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I have spent a lot of time thinking about some of the feedback that essay generated. Cops don’t belong at pride, at all, so I shared my thoughts on that-namely that if gay cops want to attend pride, they need to leave their uniform and toxic profession at home. I continued with the Work Friend column over at The New York Times and was reminded, regularly, that a great many people are really unhappy in their jobs and our culture of overwork and the constraints of capitalism offer them little recourse. There is immense creative talent in this world and I appreciated the exposure to new to me writers. I was particularly proud of the Emerging Writer Series. I started a newsletter and a book club this year and they were fun. That is to say, I think the books are good but I am equally certain they are terrible.
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I think they’re pretty good but years of sniping, petty criticism have really just worn me the fuck down. I am writing two books I actually love, but it’s hard to just knuckle down and finish them. I am obscenely prone to missing deadlines and it all just makes me hate myself. I overcommit to projects as if I have more than twenty-four hours in my days.
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It has been for a while now and I don’t know how to fix it. Spend time with your loved ones now because you never know when they might disappear. We got to spend a lot of time with my parents and that was also lovely. My mom still has stage 4 lung cancer but her treatment is going exceedingly well. Max is adorable and sweet and funny and smart. We had our one year wedding anniversary and continued to enjoy spending time together which is really, really lovely. It was an evening of good people and good libations and great dancing. Debbie turned 60 and I threw her a surprise party. I saw icebergs and glaciers and penguins. We went to Antarctica, which I am writing about for a magazine. They seem to want things to continue to get worse and worse so they can say they were right in reading the Twitter tea leaves. It was like they replaced the omnipresent, foreboding tensions of the Trump administration with the foreboding tensions of the pandemic. And then there were people who… I don’t know what to call them but they seem to thrive on crisis or existing in a constant state of heightened anxiety. I am always stunned by the certainty with which people with no expertise in a field can make sweeping, inaccurate and sometimes dangerous statements or predictions. And the endless prognosticating on social media by self-appointed Google epidemiologists. I had hoped that life would move toward a new normal, and there were days and even weeks where it felt like yes, we were all going to be okay, at least in those places where people care enough about the collective good to do the bare minimum to contribute to our communities’ well-being. In many ways, the insurrection set the tone for the year. My father was particularly shaken because he comes from a country with a sometimes fragile democracy and he has experienced, first hand, how that country is demeaned in the American imagination and media. Suddenly, we had breathtaking evidence to the contrary. It was surreal because many people tend to sneer at other countries with fragile democracies, as if American democracy is so strong as to be infallible. And then incomprehensible images began flashing across the scene and we watched, in real time, an insurrection encouraged by the soon to be former president. I think Debbie was upstairs in her office and my mom was puttering around the house. My dad and I were watching CNN and working in the family room. On January 6th, 2021, we were in Los Angeles with my parents.