So on a regular basis, I invade my husband’s Twitter mentions and tell him to stop whatever he’s doing and come suck face with me. Lately, he’s been working on instructional videos for his new company. While he’s great on camera (look, he just is! It’s not even me being biased because I think he’s a smokeshow!), actually doing the A/V work is pretty uncharted territory for him, so he gets on Twitter to ask people for advice on how things look, and what he should do differently. A lot of the answers are really helpful and supportive.

I also have things to say.

Lower the camera and take off shirt and maybe pants.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) May 6, 2021

okay but why are you still wearing a shirt, i thought i made myself clear

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 27, 2021

Anyway, apparently I’ve been doing stuff like this for a while?

I just found a picture of you as a naked toddler holding a bucket over your winky.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) November 4, 2016

Honestly, I’m just kind of a nightmare of a wife.

YOU CAN REPORT IT FOR ASSMENT.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) May 6, 2021

Anyway, today I did it again.

TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) June 3, 2021

The thing about Rand is that while he’s pretty good at playing the straight-man in this carnival ride of wedded whimsical fuckery, every now and then I push a little too far and … well … he’ll call me on my bluff.

pic.twitter.com/J0lw5yrU6z

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) June 3, 2021

Touché, Mr. Fishkin. Though I’d like to think we’re all winners here: him, for having that chest, me, for getting to appreciate it on the regular, and the good people of Twitter, who get to see it for the first time.

Now if you’ll excuse me …

sneaking into your office right now to make out

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) June 3, 2021

When our friend arrived at our door, Rand looked at him and said, “Hey, guess what? We’re all fully vaccinated.” They’d gotten their second shots on the same day, and the CDC recommended waiting time for antibodies to build up had elapsed. They hugged on my porch, and I stared like I was watching a documentary, something beautiful I was removed from, before I realized I didn’t have to be simply an observer. I threw myself into the hug as well. We stood there on the porch, and another friend who is staying with us (another once-commonplace event made impossible, etc., etc.) saw the exchange and said, casually, “Oh, are we group hugging?” throwing her arms around us all.

My local grocery store had signs saying that fully vaccinated customers didn’t need to wear masks, based on the recommendation of the CDC. We all still wore them anyway. A few days later, they took down those signs, and replaced them with ones saying, basically, “Nevermind, keep wearing the masks, please, the CDC has no idea what’s going on.” For me, nothing had changed. I even had a dream about it, the old cliché about going to school naked, updated for the pandemic age: I was indoors, in public, without a mask. I kept apologizing to everyone, woke up relieved it wasn’t real. A few days later a maskless woman at the Goodwill berated me for wearing plastic gloves to pick through the shelves (something I do whenever I shop there, not because of Covid, but because I once found what I hope was cat poop on a sweater). The CDC ping-pongs back and forth. No one seems to exactly know what to do. Are we wearing masks? Are we hugging? Is it safe to eat indoors? Is this the end or just a lull? Why didn’t I tell that woman to shut her stupid face?

Later in the week, we went out to dinner again, this time eating indoors for the first time since February of last year. Our friends met us outside, and the hug we fell into was effortless, so that I didn’t even realize it at first. For a second, I’d forgotten to be amazed by this foreign thing, of stepping into the sacred six feet of space around one another.

Someone asked how I was doing, and in the aftermath of my second shot, I told them I could not stop crying. “Just openly weeping at everything,” I said. “I don’t really understand it.”

“Oh, me too,” they replied. “I read something that said it’s not PTSD we’re dealing with, because PTSD is for things that have passed. And this is something that we’re still in.”

There is the truth of it. The world is opening up, or parts of it are, at least – slowly, cracking open like a window left shut too long. The wind rushes in, that flash of fresh air, but I’m still hesitant to take a breath. I’m told this feeling is “social re-entry anxiety.” (We already have a name for it, for this nervousness about stepping back into the world.) More people are set to die globally from the pandemic in 2021 than 2020. Things are far from over, and trauma, as Ed Yong notes in The Atlantic, is lingering and unpredictable. Experts (in my mind’s eye, a group people in lab coats, against a dark and infinite background, holding clipboards) say that this wasn’t it. That the real big one is coming. I try to stop my imagination from going to dark places. I’ve read Station Eleven too many times.

“These next three weeks of summer are going to be great, until the variant hits,” a friend teases, and we all laugh and wince simultaneously. It hits too close to the fear that stops us from enjoying these moments thoroughly: we’re afraid of everything being snatched away again.

I try to be in the moment, but it’s hard to know exactly what this moment is. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t take away the fact that there was a tunnel to begin with. When you’re in it, your only focus is on getting through to the other side, more or less intact. It’s only afterwards, blinking in the light, that you have a second to turn around and think, well … that was awful. That’s where I am now: looking back at the dark we’ve just stepped out of, trying to acclimate to the brightness, and wondering if – and how long- it will last.

I have heard that some people need a clean workspace in order to write – the unproven hypothesis that it promotes productivity. So I wince a little when I think of my office, a place where Rand will occasionally poke his head through the door and ask, “What is happening in here?” His tone is curious rather than judgmental. The room is like a science project, an anomaly when compared to the rest of our home.

“I’M GOOD AT OTHER THINGS,” I yell by way of reply. The bacchanalia of papers and dust and empty mugs on my desk is oddly comforting. I’ve hit organizational rock-bottom. I can scribble on pieces of paper, I can pile mail on top of more stacks of mail. I can shuffle Post-It notes that have lost their adhesive quality and are now just squares of brightly colored paper, moving them around like a Vegas card dealer. The only place to go from here is up.

I am an organized person. My mother says I inherited this quality from my father. She claims that fastidiousness can’t be taught; you either have it or you don’t. I’m inclined to disagree, because her argument removes personal responsibility from the equation. Order is something I work at, something I’ve learned. But I see her point – she loses her keys so regularly I’m not sure she ever had them. She once misplaced a piece of paper the instant I handed it to her, making it vanish like a magician performing a parlor trick. It follows that I must have been born with a sense of order, because I sure as heck didn’t learn it from her.

I’ve been procrastinating on my book for a while. Not making the progress I hope for, feeling uninspired by, well – gestures broadly at everything. No one wants to hear about it – the only thing worse than a self-satisfied writer is a self-loathing one. When the only thing standing in your way is you, you don’t get to complain. Sitting in front of my computer, the page count stagnant, I decided to tackle other projects. I hung curtains and cleaned out my closet. I threw out bags of items. Had I kept the things that sparked joy? I wasn’t sure. Mostly, I had just sparked existential dread. I felt like a failure.

My office was the last hold out, my desk the final boss. There are no before photos. The shame is too great. I shredded documents like I was an mid-level exec in a Ponzi scheme. I found stickers from the Washington State Book Awards that I was supposed to put on copies of my memoir, published years ago. I found the actual paper copy of my James Beard Award, and wondered if maybe I wasn’t a failure. Maybe I just needed to clean out my office more. (This moment of confidence was short-lived.)

I went through all the tiny scraps of paper I saved, ones which at the time I could not throw out. I always thought there might be an answer on them, something that would crack my manuscript wide open, fill in all my plot holes, save my protagonist.

I … I saved this for some reason.

“Filled in all my plot holes.” #headdesk

The realization that organizing my office wasn’t the answer to my writer’s block hits me like a wave. I gently rest my head on my newly cleaned desk. There is plenty of room to do this now. My office is neat and tidy. It is not a reflection of the innerworkings of my brain, except in this respect: it feels a little too empty, and I don’t know what to do next.

P.S. – Yes, I have a Chris Pine calendar because my friends are awesome and he is the best Chris, after Lloyd.

The CDC has said that vaccinated people can gather indoors with other vaccinated people! We can hang out inside with our friends! Like we used to! Like humans have for centuries, and also like a bunch of raccoons probably do if you leave the door to a cabin in the woods open. We can be raccoons! 

The full list is here. In the spirit of this, and based on no factual evidence, I’ve started making declarations about other things the CDC has recommended, because I can do that. Because the CDC says if you are fully vaccinated, you can make up things that the CDC has said.

Me after shot #1, or as it is technically called, a half-vaxxiccino.

The CDC has said if you are vaccinated, you do not need to wear a mask if you are outdoors in an uncrowded venue.

This probably means you won’t need to wear a mask to the CDC’s summer theater in the park production of Grease. Ticket sales have not been good.

The CDC would like to note that sales are probably bad because the entire concept of Grease is dated and sexist and the idea of changing for a guy is really awful and also some of the songs are super rapey. The CDC does not feel like it’s being listened to when it recommended Grease 2 as an alternative.

Grease 2, the CDC would like to note, is super feminist and about loving someone for who they are, not who they could be, and it’s all about the girl choosing the right guy, and it’s got some bangers in it.

The CDC recommends you watch the 1982 film version of Grease 2 right now. You can do so with unvaccinated people without wearing a mask provided they are from the same household and understand that Grease 2 is far superior to Grease.

Fine, the CDC will stop talking about Grease 2.

The CDC says fully vaccinated people can gather indoors without wearing a mask or keeping six feet apart, unless you are at an Eyes Wide Shut type party, at which point you will probably need to wear a mask, but it’s not like those cover your mouth. Having your mouth free seems to be an important part of an EWS party. Admittedly, the CDC hasn’t seen that movie, but the CDC did just google “Eyes Wide Shut Masks” and now Joan in IT probably has some questions about the CDC’s search history.

The CDC recommends Joan mind her own damn business.

Okay, the CDC maybe needs to chill out. The CDC has been under a lot of pressure these last few years. The CDC guarantees that you haven’t thought about the CDC this much in your life. Like, a handful of people made bad choices and suddenly the CDC is everywhere, and it’s thrilling and exhausting. It’s probably how Pauly Shore felt in the 90s. The CDC wonders if it needs a catchphrase.

I’m the Center for Disease Control, Babyyyyy!

No. The CDC does not recommend that. Nevermind. The CDC’s schtick is more of along the line of dad-jokes. If your dad were a giant governmental institution dedicated to promoting health and quality of life by preventing and controlling disease. (Sigh. This is why the CDC is no good at parties. Which you should not have be having right now with unvaccinated people from several households.)

It’s not that the CDC can’t be funny!

The CDC says hop on one foot.

The CDC says raise one hand.

The CDC says raise your other hand.

The CDC says hop faster.

Okay, this is ridiculous, you can put your arms down … Ah, ah, ahhhhh, the CDC didn’t say!

(Now go wash those hands for the time it takes you to sing the “Happy Birthday” song twice.)

The CDC recommends blocking your uncle on Facebook who says that the vaccine is going to put a tracking chip in your blood. The CDC would like to remind that uncle that his phone has GPS, everyone already knows where he is, and what he’s searching for while taking a dump, and no one cares.

The CDC says fully vaccinated people don’t have to wear pants. The CDC realizes that you probably haven’t been wearing pants anyway. The CDC lauds your preparedness.

The CDC really wants to know what happened to the neighbor’s cat. If you ask, the CDC would like to remind you to keep as distance of at least six feet, unless everyone has been vaccinated.

Actually, given the state of the cat, maybe stay six feet away, anyway.

The CDC recommends you avoid large indoor gatherings. The CDC recommends you just sit on the couch and rewatch Grease 2, because there is zero chance that you will accidentally run into your ex unexpectedly on your couch and be forced to have an awkward conversation about what they are up to now. Actually, you know what? The CDC is just going to permanently recommend avoiding large gatherings. Like, forever.

The CDC says that even if you have been vaccinated, you should still watch out for symptoms of Covid-19. I mean, you’ll probably be fine, but remember that final scene in Die Hard when you think Karl is dead but then he pops up and tries to kill John and Holly and Carl Winslow has to shoot him?

Covid is kind of like Karl.

The CDC is wondering if the CDC makes too many movie references.

The CDC recommends you still wear a mask in public spaces like stores and airports and around people who are immunocompromised. The CDC also recommends that you don’t race down an exit lane because it’s moving more quickly, and then swerve back into traffic just to save a few seconds. The CDC recommends you pick up your dog poop and that you don’t put that poop in a neighbor’s trash can because maybe that neighbor doesn’t have a dog specifically because they don’t want to deal with poop. The CDC expects you to throw that away at your house. Basically, the CDC wants you to care about other humans and not be an absolute shitburger, and realize that your individual liberty does not mean that you get to endanger others. The CDC would like to note that it isn’t hard to give, like, three flying fucks about other people, and frankly, the CDC can’t believe it has to tell people to stop acting like fully grown, spoiled-ass Veruca Salts, and explain to them that yes, science is real and yes, vaccines work, and yes, everyone in a society has an obligation to one another, and also, Grease 2 is amazing.

This shit is obvious, people.

The CDC is tired. The CDC is done. Happy summer, from the goddamn CDC, babyyyy.

Scrolling my social media, I see a stream of selfies; people receiving their vaccines, eyes smiling over their masks, a shirt-sleeve rolled up, something exceptionally vulnerable about that stretch of skin on the upper arm. Everything opening again. It feels both overdue and impossible all at once.

The thing that I – a shameless extrovert – have maintained over the last year is that when the world opened up again I would run screaming into it, possibly naked. I would unleash a torrent of affection and attention on whoever was willing, feeding off of the company of others, a social vampire. But as we’ve started seeing people – my mother, Rand’s grandfather, those few friends who, due to circumstance or profession are already vaccinated – I find myself unsure of how to return the world I once knew.

I don’t know how exactly to get back to normal anymore.

I remember those first few harrowing weeks when my town and state went on lockdown, stores and restaurants and gyms closing, my friends with children panicking at the idea of schools closing for two weeks (“TWO WEEKS!” a friend said to me now, a year later, a sputtering laugh coming out of her.) I didn’t know what to do with myself, with my days. I didn’t know how to exist in a world that wasn’t humming and busy, a sudden halting of the Indiana Jones animations of planes that I always imagined moving across a map whenever I traveled. I felt unmoored, rather paradoxically, from being stuck indoors. And then weeks melted into months and waves of despair hit again and again and I hit some sort of existential crisis (what happens to a travel writer when they are unable to travel?). I forgot what it was like before, and a new normal took over. Staying home, and walking into the street when anyone came towards me on the sidewalk. The lower half of someone’s face taking on a new, stunning intimacy. I wrote about being at home, I tried to work on my novel, I wrote nothing at all, I may have wasted a year.

It would all be fine, I told myself, when things went back to normal.

A week ago, some vaccinated friends invited us over to a backyard dinner. I figured I would step right back into it, but before I even left the house, it occurred to me that I’d forgotten exactly how to do it. I stared at an entire closet full of clean clothes – everything that wasn’t pajamas or workout wear was just hanging there – and was utterly baffled by what to do with it. Do you wear a blazer to dinner with friends? Do you talk about the weather? How do social interactions work? Am I being weird? Have I just been sitting here thinking about how weird I’m being, and staring at a spot on the ground with a weird look on my face, and now everyone is expecting me to say something? Or maybe they haven’t noticed at all, because I am not the center of the universe, honestly, why would I think that I am? I was suddenly on conversational training wheels. The CDC gives us parameters for hanging out, but no one tells you how awkward it might be.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. In the quest to get back to normal, it’s easy to ignore how the last year has changed us all. The things that once felt like a reflex, an effortless sort of second-nature, now feel foreign. We once hugged our friends, and we ate meals together, and we all sat around tables indoors. And then we lost loved ones and we were alone and we didn’t know when it would end, and it felt like all of that worked itself down to our marrow. Some of us lost a year of time, and others lost the futures they were promised. Movie theaters can reopen, but you still carry your grief. Something deep down that you can’t quite put your finger on, that you hesitate to call trauma, because that feels like an exaggeration, that feels too heavy, that feels like you are mitigating the real trauma of others. But what else is it? How else to describe it? The thing that made your grandparents save scraps of tin foil and refuse to throw out food. The thing that made your parents worry that you were going to be kidnapped, because of what happened to that poor boy on the news. The thing that – you fear – will make you keep your distance from other people and disinfect your hands until the end of your days.

How do you go back to normal when that world is already gone?

There are antibodies building inside of me, but my brain is taking longer to catch up. That’s the thing that no one told me while I sat at home, waiting for this moment – that I might not be ready for it. That the world opening up again might take just as much getting used to as the world shutting down. I stare at the leaves on the trees outside, back again after a long winter, and wonder what their secret is.

Or maybe have at it, I’m not your mother.

Okay … ready?

Rand’s pandemic hobby has been cooking.

PUT THAT SHOE DOWN, WE DO NOT THROW THINGS.

Look, I know, I know. This is the last thing that you need to hear about childless couple who normally travels but is now stuck in their home for a year. Ideally, you would like to be reading about how one of us snapped and cannibalized the other, or that we’re at least starting to grate on one another’s nerves. And while we occasionally had moments like that (sometimes the cannibalization and the nerve-grating happened simultaneously as evidenced by the photo below) for the most part we just sort of … got along.

Look, we had the occasional fight, we occasionally had to go for a walk because the other was just “a lot right now”, but for the most part, things were okay, and I think a big part of that had to do, I am realizing now, with my husband making sure I was regularly fed and hydrated.

So maybe his pandemic hobby was neutralizing the fine middle-aged cannibal in the house. I still think it was a win-win. In the before times, dinner parties were our thing, that obnoxious pastime of people in their late 30s and beyond, bottles of wine and trays of charcuterie, mains and passed sides, me bringing out dessert and him pulling out bottles of scotch. It felt effortless and second-nature, was what we did, having people over and cooking for them, or going out to a restaurant with friends. At the start of a given week Rand would remind me of who we had dinner with in the days to come. Inevitably we’d have plans for at least four or five of the nights, more if we were on the road.

There was a novelty, early in the pandemic when it was just the two of the us (“We are eating in front of the TV!” “We are cooking just for ourselves!” “Our President is actively trying to kill us all!”), and we leaned into it because everything else was just too sad and scary to consider. After a while, Rand needed bigger challenges, and he started delving into new recipes. We watched Midnight Diner, a relaxing and hard-to-classify show that takes place in, obviously, a diner, a small one in Tokyo. He missed travel, he became wistful about our trip to Japan. He bought himself a donabe pot and temporarily lost his mind.

This was not the end of it. It rarely is with Rand. In the words of that fallen star, he’s always got to be starting something. He will roll out fresh pasta like he learned to do in Bologna.

At least once a month he will roast giant marrow bones and make a pot of stock, tossing in an entire chicken. He uses it to make risotto, and when his grandfather was fully vaccinated we had him over to help.

He makes me steaks and soups and pastas. He garnishes and composes and fries and braises and grills and simmers.

I have spent years writing about our travels, felt like our lives were an open book, hell, even wrote the damn book, but I’ve been tweeting out these photos, and it’s felt like opening people up to our home. The responses are occasionally overly-scrutinizing (people seem obsessed about the quantity of food that we cook, which feels inappropriate at best), but for the most part, lovely.

Keep posting your dude cooking. It’s my favorite activity and your evangelizing is helping to normalize it. Dual knife blocks is a nice touch.

— Gregg McLennan (@Strayarc) April 10, 2021

I love his aprons!

— Mary Swift (@swiftlytweet) April 10, 2021

Need that in my belly STAT

— One Fresh Pillow (@OneFreshPillow) April 11, 2021

Your husband really twinkles

— Colominipiccolominipiccolominipiccolominipiccolomi (@MavetyStreet) April 5, 2021

Still, when online abusers are particularly active in my thread, they attack my husband’s masculinity specifically because he cooks for me.

They tell me to enjoy it, because he’s going to inevitably leave me (for a man, because they need to add homophobia to it).

Man this long con of his is loooooooong. pic.twitter.com/TpCZH2OeVD

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) March 21, 2021

“Why are they so invested in you leaving me?” I ask.

“Because if you are loved and happy, what does that say about their lives?”

There is something else, too. Something less personal. Professional chefs are often male. As a society, we’re comfortable with men cooking in that context – doing so as a job, in command of a restaurant. But a man cooking at home is occupying a space that we often expect women to – one of a caretaker. He is taking on invisible labor that we are used to dismissing. And in doing so, forcing misogynists into an uncomfortable reckoning: domestic work is important, valuable, and hard.

I tell him I can cook, or that we can get take-out, and sometimes he takes me up on the offer. I occasionally make dessert. If I’m quick enough, I can get the dishes done before he has a chance.

“Still – think how devastated I’d be if you left. I wouldn’t see it coming,” I say.

“Neither of us would.”

“No one was more surprised than us!”

I tease him that the worst part would be that I’d have to cook for myself, and he tells me that he could still come over and cook for me.

“And we could still make out?”

“Definitely.”

Maybe, I suggest tentatively, it would be best if he didn’t leave me in the first place. And he agrees that maybe that’s the best way to go. I mean, think about how brilliant and devastating this ruse will be if it goes on for another fifty years and then it ends.

It’ll be just heartbreaking.

Vaccines are rolling out – slow at first, and now a steady trickle. My friends and I keep checking in on one another as we have for the last year, though the topic has switched from “You hanging in there?” to “Any side-effects?” We’ve become a little bit like science experiments, marigolds clipped to electrodes. I have many hypotheses about what the effects of the world opening up again will be like after more than a year of trauma and death and lockdowns and the politicization of basic science. In the words of Jessie Spano, I’m so excited, and I’m so scared.

“Do you have your superpowers?” a man asked me as I left.

I remind myself of the luck and the privilege that allowed for this, with having internet and a governor who wasn’t corrupt, with having access and the ability to book my shot.

I treated many really sick Covid-19 patients today.

All wanted to get vaccinated but didn’t know how to navigate appointments, transportation. Might sound easy, but for many, it’s not.

Expanding eligibility doesn’t always mean accessibility, especially for the most vulnerable.

— Craig Spencer MD MPH (@Craig_A_Spencer) April 6, 2021

Rand was giddy about it when I came home – “I can’t believe it,” he said. I couldn’t either. When we went into lockdown last March he told me we’d be through by August.

“Six months, tops,” he said. By my birthday at the latest.

The time came and went. I turned 40 in lockdown, argued that it didn’t count while the skin under my neck flappingly disagreed. His grandmother died. My nephew started to walk and talk. My friends had babies. Time passed at the same time that it stood still, and I watched a lot of TV. When talk of the vaccine started, Rand said we’d probably not be able to get it until the end of summer, and he was wrong again, but this time in the best way. When that needle went in my arm I almost cried, not from the pain but because I realized I had been carrying all those damn tears around, everywhere I didn’t go.

“I need you to know,” I told him, “about some of the side-effects of the vaccine.”

“Oh?”

“I might get cranky if I don’t snack regularly.”

“I see.”

“That one seems to be unfortunately permanent.”

“And we’re going to attribute that to the vaccine, are we?”

“We are.”

Other things that, in the last two days, I have claimed were side-effects to the vaccine:

1. Demanding to be hand-fed Cheet-os as though I am a baby bird.
   –
2. Crying while watching The Great Pottery Thrown Down, a program which should not actually elicit tears, but reminds me that my studio has been closed for a year, and I don’t know if I still remember how to throw, or how to apply surface decoration, or the name of the woman with the dark hair who inspired me to spend a year reading female authors. Also, one of the judges cries all the time and it’s wonderful, truly, but that sort of thing is contagious.
   –
3. Farting.
   –
4. Eating an entire bag of kettle corn for dinner.
   –
5. Crying after learning that 7 million people will not get the vaccine because they are concerned about the cost of it, and they don’t realize that it is free.
   –
6. Being very scared that I am going to look back on this year having accomplished nothing besides surviving it.
   –
7. Crying while watching that very stupid Google commercial where people do searches and at first the searches are all “pandemic family activities” and then the cursor deletes “pandemic” and oh my god.
   – 
8. Absolutely losing my mind with sobs when I ended a phone call with my brother and heard my little nephew say “Bye-bye” in the background.
   –
9. Screaming “I have had just about enough of everyone’s bullshit!” and then refusing to specify who everyone is and what bullshit I am referring to.
   –
10. Crying while watching The Muppets because technically shouldn’t some of them have died by now?
    –
11. Losing several hours to looking up the lifespan of the average Muppet.
    

    Oh god.

    –

12.  Going to the store to buy groceries and forgetting the one thing I went there to buy but picking up a whole bunch of other things that were not on my list but looked good at the time.
    –
13. An overwhelming worry that I’ve forgotten how to be in the world.
    –
14. More crying.

So, that’s where I am. Normalcy still feels elusive and I miss everyone and everything. If I think too hard about it and the last year, my eyesight gets all watery, and it makes it hard to see, but still – there it is, that stupid light at the end of that stupid tunnel, forever too late for some of us.

“It’s a side-effect,” I say into his shoulder as we sit on the couch.

“Okay,” he replies, and puts on a show. It makes me cry, but what did I expect?

So, last week, or maybe two weeks ago, or three months (does it matter? Does anyone remember? Are we still keeping track? HOW IS IT STILL MARCH? IT HAS BEEN MARCH FOR A YEAR.) I did something that caught people’s attention on Twitter, and it amused some folks and rankled others, the way anything that catches people’s attention does.

And since it’s International Women’s Day, I thought I’d talk about it.

A little while ago, Lauren Boebert, a Representative from Colorado (she was the one who was livetweeting the location of several sheltering Democratic officials, including Speaker Pelosi, during the armed siege of the Capitol, and also vowed to take a loaded glock onto the Senate floor) posed in front of her bookshelf, onto which she’d precariously shoved a bunch of firearms.

I decided to do the same with sanitary pads.

Decided to display menstrual products on the bookshelves behind me the way Lauren Boebert does firearms. pic.twitter.com/GGfai6gdqL

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) February 18, 2021

Generally if I tweet anything vaguely critical of the free-for-all smorgasboard that is American’s gun control laws, or anything that acknowledges the horrifying truth that menstruation happens for some humans, my mentions become a shitstorm for a few days. But this, dear friends, managed to hit the sweet spot in the Venn diagram where those two concepts overlap, and so I was hit with a monsoon of crap.

(Nice things were said, too. The problem with a monsoon of crap is that you tend to lose sight of all those nice things.)

At some point, even Boebert herself saw the tweet and felt the need to weigh in, with some weird transphobic comment that still remains baffling to me.

But what’s amazing is just how unoriginal all the insults were. They were the same thing I’ve always gotten. Every single time. Again and again and again. And they’re virtually identical to all the comments my friends get, again and again and again. It’s like Groundhog Day, but I’m surrounded by white supremacist misogynistic transphobes who are just deeply unloved. So, I figure, I’m just going to cover all the insults I get online here, so we don’t need to go through this again next time.

Narrator: she would absolutely be going through this again next time. 

1. “You are mentally ill and need help!”
   
   
   Yes, please lock me up in a home for the unstable, for I have a wandering uterus which is giving me fits, and have developed a nasty habit of literacy, as well as an acute infection of feminism on the brain. The only cure is a mixture of laudanum, writing up legislation to repeal the 19th amendment, and planning my future dream life when I become Mrs. Matt Gaetz.
   –
2. “You look like a dude/ You secretly ARE a dude.” Please, if I was a dude, people would be listening to me right now.
   –
3. “Your husband is a girl.” Someone literally said this because Rand likes to cook.
   Anyway, this is sexy as hell and calling someone a girl isn’t the insult you think it is.
   –
4. “You are super ugly.”
   Oh, no, the guys on Twitter who are frightened by menstruation and find grammar as baffling as they do the clitoris doesn’t want to fuck me, whatever will I do.
   –
5. “Your husband doesn’t actually love you”/”How the fuck are you married, you’re disgusting” etc, etc.
   

   DAMN IT, THEY HAVE FIGURED US OUT, HE JUST MARRIED ME FOR THE DOWRY AND THE TITLE OF MR. “SHE SEEMS LIKE A BITCH” pic.twitter.com/DY9zvuWq5T

   — Geraldine (@everywhereist) February 19, 2021

   Yup. It’s all a sham. And my husband is a girl. And I am a boy. We’re very unhappy. It’s been two decades of hell. I’m too gross to be loved.
   We only stay together for the children, which is how I refer to our shared Netflix and Amazon Prime accounts.
   –
   –

6. “Just take the L!”
   
   Ah, take the L. I assume that this also what they say to women after they’ve failed to given them an O. HEYOOOOOOOO!!!!
   –
7. “You are gross/disgusting/need to bathe more.”
   
   
   
   Fear not, gentle souls: when I am on my menses I will retreat to a dark cave in the forest until I am done, and should the dark day arise that I ever need to defecate, I will flee into the hinterlands, never to return to polite society. (Also, of all these folks who are very eager to tell me how gross I am, none of them are using their real photos. Because I’m sure they’re super comfortable with how they look.)
   –
8. “Some other insulting comment about my glasses/nose ring!”
   –
   Oh. Oh, JayeMarie. What was that about glasses?–
9. “You are old! You are menopausal! YOU ARE 80!”
   
   Sit down, my little kittens. Let me tell you a story. Sometime at the closing of the 1970s, in the sunset of Disco, my parents did lie together and begat a child of that long-ago epoch. Now, decades later, I watch my bones wither to dust and my memories fade. “The first time I saw Back to The Future,” I whisper, tears rolling down skin as thin and creased as crepe paper, “it really was 1985.”Anyway, I will continue to strive to be as comfortable with my withering looks as you, grown woman who uses cartoon avatar and guy whose profile pic is a blurry group shot.
   –
10. “You don’t know you’re talking about!” It’s literally a photo of me in front of tampons, Dave. I’m not sure that there’s that much to scrutinize here.
    –
11. The Death/Rape Threat. Of course, no discussion of online abuse would be complete without these guys, who truly are at the bottom of the shit barrel. They take a few forms, most of them single-celled. Some try to hide behind hypotheticals, like “How are you going to protect yourself when a rapist comes busting through your door?” and comments that assess our value according to how rapeable we are – i.e., “You are too ugly to rape, anyway!”. 

    This dude felt the need to decapitate me because he got upset at the sight of menstrual pads. Imagine having this many books about programming on your shelf and still being this fucking bad at Photoshop.
    –
    –
    Or being this mad because I. Posed. With. Maxi. Pads. He’s is about to give himself a rage stroke because he had to look at overnight super absorbents with wings.
    –
    

12. The absolutely baffling.
    
    –
    Me:–
13. Bonus: The unintentional self-burn.
    The poor dipshits are so unfamiliar with basic human anatomy that they don’t understand why someone would need pads of different absorbencies.
    

What’s funny is I actually PREDICTED this would happen:

If you did this with menstrual products and contraceptives, the GOP would lose their minds pic.twitter.com/zyoYXG5VQs

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) February 18, 2021

Because the insults s are always the fucking same. Because hate is inherently unimaginative. It’s the opposite of creativity. If you hate, you haven’t put any thought into anything.

To anyone who feels the urge to repeat any of these messages to me, I would *strongly* encourage you to try to come up with something new. You might even find yourself thinking. And that might lead somewhere good. Because as things stand, y’all are getting a little predictable.

Until next time …

I decided to spend 2020 reading only women authors. It shouldn’t have been a revolutionary act, but somehow, by the end, it started to feel like one. There’s a clear gender bias in publishing (male authors are published more often than women, have their books submitted for more awards, and are highlighted in publications more frequently). When much of the world is already written by men – not just books, but history itself – it felt like this was some small way in which I could try to tip the scales.

It wasn’t a strict rule, nothing set in stone, and I even made the occasional exception (including my friend Mike’s fantastic graphic novel, Flamer, which he published last summer). My goal for the year wasn’t a limitation or a constraint, but a focus – to seek out women writers in a way I hadn’t before.

Beyond this commonality, there was no shared theme between the books I read, and I kept no comprehensive list – it felt like doing so might somehow rob me of the magic of it, might end up imposing order when all I wanted to do was meander. I went from non-fiction memoirs to young adult to literary fiction. I loved a few, hated none, left no book unfinished. And even though not every story was joyous, I found that there was something beautiful in them, in surrounding myself with the words of women. A patchwork quilt of experiences, woven together by this facet of our identity.

Not once was I irritated with how women were portrayed, and while I was often angered or upset by how the world treated them, it never felt gratuitous. Their pain was real, and it was theirs, and they shared it with me. There was something strangely comforting in that – these complex and imperfect women existing in a vicious and stupid and unforgiving world, and knowing that none of us were alone. It had been a long time since I’d found a friend in a book. I thought I’d outgrown it. But maybe you never do.

And god, they were so gloriously, beautifully human. They had acne and mastectomies and unpleasant voices and long noses and were too tall or too fat. They were irritable and unkind and wore the same sweatshirt too many days in a row and drank too much or not at all. They befriended dragons and defeated monsters and fell in love and were hurt or raped or murdered and these things were significant not because of the men they were related to or the ones they loved but because it happened to them. These stories belonged to women. Both the characters and the authors.

(There were zero descriptions of pert breasts or erect nipples.)

When the new year started, I picked up a book by a male author in a genre I hope to one day write in. I had heard of his work, and this latest novel had gotten rave reviews.

There were things that I took issue with, and somehow I thought these things were just my problem. The teenager in a sexual relationship with someone seven years older than her; the classic depiction of a beautiful woman who ends up being a betrayer; the woman who is fragile because of her mental illness. The book and the author were so beloved that I figured it was my inability to just be cool, another example of me being a humorless bitch because that’s what feminism does to you.

It was like all the lessons of the last year just vanished.

About halfway through the book, seemingly out of nowhere, there was a graphic and horrific rape scene. I read it late at night, and found I couldn’t sleep afterwards. The act of violence was between two men. I don’t know if that makes it less of a problem. I find sexual violence against women is terrifying for a lot of women to read. And sexual violence against men is also terrifying for a lot of women to read.

Because it’s sexual violence. And a lot of us have personally experienced that.

Men have a right to tell those stories, too, of course. We all do. But we have to do it responsibly. Especially if you wield a bigger audience, and you come to the conversation with a great deal of privilege, as men so often do.

I put down the book. Over the next few days, I went through a strange mental exercise that I’ve been through before – wondering what I did wrong, wondering if I should have been more careful (should I have read more reviews? Looked up triggers for this book?), wondering again if the problem was with me. I felt betrayed, somehow.

I read a few more chapters, wondering if the assault would be addressed, if the character’s own trauma would be discussed (it wasn’t, except his attacker threatening to do it again). From a plot perspective, it wasn’t even relevant. I tried to figure out the purpose it served, other than to be homophobic and terrifying. I read spoilers for the book, hoping someone would make sense of the scene. No one did, or could. In the middle of the glowing reviews, a few people commented on how horrific it was, how blindsided they were, how it was never talked about again.

I’ve read stories of rape last year, written by women, some of which were autobiographical. It felt like they were holding my hand and leading me through the pain, and then out of it. Their assaults were not the heart of their story.

They were the heart of the story.

I told myself to keep going – that I could get through this damn book. I am a completist, after all. It was words on the page. Then I got to another chapter, where a woman with a disability was being tortured.

And I decided that I was done.

But enough about that book. Let’s not shift the spotlight away from where it should be. That happens enough already. I don’t need to do it in this post, as well.

Instead, let’s go back to the books I loved last year.

It’s still far from a perfect collection. I had hoped to read more poetry and more plays, I wish that I had sought out more women authors who remain underrepresented in publishing: trans women and indigenous women, and women with disabilities. But I remind myself that nothing ended when the clock hit midnight. My reading list is a work in progress, something malleable and alive. It goes on and on. And I keep adding to it, every damn day. There are some men on the list, of course.

And a hell of a lot of women.

Here are some of my favorites from last year:

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo (TW sexual assault, plane crashes, death. This is YA, and it’s handled very delicately but still.) A story about two sisters – one in the Dominican Republic, one in New York, who deal with the aftermath of their father’s death, and discover that he was living a dual life, with, yes, two families in two different countries. It’s heartbreaking but ultimately beautiful and redemptive and it’s written in verse.

Circe by Madeline Miller (TW sexual assault, violence, murder. Honestly, this one was the easiest to handle for some reason.) Okay, it’s not like you haven’t heard of this one, right? It was on everyone’s list. But, damn. It’s so, so good. Told from the perspective of Homer’s witch, she is given life and agency, and it’ll leave you feeling like everyone who got turned into a pig maybe had it coming.

Fleishman is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (TW, mental breakdowns, divorce, child bullying and abandonment) Admittedly, I slept on this one, too, and was probably the last person I knew who read it. But it’s such a fantastic exploration of a marriage (and people) falling apart, done with precision and vivid writing, and it unravels like a mystery.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon (TW sexual assault – alluded to, violence, racism, child endangerment and murder). An afro-futuristic tale of a genderqueer doctor/scientist struggling against a racist, oppressive system on a spaceship. Simply one of the most unique and captivating books I’ve read. It’s a tough read, emotionally, but so, so good, and Rivers Solomon’s voice is unlike anyone else’s out there.

A Heart In the Body in the World by Deb Caletti (TW gun violence, murder, stalking) A young woman tries to grapple with an act of violence by (literally) running across the country. It’s so sad, but also redemptive and sweet (it takes place partially in Seattle, and the family at the heart of it is Italian, which hit close for me for a lot of reasons.)

My To Be Read (TBR) list includes Culture Warlords by Talia Lavin (where she goes undercover and infiltrates white supremacist groups online), Wow, No Thank You – Samantha Irby’s book of essays (another book I’ve been sleeping on), and Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism. I also just bought Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, and I’m planning on picking up Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind. If there is something you want to recommend, please do so in the comments. (My book buying attitude over the last few years has basically been this.)

Look, here’s the thing: I’ve got a lot going on right now.

I mean, not technically. Technically, I walk around the house nursing a stash of Halloween candy while occasionally changing from “day pajamas” to “night pajamas” (the sartorial differences are subtle but significant). Today I cried while watching a tiktok video, a medium which I only vaguely grasp. I’m like Miss Havisham if she were dumped on a weekday when she thought she maybe had the flu and decided to just stay in bed.

What I mean is, I have a lot going on, emotionally.

It’s just been a really long hoax pandemic, you know? With a lot of people getting hoax-sick and hoax-dying, including the loved ones of my friends. And this hoax lockdown has led to what my therapist refers to as “very real depression” (but honestly, probably a hoax). And then my husband’s grandmother died last month but so many other people died (hoaxly, I should add) that we can’t inter her yet. We had to have her memorial over Zoom (cough, cough, hoax, cough), because what’s the point in grieving without someone repeatedly shouting “YOU NEED TO UNMUTE YOURSELF” in the background?

What I mean to say is – I don’t think anyone has the emotional bandwidth for this coup.

Look, I get it. Despite numerous attempts to burn ballots, purge voting rolls, intimidate voters, and even destroy the U.S. postal service as a means of decimating the mail-in vote (seriously, gents, Bravo, that was some unforeseen shit), Trump still lost the election. I mean, that’s just embarrassing. Clearly, the only way to save face is for the government – in a sudden, striking, potentially violent move – to flagrantly overthrow the will of the people and crumble what is left of our fragile democracy by declaring that Trump should still be president. Who among us has not lost a game of Pictionary and thought, “I will destroy all democratic and governmental norms and create a constitutional crisis that will have devastating ramifications for generations?” ALL OF US, THAT’S WHO.

But listen, my dear aspiring totalitarian dipshits: I am so, so tired. I’m emotionally spent, and I can’t give this blatant violation of all of our constitutional rights the attention it deserves. You deserve pithy signs! And chants! Honestly the best thing I could come up with is “TIRED OF BEING COUP-ED UP” and I don’t even know that that means. I just want to go back to my usual life of never leaving my house since February and watching my mental health dissolve like an Alka-Seltzer in the rain. Honestly, this is just not a good time for me, and next week is looking terrible, too, and then we’re in the holiday season, and you know how that gets. It makes you just want to shout “FUCK CHRISTMAS!”

Plus, think of how much better a coup will be when we have hope again! Rescheduling for like, year two of a Biden administration will hit way harder.

Look, the point is, I think you are just going to have to accept the terrifying truth – that Americans just democratically elected a new leader who won both the electoral college and the popular vote, while you will (probably) maintain power in the Senate. I know, I know – it’s scary. But it’ll be okay. Really. If it’s any solace, we can remember all of those Republican Presidents who took office with fewer people voting for them. And hey, you still have gerrymandering and voter suppression! That’ll ease the sting of this injustice.

Anyway, I hope you’ll consider letting this election slide by a weensy margin of 76 electoral votes and 7 million legally cast ballots. Or maybe delay this whole coup until later? If you’re going to overthrown a democratically-elected leader, it’s not like it has to happen now, right? Why not give us all some time to recharge and give this thing our full attention? Because honestly, you deserve that. Get some rest. You’re looking a little hoax-feverish. And, holy hell, am I tired.