Class Requirements: Black turtleneck. Hair pomade. Pack of Gauloises (or, in a pinch, Camel non-filters). Espresso-stained copy of Être et rien (and you will regette rien by rrroolling those r’s).
Gabby Star married my Grandpappy when he was a body-building swarthy hunk of a man and she had a Dolly Parton wig and waist. Gabriella Stella was Gabby Star’s given name but she preferred the anglicized Star lest someone miss the glorious implications of her naming. And Gabby to balance the glory with accessibility. And never Grandma, Nana, nothing to suggest she had lived long enough to see two generations birthed. Gabby Star preferred to be called nothing but Gabby Star. Unless it was a deep bass Baby from hunky Grandpappy across the room. That seemed permissible.
When I first moved to NYC in 2010, I arrived without a job. I was, of course, the trailing spouse as my wife had arrived to Manhattan with a lucrative banking job downtown. Every day, I would wake up late, shower and eat breakfast, and then walk two blocks up the street to my favorite coffee shop in all of New York, a yellow and brown facaded Italian cafe which no longer exists called SiCafe. It was mostly frequented by affluent Upper East Side folks and college students (Hunter College was located just a block away). With my laptop in hand, I’d order my standard cappuccino and take my spot near the picture window in front. Then I would begin searching for jobs online. One particular day, I found myself becoming very frustrated over my fruitless job search, and so I penned the following:
What if being unemployed held some special power?
When the universe alters to another dimension and cell phones are a relic of the past, the way cave writing once was for our ancestors, future spawnings will perhaps find solace and respite in the stories from our technological generation, and there’s nothing more ‘generational’ than that of a parent connecting with their children in the digital space.
The Global Burden of Disease: A Comprehensive Assessment of Mortality and Disability from Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors in 1990 and Projected to 2020 states that OCD, the anxiety disorder which I have, is the tenth most disabling disorder worldwide. This statistic got me thinking. First, I didn’t know that there was a ranking system. Since when was this a competition? Who is keeping stats for this, and how? Do people place bets on this? Is there an underground betting scene for mental illnesses that I don’t know about?