My darling sister, who is an English professor and the head of the writing center at a fancy university here in NYC, proofread a small thing I was writing. It was a humbling experience, but not humbling like when you win the Nobel prize and claim to feel humbled. It was humbling in a more traditionally humiliating way. Compliment / complement! Who knew, who remembered? (Jane did, I did not.)

~

Plenty of people are still mistaking generosity for narcissism. If you think that the only reason people make things to give away free online is to gain something in return, I think you might be missing the point. But if I’m mistaken or you just can’t help it, than you’d likely better get to work catching up on what you owe the world. GalaxyZoo is a nice place to start.

And while we’re on narcissism, I just voluntarily put a photograph of my own mug on the internet for the first time ever. I find I need to be recognizable for work-related reasons at the moment. Aside from the evil real estate broker associations, I’m not sure why it feels like such a big deal; but it does. I could say that I got harassed a lot online in the nineties and that keeping a more gender neutral profile just feels more comfortable, and all that would be true; but it’s a little weirder than that. It simply feels more authentic somehow to disassociate my face from my online persona. I don’t entirely own my own image. Photos surprise me and reflections confound me. Do I really look that sulky and uncertain? I am neither. My mirror face, which is apparently unrelated to the face I walk around with, is cool and neutral; mostly poised for hair brushing or lipsticking. I am fond of it and wouldn’t trade if for a more beautiful face if I could. (There was a time when I would have traded my elbows though. When I was eleven I caught a glimpse of my straightened arms in the mirror and refused to unbend them again for a year or so. All that elbow skin!) The face of photos and chance reflections feels oddly fraudulent.

~

Must stop typing. I hear Aure piping to his babysitter about how he will be dead after a while and his body will grow into lettuces and worms. (We are still working on death.) In he comes! My little goth darling is wearing a neighbor child’s dress, the skirts of which he flaps like a butterfly as he bounds about searching for imaginary flowers to “devour.” His red ball cap reads Fierce Avenger. But quickly—more death. Prodromal Alzheimer’s, portraits taken before and after death, and E.M. Forster’s solemn and beautiful claim that “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.”