June 23, 2025
New poem!
Hi all! I’m very, very proud and happy to have a poem out in the latest issue of the Champagne Room journal! It’s called “Coming Back in the Summer,” and it’s available here!
June 10, 2025
A prayer to the future
I can’t guarantee it, but I feel like I’m probably not alone, having spent a lot of my life surrounded by apocalypse and disaster fiction, in having fantasized on some level, at some time, about starting over, societally. About how exciting and on some level hopeful it might be to be a survivor, to be part of a scrappy small community, to be engaged in rebuilding a life from the ground up.
Especially for people who’ve felt very disconnected from or mistreated by the world and society as it is, or ill-served by the structures we have.
I’m not going to be a grandmother at this point, so I won’t be telling the story of this time to my own grandchildren someday, but if I ever do get to talk to kids about what this was like—presuming we make it out the other side of this at all—I’d say, first and foremost, to forget about those fantasies. Don’t romanticize this.
It is in fact not romantic at all to watch society being torn down around you. Even if you’re not personally experiencing any of the worst day to day consequences yet.
Even if you’re still basically getting up and going to work and getting coffee and writing and seeing friends, planning summer travel and going to church and going to brunch and keeping the dishes and laundry done.
It is frightening and traumatizing in a way that is very hard to describe, and very hard to imagine, before you’ve experienced it, to have to watch evil, stupid men setting the future on fire in front of you and laughing.
Because indulgence of fantasy about tearing down the world, of burning it all to the ground and starting over, is a huge aspect of how we got here. We should never, ever have allowed any individual people to amass the kind of wealth or power where they could just do that, could just decide to remake the world in the image of their own adolescent dystopian fantasy, regardless of how many people’s lives they destroyed or upended.
Having just been through a life-altering pandemic and watching our public health and infectious disease defenses be dismantled and not knowing who is going to die now, who you are going to lose this time as a result.
You have absolutely no idea of the depth of grief you’re capable of feeling for federal infrastructure you barely knew existed. For programs you never heard of or thought about before. Because they were part of what quietly, invisibly kept the lives of you and everyone you know going off the rails from preventable disaster, or added value to your community in ways you never had to think about.
Dream about what you want to get to do in a world not falling down around you. In a world with appropriate, sustainable support for human beings, for human life, in a world in which the government isn’t actively working against you. Where there are resources and scaffolding for the best things any of us could dream. About how much you could do in a future that felt safe in a fundamental way.
What do you want all the time in the world to learn or to do?
December 3, 2024
The music getting me through
Something really odd happened to me almost immediately in the aftermath of the presidential election in November, which is that almost all of the music I’d been listening to beforehand became emotionally unlistenable.
It suddenly all just felt like it belonged to the possibilities of a different world, and some kind of curtain had fallen, irrevocably, between the day before and the day after.
Weirdly, the music I suddenly craved, found oddly comforting, or even found possible to listen to, were things that I’d been giving short shrift to in my library, that I’d thought I’d disliked or (with certain exceptions) didn’t feel like I’d had as much of an emotional connection to beforehand….
I made a playlist called “Wednesday.”
Caroline Shaw with the Attacca Quartet, “Entr’acte”
I actually do love this piece, but I’d given much less attention to this album than to Caroline Shaw’s second album with the Attacca Quartet, Evergreen.
The Flaming Lips, “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”
Two nights after the election, I went to see a low-budget, Off-Off-Broadway production of Fahrenheit 451 being performed at a local church, which was scrappy, weird, and delightful. Bradbury adapted the script himself. I heard a girl sitting behind me say that she’d never actually read the book, but she liked the play. This was her first exposure to the story. It was a tiny thing that felt oddly hopeful.
They used this song in the house music playlist.
The White Stripes, “Black Math”
A friend of mine with whom I often flail about gender and disability and music has been trying to get me to listen to the White Stripes for a long time. I was in college when they were huge and even went to a concert (where I didn’t have a good time, for totally unrelated reasons) but never really resonated with their music. But I felt like now might be the time.
I like this one especially; it feels kind of like hearing Led Zeppelin sing a Buddy Holly song.
Radiohead, “Ful Stop”
I also wanted to like this album more than I did when it first came out, but it feels more and more right to this period of time.
“You really messed up everything.”
R.E.M., “Wendell Gee”
R.E.M. is one of the few groups I had on heavy rotation before the election who have somehow managed to bridge the time for me, though Fables of the Reconstruction was never one of my favorite albums.
I saw a video of Michael Stipe performing this song at a Harris/Walz campaign event a few days before the election, and it took on an almost impossible poignancy afterwards.
Anyone else have any old or new music you’ve been finding particularly resonant or sustaining these days?
July 11, 2024
Close of day
Back home from my latest gig. I meant to get more writing done while I was away, but things turned a bit hectic. I’m glad to be back, but among other things, I’ll miss the quality of the summer light in the evenings up there, which has such a specific and slightly saturated quality it’s hard for the camera to even catch. (This was the sunset over a local park on an evening stroll.)
May 20, 2024
Out of town
Well, I have found myself somewhat unexpectedly working out of town until the middle of the summer. Here’s a little photo dump of my first two weeks in Massachusetts, of prep work, hikes, and just around the neighborhood!
April 16, 2024
I hate this city but I love it
I was away this weekend to attend a memorial service in my hometown. I landed early enough on Sunday to go for an evening walk. It’s the time of year when golden hour turns truly gold, and it reminded me just a little bit what I’m doing here in the first place.
November 24, 2023
Pork & butternut squash stew
Getting back into the swing of cooking after a really difficult couple of months that rarely left me with the time to do much but come home and eat cheese or something while I answered e-mail. I’d actually bought boxes of Bagel Bites and some of those pouches of Indian food you just heat up in a pot to pour over rice and so many nights wound up not even having time or bandwidth to do that.
Anyway. I’ve been meaning to try to do a lamb stew with butternut squash in place of the potatoes, but the grocery store had pork, so this is what I did instead!
The pork cubes I seasoned with salt and pepper and left to tenderize for a couple hours, then seasoned with ginger and rosemary, dredged in flower, and browned. Then softened a diced onion, about three cloves of garlic, and half a poblano pepper I had left over from another recipe. Added the pork back in with two cups of apple cider, about two of homemade veggie stock I’d had in the freezer, about half of a cubed butternut squash, a handful of lemon thyme, brought it to a simmer and then put it in the oven at 350º for about an hour.
It came out more or less perfect, and I ate it over mashed red potatoes. (Though in the future, I’d brown the pork for slightly longer, use more poblano pepper, and cook it in the oven for not quite as long. The squash was slightly more tender than I needed it to be.)
August 27, 2023
Anti-inspiration porn
I think most people are familiar at this point with the concept of “inspiration porn,” or the tendency to treat disabled people with disproportionate admiration or praise for accomplishing fairly mundane things or going about their lives with a disability. I’m going to try something here I’m calling, for the moment, “anti-inspiration porn.”
*
This thing happens to me now and again where someone–usually younger than me but sometimes not–will get like really disproportionately admiring or awestruck at stuff I’ve done or stuff I can do. I’m not talking about, like, occasional compliments or telling me something is cool or congratulating me for something that by any measure was actually a huge achievement…but truly disproportionate praise for stuff like the books I’ve read, the things I’ve written, the hiking I’ve done, the places I’ve been, my clothes, my food, the stuff I know, etc. etc. etc. etc., with this edge of “oh, I could never” or “you’re so much cooler than me/your life is so much more impressive than mine…”
(And sometimes part of what I think is going on might be that people are mistaking me for someone closer to their own age, when…the reason I have the experience or knowledge of someone 10-15 years older than they are, is because I am.)
And from the bottom of my heart…
Almost none of this is out of your own reach.
It really isn’t. And absolutely none of it is magic. Admittedly some of it is a lot easier if you don’t have kids. You just have to do stuff. You get more skilled and comfortable at doing stuff the more you do stuff.
Do stuff you want to do. Try stuff you want to try.
Fuck what Yoda says, honestly; there is try.
Do stuff and try stuff and keep doing stuff you like doing.
That’s truly all this is.
*
If you want to be a person who’s read books, you have to read them. If you want to have written stuff, you have to write. If you want to have gone places, you have to get on a train and go there.
If you want to try that restaurant? Try it.
Want to take good pictures? Go out and take pictures.
Want to get better at cooking? Cook.
Wear clothes you like. If you don’t know what you like, figure out what you like. Take a stroll. Go window shopping.
If you want to like poetry? You have to read it. If you want to write it, you have to write it.
There’s no special virtue to any of this–I really am out here just doing stuff and trying stuff.
Pay attention to things you care about. Be willing to be bad at stuff the first time you try. Be willing to do stuff that can seem really tedious. So, like, I do a lot of hand sewing while I watch TV. I listen to baseball or listen to podcasts and cook.
I’m good at the job I do because I have been doing it for over half my life. I have done a lot of making mistakes at it and fucking up at it and wishing I’d handled something better than I did, and just…internalized those lessons and kept doing it.
I’ve had a blog for 13 years because I just kept using it…for writing practice and for things I couldn’t get published somewhere else but mostly just as an outlet so that I do not annoy the people around me with strong opinions they did not ask for constantly. That’s it. That’s all. Thirteen years later, I’ve had a blog for thirteen years.
This person is right about not weeding your parsnips too soon.
My favorite singer/songwriter has written some great posts about making a plan to do things you want to do, and letting envy drive you instead of discourage you. I saw a Tumblr post once about how it’s okay to write STUPIDEST VERSION at the top of your page, just to allow yourself to get words on the page without worrying if they’re good enough, and since I read that, it’s not just how I write; I go through life with STUPIDEST VERSION written across my brain now, pretty much constantly (not when it really counts that I do as good a job as possible, but when I’m trying something for the first time, or trying something just to try it).
It’s a lot of fun, and it’s a great antidote to both inertia and to the kind of anxiety and perfectionism probably drilled into a lot of us as G&T kids with undiagnosed neurological disabilities. Not only do you not have to get something right or do it perfectly the very first time you try, to develop genuine, lasting, talent at something pretty much requires embracing the fact that you will not!
And there are people who are probably going to accuse me of being dismissive or ignorant about disability or financial limitations, but… I am autistic. I suffer from a lot of inertia and anxiety, I am very clumsy, and my job is erratic and often leaves me exhausted. I spend a lot of time frustrated at the amount of time it takes me to do normal things, and what I can’t do that it seems like other people just can. A whole lot of me being this capable at what I’m capable of has involved accepting what I am just flatly not capable of, and therefore not giving undue energy to it.
It is okay to start small.
But just start.
Laura Hersey said “You get proud by practicing,” and unfortunately, you also get good at other shit by practicing.
July 26, 2023
On looking young, and not being Martha Stewart
You know that thing about how every time I identify with a character, and especially with a female one, even for like a second, someone will unfailingly pop up to go “She’s nothing like a real girl, though,” and often in the name of feminism?
It turns out they’ll even do that with actual, real, living women!
And I never for a second thought I was ever going to have to feel this way about…Martha Stewart.
I could not ever have predicted that I’d ever look at Martha Stewart on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and see someone I could be in the world, in any way. A version of a possible future.
Trust me. At no point up until that moment could I have foreseen a future in which I’d even have to construct that sentence.
I have not lived my life, generally speaking, being able to look at swimsuit models and see a version of womanhood that has anything to do with me.
(I never would’ve thought when I was 18 or so that I’d be following Britney Spears or Paris Hilton for their disability rights/anti-institutionalization work, either, but here we are.)
I look really young. It is not always a privilege, when you are not Martha Stewart. People try to baby me at work. People younger than me try to sideline me and treat me like I don’t know what my job is. People have assumed that the birth year I’ve written on a form was a typo or mistake.
It’s not anti-authenticity to look the way I do. It can be hard, and alienating, and I don’t have a choice. Other people already have a hard time with it, and I’m half Martha’s age.
I was out one night after a show I was working on, a few years ago, with the cast and our PSM. We chose a bar, and nobody else even got carded on our way in, but the bouncer grabbed my arm as I tried to follow my friends to pull me backwards and demand my ID. I was in my 30’s.
I’ve been wondering what things could possibly, possibly be like for me at 80, if I keep looking like this. What does it look like for me to keep working? What does it look like for me to retire? At what point do I need to look into getting a fake ID to say I’m younger than I am to avoid accusations of faking my real ID?
Obviously, I don’t have the financial resources of Martha Stewart. In most ways I’m not ever going to be living like Martha Stewart.
But good to know… that’s genuinely how I might look in a swimsuit.
Lately my hair looks really good. I’m enjoying it; it hasn’t been this way for most of my life. But why did it take so long for anyone to cut my hair right, tell me the truth about it, tell me things like how often to wash it (way less often than you think!), how often to condition it, how to find a different shampoo if one wasn’t working well, that not all municipal water supplies are created equal? That it wasn’t just me? That my hair and skin weren’t just bad, that solutions existed and you could buy them in drugstores? That things like getting enough sleep and living somewhere with differently treated tap water might help?
Lately I look at myself in the mirror as I brush my hair and get dressed in the morning, and I like the way my hair looks. And I kind of woke up one day to realize I had the bust size of my dreams. A lot of days I feel and look really good in my clothes.
And sometimes I can only think “why now?” Why did it have to take this long? Why couldn’t I have had this when I was young, when everyone else got to enjoy themselves this way?
I feel like Molly in that scene from the Last Unicorn where she asks “How dare you come to me now? When I’m this?”
Like, what is the point? What good could this possibly do me now? How long could I even possibly get to have this for?
I didn’t ever expect to be someone for whom any possible answer gets dropped on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition one day.
But I saw it and went “….Oh.
“Huh.”
I guess I might still have 40 or 50 years to like how I look in a swimsuit?
I never got to be pretty when I was young. I’m actually not hating the prospect that I might get to be when I’m old. I’m not hating the possibility of it becoming common knowledge that this is a way 80-year-old women can look…purely for the amount of bureaucratic hassle it might save me.
It strikes me also that we know that the bodies of cover models are not, as a general rule, realistic aspirations for most women. I’m not gonna call them inauthentic! But it’s been something generally known, for a long, long time, that maintenance of that body type requires a lot of work and attention in addition to lucky genetics. This is not something that has occasioned remark for quite a while. People with bodies that get on the cover of Sports Illustrated, whether because of their athletic achievement or how they look in a bikini, aren’t common.
As soon as one of them is old, though?
We have to make sure everyone knows that isn’t a real woman’s experience!
So many people just have no idea of other people’s realities, if they lie even slightly outside of their own. And that can calcify itself into essentialism and bigotry really easily. What “real” women’s experiences are and aren’t. What they do or don’t look like. That experiences unfamiliar or invisible to them don’t really exist. They don’t know what to do with us when they encounter us in the real world.
That people with “authentic” women’s experiences of aging don’t look like that when they’re 80.
But I might. And not because I’m insanely privileged, not because of plastic surgery or having a personal trainer or a limitless budget for organic food, but because I have a developmental disability and I work in the dark.
And heck, Martha’s face might still look more like Apo Whang-Od by the time she is, in fact, 106.
I’d be happy still being alive and looking like either of them by that point.
April 16, 2023
A quiet kid was bullied at school for the mere fact of being quiet. There was no -ism or historical legacy he could turn to or seek hope within. There was no subgroup of hate crime legislation he could turn to. There was no lobby group campaigning for the rights, suitable living and labor conditions of quiet people. Unlike other forms of hate crime, there are no statistics accounting for the painful experiences that quiet people have been through. Yet, I feel, the problem is privately acknowledged on a massive scale.
Hamja Ahsan, Shy Radicals
Chavisory's Notebook 