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One more fucking thing

On my way to get yet another MRI, this time with contrast, I encounter Karlo, one of my middle eastern neighbors. “Someone broke into my apartment yesterday,” he says .“My window overlooks the roof of a garage and they pretended to be construction workers and hopped the fence and got on the roof of the garage. From there, they somehow opened my locked double-hung window, they didn’t even break the glass They took a bunch of cash. We called the police and they came and took a report and dusted for fingerprints. They told us not to keep much cash in the house. They looked at the building’s cameras and there were two guys, one was wearing a white sweater.” “That sounds hard to keep clean,” I say, “If you are climbing on roofs and jumping fences.” “They had their faces covered,” he says. “The fingerprints might be more useful,” I say. “If they have ever been arrested before, their fingerprints will be in the system”. When I get to Union Square, I am waiting with a much old...
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Breast Cancer Family

I’m doctored out. The super specialization of American medical training means that you can wind up with a snowballing number of doctors and appointments as each one sends you to somebody else. Today is Dr Park, the breast surgeon who took over for Dr Cait who actually did my surgery a couple of years ago, slicing what looked like the smile of a smiley face along the bottom of my left nipple so skillfully that now you would not know anything had happened. This is a major contrast to the procedure I had in 2003 at St Vincent’s, where Dr Axelrod, a well-known breast surgeon, decided to operate without anesthesia because my liver enzymes were high on the day of the procedure. They had me lie with my arms outstretched like jesus on the cross, and tied them down, and then covered my eyes with something that resembled a pillowcase so I couldn’t see. She used local pain medication, but I could still feel the pulling and the prodding, and then sharp pain when she ventured beyond ...
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Erik's Swearing In

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Today was Erik Bottcher’s swearing in as State Senator. There’s a cold wind blowing and it’s a little hard to be enthusiastic about another one of these events in a single weekend, but Erik has volunteered in the kitchen at New Alt, and watched the clients perform at Craft Your Truth, and we have a thing where I text him upcoming demos and he shows up when he can. I put on another dress, my ankles freezing with every wintery gust, and head to the Museum of Natural History. For this event we were let in through the staff entrance on 77th St. and walked through an exhibit about American Indians to get to the auditorium. Looking at the displays as I passed, I thought about the controversy that is raging about the provenance of these and so many other artifacts, and whether they should be returned to the societies they were taken from. The program hadn’t started yet, so Erik and I shared a quick laugh about how he was chatting so much during Brad’s event he missed himself being in...
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Cat hair and Conspiracy Theories

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Today Brad Hoylman-Sigal was being sworn in at Alice Tully Hall, so I pulled out a sweater dress and headed into Manhattan on my day off. Despite my best efforts at dodging the cats before I left, they had managed to get some hairs on my dress and I was busy brushing them off when an older middle eastern man asked me where I was going. When I explained that it was the swearing in of the Manhattan Borough President, he said "so you're involved in politics." I explained that this is not really about politocs exactly, that I run a nonprofit and that relationships with local politicians are important both for fundraisinng and for help with other things. "Do you think Trump thinks of all this himself?" he asks. "No," I reply. "I think ideas are being fed to him." "Who do you think is telling him what to do?" he asks. "I think it's a combination," I say. "There are the people who wrote Project 2026, which i...
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Grey day

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March 12th, 2026 The warm, sunny weather that brought New Yorkers- people, dogs and squirrels- out dashing around for the past couple of days gave way to an intense thunderstorm last night. Amid the flashes of lightning and pouring rain, I went into the second bedroom to fill up April and Sapphire’s bowls and heard a loud dripping sound. Searching the room, I spotted drip marks and followed them up to a crack in the ceiling, with big drops welling and then falling, pulled down by their own weight. I put a pan under the drip to catch the water and went to bed. Even as I gathered Smokey - who has been clingy since his outdoor adventure - into my arms I was thinking, now the roof is leaking. One more fucking thing. The next day is so damp and persistently grey that I feel like I have woken up in London. My joints- knees, shoulders, wrists and hands- hurt so much I wish I could spend the day like Smokey, who curls up so close to the heater than sometimes the room smells like hot- but n...
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Conversation on the way to the MS Center

Every few years, one doctor or another decides that my latest neurological symptoms look enough like MS that they send me back to Dr K, the MS specialist. Then we go through a bunch of rigamarole involving reflex hammers and vibrations and testing sensation by poking me with something sharp. She orders a brain MRI, and then she decides that it doesn’t meet the criteria for MS and sets me loose for a few more years until the pattern repeats again. This time it’s my spine surgeon who, after deciding that the random tingling that keeps happening in half my face is not related to the hardware he put in my neck, has sent me to back to Dr K. So I was making my way up to the Mt Sinai MS Center on E 98th in a pretty grumpy mood because this feels like a waste of time and also I really really don’t want to add MS to my list of medical crap. Suddenly, my crabby thoughts about neurology were interrupted by a young man who said, “I was born in Lebanon but I came here when I was one ...
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From Chippendale's to the Javitz Center

I was not paying much attention to the older black man with the graying beard sitting next to me on the train with a book in his lap until he slid closer to me to let a young woman sit down on his other side. There wasn’t enough room for her friend to sit down too, but there was an empty seat on the other side of the pole next to me so I stood up and took that seat, the man shifted over and the other young woman sat down. By then he was smiling broadly, a striking smile. “I just went to the comedy club with a friend I haven’t seen in 30 years he told me,” pulling up a photo of himself posing with three women against a Harlem Comedy Club backdrop. Pointing out one he said, “she used to work at the Javitz Center with me, but she left in 1991, and those are her friends.” The photo blinked off the screen and was replaced by his screen saver, a photo of himself, much younger, posing with two women for a Newport cigarette ad. The glasses and grey beard were gone, but it was the same broad ...
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