Margaritaville

i went, and so can you

This week I just don’t have it in me to write a whole thing - I’ve tried to start two, but one of the things about being at this (writing) for a long time is that I can know, now, without having to ask someone to read it, when something just doesn’t work. After deleting the first paragraph and then realizing I should also delete the second - well, you see where this is going (reader, I wanted to delete the third). I’m exhausted from an egg retrieval on Saturday that netted us nineteen—NINETEEN—eggs, thirteen of which fertilized, so now we’re waiting to see how many of those fall off / wander into the beyond vs how many grow to something like two hundred cells, seven of which are available for genetic testing. I look like I’m five months pregnant from all the swelling, which is weird, and makes me wonder what it might actually feel like to ever be pregnant, if that’s something that’s in the cards for me (one day at a time, my friends; one day at a time), but I’ve also had this deadline for my academic book, which meant spending all of Sunday trying to coordinate and track down images and add figures to a book. You might wonder why I did this all the day before the deadline and part of me thinks it’s obviously my ADHD and the way in which my psychiatrist has told me that the only two things that will ever compel me to work are 1) fear and 2) pleasure (he’s not wrong), but it’s actually because I just didn’t get permission to use my source text until last week and I didn’t want to spend $1200 on images until I was sure I’d really use them. I used to be drowning in money and now I’m pretty much broke again, but this has happened before and will happen again. I’ve always been fine.

Anyway, in lieu of any more of a substack I’m going to send you to the piece I wrote about Margaritaville, which was published in the Architect’s Newspaper. I think it’s a gas.