Me My composure at work could be described as "frigid bitch." Controlled, and never playing fast and loose. The words that come out of my mouth in the corporate sphere are affectionally modest, reserved, and curious. They're so sweet and well-articulated. I could kiss most of them, except for the filler words: "like," "um," "essentially", etc. Those words penetrate my corporate facade, parting the beaded curtains to slip inside the "bad room," i.e. , my self-hatred, as soon as I hear myself fill a sentence with them. My body, the physical presentation of another me, is not compatible with anything corporate. It is meant to be fucked, seen, it moves between color and light, grabs eyesight, and takes air. My body looks and feels like the morning time, when everything is quiet and about to be devoured. It is pink and soft and needs to be tasted by your tongue but it is prepared to be brutalized in the center of a mosh pit. The rest is up for determination. Not by you, but by me. I know what it is but it's hard to bring it all to the surface. I don't present as, "I-don't-give-a-fuck." But I want to get there. I'm desperate to regress and unlearn so many things that fill my mind. I want to be a fucking degenerate. Reactions to Art in Three Stages Reactions to art occur in three distinct stages. First, there's your emotional reaction. In his essay What is Art? , Tolstoy articulates this initial reaction type as follows: The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving, through his sense of hearing or sight, another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion that moved the man who expressed it. . . . Art begins when some one, with the object of making others share his feeling , expresses his feeling by certain external indications. This initial reaction to art arises instinctively, and produces a gut-level, simple response: "I like it," or, "I don't like it." For instance, like many who've seen Picasso's Guernica , when I first saw it, I felt overwhelmed by the size of its sadness. I liked it, but it's tragic work of art. The second stage of reaction involves engaging with the art on an intellectual level. This is a Kantian notion, but it's also rooted in Susanne Langer's arguments in Feeling and Form . Admittedly, I haven't read her text, but I'm sick of only referencing fuck-ass men. In her book, she states: "[w]hat is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding." She further observes that, "the wide discrepancy between reason and feeling may be unreal; it is not improbable that intellect is a high form of feeling — a specialized, intensive intuition about feelings." I love this conception of intellectualizing art because Langer doesn't separate it from the initial, emotional response; the two are intertwined. The idea that the intellectualization of art —or any subject— is merely an intensified form of intuition also helps to explain why so many things fail to make sense, particularly in areas of the corporate world where things are presented as purely intellectual and devoid of intuition. The third stage of reacting to art is through comparison and analogy. When you engage with highly intelligent individuals, this is their mark: presenting new ideas and concepts within a comparative framework. Comparison helps to contextualize new art and ideas primarily because so much of "new" art is based upon reference rather than being entirely unprecedented or wholly original. This concept aligns closely with Hegel's notion of the Zeitgeist —the spirit of the age— and his thesis that art is intelligible because it reflects the historical, cultural state of the collective and human self-knowledge. Me, Again See, the first two reactionary stages outlined above are so obvious to me. They are within me and my art, and they're not going anywhere. The emotion and the intuitive intellect are engrained in everything and there is no reason to strive for escape. There is no reaction, and perhaps no art, without the involvement of these two initial stages. But it's the third reactionary stage that presents a challenge for me. My art and my being are intelligible within a broad, comparative framework of all that currently exists and has existed, but concomitantly, I want to break free from being beholden to reference. I want to digress, degenerate, exist without a "bad room," and be contemplated without the need to understand something that's come before me. Has it been done before? Can it be done? Has everything that has ever existed been built brick-by-brick? It's a version of, "I'm not like other girls," but multiply it by 1,000,000,000, set it on fire, burn it down, and see what rises from the ashes —it won't be a phoenix, because that's what you're expecting.

There's nothing interesting about drinking. My face and lips are swollen and red. I can seek the same experiences without alcohol. What am I looking for. Why do I want to get in trouble. What if I disappeared. Got sober. Worked out religiously. Was kind to myself. Slept better. Slept more. Cried less. Played guitar all day. Stopped repeating the same stories. I have one chance. Why throw it away. Why am I so intrigued by nightlife. Why am I addicted to cold coffee and good wine. Do I want to be seen. Who am I when I'm not perceived. Staying out of trouble feels like the death of a girl I've always dreamt of being. I don't care about getting into heaven. I don't need instant gratification. I don't want to be venerated for my discipline. I just want to be kinder to myself.

On the first floor of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Department of Greek and Roman Art, is the Mary and Michael Jaharis Gallery. Within it, a marble sculpture of a female figure protrudes slightly out into the center walkway, diagonally facing the Roman copy of Polykleitos’ Diadoumenos . Indicated by a short pillar the figure leans on, Marble Statue of a Wounded Amazon is also a Roman copy of an original Greek bronze creation, dating back to 450-425 B.C.E. with its creator unknown. This figure possesses a peculiarity that has always stuck with me, even after many visits to the Met's sculpture gallery. Her gaze is unrelenting, and her contrapposto conveys not ease, but weariness. The Amazon woman idealizes the human figure in its portrayal similar to Diadoumenos , but unlike her youthful male counterpart, she is anything but a common person. She is a wounded warrior. The Amazons were a mysterious - and potentially fabricated - group of warrior women from Asia Minor, often described by historians and storytellers as living in male-free nomadic groups with great proweress on the battlefield. It said they would remove their right breast to facilitate drawing an arrow or throwing a spear. They were moon-worshippers and engaged in sex under the cover of darkness, without taking any pleasure of the act. This context is reflected in the marble sculpture's dress, physique, and stance. The figure is clothed in a draping peplos reaching just above her knee. Her left breast is fully exposed, as only one side of the garment is fastened with the left strap hanging or possibly broken from post-battle. Her clothing is cinched at the waist with the front of the garment tucked underneath a belt made of rope and plaited material. The shortness of her peplos and the exposure of her breast contradicts classic Greek decorum, as females were usually fully clothed and males were nude. The uniqueness of this sculpture lies within its interplay of traditional gender characteristics. The Amazon’s purposefully-shaped waist, exposed breasts, and other feminine features juxtapose the robust masculine physique of her arms and legs. The Amazon supports her weight with her right leg as she leans against the pillar on her left side. Her arms form triangular shapes, influencing the way the light and shadow interact with her marbled surfaces, enhancing her depth and dimensionality. This Amazon is indeed wounded, with small engraved droplets of blood flowing out of the side of her right breast. While seemingly regal and showing no signs of pain from her wound, she pauses momentarily, bracing herself for the next onslaught. I imagine her at the Pink Pony Club in West Hollywood. She's leaning casually against the bar, catching her breath from the dancefloor. She's not the kind to wear heels but she has glitter under her eyes and a silk top with no bra on. Her heart aches for a myriad of reasons, though none of them occupy her mind with great depth in that moment. She hears the DJ intro one of her recent favorites. The Amazonian starts to the dancefloor, her battlefield ahead, her wounded heart to attend to at another time. Author's note : The title of this post was originally, "Marble Statute of a Wounded Amazon." Please ignore my mistake, when the title should have read "Statue." I have lawyer brain rot. It's disgusting.

There was once a woman in my life whom I think about often. She was my boss at one of my first jobs out of college, and we worked together the year before I started law school.   She was late fifties or early sixties, tall, blonde, beautiful. She read books all day. She never worked. I could see her fighting against the mentalities that came in the generations before her: she wanted a man to take care of her and pay for her life, but she hated most men. She wanted to be alone. She was alone, following two great relationships. The first, her husband, who cheated on her with his secretary while she was having a miscarriage in their home upstate. The second, her decades-long love affair with a Frenchman, who deserted her when he moved to Miami to date young women. I met her in the middle of her breakup with the Frenchman, during which I was also going through my own relationship misfortunes. She was a feminist, like her mom, but not radical. The type of feminist who works at City Hall, attended the 2017 Women’s March, and complains about men walking around the office with their crotches jutting forward. She would say things like, “behind every great woman is another great woman.”   I loved her dearly. She was named after a flower, grew up in Boston, a rower in college, an investment banker early in her career, she loved the snow, the sun, soup, old buildings, and conversing with strangers. She was warm and kind, but never welcomed a hug. I wanted to hold her hand more than anything in the world. Her big blue eyes glimmered every time she smiled, so much so it sometimes looked like she was crying.   And like every extraordinary woman I’ve met, she could be cruel and knew when to be cruel. She insisted I date older men who would take me to ballets and galas, so that I could become “cultured.” When I gained weight, she purchased a dress two sizes too big for me and requested that I reimburse her for it. She encouraged my affair. She would advocate for me when I wasn’t in the room, but simultaneously I felt her jealousy emanating from the cubicle next to mine.      Her cruelest act, however, was when she stopped talking to me.   I had quit work to start law school during the height of the pandemic. My affair was coming to an end. I was emotionally devasted and I needed her. We sat in rusted chairs in a communal garden in the Village, drinking champagne and eating blinis topped with caviar and dill. I was worried always that I would do something incorrect or say something stupid that would reveal the differences in our upbringings. I came from dirt and tuna helper; she, from townhouses with white lofted ceilings and summers in Martha’s Vineyard. But she knew all too well where I was from and who I was.   I can’t remember the details of what we talked about that day. I remember she loved my blue, floor-length dress. She asked about my affair. We gossiped about a mutual friend. She told me she handed out finger sandwiches to the homeless every Sunday at the church around the corner. I recall walking out of her garden, tipsy from the champagne, believing we had just started a tradition. I had no traditions, but I desperately wanted one. I thought I would be back the next week, and the week thereafter, eating caviar in the garden and clinking my toasting flute against hers.      Weeks went by, and I texted her when the media ran a story on a monumental project we had worked on together. I can only surmise that she thought I took too much credit for the project during the journalist's interview, when it was really decades of her hard work that led to the project's completion. I didn’t mean for it to happen that way. And when I texted her again, years later, to let her know I passed the bar exam and so many of my accomplishments could be attributed to her encouragement, I didn’t hear back. I knew then that I would never hear from her again.   I hope one day I'll run into her in the places she'd frequent: the Jefferson Market Library, Takahachi Bakery in Tribeca, or the farmer's market at Union Square. I used to hang my hat on every word she said. I miss listening to the way she talked about her mom, and how she glistened when she described the way men dress in Paris.

In New York City, amongst throngs of people, we are forced into a strange interplay between anonymity and intimacy. Whether through apartment living in a spiderweb of roommates and neighbors, or our bodies pressed against one another on the 8:30am D train to Midtown, to open-office designs sprawling with coworkers, and queuing in the Trader Joe’s check-out line down two, three, four aisles, we’re often in close to proximately to others—to strangers.    In these settings, being alone with other strangers is familiar and commonplace to our everyday routines. But when it comes to eating dinner at a restaurant by yourself, grabbing a drink without a date, or going out alone with the intention of meeting new friends and lovers, the endeavor feels daunting. Yet, New York City is the best place to spend time by yourself, wherein solitude among the city's chaos can lead to a profound experience. In  Women Who Run With the Wolves , Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes suggests that, “[t]hough we all might prefer to have the kind of sojourn to home that is much more sustained, wherein we depart and no one knows where we are and we return much later, it is also very good practice taking solitude in a room full of a thousand persons.”    Consider what you do to prepare for a job interview. You anticipate the questions that will be asked. You might even rehearse your responses before a mirror. Unlike a job interview, there is no way to prepare yourself for venturing out alone in the city, which is exactly why I encourage you to try it. It is both a dazzling and intimidating experience, especially when you attempt to socialize or have unexpected encounters with others. When you venture out alone, you have the opportunity to present yourself—or a version of yourself—however you choose. You may be the person whose chambers of the heart are full of rage, who eats her sins for breakfast, and who conquers and devours and resists the easy seductions of the nights. You may be the naïve person whose pleasure overrules intuition, who arrives wildly and recklessly, throwing her head back toward the stars to laugh loudly at nothing.     You can be whomever, and discover within yourself the person you want to unfold in that particular circumstance.    I remember one of these nights out that I had, alone. It was about two years ago. I was in my second year of law school, and my semester of working full time for a judge had just come to an end. I found myself drinking a $7 glass of wine in a corner of the redly-lit XPizza, a tiny joint in the Seaport with live DJs playing techno music, while cheesy, thick pizza was made directly behind the DJ booth. I had no expectations for that evening (albeit I was wearing my lucky shirt), but I decided I was not going to be a law student. That night, I was going to be a music lover, one with blue nails, who starts her weekend on a Thursday night, a Lilith, some psychoid of the patriarchy’s unconsciousness, appearing in your dreams just when you’ve stopped stalking her Instagram daily.   I introduced myself to a rugged man behind the bar, who was wearing clothes he designed and created. The rest of that evening led to a five-course dinner, a popstar in her luxury G-string hanging off the side of a sanitation truck, and a man obsessed with Catholicism, whose beautiful Williamsburg apartment contained an enormous collection of books, each adorned with intricate covers depicting the Crucifixion of Christ.    It was a night I’ll treasure forever. It was a night where I discovered many things about myself, including the fact that maybe I am, at least for now, a music lover with blue nails who treats Thursday nights as the beginning of the weekend.     You have to experience life, alone. You are too full of life to be intimidated by surrounding yourself with a room of strangers—a scenario you already navigate daily in this vibrant city.

summer nights, smell of soil, watching the sky turn from baby blue to navy olive skin, Iate dinners, late coffee in the afternoon kisses with fresh lips, soft sleep, mouths closed alone, not being watched, having integrity calling a car, returning to my lover i'll be in paris soon.