Advil

Article

Advil is a recurring brand in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 03, 2025 and January 14, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “I take Advil, very rarely Adderall these days”; “Sparkling ICEE water and Advil and fever chills”; “taking Advil in thick blue translucent pill form”. It most often appears alongside Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, Celsius, El Salvador.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: February 03, 2025
  • Last seen: January 14, 2026

Appears In

None.

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

February 03, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, January 26 Lying under red light at Ruby's apartment. The light here is all good - hanging infrared wires, silver orbs, all the lights seem incandescent. It's warmer today - walking through Little Italy there's a man on the fire escape looking down on the street with his dog, a big golden retriever, I like looking into other peoples lives like this. Earlier, lying on the couch in my own apartment, looking in our neighbors windows and at first it's absentminded but then I start to be intrigued. David says stop staring, they can see you staring, but I don't think they can. They can see me, sure, but the distinction between simply looking out the window or looking at them; impossible. You can't perceive eye movements from even a slight distance and anyways, if they see me looking at them, they admit they were looking at me, the gaze goes two ways, and so on... The last conference in El Salvador was all about Light, they told me on the phone on Friday. This year, it will be all about Earth. Ruby orders magnesium, orange juice, she swooshes coconut oil. These are good remedies. I take Advil, very rarely Adderall these days but still sometimes. I should be taking aspirin instead - this is what everyone says online, and what some people say in real life, too. I'm reading St Augustine's Confessions - mostly reading it for school, although I've been invited to discuss it on a Podcast as well. My track record with Podcasts is bleak, scary, and abysmal. My track record with Catholicism is - I never really went through that phase. I struggle to separate vanity from philosophy and prayer. I'm drawn to this part of Confessions most, things like "there is no pleasure in eating or drinking unless it is preceded by the discomfort of hunger and thirst.” Things like "Drunkards eat salty things to make their throats dry and painful, so that they may enjoy the pleasure of quenching their thirst.” Drawn to these, of course, because they elicit reflection on my own actions in the most vain and superficial sense of it all. Simone Weil Food Diary. Aliens and Anorexia. Like Grimes has been tweeting things like she found God to quit vaping. Hypnotize me instead, perhaps - it seems vulgar to attempt contemplation, and to end up here. Ruby and I walk to Flower Power in the East Village for; Wild Oat bromus ramosus (green). It does things like; “work as an expression of inner calling, manifestation of one’s true goals and values, work experiences motivated by a clear life purpose and conviction.” We go to Bar Oliver for vermouth tonic. Ruby makes me steak. David calls. Ruby and I watch Mulholland Drive - the first time for me. Only eleven pm and I usually sleep late, much later, but this red light casts a different glow. I'm closer to the ground in my friend’s apartment, no planes overhead and melting ice. I get homesick easily. In hours, really. But then, you can always go back. Monday, January 27 Perhaps you theme your days. On Health, you say. L-theanine with my coffee. Not really, but I’ll plan for this down the line. Bar Oliver is all lit up in piercing morning sun. I walk outside early this morning. Chinatown fruit market coming alive so quickly. There was a cemetery outside the window where I slept last night. I kept on looking out and seeing icy branches overhead that framed the building like a second roof, the cemetery like a courtyard. It scared me once, I screamed once in my sleep, but I woke up other times too, and it wasn't too bad then. Mostly, the sky outside just looked all pale blue and clear, the same pale blue all night in my memory, although this doesn't make sense in a logical way, what with the night passing and the becoming dark and the me being asleep for it all. Dream Logic. A recollection of slippery silvery vines forming an outline of a roof over a gravestone. You wake up, and there is no roof, the trees were never shaped like that at all. Tahini chocolate cookie because Ruby told me sugar is actually ok. Whole milk cappuccino and I'm adding honey instead of Splenda. Enough is enough. I'm not going to crash out, but days are different now that my hours don't float on and on in pacing and typing that becomes like a trance. I felt like I was floating yesterday. Not today. That's probably ok. Tuesday, January 28 Tea with Madelyn Grace and then hot apple cider and Jameson whiskey at Cafe Reggio last night. David and his friends came by and acted abrasive. I was annoyed, but then I wasn’t. I walked the Williamsburg Bridge this morning - all the way from The West Village to Brooklyn. Delancey street was crazy at that hour, but everything after that was nice. I’d never done this before - walk the bridge, I mean - and it went on for so much longer than I expected. At first it was all windy and it made me scared, how once you got on the bridge you really couldn’t get off, how in the center the only exit was to finish the walk or perhaps to blow over, and I was the only one there, people were biking by so fast but no one else was walking, so then I started to run, and so then it got all warm, the water in the Hudson looked nice and wild and churning and distant from up here. The thing is, this winter was mostly a practice in what I’m recalling like a meditation now, with even the slight perspective - now that it’s late January, that is. Everything was present, so hyper present, and all I did was walk and think and walk and walk and walk and write down what I was thinking about and sometimes I yelled a lot, and I know it’s still the depth of winter, but this time starts to feel like it is passing. I freaked out last week, I thought about what if I couldn’t keep my days like that, but my days still hold all of this, only now, they hold more too. At the gym, I write about how it is ok to just do things like - go for a walk, go to work, lie by the window with David, go to the gym, write a story, and these days can be good and even better than the other ones, the ones that snap you into fierce exteriority. After the gym, Cassidy texts me. “Are you at KGB?,” and I’m not, but I think, well, I would go. Augustine says - “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Etc etc etc. I feel better when almost all my time is spent with people, and I think my mind is better like this, too. At KGB, I am dressed all in Pilates and Going-For-A-Jog type clothing. At KGB, Matthew is telling a girl about how Blade Runner the movie is based on a very antisemitic book. I've heard him tell this story before, and the gist varies each time, but there are a few lines that consistently resurface. I zone out after I hear the first line that I am sure I have heard before. When I zone back in, he's talking about religion more generally. "Really?," the girl he's with is saying. "Yes, YES," Matthew is saying “I looked up the history of the Blade Runner movie, and it said it was made around World War II," the girl is saying. “No, not at all," Matthew says “Oh,” the girl says “How did you like the rape scene?" Matthew asks “What rape scene?" the girl says “Oh that's good," Matthew says. There is new art on the wall of KGB. A rendition of Vermeer’s Girl With Pearl Earring, except in this case, the girl is a dog. “Do you like the new art?,” David asks. “Yes,” I say. “I don’t,” David says. I am picking at the wax on the candle, because everyone is talking and because I don’t have much to say. “Stop playing with fire,” the bartender tells me. “Act like you are at your mothers house.” Except - I mishear her. I think she says you aren’t at your mothers house, because she is right, I am not, but if I was; I would play with the flames as much as I liked. Wednesday, January 29 I would like to put away this phone, I think. Warmer, today. They’ve left the windows open at the coffee shop. I told you it was starting to feel like spring. I told you it would be all spring-like in the depth of winter, soon. Sunlight filtering, filtering, filtering, through the roof at home. The roof and the windows. It’s all one and the same. It’s a new moon tonight. Lunar New Year tonight. You put your head under the covers and filter out the sun. You like it because it is warm but also - the blue light of your phone can absorb your entire vision at any hour, here, in this makeshift tent. I am not of the Escape The Internet train of thought. It’s designed to addict you but then, well, having some fucking discipline. On my phone, I see people saying things like - “there is no ‘on your phone’, just another layer of constant consciousness”. And in real life I think things like - you should separate it if you can, you should know real life if you can but, to leave it all behind - impossible, because it will always be right there, and you could still do things like walk down the street and understand the street as purely physical but then, look around you, look at the other people, look at the surroundings they are absorbing and none of them are real, none of them are there, and so you can’t just stand on this street and get it, understand it, all offline. I don’t really want to get it anymore. My mornings could be real, they could be with just a little discipline and a touch of joie de vivre. They aren’t real, really, because I’m making makeshift Blue Light tents to filter out the sunlight, but then, I’m working on this. Blue, blue, blue sky today. Doomers previews, tonight. Biohacker meetup tonight. Bryan Johnson in Interview Magazine tonight. I like to do things like drink six teas with six Splenda each, and then I like to act very harsh with myself and others regarding the principles of a life well lived. Year of the snake. What do you think about that...? All this talk about discipline, and my afternoon is all drop off a few Depop packages and refresh, refresh, refresh the stats on a piece that I didn’t even write. There’s a hazy little run in the afternoon. There’s some bad news, or, news that is more irritating, really. Ruby spreads the word: "do not take my advice about eating lots of honey," she says. Ok. Ok, it's all protein now, then. David takes me to a strange party tonight. An interloper arrives, and he is chased out at sword point. It is insane how quickly the tides turn. You said the things that you didn’t mean, again. It wasn't supposed to happen like this, but then, it never is. You wrote today, earlier, about how - things were good, better, but you didn't want to get too cocky because remember what you were capable of really not too long ago, it was only a few weeks back, but it felt so distant. And then, tonight, again... Thursday, January 30 And then it's ok. Well, it's not, but it can be. You’ve been taking for granted that it will be ok, if it has to be ok. That if you care about something so, so, so deeply then it cannot possibly be destroyed, but it could, you are capable of this. It feels foreign sometimes, this force, this capacity for destruction, like it can’t belong to you, but it does, it’s no one else’s. It becomes simple, then. You can’t just say I crossed my fingers, you can’t just say I take it back. And so, no more. I'm working the door at Tense tonight, which is my favorite - both TENSE, and working doors, that is. It’s a beautiful night, and this, after everything, is a relief. Christian Lorentzen reads emails with Gary Indiana. “I now believe you can tell if the writer is part of a writing program, by looking at their teeth,” Gary told Christian. "Why does everybody love Downton Abbey?" Gary asked Christian, in another email. "Well, what's not to love? The series construction is so glibly subscribed that you know what will happen before the writers do." In another, he lamented the logistical problems surrounding his writings on Cuba - the travel ban, his lover there, etc etc etc. It's a good format for a reading - the emails thing. Correspondences brought to life. Not quite a diary, but close, more intimate, often, because one isn't writing into the void of one's own neurosis in a correspondence. Madelyn writes me an email, after. I am working on my own correspondence back, still. Mania delays the process. It's good to have a long form conversation to return to. I hope this email finds you well. This email finds me almost incapacitated, but I won't be, soon. Beckett's reading is full of empathy and wit as always. He's lamenting the narcissism of our times in his introductory speech, and his own gut impulses and the stories that follow give him the proper wherewithal to do so. I see Sean Lynch and others outside. Sean writes something nice on the evening. I see Doomers the next day - the dream logic of my thoughts following this production requiring another letter altogether WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, February 4 From 7pm at Heaven Can't Wait — Cynosure presents the first of a two night fundraiser for Los Angeles, featuring Alex Arthur, Precious Human, Truman Flyer, and more.
December 22, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, December 15 Woke up to snow feeling self possessed, self determined, and ill, and so I’ll hold onto this for a while, I think. Everyone keeps on telling me what I should do next, to which I say: o.k. Everything is kind of medium levels of certain, these days. Lying on the floor last night at the after party and I could tell that people’s visions were kind of starting to spin but I have needed, personally, to be more solid about it. I have needed, personally, to keep my own vision clear. You can look at her face and see she’s not a good writer, the boys were saying, last night, about someone, can’t remember who. Can we just talk about pretty girls who are good writers?, the boys were asking the group. I wasn’t fishing for compliments. Just kind of sitting there watching everything because my only real goal here is to be observational and not prescriptive. There’s not a role to be filled if you want God to love what you do, someone was saying. If you want the angels to sing you have to eat the script. Angels weren’t really on the mind as I drifted home, more consumed with things like self improvement and hand selecting a new addiction and a caution to the wind sort of impulse. Potions washed up at my doorstep this morning. Sparkling ICEE water and Advil and fever chills which come as blessings when one reads them as signs. Anyways, magical blue hour snowy dusk over Washington Square Park on the way uptown tonight, and since everything changed this summer or really three days ago in a way that is true, I have started to imagine something else. The Christmas party was in an apartment around the corner from Saint Vincent Ferrer Roman Catholic Church off Lexington Ave, last night. The apartment was open-concept with big windows and a pine tree and roaring fire, poached salmon, chocolate chip cookies and a beautiful bed on which everyone lay their beautiful coats. I wanted to stay there forever, as I always do in places that I like. I wore the Cinq-a-Sept holiday dress and the big wool coat I’ve been donning for weeks now, and I wore pearls, too, which is something new. Everything was slippery and bright and better and kind of like a dream, but I don’t want to get complacent. When I moved to New York, I lived in Yorkville where I could not sleep and where the streets were too muted and it made me uneasy. In the Lower East Side, in an apartment I hated, I was given a whole new life, and there, nothing was muted and everything was windy and cold. The wind made me kind of crazy, as wind tends to do. I was airlifted out of that apartment, ultimately, which I suppose is what I’ve kind of been praying for, here, in a space that is my own and good except for; the bed faces a fluorescent hallway and there is no room for a couch or even really a trash can. I’m seeking clarity for kind of selfish but partly religious reasons. And I’m sick of writing about the things I own or once did. On the end of the year; it is kind of pointless to say anything at all when things were fast then slow then impossible to recall, and all of this is just to say that I hope I’ve been sincere. Almost midnight, and so I go to Caffe Reggio, where things are small and precise and decked in holiday cheer, cozier even than the hotel lobby. Resolutions are: everything beautiful. And more stories that flow like water, obviously. The night is crisp and cool and I care to be extremely alert. Tuesday, December 16 Celia left the scene because she was good at noticing when things became embarrassing, and I resonated with the principle but still could not help but to hover. Nothing was embarrassing, anymore, Matthew reminded me, because everything was dead in the water and then it wasn’t and then it was and now, he suspected a new wave. Last year at this time I had to beg girls to come to parties, Matthew sighed. He gestured around the very crowded and warm bar and towards the people standing and sitting in circles and filtering in and out and the elderly Italian birthday party in the backroom. This is nothing like last year, he insisted. In the Financial District, everything was FAKE. Fake little streets and old-timey bars and I only realized the facade of it all because I walked by a Christmas Tree and the sign at its edges sent the whole charade tumbling down. EVEN THE CHRISTMAS TREE IS FAKE, the sign said. In the freezing cold, the most freezing day of the year so far, Celia and I got burgers at a small and new seafood spot. Celia wore three pops of red (bag, tights, gloves), and I wore all black. After the reading, where the stories were good and where more and more people kept materializing as if out of dust by the door, I bought three books and then sat on what seemed to be a bike rack in the back of a van driving towards the Lower East Side. Ducked my head so it wouldn’t slam into the van ceiling on every bump. The views became Real again, driving out of toy-house-town simulation FiDi, and then the bridges were glowing and the streets were full of snow and I was writing on my phone, kind of just humming to myself and mostly just saying the same things in my head over and over and over again; everything clear and everything sweet. Cold and windy winter where the elements make me kind of lose my mind. Sober minded mania. I am drawn to these kinds of things. The thing about this winter is that everyone has been going crazy. Me first, but then I learned how to put a stop to it. Sophia gave me a white rose at the Marlton Hotel in the morning, and then I found it kind of crumpled in the recesses of my bag. Petals floating everywhere and we’d moved to a different bar by then, somewhere kind of velvety and sleek and my friends and I were the only people there. Matthew was talking about people who fabricate enemies out of neutral acquaintances who just didn’t want to be their friends. A sad sort of thing, but you can’t feel too bad about someone who decides to turn evil. Dimes Square was a two year operation to get [redacted] laid, Matthew was saying. The experiment is now over. The social experiment is now over, and now you can all go home. Wednesday, December 17 I have decided to take the rest of the winter floating and soaring. Orange leaves turning brown outside the open window. Little gold watch and swan and cross and green Dartmouth Tercentenary tile and white Lake Neuchatel winter landscape postcard propped against the windowsill. So, if clarity is the thing that is most important above all, then you know what has to give. I will play “Garden Botanum” and “Come Undone” and “When Autumn Leaves” and everything by Dougie Mcclean and watch as things become crisper and more into focus. It’s important to only make a promise once and then keep it. It’s important to not be so vague about all of it going forward. Very precise and very discerning. That can be what a winter is like. I watch the light and shadows shift and shudder off my walls and bad-feng-shua hallway for some hours. I walk to the gym and I feel normal. Water and hyperpop music and images of faces sheathed in light or maybe armor all around. The television is falling off its hinges at the gym, and so the mantras on the walls are all skewed. COMMIT TO SOMETHING. REACT TO NOTHING. I’ve been culling mantras from the internet. I’ve been making lists of all my friends and everything kind I have to say about them. I’ve been making lists of all the ways I’ve maybe wronged others but have never been wronged myself. Sitting in a basement that’s illuminated blue watching films last night. Sitting in a conversation pit all day and all night for most moments of this week. Sitting under holly and cranberry and splintering wood and dried wasps nests and flowers and everything sparkling and snowy outside, soon, next week. There’s a few more dinners before that. The last days of gluttony but everyone seems over it. Sitting around dimly lit tables and everyone keeps talking about the ways we used to be. We used to wake up with crumbling Prada purses at the foot of our beds, overflowing with candy and mascara and all the things we didn’t remember stealing the night before. We used to be at the gym before dawn. I used to get along with people who viewed things as linear. I’ve always known the happiest days of my life to be exactly what they are, even as they are happening. Slipping away. There are other things, too. What do you think your new addiction will be?, Celia asks me. Something unrelated to consumption, I tell Celia. Something kind of manic and empty?, Celia asks me. It’s not so bad to think about what you want in strictly material terms, I tell Celia Thursday, December 18 THINGS I PROCURED THIS YEAR IN STRICTLY MATERIAL TERMS Silk long sleeve Ganni top
January 14, 2026 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, January 5 Start the year at Cassandra’s apartment, and then a few days pass kind of breathless and stranded in this way. Her bedroom looks over St Vincent’s Ferrer, and it is light filled and sweet. Cards and paper star cut outs hung on red ribbon stream down the edges of the cream walls. A seashell necklace, Mary Magdalene portrait, books of Adorno and Mary Gaitskill. The bible. When my friends leave for the day, I do not. Rush of opening doors and boots on wood and winter air, and then they are gone. Cassandra’s apartment is very clean. It strikes me, somewhat uneasily, that everything I touch appears slightly less precise when I’m the one returning it to its proper place. Face oil left off kilter and kind of dripping. A little bit bad at treading gently in this place where I am a guest and everything is delicate and gorgeous. Wearing my friend’s Adidas pajamas and drinking water and taking Advil in thick blue translucent pill form. Writing down the things I no longer care to reflect on. A lot can happen in a year, I tell Cassandra, but then again, a lot can happen in one day or one hour or one minute, even, so best to be kind of chill about it. We go to Heidelberg for herring and brown bread and hot raspberries in ice cream and apple strudel at night. We go to CVS for baby food and tooth brushes and nicotine gum. The evenings uptown are more sparkling and quiet. Back at the apartment, and I can’t stop talking about all the things I want to do or places I want to move. California, Switzerland, El Salvador. Uptown, to a four bedroom apartment with my four best friends. Lying on Cassandra’s couch wearing a blue sweater under a gray blanket and drinking flower power kombucha this morning. Cassandra gets ready for work and offers general hospitality. Eat any fruits and vegetables you want, Cassandra tells me. She lists them like a game. Ad libs. She was teaching me how to type cast a person as “Lego” or “Dust Bowl” or “Victorian Orphan,” last night. Blueberries, shallots, pickles, seeded mustard from the Amish farm stand. I tell Cassandra that she’ll come home to find I have devoured all of her arugula with my bare hands. Later, I wear Cassandra’s blue sweater and black ballet flats and take my own belongings clutched in my arms in a cab downtown. Am I crazy, or did you take my black ballet flats, Cassandra texts, that evening. We discuss an exchange. Tomorrow’s plans. My polyester black gown bartered for Cassandra’s blue sweater and black ballet flats. We’ll meet at mass, lunch, The Frick, The Met, the play, the party. The light is blue gray in my apartment, and all the windows steam over when the hot water is on. All the windows steam over because my apartment is very small, and because the bathroom has no doors. A New Year should feel psychedelic, not sluggish, one of my friends said, a few days back. Psychedelic??? I said. What about crisp and clear???? After my dream where there is No Air Left, I come to consciousness with concerns about redemption. Something about bad habits and something omnipresent left unsaid. Sun and light and real sort of detox incoming and yes this has all happened or is happening or needs to happen soon. Sirens outside the foggy window. Gentle winter sunrise. Watching Darling (1965) on my computer as it gets light outside. The Schlesinger film where Julie Christie whirls about all thrilled to find it’s not too late, even though, of course, it is. Back on my phone, I’m checking prediction markets and trackers and fortune tellers and all the things I’m trying to avoid for religious and also paranoid reasons. My fears are all confirmed. Reading the stars. That voice in your head telling you everything will work out fine is wrong, they say. Sound of shattering glass crystallizing outside my open window this morning. I can sense, therefore, more than see, bright morning light starting to seep through. Thank God. It was a few days of gluttony last week. Last days of bohemia, but it was different from the bohemia of before. Different from the times that we were all manic from the wind and cold and early January where everything or nothing happens all at once. Everything used to be reeling. I miss Butterfly Club. Ex-best friends are forever. I’ve been talking about being ascetic for reasons of necessity, and also because simulated intensity can only do so much when it comes to keeping a life pure. Morning, now, and I don’t remember my dreams but I jolted awake ready to chase the same thoughts in circles. Washington Square Park is bright and feeling like spring today, because the snow is melting and the trees and lights are coming down. Pine piles looking a little lonely under the park archway. Something a bit melancholy about it. Dead and gone. Nothing to overthink. Cassandra comes downtown for mass and black ballet flat retrieval, and then she goes uptown to clean her apartment and do good things so she can be a good person. Your apartment is already so clean, I want to tell Cassandra. Cassandra is telling me about the only girl in the world who are funny. I went to tell Cassandra about someone who said me and one other girl and one specific nun are only girls who are funny, but the conversation moves on before I can assert my piece. And I think I’m mostly funny when I’m being mimetic, anyway. Better at knowing funny than at being funny myself. Cassandra is telling me about childlike wonder. Washed my face with La Rouche Possay cleanser and Japanese milk toner and did Big 6 Lymphatic drainage which is supposed to do things like give you the whites of your eyes back and also cleanse your insides through and through, this morning. Procured a Celsius and cool minty zyn from the fridge. Procured green juice and cliff bar and sat in Prada boots, for a while, on the edge of my bed. I do feel confident things will work out in the end, Cassandra texts me. Only if no spiritual blockage with vice or isolation, I text her in response. What if we had seven more hours of daylight, my friend said tonight, but I like it when it is four pm and I’ve completed my day of obligations and the fading daylight matches a sense of completion. I wore a tan skirt with no tights because they all keep running and a black long sleeve tee and sneakers to do venue tours and other obligations. I thought you were coming from the gym when I saw you wearing shorts, my friend said, after I ran into him on the street. I’m not wearing shorts, but I am wearing sneakers because I keep on procuring mysterious injuries, I said in response. It was a strange December and then a good January, incoming. Good, because it is quiet. Good, because I think I sense things picking up. Can I see a menu, I asked the bartender, at a dive bar, later that night. There is no menu, because this is a dive bar, the bartender told me. Can I get something warm, I asked. The bartender fired up the kettle. Imagine seeking out attention to get only the negative aspects of fame like stalkers and rage, my friends were saying, at the dive bar. Imagine selling out your friends to cloy for low hanging fruit. Imagine turning twenty-six. Imagine playing pool. Imagine moving to Los Angeles, California, or San Salvador, El Salvador, or Geneva, or even Austin I would move anywhere, I was saying to my friends. I would move across the country or even the world and become very sweet or even very bored. My friends were talking about people for whom spectacle is just real life. You assume that everyone is excited to go back to real life, and then you realize that they have no real life. So these are the people that you’re supposed to avoid. And then after that, everyone was talking about religion again. Which is sort of crystallizing to be the topic these days, or even this year. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, January 14 A few good downtown art openings tonight (6pm - 9pm) — At 56 Henry; works by Yifan Jiang and Sareh Imani. At Entrance; Seth Cameron’s first New York exhibition in six years. At Post Times; Elberto Muller solo show.