Greetings from a new life

Hello from Manhattan, in what I deem to be its grossest state yet this summer. One minute you’re opening your iPhone to see if your friend wants to get dinner with you, the next minute he’s posting Substack Notes about having the lettuce parasite. We are living in a world unsuitable for human life.

Last week, the skies were orange. When I started writing this, I was told by loved ones it wasn’t safe to go outside, because going outside and inhaling would be like smoking cigarettes. I walked home from work in the worst of it—like Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds—and I was already sick, and I was fine. Something’s gotta get us, and I can’t say I particularly care if my time is announced this summer by Canadian ash or the lettuce parasite. I’m trying so hard, already. I relent.

Today is a bratty personal post about things I’ve been up to and seen on my phone, like this:

Taylor Swift Fan Archive@Taylors_Archive

Taylor Swift with celebrity manicurist Tom Bachik (2011)

1:13 AM · Jul 17, 2026 · 35.4K Views

5 Replies · 49 Reposts · 1.51K Likes

Please also remember to AMA about grad school in this Google form. And, in case you missed it, I interviewed my mom and it’s really funny.

I also reviewed The Odyssey:

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I wanted to stop drinking. I had noticed I was drinking more than I’d ever have before out of misery, and felt like I had enough stacked against me in terms of esophageal cancer—lifelong GERD—to continue that way. More significantly, drugs of all kinds are most commonly a shortcut for dealing with material and emotional conditions that are not fulfilling. Doing them can make me feel lazy, and ergo unknowable to myself. I am not much beyond completed tasks.

Around the same time, I started taking leftover Accutane pills from when I stopped a course a quarter way through in 2022. I’m not a doctor, yadda yadda, but I know that isotretinoin is fat soluble and believe it is over-prescribed in dosage and under-prescribed per capita; I cannot tolerate more than a few pills a week, but if I wouldn’t have gone on a little of it as a young person, I would still have cystic and unbearable acne. In any case, isotretinoin is Vitamin A, which is hard on your liver, so you can’t drink very much when you’re on it. This helped me stop ordering martinis at dinner.

Now, however, I am simply, and more viscerally, miserable. The Accutane is giving me acid reflux and making my eyes bloodshot. More motivational to stop drinking than this medicine was an unexplained mass exodus of every friend I’ve ever had from New York City: there’s no dinners to have drinks at, at all.

My skin is, of course, perfect, but this might be in part due to The Device.

When I went home for the Fourth of July, it took my mom less than 10 minutes to show me her new skin regime. She—and this is a new behavior—keeps tens, if not hundreds, of multicolored bottles in a jewelry box on her bathroom counter. They all have a specifically defined clinical function and role in her daily and weekly routines.