gabby windey is an amazing name

This weekend I had to speak with striving children again. It happens from time to time—for anyone, probably, and more often if you’re in Los Angeles or similar cities, places such creatures travel to from afar to convene. Did I do that? Perhaps I thought I did that. I think I believed I was doing that. I worked fourteen hours on Saturday and many more in preparation during the troubled winter weeks before. Many of my tasks were menial and some were a lot of fun. I work with a lot of very young people. People who were in high school when Trump was first elected. People who wear bootcut jeans because they’re retro. People who don’t get hangovers. People who are consistently confounded by me.

In many ways, I have failed. I have a job suited for someone a decade my junior and little reason to anticipate advancement. Things could change. I could change them! Maybe. But I haven’t and history suggests I won’t. I don’t know. These kids are so ambitious. I was born free from that and the lack, though restful, traps me down low in my meager comforts. Much like my beloved Carmelo Anthony, I simply do not have that dog in me. The kids at work, the fellow assistants, the just-for-now grunts, don’t know what to make of me. I’m young-seeming enough yet very obviously not truly Young and so I register neither as a fully adult administrative lifer nor as a clever upstart putting in their dues before world domination/a more lucrative email job in entertainment where they’ll have their way over a phone-answering youth of their own. I am an anomaly. It is evident on their faces. No one, me included, really understands why I’m here. I am usually able to project a peace incommensurate with my position—which is to say, to chat and say vaguely smart things and behave as if I do not think myself a loser—and I watch my child peers struggle to make it make sense. In a quiet moment Saturday amidst the chaos of the awards show, one coworker, a curly haired journalist, elfin, chirpy, wearing lace, elbow length gloves, asked me what my dream is. What do you really want to do? Out of embarrassment I said I don’t dream of labor and then I made a face to assure her I was just being a dick. It’s a little true. It’s not really true. I don’t dream of labor because I am afraid that nothing I dream will come true. I am not radical. I’m calculated. I anticipate falling so luridly that I won’t climb. But I tell myself that’s true. I try to stop wanting anything because when I can’t get it I’ll have to face real pain, not these ghost aches I weather now from never trying at all, these tremors that are followed by lulls in which the pretending at contentment feels quite close to the real thing. What do I really want to do?

I do not want to get promoted. I do not want to be in charge. Still, I am ashamed sometimes of my lowly position, my pitiable wage. In principle, I believe a person should be judged separate from their job title, judged not by their income or how much respect they’ve garnered in a some business sector but by the words they say to friends in times of pain, the way they treat children, the color and clarity of their ideas, their stupid jokes or their willingness to carry something heavy when somebody else needs a break. I do not want to be poisoned by managerial class politics, ashamed of myself for not being somebody’s boss. And I’m not! I’m not, exactly. But there are moments. It hurts to feel like a faceless cog when you are dangerously certain that your insides span centuries and miles. In the intricate universes of the fantastical which I build in my wonderings both consciously and not, I am a person of value. I am a thinker. I pursue ideas with courage and love. In the real world I transfer phone calls and reply to emails. I make coffee. I feel sorry for myself. I lock a bathroom stall and play games on my phone until the motor of my mind stalls and sputters and the nothingness seeps down to my toes.

Today I am buoyant because I skipped the gym to sleep in and might have accidentally taken an extra Welbutrin. I arrived at my desk with enough energy to name the cloud of misery I choked on yesterday. Yesterday, I could not have written even these solipsistic sentences. The hurt was all over me. Souring in my stomach every moment was a teeth-knocked out sort of embarrassment, corrosive, immobilizing. When I wanted to scratch out a thought even just in my journal the fact of trying seemed a fresh humiliation.

We saw the documentary No Other Land last night after work, which tells the story of Palestinian journalist and activist Basel Adra as he and his family, friends, and community fight for their lives, their dignity, and their homes against the boundless evil of the Israeli occupying forces. It’s a very beautiful and affecting film which, despite being nominated for an Oscar, has yet to acquire a distributor. The genocidal cowardice and greed that leads men in uniforms and helmets to bulldoze Palestinian homes in Masafer Yatta, to crush the belongings of crying children, to gun down those who attempt to fight for what is and has for generations been theirs is not a unique emotional force and it is this very same hate and fear which has to date made film distributors too nervous to take on the documentary. Even so, the creators have self-distributed, and it is in limited release in the U.S. We drove up into the hills and along Mulholland last night to avoid traffic on the way to Glendale. The light of the city wriggling up like fingers around each jagged bend in the road encouraged me to release my whining and my complaints. The rice balls we purchased and gobbled for dinner around the block from the theater nourished my better self. The film is heartbreaking and sometimes quite funny. Our protagonist and co-director, Basel, has a hot dad. I cried. And the bottom dropped out of the pool where I keep my morose and watery wantings so to look down at them and see myself and feel wronged. This is obviously not the point of the film and not why you should see it. But it did serve me well at that particular moment as a reminder to shut the fuck up and live.

At the awards this weekend, anyway, I felt useful and happy. I was busy. I was pleased. I tired myself. I performed. I had not inconsiderable responsibilities, many of which demanded delicacy, and I did well. I was thanked. I was given a cute little succulent. But I am a helper. I am thirty-three and I do tasks. My input is unnecessary. I couldn’t attend the debrief meeting. I have to answer the phone.

I told those girls that I used to want to be a writer. I told them that I like my job because it’s easy and I’m lazy. This is somewhat true. I like my job because it affords me what seems like a lot of free time. It demands almost nothing of my mind. I like that I can fuck around online a lot. That a job does not stimulate the mind does not mean that it leaves it open and available for other pursuits. That free time is not really free. It’s not free time to be creative. It’s not free time to enrich myself or serve the world. I’m sitting here now and I’m writing this. But that’s blogging. My job affords me a lot of time to blog. Anything that requires genuine thought or reflection does not fit into a schedule which has me at the constant beck and call of minor demands. I know I have it easy; I know that what feels hard to me, what feels dispiriting, a life that leaves me frustrated, is still life of great privilege, comfort, safety. I am fortunate, but I often pretend that I have it truly good, that things are better than they are, that I am more fulfilled, and maybe it would be healthier for me to admit the lie. To admit that I feel crushed sometimes by how low I am on the great organizational chart in the sky, by how people younger than me have passed me by and how I do not know how to course correct nor whether or not I have the skills or will to do it. I keep halfheartedly picking up hobbies (painting, photography, the television show Survivor) in order to cultivate value outside the professional sphere. There is work that I am not doing. There is suffering that need not exist. I could help more people. I could go outside where there’s problems to solve and I could bitch less. I could do watercolors every Sunday morning. I could write at night every night. I could dedicate myself to being in cloying beautiful massive sickly sugar-coated super always love and I do. I see places where my focus ought to be, places where I should give more of myself so as to feel more balanced, prouder of my real and whole self, less concerned with what happens at the place where I go to get money. I see it, but I fall short again and again when trying to put it there.

The immediate proximity to ~*~the film world~*~ which my job affords me is an occasional balm for my sore ego but more often makes matters considerably worse. I made a few minutes of pleasant chitchat with Sean Baker over the weekend and then felt so depressed I thought I would be sick. I was wearing a name tag. I don’t want to want to be an elitist cunt. It comes up from place at the pit of me which recognizes no authority but its own. I’m jealous. I’m mad at myself. I’m jealous. Something I found incredibly effective about No Other Land was the scenes where our protagonists chatted vaguely about jobs and families that could exist in a future world of their visions. To yearn is our natural fate. Even when living under conditions more violent and frightening than most of us can fathom, experiencing things that I can read about and understand intellectually but cannot, for I am lucky, truly know the shape of at my core, a person is and can only be a person. We have our little plans, the miniatures of ourselves and others that we move from room to tiny room inside our heads, testing possibilities. The human cannot help but wonder about who they’ll be.

Gabby Windey was the Bachelorette on the TV show The Bachelorette and now she’s a lesbian. She is selling me vitamins. She is here for the girls. She is seeing through Boston Rob. She is speaking like no one in history. I love her. I think “Gabby Windey” is a great name because it sounds like a weather girl (gender neutral) which is the third sexiest job you can have. Gabby is doing so much for me right now. It’s become foundational to my day-to-day survival to send my girlfriend videos of Gabby talking. When the Traitors kill her I’m going to hold a funeral. I’m going to picket NBCUniversal. I think Gabby should have me on her podcast. Why didn’t I become a celesbian? Is there still time? I ate a frozen ravioli meal for lunch and I’m hopped up on marinara. It’s fine that all the twenty-four-year-olds in my office feel bad for me. I bought myself a beautiful leather tote bag. I wear my reading glasses. I go home and kiss my girlfriend. Our couch is big enough to lay on side by side and I’m grateful for that. I pulled up my old lesbian vampire script the other day. It needs a complete rehaul. I should have started posting really bad poems on Instagram a long time ago. Maybe that was my opportunity. While I like to pretend that I am healed I sort of know deep down that if I were single I’d have tried Ozempic so there’s another way Megan has saved my life. National treasure and smoke show force ICU nurse Gabby Windey having a Larry David swag butch comedy girlfriend feels really important for the culture. It’s opening doorways. Spiritually. I’m not butch. I blushed when explaining to my hairdresser that I needed the cut to look gayer. I’m something softer. I’m something less structurally sound than Play-Doh. I miss Play-Doh. And I’m not looking to date girls who were once involved with televised heterosexual marriage contests. I just think there’s something to be said for professional hot women fucking girls in sweater vests. It’s a hopeful happening.

That ravioli is hurting my stomach. It’s almost two and I’ll fill and drain my water bottle three more times before six so that I have reason to walk around waiting to pee. Then home where the light is gold and I’m boundless. Thursday, Friday, then a long weekend. Why is the good luck of being able to come in from the rain not enough to make me joyful? It is. It isn’t and it is. I am and I’m not. Maybe if I had gone to grad school I would be able to more articulately express how happy I am to have my immediate needs so accounted for as to allow space and time to make myself unhappy. The world is wet today and the hills might fill up and fall. I’ll be safe inside. I wrote a story about a girl on her way to a support group for people living with suicidal ideations who accidentally entered, instead, a group devoted to attempting to talk with the dead. No. I wrote a third of that story. I dreamed the rest. I work hard in the elsewhere and struggle in bringing it earthside. I watched Jonathan Glazer’s Birth on Sunday and I think that could happen to me.