Everybody’s Trying Not To Disappear
I’m sitting in the waiting room of an oral surgeon’s office in south Brooklyn (the real south Brooklyn, like if you look at a map you’d think “yes, that is the southern part”) waiting for my husband to get a cracked tooth pulled after a weekend of pain and an afternoon of bouncing between dentists’ offices. I’m sick—I can’t fly home without catching something—and I haven’t showered in four days. I am the shining jewel of this waiting room.
Maybe it’s a fitting image for the end of 2014, a year everyone hated, but it doesn’t seem so bad. In the larger picture of my life this is a manageable crisis, and honestly—embarrassingly—I had a pretty good year.
2014 was my first year in New York, after taking a job and moving in three weeks flat in November 2013. It’s a “day job,” in that it’s not a writing job, but I like it and I’m good at it and it brought me here. I also promised myself that I would try, somehow, to carve out time to write more and maybe do some comedy, and I’ve been mostly successful at that. I’m not prolific, but I don’t mind. Here’s what I wrote in 2014, in roughly chronological order:
Today in Tabs (here and here and here)
Rusty Foster once joked on Twitter that he should have guest-tab Fridays. I threatened to submit a newsletter full of pictures of spiders, so naturally he asked me to be the first guest-tabber. I’ve guest-tabbed five times this year, on anywhere from 7 days to 3 hours notice. It’s probably not very noble, but it’s fun being a Civil War picnicker overlooking the content wars.
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Hot Felons”
Everyone on Twitter wouldn’t shut up about the hot felon, and I DMed Jess Zimmerman in response to a thoughtful tweet with my own thoughts as someone with a brother in prison. She convinced me to write an essay and a few hours later we published it.
“Suicide Prevention Day”
I wrote this for myself.
“Scary Stories to Tell Dads in the Dark”
My first idea was “Scary Stories to tell MRAs in the Dark,” but the punchline was always “and the woman was a self-actualized and complex human beeeeeing.” I loved writing this. Growing up, I constantly wrote short stories (and eventually fanfiction, of course), but this was my first short-story-ish thing since high school. I hope I’ll publish more fiction next year.
“Reader’s Guide: Philip K. Dick”
Philip K. Dick has been one of my favorite authors since I started reading him at 13. I was so excited that great editor and human Kevin Nguyen gave me the opportunity to write about him for the Oyster Review.
That’s it! A lil baby year for a lil baby woman freelancer. I finish grad school in May, so hopefully things pick up in the back half of next year, but for now, I’ll stay in the sewer and release writing on a quarterly basis. Thank you to everyone who’s read anything I wrote, everyone who’s edited me, John and the cats for being my designated first-draft reviewers, and everyone who’s been a friend.
