I have, as is my (regrettable) nature, become a lazy captive to the summer doldrums, full of those strange expanses of time in which I could do all of the things I've been plotting but can't quite gather the necessary momentum. Book-reading has mostly gone on hold, as have writing projects (besides a couple of consuming ones at work). I go on midday walks, fold the laundry, cook cheap meals and package them away in identical plastic containers. It still hits 90 degrees on a regular basis, afternoon thunderstorms smothering my apartment with thick heat and eruptions of lightning that terrify the dog (that's another new development). The other staples of summer linger: cheap freeze pops, late-night beers, no-bake desserts.

July began with a glimpse of Venus and sparklers on the third. I turned 23 with Thai iced tea and white wine, sang bad karaoke during an Ybor bar crawl, watched the owner of an old Greek diner to do magic tricks at our table. I read Blackout and Blankets and bought too many books on a trip to DC. Now, apparently, the school year has begun, and fall approaches in its plodding way, though I'm enough of a novice here that all the months seem to melt into each other. It's all a bit unceremonious.

Lately:

"In history and literature, the spinster is not typically cool and stylish like Bolick’s glamorous 'awakeners.' She is often weird, difficult, dissonant, queer — like an unnerving dream, or a pungent dose of smelling salts. And her social and emotional life is not primarily oriented around the familiar forms of straight romance."

Reaching my autistic son through Disney. I was told I'd cry and I did. One of the best stories I've read all year. 

Just some light summer reading: the unnerving, convincing New Yorker story about the earthquake that, before long, will devastate a huge swath of the Pacific Northwest.

"It’s more the case that Antrim’s fictional universe is different. It doesn’t bend toward justice, not even the kind that knows there is none but sort of hopes art can provide absolution. His universe bends — it is defi­nitely bent — but always toward greater absurdity (in both funny and frightening guises)." John Jeremiah Sullivan writes a perfect profile of Donald Antrim. 

"I once brought the conversation at a dinner party to a halt by saying that if everyone I knew died tomorrow, I wouldn’t be undone, because I’d still have the streets of New York, where, sooner or later, almost every form of human expressiveness is on display and I am free to look it right in the face, or avert my eyes if I wish, let my jaw drop, offer it an ice cream, or call the cops—as the mood takes me." How to be alone: a guide.

"Depression calls on resources some women have and some women don’t, including a capacity to hatch intimacy out of despair. Wanting to love your child is not the same thing as loving your child, but there is a lot of love even in the wanting."

Beatlemaniacs 50 years later / Tig / Reimagined covers for classics by women / The Jefferson Grid / New York in June / LA dreamscapes / Kids need boredom / Down with LEGO kits / A safari through Tanzania / Keith Haring's Unfinished Painting / The airplane guy / 1970s Americana / Brownstone dreams. 

"However dispassionately delivered, all of this amounts to a lament, the scientist's version of the mothers who stand on hillsides and keen over the death of their sons." Ballad of the sad climatologists.

Learn to be hot. Learn to be cold.

Death and anger on Everest: more and more Westerners clog the mountain, while more and more Sherpas die in increasingly dangerous conditions. 

Suicide on campus and the pressure of perfection. 

After reading and becoming somewhat obsessed with Edinburgh, I've been rereading some Alexander Chee essays. Here's one about his time as a cater-waiter for an extravagantly rich society couple ("When you’re a waiter, clients usually treat you like human furniture. The result is that you see them in unguarded moments, and that, I liked") and one about what getting his MFA at Iowa meant to him ("I still have a waiter check with an outline for my novel on it that came to me while I waited for my section to be sat. I wrote it, it was all that mattered"). 

Songs on repeat: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6.

"I felt like I was committing a sin, destroying one of the few connections I had with the girl, whose spirit I suspected could be kept alive through her possessions. But I was also pissed off that I had been inconvenienced by her death — a late move-in, a dirty apartment littered with worn-out junk, restless nights. I wanted to sleep; I wanted my selfish summer." Living in the dead girl's room.

Best apartment tour / Late August / JFK's favorite photo of himself / How Emily St. John Mandel edited Station Eleven / A home in Paris with really good rugs / A food critic cooks on vacation / Performative female friendship / Silent history / The Craigslist Killers / A speck in the sea / Walk more. 

"It's everything you want in a story — consequential, evolving, complicated. This work will matter in a way that so many other stories don't or won't. But this beat has also been distressing and unrelenting. I've come uncomfortably close to handing in my resignation, asking to cover anything but this." How black reporters cover black death. 

The 199 Most Donald Trump Things Donald Trump Has Ever Said. And the strange world of presidential campaign reporting.

"When we’re too angry to touch each other, we’ll still both touch Sadie." How a kitten eased my partner's depression.

Oddly specific fears for one's children, including "My daughter becomes the #2 in a mean girl trio" and "My children become committed, but utterly talentless, folk singers/poets."

Life in the Anthropocene!

As the heat rises here I've begun to move in slow motion, sleeping nine hours a night, reading books in waves, drifting at half-pace through my apartment, which never drops below 82 degrees. In impulsive moments I've tried to channel my jangly energy into something productive: I chopped off half of my hair, I bought a dining room table with a stack of ATM $20s, I started planning a 10-day solo road trip to the late-summer mountains I miss so much. At the end of the month, the Supreme Court decision came down and I wore a dollar-store flower crown in my first real Pride parade, throwing beads to all the people thronged along the road's edge. All that, and I spent too much money on ingredients for key lime pie.

Lately: 

"This happens to me sometimes. A curtain falling in the middle of the act, leaving minutes and sometimes hours in the dark. But anyone watching me wouldn’t notice. They’d simply see a woman on her way to somewhere else, with no idea her memory just snapped in half." One of my favorite essayists on her drinking years.

"Isn’t that the way all love affairs run—from dream and cloud-journey to earth-firmness?"

Everything is yours, everything is not yours.

"After a few months off lithium, I felt energetic, engaged, even electric. It’s hard to know if that feeling was just a ramping up toward mania again or if it was the lifting of a lithium fog. But this is what ended up happening: I turned down jobs and burned all professional bridges with sharp and illogical emails, many of them referring to Eminem; I kept a stash of homemade granola in my pocket to hand out to anyone who would accept a stranger’s dirty pocket granola; I developed an alter ego, a rapper named Jamya; I painted my face with spectacular green-and-gold eye shadow; I was kicked out of a bar without even drinking; I stood on my head every morning; my apartment burned down; I served as the sole witness to a stranger’s wedding on top of the World Trade Center; I wore 800 necklaces and spoke in a slow growl or sometimes a high-pitched squeal; I saved a corgi from being hit by a cab on Central Park West (on which occasion Ben Vereen stopped to call a dog ambulance); I spoke to strangers with the intensity of a car salesman stuck in a Mamet monologue; I preached about Jesus wherever I went, which for a Jew is unusual; I spent almost $700 on butternut squash and assorted seasonal gourds. My clothes smelled of fire, from the burned-out apartment. I scared the scary people on the subway. All that took place over two weeks, maybe three, as I made my way back and forth between Los Angeles and New York."

A son of football calls his mother.

"'How many people do this hike?' I ask the bartender, after I’ve come out of my reverie. 'None,' she says."

Peter Eastman's studio / The small, happy life / Trail type / Groundhog Day and making art / The last true hermit / Shots from a 1978 Stones concert / Inside Clickhole / The image search for Lofoten / Sweet dog mug / Matisse bag / Was this my baby? Who was he? / Advanced style / Addendum to the Proust questionnaire.

"I have this wretched vision of myself as others must currently see me—as the nucleus of all sorrow, the person to whom Bad Things happen. My body the site of the catastrophe. It’s mostly imagined, this vision, but for some it’s true. Some people edge politely away from my grief; they don’t talk about it because they don’t know how to, or they don’t want to. Or they think that by talking about it, they’ll remind me it exists." Dispatches from Trauma Island.

"If there were a Mount Rushmore for writers, he'd be there already." Remembering James Salter.

"A person is not supposed to be in both Asia and Africa in the same week on a regular basis; the world should not be traversed at that speed. It was scrambling, discombobulating; worse, it was damaging – some central element of my subjective self was being ebbed away." Hotel Melancholia. 

Questions from my mixed-race son.

"What happened in a Charleston church on Wednesday night is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is 'unspeakable.' We should speak of it often. We should speak of it loudly. We should speak of it as terrorism, which is what it was. We should speak of it as racial violence, which is what it was."

And: "We created the day. We bear the judgment. May God have mercy on the poor South that has so been led."

Grieving a brother. It comes as no surprise that this made me cry.

"Describing a life doesn’t actually tell a story. And we’re actually not usually given to know our place inside of our lives in quite the same way we do with our characters. So writing autobiographical fiction is in some ways much harder than writing fiction. You know less about what is happening." Alexander Chee gives great interviews. His book Edinburgh was the best I read this month. 

The Instagrams of Hallie Bateman and Kara Haupt.

What Sally Mann would have the President read: "Books that will send him down on his knees in a loamy forest to observe the bijoux details of this sweet, complex life."

How Reddit works as an incubator of hate.

"Sometimes, I’ve noticed with horror that the memories I have of things like my daughter’s birthday parties or the trips we’ve taken together are actually memories of the photographs I took, not of the events themselves, and together, the two somehow become ever more worn and overwrought, like lines gone over too many times in a drawing."

"Baltimore woman asked to tone down 'relentlessly gay' yard will instead make it even more relentless and more gay."

And once again I begin to feel my finite remaining hours on this earth slipping inexorably away while my daughter sits next to me, mesmerized. Which is what parenting is sometimes: the pouring of one’s ever-diminishing stock of time into this other being, her own supply seeming, for now, inexhaustible. The scourge of terrible children's books by Gabriel Roth, whose novel The Unknowns is so great.

"I have lived thirty years in these thirty days. I am thirty years sadder. I feel like I am thirty years wiser."

Ten years at the Post: "Life doesn't usually conform to narrative, or, at least, a single narrative. Rigorous reporting can reveal arcs and themes and twists and denouements and literary-like symbolism, but in the end life is mostly open-ended, unsatisfying and incomplete. Honor that incompleteness. Respect it."

Late again, not that anyone's counting, but I will say it's more difficult to mark the months when I no longer live by the semester. I've been terrible at record-keeping; I have to check my camera roll to remember how I spent half of my days. Mostly the answer is underlining sentences in books and taking pictures of Florida's storybook summer clouds. May's best moments were the day trips I forced upon myself (out of the apartment, into the unrelenting heat): a book on the beach where the Gulf meets the Bay, a miniature key lime pie in a tin foil cup, boba tea and baseball, sea sponges and Greek desserts I will never be able to pronounce.

Lately:

The best book month in ages! Exclamation point worthy! Standouts: Jenny Offill's unforgettable Dept. of Speculation, of which I now own two copies since I underlined the entire first one (my Goodreads review was simply: "GOD."); Maggie Nelson's Bluets, a stunning melancholia on heartbreak and color; Heidi Julavits' diary in The Folded Clock, clever, absorbing, self-aware; A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, master of the individual sentence (though I think he shares the title with Lorrie Moore); Station Eleven, all magic and dreaminess; and the graphic novel This One Summer, which distills the fumbling summers of girlhood into a gorgeous, blue story of growing up a season at a time.

"If you are young and you are reading this, perhaps you will understand the gleam in the eye of any woman who is sixty, seventy, eighty, or ninety: they cannot take you seriously (sorry) for you are just a girl to them, despite your babies and shoes and lovemaking and all of that. You are just a girl playing at life."

RIP Mad Men. Emily Nussbaum's take. Jon Hamm's take. RIP Mad Style. 

Supernaturally talented Sia, interviewed by Howard Stern.

Georgia O'Keeffe's studio / Plant heaven / Scenes from a Southern childhood / Mattress weekend / Second Life's forgotten wonders / A poem / Looking at Appalachia / 36 hours in Chapel Hill-Carrboro / Split image / Transgender today / Rihanna at the Met Gala / Segregation story / Nat Geo's photo blog. 

"I had made a forest of my own beliefs, and lived in it. Here’s how I left: I stripped away the trees." This essay knocked me out. 

"...which is another story about the way you can tell your past as a story, but the truth is usually harder to hold than the story you make it into."

"'Women' is kind of a crazy beat...  On the planet, women constitute half of the human population, but on the Internet, they’re just one vertical among dozens."

"My hands tremble, relaxing only once everything has been sufficiently documented, each memory in my grasp, as if by putting them down on paper, I can make them last forever. I develop my own form of sacred geometry to find the secret knots among these details and fit them into the rest of my journal." Tavi on the art of journaling.

Meant to post this days ago but couldn't find words for this top section. So, a list: browning butter on my little gas stove with the porch door open, popsicles for breakfast, mellow nights at work and mornings spent reading in the light of my apartment. Solo beach days and salad lunches. 

Lately:

"When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse." Baltimore.

On James Salter, whose works are " hewn from the same stone: the fretfulness that stalks us even in the moments when we should be most content." (Currently reading the dreamlike A Sport and a Pastime.)

Embracing a life of solitude in a mountain town. 

"Three or four times I went away to teach, but usually M. would come with me, and we simply made our home, temporarily, somewhere else. And, while I always loved the stillness I found in the fields and the woods, our house was a different thing, and I loved that too. We were talkers -- about our work, our pasts, our friends, our ideas ordinary and far-fetched. We would often wake before there was light in the sky and make coffee and let our minds rattle our tongues. We would end in exhaustion and elation. Not many nights or early mornings later, we would do the same. It was a forty-year conversation." Mary Oliver writes of her longtime partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook, and their life together.

"Listen, my wary one, it's far too late to unlove each other." Misgivings.

Alexander Chee on drag.

"The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph." Sally Mann's exposure, via Jessica Stanley.

Chasing Yeats / Building the man I am / Molly Lambert on Mad Men / Good intentions / Remembering Dave Goldberg / NYC subway style / Enjoying the Lit Up podcast / Richard Scarry's LA / A beautiful Florida home / Really looking forward to The Folded Clock / A keeping society / Also looking forward to Spinster / and Krakauer's take on Missoula.

"Faced with the knowledge that nothing we say, no matter how trivial or silly, will ever be completely erased, we find it hard to take the risks that togetherness entails. But perhaps, as lonely people often are, I am being too negative, too paranoid. Perhaps we are capable of adapting, of finding intimacy in this landscape of unprecedented exposure. What I want to know is where we are headed. What is this sense of perpetual scrutiny doing to our ability to connect?"

"When I began seriously reading Joan Didion, in my early twenties, my response was less 'this is amazing' than 'this is allowed?' As is the case with many young writers, early encounters with Didion felt to me like a revelation, a shocking and delightful window into what it meant to forge an intimacy with one's readers while remaining duly mysterious." Meghan Daum on Joan Didion.

For a while this month I slept on a mattress on the floor, the room bare, the pieces of my new apartment still unassembled. A few weeks later, I still lack most basic furniture, but the point is: I have enough pots and pans to cook a big pasta dinner with roasted tomatoes for my friends, who will gamely set up beach chairs in the living room and drink Trader Joe's wine and come running when I set something on fire. The walls are bare and the cabinets are mostly vacant but slowly I'm filling the space with my books and plants and hangers. I bought a chair that I love. I'm reading again (picking up with Dorothy Allison's gritty, poetic Trash). I'm settling into the rhythms of my job. There's a story I'm working on that I love. I sweep the floors.

The point is some kind of permanence. The point is there's no rush at all.

Lately:

Kurt Vonnegut writes to his daughter: "You’re learning now that you do not inhabit a solid, reliable, social structure – that the older you get people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few days ago. So home can fall apart and schools can fall apart, usually for childish reasons, and what have you got? A space wanderer named Nan."

Disney for the sad. 

"When you live alone, the droop of plant leaves, a black sock pocking out of my blue dresser, or an avocado that ripened overnight, all this stuff provides a rare, brief harmony: the consolidation of my things, all mine, in a space befit for staring off as I skirmish with a sentence on my screen or wait for water to boil. The only person who might interrupt my thoughts is me."

The best cooking advice ever! is really pretty good.

The loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings.

Little things: Neon Chinatown / Soppy / A story is not like a road to follow / Tim Gunn's Sunday routine / Illustrated ladies / One day in rural Florida / Sports goth in an old Nike ad / Photos from Kruger National Park / Great journalism / Good tweet / Sweetcakes, God said / Landscapes / A gamechanging bra company / Nine years of painting in a sketchbook. 

Matthew Weiner on Mad Men's many elevator scenes. I've been spending late nights rewatching some choice old episodes. 

Good journalism: Marathon / Are you man enough for the men's rights movement? / Mary Cain is growing up fast / Fury entered here / The pale glow of a brighter day / Human props stay in luxury homes but live like ghosts.

"We need to stop labeling our sadness and anxiety as uncomfortable symptoms, and to appreciate them as a healthy, adaptive part of our biology." Medicating women's feelings.

Apartments, one and two.

Females are strong as hell.

The death of the American newsroom, in pictures. 

Expensive, exhausting and deeply unsexy: babymaking while queer.

"I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life — not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often those patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again." -- Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland

Winter in Florida exists if you look for it.  It's fur-lined parkas and dramatic scarves that appear as soon as the temperature drops below 50F. It's late-night chamomile tea and those same disconsolate evenings that'll dog you anywhere else. Most of the time, though, it's beautiful, all blue skies and freshness like early spring. 

I'm apartment hunting now, logging hits and misses in a Craigslist spreadsheet and wrapping my head around the idea that I'm a new Floridian. I just got a permanent job here, and for the first time in years, I know I'll be somewhere longer than a few months. I'll be working the night shift, covering general assignment news, cops, features and the rest for the Times. I'm relieved and grateful and excited and, thanks to the ticking apartment time bomb, just a bit stressed.

Elsewhere this month: Rolled a suitcase 50+ blocks in 18F weather in New York City, then spent all my rent money on books, food & beer with my best friend from home. It was the best, most-needed trip. The weekend after that, I hosted my best friend from college. We ate late-night tacos and people-watched and split $8 pitchers of foamy beer in a dimly lit bowling alley, complete with a smoke machine and lasers and grainy music videos from 2004 projected on a big screen. We cheered anytime we knocked over more than five pins. 

Lately:

"You will catch yourself sometimes saying, 'Well at least I don’t have to deal with [small relationship grievance] anymore!' but you will also know it’s a lie. You would have dealt with [grievance] forever. You would have grown old with [grievance]. [Grievance] would have made you laugh at the kitchen table at age 60 while you did the crossword together in a punk rock LL Bean fever dream." A breakup.

“The subreddit doesn’t exist because anyone thinks it’s a good idea to do suicide intervention here. It exists because there are people who only feel comfortable here. And they need to talk to somebody.” How Reddit is changing suicide intervention.

Little things: Diners are important / Greenland on expired film / Lunch al desko / What guys' shoes say about them / An important friend / Dream home / Rosalie's Good Eats Cafe / Leslie Duke's art / Florence vs. Atlanta / At home with Maira Kalman / How to lose weight in four easy steps / A song / A poem / Photos on the iPhone 6 /Another poem / 30 and bookless. 

"Our libraries struck me as something like Rilke’s ideal for love—two solitudes, side by side." A longtime couple combines their books, by Alexander Chee.

I'm going to miss Parks and Rec so much.

"A lot of men’s stories seem tinged by regret and nostalgia. They wish previous relationships hadn’t ended or romantic opportunities hadn’t slipped away... Women are more inclined to write with restlessness. They want to figure love out."

I love Yelena Bryksenkova's art. 

"You could call summers like this a colossal waste of time. But that’s what feels immortal about them—wasting time, colossally, as the gods must do. And as energizing and healthy as it can be to participate in society and be a good citizen, I’m greedy for time with the soul, or at least with my brain, the neurons firing fiercely even when I’m sluggish—all those mysterious goings-on, so easy to ignore in the productive life." True summer. 

What will happen to the Tampa Bay Times?

"With this 'parking' alibi, we’re being asked to imagine that these killings are a private tragedy, not some big public deal—not terrorism, not even like terrorism. We’re being told to believe that the vigilante killing of three young Americans is socially and politically meaningless." The Chapel Hill massacre blues.

Been spending my midnight commutes with the decidedly saccharine, nevertheless lovely Dear Sugar podcast. 

"I had never realized how much my sense of self came from remaining unobserved, or from having spaces where I felt I could be as such."

"I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it." Joan Didion.

"I now inhabit a life I don’t deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end anytime soon." David Carr.