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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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US Out of Everywhere

2/28/26 Ships blowing their fog horns as they passed under the Verrazano and into the Narrows woke me before dawn. Connor’s focused stare, willing me to feed him to make up for the dinner he rejected the night before, probably contributed. The thing about Trump being president, is that you wake up thinking, what now? This morning it’s another disaster – the US joining with Israel to bomb Iran. I don’t support the oppressive Iranian regime, but US intervention anywhere is rarely effective and it’s pretty clear that Trump’s agenda in this, whether it be oil, power, greed or distracting the populace has nothing to do with the people of Iran. This is the 7th country he’s bombed since his 2nd term began. He treats our military powers like a toddler with a toy, apparently oblivious to the potential consequences. So far an elementary school has been bombed killing dozens of little girls, three American soldiers have been killed, five soldiers are seriously injured, and the conflict is s...
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Home at last

I’m off today, but I am still thinking about yesterday’s new client, a trans 20 year old FIT student whose uncle decided to throw her down a flight of stairs. She fled in just her socks, walking through the snow to her friend’s house, where she can stay for a week. She told me that things had not been comfortable at home for a long time, but she was hoping she could get through school and then leave. I’m also thinking about the discussion at Rise and Resist last night about FBI agents showing up at the homes of members (and former members) of several environmental orgs including XR and Sunrise. We talked about what to do in such a situation – don’t open the door, ask if they have a warrant (which they often don’t), don’t talk to them, call Ron Kuby who has offered to represent any of us in that situation. Today Kuby also offered to represent the snowball-throwers – the NYPD and their supporters are all outraged because some officers got pelted by snowballs during a big post-blizz...
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