witch.

Her: You would make the best witch! I would only be part of your coven.

Me: I know nothing about herbs! I'd make a horrible witch.

Her: You would work with electricity. I see it. I feel it.

Destiny's Traps

Him: Would you go to Mars if asked?

Me: Yes.

Him: You couldn’t come back.

Me: I guess it depends when in my life...

Him: Tomorrow. You have to leave tomorrow.

Me: Yes. Still yes.

Him: So you’d leave me. For Mars.

Me: No! You could come!

Him: No, I don’t have an invitation.

Me: Then of course I would stay for you.

Him: No. No, you wouldn’t.

Me: Why would you entrap me like this?!! Where is this even coming from?

Him: It doesn’t matter. But now I know you’d leave me from one day to the next for something dumb. 

Revolutions

I started this blog in 2005 with a secret plan, the kind you hatch in college when everything is possible and all the world is new: I'd curate some cool advertising and marketing-related stuff happening on big sites already doing that, then punt myself to editors and ask them to hire me.

Ad blogs were plentiful, growing fat at that stage where they're rapidly commodifying and there are plenty of big players, but shakeout and consolidation hasn't happened yet. I still had a personal Xanga, back when private blogs for just a few people were still something that existed.

My plan worked: I became a writer, then, in due course, an editor, and I dedicated my pen to the places that paid me, leaving Live and Uncensored to languish. With time this site evolved again—mostly into a place where I curated cool ad stuff and talked about my movements.

Then the sector changed, as sectors do. The aforementioned shakeout happened and I was laid off, right as I'd arrived in Paris, convinced I was stable enough to unhook from my built-in ecosystem and try making a whole new life from scratch. Ha! the universe said. I see you testing the ocean, you silly small-town fish. Meet the fucking sharks.

"You're still young; you can always move back in with your parents," an editor told me as he dropped the axe and I watched the sun set through the window of my 500 square-foot Paris apartment. I hadn't even emptied the boxes yet.

When Adrants and MarketingVOX cut me loose, I didn't know it then but the timing was right. On the MarketingVOX side I'd been asked to get rid of all my journalists and found myself alone, writing up to 16 articles a day, with few vacations and little downtime. Every time I asked, I got the same answer: "Lots of writers want your job." They weren't wrong, but I was also too young to understand the extent of what was being asked of me. I was too young not to fear my obsolescence.

So when the blog universe collapsed in the wake of the subprime crisis, I was so tired that I didn't ever want to write again, and I got lucky: In France, Adrants and MarketingVOX had pretty good brand equity. Contagious, and all the cooler publications that would follow, were still young and new. So French publications, ad agencies and startups reached out and said, "Hey, we feel like we know you; let us help."

Our sector, which is historically fickle, saved me and I will never forget it.

I went into strategy and still wrote, but less—maybe a handful of articles a week, for a smattering of advertising and tech publications for French brands putting feelers out to the English-speaking market.

Live and Uncensored slid into stasis.

At the same time all this was happening, personal blogging also underwent an evolution. Xanga fell apart, and even Blogger—where this blog still lives—lost equity to sites like Posterous and Tumblr. Medium rose up with its cool-hunter cachet, and suddenly there didn't seem to be a point in blogging about one's life unless it was in the interest of advancing the narrow themes of your Personal Brand.

I wrote less and less and less here, finding occasional solace in a minor concept called Inklust, which I made just because I wanted to be able to share quotes from books I was reading.

As websites slid out of style, aggregator sites where you could store all your social and work links in a sassy format—like flavors.me and the about.me—rose to glory, and I redirected angelanatividad.com from here to a flavors.me page. There it remained for at least a handful of years, driving people to a short bio where they could quickly jump to my Facebook, my LinkedIn, my articles, whatever they wanted.

In the meantime, Live and Uncensored got its own URL, where it remained in the quiet, gathering random hits from hopeful porn-seekers. I'd come back a few times a year, when I had a quote to share or something new to say (usually related to some world tragedy currently in progress).

Much has happened since. I started writing for Adweek and launched my own agency, Hurrah. I wrote a book, Generation Creation, with two of my best friends in the world. I began applying for naturalisation in France. I learned how to make pancakes. I quit smoking for a week.

Last week I went away on a writers retreat and the world changed again: Flavors.me is shuttering, and About.me probably isn't far behind. It turns out we are as interested in aggregator sites as we are in websites.

So I've redirected angelanatividad.com back here, where it belongs and where perhaps it should have been pointing all along. More than a decade of my life passed and this little corner of the internet has been the only place I could return to. It bore witness as we reinvented ourselves with each new morning in the arms race of social relevance. And while I went off and tried setting roots elsewhere, at places that became other things, Live and Uncensored remains—the site of my crash-landings and rebirths.

I'd like to promise to write more consistently here, as I've done many times in 12 or so years, but experience says that isn't likely. What I do know is that I'll keep coming back.

In the face of relentless change, that's something, isn't it?

Chapter 33

It's day one of a new year and a new chapter in the story of our lives. Since I'm turning 33 in June, I've decided to call this Chapter 33.

So, 2016. All things considered—and despite the untimely deaths of Bowie, Prince and Professor Snape, among others—it was packed with good surprises:

• Generation Creation got published (and I do hope you'll read it, and like it)
• Hurrah got offices, five employees and closed the year off with 3 awesome long-term clients
• I appeared in my first panel in French!
• I made my own soap
• I KonMari'd and it totally changed my life
• I learned to knit, and closed out the year with a big-ass blanket
• I went to concerts!
• I traveled—a lot. Not far, but I discovered new places

And the traveling and the friending and the magic looks like it'll continue into the new year. January is already packed with new work, trips and visits.

This is chapter 33 of my life. If I'm lucky, I get around 85 of these. You can't waste a whole chapter, or multiple chapters, on things or people you don't like when you could be doing otherwise. There just aren't enough of them.

So let's raise our glasses to the next chapter. The pages are virgin and resplendent in white. We can pick how we mark them. I want to assume that choice every day, even if there's failure and sadness. It's all building to something that I hope will be beautiful, and there's no beauty without strain or real stakes.

Now: off to write a "thankfulness" email to an old new friend in response to her "thankfulness" text, in part because I know she hates email.

A Potentially Incomplete List of Things I Keep Lists Of

1. Tasks, organised by type (freelance, personal life, money owed, money loaned, etc. Long-term projects get their own special separate lists)
2. Shopping list
3. Things to pack for a given trip
4. Talking points for given events... or just to have a handle on what I want to say if I have my hand raised
5. Things I'd like to watch, and who referred them
6. Things I might read, and who referred them
7. Books I've read—the longest list running in terms of seniority. I think it's about six years old?
8. Shows I'm currently watching and have completed, plus notes on who referred them and how I generally feel about them
9. Articles or stories I'd like to write
10. Articles or stories written on a given day, and the word count (20.000 words at MIP alone!)
11. People I hang out with (full name, current job title, date, location, what we discussed, photo)
12. Things I may like to buy—a list I often forget about, but that's by design. When I open the list again, sometimes years later, I buy the thing if I still want it and the timing is right. Or I delete it, because it's otherwise taking up room on the list
13. Potentially cool book ideas
14. Potentially cool business ideas
15. Patterns I'd like to knit—possibly my youngest list
16. Things to be grateful for—not often updated, but generally updated in times of duress. It's a good exercise
17. People to buy presents for, and/or presents to buy people, and why 

I think that's everything, but I can't really be sure. Written out like this, it seems a bit manic. But the funny thing about lists is that they become religions, planets around which I orbit, gravitational anchors to keep from spinning into chaos.

It's possible that I do this because, like marketing people frenetically counting Likes, it's an easy way to mark progress. And maybe at some point, these small demarcations of a life will yield a deeper thing I'm trying to keep track of but can't quite put a finger on. 

That's about all I have to say about lists.

Inklust #21: Fake Eyelashes + Alligator Tears

Decorous weeping was another of those arts I never mastered, like putting on false eyelashes.

—Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Thinking About Ms. R

The ad above was made by RPA to advertise the Honda Accord, with help from the imagination of a four-year-old named Ethan, who transforms the Honda into a rocket to save a princess from a dragon.

The first feminist treatise I ever heard was when my fourth-grade teacher started ranting at us about how maybe the Mushroom Princess in "Super Mario" doesn't want to be saved. I can't remember what brought this on. In my recollection, we all stared wide-eyed while she spat and sputtered about the lame fictional heroics of our favourite Italian plumbers. A girl sitting next to me leaned into my ear and whispered, "I don't think she knows about Bowser."

I am probably a little older now than my teacher was then, and I get what she was trying to convey. The message would perhaps have had the chance to stick if she didn't do other weird things, like try teaching us about mass and density with an example about when she can, and cannot, fit into her boyfriend's pants.

Too soon, Ms. R, too soon.

Anyway, all this is to say that very little has changed, apart from that more little girls are perhaps more willing to say "I don't want to be a princess" and "I don't need to be saved." But there are still little boys who want to save princesses from dragons, and there are still advertising agencies who still imagine the default princess as a curly-haired blonde in a pink prom dress.

Great job, everybody, great job.

Inklust #20: That is Your Role

When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.

—The Night Circus, Erin Morganstern 

Image via.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Today I left a book on the métro.

Even after six years in France, it's hard to shake off the metrics that used to drive me: Start a company. Get rich in five years. Vacations waste time. Weigh every moment against your net worth.

A good friend who's enjoyed more success than I have, lived longer than I have, and is now fighting a much tougher battle than I am, recently told me that money, power and stuff make no difference in the scheme of things. What he cares about now is leaving ripples of happiness among the people he loves—making a difference to them.

And it isn't just an insular thing. Even in his work, he seeks to be a force for good.

I was moved by this. But knowing he's fundamentally right is insufficient to unteach years of conditioning.

I try to be a force for good in my work: To lift people up, share credit, see opportunities to help. But today I thought, What if every day I did a small, enriching thing? Something that improves the lot of a stranger and doesn't just improve my work environment or fuel my socnets?

So today I left a book on the train. I read it, I liked it, and I happened to be carrying it with me. It seems small and insignificant but I'm weird about books; I have always needed to own them. I like touching the spines on my shelf. They benchmark my life. They're my great treasures.

One less thing for me, one more enriching thing for somebody else. It's a baby step. But it's a reminder of how little I need and how much I can give. Doing it once is insufficient; it's one of those things worth relearning every day.

I think that's what makes us better—the act of taking a lesson and manifesting it physically, as often as possible, until it simply becomes nature: A thing that ripples into everything we do. To change, it's important to undo even the small things that make us who we've been. It's only old skin.

My hope is that with time and the aggregation of these small acts, my metrics will change. My vision of success will change. And I'll no longer feel the compulsion to gauge how well I'm doing by how much of anything I have—not money or posterity or the capacity to disrupt. It will have been enough to be a force for good—to have been curious, to have learnt about other people and enriched the place where I was, and to have passed those pieces along.

I'm just a word in a very small chapter in the very short story of humanity—a story the universe, in its vastness and indifference, will not even realise occurred. Life is an accident that will end in a flutter.

It's enough to have been here.

Inklust #18: Unending Kiss

Today, the nostalgia for pre-Internet life is pervasive. What was it like back then, wandering around in an eternally unknowing state, scrounging for bits of information? Is what we get out of a performance today any different now than it was then? No, it’s the same thing: the need for transcendence, or maybe just a distraction—a day at the beach, a trip to the mountains—from humdrum life, boredom, pain, loneliness. Maybe that’s all performance ever was, really. An unending kiss—that’s all we ever wanted to feel when we paid money to hear someone play.

—Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

Some music I fall in love with at first hearing, a phenomenon limited to what I've been exposed to culturally and have a natural preference for. Much of the music I love isn't stuff I grew up with. I discovered them by accident—but rarely by ear.

Most came from books.

I wouldn't have known how to understand, how to appreciate, the full body of The Beatles' work without reading Here, There and Everywhere by Geoff Emerick, one of two Beatles books I picked up and started perusing while bored at a friend's house as a teenager. I would never have found Sonic Youth if not for Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band, which I bought on impulse after reading her interview in The Happy Reader. She has so much soul. And were it not for Ben Fong-Torres, I would never have discovered Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground. These would have all been terrible losses.

Years ago I read a study that found only 6% of self-proclaimed music enthusiasts care about the words in the music they listen to. I am part of that 6%, and in the worst way—it's often words that get me to music in the first place. I cannot separate a melody from the people, their story, their words. The place where my unending kiss begins is inextricably tied to that great totem of pre-internet life: In a book.

Photo Credit: [carlo cravero] via Compfight cc



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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Writer

Throes of Creation, Leonid Pasternak

I am working on a book, or rather trying to.

When I was little I used to write a lot. On our old computer (“Four gigs of ROM!” my mother cried, “You couldn’t fill that your whole life!”), I zapped out over two feet of floppy discs, filling them with stories about children who time-travel and a girl who saves Mars. They slid easily into the hundreds of pages, until my mother threw her hands up in frustration and shouted, “Just kill them!”

My mother yells a lot.

I never could finish properly, but it hardly mattered. What mattered was that I wrote every single goddamn day. And because I’d developed that habit, the words came like water when I sat down to do the work. It flowed. It was good.

I’ve been trying to find my way back to that river ever since, but when you’re older, it’s harder. You start questioning your work. You become convinced you didn’t research enough, haven’t experienced enough to produce living people from ink and breathe life into their two-dimensional bodies, like God blowing substance into clay.

(Remember when it was so easy? Remember when you were twelve and all you had to do was ask your Iranian friend, “Hey, what’s a common Iranian girl’s name?”, and then you could write an Iranian character that satisfied you enough? Knowing the name gave her mystery, an accent, the dark eyes that described to you her dark past. No more.)

Then you become convinced that you can’t write because you don’t have the right tools. So you buy books about writing. So many books! Stacks, and you’ve picked up maybe one, because the voices of other writers in your head, giving you their subjective “tips”, irks you.

Then notebooks—one after the other, sometimes you fill them, sometimes you don’t, but all you learn from that is to get fickle about paper quality. I can only write in a Leuchtturm1917, it’s the smoothest. Also it’s German, and the Germans think of nice touches like page numbers and table of contents sections. Can’t live without those again.

Then it’s all about the pen: Pilot fine-tips first, then Uni-Ball Jetstreams, then you graduate to a smooth maroon Sheaffer fountain pen made specifically for left-handed people. A delightful instrument. Too bad it inks you all over your hand, and inside your handbag, and it’s hell writing on cards with because you’re always smearing, smearing.

A typewriter, maybe? The best writers rode hard, lugged their Olympia SMs or their Hermes 3000s everywhere, slugged whiskey, changed ink cartridges around and carried reams and reams of paper. Threw out and rewrote the ones they didn’t like, or maybe just made typos on.

So much ribbon and paper and ink. And to produce what?

A short story once in awhile, when you take a weekend writer’s workshop, once or twice a year. Then the fragments of something longer, something that betrays you and flies off to finish itself with a better, faster writer. The bitch. Then you manage to produce one thing in a fit of rage one sleepless night—but it’s too personal, you can’t let anyone read that ever, because then you’ll betray everyone you know and also everyone will learn how much you love yourself. How very much.

So one day in March, on one of these soul-chases, I picked up Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Writing’s like a marathon, he says. It’s solitary. It requires discipline. It’s a long game. And I took up running, because I thought it would help me write.

But then my knee started to hurt, so I bought stability shoes and knee wraps. And I realised I only had one sportsbra, so I bought more, and since I was on Nike.com anyway, and there was a sale, I bought a whole runner’s wardrobe: Everything needed for fall, spring, summer, winter.

Even the padded breathable socks. Such good socks! You can get two runs out of them before throwing them into the wash.

I ran for about six months, then the pain came back into my leg, so I bought another pair of shoes. Then that pair gave out, so I went to a podologist and got specially-made soles, ones that ensure my shoes last longer because these bad-boys will hold out.

In short, I became a runner. And in that time—one year of buyer’s hijinks, of gathering the perfect accoutrements and watching runners’ YouTube videos!—I wrote plenty of words, lots of fragments of things, but still never finished anything. I can’t get past my own head. I can’t see past the callous, tiresome but sexy world of advertising, can’t see past the neuroses that keep me comparing myself to another account director or strategist or copywriter. Maybe one day when I’m retired and fuck-you rich, I think. But not today. I don’t deserve it yet.

In the meantime, I keep running, keep taking the weekend workshops once a year, keep buying Leuchtturm1917 notebooks, keep refilling the ink in my bleedy-ass Sheaffer pen. I drink whisky, I drink tea, I smoke. I read voraciously, in French and English, biographies and science books and literature—so much literature! I reread, to see how the books “work”. And I blog. About advertising. Small, pithy blogs about ad campaigns. People laugh, sometimes.

All the conditions are right.

So I wait.