life’s not a paragraph

I fear we've been priced out of Montauk. The cheapest, shittiest room I could find with a Tuesday check-in and a Thursday check-out was $1,738 for two nights. No thank you. That was more than we were going to spend on our NOLA hotel + roundtrip flights. We can go out there for a day and come back at night. Kirby loves the beach. I can't believe how expensive it's gotten and that people are willing to pay it. Montauk is nice but it is still a good distance from The Hamptons proper, where people like to see and be seen. But I suppose most of the vacationers already live on Long Island or the city and have the means to not care.

The place in the Hudson Valley at the foot of the Catskills, where we've been going every summer/fall since 2018, is closed for renovations and their booking page has been deleted. Which is wild to me because they host a lot of weddings there. Something big must have malfunctioned for them to close during the busiest season. Even in the winters they have guests.

So I clicked it because I am nosy. And now I know all of this random info about this stranger who is going to interview me on Monday.

Like their wedding anniversary is the day after mine! And their wedding ceremony was a picnic in the park where guests were asked to “bring your own everything.”

I'm also planning to (in response to a question) bring up the discussions I've had with the girls about their teacher who was a DACA recipient needing to leave the U.S. because of his immigration status, and the 12yo expressing frustration that the POTUS is allowed to lie all of the time.

I wore these wide leg floral print pants yesterday and littlest BFF said “I love your pants! They look like Blake Lively.”

“Does Blake Lively have flower pants?”

Three new ones were posted in the last 48 hours that sound great on paper. One starts immediately (boo) but it would be foolish to cut myself off from a great opportunity just because I want to enjoy some downtime in the summer. I can be off later. It’s fine.

I still prefer a rotational job (24/7 every other week) but there are roles with traditional schedules that also sound fine.

Aiming for a minimum of $120K annually + 3 weeks of PTO + a healthcare stipend. Putting it out into the universe. I believe it’s coming.

I’ll never forget the afternoon I sat in an office on Madison Ave with a recruiter who was probably 23 years old and told me to my face that I was expecting too much money based on my experience (which at that point was almost a decade). A week later I signed a contract with my current job, completely unrelated to that agency, where they offered me $20K more than I’d asked for. It was double my previous salary.

Another 10 years and change later, it’s unlikely I’ll be able to double my salary again. A 20% increase feels possible and within my grasp.

An hour or so later, my husband realized his mistake. I said nothing. Without any malice or sarcasm, he asked, “Does it feel good to be the rightest person in the world?”

No! No, it doesn’t, actually! Because I am constantly being put into situations where I’m told by someone-who-is-wrong that an indisputable fact is “just [my] opinion.” (To be clear, my husband did not say this.)

Some things are not open to interpretation and do have definitive answers and conclusions. They are not opinions; they are facts. We seem collectively unable to understand this as a nation. It is one of the great frustrations of my life.

For some context, my mom has a recently resurfaced eating disorder. When I was in middle school she got really into Weight Watchers and joined and lost 50 lbs and maintained that for a very long time. She’s 71 now and has several longterm health issues (none related to her weight) that cause fluid retention and felt “big” and that bothered her. She can’t exercise because she has a spinal cord injury and breathing issues due to COPD. She goes to pulmonary therapy and uses oxygen at night. Walking is really the only way she can be active.

Around the holidays she began a very intense diet. She fasts all day and eats a small salad with chicken and tomatoes each night. She drinks water and coffee with zero calorie non dairy creamer. And that’s basically it. She talks about food constantly in a way that seems obsessive and like… I don’t know why you want to think about what you are eating and what you wish you could be eating so much. Feels like an awful lot of time spent obsessing over food. But she is pleased with her progress. I want to be clear she wasn’t overweight before she started this diet.

We had a brunch/lunch reservation today for a restaurant I’d wanted to go to for years. She’s the one who told me about it, it’s local to her and not us. I sent her a link to the website and their menu ahead of time. The website said they serve brunch and lunch at this time frame.

Sitting down and perusing the menu in the restaurant was a shit show. She wasn’t rude to our server, but she was difficult. He checked on us a dozen times and she wasn’t ready. The one thing she’d decided at home she wanted was on the lunch menu, and they were only serving off the brunch menu.

This is a “New American” style restaurant. It’s not very exotic except some things are served with a sauce or a dressing. They have 3 different burgers on their brunch menu. And 3 salads. And pancakes. And steak and eggs. And other kinds of eggs. And salmon. And chicken. And shrimp. And lamb, which she loves.

So then my dad asks the server if it might be possible to order the steak sandwich from the lunch menu? And the server says let me check with the kitchen, I imagine they can!

She says (to us, not the server) she can’t have eggs anymore because of her heart. She doesn’t want any of these other things. She doesn’t want the kitchen to make her something that isn’t on the menu. She doesn’t want to pick one of the fucking salads, the only things on their menu that don’t have a sauce or a spice or a protein that she doesn’t want. “I don’t want to order a salad. I eat salad every day.”

THIRTY MINUTES have now passed. I finally ask “Would you prefer to go somewhere else?”

“I guess I could get the croque madame without the eggs. I would NEVER pick this restaurant.”

Next time I send you a menu, just say that? Excuse me for thinking that between shrimp and chicken and burgers and lamb and salad, all things you have liked for the entire time I have known you, you would be able to find something.

Anyway my husband and I had a great meal. I hadn’t eaten the entire day so by the time the food arrived at 2:45pm I was stoked. I had a lovely spritz with hibiscus rose and along with my dad we shared bites of eggs, andouille, veggies, shrimp and grits, a creamy orzo with bacon, chicken tostadas, and matcha pancakes. All of the plates were “small” and meant for sharing. I thought it was fun!

Yesterday was a wild day to be a human on a United Airlines flight.

I find it hard to believe it’s 7. That almost sounds like a long time. I guess 12 years is sort of long in the scheme of things. More than a decade.