REID #118

Jan 03, 2023

SHORT:

Another awesome (🤞) year is here.

Last January, the FBI showed up to my apartment because I anthropomorphized the New Year’s Ball and likened it to a transexual (+ then JOKINGLY threatened to shoot it… which was what made the FBI come-a-knockin’). You can read about it all here if you haven’t.

This January, I am a temp receptionist.

I wore new shoes to the first day and they sliced open my feet so I spent the morning in the gender-neutral-single-stall bathroom trying to stuff toilet paper into my socks to relieve the pain. I felt like a middle schooler with a padded uni-boob bra on each ankle.

If you’re currently subscribed to REID for free, join my “buy me a coffee” page. It’s $3/month, and it’ll help me keep writing this thing!

You can also…

Give a gift subscription

MEDIUM:

It turns out that, wherever you are, even if it’s an auxiliary storage room of a major private equity company that makes you wear a blazer and answer phones (unless they don’t have any phones for you to answer in which case they send you to sit in the auxiliary storage room), you will hear the words “I just started reading The Artist’s Way”.

The girl with a bob who’s temping with me is an actress. She’s 50 pages into the seminal text. I tell her “it’s awesome”, leaving out the fact that I stopped reading mid-way through when it told me to stop using technology for a week.

I also stopped doing morning pages (something The Artist’s Way recommends) when I got rip-roaring diarrhea while living in a shack in Massachusetts. I was unable to “mindfully journal about my feelings” upon waking because I had to fling myself out of bed and shoot over to the bathroom, where I’d sit for 2-3 hours (it was my own fault, my mom sent me a tub of banana pudding for my birthday, and I exclusively ate the delicious sludge for a week while binging Euphoria which resulted in less-delicious sludge exiting my body for the next 4 days — an experience that was not “euphoric” … but did kinda feel like a perverse Magnolia Bakery sponsored ayahuasca trip).

Anyway. I can’t eat that shit anymore. And I don’t write emo-pages every morning. But the girl with the temporary job and semi-permanent bob just started doing that. So good for her. I just sit and refresh every app on my phone, telling myself that something’s bound to pop up that’ll change my life forever.

This newsletter is supported by REIDers like you. Donate if you can. Here!

LONG:

I’ve decided books are going to be huge in 2023 (for the first time ever). Add me on Goodreads. I just finished this and I’m now reading this.

My favorite book of 2022 was this. Every queer person should read it and maybe even straight people.

I saw Sandra Bernhard live. It set my soul on fire. There’s no one else on earth like her. She covered Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” in a sparkly gown after ranting about how she finally got her mother’s painting of a cyst — “Blue Dome Cyst” (1969) — back after her mother’s friend (who inherited it) passed away. Jess got me the tickets for Christmas/Hannukah.

She also got me a cameo from Janusz from GBBO, an Ed Sheeran poster that says “If you can dream it, you can do it”, and a Hooters shirt. The perfect superfecta.

Now Jess’s best friend Lilia is visiting. We spent New Years eating Jess-made coffee cake and ~reflecting~.

This year was pretty sweet. I performed for a lot of people in a lot of cool places. I directed a show in Scotland. I was a content creator to watch at New York Comedy Fest. I went to Fire Island, Napa, Colorado, California, Providence, & upstate with Jess.

I got to pitch my TV show about old gay people. I taught two classes (one of which gave me the unforgettable gift of an essay to grade about “tragic heroes” that was misspelled as “tragic herpes” throughout). I died from martinis at my friend’s Netflix Premiere party and went to Mt. Sinai at 3am and now they’re emailing me to “donate” this holiday season. A bunch of Danish schoolchildren showed up to a bar show I was on and I became their god.

I took a bunch of classes and wrote a bunch of plays.

And BEST OF ALL, I wrote 50+ newsletters (and u read every single 1 and loved every single 1).

In 2023, I hope to: learn a lot, read a lot, stand in my own power, be less self-conscious, show more of my true self to people, be kinder to myself about my appearance, be kinder in general, believe in myself, blah blah etc.

Oh, and finally find a location in New York City that will ACCEPT MY CINNABON GIFT CARD.

Reply with your goals! Or literally anything you wanna say about anything!