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Lily

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Lily

Article

Lily is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between October 06, 2025 and March 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “In a cab downtown to meet Lily… She’s wearing a white dress and she looks sparkling”; “Lily invited me to the Philharmonic with friends”; “Lily texts me - I would like to spend a day like you did”. It most often appears alongside Night Club 101, Celia, Los Angeles.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: October 06, 2025
  • Last seen: March 06, 2026

Appears In

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.

Big Huge World
October 06, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, September 22 On the Upper West Side, there are stone townhouses and quiet streets and nice branzino and diet coke with lemon and they bring us baskets of red pesto and baguette and memories both good and bad become holographic quite quickly. New York is not all rotten. There are the last days of summer to take care of. Last days of gluttony. Last days of Reading Series. In a cab downtown to meet Lily with a stomach ache, Lily tells me that she is at a bar meeting boys. I meet her on the street. She’s wearing a white dress and she looks sparkling. There are others, on the steps, out here, and we all do the whole charade of all pretending like we have all never met. Lily met a boy at the bar who wants to take her on a road trip with his dogs, she tells me. You’re too young for me, but it’ll be fun while it lasts, the boy tells Lily. He sends each individual word as a separate message and then shares a video of two pitbulls sparing on a field of plastic turf. Lily lays her phone flat in her hand and we loom over it in the orange September sort of night. The video plays on an infinite loop. The dogs unhinge their massive jaws and aim to swallow a basketball whole. You’ll go upstate and get mauled to death by this guy’s pitbulls, I tell Lily. I’m not going upstate, Lily tells me. We walk further downtown, trace the usual path to a magazine launch in a night club that I thought would be more crowded. We sit in the backroom, and you can hear the readings better here than if you claw your way to the front like everyone else, but we probably appear to be kind of checked out. I’m going to save you, Lily tells me. We walk to Funny Bar where Sam is smoking outside. Am I safe to go inside, I ask Sam. He nods and flicks his hand towards the door. His friends are all from The Internet, and they introduce themselves by alias. Standing by the bar and Sam is saying that Los Angeles is it now. I stand a little halfway outside the conversation circle with my shirt pulled pretty tight around me and contribute a few half hearted sentiments about how Los Angeles can’t be it. The cars, the sprawl, the niceties, the plastic surgery. It’s got to be Austin, Sam’s friend is saying. It’s the same stale conversation topic as usual. How New York is over. Culture is over. Sam is listing a few mid to low tier Los Angeles based Internet personalities around which a new and transgressive art scene could revolve. I am dead sober, and therefore relieved to notice that I do not float out of my body and watch myself say something annoying and off-beat, like I inevitably would if I were drunk. None of those people have a mass fanbase of beautiful women, I point out to Sam. In Los Angeles, you’d find fifteen e-girls and they’d have to take Ubers. Sam agrees that this could potentially be a problem. If it’s uninteresting here, then it’s uninteresting everywhere, but I understand why everyone is seeking renewal. Like The Internet isn’t alive and everyone isn’t talking about the same things everywhere. Like Sam and his crew could wash up on Hollywood Boulevard and say the same things five years later, to a five years younger crop of wonderful young girls, fresh eyed and eager, they’d spawn out of nowhere, they would never have heard all of the things that have already been said before. Tuesday, September 23 Watching the gray light filter through the windows of a studio where everything is tan or cream or pale blue or gold. Watching a waiter at a cafe down the street bring over black coffee, cannoli, and strawberries in a chalice. Start the day with solitude. I have never lived like this before. A smooth and slick kind of woman across from me is talking about her sister who broke up with her boyfriend after meeting a Danish stone carver who believes in hard work and apprenticeship and not necessarily general education. The sister became repulsed by her boyfriend after spending time with the stone carver because she felt her boyfriend had too pragmatic a view on life. The sister left her passport at her ex’s place for one whole week and needs an ego death. She needs a concrete understanding of the next couple years. She wants to continue to go to school for forever, though this part, the whole family agrees is fine. The girl across from me is practically dripping gel from her slicked back bright red bun. She’s cloaked in business casual and a bad attitude. She’s drinking a cappuccino and she’s off to pilates. I am wondering if I would find her smug and didactic demeanor less off putting if she were more beautiful. She is wearing a stripped shirt and she gestures a J-Crew sleeve towards me and my own striped shirt as she leaves. It’s like a movie, she says. My shirt is softer and thinner and I want to coil the sleeves up and climb inside. It’s like mimes, I respond. Mimes? she asks. I do not mime. I hope she knows what that word means. It is not so much a thing of feeling out of place. I have worlds of characters and oddities at my fingertips. I like characters and oddities, which, along with a desire driven by ennui and terror to remain right at the very center of things, is why I am still here. I tend to like when people are abrasive, because it means they are fixated on just one thing. I watch the woman leave and I know for certain that I do not like her but it is not a thought that troubles me too much. It is a thought that passes like a cloud. Wednesday, September 24 Later, the air conditioning is off, and I’m pacing through empty health food aisles, drawing signs of the moon in class; waxing crescent moon, Libra moon, PLS GO FETCH ME THE MOON. Later, someone is talking about bio weapons at another party downtown. The genomes, the rapture, the clarity, the apocalyptic ideation. Please do not stress me out right now, the man on stage at the party is saying. I do not like that question. A different question. Could someone in the audience please ask one precise and better question? I see Iris and her blond hair bobbing up and down across the traffic stop as I stand outside the ice cream shop taking stock of my day and my night. Iris is carrying bright-blue-epson-salt and she is walking back towards a glass apartment in the sky. Do you want to sit, Iris asks? Inside? The rotating apartment in the sky. One rotation used to be mine. I can survive going inside. No, outside. We sit on the benches at the edge of the street as the ice cream shop closes, and I tell Iris all about how much things have improved. I have not been home all day, I tell Iris. I throw up my hands. Performative exhaustion. The whole ordeal is pleasant. Iris is very buoyant today. You should write aphorisms, Iris tells me. Passivity responds to harshness. Lethargy responds to good metabolic function. Have you noticed how all the energy here has come whirling-back-to-life? Iris starts telling me about the state of things. She has figured out where she stands when it comes to her positioning in the state of things. She has surmised who will be left behind. I nod. I clarify my own positions and I mean it. So we agree, Iris says. Good! I tell Iris about how I was at a French Cafe in Chinatown drinking matcha with almond milk which surprised my friends because they would have presumed that someone becoming Catholic would take coffee and drink it with whole milk, preferably raw. I tell Iris about how a lot has changed but I am still not so sure. I tell Iris about how culture isn’t dead but a lot of people have just decided not to be a part of it. I don’t say all of this out loud. I am still not so sure. Every apartment I go to is full of relics. Every party I go to is the same. Thursday, September 25 Sitting at Bar Oliver with Celia and it’s all red leather booths, light jazz music, non alcoholic beer which can be good for estrogen levels in women and black coffee and my eyes keep following the ceiling fans in circles. The rain has come and washed everything clean. I can have anything I want. I hang my purse on the metal arm of the tableside lamp. Incandescent bulbs. Write a note on the top of my planner. I CAN HAVE ANYTHING I WANT BUT I CAN’T HAVE EVERYTHING I WANT. Chinatown in the rain is cinematic and less like the land of leggings and small dogs that is increasingly stretching its grimy tendrils out and expanding all over downtown Manhattan. Celia turns her laptop around to show me a photograph of a light wood living room, checkered yellow table cloth, soft and warm armchair. This looks like your parents house, Celia says. Where did you find that, I ask. I found it on Tumblr, Celia says. We go for a walk along the East River, where the rain and the heat have turned everything kind of the same shade of fairytale gray. Celia tells me stories as we walk. Sylvia was an heiress and her dad was an inventor. Camilla was a tragic figure. Lucy was a ghost. I can imagine there were a lot of inventors coming out of that part of the world, I tell Celia. Why do you imagine that?, Celia asks me. Because there’s little to do but the temperament of the area is less mundane and passive than in neighboring states, I explain. The opioid crisis never hit, Celia agrees. There was no heroin, and so people invented things. We walk past the Governors Island Ferry and a kind of dilapidated and green Casa Cipriani. This is where the art fair was, Celia says. I have brain fog, I say. I go home, cheerful and ill. I go to an album release party where the singer is shaking with tears streaming down his face as the songs play, and then very cheerful and calm as he greets his wife and friends. I go to a Right Wing magazine launch and then to a celebration for a zine about ETHICS. I listen to the same song until I can’t bear it anymore. Take the M to the end of the line. Take photos of the tennis courts here, because they’re glistening in the rain and night. I show the bartender at Gotscheer Hall my passport from Switzerland and he beams. You should work here, he says. I beam back. I should work here, I say. Gotscheer Hall is huge and cavernous and covered with murals of fairytales. It’s like a whole huge world here. The world of Gotscheer Hall, and then the world of the fairytales that line its walls. It’s a Whole Huge World, I say. I say this over and over again. I took the train to the end of the M line, and then I remembered that it’s a whole huge world. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, October 6 From 4:40pm at Film Forum — Bresson’s Four Nights Of A Dreamer (1972) screens. - “Third filming (following Visconti’s) of Dostoevsky’s White Nights, transposed to ’70s Paris.” Worth seeing before it closes.
Inline links: Film Forum, Four Nights Of A Dreamer
The Downtown Festival presents a series of screenings at The Roxy — at 2:30pm; Realities and Illusions - featuring works by Lily Lady, Alex O Eaton, Lisa Hammer, Andrew Norman Wilson, and more. At 5pm; Desperately Seeking Susan followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Susan Seidelman and actor Rosanna Arquette, moderated by Special Guest. At 7pm; New Rose Hotel followed by conversation with Abel Ferrara and Stephanie LaCava. At 10pm; Ryan Trecartin Movies; Selected Works 2009 - 2016
Inline links: The Downtown Festival, Realities and Illusions, Desperately Seeking Susan, New Rose Hotel, Ryan Trecartin Movies; Selected Works 2009 - 2016
One Million Billion Interludes
November 27, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, November 17 After the summer passed and I started fresh one million billion times and nothing really happened all autumn which is always how it kind of goes this time of year, I realized I’d been trying to be a bit too ethereal about it. There were certain ways I actually spent my days, after all. One tried to become more private, and instead, one started to simply become a bit obtuse. On Saturday, Lily invited me to the Philharmonic with friends, for example. Composed and conducted by John Adams to create “jazz-inflected take on film noir’s gritty sound world” as well as “a tribute to the Northern California coastline.” This was nice, because everything I’d been imagining for months now was all misty shores and temperate gray climates and so it was nice to hear the music and imagine kind of floating in that. Sat there kind of ignorant about it all, but liking the ideas that form in one’s subconscious in conjunction to classical music and the high ceilings and fancy rooms and watching the conductor move like a marionette. That was like drugs, Lily said, after. Phillip Glass was seated a few seats over the last time we were here, my new friends said, before. It was not quite midtown in Winter but Lincoln Center was still starting to glow, what with the horses and the Christmas trees and an older demographic of opera and film and philharmonic-goers all dressed up. Negronis in sippy-cups and vodka at the Russian Tea Room, and Lily’s artist boss had dressed her for the occasion and so she looked kind of sparkling in a long green skirt and a wool coat with a shoulder-hook for her purse. You look like a martini, I told Lily. I wore tights from the Internet and a dress from my ex-roomate and a falling-apart-purse from my ex-boyfriend and black shoes from my mother. You look like a whiteclaw, Lily told me, but she said it very kindly and so I didn’t take offense. After, our new friends showed us the lines in the road where the horse manure and hay had become indented to permanence, and they showed us a fountain where once an old woman was seen wrangling snakes, and they showed us an apple store they’d robbed, and they assisted the blind. We followed the blind man onto the subway and then later I was at downtown bars where it’s the same thing over and over again. Matt and Matt perched in the corridor by the bathroom. Ran into a friend fresh off of working a Palantir-Party. It could have been so good in theory, she explained. They’d rented out multiple bars and catered Carbone and a martini tower, after all. But the dry ice was kind of glitching and San Francisco people all wear aura rings even on nights-out and on the bright side, they left behind thousands and thousands of dollars in parmesan cheese. What else? Two dresses arrived in the night from resale Cinq de Sept and Gil Rodriguez and I laid them out on my perfectly made bed all black and christmas white. I wrote a small review about a book about a girl who idolizes the apocalypse because she does not desire to get old. I was paralyzed, for a while, which come to think of it, was what stirred all that talk about momentum. For breakfast, I am served a rotten egg at the gym on Prince Street. It emerges in a plastic cup and it is sheened in dark brown sludge. This egg is rotten, I cautiously tell the man who is working behind the counter. Oh, the man says, and then he opens his palms like he hopes for me to place the plastic box and rotting egg in them. We both seem unsure of what to do. Oh I’m sorry, he says. It’s ok, I say. And then he hands me a barbell bar in response. Like we are doing barter and trade. Cassandra tells me a story about one of her favorite days of her life. We were all on the peninsula for the week, by the ocean, in the room with the big wooden bed and the canopy curtains and the patchwork quilts. We let Cassandra and Celia in around mid afternoon, and we were all watching the boats float by on the window. And I was doing a rubix cube, Cassandra says. And you were getting so mad. And the day went on forever, I tell Cassandra Not forever, Cassandra says. I do remember writing down everything everyone said, though. Now, everything hovering hovering hovering. New Moon, tomorrow. Grab all that crisp and frozen air that’s hovering so thin it could snap, and maybe it will. November snaps in half and all the other omens and things-that-could-happen come spilling out. All because of the New Moon. All because of the artificial intelligence apocalypse. All because I’m reading the book that Alice Bailey’s demon wrote. Not to get too new age about it... WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, November 26 From 7:00 - 9:00pm at The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — Hillsdale opened yesterday, and there’s another performance tonight! A play written by Roman D’Ambrosio and directed by Rabiah Rowther. “During homecoming weekend at the infamous conservative Hillsdale College, former fraternity brothers, and the women they love, reunite. As the weekend unfolds and the drinking increases, the alumni question their relationship with each other and the promises they were told. | This is a very unique play that I’m excited about. Definitely worth seeing. tickets here (additional performances Nov 28
Inline links: The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, Hillsdale, Roman D’Ambrosio, Rabiah Rowther, here
From 10pm at Baby’s All Right — It’s Baby Dance #013 - ft Le Keep and Catie Lausten live, DJs Donna Francesca, Sid Simons, and Sadie. Hosted by Lily Myrick, Alex Arthur, Callie Reiff, and London Yuji.
Inline links: Baby’s All Right, Baby Dance #013
Hotel-Life-For-Life
February 04, 2026 · Original source
Monday, January 26 On the first day of the clearest week of the year, I vow to be meticulous about it. As hell and even heaven and all of New York City freezes over in the cold, Olivia keeps on asking if I’m sick of it. Impossible to feel lonely when my opinion on the benchmarks of the weather is demanded at the start of every day. Are you still happy about this? Olivia keeps on asking. It got colder and colder and colder for one week or maybe more. Soon, I expect the cold will break. Soon, there will be something to talk about besides the arctic winds. Although I do find it thrilling and even telling, really, to see how everyone reacts to extremity. I am only being a little bit factious. It is icy and hazy and pale and like playing tetris with myself, finding footholds in the snow banks, this week. Creep past the frozen turtle pond, shut the open window, position my salt stained boots in the divots in ice piles that other passerby’s have left behind. Hidden little trails and maps and loopholes in treacherous places. Exciting places. Game theory in the blizzard. Do you still feel ‘manic’ and ‘energized’ by this, Olivia wants to know. Are you still wearing sheer tights and a-line skirts and enjoying how the wind chill makes everything feel empty? Are you still seeking redemption in the spaces left barren while everyone rushes through tundra streets? Are you still feeling pretentious or maybe just autistic standing stock still and underdressed in courtyards that have never really been yours? This week, I have decided to just say what I really mean. Listening to Dark But Just A Game by Lana del Rey while the sun comes up this morning. Not a new song, but new to me. They are talking about Video Games album anniversary on The Internet this morning. Thank you for my mental illness, girls are saying on the Internet. I tell Olivia that what I remember from this album is before I knew much on the Internet. I remember my mentally ill friend turning on Video Games in a wall to wall carpeted suburban room encased in sunlight and green branches that brushed against wide windows when I was something like thirteen or maybe younger. Turn that stuff off, I remember telling my friend. Turn off those sad and strange songs before we all start to get freaked out. Playing Dark But Just A Game over and over and over again, this morning. Breathing kind of shallow breaths and making calls of confession or maybe complaints. I vowed to be more private about it and then I vowed to make my blog more true. If I cannot speak about something clearly, then I think I will not speak about it at all. In the morning, there is salt stained mirror and la Roche Posay cleanser and peptide moisturizer and mineral sunscreen and amazon tights and a call from Maria saying hotel lobby for lunch, maybe. Rituals like magic. Compulsive documentation. Live-blogging for my live-diary which is mostly just an event calendar plus some but not-so-many lurid life details because I have never been so good at keeping it all so private. The truth of it is, one can return to oneself quite quickly, but this should only have to happen once or maybe twice. In the hotel lobby, a beautiful girl walks in. She is a model, clearly. You are twenty-nine, a horrible man is saying to her, across the table. Good genes, he is saying. He is saying things about a girl like you and you can leave if you want. He is complimenting her grotesquely and it is very understandable why she would feel extremely annoyed. She is very articulate and pretty, though, and seems to know this game. Girls like you have hobbies, the man is saying. Do you have hobbies like art collecting or acoustic music or perhaps even ice skating? The girl is good at modulating her voice, and so my eavesdropping is abruptly cut off. Order: almond milk cappuccino, almond milk matcha, ginger tea, diet coke at Hotel Lobby. Too many beverages . Too many things I want. Discipline is pleasure. Restraint enhances desire. Reading something true on Health Gossip about the things a person must do before they lick the candy wrapper of success and then im thinking o.k perhaps time to cut myself off of this sort of thing for a little bit. Maria wears a red sweater and black pants and orders only two drinks: (1) black coffee and (2) greens juice. I ask Maria to read my diaries and she obliges and then, even highlights the parts she likes best. Too much to say? I ask Maria. No, she says. No and I think your instincts would stop you before you really said anything too uncouth. Too panopticoned? I ask. It’s fine to talk about faux-purity, Maria says. Nightfall in the hotel lobby, where the lights are yellow and glowing and dark and my computer screen is starting to look fluorescent and bright and bad, in contrast to the low-light and well-curated vibe they have fired up in here. A friend group I was eavesdropping on in rather nefarious and uncouth ways have gone silent, now. The man across the couch from me is talking about working on a film pilot in Malaysia and a need-for-speed and also thirty-million-dollars. He could never do what you are doing, two of the girls in the friend group were telling the third, earlier, as she sobbed. Do what you’re doing, being: sobbing in hotel lobby. Radical vulnerability in hotel lobby. I am feeling nefarious and busy body and a little bit mean. We’re your friends so we sure are going to be kind to you, the two girls had been telling the third. Just because our mothers were born in the wrong generation, does not mean they can’t listen-and-learn. Ordered tonic water and avocado and adopted vaguely negative vibe towards; people who did not know they were being panopticoned. Girls whose conversation I could have just let flow around me like water. There’s stagnation in judging harshly, particularly in judging people with whom I am totally uninvolved. No one in the world knows where I am right now, but anyone who wanted to could probably guess. And it’s not that I think it’s particularly good or even beneficial to be cultivating mystique, but once secrets are in the air they swirl around forever, and so one might want to hold some things a bit closer to one’s chest. Pitch black outside, which makes it even more warm or silver in here, depending on where I look. Lily texts me - I would like to spend a day like you did. We can recreate my whole day, I respond. We can recreate the good days. We can eradicate all slush. I can tell you all about what actually happened. Soon, I will walk home in the freezing and sparkling night in my black and soleless ballet flats. I will slip on ice and look at the moon and Washington Square Park archway and the dark and getting even darker sky. I’ve been feeling kind of desperate to chronicle the things that are mine, if I’m being honest about it. Hold onto the things I never lost. This is different from grasping onto things that never were or no longer are, yours. Parties last week, but I don’t really remember. Party last weekend, but full of people I didn’t want to see. Party tonight, and I wear athleisure to the bar and make a friend who shares my name and also my sensibilities. We’re here because of your blog, someone tells me, at the bar. We’re here because we just made a film in Nigeria and now we’re moving to Rome to work for Vatican II. We’re here because of an article that everyone hates. Birthday party. Renaissance themed karaoke. Did you just meet and become best friends, someone asks me and my new friend. We all go outside to smoke a cigarette. Duh, I respond. This is always how it goes with new and fast friends. In my room, tonight, and I’ve been feeling good and normal. The cleaner my room gets, the more I remember. At the bar tonight, I met someone who lives in a hotel-for-life. Is everything perfect-all-the-time? I asked the hotel-inhabitant. Is everything clean and contained and curated and beautiful and taken care of? Do you order room service for dinner? If you develop a problem, is it immediately fixed? In my room, there is a computer and also a wooden music box that plays Silent Night when opened. Inside the box, there are blue little blue pearls and letters and a ballerina that spins. Above my bed, there are lace white curtains newly pinned over courtyard-facing open windows. The curtains are there to keep out ice and possibly fire-escape intruders. The unearthed music box is the reward for cleaning my room. Thinking about rabbit holes I’d like to really delve into next. Getting texts from friends from online who go by names after celestial objects. Thinking about Saorise’s brand new robot that sends her pilates-training-packets. Thinking about Esoteric Health Book Club. Saint Teresa de Ávila. Thinking about no more vice. Everything has frozen over and hovered and smoothed itself thin in the months that came in between. Descents into madness happen very quickly, my new friend was saying, today, at the bar, where everything was more lovely than I could possibly have imagined. We were talking about cults, because the topic does arise even in beautiful places. Talking about posture. Talking about cult leaders. Matchmakers. Scammers. Beautiful lives. The Places To Be.. Hours later, now. Home, now. Still listening to Jeff Buckley “Forget Her” and Lana del Rey “Dark But Just a Game” on repeat because I love pleasure in excess. So addicted to everything. I can get addicted to good things too, I think. Tomorrow, I will fall asleep in a snowy white house in the woods. We will get vanilla milkshakes on the drive down. Many rooms. Plans to cook dinner. Last summer, I wanted very badly to drive to this house in July. I wanted to find secret waterfalls and secret gardens, too. It’s a house just an hour or so from the city where I used to go often, and I remember the surroundings as very green. I remember fighter jets over Celia’s graduation. I remember Rose writing her social security number up and down her arms in sharpie, last summer, because chaos was kind of the objective everyone was seeking, then. Enough reminiscing. Same songs, over and over and over again. Opening my window because it is time for bed. Tell yourself over and over and over, Jeff Buckley keeps saying. He died early with something to show for it. Addicted to repeating myself. Addicted to new beginnings and no more false starts. Working on getting addicted to continuity now, I think. I will become totally obsessed with continuity. What a relief. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, February 4 From 6pm - 8pm at Latitude Gallery — Unbridled: Horsin Around opens; a salon-style group exhibition celebrating the Year of the Horse.
Inline links: Latitude Gallery, Unbridled: Horsin Around
Yellow-all-around
February 15, 2026 · Original source
Feeling like I am kind of on a leash Sunday, February 8 Now, I am in my room and I am feeling ok. I am lying under my big white comforter in a green cashmere sweater, black Amazon tights, tennis skirt, nothing is messy anymore. After today’s reading group, where the discussion was about Virtue and Vice, Cassandra and Olivia and some others and I walked over to Washington Square Diner. I used to frequent Washington Square Diner at night, but in the day everything was brighter and I liked it better this way. I ordered black coffee and lemon tea and was happy with this choice, as no one seemed particularly pleased with the sandwiches that they kept on trotting out. Dry chicken, huge bread. I’m a snob, I’m a snob, Olivia kept saying. Sorry, she was saying. Sorry but I just feel really fucking bored. I added splenda to my water kind of indignantly, and stirred it around feeling strange. Olivia was talking about how it’s fine to eat anything if you’re on a desert island. It’s fine to eat bacon if the desert island is the prison-of-your mind and it’s the-only-food-you-like. Cassandra was talking about how none of her friends were getting married anytime soon, and so perhaps she’d have to conjure up a wedding of her own. Yeah, sorry, I was saying. Why sorry? Cassandra asked. There was way too much food on the table, and I think that this was the part that was throwing off everybody’s vibe. There was a new Cool Sips soda shop where Pepsi is mixed with heavy cream in town, and so after lunch, there was talk of maybe we go. Maybe we go drink heavy cream and diet Pepsi. Maybe we go weightlifting. Maybe we buy cottage cheese which is calories-per-pound-per-protein-per - I never really understood these things - better than chicken. Maybe we all go home. Whilst talking about protein in ground beef and also cottage cheese and also high cholesterol versus heavy metals, Olivia reminded us that the number one health factor is joy. At home, I am sitting on the edge of my bed in a black skirt and Lafayette striped cream sweater and brown snow and salt stained Prada boots. Thinking about self fulfilling prophecies. I will not drink and I will not look particularly pretty and I will not be socially offputting and strange. I don’t need to share every word of my google doc diaries. Twenty-five-thousand words written this week in google doc diaries because I just can’t cut myself off. Real-life-diaries. Real-life-compulsions. Fake-life-blog, maybe. In the afternoon, I walk over to a kind of industrial style Japanese coffee shop to meet Lily for tea. I am wearing a thin spring coat, no gloves, and the wind chill is negative-fifteen. My face is sort of swollen as a product of bad habits, but I am hoping to blame expedited deterioration on wind burn. I run into my priest walking quickly, somewhere around West 4th. Are you crying, my priest shouts in my direction. Just cold, I say in response. I walk for twelve more minutes, and when I reach the Japanese Coffee shop, my hands are burning and there are tears streaming down my face. A product of the cold, no-emotion, I tell Lily. The coffee shop is lined with narrow benches, and Lily lets me occupy the one-free-seat because it is clear that I am feeling fragile. She hovers above me holding silver trays, pistachio milk, black coffee, chocolate chip cookies. I feel like maybe I shouldn’t move to Los Angeles, she sighs, when I finish telling her my week of whirling hotel stories. I feel like in Los Angeles, everyone pretends that they don’t care about nice things. I drink my coffee in a few big sips, and I am feeling better at talking than listening. Did you write anything down about the people my party last week, Lily asks me. I nod, and pull up my notes. Most of my friends call girls ‘girls’ I say, The people at the party called ‘girls’ ‘women.‘ Lily smiles. It’s a posture just the same. At night, at the Superbowl party, in an apartment where the walls were recently washed a sort of deep-cloud blue, and the drinks are made with vodka and coconut water and grapefruit juice and on the side, some champagne, I arrive late. I’ve been making the drinks kind of strong, which I know you like, Savannah says. The advertisements this year are all made by Artificial Intelligence. The only advertisement not visibly made by Artificial Intelligence in an anti-hate ad wherein an antisemitic attack is covered up by a blue square, and two students walk off screen in redeemed solidarity. When this advertisement begins to play, Matt suggests that we all shut up. Everyone watch the ad, he says. The advertisement finishes, and then all the boys’ phones begin to buzz. Did you just see the ad, all the boys’ friends are asking the boys. They are all really into things like hot-ticket-cultural-discourse. What did you do last night? Matt asks me, later after everyone is already all a little drunk, and I am curled up on the couch, eating pistachios, staring at the screen. I hung out with my new friends, I tell Matt. I am feeling triumphant, and a little bit sad. Who are your new friends? Matt asks. Very nice and very promising people, I tell Matt. Don’t tell anyone that I’m making new friends, I tell Matt. I won’t, Matt responds. I won’t, because it doesn’t sound like you are. Later, trying to leave, and everyone is stuck. I think your taxi is blocking mine, Matt texts. I think a cop car is blocking me. Everyone is trying to honk louder than the car before. I was playing tetris in the snow and now we’re playing tetris at the wheel. Tetris on Houston street. My taxi makes a fake-out breakaway left and I speed away. Writing everything down in my apartment, back home. My moods are very predictable. I write about systems. I’m telling my computer that it’s never really about me. Watch how the patterns repeat. Could a human girl be so good at cycles? I’m telling my computer that I’m the best human girl at cycles. I’m the best at downward spirals. I’m the best at it’s happening over and over and over again. I’m not an evil genius. Writing like I’m top-of-class (fifth grade). Writing like I’m queen of staying up late. Window is closed tonight because outside it is just too cold. Drinking Perrier not Evian because I have ambitions of aesthetic cohesion. Dream logic. Magic logic. I am too tired to miss anything, and I am too caught up in self-surveillance to be really running on anything other than vibes. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Sunday, February 15 From 8pm at Night Club 101 — Punisher returns with a post Valentine’s Day debrief. Readings by Megsuperstarprincess, Riley Mac, Nicole Sellew, Francesca D’Alessandro, Dove Ginsburg, and Ava Doorley. Party to follow with ​​The Heaven Forever. Mélange á seven. | RSVP here.
Inline links: Night Club 101, Punisher, The Heaven Forever, here
Humanoid-Robots
March 06, 2026 · Original source
Before the once-in one-hundred-years snow-storm, the air was soft and warm and not even that still, and so no one could believe what was about to come. I spent all day thinking about winter cleaning, but I did not spring into action until late. Then, I pulled on a black Gil Rodriguez dress, and I walked to buy Celsius, get on the train, drift over to downtown for a book launch, whilst feeling tired yet optimistic. Sam was sitting behind the bar next to a huge bison head and a lot of Olympic memorabilia, and he told me that Ellie was there and New-York-University girls were there and not Saiorse, yet, who is terminally late. Downstairs, the lounge was open and dark and I mixed myself a drink full of Campari syrup and ginger and gin. I went upstairs and I sat at the bar and Sam made me a Roy Rogers which is a Shirley Temple but for boys. Saiorse arrived in a gray dress and boots, and she made me a glass of melon juice. Lily arrived, and she told Sam that she only drinks diet coke. After that, we walked over through the still warm enough night to a penthouse party full of people who make robots. This, or a dive-bar. This, or Soho House. This or homeward bound. Choose your own adventure. Humanoid robots are designed to do physical things that humans do like serve food at restaurants, and to potentially also have superior intellect and perhaps become agentic-not-mimetic, Saiorse explained. She explained something of a sort of space-race to get this show-on-the-road. Cold War. I was thinking more in hypotheticals. I hadn’t really been invited. I have not had existential dread since summer, when I moved out of a glass apartment where I was always staring up at terminally blinking skies. I only ever said I was a nihilist when I didn’t know what that word meant. At the party, there were trays and trays of sushi and a spiral staircase and men carrying around platters of dumplings. Everyone from the Stanford class of twenty-two is here, Sam said. A lot of people flew in for this party, he explained. Saiorse and I maneuvered our way to the bar, and then towards a long counter top that appeared to be a buffet, but was totally untouched. Lily and Saoirse and I began to eat everything on display. Grabbing plates of salmon and being greedy. A girl standing in the center of the room was saying she felt dizzy. Does anyone else feel dizzy, she was asking. Yes, I decided. Yes indeed I do, and so I went to the bathroom but the door was just one big plywood sheath with no lock, and the music that was fired up throughout the whole huge vast apartment was pumping out from two small speakers that were located here. Blaring Ye so loudly from out of the bathroom ceiling and from under the sink. It felt kind of like a strange and architectural dream. Not like a bad dream, but like I had to go. The girl in the center of the room had reminded me that I was feeling dizzy. She disappeared by the time I came back to the party, and I tried to tell my friends about the strange and blaring bathroom music but they were absorbed in things that seemed hyper and happy and totally present. Nobody seemed too future-oriented despite the product at hand, but they never do at these sorts of things. The books on display all had colorful spines and recognizable titles. I did say goodbye, and outside, the snow had still not started.

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